Free Deep Wizardry-wiz 2 by Diane Duane Page A

weight, and somehow the danger—and kept her movements slow and respectful. He was still Kit—but something had been added.
    He glanced at S’reee and Nita, saying nothing, as he rose past them and broke surface to breathe. They followed. He spouted once or twice, apparently to get the feel of it, and then said to S’reee in a rather rueful tone of song, “I wish you’d warned me!”
    His voice ranged into a deeper register than a humpback’s and had a sharper sound to it—more clicks and buzzes. It was not entirely comfortable on the skin. “I couldn’t,” S’reee said, “or you might have fought it even harder than you did, and the change might have refused to take. That would’ve been trouble for us; if a whalesark once rejects a person, it’ll never work for him at all. After this it’ll be easier for you. Which in itself will make some problems. Right now, though, let’s get going. Take a long breath; I want to get out of the bay without attracting too much attention.”
    They took breath together and dived deep, S’reee in the lead and swimming south by west, Nita and Kit following. The surroundings—thick, lazily waving kelp beds and colonies of bright polyps and anemones, stitched through with the brief silver flash of passing fish—fascinated Nita. But she couldn’t give the landscape, or seascape, her whole attention; she had other concerns. (Kit,) she tried to say in the Speech’s silent form, for privacy’s sake -then found that it wasn’t working; she wasn’t getting the sort of mental “echo” that told her she was sending successfully. Probably it had something to do with the shapechange spell. “Hey,” she said aloud, “you okay?”
    The question came out of her as such a long, mournful moan that Kit laughed—a sound more like boiling lava than boiling oatmeal: huge hisses and bubblings mixed together. “Now I am,” he said, “or I will be as soon as I can get used to this bit with the eyes—“
    “Yeah, it’s weird. But kind of nice too. Feeling things, instead of seeing them...”
    “Yeah. Even the voices have feelings. S’reee’s is kind of twitchy—“
    “Yeah. You’ve got sharp edges—“
    “You’ve got fur.”
    “I do not!”
    “Oh, yes you do. It’s soft, your voice. Not like your usual one—“
    Nita was unsure whether to take this as a compliment, so she let it lie. The moment had abruptly turned into one of those times when she had no idea just what to say to Kit, the sort of sudden silence that was acutely painful to Nita, though Kit never seemed to notice it at all. Nita couldn’t think of anything to do about the problem, which was the worst part of the whole business. She wasn’t about to mention the problem to her mom, and on this subject the wizards’ manual was hugely unhelpful.
    The silence was well along toward becoming interminable when S’reee said, “That’s the primary way we have for knowing one another, down here. We haven’t the sort of physical variations you have—differences in head shape and so forth—and even if we did, what good would a distinction be if you had to come right up to someone to make it? By voice, we can tell how far away a friend is, how he’s feeling, practically what he’s thinking. Though the closer a friend is to you, usually, the harder it is to tell what’s on his mind with any accuracy.”
    Nita started to sing something, then caught herself back to silence. “Is the change settling in, Kit?” S’reee said.
    “Now it is. I had a weird feeling, though, like something besides me, my mind I mean—like something besides that was fighting the change. But it’s gone now.”
    “Only for the moment,” S’reee said. “See, it’s the old rule: no wizardry without its price, or its dangers. Though the dangers are different for each of you, since you changed by different methods. As I said, HNii’t, you have to beware pretending too hard—thinking so much like a whale that you don’t want to be