her. “Huh? Oh. Sure. Better put up a wizard’s wall first, so that the dolphins can get back in the water without getting attacked again.”
“Right.” Nita got her book out and riffled through pages to the appropriate spell, a short-term forcefield that needed no extra supplies to produce She said the spell and felt it take hold, then sagged back against the whale and closed her eyes till the dizziness went away. Off to one side she heard Kit saying the words that released the freeze.
A few moments later fins began appearing again out on the water, circling inward toward the sandbar, then sliding away as if they bumped into something, and circling in again.
“The water will take the blood away soon enough,” the whale said. “They’ll go away and not even remember why they were here…” The whale’s eye fixed on Nita again. “Thanks for coming so quickly, cousins.”
“It took us longer than we wanted. I’m Nita. That’s Kit.”
“I’m S’reee,” the whale said. The name was a hiss and a long, plaintive, upscaling whistle.
Kit left the wound and came up to join Nita. “It was one of those explosive harpoons, all right,” he said. “But I thought those were supposed to be powerful enough to blow even big whales in two.”
“They are. Ae’mhnuu died that way, this morning.” S’reee’s whistle was bitter. “He was the Senior Wizard for this whole region of the Plateau. I was studying with him — I was going to be promoted to Advisory soon. Then the ship came, and we were doing a wizardry, we didn’t notice—“
Nita and Kit looked at each other. They had found out for themselves that a wizard is at his most vulnerable when exercising his strength. “He died right away,” S’reee said. “I took a spear too. But it didn’t explode right away; and the sharks smelled Ae’mhnuu’s blood and a great pack of them showed up to eat. They went into feeding frenzy and bit the spear right out of me. Then one of them started chewing on the spear, and the blasting part of it went off. It killed a lot of them and blew this hole in me. They got so busy eating each other and Ae’mhnuu that I had time to get away. But I was leaving bloodtrail, and they followed it. What else should I have expected?…”
She wheezed. “Cousins, I hope one of you has skill at healing, for I’m in trouble, and I can’t die now, there’s too much to do.”
“Healing’s part of my specialty,” Nita said, and was quiet for a moment. She’d become adept, as Kit had, at fixing the minor hurts Ponch kept picking up — bee stings and cat bites and so forth. But this was going to be different.
She stepped away from S’reee’s head and went back to look at the wound, keeping tight control of her stomach. “I can seal this up all right,” she said-“But you’re gonna have a huge scar. And I don’t know how long it’ll take the muscles underneath to grow back. I’m not real good at this yet.”
“Keep my breath in my body, cousin, that’ll be enough for me,” S’reee said.
Nita nodded and started paging through her book for the section on rnedicine. It started out casually enough with first aid for the minor ailments of wizards — the physical ones like colds and the mental ones like spell backlash and brainburn. Behind that was a section she had only skimmed before, never expecting to need it: Major Surgery. The spells were complex and lengthy. That by itself was no problem. But all of them called for one supply in common — the blood of the wizard performing them. Nita began to shake. Seeing someone else bleed was bad enough; the sight of her own blood in quantity tended to make her pass out.
“Oh, great,” she said, for there was no avoiding what had to be done. “Kit, you have anything sharp on you?”
He felt around in his pockets. “No such luck, Neets…”
“Then find me a shell or something.”
S’reee’s eye glinted in the moonlight. “There are the dolphins,” she said.
“What do they — oh.” The one dolphin still beached, the one who had brought them in, smiled at Nita, exhibiting many sharp teeth.
“Oh, brother,” she said, and went down the sandbar to where the dolphin lay. “Look,” she said, hunkering down in front of it, “I don’t even know your name—“
“Hotshot.” He gave her a look that was amused but also kindly.
“Hotshot, right. Look — don’t do it hard, okay?” And wincing, Nita put out her left hand and looked away.
“Do what?”
“Do — ulp!” Nita said, as the pain hit. When she looked again, she saw that Hotshot had nipped her very precisely on the outside of the palm — two little crescents of toothmarks facing each other. Blood welled up, and the place stung, but not too badly to bear.
Hotshot’s eyes glittered at her. “Needs salt.”
“Yeccch!” But Nita still wanted to laugh, even while her stomach churned. She got up and hurried back to Kit, who was holding her book for her.
Together they went over to the terrible wound, and Nita put her bleeding hand to it, turned away as far as she could, and started reading the spell. It was a long series of complicated phrases in the Speech; she spoke them quickly at first, then more slowly as she began to be distracted by the pain in her hand. And as often happens in a wizardry, she began to lose contact with her physical surroundings.
Soon Kit and S’reee and the beach were gone. Even the book was gone, though she was reading from it. She was surrounded by the roaring of green water around her, and the smell of blood and fear, and shadows in the water, pursuing her. She swam for her life, and kept reading.
No wound can be healed, the book said, unless the pain of its inflicting is fully experienced. There was nothing to do but read, and flee, wailing terror and and grief-song into the water, until the first pain came, the sick, cold sharpness in her side. Nita knew she was sagging, knew Kit was holding her up from behind. But all that was far away.
The second pain came, the fierce mouths ripping and worrying at her till she couldn’t go forward any more, only flail and thrash in an agony of helplessness and revulsion— and then the third pain hit, and Nita lost control of everything and started to fall down as the white fire blew up in her side. But the words were speaking her now, as they do in the more powerful wizardries. Though inwardly Nita screamed and cried for release, it did her no good. Her own power was loose, doing what she had told it to, and the wizardry wouldn’t let her go until it was done. When it was, finally, it dropped her on her face in the sand, and she felt Kit go down with her, trying to keep her from breaking something.
Eventually the world came back. Nita found herself sitting on the sand, feeling wobbly, but not hurting anywhere. She looked up at S’reee’s side. New gray skin covered the wound, paler than the rest of the whale, but unbroken. There was still a crater there, but no blood flowed; and many of the smaller shark bites were completely gone, as were the burns from the harpoon’s rope where it had gotten tangled around S’reee’s flukes.
“Wow,” Nita said. She lifted her left hand and looked at it. The place where Hotshot had bitten her was just a little oval of pink puncture marks, all healed.
“You all right?” Kit said, trying to help her up.
“Yeah, yeah, sure,” Nita said. She pushed him away as kindly and quickly as she could, staggered down to the water line, and lost her dinner.
When she came back, her mouth full of the taste of the salt water she’d used to wash it out, S’reee had rolled herself more upright and was talking to Kit. “I still feel deathly sick,” she said, “but at least dying isn’t a problem… not for the moment.”
She looked at Nita. Though the long face was frozen into that eternal smile, it was amazing how many expressions could live in a whale’s eyes. Admiration was there just now, and gratitude. “You and I aren’t just cousins now, Niit,” S’reee said, giving Nita’s name a whistly whalish intonation, “but sisters too, by blood exchanged. And I’m in your debt. Maybe it’s poor thanks to a debtor to ask him to lend to you again, right away. But maybe a sister, or a friend”—she glanced at Kit—“would excuse that if it had to happen.”
“We’re on active status,” Kit said. “We have to handle whatever comes up in this area. What’s the problem?”
“Well then.” S’reee’s whistling took on a more formal rhythm. “As the only remaining candidate Senior Wizard for the Waters About the Gates, by wizard’s Right I request and require your assistance. Intervention will take place locally and last no more than ten lights-and-darks. The probable level of difficulty does not exceed what the manual describes as ‘dangerous’, though if intervention is delayed, the level may escalate to ‘extremely dangerous’ or ‘critical.’ Will you assist?”
