Kit tried to keep the grin of pride off his face. He was only partly successful. Irina smiled, too, but her look was still serious. “Naturally I trust my Seniors’ judgment,” she said. “But, regardless, since Mamvish seems to think you should be taking a leading role in what starts happening here now, I want you to be very, very careful what you do.” Irina gave Kit a look that suddenly had a slight edge of frown on it. “When Tom and Carl briefed me on what you’ve been working on here, I naturally took a long look at your history as a wizard. All your histories,” she said, glancing at Ronan and at Darryl. Then she turned her attention back to Kit. “So far in your career you’ve shown a certain talent for gambling successfully with your own skin in crisis situations. But this work won’t be like that. This is likely to be one of those extended projects where when things go wrong, they start so small that you miss the early warning signs. Whatever happens here will inevitably affect Earth sooner or later… so I expect you’ll behave accordingly.”
“Yes ma’am,” Kit said, sounding very subdued.
“All right,” Irina said. “And now that all that’s said—” The sudden grin that flashed out was as excited as Kit’s would have been. “You’re on the cutting edge of something very unusual, very special. Enjoy it! And keep us posted.”
She turned away and strolled back over to Mamvish. “Don’t forget, now,” Irina said, “let me know right away if there’s anything you need.”
“Cousin, I’ll do that,” Mamvish said, and bowed her head again. Kit put his eyebrows up, for the word wasn’t quite the casually friendly relationship-word hrasht that one wizard used to another in the ordinary course of business. It still spoke of a close kinship, but it was more nuanced, and echoes of the overshadowing attention of the Powers That Be hung over it.
Irina patted Mamvish on the flank, waved to the rest of them, and then she was gone.
A leading role! Kit thought. A leading role!
“Yeah, well, you heard her reading you the pre-riot version of the Riot Act,” Ronan said under his breath. “So don’t get cocky.”
Kit threw Ronan a smug look that suggested the advice might already be a bit late. Ronan rolled his eyes.
“Is she really the most senior wizard on Earth?” Carmela said. “She doesn’t look old enough.”
Kit winced in embarrassment at someone as sketchily informed about wizardry as Carmela making such judgments… even though the thought had crossed his mind as well. Mamvish, though, cocked an indulgent eye at her. “Seniority,” Mamvish said, “takes many forms. Irina is quite special. No one understands the Earth the way she does: and as a result, it listens to her.” She waved her tail in a way that to Kit somehow communicated a strange level of concern. “If for some reason the Earth needed to be destroyed in a hurry, she’d be the one that the Powers would talk to.”
“She takes care of the Earth’s kernel?” Darryl said, awed.
“She may occasionally be the Earth’s kernel,” said Mamvish. “Certainly she’s the planet’s foremost geomancer. And when you possess and exercise power at so central a level, the difference between what you do and what you are does start to blur.” She waved her tail again, turning as she did so.
Another brief storm of Speech-characters broke out under Mamvish’s hide, and the newly deposited red dust went sliding away sideways from the outcropping and the dune, blown there by a more concentrated and focused wind than the one that had dropped it there. “Let’s tuck the egg back in where we found it,” Mamvish said to Kit. “It’ll be safe enough here. Your manuals, and my version of the Knowledge, have stored all the data we acquired from the egg today. The rest of the investigative team will now have the data, too. Our next task is to work out how to open the egg, or read its interior, so that we don’t lose any potential clues to just what happened on this world.”
“You mean,” Carmela said, “maybe the species that lived here destroyed themselves or something?”
Mamvish waved her tail uncertainly. “It’s too soon to say. When both the planets and the species in a given system have such ambivalences about another of the system’s worlds, it could be an indicator that something catastrophic occurred. But with so little information in the manual to guide us, we have to be careful not to jump to conclusions.”
“Isn’t it kind of weird that there isn’t anything?” Darryl said.
“Not at all. Sometimes the Powers That Be purposely conceal information for one reason or another. But in this case They tell me They’ve done no such thing. Which leaves us with other possibilities. The Lone Power might have interfered, causing that information to be hidden. Or the species in question may itself have found a way to redact the data, for reasons of their own.” Mamvish waved her tail again. “We’ll take our time and find the truth. Meanwhile, I’ve got other business to take care of… so let’s seal this up and call it a day.”
Kit nodded and went to kneel in front of the outcropping again. He put one hand on that cold brownish stone and said the Mason’s Word, feeling the stone go soft under his skin. Then carefully he slipped the egg back into the heart of the outcropping.
When it was completely concealed, he paused for just a moment more with his hands on the smooth alien metal, unwilling to take his hands away: he thought he felt the egg tingling slightly in his grip. Am I imagining that? But a moment later the sensation had faded. Probably something to do with using the Mason’s Word: you always get a little fizz, something to do with the gas atoms in the oxides or nitrates or whatever coming unbound.
Kit pulled his arms out of the stone, stood up, and dusted his hands on his pants. As usual, the gesture was fruitless: there always seemed to be more dust to get rid of. “Yeah,” Carmela said, “and when you get home, make sure you stay away from the DVDs until you’ve washed up…”
Kit silently gritted his teeth. I can’t wait to dump her, he thought. And then we have to find a way to keep her from tagging along everywhere we go, or this thing’s gonna turn into a disaster…
“So,” Mamvish said. “Keep doing what you’re doing, cousins: and keep me informed. I’ll leave the shield here to protect what we’ve found. Dai stihó!”
And she was gone, without the slightest movement of the air inside the shield.
“Now there goes a professional,” Ronan said, shaking his head in admiration. “Irina’s right: we’re lucky to have her around.” He stretched, glanced around. “Meanwhile, I’ve got to get back myself. Conference call tonight?”
“Yeah,” Kit said. “Put a note in my manual— we’ll set a time. Big D?” He glanced at Darryl.
“Any time after dinner’s fine,” Darryl said. He waved and vanished, making a careless pop in the air.
Ronan rolled his eyes again. “Sloppy,” he said. “See you later—”
A second later Ronan, too, was gone, more silently. Kit looked at Carmela. “Well,” he said, “let’s get you back.” He reached into his otherspace pocket and pulled out the ready-set transit spell he used to get back to his bedroom from Mars. Uncoiling the long sentence in the Speech, he ran the glowing line of light through his hands until he found the part he was looking for. “We need to put your personal info in this,” he said. “Now, how much do you weigh this week?”
His sister glared at him. “Could you start with a more tactless question?”
“Sure. Your IQ?”
Carmela glowered. Kit grinned as he dropped the spell to the ground, and it stretched into a circle around the two of them and joined one end to another like a snake biting its tail. His hands were still tingling slightly as he started reciting the first part of the transit spell and the world started to go silent around them. It was strange that even as the silence built and the universe leaned in to listen to what Kit wanted, he could still hear that hissing, the dust whirling by…