Deep Wizardry, New Millennium Edition

  Nita sighed, for this morning the status note had said, like Tom’s, “Vacationing/emergencies only.” The book was constantly updating itself 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 eye of newt at your Local Advisory. Active status now, though. Whatever’s come up, we’re expected to be able to handle it.

  Nita made a face. Of course, last time out they expected us to save the world, too…

  “Neets!”

  She jumped, startled: then glanced out the window, and seeing Kit there, tossed her manual out to him and started climbing out. “Sssh, keep it down!”

  “Shhh yourself! They’re asleep. From out here you can hear your dad snoring. C’mon.”

  Nita pulled the window mostly closed behind her and headed after Kit. Once they were on the other side of the dune, the hiss and rumble of the midnight sea made talking easier. “You on active status too?” Kit said.

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

  They ran for the breakers. Kit was in bathing suit and windbreaker as Nita was, with his 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 then Kit ran right at the water, which was retreating at that particular moment—and then right up 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 five or ten paces out onto the silver-slicked surface—then lost his balance and fell over sideways.

  Nita started laughing, then hurriedly shut up for fear the whole beach whould 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. “Not funny, Neets! I did it all last night and this never happened once.”

  “Must be that you did the spell for two this time,” Nita said, tempted to start laughing again but restraining herself. 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 to his feet again, swaying as he got his balance. “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 shortly came to understand why not many people, wizards or otherwise, spend a lot of time walking on water. The constant slip and slide of the water under their feet forced them to use leg muscles they rarely bothered with on land, and Nita became clear that her legs were going to be killing her in the morning. Both of them had to stop and sit down to rest a few times, 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 of 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 two—

  “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. “Whoa!” Nita said as she instantly 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 in the cold dark water.before managing to get hold of one of the dolphin’s forefins.

  Instantly the dolphin took off, and Nita hoisted herself up to a better position, throwing an arm up and around the triangular fin on top so her body was half out of the water and her legs were safely away from the fiercely lashing tail. As they sped up, Nita quickly realized she needed to press herself as flat as she could against the dolphin’s side to keep the rush of the water from slowing them down. On the far side of the dolphin, Kit was doing the same, which brought him up to face her over the dolphin’s back. “Kit, you think you might have warned me?” she shouted at him.

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

  She rolled her eyes right back at him and dropped it for the moment: there was more important business. Nita turned her head toward the dolphin’s and said to it in the Speech, “What’s S’reee? And why’s it going to be late? What’s the matter?”

  “She,” the dolphin said, swimming faster. “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—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 westward along the shoreline, 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 on dry land these days?”

  Nita had no answer for this. She was too busy staring ahead of them at a sandbar with a long dark bumpy whale-shape lying atop it, 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, fumbling for his manual.

  Nita started to do the same—and then had an idea, and blessed her mom for having watched the DVD
of Jaws so many times that Nita almost knew it by heart. “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!” Nita pounded the dolphin’s side behind its head. “Go beach yourself! Tell your buddies to beach too!”

  “But—”

  “Go do it!” Nita 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, hurry up, get the water working again!”

  It took a whole precious second for him to say the three words to reinstate the spell; 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 what was now, for them at least, going solid. They made it up onto the surface and grabbed one another for both physical and moral support, as that fin kept coming toward them. “Got the other spell set?” Nita gasped.

  “Yeah. Now!”

  Nita felt Kit’s “freeze” spell waiting like a phone number all punched in except for one digit. Kit said the one word in the Speech that turned the spell loose, the “last digit,” then gripped Nita’s hand hard. The usual brief 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 whole that was somehow bigger than even Nita and Kit together could be.

  Inside that sudden oneness Nita did her part, quickly saying the three most dangerous words in all wizardry—the words that, in the right order and with the right emphasis, give all a wizard’s power over into another’s hands. Instantly Nita felt the energy running out of her like blood, and felt Kit shaking as he wound that power, and her trust, into the spell. And then Nita 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 touching a live wire—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 simultaneously out of sight, their owners paralyzed and unable to swim.

  No wizardry is worked without a price. Personal energy, life force, is the most common and powerful currency with which magic is paid for, and that was what they were using now. Kit wobbled in Nita’s grip as if about to keel over, and 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. “One of the new killing spears the whalers use,” the whale said to Nita, “the blasting kind. Never mind that now. What did you do with the sharks?”

  “Sank them. They’re lying on the bottom, ‘frozen’.”

  “But if they don’t swim, they can’t breathe—they’ll die!” The concern in the whale’s voice astonished Nita. “Cousins, quick, you have to 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. “What? —Okay, but better put up a forcewall first, so that the dolphins can get back in the water without getting attacked again.”

  “Right.” Nita got her manual out and riffled through pages to the appropriate spell, a short-term forcefield wizardry 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.

  Moments later fins began appearing again out on the water, circling inward toward the sandbar, then sliding away as if bumping 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, anguished but intent. “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. We were out past the offshore limit and we were in the middle of a complicated wizardry. We heard the ship come but we were too distracted by the spell to realize in time what kind it was—”

  Nita and Kit looked at each other. They’d found out for themselves that a wizard can be 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. No surprise there…”

  S’reee was wheezing now with the effort of speech. “Cousins, I hope one of you has skill at healing. 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 the wound over, keeping tight control of her stomach. “I can seal this up,” 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.”

  “Keep my breath in my body, cousin, that’ll be enough for me,” S’reee said.

  Nita nodded and hurriedly paged through her book for the section on medicine. It started out casually enough with first aid for the minor ailments of wizards—the physical ones like colds and the mental ones like spell backlash and brainburn. Behind that was a section she had only skimmed before, never expecting to need it: Major Surgery. The spells were complex and lengthy. That by itself was no problem. But they all called for one supply in common—the blood of the wizard performing them. Nita started shaking. Seeing someone else bleed was bad enough; the sight of her own blood in quantity tended to make her pass out.
/>
  “Oh, great,” she said, for there was no avoiding what had to be done. “Kit, you have anything sharp on you?”

  He felt around in his pockets. “No such luck, Neets…”

  “Great. Find me a shell or something.”

  S’reee’s eye glinted in the moonlight. “There are the dolphins,” she said.

  “What do they— Oh.” The one dolphin still beached, the one who’d brought them in, smiled at Nita, exhibiting many sharp teeth.

  “Oh, brother,” she said, and went down the sandbar to where the dolphin lay. “Look,” she said, hunkering down in front of it, “I don’t even know your name—”

  “Hotshot.” He gave her a look that was amused but also kindly.

  “Hotshot, right. Look—don’t do it hard, okay?” And wincing, Nita put out her left hand and looked away.

  “Do what?”

  “Do aaaahh!” Nita said, as the pain hit. When she looked again, she saw that Hotshot had nipped her very precisely on the outside of the palm—two little crescents of toothmarks facing each other. Blood welled up, and the place stung, but not too badly to bear.

  Hotshot’s eyes glittered at her. “Needs salt.”

  “Ewwww!” But Nita still wanted to laugh, even while her stomach churned. She got up and hurried back to Kit, who was holding her manual for her.

  Together they went over to the terrible wound, and Nita put her bleeding hand to it, turned away from it as far as she could, and started reading the spell. It was a long series of complicated phrases in the Speech; she spoke them quickly at first, then more slowly as she began to be distracted by the pain in her hand. And as often happens in a wizardry, she began to lose contact with her physical surroundings.

  Soon Kit and S’reee and the beach were gone. Even the book was gone, though Nita was reading from it. She was surrounded by the roaring of green water around her, and the smell of blood and fear, and hemmed in by shadows in the water, pursuing her. She swam for her life, and kept reading.

  No wound can be healed, the book said, unless the pain of its inflicting is fully experienced. There was nothing to do but read, and flee, wailing terror-song and grief-song into the water, until the first pain came, the sick, cold sharpness in her side. Nita knew she was sagging, knew Kit was bracing her up from behind. But all that was far away.