Диана Дуэйн - A Wizard Of Mars

Kit had taken Khretef off to one side, and together the two of them stood for a good while looking down at Kit’s manual while Kit turned the pages, shifting from section to section as he constructed a spell. After a few moments he pulled a long glowing string of speech-characters out of the manual—a deactivated spell, set for storage and later use by another wizard.

Nita watched Kit checking the center section of the spell one last time before passing it to Khretef, and knew what it was. Her mouth went dry at the prospect of handing another being so much personal information. But it’s his business. And Khretef, too, looked at the spell with some disquiet: but also, Nita thought, with a touch of guilt. He and Kit exchanged a long glance before Khretef took the spell and made it vanish into his own unseen version of the manual: and he bowed to Kit, quite deeply.

Finally Kit headed back to where Nita waited. “He’s got what he needs to build into the Nascence,” Kit said as they joined her. “So the superegg’ll recognize me and behave the way it ought to, and start all this going.” He glanced over at Irina, who nodded at him. “Irina and Mamvish have stoked the Nascence wizardry up so it can’t be cracked by any amount of brute-force wizardry in backtime …and they’ve stuck a heavy-duty cloaking routine on it so they won’t recognize the presence of their own spell routines in the superegg when we find it on the uptime leg.”

Nita realized that Irina was looking at her. For a moment she didn’t understand— and then she realized what was needed. “I have to give her what you did, don’t I?” she said. “Enough of my personal information for Aurilelde to link to her own. So that the congruency between us is complete, and all this works out the way it should…”

Kit didn’t say anything.

But why wouldn’t I? Nita thought. To make all this come out all right. She nodded at Irina. Irina nodded back, turned away as Khretef headed over to join Kit again.

And only then did it occur to Nita, with a shock, that this would mean it hadn’t actually been Aurilelde who Kit had been so attracted to. It was me…

Khretef looked at her apologetically as he came up beside Kit. “It is a great gift you give us,” Khretef said to both of them. “We will not forget you—who helped us when you had little reason to.”

“I had the same reason any wizard had,” Kit said. “You just had, well, a little memory lapse. With some assistance.”

From a little distance away, where she’d been standing looking rather forlorn, Aurilelde now came over to clutch Khretef’s hand. For a long time it seemed as if she wouldn’t look at Kit or Nita. But finally she stole a glance at them. “You know that I had to—” she said: and then she fell silent.

Nita sighed and shook her head. “It all worked out in the end,” she said. “You were scared. At times like that it’s hard to think straight. Don’t be afraid anymore, okay? And you two be happy together.”

Khretef and Kit were exchanging glances. “Cousin,” Khretef said holding a hand out, “brother— I’m sorry.”

Kit took his arm. “You think you screwed up?” he said. “You should’ve seen some of mine. Go on. And take care of her.”

“Time, Kit,” Irina said.

Kit stepped back. Khretef and Aurilelde and Iskard stepped back as well, in the direction of the city.

Irina raised her hands; in them was the leash, knotted into a circle. She threw the leash into the air. It hovered there and began to stretch into a circular line of light, widening, growing—

The leash ascended, growing with astonishing speed, becoming a circle yards wide, tens of yards, hundreds: finally nearly a mile in diameter, still stretching as it rose. Then, high above the City of the Shamaska, centered over it, the burning circle began to fall. As it did, the space that it enclosed began to go misty. It fell farther, and the uppermost towers of the City were no longer there, vanishing as if some invisible shade were being drawn down over them, obscuring the view. Then the city proper vanished; next the buildings around them. Finally Nita saw Aurilelde turn to Khretef, and the circle dropped to the ground only a few feet away—

Everything was gone. The shoulder of Olympus Mons stood bare in the afternoon: and slowly, from high clouds up in the dusty sky, a little snow started to fall.

Mamvish and Irina stood there watching the snow come down. After a moment, Irina turned to them and let out a long breath. “It took,” she said. “And at the other city site as well. They’re positioned where we intended… far from each other in time and space.”

Mamvish flourished her tail, looking around. “Well,” she said, “we have a lot of work to do. We’re going to have to do extensive time-patching on this whole environment to get rid of the seismic damage and the water…”

“You’ll be wanting to call in all your Mars teams, then,” Irina said. And she looked at Kit. “I’d suggest, though, that for the moment you sit this out. The wizardry that connected you and Khretef will need some time to fade.”

“And that was why he was so crazy?” Nita said, starting to feel wobbly again.

“Yes,” Irina said. “Among other things. Which is why I’ve arranged for the energy outlay for the normally rather illegal thing you did to his manual to be subsidized, and for you to be forgiven.”

Kit stared at Nita. “What did you do to my manual?”

Nita rubbed her eyes. “Later,” she said. “Right now, I really, really need a nap.”

Together, they vanished.

16: Elysium

It took more than a nap before Nita was ready to do much of anything the next day. Her dad had gotten her off the final day of school, citing family business; which was true enough. But once she got home, she slept straight through into the next morning. It was mid-evening before she and Kit had a chance to get together with Irina and Mamvish to review the events of the weekend.

Her father set out the lawn chairs and the barbecue kettle in the shielded part of the backyard, and sat there drinking iced tea with Kit’s mama and pop and Tom and Carl. Across from them, the Powers’ Archivist (too large to do anything but sprawl near the lawn chairs) and Earth’s Planetary relaxed with Nita, Kit, Dairine, Carmela, Ronan, and Darryl, debriefing them on the fine details of the last few days and filling in missing ones.

Mars had been fairly quickly repaired, since the necessary timeline-patching started almost immediately after the Cities were gone. The power requirements of the patching spells had meant that a lot of wizards had to be called in to assist, but now everything was once again dry except for carbon dioxide snow, and all the planet’s water was back where it belonged, frozen under the crust or at the poles. However, there were still endless minor details to sort out.

“So the ‘blue star’ was Earth,” Carmela was saying to Dairine, while making notes on the spiral notebook in her lap. “That was these guys getting involved. And ‘the word long lost,’ that was the Shard—”

“How’s that a word?” Dairine said, unconvinced.

“It’s a pun in the Speech. One term for a single word in the Speech is shafath, a fragment of a longer expression, get it?”

“Yeah, but what about the ‘spoke by the watcher’ thing? How can you ‘speak’ a fragment of anything?”

Carmela sighed, looked up at Mamvish. “It’s true,” Mamvish said, “there is a verb form of shafath as well: shafait’, to use a fragment or split one off—”

Dairine rolled her eyes. “Forget it,” she said. “It’s just another of these symbolic poems that can mean anything. Give me the concrete stuff any day.”

Carmela was starting to look annoyed. “Okay, I’ll give you this,” Dairine said. “This stuff about the watcher, the silent yearning for the lost one found, blah de blah de blah de blah. Fine: that was Aurilelde and Khretef. He was dead while everybody else was in stasis. Then when Kit showed up, he got unlost and started looking for the Shard again. But ‘she must slay her rival’? Just who was her rival? Because nobody got slain! You should find somebody to complain to, because this prophecy is substandard.”