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

about ‘the Gates of the Sea.’ I tried looking in the manual, but all I could find was one of those ‘restrictEd’ notices and a footnote that said to see the local Senior for more details—“
    Kit looked up, saw Nita coming, and pointed at the phone, mouthing the words “Tom and Carl.” She nodded and squeezed into the booth with him; Kit tipped the hearing part of the receiver toward her, and they put their heads together. “Hi, it’s Nita—“
    “Well, hi there yourself,” Tom Swale’s voice came back. He would doubtless have gone on with more of the same if someone else, farther away from his end of the line, hadn’t begun screaming “Hel-LOOOOOOO! HEL-lo!” in a creaky, high-pitched voice that sounded as if Tom were keeping his insane grandmother chained up in the living room. This, Nita knew, was Tom and Carl’s intractable macaw Machu Picchu, or Peach for short. Wizards’ pets tended to get a bit strange as their masters grew more adept in wizardry, but Peach was stranger than most, and more trying. Even a pair of Senior wizards must have wondered what to do with a creature that would at one moment deliver the evening news a day early, in a flawless imitation of any major newscaster you pleased, and then a second later start ripping up the couch for the fun of it.
    Cut that out!” Nita heard another voice saying in the background, one with a more New Yorkish sound to it: That was Carl. “Look out!— She’s on the stove. Get her—oh, Lord. There go the eggs. You little cannibal!—“
    “It’s business as usual around here, as you can tell,” Tom said. “Not where you are, though, to judge from how early Kit called ... and from what he tells me. Kit, hang on a minute: Carl’s getting the information released for you Evidently the Powers That Be don’t want it distributed without a Senior s supervision. The area must be sensitive right now.”
    Nita made small talk with Tom for a few minutes while, in the back-ground, Peach screamed, and Annie and Monty the sheepdogs barked irritably at the macaw, who was shouting “Bad dog! Bad dog! Nonono!” at them —or possibly at Carl. Nita could imagine the scene very well—the bright airy house full of plants and animals, a very ordinary-looking place as far as the neighbors were concerned. Except that Tom spent his days doing research and development on complex spells and incantations for other wizards, and then used some of the things he discovered to make a living as a writer on the side. And Carl, who sold commercial time for a “flagship” station of one of the major television networks, might also make a deal to sell you a more unusual kind of time—say, a piece of last Thursday. The two of them were living proof that it was possible to live in the workaday world and function as wizards at the same time. Nita was very glad to know them.
    “The link’s busy,” she heard Carl saying, at some distance from the phone. “Oh, never mind, there it goes. Look,” he said, apparently to one of his own advanced-level manuals, “we need an intervention authorization for an offshore area—yeah, that’s right. Here’s the numbers—“
    Kit had his manual open to the spot where he’d found the notification. Nita looked over his shoulder and watched the box that said RESTRICTED INFORMATION suddenly blink out, replaced by the words SEE CHART PAGE 1096. “Got it?” Tom said.
    “Almost.” Kit turned pages. Nita looked over his shoulder and found herself looking at a map of the East Coast, from Nova Scotia to Virginia. But the coast itself was squeezed far over on the left-hand side, and individual cities and states were only sketchily indicated. The map was primarily concerned with the ocean.
    “Okay, I’ve got it in my book too,” Tom said. “All those lines in the middle of the water are contour lines, indicating the depth of the sea bottom. You can see that there aren’t many lines within about a hundred miles of Long Island. The