Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

“hNii’t,” S’reee sang very softly. “Look—”

The darkness of the space out past the edge of the scorpion pattern was becoming less complete. Shadowy shapes were forming between them and the distant walls: transparent shadows on the dark air, almost impossible to see. “It’s such an old wizardry, I hardly felt it start,” S’reee said. “Whatever was set to power it is very weak now.”

“And this is part of the hot-spot wizardry that brought the scorpions in?” Nita said.

“Probably,” S’reee said. “If the scorpions were the defensive part of the wizardry, they might have been activated often enough to siphon a lot of power away from this part of the spell. Now it’s using whatever other power it can find to do its job. And even our sensitivity to the fact that there’s a story here could be helping.” She glanced around at the almost-unseen, multitudinous engravings in the distant walls. “The Speech isn’t the only language with power. If a story hasn’t been heard in a long time, much power can lie in it, tightly compressed until it’s told again…”

Nita nodded. Bobo, she said silently, this might be important. Can you add some power to the equation?

Some, the peridexis said. But this wizardry is fragile. I’m limited in how much I can help without interfering, maybe even destroying what it’s trying to do. Also, the power must be paid for.

That was no surprise. Okay, let’s do what we can— “Mela,” Nita said, sitting down, “Bobo and I will try sticking a little juice into this.”

Carmela nodded, absorbed. Nita closed her eyes and started a little exercise that Tom had taught her: concentrating on her breathing, and then imagining herself breathing a little of her power as a wizard out into the spell around her with every outward breath. It was one of many ways a wizard could manage the way he or she paid the energy price for a spell— a gradual, steady outflow of intention, rather than a single unmanaged moment of payment that left you limp. Nita imagined that she could see it, a hazy cloud of light surrounding her, more visible with each breath. Shortly it seemed that out at the edges, that cloud was thinning, being drawn away. We getting some uptake? she said to Bobo.

Some. It’s slow. Take a break for a moment; don’t feed it too fast…

Nita opened her eyes again, feeling faintly fatigued, the normal result of this kind of power outlay. Out past the edges of the pattern, those shadows in the dark air were more substantial. She tried to see more detail. There were spiky shapes, jagged, rearing up against deeper darkness. “Mountains?” Nita said.

Carmela didn’t look up, just nodded. “Neets, whatever you did is just helping. I’m getting a lot more of this now…”

“Great. What kind of people were they? Much further out from the Sun and you’d expect something that wasn’t based on carbon.”

“There’s not much about that here,” Carmela said, standing up to move along down the pattern, as around them the shadowy landscape became less obscure. The mountains becoming visible all around them seemed to cover all of a vast landscape stretching away in all directions. It was as if the pattern-disc was at the top of some peak supereminent above the others. All around, in endless shades of navy and sky blue and violet, the narrow, spearlike mountains cast long fingers of indigo shadow away behind them in the light of a Sun that made Nita blink, for— considering the distance they were discussing— it shouldn’t have been so bright.

“Not a friendly-looking place,” S’reee said, “to our eyes, at least.”

Nita had to agree. In this vista, at least, there didn’t seem to be any flat land: it was all ups and downs. A haze of atmosphere was visible, hanging low, completely covering some peaks, reaching only partway up others. On those lower peaks, Nita could make out the glitter of lights, scattered down from the pinnacles like snow. On some of the nearer mountains, she thought she could make out buildings partially mimicking the structure of the peaks to which they clung— upward-jutting crowns of stony thorns, artificial spires spearing up from the passes or saddles between peaks. Here and there, dartlike shapes soared or arrowed between the city-mountains, but it was impossible at this distance to tell whether the moving shapes were creatures or machines.

In the imagery surrounding the pattern-circle, time sped up, fled by. The world changed with the passage of thousands of years. Mountains eroded and crumbled, pinnacles shattered and fractured to sharper points; on those heights where the Sun reached best, low-domed cities now clung to the ancient cliffs. Like glassy nodules of some exotic gemstone, by night the cities gleamed and glowed from within; by day the Sun glanced from them, blinding. “It’s brighter than it should be,” Nita said.

“The Sun’s much younger,” S’reee said. “And it did have a variable period early in its history. This is a long, long time ago.”

The machines that rode the violet-dark sky grew, changing shape, as more cities budded from the peaks their view included. “Those people were there for a long time,” Carmela said, looking over more of the writing. “And they got really technologically advanced. Antigravity, ion tech, a lot of fancy stuff. But no worldgates.” She left the long curve of pattern she’d been reading and stepped to another. “Isn’t that strange?”

“Not always,” S’reee said. “The technology’s not universal, as Mamvish could tell you. There are worlds that can’t conceive of other planets or dimensions, or even other ways of life: yet they still have wizardry.”

“Mela, you see anything about what they called this planet?” Nita said.

Carmela shook her head. “I’m not sure,” she said. “There were lots of names for it, at the beginning. Probably as many names as we have for Earth. But then they start to get fewer. In all this later stuff, there are just two left, and I don’t know which one to use. One of the two groups that dominated the planet called it Shamask. The other called it Eilith.”

“What do the words mean?” S’reee said.

Carmela looked up then, and her expression was grim. “‘Ours.’”

Nita and S’reee exchanged a glance.

“They don’t seem to have liked each other a whole lot, the Shamaska and the Eilitt,” Carmela said, getting down on her knees to look at the writing embedded in that part of the pattern. “All along here, it’s descriptions of things that one side did, or the other side did—” She shook her head. “I don’t understand most of it. But the tone’s never friendly. Then it gets angry. Then—”

Nita started in surprise, and so did S’reee, as the first flashes and impacts of energy weapons erupted among the spires of the First World. Mountains fell and buildings crumbled in a newer and deadlier sort of erosion. “Surprised it took that long,” Carmela said, getting up again to head farther down that stroke of the pattern. “Their first really big war…”

“Why were they fighting?” Nita said.

Carmela stood where she was and looked all along that stroke of the scorpion pattern with her hands on her hips, hunting an answer. “I’m not sure,” she said. “There are so many reasons and excuses here. A lot of them don’t make sense. I think each side thought the other had cheated them out of something, or stolen something, that they needed to survive.” She shook her head, annoyed. “So they started having wars. This one went on for—” She hunkered down to trace out, with one finger, a specific sequence of the long, curved characters. “Twelve or thirteen thousand years.”

Nita and S’reee exchanged a glance. “This one??” Nita said.

S’reee blew out an unhappy breath. “There are species,” she said, “that are very advanced at science and technology …but the technologies of being in harmony with one another just elude them. They tend to have more wizards than most.”