DEEP WIZARDRY 175"You okay?" Kit said."Yeah. It's just that the sea seems . . . safer near the shore, somehow, deep is it here?"Kit slipped his manual out of his windbreaker and pulled out a large nauti-cal map. "About eighty feet, it looks like."Nita sat up straight in shock. Something had broken the surface of the water and was arrowing toward them at a great rate. It was a triangular fin. Nita scrambled to her feet. "Uh, Kit!"He was on his feet beside her in a second, staring too. "A shark has to stay in the water," he said, sounding more confident than he looked. "We don't. We can jump—""Oh, yeah? How high? And for how long?" The fin was thirty yards or so away. A silvery body rose up under it, and Nita breathed out in relief at the frantic, high-pitched chattering of a dol-phin's voice. The swimmer leaped right out of the water in its speed, came down, and splashed them both. "I'm late, and you're late," it gasped in a string of whistles and pops, "and S'reee's about to be! Hurry!""Right," Kit said, and slapped his manual shut. He said nothing aloud, but the sea's surface instantly stopped behaving like a waterbed and started act-ing like water. "Whoolp!" Nita said as she sank like a stone. She didn't get wet—that part of Kit's spell was still working—but she floundered wildly for a moment before managing to get hold of the dolphin in the cold and dark of the water.Nita groped up its side and found a fin. Instantly the dolphin took off, and Nita hoisted herself up to a better position, hanging from the dorsal fin so that her body was half out of the water and her legs were safely out of the way of the fiercely lashing tail. On the other side, Kit had done the same. "You might have warned me!" she said to him across the dolphin's back.
