A Wizard of Mars New Millennium Edition Read online

  Young Wizards

  New Millennium Editions

  Book 9:

  A Wizard of Mars

  Diane Duane

  Errantry Press

  A department of

  The Owl Springs Partnership

  County Wicklow

  Republic of Ireland

  Copyright page

  A Wizard of Mars

  New Millennium Edition

  Errantry Press

  County Wicklow, Ireland

  Original edition copyright © 2010 by Diane Duane

  Revised edition copyright © 2012 by Diane Duane

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to the following address:

  Donald Maass Literary Agency

  Suite 801, 121 West 27th Street

  New York, NY 10001

  USA

  Publication history:

  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt North American hardcover edition, April 2010

  Magic Carpet Books paperback edition, August 2011

  Errantry Press International ebook edition, 2012

  This Young Wizards New Millennium Edition of A Wizard of Mars follows the text of the 2012 Errantry Press International Edition, and has been revised and updated to reflect the new timeline that begins in the New Millennium Edition of So You Want to Be a Wizard.

  Dedication

  For Kim and Ben and Greg

  and Jules and ERB,

  and, most affectionately, for Ray and Robert:

  ...because (one way or another)

  we are all Martians:

  — and for Peter Murray,

  much-missed moderator of

  the Young Wizards Discussion Forums,

  something he'd really have liked:

  that pesky timeline, sorted at last

  Rubrics

  ...Mars, why art thou bent

  On kindling thus the Scorpion, his tail

  Portending evil and his claws aflame?...

  Why planets leave their paths and through the void

  Thus journey on obscure? ’Tis war that comes,

  Fierce rabid war: the sword shall bear the rule...

  (Pharsalia, Marcus Annaeus Lucanus: Book 1)

  The one departed | is the one who returns

  From the straitened circle | and the shortened night,

  When the blue star rises | and the water burns:

  Then the word long-lost | comes again to light

  To be spoke by the watcher | who silent yearns

  For the lost one found. Yet to wreak aright,

  She must slay her rival | and the First World spurn

  Lest the one departed | no more return.

  (The Red Rede, 1-8)

  Truth is always late, always last to arrive, limping along with Time.

  (The Art of Worldly Wisdom, Baltasar Gracián, §146)

  Time fix

  Late June, 2010

  1: Terra Cognita

  The problem, Kit thought, scowling at the paper, isn’t the basic shape, so much. It’s what to do with the legs...

  He briefly glanced up from the pencil sketch he’d been doing in the margin of his notebook and looked wearily up at Mr. Machiavelli, his history teacher, as if he’d actually been paying attention to anything the Mack was saying. It was hard enough to care, this time of year. One more week till school’s out. One more week!— and especially late on a Friday afternoon, when the air-conditioning was broken.

  Again! Kit thought. He was sweltering, along with everyone else in the place. Only little, balding Mr. Mack, strolling back and forth in front of the blackboard and holding forth on Asian politics of the 50s, seemed untouched by the heat and humidity. He paused to write the word “Pyongyang” on the board, pausing in the middle of the process to stare at the word as if not sure of the spelling.

  Oh, come on, Mack, give us a break: who cares about this stuff right now?! But the Mack, as the whole class knew too well by now, was unstoppable; the heat slowed him down no more than cold or rain or dark of night probably would have. People names and place names and endless dates just kept on rolling out of him, and now he turned to the blackboard and started writing again...

  Kit let out a sigh and glanced at the air vents at the back of the room. Cold air should have been coming out of them, but right now they were emitting nothing but an occasional faint clunking noise as somewhere in the system a feeder vent kept trying and failing to open. The school system was having budget troubles, which meant that some equipment that needed to be completely replaced wasn’t even getting maintenance. But knowing this didn’t make the heat any easier to bear.

  People in the back of the room were fanning themselves with paperwork and notebooks. Kids sitting by the open windows were leaning toward them, courting any passing breath of air, and (when Mr. Machiavelli wasn’t looking) panting obviously, as if that would help. Without stopping what he was saying, Mr. Mack had paused to flip open a book on his desk and peer down at it: he shoved a bookmark into it and turned back to the blackboard, starting to write something else. How can this not be bothering him when he’s got a whole suit on? Kit thought. Doesn’t he have sweat glands??

  The cooling system clunked several times more, to no effect. Kit made a face, glanced at the clock. It seemed hopelessly stuck at twenty past two, and the class wasn’t going to let out until quarter of three...which from where Kit was sitting felt like at least a year away. I can’t stand it anymore. And anyway, none of them’ll notice—

  Very quietly Kit reached down into the book bag beside his desk and pulled out his wizard’s manual. At the moment, the manual looked like his history textbook— which was perfectly normal, since earlier this year Kit had stuck a chameleon spell on the manual’s exterior, causing it to imitate the proper textbook for whatever class he happened to be in.

  Kit turned idly through the manual’s pages to the one that held the spell he’d first crafted to do repairs on the school’s cooling system, back when it broke down during the unseasonal heat wave back in April. He’d had to use the spell several times since, and he’d had to rework it every time, because engineers from other schools kept coming over to work on the system— and every time they did, they disrupted whatever quick fix Kit had managed to implement the last time he’d done the fix-it spell. Gotta get in here sometime during vacation and do a real fix on the whole system, Kit thought. Otherwise things’ll get even worse when the cold weather comes around...

  The words of the spell, in the long, curved strokes and curlicue hooks-and-crooks of the wizardly Speech, laid themselves out before him on the manual page. Hovering above them, faint and hardly to be seen, was the shadow of the camouflage page that any casual, nonwizardly observer would see if he or she looked at the book.

  There was of course no question of saying the spell out loud in a situation like this. Gonna be kind of a strain doing it on the quiet, Kit thought. But this heat’s just too much. And what’s it like on the other side of the building, where the Sun’s hitting? The kids over there must be dying. Let’s just call this my good deed for the day.

  He closed his eyes for a moment, working to make the requisite “quiet zone” inside his mind, and then opened his eyes again and started silently reading the words of the wizardry in the Speech. Slowly the wizardry started to work: a silence started to fall around Kit as the universe seemed to lean in around him, listening to the spell.

&n
bsp; In the growing silence, Kit watched the room around him seem to fade, while the normally invisible layout of the cooling system now started to become visible, glowing like a wireframe diagram stretching out and away from the history classroom. Kit didn’t need to go hunting through the system to find the source of the problem. He knew where it was, and anyway, the locator functions of the spell would have shown him the duct near the heart of the building, just this side of the heat pump in the school’s engineering center.

  Kit peered at the duct in his mind, concentrating on the source of the problem— a vent shutter that looked something like a small, boxy Venetian blind.

  “Okay,” he said silently in the Speech. “What is it this time?”

  The guy came again, said the vent shutter buried deep in the duct, and he tightened those bolts up too much...

  “Said” was of course not the best way to put it— inanimate objects don’t communicate the way organic ones do— but to a wizard like Kit, who was good at communicating with such objects, the way the information passed was enough like talking and listening to think of it that way.

  The wizardry showed Kit the bolts that the vent shutter meant: a series of them, up and down each side of it, fixing its shutter hinges to the inside of the duct. “Got it,” Kit said silently. “Okay, here we go—”

  He turned his attention to the bolts. “Come on, guys, lighten up. You don’t need all that tension. Just let yourselves unwind...”

  Half of wizardry was persuading people, creatures, or objects to do what you wanted them to. The rest of it was knowing what words in the Speech would get the intention across... and by now, Kit knew the words entirely too well. Slowly, the wizardry showed him the bolts loosening up one by one. “Not too much,” he said in his mind. “We don’t want the shutter to fall out. Yeah, that’s it... just like that.”

  The last bolt rotated a quarter turn. “That’s the ticket,” Kit said in his mind. “That should do it. Thanks, guys.”

  With one finger Kit traced a series of curves on the desk, the “unknotting” routine to undo the Wizard’s Knot that fastened most spells closed and started them working. The wizardry obediently unraveled: the glowing wireframe of the duct structure faded out as the classroom faded in around Kit again. And from far away in the building, echoing down the air vents that led into the room, Kit heard something go clunk, just once— the vent’s shutters, locking into the correct position. After a few moments, a breath of cooler air started sighing out of the vent.

  Kit let out a breath of his own. It was tough to conceal the effects of doing a spell, even a minor one like this. He felt as if he’d just run up a few flights of stairs, and it was now taking some effort to keep his breathing regular. For the moment, all Kit could do was shut his manual and pick up his pencil, his hand shaking with a fine muscle tremor born of the brief exertion. But the air was cooling already. Worth it, Kit thought, even for just twenty minutes... He glanced again at the sketches in his notebook’s margin, the topmost of which showed a single slender tower rising from a forest of smaller ones, all surrounded by a barren, otherwordly landscape. The tower in particular was fuzzy around the edges, with erasures and redrawing: rendering architecture wasn’t Kit’s strong suit. But the figures he’d drawn farther down the page were better, especially the—

  “Not too bad,” said a voice over his shoulder. “Better put some more clothes on her, though, or you’ll lose your PG-13 rating.”

  Kit froze as the laughter of his classmates spread around the room.

  Mr. Mack’s hand came down and picked up the notebook. “Actually, as regards the draftsmanship, not bad at all,” his history teacher said. “I’d rate her babe quotient at, oh, an eight or so. Make it eight-point-five for her, uh, attributes.” More snickering went around the class. Kit’s face went hot. “But as for the content...” Mr. Mack gave Kit a disapproving glance. “Not sure what it has to do with the aftermath of the Korean War...”

  “Uh. Nothing,” Kit said.

  “Nice to see that you realize that, Mr. Rodriguez,” Mr. Mack said, wandering back up to his desk and dropping the notebook on it. “So maybe you’ll exculpate yourself by filling us in on the continuing significance of the thirty-eighth parallel...”

  Kit swallowed hard. This kind of thing was so much easier to do on paper: the shufflings and mutterings and under-the-breath comments of his classmates routinely filled him with more dread than being locked in a closet with the Lone Power. “It’s the border between North and South Korea,” he said. “Both sides have it heavily fortified. It’s also one of the few land borders you can see from space, because there’s normal city light on the southern side of the line, and it’s almost pitch-black on the north...”

  Slowly his throat got less dry. Kit went on for a minute or two more about famines and political tensions, trying to remember some of the really good stuff that would have been just a couple of pages back in the notebook right in front of him if he hadn’t been drawing in it. Finally Mr. Mack held up a hand.

  “Enough,” he said. “Ms. Simmons, maybe you’d pick up where the artistic Mr. Rodriguez left off. What effect is the UN’s food-aid effort likely to have on the North in view of the present political situation?”

  “Uh—”

  Kit had little amusement to spare for poor Delinda Simmons’s ensuing struggle to find an answer. Between doing the spell, trying to hide it, and then having to try to recall notes he’d taken two weeks before, he was now stressed to breathlessness. He concentrated on acting like he was paying attention, while being grateful Mr. Mack had let him off the hook so soon— he’d seen some of his classmates go through scenes of torment that had lasted a lot longer.

  At last Mr. Machiavelli held up a hand, with just a glance at the clock. Kit glanced at it, too. Somehow it was still only two thirty. Boy, you don’t need wizardry to get time to run slow, sometimes ...“All right,” Mr. Machiavelli said. “Were this an ordinary day, you’d all have to sit here and suffer through me doing a recap of what the work required for next Friday was going to be. But, lucky you, for you there is no next Friday! Where you’ll all be by then, since classes end on Tuesday, I neither know nor care. Me, I’ll be up on the North Fork, wearing a really beat-up straw hat and helping an old friend prune her grapevines— not that any of you will care. What you will care about, of course, are your final grades.”

  A great stillness settled over the classroom, broken only by the sighing of cool air from the vent. Mr. Mack turned toward his desk, flipped his briefcase up onto it, and opened it. “These exams,” he said, “as you know, are sixty percent of your final grade. As usual, there’ll probably be questions and comments from some of your parents.” Mr. Mack drew himself up as tall as was possible for him: maybe five feet two. “But you, and they, should know by now that there aren’t going to be any changes. Whatever you’ve got, you’ve brought on yourselves. So, those of you who have recourse to inhalers, get them out now...”

  He brought out a pile of papers stapled together in six-sheet bundles, and started to work his way up and down the aisles, starting from the leftmost row. Kit sat there with his palms sweating, grateful that at least Mr. Mack wasn’t one of those sadists who called you up to the desk in front of everybody to get the bad news.

  In the first row, subdued mutters of “Yes!” or “Oh, no...” were already going up. A couple of seats behind Kit and to the left, his buddy Raoul Eschemeling got his paper and looked at the back page, where Mr. Mack usually wrote the grade. Then he raised his eyebrows at Kit, grinned at him, at the same time making an “OK, not bad ...!” gesture with one hand.

  Kit swallowed as Mr. Mack came to his row, gave Gracie Mackintosh her paper, gave Tim Walenczak, in front of Kit, his... and then glanced down at Kit, shook his head slightly, and walked on by. “I’ll see you after class,” Mr. Mack said.

  The sweat all over Kit went cold in a flash. Some kids in the class broke out in either a low moan of “Uh-oh...” or some really nasty laughs that
were badly smothered, on purpose. Kit went hot again at the laughter. There were some junior boys and a senior in here who resented being tracked into this class with the smart younger kids; these guys were constantly ragging Kit about his grades being too good.

  As if something like that’s possible where my folks are concerned! Kit thought. But nonetheless, he could just hear them: He’s a geek, just a nerd, it comes naturally, he can’t help it. Or else: teacher’s pet, little brownnoser, who knows what he’s doing to Mack to get grades like this... They were just the normal jeers that Kit had long ago learned to expect, and it didn’t take mind reading or any other kind of wizardry to hear them going through those kids’ brains right now.

  Kit could do nothing now but sit there as students all around him got their papers while his own desk remained terrifyingly empty. Oh, no. Oh, no. What’s going on? What have I done now? And the tragedy was that he had no idea. He racked his brain for anything that made any kind of sense, as the last papers in the right-hand row went out.

  Mr. Mack made his way back to his desk. “Not a brilliant result, all told,” Mr. Mack said as he closed his briefcase and put it aside. “Workmanlike, in many cases. Dull, in a lot of others. You people need to get it through your heads that spitting a teacher’s exact words back at him in an essay, or adding material that’s plainly been plagiarized from encyclopedias and online sources, won’t cut it... with me, or the much tougher teachers to follow, who’ll get really offended at you insulting their intelligence with such lackluster output. None of your result exactly shone, and none of your results were utter disasters. With a very few exceptions.”