A Wizard Of Mars

“Fine,” Carmela said. “But seriously, next week when school’s really finished, let’s go up to the Crossings and have Sker’ret do you a favor. It’s not like he doesn’t want to! It probably just didn’t occur to him. He’s so used to having unlimited worldgating available that he forgets other people don’t have it. Anyway, where do you want me to drop you off?”

Nita thought about that for a moment. In her mind’s eye she suddenly saw the map she’d been looking at earlier.

“Argyre Planitia,” she said.

“You got it,” Carmela said. “Come on.”

They headed upstairs.

***

Fifty million miles away, Kit was sitting out on the vast southwestern shoulder of Olympus Mons, where Aurilelde’s city had stood in his dream, staring into the distance and wondering what exactly he was waiting for. From where he sat to the edge of the southern horizon, where the shoulder of the mountain dropped away and out of sight, the fine dust of carbon dioxide snow lay over everything, lightening a vista that normally would have been much darker in the predawn twilight.

He felt strange. For one thing, he’d found it peculiar to come here and not find Aurilelde’s city still standing where he’d seen it last. That was impossible, of course: logically Kit knew that. Logically he knew that his dream, and the image he’d seen during the wizardry at Hutton yesterday, were of things that had happened in the deep past. Yet the feeling that they should be happening here and now was something he couldn’t get rid of—especially since his presence in those visions had seemed to alter them. There was a sense that the landscape of the present that he had moved through coming here was a thin veil over something far stronger, deeper, more real. All it would take would be the right action, the right words, to sweep the veil aside right across the planet and bring the old Mars alive.

Air it had… water it had. Aurilelde’s remembered words brought the hair up on the back of Kit’s neck. That living Mars, awash with oceans and the promise of life, was the Mars he wanted to see more than anything. And Aurilelde had all but promised that he could see it again. All he had to do was finish the task that had been his, that had been Khretef’s, before Aurilelde’s people buried their cities on Mars and immersed themselves in their long sleep again, waiting for the help they needed to come from outside.

The only thing that would stop it would be interference from people who didn’t understand. Kit was half afraid what he might hear from Mamvish when she finally finished with whatever business was keeping her away from here. She has to see what needs to be done, Kit thought. She has to understand! She was, after all, the Powers’ own Species Archivist. Here was a species that had survived incredible adversity, that had archived itself!

Now all they needed was some help getting reestablished. Sure, it’ll be tough, when they have a planet next door that doesn’t believe in aliens yet, a planet covered with telescopes. But it can be done. The right wizardries, the right implementations of power, and you could have another species living here right under the noses of all the nonwizardly observers on Earth.

Misunderstanding, though… that was going to be the great enemy. Even Nita, who normally got the sense of what was going on without too much trouble, seemed to be having trouble understanding why Kit needed to be let alone to work out what to do up here. Why was she insisting so hard that she wanted to go with me? Kit thought. Unless she saw something.

Kit sat there wondering about that for a moment. Nita was working very hard, lately, on the visionary specialty that she’d been developing. There were times when she turned to Kit and finished a sentence for him, or described something that was at the back of his mind that he’d meant to tell her about and had then forgotten. What kind of things is she seeing that she’s not telling me about? he’d wondered before. And now he was wondering about it harder than usual.

What if she had seen Aurilelde somehow? Or knew something about her that Kit didn’t? There was no way to be sure she hadn’t. Trouble was, Nita’s visions weren’t always right. He’d heard her himself complaining that sometimes they turned up too late to do her any good: or that they emphasized something that turned out not to be all that important later. All it would take would be for her to get some wrong idea about Aurilelde into her head, and then there would be real trouble.

Better to keep her away from Aurilelde and her issues entirely. ’Lelde had told him candidly enough about what her own fears and hopes were like. And as for Khretef—

Kit let out a long, uncertain breath. There was definitely some connection between them, though he didn’t understand how or why. Early this morning, soon after he woke up, he’d started to consider some of the similarities between Khretef’s and Aurilelde’s life, and his and Nita’s. Two wizards, one a visionary— or getting to be that way— one good with machines. And another pair, one a wizard, good with machines and concrete things, the other one not a wizard, but a visionary, definitely…

Am I what I am because I really am Khretef come back?

He sat there considering that for a while. The manual, as on some other vital subjects, was silent on the subject of reincarnation. There were hints that it could happen under some circumstances, but it seemed to be an elective issue, not necessarily enforced or enforceable. Apparently the One felt you were competent to decide if or when you were ready to come back, or how long a respite you needed from the business of errantry and life.

It doesn’t matter, Kit thought at last. They’re alive, her people! Or waiting to be alive again. But there’s something she needs to make it happen, so that they can settle themselves down on Mars and get back to living their lives again. Khretef went to find this thing that Aurilelde needs… whatever it was. And died—

Kit hunched forward on his stone again, thinking about that, scuffing with one foot at the snow lying at his feet. There had been no mistaking the word she’d been using; Aurilelde’s language was one that came through perfectly clearly when you listened to it with a basic knowledge of the Speech—

A breath of cold wind went past Kit’s ear, raising the hair on his neck again. I need to see to this force field, he thought. What’s going on? Is it leaking a little?

He pulled out his manual and checked the status on the spell that was managing his air and temperature control. It was fine. Kit sighed, shut the manual, put it down, and ran his hands through his hair, finally hiding his face in them. He let out a breath—

And saw something. Darkness: and in it, a tiny faint light, distant, shining. The light was a deep, vivid blue-violet.

That’s it, said the voice in his ear. The thing that’s needed. And it was his own voice—

Kit shivered, opened his eyes.

Everything was as it should be: the mountain, the snow, the falling night. “This is really creepy…” Kit said aloud.

Possibly because you’re too hung up on the connotations of the word ‘dead,’ said the voice in his ear. You’re a wizard! You know other species don’t necessarily handle ‘dead’ the way your species does.

Kit swallowed. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll grant you that. But you get to explain how this is happening.”

He could feel that the owner of the voice was grinning at him— a strange amusement born of seeing how like itself Kit was. The whole planet is awash in newly released wizardry now, it said, hunting for an outlet or a purpose the way lightning looks for something tall to strike. But you caused that. You broke open the Nascence.

“The superegg,” Kit said.

That’s right. You’ve turned loose a series of events like the series I set free long ago. That was when enemies of Aurilelde’s city, the Shamaska City, stole something she and her father needed to master the planet. A tool: a weapon. Or a key to both. People from the Eilitt City stole it, and hid it. So I went to find it. The Nascence held the wizardry that would show the location of what was stolen, and it did reveal that to me. But when I went looking…

“You got killed,” Kit said.

The voice sighed. It was kind of unavoidable, he said. Our enemies knew me too well. They laid enough traps that sooner or later I was likely to fall afoul of one of them. And eventually I did. But this time, when you set out to complete the task, you have an advantage.

Kit looked out toward the sunset. “That being?”

Me. I know where the traps are. There’s no need for me, for us, to fall into them this time! We can go straight to the place where the Shard is hidden, find it, escape with it, and put it in Aurilelde’s hands. After that… everything changes.

Kit swallowed. “That’s what’s needed to make it possible to wake the Martians up?”

If this is Mars, said Khretef, and we are the Martians… then yes.

Kit hesitated. Then he stood up and got out his wand. “Let’s go,” he said.

***

Some four thousand miles away, Nita stood in the basin of Argyre Planitia and looked around her. A phrase that had crossed her mind many times recently in terms of the landscapes of the Solar System now came up for consideration again: magnificent desolation.

It was well past midnight, local time: morning would be coming along in a while, but not soon. Snow had fallen here recently, but after that had come a dust storm, and snow and dust had been all whipped up together. Now a combination of powder-fine dry ice and pale gritty dust lay drifted between a foot and two feet deep over everything, glowing faintly with starlight.

Through this pallid emptiness Nita slowly made her way, her force field brushing the dust and snow aside as she passed. How beautiful this is, she thought. But not a place where you’d ever really want to live.

She breathed out then, annoyed at her own Earth-centric viewpoint. In its ancient state, this wilderness had looked like an untouched paradise to the people from Shamask-Eilith when they arrived: close to the sun, better provided with atmosphere at that point— that much the manual had confirmed, suggesting an overactive younger Sun had later on torn much of a too-light atmosphere away—and flowing with liquid surface water. This spot, for example: the manual had said that a lot of the stone fragments scattered around were sedimentary. So there were rivers here: maybe even a lake. This place must have seemed energy-rich and hospitable to the Shamaska and Eilitt, especially once they’d finished tailoring their new bodies to the world that would be their home.

But then things went wrong for them, Nita thought, stopping and looking out across the pale, rippling dunes of dust and snow. And after coming such a long way.

We had such high hopes for the new world, she heard a faraway voice saying. We changed our bodies. We changed our minds. We thought that surely we had now left the old troubles behind and could have peace. And for a while it seemed so. But we couldn’t change our souls. And so it turned out that not only were the same old troubles with us, but now they were even worse…

Nita paused, listening as the voice faded away. Her visionary tendencies were taking unusual forms in this environment: normally she saw things rather than hearing them. “Bobo,” she said, feeling unnerved, “is this going to get to be a habit?”

It was a moment before she got an answer back. There is a lot of wizardry loose on this planet at the moment, he said. When Kit broke the superegg open, the first effect of the breakage was to send out those signals to the various sites around Mars. But since then, levels of available power—unfocused, unassigned power, which any running wizardry might access—have been slowly rising all over the planet. It’s as if the wizards who came with the Shamaska and the Eilitt stored great reservoirs of power in the fabric of the planet itself, ready to be used when that resource was broken open. And now it’s welling up. You want to be careful about any wizardry you start under these conditions.

Nita shivered inadvertently. “It’d be like dropping a match in gasoline,” she said.

It could be. You must take care.

She started walking on slowly again. “They must have had some really big wizardry in mind,” Nita said, “to lay in that much power.”

That would seem like a reasonable assessment.

“Great,” Nita muttered. “Terraforming, maybe?”

Possibly.

Nita shook her head and walked on. Despite the difference and strangeness of this landscape, that reminded her strongly of the rest of Mars in feeling not just empty, but sad: not just like a deserted house, but like one where all the furniture’s been moved out and no one ever intends to live there again. The other kind of desolation, Nita thought.Not just physically empty, but empty of soul. Maybe that was why she’d never been as keen on Mars as Kit was.

Nostalgia seemed to be part of the appeal for Kit, and for some of the wizards working with him on the greater Martian project: that wistful longing for a time when water ran here and the air had been dense enough for the sky to be really blue. It would never have been a warm place by Earth’s standards. Its orbit was all wrong for that. But Mars would nonetheless have had a chance to come by its own kind of life eventually. That had all gone wrong, though. Nothing was left but this sad emptiness, this hollowness.

It’s the missing kernel, of course. Probably its absence was so much more noticeable now because she was here alone, instead of in the company of Kit and his Mars-team buddies, as she’d often been in the past. Nita stood there considering the bizarre lack all over again, wondering what could have caused it.

When she’d still been desperately trying to find ways to save her mother’s life by manipulating her body’s kernel, Nita had worked closely with all kinds of kernels, even planetary ones, and with wizards expert at handling them. A wizard with the right training and enough power could manipulate a world’s kernel into doing all kinds of amazing things— offsetting climate change, shifting the planet’s interior structure, even changing elements of its orbit if they knew what they were doing.

Which is always the problem, Nita thought. You have to be absolutely sure you do know what you’re doing. Kernels were so sensitive and risky to work with that there was a whole practice universe equipped with test kernels where you were sent to train before you ever touched a real one.

Nita had never bothered looking into the issue of Mars’s kernel herself. Seniors and Planetaries hadn’t found it over many years of looking, and she’d had her own projects to think about; but now her curiosity was getting the better of her. Where exactly was Mars’s kernel? What had happened to it? Kernels didn’t just get lost or fall off into space. And no wizard in his or her or its right mind would have considered removing one from where it belonged. The whole structure of the planet could have been deranged. But maybe it was hidden? Somebody went to a lot of trouble to hide the superegg. And on some planets, wizards do hide kernels to keep them from being tampered with.

Standing in the midst of that snowy, dusty wilderness, Nita got out her manual and paged through it to one prominently bookmarked section, a line of light in the closed pages: the Kernel Tactics and Management section for which she’d been cleared for access months ago. The page that itemized local kernel presences confirmed that no planetary kernel was present anywhere in the areosphere, though there certainly had been one here once. In the distant past, the kernel had even been present right here in Argyre Planitia for a while.

No big surprise there, Nita thought: unsupervised planetary kernels had a tendency to wander around freely in the bodies they inhabited. Only if a planet had a resident wizard operating actively as a Planetary did a kernel tend to stay in one place, mostly because the wizard working with it wanted to be able to get his, her, or its hands, fins, or tentacles on it quickly in an emergency. But there hasn’t been a kernel here for… She frowned as she deciphered the Speech-character suffix after the number she was looking at. Half a million years!

Nita shook her head. The manual confirmed that no other Planetary in the system had interfered with Mars’s kernel. So where’d it go? What happened to it?

She looked again at the page for Mars. It showed the date of the original establishment of the kernel, shortly after the coalescence of the planet— a date coordinate with a negative powers-of-ten suffix far, far bigger than the first one— and after that came a long, long period of uneventful tenancy during which Mars’s kernel oscillated gently about inside the planet’s bulk in the normal way, until half a million years ago.

And after that— nothing. Nita scanned up the page again, and after the word STATUS there appeared only the notation: Indeterminate.

Nita put her manual away and looked around at the silent, frigid night in complete bemusement. “Bobo,” she said after a moment, “what the heck does ‘indeterminate’ mean?”

It means that the kernel disappeared with no documented cause, said the peridexis after a moment.

“How come you don’t know where it went?”

The peridexis sounded almost embarrassed now. I may be wizardry, it said, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I have access to all the universe’s knowledge. And data, or even just the ability to understand it, can be lost over time, as you saw in the Cavern: or misplaced.

Nita frowned. “Or hidden.”

Redacted, yes. Sometimes by the Powers, of course, or those acting for Them—

“And the Lone Power?” Nita said.

There was a longish silence. It cannot interfere with manual content directly, the peridexis said. But it remains one of the Powers, and has enough strength to range about interfering with matter and spirit— out of sight, as it were. At which point the manual will find no data to store or relay.

Nita was beginning to wonder if what she was starting to think of as the Case of the Purloined Kernel was going to reveal, lurking at the bottom of it, every wizard’s oldest adversary. But why? It doesn’t make sense. Right next door to Mars you’ve got a planet full of nosy wizards. There’s much too much chance that one of them would notice. Even though, all right, none of them did. But they could have. And anyway, why would the Lone One come sneaking in here and run off with Mars’s kernel?

Nita stood there for some moments, running various scenarios in her head. Finally she stopped. “Bobo,” she said, “it’s not good for a planet not to have a kernel. They get run down, like a house that’s not maintained when it’s empty. And the matter gets lonely.”

It would, yes.

Nita shoved her manual into her otherspace pocket. “Somebody needs to look into this again,” she said. “But first things first. Where’s Kit?”

There was a long pause.

Indeterminate… said Bobo.

***

Kit stood there on the shoulder of Olympus Mons and looked out into the falling night. “So listen,” he said, glancing around him and wishing there was something to fix his attention on: this talking to the empty air was extremely hard to get used to. “Before I start running around just doing errands for you, I need some questions answered.”

That makes sense, his voice said to him.

“What exactly is it we need to do next?” Kit said. “Where do we need to go?” He paused. “And would you please explain why I should be helping you in the first place?! You’re trying to take over my mind! Or my life. Or something.”

It’s nothing to do with taking anything over, Khretef said. We’re the same. I’m you… just earlier. And Kit could feel his shrug.

He couldn’t do much but shake his head at that. “Assuming that’s true,” Kit said, “there’s something really wrong with you being here now. I mean, I’m no expert, but as far as I understood it, one soul should only be in one place at one time. Sure, there are some exceptions—”

You mean like the wizard who was here with you before? Khretef said. Yes, he’d be a special case. We had wizards like him once: but ours died. And Khretef shook his head sadly and sat down on one of the stones of the cavern.

Kit looked around him in alarm at the discovery that they were suddenly underground and that he wasn’t talking to empty air anymore, but to someone of the same species as Aurilelde— apparently about his own weight, though taller. Khretef had the same smooth, gray, stony skin, though a shade darker than Aurilelde’s, and he was dressed in the harness of metals and silks and leatherlike material that he’d seen on other Shamaska-Eilitt males, with a long, slim sword at his side. Khretef’s smoke-hair was much shorter than Aurilelde’s, just a film of darkness around the top of his head, like a buzzcut made of haze. Aside from the slight difference in the hair, Kit realized that the being he was looking at really did look a lot like him— or the way he’d look if he’d been born into that species.

“Now, how’d you do that?” Kit said. And then he just had to laugh, if uncomfortably, for Khretef was studying Kit with the same look of uneasy recognition. “And how do you keep pulling these fast ones on me? Not very polite to the new wizard on the block.”

“I don’t care for it much, either,” Khretef said, looking up at Kit with an expression that suggested he really meant it. “But maybe not wasting time is a smart thing, because we don’t have a lot to waste right now. Entropy’s running. And for me, the time that’s running is also running out.” He shook his head. “We really should get going, because they’re going to be here soon.”

“They?” Kit said.

“Can’t you hear them?” said Khretef.

Kit held still. Distant, somewhere down deeper in the caves, he could hear the gravelly ratchet of claws on stone. “Don’t tell me,” he said. “It’s more of those scorpion things! What is it with those?”

“They’re just constructs,” Khretef said. “They recall an animal that was once our great companion in the First World, from way back in time. Very few survived the move to this world: they were too bound to the First One. Some of us got an idea that it would be good to build new ones. But they were never quite the same. You saw mine—”

Khretef sounded wistful. Kit looked at him with sudden understanding. “The one in the tower? He was your— your dog?”

“That’s right,” Khretef said. “I had him since I was a child. Or he had me. You could never really tell, my mother used to say. He was always underfoot, or under my couch, or just under.” Khretef sighed. “He made it here, but he didn’t last long. Though it wasn’t the usual wasting away. He—” Khretef frowned— “he had an accident.”

A little chill ran down Kit’s back as he remembered how his mama had told Helena that that was what had happened to Ponch: “an accident.” The chill got worse a second later as Kit started to hear more clearly those claws-on-stone sounds from somewhere farther down in the caves. “We’d better get moving. What exactly is it that we’re looking for?”

“Something Aurilelde’s father said was vital to his ability to make this world livable for us,” Khretef said, getting up. “When we knew we were coming here, we used wizardry and science together to build ourselves new bodies to suit the local environment. But you can only do that so many times. Too many changes, and you’re not the species you were anymore.” He slipped the sword he was carrying out of his belt, glancing around him in the dark. “So if our species was going to survive here, it’d be the world that had to change. Aurilelde’s father was one of the last of our senior wizards who survived the journey, and one of the most powerful: so much so that he became Master of the City after we first came. He used his power to find the Heart of the planet, the Soul Bundle—”

Kit understood that Khretef was using both the Shamaska and Eilitt words for a single word in the Speech: tevet. “Mars’s kernel,” Kit said. “I know about those. My partner works with them.”

Khretef looked at Kit very strangely indeed. “Does he, now?”

“She,” Kit said.

Khretef’s dark eyes widened. “This is beyond strange,” he said softly. “Her, too?”

From down in the darkness came another roar.

“We should go,” Khretef said. “If we stay here they’ll catch us where we won’t have any advantage.”

Kit nodded and pulled out his antenna-wand. Khretef snapped his fingers, and a small constellation of wizard-lights sparked to life in the air and drifted ahead of the two of them as they started picking their way downslope across the rough floor of the cave.

By the glow of the wizard-lights, Khretef glanced sideways as he caught a gleam off the surface of Kit’s wand. “Noon-forged?”

Kit nodded. “Present from a friend.”

“Best kind,” Khretef said, hefting the sword. “So was this.”

They walked downhill together in a silence that was both companionable and uneasy. “Anyway,” Khretef said, “the kernel. Iskard found it, but spies for the City of Eilith discovered where it was being held in the Shamaska City, and their wizards stole it. What they didn’t know was Iskard had suspected something like this could happen, and before the kernel was stolen, he’d managed to fragment out a part of its power core. The kernel couldn’t be used without the missing fragment: so what the spies and wizards stole was useless. Later, after a great battle between the Cities, the kernel was recovered by Iskard. But even as that was happening, the fragment— the Shard, as Iskard called it— was taken and delivered to the Eilitt by a Shamaska turned traitor. Here they hid it, right under the Shamaska City, to taunt Iskard. It was so surrounded with deadfalls and wizardly weapons and barriers that no one could reach it alive.”

“Booby-trapped,” Kit said.

Khretef nodded. “A good word. And as the final mockery, a great wizardry was locked around the Shard itself that would kill any Shamaska who touched it. But they forgot something.” Khretef’s mouth stretched in his people’s version of a grin. “I am not Shamaska.”

Kit blinked. “You’re not?”

“No. I’m Eilitt by birth. My mother was a Co-Chief of the City of Eilith.”

“Then how come you’re working for their side?”

Khretef gave him a wry look. “Aurilelde,” he said. Then he held up his hand for a moment, listening. “Not this way,” he said. “A side access instead. Follow me.”

He turned and headed toward another opening off to one side of the cavern. “I don’t get it, though,” Kit said. “If all your people needed to have this happen, and Aurilelde’s dad found the planet’s kernel and was about to make it happen, then why did the Eilitt stop him?’

“They were afraid he secretly intended to destroy the City of Eilith,” Khretef said. “And even if he didn’t want to do that— which the rulers of the Eilitt didn’t believe— they didn’t want Iskard to have the kernel. They wanted for themselves the power that would come with control over the planet. They’d have preferred both Eilitt and Shamaska to die together rather than have to suffer the shame and humiliation of being saved by a Shamaska.”

Kit shook his head, disgusted. When he had been studying Earth history, and especially during the last month or so, when North Korea had come up in his history unit, he’d found himself hoping that only human beings went so far out of their way to rabidly distrust one another, and to teach their innocent children to do the same. “Nut cases!” he said.

“I hear you,” Khretef said, “whatever a nut is.”

Together he and Kit paused in the huge opening to another gallery. Khretef glanced from side to side, then up at the huge chandelier-mass of stalactites hanging down from the high ceiling. Kit, looking at them too, shook his head in wonder. “Think of how much water,” he said. “And how many years…”

Khretef nodded. “Not long now,” he said, and led Kit onward through the cavern and downward again.

“Am I right,” Kit said, “to say that your two cities have been fighting the whole time since you settled here?”

“Oh, yes,” Khretef said. “A constant state of— what was the term for it? Armed engagement.” Khretef laughed. “Both cities were constantly exchanging diplomats and deputations to try to talk things over, solve our grievances.” He shook his head. “But it was never about that. It was always about finding a new way to stab the other side in the back. Or finding out what they were really up to, and then looking for ways to stop it. That was, after all, the way things had always been…”

Khretef sighed as they made their way across the cavern, toward another dark exit. “There came a time, after I passed my Ordeal and became a wizard, that my mother decided I should go on one of these deputations. So I went.”

Kit got a sudden flash of Khretef’s memory of that first trip: and of a moment of astonishment on the way there as his traveling party was overtaken by a sudden wonder; one of the Martian dust-devils. Again Kit saw the view of the circle of sky far up that whirling tunnel, and now understood his rush of déjà vu. This was the connection. “I was ready for it. I knew the Shamaska would all be looking for ways to trick or betray me because I was new and young, trying to turn me into a tool they could use against my own people. I was on my guard. Then I went to the Shamaska City, and—”

Khretef laughed, bitter. “I discovered that the terrible Shamaska, our ancient enemies, were just people like us! It seemed like the worst kind of betrayal. Either I was completely confused, and they were pulling one over on me— or this had always been true, and we were the deluded ones. Like us, the Shamaska were scared of the other side, trying to keep themselves safe, but unsure how to do it when the others were so determined to wipe them out. Watch out where you put your feet here—”

The surface underneath them was changing to rough, stony ropes of pillow lava, all crusted with the pale leached minerals of millennia. Kit picked his way with care as he listened. “Anyway, I kept my mouth shut and went through with my duties in the deputation, and waited for it to be time for us to go home, for I didn’t like what I was seeing, and I didn’t want to do any more of this work, where it was impossible to ignore how our own leaders had been lying to us. And then, at a function just before I was to return home to Eilith, I met Aurilelde.”

As they paused before negotiating another long gallery leading to a third cavern, Khretef’s face changed subtly, and even by the now-subdued wizard-light, Kit could see the change. When Khretef looked over at Kit, his uncertain expression suggested that he wasn’t sure Kit understood what he was saying. “I thought she was going to be just another of these cold, proud Shamaska I’d spent twenty days meeting: someone who’d be hating me, but polite to my face. Then we looked at each other, and there was something different about her. I still don’t know what it was. We started talking…”

Khretef glanced around again, then pointed. “Down there. See that opening? That’s what we want. —Oh, we were so careful to try to look like nothing different was happening. We knew everyone was watching us. But finally we realized that we liked each other. Aurilelde was interested in meeting a wizard her own age. I was interested in her talents as a Seer: it’s a gift that’s rare among the Eilitt.”

Kit felt that chill again, thinking of Nita’s growing visionary specialty. Khretef shrugged. “I went home, eventually. But soon I told my mother that I wanted to go on the next deputation, that more experience would be good for the son of a Chief of the City. And I went, and Aurilelde and I met again. And again, the next time. After that we kept meeting privately. We were terrified, but we knew we had to find a way to be together that wouldn’t be misunderstood.”

From ahead of them, from below, Kit heard a subdued roar. “But they misunderstood, anyway,” he said, “so you left.”

Khretef nodded. “I fled to her city,” he said. “My people declared me a traitor, to be killed on sight. My mother disowned me. And though I’d come over to the Shamaska side, they never trusted me. Rorsik, one of Aurilelde’s father’s counselors, claimed that the only reason I’d sought refuge in the city was to seek ways to betray the Shamaska to the Eilitt. He claimed I’d seduced the Daughter of the City in order to render her visions friendlier to the Eilitt side. I think possibly Rorsik wanted her for himself, and saw me as a rival.”

And Khretef snorted, a sound so like one that Kit’s friend Raoul would make that Kit couldn’t help laughing. “The idiot couldn’t even see how she loathed him! But even her own people were starting to distrust her because of me. They thought that she was lying about her visions to forward my agenda. We thought they’d understand that we just wanted to be together, but…” He shook his head.

Kit frowned. “We have stories like that where I come from,” he said, thinking of his last year’s long English unit on Shakespeare. “Mostly the star-crossed lovers wind up dead.”

Khretef gave him an ironic look. “Well, I did,” he said.

That was when they heard the huge roar away ahead of them. Kit froze where he was. “We’re too alike as it is,” he said, “and if it’s all the same to you, I’d sooner stop before we get that alike!” He shook his antenna-wand, and a reassuring jolt of red fire ran down it, vanished. Its charge was running full. “That really didn’t sound like your usual scorpion—”

“No,” Khretef said, “they weren’t. Down this way—”

They walked a short way along to the entrance to a narrow gallery, like a hallway, leading down into a wider space. There Khretef paused, uneasy. “This is where I got killed the last time,” he said.

The hair went up on the back of Kit’s neck. “Yeah, about that,” Kit said. “If you’re dead, how come you aren’t in Timeheart?”

“I wasn’t finished,” Khretef said. “You know how it is sometimes. People hang on, even though there’s usually no hope of doing what they’ve left undone. Usually after a while they move on. But I couldn’t leave. So many lives depended on what I’d failed to do, so many futures. My people, Aurilelde’s people. Aurilelde …I couldn’t leave. And when they had to go back into stasis, which they had so much been trying not to do— then even more, I had to stay.”

The dread in his voice surprised Kit. “What was the matter with the stasis?”

“There weren’t enough wizards left, not enough power, to rebuild the spells correctly. The stasis wasn’t true dreamless sleep anymore, but a half-life full of repetitions and endless dreams without resolution, a journey with no end. The souls of those in stasis were being damaged, their personalities corrupted. Just once more we could endure it without being destroyed as a species, Shamaska and Eilitt together. But not another time.”

Khretef shivered all over with the memory. “So for so many years I waited in this not-life, not-death while they slept, all the time fearing what they were going through would destroy them before help came. But then, just now, something happened.” And he looked at Kit, his eyes alight with an excitement he had plainly been fighting to keep under control. “You got here. You cracked open the Nascence. You let loose the wizardry to fuel the awakening of the unfinished past. And you’re me. Or a version of me, one rooted in the present and with access to its power. How could I not come find you? Now it can all be finished. Now we can remake the world; now the last problem can be solved. And Aurilelde and I can be together.”

Kit wasn’t so sure about that, but for the time being the subject was better left alone. “Just so we don’t wind up repeating past events, you should probably dump the light now,” he said softly. “You know the spell for seeing by heat?”

That took Khretef by surprise. “I know the theory,” he said. “But it’s not something I’d have thought of. In our old bodies, in the cold of the First World, almost any heat would be blinding. Degrees of it didn’t seem to be much use—”

“How do you get your spells?” Kit said. “Our species has several methods, but a lot of us read ours from a book or a portable device—” He pulled out his manual, showed it to Khretef.

He peered at it. “How unusual. We call ours the Dark Speaking: we hear it in the silence—”

Kit found the spell, flagged it. “Here,” he said.

Khretef stood listening. “Ah,” he said. “Not too complex. Let’s see—”

Kit, meanwhile, very quietly spoke the Speech-words for the spell. A second later his vision had changed, and he could see Khretef as a Shamaska-shaped light in the darkness. All around him the cavern gallery glowed faintly— more brightly nearer the floor, more dimly up above where the stone was losing heat to the Martian night. “How’s that?” he said.

Khretef was looking around him, then down at his arms and the sword he held. “That works very well.”

“And the scorpions are metallic, mostly?” Kit said. “How are they powered?”

“Cold power cells,” Khretef said. “They would be far below your ambient temperature or mine.”

“We’ll be seeing dark blots as we come up with them, then,” Kit said. “Can they see in the heat wavelengths?”

“I wouldn’t be sure,” Khretef said. “I never had one of the substitutes: I much preferred the real creatures.”

They walked on cautiously together. “Yeah,” Kit said. “I saw your guy. I could see why you’d prefer the real thing—”

He stopped still as Khretef held out the hand with the sword, a gesture of alarm. Silence would probably be better than speech now, Khretef said. They’re in the next chamber. Though they’re expecting us to come in through another entrance, we’ll have little time to deal with them.

They can’t hear thought, though?

No. That only the original creatures could manage, and not always.

Good. Kit looked up ahead toward the glow of warmth that came from the archway before them. Warmer …Does the ground drop off in there?

There’s a deep pit. The Shard is down at the bottom of it, protected by the final spell-shield, the one proof against any Shamaska.

Kit thought. Okay, he said. Are these like the ones up on the surface? Do they learn from past experience?

They do. That’s what killed me. It was a development I hadn’t been expecting, and when I used the firesword the second time, it was ineffective. It should only have taken a second to bring up another spell, but in that second—

He went silent. Kit could feel him wincing from the memory. Right, Kit said. I think I’ve got something useful.

He reached out beside him, opened his otherspace pocket, and felt around in it, bringing out a device that Khretef looked at curiously: a smooth metal rod about a foot and a half long, with what looked like white ceramic striping down the side of it, a half-sheath of more ceramic down its length, and a thick handle with various controls. Kit touched one of the controls. At the butt end of the device, a tiny blue light came on.

What is it? Khretef said.

Something never used on this planet before, Kit said. Should take them by surprise. Come on.

Silently they made their way down the length of the gallery, toward the glow of heat. Tell me something, Kit said. When you got here from the First World, did you find any signs of any species having been here before you?

None, said Khretef. There was no evidence of any life more advanced than simple one-celled or multicelled organisms.

Kit sighed. Pity, he said.

As they drew near to the entrance to the next chamber, Khretef held up the sword in warning again, then waved Kit to one side of the narrow gallery and flattened himself against the other. Together they inched toward the entrance, peered through.

Beyond the archway, a crowd of green metal scorpions was moving about a near-circular cave, almost obscuring the floor except in one spot—the center, where the circular pit Khretef had mentioned fell sheerly away. Kit looked the situation over. Nasty, he said. Fight them and they take you down before you’re anywhere near the Shard. Try to avoid them by jumping into the pit, and they all just pile on top of you.

Khretef nodded. Fortunately there’s no need to take them all on. He pointed at the largest one, the scorpion that Kit had earlier heard roaring. It let out another uneasy roar even as they watched.

They’re all linked, he said. It handles their processing. Take out that largest one, and they’ll all go together.

Kit nodded. I did that by accident before, he said. Good to know. Got a self-defense shield? Good. Put it up—

He glanced around one last time, then spoke the words in the Speech that activated his own shield, thumbed the setting on Carmela’s portable dissociator up to “overkill,” and stepped out of the gallery.

Instantly the scorpions all raised their claws and turned toward him, and the biggest one crouched down. But Kit was already shouting the Mason’s Word, the version with the additional syllables for the Martian ecology, and was running up the hardened air. It was squishier than usual because of the thinness of the atmosphere, but he didn’t let that stop him. He just ran up the air high enough to get a clear shot at the biggest scorpion.

It tried to leap into the pit as its lesser associates rushed Kit’s skywalk: but it had no time. The dissociator field hit it and tore it into thousands of microscopic fragments, all of which promptly flashed into plasma and sizzled away to nothing, leaving behind only a blinding flare of heat. All the remaining scorpions promptly crashed to the stony floor in a metallic clamor of collapsing claws and joints.

Kit looked over his shoulder and saw Khretef emerging from the gallery. “You all right?” he said.

“Much more so than the last time,” Khretef said drily, but with a grin. “That was nicely done!”

“Yeah,” Kit said, shoving the dissociator back into his otherspace pocket. “I’m gonna get it from my sister when she finds out I borrowed this without asking, but I’ll make it up to her later…”

He said a few more words of the Speech under his breath, changed the angle of his skywalking steps so that they led down into the pit, and walked down into it. There at the bottom, the Shard shone as he’d seen it in his earlier vision. It looked like nothing but a little round, red sandstone pebble, but it burned with an intense blue-violet fire. Around it was a shell of paler, bluer brilliance, sparking with hot green lights. “Is that the anti-Shamaska wizardry?” Kit said.

Khretef nodded. “Since you’re not Shamaska, either,” he said, “it can do you no harm.”

Kit could already feel as much. He reached down, picked up the pebble, and jumped at the jolt of power that ran through him from it. “Wow. Aurilelde’s dad packed a whole lot of the kernel into that…” he said. He stood up, wobbling slightly.

“And more than just the kernel,” Khretef said. “One other thing as well. Me.”

Kit’s eyes widened. But it was too late. His consciousness whited out: and a moment later, when vision returned, there was only one of him standing there— Khretef.

He looked down at the little shining thing in his hand with a great rush of excitement… but also fear.

Now to get this back to her, he thought, and put everything right. Finally, finally we’ll be free!

And he vanished.

13: Oceanidum Mons

“Indeterminate?” Nita said to the peridexis. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

The peridexis paused for a moment. No, it said, that was an error: sorry. He’s now showing in the neighborhood of Olympus Mons. There was a momentary difficulty in reading his status.

“Not usual for you,” Nita said. “Well, everything else has been crazy here…” She let out a long breath, which actually froze out of the air and started drifting down as tiny flakes of snow.

You want to be paying more attention to your life support, Bobo said.

Nita rolled her eyes. “You’re always saying you want to handle that for me,” she said. “You deal with it.”

Immediately she started feeling the air warming up around her, and started to smell the odd gunpowdery smell of Mars dust. “Thanks,” she said. Kit? she said inside her head.

No answer.

Once again she started to wonder if he was annoyed with her for breaking in on his boy-trip the day before. Nita pulled out her manual, flipped it open to the messaging section. There on her contacts list his name appeared as usual. Location: Olympus Mons— and a set of coordinates. Mission status: independent investigation; occupied; please do not disturb. “Well, fine,” she said under her breath, starting to feel annoyed. “Messaging, please?”

The space under Kit’s name cleared. “Kit,” she said to the manual, “sorry about yesterday. Give me a call or drop me a note when you’re done.” She tapped the page: the message inserted itself and began to flash bright and dark, with the notation appearing beside it, Holding for delivery.

Nita shut the manual and put it away. No point in getting all cranky about this. He wants to be too busy for me? Fine. “Okay,” she said, “might as well head home. Want to handle the gating?”

No problem. Off to one side, dust and snow whirled away from a flat place among the stones; a circle of light appeared there. Nita stepped through—

— and came out in her bedroom as usual. She sighed and tossed her manual onto the desk while she pulled off her outdoor clothes, then grabbed it again and headed downstairs.

Her dad was in the living room, reading the Sunday paper. Dairine was actually in the same room with him, stretched out on the floor and paging through the travel section, while Spot looked over her shoulder with stalked eyes. All of them glanced up as Nita came in. “You hungry?” her dad said. “I’ll make you something.”

“No, it’s okay,” Nita said. She dropped her manual on the dining room table and wandered into the kitchen, glancing at the clock. Two thirty. Okay, I’ll give him till five. He has to be back then, anyway, Carmela says. And I want lunch.

She rummaged around in the fridge for the makings of a chicken sandwich, put the kettle on, assembled the sandwich—all except the mustard she wanted, which Dairine had apparently finished, so that Nita had to make do with mayonnaise— and then wandered back into the dining room and sat down, staring morosely at the manual while she ate half the sandwich.

What is it with him? she thought.

But Nita had her suspicions. Right there as if in front of her, she could just see the Martian princess. It’s not fair, she thought. She was pretty. She was stacked. Nita squirmed uneasily in the chair. She had nothing on. Almost. And it looked good on her!

“Dammit!” Nita said under her breath.

She scowled at the rest of her sandwich, then picked it up and ate it, annoyed. How am I supposed to compete with that?

Are you crazy? You’re not in a competition, said some part of her brain that was taking desperate refuge in rationality. She was a hallucination. She was a character in a book that the wizardry used to communicate with him…

Yeah, and I know just what she was communicating! answered back another part of Nita’s mind, one that had no intention of being thrown off the track by logic, especially as logic when used on boys lately seemed to produce only indifferent results. You saw him looking at Janie Lowell the other morning. Her and that alleged skirt.

Nita dropped the rest of the sandwich on the plate and put her head in her hands. This is dumb. I don’t want to wear that kind of skirt, anyway. If “skirt” is the word we’re looking for, and not “belt”! I just want— She groaned. I don’t know what I want.

Kit, you’re an idiot!

And this statement embarrassed Nit profoundly, since it both flowed naturally from what she was feeling right now and made no sense whatsoever.

“Aaaaaagh,” she said under her breath after a moment, which also made no sense, but at least discharged some tension. Nita picked up the rest of the sandwich, ate it while glowering at the table, and then noticed that the kettle was screaming for her attention.

“Sorry, sorry,” she said, and scrambled up to turn off the stove and get the kettle off the hot ring and find herself a tea bag. “Sorry…”

The kettle regarded her with mute accusation. She picked it up and poured hot water onto the tea bag in her mug. “Maybe I’m the idiot,” she muttered, putting the kettle down.

It didn’t respond. She immediately felt somehow inadequate, as Kit always got immediate responses out of the household appliances: they were very forthcoming with him. “Never mind,” she said, and patted it on the handle as she went out. “Different wizards, different specialties…” But she still felt it watching her as she went out.

Nita sighed and went back into the dining room, where she sat down at the end of the table and drank the tea. Finally she reached out to her manual again and opened it, going back to the Mars data for the previous day. In particular, the reports on the meetings with the scorpion creatures were now in there, both the encounter in the Cavern and those that had happened out in the Martian terrain, and Nita read them both over with interest. So weird, though, she thought. The encounters were so different.

Across the table, Dairine had left a pad and a few pens from something else she’d been doing. On impulse Nita reached out and pulled them over as she looked over the details of power levels and personnel, topography and coordinates. What a crowd of us, she thought. But our two groups got such different results.

Did one group have a higher aggregate power level or something? But the groups’ power levels weren’t really all that different, when you averaged things out. Okay, Carmela’s not a wizard. But she has her own specialties. And S’reee and I were there: a more senior talent and a lesser one. And on the other side there were Kit and Ronan, and Darryl, who’s not an older talent, but in his own way as powerful as a Senior: maybe more so.

She picked up the pen and started making a list on the top page of the pad, comparing power levels and matching them off against one another: Kit, Nita, Ronan, Carmela, Darryl, S’reee. Nita shook her head and tapped the names idly with her pen, looking for some other factor that could be operating: ages, origins, wizardly specialties. Newer wizard, older one. Younger person, older one. Boy, girl, boy, girl, boy…

Nita stopped. She stared at the lists.

Our team was all girls. Theirs was all guys.

Her first thought was that this was just a coincidence. But the scorpions walked right past us! And we didn’t get what the guys got, this weird re-creation of somebody else’s Mars. We got what had actually been left there. We identified ourselves as wizards and they let us right in. Almost ignored us, even. Whereas the guys had all these hoops to jump through. Something to prove.

Nita stared at the manual page, shaking her head. Why? Just because they were guys? It doesn’t make sense. There has to be something else going on.

She sat back in the chair. Even the guys were clear they were being tested for something. At the very least, that they were wizards. But maybe something else, too. Possibly to see whose mindview was closest to the Martians’?

Nita picked up her tea mug and had a swig. She couldn’t get rid of the feeling that there was something about this situation that Kit was hiding specifically from her. The hurt this was creating in her at the moment was all out of proportion to any real reason for it, but that didn’t make it easier for Nita to bear. And she kept trying to reason his behavior away, and failing.

We’ve been through a lot together. All kinds of crap. But we’ve never gone out of our way to hide stuff from each other.

There could be something bad going on with him and this connection to Miss Martian Princess, Nita thought. Some bad influence. It’s happened before. Sometimes it’s taken some work to get him out of trouble.

Big deal, though! He’s done the same for me.

But why doesn’t it feel like that’s what’s happening this time? It’s something else. I just know it. Something he doesn’t want me to know about.

And what could it be?! She banged her mug down on the table, and tea splashed out of it. Nita didn’t care, just sat staring at the splashed droplets. Crap! Crap, crap, crap !

“You drop something?” her dad said from the living room.

“Huh? Oh no, sorry.”

Nita scowled. If only there was some way to get at what he was really thinking. Something like the live stuff coming out of Dairine’s manual, the “streaming consciousness…

And then she stopped as the idea came into her head.

If it worked on Dairine’s manual, she thought, it would work on Kit’s.

She held still for some moments longer. Then she said, “Bobo?”

You rang?

“You say something, honey?”

“Just talking to Bobo, Daddy.”

“Oh, okay.” And a snort, as if this was now just another amusing part of day-to-day life.

Nita took another drink of her tea. “The thing you did to Spot,” she said. “Or to his manual functions—” She stopped again.

Yes?

“Could you do that to Kit’s manual?”

It was some moments before Bobo said anything. Spot gave consent.

Nita swallowed. That was the point, of course. And Bobo hadn’t actually answered her question. “But you could do it.”

If a wizard feels that a wizardry is not in contravention of the Oath, Bobo said, or is certain beyond any reasonable doubt that a given spell is required to fulfill the conditions of the Oath, then that wizardry can be implemented and will execute.

Nita sat there and just thought for a minute, then two.

She found that she was trembling. Certain beyond any reasonable doubt.

The problem was that doubt was all she had at the moment. It is impossible to serve the Lone Power directly: that was one of the most basic tenets of wizardry. The power itself would refuse to be used in such ways. But there were lots of ways the Lone One could get you to do Its will indirectly. In fact, It preferred those. It liked, whenever It could, to get wizards into situations where they felt that the only way to do right was by doing something that would later turn out to be wrong.

Am I sure I’m really wanting to do this because it’s right? And not just because I’m scared that she’s really the one that he— that Kit and I— that I have to know if he—

She swallowed. “It’s all about the situation you’re in, isn’t it?” Nita said under her breath. “It all comes down to how it looks to you.” She took a long breath. “Free will.”

The Worlds are based on it, Bobo said. The One has no interest in inhabiting a universe full of puppets.

“Even though we get it wrong a whole lot?”

Apparently the benefits are felt to offset the dangers, the peridexis said. Or counterbalance them.

“Doesn’t make me feel any better,” Nita muttered. “Because I’m not sure which side I’m coming down on.”

Yet she did know. It was wrong, wrong to tamper with the private insides of someone’s brain. This was why the psychotropic wizardries tended to backlash so violently on the user. And this would be only a step away from that. It was like stealing Dairine’s diary and reading it, that time.

But I can’t get rid of the feeling that if I don’t stop him from what he’s doing, bad things are going to happen. I think he’s in danger somehow. And I don’t know if it’s just me thinking that because I want to think that… or because it’s real.

Nita hid her face in her hands. If this is what adult wizardry is going to be like, she thought, I prefer the kid kind. More clean-cut. More obvious.

But she had the horrible feeling that her preferences weren’t at all the issue here. And worse, the fact that Bobo still hadn’t clearly answered her question told Nita something she didn’t want to know: that if she told him to bug Kit’s manual— or his brain— and she was convinced that this was the right thing to do, then Bobo would do it.

Nita’s mouth was dry. It suddenly seemed to her that, from the time she took the Oath until now, she had been using some kind of wizardry that had kiddie-gates installed at the top of the stairs. But now she had a way to get the gate off. Now it was entirely up to her what she did with the power. All I have to do is convince myself that what I’m doing is right.

And it would be so easy to do that. Too easy.

Nita put her head down on the table and was tempted to moan, except that in the living room they might have heard her. In there she could hear her dad quietly talking to Dairine: actually talking to her, not angrily, just a normal conversation, despite the uncomfortable way things had been going just a few days ago.

And that’s because of what I did to her manual. Or is it because of what Dad saw there, and it bothered him so much that he didn’t want to see any more?

Oh God, I don’t know what to do about any of this!!

But she did. Right now, at least, Nita was sure that what she was considering was wrong. If it sounds like something the Lone Power would suggest… if it walks like the Lone Power, and quacks like the Lone Power…

And she was suddenly caught completely off guard by the image of the Lone One as an evil duck— a black duck in a shiny black helmet, and maybe even a cape, waddling along to ominous movie music. Nita burst out laughing at the image. She could just hear the noise Its breathing would make, a dreadful asthmatic snerking—

She laughed a lot harder at the thought. “Bobo being funny in there?” her dad said.

Nita couldn’t stop laughing to answer him.

“Stress,” Dairine said, sounding dry. “She’s got that hysterical sound.”

This was possibly true, but Nita was still laughing so hard she could barely breathe. Finally she choked herself back into some kind of control, wiping her eyes and snickering, even though the thoughts behind it were pretty serious. Yeah, I’ll have to watch out… keep an eye on how I’m thinking. This is a really big deal we’re involved in here, and It’ll move in the first second It catches somebody getting careless. Nonetheless, the thought of ultimate Evil coming after her in the shape of a duck was strangely reassuring. Lone One or not, a duck I could handle.

Nita caught the laughter trying to start again, and stopped it. But what a way to get up the Lone One’s nose, she thought… Or beak. She allowed herself a last giggle. It’s so hung up on being taken dead seriously. Pull that line on It, and who knows, It might do that cartoon thing: get so mad, It’ll make a mistake…

Finally Nita sighed and got up to get a sponge so that she could clean the tea off the table before it dried sticky. She picked up the mug and wiped up wet tea from underneath it, and put the mug down again, and then froze as the room abruptly blanked out around her.

Behind her eyes, Nita saw some city’s streets full of screaming, plunging crowds. She saw Mars, Mars, Mars, a hundred times, on a hundred TV screens. There was something wrong with that Mars: it was turning blue. She saw Kit skywalking precariously over a pit of giant green metal scorpions. She saw a line of fierce light stretching from dawn into darkness, pulling and pulling at something with great force, singing like a plucked string with unbearable tension. And she saw a huge wave that was slowly, slowly leaning up over her. The Sun was caught in it, faint, pale, fluttering weakly in the water like a drowning bug.

Then she found herself looking at the tea mug again.

What was that?!

She was breathing hard. The images had come fast but were entirely clear, and they scared her.

Okay, she thought. “Bobo? Did you see those?”

It would have been difficult to avoid seeing them.

“Take notes!”

Consider it done.

Nita stared at the mug, then went back into the kitchen for more tea. As she turned on the heat under the kettle again, she had a sudden thought. She dug around in her pocket for her phone, pulled it out, and dialed.

“Hola Nita!” said the voice on the other end.

“Hey, you’re back already. I thought you’d still be up there.”

“Nope,” Nita said. “Got bored, came home.”

“What, didn’t you find Kit?”

“Oh, he’s up there all right,” Nita said, “with a big Do Not Disturb sign hung around his neck.”

Carmela snorted. “Counting craters again,” she said. “Never mind. He’ll be back here pretty soon for dinner. I’ll tell him you called.”

“Oh, I wasn’t calling for him! Thought you might have something else on your poem.”

“Turns out it has a name!” Carmela said. “It’s called the Red Rede.”

“So it is a big deal, then,” Nita said.

“I think so. Anyway, I think I’ve got that last verse translated. Though it’s vague.”

“Par for the course at the moment, isn’t it?” Nita said. “Shoot.”

“Here’s the whole thing,” Carmela said. And she recited:

“The one departed | is the one who returns

From the straitened circle | and the shortened night,

When the blue star rises | and the water burns:

Then the word long-lost | comes again to light

To be spoke by the watcher | who silent yearns

For the lost one found. Yet to wreak aright,

She must slay her rival | and the First World spurn

Lest the one departed | no more return.”

Nita sat there for a moment and felt again, in full force, that sense of impending doom that had taken her by the throat during those strange moments when the imageries of crowds and water and scorpions and Kit had flickered behind her eyes, like shots from an unusually eclectic movie trailer. Now, as Carmela spoke the words, Nita heard the rhythm of them behind the images like a drumbeat, slow, threatening, and she could almost feel a physical pressure building up in her head as the beat went on.

When the blue star rises. She saw Mars lowering overhead, in TV screens, in views from telescopes, going suddenly and scarily blue. When the water burns. She saw the struggling Sun caught in that bizarre wave, dimmed down and out after a moment by dirt in the water, then lost in a greater shadow that came crashing down. The lost one found. She saw the princess come dancing up to Kit and take his hand with a look on her face that said she’d been waiting for him for a long time. She must slay her rival. Nita seemed to be hanging high above a vista of cloud-streaked terrain, glinting with water; and somewhere between her and the Sun, blocking away its light, hung a dark and furious female shape with near-invisible energies flowing about its hands—

“Neets?”

“Uh, yeah,” Nita said. “Yeah.”

“What do you think?”

“I’m not sure. Are you pretty clear about the translation?”

“Oh, yeah,” Carmela said. “I took my time. You have any ideas about this?”

The kettle started whistling softly. Nita pulled it off the heat and got herself another tea bag out of the canister. “Some,” she said. “I need to touch base with Kit first.”

“Okay. Well, I’ll tell him to call you.”

“Yeah. Thanks! And hey, you did a great job.”

“I hope so. Let me know.”

“Yeah,” Nita said. “Later.” She hung up and found herself staring out the kitchen window, where the morning glories that climbed up the chimney every year were as usual making a bid to climb in through the screen. They suddenly struck Nita as looking bizarre and alien, and the color of them made her think immediately of the too-blue Mars.

Kit, she thought, get your butt home. Because we really need to talk!

***

Kit straightened up from where he’d been hunched over on the rock at the top of Olympus Mons. For a second or so he just let his eyes rest in that astonishing view. Then he slowly realized that something was wrong with the view. It should be much darker. Why’s it so light?

And then he realized that out there, at the edge of things, the Sun was about to come up.

What?? It was— where was— what time is it?! He stared at his watch. Oh, my god, it’s five thirty; dinner’s at six!

Kit frantically paged through his manual to the bookmarked area, where he kept his pre-prepared spells, pulled the transit spell off his page, dropped it to the icy dirt, and jumped through. A second later he was in his bedroom, and he could hear a lot of voices talking underneath him in the living room. He ran down the stairs.

The whole family was standing in there, dressed up and ready to go. Now they turned to Kit and looked at him with a broad assortment of expressions— annoyance, confusion, resignation, curiosity.

“Kit,” his papa said. And Pop was the one doing annoyance.

Kit immediately panicked. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m really sorry, I— I— just sort of lost track of the time. I’ll be dressed in five minutes—”

“We’ll go wait in the car,” said his mama, who was handling the resignation end of things. Kit fled up the stairs before Helena would have a chance to get really started on the curiosity, now that she had a reason to think it was safe to be curious.

Kit plunged around in his room getting undressed and redressed, hearing people head out the back door, hearing the car start. What happened? How did I do that? Why did I do that? Since when do I fall asleep on Mars? What if my wizardry had failed? But he didn’t have answers for any of those questions. This is so bizarre!

Dressed in cords and a shirt and the really nice jacket his mama had gotten him— which he hated but which he was hoping would confuse her out of being annoyed with him for the evening— Kit paused just long enough to return Carmela’s hotcurler weapon to its usual place. Then he pounded down the stairs and was just heading out of the living room when the front doorbell rang. “I’ll get it!” he yelled, and ran to the door. Probably one of Helena’s crowd. Who knew there would be so many of them? He unlocked the door, pulled it open—

— to find himself looking at Tom Swale. “Kit,” Tom said. “We need to have a word.”

He looked grim. Sweat burst out all over Kit. “Uh, sure,” he said, and went outside, pulling the front door closed behind him.

“I was really expecting you to get in touch with me,” Tom said, “or at least with Mamvish—”

Kit flushed hot, then cold. “I left her a message. At least, I tried to. Her manual wasn’t taking messages—”

Tom stuffed his hands in his jeans pockets and looked at Kit with an expression of disappointment. “And then you went ahead,” he said, “and called Ronan and Darryl, and went off to Mars. And there—” He shook his head. “I don’t know if I can specifically characterize what you did as damage: it’s too soon to tell. But you got involved with things that you actively should not have gotten involved with. At the very least, not without expert assistance! The minute that superegg sent out signals to those four other sites, you should have backed off and called for backup. You know that this has been a team effort from the start! There’s too much riding on this for any one wizard to go off in some novel direction, no matter how good an idea he thinks it is, without consulting everyone else.”

He fell silent. Kit couldn’t do anything but stand there in terrible embarrassment and wonder what he was going to hear next.

“It’s true what Irina told you the other day,” Tom said. “Mostly, in the past, you’ve been able to depend on the sheer power of a relatively new wizard, and a certain talent for riding unfolding events, to get you out of Dutch. But this time, unfortunately, you’ve gone a little bit too far. The power that was let loose on Mars last night went right off the scale. And unfortunately, you and Ronan and Darryl don’t seem to be good influences on each other as regards, well, exercising restraint in team situations. You’re all too far into the loner column for that kind of thing to be easy for you.”

Tom rubbed his eyes. “Now locally, when small-scale personal wizardries are involved— all right, we can find ways to make exceptions for when circumstances allow. But when I have my supervisory levels come down on me and inquire why I’m allowing new wizards to plunge around unsupervised in an offplanet wizardry that could theoretically affect the viability of an entire species, I’m afraid I have to pass some of the pain around.”

He looked at Kit with a mixture of annoyance and disappointment. “I hate having to be in this position,” he said, “but for the time being I’m going to have to ground you. I’m pulling your ability to transit off the planet. And I’ve specifically instructed Darryl not to assist you in this matter. When you’re under supervision, when you come up with other more senior members of the team, that’ll be a different issue. Your sympathy for the planet, your resonance with it, are unquestionably valuable to the project. And they’ll make a big difference in the way we handle the situation as it unfolds. But for the time being, you’re not going to be allowed up there alone.”

Kit couldn’t do anything but nod glumly. “I understand,” he whispered. But he didn’t, really. An unrepentant something in the rear of his mind was shouting, Not fair! It’s just not fair!

“I have a lot on my plate today,” Tom said, “so let’s call this discussion complete for the moment. Just—” He looked hard at Kit. “Use this upcoming time to think, all right? I’m not suggesting that you go stand in the corner. You have other things to do here on Earth, and you can get into your manual and annotate the précis we got back of the events of yesterday. Will you do that?”

“Yeah,” Kit said. “I’ll do it when we get back.”

“Right,” Tom said. “I’ll see you later.” And he walked off down the street, vanishing into the early dusk.

Kit stood there, staring down the street after him and burning with embarrassment. The restriction would show up in the manual next to his name: he could just imagine what Nita would think when she saw it. And she doesn’t understand, he thought. Not the way that Aurilelde would—

Then he stopped. What? Kit thought. What’s going on in my head?

There was no way to find out. The answer was on Mars, and now he couldn’t get there. Even trying would be hopeless. Kit remembered how hard Dairine had tried to break her ban, the time she’d been restricted to staying inside the Solar System for misbehavior. She’d come back furious, describing it “like hitting your head on a stone wall again and again. Except not just your head: all of you.” And then she’d gone off to sulk.

Kit was tempted to do the same, except there was no time: in the driveway, his dad was beeping for him to hurry up. After locking the front door, Kit headed around the side of the house to close the side door, then got into the car. His dad pulled out of the driveway, and everybody rode to the restaurant in that tight-faced fake good humor that means the whole family’s trying to avoid taking out their annoyance on a single transgressor.

The mood had broken by the time they got to the restaurant, but Kit found that he couldn’t enjoy the evening. His mama had picked a place by the water in Bay Shore that had been in the same location for nearly a hundred years. The food was terrific, and the conversation loosened up and became positively fun, and Kit strained hard to not bring the others down by letting them notice how he was feeling at the moment. At this he succeeded pretty well. But all the time he kept imagining how his name was going to look in the manual with the notation DISCIPLINARY TRAVEL RESTRICTION against it, and then he would blush with fury and embarrassment and have to work at covering it up all over again.

Finally it was over and they went home, and Kit found that he was developing a case of indigestion. It was a big relief to get back up to his room and change out of his dinner clothes into some sweats. As he headed downstairs to see if there was Alka-Seltzer in the downstairs bathroom, Kit passed Carmela heading downstairs for something, too. She had her earphones in and was bopping to something inaudible on her iPod. As she met up with Kit, she paused and said, more loudly than he liked, “What’s the matter? You look like somebody just stole your wand.”

“You have no idea,” Kit said as he headed down the stairs. For some reason, Carmela’s good mood infuriated him. He made and drank the Alka-Seltzer, then stomped back to his room, didn’t quite slam the door shut behind him, and threw himself down on the bed.

That was when the idea hit him, complete from beginning to end. Kit got up again, opened his door very softly, and made his way as quickly and silently as he could down the hall to Carmela’s room.

It wasn’t someplace he usually ventured— not so much because of privacy issues as because it was his sister’s room and therefore usually void of interest for him. However, there was something in there that, though he normally tended to ignore it, was now very much of interest indeed.

The room was very tidy. This was yet another relatively recent development which Kit found peculiar; teenage girls’ rooms were supposed to be a morass of clutter. But Carmela had become compulsive about putting everything in its drawer or on its hanger or shelf without fail. Sometimes he made fun of her for this. But today, just this once, it was useful.

He crossed softly to the closet and opened it. It was full of clothes—much fuller than it had used to be: Carmela had caught the clothes bug only recently. Everything here was on its hanger, all perfectly neat. But there was also something else in this closet.

Kit reached over to the bookshelf next to the closet and found there what he’d known would be there: a clone of the downstairs TV remote. At least it had begun its life that way, but now it had a lot more buttons on it than the original remote had. Kit knew what every one was for, as he had programmed them himself. Now he studied the various buttons, chose one, pointed at the back of Carmela’s closet, and punched the remote.

The back of the closet instantly went black, then flickered into light again— the random rainbowy moiré pattern of a commercial worldgate not yet patent but ready to be activated. At the forefront of the carrier pattern was the identifying brand of the Crossings’ worldgate system, its famous logo of linked gate hexes prominently displayed with the notation in the Speech and several other languages, CROSSINGS INTERCONTINUAL WORLDGATING FACILITY, RIRHATH B— DESTINATION ONE.

Kit grinned and began punching coordinates into the remote. He knew what he was planning would fly in the face of the spirit of the ban Tom had imposed on him. But he’ll have to see, Kit thought. When I show him, when he understands what’s at stake, he’ll have to see why I can’t leave this to anybody else. Nobody else has my perspective—

He punched the button again. The Crossings logo vanished, replaced by a long spill of coordinates. Under them appeared a single word in the Speech: Confirm?

Kit punched the “go” button on the remote. The gate went patent. A second later he found himself looking at red-brown soil again, the cratered landscape, the hazy pink horizon, and, silhouetted against it, in the light of local sunset, a city of spires and gleaming metal.

All right, Kit thought. He punched another set of buttons on the remote, locking the coordinates in storage for later. Then he hit the remote’s off button.

The gate flickered out, leaving nothing but the back of a closet full of clothes. Kit quietly put the remote back on the shelf, slipped out of the room, and shut the door.

***

Later that evening, Nita was lying upstairs in bed with a throw over her, trying to relax and get some reading done, but finding it impossible. She had Mars on her mind.

For about the twelfth time that evening, she pulled her manual over to her and had a look at her messaging section, but there was no answer yet to the note she’d sent Kit. What is going on with him? she thought. Idly she flipped back to the previous page of the messaging section, and her glance fell on Darryl’s listing there.

I wonder, she thought. She reached out and touched Darryl’s listing: it blinked.

“Yeah?” his voice said from the page. “Oh, it’s you, Neets! Hi.”

“Hey, Darryl. How’re you doing?”

“Pooped,” Darryl said. “And bruised. What a day.”

“Bruised? What, did you take a spill up there while you were running away from the movie monsters?”

His laugh was rueful. “Wish I had,” Darryl said. “It might ache less. I had a little visit from Tom a while ago.”

Nita blinked. “What?”

“Yeah,” Darryl said. “Looks like he and Mamvish and some of the Upper Ups weren’t real pleased with what we were doing up there. I guess I can understand why, after the fact. But he was really steamed. I don’t get to go up there again without other team members along, he says. Neither does Ronan. And he grounded Kit.”

Nita’s mouth fell open. “No way!”

“Oh yeah,” Darryl said. “Escorted visits only, and no other travel off the planet for the moment—”

But Nita was already paging through the manual to Kit’s listing, and sure enough, there was the red no-travel access flag. She was shocked. “Wow! He must be crushed—”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Darryl said. “I sure feel like an idiot. I can’t believe I didn’t think it through while we were up there. Though there didn’t seem to be a lot of time to think; everything kept happening so fast…”

Nita was still shaking her head in disbelief. “Have you talked to him? How is he?”

“No, he wasn’t home. Didn’t he have to go out or something?”

“Yeah. They must still be out.” She rubbed her eyes. “Poor Kit! This is gonna make him crazy.”

“Yeah.” Darryl sighed. “Look, Neets, I’m having some trouble with my own peeps right now. I should get off—”

“Sure,” Nita said. “Darryl, thanks for letting me know. I hadn’t even noticed.”

“Knowing Kit, he might be grateful for that …Don’t beat him up too much, Miss Neets.”

“I won’t. Talk to you later—”

“Yeah,” Darryl said. And his listing grayed out.

Nita closed the manual. Wow, she thought. She closed her eyes for a moment. Kit?

It was several moments before the answer came back. What?

Her insides clenched. He sounded sullen and hugely hurt, and there was something else hanging over the back of his mind that Nita couldn’t read and wasn’t sure she wanted to— a strange sense of mingled frustration and fear.

Listen, I heard—

Of course you did, he said. The entire planet has to have heard. Other planets, too. Every wizard who can read, anyway. His anger was simply sizzling under his skin.

Look, Nita said, try not to take it so hard! You’ve been in situations like this before and you’ve come out okay—

Oh, really? When have I ever been banned? Kit nearly shouted. And this is the worst time, the worst possible time. We didn’t hurt anything. Nothing bad happened. I don’t get why I have to be banned now!

Kit, look—

Yeah, but I’m sure you’ve got some good reason. Why don’t you enlighten me?

Nita blinked at the nasty tone. Kit, she said, I don’t have any reasons. I don’t know that much about what happened up there. You’re the one who knows—

Oh, yeah? You know about some stuff, all right. You know about Aurilelde. I saw you looking. I could feel it—

She had half been afraid of that: but she couldn’t let herself be ashamed of what she’d done. Kit, I was just worried about you. I had to make sure that you—

—Weren’t in some kind of trouble I couldn’t get myself out of, is that the excuse? Well, I wasn’t! I was fine! But I can’t do anything by myself without you getting involved, can I? Watchdogging me all the time. Spying on me! Like you’re jealous!

Nita’s mouth dropped open. Kit, she said, no way I would spy on you, I just—

It just sort of turned out that way, huh? Sure, I believe that. You just can’t cope with the idea that there might be somebody else in my life, somebody who’s not a wizard, somebody you can’t control—

She took a long breath, and another long breath, before saying anything further. But Kit said, So just do me a favor and butt out, all right? Now that I’m nice and safe and grounded on Earth, you won’t have to worry about me getting myself in trouble and needing to be rescued! So take a break, all right? Just let me alone!

And he cut the connection.

Nita stared at the manual in complete astonishment.

What… was…that?

It almost didn’t even sound like Kit there in the middle.

Well, like him, yeah.

But not like him saying it. Not really him.

She lay there for some time, in shock. Other thoughts were roiling in her head: ideas that she’d previously dismissed as bad ones were starting to look not only good but necessary.

Yet if I do this, it will be exactly what he’s accusing me of. I’ll be spying on him.

Nita lay there for some moments more. After a while, almost reluctantly, the peridexis said, I have the results of that persona analysis of Kit’s experience with Aurilelde.

Nita raised her eyebrows. “Took you long enough!”

I warned you it would take some while. Even now some of the extrapolation is dubious.

Nita sighed. “Never mind. Show me what you’ve got.” She closed her eyes.

In the dark behind her eyelids, the analysis displayed, laid out like a sector of a spell diagram— not the full circle, but the chord and arc that expressed and described the important physical, mental, and spiritual aspects of the subject of the analysis. It was the person’s wizardly signature, expressed in the Speech so that a spell into which it was inserted would include that person properly. Normally working this out could take quite a while: the utility was handy for last-minute work.

Nita looked the signature over. The curved ribbon of it was spotted with dark empty patches, but the main structure was plain enough to read. As she looked it over, Nita felt some puzzlement. “This looks familiar,” she said. “Why does this look so familiar?”

She peered more closely at the particular structure she thought she recognized, an intricately knotted string of Speech-characters. Look at that, it looks just like—

—just like the one in my signature—

Nita stared. The longer she looked, the more obvious it became that there were a lot of parts to this signature that looked like hers.

I would say perhaps forty percent, the peridexis said.

Nita opened her eyes and sat up. “How does that happen?” she whispered.

And the thought came into her head: Somebody’s using things they found out about me to trap Kit.

“Bobo,” Nita said after a few moments, “I hate this.”

That, the peridexis said, closely reflects the sound of all wizards everywhere when making difficult but closely considered ethical choices.

“But I don’t see that I have a choice,” Nita said. “Too many lives depend on it. People on Earth, wizards who might get involved. Even the Shamaska-Eilitt! If this goes wrong somehow, they’re all in danger. At the very least there’s going to be a lot of disruption on Earth. There could be riots. People could get hurt or killed. And there could be other effects I can’t foresee.”

You do have a choice, Bobo said, and you’re about to tell me what it is.

Nita took a deep breath. “Bug him,” she said. “Put a spinoff on Kit’s manual’s log like the one on Dairine’s. I want the same kind of readout on his thought processes that Spot was giving Dad— the streaming consciousness.”

There was a silence. I am required to remind you that there will be a ‘final reckoning’ payment when you decommission this wizardry, and the payment may be personally damaging if oversight determines the wizardry was not successful, or successful in the wrong ways.

“I understand,” Nita said. And she swallowed. “Do it.”

Done, the peridexis said.

She looked at the manual, ready to pick it up right away and see what it revealed. But she just couldn’t bring herself to do it. Tomorrow, she thought. Tomorrow morning. Wait for some content to build up and I’ll look at it then.

But she knew that she wouldn’t be eager to look at it in the morning, either…

***

It was two thirty-three in the morning when Kit finally worked up the courage to open his bedroom door and sneak down the hall toward Carmela’s room. He knew it was two thirty-three because every minute, from about half past midnight on, he had been looking at his propped-up smartphone pn the bedside table and thinking, Now. Now I’m going to do it. No, I’ll wait a few minutes more. Somebody might hear me…

Kit was heartsore. He was angry at Nita and knew that it was wrong for him to be angry at her, but he didn’t want to stop. His guilt at what he was about to do was also terrible, though he hadn’t done it yet. But stronger by far than either of these feelings was the sense that he had to get back to Mars: that if he didn’t, terrible things were going to happen: that the fate of a people rested on what he did or didn’t do.

And even more important than that was the expectation of what he would do to a single heart up there, the imploring look in those eyes. I can’t let her down. I can’t fail her. Not after all this time— And though that thought seemed wrong somehow, he didn’t care.

In any case, sweat was trickling down Kit’s back as he made his way down the hall to Carmela’s bedroom door. I am going to get in so much trouble for this, he thought. But there was simply too great a compulsion to go through with this, to get back up to Mars and find out…

Find out what, exactly?

Well, among other things, where did three hours of my life just go!? He could remember the brief battle with the scorpions under the mountain, all right. The only thing Kit regretted about that was that he wouldn’t be able to use the “curling iron” at any later date: the scorpions would be armored against it. Then he’d gone down into the pit and picked up the Shard, and then— what?

He had awakened by himself on the cold mountainside, with a strange feeling that somewhere else, in a world or a time more real than this one, something more important than anything else was going on. But even as he regarded that, he got a sense that there were parts of Khretef’s story, or their joint one, that Khretef hadn’t been telling him. Something he was having trouble with— something he didn’t want to come to grips with. And it was important—

Maybe something to do with him dying, Kit thought, as he crept cautiously step by step down the hall. Well, that would make me nervous, too. But there was something else going on, he was sure. Part of it had to do with the Nascence, as Khretef had called it. The Nascence was part of the key to this world. With it properly awakened and energized, the City could make itself safe. And once they were safe, they could turn this world into a paradise—

Kit stopped at that point in the hallway and stepped close to the wall between the door of Carmela’s room and the bathroom. There was a board here that, if you stepped on it, would go off like a gunshot as soon as you lifted your weight off it again. Kit was intent on missing it. Carefully he edged down the hall, trying not to bear his weight too heavily on the floor. Once he was past the dangerous spot, Kit put a hand on Carmela’s bedroom doorknob and very slowly and softly turned it.

It wasn’t locked, but then it wasn’t usually. Kit eased the door open, just a crack, and peered inside, letting his eyes get used to the slightly darker conditions in her bedroom. He knew its layout quite well. The foot of Carmela’s bed was near the door, which swung open to the left. All he had to do was edge in and close the door, then very softly move over to the closet door, feel just to his left for the shelf where the remote was, open the closet door, step in, and close it. Then he could use the remote to wake up the worldgate, and be gone.

Kit slipped in through the door, then quickly and quietly closed it behind him so the light from the nightlight out in the hall wouldn’t disturb Carmela. Once again he stood still, making sure he knew where he was and where everything else was. He looked toward Carmela’s bed. From somewhere in the tangled lump of covers on top of it, a tiny snore emerged.

Kit was suddenly, bizarrely reminded of Ponch, and he couldn’t keep himself from letting out a soft sigh. This would be so much simpler if he was still here, Kit thought. All I’d have to do is put his leash on, say ‘Ponch? Let’s go to Mars!’ And three steps later, we’d be there. But that couldn’t happen now. Kit shook his head and silently tiptoed over to the bedroom closet.

He put his hand up to the shelf on the left, felt around… and froze.

Where’s the remote?!

From the bed came a rustle of someone turning over, covers moving and shifting. Oh, please don’t wake up right now!! Kit thought. But it was easily thirty seconds before the rustling stopped coming from the bed, and the little snore resumed.

Kit breathed again, though with difficulty. Once more he put his hand up to the shelf, felt around more carefully. Then he let out another breath, of relief this time, as he felt the cool plastic of the remote under his hand. She just moved it further down the shelf, that’s all. He grabbed it, held it close to him, and reached for the closet door.

It took him a moment to find the doorknob. Very softly Kit turned it and opened the closet door, slipped in, and eased the closet door closed behind him. It was a matter of a few seconds to wake the remote up, punch in the macro settings he’d laid into it earlier, and wake up the gateway to Mars.

A few seconds later he was looking through the back of the closet at the gleaming city standing in the midst of that red-brown desolation. Just the sight of it suddenly left him feeling less like Kit. Suddenly he felt as if he was in a strange, closed-in place, being kept away from the one place that mattered to him most in the world, because Aurilelde was there.

Hang on, guy, Kit thought, don’t get all fired up just yet. We’ll have you there in a moment. And then you can start explaining to me what the heck is going on up there! And he stepped into the gate—

And found that he was still standing in front of it. Now what the— ! Kit thought.

He stepped forward again. Again he was prevented from going through the gate. Oh, no, he thought. They’ve blocked this, too!

Frustrated, Kit reached out and put his hand up against the gate. But it went through. Okay, Kit thought, so that’s not the problem—

He pressed himself forward against the worldgate interface, very slowly. His face went through; his arms went through; he could see what was on the other side, feel the cold of the Martian atmosphere against his face. But he couldn’t go farther. Something about chest-level was stopping him.

Kit backed up, realizing what it was. His manual wouldn’t pass. It knew he was banned, and it wasn’t going anywhere.

Kit cursed under his breath. There was nothing he could do for the moment but reach into his jacket pocket, take out the manual, and very slowly and carefully bend down to leave it leaned up against the inside wall of Carmela’s closet, where it would be unlikely to get kicked through the gate by accident. It’ll be safe enough here. He pulled out his antenna-wand, stuck it experimentally into the gate: it at least passed. So I won’t be unarmed. And I’m still a wizard— it’s not like the manual is required on the road. But all the same Kit felt unnerved at the thought of going to another planet equipped only with the very basic set of spells he had memorized: life support and so forth.

Getting back wouldn’t be a problem: he’d programmed the gate to produce an automatic portal for him three hours from now, picking him up at the border between the City of Shamask and the Martian wilderness. I’ll be back before anyone even knows I’m gone …and if I get into some kind of trouble, I can always yell for Ronan or Darryl, or even Neets. But any thought of what might cause such a need, or of the explanations he would make to the others regarding what he was doing and why, seemed very far away.

Right now the imperative of getting to Mars overrode everything else. In the back of his mind, Khretef was fretting, worrying, desperate to get back. Aurilelde needed them, needed him, before the trouble started… and Khretef seemed very sure that it would start. He also seemed very sure that they were— he was— was the only one who could stop it. We stopped it once before, Khretef’s voice said in the back of his head. But we can’t linger. We need to get going!

Kit nodded, let out one last breath of nervousness and guilt, passed through the gate, and the closet went dark behind him.

***

Nita came down for breakfast the next morning feeling very wrung out and weary of mind, for reasons she couldn’t fully understand. Granted, there’d been a lot going on lately, and the seemingly endless drudgery of the end of the school year had been wearing her down. And now there was this craziness with Kit as well. Banned. I can’t believe it. What’s the matter with him?

Coming down the stairs, Nita suddenly found herself thinking, as she’d kept finding herself doing lately, about Ponch. Obviously Kit missed him most of everybody, but it was difficult, sometimes, to look at Kit and realize that that constant, black presence was not ever again going to appear galloping along at his side. We’ve been losing so much stuff lately, Nita thought. This has not been a great year. First Mom, then Ponch…

She sighed, thinking of how she had heard her mom say sometimes that “these things come in threes.” Well, I hope they don’t! Two’s more than enough for me, thanks. Especially if losing Ponch is part of what’s left Kit acting so weird. What are we going to do about him?

In the kitchen, she yawned and put the kettle on to make tea. Listen to you, she said to herself. So depressed, and the day hasn’t even started yet! Probably your blood sugar. It was true that over the past couple of days she hadn’t been eating well: there’d been too much going on. Really need to do something about that. She leaned back against the kitchen counter, waiting for the water to boil.

It was just beginning to produce its pre-boil rumbling when Dairine came wandering into the kitchen in one of those shin-length Tshirts she favored. “You’re up early,” Nita said.

Dairine yawned, then looked at Nita with vague annoyance. “Unlike some people,” she said, “who have a half day today for the completely unfair reason that they’re older than me, I have school this morning. But if I get a head start on some of the things I need to do, I can leave early and get back to Wellakh.”

Nita nodded, turning her attention back to the kettle. “So things are going okay?”

“Dad’s lightened up, if that’s what you mean.” She opened the fridge and got out a quart of milk, then started foraging in one of the cupboards for cereal and came out with a box of her preferred oaty loops.

“Good,” Nita said.

Dairine threw her an oblique look. “When I’m working… how much is he seeing of what’s going on?”

Nita felt inclined to shy away from the question, but that would cause more trouble later. “Go ask him to show you. It’s physical stuff mostly: movements, video.” She raised her eyebrows at the slowness of the kettle and reached over to turn the stove up higher. “He’s interested, but not in an unhealthy way. So however you’ve been handling the content with him, you’re doing good.”

Dairine nodded, got down a cereal bowl from the cupboard, and poured the bowl almost entirely full of oat loops. “How are you planning to fit any milk in that?” Nita said.

“Magic,” Dairine said. “Back in a moment.” Dairine wandered out through the kitchen again, heading back upstairs to her bedroom. The milk carton that she’d left poised in midair now popped itself open, tilted, and started pouring milk into the cereal.

Nita watched this minor demonstration of expertise with interest, waiting for the milk to overflow: but it didn’t. The cereal in the bowl rose just high enough for some of the little oat o’s to teeter at the bowl’s edges without actually falling out. She’s good, Nita thought, amused. Can’t take that away from her…

Dairine came thumping down the stairs again and appeared in the dining room completely dressed, with her school backpack thrown over her shoulder, and her manual and a copy of Three Men in a Boat in one hand. “Oh, and by the way,” Dairine said as she came back into the kitchen and grabbed the milk carton out of the air, closing it and shoving it back into the fridge, “there’s a dinosaur in the back yard to see you.”

Nita stared at Dairine as she slammed the refrigerator door shut, dislodging a few of the magnets stuck to the outside of it. “What?”

“A dinosaur,” Dairine said, stooping to pick up the magnets and put them back on the fridge door, then fumbling around in the silverware drawer for a spoon. “Really big lizard? Goggly eyes? Skin all lit up in fluorescent colors like someone who’s really pissed off about something? That kind of dinosaur.”

“Oh, my god,” Nita said, and ran toward the back door. “Oops—” She ran back to the stove, shut off the heat under the kettle, and then plunged outside.

Sure enough, at the rear end of the backyard, there was Mamvish, crouching in the spell-shielded area under the sassafras saplings and the big wild cherry tree. “Mamvish!” Nita said. “Dai stihó! What’s up?”

“Apparently,” Mamvish said, fixing one eye so intently on Nita that it actually held still, “your friend Kit. What’s he doing on Mars?”

She stared. “What? He can’t be on Mars. He’s banned.”

“Exactly,” Mamvish said. The colors under her hide swirled neon-bright. “He shouldn’t be there at all. Yet somehow he is. Would you care to explain?” The nearest eye was trained on her very hard.

Nita’s own eyes went wide. “What?” she said. “Are you suggesting I helped? I knew he was grounded! No way I’d take him up there: you think I’m crazy?”

“I have to ask,” Mamvish said, “because you’re his partner. You two are quite close, and have been through some… well, let’s say some extraordinary experiences together. Experiences that might tempt one of you to break the rules for the other’s sake.”

Nita shook her head, hardly knowing what to say. Close, yes, but this close? No!

Well, maybe yes! But not this time. And that obscurely pained her. She gulped, trying to get some control over herself.

“Mamvish,” Nita said, “look, sure, sometimes he’s gone off the rails and I’ve gone after him to pull him back on. But he’s done the same for me. Anyway, if you think I took him to Mars, I didn’t! I didn’t even know he was banned till last night, and I haven’t heard from him since then. And now he’s— Where is he??”

“Since you two are normally so close,” Mamvish said, “I’d hoped you might be able to give me a better idea, as we’re having difficulty locating him precisely. His location is being obscured by local factors—”

Nita scowled. “I just bet it is.”

Mamvish turned to stare at her with the other eye. “Do you know something I should know?”

“Probably yes,” Nita said. “But it would help a lot if you can stop assuming I’m guilty before I can explain my innocence!”

Mamvish looked stricken. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Terrible changes have begun up there, and I’m on my way to deal with them, but it’s no excuse for me to deal unfairly with you. Come along and tell me what’s been happening. You’re saying you don’t know how Kit got to Mars?”

Nita shook her head. “Unless one of the guys took him— But Darryl said he wouldn’t do that.”

“As did Ronan,” Mamvish said.

“Then unless he—” Nita shut her mouth as the idea came to her. “Oh, my god. Carmela’s closet!”

Mamvish looked at her strangely. “A closet? That’s some kind of room in your house?”

“Not my house. Kit’s. His sister— you remember, she was at the Crossings when that trouble broke out? The Crossings administration gave her a spinoff worldgate as part of her compensation. It’s strictly mechanically managed. I guess if Kit used it—” Then she shook her head. “We don’t have to stand here guessing: we can find out from Kit’s manual. Let me get mine and I’ll tell you what’s going on.”

“Good,” Mamvish said. “Hurry. And when we’re there, be ready to help, because this is likely to be difficult—”

Nita burst out in a sweat on hearing a wizard of Mamvish’s experience and power levels saying that something was likely to be difficult. “Sure, half a sec, let me go get my stuff—”

She was running toward the house when her father came out and met her halfway by the backyard gate, peering over it and down toward the end of the backyard. “Okay,” he was saying to himself as Nita ran up to him, “she wasn’t exaggerating. A dinosaur. Nice color scheme; didn’t know they came like that.”

He looked at Nita. “Please tell me it’s not an herbivore. I just got the new peonies planted out.”

“I don’t know about the peonies,” Nita said, “but when we get back you’d better hide the tomatoes.” She started to push past him.

He stopped her and handed Nita her backpack. “That white wand of yours,” he said, “your manual, your phone, a sandwich. Sorry, there wasn’t time for a Thermos. I’ll call school if you’re late. Mars again?”

“Mars!” she said, grabbing the stuff from him, kissing his cheek, and running back down the yard to where Mamvish waited. As she went, Nita could just hear him mutter, “When do I start getting my perks?”

Seconds later, they were there. Nita’s breath went out of her again, the sheer range of Mamvish’s power taking her once more by surprise.

The problem was that the Mars where they now stood, outside the City of the Shamaska, was not quite the one Nita had been expecting. Yesterday, the city through which she had walked had been an ephemeral thing—plainly a construct of wizardry, partly resurrected from the deeps of time, partly from fiction and illusion. This, however, was a city standing proudly out in view for anyone to see—including any number of satellites, and telescopes, and whatever else might be looking this way. And there was air here: thinner than Earth’s, but breathable. Streams were flowing through the red landscape, and they were real—

“This wasn’t here yesterday,” Nita whispered to Mamvish. “Or not like this.”

“Not in the present, you mean,” Mamvish said. “A memory? A reconstruction?”

Nita was unsure about the fine distinctions and now was wishing she’d bugged Kit’s manual a lot sooner. “It wasn’t just Kit’s imagination,” Nita said as she looked around, “or his memories. Someone else’s, too…”

And then she stopped, because Mamvish… had changed.

The giant saurian was gone. In her place was a giant ten-legged creature, also faintly saurian-looking and big enough for a number of humans or large humanoids to ride on in a line, for the length of the “wheelbase” was considerable. A long, high neck and small fierce-toothed head; blunt, flat feet somewhat like a camel’s, good for running on the legendary Martian sands; a long, straight deinonychus-like tail for balance—

Nita had to rummage around in memory for the name of the creature: it had been a while since she’d read the Burroughs books. A thoat. She’s turned into a thoat. Well, that’s weird! But she doesn’t look concerned…

Mamvish looked sideways at Nita. “The other Kit?”

Nita shook her head. “It’s like there was an earlier version of him.”

“A more ancient incarnation?”

“Not sure. You should check what I got out of his manual.”

Mamvish’s eyes shifted to and fro for a moment. Then she looked at Nita with some concern. “What you’ve done to his manual,” she said, “is very creative… and potentially very expensive.”

“I know.” They started walking down the white road toward the City. “I’m not real wild about doing it, either.”

“And a reincarnation it may indeed be,” Mamvish said, “though not in the usual style. More of an archive function, though it needs closer analysis.” She didn’t say anything for a moment as they walked along. Then she glanced at Nita again. “But you’re also thinking that he’s involved with someone who’s another version of you?”

Nita grimaced. “I don’t know about involved…”

Oh, yes, you do, said the back of her mind. “He was— He was definitely attracted to her.”

The look in the eye on that side of Mamvish’s new, smaller head was unreadable. But now she gazed forward at the city again, noting the water and the blueness of the sky. “This effect is spreading,” Mamvish said. “Detailed analysis is going to have to wait. For the moment—”

The whole of her hide blazed with Speech-symbols, swirling, burning. Mamvish gestured with her tail, and the fire of the symbols ran out of her, through the ground, straight out to the horizon, and seemingly up to the sky, running straight to the zenith. Sky and earth flared briefly: then the spell-flare vanished.

Nita stared at Mamvish as the spell expired. Mamvish was eyeing the ground with a dubious expression. “Interesting,” she said. “Some resistance—”

She waved her tail. “No matter,” Mamvish said. “Come. They know we’re here now. But for the time being, no one on Earth will see what’s happening.”

They started walking again. Nita stared at Mamvish. “You just put a visual shield around the entire planet?”

“It’s going to take some holding,” Mamvish said, sounding aggrieved. “There’s resistance. And there shouldn’t be. But I thought this would get more complicated before it became less so. Let’s go see what these people think they’re doing.”

They continued their walk up the broad, paved way toward the city gates. About halfway there, Nita started feeling undressed. She looked down at her sweatshirt and jeans—

Or where they should have been. They were a lot less “here” now. It wasn’t that the ornaments and delicate draperies, the gems and gleaming precious metals weren’t pretty in a very exotic way. But for Nita, the thought of anybody seeing her dressed like this, especially Kit, immediately brought on a blush.

Mamvish glanced at her. “What’s the matter?”

“I, uh—” Nita grabbed at what was draped around her hips and passed for a skirt, at least in places. It was hard to get hold of, more like being dressed in faded blue-denim fog than anything else— and its opacity was subject to change without notice. “This isn’t exactly, I mean, it’s not what I usually—”

“Oh, come on, Nita,” Mamvish said as she ambled along, “it’s their reality, for the moment. We must play here if we’re to win here. What is it your people say? Snort it up?”

“Suck it up,” Nita said, and suited the action to the word, pulling in her stomach. It only hangs over a little bit, she thought. And the top doesn’t really look that bad. If there was just a little more fog between the metal bits, it might actually—

“You need to stop allowing yourself to get so self-absorbed,” Mamvish said as they got closer to the gates. “You’re a wizard! You should be well past the point in your practice where body taboos are an issue. You’ve been off-world enough now, spent time on the High Road: act the dignity of your role and stop looking like a nervous teenager!”

I am a nervous teenager! Nita thought. But she said nothing more for the moment, just concentrated on trying to walk tall. Her mother always used to say to her, When you’re embarrassed, make yourself taller. It covers.

And the covering, Nita thought as she tried to get rid of the last vestiges of panic, is exactly what I need about now!The chilly wind was playing with the long, diaphanous draperies about her hips, and no attempt of Nita’s would get them to lie down. Finally she gave up trying. She had everything she needed. What had happened to the sandwich she wasn’t sure, but her manual was in a little pouch hanging on the right side of her low-slung belt, and her wand was in an elaborately chased metal sheath on the left. And Mamvish is right. I’m a wizard. Clothes don’t make any difference to that! Though she was left uncertain whether the goosebumps she was suffering were due to the clothes or her emotional state . .

Mamvish paused. “What is it with the gravity here?” she said, shuffling her feet and glancing around her. “I don’t feel quite right. Synesthesias of some kind…”

Nita stopped and gave her a look. “What?”

“I don’t know what’s causing it,” Mamvish said, “but it’s as if—” She looked down at her feet.

Her mouth dropped open. Her eyes wiggled as if they were trying to go around. Nita, caught off guard, tried to choke down her laughter, and failed. “Wait a minute. You mean you didn’t notice?”

A growl started rumbling somewhere inside Mamvish. “What— am— I?”

“You’re a thoat. They’re—” Oh, god, how can I say it? Never mind, just look at her face! Stop laughing, stop laughing! “In the stories, they’re a beast of burden. Not very smart. People ride them.”

The growl got louder. It took Nita a few moments to get control of her laughter. “Come on, Mamvish!” Nita said. “You ought to be past being shape-proud by now! A wizard like you has the power to look like anything she wants, and you ought to know the seeming’s not the self.” She started snickering again. “So act the dignity of your role. Snort it up!”

The thoat-eyes could be surprisingly expressive. They flared with annoyance, and then came a brief flurry of furious tantrum-based foot-stamping, even more impressive with all a thoat’s legs than with Mamvish’s own. Dust flew up from the pink-white Martian road until it almost concealed her. “This is so embarrassing, what if anybody ever hears about this, some kind of gratuitous insult, do they even know why I, how can this possibly, why do I even bother, don’t these people know why I—”

Nita turned away, as there was no point in Mamvish being made worse by watching Nita fail to control her grin. Increasing entropy locally is bad, bad, bad. She’s a baby wizard still; don’t laugh any more, don’t, just don’t!

Nita got control of herself long before Mamvish did. But finally the stomping and muttering stopped, and Nita turned back to see Mamvish staring morosely at her thoat feet. “I suppose,” she said, “it wasn’t meant personally.”

And what will she do if it ever turns out it was? I’m tempted to tell her …No, no, no! Nita kept her face straight. “Wouldn’t know how it could be,” she said, which was true.

“Hmmmmmfffff,” Mamvish said, a huge blown-out exclamation of resignation and annoyance. Then she put her head up high. “Work to do,” she said. “Let’s go do it.”

“Bobo,” Nita said as they got closer to the city, “what about your tap on Kit’s manual? Is there anything about what’s going on in there?”

The tap is not active at the moment, as he could not bring it with him because of the ban. But there is some stored material that he was considering before he came. Information about persons, motivations.

“Let me have it all! And hurry up.”

Nita quickly found herself blushing hot in increasing discomfort as she browsed through entirely too much of Kit’s recent stream-of-consciousness. But this is gonna be very useful, I can’t deny that. Even if this really is not stuff I want to be seeing! Never mind, just make the most of it—

Shortly they came up to the great sheer metal gates and stood there for a moment, looking upward. The gates remained obstinately closed.

“Maybe they don’t know we’re coming…” Nita said. But immediately after she said it, she was certain that wasn’t true.

“Oh, they know,” Mamvish said. “I can hear them.” She flourished her thoat-tail. “So let’s go see how this will proceed.”

And the next second, they were standing in a high Tower room where light poured in from the pink-white sun overhead, and white clouds chased across that blue sky. And in the center of the room stood three people around a broad red sandstone bench: and a fourth one sat there on the bench, wearing at her throat a sharp oblong Shard of light burning fiercely violet even in the full light of day.

Gathered all around the sides of the great circular room were many men and women in the metal harness and light draperies of the Shamaska-Eilitt. All their dark eyes were turned to Mamvish and Nita as they walked up to the bench-throne, and Nita found it very strange to pass among them— like walking through a congress of living, breathing statues in all shades of gray, and all the faces smooth and immobile. Here and there among them were the green metal scorpions, sitting or crouching against the polished floor, watching the newcomers with all their eyes, scissoring their claws gently together. But most of Nita’s attention was on the Throne. There was Iskard, and the dark Rorsik behind him, at a little distance, watching with a cold face; and standing next to the bench-throne, Khretef.

Kit! Nita insisted to herself: and she spoke to him silently. Kit! But he was gray and stony, dressed like one of them, looking like one of them, except that he looked like Kit as well. His eyes didn’t react to hers when she looked into them: she was just another stranger walking in. And on the Throne sat Aurilelde, with the violet-blue fire of the Shard clinging to the smooth gray flesh above her gemmed metal bodice— and about her, an echo of its glow that was coming from something else, something inside her, the faintest possible rosy light—

Oh, no, Nita thought. Mars’s kernel. She’s got the planet’s kernel inside her. How long has that been there? And whose good idea was that?! But as her glance went to the smug and triumphant-looking Rorsik, she thought she knew.

Mamvish stopped about six feet from the Throne and lifted her head. “In the Powers’ names, and that of the One They serve,” she said, “we are on errantry, and we greet you.”

Some of those around the room bowed, but many looked at Mamvish and Nita with distrust, and the four around the Throne didn’t move at all. Finally, Iskard said, “Fellow wizard, tell us what errand brings you here so that we may speed you on your way.”

Nita’s eyebrows went up, for in the Speech the response had so little genuine greeting in it that it very nearly translated as “Don’t let the door hit you in the fundament on the way out.”

Mamvish blinked in reaction. Then she said, “On the Powers’ behalf and as Species Archivist for this part of the Galaxy, I’ve come to investigate your appearance on this world, which has been vacant for some while under circumstances which we’re investigating. Instances of self-archiving are also within my remit for investigation. Am I to understand that you are descendants of the people of Shamask-Eilith, formerly of this system and also called the First World?”

“We are not those people’s descendants,” Rorsik said, sounding outraged. “We are those people.”

“You have, however, built or engineered new bodies for yourselves, to better suit yourself to this world when you reached it.”

“Such was our right,” Iskard said. “A species has the right to survive.”

“But not to interfere with another species’ survival,” said Mamvish. “You must be aware that there is another planet in this system populated with life forms wearing bodies similar to the ones you’ve engineered for yourselves.”

“We know that perfectly well,” Rorsik said.

“You should also know, then, that that culture is both astahfrith, generally unaware of wizardry, and asdurrafrith.” It was the Speech-word for a species that hadn’t yet openly met alien species or didn’t yet believe in them. “The works you’re enacting here at the moment— I speak of the extensive resurrection of former environmental conditions across the planet— endanger the psychological and physical well-being of that planet. Do you accept that?”

“We not only accept it,” said Rorsik, “but we embrace it. The other planet is no concern of ours. If they are not strong enough to accept the return of the People of the First World to the system where we were the First Life, then they should learn such strength. Or possibly vacate that world in favor of a people better suited to occupy it.”

Nita blinked, unable to believe what she was hearing. “Kit,” she said. “Listen to them! They’re talking about invading the Earth! What are you doing here with these guys?”

Khretef shifted uneasily but said nothing.

Aurilelde looked at Nita with what was supposed to look like understanding, but Nita didn’t miss the slight edge of contempt in the expression. “He came to us first because I called him,” she said. “Because he was a fragment, as this was once a fragment—” She touched the Shard that lay between her breasts. “And is now reunited with the kernel from which it was severed. For a long time the test lay waiting, while all of us and our cities lay in stasis, and while Khretef’s soul waited and worked to be reborn. Finally he was. And sure enough he found his way here along with others— my hero, my warrior, my other half— and took the test, and freed the power that we needed to be alive again.”

She looked up at him and took his hand. “As Kit, he finished the quest that once was his bane: broke open the Nascence and brought home the Shard, the tool to use the Nascence’s power.”

Nita folded her arms, getting more annoyed by the moment at Aurilelde’s manner. “There were more tests than just that one. And not just for guys.”

“Those were of no concern to me,” Aurilelde said. “Knowing what daughters of another world might make of the ancient Daughters’ tales of past years mattered far less than finding the male wizard in whom our savior would lie hidden. Only to him and his kind would the real tests present themselves—especially to the right one. Now that he has come again through them, we all live once more. And he lives as Khretef.” She smiled up at him.

Khretef smiled back, which Nita found hard to bear. But she looked Aurilelde in the eye. “So nothing we found matters, huh?” she said. “Even the Red Rede?”

For a second Aurilelde’s expression changed, as if she was at a loss. “You don’t know what it means,” Nita said. “Or not all of it. You think you do, though. You’ve convinced yourself that you understand it. I wouldn’t be so sure.”

Then she stopped, because she had no idea what she’d meant by that and was desperate not to be asked.

Aurilelde forced that superior smile again. “The Rede is no issue to me, or our people. All that matters is changing this world so that we can live in it again.”

“So,” Mamvish said, “you will not stop.”

Slowly Aurilelde stood up, looking at them. Nita was watching the Shard. Has that dumped its power into the main body of the kernel now, she wondered, or is it just immaterially connected? If somebody could grab it—

Aurilelde was laughing. “Stop? We will do no such thing! We’ve spent enough terrible endless years waiting trapped half alive in the cold and dark, waiting to be freed in a better time. That time has come! And if you think an overgrown slessth and a scrawny bad-mannered brat-child who was never even off her own planet until a few years ago are going to stop the rebirth of a mighty race that ruled this system hundreds of millions of years before your planet was even solid, then you’d better think again.”

Nita’s eyes narrowed. “One last time,” she said. “Before we start dealing with you, I want to talk to Kit.”

Aurilelde simply squeezed Khretef’s hand, then smiled at Nita. “But you still don’t understand, do you? He returned to us as soon as he was able to, some hours ago. And as soon as that happened, he was absorbed.”

She smiled up at Khretef again. “The more senior soul always has priority in any such meeting. It didn’t take much doing: he was young and inexperienced, and not as wholly there as either of us are.” She looked at Nita with what was perhaps meant to be kindness. “If you really want so to be with him,” she said, “maybe you should consider submitting yourself to the same fate. I dare say I could fit you in somewhere.”

Nita flushed with fury. But she knew what to do with that. “Don’t count on it,” she said.

“And why wouldn’t I? Surely you can see my Khretef far exceeds the incomplete fragment you’ve fastened onto! He’s a child of the First World, a warrior, a great wizard, greater than anything you or your poor Kit would ever have been. You two are just shadows. Khretef and I are the substance, the originals. And Khretef lived for me. He died for me! Whereas your little Kit seems merely to have been saved from dying for you once or twice. Sometimes even by you—”

Nita looked at Aurilelde and concentrated on holding still. “If you think you’re holding some kind of moral high ground because somebody’s died for you,” she said, her voice shaking, “I’ve been there, and what you’re displaying now looks nothing like it. And as for the possibility that I might want to make up any part of you—” She laughed. “That’s not gonna happen. So turn him loose, and then we’ll talk about what happens to this planet.”

Aurilelde regarded her quietly. “No,” she said after a moment, “if that’s your response, the talking’s over. So, to wreak aright—” She made a casual gesture at Nita.

And the world upended itself around Nita and dumped her on the ground…

In desperate cold and freezing vacuum. Nita had just sense enough to instantly close her eyes and let out the breath she was tempted to hold. Then she got her life-support force field working again, just before something else happened all around her: a shudder, a strange feeling of change and negation—

She took an experimental breath, found that there was air, opened her eyes. She was sitting on red-brown dirt, out under an early morning sky. Why does this look familiar? she thought.

She stood up, brushing herself off, and looked around. Morning, and still pretty early in the sol, she thought. That puts me, let’s see—

Nita glanced toward the southern horizon and froze. Between her and the pale, pinky Sun, something was rising up that filtered and dimmed that light. It was a wave, easily a hundred feet thick in this gravity, and easily a mile high. Up and up it reared, taller by far now than the mountain, even at that distance leaning up over Nita, leaning farther out, the great sparkling arch of it stretching out over the top of the crater basin and shadowing the mountains in it like a vast, downward-curving smoked-glass roof. The distant Sun was caught in the oncoming wave, flickering, flaring brighter briefly as the water sporadically lensed its light. When the water burns—

But the Sun was struggling to shine now, the thickness of the wave obscuring it as it grew, putting it out.

From what seemed a million years ago, she heard a scratchy bird voice, the voice of a scarlet macaw, saying: Fear death by water!

Oh, no, Nita thought. Oh, no. That dream… it wasn’t a dream.

It’s now.

14: Aurorae Chaos

Nita looked southward across the vast impact basin at the oncoming wall of water. There’s enough water frozen on Mars to flood the whole planet thirty feet deep, she remembered Kit telling her so many times that she had to threaten him with whacking to make him stop.

Now you could repeat it fifty times in a row and I wouldn’t care, she said to Kit, wherever he was, as long as it was really you saying it! But right now she had a more serious problem, because a significant portion of that water was apparently coming right at her. “Bobo,” Nita said. “What is this I’m standing on?”

Oceanidum Mons, Bobo said. It’s not far from where you were before: toward the southwestern side of Argyre Planitia—

Oh, no, Nita thought. Then I didn’t come here because the kernel had been here before. I came here because this was going to happen, and I saw it was coming. Because I was going to be here. Or supposed to be here. If there’s a difference—

And something else that was going to be here? Nita thought. Or supposed to be here? The lake that was here before. Well, here it comes!

“Screw it,” Nita said. “If she thinks I’m going to hold still for this, boy is she wrong!” She reached down to her charm bracelet for a transit spell, started to recite it with some changes—

— and found herself being blocked.

Okay, Nita thought. Shield-spell! She started to enact her usual one—

It was blocked, too. Nita blanched. “Bobo, what’s going on?!”

Someone managing the planet’s kernel, Bobo said, is disallowing the wizardry locally.

“Can she do that??”

Unfortunately, yes.

Nita went hot with fury. She wants me dead! she thought. And she wants me to stand here and watch it coming. That complete and total bitch!

It wasn’t that various Powers and principalities hadn’t tried to kill Nita over time. But this was somehow much more personal, much more offensive, because she’d really been trying to understand this other person, only to have the understanding completely rejected, or used against her. Now Nita’s rage was starting to boil over, and she did her best to get control of it— because it would be really useful, just so long as she did stay in control.

Nita breathed out and tried to get a grip. “Where’s Mamvish?” she said.

Not on the planet, said Bobo. She appears to have been forcibly removed. Possibly her return is also being blocked.

She swore under her breath. I’m on my own, then, Nita thought. But boy, if I’d realized kernels were this powerful, I’d have studied them even harder than I did…

Nita watched the water coming, lifting higher, the wavefront bulking up and up as the water flowing into existence behind it pushed it higher in the light gravity. She shook her head, awed. This would be one of the coolest things I ever saw, Nita thought, if it wasn’t going to kill me. She had maybe two minutes to figure out what to do, find a spell that would do the job, implement the spell, and turn it loose. And then, ideally, recover from it and get the hell out of here.

The wave was closer, climbing the sky. “Bobo, she can’t disallow all wizardry here, can she?” Nita said.

No. That would require power levels similar to Mamvish’s. The blockage involves any transit or defensive spell.

“Okay, let’s go on the offensive. Water magics…”

I have the ones you’ve been researching recently, Bobo said. And all the other ones there are.

Some of which probably look real impressive but might not work for me. The sweat was breaking out on Nita. Where do I begin?

And then she remembered sitting on the jetty with S’reee the other morning, which now seemed about a million years ago. You should talk to Arooon, S’reee was saying. He knew Pellegrino…

Nita gulped. “Bobo,” she said. “The Gibraltar Passthrough wizardry—” Because yes, the idea is insane. But with all the insanity running around already, what’s a little more?

There was a pause. A big piece of work, the peridexis said. And the conditions here are very different.

“Yes, they are,” Nita said, “because the gravity’s way less here! And look at it. All these highlands!” She stared around her. “This is perfect. It’s like the underwater terrain where Pellegrino designed the spell to be used! And I don’t have to control the whole body of water, just what’s coming at me!” She grinned, briefly feeling fierce. “Aurilelde thinks I’m stuck here; she’s sure I can’t gate out; she’s counting on me not to be able to react in time.”

Another pause. Fueling it, Bobo said, is going to cost you.

“Being dead is going to cost me too!”

Point taken. But Bobo still sounded extremely concerned.

“This is what you’ve been wanting to do for me,” Nita said, “so get on with it. It’s a big spell diagram. Lay it out!”

A second later the diagram was burning in lines of light all over the top of the massive tableland where Nita stood. “Big” didn’t begin to sum it up. But Nita didn’t let the size of it freak her: there was no time.

She looked it over quickly and located the control nodes, as well as the specific lines and chords of the spell that needed her own name information written out along them. As she went to them, stepping carefully so as not to interrupt the design, Nita saw her name and other personal information flash into fire along the lines. She stooped to check them: found them complete.

Nita straightened up, saw the gigantic main wavecrest thundering closer. Lesser waves were running and splashing hugely along either side of the tableland. The memory of her previous visions of that wave was making her shiver.But remember the cave, she thought then. You saw the scorpions get you once. And then you did something different, and it didn’t turn out that way. Let it be that way now—

The water kept coming, vast, roaring low. The frontal main wavecrest was still miles off— but not for much longer: the low gravity meant it could move a lot faster than it could on Earth. Maybe another minute, Nita thought. Let’s go.

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.”

Khretef was trying to stop her, but Aurilelde leaped to her feet, a murderous expression on her face. The white-hot fury would have looked astonishing on someone so young, except that Nita had Dairine for a little sister and was used to such displays. “I have no fear of you! You cannot take my world, or my Khretef, or my City—”

“Actually, I can,” Nita said softly. “Come down here and stop me. If you dare.” And she turned her back on them.Bobo? Kill it.

The view into the City vanished. Nita glanced at the passthrough wizardry. “How long will it hold there?” she said.

Approximately twenty-eight minutes. Then your backlash will kick in .

Nita rubbed her face, feeling the shakes starting, and tensed herself: she didn’t dare let them take hold. “I need some height,” she said. “She was able to stop local spelling partly because I was too close to the ground, where a kernel’s power is most effective, close to the body of the planet. It’ll be weaker up high. She’ll be limited to exploiting magnetic fields and microgravity and wind and such, and she won’t have had enough time to get proficient with those. I just need to wear her down and get close, and then—”

Physical confrontation?

“Crude and ugly,” Nita said, “but though I hate to admit it, occasionally effective. So let’s go skywalking.”

***

Hi, Kit!

He had been dozing uneasily in the darkness, caught in a dream from which he couldn’t wake and through which he couldn’t sink into deeper sleep. But the words caught him out of the darkness, pushed him toward waking.

He caught just a glimpse of the world through Khretef’s eyes: the room at the top of the Scarlet Tower, the Shamaska people gathered there—and in the midst of it all a single non-Shamaska figure, slender, erect, and dangerous-looking. Over everything loomed vast twin serpents of water, poised and waiting on her word. He caught the gleam of her eyes, angry, but somehow still with a hint of amusement in the anger: everything under control, even though she was also deadly tired and scared.

Neets!

Hi, Kit!

The image shut down, and fear darkened everything around him. But at least he knew his name again. For a few moments there, he’d lost it. Kit looked around him in the darkness, hunting for a way out, for any ray of light. There was none. He might as well have been in a hole in the ground, the dirt shoveled in, tamped down…

A grave. That’s what this is like.

It was a freaky image, one he pushed away. It’s only if I accept it that I’m going to be stuck here, he thought. Yes, it was hard to think: there was pressure all around him to give it up, let it go, no way out… And the darkness itself seemed to have weight. But time’s weight wasn’t enough to keep a wizard down, not unless he let it. And the weight of intention wasn’t enough, either. I’ve got some intention of my own—

As if in response, the darkness pushed down harder on him. But Kit had something to hold up against it: the image he’d just caught, the glimpse of Nita. She’s hot, Kit thought in surprise. Just how exactly have I failed to notice that Neets is hot?

Maybe it was because she didn’t throw it around or make a weapon of it, the way some of the girls at school did, or tried to. Maybe it was because Kit was so busy just being her friend and not wanting to add anything extraneous to the equation. When the spell was already balanced, you didn’t go hanging extra elements on it just because you could—

And maybe I was just a little bit chicken about it? Kit thought. Because this admission would complicate things, no question about it. Maybe life was nice and comfy and safe without this complication, at a time when a lot of things had not been comfy or safe for either of them… so that Kit hadn’t wanted to rock the boat. And maybe that’s why I’ve been giving Darryl and Ronan so much grief.

But the sight of her there, looking deadly— and extremely competent and wizardly and pissed off and, well, frankly, kind of magnificent—

Kit blushed. Then he swore at himself. Later for that. Right now we’ve got problems! And there was somebody else besides Khretef who was part of the “we.” The realization was strangely exciting. Now all I have to do is get the hell out of here so I can be some use to her. Because I got her into this.

“You can’t!” said a gigantic voice that was both Khretef’s and his own—and for that reason, strangely difficult to argue with. “Too much is riding on it! The fate of our people, their past and their future—”

He’s trying to drown you out, Kit thought. Don’t let it happen. Stand up; get real; get focused. You still have a body. Even if you don’t, fake it that you have a body!

Kit felt around him. For a scary few seconds there was nothing to be felt in the darkness. Nothing’s here, I’m not here…

Cut that out! Yes, I am!

And slowly he felt a floor under him— or talked himself into believing there was one. Which is it? Doesn’t matter. Wizardry’s about persuasion, and sometimes the one you’ve got to persuade is yourself. Let’s go, floor!

It was there: he could feel it against his hands. He was sitting on it. Kit got his feet under him, got up. “Khretef?” he shouted. “This has got to stop!”

“Yes, it does. At your end! Stop fighting it: let what’s fated happen!”

Kit clenched his fists as the pressure of the darkness came down on him again, and he braced himself against it. It was tough: he felt strangely hollow, as if he had no access to wizardry.

“You don’t,” said that weird dual voice. “Your power is mine now. And it’s being passed to someone who can make the best use of it.”

Kit’s eyes narrowed. There were ways to do that legally: any wizard could act as power source for someone else’s spell. But the procedure required consent. “No way!” he shouted. “I’m not playing this game!”

“You consented when we blended a little while ago,” said the voice. “Too late now. Why fight with yourself? It’s over.”

The darkness kept pressing down, a physical force, hard to resist. But Kit flashed on something else— one of his gym teachers, Mr. Thorgesen, who’d been coaching him on weights this last semester. Kit had started out hating this part of gym but had suddenly realized that there was a skill involved, a matter of balance and leverage very like some acts of wizardry, and almost against his will he’d started to get into it. And will’s the issue. “It’s not just a dead weight,” Mr. T. kept saying. “Work out where the leverage is and use it to your best advantage.”

“I’m not fighting with myself!” Kit said, pressing up, feeling for the points of leverage in the other’s mind. And suddenly, in bizarre alliance with his gym teacher, it was Mr. Mack helping him here, too, helping Kit find the leverage point. What matters is thinking yourself into those people’s heads. Imagine how the world looked to them! Their lives, their troubles. That’s how what they do starts to make sense. “I’m me! And Nita’s Nita! We are not just little fragments of you guys, like the Shard’s a fragment of the kernel! We’ve got our own lives, and they’re not yours! But you people are all about being fragmented and broken up. You see everything that way! And you really need to get past the blind spot, because you’re ruining any chance for your own lives to be whole things that aren’t broken!”

For the first time Khretef didn’t seem to have an answer ready. Kit could feel his uncertainty, like a splinter of light piercing the gloom. It actually was a splinter of light: the room in the Tower, right now, where Nita stood challenging the furious Aurilelde, and then vanished. “You’ve got it backwards!” Kit said as Aurilelde vanished too. “We’re not the ones who’re like you: you’re the ones who’re like us! We’re what you could be if you weren’t stuck in the past and in the middle of this stupid thing where your people hate each other! And your two sides have been hating each other so long, I bet you don’t even remember what started it in the first place!”

“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!”

Aurilelde’s expression was going back and forth between stricken and furious— and then the horror shifted permanently to rage. Nita, drifting just a little closer, thought again of the good old cartoon idiom about getting an opponent angry so they’d make a mistake. Aurilelde was making it already. Just let me close enough to you to get a good grip and pull that kernel out of you—

But Aurilelde wasn’t angry enough. One last thing was needed. “I wonder, though,” Nita said, “whether someone who died for you once might just see how you’re behaving now and say, ‘Did I die for her, or did she just let me go out and be killed so she could have this? The power to rule the planet?’” For she could feel the tremor down below them starting to grow. “‘And when this poor Kit came along, she used him the same way, and let his soul be lost so she could keep this power for herself—’”

“No!”

“And then he’ll say, ‘How long do I have? When she realizes the truth, she’ll find another way to get rid of me!’” Nita was now staring into Aurilelde’s eyes from only a few feet away—

“No, no, no!” Screaming, Aurilelde lunged at Nita. Nita grabbed for her, but Aurilelde hurled herself backward and away in reaction, raising her arms.

Underneath the two of them, the surface of the planet started going hazy. Dust storm? Nita thought, and then realized the truth. No! Marsquake!

The planet’s crust was beginning to convulse, great ripples starting to spread away from the spot beneath them. Craters were cracking across, water flooding down into the crevasses; elsewhere vast blocks and slabs of stone were jolting upward out of the crust—

Olympus Mons wasn’t affected yet, but Nita had no idea how long that would last. She doesn’t realize what she’s capable of with that thing inside her, Nita thought, horrified. She doesn’t realize that the kernel’s more than just a planet’s physical rules, but its spiritual affiliations too, the myths and stories others wind into it, all tangled up together. Aurilelde didn’t realize what was happening to her. She was becoming Mars itself, a mad Mars: not a god of war, but a goddess, and a goddess scorned—

And in her craziness she’ll pull the whole planet apart, Nita thought, horrified. She could feel the tremors propagating farther down into the crust, the strains in the planet’s mantle increasing. It’ll just shatter! At first the pieces wouldn’t go far: they’d settle into another great asteroid belt. But orbits elsewhere in the system will be destabilized! And Earth’s closest—

Twenty-four minutes, Bobo said.

Nita swallowed and headed directly for Aurilelde. “If you’re trying to get at me that way,” Nita said to her, “you’re going to have to get a lot more personal.”

That was when the blow hit Nita and slammed her tumbling up toward space. “Think so?” Aurilelde said. “Then we’ll just give you your wish.”

Around Nita, now choking in the vacuum, suddenly freezing, the pitiless darkness closed in…

***

In the darkness Khretef’s voice was saying, “It doesn’t matter, anyway. When they’re done, when Aurilelde’s won, we’ll be one forever. Why should this be so bad?” Khretef was almost pleading. “We were so alike, anyway, almost the same…”

Standing there by himself in the dark, holding off its ever-increasing pressure, Kit shook his head. “We have things in common, sure!” he said. “We’re alive! And you and me, we’re in the service of Life: you took the Oath! We’re on the same side! So why are you trying to rub me out? Wizards don’t destroy things without good reason! Wizards keep things going, they fix what’s broken, they don’t throw other living beings out just because they’re in the way!”

“But Aurilelde says—”

“Aurilelde’s not a wizard, Khretef! She’s a seer, yeah, but even seers don’t always see straight. Especially if they’re scared! She’s scared for you, and she’s letting that warp the way she sees what has to happen. You can’t just let her pictures of how the world ought to be erase yours. It’s as bad as what she’s told you that you’ve got to do to me!”

“That’s wrong,” Khretef said. “That has to be wrong. You don’t understand—”

Once again that uncertainty made Kit sure he was right. “She got it backwards, buddy!” Kit said. “She foresaw us, me and Nita, and she saw that we were somehow the answer to Mars’s problem. No news there: every wizard’s the answer to some problem of the universe’s! But she also saw that everything was going to have to change for you guys in some big weird way, and that scared her. She started concentrating on the parts of the vision she could bear to look at, and screened out the rest. She saw she needed a wizard’s power to bring Earth’s wizards into the picture. She saw herself at the center of it, protecting her dad and her people, even protecting you. So you gave her access to your power. And now you just feel like an idiot because you can’t take it back without a fight, and fighting her’s the last thing you want to do!”

The silence in the darkness was anguished.

Finally the voice spoke again, and this time it was far less Kit’s, far more Khretef’s. “She was so sure,” he said. “Even when I started becoming uncomfortable about letting her share my own power…” Kit could feel Khretef’s shame at that remembered discomfort: how could he deny any part of himself to the love of his life? “And then she said, ‘The other’s coming: give me his power if you can’t give me yours! It won’t matter; he’s just another you. And think what it will mean. No more fighting. The end of the other side’s threats, at last and forever—’”

“The old story,” Kit said. “And not Aurilelde’s voice, either. You know who wrote that dialogue! You didn’t invent war: the Lone Power did! One of its favorite tools—because war’s the easy way out of conflict. And not having wars, having enough compassion and smarts to stay out of them, is real hard work! Getting into the other guy’s mindset is real tough to do in the first place, and it’s hard to stay there. Lots easier to decide that the other guy’s so different from you that there’s no hope for him. That he’s going to hate you forever, and for the sake of your peace of mind he’s better off dead.”

The image of that dark splotch on the Korean peninsula, where the light suddenly stopped, was flaring at the back of Kit’s mind: and Khretef saw it, too, laid out before them in the darkness as Kit had seen it while sitting on his Earthwatching rock on the Moon. “But it doesn’t have to be that way, Khretef! Break the pattern and poke the Lone One in the eye!”

There was a long silence. “They’ll say I’m a traitor to both sides,” Khretef whispered. “Again! And I’ll be betraying Aurilelde, too—”

“Brother, you’ve got to do something!” Kit said. “You can’t just sit here and let this go on! It’s not just your world, and your people—all of them, the Eilitt and the Shamaska. It’s Earth, too, billions of people whose lives are going to get completely screwed up because of what’s happening here if it’s not stopped! You’re a wizard. You know how it has to go! You can love Aurilelde all you like, but if you don’t act now, the Lone Power’s just going to sit there laughing at how you gave It just what It wanted while you were sure you were doing the only thing you could.”

Another long and desperate silence. “What do I do?” Khretef said finally.

“Let me go!” Kit said. “I’ll do what I can for you and Aurilelde, I promise, but right now we’ve got two whole worlds to worry about. Let me out of here!”

The silence continued. Then the pressure against which Kit had been straining started to let up. From deep inside the darkness, Kit felt a shift in the power underlying the place. The feeling started slowly transmuting into a weird stretching, as if something was fastened to Kit’s skin and his bones, pulling him painfully out of shape. Kit set his teeth, tried to deal with the pain as it worsened, became intolerable—

It stopped.

It’s not working, Khretef said silently, as if inside Kit’s head again. It’s too late. For both of us…

***

Nita tried to blink, couldn’t. She gasped for air, shivering with the frost that had formed on her skin in just a few seconds of airless darkness. Bobo?

She hit you with a chunk of hardened atmosphere, the peridexis said. I was just able to keep your shields in force at minimum, because you weren’t entirely unconscious. You got lucky. Stay conscious, or I can’t be of any use to you!

Nita brushed away ice, blinked until her eyes worked again, and turned to face Aurilelde, who was hanging there in the darkness and laughing. “You see?” she said. “You have no idea what I can do. With the kernel, and the power of a wizard whose will is in abeyance, I can do things you can’t imagine!”

Nita was starting to get really steamed now. “What, hitting somebody with a brick? That’s unimaginable? Heaven forbid I should get really creative with you, then. Let’s keep it simple.” Because all that bluffing down there aside, I really don’t want to run the risk of killing you and maybe screwing up the kernel forever!

She reached her hands out into the space around her. Dust, she thought. The space around the planet was full of it. Nita called it to her, whispering in the Speech. Dust, come help your mother-world, because if this space case has her way, there won’t be a solid place for you to fall back on: you’ll be left floating out around here by yourself forever in the dark till Jupiter eats you or you fall into the Sun! Come lend me a hand here, get solid, get real—

Seconds later Nita was almost obscured by a cloud of it. Aurilelde laughed at her. “You think you can hide that way?” she cried, and came at Nita. “Watch this—”

“By all means,” Nita said, turning the spell loose, and swept one hand down at Aurilelde. The dust followed, clumping together, solidifying, and striking Aurilelde hard in the chest. The impact of the blow sent her plummeting toward the planet as if a giant hand had swatted her there.

Nita dived after her, intent on the kernel. Have to work out how to do this. Don’t want to hurt her, just have to get that kernel out of her! Got them out of walls and floors and planetary cores before: but those weren’t alive. How do I do this without—

Something struck Nita hard in the head. She jerked sideways, dazed for a moment, and just got a glimpse of the thing as it floated away on the rebound. It was a nickel-iron meteorite about the size of a walnut. Aurilelde, recovering too quickly from Nita’s blow, had snagged it in passing and slung it at her.

Nita put her hand up to her head, pulled it back and saw the blood, and went queasy. Better quit being so nice and put a stop to this real quick before she hits you with something bigger. Like Deimos!

Fortunately Mars’s lesser satellite wasn’t in the neighborhood, but there were other asteroid fragments nearby, and Aurilelde threw a number of those at Nita, missing as Nita dodged. Then she started using the weak Martian magnetic field itself on Nita. Strange lights started sparking at the back of Nita’s eyes, and her ears started ringing as her nervous system complained about the abuse by the locally accelerated fields—

Would you please cut that out?! Nita said to the magnetic field: and as usual, preferring courteous wizardly persuasion to the crass ordering-around that Aurilelde was inflicting on it, the knots of magnetic flux assailing her dissolved.

But by the time Nita’s vision and sense of balance were back to normal, Aurilelde was trying the hardened-air exploit on her again, this time simply sliding a block of it up under Nita and accelerating it. Whoa! Nita thought as the acceleration sharply increased. Not good, we’re heading for escape velocity here— !

Nita angrily pushed sideways off the block to drift free again in the microgravity: then spoke the phrase that would undo several vital strands of the antigrav spell she was wearing. I’m trying to help you out here! she said in the Speech to Mars’s gravity well. A little pull here, please? You’ve got some gravitational anomalies to spare—

Her acceleration away from the planet slowed, ceased, then reversed direction. Nita dropped toward the planet’s surface with increasing speed; she doubled over into a dive, straightening as she fell faster. Doing end-runs around the kernel by sweet-talking local forces isn’t going to stop this, she thought. Got to get my hands on that thing fast! “Bobo, how’re her energy levels holding up?”

She’s strong, Bobo said. She’s got a whole planet to draw on.

“Can’t you do anything about it?”

Not without getting the kernel dissociated from her, Bobo said. For the time being, she is Mars—

Don’t remind me, Nita thought, for down on the surface the dust was kicking up. So how the heck do I get her to stop being Mars? If only for a few minutes… Another of those blocks of hardened air hit Nita and clouted her hard up into the borders of the atmosphere again.

As she recovered and plunged downward once more, Nita could see the destruction continuing, the desolation spreading as some old volcanoes woke up and new ones broke out like a fiery rash as the crust ripped and lava thrust up from the depths. Fueled by the power Aurilelde’s kernel-connected rage was feeding to the wizardry running loose on the planet, whole oceans were coming real out of the past; even Valles Marineris was running over with ancient water beyond its ability to drain out into the northern ocean basins. Mars was tearing itself apart in fire and water. “Stop it, Aurilelde!” Nita shouted at her as she got close to Aurilelde again. “You can’t do this!”

“I can!” Aurilelde yelled back. “And I will! If only to teach you what I can do and you can’t. What I can have and you can’t! Khretef is mine! He was always mine! We don’t need this world! Yours will do just as well. When this world’s gone, and we’ve taken yours, we’ll live there and he’ll be mine again, mine forever—”

Nita kept heading toward her. Angry isn’t working! Just tell her the truth— “Nothing’s forever, Aurilelde!” she shouted. “You may not be a wizard, but Kit is, and Khretef is, and they both know that entropy’s running, and sooner or later, everything dies.” Nita’s eyes started to sting. “The people you love die, and love may be enough to slow down the death sometimes, or even reverse it for a while— but not every time, and not forever!”

She thought of her mother, of Ponch, and had to wipe her eyes. Oh, damn it, I thought I was through with this! I guess not for a while yet. “It won’t work. Kit will die someday, yeah! I may be there to see it: I’ve already almost seen it once or twice.” She wiped her eyes again, but anger was getting the better of her now. “But that’s more than you can say. Because where were you when Khretef died? Off somewhere safe. Let him handle the danger, huh? Not your business, Princess? That’s not how love works!”

Aurilelde laughed scornfully as she arrowed toward Nita again. “As if you know anything about love! Your idea of physical intimacy is punching Kit in the arm.”

Nita flushed hot. “Well, looks like I know more than you do, because I don’t have to keep my boyfriend in a cage! That’s what you’re trying to build for Khretef. You’ll stamp out all your enemies, meaning his people, mostly, and then rule Mars or Earth or whatever with him at your side. Chained there! Because the life you’re awake in now scares you too much to ever let him go. He’s the only thing that makes you feel safe. It’s not love holding you to him now: it’s fear! And Khretef knows that! But he means to stay with you anyway, because he’s sorry for what the fear’s turned you into—”

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.

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?”

Nita smiled a grim half-smile. “No problem.” They headed over toward Mamvish.

Irina was making her way toward the Throne, where Iskard still stood, and to which Rorsik had just slowly returned. The baby, apparently asleep, took no notice of any of this. The yellow parakeet, however, glared at the two Shamaska, rustled its wings, and made an angry scolding sound as its mistress stopped and folded her arms.

“My name is Irina Mladen,” she said. “I am the Planetary Wizard for Earth. I speak for our world, but also for the system’s other Planetaries, who vest their joint authority in me at this time as presently the system’s most senior among equals. In the Powers’ names and the name of the One they serve, I greet you with reservation, and with regret at the sanction I have come to impose.”

Her voice was chilly, and Nita shivered all over at the sound of it. “What sanction?” Rorsik said. “What are you talking about?”

Iskard had gone pale even for someone of the Shamaska’s stony complexion. Now he put out a hand to try to stop Rorsik from saying anything further. But Irina merely gave Rorsik a look, then turned her attention back to Iskard.

“Regardless of being a wizard for much of your lifetime and fully cognizant of the responsibilities the Art requires of its practitioners,” Irina said, “you have allowed your people in general, and other wizards and talents under your management in particular, to enter into courses of action that have recklessly endangered the conduct of life on an entire neighboring world.”

She turned that cool regard on Khretef, who along with the faint and miserable Aurilelde he was half carrying had now come up alongside the Throne. “In your case, you must be clear that we do understand the terrible urgency of hwanthaet that you’ve been experiencing. The condition can cause irrational responses in even the most stable species when it becomes acute, and we are therefore willing to consider it to a limited extent as an extenuating circumstance for you personally—”

“What’s hwanthaet?” Kit muttered under his breath.

Nita shook her head.

“But this consideration does not exonerate you for your own errors of judgment and lapses in wizardly conduct,” Irina said. “And we have yet to determine whether further sanctions need to be taken against you personally and, if so, what form they should take.” She turned away from Khretef and Aurilelde, glancing just briefly at Kit and Nita as she did so.

“Meanwhile,” she said to Iskard and Rorsik, “as rulers of this city, immediate responsibility for the actions of its inhabitants falls on you. You—” and she indicated Iskard— “were the deviser of the superegg-based conditional stasis and revival routines, called by you the Nascence, which induced matter/spirit hibernation for you and the City of your kindred the Eilitt, and then brought them out of stasis again. Your actions since then have all flowed from a desire to destroy that other City.”

“They have been trying to do the same to us!” Rorsik cried. “They have been trying to destroy us since the First World was young!”

“And you haven’t been making any serious attempts to stop that trend,” Mamvish said. “Rather, you’ve been intent on keeping it going. You have repeatedly failed to question your own motives and assumptions as the Art requires.”

“By irresponsible use of both wizardry and science,” Irina said to Iskard, “you’ve seriously damaged the normal developmental progress of this planet. If major intervention had not taken place, you would have caused significant psychological damage to the inhabitants of the third planet as well. And though you’ve been the aggressors here, it’s not realistic to assume, bearing in mind the past actions of your enemies, that they wouldn’t eventually try to do something very similar if the opportunity arose.” Irina let out an aggrieved breath. “Therefore sanction will be imposed forthwith upon both your cities generally, and upon the major actors personally.”

A terrible silence fell in the room.

“You have two options,” Mamvish said. “You can elect to be rafted to another solar system and resettled on a new world. There the Art will be withdrawn from you, and you will be left to your own devices until the One sees fit to release wizardry into your world once more.”

“Why should we go to any other solar system? This one is ours!” Rorsik shouted. “We were the First People, the originals. We are the true Masters of this system, whatever power you may claim! All of this only comes now because you weaklings desire the use of this world for yourselves, for your—”

And Rorsik suddenly fell silent. His face got quite dark gray, his mouth worked, but not another sound came out of him.