DUEL OF THE RINGLORD

a fragment of the Martian novel

A detail from Tyler Jacobson’s cover art for Andre Norton’s Forerunner.

After weeks of sifting through 500 pages of my failed Martian novel, in search of anything to salvage, I found the one of the few bits that kinda sorta works.  A number of you have asked me to share something of the failed novel so without further ado I will share with you this one bit.  If I’m saying this is what kinda sorta works, just imagine the rest of it.   

What you need to know:

--in this SF/F world the elites have the ability to channel wizard-like power (“math”) through a network embedded into their bodies (their “rings,”) 

--the narrator’s grandmother is attempting to apprehend a renegade girl rumored to possess mutant powers. 

Cover for Octavia Butler’s “Wildseed” by John Jude Palencar,

A FAMILY SQUABBLE

My grandmother had one of her generation’s most formidable rings and she was backed by her two fiercest retainers -- yet what awaited them inside the strange girl's pattern put an end to all plans, to all hopes.  The girl's math was like staring straight into the churning heart of a radium bomb at the moment of ignition.  Like staring into the Black Hole that the Sciencemasters claimed would eventually consume the Universe. 

It was like nothing my grandmother had ever encountered before; and its might was beyond reckoning. 

The instant my grandmother entered the girl’s math she was confronted with a radiant darkness, a perfect abyss which threatened and towered and howled and if she'd not been mighty herself my grandmother might have been lost to it completely, but she held on.  Within the pulsing void she forced a glimpse of a deeper blackness, endlessly roiling coils of blackness, and she had to push her math to the breaking point to grasp it and only then did she perceive something that simply could not be. 

The girl's code was both math and its own negation, eating and birthing itself endlessly, ouroborously - a metaphysical impossibility. 

A contradiction that bombed the mind.  

Whatever it was: the girl's math smashed down on them like a Holy Judgment, blew through their defenses.  My grandmother’s bodyguards attacked her from separate vectors but the girl blasted them unconscious.  The eldest of the bodyguards, Natanyael, tried to signal my grandmother to flee but before he could utter a syllable he was gone.

The Old Ones say that it is only when a people face destruction that their true hearts begin to beat.  Who knows if this is actually true, but that's sorta what happened with Irkaina.  In the instances before the girl unleashed her impossible energies, my grandmother didn't attempt to flee or to muscle through. 

In the last moments of her life, Irkania tried a trick instead. 

A silly trick.  Something her own mother had taught her from their House Arcana, a deception that young Irkaina had often used during her first duels: a shadowcast called Narcissa Considers the Pool.  A tricky bit of math that when woven properly generates a nearly identical copy of your ring pattern.  The deception creates a false signature.  Perfect for wrongfooting the young and the foolish in the middle of a duel but a sleight of hand that any ringlord with half a brain would see through in an instant, which was why young Irkania eventually abandoned the deception.  As my grandmother wrote in her journals: "What tempted me was that the girl didn't appear to be controlling her ring.  The ring itself seemed to be protecting her of its own accord, as if out of reflex."

It was a fool's gambit, a desperate play -- and yet it worked. 

The girl's ring fell for Irkania's shadow double and annihilated it.  When it realized it had missed my grandmother altogether, it pivoted contingencies at a speed incalculable but it was too late.  Irkania fired a single line of math right between the strange girl's eyes, and that was it.  The girl crumbled to the deck, her alien math extinguished.  

Irkania crawled over her dead kinsmen.  The girl's locks were so dense and tangled my grandmother initially had trouble finding her face. 

"So much trouble," Irkania wrote, "for one so ugly."

And that was how my mother met the family.