Deep Wizardry

The Gray Lord’s Song

They found the whale who would sing the part of the Gray in the chill waters about Old Man Shoals, a gloomy place strewn full of boulders above which turbulent water howled and thundered. The current set swift through the shoals, and the remnants of its victims lay everywhere. Old splintered spars of rotting masts, fragments of crumbled planks, bits of rusted iron covered with barnacles or twined about with anemones; here and there a human bone, crusted over with coral— Broken-backed ships lay all about, strangled in weed, ominous shapes in the murk; and when Nita and Kit and the others sang to find their way, the songs fell into the silence with a wet, thick, troubled sound utterly unlike the clear echoes that came back from the sandy bottoms off Long Island.

The place suited Nita’s mood perfectly. She swam low among the corpses of dead ships, thinking bitter thoughts — most of them centering on her own stupidity.

They warned me. Everybody warned me! Even Picchu warned me: “Read the fine print before you sign!” Idiot! she thought bitterly. What do I do now? I don’t want to die!

But “Any agreements you make, make sure you keep,” Tom had said — and though his voice had been kind, it had also been stern. As stern as the Blue s: “Nowhere does the Lone Power enter in so readily as through the broken word.”

She could see what she was expected to do… and it was impossible. I can’t die — I’m too young, what would Kit say to Mom and Dad, I don’t want to, it’s not fair! But the answer stayed the same nonetheless.

She groaned out loud. Two days. Two days left. Two days is a long time-Maybe something will happen and I won’t have to die.

“Stop that sniveling noise!” came a sharp, angry burst of song, from practically in front of her. Nita backfinned, shocked at the great bulk rising up from the bottom before her. The echoes of her surprised squeak came back raggedly, speaking of old scars, torn fins and flukes, skin ripped and gouged and badly healed. And the other’s song had an undercurrent of rage to it that hit Nita like a deep dive into water so cold it burned.

“How dare you come into my grounds without protocol?” said the new whale as she cruised toward Nita with a slow deliberateness that made Nita back away even faster than before. The great head and lack of a dorsal fin made it plain that this was another sperm whale.

“Your pardon,” Nita sang hurriedly, sounding as conciliatory as possible. “I didn’t mean to intrude—“

“You have,” said the sperm, in a scraping phrase perilously close to the awful sperm-whale battlecry that Nita had heard from Kit. She kept advancing on Nita, and Nita kept backing, her eye on those sharp teeth. “These are my waters, and I won’t have some noisy krill-eating songster scaring my food—“

That voice was not only angry, it was cruel. Nita started to get angry at the sound of it. She stopped backing up and held her ground, poising her tail for a short rush to ram the other if necessary. “I’m not interested in your fish, even if they could hear me, which they can’t — and you know it!” she sang angrily. “Humpbacks sing higher than fish can hear — the same as you do!”

The sperm kept coming, showing more teeth. “You look like a whale,” she said, voice lowering suspiciously, “and you sing like a whale — but you don’t sound like a whale. Who are you?”

“HNii’t,” Nita said, giving her name the humpback accent. “I’m a wizard. A human wizard—“

The sperm whale cried out and rushed at her, jaws wide. Nita arrowed off to one side, easily avoiding the sperm’s rush. “Spy! Murderer!” The sperm was howling, a terrible rasping song like a scream. It came at her again—

Again Nita rolled out of the way, her maneuverability easily defeating the other’s rage-blinded charge. “I may be a human,” she sang angrily, “but I’m still a wizard! Mess with me and I’ll—“

WHAM! The sperm whale’s spell hit her with an impact that made the displaced-water explosions of Kit’s shapechanges seem puny. Nita was thrown backward, literally head over tail, thrashing and struggling for control as she swore at herself for being caught off guard. The spell was a simple physical-violence wizardry, as contemptuous a gesture from one wizard to another as a slap in the face… and as much a challenge to battle as such a slap would have been from one human to another.

Nita went hot with rage, felt about for her inner contact with the Sea, found it, and sang — only three notes, but pitched and prolonged with exquisite accuracy to take the power of the other’s spell and turn it back on her tenfold. The spell and the water thundered together. The sperm whale was blown backward as Nita had been, but with more force, tumbling violently and trailing a song of shock and rage behind her.

Nita held still, shaking with anger, while S’reee and Hotshot and Kit gathered around her. “I’m all right,” she said, the trembling getting into her song. “But that one needs some lessons in manners.”

“She always has,” S’reee said. “HNii’t, I’m sorry. I would have kept you back with us, but—“ She didn’t go on.

“It’s all right,” Nita said, still shaking.

“Nice shot,” said a low scrape of song beside her ear, angry and appreciative: Kit. She brushed him lightly with one flank as a great pale shape came drifting down on the other side of her, eyeing her with dark-eyed interest.

“So,” Ed said, calm as ever, “the Sprat has teeth after all. I am impressed.”

“Thanks,” Nita said, not up to much more conversation with Ed at the moment.

Slowly they swam forward together to where S’reee was hovering in the water, singing more at than with the other whale. “—know you were out of bounds, Areinnye,” she said. “There was no breach of protocol. We came in singing.”

“That one did not,” said the sperm whale, her song so sharp with anger that it was a torture to the ears. “My right—“

“—does not extend to attacking a silent member of a party entering your waters within protocols,” S’reee said. “You attacked HNii’t out of spite, nothing more. First spite, then anger because she was human. We heard—“

“Did you indeed? And what else have you heard in these waters, you nursling wizard, you and your little playfellows?” The sperm whale glared at them all as they gathered around her, and the rasp of pain and hatred in her voice was terrible. “Have you seen my calf hereabouts? For all your magics, I think not. The whalers have been through these waters three days ago, and they served my little M’hali as they served your precious Ae’mhnuu! Speared and left to float belly-up, slowly dying, while they hunted me — then hauled bloated out of the water and gutted, his bleeding innards thrown overboard by bits and pieces for the gulls and the sharks to eat!”

When S’reee spoke again, her voice was unhappy. “Areinnye, I share your grief. It’s things like this that the Song will help to stop. That’s why we’re here.”

The sperm whale laughed, a sound both anguished and cruel. “What lies,” she said. “Or what delusions. Do you truly think anything will make them go away and stop hunting us, S’reee?” Areinnye looked with hatred at Nita. “Now they’re even coming into the water after us, I see.”

Kit glided forward ever so slowly, until he was squarely between Nita and Areinnye. “I guarantee you don’t know what she’s here for, Areinnye. She’s saving your life, along with those of a lot of others — though at the moment, in your case, I can’t imagine why anyone would bother.”

Areinnye made a sound at Kit that was the sperm-whale equivalent of a sneer. “Oh, indeed,” Areinnye said. “What could she possibly do that would make any difference to my life?”

“She is the Silent Lord for the Song,” S’reee said.

Areinnye turned that scornful regard on Nita. “Indeed,” the sperm said again. “Well. We are finally getting something useful out of a human. But she doubtless had to be compelled to it. No human would ever give up its life for one of us, wizard or not. Or did you trick her into it?”

Gently, hardly stroking a fin, Ed soared toward Areinnye. “Unwise,” he said. “Most unwise, wizard, to scorn a fellow wizard so — whatever species she may belong to. And will you hold Nita responsible for all her species’ wrongdoing, then? If you do that, Areinnye, I would feel no qualms about holding you responsible for various hurts done my people by yours over the years. Nor would I feel any guilt over taking payment for those hurts out of your hide, now.”

Areinnye turned her back on Ed and swam away, as if not caring what he said. “You take strange sides, Slayer,” the sperm said at last, cold-voiced. “The humans hunt those of your Mastery as relentlessly as they hunt us.”

“I take no sides, Areinnye,” Ed said, still following her. “Not with whales, or fish, or humans, or any other Power in the Sea or above it. Wizard that you are, you should know that.” He was beginning to circle her now. “And if I sing this Song, it is for the same reason that I have sung a hundred others: for the sake of my Mastery — and because I am pleased to sing. You had best put your distress aside and deal with the business we have come to discuss, lest something worse befall you.”

Areinnye turned slowly back toward the group. “Well, if you’ve come to administer me the Oath,” Areinnye said to S’reee, “you might as well get on with it. I was in the midst of hunting when you interrupted me.”

“Softly,” S’reee said. “Your power is a byword all throughout these parts; I want it in the Song. But we’re not so short of wizards that I’ll include one who’ll bring the High and Dry down on us. Choose, and tell me whether you can truthfully sing and leave your anger behind.”

Areinnye cruised slowly through the group, making no sound but the small ticking noises the sperm uses to navigate. “Seeing that the human who sings with us sings for the Sea’s sake,” she said at last, in that tight, flat voice, “I am content. But my heart is bitter in me for my calf’s loss, and I cannot forget that easily. Let the humans remember that, and keep their distance.”

“If that is well for you two—“ Kit and Nita both flicked tails in agreement. Well enough, then,” said S’reee. “Areinnye t’Hwio-dheii, those who gather to sing that Song that is the Sea’s shame and the Sea’s glory desire you to be of their company. Say, for my hearing, whether you consent to that Song.”

“I consent…” Areinnye sang her way through the responses with slow care, and Nita began to relax slightly. The sperm’s voice was beautiful, as pleasant as Kit’s, when she wasn’t angry. Yet she couldn’t help but catch a couple of Areinnye’s glances at Ed — as if she knew that she was being watched for her responses and would be watched in the future.

Then the third Question was asked, and Areinnye’s song scaled up in the high notes of final affirmation, a sound of tearing, chilly beauty. “Let me wander forever amid the broken and the lost, sooner than I shall refuse the Song,” Areinnye sang, “or what it brings about for the good of those who live.” But there was a faint note of scorn in the last phrase, as if the singer already counted herself among the lost and broken; and the notes on “those who live” twisted down the scale into a bitter diminuendo of pain that said life was a curse.

Now it was S’reee’s turn to look dubious; but it was too late.

“Well,” the sperm said, “when is the Foregathering? And where?”

“Tomorrow dawn,” said S’reee, “in the waters off the Hook. Will you be on time?”

“Yes,” Areinnye said. “So farewell.” And she turned tail and swam off.

Kit flicked a glance at Ed and said quietly to Nita, “Boy, that was a close one. If those two got started fighting…”

“It would not be anything like ‘close,’ “ Ed said. ‘

“Okay, great,” Kit said in mild annoyance, “she couldn’t kill you. But isn’t it just possible she might hurt you a little?”

“She would regret it if she did,” Ed said. “Blood in the water will call in some sharks, true. But their Master’s blood in the water will call them all in, whether they smell it or not… every shark for thousands of lengths around. That is my magic, you see. And whatever the Master-Shark might be fighting when his people arrived would shortly not be there at all, except as rags and scraps for fingerlings to eat.”

Nita and Kit and S’reee looked at each other.

“Why do we need Areinnye in the first place?” Nita said to S’reee. “Is she really that good a wizard?”

Turning, S’reee began to swim back the way they had come, through the now-darkening water. Hotshot paced her; and silently, pale in the dimness, Ed brought up the rear. “Yes,” S’reee said. “In fact, by rights, she should have been Ae’mhnuu’s apprentice, not I.”

Kit looked at her in surprise. “Why wasn’t she?”

S’reee made a little moan of annoyance. “I don’t know,” she said. “Areinnye is a much more powerful wizard than I am — even Ae’mhnuu agreed with me about that. Yet he refused her request to study with him, not just once but several times. And now this business with her calf—“ S’reee blew a few huge bubbles out her blowhole, making an unsettled noise. “Well, we’ll make it work out.”

“That shall yet be seen,” Ed said from behind them.

The Moon was high when Nita and Kit came out of the water close to the jetty and went looking for their clothes. Kit spent a while gazing longingly up at the silver-golden disc, while Nita dressed. “We’re really gonna get killed now, aren’t we?” he said, so quietly that Nita could hardly hear him.

“Uh-huh.” Nita sat down on the sand and stared out at the waves while Kit went hunting for his bathing suit and windbreaker.

“Whaddaya think they’ll do?” Kit said.

Nita shook her head. “No idea.”

Kit came up beside her, adjusting his windbreaker. “You think they’re gonna send me home?”

“They might,” she said.

They toiled up the last dune before home and looked down toward the little rough road that ran past the house. All the upstairs lights were on. The downstairs ones were dark; evidently Dairine had been sent to bed.

“Neets—“ Kit said. “What’re you gonna do?”

“I’m sworn, Kit. I’m in the Song. I have to be there.”

“You mean you’re going to—“

“Don’t,” she said, in genuine pain. She didn’t want him to say it, to think it, any more than she wanted to think it herself. And to tell the absolute truth, she wasn’t sure of what she was going to do about the Song yet.

“They don’t need me for the Song,” Kit said.

“It doesn’t look that way.”

“Yeah.” He was quiet a moment. “Look — if somehow I can get you off the hook, get your folks to think this is all my fault somehow, so that you can still go out…”

“No,” Nita said, scandalized. “Anyway, they’d never buy it. I promised my mom I’d be back on time last time — and blew it. Then I snuck out today. They know it’s me as much as you. I’m just gonna have to face the music.”

“With what?” Kit said.

“I don’t know.” The thought of treating her parents as enemies made her feel as if the bottom had fallen out of the Universe.

The one good thing, she thought, is that by tomorrow, tonight will be over.

I hope.

“C’mon,” she said. Together they went home.

The house was deadly still when they stepped in, and the screen door closing behind them seemed loud enough to be heard for miles around. The kitchen was dark; light flowed into it from the living room, the subdued illumination of a couple of table lamps. There was no sound of TV, even though Nita knew her dad’s passion for late movies; no music, despite her mom’s fondness for classics and symphonic rock at any hour of day or night.

Nita’s mouth felt dry as beach sand. She stopped where she was, tried to swallow, looked at Kit. He looked back, punched her lightly in the arm, then pushed past her and walked into the living room.

For the rest of her life, Nita thought, she would remember the way that room looked and felt when she walked in. The living room needed a new paint job, its rug was threadbare in places, and the walls were hung with bargain-basement seascapes, wide-eyed children of almost terminal cuteness, and, in one corner, something her dad called the Piece of Resistance — a garish matador done in day-glow paint on black velvet.

Her mother and father were sitting side by side on the Coca-Cola-colored couch, their backs straight. They looked up as Nita and Kit came through the door, and Nita saw her mother’s face tight with fear and her father’s closed like a door. They had been reading magazines; they put them aside, and the usually friendly room suddenly looked dingy as a prison, and the matador hurt Nita’s eyes.

“Sit down,” her father said. His voice, quiet, calm, sounded too much like Ed’s. She managed to hold onto her composure as she headed for Dairine’s favorite chair and sat down quickly.

“Pretty slick,” said her father. “My daughter appears to have a great future in breaking and entering. Or breaking and departing.”

Nita opened her mouth and shut it again. She could have dealt with a good scolding… but this chilly sarcasm terrified her. And there was no way out of it.

“Well?” her father said. “You’d better start coming up with some answers, young lady. You too,” he said to Kit, his eyes flashing; and at the sight of the anger, Nita felt a wash of relief. That look was normal. “Because what you two say is going to determine whether we send you straight home tomorrow morning, Kit — and whether we let you and Nita see any more of each other.”

Kit looked her father straight in the eye and said nothing.

Sperm whales! Nita thought, and it was nearly a curse. But then she took the thought back as she realized that Kit was waiting for her to say something first, to give him a lead. Great! Now all I have to do is do something!

What do I do?

“Kit,” her father said, “I warn you, I’m in no mood for Latin gallantry and the whole protect-the-lady business. You were entrusted to my care and I want answers. Your parents are going to hear about this in any case — what you say, or don’t say, is going to determine what I tell them. So be advised.”

“I understand,” Kit said. Then he glanced at Nita. “Neets?”

Nita shook her head ever so slightly, amazed as always by that frightened bravery that would wait for her to make a move, then back her utterly. It had nothing to do with the whalesark. Kit, Nita thought, practically trembling with the force of what she felt, you’re incredible! But I don’t have your guts — and I have to do something!

Her mother and father were looking at her, waiting.

Oh, Lord, Nita thought then, and bowed her head and put one hand over her face, for she suddenly knew what to do.

She looked up. “Mom,” she said — and then had to start over, for the word came out in a kind of strangled squeak. “Mom, you remember when we were talking the other day? And you said you wanted to know why we were staying out so much, because you thought something besides ‘nothing’ was going on?”

Her mother nodded, frozen-faced.

“Uh, well, there was,” Nita said, not sure where to go from there. Two months of wizardry, spells wrought and strange places visited and wonders seen — how to explain it all to nonwizards? Especially when they might not be able to see wizardry done right under their eyes — and in the past hadn’t? Never mind that, Nita told herself desperately. If you think too much, you’ll get cold feet. Just talk.

Her mother was wearing a ready-to-hear-the-worst expression. “No, not that,” Nita said, feeling downright cross that her mother was still thinking along those idiotic lines. “But this is going to take a while.”

Nita swallowed hard. “You remember in the spring,” she said, “that day Kit and I went into the city — and that night, the Sun went out?”

Her parents stared at her, still angry, and now slightly perplexed too.

“We had something to do with that,” Nita said.