Wizards At War

Ronan looked nonplussed. You’re all we have to work with, said the One’s Champion. And you’ve always produced the result before. Suddenly Ronan grinned; it was a sour look. “See, this is your reward for not letting the Lone One defeat you a long time ago.”

“You wouldn’t think it was so funny if you knew what Its idea of defeat usually looks like,” Kit said. “And I still wish the Powers thought we were a little more clueless. We might get things done faster.”

But not as effectively, the Champion said.

“Yeah, well,” Nita said, sounding uncomfortable. She turned her attention back to her manual, and when her gaze was turned away, Kit sneaked a concerned look at her. Nita had been as unnerved as Filif when they’d first gotten up here, and to Kit’s eye, she still looked pale. “Probably we should start with the cities,” Nita said. “There are two city-hives on the bigger of the two continents, kind of like giant anthills. They’re a few hundred miles apart. They’ve been fighting each other, on and off, for—” Nita looked at the numbers on the timeline indicator that shone on the page, and squinted in disbelief. “Millions of years?”

“They must really be enjoying it,” Sker’ret said dryly, “to keep the war going so long.”

“I don’t know if enjoy would be the right word,” Nita said, turning another page. “Each side sees the other as a terrible threat.” She glanced at Sker’ret. “Just think about it. If each of the Yaldiv cities always saw itself as the only being in the world—and then all of a sudden another one turned up, one that thought of itself as the only being in the world—”

“Then both sides have a great reason to panic,” Ronan said. “And an excuse to wipe the other side out.”

“It looks like somebody might already have had a run at that,” Kit said, turning a page in his own manual. “Have you looked at the background radiation numbers for this place?”

Nita looked surprised. “I thought maybe those were so high because we’re so close to the star.”

Kit shook his head, looking increasingly grim. “Oh, yeah, the atmosphere’s real ionized, but that’s not going to account for the plutonium residue all over the place.” He pointed at the manual page. “Look here. And over there—”

Filif shook all over, a horrified shudder. “Someone here was using atomics?” he said. “The Kindler must have driven them completely insane.”

“It’s a popular kind of crazy,” Kit said. “Unfortunately.”

“You’ll be telling me next that they burn their hydrocarbons!”

“Uh, no,” Kit said. “But it looks like there was a more developed civilization here once. A real long time ago. There’s nothing left now. It’s been completely degraded.”

“Were the creatures here part of that civilization?” Sker’ret said to Nita. “Or are they a successor species?”

Nita shook her head. “No way to tell. Almost all the rest of the history section is blocked out. ‘Data withheld.’”

“And here’s something else that’s kind of nasty,” Ronan said, glancing back at the group. He had been looking off into the distance, the way Irish wizards did when consulting their memory-based version of the manual. “All these creatures’ve got a significant, aware fraction of the Lone Power as part of their souls.”

Nita turned a horrified look on him. “Are you saying that the whole Yaldiv species is overshadowed?”

It’s rather worse than that, the One’s Champion said. And rather more permanent. They’re all avatars.

Everyone stared at Ronan. “All of them are mortal versions of the Lone One?” Sker’ret said. “How’s that possible? Such a multiple embodiment would require immense power.”

Which It has, said the Champion. But, yes, even for one of us, this kind of power outlay would be significant. My guess is that this culture has either been owned for so long that this kind of avataric presence has simply seeped into the species’ nature over millennia. Or else the manifestation is something new, a test bed for something the Lone Power is planning.

“Probably a good reason for the world’s history to be blocked,” Filif said, “at least from the Lone One’s point of view. It would be a fair guess that we’d have a better idea where to start looking for the Instrumentality if we knew more about when this process started, and what this world has been through.”