A Wizard of Mars, New Millennium Edition (54 page)

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.

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—