A Wizard of Mars, New Millennium Edition (38 page)

“The wizards are here 
now!
” Aurilelde said, and every eye in that great room turned to her. “They’ve found the Nascence in the dunes; they released its power; they triggered the tests, even the one that called for the manipulation of time. One has even invoked the Kinship upon himself! Soon we’ll be able to go among them and show them what we need. Then they’ll help us as I foretold, and there’ll be peace at last—”

Rorsik laughed again. “We all know why you want peace, Master’s Daughter! You and your traitor lover. You will sell us all to the Eilitt and destroy your own people. You are nothing but a tool of the ancient Power that sent the Darkness and the Doom upon us to begin with—”

A growl of anger started to go up from around the room. In the back of Kit’s mind, something said, quite clearly, 
Uh-oh— here we go! I was wondering when
 that 
name would come up.

He shivered at the sudden clarity of that voice, and Aurilelde, almost as if she’d heard something, too, glanced at him, worried. Undeterred by the anger of the crowd, Rorsik was shouting, “We can do nothing to make ourselves safe until the Dark Ones are destroyed— until their cities are dust, and the New World is cleansed of them! Only then can we spread safely through this world, make it our own, and resume our place in the light of the Sun as the First Ones, untroubled, in mastery over our world and our system again! And until the Nascence is ours, and the Dark Ones’ cities are revived and wiped out, none of us can be safe—”

Our 
worlds and
 our 
system?
 There was something about the phrasing that got the uneasy attention of the stranger-soul at the back of Kit’s mind. And something else was happening as well. The hair was standing up on the back of his neck. At his feet, Takaf was hissing, glancing about him with all his eyes, uncertain.

Above them, the sunlight was wavering, looking suddenly strangely faint. Almost everybody standing in that great assemblage under the Tower’s peak stared upward, even Iskard and Rorsik.

But Aurilelde did not. She turned to Kit. “It’s breaking,” she whispered. “It’s breaking too soon. There’s someone else here!”

Kit blinked— and suddenly he was Kit again, not Khretef with Kit watching from the background. It was strange, though, that now he could look at Aurilelde and see her as Khretef did. “It’s all right,” he said. “If it’s breaking, I can guess why. My friends have followed me. The other wizards. No, don’t be afraid! They’re really smart. They can help you! It’s what we came for, to help you—”

But Aurilelde was shaking her head, and her expression was frightened. “One of them is here already,” she said, gazing up into the sky, then looking nervously around her as if she was expecting something sudden to happen. “You can’t stay!”

“It’s okay,” Kit said, “they’re nice guys; you should meet them! One of them in particular is kind of special. Actually, they both are, but I should warn you about this one—”

“I know,” Aurilelde said, looking more alarmed by the moment. Her expression began to darken. “That one cannot come here. It would be dangerous— the City’s protection will break prematurely. You have to go!”

“Huh?”

“Khretef, listen to me. I don’t want you to go but you must!” She was staring around her now in real fright, and Kit started to get frightened himself, besides wanting to calm her down. “If the spell breaks before the right safeguards are in place and there’s enough power present to back them up, everything will be ruined. I won’t be able to stay.
You
 won’t be able to stay! Please, Khr— Kit; I’m sorry, Kit; you have to go before anyone else comes. Please 
go!
”

“All right,” Kit said. “But you have to try to let us help you, and if we can’t come here, how’re we supposed to—”

“I can’t tell you now. Later, later I’ll tell you, but this is a bad time, the wrong time!” Aurilelde was looking pale and scared. “It’s like it was before—when all the times were bad times, when it went cold and the Darkness was coming. We can’t let it come again—not after so long, not after all the time we waited!” She looked like she was about to burst into tears. “Please, Khretef; please go before the spell breaks!”

And now she was actually pushing Kit away, pushing him back toward the pad that had brought them up into the great throne room.

“Okay,” Kit said, backing away, “sure, no problem—” He glanced down and noticed that his clothes had shifted back to jeans and shirt and down vest: the sword that had been hanging at his side was a wand stuck in his belt again. And then as he looked at Aurilelde, he saw that her shape was wavering, too, and the long dark hair vanished and came back again, the beautiful face flickered and went smooth and gray, then came back; the eyes went pale, went dark—

Around him, the sunlight went weak; the Tower itself started to waver, to shimmer—

—was gone. Kit fell.

Just for a second he had a glimpse of the bare red ground, far far beneath. 
Skywalk!
 was his first thought, and he felt around in his head with desperate haste for the spell that would make the air go solid under him—

WHAM!

Kit came down on his face much too soon, as if he’d only fallen a few feet. All the same, the impact jarred the breath right out of him. He lay there gasping.

“Whoa,” he heard Darryl say. “Kit, you okay?”

Kit groaned and rolled over.

“If he can make 
that
 noise,” said a voice he wasn’t expecting, “he’s fine.”

He opened his eyes. There was a girl looking down at him: dark-haired, but the hair was strangely short. It was odd how much she reminded him of Aurilelde—

He blinked. Nita was looking down at him. Of course it was Nita.

“Where’ve you been?” she said, reaching down to help him up.

Kit staggered as he got to his feet. “Uh,” he said, “in the middle of a 
really
 strange experience.”

“Stranger than what we’ve 
been
 having?” Ronan said as Kit looked around him. They were near the edge of Hutton crater, and Kit looked southeastward from the crater’s edge to glimpse the edge of the next one over. Then Kit grinned a small crooked grin, for that crater’s name was Burroughs.

“You have no idea,” Kit said. “Come on and I’ll tell you—”

“You’ll tell us later,” Nita said. “You have to go home.”

“What? Why?”

“Helena’s back.”

For a second the name meant absolutely nothing to him... but only for a second. “Oh, no,” Kit said. “Better get it over with...”

“Like you have a choice,” Nita said. “Darryl, can you do the honors? We can all meet up tonight or something and go over the details of what just happened here.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Kit thought. But privately it occurred to him, as Darryl laid a hand on his shoulder, that the details might take considerably longer to sort out.

And as he and Ronan and Darryl all vanished, it seemed to Kit that there was somebody else inside his head who was agreeing with him.

Nita stood there looking out across the crater called Hutton. It was late in the sol, and the light here would start failing in a while. But a glow of residual wizardry lay over the whole crater, sheening the surface with a thin skin of greenish light, as if with water.  

In the midst of it all, Nita could still glimpse something that wasn’t really there anymore. A memory of gleaming towers and spires towered up into the Martian afternoon, the red tower at the heart of it all glancing back light at the setting Sun like a beacon.  

She shook her head. Nita didn’t know the planet’s satellite schedule the way Kit did, but she knew that every inch of its surface got covered sooner or later. “Bobo,” she said under her breath, “we’d better stick a shield-spell over this until it fades out. It’s going to have to cover a whole lot of real estate...”  

For how long?
 Bobo said.  

Nita shook her head. There was no telling how long this effect might linger: the wizardry that had initially fueled it had surprising staying power. “Maybe a couple of hours?” she said, but it was a guess at best. “Can you get any sense of how much oomph is left in the original spell?”  

A fair amount,
 the peridexis said. 
You could parasitize it, if you wanted to
 
.
  

“You mean tell the illusion to hide itself?” 

Yes. That will save you having to make the energy outlay for the shield yourself. And it’ll run the spell down faster.
  

“I’m all for that,” Nita said. “Let’s do it.”  

A moment later the heat-shimmer of the simplest kind of visual shield came alive in the air above the city and spread itself downward toward her in an expanding dome. Seconds later, nothing was visible but a duplication of the rock-tumble and cratery landscape directly beyond the city’s limits. “Okay,” Nita said under her breath, “that should keep the neighbors from getting too crazy...” For there were already enough people on Earth who got all overexcited about rock formations that they insisted as seeing as faces and pyramids and whatnot—people who also insisted these “carvings” were proof that the doings of alien civilizations were being covered up by one government or another. 
Sometimes I wish wizards could just come out and tell them how hard it’s been to
find out
anything on the subject, even when you’re right down here walking around on the planet!
  

But that wasn’t likely to happen for a long time. Nita glanced around, seeing nothing outside the shield but the usual scatter of reddish stones and sand. “Everything behaving itself at the other spell sites?” she said.  

Yes; those wizardries have run their course. Just as well— they were potentially quite dangerous, especially the second one.
  

Nita blinked as the peridexis showed her a few glimpses of the previous visitations. “Yeah,” she said, and shivered: she’d never been wild about the whole war-machine concept.  

But certainly elegant in that the wizardries were built with the expectation that each triggering wizard would set the parameters of his own test... and then be required to understand the trigger in order to defuse the attack.
  

Nita stood looking southward for a moment. “Sounds almost like you approve, Bobo.”  

I can hardly fail to appreciate good workmanship in a spell, that’s all
, Bobo said, sounding a little hurt.  

She snickered a little as she turned, looking southeastward toward Burroughs crater. “Well,” Nita said, “maybe it’s just as well I wasn’t on site when one of those other spells was live. No telling what might have turned up.”  

She turned back toward were the city was hidden and abruptly realized that something was standing between her and the slight waver of the force field. It was a small red-suited alien creature wearing what looked like oversize white sneakers, white gloves, a green metal tutu, and a shiny green helmet that appeared to have a scrub brush attached to the top of it. Out of a dark and otherwise featureless face, large oval eyes regarded Nita with mild alarm.  

“What happened to the kaboom?” the creature said. “There was supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom!” And he scuttled through the force field and vanished.  

Nita just stood there for a second. “Bobo ...?!”  

Just a flicker of residual spell artifact
, Bobo said, unconcerned. 
Nothing to worry about.
  

Oh yeah? Not sure I want to know what this says about
 my 
relationship with Mars.
“Do me a favor?” Nita said as she headed for the force field herself.  

Speak, demand: I’ll answer.
  

“If there’s a spell against the use of an Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator, get it ready. Just in case...”  

Nita stepped through the shield, looking cautiously around her. To her relief, there was no further sign of her own brief Martian moment. But the city was there: a handsome place, futuristic-looking in a charming and retro way— doubtless accurately reflecting Kit’s take on the Burroughs Martian books. Nita had read them years previously, but for some reason their vision hadn’t really appealed to her. She’d had too much trouble syncing the writer’s ideas about the Martian climate and terrain with what people now knew to be true about the place. And the concept of egg-laying humanoids and green-skinned, multi-armed tusky guys riding ten-legged lizard creatures all over the landscape and shooting at each other with radium guns simply struck her as funny.  

He likes it, though,
 Nita thought. 
Just what makes it so interesting for him?
 The whole place lay still and quiet now, the wizardry running down. 
But... I wonder. I should still be able to see what he saw, if I work at it. It’s just the recent past, after all, and the imagery was wizardry-based to begin with. I might be able to use the visionary talent a little to patch into it.

It would be like the viewing she’d been doing in the library cavern a while ago, though she would have to power it herself. Nita closed her eyes. 
Let’s see—