All around them, there was the sound of breath being pulled in. “Does the ground suit?” was the question asked by a wizard offering another one the opportunity to duel.
“Right here’ll do,” Penn said, glancing around them. “Even you’ve got enough expertise not to damage anything.”
“Let’s make double sure,” Kit said. “Keep it inside a force field. Who’ll hold it for us?”
Ronan came striding with some urgency from the far side of the room and stopped in front of Kit, bending his head down. “Are you seriously going to waste your time on this little twat?”
“No more than about five minutes of it,” Kit said.
“You are bloody buggering insane, have you ever even done this before?”
He hadn’t, but the phrase I’ll keep her was ringing over and over again in Kit’s head like a gong and making it impossible for him to feel anything but a deep, cold anger. “First time for everything,” Kit said. “So are you going to hold the force field or not?”
Ronan stepped back a couple of paces, shaking his head. “Clear back, people,” was all he said.
Murmuring, the people who’d been in the center of the room started backing away. Penn walked out into the space they’d left and Kit followed, wishing Penn would change his mind. But it plainly wasn’t going to happen.
In the center of the empty space, they turned to face each other, and Kit swallowed. He’d been the one to offer the challenge phrase, so it was Penn’s right to pick the manner in which the duel would be conducted. “What’s the paradigm?” Kit said
Penn was grinning. “Elemental,” he said. “Pick two elements, stay inside them. No sliding out; changing into a nonelected element disqualifies you immediately. Best four falls out of seven. Leaving the agreed space is an instant forfeit. Winner’s the one who forces the other out of an element or makes it impossible for them to change between the two. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” Kit said.
“Pick your two,” said Penn.
“Earth and water,” Kit said.
“So passive-aggressive,” Penn said. “Perfect. Air and fire for me.”
Kit rolled his eyes. “If the ground suits,” he said, “shut up and get on with it.” He shifted his gaze to Ronan. “Got the field sorted?” he said.
Ronan had his eyes closed as he consulted his Knowledge-based version of the manual. Now he flipped his hands open in a “Not my problem now, you idiots . . .” gesture, and the faint shimmer of a hemispherical force field domed up around them.
Penn vanished, or seemed to.
Kit closed his eyes and whispered the words he needed, dissolving.
The principle behind the kind of shape change you used for this sort of duel was uncomfortably simple. You dissociated your consciousness from your body’s matter, and used that as raw material to mimic other kinds, states and masses of matter. Key to coming back to your own form after such a bout was making sure that you had your own bodily structure and elemental construction locked down correctly before you shifted out.
That was a simple business for someone who was used to working with the Mason’s Word, and there were few spells Kit knew better. Or maybe one, he thought. Save that for later . . . Before the force field was even up, he’d had the coded matrix for his own body’s structure laid out in his mind, and he’d saved all the pertinent data to it. It was fail-safed as well: should he be incapacitated, his mind would find its way back to his reconstituted body automatically.
Okay, Kit thought. Let’s start out basic. He’d been immaterial for a few moments, and already the space inside the force field was being buffeted by a ferocious wind meant to keep him from coalescing. Don’t think so, Kit thought, and pulled up into the forefront of his mind the structure of a large granite boulder—
All around him he could feel the wind changing tack, blowing at him with force and pressure impossible except in places like Venus. And here came the heat, too. Between the wind and the fire, flakes and granules of sand were being eroded swiftly off the structure of his granite. The air inside the force field went thick and gritty with his own substance that was being stolen from him. If this went on for more than a minute or so there wouldn’t be much of him left—
He shifted elements, letting go of the hard lattices of stone and letting all his atoms slide into liquid state, into water, completely filling the body of the force field. Wind can’t blow if there’s nowhere to blow to—
He heard a screech of frustration, much dulled by the weight of the water. Okay, let’s see what you’ve got next—
Terrible actinic light erupted inside Kit, blinding him and stabbing him with pain. It was plasma, burning the water in the middle of the dome, combusting it away to hydrogen and oxygen. Gas started to fill the upper part of the dome, and Kit could feel Penn starting to pressurize it, meaning to break the force field and push Kit’s water form out past its boundaries to make it forfeit.
Nope, Kit thought, no way, and shifted elements again, back to earth this time in the form of the extraordinarily energy-resistant green metal that the Martians had used. It flowed gleaming green in the space and solidified into the shape of one of the Martians’ giant scorpion-pets, a heavily-clawed and armed sathak.
Instantly fire flowed around him, but the sathak-constructs that Kit was mimicking were impervious to that. It’s so perfect, Kit thought. He wants to go big and flashy. He thinks water and earth are weak because they’re not violent and showy—
Kit, Nita yelled at him, what the hell are you doing?!
Who was it who said he needed some slapping down? Kit said. The temperature of the fire was increasing, but he could resist it for the moment.
Not like this!!
Are you kidding? Just like this! This is the first time he’s fully engaged with anything since we’ve met. He’s always held something back so he can concentrate on playing Most Alpha Guy On The Block. Not now, though!
Then Kit realized he’d better start paying attention again, as Penn had switched tactics and was now blasting his metal scorpion with pure oxygen and sulfide gases. Between them Kit was being simultaneously bathed in acid and rusted away in huge unnerving flakes. Okay, not good, Kit thought, what’s a good response—?
You shouldn’t be doing this! Nita was shouting at him. You’re enjoying it way too much!
I absolutely am enjoying it. Incredibly. And you would be too if you’d heard the kind of things he was saying about you. In fact you’d be helping!
She didn’t answer, just stood there fuming. Fuming, Kit thought, there’s a good idea. Let’s get volatile. Sodium? Naah, too quiet.
Magnesium—
Kit’s scorpion slumped into a dusty pile of silvery metal grains. The acids and the pure oxygen hit it and its surface began instantly to bubble. Kit felt the instant shock of alarm go through Penn as he tried to change into something less reactive, but too late, the magnesium ignited—
The explosion that followed was tremendous and deafening, even inside the force field. For a moment things were quiet: then came a scream of rage, followed by the force field being filled entirely by a ravening ball of compressed plasma, pure star-core.
Kit screamed with the burn of it. But he still had an answer as his magnesium atoms started to burn away. Just enough left, and don’t forget the gravity damper—
A second later the inside of the force field was completely coated with the thinnest imaginable skin of collapsed matter, so dense and dead black it could hardly be seen. Because there’s more than one kind of star-core, little boy!
Inside the shell Kit could hear Penn raging and screaming in plasma form, but there was nothing he could do: he was trapped. Very slowly Kit began to collapse the skin of hyperdense matter around him, and inside it the plasma started to burn lower under the increased pressure. Penn was choking as Kit slowly put his fire out.
Give up, Penn, Kit said silently.
No!
Kit squeezed tighter. The shell collapsed smaller and thicke
r every moment: the size of a beach ball, the size of a basketball. Say it!
No—
Penn’s voice was weaker, the fire was almost entirely out now, he was gasping—
—the size of a softball, and there was hardly a spark of plasma left burning in it now. Say it!
A final desperate gasp, and then—The ground’s yours! Penn whispered. The ground’s yours, let me—
Kit let the spell go and called his matter back to make up his body again.
The force field vanished. Kit was lying there on top of Penn in clothes that were acid-burned and sandblasted and very much the worse for wear. Penn’s clothes were scorched and stained and his flipflops were melted. Kit started getting up—
To find himself staring up into the furious face of Irina Mladen, and the outraged parakeet on her shoulder, which was flapping its wings and shrieking at him. The baby, surprisingly, was asleep.
“Up,” Irina said, “both of you.”
Kit and Penn struggled to their feet.
“Your team is suspended until I decide whether you should be allowed to compete further,” Irina said. “Go home. I want to see you both tomorrow. I’ll send for you.”
And she disappeared.
Penn threw Kit a withering glance, turned his back on him, and took a few steps toward Nita. “Did you see what I—”
“Don’t,” Nita said in a voice like someone contemplating murder. “This is your fault.”
“What do you mean? I didn’t do anything, he started it, everyone here saw it—”
“Penn, shut up! This wasn’t about you, don’t pretend this was about him, this was about me somehow. Why are you so damn fixated on me?”
“Because you have something I need!”
It was a cry of pure rage and anguish that froze Kit where he was, it was so unexpected.
Nita didn’t sound impressed. “Well, what?”
“I don’t know!”
And a dead silence fell.
Nita seemed powerless to do anything but stand there and shake her head. “Look,” she said, “I’m done with you for today. Actually I’m done with both of you at the moment, but him I’ll forgive. I guess,” she said, pointing at Kit. Then she glared at him. “When I get over being fought over like some prize out of a bubblegum machine!”
She swung on Penn. “And as for you! I made a promise, and if Irina lets me keep it I’ll keep mentoring you with Kit if it kills me. If it kills both of us, because all this crap has to be about something. Now go the hell home and don’t let me see either of you until you’re done with Irina!”
And she vanished, too.
Kit and Penn stood there staring at each other, then sullenly turned their backs on each other and walked away.
I don’t get it, Kit thought. That was for her. Why doesn’t she get it?
. . . Girls!!
15
Antarctica and Daedalus
“TO DESCRIBE THIS WHOLE EVENT as unbelievably witless and profoundly distasteful would probably be an understatement of considerable magnitude.”
The Planetary Wizard for Earth lived in a third floor apartment in a very average suburb of Prague. The flat had beautiful high ceilings and a hardwood floor and five or six rooms that opened in and out of one another through tall double doors. The living room had six tall windows, a fireplace in the far wall, and shag rugs and brightly colored baby toys scattered across the floor. Over on one side was a crib, in which a baby in a diaper and a T-shirt with a picture of Donald Duck was lying on his back, sound asleep. The rest of the room was filled with comfortable furniture, none of which Kit or Penn was sitting on. They were standing in the middle of that hard wooden floor, shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot, while the woman who was arguably the most powerful wizard on Earth glowered at them from across the dining room table where she was working.
She sighed the exasperated sigh of someone with too many chores to do in too short a time. All around her on the table were piles of paperwork, books that might or might not have been wizards’ manuals, and empty coffee cups. With one hand Irina was rubbing her forehead. With the other she held a pen she was using to tap more or less constantly on a legal pad, where many notes were written in a tiny, neat hand.
“You,” Irina said, pointing at Kit. “I’m sure I don’t know why I need to keep having these talks with you. You came to me very highly recommended. Tom Swale, whose opinion I trust implicitly, spoke very highly of you. But now I have to go back to Tom and say, ‘How can you be sending me this person to work with when he behaves the way he behaved last night?’ You’ve embarrassed Tom, you’ve embarrassed me, and as for what the Powers That Be make of it—” She stared at the ceiling as if begging for help.
“And about you,” she said, pointing at Penn, “I’ve no particular reports at all. You do your work, you go on errantry when it’s required of you, and generally speaking you do an okay job! But the problem seems to be that when you’re not on errantry, you feel yourself at liberty to share your opinions about things. And some of these opinions . . .” She shook her head rather helplessly. “I’m not sure what century they come from. They remind me more of ancient Babylon than anything else. And the Babylonians may have had some terrific wizards, but as a civilization they had a long way to go before they started treating people like human beings.”
Irina glared at them both again. “Wizards are in general expected by the Powers That Be to exhibit good sense. Courteous behavior. Intelligence! But I’m looking in vain for any sign of any of those from you two after—” and she glanced at the legal pad she’d been writing on—“9:48 Canberra time last night. You could’ve done serious damage to the convention center. You could’ve done serious damage to each other. The spell you were using, yes, it’s very well known, and if you’re familiar with it and careful with it one can usually recover from it even under fairly dire circumstances, but I question whether either of you was being careful last night. At least you had the smidgen of good sense to ask for a force field. I wish that Ronan had exerted more pressure on you to to stop what you were doing, but it’s possible he correctly perceived that at that point there was no stopping either of you, short of dropping the roof on your heads.”
She dropped the pen on her legal pad so that she could rub her forehead with both hands. “There’s no point in asking either of you what you were thinking, as you plainly weren’t thinking,” Irina said, as with a whirr of wings the parakeet flew onto the table, wobbled over to the pad, and picked up the pen in its beak. It started to walk off with it, and Irina reached out and took the pen back, then dropped it on the legal pad again. “Thought was in fact the furthest thing from either of your minds. Other organs appear to have been in play that are not very useful for thought. Yes, I know that at your age everyone gets very hormonal, there’s no way to avoid it. But combining that particular set of hormones with wizardry can be as irresponsible and counterproductive as combining wizardry with alcohol or drugs.” And she glared at Penn. “Understand me: We have room for passionate wizards, we have room for sexual wizards, we have room for wizards who act on impulse—because sometimes impulse is the right thing to act on. But we have no room, none, for idiotic wizards. And you two have somehow managed to combine cleverness about the way you use spells and manage your wizardly practice with occasional flashes of the most extraordinary idiocy. I really begin to wonder if it might not be smartest to take you out of circulation for a while.”
Kit and Penn stared at each other in confusion and dread.
Irina let them stand there like that for a few moments. “You have to understand,” she said, “that because of my position as Planetary, I have wide latitude over the practice of wizardry on this planet. I am sometimes in a position to recommend to the Powers That Be that they offer wizardry to a specific person. And I’m also in a position, sometimes with the greatest regret, to request the Powers to withdraw wizardry from a person. The withdrawal can be very short-term, or very, very long, if necessary.”
r /> The parakeet was attempting to make off with Irina’s ballpoint pen again. She took it back and once more began tapping on the legal pad with it while the parakeet made grabs for it.
“I hate doing that to younger wizards,” she said, “because all their good habits and expertise they’ve acquired during the early practice tend to get mislaid during a prolonged ban. Often they’re never again quite the wizards they were. And you can guess what such a ban does to relationships that these individuals might have with other wizards.”
Kit had never had a referent before for the phrase “his blood ran cold,” but he had one now.
“I wouldn’t like Nita to suffer as a result of such a ban,” Irina said. “She’s done nothing but try hard to keep you two on an even keel. But the way you work with each other, or I should say fail to do so, is making that effort increasingly difficult. I need to find a solution to this problem fairly quickly, because the finals of the Invitational are fast approaching. And we have never, never yet had a finalist chucked out for behavioral issues. Other reasons, sometimes, yes. But not that.”
She paused. “If either of you has anything useful to say to me here that does not involve some imbecilic attempt to blame the other guy, I’d be happy to hear it now. Anything.”
Kit fought with his own urges briefly before finally saying, “Nita’s been seeing some kinds of disturbing things in her dreams. And I think maybe I’ve been getting kind of disturbed by them too.”
Irina sat looking thoughtfully at him.“You two are fairly close,” she said.
Kit blushed, twitched a bit where he stood, and looked away. “Not like that,” Irina said. “I have no interest in where you are in that regard. It’s not my business. But your mental connection has sometimes been quite strong. I understand that that’s in flux right now—which is normal for this age, and for this type of relationship. But how have your dreams been?”
Kit shook his head slowly. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Usually I don’t remember most of my dreams. But right at the moment—I’m not remembering any of them.”