Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

“That’s nonsense!” Khretef shouted.

And then for just a shocked second he was silent. The silence told Kit that Khretef couldn’t find anything to say, and however screwed up he might be, Khretef was still wizard enough not to want to lie—

“It’s true, and you know it is!” Kit said, both sad for Khretef’s people’s sake and yet triumphant to know that his guess was true. “Whatever got you guys fighting, it’s so long ago that you can’t remember. Which means it also shouldn’t matter anymore! And you’ve got the sense to see that. But Aurilelde doesn’t. She’s the one who scared you into trapping me in here, isn’t she? And now she’s going to take this mess through to its illogical conclusion. Lots of people on Earth will die when our world’s status quo gets destabilized by what’s happening here. The Eilitt and the Shamaska will keep right on killing each other. Everything will get worse. This isn’t your dream of everything working out for the best. This’ll be a nightmare. Put a stop to it, Khretef! Let me go!”

There was a long, unhappy silence. “It’s too late now,” the voice said. “It’s started…”

***

The skywalking Nita had in mind didn’t involve actual walking, as in the various exploits using hardened air. From the manual Nita had pulled a spell that persuaded local gravity to ignore her for a while, wrapping it around her like a blanket so that it dissolved into her body. Another price to be paid later— and not too much later.

I’ll worry about that in half an hour, Nita thought as she more completely undid gravity’s effects on her mass and drifted ever more quickly upward. Normally this kind of spell was a fair amount of work, which was why wizards didn’t overdo it. But she was in a hurry, and the effort would have a specific use in what she was doing; so Nita soared, and enjoyed it. Since who knows how much time I’m going to have to enjoy afterwards?

She reached an altitude of about thirty thousand feet above Argyre Planitia and just hung there, savoring the view. High above her, Mamvish’s cloaking spell was holding: it was too far above the planetary kernel’s range for Aurilelde to interfere with it, and too powerful for Khretef or Iskard to alter, even if they wanted to. Down below, though… water was everywhere. It was stunning. Nita thought of how it would be someday when people from Earth or wherever started terraforming this terrain slowly and responsibly. When there was an atmosphere again, when there was enough heat held in to keep water liquid, enough to grow plants …she could imagine what it would look like. But even now the huge flow and rush of water across the landscape was beautiful. Chains of crater lakes flashed in the sunlight: water was rushing down the sides of Valles Marineris in waterfalls six miles high. The southern polar basins were flooding, flashing the Sun back in a bloom of light—

—and a small, dark shape was suddenly there between Nita and the water, drifting closer, her veils of smoke and her smoky hair wreathing weightless around her up here in the almost-nonexistent air: Aurilelde. Nita let herself drift closer to Aurilelde, holding out her hands, ready. Normally she didn’t believe in grandstanding during her spells, and dramatic gestures weren’t for her. But perception could count for a great deal in a wizards’ duel.

Nita gulped hard at the thought that that was exactly what she was now embarked upon. It was not a situation you normally invited. Wizardry itself could become cranky at the concept of being used against itself without good reason. And she wasn’t sure that even having Bobo on her side would necessarily mean she was going to prevail in this contest. The phrase “grudge match” kept rising in her mind, and Nita had to keep pushing it away.

Aurilelde was drifting closer to Nita now. Nita assumed an amused smile while stretching out her senses to learn the one thing that she most desperately needed to know: that the kernel was still indeed here, and complete. It’s all here, and it’s still inside of her.

“So you can feel it,” said Aurilelde. “You’re more talented than I thought.”

“Any wizard can feel it,” Nita said. “And are you insane to actually allow someone to talk you into putting a planet’s kernel inside your body? Do you have any idea what that’ll do to you?”

“Rorsik has told me what it will do to you,” Aurilelde said. “That’s sufficient.”

Nita shook her head. “Bad advice,” she said. “The kind of management you get from internalization is short-lived. And management isn’t anywhere near mastery. Down on the ground, it might have been enough. Up here?” She laughed softly. “Let’s see what you’ve got, because the about-to-be-ex-Khretef can’t help you anymore.”

“On the contrary,” Aurilelde said in her mind, cold and furious. “He’s helped me all he needs to. And he’s taken your little ghost-Kit’s power and shown me how to use it to manage the planet’s non-gravitic forces: the magnetic fields, the upper winds. So now the problems are all yours. Does the ground suit?”

Nita frowned. In a wizard’s duel, the phrase acquired a meaning past the usual one; it was tantamount to offering the other wizard a choice of weapons. “Aurilelde, that is not a question you have any right to ask me! You’re just piggybacking on a wizard’s talents. If you were one of us, you’d be concerned about the responsibility that goes with the power. But you just want your own way. You don’t care what happens to anyone else.”

Aurilelde gave her a furious look. “I care! I care about Khretef! More than anything—”

“No, you don’t,” Nita said. “And if you did, that would be another problem.” She clenched her fists. “I really don’t want to do this…”

“That’s apparent,” Aurilelde said, laughing. “You hate the thought of fighting to keep what you think is yours! You want me to just give him up and walk away.”

Nita shook her head. “One of us has to be grown up about this, and I guess it gets to be me. Despite the fact that you’re about five billion years old—”

Aurilelde glared at her, furious. “I am not!”

Nita had to grin. And name-calling is so unproductive usually. “Okay. Four point five billion, give or take an eon.”

“And you just want back what you think belongs to you!” Aurilelde said. “Khretef told me what he could hear in Kit’s mind. You never let him be what he wanted to be! It was always about what you wanted, what you feared. But when he started to find a new life, a different world, you wanted no part of it: it bored you! Only when you thought it might take him from you did you start to become interested, and then you pushed yourself in—”

Nita was about to start arguing hotly about how this wasn’t true. But she stopped herself. “This is about what you’re about to do to my home planet. It isn’t about him—”

“It’s all about him!” Aurilelde cried. “It’s only about him! To try to pretend otherwise is a lie. And wizards don’t lie. Do you?”

Nita let herself drift more closely to Aurilelde, trying not to make it look like she was doing it on purpose. But as she did, through her tenuous connection to Mars’s kernel, she could feel the planet under her shiver uneasily, as if about to turn in its sleep. It wasn’t a feeling she liked.

“You’re trying to tell me,” Nita said, “that I’m just jealous of you. There’s an easy lie. Even easier for somebody who’s not a wizard. But even if you and Khretef are so much older than us, that doesn’t give you the right to do whatever you like with Kit’s soul! And if you or Khretef have actually done what you say you have”— she found suddenly that she was shaking— “then it’s better we should all die, right here and now. The One will sort us out, reincarnation or no reincarnation. I know what Timeheart is, if you don’t!”