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—
Nita got her feet under her, staggered, steadied herself. “Bobo,” she said. “I want to see them. And I want them to see me. And the area around me for about a mile or so.”
Remote visioning? I can handle that.
“What’s the energy outlay like?”
Against what you just did? Negligible.
“Do it.”
Nita stood as straight as she could. She didn’t have to work at looking angry. A moment later, she was looking at the floor of the Scarlet Tower as if it were an island touching her own. All around it, the Shamaska stared at her in astonishment: and the four in the center were trying to maintain neutral expressions, and mostly failing. Aurilelde in particular was looking both horrified and enraged, and trying to cover it up.
“Well,” Nita said, trying to sound as snotty and unconcerned as Dairine could on occasion, “that was pretty lame.”
Aurilelde opened her mouth. Nita didn’t give her a chance. “Yeah, yeah, impossible,” she said. “Well, guess what, Miss Not-a-Wizard? Not impossible. And I am annoyed with you. Not Khretef, who is really Kit— Hi, Kit!— and not your poor dad; the One only knows which of you is running things, and I don’t care. Not even Mister Rorsik behind you there; I don’t know who he thinks he’s running, and I don’t have time to waste finding out. You dropped that wave on me and choked off transit and shield-spelling. So let’s get serious.”
She glanced over her shoulder. Behind her, their initial stage completed, the massive twin tubes of the Pellegrino passthrough were now slowly rearing up behind her over the city like the graceful bodies of two gigantic serpents—the wizardly containment field no more than a thin, shimmering skin that looked like it could let go at any moment.
“Earth’s premier hydromage,” Nita said, “spent nine years of her life designing this wizardry to move huge volumes of water around between two oceans, under precise control. And I mean precise—not like the big crude kindergarten-sandbox stunt you just tried. But then you’re not a wizard, and having one telling you how to dump a bucket of water over somebody’s head isn’t the same as actually understanding what you’re controlling. I, however, understand water because I work with it a lot. So you’d better believe me when I tell you that if you don’t answer my challenge right now, I’m going to instruct one of the two ends of this wizardry to terminate right there in that room with you, and the other to terminate over the City of the Shamaska, and then I’ll tell both of them to emit the same volume of water as you just dropped on me, with approximately a hundred times the force. The City will be destroyed. And as for you personally, your bodies may be tough, but I’m betting a lot of you will die. And even if you don’t, how pleasant will the very few Shamaska survivors find life in this world when I’ve destroyed all your lovely, c
omfy tech, and your pretty city, and forced you to roam the surface of Mars digging up raw materials and building things from scratch?”
The three men around the Throne looked nervously from Nita to Aurilelde. “You would never do such a thing!” Aurilelde cried. “You are a wizard! Wizards cannot—”
“Oh yes wizards can,” Nita said. “Watch me! I told you, I am annoyed. You are screwing with life on my planet generally and my life personally ...and I’m willing to pay the price for dealing with you once and for all. You want to prevent me smashing you and your little toy city all over the mountainside? Then you, Aurilelde, meet me right here, and you and I will have it out. You have a kernel. I have everything else. Let’s find out who really rules Mars.” And she grinned a nasty grin that she did not have to borrow from Dairine. “Should be fun.” Then she allowed some scorn to show. “Unless you’re scared, of course.”
Khretef was trying to stop her, but Aurilelde leaped to her feet, a murderous expression on her face. The white-hot fury would have looked astonishing on someone so young, except that Nita had Dairine for a little sister and was used to such displays. “I have no fear of you! You cannot take my world, or my Khretef, or my City—”
“Actually, I can,” Nita said softly. “Come down here and stop me. If you dare.” And she turned her back on them.Bobo? Kill it.
The view into the City vanished. Nita glanced at the passthrough wizardry. “How long will it hold there?” she said.
Approximately twenty-eight minutes. Then your backlash will kick in .
Nita rubbed her face, feeling the shakes starting, and tensed herself: she didn’t dare let them take hold. “I need some height,” she said. “She was able to stop local spelling partly because I was too close to the ground, where a kernel’s power is most effective, close to the body of the planet. It’ll be weaker up high. She’ll be limited to exploiting magnetic fields and microgravity and wind and such, and she won’t have had enough time to get proficient with those. I just need to wear her down and get close, and then—”
Physical confrontation?
“Crude and ugly,” Nita said, “but though I hate to admit it, occasionally effective. So let’s go skywalking.”
***
Hi, Kit!
He had been dozing uneasily in the darkness, caught in a dream from which he couldn’t wake and through which he couldn’t sink into deeper sleep. But the words caught him out of the darkness, pushed him toward waking.
He caught just a glimpse of the world through Khretef’s eyes: the room at the top of the Scarlet Tower, the Shamaska people gathered there—and in the midst of it all a single non-Shamaska figure, slender, erect, and dangerous-looking. Over everything loomed vast twin serpents of water, poised and waiting on her word. He caught the gleam of her eyes, angry, but somehow still with a hint of amusement in the anger: everything under control, even though she was also deadly tired and scared.
Neets!
Hi, Kit!
The image shut down, and fear darkened everything around him. But at least he knew his name again. For a few moments there, he’d lost it. Kit looked around him in the darkness, hunting for a way out, for any ray of light. There was none. He might as well have been in a hole in the ground, the dirt shoveled in, tamped down...
A grave. That’s what this is like.
It was a freaky image, one he pushed away. It’s only if I accept it that I’m going to be stuck here, he thought. Yes, it was hard to think: there was pressure all around him to give it up, let it go, no way out... And the darkness itself seemed to have weight. But time’s weight wasn’t enough to keep a wizard down, not unless he let it. And the weight of intention wasn’t enough, either. I’ve got some intention of my own—
As if in response, the darkness pushed down harder on him. But Kit had something to hold up against it: the image he’d just caught, the glimpse of Nita. She’s hot, Kit thought in surprise. Just how exactly have I failed to notice that Neets is hot?
Maybe it was because she didn’t throw it around or make a weapon of it, the way some of the girls at school did, or tried to. Maybe it was because Kit was so busy just being her friend and not wanting to add anything extraneous to the equation. When the spell was already balanced, you didn’t go hanging extra elements on it just because you could—
And maybe I was just a little bit chicken about it? Kit thought. Because this admission would complicate things, no question about it. Maybe life was nice and comfy and safe without this complication, at a time when a lot of things had not been comfy or safe for either of them… so that Kit hadn’t wanted to rock the boat. And maybe that’s why I’ve been giving Darryl and Ronan so much grief.
But the sight of her there, looking deadly— and extremely competent and wizardly and pissed off and, well, frankly, kind of magnificent—
Kit blushed. Then he swore at himself. Later for that. Right now we’ve got problems! And there was somebody else besides Khretef who was part of the “we.” The realization was strangely exciting. Now all I have to do is get the hell out of here so I can be some use to her. Because I got her into this.
“You can’t!” said a gigantic voice that was both Khretef’s and his own—and for that reason, strangely difficult to argue with. “Too much is riding on it! The fate of our people, their past and their future—”
He’s trying to drown you out, Kit thought. Don’t let it happen. Stand up; get real; get focused. You still have a body. Even if you don’t, fake it that you have a body!
Kit felt around him. For a scary few seconds there was nothing to be felt in the darkness. Nothing’s here, I’m not here…
Cut that out! Yes, I am!
And slowly he felt a floor under him— or talked himself into believing there was one. Which is it? Doesn’t matter. Wizardry’s about persuasion, and sometimes the one you’ve got to persuade is yourself. Let’s go, floor!
It was there: he could feel it against his hands. He was sitting on it. Kit got his feet under him, got up. “Khretef?” he shouted. “This has got to stop!”
“Yes, it does. At your end! Stop fighting it: let what’s fated happen!”
Kit clenched his fists as the pressure of the darkness came down on him again, and he braced himself against it. It was tough: he felt strangely hollow, as if he had no access to wizardry.
“You don’t,” said that weird dual voice. “Your power is mine now. And it’s being passed to someone who can make the best use of it.”
Kit’s eyes narrowed. There were ways to do that legally: any wizard could act as power source for someone else’s spell. But the procedure required consent. “No way!” he shouted. “I’m not playing this game!”
“You consented when we blended a little while ago,” said the voice. “Too late now. Why fight with yourself? It’s over.”
The darkness kept pressing down, a physical force, hard to resist. But Kit flashed on something else— one of his gym teachers, Mr. Thorgesen, who’d been coaching him on weights this last semester. Kit had started out hating this part of gym but had suddenly realized that there was a skill involved, a matter of balance and leverage very like some acts of wizardry, and almost against his will he’d started to get into it. And will’s the issue. “It’s not just a dead weight,” Mr. T. kept saying. “Work out where the leverage is and use it to your best advantage.”
“I’m not fighting with myself!” Kit said, pressing up, feeling for the points of leverage in the other’s mind. And suddenly, in bizarre alliance with his gym teacher, it was Mr. Mack helping him here, too, helping Kit find the leverage point. What matters is thinking yourself into those people’s heads. Imagine how the world looked to them! Their lives, their troubles. That’s how what they do starts to make sense. “I’m me! And Nita’s Nita! We are not just little fragments of you guys, like the Shard’s a fragment of the kernel! We’ve got our own lives, and they’re not yours! But you people are all about being fragmented and broken up. You see everything that way! And you really need
to get past the blind spot, because you’re ruining any chance for your own lives to be whole things that aren’t broken!”
For the first time Khretef didn’t seem to have an answer ready. Kit could feel his uncertainty, like a splinter of light piercing the gloom. It actually was a splinter of light: the room in the Tower, right now, where Nita stood challenging the furious Aurilelde, and then vanished. “You’ve got it backwards!” Kit said as Aurilelde vanished too. “We’re not the ones who’re like you: you’re the ones who’re like us! We’re what you could be if you weren’t stuck in the past and in the middle of this stupid thing where your people hate each other! And your two sides have been hating each other so long, I bet you don’t even remember what started it in the first place!”
“That’s nonsense!” Khretef shouted.
And then for just a shocked second he was silent. The silence told Kit that Khretef couldn’t find anything to say, and however screwed up he might be, Khretef was still wizard enough not to want to lie—
“It’s true, and you know it is!” Kit said, both sad for Khretef’s people’s sake and yet triumphant to know that his guess was true. “Whatever got you guys fighting, it’s so long ago that you can’t remember. Which means it also shouldn’t matter anymore! And you’ve got the sense to see that. But Aurilelde doesn’t. She’s the one who scared you into trapping me in here, isn’t she? And now she’s going to take this mess through to its illogical conclusion. Lots of people on Earth will die when our world’s status quo gets destabilized by what’s happening here. The Eilitt and the Shamaska will keep right on killing each other. Everything will get worse. This isn’t your dream of everything working out for the best. This’ll be a nightmare. Put a stop to it, Khretef! Let me go!”
There was a long, unhappy silence. “It’s too late now,” the voice said. “It’s started...”