Диана Дуэйн: Deep Wizardry

243 E. Clinton Avenue HempsteadNY 11575 (516) 379-6786 Assignment location: 38 Tiana Beach Road Southampton NY 11829 (516) 667-9084
Nita sighed, for this morning the status note had said, like Tom's, "Vaca-tioning/emergencies only." The book updated itself all over that way—pages changing sometimes second to second, reporting the status of worldgates in |he area, what spells were working where, the cost of powdered newt at your '°cal Advisory. Whatever's come up, Nita thought, we're expected to be able to handle it.
Uf course, last time out they expected us to save the world, too. . . . "Neets!" . A ne jumped, then tossed her book out the window to Kit and began climb-'"gout. "Sssh!" Shhh yourself, mouth. They're asleep. C'mon."
nce over the dune, the hiss and rumble of the midnight sea made talking A – You on active status too?" Kit said. ' U P– Let's find the dolphin and see what's up."
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They ran for the breakers. Kit was in bathing suit and windbreaker as Nib was, with sneakers slung over his shoulder by the laces. "Okay," he said "watch this." He said something in the Speech, a long liquid-sounding sen' tence 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 without pause Kit ran right up to the water, which was retreating at that particular moment—and then 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 four or five paces out onto the silver-slicked surface—then lost his balance and fell over sideways. Nita started laughing, then hurriedly shut herself up for fear the whole beach should 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. "It's not funny. I did it all last night and it never happened once."
"Must be that you did the spell for two this time," Nita said, tempted to start laughing again, except that Kit would probably have punched her out. 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 again, swaying. "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 came to understand shortly why not many people, wizards or otherwise, walk on water much. The constant slip and slide of the water under their feet forced them to use leg muscles they rarely bothered with on land. They had to rest frequently, sitting, 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 or Ponquogue and Hampton Bays and West Tiana on the mainland, three mite north. Closer, red and white flashing lights marked the entrance to Shin-necock 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 *# 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 tff°-
DEEP WIZARDRY 175
"You okay?" Kit said.
"Yeah. It's just that the sea seems . . . safer near the shore, somehow, deep is it here?"
Kit slipped his manual out of his windbreaker and pulled out a large nauti-cal 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 dol-phin'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 act-ing 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 ne r, 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— a nd 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 to ward Quogue. "The Hunters," it said in a series of annoyed squeaks and
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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—"