Kit and Darryl watched as Ronan started reciting his spell again. Within seconds, the ground faded to transparency under their feet. It was like standing on a bumpy glass floor, the “glass” apparently about a hundred feet thick beneath them, full of shadowy flaws and striations illuminated sourcelessly by the spell itself. “Look at that,” Ronan said, sounding abstracted as the wizardry penetrated the surface more deeply and he peered down into it. “See how those layers are piled up? Looks like there was water here once.”
“A lot of places,” Kit said, as Ronan walked slowly around the spot where Darryl and Kit were standing. “There’s enough water ice at the south pole to flood the whole planet thirty feet deep. But how it got down there, and when…” He shook his head. “You need me to split this air bubble for you so you can walk further out?”
“Not yet,” Ronan said. He kept walking. Everywhere he moved, for about ten feet in front of him and to the sides, the ground went transparent. The Sun had climbed higher as they’d come, and the light continued getting better as the blue dawn shaded into the pale amber of early morning; but there was nothing unusual to be seen under the ground. Finally Ronan paused. “How accurate was your tracking on the spot that signal targeted?”
“Within a meter,” Kit said. “At least that’s what the manual said.”
“Might be something else going on,” Ronan said. “Maybe something cloaking whatever’s down there? I tweaked this scan so it includes the detection routine that Síle and Markus came up with. However—” He peered down into the unrevealing depths. “If whatever’s here was alerted by the egg that the cloaking routine it was using had been broken—”
“Could be,” Darryl said, pulling out his WizPod and touching it into manual function. “Let’s see if any other wizardries are working around here. Maybe with different cloaking routines. I’ll tell it—” and he pulled a glowing page out of the body of the Pod, stretching it out on the air and writing on it in the Speech with one finger— “to look around for the material the egg was made of.”
A few moments later Darryl stood back, leaving the Pod and its stretched-out manual page hanging in midair, and started whispering the words he’d written. The world went quiet around them as the spell “took” with unusual speed.But he really is still pretty close to his Ordeal, Kit thought. His power levels are way above either of ours. And on top of that, he’s an abdaclass="underline" practically a living power conduit. No telling what he could do now if he wanted to. Assuming, like the rest of us, he can get enough of what he needs out of the manual to figure out how.
Far down in that abnormal clarity of Martian soil, Kit could suddenly see a green light glowing. He gulped, recognizing the color. “Got some action here, all right!” Darryl said, as under their feet the glow rose and spread like a slowly rising tide of liquid light. “Something’s awake! There are elements in this energy flow that’re part of the transmission from the egg in Nili Patera—”
“Is this wizardry hooked to anything physical down there?” Kit said.
Darryl shook his head. “Nope. It’s just linked to the terrain. Uh-oh—”
“Uh-oh” wasn’t something Kit liked hearing another wizard say. He was about to ask what was wrong when that green light boiled up from the depths, bursting against the ground under their feet like blood under skin, and then flowed lightning-quick away from them in all directions. The rush of light left itself burning in every rock and pebble it passed as it flash-flooded out across the crater’s bottom. Within seconds it washed up against the crater’s rim, flooded up it on all sides, splashed over the ragged crest, and vanished over the side—
Kit and Ronan and Darryl stood looking across the crater in three different directions. Darryl said, “Okay… now what?”
Ronan shook his head. “Maybe nothing. It’s fading.”
Kit looked around them. Right across the crater that light was already growing paler—not just because the Sun was higher and brighter in the amber sky. “So what was that? Another signal? Or just some kind of acknowledgment that we followed up on the first one?”
Darryl was looking at the manual page he’d extracted from his WizPod. “It was a limited-run wizardry. It triggered right when Ronan did his see-into-the-ground routine. The triggered spell blew all its energy in one big spike. The energy’s dropping right off the scale again.” Darryl shook his head. “It was a big spike, though. And there was something funny about the time stamp—”
Kit looked across the crater for any sign of life or movement. There was nothing. “Analysis,” he muttered. “Mamvish warned us we’d probably wind up doing a lot of it…” He pulled out his manual and opened it to the log pages for this trip. Among several charts showing what wizardries the three of them were carrying or utilizing, Kit saw the diagram that showed what wizardly energy was associated with this specific spot. Darryl hadn’t been overstating the size of the spike associated with their arrival. The graph had had to stretch itself to the top of the manual page to accommodate it. “What was the problem with the time stamp on the spike?” Kit said. “It looks okay to me.”
“Not the spike itself,” Darryl said. “The indicator showing when the spell was actually installed here. It looked earlier than the egg’s installation date—” Then Darryl made a little hiss of annoyance as the indicator vanished from the page. Kit shook his head. “Can you get that back?”
“I’ll let you know when I understand why it went away!” Darryl said. “Here—” But Kit was now distracted by his manuaclass="underline" its pages were flushing pink. He glanced up.
Atmospheric conditions could sometimes get very odd on Mars, but in all the times he’d been there, Kit had never seen anything like this. From where the three of them stood to the horizon, it was as if the Red Planet had suddenly taken the sobriquet personally and decided that for a change today it was going to get really, really red: not just rusty-colored, but positively crimson. Everything was turning that color— the ground, the sky— as if Kit was wearing red glasses.
“This could give you a headache after a while,” Ronan said. He sounded uneasy.
Darryl looked up and around. “Sky’s clear. Not a dust storm, then.”
“This is that new wizardry working,” Kit said. He started flipping through his manual to the defensive spells.
“But what’s it doing?” Ronan said, taking the sunglasses off to stare at the horizon. “I mean, if something’s going to…”
He trailed off. “Going to what?” Darryl said.
Ronan pointed and shook his head. Maybe a quarter mile away from them across the crimson sands, teetering unevenly along in their general direction, was something with four long legs and some kind of body hung in the middle.
They stared. “What is that?” Kit said. “A giant spider?”
Ronan squinted at it. “The legs look more, I don’t know, crabby. Look, they’ve got webs or something between the joints.” He paused. “Sorry, maybe I need to hit the optometrist when I get home, but does that look like it has the head of a bat?”
Kit shook his head. “I wasn’t going to say anything. There’s a tail, too. Like a rat tail.”
“One of the original inhabitants, maybe,” Ronan said, “coming to say hello?”
Kit shook his head. The approaching thing unsettled him: it looked not just unlikely, but also somehow rickety and badly built. Kit flipped his manual to a bookmarked page where he’d set up a life-sign detector sensitive to all the kinds of life that wizards knew about—which meant quite a few. But the display showed nothing in the area but three dots labeled with the twelve-character code in the Speech that meant Earth-human. “Not alive,” Kit said.
The bat-rat-spider-crab came tottering toward them, only a few hundred yards away now. Ronan shook his head. “Illusion?”