Nita and Kit looked at each other. They had found out for themselves that a wizard is at his most vulnerable when exercising his strength. "He died right away," S'reee said. "I took a spear too. But it didn't explode right away; and the sharks smelled Ae'mhnuu's blood and a great pack of them showed up to eat. They went into feeding frenzy and bit the spear right out of me. Then one of them started chewing on the spear, and the blasting part of it went off. It killed a lot of them and blew this hole in me. They got so busy eating each other and Ae'mhnuu that I had time to get away. But I was leaving bloodtrail, and they followed it. What else should I have ex-pected? .кShe wheezed. "Cousins, I hope one of you has skill at healing, for I'm in trouble, and I can't die now, there's too much to do.""Healing's part of my specialty," Nita said, and was quiet for a moment. She'd become adept, as Kit had, at fixing the minor hurts Ponch kept picking up—bee stings and cat bites and so forth. But this was going to be different.She stepped away from S'reee's head and went back to look at the wound, keeping tight control of her stomach. "I can seal this up all right," she said-"But you're gonna have a huge scar. And I don't know how long it'll take the muscles underneath to growback. I'm not real good at this yet.""Keep my breath in my body, cousin, that'll be enough for me," S'reee said. Nita nodded and started paging through her book for the section on rnedi– iDEEP WIZARDRY 179cine– It started out casually enough with first aid for the minor ailments of wizards—the physical ones like colds and the mental ones like spell backlash and brainburn. Behind that was a section she had only skimmed before, never expecting to need it: Major Surgery. The spells were complex and lengthy. That by itself was no problem. But all of them called for one supply in common—the blood of the wizard performing them. Nita began to shake. Seeing someone else bleed was bad enough; the sight of her own blood in quantity tended to make her pass out.
