A Wizard of Mars, New Millennium Edition (37 page)

He wouldn’t have had the courage to find it on his own, anyway,
 the back of Kit’s brain whispered to him.

Kit blinked again: but then he realized that this was what he had been half hoping would happen— that the spell itself would clue him in as to what was going on here, what tack he should take. 
I wanted it to tell me what was going on.

So let’s have it,
 Kit said silently to the magic. 
Who’s Rorsik? What’s going on here? Are these people the original Martians? And what happened to them? Tell me!

The archway before them was guarded by men in leather crossbelts and more utilitarian-looking clothing than Kit had seen so far—loincloths of some shimmering metallic material. The guards blocked the way with long, crossed lances that appeared to be tipped with something like diamond. 
Not Barsoomian weapons,
 Kit thought. 
Something else is seeping through the spell’s appearance now, the way Aurilelde’s name did.

“Aurilelde—” Kit said as they made for the archway, and the guards there, seeing them, came to attention and pulled the weapons out of their way, raising them to the salute. “What exactly is your father going to be expecting me to do?”

She shot him a slightly surprised look as they entered the Scarlet Tower. “Well, of course you’ve brought the Nascence—”

Kit didn’t say anything for a moment, having been thrown off slightly by the discovery that the metal of the Scarlet Tower was transparent: the Sun falling on its outer surface poured straight through and splashed to the white floor like blood. He paused, seeing that they had stepped into the heart of a great atrium. All around the inner skin of the Tower, platforms and floors reached up for more than three-quarters of a mile, ceasing only in one final floor near the one-mile mark that took the Tower’s whole width at that height.

Aurilelde had kept on walking for a moment: now, though, she paused, looking over her shoulder, surprised that he hadn’t answered her. “Kit,” she said, very quietly, like someone saying a strange word and fearing to be overheard saying it. “The Nascence. You 
do
 have it, don’t you?”

Kit looked at her and felt a sudden terrible wash of embarrassment and fear. “No,” he said. “But I know where it is.”

Then he blinked again. 
I do?

But the whisper inside Kit’s head was coaching him now, and things were starting to come back into focus— slowly, as if he’d been waking up from a long sleep, these last few minutes. It was like that time when he’d been away with the family on vacation, and they’d changed motels three or four nights in a row. The fourth morning he’d awakened and stared at the ceiling, absolutely unable to work out where he was or how he’d gotten there. Now once again he’d been seeing everything around him with that same traveler’s confusion, uncertain where or when he was—

Aurilelde retraced her steps to him, reached out to him, and took him by the arms. It was an urgent gesture, a frightened one. “If you don’t have it,” she whispered, “why did you come? You know what they’ll do! Rorsik especially! He’ll claim forfeiture! He’ll say you’ve proven unable to defend the city from its enemies, to free us to take our rightful place in this world. He’ll accuse you of treason! You 
know
 he’s always wanted an excuse to do that. And if my father agrees—”

“He won’t.” The whisper in his head was certain now. “Rorsik is the only man in the New Lands that your father wants in the Tower even less than he wants me.”

Aurilelde’s face went pained at that, and she opened her mouth to say something. But then from across the huge interior of the Tower, a crazy, yodeling yelling went up. Aurilelde turned, and so did Kit—

Running at them from one of many doors right across the atrium came a glinting green shape, many-legged, all its claws clacking on the polished floor as it came howling toward them. Kit saw the two raised pairs of claws in front, realized what he was seeing, and snatched the wand out of his belt and got it ready—

Aurilelde grabbed his arm. “Khr—
Kit!”
she said. “No,
don’t—”

But there was no need. One second Kit had believed himself to be looking at a monster, another example of the things that had just attacked him. 
Just?
 said the voice in his head. But now it seemed a month ago, a year. And the horrible thing running toward him was suddenly harmless, even funny, as the hind claws scrabbled for purchase on the floor, as it hurled itself toward him. “Takaf!” he said, and started laughing: he couldn’t help it. He got down on one knee.

The 
sathak
 flung itself at him, howling in inane greeting. Kit shoved the wand back into his belt and batted the claws away in the usual way. Then he grabbed the bizarre body, flipped it onto its back, and started rubbing the soft underbelly plating in all the right places, while Takaf squirmed and waved his claws around and made the usual idiot of himself.

Some other part of Kit stared at the strange thing on the floor, obsessed by a dream-memory of glinting green claws and deadly, empty metal eyes. But his waking mind now knew that the cold-hearted mechanical 
mav-sathakti
 were just imitations of the 
sathak,
 the few remaining companion-creatures from the First World to have survived here: and Takaf was probably the friendliest, most faithful, and dimmest of them all.

It took some minutes before Takaf had had enough reassurance that his master had returned for him to stop howling his relief and delight to the uttermost heights of the Tower. Then Kit stood up and looked over at Aurilelde, smiling slightly. “I couldn’t go up there without him,” he said. “Last time it was the three of us. This time it had to be the three of us again.”

Aurilelde looked at him, and a small, relieved smile started to creep across her face. “You are you again,” she whispered. “It’s truly you, come back as you promised. Even from so far, from so long! You had me frightened there for a while—”

Kit shook his head. “Let’s go up,” he said. “Let Rorsik bring on anything he likes. When we’re together, we can take on anything he’s got. Even the Darkness and the Doom—”

Aurilelde shivered. But she took Kit’s arm, and they headed across the Tower together to the transit cluster at the heart of the ground floor, with Takaf scuttling along behind.

The centermost pad in the cluster was empty. The three of them stepped on it together, and under them the circle of white stone lifted and began levitating into the Tower space, heading for the topmost floor and the tiny opening in it. “How many of them are up there, do you think?” Kit said.

Aurilelde shook her head. “Hundreds,” she said as they rose upward more and more quickly. “Rorsik has been whispering in a lot of ears that he’d take Father’s place if you don’t prove his trust in you to be wise. No one dares to be absent: everyone wants to prove they’re on the right side when the trouble starts...”

Kit swallowed, hearing that. But at the back of his mind, something odd was going on. The stranger-soul, the one who had been looking through his eyes and finding everything so weird and frightening, was now settling itself into a peculiar armed readiness, alert and waiting to see what would happen next. It was ready to intervene. Its heart was a wizard’s heart, and it seemed to be saying to him, 
I’ve come up against the Darkness every now and then, and It hasn’t done all that well. Let’s see what It’s got this time—

The pad of stone was drawing near the upper level now, and the aperture that would admit it was growing bigger and bigger above them. “’Lelde,” Kit said, while Takaf stood staring up at the many eyes gazing down at them through the nearing, glassy floor, “are you ready?”

“By myself?” She shivered. “But if you are— then I can be ready with you.”

He hugged Aurilelde’s arm to his side for a moment, then stood free of her as they ascended through the floor, concentrating on standing straight and tall beside her, trying to match a Daughter’s proud dignity with his own. As the pad locked into place, he heard the rustle and mutter of the crowd about them, felt the pressure of the hundreds of eyes on them: the fear, the unease, and in some cases the hate, bizarrely paired with hope. 
They hate it that they need an enemy to save them,
 Kit thought. 
They wish it could be any other way—

The two of them stepped out onto the ruby floor and headed for the Throne. Takaf came clacking along behind them, glancing nervously from side to side, for he could feel the threat as clearly as the two in front of him. Here, at the top of the Tower, the metal had been altered to let the clear uncolored light of day pour in; and under it, alone on that plain red sandstone bench, Iskard sat awaiting them, arrayed in the robes of the Master of the City, with a short lightgoad in his hand.

As they approached, he rose. Kit looked up at him—a man big and tall even for a Shamaska; the red-skinned face cold, set, and chiseled; the dark eyes cold, too. Only on his daughter did those eyes rest with any affection, and even then only for a moment. There were other influences in the room that mattered more.

Coming closer, Kit tried to keep his face set, too, trying not to betray any response that might upset what was happening. It had taken Iskard long enough to come to some kind of interior accommodation as regarded the relationship between the Daughter of the Shamaska and the son of the man who would have been the Eilith Master had their ancient rivalry followed the normal course. But no courses were normal anymore, nor could they be until both sides were freed to follow their separate fates in the New World—

They came to a halt before the Throne, and Takaf crouched behind them. “Welcome, young Khretef—”

Kit bowed. Aurilelde stood straight. “The Son of the Eilitt has returned,” she said, “bringing with him news of the prize the Master of the City requires.”

“News?”
came a harsh voice from the crowd, and within a moment there was movement there, the expected shape forcing itself out into the open.

“My daughter always said you would return,” said Iskard, ignoring the interruption. “Many others had given you up for lost, Khretef. When you ventured out into lands filled with the creatures loosed on us by our ancient enemies, we feared you lost forever. Some there were—” and he looked toward the source of the interruption— “who even said you had betrayed us. But the Daughter spoke for you, and Aurilelde has always been wiser than fear: one who’s been able to see what others couldn’t, a seeress of the Old Light as well as one who sees into the Dark left behind us.”

The people gathered around the Throne rustled and muttered approval, some laying fists to chests and bowing in Aurilelde’s direction. She smiled at her father, and at the reaction of her people, but the expression had an absent-minded quality to it: it was Kit she was watching.

“She has seen nothing,” said the Shamaska man who was now approaching the Throne, “if this child of traitors and murderers has not brought back the Nascence with him! But he has nothing. Otherwise the City would not now still be trapped behind walls that cannot be broken, hemmed in by command of its enemies!”

Kit looked over at the owner of the angry voice now approaching them. He wore robes that were meant to recall the ones worn by the Master of the City, and he carried a lightgoad like the Master’s— through prudently unkindled: the city guards and warriors in the room would not have taken kindly to such a gesture, an overt challenge to the Master’s power. For his own part, Kit, now aware that his own clothes had somewhere along the line transformed themselves to a warrior’s proper harness, simply touched the firesword hanging at his belt and was reassured to hear the metal speak back to him in his mind as usual. That at least was normal, in this time when nothing else was.

“Rorsik,” said Aurilelde’s father in a dreadfully level and quiet voice, “be still. Your time to speak will come all too soon, I fear.” He turned to Kit. “So, Son of Eilitt: where 
is
 the Nascence, then?”

“Found, Master of the City,” Kit said, “in the green dunes halfway around the planet, where the enemies of Shamask once hid it.”

“And you should know, traitor, son of traitors,” cried Rorsik, “for it was your people who—”

“Rorsik,” said Iskard, and the lightgoad blazed up in his hand.

Rorsik fell silent.

“You have not brought it, however,” said Iskard.

“No, Master of the City,” Kit said.

The people gathered around muttered in distress. “Then your life is forfeit,” said Rorsik, and his face twisted up in a dreadful smile.

“I can’t produce it,” said Kit, “because it’s been sealed against us. Wizardries greater than ours have been used to render it dormant. It can’t be used to free us until the New World’s soul is found and mated to it. And this we cannot do without the help of the wizards of the Blue Star.”

A mutter of concern went among all those who were gathered to listen. But Rorsik only laughed. “This is 
mythology!
” he shouted. “Just more tales of mysterious unknown magics from one who has everything to gain from spinning out his time among you until you actually start to
believe
his stories. What else would you expect from a child of the other side, one of those who watched the Darkness and the Doom come down on us, and laughed to see it come, and plotted to leave us to die as our world tore itself apart—”