The problem is, this predictive stuff— just isn’t predictable! And something about that bothered Nita, even as the phrasing made her laugh. She preferred her spells straightforward and structured: she liked to do a spell and then get a result she’d known she could expect. But the dreams and visions she was now trying to learn to manage were maddeningly fluid—
Nita had to laugh again at her own phrasing: the liquid imagery kept sneaking in. I’ve got water on the brain...
A hundred yards or so off the jetty, the water roiled, then sprayed upward in a noisy blast of spume that caught the Sun in rainbows. A few moments later a dark shape came looming up through the water into visibility, and the massive, gray-skinned, barnacle-spotted body of a humpback whale rose up to loll just under the surface. One eye broke surface to peer up at Nita, a lazy, interested look.
“Dai stihó, O Honored Senior for the Waters of Earth,” Nita said.
S’reee rolled and blew spray at Nita, and Nita couldn’t get any kind of force field up fast enough to ward it away. She got soaked. “No more of that, thank you very much!” S’reee said. “I’ve had it up to my dorsal with titles! And few I’ve been gladder to get rid of than that one, now that things have quieted down.”
Nita snickered. “It just sounds good on you, that’s all.”
“I want nothing to do with it,” the humpback muttered, slapping the water with her tail in annoyed emphasis. “All I want from the Powers is my own waters and my own name, with ‘senior’ added if anyone insists. That’s more than enough honor for me.” She blew again, resting the end of her long long chin on the breakwater’s last stone, and looking up at Nita with one small bright eye. “But what are you doing up so early in the day, hNii’t? Isn’t this supposed to be time off for you? Your learning-place work is almost done for this season, I thought: you were supposed to be relaxing—”
“I am,” Nita said. “This is relaxing.”
S’reee back-finned and rolled over sideways in the water, the apparent smile of the long jaw reflected for the moment in the squeaks and clicks of her voice. “Oh, my, you’ve hit the bad phase of your wizardry already, where you can’t stop working! Middle-aged so soon! I thought I was getting old before my time.”
Nita laughed, for S’reee was younger in humpback terms than Nita was in human ones. “Oh, sure. You’re a real ancient.”
S’reee rolled right over on her back, partly in a gesture of agreement, partly to get a better view of the jetty. “And where’s K!t today?” she said.
When are people going to stop asking me that? Especially when half the time they know the answer! “Where do you think?”
S’reee chuckled, a long string of squeaks and bubbling noises. “Don’t give me that look! It’s not my fault if he’s predictable lately. And taking it all so seriously.”
“Yeah,” Nita said. “Well, I’ll catch up with him after we talk. But something occurred to me last night. Wait a sec, I’ll come down.”
She clambered down off the rocks and carefully boosted herself down onto the surface of the water. There she stood fairly still until she got her balance, bobbing up and down while she reached around to one specific charm on her bracelet, shaped like a little glass bubble: the ready-made spell she used for underwater work when she wasn’t up for a full shape-change. She pinched it between finger and thumb, whispering the last six words of the spell, the activating sequence.
Around Nita and under her feet, the transparent sphere of air went solid at its outer boundary, then sank. Nita leaned against the front of the bubble, indicating which way she wanted it to go: it began to glide along under the surface, while S’reee finned along beside her. “So what’s it about?” S’reee said.
“Not what we’ve been working on. Something different.”
“Oh?”
“The bombs.”
“Oh yes,” S’reee said. After the end of World War II, the local authorities dumped a considerable number of out-of-date depth charges into the Great South Bay, along the main approach to the New York and New Jersey harbors. For some time wizards had been arguing about what to do with these, as they were becoming increasingly unstable and dangerous with age. “I do wonder sometimes what possessed your people to just dump those there,” S’reee said. “They’ve been on my mind, too. This time of year, some of the trawlers get irresponsible and drop their nets where they might run into some of those charges if they got careless—”
“Well,” Nita said, as they made their way into the green depths out past the shoreside reefs, “something came to me last night. I’d been doing some manual reading before bed, and when I was just falling asleep I got this image of a river flowing over stones, wearing them away—”
The water around the two of them darkened with depth as they made their way down toward the bottom of the Bay, the slope dropping off southward of the old oyster beds. “Well, all the rivers go to the Sea eventually,” S’reee said, “but I’m not sure what that has to do with getting rid of the depth charges.”
“This,” Nita said. “We could dissolve them!”
S’reee looked surprised as they paused over a gravelly, barren spot where several large, lumpy shapes, encrusted with barnacles, lay half-buried in years of silt and sand. “Now, I’ve heard a lot of solutions suggested to this problem,” she said, “but that one’s novel.”
“Well,” Nita said, “the main difficulty with the depth charges right now is the instability of the explosives, right? Physically moving them would be dangerous for the wizards who get close enough to do an intervention. And if one exploded, the natural and artificial reefs around here would suffer. Years of growth gone in a second: we can’t have that. But if we just dissolve the casings off—”
“How?” S’reee said.
Nita shrugged. “I was thinking we could just accelerate the rust. I mean, they’re rusting pretty fast already. Look—”
She leaned against the wall of her air bubble, guiding it to float around the far side of the depth charge in a spot where there were no barnacles. The metal was deeply pockmarked, and Nita leaned close and pointed at one spot where the rust had clearly eaten right through. “No telling what the seawater’s doing to the explosive,” she said. “If we get the casings off and something blows, at least shrapnel won’t get blasted into the reefs. Then we can dissolve the explosive and wash it away by increasing the current. Solve the problem from the inside out rather than the outside in.”
S’reee rolled in the water, considering. “Interesting concept. I’d need to check with our land-based Seniors, too, of course. But I like the sound of this. And it comes at a time when the problem’s been preying on my mind more than usual. Time to do something about it.”
“So when will you decide?” Nita said as the two of them turned and made their way back toward land.
“Over the next week or so. It shouldn’t take more than that to do the necessary consulting and work out the actual process for dissolving the explosives. Nothing mechanical, though.”
“Something chemical makes more sense. We can build a spell to neutralize the byproducts.”
“And then the increased current takes those away, too? Makes sense.” S’reee blew briefly, a cetacean chuckle. “It sounds like something Pellegrino would have thought of.”
“I got the idea after I was reading about her,” Nita said. Angelina Pellegrino had been a great wizard of the previous century, a specialist in working with water who had single-handedly designed a way to cleanse the western Mediterranean of that period’s increasing pollution. That spell, the so-called Gibraltar Passthrough Intervention, was still reckoned by historians of wizardry as one of the greatest achievements of that period by any wizard working alone. “But this wouldn’t have to be anything like that big.”
“Which is good,” S’reee said as they made for the surface, “as hydromages are few and far between. And to move a lot of water, you need a lot of power...”
They broke surface a few hundred yards out from th
e jetty: Nita kept her bubble level with the surface until they were close enough that she wouldn’t be seen climbing out of the water. “You know, you should have a word with Arooon about her,” S’reee said.
“What, our guy who sang the Blue in the Song of the Twelve?”
“The same. He told me once that his father knew Pellegrino. I seem to remember him saying that when she got started, she was just a human farm girl who noticed that water acted strangely around her. You know the saying, that wizards who have the earliest Ordeals— and the latest ones— produce the biggest results? Angelina was one of those very late hatchers: almost out of latency when her Ordeal came along. She lived in the island down at the bottom of that long peninsula where the people lived who had that empire. You know the one, it was all around the edges of the Mediterranean—”
“The Romans. You mean Sicily?”
“That’s the place. She went swimming on the evening she took the Oath, and the Lone One met her in some kind of demon shape and tried to drown her.” S’reee snorted, a very wet blowhole-laugh that just missed drenching Nita again, though this time not on purpose. “Kind of an error of judgment on Its part! The fight between them threw her straight into sync with the whole element of water, right across the Med. For something like the whole year after, every wizard on Earth who met the Lone One physically on Ordeal reported that It turned up dripping.”
Nita snickered at the image. “She didn’t just do the water stuff, though, did she? She got to be a Planetary for a while.”
“So she did,” S’reee said. “But something else was going on with her, too, which meant she spent less time as Planetary than she might have.” S’reee rolled over, stretching those huge fins into the air. “In your reading, have you come across references to a manifestation of wizardry called infra-affinity?”
Nita considered. “Don’t know. I might have.”
“It’s one of the so-called ‘inner talents,’” S’reee said. “It’s not a spell you design, or something you do, but something you are. Lots of wizards have affinities to one or more of the classic elements or states of matter. But this state implies such a profound connection to one state of matter or another that a wizard can go into complete union with it, then come out of the unified state without showing any ill effects. Infra-affinity tends to turn up in very new wizards as an Ordeal exploit, like the water mastery your friend Ronan manifested on his Ordeal. But it takes an incredible toll if you keep it up.”
S’reee looked thoughtful. “Arooon thought that Pellegrino’s taking on the role of Planetary Wizard might have been why she died so young. A Planetary has to sync with the whole planet, and it’s possible that the required affinities to earth and air and the Earth’s interior fire started conflicting with Pellegrino’s infra-affinity to water.” S’reee let her tail fall over into the water in a sideways slap, a cetacean shrug. “No way to tell at this end of time...”
Nita sat thinking about that for a moment. “I wonder,” she said. “About Dairine ...you think she might have an elemental affinity? She was always big on fire when she was little. I can’t think how many times Dad had to stop her from playing with the barbecue. She was always getting burned. And now here she is starting to play around with stars...”
“Plasma’s a whole different element,” S’reee said, “but you might be onto something there. It could explain the connection to your colleague Roshaun as well. Like does call to like sometimes.”
“I wonder if I’m developing something like that for water.”
S’reee waved a fin in agreement that this could be a possibility. “Could be. It might explain why you took to underwater wizardry so readily, and did so well in the Song. But it’s a tendency, not a restriction. It doesn’t have to dominate your practice.”
Nita nodded and leaned against the rocks. “Something else to research...”
S’reee bubbled with laughter again. “The story of all our lives,” she said. “Though I’d try to put the research aside for a little. We do have to make sure we have other things going on in our lives than just wizardry, or what good are we to the Powers?”
There was an amused quality to S’reee’s voice, something almost secretive. Curious, Nita stretched out on the rock to get a better look at S’reee’s eye on that side. “Oh, really? What’s this all about?”
“Well, there are other reasons to go out singing than just errantry,” S’reee said.
That was when Nita remembered that “out singing” had more than one meaning for a whale. “Whoa, wait a minute! ’Ree, are you seeing somebody? You are! You’re finning around with someone!” Nita reached down and pounded S’reee on the flank in a congratulatory way. “Who’s the lucky bull?”
“Someone I met out on errantry—”
“Hey, great! Another wizard?”
“Oh, no, not at all. We can’t all date wizards, hNii’t! I met Hwiii’sh a few weeks ago up by the Grand Banks when I was on a meal break in the middle of a team wizardry. You know how it is, there are always tourists around who’re all itchy to see wizards doing what they do...”
Nita smiled ironically, letting the “dating” reference go by. She was so used to hearing this kind of thing from kids at school that she’d stopped protesting, since it just made everybody sure they were right. With luck, they’ll stop eventually. “Well, tourists aren’t a problem I have all that much,” Nita said. “So tell me all about him! What does he sing?” That being what you generally asked whales instead of “What do you do?”
“He sings aouih’hweioooiuh’hhaii!t.”
Nita had to listen to the word in the Speech to make anything of it. “Am I getting that right? He’s a food critic?”
“And very stuck up about it, too,” S’reee said, blowing a big wet laugh. “You should hear him going on about Arctic krill, and South Cape squid, and all the rest of it! Fortunately he thinks it’s a big deal that I’m a wizard, so I don’t have trouble holding my own when his ego starts to run riot...”
Nita leaned against the jetty and relaxed while S’reee talked, enjoying the fact that for once she had time to kick back and laugh at the concept of a whale who did nothing but share news about the presence and quality of food with other whales. But then lately it seemed rare for Nita to have “quality time” like this— time without school or schoolwork hanging over her head, or some terrifyingly heavy piece of wizardry that needed her attention. More of this, please, and enough saving the world for this year! Nita said silently to the One. Actually having the summer off, like a normal person, would be very, very nice! Not that she could ever be precisely normal again: wizardry kind of precluded that.
Up behind her on the jetty, Nita heard an odd sort of strangled pop. She scrambled around and peered up, one hand on her charm bracelet again, ready to wake up the light-diverting cloaking spell so she could pull it down over her and S’reee if need be. But there wasn’t any need. Halfway down the jetty, Carmela had just walked out of the air and was heading toward them down the rough stony path on the jetty’s top.
Nita let out a breath of mild exasperation. “Mela,” she said as Carmela got down near them, “you can not just go appearing out of nothing around here! People could notice.”
“But they don’t, mostly,” Carmela said, clambering down among the rocks to perch on top of one of the biggest ones near the waterline, dangling her legs over the edge. “Isn’t that one of the weird things about wizardry on Earth? Everybody says they want magic in their lives, and when it happens right in front of them, usually they don’t believe it. ‘Oh, she must have been there a moment before and I just didn’t see her,’ they’re all probably saying.” Then she paused and looked around. “Except, listen to me: who’s all saying? There’s nobody here. You’re just being paranoid. Loosen up! Good morning, Miss S’reee...”
S’reee, half-submerged except for one big eye, was bubbling in amusement. “And dai stihó to you, K!aarmii’lha. What brings you down here?”
“Well, my main project
for the day is to go shopping,” Carmela said, “and this time Nita is finally coming with me.Aren’t you, Miss Neets?”
Carmela scowled a very overstated scowl at Nita. Nita laughed, glancing at S’reee. “She’s the only one I know who can make a shopping trip sound like a death sentence.”
“Well, depending on where you shop at the Crossings, it could happen,” S’reee said, rolling over in the water. “Some of the boutiques there are very species-specific: you’d have to watch what you bought. Sea’s Name, even some of the restroom facilities there could be fatal if you walked in the wrong door.”
“S’reee, it’s hardly about the toilets. We know all about which ones not to go into!” Carmela said.
“And if we didn’t, we could always ask Dairine,” Nita said under her breath, with a smile.
“Never mind the restrooms,” Carmela said, “it’s the stores that are interesting, S’reee. The clothes stores, especially. We’ve got to get Neets out of all those these floppy sweatshirts and jeans! I’ve asked her to come with me at least six times now.” Carmela bent down toward the amused S’reee in a most confiding way. “But she just keeps handing me these lame excuses. ‘Sorry, saving the universe, can’t go shopping today!’ So help me talk her out of this morning’s one! Which I’m sure she will now provide for us.” And Carmela turned expectantly to Nita.
A wave splashed higher than others had— the tide was coming in— and Nita paused to wipe spray off her face. “I was going to go up to Mars first.”
Carmela covered her eyes theatrically. “Knew it, S’reee,” she said. “It had to happen. She’s finally come down with Kit’s Mars bug!”