Deep Wizardry

The Blue’s Song

“Giant man-eating clams,” she said to Kit later, as they walked down an isolated stretch of Tiana Beach toward the surf. “Giant squid—“

“Krakens,” Kit said.

“I don’t care what you call them, they’re still giant squid. And squid belong in sushi. I don’t like this.”

“With luck, we won’t see any of them, Carl says.”

“When have we ever had that kind of luck?…”

“Besides, Neets, even you can outrun a clam…”

“Cute,” she said. They splashed into the water together, glancing up and down the beach as they did so. No one was in sight; and they had left Ponch up in the dunes, looking for a good place to bury the remains of his latest water rat. “Look,” Nita said, pointing.

Several hundred yards out, there was a glitter of spray, and sunlight glanced off the curved, upleaping body of a dolphin as if from an unsheathed, upheld sword. Wild, merry chattering, a dolphin’s laughter, came to them over the water, as the leaping shape came down with a splash and another shock of spray.

“Hotshot,” Kit said. “Let’s go.”

They struck out through the breakers, into water that was again surprisingly warm. This time Nita wasn’t able to enjoy it quite as much; the thought of undersea volcanoes was much with her. But even she couldn’t be depressed for long when they paused to rest a moment, dog-paddling, and from behind came the nudge in the back she remembered, followed by a delphine laugh. “You rotten thing,” she said, turning to rub Hotshot affectionately. “I’m gonna get you for the first time you did that.”

“You’ll have to catch me first,” Hotshot said with a wicked chuckle — as well he might have, for nothing in the Sea except perhaps a killer whale or one of the great sharks on the hunt was fast enough to catch a dolphin that didn’t want to be caught.

“Where’s S’reee?” Kit said.

“Out in deeper water, by the Made Rock. HNii’t’s change could be done right here, but the kind of whale you’re going to be would ground at this depth, Kit. Take hold; I’ll tow you.”

The fishing platform was once more covered with seagulls, which rose in a screaming cloud at the sight of Kit and Nita and Hotshot. “I’ll meet you later, out at sea,” Hotshot said, leaving them beside a rusty metal ladder that reached down into the water.

Kit and Nita climbed up it and walked across the platform to where they could look down at S’reee, who was rolling in the wavewash.

“You’re early,” she whistled, putting her head up out of the water at them, “and it’s just as well; I’m running a bit late. I went a-Summoning last night, but I didn’t find most of the people — so we’ll have to make a stop out by the Westernmost Shoals today. Sandy Hook, you call it.”

“New Jersey?” Nita said, surprised. “How are we going to get all the way out there and back before—“

“It’s going to be all right, HNii’t,” S’reee said. “Time doesn’t run the same under the waters as it does above them, so the Sea tells me. Besides, a humpback swims fast. And as for Kit — well, one change at a time. It’ll come more easily for you, HNii’t; you’d best go first.”

Wonderful, Nita thought. She had long been used to being picked last for things; having to go first for anything gave her the jitters. “What do I have to do?” she said.

“Did you have a look at your book last night?”

“Uh-huh. I understand most of what we’re going to be doing; it’s fairly straightforward. But there was some business I didn’t understand very well—“

“The part about shapechanging.”

“Yeah. There wasn’t that much in the book, S’reee. I think it might have been missing some information.”

“Why? What did it tell you?”

“Only a lot of stuff about the power of imagination.” She was perplexed. “S’reee, aren’t there supposed to be words or something? A specific spell, or materials we need?”

“For shapechange? You have everything you need. Words would only get in the way,” said S’reee. “It’s all in the being. You pretend hard enough, and sooner or later what you’re pretending to be, you are. The same as with other things.”

“Oh, c’mon, S’reee,” Kit said. “If somebody who wasn’t a wizard jumped into the water and pretended to be a whale, I don’t care how hard they pretended, nothing would happen without wizardry—“

“Exactly right, Kit. Wizardry — not one particular spell. The only reason it works for you is that you know wizardry works and are willing to have it so. Belief is no good either; belief as such always has doubt at the bottom. It’s knowing that makes wizardry work. Only knowing can banish doubt, and while doubt remains, no spell, however powerful, will function properly. ‘Wizardry does not live in the unwilling heart,’ the Sea says. There’d be lots more wizards if more people were able to give up doubt — and belief. Like any other habit, though, they’re hard to break…”

“It did take me a while to know for sure that it wasn’t just a coincidence when the thing I’d done a spell for actually happened as soon as I’d done the spell,” Kit admitted. “I guess I see the problem.”

“Then you’re ready for the solution,” S’reee said. “Past the change itself, the chief skill of unassisted shapechanging lies in not pretending so hard that you can’t get back again. And as I said, HNii’t, you have an advantage; we’ve shared blood. You have humpback in you now — not that our species are so far apart anyway; we’re all mammals together. I suppose the first thing you’d better do is get in the water…”

Nita jumped in, bobbed to the surface again. “And that stuff around you is going to have to go,” S’reee added, looking with mild perplexity at Nita’s bathing suit. Nita shot a quick look over her shoulder. For a moment, Kit just gazed innocently down at her, refusing to look away — then he turned, rolling his eyes.

Nita skinned hurriedly out of the suit and called to Kit, “While you’re up there, put a warding spell on the platform. I don’t want the gulls doing you-know-what all over my suit while we’re gone. Or yours.” She flung the wet lump of bathing suit out of the water overhanded; it landed with a sodden thwack! at which Kit almost turned around again. “Can we get on with this?” Nita said to S’reee.

“Surely. HNii’t, are you all right?” S’reee said.

“Yes, fine, let’s do it!” Nita said.

“So begin!” said S’reee, and began singing to herself as she waited.

Nita paddled for a moment in the water, adjusting to not having her bathing suit on. Saying “Begin to what?” especially with Kit listening, seemed incredibly stupid, so she just hung there in the water for a few moments and considered being a whale. I don’t have the faintest idea what this is supposed to feel like, she thought desperately. But I should be able to come up with something. I am a wizard, after all.

Nita got an idea. She took a deep breath, held it, and slowly began to relax into the sound. Her arms, as she let them go limp, no longer supported her; she sank, eyes open, into salty greenness. It’s all right, she thought. The air’s right above me if I need it. She hung weightless in the green, thinking of nothing in particular.

Down there in the water, S’reee’s note seemed louder, fuller; it vibrated against the ears, against the skin, inside the lungs, filling everything. And there was something familiar about it. Cousin, S’reee had called her; and We have blood in common, she had said. So it should be easy. A matter of remembering, not what you have been… but what, somewhere else, you are. Simply allow what is, somewhere else, to be what is here — and the change is done, effortless. Nita shut her eyes on the greenness and trusted to the wizardry inside her. That was it. “Wizardry does not live in the unwilling heart.” Not the kind of will that meant gritted teeth, resisting something else, like your own disbelief, that was trying to undermine you — not “willpower”—but the will that was desire, the will so strong that it couldn’t be resisted by all the powers of normality…

Where am I getting all this? Nita didn’t know, didn’t care. To be a whale, she thought. To float like this all the time, to be weightless, like an astronaut. But space is green, and wet, and warm, and there are voices in it, and things growing. Freedom: no walls, no doors. And the songs in the water… Her arms were feeling heavy, her legs felt odd when she kicked; but none of it mattered. Something was utterly right, something was working. Nita began to feel short of air. It hadn’t worked all the way, that was all. She would get it right the next time. She stroked for the surface, broke it, opened her eyes to the light— and found it different. First and oddest — so that Nita tried to shake her head in disbelief, and failed, since she suddenly had no neck — the world was split in two, as if with an axe. Trying to look straight ahead of her didn’t work. The area in front of her had become a hazy uncertainty comprised of two sets of peripheral vision. And where the corners of her eyes should have been, she now had two perfectly clear sets of sideways vision that nonetheless felt like “forward.” She was seeing in colors she had no names for, and many she had names for were gone. Hands she still seemed to have, but her fingers hung down oddly long and heavy, her elbows were glued to her sides, and her sides themselves went on for what seemed years. Her legs were gone; a tail and graceful flukes were all she had left. Her nose seemed to be on the top of her head, and her mouth somewhere south of her chin; and she resolved to ask S’reee, well out of Kit’s hearing, what had happened to some other parts of her. “S’reee,” Nita said, and was amazed to hear it come out of the middle of her head, in a whistle instead of words, “it was easy!”

“Come on, HNii’t,” S’reee said. “You’re well along in wizardry at this point; you should know by now that it’s not the magic that’s exciting — its what you do with it afterward.”

More amazement yet. Nita wanted to simply roll over and lie back in the water at the sheer richness of the sound of S’reee’s words. She had done the usual experiments in school that proved water was a more efficient conductor of sound than air. But she hadn’t dreamed of what that effect would be like when one was a whale, submerged in the conducting medium and wearing a hundred square feet of skin that was a more effective hearing organ than any human ear. Suddenly sound was a thing that stroked the body, sensuous as a touch, indistinguishable from the liquid one swam in.

More, Nita could hear echoes coming back from what she and S’reee had said to each other; and the returning sound told her, with astonishing precision, the size and position of everything in the area — rocks on the bottom, weed three hundred meters away, schools of fish. She didn’t need to see them. She could feel their textures on her skin as if they touched her; yet she could also distinctly perceive their distance from her, more accurately than she could have told it with mere sight. Fascinated, she swam a couple of circles around the platform, making random noises and getting the feel of the terrain.

“I don’t believe it,” someone said above Nita, in a curious, flat voice with no echoes about it. Is that how we sound? Nita thought, and surfaced to look at Kit out of first one eye, then the other. He looked no different from the way he usually did, but something about him struck Nita as utterly hilarious, though at first she couldn’t figure out what it was. Then it occurred to her. He had legs.

“You’re next, Kit,” S’reee said. “Get in the water.” Nita held her head out of water and stared at Kit for a moment. He didn’t say anything, and after a few seconds of watching him get so red she could see it through his sunburn, Nita submerged, laughing like anything — a sound exactly like oatmeal boiling hard.

Nita felt the splash of his jump all over her. Then Kit was paddling in the water beside her, looking at her curiously. “You’ve got barnacles,” he said.

“That’s as may be, Kit,” S’reee said, laughing herself. “Look at what I brought for you.”

Kit put his head under the water for a moment to see what she was talking about. For the first time, Nita noticed that S’reee was holding something delicately in her mouth, at the very tip-end of her jaw. If spiders lived in the Sea, what S’reee held might have been a fragment torn from one of their webs. It was a filmy, delicate, irregular meshwork, its strands knotted into a net some six feet square. The knotting was an illusion, as Nita found when she glided closer to it. Each “knot” was a round swelling or bulb where several threads joined. Flashes of green-white light rippled along the net whenever it moved, and all Nita’s senses, those of whale and wizard alike, prickled with the electric feeling of a live spell, tangled in the mesh and imPatient to be used.

“You must be careful with this, Kit,” S’reee said. “This is a whalesark, and a rare thing. A sark can only be made when a whale dies, and the magic involved is considerable.”

“What is it?” Kit said, when he’d surfaced again.

“It’s a sort of shadow of a whale’s nervous system, made by wizardry. At the whale’s death, before the lifelightning’s gone, a spell-constructed energy duplicate of the whale’s brain and nerves is made from the pattern laid down by the living nerves and brain. The duplicate then has an ‘assisted shapechange’ spell woven into it. When the work’s done properly, contact with the sark is enough to change the wearer into whatever kind of whale the donor was.”

S’reee tossed her head. Shimmering, the sark billowed fully open, like a curtain in the wind. “This is a sperm-whalesark, like Aivaaan who donated it. He was a wizard who worked these waters several thousand full Moons ago, and something of a seer; so that when he died, instead of leaving himself wholly to the Sea, Aivaaan said that we should make a sark of him, because there would be some need. Come try it on for size, Kit.”

Kit didn’t move for a moment. “S’reee — is what’s his name, Aivaaan, in there? Am I going to be him, is that it?”

S’reee looked surprised. “No, how did you get that idea?”

“You said this was made from his brain,” Nita said.

“Oh. His under-brain, yes — the part of the brain that runs breathing and blood flow and such. As for the rest of Aivaaan, his mind — I don’t think so. Not that I’m any too sure where ‘mind’ is in a person. But you should still be K!t, by what the Sea tells me. Come on, time’s swimming.”

“What do I do with it?”

“Just put it around you and wrap it tight. Don’t be afraid to handle it roughly. It’s stronger than it looks.” She let go of the sark. It floated in the water, undulating gently in the current. Kit took another breath, submerged, reached down, and drew the sark around him.

“Get back, HNii’t,” S’reee said. Nita backfinned several times her own length away from Kit, not wanting to take her eyes off him. He was exhaling, slowly sinking feet-first, and with true Rodriguez insouciance he swirled the sark around him like Zorro putting on a new cape. Kit’s face grew surprised, though, as the “cape” continued the motion, swirling itself tighter and tighter around him, binding his arms to his sides.

Alarmed, Kit struggled, still sinking, bubbles rising from him as he went down. The struggling did him no good, and it suddenly became hard to see him as the wizardry in the whalesark came fully alive, and light danced around Kit and the sark. Nita had a last glimpse of Kit’s eyes going wide in panic as he and the whalesark became nothing more than a sinking, swirling storm of glitter.

“S’reee!” Nita said, getting alarmed.

With a sound like muffled thunder and a blow like a nearby lightning-strike, displaced water hit Nita and bowled her sideways and backward. She fluked madly, trying to regain her balance enough to tell what was going on. The water was full of stirred-up sand, tatters of weed, small confused fish darting in every direction. And a bulk, a massive form that had not been there before—

Nita watched the great gray shape rise toward her and understood why S’reee had insisted on Kit’s change being in deep water. Her own size had surprised her at first — though a humpback looks small and trim, even the littlest males tend to be fifty feet long. But Kit was twice that, easily. He did not have the torpedolike grace of a humpback, but what he lacked in streamlining he made up in sheer mass. The sperm is the kind that most people think of when they hear the word whale, the kind made famous by most whaling movies. Nita realized that all her life she had mostly taken the whale’s shape for granted, not considering what it would actually be like up close to one.

But here came Kit, stroking slowly and uncertainly at first with that immense tail, and getting surer by the second; looking up at her with the tiny eyes set in the huge domed head, and with his jaw working a bit, exposing the terrible teeth that could crunch a whaling boat in two. Nita felt the size of him, the weight, and somehow the danger — and kept her movements slow and respectful. He was still Kit — but something had been added.

He glanced at S’reee and Nita, saying nothing, as he rose past them and broke surface to breathe. They followed. He spouted once or twice, apparently to get the feel of it, and then said to S’reee in a rather rueful tone of song, “I wish you’d warned me!”

His voice ranged into a deeper register than a humpback’s and had a sharper sound to it — more clicks and buzzes. It was not entirely comfortable on the skin. “I couldn’t,” S’reee said, “or you might have fought it even harder than you did, and the change might have refused to take. That would’ve been trouble for us; if a whalesark once rejects a person, it’ll never work for him at all. After this it’ll be easier for you. Which in itself will make some problems. Right now, though, let’s get going. Take a long breath; I want to get out of the bay without attracting too much attention.”

They took breath together and dived deep, S’reee in the lead and swimming south by west, Nita and Kit following. The surroundings — thick, lazily waving kelp beds and colonies of bright polyps and anemones, stitched through with the brief silver flash of passing fish — fascinated Nita. But she couldn’t give the landscape, or seascape, her whole attention; she had other concerns. (Kit,) she tried to say in the Speech’s silent form, for privacy’s sake — then found that it wasn’t working; she wasn’t getting the sort of mental “echo” that told her she was sending successfully. Probably it had something to do with the shapechange spell. “Hey,” she said aloud, “you okay?”

The question came out of her as such a long, mournful moan that Kit laughed — a sound more like boiling lava than boiling oatmeal: huge hisses and bubblings mixed together. “Now I am,” he said, “or I will be as soon as I can get used to this bit with the eyes—“

“Yeah, it’s weird. But kind of nice too. Feeling things, instead of seeing them…”

“Yeah. Even the voices have feelings. S’reee’s is kind of twitchy—“

“Yeah. You’ve got sharp edges—“

“You’ve got fur.”

“I do not!”

“Oh, yes you do. It’s soft, your voice. Not like your usual one—“

Nita was unsure whether to take this as a compliment, so she let it lie. The moment had abruptly turned into one of those times when she had no idea just what to say to Kit, the sort of sudden silence that was acutely painful to Nita, though Kit never seemed to notice it at all. Nita couldn’t think of anything to do about the problem, which was the worst part of the whole business. She wasn’t about to mention the problem to her mom, and on this subject the wizards’ manual was hugely unhelpful.

The silence was well along toward becoming interminable when S’reee said, “That’s the primary way we have for knowing one another, down here. We haven’t the sort of physical variations you have — differences in head shape and so forth — and even if we did, what good would a distinction be if you had to come right up to someone to make it? By voice, we can tell how far away a friend is, how he’s feeling, practically what he’s thinking. Though the closer a friend is to you, usually, the harder it is to tell what’s on his mind with any accuracy.”

Nita started to sing something, then caught herself back to silence. “Is the change settling in, Kit?” S’reee said.

“Now it is. I had a weird feeling, though, like something besides me, my mind I mean — like something besides that was fighting the change. But it’s gone now.”

“Only for the moment,” S’reee said. “See, it’s the old rule: no wizardry without its price, or its dangers. Though the dangers are different for each of you, since you changed by different methods. As I said, HNii’t, you have to beware pretending too hard — thinking so much like a whale that you don’t want to be a human being any more, or forget how. Wizards have been lost that way before, and there’s no breaking the spell from outside; once you re stuck inside the change-shape, no one but you can break out again. If you start finding your own memories difficult to recall, it’s time to get out of the whaleshape, before it becomes you permanently.”

“Right,” Nita said. She wasn’t very worried. Being a humpback was delightful, but she had no desire to spend her life that way.

“Your problem’s different, though, K!t. Your change is powered more by the spell resident in the whalesark than by anything you’re doing yourself. And all the sark’s done is confuse your own body into thinking it’s a whale’s body, for the time being. That confusion can be broken by several different kinds of distraction. The commonest is when your own mind — which is stronger than the whale-mind left in the sark — starts to override the instructions the whalesark is giving your body.”

“Huh?”

“Kit,” S’reee said very gently, finning upward to avoid the weedy, barnacled wreck of a fishing boat, “suppose we were — oh, say several hundred humpback-lengths down, in the Crushing Dark — and suddenly your whale-body started trying to behave like a human’s body. Human breathing rate, human pulse and thought and movement patterns, human response to pressures and the temperature of the water—“

“Uh,” Kit said, as the picture sank in.

“So you see the problem. Spend too much time in the sark, and the part of your brain responsible for handling your breathing and so forth will begin to overpower the ‘dead’ brain preserved in the sark. Your warning signs are nearly the opposite of HNii’t’s. Language is the first thing to go. If you find yourself losing whalesong, you must surface and get out of the sark immediately. Ignore the warning— The best that can happen is that the whalesark will probably be so damaged it can never be used again. The worst thing—“ She didn’t say it. The worry in her voice was warning enough.

No one said much of anything for a while, as the three of them swam onward, south and west. The silence, uneasy at first, became less so as they went along. S’reee, to whom this area was as commonplace as Kit’s or Nita’s home streets might have been, simply cruised along without any great interest in the surroundings. But Nita found the seascape endlessly fascinating, and suspected Kit did too — he was looking around him with the kind of fascination he rarely lent anything but old cars and his z-gauge train set.

Nita had rarely thought of what the seascape off the coast of the island would look like. From being at the beach she had a rather dull and sketchy picture of bare sand with a lot of water on top of it; shells buried in it, as they were on the beach, and there had to be weed beds; the seaweed washed up from somewhere. But all the nature movies had given her no idea of the richness of the place.

Coral, for example; it didn’t come in the bright colors it did in tropical waters, but it was there in great quantity — huge groves and forests of it, the white or beige or yellow branches twisting and writhing together in tight-choked abstract patterns. And shells, yes — but the shells still had creatures inside them; Nita saw Kit start in amazement, then swim down for a closer look at a scallop shell that was hopping over the surface of a brain coral, going about its business.

They passed great patches of weed, kinds that Nita didn’t know the names of — until they started coming to her as if she had always known them: red-bladder, kelp, agar, their long dark leaves or flat ribbons rippling as silkily in the offshore current as wheat in a landborn wind.

And the fish! Nita hadn’t taken much notice of them at first; they’d all looked alike to her — little and silver. But something had changed. They passed by a place where piles had been driven into the sea floor, close together, and great odd-shaped lumps of rusty metal had been dumped among them. Weed and coral had seized on the spot, wrapping the metal and the piles; and the little life that frequented such places, tiny shrimp and krill, swam everywhere. So did thousands of iridescent, silvery-indigo fish, ranging from fingerling size to about a foot long, eating the krill and fry as if there were no tomorrow. For some of the smallest of them there wasn’t going to be one, Nita realized, as she also realized how hungry she was.

“Blues!” she said, one sharp happy note, then dived into the cloud of bluefish and krill, and helped herself to lunch.

It was a little while before she’d had enough. It took Nita only a couple of minutes to get used to the way a humpback ate — by straining krill and others of the tiniest ocean creatures, including the smallest of the blues, through the sievelike plates of whalebone, or “baleen,” in her jaws. The swift blue shapes that had been darting frantically in all directions were calming down already as Nita soared out of the whirling cloud of them and headed back over to S’reee and Kit, feeling slightly abashed and that an explanation of some kind was in order for the sudden interruption of their trip. However, there turned out to be no need for one. S’reee had stopped for a snack herself; and Nita realized that Kit had been snacking on fish ever since they left Tiana Beach. A sperm whale was, after all, one of the biggest of the “toothed” whales, and needed a lot of food to keep that great bulk working. Not that he did anything but swallow the fish whole when he caught them; a sperm’s terrible teeth are mostly for defense.

Kit paused only long enough to eat nine or ten of the biggest blues, then drifted down toward the pilings and the objects stacked sloppily among them. “Neets,” he said, “will you take a look at this? It’s cars!”

She glided down beside him. Sure enough, the corroded fins of an old-model Cadillac were jutting out of a great mound of coral. Under the tangled whiteness of the coral, as if under a blanket of snow, she could make out the buried shapes of hoods or doors, or the wheels and axles of wrecks wedged on their sides and choked with weed. Fish, blues and others, darted in and out of broken car windows and crumpled hoods, while in several places crabs crouched in the shells of broken headlights.

“It’s a fish haven,” S’reee said as she glided down beside them. “The land people dump scrap metal on the bottom, and the plants and coral come and make a reef out of it. The fish come to eat the littler fish and krill that live in reefs; and then the boats come and catch the fish. And it works just as well for us as for the fishers who live on land. But we’ve got other business than dinner to attend to, at the moment. And HNii’t, don’t you think it would be a good idea if you surfaced now?”

Nita and Kit looked at one another in shock, then started upward in a hurry, with S’reee following them at a more leisurely pace. “How long have we been down?” Kit whistled.

They surfaced in a rush, all three, and blew. S’reee looked at Kit in some puzzlement; the question apparently meant nothing to her. “Long enough to need to come up again,” she said.

“Neets, look,” Kit said in a rumbly groan, a sperm whale’s sound of surprise. She fluked hard once or twice, using her tail to lift herself out of the swell, and was surprised to see, standing up from the shore half a mile away, a tall brick tower with a pointed, weathered green-bronze top; a red light flashed at the tower’s peak. “Jones Beach already!” she said. “That’s miles and miles from Tiana—“

“We’ve made good time,” S’reee said, “but we’ve a ways to go yet. Let’s put our tails into it. I don’t want to keep the Blue waiting.”

They swam on. Even if the sight of the Jones Beach tower hadn’t convinced Nita they were getting close to New York, she now found that the increasing noise of the environment would have tipped off the whale that she’d become. Back at Tiana Beach, there had been only the single mournful hoot of the Shinnecock horn and the far-off sound of the various buoy bells. But this close to New York Harbor, the peaceful background hiss of the ocean soon turned into an incredible racket. Bells and horns and whistles and gongs shrieked and clunked and whanged in the water as they passed them; no sooner was she out of range of one than another one assaulted her twitching skin.

Singing pained notes at one another, the three ran the gauntlet of sound. It got worse instead of better as they got closer to the harbor entrance, and to the banging and clanging was added the sound of persistent dull engine noise. Their course to Sandy Hook unfortunately crossed all three of the major approaches to New York Harbor. Along all three of them big boats came and went with an endless low throbbing, and small ones passed with a rattling, jarring buzz that reminded Nita of lawn mowers and chain saws.

The three surfaced often to get relief from the sound, until S’reee warned to dive deep for a long underwater run through one of the shipping lanes. Nita was beginning to feel the slow discomfort that was a whale’s experience of shortness of breath before S’reee headed for the surface again.

They broached and blew and looked around them. Not far away stood a huge, black, white-lettered structure on four steel pilings. A white building stood atop the deck, and beside it was a red tower with several flashing lights. A horn on the platform sang one noncommittal note, shortLONG! short-LONG! again and again.

“Ambrose Light,” Kit said.

“The Speaking Tower, yes,” S’reee said. “After this it’ll be quieter — there are fewer markers between here and the Hook. And listen! There’s a friend’s voice.”

Nita went down again to listen, and finally managed to sort out a dolphin’s distant chattering from the background racket. She surfaced again and floated with the others awhile, watching Hotshot come, glittering in the sun like a bright lance hurling itself through the swells. As he came abreast of the Lightship he leaped high out of the water in a spectacular arc and hit the surface with a noise that pierced even all the hooting and dinging going on.

“For Sea’s sake, we hear you!” S’reee sang at the top of her lungs, and then added in annoyed affection, “He’s such a showoff.”

“But most dolphins are,” Kit said, with a note to his song that made it plain he wasn’t sure how he knew that.

“True enough. He’s worse than some, though. No question that he’s one of the best of the young wizards, and a talented singer. I love him dearly. But what this business of being Wanderer is going to do to his precious ego—“ She broke off as Hotshot came within hearing range. “Did you find him?”

“He’s feeding off the Hook,” Hotshot said, arrowing through the water toward them and executing a couple of playful and utterly unnecessary barrel rolls as he came. Nita began to wonder if S’reee might be right about him. “He’s worried about something, though he wouldn’t tell me what it was. Said it was just as well you were coming; he would’ve come looking for you if you hadn’t.”

The four of them started swimming again immediately; that last sentence was by itself most startling news. Blue whales did not do things, Nita realized, in the sudden-memory way that meant the information was the Sea s gift. Blue whales were, that was all. Action was for other, swifter species except in the Song of the Twelve, where the Blue briefly became a power to be reckoned with. The Song, as Tom had warned, had a way of changing the ones who sang it… sometimes even before they started.

“Are you ready for the Oath?” S’reee was saying to the dolphin. “Any last thoughts?”

“Only that this is going to be one more Song like any other,” Hotshot said ”even if it is your first time. Don’t worry, Ree; if you have any problems, I’ll help you out.”

Nita privately thought that this was a little on the braggy side, coming from a junior wizard. The thought of talking to an Advisory or Senior that way. — Tom, say — shocked her. Nevertheless, she kept her mouth shut, for it seemed like Hotshot and S’reee had known one another for a while.

“And how are our fry doing here?” Hotshot said, swimming careless rings around Nita as he sang. “Getting used to the fins all right?”

“Pretty much,” Nita said. Hotshot did one last loop around her and then headed off in Kit’s direction. “How about you, Minnow — eeeech!”

The huge jaw of a sperm whale abruptly opened right in front of Hotshot and closed before he could react — so that a moment later the dolphin was keeping quite still, while Kit held him with great delicacy in his huge fangs. Kit’s eyes looked angry, but the tone of his song was casual enough. “Hotshot,” he said, not stopping, just swimming along with casual deliberateness, “I’m probably singing too. And even if I’m not, I am a sperm whale. Don’t push your luck.”

Hotshot said nothing. Kit swam a few more of his own lengths, then opened his mouth and let the dolphin loose. “Hey,” he said then, “no hard feelings.”

“Of course not,” Hotshot said in his usual recklessly merry voice. But Nita noticed that the dolphin made his reply from a safe distance. “No problem, Mi”—Kit looked at Hotshot, silent—“ah, Kit.”

“Minnow it is,” Kit said, sounding casual himself. The four of them swam on; Nita dropped back a few lengths and put her head up beside Kit’s so that she could sing her quietest and not be heard too far off.

“What was that all about?”

“I’m not sure,” Kit said — and now that only Nita was listening, he sounded a bit shaken. “S’reee might have been right when she said this body doesn’t actually have what’s-his-voice’s—“

“Aivaaan.”

“His memories, yeah. But the body has its own memories. What it’s like to be a sperm. What it means to be a sperm, I guess. You don’t make fun of us — of them.” He paused, looking even more shaken. “Neets — don’t let me get lost!”

“Huh?”

“Me. I don’t beat people up, that’s not my style!”

“You didn’t beat him up—“

“No. I just did the ocean equivalent of pinning him up against the wall and scaring him a good one. Neets, I got into being a wizard because I wanted other people not to do that kind of stuff to me! And now—“

“I’ll keep an eye on you,” Nita said, as they began to come up on another foghorn, a loud one. And there was something odd about that foghorn. Its note was incredibly deep. That has to be almost too deep for people to hear at all. What kind of—

The note sounded again, and Nita shot Kit an amazed look as she felt the water all around her, and even the air in her lungs, vibrate in response to it. One note, the lowest note she could possibly imagine, held and held until a merely human singer would have collapsed trying to sing it… and then slurred slowly down through another note, and another, and holding on a last one of such profound depth that the water shook as if with thunder.

S’reee slowed her pace and answered the note in kind, the courtesy of one species of whale to another on meeting or parting — singing the same slow, somber sequence, several octaves higher. There was a pause; then she was answered with a humpback’s graceful fluting, but sung in a bottom-shaking baritone.

“Come on,” S’reee said, and dived.

The waters around Sandy Hook boil with krill in the spring and summer, so that by night the krill’s swarming luminescence defines every current and finstroke in a blaze of blue-green light; and by day the sun slants through the water, brown with millions of tiny bodies, as thickly as through the air in a dusty room. As the group dived, they began to make out a great dark shape in the cloudy water, moving so slowly it barely did more than drift. A last brown-red curtain of water parted before them in a swirl of current, and Nita found herself staring down at her first blue whale.

He was hardly even blue in this light, more a sort of slaty maroon; and the faint dapples on his sides were almost invisible. But his color was not what impressed Nita particularly. Neither was his size, though blues are the biggest of all whales; this one was perhaps a hundred twenty feet from nose to tail, and Kit, large for a sperm, was almost as big. That voice, that stately, leisurely, sober, sorrowful voice that sounded like a storm in mourning, that mattered to her; and so did the tiny eye, the size of a tennis ball, which looked at her from the immense bulk of the head. That eye was wise. There was understanding in it, and tolerance, and sadness: and most of all, great age.

Age was evident elsewhere too. The blue’s flukes were tattered and his steering fins showed scars and punctures, mementos of hungry sharks. Far down his tail, the broken stump of a harpoon protruded, the wood of it rotting, the metal crumbling with rust; yet though the tail moved slowly, it moved with strength. This creature had been through pain and danger in his long life, and though he had learned sadness, it had not made him bitter or weak.

Nita turned her attention back to the others, noticing that Kit was holding as still as she was, though at more of a distance; and even Hotshot was holding himself down to a slow glide. “Eldest Blue about the Gates,” S’reee sang, sounding more formal than Nita had ever heard her, “I greet you.”

“Senior for the Gatewaters,” said the Blue in his deep voice, with slow dignity, “I greet you also.”

“Then you’ve heard, Aroooon.”

“I have heard that the Sea has taken Ae’mhnuu to its Heart,” said the Blue, “leaving you Senior in his place, and distressed at a time when there’s distress enough. Leaving you also to organize a TwelveSong on very short notice.”

“That’s so.”

“Then you had best be about it,” said the Blue, “while time still remains for singing, and the bottom is still firm under us. First, though, tell me who comes here with you. Swift-Fire-In-The-Water I know already—“

Hotshot made the closest sound Nita could imagine to an embarrassed delphine cough. She smiled to herself; now she knew now what to tease him with if he got on her case.

“Land wizards, Aroooon,” S’reee said. “HNii’t—“ Nita wasn’t sure what to do, so she inclined the whole front of her body in the water in an approximation of a bow. “—and K!t.” Kit followed Nita’s suit. “They were the ones who went into the Dark High-And-Dry after the Naming of Lights— “

To Nita’s utter astonishment, Aroooon inclined his own body at them, additionally curling his flukes under him in what she abruptly recognized as a gesture of congratulation. “They’re calves,” S’reee added, as if not wanting to leave anything out.

“With all due respects, Senior, they are not,” Aroooon said. “They came back from that place. That is no calf’s deed. Many who were older than they did not come back — You will sing with us then? What parts?”

“I’m not sure yet,” Kit said. “S’reee needs to see if all her people come in.”

“The Silent Lord,” Nita said.

“Indeed.” Aroooon looked at her for several long moments. “You are a good age for it,” he said. “And you are learning the song—“

“I got most of the details from my manual,” she said. She had been up studying late the night before, though not as late as Kit had; a lot of exertion in salt air always left her drained, and she’d put the book aside after several hours, to finish the fine details of her research later. “The Sea will give me the rest, S’reee says, as we go along.”

“So it will. But I would have you be careful of how you enact your part, young HNii’t.” Aroooon drifted a bit closer to her, and that small, thoughtful eye regarded her carefully. “There is old trouble, and old power, about you and your friend… as if blood hung in the water where you swim. The Lone Power apparently knows your names. It will not have forgotten the disservice you did It recently. You are greatly daring to draw Its attention to you again. Even the Heart of the Sea — Timeheart as your kind calls it — will not be quiet for one who has freely attracted the Lone One’s enmity. Beware what you do. And do what you say; nowhere does the Lone Power enter in so readily as through the broken word.”

“Sir,” Nita said, rather unnerved, “I’ll be careful.”

“That is well.” Aroooon looked for a moment at Kit before speaking. “It js a whalesark, is it not?”

“Yes, sir,” Kit said in the same respectful tone Nita had heard him use on his father.

“Have a care of it, then, should you find yourself in one of the more combative parts of the Song,” said Aroooon. “Sperm whales were fighters before they were singers, and though their songs are often the fairest in the sea, the old blood rises too often and chokes those songs off before they can be sung. Keep your mouth closed, you were best, and you’ll do well enough.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Enough politeness, young wizard,” Aroooon said, for the first time sounding slightly crusty. “If size is honor, you have as much as I; and as for years, just keep breathing long enough and you’ll have as many of those as I do. — S’reee, you travel more widely now than I, so I put you a question. Are the shakings in the depths worse these days than they ought to be at this time of year and tide of Moon?”

“Much worse, Eldest. That was why Ae’mhnuu originally wanted to convene the Song. And I don’t know if the Song will be in time to save the fishing grounds to the east and north, around Nantucket and the Races. Hot water has been coming up close to there, farther east and south. The Shelf is changing.”

“Then let us get started,” Aroooon said. “I assume you came to ask me to call in some of the Celebrants, time being as limited as it is.”

“Yes, Aroooon. If you would. Though as the rite requires, I will be visiting the Pale One tomorrow, in company with HNii’t and Kit. The meeting place for the Song is to be ten thousand lengths north-northeast of the shoals at Barnegat, three days from now. A fast rehearsal — then right down the channel and through the Gates of the Sea, to the place appointed.”

“Well enough. Now administer me the Celebrant’s Oath, Senior, so that I may lawfully call the others.”

“Very well.” S’reee swam up close to Aroooon, so that she was looking him straight in one eye with one of hers; and when she began to sing, it was in a tone even more formal and careful than that in which she had greeted him.

”Aroooon u’aoluor, those who gather to sing that Song that is the Sea s shame and the Sea’s glory desire you to be of their company. Say, for my hearing, whether you consent to that Song.” „

“I consent,” the Blue said in notes so deep that coral cracked and fell on rock shelves some yards away, “and I will weave my voice and my will and my blood with that of those who sing, if there be need.”

“I ask the second time, that those with me, both of your Mastery and not, CTiay hear. Do you consent to the Song?”

“I consent. And may my wizardry and my Mastery depart from me sooner than I abandon that other Mastery I shall undertake in the Song’s celebration.”

“The third time, and the last, I ask, that the Sea, and the Heart of the Sea, shall hear. Do you consent to the Song?”

“Freely I consent,” Aroooon sang with calm finality, “and may I find no place in that Heart, but wander forever amid the broken and the lost, sooner than I shall refuse the Song or what it brings about for the good of those who live.”

“Then I accept you as Celebrant of the Song, as Blue, and as latest of a line of saviors,” S’reee said. “And though those who swim are swift to forget, the Sea forgets neither Song nor singer.” She turned a bit, looking behind her at Hotshot. “Might as well get all of you done at once,” she said. “Hotshot?”

“Right.”

The dolphin went through the Oath much faster than Aroooon had, though his embarrassment at being referred to as Swift-Fire-In-The-Water was this time so acute that Nita actually turned away so she wouldn’t have to look at him. As for the rest of the Oath, though, Hotshot recited it, as Nita had expected, with the mindless speed of a person who thinks he has other more important matters to attend to.

S’reee turned to Nita. “We can’t give K!t the Oath yet,” she said. “We don’t know who he’s going to be.”

“Can’t you just give it to me and leave that part blank or something?” Kit said eagerly. He loved ceremonies.

“Kit!”

“No, Kit. HNii’t, do you know the words?”

“The Sea does,” she said, finding it true. S’reee had already begun the ritual questioning; Nita felt for the response, found it. “I consent, and I will weave my voice and my will and my blood with that of those who sing, if were be need.” It was astonishing, how much meaning could be packed into a few notes. And the music itself was fascinating; so somber, but with that odd thread of joy running through it. She threw herself into the grave joy of we final response. “… And may I find no place in that Heart, but wander forever amid the broken and the lost, sooner than I shall refuse the Song or what it brings about for the good of those who live.”

“Then I accept you as Celebrant of the Song, and as Silent One, and as the latest in a line of saviors. And though those who swim are swift to forget, the Sea forgets neither Song nor singer.” S’reee looked at Nita with an expression in those blue eyes of vast relief, so much like the one she had given her and Kit when they’d first agreed to help that Nita shuddered a little with the intensity of it, then smiled inside. It was nice to be needed.

“That was well done,” Aroooon said slowly. “Now, S’reee, give me names so I’ll know whom to call.”

A few moments of singing ensued as S’reee recited the names of five whales Nita had never heard of. Her inner contact with the Sea, moments later, identified them all as wizards of various ratings, all impressive. Aroooon rumbled agreement. “Good enough,” he said. “Best get out of the area so that I may begin Calling.”

“Right. Come on, Kit, HNii’t. Till the Moon’s full, Aroooon—“

“Till then.”

They swam away through the darkening water. S’reee set the pace; it was a quick one. “Why did we have to leave in such a hurry?” Kit said.

“There aren’t many wizardries more powerful than a Calling,” S’reee said as she led them away. “He’ll weave those whales’ names into his spell, and if they agree to be part of the Song, the wizardry will lead them to the place appointed, at the proper time.”

“Just by singing their names?”

“Kit, that’s plenty. Don’t you pay attention when someone calls you by your name? Your name is part of you. There’s power in it, tied up with the way you secretly think of yourself, the truth of the way you are. Know what a person’s name means to him, know who he feels he is — and you have power over him. That’s what Aroooon is using.”

That was a bit of information that started Nita’s thoughts going in nervous circles. How do I think of myself? And does this mean that the people who know what I think can control me? I’m not sure I like this…

The first note rumbled through the water behind them, and Nita pulled up short, curling around in a quick turn. “Careful, HNii’t!” S’reee sang, a soft, sharp note of warning. Nita backfinned, hovering in the water. “Don’t disturb his circle—“

Looking back, she wouldn’t have dreamed of it. The water was growing darker by the second, and as a result the glow of the krill in it was now visible — a delicate, shimmery, indefinite blue-green light that filled the sea everywhere. The light grew brighter, moment by moment; but it was brighter still at the surface, where the waves slid and shifted against one another in a glowing, undulating ceiling. And brightest of all was the track left by Aroooon’s swimming — a wake that burned like clouds of cool fire behind him with every slow stroke of his tail.

At the head of the wake, Aroooon himself traced the grand curves of his spell, sheathed in bubbles and cold light. One circle he completed, melding into itself as he sang that single compelling note; then he began another at right angles to the first, and the water burned behind him, the current not taking the brilliance away. And the blue’s song seemed to get into the blood, into the bone, and would not be shaken—

“HNii’t,” S’reee said, “we can’t stay, you said you have to get back—“

Nita looked around her in shock. “S’reee, when did it get so dark! My folks are gonna have a fit!”

“Didn’t I mention that time didn’t run the same way below the water as it does in the Above?”

“Yeah, but I thought—“ Kit said, and then he broke off and said a very bad word in whale. “No, I didn’t think. I assumed that it’d go slower—“

“It goes faster,” Nita moaned. “Kit, how are we going to get anything done? S’reee, how long exactly is the Song going to take?”

“Not long,” the humpback said, sounding a bit puzzled by her distress. “A couple of lights, as it’s reckoned in the Above—“

“Two days!”

“We’re in trouble,” Kit said.

“That’s exactly what we’re in. S’reee, let’s put our tails into it! Even if we were getting home right now, we’d have some explaining to do.”

She turned and swam in the direction where her sharpening whale-senses told her home was. It was going to be bad enough, having to climb out of this splendid, strong, graceful body and put her own back on again. But Dairine was waiting to give her the Spanish Inquisition when she got home. And her mother and father were going to give her more of those strange looks. Worse… there would be questions asked, she knew it. Her folks might even call Kit’s family if they got worried enough — and Kit’s dad, who was terminally protective of his son, might make Kit come home.

That thought was worst of all.

They went home. It was lucky for them that Nita’s father was too tired from his fishing — which had been successful — to make much noise about their lateness. Her mother was cleaning fish in the kitchen, too annoyed at the smelly work to much care about anything else. And as for Dairine, she was buried so deep in a copy of The Space Shuttle Operators’ Manual that all she did when Nita passed her room was glance up for a second, then dive back into her reading. Even so, there was no feeling of relief when Nita shut the door to her room and got under the covers; just an uneasy sense of something incomplete, something that was going to come up again later … and not in a way she’d like.

“Wizardry…” she muttered sourly, and fell asleep.