A Wizard of Mars, New Millennium Edition (13 page)

“Me? How? I can’t do anything about—”

“Oh yes you can. To begin with, you can find her and get her back here. And then you can find a way to make sure she behaves.” Nita’s father frowned. “I don’t want to play the bad guy here, but I can’t spend every day of the summer wondering where she is and what trouble she’s getting into! I have a right to some time off, too—an afternoon or an evening when I don’t have to be worrying about her. This kind of behavior isn’t fair to 
me!
”

He looked at Nita. She let out a breath. “No,” she said, “guess it’s not.”

“Thank you. So I want to know from you every day where Dairine is, until I can start depending on 
her
 to let me know. And you go nowhere on any given day until you’ve satisfied me as to where she’s going to be and whether she’s okay.”

Nita heaved a heavy, exasperated sigh and stood up. “You want her back here right now?”

“Yes.”

“And then I can get back to what I was doing?”

“Yes.”

“Then I have to do something first,” Nita said.

“Do it. Then bring her home for dinner.”

Nita went slowly up the stairs, wearing a frown that she suspected looked much like her dad’s. 
I hate this. And it’s not fair to
 me. 
But there’s no way out. And he’s kind of right—

At the top of the stairs, she paused, looking out the window that overlooked the next-door neighbor’s front yard. 
So treat it like a challenge from the Powers… because maybe it is. Figure out what to do, and maybe the rest of the summer won’t turn into a horror story.
 Nita let out a breath. 
Think of Dairine as just another intervention, one more problem to be solved.

Then Nita swallowed—because whether she liked it or not, there was one step she had to take before she could start solving this particular problem.

In her bedroom she sat down on the bed and pulled her manual out of her otherspace pocket. For a long moment Nita sat hunched over, holding the closed book in her hands, looking at the scuffed blue buckram cover, then flipped the book open and paged through to the directory that listed wizards and their status.

She didn’t have a bookmark for the page she wanted, but then she’d never had cause to look up information about the world of the wizard in question: he’d just turned up in her basement while she was off on exchange. “I need the pages for the star system containing the planet Wellakh...”

The book in her hands riffled its own pages hastily from right to left, kicking up a little cool breeze. Nita smiled. “Can I get you to do this all the time when it’s hot out?”

The pages instantly laid themselves out extremely flat, open and still. “Okay, don’t get all annoyed,” Nita said under her breath, amused, and glanced at the open pages.

Wellakh’s golden-yellow star displayed in the first of a set of images on the left-hand page. The right-hand page filled with data about the system and its one inhabited planet: a précis of local system history, details about the species inhabiting the one inhabited world, and other general information. Nita read quickly through it, shaking her head; the planet’s history had been difficult. 
Not that anyone couldn’t tell that from clear out in space,
 she thought, looking at the image of the planet. Half of Wellakh was dappled with blue seas and lakes, much of its terrain red-golden with the planet’s idiosyncratic vegetation. There were even snowy mountains here and there. But the other half of that world was flat and scorched-looking, a slagged-down desolation. 
What would it have been like growing up there—knowing that anytime, your sun might get cranky and pull the same stunt again?

Nita touched the listing again. “Show me all wizards native to the planet for the last hundred Wellakhit years.”

The picture of the planet dissolved, replaced by a couple of columns’ worth of listing. Nita glanced down it, turned the page to see two more columns there. But that was all. 
Just a few hundred wizards. Not a lot for a world with a population of over a billion: mostly a pretty peaceful place. But the troubles they’ve got are big ones. And for the worst ones, they need a very special kind of wizard...

Nita started running down the list. 
Ke Nelaid, ROSHAUN... ‘See det Nuiiliat’? Oh, I get it, that’s the clan name the whole family’s listed under.

Under 
det Nuiiliat,
 a long list of wizards in that wizards in that family went right down the page. In fact, half the wizards on the planet were either in this family or related to it. Nita swallowed as she came to “Nelaid”... then realized this wasn’t the wizard she was looking for, but his father. 
Ke Seriv, NELAID. Residence—
 The address initially displayed in the Wellakhit language, then re-rendered itself in the Speech. 
Sunplace, the Borders, the Scorched Zone, Old Continent. Position: Sunlord-in-Abeyance. Power rating: 28.8 +/-.5.
 Nita’s eyebrows went up: that was a very high rating, certainly higher than Tom’s or Carl’s. 
Physical status: Corporate. Mission status: Presently unassigned; political considerations.

But this wasn’t the name Nita was looking for. 
I missed it: on Wellakh they change their names depending on who their father was.
She glanced farther up the column, and a little shiver of pain went through her as she found the name she’d resisted looking up for so long.

Ke Nelaid, ROSHAUN. Former residence: Sunplace, the Borders, the Scorched Zone, Old Continent. Position: Son of the Sunlord, son of the Great King, descendant of the Inheritors of the Great Land, the Throne-Destined.
Nita grimaced at the string of weighty titles that Dairine had immediately and somewhat scornfully reduced to “prince.” Then Nita looked down at what she had been avoiding, the single line underneath the description.

Physical status:

And she stared at the blank space after the words. There was nothing else there.

But that doesn’t make any sense—!

Nita scanned up the column again to other older names. The majority of their physical status listings showed the single long, curved-back streak of Speech charactery that meant one thing: 
Recall.
 Nita had seen it often enough in the listings of wizards from Earth, both those whose lives had been lost in the line of duty and those who had died in other circumstances. The implication seemed to be that once you were a wizard, maybe you never stopped being one unless you really wanted to— and even after you were dead, or what passed for dead in the Real World, the Powers That Be nonetheless considered you to still be on some kind of duty. It was, in a strange way, reassuring.

But this
... this 
is just strange.

The listing did have some unusual descriptions of physical status. One, attributed to one of Roshaun’s great-great-grandmothers, was 
Indeterminate
. A couple of others said 
Exhaled.
 Nita blinked. 
Whatever
 that 
means!
 But the complete lack of a physical status for Roshaun left Nita bemused. She reached out to the listing and touched a different name, feeling the small sizzle of power that spoke of active wizardry indwelling in a self. All the names had it, dead or alive. But when she touched Roshaun’s name—

No sizzle: a feeling as if the manual page was nothing but ordinary paper. 
It’s as if not even the Powers That Be are sure what’s happened to him. How can
 that 
be? I don’t get it.

And if even
 They 
don’t get it—

Nita let the manual’s pages fall forward on the finger that held her place. 
Whatever it means, it also means that Roshaun’s not dead! Or not dead yet. Or
 something. 
And whatever else I might think about what Dairine’s up to, at least she’s not nuts, or in denial. She’s looking for somebody she’s got at least a chance of finding. Maybe the smallest chance imaginable... but still a chance.

Nita spent the next few moments just getting hold of herself ...for she’d been shaking, afraid of what she was about to find. 
Which just goes to show that I should’ve done this a long time ago. Maybe I could have saved myself this grief with Dairine!
 The shock of relief was almost as hard to bear as the shock she’d braced herself for, that final awful certainty from which there would have been no retreat.

Finally she flipped the manual open again, riffling through to the section holding the directory for Earth. Nita had a quick-reference “bookmark” page installed at the front, showing names of wizards she knew well or had worked with either frequently or occasionally. The name she was looking for was almost at the top. 
Callahan, DAIRINE R. Present location: Sunplace, Old Continent, Wellakh.
 Nita raised her eyebrows. 
Okay, but doing what?
 she thought.
Arrival time: JD 2454274.10012. Power rating, 5.45 +/- .55
... Nita eyed her sister’s power level: it was lower than she’d ever seen it. 
Then again, what’s
this
supposed to be?
 She looked curiously at the listing beside it, one she couldn’t remember having seen before. It said, 
Under augmentation: augment level 3.2 +/- 2.2.
 She frowned. 
That’s a new one. What’s she up to?

She put her finger on the listing. “Coordinates, please?”

They displayed on the page. At the same time, a voice said in the back of her head, 
You know, if you’d just ask me, I’d do the gating and take you there.

“Bobo,” Nita said, “I appreciate the offer. I just want to make sure I don’t lose the hang of doing it the hard way.”

You’re just a glutton for punishment,
 the peridexis said.

“You and I are going to have to sit down—as much as you can sit, anyway—and have a long talk about—”

How we can be talking at all?
 Bobo said. At least he didn’t sound injured. 
I guess I wonder myself. But go on, do your spell the hard way.

Nita jiggled the charm bracelet on her wrist until the gating charm came up. Out of it she pulled a long, blue-glowing thread of spell, a single word-character in the Speech. This she drew down until it touched Dairine’s entry in the manual, hooking to its location parameters. Then Nita let go of the strand of light. When it snapped back into the charm, it pulled with it a whole new chain of characters, swallowed them up, and blazed, ready to go.

Nita stood up and shoved the manual into the waiting otherspace pocket. Then she pulled on the charm again, and that long line of glowing blue light slid out: she dropped it on the floor, where it went a fierce molten gold and stretched into a circle of Speech-words, ready to knot itself up in the Wizard’s Knot. Nita looked down at the glowing words and slowly began to speak them, turning as she spoke.

The room went silent. Darkness pressed in. As she completed the spell and pronounced the syllables of the Wizard’s Knot, everything went dark.

Moments later she found herself standing on a terrace of some smooth, glittering dark-golden stone. Behind her, in a sheer stone wall, was a series of tall, glassy doors, like the entry to a school or the front of a theater, leading into some dim, hard-to-see interior.

Maybe fifty yards in front of Nita, the terrace ended in a meter-high railing that followed the terrace’s curve hundreds of feet along to either side and out of sight. Out past the rail she got a glimpse of wide gardens far below, fading off into a barer landscape. Glancing from side to side, Nita saw that the terrace itself was cantilevered well out from the surface of the huge, relatively smooth needle of stone behind her, in the base of which the doors were set.

Nita tilted her head back, trying to see the top of the peak above. 
A few hundred feet, maybe—
 It was hard to tell. The blue-green sky was full of clouds: as she watched, one drifted straight into and around the top of that needle of stone, obscuring it. More terraces were visible above, staggered around the surface of the uprising spear of stone, up to the cloud and past it.

Nita glanced around, wondering where to go from here. Her transport wizardry had built into it a typical so-called “decent interval” offset; you’d be deposited somewhere within, say, a hundred meters of the person you were seeking, but the wizardry wouldn’t drop you right into that person’s lap. 
So let’s see
...Down the right side of the curve, nothing was visible but featureless, shining stone. To the left, though, maybe fifty yards down, Nita spotted a single small door, all by itself. 
But wait. Not a door. That’s a gate. It’s got bars—

Nita reached sideways and retrieved her manual from the otherspace pocket— for when a wizard was visiting a world where wizardry was practiced in the open, his manual was his passport— and walked toward that gate.

Above her, that cloud moved away. On the stony spire’s far side, the sun came out, throwing a long path of shadow down the wall, over the gate and Nita, and out to the terrace’s edge. But as she got close to the gate, she saw a light as intense pouring out of it, streaming in a narrow bar-striped ribbon out across the terrace.