Deep Wizardry

Fearsong

Nita lay awake in the dark, staring at the ceiling. It was three thirty in the morning, by the glow of the cheap electric clock on the dresser. She would very much have liked to turn over, forget about the clock, the time, and everything else, and just sack out. But soon it would be false dawn, and she and Kit would have to be leaving.

Changes…

Only last week, her relationship with her folks had seemed perfect. Now all that was over, ruined — and about to get much worse, Nita knew, when her mom and dad found her and Kit gone again in the morning.

And the changes in Kit—

She rolled over on her stomach unhappily, not wanting to think about it. She had a new problem to consider, for when everyone was in bed, Dairine had come visiting.

Nita put her face down into her pillow and groaned. Dairine had gone right through Nita’s wizard’s manual, staring at all the strange maps and pictures. It was annoying enough to begin with that Dairine could see the book at all; nonwizards such as her mother and father, looking at it, usually saw only an old, beat-up copy of something called So You Want to Be d Wizard, apparently a kids’ book. But Dairine saw what was there, and was fascinated.

The aptitude for wizardry sometimes runs through a whole generation of a family. Several famous “circles” of wizards in the past had been made up of brothers or sisters or cousins, rather than unrelated people such as she and Kit, or Tom and Carl, who met by accident or in some other line of work and came to do wizardry together by choice. But families with more than one wizard tended to be the exception rather than the rule, and Nita hadn’t been expecting this. Also, Nita was beginning to realize that she had rather enjoyed having her wizardry be a secret from everybody but the other wizards she worked with. That secret, that advantage, was gone now too. Dairine had the aptitude for wizardry as strongly as Nita herself had had it when she started.

In fact, she’s got it more strongly than I did, Nita thought glumly. The book had to get my attention by force, that first time I passed it in the library. But Dairine noticed it herself, as soon as I brought it home.

For several years Nita had kept her advantage over her sister by only the slimmest of margins. She knew quite well that Dairine was a lot smarter than she was in most things. Wizardry had been a large and satisfying secret she’d felt sure Dairine would never catch on to. But that advantage was now gone too. The youngest wizards were the strongest ones, according to the book; older ones might be wiser but had access to less sheer power. Dairine had gotten the better of her again.

Nita turned over on her back, staring at the ceiling once more.

Kit…

He just wasn’t himself in the whalesark. When he’s in his own skin, she told herself fiercely, he’s fine. But she couldn’t quite make herself believe that. His look, his stance, were too different in just the past day or two.

She had thought that having a best friend at last would be great fun. And she and Kit had enjoyed each other’s company immensely in their first couple months of wizardry, after the terror and sorrow of their initial encounter with the Art had worn off a bit. But sometimes things just didn’t work. Kit would get moody, need to be by himself for days at a time. Or he would say sudden things that Nita thought cruel — except that it was Kit saying them, and Kit wasn’t cruel; she knew that.

I wish I’d had some friends when I was younger, she thought. Now I’ve got one who really matters — and I don’t know what to do so he stays my friend. He changes…

And Kit was going to be in that whalesark for more and more time in the next couple of days. Would she even know him if this kept up?

Would he know her? Or want to? Humpbacks and sperms were different. Her own aggressiveness had frightened her badly enough, after the fight with the krakens. Kit’s had been worse. And he had been enjoying it…

Listless, Nita reached under her pillow for her wizard’s manual and a flashlight. She clicked the light on and started paging through the book, intending to kill some time doing “homework”—finishing the study of her Parts of the Song, the Silent Lord’s parts. They were mostly in what whales used for verse — songs with a particular rhythm and structure, different for each species, but always more formal than regular conversational song. Since she wasn’t good at memorizing, Nita was relieved to find that when she was in whaleform, the Sea would remind her of the exact words. What she needed to study were the emotions and motivations behind each song, the way they were sung.

She riffled through the book. There was a lot of background material — the full tale of the first Song, and of others, including the disastrous “Drowned Song” that ended in the downfall of Atlantis; the names of famous whale-wizards who had sung and how they had sung their parts; “stage direction” for the Song itself; commentary, cautions, permitted variations, even jokes, for evidently though the occasion was serious, it didn’t have to be somber. Then the Song proper, in verse, with the names of the ten Lords of the Humors: the Singer, the Gazer, the Blue, the Sounder, the Gray Lord, the Listener, the Killer, the Wanderer, the Forager, and of course the Silent Lord. Each of them ruled a kind of fish and also a kind of temperament.

Some of them struck Nita as odd; the Killer, for example, was the patroness of laughter, always joking: the Gazer looked at everything and hardly ever said what he saw. And the Silent Lord— Nita paused at the lines that described “the one who ruled seas with no songs in them, and hearts that were silent; but in her own silence, others would sing forever…”

And of course there was the Pale Slayer. And another odd thing; though the names of all the whales ever to sing the Song were listed, there was no listing for the Master-Shark, except the mere title, repeated again and again. Maybe he’s like an executioner in the old days, Nita thought. Anonymous. The commentaries weren’t very illuminating. “The Master of the lesser Death,” one of them called him, “who, mastering it, dieth not. For wizardry toucheth not one to whom it hath not been freely given: nor doth the messenger in any wise partake of the message he bears.”

The manual was like that sometimes. Nita sighed and skimmed down to the first canto: S’reee’s verse, it would be, since the Singer opens the Song as the other Ten gather around the lonely seamount Caryn Peak, the Sea’s Tooth. Alongside the musical and movement notations for a whale singing the Song, the manual had a rough translation into the Speech:

Blood in the water I sing, and one who shed it: deadliest hunger I sing, and one who fed it— weaving the ancientmost tale of the Sea’s sending; singing the tragedy, singing the joy unending.

This is our shame — this is the whole Ocean’s glory; this is the Song of the Twelve. Hark to the story! Hearken, and bring it to pass; swift, lest the sorrow long ago laid to its rest devour us tomorrow!

There was much more: the rest of the prologue, then the songs of each of the Masters who were part of the Song and their temptations by the Stranger-whale, the Lone Power in disguise. Nita didn’t need to pay any attention to those, for the Silent Lord came in only near the end, and the others, even the Stranger, dared use nothing stronger than persuasion on her. The whale singing the part of the Silent One then made her decision which side to be on — and acted.

That was the part Nita had gotten up to. Almost done, she thought with some relief, seeing that there wasn’t much more beyond this. Only a few more cantos. Boy, how do you manage to be cheerful while singing this stuff? It sounds so creepy.

Must I accept the barren Gift? Learn death, and lose my Mastery? Then let them know whose blood and breath will take the Gift and set them free:

whose is the voice and whose the mind

to set at naught the well-sung Game—

when finned Finality arrives

and calls me by my secret Name.

Not old enough to love as yet,

but old enough to die, indeed—

the death-fear bites my throat and heart,

fanged cousin to the Pale One’s breed.

But past the fear lies life for all—

perhaps for me; and, past my dread,

past loss of Mastery and life,

the Sea shall yet give up Her dead!

Glad that wasn’t me back then, she thought. I could never have pulled that off… Nita read down through the next section, the “stage directions” for this sequence of the Song. “The whale singing the Silent One then enacts the Sacrifice in a manner as close to the original enactment as possible, depending on the site where the Song is being celebrated…”

She skimmed the rest of it, the directions detailing the Pale Slayer’s “acceptance of Sacrifice,” his song, the retreat of the Lone Power, and the song’s conclusion by the remaining Ten. But she was having trouble keeping her mind on her work. Kit—

“Neets!”

His voice was the merest hiss from outside the locked window. She got up and peered out the window to see where Kit was, then waved him away from the wall. The spell she had in mind for getting out needed only one word to start it. Nita spoke it and walked through the wall.

Between the distracting peculiarity of the feeling, which was like walking through thick spiderwebs, and the fact that the floor of her room was several feet above the ground, Nita almost took a bad fall, the way someone might who’d put his foot into an open manhole. Kit staggered, barely catching her, and almost fell down himself.

“Clumsy,” he said as he turned her loose. “Watch it, Nino—“

He punched her, not as hard as he might have; then spent a moment or two brushing himself off, and redraped the whalesark over one shoulder, where it hung mistily shimmering like a scrap of fog with starlight caught in it. “Is that locked?” he said, looking up at Nita’s window with interest.

“Uh-huh.”

“And the front and back doors are too.”

“Yeah.”

Kit threw a wicked look at Nita as they made their silent way out of the yard and toward the beach. “Your mom and dad are going to be real curious how we got out of the house and then locked all the inside locks when we don’t have the keys.”

“Uh-huh,” Nita said. “If we’re gonna get in real trouble, we might as well confuse them as much as possible. It might distract them…”

“Wanna bet?” Kit said.

Nita didn’t answer.

The beach was desolate. Nita and Kit left their bathing suits under a prominent boulder and slid into the chilly water. Nita changed first and let Kit take hold of her dorsal fin and be towed out to deeper water. She shuddered once, not knowing why, at the strange cool feeling of human hands on her hide as she swam outward.

Beyond the breakers, the water was peculiarly still. The sky was cobalt with a hint of dawn-silver in it; the sea was sheenless, shadowless, the color of lead. And rising up from the listless water, four or five hundred yards from shore, a tall white fin was cruising in steady, silent circles, like the sail of a ghost ship unable to make port.

“I didn’t think Ed was going to be here,” Kit said. He let go of Nita’s fin and slipped off into the water.

“Neither did I,” Nita said, not knowing if he heard her before he dived. When he was finished changing, she dived too and made her way toward where Ed swam serenely.

S’reee was there as well. She swam close, whistling Nita a greeting, and brushed skin with her. Hotshot was there too, gamboling and swooping in the dim-lit water — though with just a little more restraint than usual around the silently drifting bulk of Ed.

“A long swim today,” S’reee said to Nita. “Up to Nantucket. Are you ready? Did you get your problem with your dam and sire worked out?”

“Not really,” Nita said. “In fact, it’ll probably get a lot worse before it gets any better. There’s going to be trouble tonight…” She stopped; there was no use letting it spoil the day. “Never mind,” she said. “Let’s go.”

S’reee led the way, a straight course east-northeast, to Nantucket Rips. From her reading and from what the Sea told her, Nita knew those were treacherous waters, full of sudden shelves and hidden rocks. And the wizard’s manual spoke of uneasy “forces” that lingered about those dead and broken ships — forces Nita suspected she would mistake for restless ghosts, if she should have the bad luck to see one.

“You are silent today,” said a dry, cool voice directly above Nita. Glancing upward, Nita saw floating above her, effortlessly keeping pace, the great pale form that had been one of the images keeping her awake last night. “And you did not greet me. Is this courtesy to another celebrant?”

“Good morning, Ed,” Nita said, in the same mildly edgy tone of voice she would have used on a human being who bugged her that way.

“Oh, indeed,” Ed said. “You’re bold, Sprat. And the boldness comes of distress. Beware lest I be forced to hurry matters, so that we should have even less time to get acquainted than you seem to desire.”

“That was something I was meaning to ask you about,” Nita said, looking up at Ed again. “The ‘distress’ business—“

“Ask, Sprat.”

“You said before that it was your ‘job’ to end distress where you found it…”

“You are wondering who gave me the job,” Ed said, sinking to Nita’s level, so that her left-side eye was filled with the sight of him. “Perhaps it was the Sea itself, which you wizards hear speaking to you all the time. You look askance? Doubtless you think the Sea would be too ‘good’ to assign a whole species to nothing but painful and violent killing.” Ed’s voice stayed cool as always, though there was a tinge of mockery to it. “If you think so, look around you, Sprat. The ocean is full of weaponry as effective as my teeth. Poisons and spines, snares and traps and claws that catch are everywhere. We all have to eat.”

Ed smiled at her. A long shiver went down Nita from head to tail; a shark’s smile is an expression the wise person does not provoke. “Those are just dumb creatures, though,” she said, keeping her song as inoffensive-sounding as possible. “They don’t think. You do — and you enjoy what you do.”

“So?” Ed swam closer. “How should I not? Like all my people I’m built to survive in a certain fashion… and it’s only wise to cause what you build to feel good when it does what it must to survive. My nerves are tuned to pain. That fact tells me beyond question what my job is. Distress calls me; blood in the water is the clearest sign of that distress, and I have a duty to it. If I destroy, still I serve life. What can’t elude me is often sick or injured, and suffering; what survives me or outthinks me is stronger and wiser for it. And the survivor’s descendants will be too. Is that so bad?”

“Well, that way… no. But I bet you wouldn’t be so calm about it if it was you dying.”

“Me? Die?” Ed laughed again. “The Master-Shark eats the Silent Lord’s ‘Gift,’ you know, along with the Silent One. There’s immortality in all the sharks, in various degrees. But what good is immortality if you haven’t died first? And nothing in the Sea is deadly enough to kill me against my will.”

Something about Ed’s voice was making Nita curious. “What about with it?”

“Ah, but will must spread to the body from the mind. And after all the years I’ve lived in it, my body is too strong. All it wants is to eat, and live. And so it does; and I swim on. Immortality is of terrible power. It would take something more powerful yet to override it…”

Nita didn’t say anything.

“But all that being so,” Ed said, “for good or ill, I am the Destroyer. Being that, I might as well enjoy my work, might I not? And so I do. Would it help if I decided to be miserable?” There was actually a touch of humor in that cold, dry voice.

“No, I suppose not.”

“So I go about my work with a merry heart,” Ed said, “and do it well as a result. That should please you, I think—“

“I’m delighted,” Nita sang, under her breath.

“—for spells work best, you wizards tell me, when all the participants are of light heart and enjoying themselves. I’ll certainly enjoy eating you when the time comes ‘round.”

“Ed, that’s not funny.”

“It isn’t?” said the Master-Shark, looking at her.

Nita stopped swimming, letting herself coast for a moment. There was something odd about the way he’d said that— “Ed, what was that crack supposed to mean?”

The look Ed gave her was expressionless as ever. “The Silent Lord is pleased to jest with me,” he said.

“Ed!”

“Distress, distress, Sprat. Have a care.”

Ed was drifting closer again, and Nita kept herself as outwardly calm as she could. “Ed,” she said, slowly and carefully, “are you trying to say that you’re actually planning to eat me sometime soon?”

“The day after tomorrow,” said the Master-Shark in perfect calm, “if we keep to schedule.”

Nita couldn’t think of a thing to say.

“You seem surprised,” Ed said. “Why?”

It took Nita a few moments to answer, for her mind was boiling with sudden memories. S’reee’s great relief when Nita agreed to participate in the Song. Her repeated questions to Nita about whether she was sure she wanted to do this. The Blue’s silent, sad appraisal and approval of her. S’reee’s remark about the Silent Lord’s contribution to the Song being the most important of any celebrant—“the Silent Lord has the most at stake.” And the wording of the Celebrant’s Oath itself, with its insistent repetition and the line Nita had been so sure was ceremonial: “and I will blend my blood with theirs should there be need…”

Nita gulped. “Ed,” she said, “the Song, the whole thing… I thought it was just sort of, sort of a play…”

“Indeed not.” Ed seemed unconcerned by her terror. “There’s always blood in the water at the end of the Song. I am no wizard, but even I know that nothing else will keep the Lone Power bound. Nothing but the willing sacrifice, newly made by the Celebrant representing the Silent One — by a wizard who knows the price he is paying and what it will buy. The spells worked during the Song would be powerless otherwise, and the Lone Power would rise again and finish what It once began.”

“But—“ Off on her right, she saw Kit looking curiously at her. But at the moment Kit meant nothing to her, and neither did Ed, or the chill silver light dawning in the water, or anything else. The manual’s words, which she’d skimmed over so casually: those were what mattered now. The whale singing the Silent One then enacts the Sacrifice in a manner as close to the original enactment as possible, depending on the site where the Song is being celebrated. The shark singing the Pale Slayer then receives the Sacrifice… With frightful clarity she could remember sitting on the fishing platform off Tiana Beach and S’reee saying, “The Silent One dived into a stand of razor coral; and the Master-Shark smelled her blood in the water, and… Well…”

Nita started to swim, without any real idea of where she was going, or why she was going there. She went slowly at first, then faster. “Neets,” Kit was singing behind her, “what’s wrong, what is it?”

“HNii’t!” sang another voice, farther away. “Wait! What’s the matter?”

That voice she wanted to hear some more from. Nita wheeled about and hurtled back the way she had come, almost ramming Kit, and not caring, letting him get out of her way as best he could. S’reee saw Nita coming and simply stopped swimming. “S’reee!” Nita cried, one long note that was more a scream than a song. “Why didn’t you tell me!”

“Oh, HNii’t,” S’reee sang, desperate and hurried, “the Master-Shark is about — for Sea’s sake, control yourself!”

“Never mind him! Why didn’t you tell me!”

“About what the Silent One does?” S’reee said, sounding confused and upset as Nita braked too late and almost hit her too. “But you said you knew!”

Nita moaned out loud. It was true, just about finished with my reading, she remembered herself saying. Only one thing I don’t understand; everything else is fairly straightforward… And, I got it, S’reee, let’s get on with it… But the truth didn’t break her rage. “You should have made sure I knew what you were talking about!”

“Why?” S’reee cried, getting angry herself now. “You’re a more experienced wizard than I am! You went into the Otherworlds and handled things by yourself that it’d normally take whole circles of wizards to do! And I warned you, make sure you know what you’re doing before you get into this! But you went right ahead!”

Nita moaned again, and S’reee lost her anger at the sound and moaned too. “I knew something bad was going to happen,” she sang unhappily. “The minute I found Ae’mhnuu dead and me stuck with organizing the Song, I knew! But I never thought it’d be anything as bad as this!”

Kit looked from one of them to the other, somewhat at a loss. “Look,” he said to S’reee, “are you telling me that the whale who sings the Silent One actually has to die?”

S’reee simply looked at him. Nita did not look at him, could not.

“That’s horrible,” Kit said in a hushed voice. “Nita, you can’t—“

“She must,” S’reee said. “She’s given her word that she would.”

“But couldn’t somebody else—“

“Someone else could,” S’reee said. “If that person would be willing to take the Oath and the role of the Silent Lord in HNii’t’s place. But no one will. What other wizard are we going to be able to find in the space of a day and a half who would be willing to die for Nita’s sake?”

Kit was silent with shock.

“Anyway, HNii’t took the Oath freely in front of witnesses,” S’reee said unhappily. “Unless someone with a wizard’s power freely substitutes himself for her, she has to perform what she’s promised. Otherwise the whole Song is sabotaged, useless — can’t be performed at all. And if we don’t perform it, or if something goes wrong…”

Nita closed her eyes in horror, remembering the time the Song failed. What Atlantis couldn’t survive, she thought in misery, New York and Loni Island sure won’t. Millions of people will die. Including Mom and Dad, Dairine, Ponch, Kit’s folks—

“But the Song hasn’t started yet,” Kit protested.

”Yes, it has,” Nita said dully. That she remembered very clearly from her reading; it had been in the commentaries, one of the things she found strange. “The minute the first Celebrant takes the Oath, the Song’s begun— and everything that happens to every Celebrant after that is part of it.”

“HNii’t,” S’reee said in a voice so small that Nita could barely hear her, “what will you do?”

A shadow fell over Nita, and a third and fourth pair of eyes joined the first two: Hotshot, grinning as always, but with alarm behind the grin; Ed, gazing down at her out of flat black eyes, emotionless as stones. “I thought I sensed some little troubling over here,” said the Master-Shark.

Kit and S’reee held still as death. “Yes,” Nita said with terrible casualness, amazed at her own temerity.

“Is the pain done?” said the Master-Shark.

“For the moment,” Nita said. She could feel herself slipping into shock, an insulation that would last her a few hours at least. She’d felt something similar, several years before, when her favorite uncle had died. The shock had gotten Nita through the funeral; but afterward, it had been nearly two weeks before she had been able to do much of anything but cry. I won’t have that option this time, she thought. There’s work to be done, a Song to sing, spells to work… But all that seemed distant and unimportant to her, since in a day and a half, it seemed, a shark was going to eat her. Kit looked at Nita in terror, as if he suddenly didn’t know her.

She stared back, feeling frozen inside. “Let’s go,” she said, and turned to start swimming east-northeast again, their original course. “The Gray is waiting, isn’t she?”

By the sound of her way-song Nita could hear S’reee and Kit and Hotshot following after her; and last of all, silent, songless, came Ed.

I’m going to die, Nita thought.

She had thought that before, occasionally. But she had never believed it.

She didn’t believe it now.

And she knew it was going to happen anyway.

Evidently, Nita thought, Ed had been right when he’d said that belief made no difference to the truth…