S'reee was lolling there in the wavewash, her long pale barnacled belly upward. The night before, when S'reee had been injured and immobile, it had been hard to tell much of anything about her. Now Nita was struck by the size of her—S'reee was at least forty feet from the tips of her flukes to her pointy nose. And last night she had been a wheezing hulk. Now she was all grace, floating and gliding and rolling like some absurd, fat, slim-winged bird—for her long swimming fins looked more like wings than anything else. "Did you sleep well?" she sang at them, a weird cheerful crescendo like something out of a happy synthesizer. "I slept wonderfully. And I ate well too. I think I may get back most of the weight I lost yesterday." Kit looked at the healed place, treading water. "What do you eat?" "Krill, mostly. The littlest things that live in the water, like little shrimp-But some fish too. The blues are running, and the little ones are good. Of they have been until now. . . ." She sighed, spraying water out her blow-hole. "That's in the story I have to tell you. Come on, we'll go out to one or the Made Rocks." They took hold of her dorsal fin, and she towed them. The "Made Rock turned out to be an old square fishing platform about three miles south oj Tiana Beach: wooden pilings topped by wooden slats covered with tarred canvas and with bland-faced seagulls. Most of the gulls immediately took ou and began flying around and screaming about the humans sitting on thet spot, despite Nita's and Kit's polite apologies. Some of the other gulls DEEP WIZARDRY 185 less annoyed, especially after they found out the visitors were wizards. Later on > whenever Nita thought of her first real conversation with S'reee, what she remembered best were the two seagulls who insisted on sitting in her lap the whole time. They were heavy, and not housebroken. "I guess the best place to start," S'reee said when Nita and Kit were settled, "is with what you already know, that there's been trouble for wizards on the land lately.