“We not only accept it,” said Rorsik, “but we embrace it. The other planet is no concern of ours. If they are not strong enough to accept the return of the People of the First World to the system where we were the First Life, then they should learn such strength. Or possibly vacate that world in favor of a people better suited to occupy it.”
Nita blinked, unable to believe what she was hearing. “Kit,” she said. “Listen to them! They’re talking about invading the Earth! What are you doing here with these guys?”
Khretef shifted uneasily but said nothing.
Aurilelde looked at Nita with what was supposed to look like understanding, but Nita didn’t miss the slight edge of contempt in the expression. “He came to us first because I called him,” she said. “Because he was a fragment, as this was once a fragment—” She touched the Shard that lay between her breasts. “And is now reunited with the kernel from which it was severed. For a long time the test lay waiting, while all of us and our cities lay in stasis, and while Khretef’s soul waited and worked to be reborn. Finally he was. And sure enough he found his way here along with others— my hero, my warrior, my other half— and took the test, and freed the power that we needed to be alive again.”
She looked up at him and took his hand. “As Kit, he finished the quest that once was his bane: broke open the Nascence and brought home the Shard, the tool to use the Nascence’s power.”
Nita folded her arms, getting more annoyed by the moment at Aurilelde’s manner. “There were more tests than just that one. And not just for guys.”
“Those were of no concern to me,” Aurilelde said. “Knowing what daughters of another world might make of the ancient Daughters’ tales of past years mattered far less than finding the male wizard in whom our savior would lie hidden. Only to him and his kind would the real tests present themselves—especially to the right one. Now that he has come again through them, we all live once more. And he lives as Khretef.” She smiled up at him.
Khretef smiled back, which Nita found hard to bear. But she looked Aurilelde in the eye. “So nothing we found matters, huh?” she said. “Even the Red Rede?”
For a second Aurilelde’s expression changed, as if she was at a loss. “You don’t know what it means,” Nita said. “Or not all of it. You think you do, though. You’ve convinced yourself that you understand it. I wouldn’t be so sure.”
Then she stopped, because she had no idea what she’d meant by that and was desperate not to be asked.
Aurilelde forced that superior smile again. “The Rede is no issue to me, or our people. All that matters is changing this world so that we can live in it again.”
“So,” Mamvish said, “you will not stop.”
Slowly Aurilelde stood up, looking at them. Nita was watching the Shard. Has that dumped its power into the main body of the kernel now, she wondered, or is it just immaterially connected? If somebody could grab it—
Aurilelde was laughing. “Stop? We will do no such thing! We’ve spent enough terrible endless years waiting trapped half alive in the cold and dark, waiting to be freed in a better time. That time has come! And if you think an overgrown slessth and a scrawny bad-mannered brat-child who was never even off her own planet until a few years ago are going to stop the rebirth of a mighty race that ruled this system hundreds of millions of years before your planet was even solid, then you’d better think again.”
Nita’s eyes narrowed. “One last time,” she said. “Before we start dealing with you, I want to talk to Kit.”
Aurilelde simply squeezed Khretef’s hand, then smiled at Nita. “But you still don’t understand, do you? He returned to us as soon as he was able to, some hours ago. And as soon as that happened, he was absorbed.”
She smiled up at Khretef again. “The more senior soul always has priority in any such meeting. It didn’t take much doing: he was young and inexperienced, and not as wholly there as either of us are.” She looked at Nita with what was perhaps meant to be kindness. “If you really want so to be with him,” she said, “maybe you should consider submitting yourself to the same fate. I dare say I could fit you in somewhere.”
Nita flushed with fury. But she knew what to do with that. “Don’t count on it,” she said.
“And why wouldn’t I? Surely you can see my Khretef far exceeds the incomplete fragment you’ve fastened onto! He’s a child of the First World, a warrior, a great wizard, greater than anything you or your poor Kit would ever have been. You two are just shadows. Khretef and I are the substance, the originals. And Khretef lived for me. He died for me! Whereas your little Kit seems merely to have been saved from dying for you once or twice. Sometimes even by you—”
Nita looked at Aurilelde and concentrated on holding still. “If you think you’re holding some kind of moral high ground because somebody’s died for you,” she said, her voice shaking, “I’ve been there, and what you’re displaying now looks nothing like it. And as for the possibility that I might want to make up any part of you—” She laughed. “That’s not gonna happen. So turn him loose, and then we’ll talk about what happens to this planet.”
Aurilelde regarded her quietly. “No,” she said after a moment, “if that’s your response, the talking’s over. So, to wreak aright—” She made a casual gesture at Nita.
And the world upended itself around Nita and dumped her on the ground…
In desperate cold and freezing vacuum. Nita had just sense enough to instantly close her eyes and let out the breath she was tempted to hold. Then she got her life-support force field working again, just before something else happened all around her: a shudder, a strange feeling of change and negation—
She took an experimental breath, found that there was air, opened her eyes. She was sitting on red-brown dirt, out under an early morning sky. Why does this look familiar? she thought.
She stood up, brushing herself off, and looked around. Morning, and still pretty early in the sol, she thought. That puts me, let’s see—
Nita glanced toward the southern horizon and froze. Between her and the pale, pinky Sun, something was rising up that filtered and dimmed that light. It was a wave, easily a hundred feet thick in this gravity, and easily a mile high. Up and up it reared, taller by far now than the mountain, even at that distance leaning up over Nita, leaning farther out, the great sparkling arch of it stretching out over the top of the crater basin and shadowing the mountains in it like a vast, downward-curving smoked-glass roof. The distant Sun was caught in the oncoming wave, flickering, flaring brighter briefly as the water sporadically lensed its light. When the water burns—
But the Sun was struggling to shine now, the thickness of the wave obscuring it as it grew, putting it out.
From what seemed a million years ago, she heard a scratchy bird voice, the voice of a scarlet macaw, saying: Fear death by water!
Oh, no, Nita thought. Oh, no. That dream… it wasn’t a dream.
It’s now.
14: Aurorae Chaos
Nita looked southward across the vast impact basin at the oncoming wall of water. There’s enough water frozen on Mars to flood the whole planet thirty feet deep, she remembered Kit telling her so many times that she had to threaten him with whacking to make him stop.
Now you could repeat it fifty times in a row and I wouldn’t care, she said to Kit, wherever he was, as long as it was really you saying it! But right now she had a more serious problem, because a significant portion of that water was apparently coming right at her. “Bobo,” Nita said. “What is this I’m standing on?”