Deep Wizardry-wiz 2 (2 page)

CALLAHAN, Juanita T.

On active status E. Clinton Avenue, Hempstead, NY 11575 (516) 379-6786 Assignment location: 38 Tiana Beach Road, Southampton, NY 11829 (516) 667-9084

Nita sighed, for this morning the status note had said, like Tom’s, “Vacationing/emergencies only.” The book updated itself all over that way—pages changing sometimes second to second, reporting the status of worldgates in the area, what spells were working where, the cost of powdered newt at your local Advisory. Whatever’s come up, Nita thought, we’re expected to be able to handle it.

Of course, last time out they expected us to save the world, too... “Neets!”

She jumped, then tossed her book out the window to Kit and began climbing out. “Sssh!”

“Shhh yourself, mouth. They’re asleep. C’mon.” Once over the dune, the hiss and rumble of the midnight sea made talking easer.

“You on active status too?” Kit said.

“Yup. Let’s find the dolphin and see what’s up.”

They ran for the breakers. Kit was in bathing suit and windbreaker as Nita was, with sneakers slung over his shoulder by the laces. “Okay,” he said, “watch this.” He said something in the Speech, a long liquid-sounding sentence with a curious even-uneven rhyme in it, all of which told the night and the wind and the water what Kit wanted of them. And without pause Kit ran right up to the water, which was retreating at that particular moment—and then onto it. Under his weight it bucked and sloshed the way a waterbed will when you stand on it; but Kit didn’t sink. He ran four or five paces out onto the silver-slicked surface—then lost his balance and fell over sideways.

Nita started laughing, then hurriedly shut herself up for fear the whole beach should hear. Kit was lying on the water, his head propped up on one hand; the water bobbed him up and down while he looked at her with a sour expression. “It’s not funny. I did it all last night and it never happened once.”

“Must be that you did the spell for two this time,” Nita said, tempted to start laughing again, except that Kit would probably have punched her out. She kept her face as straight as she could and stepped out to the water, putting a foot carefully on an incoming, flattened-out wave. It took her weight, flattening more as she stepped up with the other foot and was carried backward. “It’s like the slidewalk at the airport,” she said, putting her arms out for balance and wobbling.

“Kind of.” Kit got up on hands and knees and then again, swaying. “Come on. Keep your knees bent a little. And pick up your feet.”

It was a useful warning. Nita tripped over several breakers and sprawled each time, a sensation like doing a bellywhopper onto a waterbed, until she got her sea legs. Once past the breakers she had no more trouble, and Kit led her at a bouncy trot out into the open Atlantic.

They both came to understand shortly why not many people, wizards or otherwise, walk on water much. The constant slip and slide of the water under their feet forced them to use leg muscles they rarely bothered with on land. They had to rest frequently, sitting, while they looked around them for signs of the dolphin.

At their first two rest stops there was nothing to be seen but the lights on Ponquogue and Hampton Bays and West Tiana on the mainland, three miles north. Closer, red and white flashing lights marked the entrance to Shinnecock Inlet, the break in the long strip of beach where they were staying. The Shinnecock horn hooted mournfully at them four times a minute, a lonely-sounding call. Nita’s hair stood up all over her as they sat down the third time and she rubbed her aching legs. Kit’s spell kept them from getting wet, but she was chilly; and being so far out there in the dark and quiet was very much like being in the middle of a desert—a wet, hissing barrenness unbroken for miles except by the quick-flashing white light of a buoy or boat.

“You okay?” Kit said.

“Yeah. It’s just that the sea seems ... safer near the shore, somehow. How deep is it here?”

Kit slipped his manual out of his windbreaker and pulled out a large nautical map. “About eighty feet, it looks like.”

Nita sat up straight in shock. Something had broken the surface of the water and was arrowing toward them at a great rate. It was a triangular fin. Nita scrambled to her feet. “Uh, Kit!”

He was on his feet beside her in a second, staring too. “A shark has to stay in the water,” he said, sounding more confident than he looked. “We don’t. We can jump—“

“Oh, yeah? How high? And for how long?”

The fin was thirty yards or so away. A silvery body rose up under it, and Nita breathed out in relief at the frantic, high-pitched chattering of a dolphin’s voice. The swimmer leaped right out of the water in its speed, came down, and splashed them both. “I’m late, and you’re late,” it gasped in a string of whistles and pops, “and S’reee’s about to be! Hurry!”

“Right,” Kit said, and slapped his manual shut. He said nothing aloud, but the sea’s surface instantly stopped behaving like a waterbed and started acting like water. “Whoolp!” Nita said as she sank like a stone. She didn’t get wet—that part of Kit’s spell was still working—but she floundered wildly for a moment before managing to get hold of the dolphin in the cold and dark of the water.

Nita groped up its side and found a fin. Instantly the dolphin took off, and Nita hoisted herself up to a better position, hanging from the dorsal fin so that her body was half out of the water and her legs were safely out of the way of the fiercely lashing tail. On the other side, Kit had done the same. “You might have warned me!” she said to him across the dolphin’s back.

He rolled his eyes at her. “If you weren’t asleep on your feet, you wouldn’t need warning.”

“Kit—“ She dropped it for the time being and said to the dolphin, “What’s S’reee? And why’s it going to be late? What’s the matter?”

“She,” the dolphin said. “S’reee’s a wizard. The Hunters are after her and she can’t do anything, she’s hurt too badly. My pod and another one are with her, but they can’t hold them off for long. She’s beached, and the tide’s coming in—“

Kit and Nita shot each other shocked looks. Another wizard in the area— and out in the ocean in the middle of the night? “What hunters?” Kit said, and “Your pod?” Nita said at the same moment.

The dolphin was coming about and heading along the shoreline, westward toward Quogue. “The Hunters,” it said in a series of annoyed squeaks and whistles. “The ones with teeth, who else? What kind of wizards are they turning out these days, anyway?”

Nita said nothing to this. She was too busy staring ahead of them at a long dark bumpy whale shape lying on a sandbar, a shape slicked with moonlight along its upper contours and silhouetted against the dull silver of the sea. It was the look of the water that particularly troubled Nita. Shapes leaped and twisted in it, shapes with two different kinds of fins. “Kit!”

“Neets,” Kit said, not sounding happy, “there really aren’t sharks here, the guy from the Coast Guard said so last week—“

“Tell them!” the dolphin said angrily. It hurtled through the water toward the sandbar around which the fighting continued, silent for all its viciousness. The only sound came from the dark shape that lay partly on the bar, partly off it—a piteous, wailing whistle almost too high to hear.

“Are you ready?”’ the dolphin said. They were about fifty yards from the trouble.

“Ready to what?” Kit asked, and started fumbling for his manual.

Nita started to do the same—and then had an idea, and blessed her mother for having watched Jaws on TV so many times. “Kit, forget it! Remember a couple months ago and those guys who tried to beat you up? The freeze spell?”

“Yeah...”

“Do it, do it big. I’ll feed you power!” She pounded the dolphin on the side. “Go beach! Tell your buddies to beach too!”

“But—“

“Go do it!” She let go of the dolphin’s fin and dropped into the water, swallowing hard as she saw another fin, of the wrong shape entirely, begin to circle in on her and Kit. “Kit, get the water working again!”

It took a precious second; and the next one—one of the longer seconds of Nita’s life—for her and Kit to clamber up out of the “liquid” water onto the “solid.” They made it and grabbed one another for both physical and moral support, as that fin kept coming. “The other spell set?” Nita gasped.

“Yeah—now!”

The usual immobility of a working spell came down on them both, with something added—a sense of being not one person alone, but part of a one that was somehow bigger than even Nita and Kit together could be. Inside that sudden oneness, she felt the “freeze” spell waiting like a phone number with all but one digit dialed. Kit said the one word in the Speech that set the spell free, the “last digit,” then gripped Nita’s hand hard.

Nita did her part, quickly saying the three most dangerous words in all wizardry—the words that give all of a wizard’s power over into another s hands. She felt it going from her, felt Kit shaking as he wound her power, her trust, into the spell. And then she took all her fright, and her anger at the sharks, and her pity for the poor wailing bulk on the sand, and let Kit have those too. The spell blasted away from the two of them with a shock like a huge jolt of static, then dropped down over the sandbar and the water for hundreds of feet around, sinking like a weighted net. And as if the spell had physically dragged them down, all the circling, hunting fins in the water sank out of sight, their owners paralyzed and unable to swim.

No wizardry is done without a price. Kit wobbled in Nita’s grip as if he were going to keel over. Nita had to lock her knees to keep standing. But both of them managed to stay upright until the weakness passed, and Nita looked around with grim satisfaction at the empty water. “The sharks won’t be bothering us now,” she said. “Let’s get up on the sandbar.”

It was a few seconds’ walk to where the dolphins lay beached on the bar, chattering excitedly. Once up on the sand, Kit took a look at what awaited them and groaned out loud. Nita would have too, except that she found herself busy breathing deep to keep from throwing up. Everywhere the sand was black and sticky with gobs and splatters of blood, some clotted, some fresh.

The dark bulk of the injured whale heaved up and down with her breathing, while small weak whistling noises went in and out. The whale’s skin was marked with rope burns and little pits and ragged gashes of shark bites. The greatest wound, though, the one still leaking blood, was too large for any shark to have made. It was a crater in the whale’s left side, behind the long swimming fin; a crater easily three feet wide, ragged with ripped flesh. The whale’s one visible eye, turned up to the moonlight, watched Kit and Nita dully as they came.

“What happened?” Kit said, looking at the biggest wound with disbelief and horror. “It looks like somebody bombed you.”

“Someone did,” the whale said in a long pained whistle. Nita came up beside the whale’s head and laid a hand on the black skin behind her eye. It was very hot. “It was one of the new killing-spears,” the whale said to Nita, “the kind that blasts. But never mind that. What did you do with the sharks?”

“Sank them. They’re lying on the bottom with a ‘freeze’ on them.”

“But if they don’t swim, they can’t breathe—they’ll die!” The concern in the whale’s voice astonished Nita. “Cousins, quick, kill the spell! We’re going to need their good will later.”

Nita glanced at Kit, who was still staring at the wound with a tight, angry look on his face. He glanced up at her. “Huh? Oh. Sure. Better put up a wizard’s wall first, so that the dolphins can get back in the water without getting attacked again.”           

“Right.” Nita got her book out and riffled through pages to the appropriate spell, a short-term forcefield that needed no extra supplies to produce She said the spell and felt it take hold, then sagged back against the whale and closed her eyes till the dizziness went away. Off to one side she heard Kit saying the words that released the freeze.

A few moments later fins began appearing again out on the water, circling inward toward the sandbar, then sliding away as if they bumped into something, and circling in again.

“The water will take the blood away soon enough,” the whale said. “They’ll go away and not even remember why they were here...” The whale’s eye fixed on Nita again. “Thanks for coming so quickly, cousins.”

“It took us longer than we wanted. I’m Nita. That’s Kit.”

“I’m S’reee,” the whale said. The name was a hiss and a long, plaintive, upscaling whistle.

Kit left the wound and came up to join Nita. “It was one of those explosive harpoons, all right,” he said. “But I thought those were supposed to be powerful enough to blow even big whales in two.”

“They are. Ae’mhnuu died that way, this morning.” S’reee’s whistle was bitter. “He was the Senior Wizard for this whole region of the Plateau. I was studying with him—I was going to be promoted to Advisory soon. Then the ship came, and we were doing a wizardry, we didn’t notice—“

Nita and Kit looked at each other. They had found out for themselves that a wizard is at his most vulnerable when exercising his strength. “He died right away,” S’reee said. “I took a spear too. But it didn’t explode right away; and the sharks smelled Ae’mhnuu’s blood and a great pack of them showed up to eat. They went into feeding frenzy and bit the spear right out of me. Then one of them started chewing on the spear, and the blasting part of it went off. It killed a lot of them and blew this hole in me. They got so busy eating each other and Ae’mhnuu that I had time to get away. But I was leaving bloodtrail, and they followed it. What else should I have expected? ...”

She wheezed. “Cousins, I hope one of you has skill at healing, for I’m in trouble, and I can’t die now, there’s too much to do.”

“Healing’s part of my specialty,” Nita said, and was quiet for a moment. She’d become adept, as Kit had, at fixing the minor hurts Ponch kept picking up—bee stings and cat bites and so forth. But this was going to be different.

She stepped away from S’reee’s head and went back to look at the wound, keeping tight control of her stomach. “I can seal this up all right,” she said-“But you’re gonna have a huge scar. And I don’t know how long it’ll take the muscles underneath to grow back. I’m not real good at this yet.”