Off to Be the Wizard - 2 - Spell or High Water (16 page)

For any ordinary person, the implosion of a deep-sea submersible is an instant death. The violence of the event and the pressures involved will completely destroy the human body faster than its nervous system can register a single pain signal. Death is immediate and certain, like someone turning off a switch marked
you.
Phillip was not an ordinary person. He was a subroutine in a computer-generated reality, and he knew it. As such, he had made modifications to his parameters.

Phillip was badly stunned. He drifted in the water, his whole body screaming. He was impervious to physical damage, but the implosion had felt like being hit by a speeding car from every possible direction simultaneously. Normally, on the surface, he would take a few moments to recover from this. Phillip was not on the surface. He was deep under the ocean, and while the
pressure
was not killing him, it certainly wasn’t making him comfortable.

Phillip regained some small portion of his senses. He tried to look around, but there was no light this far down, and he no longer had the sphere to create and convert infra-red light into something his eyes could use. All he saw was, literally, a sea of blackness in every direction.

The cold was not an issue. Phillip’s modifications to his own statistics left him with a constant comfortable temperature regardless of the ambient conditions, so that was a victory.
The oxy
gen situation was less positive. They had found ways to make people not need oxygen, but they hadn’t found a way to make them not feel like they need oxygen, so the unlucky few who had tried this modification (or had it tried on them) spent the entire time feeling like they were suffocating, even though they were not. This was deemed so horrific that no wizard he knew of had ever chosen to keep that modification installed, so Phillip needed air, and there was no way he could swim to the surface in time.

Because of the darkness and the pressure, he didn’t feel like he was drowning. He felt like he was buried alive, under a
mountain
of water, which was not an improvement.

Phillip flailed about helplessly. He was down far too deep to have any hope of swimming to the surface. He had no light, he had no air. He wasn’t thinking in rational sentences, or even words. Just fast, panicked images, one of which was of his staff waiting for him back at Brit’s home. It was too long to fit in the sphere, so he’d left it. Without it, the shell program he’d mostly invented would not recognize him as a wizard, and would not let him teleport to safety. It was meant to be a failsafe to keep the wrong people from using magic. Luckily, after the scare they’d all had two months ago, he had developed an emergency backup: a collapsible metal pointer that he’d modified to extend to the proper length for the shell to recognize it as a wand. All he had to do was pull it out, extend it, not make the obvious joke, and use his last breath to say the right spell, and he’d be back at home, safe. He knew that it wasn’t possible to talk in any meaningful way underwater, but as long as his lungs expelled some air, and his mouth and vocal cords formed the words, he was hopeful that the shell would recognize the incantation.

Hopeful
was the word.

He jammed his right hand into his pocket, searching for the pointer. He swept his left hand in wide arcs with his fingers extended. If he could get a good grip on Brit, he could teleport them both to safety, but he needed to find her first.

He hadn’t had the chance to take a good deep breath before the implosion, and even if he had, the violence of it would
have knoc
ked most of the wind out of him anyway. His lungs were already aching. The pointer was easy enough to find in his pocket, but drifting underwater, it was surprisingly difficult to pull it out of his loose robe’s large pocket. Every time he tried to pull his hand out of the pocket, the pocket moved with his hand. Finally, after several tries, he suspended his left arm’s search for Brit, and sent it to assist his right arm. He grabbed the outside of the pocket with one hand, yanking the pointer out with the other.

He quickly extended the pointer, then started whipping his arms around wildly in a desperate attempt to find Brit. His lungs were on fire, but he did not want to leave without her. His
movements
got more and more frantic. Finally, he realized that if he didn’t get out of there soon, he wouldn’t get out of there at all.

His arms had yet to make contact with anything that might be another person. He was very quickly reaching decision time, when he felt something grab his left foot. For the first time since the implosion, actual words popped into his mind.

Oh God,
he thought,
it’s the squid!

Phillip pictured himself materializing back at home with a fifty-foot, angry, dying squid. He didn’t like what he saw. He jerked his leg upward, but it was held tight. He couldn’t shake the squid off. He knew that squid or no squid, he needed air, now. He drew up his other leg to make one desperate attempt to kick himself free. He looked down, towards his captured leg, and at first he thought he was hallucinating from the lack of oxygen. His eye struggled to focus and adjust, but submerged in murky water without goggles, his vision was only going to be so clear. Still, blurry though it was, Phillip definitely saw light beneath him. He stopped struggling and saw that it was not the squid that had his left foot, it was Brit. She had his foot jammed into the crook of her right arm, and the index finger of her left hand was glowing. They briefly made eye contact. Brit stabbed her glowing finger at a floating button that only she could see, and the two of them disappeared.

15.

Martin and Gwen were waiting.

They had realized that something was up. They wanted to tell Phillip and needed to tell Brit. They decided that finding Brit first was their priority, and decided to start with Brit the Younger, since she was the one in direct danger. They went to her home. Nik knew Gwen well and let them in, but was adamant that when Brit went out on her little head-clearing trips, she was not to be disturbed. Martin saw Phillip’s staff lying on the floor next to one of the chairs, and asked Nik if Brit had company.

Nik said, “Yes. A gentleman named Phillip.”

Nik assured Gwen and Martin that Brit would be back soon and told them to have a seat, while he went and got them some refreshments.

Gwen and Martin had just settled into their seats when Brit and Phillip returned.

Brit had her legs pulled in toward her body, one hand
pointing
into space, the other trapping Phillip’s ankle under her arm. Phillip had one leg (the one Brit was clinging to) stretched out and the other pulled up, with his knee to his chest as if he intended to kick Brit in the face. His back was hunched, his arms were akimbo, and in his right hand, he was holding a metal pointer like he had just been giving a science lecture. They both appeared out of thin air, soaking wet and several feet off the ground.

They fell to the floor with a wet thud, then lay there
gasping
for air. Gwen rushed to their sides to offer aid. Martin leaned forward in his chair.

Once she had caught her breath, Brit leaned up on one elbow, looked at Phillip, and said, “Were you going to kick me in the head?”

Phillip shrugged and said, “Sorry. I thought you were the squid.”

Martin said, “Well, there’s got to be a story behind that.”

Gwen helped Brit to her feet. Martin watched, smirking as Phillip clambered to a standing position, then wrung some of the brine out of his hat. Brit said, “Thanks, Gwen. By the way, what are you two doing here?”

Gwen put a reassuring hand on Brit’s shoulder and said, “We need to talk. Martin and I think someone may be trying to kill you.”

Phillip turned to Martin and said, “You think so, huh?”

Martin replied, “It’s a theory.”

Just then, Nik rounded the corner from the kitchen,
calling
out, “Okay, who’s thirsty?” When he saw Brit and Phillip’s condition, he nearly dropped his tray of drinks.

Phillip and Martin teleported back to their room so Phillip could clean himself up. Brit used the time to make herself look and feel more human. Twenty minutes later they reconvened in Brit’s living room to compare notes.

Brit and Phillip described how they had heard the same
hollow
popping noise when the submersible imploded that they’d heard before the two statues fell. Gwen and Martin talked about their inspection of the statue base and their belief that both statues had been brought down deliberately.

“What I don’t get,” Martin mused, “is why anyone would want to kill you in the first place, Brit.”

Brit smiled. “Thanks, Martin. I appreciate that.”

“I mean,” Martin continued, “Brit the Elder being here proves that you survive to be her, so any attempt to kill you is doomed to failure. Am I right?”

Brit looked long and hard at Martin, then said, “Is that the only reason you can think of not to kill me?”

Phillip quickly added, “Besides, it’s not really true.” He went on to give Gwen and Martin a quick synopsis of his idea
regarding
Brit the Elder’s existence, and Brit the Younger’s
killability
.

Martin thought for a moment, then asked, “Is
killability
even a word?”

Phillip said, “If I use it, and you know what it means, it a word. Also, it’s fun to say. Killability. Killability. It rolls nicely.”

“I don’t know,” Martin continued. “It’s not very elegant.”

“The word is killability. Who cares?”

“No, not the word. Well, not just the word. Your idea, too. It’s inelegant.”

“Reality is inelegant,” Phillip huffed.

“No,” Martin said definitively. “Reality is stunningly elegant. Our understanding of it is not.”

“Martin, we’re not going to have this argument again.”

“We never have this argument. Every time we start to, you get mad and start shouting.”

Phillip’s face began to turn red. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have said, ‘we’re not going to have this argument again.’ I should have said, ‘again, we are not going to have this argument.’ Maybe you’d think that was more elegant.”

Brit turned to Gwen and said, “I can see why you enjoyed hanging around with these guys. It’s entertaining in its way.”

“Yes,” Gwen agreed, “but as usual, it isn’t really getting us anywhere. Guys, arguments about Brit’s killability . . . oh, that
is fun.”

Phillip smiled, and said, “I know, right?” Brit did not smile.

Gwen continued. “Maybe Brit can be killed, maybe she can’t. Either way, Phillip can be killed, and he nearly was. Whoever it is who’s trying to take Brit out could easily kill someone else in the process. We have to stop them, and that means figuring out who it is.”

Brit said, “We know it’s someone with powers. Gunpowder won’t be invented until hundreds of years from now, and even if it were, it would take a heap of the stuff to bring down one of those statues, let alone to put a hole in my diamond sphere.”

“Agreed,” Gwen said. “Of course, this would happen during the one time that we have magic users from all over the world visiting. That won’t make it easier to narrow things down.”

“Who has the most to gain?” Martin asked. “Brit, if you were out of the picture, who’d benefit most?”

“Nobody,” Brit said. “I’m completely unimportant.”

Gwen said, “Brit, that’s not true.”

Brit waved her off. “Yes it is. Brit the Elder has all of the power. I get it. She’s the one who’s done everything. I’m just the one who’s going to do everything, and in the end, what’s that worth? Really, I’m only in the council of three to break ties.”

“But you are on the council,” Martin said. “Maybe someone wants you off. Maybe, maybe . . . maybe they want you and Brit the Elder both off of the council, and they think that if they kill you, it’ll take her out too. Two birds with one stone.”

Phillip said, “Martin, there are only two options. Either their fates are tied together, or they aren’t. If they are, and
someone
kills Brit here, then she never goes on to build
Atlantis
, none of this ever happens, and whoever it is who thinks they’re going to gain something most likely loses everything. If, on the other hand, their fates aren’t joined, then whoever kills Brit will find that the only change they’ve created is that the most powerful woman in Atlantis is furious at them for killing her younger self and giving her an identity crisis. Either way, it’s a stupid plan.”

Martin shrugged. “Then maybe the murderer is stupid.”

“Attempted murderer,” Brit corrected. “They haven’t succeeded at anything yet.”

“Which proves my point,” Martin said.

Gwen said, “Martin, you said we should look at the person who has most to gain. Well, that’s Ida, the president. With both Brits gone, she’d be the only council member left. But, she’s not stupid.”

“Are you sure?” Martin asked.

Both Gwen and Brit nodded. “We both voted for Ida. We wouldn’t vote for someone we thought might be stupid.”

Martin accepted this, and the room fell into a sullen silence.

Eventually Gwen said, “Whoever it is, either they’ll give up, which is good, or they’ll try again, and that’ll be a chance to catch them. Either way, I think the logical next step is to go tell Brit the Elder what’s going on.”

“Why?” Brit asked. “Shouldn’t she already know? Having someone try to kill you is pretty memorable. You’d think she’d recall who did it, how many more times they’ll try, and how they’re stopped.”

Phillip said, “Gwen’s right, and so are you. Either she doesn’t know, and we need to tell her, or she does know, and we need to ask her what happens next.”

“No,” Brit said flatly. “I don’t want her to have the satisfaction of knowing that I came to her for help.”

Martin asked, “And if you don’t, you’re okay with having her remembering that you risked your life rather than ask her for help?”

“Yes,” Brit said. “I’m fine with that, because that gives me satisfaction.”

Gwen said, “Brit, if your life might be in danger, and we knew about it, wouldn’t you want us to tell you?”

“You know it,” Brit said.

Gwen said, “And that’s why we have to tell her. Because she is you.” Gwen tried not to look triumphant as she said it.

Brit replied, “Then you have warned her, just now, when you told me.” Brit made a deliberate effort to look triumphant as she said it. She looked at the faces of the other three people. She could tell she had lost the argument, but that didn’t mean she had to act defeated. “Fine,” she said, “we’ll warn her, but it’s not going to be me who does it. One of you three is going to have to go deal with her. Who’s it gonna be?”

While Gwen, Phillip, and Martin all agreed that Brit the Elder needed to be warned, none of them was particularly eager to volunteer to do it in front of Brit the Younger. She clearly had issues with Brit the Elder and might take them out on anyone who seemed to be
Elder-friendly
. Gwen was her friend and didn’t want to seem disloyal. Phillip was beginning to harbor hopes of becoming something more than her friend, and especially didn’t want to seem disloyal. Martin had a life-long aversion to
offending
angry women. The three of them stared at each other, mute with indecision, until, mercifully, the doorbell rang.

Nik speedwalked across the room, saying, “Don’t get up. I’ll get that. You keep having your very serious discussion that I was definitely not listening to.”

Nik opened the door. Outside there were two guards. One, Martin had not met, was wearing the normal guard kilt and net shirt. The other, Ampyx, was also wearing an apparently
homemade
pointy wizard hat. When Ampyx noticed that Gwen was there, he winked and flicked his eyes upward to call her attention to the hat. The other guard said, “We have been sent to collect the guest of Atlantis called Phillip.”

Brit the Younger rose to her feet and asked, “Why?
What for
?”

The guard stated, “He is to meet with Brit the Elder.”

Brit the Younger glared at Phillip, who looked uneasily back at her. Martin smiled broadly and said, “Say, that’s convenient.” Ampyx studied Martin, filing this away for later.