Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

What if she had seen Aurilelde somehow? Or knew something about her that Kit didn’t? There was no way to be sure she hadn’t. Trouble was, Nita’s visions weren’t always right. He’d heard her himself complaining that sometimes they turned up too late to do her any good: or that they emphasized something that turned out not to be all that important later. All it would take would be for her to get some wrong idea about Aurilelde into her head, and then there would be real trouble.

Better to keep her away from Aurilelde and her issues entirely. ’Lelde had told him candidly enough about what her own fears and hopes were like. And as for Khretef—

Kit let out a long, uncertain breath. There was definitely some connection between them, though he didn’t understand how or why. Early this morning, soon after he woke up, he’d started to consider some of the similarities between Khretef’s and Aurilelde’s life, and his and Nita’s. Two wizards, one a visionary— or getting to be that way— one good with machines. And another pair, one a wizard, good with machines and concrete things, the other one not a wizard, but a visionary, definitely…

Am I what I am because I really am Khretef come back?

He sat there considering that for a while. The manual, as on some other vital subjects, was silent on the subject of reincarnation. There were hints that it could happen under some circumstances, but it seemed to be an elective issue, not necessarily enforced or enforceable. Apparently the One felt you were competent to decide if or when you were ready to come back, or how long a respite you needed from the business of errantry and life.

It doesn’t matter, Kit thought at last. They’re alive, her people! Or waiting to be alive again. But there’s something she needs to make it happen, so that they can settle themselves down on Mars and get back to living their lives again. Khretef went to find this thing that Aurilelde needs… whatever it was. And died—

Kit hunched forward on his stone again, thinking about that, scuffing with one foot at the snow lying at his feet. There had been no mistaking the word she’d been using; Aurilelde’s language was one that came through perfectly clearly when you listened to it with a basic knowledge of the Speech—

A breath of cold wind went past Kit’s ear, raising the hair on his neck again. I need to see to this force field, he thought. What’s going on? Is it leaking a little?

He pulled out his manual and checked the status on the spell that was managing his air and temperature control. It was fine. Kit sighed, shut the manual, put it down, and ran his hands through his hair, finally hiding his face in them. He let out a breath—

And saw something. Darkness: and in it, a tiny faint light, distant, shining. The light was a deep, vivid blue-violet.

That’s it, said the voice in his ear. The thing that’s needed. And it was his own voice—

Kit shivered, opened his eyes.

Everything was as it should be: the mountain, the snow, the falling night. “This is really creepy…” Kit said aloud.

Possibly because you’re too hung up on the connotations of the word ‘dead,’ said the voice in his ear. You’re a wizard! You know other species don’t necessarily handle ‘dead’ the way your species does.

Kit swallowed. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll grant you that. But you get to explain how this is happening.”

He could feel that the owner of the voice was grinning at him— a strange amusement born of seeing how like itself Kit was. The whole planet is awash in newly released wizardry now, it said, hunting for an outlet or a purpose the way lightning looks for something tall to strike. But you caused that. You broke open the Nascence.

“The superegg,” Kit said.

That’s right. You’ve turned loose a series of events like the series I set free long ago. That was when enemies of Aurilelde’s city, the Shamaska City, stole something she and her father needed to master the planet. A tool: a weapon. Or a key to both. People from the Eilitt City stole it, and hid it. So I went to find it. The Nascence held the wizardry that would show the location of what was stolen, and it did reveal that to me. But when I went looking…

“You got killed,” Kit said.

The voice sighed. It was kind of unavoidable, he said. Our enemies knew me too well. They laid enough traps that sooner or later I was likely to fall afoul of one of them. And eventually I did. But this time, when you set out to complete the task, you have an advantage.

Kit looked out toward the sunset. “That being?”

Me. I know where the traps are. There’s no need for me, for us, to fall into them this time! We can go straight to the place where the Shard is hidden, find it, escape with it, and put it in Aurilelde’s hands. After that… everything changes.

Kit swallowed. “That’s what’s needed to make it possible to wake the Martians up?”

If this is Mars, said Khretef, and we are the Martians… then yes.

Kit hesitated. Then he stood up and got out his wand. “Let’s go,” he said.

***

Some four thousand miles away, Nita stood in the basin of Argyre Planitia and looked around her. A phrase that had crossed her mind many times recently in terms of the landscapes of the Solar System now came up for consideration again: magnificent desolation.

It was well past midnight, local time: morning would be coming along in a while, but not soon. Snow had fallen here recently, but after that had come a dust storm, and snow and dust had been all whipped up together. Now a combination of powder-fine dry ice and pale gritty dust lay drifted between a foot and two feet deep over everything, glowing faintly with starlight.

Through this pallid emptiness Nita slowly made her way, her force field brushing the dust and snow aside as she passed. How beautiful this is, she thought. But not a place where you’d ever really want to live.

She breathed out then, annoyed at her own Earth-centric viewpoint. In its ancient state, this wilderness had looked like an untouched paradise to the people from Shamask-Eilith when they arrived: close to the sun, better provided with atmosphere at that point— that much the manual had confirmed, suggesting an overactive younger Sun had later on torn much of a too-light atmosphere away—and flowing with liquid surface water. This spot, for example: the manual had said that a lot of the stone fragments scattered around were sedimentary. So there were rivers here: maybe even a lake. This place must have seemed energy-rich and hospitable to the Shamaska and Eilitt, especially once they’d finished tailoring their new bodies to the world that would be their home.

But then things went wrong for them, Nita thought, stopping and looking out across the pale, rippling dunes of dust and snow. And after coming such a long way.

We had such high hopes for the new world, she heard a faraway voice saying. We changed our bodies. We changed our minds. We thought that surely we had now left the old troubles behind and could have peace. And for a while it seemed so. But we couldn’t change our souls. And so it turned out that not only were the same old troubles with us, but now they were even worse…

Nita paused, listening as the voice faded away. Her visionary tendencies were taking unusual forms in this environment: normally she saw things rather than hearing them. “Bobo,” she said, feeling unnerved, “is this going to get to be a habit?”

It was a moment before she got an answer back. There is a lot of wizardry loose on this planet at the moment, he said. When Kit broke the superegg open, the first effect of the breakage was to send out those signals to the various sites around Mars. But since then, levels of available power—unfocused, unassigned power, which any running wizardry might access—have been slowly rising all over the planet. It’s as if the wizards who came with the Shamaska and the Eilitt stored great reservoirs of power in the fabric of the planet itself, ready to be used when that resource was broken open. And now it’s welling up. You want to be careful about any wizardry you start under these conditions.