Deep Wizardry New Millennium Edition

  Young Wizards

  New Millennium Edition

  Book 2:

  Deep Wizardry

  Diane Duane

  Errantry Press

  A division of the Owl Springs Partnership

  County Wicklow,

  Republic of Ireland

  Copyright page

  Deep Wizardry

  New Millennium Edition

  Errantry Press

  County Wicklow, Ireland

  Original edition copyright © 1985 Diane Duane

  New Millennium Edition copyright © 2012 Diane Duane

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to the following address:

  Donald Maass Literary Agency

  121 West 27th Street, Suite 801

  New York, NY 10001

  USA

  Publication history

  Delacorte Press 1st edition hardcover, 1985

  Dell Laurel-Leaf mass market paperback, 1987

  SF Book Club edition (in omnibus), 1989

  Dell Yearling digest-format paperback, July 1992

  Corgi Books (UK) mass-market paperback, July 1991

  Harcourt Brace Magic Carpet Books mass mass-market paperback, 1996

  SF Book Club edition (in omnibus), 1996

  Harcourt Trade Publishers digest-format paperback, 2004

  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ebook, 2010

  Young Wizards International Edition ebook, 2011

  Publisher's note: This New Millennium Edition ebook is derived from the text of the 2011 Young Wizards International Edition. It has been revised and edited to follow the new series timeline which begins in the New Millennium Edition of So You Want to Be a Wizard.

  Dedication

  Once again,

  to J.A.C.

  re: redemption and fried zucchini;

  and in fond memory

  of the divine and irrepressible

  Sam

  Rubric

  A pause! Lost ground!

  —Yet not unavailing, for soon shall be found

  What took three ages to subdue.

  The hunters, on their guard

  Give sparingly and greatly, east and west:

  Yet how shall only faithfulness prevail

  Against the peril of the overarching deep?

  —Trigram 63 / Chi Chi:

  Water Over Fire

  Time fix

  July, 2008

  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’d learned to make while her mother was deciding whether to let her do something. “I’ll take Ponch with me,” Nita said in a burst of inspiration.

  “Mmm…” her mother said, considering it. Ponch was a large black and white dog, part Border collie, part German shepherd, part no one knew what else—an intrepid hunter of water rats and gulls, ferociously loyal to his master, and to Nita because she was his master’s best friend. “Where’s Kit?”

  “Dunno.” It was at least partly the truth: and since her mom’s phone wasn’t new enough to be GPS-capable and couldn’t track anyone’s location, there was no way for her to tell otherwise. “He went for a walk a while ago.”

  ‘Well… okay. You take Ponch and look for Kit, and bring him back with 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 the house to the yard before her mother could change her mind, or her father, 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 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. Having so much fun. But so are we. This is the best vacation ever…!

  At the top of the dune she paused, looking down toward the long dark expanse of the beach. “Business has been a lot better since the spring,” her father had said a month or so before, over dinner. “Way better than I’d expected, to tell you the truth… so let’s enjoy it a little. We can’t go far for vacation—but let’s go somewhere nice. One of the beaches out in the un-fancy part of the Hamptons, maybe. We’ll rent a house and live beyond our means. For a week or so 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 sometimes laughed privately about that, for 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 all directions in his hurry. “Whoa!” Nita shouted at Ponch, but it was no use; it never was. He hit her about stomach level with both paws and knocked her down onto the crest of the dune, 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 off her. “Ponch, where’s Kit?”

  “Yayayayayayayaya!” Ponch barked, jumping up and bouncing around Nita 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.

  “Ponch, cut it out! 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 pale sand was harder there, but still dry; the tide was low, 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.” Nita said. “Don’t sweat it. I’m not mad at you.” She stopped to scratch the dog in the good place behind the ears. Ponch stood still with his tongue hanging out and looked up at her, his eyes shining oddly in the light of the nearly full Moon that was climbing the sky. “I just don’t feel like playing right now. I want to swim. Would you go find Kit?”

  The big brown eyes gazed soulfully up at her, and Ponch made a small beseeching whine. “A dog biscuit?”

  Nita grinned. “Blackmailer. Okay, you find the boss, I’ll give you a biscuit. Two biscuits. Go get ‘im!”

  Ponch immediately bounded off westward down the beach, kicking up wet sand. Nita headed for the water line, where she shrugged off the windbreaker
that had been covering her bathing suit, dropping it on the sand. Two months ago, talking to a dog and getting an answer back would have been something that only happened in 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 to her. Or, more accurately, Nita 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 speak to properly, or how to hear.

  Like parents, Nita thought with mild amusement. If her mother knew Nita was going swimming, she’d pitch a fit. She’d always had a terrible thing about night swimming since seeing Jaws. …But it’s okay, Nita thought. There aren’t any sharks here. And if there were, I’m pretty sure I could talk them out of eating me.

  She made sure the spot where she was leaving her clothes was well above the high-water line, then waded down into the breakers. The surf was quiet tonight, and the water washed 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 waded out another twenty paces or so, then crouched over and dived into the next incoming wave. Waterborne sand scoured her, the water thundered in her ears. Then she broke surface up past the inward-rolling wavecrest, stroked out well past the breakers, and finally lay back to float and catch her breath in the roll and dazzle of the moonlit water. There were no streetlights out here, and the stars she loved were bright despite the moon. This is just the best….

  After a while Nita 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…

  And 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! And the sight of the slick-skinned shape in the water right behind her stopped her breath—until she realized what she was looking at.

  A slender body, ten feet long; a blowhole and an amused eye that stared at her sidelong; and a long, beaked face that wore a permanent smile. Nita reached out a hesitant hand to the smooth silver-gleaming shape, and under her touch the dolphin turned lazily, rolling sideways, brushing her with skin like warm, moonlit satin.

  She was immensely relieved. “Dai stihó!” she said, greeting the swimmer in the Speech that wizards use—the language that she’d learned from her wizard’s manual, and that all creatures understand. She expected no more answer than a buzz or squeak as the dolphin returned the greeting and went about its business.

  But the dolphin rolled back toward Nita and stared at her in what seemed to be shock. “Wait, a wizard?!” it said in an urgent whistle.

  Nita opened her mouth to answer, but didn’t have time. The dolphin dived, its tail slapping the surface and spraying her with stinging water. By the time Nita rubbed the burn of the salt water out of her eyes, there was nothing near her but the usual roaring breakers. And back up on the beach, Ponch was bouncing frantically around and barking something about sea monsters to the slight shape walking beside him.

  “Neets?”

  Nita waded out of the breakers. At the water line Kit met her and handed Nita her windbreaker. He was a little shorter than she was, dark-haired and brown-eyed and sharp of face and mind; definitely sharper, Nita thought with approval, than anyone else their age that she knew. “He was hollering about whales,” Kit said, nodding at Ponch.

  “Dolphins,” Nita said. “At least, a dolphin. I said hi to it and it just said ‘A wizard?’ and made itself scarce.”

  “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 present specialty as a wizard was living things; animals and plants talked to her and did the things she asked, at least if she could work out how to ask properly. Wizardly specialties varied, though, and it still startled Nita sometimes when Kit got the same kind of result from “unalive” things like cars and doors and telephone poles. “The rocks?” Nita said, bemused. “What can a rock get upset about?”

  “Not sure. They wouldn’t say. But the stones piled up there sure remembered something… and they didn’t want to think about it any more. They were shook.” And Kit gave Nita a quick sharp look, as if realizing something that hadn’t occurred to him before. “Literally. The earth shook once…”

  “Oh, come off it. This isn’t California. Long Island doesn’t have earthquakes.”

  “Once it did, though. The rocks remember… Wonder what that dolphin wanted?”

  Nita was wondering too. She zipped up her windbreaker. “C’mon, we should get back before Mom busts a gut.”

  “But what about 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 as she got farther from Kit and Ponch. “They’ve been turning in early every night…” Her Dad’s official excuse for this was “the bracing sea air”, but Nita’s opinion was that this was code for “married adult stuff,” and she didn’t want to know any more about it. “So when they’re asleep—”

  Kit nodded and muttered something, Nita couldn’t quite hear what. A second later he vanished in a small clap of inrushing air; then, the next instant, reappeared next to Nita, walking with her. Ponch barked in annoyance, whirled around once, and then ran to catch up.

  “He’s not real wild about that ‘beam-me-up-Scotty’ spell, is he,” Nita said.

  “No. Seems like bending space so close to him 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!”

  “Yeah. 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 rose high. Nita sat by the window of her ground-floor room in the beach house, listening through the stillness for the sound of voices upstairs. There hadn’t been any for a while, but she sat quiet, wanting to make sure.

  She glanced 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. It had 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 Limited 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 which only words were needed and those that required raw materials of some sort. The spells had in turn led Nita into the company of other wizards: both beginners like Kit, and more experienced practitioners typical of the wizards, young and old, working quietly all over the world. Then the spells had taken Nita right out of the world she’d known, into one of the ones “next door,” and into a conflict that had been going on since time’s beginning, in all the worlds there were.

  In that other world, a place like New York City but also terribly different, she’d passed through the initial ordeal that every candidate for wizardry undergoes. Kit had been with her. Together they’d pulled each other and themselves through the danger and the terror to the successful completion of the
quest into which they’d stumbled. They saved their own world without attracting much notice; they lost a couple of dear friends they’d met along the way; and they came into their full power as wizards. It was a privilege that had its price. Nita still wasn’t sure why she’d been chosen as one of those who fight for the Worlds against the Great Death that was entropy. She was just glad to have been picked.

  She flipped pages to the regional directory, where wizards were listed by name and address. Nita never got tired of seeing her own name listed there for other wizards to call if they needed her. She overshot her own page in the Nassau County section, wanting to check the names of two friends, Senior Wizards for the area—Tom Swale and Carl Romeo. They had recently been promoted to Senior from the Advisory Wizard level, and as she’d suspected, their listing now read “On sabbatical: emergencies only.” Nita grinned at the memory of the party they’d thrown to celebrate their promotion. The guests had been a select group.Many more of them had appeared out of nowhere than arrived through the front door. Several had spent the afternoon floating in midair; another had spent it in the fishpond, submerged. Human beings had been only slightly in the majority at the party, and Nita became very careful at the snack table after her first encounter with the dip made from Pennsylvania crude oil and fresh-ground iron filings.

  She paged back through the listing and looked at her own name.

  CALLAHAN, Juanita L.

  On active status

  243 E. Clinton Avenue

  Hempstead

  NY 11575

  (516) 379-6786

  Assignment location: 38 Tiana Beach Road

  Southampton, NY 11829 (516) 667-9084