Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

The completely stricken look spreading across Aurilelde’s face told Nita that this was all the truth, her visionary talent perhaps picking up on something Kit knew. Nita shivered.

“No! He stays with me because he loves me—”

“Oh, he’ll let you think that,” Nita said, angry. “Because Khretef’s a hero, like Kit, he’s willing to be locked up in that cage with you forever. He wants to be there? Then that’s your boyfriend’s business. But I’m not gonna let mine stay locked up in there with him!”

Aurilelde slowly dropped her hands and just hung there on the borders of space, a look of increasing horror spreading across her face. Nita, watching, hardly dared to breathe, even to move.

It was hard to just wait and give Aurilelde this one last chance to get it right, even with the memory of that voice screaming, I don’t need this world: yours will do as well! It was so easy to think, You’re a hopeless case: nothing to do with you but throw you out of the game!

But the Rede had said, To wreak aright | she must slay her rival— And that had to mean the scared and angry Aurilelde who was ready to tear a planet apart to get her way. She has to have the chance to reject that option, or this won’t work.

The moment stretched as Aurilelde drifted, and the back of Nita’s mind became an uproar of her own fears, for Earth, for Kit. We’re wasting time. She’ll never turn! Just put her out of her misery while she’s off balance and get on with saving one world if not two!

Nita swallowed. Bobo, she said silently, this is it. Let’s have that routine for getting a kernel out of a living matrix against its will.

The peridexis showed Nita the structure of the spell. And as it did, Aurilelde raised her arms, her face shifting into a mask of fury, and launched herself toward Nita. A moment later her hands were around Nita’s throat, squeezing.

Nita reeled back in shock bizarrely tinged with embarrassment, since her personal force field was presently keyed toward protecting her from vast impersonal forces, not the kind of playground stuff that she might have expected from Joanne and her crowd back in the bad old days.

But Nita had learned some techniques back then that still worked fine. She reached out and snaked her right arm over one of Aurilelde’s and under the other, then angled the arm up to twist her attacker’s arms free. Aurilelde tried to get another grip, but before she had a chance, Nita grabbed both her wrists in one hand, then described a quick line of hard light around them with one index finger. The thin strand of force field knotted itself tight.

That second was all Nita needed. Frozen in it, the visionary gift showed NIta the tangle of light inside Aurilelde that was what she wanted. As Aurilelde struggled and screamed, “No!,” Nita finished saying the spell the peridexis had passed her, and plunged her hand straight into Aurilelde’s chest.

Aurilelde screamed. So did Nita, so close to the pain and so much in sync with it: for the kernel she gripped was all tangled up with Aurilelde’s soul. She could even hear Kit scream, too: through Khretef he was as caught up in this as Nita.

Not—much longer! Nita thought, panting with pain. At least— I’ve got hold of the kernel. Now all I need to do is get it out—

But that was going to be the hard part. She made sure of her grip on the tangle of hot, rusty light buried inside Aurilelde. This wouldn’t be easy: the wizardry that had implanted it there was complex, elegant, and very tough.

But so are you! she heard Kit say from somewhere. Go!

Nita grinned in triumph and desperate hope. She clenched her fist around the kernel, braced herself, spoke the final word of the spell’s second part, and yanked out what she held.

The kernel came free. Nita fell backward with the flash of pain that went through her opponent. Crying out in shock and anguish, Aurilelde plummeted toward the planet. But Nita had no time for her right now. All her attention was on the brilliant interwoven tangle of profoundly ancient wizardry that was the kernel of the planet Mars. The impression she’d gotten of it earlier, of reddish light, was correct: thousands of strands and cords of wizardry, all keyed to the planet’s gravity and mass and composition and construction, were writhing and glowing in the tangle of power as it flowered out to its full volume, a beachball-sized mass of rose and rust and blood and sunset colors. But they were in chaos, the tangle of terrible power now jittering and buzzing in fury that was a residue of Aurilelde’s.

Traumatized, Nita thought. And why not, after where it’s been stuck and what it’s been through? She threw a glance down at the planet. Half of it was obscured now by the fury of dust being kicked up by the worsening quakes. Bad. Let’s go—

Nita took a deep breath, then sank her hands into the kernel, concentrating. One strand very deep in the kernel, near its nucleus, controlled geological and crustal activity, and that one was singing like a plucked string, resonating with Aurilelde’s rage.

Nita grabbed for it, tried to calm it down. But the kernel had already been locked too long in relationship with Aurilelde’s soul for the relationship to quickly come undone. Furious at having been mismanaged and now further enraged at being tampered with by yet another stranger, the whole kernel writhed and bucked in her hands, resisting Nita.

However, it was now in the hands of a wizard who’d gone through some difficult schooling in kernel management techniques— unlike Aurilelde, whose control over it had been strictly second-hand a matter of half-understood instincts, half-remembered advice, and wishful thinking. What you need with these things is understanding, Nita thought. And figuring them out always wins out over just plunging around feeling stuff.

In Nita’s grasp, the kernel kept on jumping and struggling, indignant at the sudden change of control, trying to leap away and return to where it had been moments before. “Oh no,” Nita said softly. “You are not going there!” She clutched it, hanging on, working her right hand in to close around that one shrieking string of the kernel through which she could feel the earthquakes rippling across Mars’s crust.

She gripped that string hard, damping it down. “Stop being so angry!” she told it. “There’s no point in it. It’s all over now. Just calm down—”

It ignored her. “Just stop it,” Nita told it. “It’s going to be all right! Let go of it and calm down!”

And slowly, slowly, under force of mind, under furious intention, and right through Nita’s fear for Kit, the vibration gradually began to settle down, fading, letting go. The string stopped singing.

Nita glanced down at the Martian surface. It would be a long while before the dust settled. But under the surface, she could now feel the residual transverse waves of the earthquake dying away, going quiet. She let out a long, scared breath.

Twelve minutes, Bobo said. Meanwhile, don’t you think you’ve forgotten something?

Nita glanced down. Bright in the light of the Sun behind her, like a falling star, a tiny figure was accelerating toward the planet’s surface. For just a moment, thinking of what Aurilelde had intended for Kit and for the Earth, a nasty, satisfied anger flared up in Nita. If she does land a little too hard to survive, well, maybe she had it coming. The Rede did say, yet to wreak aright, | she must slay her rival—

And if she didn’t pull that off, then maybe I’m the one who has to…

Nita hung there, silent. No, she thought. Prophecy is fine, but it doesn’t have to happen. “Sorry,” she said to someone she was sure was watching. “Not today.” And she dived after Aurilelde.

The Shamaska was falling uncontrolled, tumbling. Nita easily beat her down to ground level at Argyre Planitia— now a sprinkling of islands in a broad, round sea slowly draining away through many outlets at its edges— and alighted on one to wait for her. Nita felt around in the kernel’s interior for the controls for local gravity and planetary mass. There they are, she thought, and made a couple of simple but significant changes.