Wizards at War, New Millennium Edition (26 page)

—and then she gasped and backed up fast, as the creature came right at her through the fading light of the wizardry. Its armor was shattered and cracked, but it was still making that awful, bone-rattling hum that now escalated into a roar. Those huge claws reached out for her. One of them struck at her shield-spell, and this time the claw didn’t skid aside. It burst right through.

Nita backed up and blasted the creature again. From behind her, Kit, also visible again, came up and did the same. His blasting spell was built differently from Nita’s, and this one knocked the thing back against the nearest tree … but only for a second. The creature recovered its footing and came at them again, the huge claws reaching out.

Down!
someone said from behind them, and the word was as much wizardry as order: Nita’s and Kit’s muscles took control of them and flung them down hard on the soft, oozing ground. Nita just managed to turn her head as she went down, and so was able to see the furious fire of the Spear of Light streak over her and Kit and into the huge chitin-mailed form. The ferocity of the light left her briefly blind; she could only hear, and what she heard was a roar like the wind shouting in rage, followed by a silent wave of white-hot force that made Nita throw her arms up around her head to shield it. Then, nothing but silence.

Nita looked up, blinking and still half blinded, and pushed herself up to her knees. She and Kit were both covered with a dusty, scorched-smelling powder that was still sifting down through the air from where the attacking creature had been. Behind her, Ronan put out his hand, and the Spear flew back to his grip.

Filif and Sker’ret and Ponch came up behind him as Kit and Nita helped each other up. “I think we need to get out of here right away now,” Ronan said, “and go somewhere quiet for a think.”

“Boy, are
you
ever on,” Kit said.

Nita brushed herself off, looking at the vanishing tail end of the column of creatures, and listening to the faint sound of the sobbing trees behind them. “Bugs,” Nita said softly, and the hair stood up on the back of her neck. “Giant bugs…”

Hurriedly, the six of them vanished.

“The world’s called Rashah,” Kit said.

They sat on a transparent sheet of hardened space a couple of thousand miles above the planet’s surface, gazing down. The world turned sluggishly under them, its seemingly endless expanses of green and blue-green and brown stretching far to either side of a narrow, profoundly deep sea. Hovering a few feet above the wizardly surface where they sat, and surrounded by five intent wizards and a dog, Sker’ret’s implementation of the manual—a spherical holographic display like a particularly high-tech crystal ball—was showing them a slowly turning, annotated version of the planet.

Filif leaned past Kit, all his eye-berries on one side trained on the image as it rotated. Kit glanced over at him, concerned, for though Filif now looked fairly steady, he had been trembling all over when they first made it up into space. “You feeling better?” Kit said.

Filif rustled impatiently. “The initial shock’s passed,” he said. “Those plants aren’t sentient the way my people are. But they’re still in great pain.” His thought turned dark with anger. “The Kindler of Wildfires has plainly made this place Its own.”

There seemed no way to argue with that, for over the image of Rashah in Kit’s manual, and across it in Sker’ret’s view of his own, a string of boldface characters burned in the Speech. They said, “
ARESH-HAV,
” an acronym for a much longer phrase, and one rarely seen because few worlds were so completely dominated by the Lone Power to qualify for its use. “Aresh-hav” implied “lost”—a place almost as much lost to hope as to the powers of darkness, and presumed to be beyond redemption until the Powers That Be should intervene directly. The term also implied that the intervention might possibly be fatal for the world’s inhabitants, if the Lone One could not be otherwise dislodged.

Kit turned in his manual to the page that held the breakdown of the planet’s physical characteristics. Rashah was the fourth world out from its sun, at about the same distance Jupiter would have been in Earth’s solar system. The other three planets were much too close to Rashah’s ferocious blue-white O-type star for even Life’s endless inventiveness to do much with. Those worlds weren’t much more than little scorched Moon-sized rocks, their sunsides repeatedly slagged down by flare activity. Rashah at least had been distant enough from its star Sek to keep its atmosphere through the flares. Afterward, the plant life that had come to cover the world had slowly exhaled enough gases to breed a greenhouse effect, which allowed other life to evolve there—though not much of it. Millions of years had produced a planet where the vast march of the ruthlessly struggling rain forest was broken only by tar pits thousands of miles wide, slicked over with lakes of oozing oil—the last remnant of far more ancient forests killed by solar flares and transformed by heat and dead weight over thousands of millennia. Rashah’s turbulent weather was as unforgiving as its sun: summers hot enough to melt Earth’s polar caps alternated with winters that were simply one long, supremely violent hurricane.

Most of the living species on that planet were plants. There were a very few flying and creeping species with no intelligence to speak of, and of these, only the ravenous “topflyers” were tough enough to survive Sek’s awful burning light for long. These infested the uppermost levels of the rain forest that covered the two great continents of the world, eating one another and anything else foolish enough to venture up or out into the terrible fire of day.

“It looks like everything else living here except those topflyers stays undercover if it wants to keep on living,” Nita said, looking up from her own manual. “Even the one intelligent species…”

She turned a couple of pages, and Sker’ret’s display shifted to match hers, showing them a closely annotated image of one of the giant bugs. “They call themselves the Yaldiv,” Nita said, “though they’re such a hive species, I’m not sure that the concept of them ‘calling themselves’ anything is right. According to this, they’ve got kind of a common undermind or subconscious, so they may just think of themselves as one body with a lot of moving parts.” She shook her head. “Not a ‘them’: an ‘it.’”

Kit, glancing over at Nita’s manual, pointed at large blue-glowing patches that appeared here and there on the pages. “What the heck are those?”

Nita shook her head again. “Some of the species background information is blocked,” she said. She laid her finger on one patch, which came alive with the words in the Speech, “Data in abeyance.” Another lined-out passage, when she touched it, said, “Data withheld.”

“Withheld by whom?” Sker’ret said. “Or what?”

Nita looked over at Ronan.
Such redacted notations,
the Defender said through him,
mean that some other Power is interfering with the exchange of information.

“And you can just guess which one,” Kit said softly. “Darryl did say—”

Kit saw Nita swallow. “That we shouldn’t hang around any longer than we have to,” she said. “So let’s get down there and find out what the Instrumentality is, and what we have to do to get it and make it work for us.”

Filif rustled all his branches and looked rather challengingly at Ronan. “I don’t suppose you could be a little more forthcoming now about any details you’ve received from your sources.”

I don’t have anything new to share with you,
the One’s Champion said through Ronan.
The other Powers
seem to think we’ve been given enough information to find the Instrumentality without any further input.

“I hate that,” Kit said, though he wasn’t annoyed enough to put too much force on the statement. “You know? I really hate it when They trust us so completely.”

Ronan looked nonplussed.
You’re all we have to work with,
said the One’s Champion.
And you’ve always produced the result before.
Suddenly Ronan grinned; it was a sour look. “See, this is your reward for not letting the Lone One defeat you a long time ago.”

“You wouldn’t think it was so funny if you knew what Its idea of defeat usually looks like,” Kit said. “And I still wish the Powers thought we were a little more clueless. We might get things done faster.”

But not as effectively,
the Champion said.

“Yeah, well,” Nita said, sounding uncomfortable. She turned her attention back to her manual, and when her gaze was turned away, Kit sneaked a concerned look at her. Nita had been as unnerved as Filif when they’d first gotten up here, and to Kit’s eye, she still looked pale. “Probably we should start with the cities,” Nita said. “There are two city-hives on the bigger of the two continents, kind of like giant anthills. They’re a few hundred miles apart. They’ve been fighting each other, on and off, for—” Nita looked at the numbers on the timeline indicator that shone on the page, and squinted in disbelief.
“Millions
of years?”

“They must really be enjoying it,” Sker’ret said dryly, “to keep the war going so long.”

“I don’t know if
enjoy
would be the right word,” Nita said, turning another page. “Each side sees the other as a terrible threat.” She glanced at Sker’ret. “Just think about it. If each of the Yaldiv cities always saw itself as the only being in the world—and then all of a sudden another one turned up, one that thought of
itself
as the only being in the world—”

“Then both sides have a great reason to panic,” Ronan said. “And an excuse to wipe the other side out.”

“It looks like somebody might already have had a run at that,” Kit said, turning a page in his own manual. “Have you looked at the background radiation numbers for this place?”

Nita looked surprised. “I thought maybe those were so high because we’re so close to the star.”

Kit shook his head, looking increasingly grim. “Oh, yeah, the atmosphere’s real ionized, but that’s not going to account for the plutonium residue all over the place.” He pointed at the manual page. “Look here. And over there—”

Filif shook all over, a horrified shudder. “Someone here was using
atomics?
” he said. “The Kindler must have driven them completely insane.”

“It’s a popular kind of crazy,” Kit said. “Unfortunately.”

“You’ll be telling me next that they burn their hydrocarbons!”

“Uh, no,” Kit said. “But it looks like there was a more developed civilization here once. A
real
long time ago. There’s nothing left now. It’s been completely degraded.”

“Were the creatures here part of that civilization?” Sker’ret said to Nita. “Or are they a successor species?”

Nita shook her head. “No way to tell. Almost all the rest of the history section is blocked out. ‘Data withheld.’”

“And here’s something else that’s kind of nasty,” Ronan said, glancing back at the group. He had been looking off into the distance, the way Irish wizards did when consulting their memory-based version of the manual. “All these creatures’ve got a significant, aware fraction of the Lone Power as part of their souls.”

Nita turned a horrified look on him. “Are you saying that the
whole Yaldiv species
is overshadowed?”

It’s rather worse than that,
the One’s Champion said.
And rather more permanent. They’re all avatars.

Everyone stared at Ronan. “
All
of them are mortal versions of the Lone One?” Sker’ret said. “How’s that possible? Such a multiple embodiment would require immense power.”

Which It has,
said the Champion.
But, yes, even for one of us, this kind of power outlay would be significant. My guess is that this culture has either been owned for so long that this kind of avataric presence has simply seeped into the species’ nature over millennia. Or else the manifestation is something new, a test bed for something the Lone Power is planning.

“Probably a good reason for the world’s history to be blocked,” Filif said, “at least from the Lone One’s point of view. It would be a fair guess that we’d have a better idea where to start looking for the Instrumentality if we knew more about when this process started, and what this world has been through.”

Ronan ran his hands through his hair and looked harried. “All right,” he said. “Where do we go from here? We’ve got to figure out what the Instrumentality is, and where it is … and what to do about it. While walking around in the middle of a war zone full of giant bugs who can see us even when we’re invisible.”

“And just how did that happen?” Nita said to Ronan. “And how was that thing able to get through my shield-spell?”

“The Lone One can break a working wizardry when it’s directly present,” Ronan said. “It was party to wizardry’s creation, so It can easily interfere, if It’s got a local foothold in a willing soul. That’s what avatars are all about. They can be worked through a lot more effectively than the merely overshadowed.”

“But did that avatar recognize us as wizards?” Kit said.

Possibly not,
said the Champion.
Avatars don’t have to be conscious of their status.

“With such creatures about, it’s a shame there’s nowhere quieter to do our reconnaissance,” Filif said. “Say, the other continent.”

Ponch had been lying stretched out, looking down with a brooding expression at Rashah as the planet rotated in seeming serenity beneath them.
But what we’re looking for is down where I brought you out,
he said.
Why go elsewhere? We’d just be wasting our time.

“That being something we don’t have a lot of,” Nita said. “So let’s get busy.” She glanced over at Ronan. “I do want to call my dad in a little bit, though, to make sure what day it is back home. Is it going to be safe?”

I can cover you,
the Defender said.
But putting forth
power as a cloak is itself a detectable usage, if anyone’s looking for such. So keep it short.

Nita nodded. “But as for the Instrumentality,” she said, “what do we do when we find it? Just take it? What if it’s something that belongs to the Yaldiv? What if they don’t want to let us have it? Or they won’t tell us how it works?”