Deep Wizardry-wiz 2 (7 page)

Kit and Nita climbed up it and walked across the platform to where they could look down at S’reee, who was rolling in the wavewash.

“You’re early,” she whistled, putting her head up out of the water at them, “and it’s just as well; I’m running a bit late. I went a-Summoning last night, but I didn’t find most of the people—so we’ll have to make a stop out by the Westernmost Shoals today. Sandy Hook, you call it.”

“New Jersey?” Nita said, surprised. “How are we going to get all the way out there and back before—“

“It’s going to be all right, HNii’t,” S’reee said. “Time doesn’t run the same under the waters as it does above them, so the Sea tells me. Besides, a humpback swims fast. And as for Kit—well, one change at a time. It’ll come more easily for you, HNii’t; you’d best go first.”

Wonderful, Nita thought. She had long been used to being picked last for things; having to go first for anything gave her the jitters. “What do I have to do?” she said.

“Did you have a look at your book last night?”

“Uh-huh. I understand most of what we’re going to be doing; it’s fairly straightforward. But there was some business I didn’t understand very well—“

“The part about shapechanging.”

“Yeah. There wasn’t that much in the book, S’reee. I think it might have been missing some information.”

“Why? What did it tell you?”

“Only a lot of stuff about the power of imagination.” She was perplexed. “S’reee, aren’t there supposed to be words or something? A specific spell, or materials we need?”

“For shapechange? You have everything you need. Words would only get in the way,” said S’reee. “It’s all in the being. You pretend hard enough, and sooner or later what you’re pretending to be, you are. The same as with other things.”

“Oh, c’mon, S’reee,” Kit said. “If somebody who wasn’t a wizard jumped into the water and pretended to be a whale, I don’t care how hard they pretended, nothing would happen without wizardry—“

“Exactly right, Kit. Wizardry—not one particular spell. The only reason it works for you is that you know wizardry works and are willing to have it so. Belief is no good either; belief as such always has doubt at the bottom. It’s knowing that makes wizardry work. Only knowing can banish doubt, and while doubt remains, no spell, however powerful, will function properly. ‘Wizardry does not live in the unwilling heart,’ the Sea says. There’d be lots more wizards if more people were able to give up doubt—and belief. Like any other habit, though, they’re hard to break...”

“It did take me a while to know for sure that it wasn’t just a coincidence when the thing I’d done a spell for actually happened as soon as I’d done the spell,” Kit admitted. “I guess I see the problem.”

“Then you’re ready for the solution,” S’reee said. “Past the change itself, the chief skill of unassisted shapechanging lies in not pretending so hard that you can’t get back again. And as I said, HNii’t, you have an advantage; we’ve shared blood. You have humpback in you now—not that our species are so far apart anyway; we’re all mammals together. I suppose the first thing you’d better do is get in the water...”

Nita jumped in, bobbed to the surface again. “And that stuff around you is going to have to go,” S’reee added, looking with mild perplexity at Nita’s bathing suit. Nita shot a quick look over her shoulder. For a moment, Kit just gazed innocently down at her, refusing to look away—then he turned, rolling his eyes.

Nita skinned hurriedly out of the suit and called to Kit, “While you’re up there, put a warding spell on the platform. I don’t want the gulls doing you-know-what all over my suit while we’re gone. Or yours.” She flung the wet lump of bathing suit out of the water overhanded; it landed with a sodden thwack! at which Kit almost turned around again. “Can we get on with this?” Nita said to S’reee.

“Surely. HNii’t, are you all right?” S’reee said.

“Yes, fine, let’s do it!” Nita said.

“So begin!” said S’reee, and began singing to herself as she waited.

Nita paddled for a moment in the water, adjusting to not having her bathing suit on. Saying “Begin to what?” especially with Kit listening, seemed incredibly stupid, so she just hung there in the water for a few moments and considered being a whale. I don’t have the faintest idea what this is supposed to feel like, she thought desperately. But I should be able to come up with something. I am a wizard, after all.

Nita got an idea. She took a deep breath, held it, and slowly began to relax into the sound. Her arms, as she let them go limp, no longer supported her; she sank, eyes open, into salty greenness. It’s all right, she thought. The air’s right above me if I need it. She hung weightless in the green, thinking of nothing in particular.

Down there in the water, S’reee’s note seemed louder, fuller; it vibrated against the ears, against the skin, inside the lungs, filling everything. And there was something familiar about it. Cousin, S’reee had called her; and We have blood in common, she had said. So it should be easy. A matter of remembering, not what you have been ... but what, somewhere else, you are. Simply allow what is, somewhere else, to be what is here—and the change is done, effortless. Nita shut her eyes on the greenness and trusted to the wizardry inside her. That was it. “Wizardry does not live in the unwilling heart.” Not the kind of will that meant gritted teeth, resisting something else, like your own disbelief, that was trying to undermine you—not “willpower”—but the will that was desire, the will so strong that it couldn’t be resisted by all the powers of normality...

Where am I getting all this? Nita didn’t know, didn’t care. To be a whale, she thought. To float like this all the time, to be weightless, like an astronaut. But space is green, and wet, and warm, and there are voices in it, and things growing. Freedom: no walls, no doors. And the songs in the water... Her arms were feeling heavy, her legs felt odd when she kicked; but none of it mattered. Something was utterly right, something was working. Nita began to feel short of air. It hadn’t worked all the way, that was all. She would get it right the next time. She stroked for the surface, broke it, opened her eyes to the light— and found it different. First and oddest—so that Nita tried to shake her head in disbelief, and failed, since she suddenly had no neck—the world was split in two, as if with an axe. Trying to look straight ahead of her didn’t work. The area in front of her had become a hazy uncertainty comprised of two sets of peripheral vision. And where the corners of her eyes should have been, she now had two perfectly clear sets of sideways vision that nonetheless felt like “forward.” She was seeing in colors she had no names for, and many she had names for were gone. Hands she still seemed to have, but her fingers hung down oddly long and heavy, her elbows were glued to her sides, and her sides themselves went on for what seemed years. Her legs were gone; a tail and graceful flukes were all she had left. Her nose seemed to be on the top of her head, and her mouth somewhere south of her chin; and she resolved to ask S’reee, well out of Kit’s hearing, what had happened to some other parts of her. “S’reee,” Nita said, and was amazed to hear it come out of the middle of her head, in a whistle instead of words, “it was easy!”

“Come on, HNii’t,” S’reee said. “You’re well along in wizardry at this point; you should know by now that it’s not the magic that’s exciting—its what you do with it afterward.”

More amazement yet. Nita wanted to simply roll over and lie back in the water at the sheer richness of the sound of S’reee’s words. She had done the usual experiments in school that proved water was a more efficient conductor of sound than air. But she hadn’t dreamed of what that effect would be like when one was a whale, submerged in the conducting medium and wearing a hundred square feet of skin that was a more effective hearing organ than any human ear. Suddenly sound was a thing that stroked the body, sensuous as a touch, indistinguishable from the liquid one swam in.

More, Nita could hear echoes coming back from what she and S’reee had said to each other; and the returning sound told her, with astonishing precision, the size and position of everything in the area—rocks on the bottom, weed three hundred meters away, schools of fish. She didn’t need to see them. She could feel their textures on her skin as if they touched her; yet she could also distinctly perceive their distance from her, more accurately than she could have told it with mere sight. Fascinated, she swam a couple of circles around the platform, making random noises and getting the feel of the terrain.

“I don’t believe it,” someone said above Nita, in a curious, flat voice with no echoes about it. Is that how we sound? Nita thought, and surfaced to look at Kit out of first one eye, then the other. He looked no different from the way he usually did, but something about him struck Nita as utterly hilarious, though at first she couldn’t figure out what it was. Then it occurred to her. He had legs.

“You’re next, Kit,” S’reee said. “Get in the water.” Nita held her head out of water and stared at Kit for a moment. He didn’t say anything, and after a few seconds of watching him get so red she could see it through his sunburn, Nita submerged, laughing like anything—a sound exactly like oatmeal boiling hard.

Nita felt the splash of his jump all over her. Then Kit was paddling in the water beside her, looking at her curiously. “You’ve got barnacles,” he said.

“That’s as may be, Kit,” S’reee said, laughing herself. “Look at what I brought for you.”

Kit put his head under the water for a moment to see what she was talking about. For the first time, Nita noticed that S’reee was holding something delicately in her mouth, at the very tip-end of her jaw. If spiders lived in the Sea, what S’reee held might have been a fragment torn from one of their webs. It was a filmy, delicate, irregular meshwork, its strands knotted into a net some six feet square. The knotting was an illusion, as Nita found when she glided closer to it. Each “knot” was a round swelling or bulb where several threads joined. Flashes of green-white light rippled along the net whenever it moved, and all Nita’s senses, those of whale and wizard alike, prickled with the electric feeling of a live spell, tangled in the mesh and imPatient to be used.

“You must be careful with this, Kit,” S’reee said. “This is a whalesark, and a rare thing. A sark can only be made when a whale dies, and the magic involved is considerable.”

“What is it?” Kit said, when he’d surfaced again.

“It’s a sort of shadow of a whale’s nervous system, made by wizardry. At the whale’s death, before the lifelightning’s gone, a spell-constructed energy duplicate of the whale’s brain and nerves is made from the pattern laid down by the living nerves and brain. The duplicate then has an ‘assisted shapechange’ spell woven into it. When the work’s done properly, contact with the sark is enough to change the wearer into whatever kind of whale the donor was.”

S’reee tossed her head. Shimmering, the sark billowed fully open, like a curtain in the wind. “This is a sperm-whalesark, like Aivaaan who donated it. He was a wizard who worked these waters several thousand full Moons ago, and something of a seer; so that when he died, instead of leaving himself wholly to the Sea, Aivaaan said that we should make a sark of him, because there would be some need. Come try it on for size, Kit.”

Kit didn’t move for a moment. “S’reee—is what’s his name, Aivaaan, in there? Am I going to be him, is that it?”

S’reee looked surprised. “No, how did you get that idea?”

“You said this was made from his brain,” Nita said.

“Oh. His under-brain, yes—the part of the brain that runs breathing and blood flow and such. As for the rest of Aivaaan, his mind—I don’t think so. Not that I’m any too sure where ‘mind’ is in a person. But you should still be K!t, by what the Sea tells me. Come on, time’s swimming.”

“What do I do with it?”

“Just put it around you and wrap it tight. Don’t be afraid to handle it roughly. It’s stronger than it looks.” She let go of the sark. It floated in the water, undulating gently in the current. Kit took another breath, submerged, reached down, and drew the sark around him.

“Get back, HNii’t,” S’reee said. Nita backfinned several times her own length away from Kit, not wanting to take her eyes off him. He was exhaling, slowly sinking feet-first, and with true Rodriguez insouciance he swirled the sark around him like Zorro putting on a new cape. Kit’s face grew surprised, though, as the “cape” continued the motion, swirling itself tighter and tighter around him, binding his arms to his sides.

Alarmed, Kit struggled, still sinking, bubbles rising from him as he went down. The struggling did him no good, and it suddenly became hard to see him as the wizardry in the whalesark came fully alive, and light danced around Kit and the sark. Nita had a last glimpse of Kit’s eyes going wide in panic as he and the whalesark became nothing more than a sinking, swirling storm of glitter.

“S’reee!” Nita said, getting alarmed.

With a sound like muffled thunder and a blow like a nearby lightning-strike, displaced water hit Nita and bowled her sideways and backward. She fluked madly, trying to regain her balance enough to tell what was going on. The water was full of stirred-up sand, tatters of weed, small confused fish darting in every direction. And a bulk, a massive form that had not been there before—

Nita watched the great gray shape rise toward her and understood why S’reee had insisted on Kit’s change being in deep water. Her own size had surprised her at first—though a humpback looks small and trim, even the littlest males tend to be fifty feet long. But Kit was twice that, easily. He did not have the torpedolike grace of a humpback, but what he lacked in streamlining he made up in sheer mass. The sperm is the kind that most people think of when they hear the word whale, the kind made famous by most whaling movies. Nita realized that all her life she had mostly taken the whale’s shape for granted, not considering what it would actually be like up close to one.

But here came Kit, stroking slowly and uncertainly at first with that immense tail, and getting surer by the second; looking up at her with the tiny eyes set in the huge domed head, and with his jaw working a bit, exposing the terrible teeth that could crunch a whaling boat in two. Nita felt the size of him, the weight, and somehow the danger—and kept her movements slow and respectful. He was still Kit—but something had been added.