Read Online Deep Wizardry-wiz 2 by Diane Duane - Free Book Online Page A

you now—not that our species are so far apart anyway; we’re all mammals together. I suppose the first thing you’d better do is get in the water...”
    Nita jumped in, bobbed to the surface again. “And that stuff around you is going to have to go,” S’reee added, looking with mild perplexity at Nita’s bathing suit. Nita shot a quick look over her shoulder. For a moment, Kit just gazed innocently down at her, refusing to look away—then he turned, rolling his eyes.
    Nita skinned hurriedly out of the suit and called to Kit, “While you’re up there, put a warding spell on the platform. I don’t want the gulls doing you-know-what all over my suit while we’re gone. Or yours.” She flung the wet lump of bathing suit out of the water overhanded; it landed with a sodden thwack! at which Kit almost turned around again. “Can we get on with this?” Nita said to S’reee.
    “Surely. HNii’t, are you all right?” S’reee said.
    “Yes, fine, let’s do it!” Nita said.
    “So begin!” said S’reee, and began singing to herself as she waited.
    Nita paddled for a moment in the water, adjusting to not having her bathing suit on. Saying “Begin to what?” especially with Kit listening, seemed incredibly stupid, so she just hung there in the water for a few moments and considered being a whale. I don’t have the faintest idea what this is supposed to feel like, she thought desperately. But I should be able to come up with something. I am a wizard, after all.
    Nita got an idea. She took a deep breath, held it, and slowly began to relax into the sound. Her arms, as she let them go limp, no longer supported her; she sank, eyes open, into salty greenness. It’s all right, she thought. The air’s right above me if I need it. She hung weightless in the green, thinking of nothing in particular.
    Down there in the water, S’reee’s note seemed louder, fuller; it vibrated against the ears, against the skin, inside the lungs, filling everything. And there was something familiar about it. Cousin, S’reee had called her; and We have blood in common, she had said. So it should be easy. A matter of remembering, not what you have been ... but what, somewhere else, you are. Simply allow what is, somewhere else, to be what is here—and the change is done, effortless. Nita shut her eyes on the greenness and trusted to the wizardry inside her. That was it. “Wizardry does not live in the unwilling heart.” Not the kind of will that meant gritted teeth, resisting something else, like your own disbelief, that was trying to undermine you—not “willpower”—but the will that was desire, the will so strong that it couldn’t be resisted by all the powers of normality...
    Where am I getting all this? Nita didn’t know, didn’t care. To be a whale, she thought. To float like this all the time, to be weightless, like an astronaut. But space is green, and wet, and warm, and there are voices in it, and things growing. Freedom: no walls, no doors. And the songs in the water... Her arms were feeling heavy, her legs felt odd when she kicked; but none of it mattered. Something was utterly right, something was working. Nita began to feel short of air. It hadn’t worked all the way, that was all. She would get it right the next time. She stroked for the surface, broke it, opened her eyes to the light— and found it different. First and oddest—so that Nita tried to shake her head in disbelief, and failed, since she suddenly had no neck—the world was split in two, as if with an axe. Trying to look straight ahead of her didn’t work. The area in front of her had become a hazy uncertainty comprised of two sets of peripheral vision. And where the corners of her eyes should have been, she now had two perfectly clear sets of sideways vision that nonetheless felt like “forward.” She was seeing in colors she had no names for, and many she had names for were gone. Hands she still seemed to have, but her fingers hung down oddly