Диана Дуэйн - Games Wizards Play

Dai stihó,

Owen Dalwhinnie

for Irina Mladen, Planetary Wizard for Sol III/IIIa

cc: Swale, Thomas B., Romeo, Carl, Callahan,

Juanita L.—

Bewildered, Kit scanned on down the note at a very long list of cc’s and attached documents. Looking over Kit’s shoulder, Ronan started to swear, and not in the Speech either; it was something extremely venomous in Irish. At least most of it was Irish, but there were many heartfelt insertions of the F word in between. “What the fecking feck! ” Ronan shouted, and stalked away waving his arms, then bounced back, kicking rocks. “How do you even rate? Why do I even bother keeping on breathing! What’s the point of this whole sodding existence? I ask you!”

Kit looked at Ronan with some concern. “What? What’s your problem?”

Ronan clutched his head and then waved his arms around some more. “You benighted muppet, has your reading comprehension taken the day off? Is it possible you don’t understand what you’ve got there? It’s only an opt-in for the Invitational , you total twitmuffin!”

Twitmuffin? Kit got a feeling asking for definitions wouldn’t be a smart move right now, as Ronan was genuinely worked up. “Is this good?” he said, and started reading down the page again, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.

Ronan laughed again, but this time it was a helpless sound, like someone being kind to the intellectually challenged. “Let me explain it to you . . .”

2

Coney Island

THE SOUTH SHORE OF LONG ISLAND can properly be described as starting just east of New York’s Staten Island, where the southern side of Brooklyn meets the Great South Bay at the outward-jutting spit of land called Coney Island.

The nautical charts don’t show it as such, of course. This area is part of the huge, busy expanse of New York Harbor, and the charts are slashed up and down and across the wide white stripes of transit lanes and shipping lanes, and dotted with channel and bottom soundings, with buoy markers, and the little dashed circles that indicate underwater wrecks or danger areas. Only close to shore do things quiet down to a scatter of numbers—the distance to the seafloor in fathoms—with here and there a notation about submerged pilings or obstructions. One of these areas, Coney Island Channel, runs for a mile or so southeastward from the tiny peninsula’s farthest western edge at Norton Point.

Just inshore from the even 20-foot depth of the channel is Coney Island proper. From out on the water, the beachfront amusement park itself is only a small part of the view, the biggest of the thrill rides standing up like an awkward scarlet mushroom near the longest of the piers that stick out into the water. Farther to the west, a double handful of twenty- or thirty-story apartment buildings catch the light reflected off the water on bright afternoons, their windows blindingly afire with gridded squares of Sun.

Nita broke surface and put her head above water, and the glance of that hot white light caught her right in the starboard eye and blinded it.

“Ow,” she said, wincing, and submerged again, or tried to. For a moment nothing happened except that her tail beat the water behind her into foam, which was annoying . . . especially out here. She was no more than three hundred meters from one of the busiest waterways in the whole New York metropolitan area, and she had no particular desire to be run over by some chartered pleasure craft or returning fishing boat because she was having a tail malfunction.

“Dammit,” Nita said under her breath, and stopped thrashing. Then she rolled over on her back to float and think while scratching idly at the barnacles on her belly with one long pectoral fin. “S’reee,” she sang into the water, “this thing’s still not working . . .”

“The same problem as before?” inquired a voice floating up from underneath her. “Or something new?”

“New. It’s the tail this time.”

The voice said something very rude and crass in a long string of squeaks and squeals that sounded like a violin having its neck wrung. “I guess we should be grateful that it keeps failing in different ways each time . . .”

“Speak for yourself,” Nita said in a low, long humpback wail. She flipped both pectoral fins sideways and used their weight to roll over again, putting herself once more belly-down, and one more time tried to flip her tail up. She managed at least to lean in to the nose-downward orientation for beginning a dive, but the tail hung above the water and waved around in utter uselessness. There was a weird jittering feel to the movement, like the kind of thigh-muscle spasm Nita got sometimes after gym period when she’d just done an extra round of the quarter-mile track and pushed herself too hard.

Just hold still , she told the tail, despite her increasing nervousness at hanging there like someone doing a handstand half in and half out of the water. Am I just going to fall over sideways again, or backwards— But the stillness was starting to pay off as Nita slowly and carefully exhaled and let some of her buoyancy go, and she slid farther and farther down until the tail was halfway under, then nearly all the way, then just the flukes sticking out in the air—

Finally she was fully submerged. Nita kept sinking down through the silvery-green water toward where the others were waiting. S’reee was closest to the surface, half rolled over and watching her with concern out of her port-side eye. Hanging more upright just below her, and watching Nita carefully, was one of S’reee’s colleagues, a reticent and routinely cranky right-whale wizard called Uu’tsch, who had the heaviest encrustation of barnacles she’d ever seen on a living being. Farther down, swimming back and forth in a casual and theoretically unconcerned manner, was a third humpback, S’reee’s friend Hwiii’sh. At least “friend” was the best word Nita could find for him at the moment. While the Speech had all kinds of words for relationships, most of the ones Nita had been researching recently were for relationships with other wizards, and Hwiii’sh wasn’t one. He was a food critic—a concept that had confused Nita significantly when she first started getting to grips with it.

She tried working the tail again, and this time it started to respond, though not evenly: she could still feel a jittering in the muscles on the right side, and that bothered her. “Did you have time to run a diagnostic while you were up there?” Uu’tsch said in his creaky voice.

“No,” Nita said, “mostly I was trying to make sure I wasn’t going to get run over by something I couldn’t hear coming! Or see real well.” It was a problem in these waters. There was so much low-level sound from the never-ending big ship and small-craft traffic in the main New York Harbor channels that surprisingly large boats could sneak up on you if you were unwary and the conditions were right. And hearing aside, there was still a big spot of sunscorch interfering with her vision: a humpback’s eyes weren’t designed for looking at so concentrated a reflection of sunlight as she’d caught from those apartment-building windows.

Nita tried to just relax and let herself drift farther down through the murky water toward the diagnostic spell circle that S’reee and Uu’tsch had laid out on the sandy bottom. The humpback whaleshape she was wearing was normally one she had little trouble with; she’d become fairly expert at this particular shape-change over time, it being made easier by the blood she’d shared with S’reee back when Nita had first become involved in the Song of the Twelve. However, the shape she was wearing today, though it might superficially have looked the same, was something else entirely. It wasn’t a result of a shape-change spell she’d worked herself. She was wearing a whalesark, and after the last couple of hours’ work it was driving her just about nuts.