She was getting angrier by the moment, and shakier, but Nita was intent on seeing this through to its logical conclusion before she fell over. “You don’t understand!” Iskard said to her, coming toward her. “We dared not allow the Eilitt to obtain an advantage over us! Their wizards were doing exactly the same kind of thing, seeking control of the kernel, trying to—”
“You stop right there,” Nita said, holding up the kernel, “because I’m just about ready to hose you and your city off the face of Mars like dog poop down the driveway!”
Iskard froze where he was. “I’m sick of your excuses and your fighting!” Nita said. “And I’m sick of wizards who’re so blinded by how much they’ve hated each other for umpty million years that they’re willing to forget that they took an Oath never to do crap like this! So you’re about to get a taste of your own medicine.”
Nita staggered, straightened again. “There’s a full implementation of a transoceanic passthrough hanging over your heads right this minute, and I’m in a mood to use it if I don’t get my partner back right this minute. If I go, too, when the hard rain comes down, big deal, because life without Kit doesn’t look so hot right now! And I’m betting I’d be doing the universe a service in getting you people off the books. For Kit and me, ’cause our Oaths are in place, I’m betting there’s always Timeheart. Whereas for you, the Lone Power only knows where you’ll wind up, and I can’t bring myself to care. So?”
Iskard looked back toward where Khretef was helping Aurilelde up. He sat down dully on the Throne with a thump, like a man defeated. “It cannot be undone,” he said.
“Wrong answer,” Nita said softly. “Try again.”
In her hands, the kernel flared with furious fire, now reflecting her own mood quite clearly in an eyehurting carmine blaze that made the Shamaska around her wince and flinch away. Nita turned around and looked back toward Khretef and Aurilelde. “Well?” she said to Khretef.
Aurilelde, slumped again Khretef, wouldn’t look at her. Khretef, kneeling beside her, was doing his best to hold himself straight, but his shame was evident. “I could hear his voice inside me before,” he said, miserable, “but I can hear him no more. If I had known that another wizard would die because of me…”
“Your problem was that you didn’t think he was another wizard!” Nita said. “Rorsik talked her into believing that he was ‘just’ another version of you. And she talked you into believing it.” She glared at him, wobbling again. “I’m sorry for you, but right now that’s not going to be good enough!”
In her hands the kernel flamed even brighter. The Shamaska standing around the room began to flee for the exits: one of them was Rorsik.
Nita stood there with the kernel, feeling the big backlash from the passthrough and the smaller ones from her other exertions inexorably catching up with her. I’m out of ideas, she thought, as the shaking got worse. They really can’t do anything. I don’t know what to do! Where do we go from here?
How about we start with not panicking? Kit said inside her head.
Nita’s head snapped up. And quite abruptly there was a multicolored dinosaur standing in the middle of the room—and next to her, a young blond woman with a baby in a chest sling and a parakeet sitting on her head.
“Mamvish!” Nita said. Then she sat down on the ground, quite hard, even considering the low gravity. The surroundings started to blur. No—! “Mamvish, they’ve got Kit, what about Kit—?”
The massive head swung toward her. Suddenly Nita could see clearly again: energy poured into her in a rush, and she got to her feet again, though unsteadily.
Colleague, hold your nerve! Mamvish said way down inside her. I think I got the one thing we needed before they threw me out.
From beside Mamvish, Irina looked over at Nita with an extremely neutral expression— but Nita thought she could see an edge of amusement on it as Irina’s eyes fell on the kernel. At least you didn’t drop it, Irina said.
Do you want it?
No. Just be quiet for a moment and let’s see how this develops.
But Kit—!
“First things first,” Mamvish said to the room at large. The general rush for the exits had stopped where it was with the appearance of the two new arrivals. “It’s as I thought: what we have here is an incomplete archival.”
She looked at Khretef, and a storm of fiery Speech-characters flared under her skin. Khretef screamed and went down on hands and knees, and the hair rose on the back of Nita’s neck, because the scream had two voices in it, one of them Kit’s. Khretef collapsed, fell flat to the floor, writhed and twisted, rolled away—
— and left a body behind him, dressed as he was, but not gray-skinned.
“Kit!” Nita cried, and ran to him.
He was getting to his knees as she reached him. “Whoa,” Kit said as Nita helped him up one-handed. “That was… so interesting.”
“We’re not done with the interesting stuff yet,” Nita muttered.
Kit looked around the room, saw Irina and Mamvish standing there, and shivered all over. “Yeah, I bet,” he said. And he glanced over at Aurilelde. “You mind if we put some distance between us and her?”
Nita smiled a grim half-smile. “No problem.” They headed over toward Mamvish.
Irina was making her way toward the Throne, where Iskard still stood, and to which Rorsik had just slowly returned. The baby, apparently asleep, took no notice of any of this. The yellow parakeet, however, glared at the two Shamaska, rustled its wings, and made an angry scolding sound as its mistress stopped and folded her arms.
“My name is Irina Mladen,” she said. “I am the Planetary Wizard for Earth. I speak for our world, but also for the system’s other Planetaries, who vest their joint authority in me at this time as presently the system’s most senior among equals. In the Powers’ names and the name of the One they serve, I greet you with reservation, and with regret at the sanction I have come to impose.”
Her voice was chilly, and Nita shivered all over at the sound of it. “What sanction?” Rorsik said. “What are you talking about?”
Iskard had gone pale even for someone of the Shamaska’s stony complexion. Now he put out a hand to try to stop Rorsik from saying anything further. But Irina merely gave Rorsik a look, then turned her attention back to Iskard.
“Regardless of being a wizard for much of your lifetime and fully cognizant of the responsibilities the Art requires of its practitioners,” Irina said, “you have allowed your people in general, and other wizards and talents under your management in particular, to enter into courses of action that have recklessly endangered the conduct of life on an entire neighboring world.”
She turned that cool regard on Khretef, who along with the faint and miserable Aurilelde he was half carrying had now come up alongside the Throne. “In your case, you must be clear that we do understand the terrible urgency of hwanthaet that you’ve been experiencing. The condition can cause irrational responses in even the most stable species when it becomes acute, and we are therefore willing to consider it to a limited extent as an extenuating circumstance for you personally—”
“What’s hwanthaet?” Kit muttered under his breath.
Nita shook her head.
“But this consideration does not exonerate you for your own errors of judgment and lapses in wizardly conduct,” Irina said. “And we have yet to determine whether further sanctions need to be taken against you personally and, if so, what form they should take.” She turned away from Khretef and Aurilelde, glancing just briefly at Kit and Nita as she did so.
“Meanwhile,” she said to Iskard and Rorsik, “as rulers of this city, immediate responsibility for the actions of its inhabitants falls on you. You—” and she indicated Iskard— “were the deviser of the superegg-based conditional stasis and revival routines, called by you the Nascence, which induced matter/spirit hibernation for you and the City of your kindred the Eilitt, and then brought them out of stasis again. Your actions since then have all flowed from a desire to destroy that other City.”