Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

He couldn’t do much but shake his head at that. “Assuming that’s true,” Kit said, “there’s something really wrong with you being here now. I mean, I’m no expert, but as far as I understood it, one soul should only be in one place at one time. Sure, there are some exceptions—”

You mean like the wizard who was here with you before? Khretef said. Yes, he’d be a special case. We had wizards like him once: but ours died. And Khretef shook his head sadly and sat down on one of the stones of the cavern.

Kit looked around him in alarm at the discovery that they were suddenly underground and that he wasn’t talking to empty air anymore, but to someone of the same species as Aurilelde— apparently about his own weight, though taller. Khretef had the same smooth, gray, stony skin, though a shade darker than Aurilelde’s, and he was dressed in the harness of metals and silks and leatherlike material that he’d seen on other Shamaska-Eilitt males, with a long, slim sword at his side. Khretef’s smoke-hair was much shorter than Aurilelde’s, just a film of darkness around the top of his head, like a buzzcut made of haze. Aside from the slight difference in the hair, Kit realized that the being he was looking at really did look a lot like him— or the way he’d look if he’d been born into that species.

“Now, how’d you do that?” Kit said. And then he just had to laugh, if uncomfortably, for Khretef was studying Kit with the same look of uneasy recognition. “And how do you keep pulling these fast ones on me? Not very polite to the new wizard on the block.”

“I don’t care for it much, either,” Khretef said, looking up at Kit with an expression that suggested he really meant it. “But maybe not wasting time is a smart thing, because we don’t have a lot to waste right now. Entropy’s running. And for me, the time that’s running is also running out.” He shook his head. “We really should get going, because they’re going to be here soon.”

“They?” Kit said.

“Can’t you hear them?” said Khretef.

Kit held still. Distant, somewhere down deeper in the caves, he could hear the gravelly ratchet of claws on stone. “Don’t tell me,” he said. “It’s more of those scorpion things! What is it with those?”

“They’re just constructs,” Khretef said. “They recall an animal that was once our great companion in the First World, from way back in time. Very few survived the move to this world: they were too bound to the First One. Some of us got an idea that it would be good to build new ones. But they were never quite the same. You saw mine—”

Khretef sounded wistful. Kit looked at him with sudden understanding. “The one in the tower? He was your— your dog?”

“That’s right,” Khretef said. “I had him since I was a child. Or he had me. You could never really tell, my mother used to say. He was always underfoot, or under my couch, or just under.” Khretef sighed. “He made it here, but he didn’t last long. Though it wasn’t the usual wasting away. He—” Khretef frowned— “he had an accident.”

A little chill ran down Kit’s back as he remembered how his mama had told Helena that that was what had happened to Ponch: “an accident.” The chill got worse a second later as Kit started to hear more clearly those claws-on-stone sounds from somewhere farther down in the caves. “We’d better get moving. What exactly is it that we’re looking for?”

“Something Aurilelde’s father said was vital to his ability to make this world livable for us,” Khretef said, getting up. “When we knew we were coming here, we used wizardry and science together to build ourselves new bodies to suit the local environment. But you can only do that so many times. Too many changes, and you’re not the species you were anymore.” He slipped the sword he was carrying out of his belt, glancing around him in the dark. “So if our species was going to survive here, it’d be the world that had to change. Aurilelde’s father was one of the last of our senior wizards who survived the journey, and one of the most powerful: so much so that he became Master of the City after we first came. He used his power to find the Heart of the planet, the Soul Bundle—”

Kit understood that Khretef was using both the Shamaska and Eilitt words for a single word in the Speech: tevet. “Mars’s kernel,” Kit said. “I know about those. My partner works with them.”

Khretef looked at Kit very strangely indeed. “Does he, now?”

“She,” Kit said.

Khretef’s dark eyes widened. “This is beyond strange,” he said softly. “Her, too?”

From down in the darkness came another roar.

“We should go,” Khretef said. “If we stay here they’ll catch us where we won’t have any advantage.”

Kit nodded and pulled out his antenna-wand. Khretef snapped his fingers, and a small constellation of wizard-lights sparked to life in the air and drifted ahead of the two of them as they started picking their way downslope across the rough floor of the cave.

By the glow of the wizard-lights, Khretef glanced sideways as he caught a gleam off the surface of Kit’s wand. “Noon-forged?”

Kit nodded. “Present from a friend.”

“Best kind,” Khretef said, hefting the sword. “So was this.”

They walked downhill together in a silence that was both companionable and uneasy. “Anyway,” Khretef said, “the kernel. Iskard found it, but spies for the City of Eilith discovered where it was being held in the Shamaska City, and their wizards stole it. What they didn’t know was Iskard had suspected something like this could happen, and before the kernel was stolen, he’d managed to fragment out a part of its power core. The kernel couldn’t be used without the missing fragment: so what the spies and wizards stole was useless. Later, after a great battle between the Cities, the kernel was recovered by Iskard. But even as that was happening, the fragment— the Shard, as Iskard called it— was taken and delivered to the Eilitt by a Shamaska turned traitor. Here they hid it, right under the Shamaska City, to taunt Iskard. It was so surrounded with deadfalls and wizardly weapons and barriers that no one could reach it alive.”

“Booby-trapped,” Kit said.

Khretef nodded. “A good word. And as the final mockery, a great wizardry was locked around the Shard itself that would kill any Shamaska who touched it. But they forgot something.” Khretef’s mouth stretched in his people’s version of a grin. “I am not Shamaska.”

Kit blinked. “You’re not?”

“No. I’m Eilitt by birth. My mother was a Co-Chief of the City of Eilith.”

“Then how come you’re working for their side?”

Khretef gave him a wry look. “Aurilelde,” he said. Then he held up his hand for a moment, listening. “Not this way,” he said. “A side access instead. Follow me.”

He turned and headed toward another opening off to one side of the cavern. “I don’t get it, though,” Kit said. “If all your people needed to have this happen, and Aurilelde’s dad found the planet’s kernel and was about to make it happen, then why did the Eilitt stop him?’

“They were afraid he secretly intended to destroy the City of Eilith,” Khretef said. “And even if he didn’t want to do that— which the rulers of the Eilitt didn’t believe— they didn’t want Iskard to have the kernel. They wanted for themselves the power that would come with control over the planet. They’d have preferred both Eilitt and Shamaska to die together rather than have to suffer the shame and humiliation of being saved by a Shamaska.”

Kit shook his head, disgusted. When he had been studying Earth history, and especially during the last month or so, when North Korea had come up in his history unit, he’d found himself hoping that only human beings went so far out of their way to rabidly distrust one another, and to teach their innocent children to do the same. “Nut cases!” he said.