Deep Wizardry

A Song of Battles

“What is it?” Kit said. “Is it the krakens?”

Ed’Rashtekaresket looked at Kit and began a slow, abstracted circling around him. “You know about that?” said the Master-Shark. “You’re wise for a human.”

“I know that the krakens are breeding this year,” Kit said, “breaking their usual eleven-year cycle. And they’re bigger than usual, our Seniors told us. In the deep water, krakens have been seen that would be a match for just about any whale or submarine they grabbed.”

“That is essentially what I would have told you,” the Master-Shark said to S’reee, still circling Kit. “My own people have been reporting trouble with the bottom dwellers — but any sharks who cannot escape such are no longer entitled to the Mastery’s protection in any case. At any rate, I pass this news along as a courtesy to you warm-bloods. By way of returning the courtesy done to my people after your accident.”

“Thank you,” S’reee said, and bowed as they swam.

“Odd,” Ed’Rashtekaresket mused as they went, “that qualified wizards of high levels are so few, the whales must bring in humans to make up the number.”

“Odd isn’t the word for it, Pale One,” S’reee said. “Advisories and Seniors have been dying like clams at red tide lately.”

“As if,” the Master-Shark said, “someone or something did not care to have the Song enacted just now.” His voice sounded remote. “I’m reminded of that Song enacted, oh, a hundred thirty thousand moons ago — when the bottom shook as it does now, and the Lone One had newly lost the Battle of the Trees. One wizard was injured by rockfall while they made the journey down through the Gates of the Sea. And when they began the Singing Proper, first the Killer and then the Blue lost control of their spells at crucial times. You know the moment, S’reee: when the mock-battle breaks out among the three parties, and each one tries to force the others around to its way of thinking.”

Ed’Rashtekaresket fell silent. The four of them swam on. “Uh, Ed_ Ed’Rak—“ Nita stopped short, unable to remember the rest of his name as anything but the sound of gnashing teeth. “Look, can I call you Ed?”

Blank eyes turned their attention toward her. “At least I can say it,” she said. “And if I’m going to be singing with you, it can’t be titles all the time. We have to know each other, you say.”

“A sprat’s name,” the shark said, dry-voiced. “A fry name — for me, the Master.” Then came the quiet, terrible laughter again. “Well enough. You’re the Sprat, and I’m Ed.” He laughed again.

Nita had never heard anything that sounded less like mirth in her life. “Great. So, Ed, what happened? In that Song, when it went wrong. Was anyone hurt?”

“Of the singers? No. They were inside a spell-circle, and protected — it has to be that way, else anything might get in among the singers and upset their spelling. But when the Song failed, all the power its Singers had tried to use to bind the Lone One rebounded and freed him instead. The sea bottom for hundreds of miles about was terribly torn and changed as a result. Volcanoes, earthquakes… Also, there was a landmass, a great island in the middle of these waters. Surely you know about that country, since your people named the ocean after it. That island was drowned. There were humans on it; millions of them died when the island sank. As for the rest — eating was good hereabouts for some time. The species of my Mastery prospered.”

“A hundred thirty thousand moons ago—“ Kit whispered, one soft-breathed note of song. “Ten thousand years!”

“Atlantis,” Nita said, not much louder.

“Afallone,” S’reee said, giving the name in the wizardly Speech. “There were Senior and Master wizards there,” she said sadly, “a great many of them. But even working together, they couldn’t stop what happened. The earthquakes begun by the downfall of Afallone were so terrible that they tore straight through the first level of the land-under-Sea — the crust, I think the two-leggers call it — and right down to the mantle, the molten stuff beneath. The whole island plate on which Afallone stood was broken in pieces and pushed down into the lava of the mantle — utterly destroyed. The plates of your continent and that of Europe have since drifted together over the island’s old location, covering its grave… But even after the Downfall, there was trouble for years — mostly with the atmosphere, because of all the ash the volcanoes spat into the air. It got cold, and whole species of land creatures died for lack of their food. It was thousands of Moons before things were normal again. So we tend to be very careful about the Song. ‘Lest the Sea become the Land, and the Land become the Sea—‘ “

“And the krakens are breeding,” the Pale One said as they swam. “Well. I’m for the Northern Rips tonight; there’s trouble in the water there.”

What kind of creature, Nita wondered, could hear the sounds of simple distress at a distance of two hundred miles and more?

“Beware, Nita,” Ed said. “Only a dead shark could have avoided hearing that thought. If we’re to know each other well, as you say you desire, best mind how you show me your feelings. Else I shall at last know you most intimately, sooner than you are planning — and the relationship will be rather one-sided.”

Ed’s jaws worked. “—I was going to say: matters swimming as they do, I will see you three home. It’s getting dark, and—“

“Dark!” Nita and Kit looked around them. The water, turbid green white when they had come here, was now almost black.

“The Sun’s going down,” Kit said unhappily. “We’re really in for it now.”

Nita agreed. “Master-Shark,” she said, staying as calm as she could, “we have to get back to, uh, our feeding grounds. And in a hurry. Our parents are waiting for us, and we had orders to be back before it got dark.”

Ed simply looked at Nita with that calm black stare. “As you say,” he said, and began to swim faster. “But we will not be at Bluehaven before many stars are out and the Moon is about to set.”

“I know,” Nita said. It was hard to sound unconcerned while her insides were churning. “Maybe you should go ahead and let them know we’re okay,” she said to Kit. “Tell them I’m coming—“

“No,” Kit said, also at pains to sound calm. “I’ll take my chances with you, Neets. ‘All for one…’ “

“Sprat,” Ed said to Nita, “this is an odd thing, that your sire and dam impose restrictions on you when you’re doing a wizardry of such weight.”

“They don’t know we’re wizards,” Kit said.

S’reee was so surprised by this that she backfinned to a dead stop in the water. Ed, as if nothing took him by surprise, merely circled about the group, while Kit and Nita coasted close by. “They don’t know!” S’reee said. “How do you do anything? How do you prepare wizardries? Let alone the matter of singing the Song without the full support of the people close to you — and when you’re singing the Silent One’s part, no less!”

There had been something about that last part in the manual. Nita had thought she had all the support she needed in Kit. She was becoming less sure. Tom, got to call Tom— “I know,” she said out loud. “S’reee, let’s swim, we’re late enough as it is.”

The four of them headed west again. “It can’t be helped,” Kit said. “It’s not like it is here, where wizardry is something respectable and useful that most everybody knows about. Up on the land, they used to burn people for it. Nowadays — well, it’s safer to hide what you’re up to. People would think you were nuts if you tried to tell them you were a wizard. Most people don’t believe in magic.”

“What do they believe in?” S’reee said, unnerved.

“Things,” Nita said unhappily. “S’reee, it’s too complicated. But doing wizardry and keeping everybody from noticing is a problem.”

“I’m no wizard,” Ed said, “but only a fool would try to deny a wizard’s usefulness. It must be a crippled life your people live up there, without magic, without what can’t be understood, only accepted—“

For all her concern about being late, Nita looked wryly sideways at Ed. “This from someone who won’t admit Timeheart exists unless he sees it himself?”

“Sprat,” Ed said, “if it does in fact exist, can my not believing in it make the slightest difference? And as for understanding — I’m not interested in understanding Timeheart. What use is spending time figuring out, say, why water is wet? Will it make breathing it any— ‘Ware, all!”

The warning came so conversationally that it took Nita precious moments to realize what the problem was. The sea around them was dark to begin with. But in the black water, darker shapes were moving. One of them, writhing and growing, reached up dim arms at them. Nita let out a squeak of surprise, and the returning echoes hit her skin and told her, to her terror, what her eyes couldn’t. A long torpedo-shaped body, a great mass of arms that squirmed like snakes, and a long wicked beak-fang hidden at the bottom of them. She backfinned desperately as those writhing arms with all their hooked suckers reached for her.

The sound that began rumbling through the water probably upset the krakens as much as it did her. Nita had never heard the battlecry of an enraged sperm whale — a frightful scrape of sound, starting at the highest note a human being can hear and scaling down with watershaking roughness to the lowest note, then past it. It was hard to see what was going on, but Nita kept singing so her radar would tell her. She would have preferred not to; the echo-“sight” of Kit in the whalesark, arrowing toward the leading kraken, jaws open, all his sharp teeth showing, was a horror. Suckered arms whipped around him, squeezing; and the giant squid had its own noise, a screech so high it sounded like fingernails being scraped down a blackboard.

Before she really knew what she was doing, Nita circled off to pick up speed, and then swam straight toward the kraken’s head-ruffle, the thick place where the tentacles joined behind mouth and tooth. She sang for aim as she charged, then lost the song when she rammed the kraken. The squid’s long porous backbone crunched and broke under her blow. Rolling, tail lashing, she fluked away. All the telephone pole-length arms spasmed and squeezed Kit hard one last time, then fell away limp. Kit shot in toward the head of the broken squid. Jaws opened, crunched closed, opened again to slash once or twice with wild ferocity. Then Kit fluked powerfully, still singing, and arched away through the water.

“Kit!” Nita cried, but his only answer was the sperm-whale battlecry. The water was dark with night, thick with squid ink, and scratchy with stirred sand. Through it all a pallid shape was cruising with terrible speed, jaws open, circling in. The patch of darkness he circled threw out a score of arms to grapple with him. Ed let them draw him closer to his prey, then bit, and blood and ink billowed everywhere in the frantic rush of water expelled by the shrieking squid. Severed chunks of kraken arm spun and swirled in the water, and sank through it. Ed swept forward, jaws wide, and bit again. The shriek cut off. Out of the cloud of blood and ink Ed came silently sailing, cool, untroubled, graceful: the Pale Slayer, a silent ghost looking calmly about him for his next victim. Nita held very still and sang not a note until he passed her by.

S’reee was ramming another kraken as Nita had. But one more closed on her from behind. Kit came swimming, singing his battlecry. He bit the second squid amidships, hanging onto that bullet-shaped body like a bulldog as its struggles shook him from side to side. Between her and Kit and S’reee, Ed was circling a third kraken. It flailed at him, trying to bind his mouth shut so that it could get a better grip on him and squeeze him to death.

It might as well not have bothered. As a fourth kraken came for her, Nita saw Ed break his circling pattern to dart in and slash, then curve away. Again and again he feinted, again and again his teeth tore, until the kraken was reduced to a tattered, screaming storm of blood and ink and flailing tentacles. Blank-eyed, Ed soared straight at the finned rear end of the doomed creature and opened his mouth. When his jaws scissored shut, all that was left to drift downward were the tips of several tentacles. The kraken had been about the size of a station wagon.

A fifth kraken took a great suck of water into its internal jet-propulsion system and thrust it out again, tainting the water with the sepia taste of ink as it fled into the depths, wailing like a lost soul. Nita was willing to let it go, and was swimming for the surface when a chill current and a pale form sank past her, spiraling downward with deadly grace. The utter dark of the night sea swallowed Ed. She heard the kraken’s screams, which had been diminishing — and now grew louder, and more ragged, until they abruptly stopped.

Wearily Nita swam upward. She broached and blew gratefully, doing nothing for a long while but lie there in the wavewash, gasping.

Not too far away, S’reee broached and made her way slowly toward Nita. Neither of them said anything; but the two of them sagged together and simply leaned against each other, taking comfort in the presence of another whale. Some yards off, the water rushed away from Kit’s back and sides as he came up, gasping too. Nita looked over at him, shaking. She knew that what she saw was just her friend in a whalesuit. But she kept seeing sharp teeth slashing in a blood-hunger too much like Ed’s for comfort.

“Are you okay?” she said to Kit.

“Yeah.” He sounded uncertain, and Nita breathed out in relief. The voice was a sperm whale’s, but the person inside it was definitely Kit. “Got a little — a little carried away there. You, Neets?”

“All right,” she said.

Out of the depths a white form came drifting upward toward them.

They breathed and dived, all three, to find Ed circling in the clearing water, while a storm of fingerling blues and sardines swarmed about him, picking scraps and shreds out of the water, some of them even daring to pick bloody bits off Ed’s skin or from between his teeth. “That last one was in pain at the thought of returning to the depths without its purpose fulfilled,” he said. “So I ended that pain.”

“Purpose?” Kit said.

“Surely you don’t take that attack for an accident, young one,” Ed said. “Any more than the shaking of the sea bottom these days or the ill chances that have been befalling S’reee’s people have been accidents.”

Nita looked at Kit, and then at Ed, in confusion. “You mean that what happened to S’reee— I thought you were on our side!”

Ed began to circle slowly inward toward Nita. “Peace, spratling,” he said. “I pay no allegiance to anyone in the Sea or above it; you know that. Or you should. I am the Unmastered. I alone.” He swept in closer. “The encounter S’reee and Ae’mhnuu had with the ship-that-eats-whales was doubtless the Lone One’s doing. It has many ways to subtly influence those who live. As for the sharks—“ Ed’s voice became shaded with a cold, slow rage that chilled Nita worse than anything he’d said or done yet. “They did according to their nature, just as you do. Do not presume to blame them. On the other flank, however, my people have only one Master. If the Lone One has been tampering with species under my Mastery, then It will have to deal with me.”

That made Nita shake — not only at the thought of Ed trying to take on the Lone Power himself, but at the outrageous thought that the Lone One, for all Its power, might actually be in for some trouble. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought you meant you told the sharks to just go ahead and attack a hurt whale.” And with some trepidation, she copied S’reee’s earlier gesture— rolling over in the water, exposing her unprotected flanks and belly to the Master-Shark.

A few long seconds afterward she felt what few beings have lived to tell about — the abrasive touch of a live shark’s skin. Ed nudged Nita ever so lightly in the ribs, then glided by; almost a friendly touch, except that could see the ranged mouth working still, the opaque black eyes tracking on her. Finned whiteness sailed silent and immense above her, hardly stirring the water. “In another time, in another place, I might have told them to,” Ed said. “In another time, I may yet tell them to. And what will you think of me then, Sprat?”

“I don’t know,” she said, when the white shape had passed over.

“That was well said too.” Ed circled about the three of them, seeming to both watch them and ignore them at the same time. “So let us be on our way; we’re close to Tiana Beach. S’reee, you and I have business remaining that must be done before witnesses.”

S’reee wasted no time about it, gliding close to Ed — but, Nita noticed, not nearly as close as S’reee had come to Aroooon or Hotshot, or herself. “Ed’Rashtekaresket t’k Gh’shestaesteh, Eldest-In-Abeyance to the Pale Slayer That Was, Master for the Sharks of Plain and Shelf and what lies between — 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, 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—“

“Peace, S’reee, I know the words by now: Who better? A second time I say it, that those with me, both of my Mastery and not, may hear. Twice I consent to the Song, in my Mastery’s name; and a third time, that the Sea, and the Heart of the Sea, shall hear…” Was his voice just a touch drier on that phrase, Nita wondered? “So up, now, the three of you. We are where you need to be.”

Kit looked around him in confusion. “How can you tell? There’s a lot of Tiana Beach, and you’ve never seen our house—“

“I can smell your human bodies in the water from this morning,” Ed said, unperturbed. “And, besides, I hear distress.”

“Uh-oh…” Kit said.

“S’reee,” Nita said, stalling, “when will you need us next?”

“Next dawn,” the humpback said, brushing against first Nita, then Kit, in sympathy. “I’m sorry we can’t have a day’s rest or so, but there’s no time any more.”

“Do we have to be there?” Kit said.

“The Silent Lord does,” S’reee said, glancing at Nita. “In fact, normally it’s the Silent Lord who administers the Oath, since her stake in the Song is the greatest.”

Nita made an unhappy sound. “Kit,” she said, “maybe you’d better stay home. At least you won’t get in trouble with your folks that way.”

Kit shouldered over beside her, absent affection that bumped her considerably sideways as his hundred-foot bulk hit her. “No,” he said. “I told you: ‘All for one.’ It’s not fair for you to be stuck with this alone. Besides, what if those things show up again, and Ed’s not here—“

“Right,” Nita said.

“Neets, we better get going,” Kit said.

She headed for the surface. Kit and S’reee followed; but Ed was above her and surfaced first, several hundred yards westward and much closer to the shore. So the first sound Nita heard from the shore was the screaming.

Nita had never heard her mother scream. The raw panic in the sound got under Nita’s skin even worse than Kit’s hunting song had.

“Harry!” her mother was shouting, and every few words her terror would gnaw its way through her desperately controlled voice and come out as a scream again. “Harry, for God’s sake look, there’s a fin out there, it’s a shark! Get Mr. Friedman, get the cops, get somebody!”

The beach flickered with lights — flashlights, held by people running up and down — and every light in Nita’s house was on, as well as most of those in the houses next door. Nita gulped at her father’s hoarse reply — just as scared as her mother, trying to stay in control and failing.

“Betty, hang on, they’re coming! Hang on! Don’t go near the water!” For her mother was floundering into the surf, looking out seaward, searching for someone she couldn’t see. “Nita!”

Nita had to fight to stay silent.

Ed cruised serenely, contemptuously close to the shore, bearing off westward, away from Nita and Kit and S’reee. The flashlights followed his pale fin as it broached, as Ed went so far as to raise himself a little out of the water, showing a terrible expanse of back, then the upward-spearing tailfin as big as a windsurfer’s sail. Shouting in fear and amazement, the people followed him down the beach as if hypnotized. The flashlights bobbed away.

“He’s got them distracted, we’ve gotta get out now,” Kit said.

“But our bathing suits—“

“No time! Later! S’reee, we’ll see you in the morning!” The two of them fluked wildly and made for the beach, in the direction opposite the one in which Ed was leading the people on the shore. Nita stayed under the surface as long as she could, then felt the bottom scrape on her belly; she was grounded. Kit had grounded sooner than she had. Nita gasped a long breath of air and let the shapechange go, then collapsed into the water again — not deep for a whale, but three feet deep for her. She struggled to her feet and staggered to shore through the breakers, wiping the salt out of her eyes and shaking with the shock of a spell released too suddenly.

By the time her sight was working properly, there was no time to do anything about the small, dark figure standing a few feet up the incline of the beach, looking straight at her.

Dairine.

There was a slam of imploding air behind Nita. Kit came scrambling up out of the water, with the undone whalesark clutched glittering in one fist. “Quick,” he said, “I can do the Scotty spell before they come back—“ He reached out and grabbed her by the arm, shaking her. “Neets, are you okay?”

Then he saw Dairine too. “Uh,” he said. The sounds of voices down the beach were getting closer; and through them, abrupt and terrible, came a. sudden crack! of gunfire. Kit looked down that way, then at Dairine again, and took a long breath. “Right back,” he said. He said one quick syllable and, in another clap of air, vanished.

Dairine just stood there in her pajamas with Yoda all over them, staring at her sister. “Whales,” she said.

“Dairine,” Nita whispered, “how long have they been out here?”

“About an hour.”

“Oh, no. “And her folks would be there in moments. “Dairine,” Nita said, “look—“ There she stopped. She couldn’t think what she wanted to say.

“It is magic,” Dairine whispered back. “There really is such a thing. And it’s that book you have, isn’t it? It’s not just an old beat-up kids’ book. It’s—“

In another slam of air, blowing outward this time, Kit reappeared. He was already in his bathing suit; he flung Nita’s at her and then looked unhappily at Dairine.

“And you too,” she said to him as Nita struggled into her suit.

“A wizard?” Kit said. “Yeah. Both of us.”

Off to their left, there was another gunshot, and a mighty splash. Nita and Kit stared out at the sea. Ed was arrowing straight up out of the water with slow, frightful grace, jaws working as he arched up in a leap like a dolphin’s. Fifty feet of him towered out of the water, sixty, eighty, until even his long sharp tailfin cleared the surface and he hung there in midair, bent like a bow, the starlight and the light of the Moon sheening ice white along his hide and the water that ran down it. “Until later, my wizards!” came his hissed cry in the Speech, as Ed dived dolphin-curved back into the sea. The gunshot cracked across the water at him, once, twice. Ed went down laughing in scorn.

“That’s as much as he’s gonna do,” Kit said. “They’ll be back in a moment, when they see he’s gone.”

“That shark—“ said Dairine, sounding about ready to go into shock.

“He’s a friend,” Nita said.

“Neets,” Kit said, “what’re we gonna tell them?”

“That depends on Dairine.” Nita took care to keep her voice perfectly calm. “What about it, Dari? Are you going to spill everything? Or are you going to keep quiet?”

Dairine looked at the two of them, saying nothing. Then, “I want you to tell me everything later,” she said. “Everything.”

“It’ll have to be tonight, Dari. We’ve got to be out again by dawn.”

“You’re gonna get it,” Dairine said.

“Tell us something else we don’t know, Sherlock,” Kit said, mild-voiced

“Well. I guess I saw you two coming over the dune,” Dairine said, looking from Kit to Nita. She turned to head down the beach.

Nita caught Dairine by the arm, stopping her. Dairine looked back at Nita over her shoulder — her expression of unease just visible in the dim light from the houses up the beach. “I really don’t want to lie to them, Dari,” Nita said.

“Then you better either keep your mouth shut,” Dairine said, “or tell them the truth.” And she tugged her arm out of Nita’s grasp and went pounding off down the beach, screaming, in her best I’m-gonna-tell voice, “Mom, Dad, it’s Nita!”

Nita and Kit stood where they were. “They’re gonna ground us,” Kit said.

“Maybe not,” said Nita, in forlorn hope.

“They will. And what’re you going to do then?”

Nita’s insides clenched. And the sound of people talking was coming down the beach toward them.

“I’m going,” she said. “This is lives we’re talking about — whales’ lives. People’s lives. It can’t just be stopped in the middle! You remember what Ed said.”

“That’s what I’d been thinking,” Kit said. “I just didn’t want to get you in my trouble — just because I’m doing it, I mean.” He looked at her. “Dawn, then.”

“Better make it before,” Nita said, feeling like a conspirator and hating it. “Less light to get caught by.”

“Right.” And that was all they had time for, for Nita’s mother and father, and Mr. Friedman, and Dairine, all came trotting up together. Then things got confusing, for Nita’s dad grabbed her and hugged her to him with tears running down his face, as if he were utterly terrified; and her mother slowed from her run, waved her arms in the air and roared, “Where the blazes have you been?”

“We lost track of the time,” Kit said.

“We were out, Mom,” Nita said. “Swimming—“

“Wonderful! There are sharks the size of houses out there in the water, and my daughter is off swimming! At night, at high tide, with the undertow—“ Her mother gulped for air, then said more quietly, “I didn’t expect this of you, Nita. After we talked this morning, and all.”

Nita’s father let go of her slowly, nodding, getting a fierce, closed look on his face now that the initial shock of having his daughter back safe was passing. “And I thought you had better sense, Kit,” he said. “We had an agreement that while you stayed with us, you’d do as we said. Here it is hours and hours after dark—“

“I know, sir,” Kit said. “I forgot — and by the time I remembered, it was too late. It won’t happen again.”

“Not for a while, anyway,” Nita’s mother said, sounding grim. “I don’t want you two going out of sight of the house until further notice. Understood?”

“Yes, Mrs. Callahan.”

“Nita?” her mother said sharply.

There it was: the answer she wasn’t going to be able to get around. “Okay, Mom,” she said. Her stomach turned over inside her at the sound of the lie. Too late now. It was out, not to be recalled.

“That also means staying out of the water,” her father said.

Why me? Why me! Nita thought. She made a face. “Okay.”

“Okay,” Kit said too, not sounding very happy.

“We’ll see how you two behave in the next few days,” Nita’s mother said. “And whether that shark clears out of here. Maybe after that we’ll let you swim again. Meanwhile — you two get home.”

They went. Just once Nita looked over her shoulder and was sure she saw, far out on the water, a tall pale fin that stood high as a sail above the surface, then slid below it, arrowing off toward Montauk — distress ended for the moment, and a job done.

Nita felt the miserable place in her gut and thought it was just as well that Ed couldn’t come up on the land.