Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

“The wizards are here now!” Aurilelde said, and every eye in that great room turned to her. “They’ve found the Nascence in the dunes; they released its power; they triggered the tests, even the one that called for the manipulation of time. One has even invoked the Kinship upon himself! Soon we’ll be able to go among them and show them what we need. Then they’ll help us as I foretold, and there’ll be peace at last—”

Rorsik laughed again. “We all know why you want peace, Master’s Daughter! You and your traitor lover. You will sell us all to the Eilitt and destroy your own people. You are nothing but a tool of the ancient Power that sent the Darkness and the Doom upon us to begin with—”

A growl of anger started to go up from around the room. In the back of Kit’s mind, something said, quite clearly, Uh-oh— here we go! I was wondering when that name would come up.

He shivered at the sudden clarity of that voice, and Aurilelde, almost as if she’d heard something, too, glanced at him, worried. Undeterred by the anger of the crowd, Rorsik was shouting, “We can do nothing to make ourselves safe until the Dark Ones are destroyed— until their cities are dust, and the New World is cleansed of them! Only then can we spread safely through this world, make it our own, and resume our place in the light of the Sun as the First Ones, untroubled, in mastery over our world and our system again! And until the Nascence is ours, and the Dark Ones’ cities are revived and wiped out, none of us can be safe—”

Our worlds and our system? There was something about the phrasing that got the uneasy attention of the stranger-soul at the back of Kit’s mind. And something else was happening as well. The hair was standing up on the back of his neck. At his feet, Takaf was hissing, glancing about him with all his eyes, uncertain.

Above them, the sunlight was wavering, looking suddenly strangely faint. Almost everybody standing in that great assemblage under the Tower’s peak stared upward, even Iskard and Rorsik.

But Aurilelde did not. She turned to Kit. “It’s breaking,” she whispered. “It’s breaking too soon. There’s someone else here!”

Kit blinked— and suddenly he was Kit again, not Khretef with Kit watching from the background. It was strange, though, that now he could look at Aurilelde and see her as Khretef did. “It’s all right,” he said. “If it’s breaking, I can guess why. My friends have followed me. The other wizards. No, don’t be afraid! They’re really smart. They can help you! It’s what we came for, to help you—”

But Aurilelde was shaking her head, and her expression was frightened. “One of them is here already,” she said, gazing up into the sky, then looking nervously around her as if she was expecting something sudden to happen. “You can’t stay!”

“It’s okay,” Kit said, “they’re nice guys; you should meet them! One of them in particular is kind of special. Actually, they both are, but I should warn you about this one—”

“I know,” Aurilelde said, looking more alarmed by the moment. Her expression began to darken. “That one cannot come here. It would be dangerous— the City’s protection will break prematurely. You have to go!”

“Huh?”

“Khretef, listen to me. I don’t want you to go but you must!” She was staring around her now in real fright, and Kit started to get frightened himself, besides wanting to calm her down. “If the spell breaks before the right safeguards are in place and there’s enough power present to back them up, everything will be ruined. I won’t be able to stay.You won’t be able to stay! Please, Khr— Kit; I’m sorry, Kit; you have to go before anyone else comes. Please go!”

“All right,” Kit said. “But you have to try to let us help you, and if we can’t come here, how’re we supposed to—”

“I can’t tell you now. Later, later I’ll tell you, but this is a bad time, the wrong time!” Aurilelde was looking pale and scared. “It’s like it was before—when all the times were bad times, when it went cold and the Darkness was coming. We can’t let it come again—not after so long, not after all the time we waited!” She looked like she was about to burst into tears. “Please, Khretef; please go before the spell breaks!”

And now she was actually pushing Kit away, pushing him back toward the pad that had brought them up into the great throne room.

“Okay,” Kit said, backing away, “sure, no problem—” He glanced down and noticed that his clothes had shifted back to jeans and shirt and down vest: the sword that had been hanging at his side was a wand stuck in his belt again. And then as he looked at Aurilelde, he saw that her shape was wavering, too, and the long dark hair vanished and came back again, the beautiful face flickered and went smooth and gray, then came back; the eyes went pale, went dark—

Around him, the sunlight went weak; the Tower itself started to waver, to shimmer—

—was gone. Kit fell.

Just for a second he had a glimpse of the bare red ground, far far beneath. Skywalk! was his first thought, and he felt around in his head with desperate haste for the spell that would make the air go solid under him—

WHAM!

Kit came down on his face much too soon, as if he’d only fallen a few feet. All the same, the impact jarred the breath right out of him. He lay there gasping.

“Whoa,” he heard Darryl say. “Kit, you okay?”

Kit groaned and rolled over.

“If he can make that noise,” said a voice he wasn’t expecting, “he’s fine.”

He opened his eyes. There was a girl looking down at him: dark-haired, but the hair was strangely short. It was odd how much she reminded him of Aurilelde—

He blinked. Nita was looking down at him. Of course it was Nita.

“Where’ve you been?” she said, reaching down to help him up.

Kit staggered as he got to his feet. “Uh,” he said, “in the middle of a really strange experience.”

“Stranger than what we’ve been having?” Ronan said as Kit looked around him. They were near the edge of Hutton crater, and Kit looked southeastward from the crater’s edge to glimpse the edge of the next one over. Then Kit grinned a small crooked grin, for that crater’s name was Burroughs.

“You have no idea,” Kit said. “Come on and I’ll tell you—”

“You’ll tell us later,” Nita said. “You have to go home.”

“What? Why?”

“Helena’s back.”

For a second the name meant absolutely nothing to him… but only for a second. “Oh, no,” Kit said. “Better get it over with…”

“Like you have a choice,” Nita said. “Darryl, can you do the honors? We can all meet up tonight or something and go over the details of what just happened here.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Kit thought. But privately it occurred to him, as Darryl laid a hand on his shoulder, that the details might take considerably longer to sort out.

And as he and Ronan and Darryl all vanished, it seemed to Kit that there was somebody else inside his head who was agreeing with him.

11: Olympus Mons

Nita stood there looking out across the crater called Hutton. It was late in the sol, and the light here would start failing in a while. But a glow of residual wizardry lay over the whole crater, sheening the surface with a thin skin of greenish light, as if with water.

In the midst of it all, Nita could still glimpse something that wasn’t really there anymore. A memory of gleaming towers and spires towered up into the Martian afternoon, the red tower at the heart of it all glancing back light at the setting Sun like a beacon.

She shook her head. Nita didn’t know the planet’s satellite schedule the way Kit did, but she knew that every inch of its surface got covered sooner or later. “Bobo,” she said under her breath, “we’d better stick a shield-spell over this until it fades out. It’s going to have to cover a whole lot of real estate…”