Deep Wizardry

The Song of the Twelve

Hudson Channel begins its seaward course some twenty miles south of Ambrose Light — trending first due south, parallel to the Jersey shore, then turning gradually toward the southeast and the open sea as it deepens. Down its length, scattered over the channel’s bottom as it slowly turns from gray-green mud to gray-black sand to naked, striated stone, are the broken remnants of four hundred years’ seafaring in these waters and the refuse of three hundred years of human urban life, mixed randomly together. There are new, almost whole-bodied wrecks lying dead on their sides atop old ones long since gone to rot and rust; great dumps of incinerated wood and ash, chemical drums and lumps of coal and jagged piles of junk metal; sunken, abandoned buoys, old cable spindles, unexploded ordnance and bombs and torpedoes; all commingled with and nested in a thick ooze of untreated, settled sewage — the garbage of millions of busy lives, thrown where they won’t have to look at it.

The rugged bed of the channel starts out shallow, barely a fathom deeper than the seabed that surrounds it. It was much deeper once, especially where it begins; but the ooze has filled it thickly, and for some miles it is now hard to tell that any channel at all lies under the rotting trash, under the ancient faded beer cans and the hubcaps red with rust. Slowly, though, some twenty miles down the channel from its head, an indentation becomes apparent — a sort of crooked rut worn by the primordial Hudson River into the ocean floor, a mile wide at the rut’s deepest, five miles wide from edge to edge. This far down — forty fathoms under the surface and some sixty feet below the surrounding ocean bed, between a great wide U of walls — the dark sludge of human waste lies even thicker. The city has not been dumping here for some years, but all the old years’ sewage has not gone away. Every stone in the deepening rut, every pressure-flattened pile of junk on the steadily downward-sloping seabed around the channel, is coated thick and black. Bottom-feeding fish are few here: There is nothing for them to eat. Krill do not live here: The water is too foul to support the microscopic creatures they eat, and even of a summer night the thick olive color of the sea is unchanged.

The channel’s walls begin to grow less and less in height, as if the ocean is growing tired of concealing the scar in its side. Gradually the rut flattens out to a broad shallow depression like a thousand other valleys in the Sea. A whale hanging above the approximate end of the channel, some one hundred thirty miles southeast of New York Harbor, has little to see on looking back up the channel’s length — just an upward-sloping scatter of dark-slimed rocks and mud and scraps of garbage, drab even in the slate-green twilight that is all this bottom ever sees of noon. But looking downward, southward, where its course would run if the channel went any farther— the abyss. Suddenly the thinning muck, and the gentle swellings and dippings of the sea bed, simply stop at the edge of a great steep semicircular cliff, two miles from side to side. And beyond the cliff, beyond the edge of the Continental Shelf, curving away to northeast and southwest — nothing. Nothing anywhere but the vague glow of the ocean’s surface three hundred feet above; and below, beyond the semicircle, the deadly stillness of the great deeps, and a blackness one can hear on the skin like a dirge. Icy cold, and the dark.

“I warn you all,” S’reee said as the eleven gathered Celebrants and Kit hung there, looking down into that darkness at the head of Hudson Canyon. “Remember the length of this dive; take your own breathing needs carefully into consideration, and tell me now if you think you may need more air than our spells will be taking with us. Remember that, at the great pressures in the Below, you’ll need more oxygen than you usually do — and work will make you burn more fuel. If you feel you need to revise the breathing figures on the group spell upward, this is the time to do it. There won’t be a chance later, after we’ve passed the Gates of the Sea. Nor will there be any way to get to the surface quickly enough to breathe if you start running low. At the depths we’ll be working, even a sperm whale would get the bends and die of such an ascent. Are you all sure of your needs? Think carefully.”

No one said anything.

“All right. I remind you also, one more time, of the boundaries on the pressure-protection spell. They’re marked by this area of light around us— which will serve the added purpose of enabling us to see what’s going on around us. If we need to expand the boundaries, that’s easily done. But unless I direct you otherwise, stay inside the light. Beyond the lighted area, there’s some direction for a limited area, but it’s erratic. Don’t depend on it! Otherwise you may find yourself crushed to a pulp.”

Nita glanced at Kit; he gave her an I-don’t-care wave of the tail. Sperm whales were much less bothered by pressure changes than most of the species, and the great depths were part of their hunting grounds. “You be careful!” she sang at him in an undertone. “Don’t get cute down there.”

“Don’t you.”

“Anything else?” S’reee said. “Any questions?”

“Is there time for a fast bite?” Roots said, sounding wistful.

“Surely,” Fang said, easing up beside the beaked whale with that eternal killer-whale smile. “Where should I bite you?”

“Enough, you two. Last chance, my wizards.”

No one sang a note.

“Then forward all,” S’reee said, “and let us take the adventure the Powers send us.”

She glided forward, out into the darkness past the great curved cliff, tilted her nose down, and dived — not straight, but at a forty-five-degree angle roughly parallel to the downward slope of the canyon. The wizard-light advanced with her. Areinnye followed first; then Fang and Iniihwit, with Fluke and Roots close behind. After them came Tlhlki and Aroooon and Hotshot, and Nita, with Kit behind her as rearguard, suspiciously watching the zone of light around them. Only one of the Celebrants did not stay within that boundary, sailing above it, or far to one side, as he pleased — Ed, cruising restlessly close to the canyon walls as the group descended, or pacing them above, a ghost floating in midnight-blue water.

“I don’t like it,” Nita sang, for Kit’s hearing only, as she looked around her.

“What?”

“This.” She swung her tail at the walls — which were towering higher and higher as they cut downward through the Continental Shelf. On the nautical maps in their manuals, the canyon had looked fairly innocent; and a drop of twenty-five feet in a half-mile had seemed gentle. But Nita was finding the reality that rose in ever-steepening battlements around her much more threatening. The channel’s walls at their highest had been about three hundred feet high, comparable to the walls she’d seen in the Grand Canyon on vacation. But these walls were already five or six hundred feet high, growing steadily steeper as the canyon’s angle of descent through the shelf increased. Nita had a neck to crane back, it would already be sore.

As it was, she had something much worse — a whale’s superb sonar sense, which told her exactly how puny she was in comparison to those cliffs— exactly where loose rocks lay on them, ready to be shaken down at the slightest bottom tremor.

Kit looked up around them and sang a note of uncomfortable agreement. “Yeah,” he said. “It gives me the creeps too. It’s too tall—“

No,” Nita said softly. “It’s that this isn’t a place where we’re supposed to be. Something very large happened here once. That’s your specialty; you should be able to feel it.”

“Yeah, I should.” There was a brief pause. “I seem to have been having trouble with that lately. — But you’re right, it’s there. It’s not so much the tallness itself we’re feeling. But what it’s — what it’s a symbol of, I think—“

Nita said nothing for a moment, startled by the idea that Kit had been losing some of his talent at his specialty. There was something that could mean, some warning sign— She couldn’t think what.

“Kit, this is one of the places where Afallone was, isn’t it?”

He made a slow sound of agreement. “The whole old continental plate Atlantis stood on was ground under the new plates and buried under the Atlantic’s floor, S’reee said. But the North American plate was a lot farther west when the trouble first started, and the European one was farther east. So if I’ve got the story straight, this would have been where Afallone’s western shoreline was, more or less. Where we’re going would still have been open sea, a couple of million years ago.”

“Millions of years—“ Nita looked at him in uncomfortable wonder. “Kit — that’s much farther back than the fall of Afallone. That could—“ Her note failed her momentarily. “That could go right back to the first Song of the Twelve—“

Kit was still for a while as they kept diving. “No wonder,” he said at last, “no one travels down through the Gates of the Sea except when they’re about to do the Song. Part of the sorcery is buried in the stone. If anybody should trouble it, wake it up—“

“—like we’re doing,” Nita said, and fell silent.

They swam on. The immensities rearing up about them grew no more reassuring with time. Time, Nita thought — how long have we been down here? In this changeless cold dark, there was no telling; and even when the Sun came up, there still would be no knowing day from night. The darkness yielded only grudgingly to the little sphere of light the Celebrants carried with them, showing them not much, and too much, of what Nita didn’t want to look at — those walls, reaching so far above her now that the light couldn’t even begin to illumine them. Nita began to get a bizarre sense of being indoors — descending a winding ramp of infinite length, its walls three miles apart and now nearly a mile high.

It was at about this time that Nita felt on her skin what sounded at first like one of the Blue’s deeper notes, and stared ahead of her, wondering partly what he was saying — the note was one that made no sense to her. Then she wondered why he was curving his body upward in such surprise. But the note grew, and grew, and grew louder still, and though they were now nearly a mile from the walls on either side, to her shock and horror Nita heard the walls begin to resonate to that note.

The canyon walls sounded like a struck gong, one of such boneshaking, subterranean pitch as Nita had never imagined. She sounded, caught in the torrent of shock waves with the rest of the Celebrants. Seaquake! she thought. The sound pressed through her skin from all sides like cold weights, got into her lungs and her heart and her brain, and throbbed there, hammering her into dizziness with slow and terrible force.

The sluggish, brutal pounding against her skin and inside her body eventually began to die down. But the quake’s effects were still going on around her, and would take much more time to settle. Sonar was nearly drowned; Nita was floating blind in the blackness. This is the pits! she thought in anguish, and concentrated everything she had on one good burst of sound that would cut through the terrible noise and tell her what was going on.

The echoes that came back reassured her somewhat. All the Celebrants were still fairly close together, safe within the light of the pressure-protection spell. Kit was farther ahead than he had been, fighting for control and slowly finding it. Others, S’reee and Fang and Areinnye, were closer to Nita. And there was other movement close to them — large objects drifting downward, slowly, resonating with the same note, though in higher octaves, as the towering cliffsides. Massive objects, said the echo. Solid massive objects. Falling faster now. One of them falling past S’reee and down toward Areinnye, who was twisting and struggling against the turmoil of the water for balance—

Warn her! was Nita’s first thought, but even as she let out another cry, she realized it was useless — Areinnye would have no time to react. The falling rock, a piece of cliff-shelf nearly as long as a city block, was practically on top of her. Shield spell, Nita thought then. Impossible—

She did it anyway. It was an old friend, that spell, long since learned by heart. When activated, punches, or any physical object thrown at one, slid right off it. Running them together in her haste, she sang the nine syllables of the spell that were always the same, then added four more that set new coordinates for the spell, another three that specified how much mass the shield would have to repel — tons and tons! Oh, Lord! — and then the last syllable that turned the wizardry loose. She felt the magic fall away from her like a weight on a cord, dropping toward Areinnye. Nothing to do now but hang on, she thought, letting herself float. Faintly, through the thunder, the echoes of her spell brought Nita the shape of Areinnye, still struggling, trying to get out from under the falling rock-shelf, and failing. Her connection with the spell brought her the feeling of the massive slab of stone dropping toward it, closer, closer still. Making contact— crushing down and down onto her wizardry with force more terrible than she had anticipated. The spell was failing, the shelf was settling down on it and inexorably pressing it closer and closer to Areinnye, who was in turn being forced down against the battering of the shock waves, toward the floor of the canyon. The spell was breaking up, tearing like a rotten net filled with weights. No, Nita thought, and strained, pouring all her concentration, all her will, down the connection to the spell. No! It was like hanging on to a rope in a tug of war, and losing, and not letting go — digging in, muscles popping out all over, aching, straining, blood pounding, and not letting go-The spell firmed a little. The shelf, settling slowly down and down onto Areinnye, forcing her closer and closer to the bottom, seemed to hesitate. “Kit!” Nita screamed into the water. I’m gonna lose it. I’m gonna lose it! Kit!”

The echo of her yell for help showed her another sperm-whale shape, a larger one than Areinnye’s, fighting his way against the battering shock waves and down toward the bottom of the canyon — toward where Areinnye floundered, underneath the stone shelf, underneath the spell. Kit rammed Areinnye head-on, hitting her squarely amidships and punching the smaller sperm whale backward thirty or forty feet. But not out from under the settling shelf; and now Kit was partly under it too. The spell began sagging again. Nita panicked; she had no time or energy left for any more warnings, any more anything. She threw herself so totally into the spell that she couldn’t feel her body, couldn’t hear, couldn’t see, finally became nothing but a single, none-too-coherent thought: No! But it was no use. The spell was coming undone, the rock was coming down, this time for good. And Kit was under it. No! No, no, NO—

And everything went away.

The next thing Nita felt was the shock of a spell being broken by forces too great for it to handle, as the rock-shelf came crushing down on it, smashing it flat against something both soft and hard. “NO!” Nita screamed again in horror, as the diminishing thunder of the seaquake was briefly augmented by the multiple crashes of the shelf’s shattering. The floor of the canyon was obscured even to sonar by a thick fog of rockdust and stirred-up ooze, pierced all through by flying splinters of stone, but Nita dove into it anyway. “Kit!”

“You sang?” came a sperm whale’s sharp-edged note from down in the rock-fog, sounding tired but pleased.

Speechless with relief and shaking with effort, Nita pulled up her nose and just let herself float in the trembling water, listening to the rumbling of the quake as it faded away and the songs of the other whales round about as they checked on one another. She became aware of the Master-Shark, finning slowly down canyon not too far from her and favoring her as he went with a look that was prolonged and indecipherable. Nita glided hurriedly away from him, looking around her.

The light of the protection spell showed Nita the roiling of the cloud of ooze and dust in the bottom of the canyon, and the two shapes that swam slowly up through it — first Kit, fluking more strongly than Nita would have possible for someone who’d just gone through what they all had, then Areinnye, stroking more weakly, and swimming with a stiffness that made it very plain just how hard Kit must have hit her. Kit rose to hang beside Nita. More slowly, Areinnye came swimming up to face her.

“There seems to be a life between us, HNii’t,” the sperm whale said.

The mixture of surprise and anger in Areinnye’s song made Nita uncomfortable. “Oh, no,” she said, rather weakly. “Kit did it—“

“Oh, dead fish,” Kit said. “You held it for a good ten seconds after we were out from under. You would’ve managed even if I hadn’t helped.”

“I had incentive,” Nita muttered.

Kit looked at her for a moment. “You didn’t drop it until Ed nudged you,” he said. “You might have gone deaf for a little, or maybe you were in spell overload. But either way, this was your cookie. Don’t blame me.”

“Silent Lord,” Areinnye said — still stiffly formal, but with an uncertain note in her voice, “I thank you. I had hardly given you cause for such an act.”

“You gave me plenty of cause,” she said wearily. “You took the Oath, didn’t you? You’re with me. And you’re welcome.” She took a deep breath, feeling the respiratory part of the protection spell briefly surround her blowholes with a bubble of air for her to inhale. “Kit,” she said, “can we get going and get this over with?”

“That is well said,” came Ed’s voice. He was coming upcanyon again, fast. As Nita looked up she saw him arrow overhead, ghastly pale in the wizard-light, with a trail of darkness billowing thick behind him, and something black in his jaws. It struggled; Ed gulped it down. Inside his gill slits and lower body, Nita could see the swallowed thing give a last couple of convulsive heaves. “And we’d best get on with it—“

Thick black sucker-tipped arms whipped up from the disturbed ooze on the bottom, grasping, flailing in the light. “Oh, no,” Nita moaned. Kit plunged past her, the first note of the scraping sperm-whale battlecry rasping down Nita’s skin as he dived for the body to which those arms belonged. Farther down the canyon, almost out of range of the wizard-light, there was a confused boiling-together of arms, long dark bodies, flat platterlike yellow eyes glowing with reflected light and wild-beast hunger — not just a few krakens, but a great pack of them. “To business, Silent Lord,” Ed said, his voice rich with chilly pleasure, as he swept past Nita again on his way downcanyon.

She went to business. These krakens were bigger than the last ones had been; the smallest one Nita saw had a body the size of a stretch limousine, and arms twice that length. True, there were more toothed whales fighting this time — not only Kit, but Fang and Areinnye as well. And teeth weren’t everything — what Aroooon or Tlhlki rammed didn’t move afterward.

The Celebrants also had the advantage of being wizards. Nita was terrified at first when she saw one of the krakens come at poor slow Roots — and poor slow Roots raised her voice in a few squeaky little notes and simply blew the giant squid into a cloud of blood and ink and black rags of flesh. But a wizard’s strength has limits; such spells could only be worked once or twice. And since a spell has to be directed at what you see, not even the most deadly offensive wizardry does a bit of good against the choking tentacles that you don’t notice coming up from behind you. So it was a slow, ugly, bitter battle, that fight in the canyon. Four or five times the Celebrants were assaulted as they made their way down between the dwarfing, twisting walls of stone; four or five times they fought the attackers off, rested briefly, and started out again, knowing that somewhere deeper down, more thick tentacles and hungry eyes waited for them.

“This is your fault!” Areinnye cried angrily at Nita during one or another of the attacks, while Fang and Kit and Ed and Aroooon fought off krakens coming from downcanyon and from above, and S’reee and Tlhlki worked furiously to heal a great sucker welt torn in Areinnye’s side before Ed should notice it and turn on her.

Nita simply turned away, in no mood for it. Her face hurt from ramming krakens, she had bruises from their suckers and a stab from one’s beak, and she was sick of the smell of blood and the galling sepia taste in the water. The problem, and the only reason Nita didn’t answer Areinnye hotly back, was that there might have been some slight truth to the accusation. According to Carl and the manual, the same pollutants that caused cancer in human beings, that had caused the U.S. Fish and Game Service to warn people on the Jersey shore against eating more than one ocean-caught fish a week, were getting concentrated in the squids’ bodies, changing their DNA: changing them. The food the krakens normally ate at the great depths was dying out, also from the pollution. They had to come up into the shallows to survive. The changes were enabling them to do so. And if it was starving, a hungry kraken would find a whale perfectly acceptable as food.

Nita was startled by the sudden sharpness of S’reee’s answering voice. “Areinnye, don’t talk nonsense,” she said after singing the last note of a spell that sealed the sperm whale’s torn flesh. “The krakens are here for the same reason the quake was — because the Lone Power wants them here. We’re supposed to use up our air fighting them.”

Tlhlki looked soberly at S’reee. “That brings up the question, Ree. Can we complete the Song?”

S’reee swung her tail in a shrug, her eyes on Areinnye’s healing wound. “I thought such a thing might happen,” she said, “after we were attacked the other night. So I brought extra air, more than the group felt it needed. Even so — it’ll be close.”

“We’re a long way down the canyon,” Nita said. “Practically down to the plain. If they’re all down there, waiting for us — if these attacks have just been to wear us down—“

“I don’t think so,” Tlhlki said, glancing over at Nita. “Once out into the plain, we’ll be practically under the shadow of the Sea’s Tooth, close to the ancient site of the Song. And once our circle is set up, they couldn’t get in unless we let them.”

“Which we won’t,” S’reee said. “Let’s waste no more time. This is going to be the fastest Song on record. — Areinnye, you’re done. How do you feel?”

The sperm swayed in the water, testing her healed tail. “Well enough,” she said, grim-voiced. “Though not as well as I would if this human were—“ And Areinnye broke off. “Pardon me,” she said, more slowly. “It was an ill thought. Let me go help Kit now.”

She went. “You now,” S’reee said to Nita. She sang a few notes to start the healing spell going, then said, “HNii’t? Are you all right otherwise?”

The sound of Kit’s battlecry came scraping along Nita’s skin from down-canyon. “No,” she said. Kit had been fighting with a skill and, heaven help him, a relish that Nita would never have suspected in him. I’m not sure it’s the sark doing this, she thought. I keep thinking that Kit might actually be this way, down deep.

Then Nita stopped. What makes me think it matters one way or another? she thought. In a few hours, anything I think about Kit will make no difference at all. But I can’t stop acting as if it will. Habit is hard to break…

“If it’s something I can help with—“ S’reee said, finishing up.

Nita brushed skin with her, an absent gesture. “It’s not,” she said. And off she went after Areinnye — into the water fouled with stirred-up slime and ink and blood, into the reach of grabbing, sandpapery tentacles and the glare of yellow eyes.

It went on that way for what seemed forever, until Nita was nearly blind from head-on ramming. She gave up on sonar and concentrated on keeping just one more squid occupied until Kit or Ed or Areinnye could deal with it. So, as the walls of the canyon, which had been towering some six thousand feet above the Celebrants on either side, began to decrease in height, she didn’t really notice it. Eventually the bitter cold of the water got her attention; and she also realized that the krakens’ attack had stopped. Nita sang a few notes to “see” at a distance, and squinted around her in the sea-green wizard-light to find out where she and the other Celebrants were.

The walls closest to them were still nearly three thousand feet high. But their slope was gentler; and the canyon had widened from some two miles across to nearly five. To left and right of the canyon’s foot, curving away northward and southward, miles past sound or sight, stretched the rubble-strewn foothills of the Continental Shelf. Behind the Celebrants the shelf itself towered, a mighty cliffwall rising to lose itself in darkness. Outward before them, toward the open sea, the terrain was mostly flat, broken only occasionally by hills so shallow they were more like dunes. The rocky bottom was turning to pale sand. But the paleness did nothing to lighten the surroundings. Above it lay an intolerable, crushing weight of water, utterly black, icy cold, weighing down on the soul no matter what spell protected the body. And far out in the blackness could be seen the furtive, erratic movements of tiny lights — eerie points of peculiar-colored fire that jittered and clustered and hung in the cold dark, watching the whales.

Nita took a sharp breath, for some of those lights were definitely eyes. Tlhlki, hanging motionless in the still water beside her, did the same. He was staring down the slope, which sank past the light of the breathing-spell, and far past echo range, dropping farther downward into more darkness. “Nothing can be this deep,” he sang in an unnerved whisper. “How much farther down can we go?”

“All the way,” said another voice from Nita’s other side. She turned, not recognizing it — and then knew the speaker very well and was sick inside. Kit hung there, with a fey, frightening look in his eye — a total lack of fear.

Nita swallowed once. Sperm whales took the great dives better than any other whale, coming down this far on purpose to hunt the giant squid; but their boldness also got them in trouble. Numerous sperm-whale skeletons had been found at these depths by exploring bathyscaphs, the whales’ tails or bodies hopelessly tangled in undersea telephone or telegraph cables.

“We’re a long way up yet,” Kit said, with that cool cast to his voice that better suited Areinnye than it did him. “Barely six thousand feet down. We’ll have to go down to sixteen thousand feet at least before we see the Sea’s Tooth.” And he swam off toward the boundaries of the light.

Nita held still for a few moments as S’reee and various other of the Celebrants went slowly after Kit. Tlhlki went too; she barely noticed him go. This isn’t the Kit I want to say good-bye to.

Perhaps a hundred feet away from her, Ed glided past, staring at her. “Sprat,” he said, “come along.”

She did. But the fighting in the canyon had left Nita so fatigued that much of this part of the descent seemed unreal to her, a prolonged version of one of those dreams in which one “falls” downstairs for hours. And there was a terrible sameness about this terrain: a sea of white sand, here and there featuring a darker rock thrust up or thrown down into it, or some artifact more bizarre — occasionally, great pressure-fused lumps of coal; once an actual kitchen sink, just sitting there on the bottom by itself; another time, a lone Coca-Cola bottle standing upright in the sand with a kind of desolate, pitiful pride. But mostly the bottom was as undifferentiated as a mile-wide, glare-lit snowfield, one that pitched forever downward.

Nor was Nita’s grasp on reality much helped by the strange creatures that lived in those waters more than a thousand fathoms down. Most everything seemed to be either transparent as a ghost or brilliantly luminous. Long-bodied, lantern-eyed sharks swam curiously about Nita, paid brief homage to their Master, and moved on. Anglerfish with their luminous baits hanging on “fishlines” in front of their mouths came up to stare Nita right in the eye and then swam dourly away, disappointed that she was too big to eat. Long, many-segmented bottom worms and vampire squid, sporting dots or stripes of pink or yellow or blue-white light, inched or squirted along the bottom about their affairs, paying no attention to the Celebrants sailing overhead in their nimbus of wizard-light. Rays fluttered, using fleshy wings to rearrange the sand in which they lay buried; tripod-fish crutch-walked around the bottom like peglegged pirates on their long stiff fins. And all the eyes circling in the black water, all the phosphorescent shapes crawling on the bottom or undulating above it were doing one of two things — either looking for food or eating it, in the form of one another.

Nita knew there was no other way for these creatures to live, in this deadly cold, but by the minimum expenditure of energy for the maximum return… hence all the baits, traps, hiding. But that didn’t affect the dull horror of the scene — the endless crushing dark, the ear-blinding silence, and the pale chilly lights weaving through the space-black water as the creatures of the great depths sought and caught and ate one another with desperate, mindless diligence.

The gruesome power of the besetting horror brought Nita wide awake. She had never been superstitious; shadows in the bedroom had never bothered her when she was little, and she found horror movies fun to watch. But now she started to feel more hemmed in, more watched and trapped, than she suspected she’d feel in any haunted house. “Ed,” she sang, low as a whisper, to the pale shape that paced her, “what is it? There’s something down here…”

“Indeed there is. We are getting close.”

She would have asked To what? but as she looked down the interminable slope at the other Celebrants — who were mostly swimming gathered close together, as if they felt what she felt — something occurred to her, something so obvious that she felt like a moron for not having thought of it before. “Ed, if this is the Song of the Twelve, how come there are only eleven of us singing!”

“The Twelfth is here,” Ed said. “As the Song says, the Lone Power lies bound here, in the depths below the depths. And It will sing Its part, as It always has. It cannot help it. Indeed, It wants to sing. In the temptation and subversion of the Celebrants lies Its only hope of escape from the wizardry that binds It.”

“And if It succeeds—“ ‘

”Afallone,” Ed said. “Atlantis, all over again. Or worse.”

“Worse—“ Then she noticed something else. “Ed, the water’s getting warmer!”

“And the bottom is changing,” Ed said. “Gather your wits, Sprat. A few hundred more lengths and we are there.”

The white sand was giving way to some kind of darker stuff. At first Nita thought she was looking at the naked rock of the sea bottom. But this stuff wasn’t flat, as sediment would be. It was ropy, piled-up, ridgy-looking black stone. And here and there crystals glittered in it. Scattered around ahead of them were higher piles of the black stone, small, bizarrely shaped hills. Nita sounded a high note to get some sonar back, as the water through which she swam grew warmer and began to taste odd.

The first echoes to return surprised Nita until she started to suspect what they were. Waving frondy shapes, the hard round echoes from shelled creatures, a peculiar hollowness to the echo that indicated water of lower pressure than that surrounding it— That was a stream of sulfur-laden hot water coming out of an undersea “vent”; the other echoes were the creatures that lived around it, all adapted to take advantage of the oasis of heat and the sulfur that came up with it. And now she understood the black bottom stone — old cooled lava, the kind called pillow lava, that oozes up through the ocean’s crust and spreads itself out in flat, ropy piles.

But from past the vent came another echo that was simply impossible. A wall, a rounded wall, at least a mile and a half wide at the base, rising out of the piled black stone and spearing up, and up, and up, and up, so that fragments of the echo kept coming back to Nita for second after second. She backfinned to hold still until all the echoes could come back to her, and in Nita’s mind the picture of the massive, fluted, narrowing pillar of stone got taller and taller, until she actually had to sing a soft note or two to deafen herself to it. It was, like the walls of Hudson Canyon, “too big”—only much more so. “Five Empire State Buildings on top of each other,” Kit had called it — but Empire States a mile wide: Caryn Peak, the Sea’s Tooth, the site of the Song of the Twelve.

The whales ahead of Nita were gathering near the foot of the peak. Against that gigantic spear of stone they seemed dwarfed, insignificant. Even Aroooon looked like a toy. And the feeling of being watched, closely, by something of malicious intent, was getting stronger by the second.

She joined the others. The Celebrants were poised not too far from the open vent — evidently S’reee preferred the warmer water — in clear view of the strange creatures living about it: the twelve-foot stalks of the tubeworms, the great blind crabs, the colonies of giant blood-red clams, opening and closing their fringed shells with mindless regularity. No coral, Nita thought absently, looking around her. But she wouldn’t need any. Several hundred feet away, there on the face of the peak, were several shattered outcroppings of stone. The outcroppings were sharp as glass knives. Those should do it, Nita thought. So sharp I’ll hardly feel anything — until Ed arrives…

“If you’re all prepared,” S’reee sang, her voice wavering strangely where notes had to travel suddenly from cold water to hot, “I suggest we start right now.”

The Celebrants chorused muted agreement and began to spread out, forming the circle with which the Song begins. Nita took her place between Fang and Tlhlki, while S’reee went to the heart of the circle. Ed swam away, toward the far side of the peak and out of sight. Kit glided away from the circle, off behind Nita. She looked back at him. He found the spot from which he would watch and gazed back at her. Nita swallowed one last time, hard. There was very little of her friend in that look. “Kit—“ she said, on one low note.

“Silent Lord,” he said.

And though it was his voice, it wasn’t Kit…

Nita turned away, sick at heart, and faced inward toward the circle again; and S’reee lifted up her voice and sang the Invocation.

“ ‘Blood in the water I sing,

and one who shed it:

deadliest hunger I sing,

and one who fed it—

weaving the ancientmost tale

of the Sea’s sending:

singing the tragedy,

singing the joy unending.

“This is our shame—

this is the whole Ocean’s glory:

this is the Song of the Twelve.

Hark to the story!

Hearken, and bring it to pass;

swift, lest the sorrow

long ago laid to its rest

devour us tomorrow!’ “

And so it began, as in song S’reee laid out the foundations of the story, which began before lives learned to end in resistance and suffering. One by one the Celebrants drew together, closing up the circle, named themselves to one another, and began to discuss the problem of running the Sea to everyone’s advantage. Chief among their problems at the moment was the sudden appearance of a new whale. It was puzzling; the Sea had given them no warning, as She had in times past, that this was about to happen. But they were the Ni’hwinyii, the Lords of the Humors, and they would comport themselves as such. They would decide the question for themselves. Under whose Mastery would the Stranger fall?…

Nita, who had backed out of the circle after the Invocation, hung shivering in the currentless water as the Song shook the warm darkness about her. Part of what she felt was the same kind of trembling with excitement she had felt a hundred times in school when she knew she was about to be called on. I’m ready, she thought, trying to quiet herself. This is silly. I know my part backward and forward — there’s not that much of it. I’ll do all right.

… But there was also something else going on. She had felt it start with the Invocation and grow stronger with every passing second — that sense of something waking up, something rousing from sleepy malice, awakening to active, alert malevolence. It waits, Ed had said. It was a certainty, as sure as looking up toward a lighted window and seeing the person who’s been staring at you drop the curtain and turn away.

She wrenched her attention back to the Blue, who was at the end of one of his long stately passages. But it was hard.

“ ‘—Nay, slowly, Sounder. Slow is the wise whale’s song, and wise as slow; for he who hastens errs, who errs learns grief. And not the Master-Shark has teeth as fierce: grief eats its prey alive, and pain grows greater as the grief devours, not less. So let this Stranger sing his peace: what he desires of us; there’s Sea enough and time to hear him, though he sing the darkened Moon to full and back again. Ay, let him speak…’ “

And to Nita’s shock and fascinated horror, an answer came. The voice that raised itself in the stillness of the great depths was the sonic equivalent of the thing one sees out the corner of one’s eye, then turns to find gone, or imagined. It did not shake the water; it roused no echoes. And Nita was not alone in hearing it. She saw the encircled Celebrants look uneasily at one another. On the far side of the circle, Kit’s coolness was suddenly broken, and he stared at Nita like someone believing a myth for the first time. The innocent, gentle-spoken, unselfconscious evil in the new voice was terrifying. “With Pow’rs and Dominations need I speak,” sang that timbreless voice in quiet sincerity,

“ ‘the ancient Lords who hold the Sea in sway. I pray thee, Lords of the Humors, hear me now, last, least and poorest of the new-made whales, new-loos’d from out the Sea’s great silent Heart. No Lord have I; therefore to ye I come, beseeching low thy counsel and thy rule for one that’s homeless, lawless, mateless, lost.

“Who art thou, then, that speak’st?” sang S’reee, beginning the Singer’s questioning. At the end of her verse she was answered, in more soft-spoken, reasonable platitudes — words meant to lull the unwary and deceive the alert. And questions and answers continued, until Nita realized that there had been a shift. Rather than the Singer asking the Stranger what he wanted, the Stranger was telling the Singer what he knew she wanted — and could offer her, if only she would take the unspecified Gift he would give her.

Nita began shaking steadily now, and not from the cold. The insinuating power of that not-quite-voice somehow frightened her worse than head-on conflict with the Lone Power had, a couple of months ago. There the Power had been easily seen in its true colors. But here it was hidden, and speaking as matter-of-factly as the voices in the back of one’s own mind, whose advice one so often tends to follow without question. “Your Mastery is hollow,” said the voice to S’reee,

“ ‘—cold song, strict-ruled by law. From such bland rule come no great musics. Singer, follow me, accept my Gift and what it brings, and song shall truly have no Master save for you. My gift will teach you lyric that will break the heart that hears it; every seaborne voice will curse your newfound art, and wish that art its own. Take up the Gift, O foremost Singer…’ “

Nita glanced over at S’reee. She was trembling nearly as hard as Nita was, caught in the force of the temptation. S’reee sang her refusal calmly enough; but Nita found herself wondering how much of that refusal was the ritual’s and how much S’reee’s own.

She began watching the other Celebrants with as much care. Iniihwit sang the Gazer’s questioning and rejection with the outward attitude of mild unconcern that Nita had in their brief acquaintance come to associate with him. Aroooon’s refusal of the prize offered the Blue by the Stranger, that of Power over all the other whales, was more emphatic, though it came in his usual rich, leisurely manner. He sang not as if making ritual responses, but as if he rejected someone who swam in the circle with him and dared him to do something about it.

After that, the unheard voice sounded less certain of itself, and also impatient. The Song passed on to what would for the Lone Power be more successful ground: the Wanderer and the Killer and the Forager, all of whom would succumb to the Stranger’s temptations and become the Betrayed— those species of whales and fish to whom death would later come most frequently and most quickly. One by one Roots and Fang and Hotshot sang with the Lone One, were tempted, and in the place of the original Masters, fell. Nita tried to keep herself calm, but had trouble doing it; for each time one of the Celebrants gave in to the Lone One’s persuasion, she felt the voice grow a little more pleased with itself, a little more assured — as if something were finally going according to plan.

Nita stared across at Kit. He traded looks with her and began to make his way around the circle toward her.

The Lone One was working on the last three whales in the circle now, the ones who would become the Undecided. Their parts were the most difficult, being not only the longest sung passages but also the most complex. The Undecided argued with the Lone Power much more than did the Untouched, who tended to refuse quickly, or the Betrayed, who gave in without much fighting. Tlhlki sang first, the Sounder’s part; and strain began to show as the Power offered him all the hidden knowledge of the great deeps, and the Sounder’s song went from smooth flowing melodies to rumbles and scrapes of tortured indecision. Not all that carrying on is in the Song, Nita thought nervously. What’s happening? And indeed, though the Sounder finished his passage and turned away, ostensibly to think about what the Lone Power had said to him, Nita could see that Tlhlki looked pallid and shaken as a whale that’s sick.

The Listener fared no better. Fluke sang steadily enough to begin with; but when the voiceless voice offered him the power to hear everything that transpired in the Sea, from the random thoughts of new-hatched fry to the secret ponderings of the continental plates, he hesitated much too long — so long that Nita saw S’reee look at him in surprise and almost speak up to prompt him. It was bizarre; in rehearsals Fluke had had the best memory of any of them. He finished his verses looking troubled, and seemed relieved to turn away.

It’s what S’reee said, very early on, Nita thought. The whales picked have to be close in temperament to the original Celebrants — loving the same kinds of things. But it makes them vulnerable to the temptations too.

And then Areinnye began to sing, questioning the Power in her disturbingly sweet voice, asking and answering. She showed no sign of the unease that had troubled the others. Nita glanced over at Kit, who had managed by this time to work his way fairly close to her; he swung his tail a fraction, a whale’s version of a worried headshake. Areinnye’s singing was polished, superb, her manner poised, unruffled, royal. She sang her initial rebuff with the harsh certainty the Gray Lord’s song called for.

“ ‘Stranger, no more—

give me no gift.

Power am I,

fear in the water as my foes flee.

I need no boon.

In the Below

all bow before me.

Speak not to me.

Speak not of gifts.’ “

The voice that answered her was as sweet and poised as her own.

“And do you then desire no gift of mine— you who have lost so much? Ah no: you have strength of your own indeed — great strength of jaw, of fluke, of fin; fear goes before your face. But sorrow follows after. What use strength when slaughtered children rot beneath the waves, when the sweet mouth that you gave suck is gone, rent to red tatters by the flensing-knives; and when the second heart that beat by yours lies ground for dogs’ meat in a whaler’s hull? Gray One, accept my Gift and learn of strength—“

That’s not in the Song!

Nita stared in shock at Kit, then at the other Celebrants — who, all but Areinnye, were trading horrified looks. The sperm whale held very still, her eyes turned outward from the circle; and she shook as violently as Tlhlki had or, for that matter, Nita. The Lone Power sang on:

“—learn power! Learn how wizardry may turn to serve your purpose, sinking the whalers deep, taking the brute invaders’ lives to pay for that small life that swims the Sea no more; take up my Gift—“

“There is — there is another life,” Areinnye sang, trembling now as if storm waters battered at her, breaking the continuity of the Song. “Saved — she saved—“

“—what matter? As if brutes who fear the Sea are capable of thought, much less of love! Even a shark by accident may save a life — then turn and tear the newly saved! Take up my Gift and take a life for life, as it was done of old—“

Slowly Areinnye turned, and the glitter of the wizard-light in her eyes as she looked at Nita was horrible to see. “Life,” she sang, one low, thick, struggling note—

She leaped at Nita. In that second Fang, on her left, arrowed in front of Areinnye, punching her jaws away from Nita in time for Nita to roll out of their way. But Fang didn’t recover from the blow in time to flee himself; Areinnye’s head swept around and the great teeth of her upper jaw raked frightful gashes down Fang’s side. Nita pulled herself out of her roll just in time to see something else hit Areinnye — Kit’s huge bulk, slamming into her with such force that she was knocked straight into the side of Caryn Peak. She screamed; the water brought back echoes of the sickening sound of her impact. And then she was fleeing — out of the wizard-light, past the boundaries of the protective spell, out into the darkness past the peak.

The Celebrants stirred about in terrible confusion, while S’reee hurried to Fang’s side and examined him. Nita stroked over quickly and brushed Fang’s good side, very lightly. One of those merry eyes, now slightly less merry, managed to focus on her. “We need you — Silent One,” Fang said.

“We do,” S’reee said. “These wounds aren’t deep, but they’re bleeding a lot — and the Master-Shark’s about. I’ve got to handle this. Meanwhile, we’re shy the Gray Lord — and I don’t think she’s going to come back and take back what she said. Kit, are you willing?”

Nita looked swiftly behind her. Kit was hanging there, looking down at Fang. “I’d better be,” he said.

“Good. HNii’t, administer him the Celebrant’s Oath. And hurry.” S’reee turned away from them and began one of the faster healing spells.

“Kit, are you sure—“

“Get going,” he said.

She led him through the Oath. He said it almost as quickly as Hotshot had, tripping in only one place: “… and I shall weave my voice and my will and my blood with theirs if there be need…” He was looking at Nita as he said that, and the look went right through her like a spear.

“Done,” S’reee said. “Fang, mind that side — the repair is temporary — Swiftly, now. Everyone circle, we can’t afford a delay. Kit, from ‘No, ‘ must think—‘ “

They sang. And if the Song had been frightening before, it was becoming frantic now. Underneath them all the Celebrants could feel some malicious force straining to get free—

Nita watched Kit closely. He didn’t rehearse any of this stuff, she thought. What if he slips? But Kit sang what remained of the Gray Lord’s part faultlessly; he had laid himself wide open to the Sea and was being fed words and music directly. Nita felt a lump in her throat — that reaction humans shared with whales — at the perfect clarity of his voice. But she couldn’t stop worrying. If he’s this open to the Sea, he’s also open to that Other—

And that Other was working on him. Kit was beginning to tremble as the second part of the Gray Lord’s rebuff came to an end. The soundless voice, when it spoke for the last time, was all sweet reason:

“ ‘—strength is no use. Give over the vain strife that saves no one, keeps no old friend alive, condemns the dear to death. Take but my Gift and know long years that end not, slow-burnt days under the Sun and Moon; not for yourself alone, but for the other—‘ “

“No,” Nita said — a mere whisper of song.

Kit looked at her from the heart of the circle, shaking. In his eyes and the way he held his body Nita read how easy it would be for him to desert the Song after just these few lines, destroy it, knowing that Nita would escape alive. Here was the out he had been looking for.

“No!” she tried to say again, but something was stopping her. The malice in the water grew, burning her. Kit wavered, looking at her— then closed his eyes and took a great breath of air from the spell, and began singing again — his voice anguished, but still determined. He finished the last verse of the Gray Lord’s rebuff on a note that was mostly a squeak, and immediately turned to S’reee, for the next part would be the group singing — the battle.

S’reee lifted her head for the secondary invocation.

The ocean floor began to shake. And Nita suddenly realized that it wasn’t lust the Lone Power’s malice burning all around her. The water was heating up.

“Oh, Sea about us, no!” S’reee cried. “What now?”

“Sing!” came a great voice from above them. Aroooon had lifted out of the circle, was looking into the darkness, past the great pillar of Caryn Peak. “For your lives, sing! Forget the battle! HNii’t, quickly!”

She knew what he wanted. Nita took one last great gulp of breath, tasting it as she had never tasted anything in her life, and fluked upward out of the Circle herself, locating one of the sharp outcroppings she had noticed earlier.

A flash of ghostly white in the background— Good, she thought. Ed’s close “Sea, hear me now,” she sang in a great voice, “and take my words and make them ever law—“

“Nitaaaaaa!”

“HNii’t, look out!”

The two cries came from opposite directions. She was glancing toward Kit, one last look, when something with suckered arms grabbed her by the tail and pulled her down.

The moments that followed turned into a nightmare of thrashing and bellowing, arms that whipped at her, clung to her, dragging her inexorably toward the place where they joined and the wicked beak waited. No one was coming to help her, Nita realized, as she looked down into that sucking mouth. The water was full of screams; and two of the voices she heard were those of sperm whales. Two— She thrashed harder, getting a view as she did so of S’reee fleeing before a great gray shape with open jaws — Areinnye; and coming behind Areinnye, a flood of black shapes, bigger than any the Celebrants had had to handle in Hudson Canyon.

She’s sold out, Nita thought miserably. She’s gone over to the Lone One. She came back and broke the circle, and let the krakens in, and everything’s going to go to hell if I don’t— Nita swung her head desperately and hit the kraken with it, felt baleen plates in her mouth crack, felt the kraken shudder. Let go of me, you disgusting thing! Nita was past working any wizardry but one. Brute force was going to have to do it. Let go! She slammed her head into the kraken again, sideways. It let out a shrill painful whoop that was very satisfying to her. Your eye’s sensitive, huh? she thought. One more time!

She hit it again. Something soft gave under the blow, and the kraken screamed. Nita tore free of the loosening arms and swam upward, hard and fast, heading for her sharp outcropping. The whole area around the base of Caryn Peak was boiling with kraken, with Celebrants fighting them and trying desperately not to be dragged out of the boundaries of the protective spell. The bottom was shuddering harder; hot water was shimmering faster and faster out of the vent. It’s got to be stopped, Nita thought. “Kit,” she called, looking around hurriedly. There’s just time enough to say good-bye-Two things she saw. One was that ghostly white shape soaring close by, bolting down the rear half of a kraken about the size of a step van and gazing down at her as it passed by.

The other was Kit, turning away from a long, vicious slash he had just torn down Areinnye’s side — looking up at Nita and singing one note of heart-tearing misery — not in the Speech — not in the human-flavored whale he had always spoken before — but in pure whale.

Oh, no. He’s lost language! Nita’s heart seized. S’reee had said that if that happened, the whalesark was about to be rejected by Kit’s brain. Unless something was done, it would leave him human again, naked in the cold, three miles down.

That thought, and the echoes of Kit’s cry of anguish, suddenly meant more to Nita than any abstract idea of ten million deaths. And in that second Nita came to understand what Carl had been talking about. She wheeled around and stared at the outcropping — then chose to do, willingly, what she had thought she’d no choice but to do. The triumph that instantly flared up in her made no sense: But she wouldn’t have traded it for any feeling more sensible. She turned and fluked with all her might and threw herself at the stony knives of the peak — and hit— something, not stone, and reeled away from the blow, stunned and confused. Something had punched her in the side. Tumbling over and over with the force of the blow and the ever-increasing shockwaves blasting up from the shuddering bottom, Nita saw that great white shape again — but much closer, soaring backward with her as she tumbled. “Silent One,” he said, “before you do what you must — give me your power!”

“What?”

“Only trust me! Give it me — and be quick!”

Nita could hardly react to the outrageous demand. Only with Kit had she ever dared do such a thing. To give Ed all her power would leave her empty of it, defenseless, until he finished whatever he wanted to do with it. Which could be hours — or forever. And he wasn’t even a wizard—

“Nita, swiftly!”

“But Ed, I need it for the Sacrifice. What do you want it for!”

“To call for help!” Ed hissed, arching away through the water toward Areinnye and Kit, who was still fighting feebly to keep her busy and away from Nita. “Sprat, be quick and choose, or it will be too late!”

He dove at Areinnye, punched Kit out of harm’s way, and took a great crater of a bite out of Areinnye’s unprotected flank.

Areinnye’s head snapped up and around, slashing at Ed sideways. He avoided her, circled in again. “Nita!”

To call for help— What help? And even for Ed, to give up her power, the thing that was keeping her safe and was also the most inside part of her—

Read the fine print before you sign, said a scratchy voice in her memory. Do what the Knight tells you. And don’t be afraid to give yourself away!

“Ed,” Nita sang at the bloody comet hurtling through the water, “take it!” then she cried the three words that she had never spoken to anyone but Kit, the most dangerous words in the Speech, which release one’s whole Power to another. She felt the power run from her like blood from a wound, she felt Ed acquire it, and demand more as he turned it toward the beginning of some ferocious inner calling. And then, when she felt as empty as a shell, Ed shook himself and dived toward the lava again, driving Areinnye away from Kit.

Areinnye refused to be driven. Swiftly she turned and her fangs found Ed’s side, scoring a long deep gash from gills to tail. The Master-Shark swept away from Areinnye, his wound trailing a horrid boiling curtain of black blood-smoke in the failing wizard-light.

Nita flailed and gasped with exertion — and got air from the protective spell, much to her surprise. She was still in whaleshape. And stuck in it, I bet, she thought, till I get the power back. What in the world’s Ed doing?

The sea bottom around the vent suddenly heaved — lifting like some great dark creature taking its first breath… then heaved again, bulging up, with cracks spreading outward from the center of the bulge. The cracks, or something beneath them, glowed red-hot.

The sea floor thundered with another tremor. Superheated water blasted up from the remains of the vent; rocks rained down from Caryn Peak. The red glow burst up through the widening cracks. It was lava, burning a feverish, suppurating red through the murk and the violently shimmering water. The water that came in contact with it — unable to boil at these pressures, regardless of the heat applied to it — did the impossible, the only thing it could do: It burst into flame. Small tongues of blue-violet fire danced and snaked along the outward-reaching tentacles of lava.

The wizard-light remaining in the water was a failing, sickly mist. Caryn Peak shook on its foundations. The Celebrants were scattered. Nita swam desperately upward, trying to do what she saw Kit doing — get safe above the roasting heat of the sea floor. All the bottom between her and the peak was a mazework of lava-filled cracks, broken stone floating on the lava, and violet fire.

Under the stone, under the lava, in the depths of the great crack that had swallowed the vent, something moved. Something began to shrug the stone and lava aside. A long shape shook itself, stretched itself, swelled and shrank and swelled again — a shape clothed in lava and black-violet fire, burning terribly. Nita watched in horrified fascination. What is it? Nita wondered. Some kind of buried pipeline? But no manmade pipeline was a hundred feet across. And no pipeline would seem to breathe, or move by itself, or rear up serpentlike out of the disintegrating sea bed with the dreadful energy of something unbound at last.

That shape was rising now, letting go its grasp on part of that long burning body that stretched away as far as the eye could see from east to west. A neck, Nita thought, as the shape reared up taller, towering over the sea bottom. A neck and a head— A huge snake’s head, fringed, fanged, long and sleek, with dark-burning lava for a hide, and eyes the sick black-violet of water bursting into flame—

In the guise It had first worn after betraying the whales, and wore now again in gloating token of another victory, the Power, the many-named darkness that men had sometimes called the Old Serpent, towered over the sea bed as the binding that had held It shattered. This, Nita realized, was the terrible truth concealed under the old myths of the Serpent that lay coiled about the foundations of the world, waiting for the day It would crush the world in those coils.

And now Its moment was at hand: But It was stretching it, savoring it. It looked at Nita, drifting not two hundred feet from Its immense stony jaws— looked at her out of eyes burning with a color that would sear its way into the nightmares of anyone surviving to remember it. And those eyes knew her.

She was frightened; but she had something to do yet. I know my verse now without having to get it from the Sea, she thought. So maybe I won’t need wizardry to pull this off. And maybe just doing the Sacrifice will have its own power. Let’s find out…

Nita backfinned through the thundering water, staying out of reach of those jaws, watching for any sudden movement. She drew what she suspected was a last breath — the protective spell around her was fading fast — and lifted her voice into the roaring darkness. Ed, she thought, don’t blow it now!

“Must I accept the barren Gift?

learn death, and lose my Mastery?

Then let them know whose blood and breath

will take the Gift and set them free! — ‘ “

The gloating eyes were fixed on her — letting her sing, letting Nita make the attempt. But the Lone Power wasn’t going to let her get away with it. That huge, hideous head was bending closer to her. Nita back-finned, not too obviously, she hoped — kept her distance, kept on singing:

“ ‘Not old enough to love as yet,

but old enough to die, indeed—

the death-fear bites my throat and heart,

fanged cousin to the Pale One’s breed—‘ “

And with a low thick rumble of amusement and hunger, the Serpent’s head thrust at Nita in a strike that she couldn’t prevent.

This is it!

The sudden small shock in the water made her heart pound. She glanced downward as she sang. There was Kit — battered and struggling with the failing whalesark as if it were actually someone else’s body — but ramming the Serpent head-on, near where the neck towered up above the slowly squeezing coils. Their pressure was breaking the sea bed in great pieces, so that lava and superheated water gushed up in a hundred places. But Kit ignored the heat and rammed the Old Serpent again and again. He’s trying to distract It, Nita thought, in a terrible uprush of anguish and admiration. He’s buying me time. Oh, Kit! The gift was too precious to waste.

“But past the fear lies life for them,” she sang,

“ ‘—perhaps for me; and past my dread,

past loss of Mastery and life,

the Sea shall yet give up Her dead!’ “

Annoyed — as a human might be by a gnat — the Serpent bent Its head away from Nita to see what was troubling It. Humor and hunger glinted in Its eyes as It recognized in Kit the other wizard who had once given It so much trouble in Manhattan. It bent Its head to him, but slowly, wanting him to savor the terror. Now, Nita thought, and began to sing again. “Lone Power—“

“No!” cried another voice through the water, and something came hurtling at her and punched Nita to one side. It was Areinnye — wounded, and crazy, from the looks of her. I don’t have time for this! Nita thought, and for the first time in her life rummaged around in her mind for a spell that would kill.

Someone else came streaking in to ram. Areinnye went flying. There was blood in the water: Ed’s, pumping more and more weakly from the gash in his side. But his eyes were as cool as ever. “Ed,” Nita said, breaking off her singing, “thank you—“

He stared at her as he arrowed toward her — the old indecipherable look. “Sprat,” he said, “when did I ever leave distress uncured?” And to her complete amazement, before Nita could move, he rammed her again, close to the head — leaving her too stunned to sing, tumbling and helpless in pain.

Through the ache she heard Ed lift his voice in song. Nita’s song — the lines that, with the offered Sacrifice, bind Death anew and put the Lortf Power in Its place. Kit just went on pummeling at the great shape that bent closer and closer to them all, and Nita struggled and writhed and couldn’t make a sound.

No! she thought. But it was no use. Ed was taking her part willingly, circling in on the Lone Power. Yet even through Nita’s horror, some wonder intruded. Where did he get such a voice? she thought. It seemed to fill the whole Sea.

“ ‘Lone Power, I accept your Gift!

But take my Gift of equal worth:

I take Death with me, out of time,

and make of it a path, a birth!

Let the teeth come! As they tear me,

they tear your ancient hate for aye—

so rage, proud Power! Fail again,

and see my blood teach Death to die!’ “

And the Master-Shark dived straight at the upraised neck of the Serpent, and bit it. He made no cry as Its burning hide blasted his teeth away and seared his mouth instantly black; he made no cry as the Lone Power, enraged at Its wounding, bent down to pluck the annoying little creature from Its neck and crush it in stony jaws.

And then the sharks came.

Calling for help, Ed had said. Now Nita remembered what he had said to her so long ago, on the only way he had to call his people together… with blood: his own. Her wizardry, though, had lent the call power that even Ed’s own Mastery could never have achieved, just as it had lent him a whale-wizard’s power of song. And brought impossible distances by its power, the Master-Shark’s people came — by dozens, by hundreds, by thousands and tens of thousands. Maddened by the blood in the water, they fell on everything that had a wound and tore it to shreds.

Nita found that she could swim again, and she did, fast — away from there, where all the sharks of the world, it seemed, jostled and boiled in feeding frenzy. Areinnye vanished in a cloud of sleek silver bodies. Ed could not be seen. And the Serpent—

A scream of astonishment and pain crashed through the water. The Lone Power, like all the other Powers, had to obey the rules when within a universe and wear a body that could be acted upon. The sharks — wild with their Master’s blood and beyond feeling pain — were acting upon it. The taste of Its scalding blood in the water, and their own, drove them mad for more. They found more. The screaming went on, and on, and on, all up and down the length of the thrashing, writhing Serpent. Nita, deafened, writhing herself, felt as if it would go on forever.

Eventually forever ended. The sharks, great and small, began milling slowly about, cruising for new game, finding none. They began to disperse.

Of the Master-Shark, of Areinnye, there was no sign; only a roiling cloud of red that every now and then snowed little rags of flesh.

Of the Lone Power, nothing remained but sluggishly flowing lava running over a quieting sea bed, and in the water the hot sulfurous taste, much diluted, of Its flaming blood. The writhing shape now defined on the bottom by cooling pillow lava made it plain that the Unbound was bound once more by the blood of a willing victim, a wizard — no matter that the wizardry was borrowed.

Aching all over, impossibly tired, Nita hung there for several minutes, simply not knowing what to do. She hadn’t planned to live this long.

Now, though: “Kit?”

Her cry brought her back the echo of a sperm whale heading for the surface as quickly as was safe. She followed him.

Nita passed through the “twilight zone” at three hundred fathoms and saw light, the faint green gold she had never hoped to see again. When she broke surface and drew several long gasping breaths, she found that it was morning. Monday morning, she guessed, or hoped. It didn’t much matter. She had sunlight again, she had air to breathe — and floating half a mile away in the wavewash, looking too tired to move a fin, the massive back of a sperm whale bobbed and rocked.

She went to him. Neither of them did anything for a long time but lie there in the water, side by side, skin just touching, and breathe.

“I got carried away down there,” Kit said eventually. “And the whalesark started to go out on me. I would have gone all sperm whale — and then the sark would have blown out all the way—“

“I noticed,” Nita said.

“And you pulled me out of it. I think I owe you one.”

“After all that,” Nita said, “I’m not sure who owes what. Maybe we’d better call it even.”

“Yeah. But, Neets—“

“Don’t mention it,” she said. “Someone has to keep you out of trouble.”

He blew explosively, right in her face.

One by one, finding one another by song, the other Celebrants began to gather around them. Neither Kit nor Nita had any words for them until, last of the group, S’reee surfaced and blew in utter weariness.

She looked at Nita. “Areinnye—“

“Gone,” Kit said.

“And the Master-Shark—“

“The Sacrifice,” Nita said, “was accepted.”

There was silence as the Celebrants looked at each other. “Well,” S’reee said, “the Sea has definitely never seen a Song quite like this—“

It will be a Song well sung, said a cool voice in Nita’s head. And sung from the heart. You, young and never loving: I, old and never loved—

“—but the Lone One is bound. And the waters are quieting.”

“S’reee,” Fang said, “don’t we still need to finish the Song?”

“It’s done,” Kit said.

S’reee looked at him in silence a moment. “Yes,” she said then. “It is.”

“And I want to go home,” Kit said.

“Well enough,” said S’reee. “Kit, we’ll be in these waters resting for at least a couple of days. You know where to find us.” She paused, hunting words. “And, look—“

“Please save it,” Nita said, as gently as she could. She nudged Kit in the side; he turned shoreward for the long swim home. “We’ll see you later.”

They went home.

They found Nita’s parents waiting for them on the beach, as if they had known where and when they would be arriving. Nita found it difficult to care. She and Kit slogged their way up out of the surf, into the towels that Nita’s mom and dad held out for them, and stood there shivering with reaction and early-morning cold for several moments.

“Is it going to be all right?” Nita’s father asked.

Nita nodded.

“Are you all right?” Nita’s mother asked, holding her tight.

Nita looked up at her mom and saw no reason to start lying then. “No.”

“… Okay,” her mother said. “The questions can wait. Let’s get you home.”

“Okay,” Kit said. “And you can ask her all the questions you like… while I eat.”

Nita turned around then; gave Kit a long look… and reached out, and hugged him hard.

She didn’t answer questions when she got home. She did eat; and then she went to her room and fell onto her bed, as Kit had done in his room across the hall, to get some sleep. But before she dropped off, Nita pulled her manual out from its spot under her pillow and opened it to one of the general data supply areas. “I want a readout on all the blank-check wizardries done in this area in the last six months,” she said. “And what their results were.”

The list came up. It was short, as she’d known it would be. The second-to-last entry on the list said:

BCX 85/003—CALLAHAN, Juanita T., and RODRIGUEZ, Christopher K.: open-ended “Mobius spell” implementation.

Incurred: 4/25/85. Paid: 7/15/85, by willing substitution. See “Current Events” \ precis for details. “

Nita put the book back under her pillow, and quietly, bitterly, started to get caught up on her crying.