by Diane Duane
“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-t
erm 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.”
“Keep my breath in my body, cousin, that’ll be enough for me,” S’reee said.
Nita nodded and started paging through her book for the section on rnedicine. 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 all of them called for one supply in common — the blood of the wizard performing them. Nita began to shake. 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…”
“Then 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 had 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 — ulp!” 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.”
“Yeccch!” But Nita still wanted to laugh, even while her stomach churned. She got up and hurried back to Kit, who was holding her book for her.
Together they went over to the terrible wound, and Nita put her bleeding hand to it, turned away 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 she was reading from it. She was surrounded by the roaring of green water around her, and the smell of blood and fear, and 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 and 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 holding her up from behind. But all that was far away.
The second pain came, the fierce mouths ripping and worrying at her till she couldn’t go forward any more, only flail and thrash in an agony of helplessness and revulsion— and then the third pain hit, and Nita lost control of everything and started to fall down as the white fire blew up in her side. But the words were speaking her now, as they do in the more powerful wizardries. Though inwardly Nita screamed and cried for release, it did her no good. Her own power was loose, doing what she had told it to, and the wizardry wouldn’t let her go until it was done. When it was, finally, it dropped her on her face in the sand, and she felt Kit go down with her, trying to keep her from breaking something.
Eventually the world came back. Nita found herself sitting on the sand, feeling wobbly, but not hurting anywhere. She looked up at S’reee’s side. New gray skin covered the wound, paler than the rest of the whale, but unbroken. There was still a crater there, but no blood flowed; and many of the smaller shark bites were completely gone, as were the burns from the harpoon’s rope where it had gotten tangled around S’reee’s flukes.
“Wow,” Nita said. She lifted her left hand and looked at it. The place where Hotshot had bitten her was just a little oval of pink puncture marks, all healed.
“You all right?” Kit said, trying to help her up.
“Yeah, yeah, sure,” Nita said. She pushed him away as kindly and quickly as she could, staggered down to the water line, and lost her dinner.
When she came back, her mouth full of the taste of the salt water she’d used to wash it out, S’reee had rolled herself more upright and was talking to Kit. “I still feel deathly sick,” she said, “but at least dying isn’t a problem… not for the moment.”
She looked at Nita. Though the long face was frozen into that eternal smile, it was amazing how many expressions could live in a whale’s eyes. Admiration was there just now, and gratitude. “You and I aren’t just cousins now, Niit,” S’reee said, giving Nita’s name a whistly whalish intonation, “but sisters too, by blood exchanged. And I’m in your debt. Maybe it’s poor thanks to a debtor to ask him to lend to you again, right away. But maybe a sister, or a friend”—she glanced at Kit—“would excuse that if it had to happen.”
“We’re on active status,” Kit said. “We have to handle whatever comes up in this area. What’s the problem?”
“Well then.” S’reee’s whistling took on a more formal rhythm. “As the only remaining candidate
Senior Wizard for the Waters About the Gates, by wizard’s Right I request and require your assistance. Intervention will take place locally and last no more than ten lights-and-darks. The probable level of difficulty does not exceed what the manual describes as ‘dangerous’, though if intervention is delayed, the level may escalate to ‘extremely dangerous’ or ‘critical.’ Will you assist?”
Nita and Kit looked at each other, unnerved by the second part of the job description. S’reee moaned. “I hate the formalities,” she said in a long unhappy whistle. “I’m too young to be a Senior: I’m only two! But with Ae’mhnuu gone, I’m stuck with it! And we’re in trouble, the water people and the land people both, if we don’t finish what Ae’mhnuu was starting when he died!” She huffed out a long breath. “I’m just a calf; why did I get stuck with this?…”
Kit sighed too, and Nita made a face at nothing in particular. On their first job, she and Kit had said something similar, about a hundred times. “I’ll help,” she said, and “Me too,” said Kit, in about the same breath.
“But you’re tired,” Nita said, “and we’re tired, and it’s late, we ought to go home…”
“Come tomorrow, then, and I’ll fill you in. Are you living on the Barrier?”
Nita didn’t recognize the name. “Over there,” Kit said, pointing across the water at Tiana Beach. “Where the lights are.”
“By the old oyster beds,” S’reee said. “Can you go out swimming a couple hours after the sun’s high? I’ll meet you and we’ll go where we can talk.”
“Uh,” Kit said, “if the sharks are still around—“
Out on the water there was a splash of spray as a silvery form leaped, chattering shrilly, and hit the water again. “They won’t be,” S’reee said, sounding merry for the first time. “Hotshot and his people are one of the breeds the sharks hate worst; when there are enough of them around, few sharks would dare come into the area. Hotshot will be calling more of his people in tonight and tomorrow — that’s part of the work I’m doing.”
