Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

“I hear you,” Khretef said, “whatever a nut is.”

Together he and Kit paused in the huge opening to another gallery. Khretef glanced from side to side, then up at the huge chandelier-mass of stalactites hanging down from the high ceiling. Kit, looking at them too, shook his head in wonder. “Think of how much water,” he said. “And how many years…”

Khretef nodded. “Not long now,” he said, and led Kit onward through the cavern and downward again.

“Am I right,” Kit said, “to say that your two cities have been fighting the whole time since you settled here?”

“Oh, yes,” Khretef said. “A constant state of— what was the term for it? Armed engagement.” Khretef laughed. “Both cities were constantly exchanging diplomats and deputations to try to talk things over, solve our grievances.” He shook his head. “But it was never about that. It was always about finding a new way to stab the other side in the back. Or finding out what they were really up to, and then looking for ways to stop it. That was, after all, the way things had always been…”

Khretef sighed as they made their way across the cavern, toward another dark exit. “There came a time, after I passed my Ordeal and became a wizard, that my mother decided I should go on one of these deputations. So I went.”

Kit got a sudden flash of Khretef’s memory of that first trip: and of a moment of astonishment on the way there as his traveling party was overtaken by a sudden wonder; one of the Martian dust-devils. Again Kit saw the view of the circle of sky far up that whirling tunnel, and now understood his rush of déjà vu. This was the connection. “I was ready for it. I knew the Shamaska would all be looking for ways to trick or betray me because I was new and young, trying to turn me into a tool they could use against my own people. I was on my guard. Then I went to the Shamaska City, and—”

Khretef laughed, bitter. “I discovered that the terrible Shamaska, our ancient enemies, were just people like us! It seemed like the worst kind of betrayal. Either I was completely confused, and they were pulling one over on me— or this had always been true, and we were the deluded ones. Like us, the Shamaska were scared of the other side, trying to keep themselves safe, but unsure how to do it when the others were so determined to wipe them out. Watch out where you put your feet here—”

The surface underneath them was changing to rough, stony ropes of pillow lava, all crusted with the pale leached minerals of millennia. Kit picked his way with care as he listened. “Anyway, I kept my mouth shut and went through with my duties in the deputation, and waited for it to be time for us to go home, for I didn’t like what I was seeing, and I didn’t want to do any more of this work, where it was impossible to ignore how our own leaders had been lying to us. And then, at a function just before I was to return home to Eilith, I met Aurilelde.”

As they paused before negotiating another long gallery leading to a third cavern, Khretef’s face changed subtly, and even by the now-subdued wizard-light, Kit could see the change. When Khretef looked over at Kit, his uncertain expression suggested that he wasn’t sure Kit understood what he was saying. “I thought she was going to be just another of these cold, proud Shamaska I’d spent twenty days meeting: someone who’d be hating me, but polite to my face. Then we looked at each other, and there was something different about her. I still don’t know what it was. We started talking…”

Khretef glanced around again, then pointed. “Down there. See that opening? That’s what we want. —Oh, we were so careful to try to look like nothing different was happening. We knew everyone was watching us. But finally we realized that we liked each other. Aurilelde was interested in meeting a wizard her own age. I was interested in her talents as a Seer: it’s a gift that’s rare among the Eilitt.”

Kit felt that chill again, thinking of Nita’s growing visionary specialty. Khretef shrugged. “I went home, eventually. But soon I told my mother that I wanted to go on the next deputation, that more experience would be good for the son of a Chief of the City. And I went, and Aurilelde and I met again. And again, the next time. After that we kept meeting privately. We were terrified, but we knew we had to find a way to be together that wouldn’t be misunderstood.”

From ahead of them, from below, Kit heard a subdued roar. “But they misunderstood, anyway,” he said, “so you left.”

Khretef nodded. “I fled to her city,” he said. “My people declared me a traitor, to be killed on sight. My mother disowned me. And though I’d come over to the Shamaska side, they never trusted me. Rorsik, one of Aurilelde’s father’s counselors, claimed that the only reason I’d sought refuge in the city was to seek ways to betray the Shamaska to the Eilitt. He claimed I’d seduced the Daughter of the City in order to render her visions friendlier to the Eilitt side. I think possibly Rorsik wanted her for himself, and saw me as a rival.”

And Khretef snorted, a sound so like one that Kit’s friend Raoul would make that Kit couldn’t help laughing. “The idiot couldn’t even see how she loathed him! But even her own people were starting to distrust her because of me. They thought that she was lying about her visions to forward my agenda. We thought they’d understand that we just wanted to be together, but…” He shook his head.

Kit frowned. “We have stories like that where I come from,” he said, thinking of his last year’s long English unit on Shakespeare. “Mostly the star-crossed lovers wind up dead.”

Khretef gave him an ironic look. “Well, I did,” he said.

That was when they heard the huge roar away ahead of them. Kit froze where he was. “We’re too alike as it is,” he said, “and if it’s all the same to you, I’d sooner stop before we get that alike!” He shook his antenna-wand, and a reassuring jolt of red fire ran down it, vanished. Its charge was running full. “That really didn’t sound like your usual scorpion—”

“No,” Khretef said, “they weren’t. Down this way—”

They walked a short way along to the entrance to a narrow gallery, like a hallway, leading down into a wider space. There Khretef paused, uneasy. “This is where I got killed the last time,” he said.

The hair went up on the back of Kit’s neck. “Yeah, about that,” Kit said. “If you’re dead, how come you aren’t in Timeheart?”

“I wasn’t finished,” Khretef said. “You know how it is sometimes. People hang on, even though there’s usually no hope of doing what they’ve left undone. Usually after a while they move on. But I couldn’t leave. So many lives depended on what I’d failed to do, so many futures. My people, Aurilelde’s people. Aurilelde …I couldn’t leave. And when they had to go back into stasis, which they had so much been trying not to do— then even more, I had to stay.”

The dread in his voice surprised Kit. “What was the matter with the stasis?”

“There weren’t enough wizards left, not enough power, to rebuild the spells correctly. The stasis wasn’t true dreamless sleep anymore, but a half-life full of repetitions and endless dreams without resolution, a journey with no end. The souls of those in stasis were being damaged, their personalities corrupted. Just once more we could endure it without being destroyed as a species, Shamaska and Eilitt together. But not another time.”

Khretef shivered all over with the memory. “So for so many years I waited in this not-life, not-death while they slept, all the time fearing what they were going through would destroy them before help came. But then, just now, something happened.” And he looked at Kit, his eyes alight with an excitement he had plainly been fighting to keep under control. “You got here. You cracked open the Nascence. You let loose the wizardry to fuel the awakening of the unfinished past. And you’re me. Or a version of me, one rooted in the present and with access to its power. How could I not come find you? Now it can all be finished. Now we can remake the world; now the last problem can be solved. And Aurilelde and I can be together.”