Deep Wizardry-wiz 2 (6 page)

Nita made small talk with Tom for a few minutes while, in the back-ground, Peach screamed, and Annie and Monty the sheepdogs barked irritably at the macaw, who was shouting “Bad dog! Bad dog! Nonono!” at them —or possibly at Carl. Nita could imagine the scene very well—the bright airy house full of plants and animals, a very ordinary-looking place as far as the neighbors were concerned. Except that Tom spent his days doing research and development on complex spells and incantations for other wizards, and then used some of the things he discovered to make a living as a writer on the side. And Carl, who sold commercial time for a “flagship” station of one of the major television networks, might also make a deal to sell you a more unusual kind of time—say, a piece of last Thursday. The two of them were living proof that it was possible to live in the workaday world and function as wizards at the same time. Nita was very glad to know them.

“The link’s busy,” she heard Carl saying, at some distance from the phone. “Oh, never mind, there it goes. Look,” he said, apparently to one of his own advanced-level manuals, “we need an intervention authorization for an offshore area—yeah, that’s right. Here’s the numbers—“

Kit had his manual open to the spot where he’d found the notification. Nita looked over his shoulder and watched the box that said RESTRICTED INFORMATION suddenly blink out, replaced by the words SEE CHART PAGE 1096. “Got it?” Tom said.

“Almost.” Kit turned pages. Nita looked over his shoulder and found herself looking at a map of the East Coast, from Nova Scotia to Virginia. But the coast itself was squeezed far over on the left-hand side, and individual cities and states were only sketchily indicated. The map was primarily concerned with the ocean.

“Okay, I’ve got it in my book too,” Tom said. “All those lines in the middle of the water are contour lines, indicating the depth of the sea bottom. You can see that there aren’t many lines within about a hundred miles of Long Island. The bottom isn’t much deeper than a hundred feet within that distance. But then—you see a lot of contour lines packed closely together? That’s the edge of the Continental Shelf. Think of it as a cliff, or a mesa, with the North American continent sitting on top of it. Then there’s a steep drop—the cliff is just a shade less than a mile high—“

“Or deep,” Nita said.

“Whichever. About a five thousand foot drop; not straight down—it slopes a bit—but straight enough. Then the sea bottom keeps on sloping eastward and downward. It doesn’t slope as fast as before, but it goes deep-some fifteen thousand feet down; and it gets deeper yet farther out. See where it says ‘Sohm Abyssal Plain’ to the southeast of the Island, about six or seven hundred miles out?”

“It has ‘the Crushing Dark’ underneath that on our map,” Nita said. “” that the whales’ name for it?”

“Right. That area is more like seventeen, eighteen thousand feet down.”

“I bet it’s cold down there,” Kit muttered.

“Probably. Let me know when you get back,” Tom said, “because that’s where you’re going.”

Nita and Kit looked at each other in shock. “But I thought even submarines couldn’t go down that far,” Nita said.

“They can’t. Neither can most whales, normally—but it helps to be a wizard,” Tom said. “Look, don’t panic yet—“

“Go ahead! Panic!” screamed Picchu from somewhere in the background. “Do it now and avoid the June rush! Fear death by water!”

“Bird,” Carl’s voice said, also in the background, “you’re honing for a punch in the beak.”

“Violence! You want violence, I’ll give you violence! No quarter asked or given! Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead! Don’t give up the AWWWKI”

“Thanks, Carl,” Tom said, as silence fell. “Where were we? Oh, right. You won’t just be going out there and diving straight down. There’s a specific approach to the Plain. Look back closer to the Island, and you’ll see some contours drawn in dotted lines—“

“Hudson Channel,” Nita said.

“Right. That’s the old bed of the Hudson River—where it used to run a hundred thousand years ago, while all that part of the Continental Shelf was still above water. That old riverbed leads farther southeast, to the edge of the Shelf, and right over it ... there was quite a waterfall there once. See the notch in the Shelf?”

“Yeah. ‘Hudson Canyon,’ it says—“

“The Gates of the Sea,” said Tom. “That’s the biggest undersea canyon on the East Coast, and probably the oldest. It cuts right down through the Shelf. Those walls are at least two or three thousand feet high, sometimes four. Some of the canyons on the Moon and Mars could match the Hudson —but none on Earth. And for the whale-wizards, the Gates have become the traditional approach to the Great Depths and the Crushing Dark.”

The thought of canyon walls stretching above her almost a mile high gave chills. She’d seen a rockslide once, and it had made her uneasy about canyons in general. “Is it safe?” she said.

“Of course not,” Tom said, sounding cheerful. “But the natural dangers are Carl’s department; he’ll fill you in on what precautions you’ll need to take, and I suspect the whales will too.”

“ ‘Natural dangers,’ “ Kit said. “Meaning there are unnatural ones too.”

“In wizardry, when aren’t there? This much I can tell you, though. New York City has not been kind to that area. All kinds of things, even unexploded depth charges, have been dumped at the head of Hudson Canyon over the years. Most of them are marked on your map; but watch out for ones that aren’t. And the city has been dumping raw sewage into the Hudson Channel area for decades. Evidently in the old days, before people were too concerned about ecology, they thought the water was so deep that the dumping wouldn’t do any harm. But it has. Quite a bit of the sea-bottom life in that area, especially the vegetation that the fish depend on for food, has been killed off entirely. Other species have been ... changed. The manual will give you details. You won’t like them.”

Nita suspected that Tom was right. “Anyway,” he said, “let me give you the rest of this. After you do the appropriate rituals, which the whales will coach you through, the access through the Gates of the Sea takes you down through Hudson Canyon to its bottom at the lower edge of the Shelf, and then deeper and farther southeast—where the canyon turns into a valley that gets shallower and shallower as it goes. The valley ends just about where the Abyssal Plain begins, at seven hundred miles off the coast, and seventeen thousand feet down. Then you come to the mountain.”

It was on the map—a tiny set of concentric circles—but it had looked so peculiar, standing there all by itself in the middle of hundreds of miles of flatness, that Nita had doubted her judgment. “The Sea’s Tooth,” she said, reading from the map.

“Caryn Peak,” Tom agreed, giving the human name. “Some of the oceanographers think it’s simply the westernmost peak of an undersea mountain range called the Kelvin Seamounts—they’re off the eastward edge of your map. Some think otherwise; the geological history of that area is bizarre. But either way, the Peak’s an important spot. And impressive; that one peak is six thousand feet high. It stands up sheer from the bottom, all alone, a third as high as Everest.”

“Five Empire State Buildings on top of each other,” Kit said, awed. He liked tall things.

“A very noticeable object,” Tom said. “It’s functioned as landmark and meeting place and site of the whales’ great wizardries for not even they know how long. Certainly since the continents started drifting toward their present positions ... at least a hundred thousand years ago. And it may have been used by ... other sorts of wizards ... even earlier than that. There’s some interesting history in that area, tangled up with whale-wizards and human ones too.”

Tom’s voice grew sober. “Some of the wizards who specialize in history say that humans only learned wizardry with the whales’ assistance ... and even so, our brands of wizardry are different. It’s an old, old branch of the Art they practice. Very beautiful. Very dangerous. And the area around Caryn Peak is saturated with residue from all the old wizardries that whales and others, have done there. That makes any spell you work there even more dangerous.”

“S’reee said that the ‘danger’ level wouldn’t go above ‘moderate,’ “ Kit said.

“She said it shouldn’t,” Nita said.

“Probably it won’t,” Tom said. He didn’t sound convinced, though. “You should bear in mind that the ‘danger’ levels for humans and whales differ. Still, the book said she was about to be promoted to Advisory status, so she would know that— All the same ... you two keep your eyes open. Watch what agreements you make. And if you make them—keep them, to the letter. From all indications, the Song of the Twelve is a lovely wizardry, and a powerful one ... probably the most powerful magic done on a regular basis. The sources say it leaves its participants forever changed, for the better. At least, it does when it works. When it fails—which it has, once or twice in the past—it fails because some participant has broken the rules. And those times it’s failed... Well, all I can say is that I’m glad I wasn’t born yet. Be careful.”

“We will,” Nita said. “But what are the chances of something going wrong?”

“We could ask Peach,” Kit said. It was a sensible suggestion; the bird, besides doing dramatic readings from Variety and TV Guide, could also predict the future—when it pleased her.

“Good idea. Carl?”

“Here I am,” Carl said, having picked up an extension phone. “Now, Kit, about the monsters—“

“Carl, put that on hold a moment. What does the Walter Cronkite of the bird world have to say about all this?”

“I’ll find out.”

Monsters? Nita mouthed at Kit. “Listen,” she said hurriedly to Tom, “I’m going to get off now. I’ve got to be around the house when my folks leave, so they won’t worry about my little sister.”

“Why? Is she sick?”

“No. But that’s the problem. Tom, I don’t know what to do about Dairine. I thought nonwizards weren’t supposed to notice magic most of the time. I’m lot sure it’s working that way with Dairine. I think she’s getting suspicious...”

“We’ll talk. Meanwhile, Carl—what does the bird say?”

“Oh, it is, it is a splendid thing/To be a pirate kiiiiiiiiiiiiing!” Picchu was singing from somewhere in Tom’s living room.

“Picchu—“

“What’sa matter? Don’t you like Gilbert and Sullivan?”

”I told you we should never have let her watch Pirates on cable,” Tom remarked to his partner.

“Twice your peanut ration for the week,” Carl said.

“... and I did the deed that all men shun, I shot the Albatross...”

“You’re misquoting. How about no peanuts for the rest of the week—“

“Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!”

“How about no food?”

“Uh—“ There was a pause. It didn’t take Nita much imagination to picture the look that Carl was giving Picchu. She was glad no one had ever looked at her that way.

“Give.”

“Well.” The bird paused again, a long pause, and when she spoke her voice sounded more sober than Nita could remember ever hearing it. “Do what the night tells you. Don’t be afraid to give yourself away. And read the small print before you sign!”

Kit glanced at Nita with a quizzical expression; she shrugged. At the other end of the line, sounding exceptionally annoyed, Carl said to Picchu, “You call that advice? We asked you for the odds!”

“Never ask me the odds,” Picchu said promptly. “I don’t want to know. And neither do you, really.” And that end of the conversation swiftly degenerated into more loud squawking, and the excited barking of dogs, and Carl making suggestions to Picchu that were at best rather rude.

“Thanks,” Nita said to Tom. “I’ll talk to you later.” She squeezed out of the phone booth and past Dog, who growled at her as she went. Behind her, Kit said, in entirely too cheerful a tone of voice, “So, Carl, what about the monsters?”

Nita shook her head and went home.

The Blue’s Song

“Giant man-eating clams,” she said to Kit later, as they walked down an isolated stretch of Tiana Beach toward the surf. “Giant squid—“

“Krakens,” Kit said.

“I don’t care what you call them, they’re still giant squid. And squid belong in sushi. I don’t like this.”

“With luck, we won’t see any of them, Carl says.”

“When have we ever had that kind of luck? ...”

“Besides, Neets, even you can outrun a clam...”

“Cute,” she said. They splashed into the water together, glancing up and down the beach as they did so. No one was in sight; and they had left Ponch up in the dunes, looking for a good place to bury the remains of his latest water rat. “Look,” Nita said, pointing.

Several hundred yards out, there was a glitter of spray, and sunlight glanced off the curved, upleaping body of a dolphin as if from an unsheathed, upheld sword. Wild, merry chattering, a dolphin’s laughter, came to them over the water, as the leaping shape came down with a splash and another shock of spray.

“Hotshot,” Kit said. “Let’s go.”

They struck out through the breakers, into water that was again surprisingly warm. This time Nita wasn’t able to enjoy it quite as much; the thought of undersea volcanoes was much with her. But even she couldn’t be depressed for long when they paused to rest a moment, dog-paddling, and from behind came the nudge in the back she remembered, followed by a delphine laugh. “You rotten thing,” she said, turning to rub Hotshot affectionately. “I’m gonna get you for the first time you did that.”

“You’ll have to catch me first,” Hotshot said with a wicked chuckle—as well he might have, for nothing in the Sea except perhaps a killer whale or one of the great sharks on the hunt was fast enough to catch a dolphin that didn’t want to be caught.

“Where’s S’reee?” Kit said.

“Out in deeper water, by the Made Rock. HNii’t’s change could be done right here, but the kind of whale you’re going to be would ground at this depth, Kit. Take hold; I’ll tow you.”

The fishing platform was once more covered with seagulls, which rose in a screaming cloud at the sight of Kit and Nita and Hotshot. “I’ll meet you later, out at sea,” Hotshot said, leaving them beside a rusty metal ladder that reached down into the water.