Duane, Diane - Wizards - Young Wizards 02 - Deep Wizardry

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Summer Night's Song

Nita slipped out the back door of the beach house, careful not to let the rickety screen

door slam, and for a second stood silently on the back porch in the darkness. It was no

use. "Nita"—her mother's voice came floating out from the living room—"where're you

going?"

"Out," Nita said, hoping to get away with it just this once.

She might as well have tried to rob a bank. "Out where?"

"Down to the beach, Mom."

There was a sigh's worth of pause from the living room, broken by the sound of a crowd

on TV shouting about a base that had just been stolen somewhere in the country. "I don't

like you walking down there alone at night, Neets. ..."

"Nhhnnnnn," Nita said, a loud noncommittal noise she had learned to make while her

mother was deciding whether to let her do something. "I'll take Ponch with me," she said

in a burst of inspiration.

"Mmmmmm . . ." her mother said, considering it. Ponch was a large black and white dog,

part Border collie, part German shepherd, part mutt— an intrepid hunter of water rats and

gulls, and ferociously loyal to his master and to Nita because she was his master's best

friend. "Where's Kit?"

"I dunno." It was at least partly the truth. "He went for a walk a while ago."

'Well . . . okay. You take Ponch and look for Kit, and bring him back w'th you. Don't want

his folks thinking we're not taking care of him."

"Right, Ma," Nita said, and went pounding down the creaky steps from 'he house to the

yard before her mother could change her mind, or her rather, immersed in the ball game,

could come back to consciousness. Ponch! Hey Pancho!" Nita shouted, pounding through

the sandy front , through the gate in the ancient picket fence, and out across the narrow

168

SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL WIZARD

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Summer Night's Song

paved road to the dune on the other side of the road. Joyous barking began on the far

side of the dune as Nita ran up it. He's hunting again, Nita thought, and would have

laughed for delight if running had left her any breath. This is the best vacation we ever

had. . . .

At the top of the dune she paused, looking down toward the long dark expanse of the

beach. "It's been a good year," her father had said a couple of months before, over

dinner. "We can't go far for vacation—but let's go somewhere nice. One of the beaches

in the Hamptons, maybe. We'll rent a house and live beyond our means. For a couple

weeks, anyway. ...

It hadn't taken Nita much begging to get her folks to let her friend Kit Rodriguez go along

with them, or to get Kit's folks to say yes. Both families were delighted that their children

had each finally found a close friend. Nita, and Kit laughed about that sometimes. Their

families knew only the surface | of what was going on—which was probably for the best.

A black shape came scrabbling up the dune toward Nita, flinging sand in I all directions in

his hurry. "Whoa!" she shouted at Ponch, but it was no use; it never was. He hit her

about stomach level with both paws and knocked her down, panting with excitement;

then, when she managed to sit up, he started | enthusiastically washing her face. His

breath smelled like dead fish.

"Euuuuw, enough!" Nita said, making a face and pushing the dog more or| less off her.

"Ponch, where's Kit?"

"Yayayayayayayaya!" Ponch barked, jumping up and bouncing around Nita I in an

attempt to get her to play. He grabbed up a long string of dead seaweed | in his jaws and

began shaking it like a rope and growling.

"Cut it out, Ponch. Get serious." Nita got up and headed down the far| side of the dune,

brushing herself off as she went. "Where's the boss?"

"He played with me," Ponch said in another string of barks as he loped | down the dune

alongside her. "He threw the stick. I chased it."

"Great. Where is he now?"

They came to the bottom of the dune together. The sand was harder I there, but still dry;

the tide was low and just beginning to turn. "Don't| know," Ponch said, a bark with a

grumble on the end of it.

"Hey, you're a good boy, I'm not mad at you," Nita said. She stopped to I scratch the dog

behind the ears, in the good place. He stood still with his tongue hanging out and looked

up at her, his eyes shining oddly in the of the nearly full Moon that was climbing the sky. "I

just don't feel playing right now. I want to swim. Would you find Kit?"

The big brown eyes gazed soulfully up at her, and Ponch made a small | beseeching

whine. "A dog biscuit?"

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Summer Night's Song

Nita grinned. "Blackmailer. Okay, you find the boss, I'll give you a biscuit-Two biscuits.

Go get 'im!"

Ponch bounded off westward down the beach, kicking up wet sand.

DEEP WIZARDRY 169

headed for the water line, where she shrugged off the windbreaker that had been

covering her bathing suit and dropped it on the sand. Two months ago, talking to a dog

and getting an answer back would have been something that happened only in Disney

movies. But then one day in the library, Nita had stumbled onto a book called So You

Want to Be a Wizard. She'd followed the instructions in the book, as Kit had in the copy

he'd found in a used-book store—and afterward, dogs talked back. Or, more accurately,

she knew what language they spoke and how to hear it. There was nothing that didn 't

talk back, she'd found—only things she didn't yet know how to hear or how to talk to

properly.

Like parents, Nita thought with mild amusement. If her mother knew Nita was going

swimming, she'd probably pitch a fit: she'd had a terrible thing about night swimming after

seeing Jaws. But it's okay, Nita thought. There aren't any sharks here . . . and if there

were, I think I could talk them out of eating me.

She made sure her clothes were above the high-water line, then waded down into the

breakers. The water was surprisingly warm around her knees. The waxing Moon, slightly

golden from smog, made a silvery pathway on the water, everywhere else shedding a

dull radiance that made both land and sea look alive.

What a great night, Nita thought. She went out another twenty paces or so, then

crouched over and dived into an incoming wave. Waterborne sand scoured her, the water

thundered in her ears; then she broke surface and lay in the roil and dazzle of the moonlit

water, floating. There were no street-lights there, and the stars she loved were bright.

After a while she stood up in the shoulder-high water, watching the sky. Back up on the

beach, Ponch was barking, excited and noisy. He can't have found Kit that fast, Nita

thought. Probably something distracted him. A crab, maybe. A dead fish. A shark. .

Something pushed her in the back, hard. Nita gasped and whipped around in the water,

thinking, This is it, there are too sharks here and I'm dead! The S1§ht of the slick-skinned

shape in the water stopped her breath—until she realized what she was looking at. A

slender body, ten feet long; a blowhole and an amused eye that looked at her sidelong;

and a long, beaked face that wore a permanent smile. She reached out a hesitant hand,

and under her touch the dolphin turned lazily, rolling sideways, brushing her with skin like

warm, moonlit satin.

She was immensely relieved. "Dai'stiho," she said, greeting the swimmer

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Summer Night's Song

ln *ne Tongue that wizards use, the language that she'd learned from her

anual and that all creatures understand. She expected no more answer than

"zz or squeak as the dolphin returned the greeting and went about its

business.

170 SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL WIZARD

But the dolphin rolled back toward her and looked at her in what seemed to be shock. "A

wizard/" it said in an urgent whistle. Nita had no time to answer; the dolphin dived and its

tail slapped the surface, spraying her. By the time Nita rubbed the salt sting out of her

eyes, there was nothing near her but the usual roaring breakers. Ponch was bouncing

frantically on the beach, barking something about sea monsters to the small form walking

beside him.

"Neets?"

Nita waded out of the breakers. At the water line Kit met her and handed Nita her

windbreaker. He was smaller than she was, a year younger, dark-haired and brown-eyed

and sharp of face and mind; definitely sharper, Nita thought with approval, than the usual

twelve-year-old. "He was hollering about whales," Kit said, nodding at Ponch.

"Dolphins," Nita said. "At least, a dolphin. I said hi to it and it said 'A wizard!' and ran

away."

"Great." Kit looked southward, across the ocean. "Something's going on out there, Neets.

I was up on the jetty. The rocks are upset."

Nita shook her head. Her specialty as a wizard was living things; animals and plants

talked to her and did the things she asked, at least if she asked properly. It still startled

her sometimes when Kit got the same kind of result from "unalive" things like cars and

doors and telephone poles, but that was where his talent lay. "What can a rock get upset

about?" she said.

"I'm not sure. They wouldn't say. The stones piled up there remembered something. And

they didn't want to think about it any more. They were shook." Kit looked up sharply at

Nita. "That was it The earth shook once. . . ."

"Oh, come off it. This isn't California. Long Island doesn't have earth-quakes."

"Once it did. The rocks remember. ... I wonder what that dolphin wanted?"

Nita was wondering too. She zipped up her windbreaker. "C'mon, we have to get back

before Mom busts a gut."

"But the dolphin—"

Nita started down the beach, then turned and kept walking backward when she noticed

that Kit wasn't following her. "The ball game was almost over," she said, raising her voice

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Summer Night's Song

as she got farther from Kit and Ponch. "They'll go to bed early. They always do. And

when they're asleep—"

Kit nodded and muttered something, Nita couldn't quite hear what. He vanished in a small

clap of inrushing air and then reappeared next to Nita> walking with her; Ponch barked in

annoyance and ran to catch up.

"He really hates that 'beam-me-up-Scotty' spell," Nita said.

171

DEEP WIZARDRY

"Yeah, when it bends space, it makes him itch. Look, I was practicing that other one—"

"With the water?" She grinned at him. "In the dark, I hope."

"Yeah. I'll show you later. And then—"

"Dolphins."

"\l\\-huh. C'mon, I'll race you."

They ran up the dune, followed by a black shape barking loudly about dog biscuits.

Wizards' Song

The Moon got high. Nita sat by the window of her ground-floor room, listening through the

stillness for the sound of voices upstairs. There hadn't been any for a while.

She sighed and looked down at the book she held in her lap. It looked like a library

book—bound in one of those slick-shiny buckram library bindings, with a Dewey decimal

number written at the bottom of the spine in that indelible white ink librarians use, and at

the top of the spine, the words SO YOU WANT TO BE A WIZARD. But on opening the

book, what one saw were the words Instruction and Implementation Manual, General and

Lim-ited Special-Purpose Wizardries, Sorceries, and Spells: 933rd Edition. Or that was

what you saw if you were a wizard, for the printing was done in the graceful, Arabic-

looking written form of the Speech.

Nita turned a few pages of the manual, glancing at them in idle interest. The instructions

she'd found in the book had coached her through her first few spells—both the kinds for

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SummerNight'sSongSummerNight'sSongNitaslippedoutthebackdoorofthebeachhouse,carefulnottoletth\ericketyscreendoorslam,andforasecondstoodsilentlyonthebackporchinthedark\ness.Itwasnouse."Nita"—hermother'svoicecamefloatingoutfromthelivingroom\—"where'reyougoing?""Out,"Nitasaid,hopingtogetawaywithitjustth...

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Duane, Diane - Wizards - Young Wizards 02 - Deep Wizardry

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