Nita stood there for some moments, running various scenarios in her head. Finally she stopped. “Bobo,” she said, “it’s not good for a planet not to have a kernel. They get run down, like a house that’s not maintained when it’s empty. And the matter gets lonely.”
It would, yes.
Nita shoved her manual into her otherspace pocket. “Somebody needs to look into this again,” she said. “But first things first. Where’s Kit?”
There was a long pause.
Indeterminate... said Bobo.
***
Kit stood there on the shoulder of Olympus Mons and looked out into the falling night. “So listen,” he said, glancing around him and wishing there was something to fix his attention on: this talking to the empty air was extremely hard to get used to. “Before I start running around just doing errands for you, I need some questions answered.”
That makes sense, his voice said to him.
“What exactly is it we need to do next?” Kit said. “Where do we need to go?” He paused. “And would you please explain why I should be helping you in the first place?! You’re trying to take over my mind! Or my life. Or something.”
It’s nothing to do with taking anything over, Khretef said. We’re the same. I’m you... just earlier. And Kit could feel his shrug.
He couldn’t do much but shake his head at that. “Assuming that’s true,” Kit said, “there’s something really wrong with you being here now. I mean, I’m no expert, but as far as I understood it, one soul should only be in one place at one time. Sure, there are some exceptions—”
You mean like the wizard who was here with you before? Khretef said. Yes, he’d be a special case. We had wizards like him once: but ours died. And Khretef shook his head sadly and sat down on one of the stones of the cavern.
Kit looked around him in alarm at the discovery that they were suddenly underground and that he wasn’t talking to empty air anymore, but to someone of the same species as Aurilelde— apparently about his own weight, though taller. Khretef had the same smooth, gray, stony skin, though a shade darker than Aurilelde’s, and he was dressed in the harness of metals and silks and leatherlike material that he’d seen on other Shamaska-Eilitt males, with a long, slim sword at his side. Khretef’s smoke-hair was much shorter than Aurilelde’s, just a film of darkness around the top of his head, like a buzzcut made of haze. Aside from the slight difference in the hair, Kit realized that the being he was looking at really did look a lot like him— or the way he’d look if he’d been born into that species.
“Now, how’d you do that?” Kit said. And then he just had to laugh, if uncomfortably, for Khretef was studying Kit with the same look of uneasy recognition. “And how do you keep pulling these fast ones on me? Not very polite to the new wizard on the block.”
“I don’t care for it much, either,” Khretef said, looking up at Kit with an expression that suggested he really meant it. “But maybe not wasting time is a smart thing, because we don’t have a lot to waste right now. Entropy’s running. And for me, the time that’s running is also running out.” He shook his head. “We really should get going, because they’re going to be here soon.”
“They?” Kit said.
“Can’t you hear them?” said Khretef.
Kit held still. Distant, somewhere down deeper in the caves, he could hear the gravelly ratchet of claws on stone. “Don’t tell me,” he said. “It’s more of those scorpion things! What is it with those?”
“They’re just constructs,” Khretef said. “They recall an animal that was once our great companion in the First World, from way back in time. Very few survived the move to this world: they were too bound to the First One. Some of us got an idea that it would be good to build new ones. But they were never quite the same. You saw mine—”
Khretef sounded wistful. Kit looked at him with sudden understanding. “The one in the tower? He was your— your dog?”
“That’s right,” Khretef said. “I had him since I was a child. Or he had me. You could never really tell, my mother used to say. He was always underfoot, or under my couch, or just under.” Khretef sighed. “He made it here, but he didn’t last long. Though it wasn’t the usual wasting away. He—” Khretef frowned— “he had an accident.”
A little chill ran down Kit’s back as he remembered how his mama had told Helena that that was what had happened to Ponch: “an accident.” The chill got worse a second later as Kit started to hear more clearly those claws-on-stone sounds from somewhere farther down in the caves. “We’d better get moving. What exactly is it that we’re looking for?”
“Something Aurilelde’s father said was vital to his ability to make this world livable for us,” Khretef said, getting up. “When we knew we were coming here, we used wizardry and science together to build ourselves new bodies to suit the local environment. But you can only do that so many times. Too many changes, and you’re not the species you were anymore.” He slipped the sword he was carrying out of his belt, glancing around him in the dark. “So if our species was going to survive here, it’d be the world that had to change. Aurilelde’s father was one of the last of our senior wizards who survived the journey, and one of the most powerful: so much so that he became Master of the City after we first came. He used his power to find the Heart of the planet, the Soul Bundle—”
Kit understood that Khretef was using both the Shamaska and Eilitt words for a single word in the Speech: tevet. “Mars’s kernel,” Kit said. “I know about those. My partner works with them.”
Khretef looked at Kit very strangely indeed. “Does he, now?”
“She,” Kit said.
Khretef’s dark eyes widened. “This is beyond strange,” he said softly. “Her, too?”
From down in the darkness came another roar.
“We should go,” Khretef said. “If we stay here they’ll catch us where we won’t have any advantage.”
Kit nodded and pulled out his antenna-wand. Khretef snapped his fingers, and a small constellation of wizard-lights sparked to life in the air and drifted ahead of the two of them as they started picking their way downslope across the rough floor of the cave.
By the glow of the wizard-lights, Khretef glanced sideways as he caught a gleam off the surface of Kit’s wand. “Noon-forged?”
Kit nodded. “Present from a friend.”
“Best kind,” Khretef said, hefting the sword. “So was this.”
They walked downhill together in a silence that was both companionable and uneasy. “Anyway,” Khretef said, “the kernel. Iskard found it, but spies for the City of Eilith discovered where it was being held in the Shamaska City, and their wizards stole it. What they didn’t know was Iskard had suspected something like this could happen, and before the kernel was stolen, he’d managed to fragment out a part of its power core. The kernel couldn’t be used without the missing fragment: so what the spies and wizards stole was useless. Later, after a great battle between the Cities, the kernel was recovered by Iskard. But even as that was happening, the fragment— the Shard, as Iskard called it— was taken and delivered to the Eilitt by a Shamaska turned traitor. Here they hid it, right under the Shamaska City, to taunt Iskard. It was so surrounded with deadfalls and wizardly weapons and barriers that no one could reach it alive.”
“Booby-trapped,” Kit said.
Khretef nodded. “A good word. And as the final mockery, a great wizardry was locked around the Shard itself that would kill any Shamaska who touched it. But they forgot something.” Khretef’s mouth stretched in his people’s version of a grin. “I am not Shamaska.”
Kit blinked. “You’re not?”
“No. I’m Eilitt by birth. My mother was a Co-Chief of the City of Eilith.”
“Then how come you’re working for their side?”
Khretef gave him a wry look. “Aurilelde,” he said. Then he held up his hand for a moment, listening. “Not this way,” he said. “A side access instead. Follow me.”
He turned and headed toward
another opening off to one side of the cavern. “I don’t get it, though,” Kit said. “If all your people needed to have this happen, and Aurilelde’s dad found the planet’s kernel and was about to make it happen, then why did the Eilitt stop him?’
“They were afraid he secretly intended to destroy the City of Eilith,” Khretef said. “And even if he didn’t want to do that— which the rulers of the Eilitt didn’t believe— they didn’t want Iskard to have the kernel. They wanted for themselves the power that would come with control over the planet. They’d have preferred both Eilitt and Shamaska to die together rather than have to suffer the shame and humiliation of being saved by a Shamaska.”
Kit shook his head, disgusted. When he had been studying Earth history, and especially during the last month or so, when North Korea had come up in his history unit, he’d found himself hoping that only human beings went so far out of their way to rabidly distrust one another, and to teach their innocent children to do the same. “Nut cases!” he said.
“I hear you,” Khretef said, “whatever a nut is.”
Together he and Kit paused in the huge opening to another gallery. Khretef glanced from side to side, then up at the huge chandelier-mass of stalactites hanging down from the high ceiling. Kit, looking at them too, shook his head in wonder. “Think of how much water,” he said. “And how many years...”
Khretef nodded. “Not long now,” he said, and led Kit onward through the cavern and downward again.
“Am I right,” Kit said, “to say that your two cities have been fighting the whole time since you settled here?”
“Oh, yes,” Khretef said. “A constant state of— what was the term for it? Armed engagement.” Khretef laughed. “Both cities were constantly exchanging diplomats and deputations to try to talk things over, solve our grievances.” He shook his head. “But it was never about that. It was always about finding a new way to stab the other side in the back. Or finding out what they were really up to, and then looking for ways to stop it. That was, after all, the way things had always been...”
Khretef sighed as they made their way across the cavern, toward another dark exit. “There came a time, after I passed my Ordeal and became a wizard, that my mother decided I should go on one of these deputations. So I went.”
Kit got a sudden flash of Khretef’s memory of that first trip: and of a moment of astonishment on the way there as his traveling party was overtaken by a sudden wonder; one of the Martian dust-devils. Again Kit saw the view of the circle of sky far up that whirling tunnel, and now understood his rush of déjà vu. This was the connection. “I was ready for it. I knew the Shamaska would all be looking for ways to trick or betray me because I was new and young, trying to turn me into a tool they could use against my own people. I was on my guard. Then I went to the Shamaska City, and—”
Khretef laughed, bitter. “I discovered that the terrible Shamaska, our ancient enemies, were just people like us! It seemed like the worst kind of betrayal. Either I was completely confused, and they were pulling one over on me— or this had always been true, and we were the deluded ones. Like us, the Shamaska were scared of the other side, trying to keep themselves safe, but unsure how to do it when the others were so determined to wipe them out. Watch out where you put your feet here—”
The surface underneath them was changing to rough, stony ropes of pillow lava, all crusted with the pale leached minerals of millennia. Kit picked his way with care as he listened. “Anyway, I kept my mouth shut and went through with my duties in the deputation, and waited for it to be time for us to go home, for I didn’t like what I was seeing, and I didn’t want to do any more of this work, where it was impossible to ignore how our own leaders had been lying to us. And then, at a function just before I was to return home to Eilith, I met Aurilelde.”
As they paused before negotiating another long gallery leading to a third cavern, Khretef’s face changed subtly, and even by the now-subdued wizard-light, Kit could see the change. When Khretef looked over at Kit, his uncertain expression suggested that he wasn’t sure Kit understood what he was saying. “I thought she was going to be just another of these cold, proud Shamaska I’d spent twenty days meeting: someone who’d be hating me, but polite to my face. Then we looked at each other, and there was something different about her. I still don’t know what it was. We started talking...”
Khretef glanced around again, then pointed. “Down there. See that opening? That’s what we want. —Oh, we were so careful to try to look like nothing different was happening. We knew everyone was watching us. But finally we realized that we liked each other. Aurilelde was interested in meeting a wizard her own age. I was interested in her talents as a Seer: it’s a gift that’s rare among the Eilitt.”
Kit felt that chill again, thinking of Nita’s growing visionary specialty. Khretef shrugged. “I went home, eventually. But soon I told my mother that I wanted to go on the next deputation, that more experience would be good for the son of a Chief of the City. And I went, and Aurilelde and I met again. And again, the next time. After that we kept meeting privately. We were terrified, but we knew we had to find a way to be together that wouldn’t be misunderstood.”
From ahead of them, from below, Kit heard a subdued roar. “But they misunderstood, anyway,” he said, “so you left.”
Khretef nodded. “I fled to her city,” he said. “My people declared me a traitor, to be killed on sight. My mother disowned me. And though I’d come over to the Shamaska side, they never trusted me. Rorsik, one of Aurilelde’s father’s counselors, claimed that the only reason I’d sought refuge in the city was to seek ways to betray the Shamaska to the Eilitt. He claimed I’d seduced the Daughter of the City in order to render her visions friendlier to the Eilitt side. I think possibly Rorsik wanted her for himself, and saw me as a rival.”
And Khretef snorted, a sound so like one that Kit’s friend Raoul would make that Kit couldn’t help laughing. “The idiot couldn’t even see how she loathed him! But even her own people were starting to distrust her because of me. They thought that she was lying about her visions to forward my agenda. We thought they’d understand that we just wanted to be together, but...” He shook his head.
Kit frowned. “We have stories like that where I come from,” he said, thinking of his last year’s long English unit on Shakespeare. “Mostly the star-crossed lovers wind up dead.”
Khretef gave him an ironic look. “Well, I did,” he said.
That was when they heard the huge roar away ahead of them. Kit froze where he was. “We’re too alike as it is,” he said, “and if it’s all the same to you, I’d sooner stop before we get that alike!” He shook his antenna-wand, and a reassuring jolt of red fire ran down it, vanished. Its charge was running full. “That really didn’t sound like your usual scorpion—”
“No,” Khretef said, “they weren’t. Down this way—”
They walked a short way along to the entrance to a narrow gallery, like a hallway, leading down into a wider space. There Khretef paused, uneasy. “This is where I got killed the last time,” he said.
The hair went up on the back of Kit’s neck. “Yeah, about that,” Kit said. “If you’re dead, how come you aren’t in Timeheart?”
“I wasn’t finished,” Khretef said. “You know how it is sometimes. People hang on, even though there’s usually no hope of doing what they’ve left undone. Usually after a while they move on. But I couldn’t leave. So many lives depended on what I’d failed to do, so many futures. My people, Aurilelde’s people. Aurilelde ...I couldn’t leave. And when they had to go back into stasis, which they had so much been trying not to do— then even more, I had to stay.”
The dread in his voice surprised Kit. “What was the matter with the stasis?”
“There weren’t enough wizards left, not enough power, to rebuild the spells correctly. The stasis wasn’t true dreamless sleep anymore, but a half-life full of repetitions and endless dreams without resolution, a journey with no end. The souls of th
ose in stasis were being damaged, their personalities corrupted. Just once more we could endure it without being destroyed as a species, Shamaska and Eilitt together. But not another time.”
Khretef shivered all over with the memory. “So for so many years I waited in this not-life, not-death while they slept, all the time fearing what they were going through would destroy them before help came. But then, just now, something happened.” And he looked at Kit, his eyes alight with an excitement he had plainly been fighting to keep under control. “You got here. You cracked open the Nascence. You let loose the wizardry to fuel the awakening of the unfinished past. And you’re me. Or a version of me, one rooted in the present and with access to its power. How could I not come find you? Now it can all be finished. Now we can remake the world; now the last problem can be solved. And Aurilelde and I can be together.”
Kit wasn’t so sure about that, but for the time being the subject was better left alone. “Just so we don’t wind up repeating past events, you should probably dump the light now,” he said softly. “You know the spell for seeing by heat?”
That took Khretef by surprise. “I know the theory,” he said. “But it’s not something I’d have thought of. In our old bodies, in the cold of the First World, almost any heat would be blinding. Degrees of it didn’t seem to be much use—”
“How do you get your spells?” Kit said. “Our species has several methods, but a lot of us read ours from a book or a portable device—” He pulled out his manual, showed it to Khretef.
He peered at it. “How unusual. We call ours the Dark Speaking: we hear it in the silence—”
Kit found the spell, flagged it. “Here,” he said.
Khretef stood listening. “Ah,” he said. “Not too complex. Let’s see—”
Kit, meanwhile, very quietly spoke the Speech-words for the spell. A second later his vision had changed, and he could see Khretef as a Shamaska-shaped light in the darkness. All around him the cavern gallery glowed faintly— more brightly nearer the floor, more dimly up above where the stone was losing heat to the Martian night. “How’s that?” he said.