Deep Wizardry

Seniors’ Song

The alarm clock went off right above Nita’s head, a painful blasting buzz like a dentist’s drill. “Aaagh,” she said, reluctantly putting one arm out from under the covers and fumbling around on the bedside table for the noisy thing.

It went quiet without her having touched it. Nita squinted up through the morning brightness and found herself looking at Dairine. Her little sister was standing by the bedside table with the alarm clock in her hands, wearing Star Wars pajamas and an annoyed look.

“And where are we going at six in the morning?” Dairine said, too sweetly.

“We are not going anywhere,” Nita said, swinging herself out of bed with a groan. “Go play with your Barbie dolls, Einstein.”

“Only if you give them back,” Dairine said, unperturbed. “Anyway, there are better things to play with. Kit, for example—“

“Dairine, you’re pushing it.” Nita stood up, rubbed her eyes until they started working properly, and then pulled a dresser drawer open and began pawing through it for a T-shirt.

“What’re you doing, then — getting up so early all the time, staying out late? You think Mom and Dad aren’t noticing? — Oh, don’t wear that,” Dairine said at the sight of Nita’s favorite sweatshirt. It featured numerous holes made by Ponch’s teeth and the words WATCH THIS SPACE FOR FURTHER DEVELOPMENTS. “Oh, really, Neets, don’t, it’s incredibly tacky—“

“That sounds real weird,” Nita said, “coming from someone with little Yodas all over her pajamas.”

“Oh, stuff it, Nita,” Dairine said. Nita turned her head and smiled, thinking that Dairine had become easier to tease since she’d decided to be a Jedi Knight when she grew up. Still, Nita went easy on her sister. It wasn’t fair for a wizard to make fun of someone who wanted to do magic, of whatever brand. “Same to you, runt. When’re Mom and Dad getting up, did they say?”

“They’re up now.”

“What for?”

“They’re going fishing. We’re going with them.”

Nita blanched. “Oh, no! Dair, I can’t—“

Dairine cocked her head at Nita. “They wanted to surprise us.”

“They did,” Nita said, in shock. “I can’t go—“

“Got a hot date, huh?”

“Dairine! I told you—“

“Where were you two going?”

“Swimming.” That was the truth.

“Neets, you can swim any time,” Dairine said, imitating their mother’s tone of voice. Nita zipped up her jeans and sat down on the bed with a thump. “What were you gonna be doing, anyway?”

“I told you, swimming!” Nita got up, went to the window, and looked out, thinking of S’reee and the summoning and the Song of the Twelve and the rest of the business of being on active status, which was now looking ridiculously complicated. And it looked so simple yesterday…

“You could tell them something—“

Nita made a face at that. She had recently come to dislike lying to her parents. For one thing, she valued their trust. For another, a wizard, whose business is making things happen by the power of the spoken word, learns early on not to say things out loud that aren’t true or that he doesn’t want to happen.

“Sure,” she said in bitter sarcasm. “Why don’t I just tell them that we’re on a secret mission? Or that we’re busy saving Long Island and the greater metropolitan area from a fate worse than death? Or maybe I could tell them that Kit and I have an appointment to go out and get turned into whales, how about that?”

Even without turning around, Nita could feel her sister staring at her back. Finally the quiet made Nita twitchy. She turned around, but Dairine was already heading out of the room. “Go on and eat,” Dairine said quietly, over her shoulder. “Sound happy.” And she was gone.

Under her breath, Nita said a word her father would have frowned at, and then sighed and headed for breakfast, plastering onto her face the most sincere smile she could manage. At first it felt hopelessly unnatural, but in a few seconds it was beginning to stick. At the dining-room door, where her father came around the corner from the kitchen and nearly ran her over, Nita took one look at him — in his faded lumberjack shirt and his hat stuck full of fish hooks — and wondered why she had ever been worried about getting out of the fishing trip. It was going to be all right.

Her dad looked surprised. “Oh! You’re up. Did Dairine—“

“She told me,” Nita said. “Is there time to eat something?”

“Sure. I guess she told Kit too then — I just looked in his room, but he wasn’t there. The bed was made; I guess he’s ready—“

Nita cheerfully allowed her father to draw his own conclusions, especially since they were the wrong ones. “He’s probably down at the beach killing time,” she said. “I’ll go get him after I eat.”

She made a hurried commando raid on the kitchen and put the kettle on the stove for her mother, who was browsing through the science section of The New York Times and was ready for another cup of tea. Nita’s mother looked up at her from the paper and said, “Neets, where’s your sister? She hasn’t had breakfast.”

That was when her sister came thumping into the dining room. Nita saw her mom look at Dairine and develop a peculiar expression. “Dari,” her mother said, “are you feeling all right?”

“Yeah!” said Dairine in an offended tone. Nita turned in her chair to look at her. Her sister looked flushed, and she wasn’t moving at her normal breakneck speed. “C’mere, baby,” Nita’s mother said. “Let me feel your forehead.”

“Mom!”

“Dairine,” her father said.

“Yeah, right.” Dairine went over to her mother and had her forehead felt, rolling her eyes at the ceiling. “You’re hot, sweetie,” Nita’s mother said in alarm. “Harry, I told you she was in the water too long yesterday. Feel her.”

Nita’s dad looked slightly bored, but he checked Dairine’s forehead and then frowned. “Well…”

“No ‘wells.’ Dari, I think you’d better sit this one out.”

“Oh, Mom!”

“Cork it, little one. You can come fishing with us in a day or two.” Nita’s mother turned to her. “Neets, will you stick around and keep an eye on your sister?”

“Mom, I don’t need a babysitter!”

“Enough, Dairine,” her mom said. “Up to bed with you. Nita, we’ll take you and Kit with us the next time; but your dad really wants to get out today.”

“It’s okay, Mom,” Nita said, dropping what was left of the smile (though it now really wanted to stay on). “I’ll keep an eye on the runt.”

“Don’t call me a runt!”

“Dairine,” her father said again. Nita’s little sister made a face and left, again at half the usual speed.

As soon as she could, Nita slipped into Dairine’s room. Her sister was lying on top of the bed, reading her way through a pile of X-Men comics; she looked flushed. “Not bad, huh?” she said in a low voice as Nita came in.

“How did you do that?” Nita whispered.

“I used the Force,” Dairine said, flashing a wicked look at Nita.

“Dair! Spill it!”

“I turned Dad’s electric blanket up high and spent a few minutes under it. Then I drank about a quart of hot water to make sure I stayed too warm.” Dairine turned a page in her comic book, looking blase about the whole thing. “Mom did the rest.”

Nita shook her head in admiration. “Runt, I owe you one.”

Dairine looked up from her comic at Nita. “Yeah,” Dairine said, “you do.”

Nita felt a chill. “Right,” she said. “I’ll hang out here till they leave. Then I have to find Kit—“

“He went down to the general store just before you got up,” Dairine said. “I think he was going to call somebody.”

“Right,” Nita said again.

There was the briefest pause. Then: “Whales, huh?” Dairine said, very softly.

Nita got out of there in a great hurry.

The sign on top of the building merely said, in big, square, black letters, TIANA BEACH. “ Tiana Beach’ what?” people typically said, and it was a fair question. From a distance there was no telling what the place was, except a one-story structure with peeling white paint.

The building stood off the main road, at the end of a spur road that ran down to the water. On one side of it was its small parking lot, a black patch of heat-heaved asphalt always littered with pieces of clamshells, which the gulls liked to drop and crack open there. On the other side was a dock for people who came shopping in their boats.

The dock was in superb repair. The store was less so. Its large multipaned front windows, for example, were clean enough outside, but inside they were either covered by stacked-up boxes or with grime; nothing was visible through them except spastically flashing old neon signs that said “Pabst Blue Ribbon” or “Cerveza BUDWEISER.” Beachgrass and aggressive weeds grew next to (and in places, through) the building’s cracked concrete steps-The rough little U.S. Post Office sign above the front door had a sparrow’s nest behind it.

Nita headed for the open door. It was always open, whether Mr. Friedman the storekeeper was there or not; “On the off chance,” as Mr. Friedmam usually said, “that someone might need something at three in the morning… or the afternoon…” Nita walked into the dark, brown-smelling store, past the haphazard shelves of canned goods and cereal and the racks of plastic earthworms and nylon surf-casting line. By the cereal and the crackers, she met the reason that Mr. Friedman’s store was safe day and night. The reason’s name was Dog: a whitish, curlyish, terrierish mutt, with eyes like something out of Disney and teeth like something out of Transylvania. Dog could smell attempted theft for miles; and when not biting people in the line of business, he would do it on his own time, for no reason whatever — perhaps just to keep his fangs in.

“Hi, Dog,” Nita said, being careful not to get too close.

Dog showed Nita his teeth. “Go chew dry bones,” he said in a growl.

“Same to you,” Nita said pleasantly, and made a wide detour around him, heading for the phone booth in the rear of the store.

“Right,” Kit was saying, his voice slightly muffled by being in the booth. “Something about ‘the Gates of the Sea.’ I tried looking in the manual, but all I could find was one of those ‘restrictEd’ notices and a footnote that said to see the local Senior for more details—“

Kit looked up, saw Nita coming, and pointed at the phone, mouthing the words “Tom and Carl.” She nodded and squeezed into the booth with him; Kit tipped the hearing part of the receiver toward her, and they put their heads together. “Hi, it’s Nita—“

“Well, hi there yourself,” Tom Swale’s voice came back. He would doubtless have gone on with more of the same if someone else, farther away from his end of the line, hadn’t begun screaming “Hel-LOOOOOOO! HEL-lo!” in a creaky, high-pitched voice that sounded as if Tom were keeping his insane grandmother chained up in the living room. This, Nita knew, was Tom and Carl’s intractable macaw Machu Picchu, or Peach for short. Wizards’ pets tended to get a bit strange as their masters grew more adept in wizardry, but Peach was stranger than most, and more trying. Even a pair of Senior wizards must have wondered what to do with a creature that would at one moment deliver the evening news a day early, in a flawless imitation of any major newscaster you pleased, and then a second later start ripping up the couch for the fun of it.

Cut that out!” Nita heard another voice saying in the background, one with a more New Yorkish sound to it: That was Carl. “Look out! — She’s on the stove. Get her — oh, Lord. There go the eggs. You little cannibal!—“

“It’s business as usual around here, as you can tell,” Tom said. “Not where you are, though, to judge from how early Kit called… and from what he tells me. Kit, hang on a minute: Carl’s getting the information released for you Evidently the Powers That Be don’t want it distributed without a Senior s supervision. The area must be sensitive right now.”

Nita made small talk with Tom for a few minutes while, in the back-ground, Peach screamed, and Annie and Monty the sheepdogs barked irritably at the macaw, who was shouting “Bad dog! Bad dog! Nonono!” at them — or possibly at Carl. Nita could imagine the scene very well — the bright airy house full of plants and animals, a very ordinary-looking place as far as the neighbors were concerned. Except that Tom spent his days doing research and development on complex spells and incantations for other wizards, and then used some of the things he discovered to make a living as a writer on the side. And Carl, who sold commercial time for a “flagship” station of one of the major television networks, might also make a deal to sell you a more unusual kind of time — say, a piece of last Thursday. The two of them were living proof that it was possible to live in the workaday world and function as wizards at the same time. Nita was very glad to know them.

“The link’s busy,” she heard Carl saying, at some distance from the phone. “Oh, never mind, there it goes. Look,” he said, apparently to one of his own advanced-level manuals, “we need an intervention authorization for an offshore area — yeah, that’s right. Here’s the numbers—“

Kit had his manual open to the spot where he’d found the notification. Nita looked over his shoulder and watched the box that said RESTRICTED INFORMATION suddenly blink out, replaced by the words SEE CHART PAGE 1096. “Got it?” Tom said.

“Almost.” Kit turned pages. Nita looked over his shoulder and found herself looking at a map of the East Coast, from Nova Scotia to Virginia. But the coast itself was squeezed far over on the left-hand side, and individual cities and states were only sketchily indicated. The map was primarily concerned with the ocean.

“Okay, I’ve got it in my book too,” Tom said. “All those lines in the middle of the water are contour lines, indicating the depth of the sea bottom. You can see that there aren’t many lines within about a hundred miles of Long Island. The bottom isn’t much deeper than a hundred feet within that distance. But then — you see a lot of contour lines packed closely together? That’s the edge of the Continental Shelf. Think of it as a cliff, or a mesa, with the North American continent sitting on top of it. Then there’s a steep drop — the cliff is just a shade less than a mile high—“

“Or deep,” Nita said.

“Whichever. About a five thousand foot drop; not straight down — it slopes a bit — but straight enough. Then the sea bottom keeps on sloping eastward and downward. It doesn’t slope as fast as before, but it goes deep-some fifteen thousand feet down; and it gets deeper yet farther out. See where it says ‘Sohm Abyssal Plain’ to the southeast of the Island, about six or seven hundred miles out?”

“It has ‘the Crushing Dark’ underneath that on our map,” Nita said. “” that the whales’ name for it?”

“Right. That area is more like seventeen, eighteen thousand feet down.”

“I bet it’s cold down there,” Kit muttered.

“Probably. Let me know when you get back,” Tom said, “because that’s where you’re going.”

Nita and Kit looked at each other in shock. “But I thought even submarines couldn’t go down that far,” Nita said.

“They can’t. Neither can most whales, normally — but it helps to be a wizard,” Tom said. “Look, don’t panic yet—“

“Go ahead! Panic!” screamed Picchu from somewhere in the background. “Do it now and avoid the June rush! Fear death by water!”

“Bird,” Carl’s voice said, also in the background, “you’re honing for a punch in the beak.”

“Violence! You want violence, I’ll give you violence! No quarter asked or given! Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead! Don’t give up the AWWWKI”

“Thanks, Carl,” Tom said, as silence fell. “Where were we? Oh, right. You won’t just be going out there and diving straight down. There’s a specific approach to the Plain. Look back closer to the Island, and you’ll see some contours drawn in dotted lines—“

“Hudson Channel,” Nita said.

“Right. That’s the old bed of the Hudson River — where it used to run a hundred thousand years ago, while all that part of the Continental Shelf was still above water. That old riverbed leads farther southeast, to the edge of the Shelf, and right over it… there was quite a waterfall there once. See the notch in the Shelf?”

“Yeah. ‘Hudson Canyon,’ it says—“

“The Gates of the Sea,” said Tom. “That’s the biggest undersea canyon on the East Coast, and probably the oldest. It cuts right down through the Shelf. Those walls are at least two or three thousand feet high, sometimes four. Some of the canyons on the Moon and Mars could match the Hudson — but none on Earth. And for the whale-wizards, the Gates have become the traditional approach to the Great Depths and the Crushing Dark.”

The thought of canyon walls stretching above her almost a mile high gave chills. She’d seen a rockslide once, and it had made her uneasy about canyons in general. “Is it safe?” she said.

“Of course not,” Tom said, sounding cheerful. “But the natural dangers are Carl’s department; he’ll fill you in on what precautions you’ll need to take, and I suspect the whales will too.”

“ ‘Natural dangers,’ “ Kit said. “Meaning there are unnatural ones too.”

“In wizardry, when aren’t there? This much I can tell you, though. New York City has not been kind to that area. All kinds of things, even unexploded depth charges, have been dumped at the head of Hudson Canyon over the years. Most of them are marked on your map; but watch out for ones that aren’t. And the city has been dumping raw sewage into the Hudson Channel area for decades. Evidently in the old days, before people were too concerned about ecology, they thought the water was so deep that the dumping wouldn’t do any harm. But it has. Quite a bit of the sea-bottom life in that area, especially the vegetation that the fish depend on for food, has been killed off entirely. Other species have been… changed. The manual will give you details. You won’t like them.”

Nita suspected that Tom was right. “Anyway,” he said, “let me give you the rest of this. After you do the appropriate rituals, which the whales will coach you through, the access through the Gates of the Sea takes you down through Hudson Canyon to its bottom at the lower edge of the Shelf, and then deeper and farther southeast — where the canyon turns into a valley that gets shallower and shallower as it goes. The valley ends just about where the Abyssal Plain begins, at seven hundred miles off the coast, and seventeen thousand feet down. Then you come to the mountain.”

It was on the map — a tiny set of concentric circles — but it had looked so peculiar, standing there all by itself in the middle of hundreds of miles of flatness, that Nita had doubted her judgment. “The Sea’s Tooth,” she said, reading from the map.

“Caryn Peak,” Tom agreed, giving the human name. “Some of the oceanographers think it’s simply the westernmost peak of an undersea mountain range called the Kelvin Seamounts — they’re off the eastward edge of your map. Some think otherwise; the geological history of that area is bizarre. But either way, the Peak’s an important spot. And impressive; that one peak is six thousand feet high. It stands up sheer from the bottom, all alone, a third as high as Everest.”

“Five Empire State Buildings on top of each other,” Kit said, awed. He liked tall things.

“A very noticeable object,” Tom said. “It’s functioned as landmark and meeting place and site of the whales’ great wizardries for not even they know how long. Certainly since the continents started drifting toward their present positions… at least a hundred thousand years ago. And it may have been used by… other sorts of wizards… even earlier than that. There’s some interesting history in that area, tangled up with whale-wizards and human ones too.”

Tom’s voice grew sober. “Some of the wizards who specialize in history say that humans only learned wizardry with the whales’ assistance… and even so, our brands of wizardry are different. It’s an old, old branch of the Art they practice. Very beautiful. Very dangerous. And the area around Caryn Peak is saturated with residue from all the old wizardries that whales and others, have done there. That makes any spell you work there even more dangerous.”

“S’reee said that the ‘danger’ level wouldn’t go above ‘moderate,’ “ Kit said.

“She said it shouldn’t,” Nita said.

“Probably it won’t,” Tom said. He didn’t sound convinced, though. “You should bear in mind that the ‘danger’ levels for humans and whales differ. Still, the book said she was about to be promoted to Advisory status, so she would know that— All the same… you two keep your eyes open. Watch what agreements you make. And if you make them — keep them, to the letter. From all indications, the Song of the Twelve is a lovely wizardry, and a powerful one… probably the most powerful magic done on a regular basis. The sources say it leaves its participants forever changed, for the better. At least, it does when it works. When it fails — which it has, once or twice in the past — it fails because some participant has broken the rules. And those times it’s failed… Well, all I can say is that I’m glad I wasn’t born yet. Be careful.”

“We will,” Nita said. “But what are the chances of something going wrong?”

“We could ask Peach,” Kit said. It was a sensible suggestion; the bird, besides doing dramatic readings from Variety and TV Guide, could also predict the future — when it pleased her.

“Good idea. Carl?”

“Here I am,” Carl said, having picked up an extension phone. “Now, Kit, about the monsters—“

“Carl, put that on hold a moment. What does the Walter Cronkite of the bird world have to say about all this?”

“I’ll find out.”

Monsters? Nita mouthed at Kit. “Listen,” she said hurriedly to Tom, “I’m going to get off now. I’ve got to be around the house when my folks leave, so they won’t worry about my little sister.”

“Why? Is she sick?”

“No. But that’s the problem. Tom, I don’t know what to do about Dairine. I thought nonwizards weren’t supposed to notice magic most of the time. I’m lot sure it’s working that way with Dairine. I think she’s getting suspicious…”

“We’ll talk. Meanwhile, Carl — what does the bird say?”

“Oh, it is, it is a splendid thing/To be a pirate kiiiiiiiiiiiiing!” Picchu was singing from somewhere in Tom’s living room.

“Picchu—“

“What’sa matter? Don’t you like Gilbert and Sullivan?”

”I told you we should never have let her watch Pirates on cable,” Tom remarked to his partner.

“Twice your peanut ration for the week,” Carl said.

“… and I did the deed that all men shun, I shot the Albatross…”

“You’re misquoting. How about no peanuts for the rest of the week—“

“Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!”

“How about no food?”

“Uh—“ There was a pause. It didn’t take Nita much imagination to picture the look that Carl was giving Picchu. She was glad no one had ever looked at her that way.

“Give.”

“Well.” The bird paused again, a long pause, and when she spoke her voice sounded more sober than Nita could remember ever hearing it. “Do what the night tells you. Don’t be afraid to give yourself away. And read the small print before you sign!”

Kit glanced at Nita with a quizzical expression; she shrugged. At the other end of the line, sounding exceptionally annoyed, Carl said to Picchu, “You call that advice? We asked you for the odds!”

“Never ask me the odds,” Picchu said promptly. “I don’t want to know. And neither do you, really.” And that end of the conversation swiftly degenerated into more loud squawking, and the excited barking of dogs, and Carl making suggestions to Picchu that were at best rather rude.

“Thanks,” Nita said to Tom. “I’ll talk to you later.” She squeezed out of the phone booth and past Dog, who growled at her as she went. Behind her, Kit said, in entirely too cheerful a tone of voice, “So, Carl, what about the monsters?”

Nita shook her head and went home.