Deep Wizardry-wiz 2 Read Free Page A

“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