Deep Wizardry

A Song of Choice

Nita got up late, and was still yawning and scrubbing her eyes even after she’d washed and dressed and was well into her second bowl of cereal. Her mother, walking around the kitchen in her bathrobe and watering the plants that hung all over, looked at Nita curiously.

“Neets, were you reading under the covers again last night?”

“No, Mom.” Nita started to eat faster.

Her mother watered another plant, then headed for the sink. On the way, she put a hand against Nita’s forehead. “You feel okay? Not coming down with anything, are you?”

“No, I’m fine.” Nita made an annoyed face when her mother’s back was turned. Her mom loved the beach, but at the same time was sure that there were hundreds of ways to get sick there: too much heat, too much cold, too much time in the water; splinters, rusty nails, tar… Nita’s little sister Dairine had kicked off a tremendous family fight last week by insisting that the blueness of her lips after a prolonged swim was actually caused by a grape Popsicle.

“Is Kit having a good time?” her mother said.

“Wow, yeah, he says it’s the best,” Nita said. Which was true enough: Kit had never been at the beach for more than a day at a time before. Nita suspected that if he could, he’d dig into the sand like a clam and not come out for months.

“I just wanted to make sure. His dad called last night… wanted to see how his ‘littlest’ was.”

“ ‘El Nino,’ “ Nita said, under her breath, grinning. It was what Kit s family called him sometimes, a pun — both the word for “the baby” and the name for a Pacific current that caused storms that could devastate whole countries. The name made Kit crazy, and Nita loved to use it on him.

“Be careful he doesn’t hear you,” Nita’s mom said mildly, “or he’ll deck you again. — How have you two been getting along?”

“Huh? We’re fine. Kit’s great.” Nita saw a slightly odd look come into her mother’s eyes. “For a boy,” she added hurriedly.

“Well,” her mother said, “be careful.” And she took the watering can off into the living room.

Now what was that about? Nita thought. She finished her cornflakes at high speed, rinsed the bowl and spoon in the sink, and hurried out of the house to find Kit.

Halfway across the sparse sandy grass of the front yard, another voice spoke up. “Aha,” it said. “The mystery lady.”

“Put a cork in it, Dairine,” Nita said. Her sister was hanging upside down from the trapeze swing of the rusty swing set, her short red hair ruffling in the breeze. Dairine was a tiny stick of a thing and an all right younger sister, though (in Nita’s estimation) much too smart for her own good. Right now entirely too much smart was showing in those sharp gray eyes. Nita tried not to react to it. “Gonna fall down and bust your head open,” she said. “Probably lose what few brains you have all over the ground.”

Dairine shook her head, causing herself to swing a little. “Naaah,” she said, “but I’d sooner”—she started pumping, so as to swing harder—“fall off the swing — than fall out the window — in the middle of the night!”

Nita went first cold, then hot. She glanced at the windows to see if anyone was looking out. They weren’t. “Did you tell?” she hissed.

“I — don’t tell anybody — anything,” Dairine said, in time with her swinging. This was true enough. When Dairine had needed glasses, when she’d started getting beaten up at school, and when she was exposed to German measles, nobody had heard about it from her.

“Y’like him, huh?” Dairine said.

Nita glared at Dairine, opened her mouth to start shouting, then remembered the open windows.

“Yeah, I like him,” Nita said, and turned red at having to make the admission. The problem was, there was no lying to Dairine. She always found out the truth sooner or later and made your life unbearable for having tried to hide it from her.

“You messing around?” Dairine said.

“Dairiiiiiiiine!” Nita said, quietly, but with murder in it. “No, we are not Kessing around!”

“Okay. I just wondered. You going swimming?”

“No,” Nita said, snapping the strap of her bathing suit very obviously at her sister, “I thought I’d go skiing. Wake up, lamebrain.”

Dairine grinned at Nita upside down. “Kit went west,” she said.

“Thanks,” Nita said, and headed out of the yard. “Tell Mom and Dad I’ll be back for supper.”

“Be careful,” Dairine called after Nita, in a perfect imitation of their mother. Nita made a face.

“And watch out for sharks!” Dairine added at the top of her lungs.

“Oh, great,” Nita said to herself, wondering if her mom or dad had heard She took off at a dead run in case they had.

She found Kit waiting about a mile down the beach, playing fetch with Ponch to tire him out, as he’d told her he was going to. “Otherwise he gets crazy if I go away. This way he’ll just lie down and sack out.” And sure enough, after some initial barking and dancing around Nita when she arrived, Ponch flopped panting on the sand beside them where they sat talking and finally rolled over on one side and began to snore.

They grinned at each other and headed out into the water. It was unnerving at first, to swim straight out into the ocean, past the breakers and the rollers, past the place where the bottom fell away, and to just keep going as if they never intended to come back. Nita had uncomfortable thoughts about undertow and how it might feel to drown. But just when she was at her twitchiest, she saw a long floppy fin tip up out of the water. S’reee was lolling there in the wavewash, her long pale barnacled belly upward.

The night before, when S’reee had been injured and immobile, it had been hard to tell much of anything about her. Now Nita was struck by the size of her — S’reee was at least forty feet from the tips of her flukes to her pointy nose. And last night she had been a wheezing hulk. Now she was all grace, floating and gliding and rolling like some absurd, fat, slim-winged bird — for her long swimming fins looked more like wings than anything else.

“Did you sleep well?” she sang at them, a weird cheerful crescendo like something out of a happy synthesizer. “I slept wonderfully. And I ate well too. I think I may get back most of the weight I lost yesterday.”

Kit looked at the healed place, treading water. “What do you eat?”

“Krill, mostly. The littlest things that live in the water, like little shrimp. But some fish too. The blues are running, and the little ones are good. Of they have been until now…” She sighed, spraying water out her blowhole. “That’s in the story I have to tell you. Come on, we’ll go out to one of the Made Rocks.”

They took hold of her dorsal fin, and she towed them. The “Made Rock” turned out to be an old square fishing platform about three miles south of Tiana Beach: wooden pilings topped by wooden slats covered with tarred canvas and with bland-faced seagulls. Most of the gulls immediately took off and began flying around and screaming about the humans sitting on their spot, despite Nita’s and Kit’s polite apologies. Some of the other gulls were less annoyed, especially after they found out the visitors were wizards. Later on, whenever Nita thought of her first real conversation with S’reee, what she remembered best were the two seagulls who insisted on sitting in her lap the whole time. They were heavy, and not housebroken.

“I guess the best place to start,” S’reee said when Nita and Kit were settled, “is with what you already know, that there’s been trouble for wizards on the land lately. The trouble’s been felt in the sea too. Out here we’ve been having quakes on the sea floor much more often than we should be having them — severe ones. And some other old problems have been getting worse. The dirt they throw into the water from the High and Dry, especially: there’s more of it than ever—“

“ ‘The High and Dry’?”

“The place with all the high things on it.”

“Oh,” Kit said. “New York City. Manhattan, actually.”

“The water close to it is getting so foul, the fish can’t breathe it for many thousands of lengths out. Those that can are mostly sick. And many more of the boats-that-eat-whales have been out here recently. The past few months, there’s been a great slaughter—“

Nita frowned at the thought of other creatures suffering what S’reee had been through. She had heard all the stories about the hungry people in Japan, but at the moment she found herself thinking that there had to be something else to eat.

“Things have not been good,” S’reee said. “I know less about the troubles on land, but the Sea tells us that the land wizards have been troubled of late, that there was some great strife of powers on the High and Dry. We saw the Moon go out one night—“

“So did we,” Kit said. There was fear in his eyes at the memory, and pride in his voice. “We were in Manhattan when it happened.”

“We were part of it,” Nita said. She still didn’t know all of how she felt about what had happened. But she would never forget reading from the book that kept the world as it should be, the Book of Night with Moon, while around her and Kit the buildings of Manhattan wavered like a dream about to break — and beyond a barrier of trees brought to life, and battling statues, the personification of all darkness and fear, the Lone Power, fought to get at them and destroy them.

S’reee looked at them somberly from one eye. “It’s true then what the mhnuu used to tell me, that there are no accidents. You’ve met the Power that created death in the beginning and was cast out for it. All these things— the lost Moon, that night, and the earthquakes, and the fouled water, and the whale-eating ships — they’re all Its doing, one way or another.”

Kit and Nita nodded. “It took a defeat in that battle you two were in,” S’reee said. “It’s angry, and the problems we’ve been having are symptoms of that anger. So we have to bind It, make It less harmful, as the first sea people bound It a long time ago. Then things will be quiet again for a while.”

“Bind It how?” Nita said.

“No, wait a minute,” Kit said. “You said something about the Sea telling you things—“

S’reee looked surprised for a moment. “Oh, I forgot that you do it differently. You work your wizardry with the aid of those things you carry—“

“Our books.”

“Right. The whales who are wizards get their wizardry from the Sea. The water speaks to you when you’re ready, and offers you the Ordeal. Then if you pass it, the Heart of the Sea speaks whenever you need to hear it and tells you what you need to know.”

Nita nodded. The events in that “other” Manhattan had been her Ordeal, and Kit’s; and after they passed it, their books had contained much more information than before. “So,” she said, “bind the Lone Power how?”

“The way the first whale-wizards did,” S’reee said. “The story itself is the binding. Or rather, the story’s a song: the Song of the Twelve. In the long form it takes — will take — hours to sing.”

“I’m glad I had breakfast,” Kit muttered.

S’reee spouted good-naturedly. Nita wondered whether it was accidental that the wind turned at that exact moment, threw the spray straight at Kit, and soaked him to the skin. At any rate, Nita laughed.

“I won’t take quite that long,” S’reee said. “You know about the great War of the Powers, at the beginning of everything; and how the Lone Power invented death and pain, and tried to impose them on the whole universe, and the other Powers wouldn’t let It, and threw It out.”

“Even regular human beings have stories about it,” Kit said. He took off his windbreaker and shook it out, mostly on Nita.

“I’m not surprised,” S’reee said. “Everything that lives and tells stories has this story in one form or another. Well. After that war in the Above and Beyond, the Lone Power spent a long while in untraveled barren universes, recouping Its strength. Then It came back to our native universe, looking for some quiet, out-of-the-way place to try out Its new inventions. Right then the only place vulnerable to It, because thinking life was very new here, was this world; and the only place thinking life existed as yet was the Sea. So the Lone One came here to trick the Sea into accepting Death. Its sort of death, anyway — where all power and love are wasted into an endless darkness, lost forever.”

“Entropy,” Nita said.

“Yes. And any sea people It succeeded in tricking would be stuck with that death, the Great Death, forever. — Now there was already a sort of death in the Sea, but only the kind where your body stops. Everyone knew it wasn’t permanent, and it didn’t hurt much; you might get eaten, but you would go on as part of someone else. No one was afraid of not being his own self anymore — I guess that’s the simplest way of putting it. That calm way of life drove the Lone Power wild with hate, and It swore to attach fear and pain to it and make it a lot more interesting.”

S’reee sighed. “The whales’ job then was what it is now: to be masters and caretakers for the fish and the smaller sea people, the way you two-leggers are for the dry-land beasts. So naturally, the only wizards in the Sea were whales, just as humans were originally the only ones on land. That early on, there were only ten whale-wizards, all Seniors. Ni’hwinyii, they were called, the Lords of the Humors—“

Nita was puzzled. “It’s the old word for emotions, sort of,” Kit said. “Not like ‘funny’ humor.”

“I know,” Nita said, annoyed. She hadn’t.

S’reee blew, laughing. The spray missed Kit this time. “Those ten whales ruled the Sea, under the Powers,” she said. “If the Lone Power wanted to trick the Sea into the Great Death, It had to trick the Ten — then all the life they ruled would be stuck with the Great Death too. So the Lone One went to the Ten in disguise, pretending to be a stranger, a new whale sent to them so that they could decide under which of their Masteries it fell. And as each one questioned the Lone Power, the Stranger whale offered each of them the thing he wanted most, if he would only accept the ‘Gift’ the Stranger would give him. And he showed them just enough of his power to prove that he could do it.”

“Uh-oh,” Kit said softly. “I’ve heard that one before.”

“Apples and snakes,” Nita said.

“Yes. The pattern repeats. One after another, the Lone One tempted the Ten. The Sea was silent then and gave them no advice — some people say that the Powers wanted the Ten to make up their own minds. But however that might have been, three of the Ten took the Gift, and fell. Three of them were undecided. Three of them rejected the Gift. And the Lone Power needed a majority of the Lords to accept Death, or Its victory would only be Partial.”

“Those were only nine Lords, though,” Kit said.

“Yes, and here the Tenth comes in: the Silent Lord, they called her. She was the youngest of them, and each of the other Nine tried to bring her around to his own way of thinking. The Lone One came to her too and tempted her as It had tempted the others. You know, though, that it’s the youngest wizard who has the most power, and where the other Lords were deceived, the Silent Lord wasn’t. She realized what the Stranger was and what It was trying to do.

She was faced with a difficult choice. She knew that even if she rejected the Stranger, the fighting would only go on among the other Nine. Sooner or later they or their successors would accept the Gift and doom the whole Sea to the Great Death. But she also knew something else that the Sea had told her long before, and that others have found out since. If one knows death is coming — any death, from the small ones to the Great one — and is willing to accept it fully, and experience it fully, then the death becomes something else — a passage, not an ending: not only for himself, but for others.”

S’reee’s voice got very soft. “So the Silent Lord did that,” she said. “Luck, or the Powers, brought one more creature into the singing, uninvited. It was the one fish over whom no mastery was ever given — the Pale Slayer, whom we call the Master-Shark. The Silent Lord decided to accept the ‘Gift’ that the Stranger offered her — and then, to transform the Gift and make it ‘safe,’ she gave herself up willingly to die. She dived into a stand of razor coral; and the Master-Shark smelled her blood in the water, and… well.” S’reee blew. “He accepted the sacrifice.”

Nita and Kit looked at each other.

“When that happened, the Lone Power went wild with rage,” S’reee said. “But that did It no good. The Silent One’s sacrifice turned death loose in some of the Sea, but not all; and even where it did turn up, death was much weaker than it would have been otherwise. To this day there are fish and whales that have astonishing lifespans, and some that never seem to die of natural causes. The sharks, for instance: some people say that’s a result of the Master-Shark’s acceptance of the Silent Lord’s sacrifice. But the important thing is that the Lone Power had put a lot of Its strength into Its death-wizardry. It had become death Itself, in a way. And when death was weakened, so was the Lone One. It fell to the sea floor, and it opened for It and closed on It afterward. And there It lies bound.”

“ ‘Bound’?” Kit said. “S’reee, when we had our last run-in with the Lone Power, It didn’t seem very bound to us. It had a whole alternate universe of Its own, and when It came into this one to get us, It went around tearing things up any way It liked. If It is bound, how could It have also been running loose in Manhattan?”

S’reee blew, a sober sound. “It’s the usual confusion about time,” she said. “All the great Powers exist outside it, and all we usually see of Them are the places and moments where and when They dip into the timeflow we’re inhabiting. This world has always been an annoyance to the Lone One. Its gets frustrated here a lot — so It visits often, in many forms. From inside our timeflow, it can look as if the Lone Power is bound in one place-time and free in another… and both appearances are true.” S’reee rolled and stretched in the water. “Meanwhile, outside the timeflow, where things don’t have to happen one after another, the Lone One is eternally rebelling and eternally defeated—“

“We gave It a chance to do something else, when we fought last,” Nita said. “We offered It the option to stop being a dark power—“

“And it worked,” S’reee said, sounding very pleased. “Didn’t you know? It’s also eternally redeemed. But meantime we have to keep fighting the battles, even though the war’s decided. The Lone One’s going to take a long while to complete Its choice, and if we get lazy or sloppy about handling Its thrashing around, a lot of people are going to die.”

“The sea floor,” Nita said, “has been shaken up a lot lately.”

“That’s one symptom that tells us the Twelve Song needs to be reenacted,” S’reee said. “We do the Song at intervals anyway, to make sure the story’s never forgotten. But when the Lone Power gets troublesome — as It seems to be doing now — we reenact the Song, and bind It quiet again.”

“Where do you do this stuff?” Kit said.

“Down the coast a ways,” S’reee said, “off the edge of the plateau, in the Great Deep past the Gates of the Sea. Ae’mhnuu was getting ready to call the Ten together for a Song in three days or so. He was training me for the Singer’s part — before they blew him in two pieces and boiled him down for oil.”

Her song went bitter, acquiring a rasp that hurt Nita’s ears. “Now I’m stuck handling it all myself. It’s not easy: You have to pick each whale wizard carefully for each part. I don’t know who he had in mind to do what. Now I have to work it out myself — and I need help, from wizards who can handle trouble if it comes up.” She looked up at them. “You two can obviously manage that. And the Ten will listen to you, they’ll respect you, after what you went through up in the High and Dry. You’ve fought the Lone Power yourselves and gotten off—“

“It was luck,” Kit muttered. Nita elbowed him.

“Singing, huh,” Nita said, smiling slightly. “I don’t have much of a singing voice. Maybe I’d better take the Silent One’s part.”

S’reee looked at Nita in amazement. “Would you?”

“Why not?”

“Not me,” Kit said. “I’m even worse than she is. But I’ll come along for the ride. The swim, I mean.”

S’reee looked from Kit to Nita. “You two are enough to make me doubt all the stories I’ve heard about humans,” she said. “HNii’t, best check that book’thing and make sure this is something you’re suited for. The temperaments of the singers have to match the parts they sing — but I think this might suit you. And the original Silent Lord was a humpback. The shapechange would come easily to you, since we’ve shared blood—“

“Wait a minute! Shapechange?” Nita cried. “You mean me be a whale?”

Kit laughed. “Why not, Neets? You have been putting on a little weight lately…”

She elbowed him again, harder. “Oh, you’d shapechange too, Kit,” S’reee said. “We couldn’t take you down in the Great Deeps otherwise. — Look, you two, there’s too much to tell, and some of it’s going to have to be handled as we go along. We’ve got three days to get everyone together for the Song, so that it happens when the Moon’s round. Otherwise it won’t keep the sea bottom quiet—“

Kit looked suddenly at Nita. “Did you see that thing on the news the other night? About the volcano?”

“The what?”

“There was some scientist on. He said that hot-water vents had been opening up all of a sudden off the Continental Shelf. And he said that if those little tremors we’ve been having keep getting worse, it could open the bottom right up and there’d be a volcano. The least it’d do would be to boil the water for miles. But it could also break Long Island in two. The beaches would go right under water. And Manhattan skyscrapers aren’t built for earthquakes.” Kit was quiet for a moment, then said, “The rocks remembered. That’s why they were upset…”

Nita wasn’t thinking about rocks, or Manhattan. She was thinking that her folks were planning to be there for another week and a half at least — and she saw a very clear picture of a tidal wave of dirty, boiling water crashing down on the beach house and smashing it to driftwood.

“When should we start, S’reee?” she said.

“Dawn tomorrow. There’s little time to waste. Hotshot will be going with us — he’ll be singing the Fourth Lord, the Wanderer, in the Song.”

“Dawn—“ Nita chewed her lip. “Could it be a little later? We’ve got to have breakfast with my parents or they’ll freak out.”

“Parents?” S’reee looked from Nita to Kit in shock. “You’re still calves, is that what you’re telling me? And you went outworld into a Dark Place and came back! I’d thought you were much older—“

“We wished we were,” Nita said under her breath.

“Oh, well. No matter. Three hours after dawn be all right? The same place? Good enough. Let me take you back. I have something to fetch so that you can swim with us, Kit. And, look—“ She gazed at them for some time from that small, worried, gentle eye; but longer at Nita. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you very much indeed.”

“Think nothing of it,” Kit said grandly, slipping into the water and patting S’reee on one big ribbed flank.

Nita slid into the water, took hold of S’reee’s dorsal fin, and thought something of it all the way home.