Deep Wizardry-wiz 2 Read Free

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 on 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 boat.
    “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,