Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

She walked to the middle of the spell. Away on its far side, almost exactly opposite her own name, she caught sight of another scrawl of characters in the Speech, in neither her own handwriting nor the peridexis’s flawless printlike Speech-charactery. It was Angelina Pellegrino’s signature, the autograph of the greatest hydromage of the last two centuries, a small, firm, elegant set of curves and curls.

Nita, standing at the center of the circle, remembered how proud she’d been to discover that she, too, now had a spell named after her in the manual: that in however small a way, Callahan’s Unfavorable Instigation now held the same kind of stature in the wizard’s manual as a work of art like this, and had her signature on it. And it won’t be the last one, she thought, watching that wall of water run at her.Not if this works. Angelina, if you’re around, watch this!

The core of the spell was laid out around the center, where Nita was standing. She started reading in the Speech, one eye on the approaching water, and sped up her reading as the main wave drew closer more swiftly than she’d ever thought it might. Don’t panic, just get the spell finished, then get your mind in the right shape to let the water through and tell it which way to go— !

She read and read, faster and faster— Two phrases left!— as the inrushing wave towered higher and higher over her, as the Sun struggled its last against the tumbled-up dirt and stone trapped in the oncoming water, and the water on either side of the tableland rose higher and higher, and Nita was standing on an island in a raging sea. One phrase left!— as the main oncoming wave leaned over her like a curved glass roof, reaching out and out over her and the tableland and even the angry water beyond them. Isn’t light gravity cool? How can it possibly do that? It has to fall now, it has to, and here’s the last phrase, five words, three, the last really long one—

The wave fell.

And the wizardry leapt up at it from the tableland like a sword-edge of focused fire, splitting the wave vertically down the middle into two vast, downcurling sheets of water that fell crashing to left and right.

Nita dropped to her knees as the energy went out of her in a blast like a fire hose. Now I know why there aren’t a lot of hydromages, she thought as she pitched forward and supported herself on her hands, doing her best not to collapse, to stay conscious, because she had to stay conscious. Above her, the wizardry was pushing itself out into the body of water behind the split wave and curling into two gigantic tubular structures burning with light, each one finned inside with what the spell’s précis had described as “tailored Venturi structures.” Whatever those were: to Nita they looked like someone had taken the chambers out of a chambered nautilus and set the chamber walls around the tubes’ walls in a spiral structure. The fins and the shapes of the tubes blazed as they lifted the water up and slowed it down, soaking up the fury of the extra energy that the tsunami had been about to dump on top of Nita and all the surrounding terrain.

She was gasping for air now, having to concentrate harder on staying conscious, staying focused. The thought of Kit was helping. He has to be in there inside Khretef somewhere. He has to! No way he’d ever just let himself be absorbed, no matter how smart a wizard Khretef might be. And as for Aurilelde—

Nita breathed out, breathed in, getting her second wind, feeling less shattered. But I’m getting angry again. She looked up at the wave, no longer a wave anymore but a long, sinking slope, filling the impact basin around her rapidly but not in danger of killing her. She may have control of this planet’s kernel, Nita thought, but she can’t just keep throwing stuff like that at me. In fact she has to be suffering now, no matter how easy she tried to make that look. And control or no control, she’s not a wizard—

Nita pushed herself up until she was kneeling upright again. The wave had sunk now almost to the level of the filling impact basin, and the whole huge space, at least the stretch of it that Nita could see from horizon to horizon, was full of water splashing back and forth like a bathtub in which the person submerged has moved too quickly. It’ll take care of itself now, she thought. The next stage will be ready to go in a few seconds. So get up and do the next thing before the reaction sets in. Hers will be setting in, too, and if you can push her into overloading herself before she understands what’s happening—

Nita got her feet under her, staggered, steadied herself. “Bobo,” she said. “I want to see them. And I want them to see me. And the area around me for about a mile or so.”

Remote visioning? I can handle that.

“What’s the energy outlay like?”

Against what you just did? Negligible.

“Do it.”

Nita stood as straight as she could. She didn’t have to work at looking angry. A moment later, she was looking at the floor of the Scarlet Tower as if it were an island touching her own. All around it, the Shamaska stared at her in astonishment: and the four in the center were trying to maintain neutral expressions, and mostly failing. Aurilelde in particular was looking both horrified and enraged, and trying to cover it up.

“Well,” Nita said, trying to sound as snotty and unconcerned as Dairine could on occasion, “that was pretty lame.”

Aurilelde opened her mouth. Nita didn’t give her a chance. “Yeah, yeah, impossible,” she said. “Well, guess what, Miss Not-a-Wizard? Not impossible. And I am annoyed with you. Not Khretef, who is really Kit— Hi, Kit!— and not your poor dad; the One only knows which of you is running things, and I don’t care. Not even Mister Rorsik behind you there; I don’t know who he thinks he’s running, and I don’t have time to waste finding out. You dropped that wave on me and choked off transit and shield-spelling. So let’s get serious.”

She glanced over her shoulder. Behind her, their initial stage completed, the massive twin tubes of the Pellegrino passthrough were now slowly rearing up behind her over the city like the graceful bodies of two gigantic serpents—the wizardly containment field no more than a thin, shimmering skin that looked like it could let go at any moment.

“Earth’s premier hydromage,” Nita said, “spent nine years of her life designing this wizardry to move huge volumes of water around between two oceans, under precise control. And I mean precise—not like the big crude kindergarten-sandbox stunt you just tried. But then you’re not a wizard, and having one telling you how to dump a bucket of water over somebody’s head isn’t the same as actually understanding what you’re controlling. I, however, understand water because I work with it a lot. So you’d better believe me when I tell you that if you don’t answer my challenge right now, I’m going to instruct one of the two ends of this wizardry to terminate right there in that room with you, and the other to terminate over the City of the Shamaska, and then I’ll tell both of them to emit the same volume of water as you just dropped on me, with approximately a hundred times the force. The City will be destroyed. And as for you personally, your bodies may be tough, but I’m betting a lot of you will die. And even if you don’t, how pleasant will the very few Shamaska survivors find life in this world when I’ve destroyed all your lovely, comfy tech, and your pretty city, and forced you to roam the surface of Mars digging up raw materials and building things from scratch?”

The three men around the Throne looked nervously from Nita to Aurilelde. “You would never do such a thing!” Aurilelde cried. “You are a wizard! Wizards cannot—”

“Oh yes wizards can,” Nita said. “Watch me! I told you, I am annoyed. You are screwing with life on my planet generally and my life personally …and I’m willing to pay the price for dealing with you once and for all. You want to prevent me smashing you and your little toy city all over the mountainside? Then you, Aurilelde, meet me right here, and you and I will have it out. You have a kernel. I have everything else. Let’s find out who really rules Mars.” And she grinned a nasty grin that she did not have to borrow from Dairine. “Should be fun.” Then she allowed some scorn to show. “Unless you’re scared, of course.”