Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

High above her, Aurilelde’s fall began to slow. By the time she was perceptible as a body with arms and legs, several hundred feet up, she had decelerated to a slow drift. “Bobo,” Nita said, “I need the usual transit spell. Put the far end down inside the Scarlet Tower—”

Right, the peridexis said. Nine minutes…

“Until I collapse?” Nita said.

Unless you do it sooner.

Nita gulped. She was starting to feel those shakes again as the circle of the transit spell appeared on the tableland in front of her. Never mind, she thought. Not just yet—

Aurilelde was falling toward the center of the circle. Nita checked the integrity of her personal force field, making sure it was set for physical attack and weaponry now. “Collapse this after we’re both through,” she said to Bobo, and stepped in.

15: Meridiani Planum

Nita’s second step came down on the polished floor of the Tower. The Throne was empty. A hubbub of scared, angry voices was bouncing around inside, but it went hushed as they registered Nita’s sudden presence.

She headed for the Throne and the three men standing there, the kernel in her hands. They stared at her: Iskard in shock, Khretef in horror, Rorsik in rage. “That is ours!” Rorsik cried. “Give it back!”

Nita stared at him, then looked at Khretef. “You see what he cares about,” she said, jerking her head at Rorsik.

Khretef hurried toward her. “Where is Aurilelde?”

Behind Nita, Aurilelde fell out of the air and bounced gently to the floor. Khretef rushed to her.

Nita ignored those two for the moment. “This is not yours!” she said to Rorsik. “It belongs to Mars. And you haven’t done a whole lot today to prove that you ever ought to be given access to it, so if I were you, I’d just shut up. Especially since you put her up to this.”

Rorsik opened his mouth, shut it again.

“And as for you,” Nita said, turning her attention to Iskard, “you really need some father lessons. I’m sure it’s nice for you to run the city! Maybe you even really do have your people’s interests at heart. But you let this guy talk you into endangering your daughter’s life so she could use the kernel to wipe out your enemies. You know what? She would have destroyed the planet doing it! She was halfway there already. And then you forced Khretef into doing things he wouldn’t otherwise have wanted to do, because otherwise you wouldn’t let him and Aurilelde hook up. Which was really nasty and sick. One wizard subverting another like that? One wizard getting another one to bend the Oath way out of shape for his own purposes? What got into you? Then again, I think I can guess.”

She was getting angrier by the moment, and shakier, but Nita was intent on seeing this through to its logical conclusion before she fell over. “You don’t understand!” Iskard said to her, coming toward her. “We dared not allow the Eilitt to obtain an advantage over us! Their wizards were doing exactly the same kind of thing, seeking control of the kernel, trying to—”

“You stop right there,” Nita said, holding up the kernel, “because I’m just about ready to hose you and your city off the face of Mars like dog poop down the driveway!”

Iskard froze where he was. “I’m sick of your excuses and your fighting!” Nita said. “And I’m sick of wizards who’re so blinded by how much they’ve hated each other for umpty million years that they’re willing to forget that they took an Oath never to do crap like this! So you’re about to get a taste of your own medicine.”

Nita staggered, straightened again. “There’s a full implementation of a transoceanic passthrough hanging over your heads right this minute, and I’m in a mood to use it if I don’t get my partner back right this minute. If I go, too, when the hard rain comes down, big deal, because life without Kit doesn’t look so hot right now! And I’m betting I’d be doing the universe a service in getting you people off the books. For Kit and me, ’cause our Oaths are in place, I’m betting there’s always Timeheart. Whereas for you, the Lone Power only knows where you’ll wind up, and I can’t bring myself to care. So?”

Iskard looked back toward where Khretef was helping Aurilelde up. He sat down dully on the Throne with a thump, like a man defeated. “It cannot be undone,” he said.

“Wrong answer,” Nita said softly. “Try again.”

In her hands, the kernel flared with furious fire, now reflecting her own mood quite clearly in an eyehurting carmine blaze that made the Shamaska around her wince and flinch away. Nita turned around and looked back toward Khretef and Aurilelde. “Well?” she said to Khretef.

Aurilelde, slumped again Khretef, wouldn’t look at her. Khretef, kneeling beside her, was doing his best to hold himself straight, but his shame was evident. “I could hear his voice inside me before,” he said, miserable, “but I can hear him no more. If I had known that another wizard would die because of me…”

“Your problem was that you didn’t think he was another wizard!” Nita said. “Rorsik talked her into believing that he was ‘just’ another version of you. And she talked you into believing it.” She glared at him, wobbling again. “I’m sorry for you, but right now that’s not going to be good enough!”

In her hands the kernel flamed even brighter. The Shamaska standing around the room began to flee for the exits: one of them was Rorsik.

Nita stood there with the kernel, feeling the big backlash from the passthrough and the smaller ones from her other exertions inexorably catching up with her. I’m out of ideas, she thought, as the shaking got worse. They really can’t do anything. I don’t know what to do! Where do we go from here?

How about we start with not panicking? Kit said inside her head.

Nita’s head snapped up. And quite abruptly there was a multicolored dinosaur standing in the middle of the room—and next to her, a young blond woman with a baby in a chest sling and a parakeet sitting on her head.

“Mamvish!” Nita said. Then she sat down on the ground, quite hard, even considering the low gravity. The surroundings started to blur. No—! “Mamvish, they’ve got Kit, what about Kit—?”

The massive head swung toward her. Suddenly Nita could see clearly again: energy poured into her in a rush, and she got to her feet again, though unsteadily.

Colleague, hold your nerve! Mamvish said way down inside her. I think I got the one thing we needed before they threw me out.

From beside Mamvish, Irina looked over at Nita with an extremely neutral expression— but Nita thought she could see an edge of amusement on it as Irina’s eyes fell on the kernel. At least you didn’t drop it, Irina said.

Do you want it?

No. Just be quiet for a moment and let’s see how this develops.

But Kit—!

“First things first,” Mamvish said to the room at large. The general rush for the exits had stopped where it was with the appearance of the two new arrivals. “It’s as I thought: what we have here is an incomplete archival.”

She looked at Khretef, and a storm of fiery Speech-characters flared under her skin. Khretef screamed and went down on hands and knees, and the hair rose on the back of Nita’s neck, because the scream had two voices in it, one of them Kit’s. Khretef collapsed, fell flat to the floor, writhed and twisted, rolled away—

— and left a body behind him, dressed as he was, but not gray-skinned.

“Kit!” Nita cried, and ran to him.

He was getting to his knees as she reached him. “Whoa,” Kit said as Nita helped him up one-handed. “That was… so interesting.”

“We’re not done with the interesting stuff yet,” Nita muttered.

Kit looked around the room, saw Irina and Mamvish standing there, and shivered all over. “Yeah, I bet,” he said. And he glanced over at Aurilelde. “You mind if we put some distance between us and her?”