A Wizard of Mars, New Millennium Edition (58 page)

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.

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—