Summer Night's Song

Summer Night's Song




 Nita slipped out the back door of the beach house, careful not to let the rickety screen
 door slam, and for a second stood silently on the back porch in the darkness. It was no
 use. "Nita"—her mother's voice came floating out from the living room—"where're you
 going?"
  "Out," Nita said, hoping to get away with it just this once.
   She might as well have tried to rob a bank. "Out where?"
   "Down to the beach, Mom."
There was a sigh's worth of pause from the living room, broken by the sound of a crowd
on TV shouting about a base that had just been stolen somewhere in the country. "I don't
like you walking down there alone at night, Neets. ..."
"Nhhnnnnn," Nita said, a loud noncommittal noise she had learned to make while her
mother was deciding whether to let her do something. "I'll take Ponch with me," she said
in a burst of inspiration.
"Mmmmmm . . ." her mother said, considering it. Ponch was a large black and white dog,
part Border collie, part German shepherd, part mutt— an intrepid hunter of water rats and
gulls, and ferociously loyal to his master and to Nita because she was his master's best
friend. "Where's Kit?"
"I dunno." It was at least partly the truth. "He went for a walk a while ago."
'Well . . . okay. You take Ponch and look for Kit, and bring him back w'th you. Don't want
his folks thinking we're not taking care of him."
"Right, Ma," Nita said, and went pounding down the creaky steps from 'he house to the
yard before her mother could change her mind, or her rather, immersed in the ball game,
could come back to consciousness. Ponch! Hey Pancho!" Nita shouted, pounding through
the sandy front , through the gate in the ancient picket fence, and out across the narrow

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 paved road to the dune on the other side of the road. Joyous barking began on the far
 side of the dune as Nita ran up it. He's hunting again, Nita thought, and would have
 laughed for delight if running had left her any breath. This is the best vacation we ever
 had. . . .
 At the top of the dune she paused, looking down toward the long dark expanse of the
 beach. "It's been a good year," her father had said a couple of months before, over
 dinner. "We can't go far for vacation—but let's go somewhere nice. One of the beaches
 in the Hamptons, maybe. We'll rent a house and live beyond our means. For a couple
 weeks, anyway. ...
 It hadn't taken Nita much begging to get her folks to let her friend Kit Rodriguez go along
 with them, or to get Kit's folks to say yes. Both families were delighted that their children
 had each finally found a close friend. Nita, and Kit laughed about that sometimes. Their
 families knew only the surface | of what was going on—which was probably for the best.
 A black shape came scrabbling up the dune toward Nita, flinging sand in I all directions in
 his hurry. "Whoa!" she shouted at Ponch, but it was no use; it never was. He hit her
 about stomach level with both paws and knocked her down, panting with excitement;
 then, when she managed to sit up, he started | enthusiastically washing her face. His
 breath smelled like dead fish.
 "Euuuuw, enough!" Nita said, making a face and pushing the dog more or| less off her.
 "Ponch, where's Kit?"
"Yayayayayayayaya!" Ponch barked, jumping up and bouncing around Nita I in an
attempt to get her to play. He grabbed up a long string of dead seaweed | in his jaws and
began shaking it like a rope and growling.
"Cut it out, Ponch. Get serious." Nita got up and headed down the far| side of the dune,
brushing herself off as she went. "Where's the boss?"
"He played with me," Ponch said in another string of barks as he loped | down the dune
alongside her. "He threw the stick. I chased it."
    "Great. Where is he now?"
They came to the bottom of the dune together. The sand was harder I there, but still dry;
the tide was low and just beginning to turn. "Don't| know," Ponch said, a bark with a
grumble on the end of it.
"Hey, you're a good boy, I'm not mad at you," Nita said. She stopped to I scratch the dog
behind the ears, in the good place. He stood still with his tongue hanging out and looked
up at her, his eyes shining oddly in the of the nearly full Moon that was climbing the sky. "I
just don't feel playing right now. I want to swim. Would you find Kit?"
The big brown eyes gazed soulfully up at her, and Ponch made a small | beseeching
whine. "A dog biscuit?"


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Nita grinned. "Blackmailer. Okay, you find the boss, I'll give you a biscuit-Two biscuits.
Go get 'im!"
  Ponch bounded off westward down the beach, kicking up wet sand.

     DEEP WIZARDRY                                                                                                  169

 headed for the water line, where she shrugged off the windbreaker that had been
 covering her bathing suit and dropped it on the sand. Two months ago, talking to a dog
 and getting an answer back would have been something that happened only in Disney
 movies. But then one day in the library, Nita had stumbled onto a book called So You
 Want to Be a Wizard. She'd followed the instructions in the book, as Kit had in the copy
 he'd found in a used-book store—and afterward, dogs talked back. Or, more accurately,
 she knew what language they spoke and how to hear it. There was nothing that didn 't
 talk back, she'd found—only things she didn't yet know how to hear or how to talk to
 properly.
 Like parents, Nita thought with mild amusement. If her mother knew Nita was going
 swimming, she'd probably pitch a fit: she'd had a terrible thing about night swimming after
 seeing Jaws. But it's okay, Nita thought. There aren't any sharks here . . . and if there
 were, I think I could talk them out of eating me.
 She made sure her clothes were above the high-water line, then waded down into the
 breakers. The water was surprisingly warm around her knees. The waxing Moon, slightly
 golden from smog, made a silvery pathway on the water, everywhere else shedding a
 dull radiance that made both land and sea look alive.
What a great night, Nita thought. She went out another twenty paces or so, then
crouched over and dived into an incoming wave. Waterborne sand scoured her, the water
thundered in her ears; then she broke surface and lay in the roil and dazzle of the moonlit
water, floating. There were no street-lights there, and the stars she loved were bright.
After a while she stood up in the shoulder-high water, watching the sky. Back up on the
beach, Ponch was barking, excited and noisy. He can't have found Kit that fast, Nita
thought. Probably something distracted him. A crab, maybe. A dead fish. A shark. .
Something pushed her in the back, hard. Nita gasped and whipped around in the water,
thinking, This is it, there are too sharks here and I'm dead! The S1§ht of the slick-skinned
shape in the water stopped her breath—until she realized what she was looking at. A
slender body, ten feet long; a blowhole and an amused eye that looked at her sidelong;
and a long, beaked face that wore a permanent smile. She reached out a hesitant hand,
and under her touch the dolphin turned lazily, rolling sideways, brushing her with skin like
warm, moonlit satin.
                   She was immensely relieved. "Dai'stiho," she said, greeting the swimmer

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                        ln *ne
                            Tongue that wizards use, the language that she'd learned from her
                   anual and that all creatures understand. She expected no more answer than
                          "zz or squeak as the dolphin returned the greeting and went about its
                      business.

170                              SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL WIZARD

But the dolphin rolled back toward her and looked at her in what seemed to be shock. "A
wizard/" it said in an urgent whistle. Nita had no time to answer; the dolphin dived and its
tail slapped the surface, spraying her. By the time Nita rubbed the salt sting out of her
eyes, there was nothing near her but the usual roaring breakers. Ponch was bouncing
frantically on the beach, barking something about sea monsters to the small form walking
beside him.
   "Neets?"
Nita waded out of the breakers. At the water line Kit met her and handed Nita her
windbreaker. He was smaller than she was, a year younger, dark-haired and brown-eyed
and sharp of face and mind; definitely sharper, Nita thought with approval, than the usual
twelve-year-old. "He was hollering about whales," Kit said, nodding at Ponch.
"Dolphins," Nita said. "At least, a dolphin. I said hi to it and it said 'A wizard!' and ran
away."
"Great." Kit looked southward, across the ocean. "Something's going on out there, Neets.
I was up on the jetty. The rocks are upset."
Nita shook her head. Her specialty as a wizard was living things; animals and plants
talked to her and did the things she asked, at least if she asked properly. It still startled
her sometimes when Kit got the same kind of result from "unalive" things like cars and
doors and telephone poles, but that was where his talent lay. "What can a rock get upset
about?" she said.
"I'm not sure. They wouldn't say. The stones piled up there remembered something. And
they didn't want to think about it any more. They were shook." Kit looked up sharply at
Nita. "That was it The earth shook once. . . ."
"Oh, come off it. This isn't California. Long Island doesn't have earth-quakes."
"Once it did. The rocks remember. ... I wonder what that dolphin wanted?"
Nita was wondering too. She zipped up her windbreaker. "C'mon, we have to get back
before Mom busts a gut."
   "But the dolphin—"
Nita started down the beach, then turned and kept walking backward when she noticed
that Kit wasn't following her. "The ball game was almost over," she said, raising her voice

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as she got farther from Kit and Ponch. "They'll go to bed early. They always do. And
when they're asleep—"
Kit nodded and muttered something, Nita couldn't quite hear what. He vanished in a small
clap of inrushing air and then reappeared next to Nita> walking with her; Ponch barked in
annoyance and ran to catch up.
   "He really hates that 'beam-me-up-Scotty' spell," Nita said.

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"Yeah, when it bends space, it makes him itch. Look, I was practicing that other one—"
  "With the water?" She grinned at him. "In the dark, I hope."
  "Yeah. I'll show you later. And then—"
  "Dolphins."
  "\l\\-huh. C'mon, I'll race you."
They ran up the dune, followed by a black shape barking loudly about dog biscuits.

Wizards' Song




The Moon got high. Nita sat by the window of her ground-floor room, listening through the
stillness for the sound of voices upstairs. There hadn't been any for a while.
She sighed and looked down at the book she held in her lap. It looked like a library
book—bound in one of those slick-shiny buckram library bindings, with a Dewey decimal
number written at the bottom of the spine in that indelible white ink librarians use, and at
the top of the spine, the words SO YOU WANT TO BE A WIZARD. But on opening the
book, what one saw were the words Instruction and Implementation Manual, General and
Lim-ited Special-Purpose Wizardries, Sorceries, and Spells: 933rd Edition. Or that was
what you saw if you were a wizard, for the printing was done in the graceful, Arabic-
looking written form of the Speech.
Nita turned a few pages of the manual, glancing at them in idle interest. The instructions
she'd found in the book had coached her through her first few spells—both the kinds for

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which only words were needed and those that required raw materials of some sort. The
spells had in turn led her into the company of other wizards—beginners like Kit and more
experienced ones, typical of the wizards, young and old, working quietly all over the
world. And then the spells had taken her right out of the world she'd known, into one or
the ones "next door," and into a conflict that had been going on since time s beginning, in
all the worlds there were.
In that other world, in a place like New York City but also terribly differ' ent, she had
passed through the initial ordeal that every candidate for w ardry undergoes. Kit had been
with her. Together they had pulled each other and themselves through the danger and
the terror, to the successful compl6' tion of a quest into which they had stumbled. They
saved their own world without attracting much notice; they lost a couple of dear friends
they'd me'

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long tne way; and they came into their full power as wizards. It was a •yjlege that had its
price. Nita still wasn't sure why she'd been chosen as one of those who fight for the
Worlds against the Great Death of entropy. She was just glad she'd been picked.
She flipped pages to the regional directory, where wizards were listed by name and
address. Nita never got tired of seeing her own name listed there, for other wizards to call
if they needed her. She overshot her own page in the Nassau County section, wanting to
check the names of two friends, Senior Wizards for the area—Tom Swale and Carl
Romeo. They had recently been promoted to Senior from the Advisory Wizard level, and
as she'd suspected, their listing now read "On sabbatical: emergencies only." Nita
grinned at the memory of the party they'd thrown to celebrate their promotion. The guests
had been a select group. More of them had appeared out of nowhere than arrived
through the front door. Several had spent the afternoon floating in midair; another had
spent it in the fishpond, submerged. Human beings had been only slightly in the majority
at the party, and Nita became very careful at the snack table after her first encounter with
the dip made from Pennsyl-vania crude oil and fresh-ground iron filings. She paged back
through the listing and looked at her own name.

CALLAHAN, Juanita T.
On active status


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                                         243 E. Clinton Avenue HempsteadNY 11575 (516)
                                         379-6786 Assignment location: 38 Tiana Beach
                                         Road Southampton NY 11829 (516) 667-9084

Nita sighed, for this morning the status note had said, like Tom's,
"Vaca-tioning/emergencies only." The book updated itself all over that way—pages
changing sometimes second to second, reporting the status of worldgates in |he area,
what spells were working where, the cost of powdered newt at your '°cal Advisory.
Whatever's come up, Nita thought, we're expected to be able to handle it.
   Uf course, last time out they expected us to save the world, too. . . . "Neets!"
. ^ne jumped, then tossed her book out the window to Kit and began climb-'"gout. "Sssh!"
   Shhh yourself, mouth. They're asleep. C'mon."
  nce over the dune, the hiss and rumble of the midnight sea made talking ^- You on
  active status too?" Kit said. 'UP- Let's find the dolphin and see what's up."

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They ran for the breakers. Kit was in bathing suit and windbreaker as Nib was, with
sneakers slung over his shoulder by the laces. "Okay," he said "watch this." He said
something in the Speech, a long liquid-sounding sen' tence with a curious even-uneven
rhyme in it, all of which told the night and the wind and the water what Kit wanted of
them. And without pause Kit ran right up to the water, which was retreating at that
particular moment—and then onto it. Under his weight it bucked and sloshed the way a
waterbed will when you stand on it; but Kit didn't sink. He ran four or five paces out onto
the silver-slicked surface—then lost his balance and fell over sideways.
Nita started laughing, then hurriedly shut herself up for fear the whole beach should hear.
Kit was lying on the water, his head propped up on one hand; the water bobbed him up
and down while he looked at her with a sour expression. "It's not funny. I did it all last
night and it never happened once."
"Must be that you did the spell for two this time," Nita said, tempted to start laughing
again, except that Kit would probably have punched her out. She kept her face as
straight as she could and stepped out to the water, putting a foot carefully on an
incoming, flattened-out wave. It took her weight, flattening more as she stepped up with
the other foot and was carried backward. "It's like the slidewalk at the airport," she said,
putting her arms out for balance and wobbling.
"Kind of." Kit got up on hands and knees and then again, swaying. "Come on. Keep your
knees bent a little. And pick up your feet."


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It was a useful warning. Nita tripped over several breakers and sprawled each time, a
sensation like doing a bellywhopper onto a waterbed, until she got her sea legs. Once
past the breakers she had no more trouble, and Kit led her at a bouncy trot out into the
open Atlantic.

They both came to understand shortly why not many people, wizards or otherwise, walk
on water much. The constant slip and slide of the water under their feet forced them to
use leg muscles they rarely bothered with on land. They had to rest frequently, sitting,
while they looked around them for signs of the dolphin.
At their first two rest stops there was nothing to be seen but the lights or Ponquogue and
Hampton Bays and West Tiana on the mainland, three mite north. Closer, red and white
flashing lights marked the entrance to Shin-necock Inlet, the break in the long strip of
beach where they were staying-The Shinnecock horn hooted mournfully at them four
times a minute, a lonely-sounding call. Nita's hair stood up all over her as they sat down
the third time and she rubbed her aching legs. Kit's spell kept them from getting wet, but
she was chilly; and being so far out there in the dark and quiet *# very much like being in
the middle of a desert—a wet, hissing barrenness unbroken for miles except by the quick-
flashing white light of a buoy or tff°-

                              DEEP WIZARDRY                                                                         175

  "You okay?" Kit said.
     "Yeah. It's just that the sea seems . . . safer near the shore, somehow, deep is it
     here?"
Kit slipped his manual out of his windbreaker and pulled out a large nauti-cal map.
"About eighty feet, it looks like."
Nita sat up straight in shock. Something had broken the surface of the water and was
arrowing toward them at a great rate. It was a triangular fin. Nita scrambled to her feet.
"Uh, Kit!"
He was on his feet beside her in a second, staring too. "A shark has to stay in the water,"
he said, sounding more confident than he looked. "We don't. We can jump—"
  "Oh, yeah? How high? And for how long?"
The fin was thirty yards or so away. A silvery body rose up under it, and Nita breathed
out in relief at the frantic, high-pitched chattering of a dol-phin's voice. The swimmer
leaped right out of the water in its speed, came down, and splashed them both. "I'm late,
and you're late," it gasped in a string of whistles and pops, "and S'reee's about to be!
Hurry!"


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"Right," Kit said, and slapped his manual shut. He said nothing aloud, but the sea's
surface instantly stopped behaving like a waterbed and started act-ing like water.
"Whoolp!" Nita said as she sank like a stone. She didn't get wet—that part of Kit's spell
was still working—but she floundered wildly for a moment before managing to get hold of
the dolphin in the cold and dark of the water.
Nita groped up its side and found a fin. Instantly the dolphin took off, and Nita hoisted
herself up to a better position, hanging from the dorsal fin so that her body was half out of
the water and her legs were safely out of the way of the fiercely lashing tail. On the other
side, Kit had done the same. "You might have warned me!" she said to him across the
dolphin's back.
He rolled his eyes at her. "If you weren't asleep on your feet, you wouldn't need warning."
 "Kit—" She dropped it for the time being and said to the dolphin, 'What's S'reee? And
 why's it going to be late? What's the matter?"
"She," the dolphin said. "S'reee's a wizard. The Hunters are after her and she can't do
anything, she's hurt too badly. My pod and another one are with ner, but they can't hold
them off for long. She's beached, and the tide's coming in—"
Kit and Nita shot each other shocked looks. Another wizard in the area— and out in the
ocean in the middle of the night? "What hunters?" Kit said, and "Your pod?" Nita said at
the same moment.
The dolphin was coming about and heading along the shoreline, westward toward
Quogue. "The Hunters," it said in a series of annoyed squeaks and

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whistles. "The ones with teeth, who else? What kind of wizards are they turning out these
days, anyway?"
Nita said nothing to this. She was too busy staring ahead of them at a long dark bumpy
whale shape lying on a sandbar, a shape slicked with moonlight along its upper contours
and silhouetted against the dull silver of the sea. It was the look of the water that
particularly troubled Nita. Shapes leaped and twisted in it, shapes with two different kinds
of fins. "Kit!"
"Neets," Kit said, not sounding happy, "there really aren't sharks here, the guy from the
Coast Guard said so last week—"
"Tell them!" the dolphin said angrily. It hurtled through the water toward the sandbar


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around which the fighting continued, silent for all its viciousness. The only sound came
from the dark shape that lay partly on the bar, partly off it—a piteous, wailing whistle
almost too high to hear.
"Are you ready?"' the dolphin said. They were about fifty yards from the trouble.
    "Ready to what?" Kit asked, and started fumbling for his manual.
Nita started to do the same—and then had an idea, and blessed her mother for having
watched Jaws on TV so many times. "Kit, forget it! Remember a couple months ago and
those guys who tried to beat you up? The freeze spell?"
    "Yeah. . . ."
"Do it, do it big. I'll feed you power!" She pounded the dolphin on the side. "Go beach!
Tell your buddies to beach too!"
    "But—"
"Go do it!" She let go of the dolphin's fin and dropped into the water, swallowing hard as
she saw another fin, of the wrong shape entirely, begin to circle in on her and Kit. "Kit, get
the water working again!"
It took a precious second; and the next one—one of the longer seconds of Nita's life—for
her and Kit to clamber up out of the "liquid" water onto the "solid." They made it and
grabbed one another for both physical and moral support, as that fin kept coming. "The
other spell set?" Nita gasped.
    "Yeah—now!"
The usual immobility of a working spell came down on them both, with something
added—a sense of being not one person alone, but part of a one that was somehow
bigger than even Nita and Kit together could be. Inside that sudden oneness, she felt the
"freeze" spell waiting like a phone number with all but one digit dialed. Kit said the one
word in the Speech that set the spell free, the "last digit," then gripped Nita's hand hard.
Nita did her part, quickly saying the three most dangerous words in all wizardry—the
words that give all of a wizard's power over into another s hands. She felt it going from
her, felt Kit shaking as he wound her power, her trust, into the spell. And then she took all
her fright, and her anger at the

                        DEEP WIZARDRY                                            177

sharks, and her pity for the poor wailing bulk on the sand, and let Kit have those
too.
The spell blasted away from the two of them with a shock like a huge jolt of
static, then dropped down over the sandbar and the water for hundreds of
feet around, sinking like a weighted net. And as if the spell had physically
dragged them down, all the circling, hunting fins in the water sank out of

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 sight, their owners paralyzed and unable to swim.
 No wizardry is done without a price. Kit wobbled in Nita's grip as if he were
 going to keel over. Nita had to lock her knees to keep standing. But both of
 them managed to stay upright until the weakness passed, and Nita looked
 around with grim satisfaction at the empty water. "The sharks won't be
 bothering us now," she said. "Let's get up on the sandbar."
 It was a few seconds' walk to where the dolphins lay beached on the bar,
 chattering excitedly. Once up on the sand, Kit took a look at what awaited
 them and groaned out loud. Nita would have too, except that she found
 herself busy breathing deep to keep from throwing up. Everywhere the sand
 was black and sticky with gobs and splatters of blood, some clotted, some
 fresh.
 The dark bulk of the injured whale heaved up and down with her breath-ing,
 while small weak whistling noises went in and out. The whale's skin was
 marked with rope burns and little pits and ragged gashes of shark bites. The
 greatest wound, though, the one still leaking blood, was too large for any
 shark to have made. It was a crater in the whale's left side, behind the long
 swimming fin; a crater easily three feet wide, ragged with ripped flesh. The
 whale's one visible eye, turned up to the moonlight, watched Kit and Nita
 dully as they came.
 "What happened?" Kit said, looking at the biggest wound with disbelief and
 horror. "It looks like somebody bombed you."
"Someone did," the whale said in a long pained whistle. Nita came up beside
the whale's head and laid a hand on the black skin behind her eye. It was
very hot. "It was one of the new killing-spears," the whale said to Nita, "the
kind that blasts. But never mind that. What did you do with the sharks?"
Sank them. They're lying on the bottom with a 'freeze' on them." But if they don't
swim, they can't breathe—they'll die!" The concern in the whale's voice
astonished Nita. "Cousins, quick, kill the spell! We're going to need their good will
later."
Nita glanced at Kit, who was still staring at the wound with a tight, angry
'°ok on his face. He glanced up at her. "Huh? Oh. Sure. Better put up a
•zard's wall first, so that the dolphins can get back in the water without
getting attacked again."                                                        |
Right." Nita got her book out and riffled through pages to the appropri-              1

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ate spell, a short-term forcefield that needed no extra supplies to produce She said
the spell and felt it take hold, then sagged back against the whale and closed her eyes
till the dizziness went away. Off to one side she heard Kit saying the words that
released the freeze.
 A few moments later fins began appearing again out on the water, circling inward
 toward the sandbar, then sliding away as if they bumped into some-thing, and circling
 in again.
"The water will take the blood away soon enough," the whale said. "They'll go away
and not even remember why they were here. . . ." The whale's eye fixed on Nita
again. "Thanks for coming so quickly, cousins."
    "It took us longer than we wanted. I'm Nita. That's Kit."
 "I'm S'reee," the whale said. The name was a hiss and a long, plaintive, upscaling
 whistle.
Kit left the wound and came up to join Nita. "It was one of those explosive harpoons,
all right," he said. "But I thought those were supposed to be powerful enough to blow
even big whales in two."
"They are. Ae'mhnuu died that way, this morning." S'reee's whistle was bitter. "He was
the Senior Wizard for this whole region of the Plateau. I was studying with him—I was
going to be promoted to Advisory soon. Then the ship came, and we were doing a
wizardry, we didn't notice—"
Nita and Kit looked at each other. They had found out for themselves that a wizard is
at his most vulnerable when exercising his strength. "He died right away," S'reee said.
"I took a spear too. But it didn't explode right away; and the sharks smelled
Ae'mhnuu's blood and a great pack of them showed up to eat. They went into feeding
frenzy and bit the spear right out of me. Then one of them started chewing on the
spear, and the blasting part of it went off. It killed a lot of them and blew this hole in
me. They got so busy eating each other and Ae'mhnuu that I had time to get away.
But I was leaving bloodtrail, and they followed it. What else should I have ex-pected? .
. ."
She wheezed. "Cousins, I hope one of you has skill at healing, for I'm in trouble, and I
can't die now, there's too much to do."
"Healing's part of my specialty," Nita said, and was quiet for a moment. She'd become
adept, as Kit had, at fixing the minor hurts Ponch kept picking up—bee stings and cat
bites and so forth. But this was going to be different.
She stepped away from S'reee's head and went back to look at the wound, keeping
tight control of her stomach. "I can seal this up all right," she said-"But you're gonna
have a huge scar. And I don't know how long it'll take the muscles underneath to grow

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back. I'm not real good at this yet."
"Keep my breath in my body, cousin, that'll be enough for me," S'reee said.
  Nita nodded and started paging through her book for the section on rnedi-                                     i
                                                                                                                       I

                              DEEP WIZARDRY                                                                          179

cine- It started out casually enough with first aid for the minor ailments of wizards—the
physical ones like colds and the mental ones like spell backlash and brainburn. Behind
that was a section she had only skimmed before, never expecting to need it: Major
Surgery. The spells were complex and lengthy. That by itself was no problem. But all of
them called for one supply in common—the blood of the wizard performing them. Nita
began to shake. Seeing someone else bleed was bad enough; the sight of her own blood
in quantity tended to make her pass out.
"Oh, great," she said, for there was no avoiding what had to be done. "Kit, you have
anything sharp on you?"
  He felt around in his pockets. "No such luck, Neets. . . ."
  "Then find me a shell or something."
  S'reee's eye glinted in the moonlight. "There are the dolphins," she said.
"What do they—oh." The one dolphin still beached, the one who had brought them in,
smiled at Nita, exhibiting many sharp teeth.
"Oh, brother," she said, and went down the sandbar to where the dolphin lay. "Look," she
said, hunkering down in front of it, "I don't even know your name—"
  "Hotshot." He gave her a look that was amused but also kindly.
"Hotshot, right. Look—don't do it hard, okay?" And wincing, Nita put out her left hand and
looked away.
  "Do what?"
"Do llllp!" Nita said, as the pain hit. When she looked again, she saw that Hotshot had
nipped her very precisely on the outside of the palm—two little crescents of toothmarks
facing each other. Blood welled up, and the place stung, but not too badly to bear.
  Hotshot's eyes glittered at her. "Needs salt."
"Yeccch!" But Nita still wanted to laugh, even while her stomach churned. She got up and
hurried back to Kit, who was holding her book for her.
Together they went over to the terrible wound, and Nita put her bleeding hand to it, turned
away as far as she could, and started reading the spell. It was a long series of
complicated phrases in the Speech; she spoke them quickly at first, then more slowly as
she began to be distracted by the pain in her hand. And as often happens in a wizardry,
she began to lose contact with ner physical surroundings.

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Soon Kit and S'reee and the beach were gone. Even the book was gone, though she was
reading from it. She was surrounded by the roaring of green Water around her, and the
smell of blood and fear, and shadows in the water, Pursuing her. She swam for her life,
and kept reading.
 No wound can be healed, the book said, unless the pain of its inflicting is ully
 experienced. There was nothing to do but read, and flee, wailing terror-°ng and grief-
 song into the water, until the first pain came, the sick, cold

180                            SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL WIZARD

sharpness in her side. Nita knew she was sagging, knew Kit was holding her up from
behind. But all that was far away.
The second pain came, the fierce mouths ripping and worrying at her till she couldn't go
forward any more, only flail and thrash in an agony of help-lessness and revulsion—
—and then the third pain hit, and Nita lost control of everything and started to fall down as
the white fire blew up in her side. But the words were speaking her now, as they do in the
more powerful wizardries. Though in-wardly Nita screamed and cried for release, it did
her no good. Her own power was loose, doing what she had told it to, and the wizardry
wouldn't let her go until it was done. When it was, finally, it dropped her on her face in the
sand, and she felt Kit go down with her, trying to keep her from breaking something.
Eventually the world came back. Nita found herself sitting on the sand, feeling wobbly,
but not hurting anywhere. She looked up at S'reee's side. New gray skin covered the
wound, paler than the rest of the whale, but unbroken. There was still a crater there, but
no blood flowed; and many of the smaller shark bites were completely gone, as were the
burns from the harpoon's rope where it had gotten tangled around S'reee's flukes.
"Wow," Nita said. She lifted her left hand and looked at it. The place where Hotshot had
bitten her was just a little oval of pink puncture marks, all healed.
   "You all right?" Kit said, trying to help her up.
"Yeah, yeah, sure," Nita said. She pushed him away as kindly and quickly as she could,
staggered down to the water line, and lost her dinner.
When she came back, her mouth full of the taste of the salt water she'd used to wash it
out, S'reee had rolled herself more upright and was talking to Kit. "I still feel deathly sick,"
she said, "but at least dying isn't a problem . . . not for the moment."
She looked at Nita. Though the long face was frozen into that eternal smile, it was
amazing how many expressions could live in a whale's eyes. Admiration was there just
now, and gratitude. "You and I aren't just cousins now, hNii't," S'reee said, giving Nita's
name a whistly whalish intonation, "but sisters too, by blood exchanged. And I'm in your
debt. Maybe it's poor thanks to a debtor to ask him to lend to you again, right away. But

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maybe a sister, or a friend"—she glanced at Kit—"would excuse that if it had to happen."
"We're on active status," Kit said. "We have to handle whatever comes up in this area.
What's the problem?"
"Well then." S'reee's whistling took on a more formal rhythm. "As the only remaining
candidate Senior Wizard for the Waters About the Gates, by wizard's Right I request and
require your assistance. Intervention will take

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 place locally and last no more than ten lights-and-darks. The probable level of difficulty
 does not exceed what the manual describes as 'dangerous/ though if intervention is
 delayed, the level may escalate to 'extremely dangerous' or 'critical.' Will you assist?"
 Nita and Kit looked at each other, unnerved by the second part of the job description.
 S'reee moaned. "I hate the formalities," she said in a long un-happy whistle. "I'm too
 young to be a Senior: I'm only two! But with Ae'mhnuu gone, I'm stuck with it! And we're
 in trouble, the water people and the land people both, if we don't finish what Ae'mhnuu
 was starting when he died!" She huffed out a long breath. "I'm just a calf; why did I get
 stuck with this? . . ."
 Kit sighed too, and Nita made a face at nothing in particular. On their first job, she and Kit
 had said something similar, about a hundred times. "I'll help," she said, and "Me too,"
 said Kit, in about the same breath.
 "But you're tired," Nita said, "and we're tired, and it's late, we ought to go home. ..."
  "Come tomorrow, then, and I'll fill you in. Are you living on the Barrier?"
 Nita didn't recognize the name. "Over there," Kit said, pointing across the water at Tiana
 Beach. "Where the lights are."
 "By the old oyster beds," S'reee said. "Can you go out swimming a couple hours after the
 sun's high? I'll meet you and we'll go where we can talk."
   "Uh," Kit said, "if the sharks are still around—"
Out on the water there was a splash of spray as a silvery form leaped, chattering shrilly,
and hit the water again. "They won't be," S'reee said, sounding merry for the first time.
"Hotshot and his people are one of the breeds the sharks hate worst; when there are
enough of them around, few sharks would dare come into the area. Hotshot will be
calling more of his people in tonight and tomorrow—that's part of the work I'm doing."
   "Okay," Nita said. "But what about you? You're stuck here."
"Wake up!" Kit shouted playfully in Nita's ear, nudging her to look down at the sandbar.
She found herself standing ankle-deep in salt water. "Tide's coming in. She'll be floated
off here in no time."
''Oh. Well then. . . ." Nita opened her book, found the word to kill the wizard's-wall spell,

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and said it. Then she looked up at S'reee. "Are you sure you're gonna be all right?"
S'reee looked mildly at her from one huge eye. "We'll find out tomorrow," she said.
"Dai'stiho."
"Dai," Nita and Kit said, and walked slowly off the sandbar, across the water, and toward
the lights of home.

A Song of Choice




 Nita got up late, and was still yawning and scrubbing her eyes even after she'd washed
 and dressed and was well into her second bowl of cereal. Her mother, walking around the
 kitchen in her bathrobe and watering the plants that hung all over, looked at Nita
 curiously.
    "Neets, were you reading under the covers again last night?"
    "No, Mom." Nita started to eat faster.
 Her mother watered another plant, then headed for the sink. On the way, she put a hand
 against Nita's forehead. "You feel okay? Not coming down with anything, are you?"
 "No, I'm fine." Nita made an annoyed face when her mother's back was turned. Her mom
 loved the beach, but at the same time was sure that there were hundreds of ways to get
 sick there: too much heat, too much cold, too much time in the water; splinters, rusty
 nails, tar. . . . Nita's little sister Dairine had kicked off a tremendous family fight last week
 by insisting that the blueness of her lips after a prolonged swim was actually caused by a
 grape Popsicle.
    "Is Kit having a good time?" her mother said.
"Wow, yeah, he says it's the best," Nita said. Which was true enough: Kit had never been
at the beach for more than a day at a time before. Nita suspected that if he could, he'd
dig into the sand like a clam and not come out for months.
"I just wanted to make sure. His dad called last night . . . wanted to see how his 'littlest'
was."
" 'El Nino,' " Nita said, under her breath, grinning. It was what Kit s family called him
sometimes, a pun—both the word for "the baby" and the name for a Pacific current that
caused storms that could devastate whole countries. The name made Kit crazy, and Nita
loved to use it on him.

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                              DEEP WIZARDRY                                                                          183

 "Be careful he doesn't hear you," Nita's mom said mildly, "or he'll deck vou again. —How
 have you two been getting along?"
 "Huh? We're fine. Kit's great." Nita saw a slightly odd look come into her mother's eyes.
 "For a boy," she added hurriedly.
 "Well," her mother said, "be careful." And she took the watering can off jnto the living
 room.
 Now what was that about? Nita thought. She finished her cornflakes at high speed,
 rinsed the bowl and spoon in the sink, and hurried out of the house to find Kit.
 Halfway across the sparse sandy grass of the front yard, another voice spoke up. "Aha,"
 it said. "The mystery lady."
 "Put a cork in it, Dairine," Nita said. Her sister was hanging upside down from the trapeze
 swing of the rusty swing set, her short red hair rufHing in the breeze. Dairine was a tiny
 stick of a thing and an all right younger sister, though (in Nita's estimation) much too
 smart for her own good. Right now entirely too much smart was showing in those sharp
 gray eyes. Nita tried not to react to it. "Gonna fall down and bust your head open," she
 said. "Proba-bly lose what few brains you have all over the ground."
 Dairine shook her head, causing herself to swing a little. "Naaah," she said, "but I'd
 sooner"—she started pumping, so as to swing harder—"fall off the swing—than fall out
 the window—in the middle of the night!"
 Nita went first cold, then hot. She glanced at the windows to see if anyone was looking
 out. They weren't. "Did you tell?" she hissed.
"I—don't tell anybody—anything," Dairine said, in time with her swing-ing. This was true
enough. When Dairine had needed glasses, when she'd started getting beaten up at
school, and when she was exposed to German measles, nobody had heard about it from
her.
    "Y'like him, huh?" Dairine said.
Nita glared at Dairine, opened her mouth to start shouting, then remem-bered the open
windows.
"Yeah, I like him," Nita said, and turned red at having to make the admission. The
problem was, there was no lying to Dairine. She always found °ut the truth sooner or later
and made your life unbearable for having tried to h'de it from her.
     You messing around?" Dairine said.
'Dairiiiiiiiine!" Nita said, quietly, but with murder in it. "No, we are not Kessing around!"
     Okay. I just wondered. You going swimming?"

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No," Nita said, snapping the strap of her bathing suit very obviously at "er sister, "I
thought I'd go skiing. Wake up, lamebrain."
  Dairine grinned at Nita upside down. "Kit went west," she said.

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"Thanks," Nita said, and headed out of the yard. "Tell Mom and Dad I']] be back for
supper."
"Be careful," Dairine called after Nita, in a perfect imitation of their mother. Nita made a
face.
   "And watch out for sharks!" Dairine added at the top of her lungs.
"Oh, great," Nita said to herself, wondering if her mom or dad had heard She took off at a
dead run in case they had.

She found Kit waiting about a mile down the beach, playing fetch with Ponch to tire him
out, as he'd told her he was going to. "Otherwise he gets crazy if I go away. This way he'll
just lie down and sack out." And sure enough, after some initial barking and dancing
around Nita when she arrived, Ponch flopped panting on the sand beside them where
they sat talking and finally rolled over on one side and began to snore.
They grinned at each other and headed out into the water. It was un-nerving at first, to
swim straight out into the ocean, past the breakers and the rollers, past the place where
the bottom fell away, and to just keep going as if they never intended to come back. Nita
had uncomfortable thoughts about undertow and how it might feel to drown. But just
when she was at her twitchiest, she saw a long floppy fin tip up out of the water. S'reee
was lolling there in the wavewash, her long pale barnacled belly upward.
The night before, when S'reee had been injured and immobile, it had been hard to tell
much of anything about her. Now Nita was struck by the size of her—S'reee was at least
forty feet from the tips of her flukes to her pointy nose. And last night she had been a
wheezing hulk. Now she was all grace, floating and gliding and rolling like some absurd,
fat, slim-winged bird—for her long swimming fins looked more like wings than anything
else.
"Did you sleep well?" she sang at them, a weird cheerful crescendo like something out of
a happy synthesizer. "I slept wonderfully. And I ate well too. I think I may get back most
of the weight I lost yesterday."
   Kit looked at the healed place, treading water. "What do you eat?"
"Krill, mostly. The littlest things that live in the water, like little shrimp-But some fish too.
The blues are running, and the little ones are good. Of they have been until now. . . ."
She sighed, spraying water out her blow-hole. "That's in the story I have to tell you. Come

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on, we'll go out to one or the Made Rocks."
They took hold of her dorsal fin, and she towed them. The "Made Rock turned out to be
an old square fishing platform about three miles south oj Tiana Beach: wooden pilings
topped by wooden slats covered with tarred canvas and with bland-faced seagulls. Most
of the gulls immediately took ou and began flying around and screaming about the
humans sitting on thet spot, despite Nita's and Kit's polite apologies. Some of the other
gulls

                              DEEP WIZARDRY                                                                          185

less annoyed, especially after they found out the visitors were wizards. Later on>
whenever Nita thought of her first real conversation with S'reee, what she remembered
best were the two seagulls who insisted on sitting in her lap the whole time. They were
heavy, and not housebroken.
"I guess the best place to start," S'reee said when Nita and Kit were settled, "is with what
you already know, that there's been trouble for wizards on the land lately. The trouble's
been felt in the sea too. Out here we've been having quakes on the sea floor much more
often than we should be having them—severe ones. And some other old problems have
been getting worse. The dirt they throw into the water from the High and Dry, especially:
there's more of it than ever—"
   " The High and Dry'?"
   "The place with all the high things on it."
   "Oh," Kit said. "New York City. Manhattan, actually."
"The water close to it is getting so foul, the fish can't breathe it for many thousands of
lengths out. Those that can are mostly sick. And many more of the boats-that-eat-whales
have been out here recently. The past few months, there's been a great slaughter—"
Nita frowned at the thought of other creatures suffering what S'reee had been through.
She had heard all the stories about the hungry people in Japan, but at the moment she
found herself thinking that there had to be something else to eat.
"Things have not been good," S'reee said. "I know less about the troubles on land, but
the Sea tells us that the land wizards have been troubled of late, that there was some
great strife of powers on the High and Dry. We saw the Moon go out one night—"
"So did we," Kit said. There was fear in his eyes at the memory, and pride in his voice.
"We were in Manhattan when it happened."
"We were part of it," Nita said. She still didn't know all of how she felt about what had
happened. But she would never forget reading from the book that kept the world as it
should be, the Book of Night with Moon, while around her and Kit the buildings of
Manhattan wavered like a dream about to break—and beyond a barrier of trees brought

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 Summer Night's Song


to life, and battling statues, the personification of all darkness and fear, the Lone Power,
fought to get at toem and destroy them.
S'reee looked at them somberly from one eye. "It's true then what ^e mhnuu used to tell
me, that there are no accidents. You've met the Power that created death in the
beginning and was cast out for it. All these things— toe lost Moon, that night, and the
earthquakes, and the fouled water, and "e whale-eating ships—they're all Its doing, one
way or another."
  Kit and Nita nodded. "It took a defeat in that battle you two were in," reee said. "It's
  angry, and the problems we've been having are symptoms of

186                     SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL WIZARD

that anger. So we have to bind It, make It less harmful, as the first sea people bound It a
long time ago. Then things will be quiet again for a while."
   "Bind It how?" Nita said.
"No, wait a minute," Kit said. "You said something about the Sea telling you things—"
S'reee looked surprised for a moment. "Oh, I forgot that you do it differ-ently. You work
your wizardry with the aid of those things you carry—"
   "Our books."
"Right. The whales who are wizards get their wizardry from the Sea. The water speaks to
you when you're ready, and offers you the Ordeal. Then if you pass it, the Heart of the
Sea speaks whenever you need to hear it and tells you what you need to know."
Nita nodded. The events in that "other" Manhattan had been her Ordeal, and Kit's; and
after they passed it, their books had contained much more information than before. "So,"
she said, "bind the Lone Power how?"
"The way the first whale-wizards did," S'reee said. "The story itself is the binding. Or
rather, the story's a song: the Song of the Twelve. In the long form it takes—will
take—hours to sing."
   "I'm glad I had breakfast," Kit muttered.
S'reee spouted good-naturedly. Nita wondered whether it was accidental that the wind
turned at that exact moment, threw the spray straight at Kit, and soaked him to the skin.
At any rate, Nita laughed.
"I won't take quite that long," S'reee said. "You know about the great War of the Powers,
at the beginning of everything; and how the Lone Power invented death and pain, and
tried to impose them on the whole universe, and the other Powers wouldn't let It, and
threw It out."
"Even regular human beings have stories about it," Kit said. He took off his windbreaker
and shook it out, mostly on Nita.

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"I'm not surprised," S'reee said. "Everything that lives and tells stories has this story in
one form or another. Well. After that war in the Above and Beyond, the Lone Power spent
a long while in untraveled barren universes, recouping Its strength. Then It came back to
our native universe, looking for some quiet, out-of-the-way place to try out Its new
inventions. Right then the only place vulnerable to It, because thinking life was very new
here, was this world; and the only place thinking life existed as yet was the Sea. So the
Lo"e One came here to trick the Sea into accepting Death. Its sort of death,
anyway—where all power and love are wasted into an endless darkness, lost forever."
   "Entropy," Nita said.
"Yes. And any sea people It succeeded in tricking would be stuck with thai death, the
Great Death, forever. —Now there was already a sort of death «J the Sea, but only the
kind where your body stops. Everyone knew it wasn ~

                              DEEP WIZARDRY                                                                          187

permanent, and it didn't hurt much; you might get eaten, but you would go On as part of
someone else. No one was afraid of not being his own self any ffl0re—I guess that's the
simplest way of putting it. That calm way of life drove the Lone Power wild with hate, and
It swore to attach fear and pain to it and make it a lot more interesting."
S'reee sighed. "The whales' job then was what it is now: to be masters and caretakers for
the fish and the smaller sea people, the way you two-leggers are for the dry-land beasts.
So naturally, the only wizards in the Sea were whales, just as humans were originally the
only ones on land. That early on, there were only ten whale-wizards, all Seniors.
Ni'hwinyii, they were called, the Lords of the Humors—"
Nita was puzzled. "It's the old word for emotions, sort of," Kit said. "Not like 'funny'
humor."
   "I know," Nita said, annoyed. She hadn't.
S'reee blew, laughing. The spray missed Kit this time. "Those ten whales ruled the Sea,
under the Powers," she said. "If the Lone Power wanted to trick the Sea into the Great
Death, It had to trick the Ten—then all the life they ruled would be stuck with the Great
Death too. So the Lone One went to the Ten in disguise, pretending to be a stranger, a
new whale sent to them so that they could decide under which of their Masteries it fell.
And as each one questioned the Lone Power, the Stranger whale offered each of them
the thing he wanted most, if he would only accept the 'Gift' the Stranger would give him.
And he showed them just enough of his power to prove that he could do it."
   "Uh-oh," Kit said softly. "I've heard that one before."
   "Apples and snakes," Nita said.


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"Yes. The pattern repeats. One after another, the Lone One tempted the Ten. The Sea
was silent then and gave them no advice—some people say that the Powers wanted the
Ten to make up their own minds. But however that might have been, three of the Ten
took the Gift, and fell. Three of them were undecided. Three of them rejected the Gift.
And the Lone Power needed a majority of the Lords to accept Death, or Its victory would
only be Partial."
   "Those were only nine Lords, though," Kit said.
'Yes, and here the Tenth comes in: the Silent Lord, they called her. She was the youngest
of them, and each of the other Nine tried to bring her around to his own way of thinking.
The Lone One came to her too and tempted her as It had tempted the others. You know,
though, that it's the youngest wizard who has the most power, and where the other Lords
were deceived, the Silent Lord wasn't. She realized what the Stranger was and what It
was trying to do.
    She was faced with a difficult choice. She knew that even if she rejected

188                            SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL WIZARD

the Stranger, the fighting would only go on among the other Nine. Sooner or later they or
their successors would accept the Gift and doom the whole Sea to the Great Death. But
she also knew something else that the Sea had told her long before, and that others have
found out since. If one knows death is coming—any death, from the small ones to the
Great one—and is willing to accept it fully, and experience it fully, then the death
becomes something else—a passage, not an ending: not only for himself, but for others."
S'reee's voice got very soft. "So the Silent Lord did that," she said. "Luck, or the Powers,
brought one more creature into the singing, uninvited. It was the one fish over whom no
mastery was ever given—the Pale Slayer, whom we call the Master-Shark. The Silent
Lord decided to accept the 'Gift' that the Stranger offered her—and then, to transform the
Gift and make it 'safe,' she gave herself up willingly to die. She dived into a stand of razor
coral; and the Master-Shark smelled her blood in the water, and . . . well." S'reee blew.
"He accepted the sacrifice."
  Nita and Kit looked at each other.
"When that happened, the Lone Power went wild with rage," S'reee said. "But that did It
no good. The Silent One's sacrifice turned death loose in some of the Sea, but not all;
and even where it did turn up, death was much weaker than it would have been
otherwise. To this day there are fish and whales that have astonishing lifespans, and
some that never seem to die of natural causes. The sharks, for instance: some people
say that's a result of the Master-Shark's acceptance of the Silent Lord's sacrifice. But the
important thing is that the Lone Power had put a lot of Its strength into Its death-wizardry.

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 It had become death Itself, in a way. And when death was weak-ened, so was the Lone
 One. It fell to the sea floor, and it opened for It and closed on It afterward. And there It lies
 bound."
 " 'Bound'?" Kit said. "S'reee, when we had our last run-in with the Lone Power, It didn't
 seem very bound to us. It had a whole alternate universe of Its own, and when It came
 into this one to get us, It went around tearing things up any way It liked. If It is bound, how
 could It have also been running loose in Manhattan?"
S'reee blew, a sober sound. "It's the usual confusion about time," she said. "All the great
Powers exist outside it, and all we usually see of Them are the places and moments
where and when They dip into the timeflow we're inhabiting. This world has always been
an annoyance to the Lone One^K gets frustrated here a lot—so It visits often, in many
forms. From inside our timeflow, it can look as if the Lone Power is bound in one place-
time and free in another . . . and both appearances are true." S'reee rolled and stretched
in the water. "Meanwhile, outside the timeflow, where things don't have to happen one
after another, the Lone One is eternally rebelling and eternally defeated—"

                              DEEP WIZARDRY                                                                          189

"We gave It a chance to do something else, when we fought last," Nita said. "We offered
It the option to stop being a dark power—"
"And it worked," S'reee said, sounding very pleased. "Didn't you know? It's also eternally
redeemed. But meantime we have to keep fighting the battles, even though the war's
decided. The Lone One's going to take a long while to complete Its choice, and if we get
lazy or sloppy about handling Its thrashing around, a lot of people are going to die."
   "The sea floor," Nita said, "has been shaken up a lot lately."
"That's one symptom that tells us the TwelveSong needs to be reenacted," S'reee said.
"We do the Song at intervals anyway, to make sure the story's never forgotten. But when
the Lone Power gets troublesome—as It seems to be doing now—we reenact the Song,
and bind It quiet again."
   "Where do you do this stuff?" Kit said.
"Down the coast a ways," S'reee said, "off the edge of the plateau, in the Great Deep
past the Gates of the Sea. Ae'mhnuu was getting ready to call the Ten together for a
Song in three days or so. He was training me for the Singer's part—before they blew him
in two pieces and boiled him down for oil."
Her song went bitter, acquiring a rasp that hurt Nita's ears. "Now I'm stuck handling it all
myself. It's not easy: You have to pick each whale wizard carefully for each part. I don't
know who he had in mind to do what. Now I have to work it out myself—and I need help,
from wizards who can handle trouble if it comes up." She looked up at them. "You two

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can obviously manage that. And the Ten will listen to you, they'll respect you, after what
you went through up in the High and Dry. You've fought the Lone Power yourselves and
gotten off—"
   "It was luck," Kit muttered. Nita elbowed him.
"Singing, huh," Nita said, smiling slightly. "I don't have much of a singing voice. Maybe I'd
better take the Silent One's part."
   S'reee looked at Nita in amazement. "Would you?"
   "Why not?"
"Not me," Kit said. "I'm even worse than she is. But I'll come along for the ride. The swim,
I mean."
S'reee looked from Kit to Nita. "You two are enough to make me doubt all the stories I've
heard about humans," she said. "HNii't, best check that book' thing and make sure this is
something you'ie suited for. The tempera-ments of the singers have to match the parts
they sing—but I think this might suit you. And the original Silent Lord was a humpback.
The shapechange would come easily to you, since we've shared blood—"
  "Wait a minute! Shapechange?" Nita cried. "You mean me be a whale?"
Kit laughed. "Why not, Neets? You have been putting on a little weight lately. ..."

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She elbowed him again, harder. "Oh, you'd shapechange too, Kit," S'reee said. "We
couldn't take you down in the Great Deeps otherwise. —Look, you two, there's too much
to tell, and some of it's going to have to be handled as we go along. We've got three days
to get everyone together for the Song, so that it happens when the Moon's round.
Otherwise it won't keep the sea bottom quiet—"
Kit looked suddenly at Nita. "Did you see that thing on the news the other night? About
the volcano?"
   "The what?"
"There was some scientist on. He said that hot-water vents had been opening up all of a
sudden off the Continental Shelf. And he said that if those little tremors we've been
having keep getting worse, it could open the bottom right up and there'd be a volcano.
The least it'd do would be to boil the water for miles. But it could also break Long Island in
two. The beaches would go right under water. And Manhattan skyscrapers aren't built for
earthquakes." Kit was quiet for a moment, then said, "The rocks remem-bered. That's
why they were upset. . . ."
Nita wasn't thinking about rocks, or Manhattan. She was thinking that her folks were
planning to be there for another week and a half at least—and she saw a very clear
picture of a tidal wave of dirty, boiling water crashing down on the beach house and

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smashing it to driftwood.
   "When should we start, S'reee?" she said.
"Dawn tomorrow. There's little time to waste. Hotshot will be going with us—he'll be
singing the Fourth Lord, the Wanderer, in the Song."
"Dawn—" Nita chewed her lip. "Could it be a little later? We've got to have breakfast with
my parents or they'll freak out."
"Parents?" S'reee looked from Nita to Kit in shock. "You're still calves, is that what you're
telling me? And you went outworld into a Dark Place and came back! I'd thought you
were much older—"
   "We wished we were," Nita said under her breath.
"Oh, well. No matter. Three hours after dawn be all right? The same place? Good
enough. Let me take you back. I have something to fetch so that you can swim with us,
Kit. And, look—" She gazed at them for some time from that small, worried, gentle eye;
but longer at Nita. "Thank you," she said. "Thank you very much indeed."
"Think nothing of it," Kit said grandly, slipping into the water and patting S'reee on one big
ribbed flank.
Nita slid into the water, took hold of S'reee's dorsal fin, and thought something of it all the
way home.

Seniors' Song




The alarm clock went off right above Nita's head, a painful blasting buzz like a dentist's
drill. "Aaagh," she said, reluctantly putting one arm out from under the covers and
fumbling around on the bedside table for the noisy thing.
It went quiet without her having touched it. Nita squinted up through the morning
brightness and found herself looking at Dairine. Her little sister was standing by the
bedside table with the alarm clock in her hands, wearing Star Wars pajamas and an
annoyed look.
   "And where are we going at six in the morning?" Dairine said, too sweetly.
"We are not going anywhere," Nita said, swinging herself out of bed with a groan. "Go
play with your Barbie dolls, Einstein."
"Only if you give them back," Dairine said, unperturbed. "Anyway, there are better things

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to play with. Kit, for example—"
"Dairine, you're pushing it." Nita stood up, rubbed her eyes until they started working
properly, and then pulled a dresser drawer open and began Pawing through it for a T-
shirt.
"What're you doing, then—getting up so early all the time, staying out late? You think
Mom and Dad aren't noticing? —Oh, don't wear that," Dairine said aj the sight of Nita's
favorite sweatshirt. It featured numerous holes made by Ponch's teeth and the words
watch this space for fur-ther developments. "Oh, really, Neets, don't, it's incredibly
tacky—"
"That sounds real weird," Nita said, "coming from someone with little Yodas all over her
pajamas."
"Oh, stuff it, Nita," Dairine said. Nita turned her head and smiled, think-lng that Dairine
had become easier to tease since she'd decided to be a Jedi ^night when she grew up.
Still, Nita went easy on her sister. It wasn't fair for

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a wizard to make fun of someone who wanted to do magic, of whatever brand.
    "Same to you, runt. When're Mom and Dad getting up, did they say?"
    "They're up now."
    "What for?"
    "They're going fishing. We're going with them."
    Nita blanched. "Oh, no! Dair, I can't—"
    Dairine cocked her head at Nita. "They wanted to surprise us."
    "They did," Nita said, in shock. "I can't go—"
    "Got a hot date, huh?"
    "Dairine! I told you—"
    "Where were you two going?"
    "Swimming." That was the truth.
"Neets, you can swim any time," Dairine said, imitating their mother's tone of voice. Nita
zipped up her jeans and sat down on the bed with a thump. "What were you gonna be
doing, anyway?"
"I told you, swimming!"Nita got up, went to the window, and looked out, thinking of S'reee
and the summoning and the Song of the Twelve and the rest of the business of being on
active status, which was now looking ridicu-lously complicated. And it looked so simple
yesterday. . . .


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   "You could tell them something—"
Nita made a face at that. She had recently come to dislike lying to her parents. For one
thing, she valued their trust. For another, a wizard, whose business is making things
happen by the power of the spoken word, learns early on not to say things out loud that
aren't true or that he doesn't want to happen.
"Sure," she said in bitter sarcasm. "Why don't I just tell them that we're on a secret
mission? Or that we're busy saving Long Island and the greater metropolitan area from a
fate worse than death? Or maybe I could tell them that Kit and I have an appointment to
go out and get turned into whales, how about that?"
Even without turning around, Nita could feel her sister staring at her back. Finally the
quiet made Nita twitchy. She turned around, but Dairine was already heading out of the
room. "Go on and eat," Dairine said quietly, over her shoulder. "Sound happy." And she
was gone.
Under her breath, Nita said a word her father would have frowned at, and then sighed
and headed for breakfast, plastering onto her face the most sincere smile she could
manage. At first it felt hopelessly unnatural, but in a few seconds it was beginning to stick.
At the dining-room door, where her father came around the corner from the kitchen and
nearly ran her over, Nita took one look at him—in his faded lumberjack shirt and his hat
stuck full o>

193

DEEP WIZARDRY


gsh hooks—and wondered why she had ever been worried about getting out Of the
fishing trip. It was going to be all right.
   Her dad looked surprised. "Oh! You're up. Did Dairine—"
   "She told me," Nita said. "Is there time to eat something?"
"Sure. I guess she told Kit too then—I just looked in his room, but he wasn't there. The
bed was made; I guess he's ready—"
Nita cheerfully allowed her father to draw his own conclusions, especially since they were
the wrong ones. "He's probably down at the beach killing time," she said. "I'll go get him
after I eat."
She made a hurried commando raid on the kitchen and put the kettle on the stove for her
mother, who was browsing through the science section of The New York Times and was
ready for another cup of tea. Nita's mother looked up at her from the paper and said,
"Neets, where's your sister? She hasn't had breakfast."

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 That was when her sister came thumping into the dining room. Nita saw her mom look at
 Dairine and develop a peculiar expression. "Dari," her mother said, "are you feeling all
 right?"
 "Yeah!" said Dairine in an offended tone. Nita turned in her chair to look at her. Her sister
 looked flushed, and she wasn't moving at her normal break-neck speed. "C'mere, baby,"
 Nita's mother said. "Let me feel your fore-head."
     "Mom!"
   "Dairine," her father said.
"Yeah, right." Dairine went over to her mother and had her forehead felt, rolling her eyes
at the ceiling. "You're hot, sweetie," Nita's mother said in alarm. "Harry, I told you she
was in the water too long yesterday. Feel her."
Nita's dad looked slightly bored, but he checked Dairine's forehead and then frowned.
"Well. . . ."
    "No 'wells.' Dari, I think you'd better sit this one out."
    "Oh, Mom!"
"Cork it, little one. You can come fishing with us in a day or two." Nita's mother turned to
her. "Neets, will you stick around and keep an eye on your sister?"
    "Mom, I don't need a babysitter!"
'Enough, Dairine," her mom said. "Up to bed with you. Nita, we'll take you and Kit with us
the next time; but your dad really wants to get out today."
''t's okay, Mom," Nita said, dropping what was left of the smile (though it now really
wanted to stay on). "I'll keep an eye on the runt."
    "Don't call me a runt!"
Dairine," her father said again. Nita's little sister made a face and left, a8ain at half the
usual speed.

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As soon as she could, Nita slipped into Dairine's room. Her sister was lying on top of the
bed, reading her way through a pile of X-Men comics; she looked flushed. "Not bad,
huh?" she said in a low voice as Nita came in.
   "How did you do that?" Nita whispered.
   "I used the Force," Dairine said, flashing a wicked look at Nita.
    "Dan! Spill it!"
"I turned Dad's electric blanket up high and spent a few minutes under it. Then I drank
about a quart of hot water to make sure I stayed too warm." Dairine turned a page in her
comic book, looking blase about the whole thing. "Mom did the rest."


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  Nita shook her head in admiration. "Runt, I owe you one."
  Dairine looked up from her comic at Nita. "Yeah," Dairine said, "you do."
Nita felt a chill. "Right," she said. "I'll hang out here till they leave. Then I have to find
Kit—"
"He went down to the general store just before you got up," Dairine said. "I think he was
going to call somebody."
  "Right," Nita said again.
There was the briefest pause. Then: "Whales, huh?" Dairine said, very softly.
  Nita got out of there in a great hurry.

The sign on top of the building merely said, in big, square, black letters, tiana beach. "
Tiana Beach' what?" people typically said, and it was a fair question. From a distance
there was no telling what the place was, except a one-story structure with peeling white
paint.
The building stood off the main road, at the end of a spur road that ran down to the water.
On one side of it was its small parking lot, a black patch of heat-heaved asphalt always
littered with pieces of clamshells, which the gulls liked to drop and crack open there. On
the other side was a dock for people who came shopping in their boats.
The dock was in superb repair. The store was less so. Its large multipaned front windows,
for example, were clean enough outside, but inside they were either covered by stacked-
up boxes or with grime; nothing was visible through them except spastically flashing old
neon signs that said "Pabst Blue Ribbon" or "Cerveza BUDWEISER." Beachgrass and
aggressive weeds grew next to (and in places, through) the building's cracked concrete
steps-The rough little U.S. Post Office sign above the front door had a sparrow's nest
behind it.
Nita headed for the open door. It was always open, whether Mr. Friedman the
storekeeper was there or not; "On the off chance," as Mr. FriedmaH usually said, "that
someone might need something at three in the morning ... or the afternoon. ..."

                              DEEP WIZARDRY                                                                          195

jsjita walked into the dark, brown-smelling store, past the haphazard shelves of canned
goods and cereal and the racks of plastic earthworms and nylon surf-casting line. By the
cereal and the crackers, she met the reason that Mr. Friedman's store was safe day and
night. The reason's name was Dog: a whitish, curlyish, terrierish mutt, with eyes like
something out of Disney and teeth like something out of Transylvania. Dog could smell
at-tempted theft for miles; and when not biting people in the line of business, he would do
it on his own time, for no reason whatever—perhaps just to keep his fangs in.

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    "Hi, Dog," Nita said, being careful not to get too close.
    Dog showed Nita his teeth. "Go chew dry bones," he said in a growl.
 "Same to you," Nita said pleasantly, and made a wide detour around him, heading for the
 phone booth in the rear of the store.
 "Right," Kit was saying, his voice slightly muffled by being in the booth. "Something about
 'the Gates of the Sea.' I tried looking in the manual, but all I could find was one of those
 'restricted' notices and a footnote that said to see the local Senior for more details—"
 Kit looked up, saw Nita coming, and pointed at the phone, mouthing the words "Tom and
 Carl." She nodded and squeezed into the booth with him; Kit tipped the hearing part of
 the receiver toward her, and they put their heads together. "Hi, it's Nita—"
"Well, hi there yourself," Tom Swale's voice came back. He would doubt-less have gone
on with more of the same if someone else, farther away from his end of the line, hadn't
begun screaming "Hel-LOOOOOOO! HEL-lo!" in a creaky, high-pitched voice that
sounded as if Tom were keeping his insane grandmother chained up in the living room.
This, Nita knew, was Tom and Carl's intractable macaw Machu Picchu, or Peach for
short. Wiz-ards' pets tended to get a bit strange as their masters grew more adept in
wizardry, but Peach was stranger than most, and more trying. Even a pair of Senior
wizards must have wondered what to do with a creature that would at °ne moment deliver
the evening news a day early, in a flawless imitation of anY major newscaster you
pleased, and then a second later start ripping up the couch for the fun of it.
Cut that out!" Nita heard another voice saying in the background, one w'th a more New
Yorkish sound to it: That was Carl. "Look out!— She's on the stove. Get her—oh, Lord.
There go the eggs. You little cannibal!—"
'It's business as usual around here, as you can tell," Tom said. "Not where you are,
though, to judge from how early Kit called . . . and from what he tells me. Kit, hang on a
minute: Carl's getting the information released for y°u Evidently the Powers That Be don't
want it distributed without a Se-ni°r s supervision. The area must be sensitive right now."
   Nita made small talk with Tom for a few minutes while, in the back-

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ground, Peach screamed, and Annie and Monty the sheepdogs barked irrita-bly at the
macaw, who was shouting "Bad dog! Bad dog! Nonono!" at them —or possibly at Carl.
Nita could imagine the scene very well—the bright airy house full of plants and animals, a
very ordinary-looking place as far as the neighbors were concerned. Except that Tom
spent his days doing research and development on complex spells and incantations for
other wizards, and then used some of the things he discovered to make a living as a
writer on the side. And Carl, who sold commercial time for a "flagship" station of one of

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the major television networks, might also make a deal to sell you a more unusual kind of
time—say, a piece of last Thursday. The two of them were living proof that it was possible
to live in the workaday world and function as wizards at the same time. Nita was very glad
to know them.
 "The link's busy," she heard Carl saying, at some distance from the phone. "Oh, never
 mind, there it goes. Look," he said, apparently to one of his own advanced-level manuals,
 "we need an intervention authorization for an off-shore area—yeah, that's right. Here's
 the numbers—"
 Kit had his manual open to the spot where he'd found the notification. Nita looked over
 his shoulder and watched the box that said restricted information suddenly blink out,
 replaced by the words see chart page 1096. "Got it?" Tom said.
"Almost." Kit turned pages. Nita looked over his shoulder and found her-self looking at a
map of the East Coast, from Nova Scotia to Virginia. But the coast itself was squeezed
far over on the left-hand side, and individual cities and states were only sketchily
indicated. The map was primarily con-cerned with the ocean.
"Okay, I've got it in my book too," Tom said. "All those lines in the middle of the water are
contour lines, indicating the depth of the sea bottom. You can see that there aren't many
lines within about a hundred miles of Long Island. The bottom isn't much deeper than a
hundred feet within that distance. But then—you see a lot of contour lines packed closely
together? That's the edge of the Continental Shelf. Think of it as a cliff, or a mesa, with
the North American continent sitting on top of it. Then there's a steep drop—the cliff is
just a shade less than a mile high—"
   "Or deep," Nita said.
"Whichever. About a five thousand foot drop; not straight down—-it slopes a bit—but
straight enough. Then the sea bottom keeps on sloping eastward and downward. It
doesn't slope as fast as before, but it goes deep-some fifteen thousand feet down; and it
gets deeper yet farther out. See where it says 'Sohm Abyssal Plain' to the southeast of
the Island, about six or seven hundred miles out?"
"It has 'the Crushing Dark' underneath that on our map," Nita said. "" that the whales'
name for it?"

                              DEEP WIZARDRY                                                                          197

  "Right. That area is more like seventeen, eighteen thousand feet down."
  "I bet it's cold down there," Kit muttered.
"Probably. Let me know when you get back," Tom said, "because that's where you're
going."
Nita and Kit looked at each other in shock. "But I thought even subma-rines couldn't go

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 down that far," Nita said.
 "They can't. Neither can most whales, normally—but it helps to be a wizard," Tom said.
 "Look, don't panic yet—"
 "Go ahead! Panic!" screamed Picchu from somewhere in the background. "Do it now and
 avoid the June rush! Fear death by water!"
 "Bird," Carl's voice said, also in the background, "you're honing for a punch in the beak."
 "Violence! You want violence, I'll give you violence! No quarter asked or given! Damn the
 torpedoes, full speed ahead! Don't give up the AWWWKI"
 "Thanks, Carl," Tom said, as silence fell. "Where were we? Oh, right. You won't just be
 going out there and diving straight down. There's a specific approach to the Plain. Look
 back closer to the Island, and you'll see some contours drawn in dotted lines—"
     "Hudson Channel," Nita said.
 "Right. That's the old bed of the Hudson River—where it used to run a hundred thousand
 years ago, while all that part of the Continental Shelf was still above water. That old
 riverbed leads farther southeast, to the edge of the Shelf, and right over it ... there was
 quite a waterfall there once. See the notch in the Shelf?"
   "Yeah. 'Hudson Canyon,' it says—"
"The Gates of the Sea," said Tom. "That's the biggest undersea canyon on the East
Coast, and probably the oldest. It cuts right down through the Shelf. Those walls are at
least two or three thousand feet high, sometimes four. Some of the canyons on the Moon
and Mars could match the Hudson —but none on Earth. And for the whale-wizards, the
Gates have become the traditional approach to the Great Depths and the Crushing Dark."
The thought of canyon walls stretching above her almost a mile high gave chills. She'd
seen a rockslide once, and it had made her uneasy about canyons in general. "Is it
safe?" she said.
"Of course not," Tom said, sounding cheerful. "But the natural dangers are Carl's
department; he'll fill you in on what precautions you'll need to take, and I suspect the
whales will too."
    " 'Natural dangers,' " Kit said. "Meaning there are unnatural ones too."
"In wizardry, when aren't there? This much I can tell you, though. New York City has not
been kind to that area. All kinds of things, even unex-Ploded depth charges, have been
dumped at the head of Hudson Canyon

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over the years. Most of them are marked on your map; but watch out for ones that aren't.
And the city has been dumping raw sewage into the Hudson Channel area for decades.
Evidently in the old days, before people were too concerned about ecology, they thought

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the water was so deep that the dump-ing wouldn't do any harm. But it has. Quite a bit of
the sea-bottom life in that area, especially the vegetation that the fish depend on for food,
has been killed off entirely. Other species have been . . . changed. The manual will give
you details. You won't like them."
Nita suspected that Tom was right. "Anyway," he said, "let me give you the rest of this.
After you do the appropriate rituals, which the whales will coach you through, the access
through the Gates of the Sea takes you down through Hudson Canyon to its bottom at
the lower edge of the Shelf, and then deeper and farther southeast—where the canyon
turns into a valley that gets shallower and shallower as it goes. The valley ends just about
where the Abyssal Plain begins, at seven hundred miles off the coast, and seventeen
thousand feet down. Then you come to the mountain."
It was on the map—a tiny set of concentric circles—but it had looked so peculiar,
standing there all by itself in the middle of hundreds of miles of flatness, that Nita had
doubted her judgment. "The Sea's Tooth," she said, reading from the map.
"Caryn Peak," Tom agreed, giving the human name. "Some of the ocean-ographers think
it's simply the westernmost peak of an undersea mountain range called the Kelvin
Seamounts—they're off the eastward edge of your map. Some think otherwise; the
geological history of that area is bizarre. But either way, the Peak's an important spot.
And impressive; that one peak is six thousand feet high. It stands up sheer from the
bottom, all alone, a third as high as Everest."
"Five Empire State Buildings on top of each other," Kit said, awed. He liked tall things.
"A very noticeable object," Tom said. "It's functioned as landmark and meeting place and
site of the whales' great wizardries for not even they know how long. Certainly since the
continents started drifting toward their present positions ... at least a hundred thousand
years ago. And it may have been used by ... other sorts of wizards . . . even earlier than
that. There's some interesting history in that area, tangled up with whale-wizards and
human ones too."
Tom's voice grew sober. "Some of the wizards who specialize in history saJ that humans
only learned wizardry with the whales' assistance . . . an" even so, our brands of wizardry
are different. It's an old, old branch of the Art they practice. Very beautiful. Very
dangerous. And the area around Caryn Peak is saturated with residue from all the old
wizardries that whales>

                              DEEP WIZARDRY                                                                          199

and others, have done there. That makes any spell you work there even more
dangerous." "S'reee said that the 'danger' level wouldn't go above 'moderate,' " Kit

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said.
   "She said it shouldn't," Nita said.
"Probably it won't," Tom said. He didn't sound convinced, though. "You should bear in
mind that the 'danger' levels for humans and whales differ. Still, the book said she was
about to be promoted to Advisory status, so she would know that— All the same . . . you
two keep your eyes open. Watch what agreements you make. And if you make
them—keep them, to the letter. From all indications, the Song of the Twelve is a lovely
wizardry, and a powerful one . . . probably the most powerful magic done on a regular
basis. The sources say it leaves its participants forever changed, for the better. At least, it
does when it works. When it fails—which it has, once or twice in the past—it fails
because some participant has broken the rules. And those times it's failed. . . . Well, all I
can say is that I'm glad I wasn't born yet. Be careful."
"We will," Nita said. "But what are the chances of something going wrong?"
"We could ask Peach," Kit said. It was a sensible suggestion; the bird, besides doing
dramatic readings from Variety and TV Guide, could also predict the future—when it
pleased her.
   "Good idea. Carl?"
"Here I am," Carl said, having picked up an extension phone. "Now, Kit, about the
monsters—"
"Carl, put that on hold a moment. What does the Walter Cronkite of the bird world have to
say about all this?"
    "I'll find out."
Monsters? Nita mouthed at Kit. "Listen," she said hurriedly to Tom, "I'm going to get off
now. I've got to be around the house when my folks leave, so they won't worry about my
little sister."
    "Why? Is she sick?"
"No. But that's the problem. Tom, I don't know what to do about Dairine. I thought
nonwizards weren't supposed to notice magic most of the time. I'm lot sure it's working
that way with Dairine. I think she's getting suspi-cious. ..."
    "We'll talk. Meanwhile, Carl—what does the bird say?"
"Oh, it is, it is a splendid thing/To be a pirate kiiiiiiiiiiiiing!" Picchu was Slnging from
somewhere in Tom's living room.
    "Picchu—"
    "What'sa matter? Don't you like Gilbert and Sullivan?"

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"I told you we should never have let her watch Pirates on cable," Tom remarked to his
partner.
   "Twice your peanut ration for the week," Carl said.
  ". . . and I did the deed that all men shun, I shot the Albatross. . . ."
   "You're misquoting. How about no peanuts for the rest of the week—"
  "Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!"
   "How about no food?"
"Uh—" There was a pause. It didn't take Nita much imagination to picture the look that
Carl was giving Picchu. She was glad no one had ever looked at her that way.
   "Give."
"Well." The bird paused again, a long pause, and when she spoke her voice sounded
more sober than Nita could remember ever hearing it. "Do what the night tells you. Don't
be afraid to give yourself away. And read the small print before you sign!"
Kit glanced at Nita with a quizzical expression; she shrugged. At the other end of the line,
sounding exceptionally annoyed, Carl said to Picchu, "You call that advice? We asked
you for the odds!"
"Never ask me the odds," Picchu said promptly. "I don't want to know. And neither do you,
really." And that end of the conversation swiftly degen-erated into more loud squawking,
and the excited barking of dogs, and Carl making suggestions to Picchu that were at best
rather rude.
"Thanks," Nita said to Tom. "I'll talk to you later." She squeezed out of the phone booth
and past Dog, who growled at her as she went. Behind her, Kit said, in entirely too
cheerful a tone of voice, "So, Carl, what about the monsters?"
   Nita shook her head and went home.

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—"

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    "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 surpris-"igly warm. This
time Nita wasn't able to enjoy it quite as much; the thought °f undersea volcanoes was
much with her. But even she couldn't be de-Pressed 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 Jaugh. "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 *ell he might have,
for nothing in the Sea except perhaps a killer whale or

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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

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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 ie* 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

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jnto 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. 5elief 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


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  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 "foments 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

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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,

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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 "will-power"—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

                              DEEP WIZARDRY                                                                          205

    at the sheer richness of the sound of S'reee's words. She had done the usual
 ter
 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


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  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 preci-sion, 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 s"e 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, Pr'ckled with the electric feeling of a
live spell, tangled in the mesh and lmPatient to be used.

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"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 rnagjr 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

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 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 'n panic as he and the whalesark became nothing more
than a sinking, swirling storm of glitter.

                              DEEP WIZARDRY                                                                          207

 "S'reee!" Nita said, getting alarmed.
With a sound like muffled thunder and a blow like a nearby lightning-strike, displaced

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 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 stream-lining 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 im-mense 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, appar-ently 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 °n 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 swim-m'ng 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

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 "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, K!t?" 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 y°u
start finding your own memories difficult to recall, it's time to get out of the whaleshape,
before it becomes you permanently."

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 "Right," Nita said. She wasn't very worried. Being a humpback was de-lightful, 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 instruc-tions the whalesark is giving your body."
    "Huh?"
 "Kit," S'reee said very gently, finning upward to avoid the weedy, barna-cled 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 pres-sures 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 immedi-ately. 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 inter-est 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,


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yes—but the shells still had creatures

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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 to-gether, 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 any-thing 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

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were jutting out of a great mound of cofal. 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

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 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 sur-prise. 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 con-vinced 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; 2nd no sooner was she out of range of one than another one assaulted her

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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 "lajor 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

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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

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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 real-ized, 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

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"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. "Hot-shot," 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

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 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 ar>d scaring him a
good one. Neets, I got into being a wizard because I ^anted 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

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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-

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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, lei-surely, 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

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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 Gate-waters," 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.

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 "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 approxi-mation 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 ln salt air always left her
drained, and she'd put the book aside after several "ours, to finish the fine details of her
research later. "The Sea will give me 'he 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 7°ne 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

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you again. Even the Heart of the Sea—Timeheart as your kind calls it—nia 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


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 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 sound-ing 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 con-vene 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 chan-nel and through the Gates of the Sea, to the place
appointed."
"Well enough. Now administer me the Celebrant's Oath, Senior, so that 1 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 m 3
tone even more formal and careful than that in which she had greeted nifi-
"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

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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?"

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 "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 celebra-tion."
 "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 ntual 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 !Je latest in a line
 of saviors. And though those who swim are swift to forget, "e Sea forgets neither Song
 nor singer." S'reee looked at Nita with an

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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?"
"K!t, 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 dis-turb 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 every-where. 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,

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sheathed in bubbles and cold light. One circle he completed, melding '* into itself as he
sang that single compelling note; then he began another
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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

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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.

Ed's Song




"Neets," her mother said from where she stood at the sink, her back turned. "Got a few
minutes?"
    Nita looked up from her breakfast. "What's up?"
Her mother was silent for a second, as if wondering how to broach what-ever she had on
her mind. "You and Kit've been out a lot lately," she said at last. "Dad and I hardly ever
seem to see you."
"I thought Dad said it'd be fun to have Dairine and me out of his hair for a while, this
vacation," said Nita.
"Out of his hair, yes. Not out of his life. —We worry about you two when you're out so
much."
    "Mom, we're fine."
    "Well, I wonder. . . . What exactly are you two doing out there all day?"
    "Oh, Mom! Nothing!"
Her mother looked at her and put up one eyebrow in an excellent imita-tion of Mr. Spock.
Nita blushed a bit. It was one of those family jokes that you wish would go away, but
never does; when Nita had been little and had said "Nothing!" she had usually been
getting into incredible trouble. "Mom," Nita said, "some-times when I say 'nothing,' it's
really just nothing. We hang out, that's all-We.. . . do stuff."
  "What kind of stuff?"
   "Mom, what does it matter? Just stuff!"
"It matters," her mother said, "if it's adult kinds of stuff . . . instead of kid stuff."

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Nita didn't say a word. There was no question that what she and Kit were doing were
adult sorts of things.
  Her mother took in Nita's silence, waiting for her daughter to break it. '

        DEEP WIZARDRY                                                                                                III

 won't beat around the bush with you, Neets," she said at last. "Are you and Kit getting . . .
 physically involved?"
 Nita looked at her mother in complete shock. "Mom!" she said in a de-spairing groan.
 "You mean sex? No!"
 "Well," her mother said slowly, "that takes a bit of a load off my mind." There was a
 silence after the words. Nita was almost sure she could hear her mother thinking, // it's
 true. . . .
 The silence unnerved Nita more than the prospect of a talk on the facts of life ever could
 have. "Mom," she said, "if I were gonna do something like that, I'd talk to you about it
 first." She blushed as she said it. She was embarrassed even to be talking about this to
 anybody, and she would have been embarrassed to talk to her mom about it too.
 Nevertheless, what she'd said was the truth. "Look, Mom, you know me, I'm chicken. I
 always run and ask for advice before I do anything."
    "Even about this?"
    "Especially about this!"
"Then what are you doing?" her mother said, sounding just plain curious now. And there
was another sound in her voice—wistfulness. She was feeling left out of something.
"Sometimes you say to me 'playing,' but I don't know what kids mean any more when
they say that. When I was little, it was hopscotch, or Chinese jumprope, or games in the
dirt with plastic animals. Now when I ask Dairine what she's doing, and she says 'playing,'
I go in and find she's doing quadratic equations ... or using my hot-curlers on the
neighbor's red setter. I don't know what to expect."
    Nita shrugged. "Kit and I swim a lot," she said.
   "Where you won't get in trouble, I hope," her mother said.
"Yeah," Nita said, grateful that her mother hadn't said anything about lifeguards or public
beaches. This is a real pain, she thought. I have to talk to Tom and Carl about this. What
do they do with their families? . . . But her mother was waiting for more explanation. She
struggled to find some. "We talk, we look at stuff. We explore. ..."
Nita shook her head, then, for it was hopeless. There was no explaining even the parts of
her relationship with Kit that her mother could understand. "He's just my friend," Nita said
finally. It was a horrible understatement, but she was getting hot with embarrassment at
even having to think about this kind of thing. "Mom, we're okay, really."

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"I suppose you are," her mom said. "Though I can't shake the feeling that there are things
going on you're not telling me about. Nita, I trust you . . . but I still worry."
   Nita just nodded. "Can I go out now, Mom?"
"Sure. Just be back by the time it gets dark," she said, and Nita sighed and headed for
the door. But there was no feeling of release, no sense of anything

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having been really settled, as there usually was when a family problem had been hashed
out to everyone's satisfaction. Nita knew her mother was going to be watching her. It
griped her.
There's no reason for it! she thought guiltily as she went down to the beach, running so
she wouldn't be late for meeting Kit. But there was reason for it, she knew; and the guilt
settled quietly into place inside her, where not all the sea water in the world would wash it
out.

She found Kit far down the beach, standing on the end of the jetty with a rippling, near-
invisible glitter clutched in one hand: the whalesark. "You're late," he said, scowling, as
Nita climbed the jetty. "S'reee's waiting—" Then the scowl fell off his face when he saw
her expression. "You okay?"
"Yeah. But my mom's getting suspicious. And we have to be back by dark or it'll get
worse."
   Kit said something under his breath in Spanish.
"/Ay!" Nita said back, a precise imitation of what either of Kit's folks would have said if
they'd heard him. He laughed.
   "It's okay," she said. "Let's go."
"We'd better leave our suits here," Kit said. Nita agreed, turning her back and starting to
peel out of hers. Kit made his way down the rocks and into the water as she put her
bathing suit under the rock with his. Then she started down the other side of the jetty.
Nita found that the whale-body came much more easily to her than it had the day before.
She towed Kit out into deeper water, where he wrapped the whalesark around him and
made his own change; his too came more quickly and with less struggle, though the
shock of displaced water, like an undersea explosion, was no less. S'reee came to meet
them then, and they greeted her and followed her off eastward, passing Shinnecock Inlet.
"Some answers to Aroooon's Calling have already come back," she said. "Kit, it looks like
we may not need you to sing after all. But I would hope you'd attend the Song anyway."
"I wouldn't miss it," he sang cheerfully. "Somebody has to be around to keep Neets from
screwing up, after all. . . ."

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Nita made a humpback's snort of indignation. But she also wondered about the
nervousness in S'reee's song. "Where's Hotshot this morning?"
"Out calling the rest of his people for patrol around the Gates. Besides, I'm not sure he's .
. . well, suited for what we're doing today. . -. ."
"S'reee," Kit said, picking up the tremor in her song, "what's the problem? It's just another
wizard we're going to see—"
"Oh, no," she said. "The Pale One's no wizard. He'll be singing one of the Twelve, all
right—but the only one who has no magic."
   "Then what's the problem? Even a shark is no match for three wizards—"

                              DEEP WIZARDRY                                                                          223

"K!t," S'reee said, "that's easy for you to say. You're a sperm, and it's true enough that
the average shark's no threat to one of your kind. But this is no average shark we're
going to see. This shark would be a good candidate to really be the Pale Slayer, the
original Master-Shark, instead of just playing him. And there are some kinds of strength
that even wizardry has trouble matching." Her song grew quieter. "We're getting close. If
you have any plans to stay living for a while more, watch what you say when the Pale
One starts talking. And for the Sea's sake, if you're upset about anything, don't show it!"
They swam on toward Montauk Point, the long spit of land that was the southeastern tip
of Long Island. The bottom began to change from the yellow, fairly smooth sand of the
South Shore, littered with fish havens and abandoned oyster beds and deep
undergrowth, to a bottom of darker shades
—dun, brown, almost black—rocky and badly broken, scattered with old wrecks. The sea
around them grew noisy, changing from the usual soft back-ground hiss of quiet water to
a rushing, liquid roar that grew in intensity until Nita couldn't hear herself think, let alone
sing. Seeing in the water was difficult. The surface was whitecapped, the middle waters
were murky with dissolved air, and the hazy sunlight diffused in the sea until everything
seemed to glow a pallid gray white, with no shadows anywhere.
"Mind your swimming," S'reee said, again in that subdued voice. "The rocks are sharp
around here; you don't want to start bleeding."
They surfaced once for breath near Montauk Point, so that Nita got a glimpse of its tall
octagonal lighthouse, the little tender's house nearby, and a group of tourists milling
about on the cliff that slanted sharply down to the sea. Nita blew, just once, but
spectacularly, and grinned to herself at the sight of the tourists pointing and shouting at
each other and taking pictures of her. She cruised the surface for a good long moment to
let them get some good shots, then submerged again and caught up with Kit and S'reee.

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The murkiness of the water made it hard to find her way except by singing brief notes,
waiting for the return of the sound, and judging the bottom by it. S'reee was doing so, but
her notes were so short that she seemed to be grudging them.
  What's the matter with her? Nita thought. You can't get a decent sound-
•ng off such short notes— And indeed, she almost hit a rock herself as she was thinking
that, and saved herself from it only by a quick lithe twist that 'eft her aching afterward.
The roaring of the water over the Shoals kept on irowing, interfering with the rebound of
the song-notes, whiting them out. S reee was bearing north around the point now and
slowing to the slowest of i»des. Kit, to keep from overswimming her, was barely drifting,
and keeping well above the bottom. Nita glanced up at him, a great dark shape against
the

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greater brightness of the surface water—and saw his whole body thrash once hard, in a
gesture of terrible shock. "Nita!"
She looked ahead and saw what he saw. The milky water ahead of them had a great
cloud of blood hanging and swirling in it, with small bright shapes flashing in and out of
the cloud in mindless confusion. Nita let out one small squeak of fear, then forced herself
to be quiet. The sound came back, though, and told her that inside that roiling red
darkness, something was cruising by in a wide curve—something nearly Kit's size. She
backfinned to hover in the water, glancing up at Kit.
He drifted downward to her, singing no note of his own. She could under-stand why.
Tumbling weightlessly out of the blood-cloud, trailing streaks of watery red, were the
slashed and broken bodies of a school of smallfin tuna— heads, tails, pieces too
mangled to name, let alone to bear close examination. Some of these drifted slowly to
the bottom, where the scavengers—salt-water catfish and crabs and other such—ate
them hurriedly, as if not wanting to linger and face whatever hunted above.
Nita didn't want to attract its attention either, but she also wanted Kit's reassurance. This
place to which S'reee had brought them was unquestion-ably the location of a shark's
"feeding frenzy," in which the hunter begins to devour not only its prey, but anything else
that gets in the way, uncontrolla-bly, mindlessly, until sated.
Inside the cloud of blood, which the current over the shoals was taking away, something
moved. Impossible, was Nita's first reaction as the circling shape was revealed. It broke
out of its circling and began to soar slowly toward her and Kit and S'reee. Sonar had
warned her of its size, but she was still astonished. No mere fish could be that big.
This one could. Nita didn't move. With slow, calm, deadly grace the huge form came


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curving toward them. Nita could see why S'reee had said that this creature was a good
candidate for the title Master-Shark, even if the original had lived ten thousand years ago,
when everything was bigger. The shark was nearly as long as Kit—from its blunt nose to
the end of its tail's topfin, no less than ninety feet. Its eyes were that same dull,
expressionless black that had horrified Nita when she'd watched Jaws. But seeing those
eyes on a TV screen was one thing. Having them dwell on you, calm and hungry even
after a feeding frenzy—that was much worse.
The pale shape glided closer. Nita felt Kit drift so close to her that his skin brushed hers,
and she felt the thudding of his huge heart. In shape, the shark looked like a great white,
at least as well as Nita could remember from Jaws. There, though, the resemblance
ended. "Great white" sharks were actually a pale blue on their upper bodies and only
white below. This one was white all over, an ivory white so pale that great age might have
bleached it that color. And as for size, this one could have eaten the Jaws shark for lunch,
and

                              DEEP WIZARDRY                                                                          225

looked capable of working Nita in, in no more than a bite or two, as dessert. Its terrible
maw, hung with drifting, mangled shreds of bleeding tuna, was easily fifteen feet across.
Those jaws worked gently, absently, as the white horror cruised toward the three of
them.
S'reee finned forward a little. She inclined the fore half of her body toward the white one
and sang, in what seemed utter, toneless calm, "Ed'Rashtekaresket, chief of the
Unmastered in these waters, 1 greet you."
The shark swam straight toward S'reee, those blank eyes fixed on her. The whale held
her position as the Pale One glided toward her, his mouth open, his jaws working. At the
last possible moment he veered to one side and began to describe a great circle around
the three.
Three times he circled them, in silence. Next to Nita, Kit shuddered. The shark looked
sharply at them, but still said nothing, just kept swimming until he had completed his third
circle. When he spoke at last, there was no warmth in his voice, none of the skin-stroking
richness she had grown used to in whale-voices. This voice was dry . . . interested, but
passionless; and though insatiably hungry, not even slightly angry or vicious. The voice
de-stroyed every idea Nita had of what a shark would sound like. Some terrible malice,
she could have accepted—not this deadly equanimity. "Young wiz-ard," the voice said,
cool and courteous, "well met."
The swimmer broke free of his circling and described a swift, clean arc that brought him


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 close enough to Nita and Kit for Nita to see the kind of rough, spiky skin that had injured
 S'reee so badly two nights before. The great shark almost touched Nita's nose as he
 swept by.
 "My people," the Pale One said to S'reee, "tell me that they met with you two nights
 since. And fed well."
  "The nerve!" Kit said, none too quietly, and started to swim forward.
 Aghast, Nita bumped him to one side, hard. He was so startled he held still again. "Keep
 your mouth shut!" she said quietly. "That thing could eat us all if it wanted to!"
"If he wanted to," said the Pale One, glancing at Nita and fixing her, just for a moment,
with one of those expressionless eyes. "Peace, young human. I'll deal with you in a
moment."
   She subsided instantly, feeling like a bird face to face with a snake.
"I am told further," said the shark, circling S'reee lazily, "that wizardry struck my people
down at their meal. . . ."
   "And then released them."
   "The story's true, then."
"True enough, Unmastered," said S'reee, still not moving. "I'm no more 'gnorant than
Ae'mhnuu was of the price paid for the reckless wasting of life. Besides, I knew I'd be
talking to you today . . . and even if I didn't, I'd

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have you to deal with at some later time. . . . Shall we two be finished with this matter,
then? I have other things to discuss with you."
"Having heard the Calling in the water last night, I believe you do," said the Pale One, still
circling S'reee with slow grace. His jaws, Nita noticed were still working. "You were wise
to spare those of my Mastery. Are your wounds healed? Is your pain ended?"
   "Yes to both questions, Pale One."
"I have no further business with you, then," said the shark. Nita felt Kit move slightly
against her, an angry, balked movement. Evidently he had been expecting the shark to
apologize. But the shark's tone of voice made it plain that he didn't think he'd done
anything wrong . . . and bizarrely, it seemed as if S'reee agreed with him.
"Well enough," S'reee said, moving for the first time, to break out of the Pale One's circle.
"Let's get to business." The shark went after, pacing her.
   "Since you heard the Calling," S'reee said, "you know why I'm here."
"To ask me to be Twelfth in the Song," said the shark. "When have I not? You may
administer the Oath to me at your leisure. But first you must tell me who the Silent One

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 is."
 "She swims with us," S'reee said, rolling over on her back as she swam— something Nita
 would certainly never have dared do, lest it give this monster ideas—and indicating Nita
 with one long forefin.
Nita would have preferred to keep Kit between her and the shark; but something, the Sea
perhaps, told her that this would be a bad idea. Gulping, she slipped past Kit and glided
up between S'reee and the great white. She was uncertain of protocol—or of anything
except that she should show no fear. "Sir," she said, not "bowing" but looking him straight
in those black eyes, "I'm Nita."
"My lady wizard," the Pale One said in that cool, dry voice, "you're also terrified out of
your wits."
What to say now? But the shark's tone did have a sort of brittle humor about it. She could
at least match it. "Master-Shark," she said, giving him the title to be on the safe side, "if I
were, saying so would be stupid; I'd be inviting you to eat me. And saying I wasn't afraid
would be stupid too—and a lie."
The shark laughed, a terrible sound—quiet, and dry, and violent under its humor. "That's
well said, Nita," he said when the laughing was done. "You're wise not to lie to a
shark—nor to tell him that particular truth. After all, fear is distress. And I end distress;
that's my job. So beware. I am pleased to meet you; but don't bleed around me. Who's
your friend? Make him known to me."
   Nita curved around with two long strokes, swam back to Kit, and escorted

                              DEEP WIZARDRY                                                                          111

him back to the white with her fins barely touching him, a don't-screw-it-up! gesture. "This
is Kit," she said. "He may or may not be singing with us."
   "A whalesark?" said the Pale One, as Kit glided close to him.
"Yes," Kit said bluntly, without any honorific note or tone of courtesy appended to the
word. Nita looked at him in shock, wondering what had gotten into him. He ignored her,
staring at the shark. Kit's teeth were show-ing.
The Pale One circled Kit once, lazily, as he had when offering challenge to S'reee. "She
is not as frightened as she looks, Kit," he said, "and at any rate, I suspect you're more so.
Look to yourself first until you know your new shape better. It has its own fierce ways, I
hear; but a sperm whale is still no match for me." He said this with the utter calm of
someone telling someone else what time it was. "I would not make three bites of you, as I
would with Nita. I would seize your face and crush your upper jaw to make myself safe
from your teeth. Then I would take hold of that great tongue of yours and not let go until I

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 had ripped it loose to devour. Smaller sharks than I am have done that to sperm whales
 before. The tongue is, shall we say, a delicacy."
 The shark circled away from Kit. Very slowly, Kit glided after. "Sir," he said—sounding
 subdued, if not afraid, "I didn't come here to fight. I thought we were supposed to be on
 the same side. But frightening us seems a poor tactic if we're supposed to be allies, and
 singing the same Song."
 "I frighten no one," said the shark. "No one who fears gets it from any-where but himself.
 Or herself. Cast the fear out—and then I am nothing to fear. ... No matter, though; you're
 working at it. Kit, Nita, my name is ed'Rashtekaresket."
    "It has teeth in it," Nita said.
 The shark looked at her with interest in his opaque gaze. "It has indeed," he said. "You
 hear well. And you're the Silent One? Not the Listener?"
"The Listener's part is spoken for, Pale One," S'reee said. "And the Silent One's part
needs a wizard more experienced than any we have—one already tested against the
Lone Power, yet young enough to fulfill the other criteria. HNii't is the one."
"Then these are the two who went up against the Lone One in Manhat-tan,"
ed'Rashtekaresket said. "Oh, don't sing surprise at me, Kit: I know the Human names well
enough. After all, you are who you eat."
Nita swallowed hard. "Such shock," the shark said, favoring Nita again with that dark,
stony, unreadable look. "Beware your fear, Nita. They say I'm a 'killing machine'—and
they say well. I am one." The terrible laugh hissed in the water again. "But one with a
mind. Nor such a machine that I devour without cause. Those whom I eat, human or
whale or fish, always give me cause. —I'm glad you brought them, S'reee. If this 'Heart of
the Sea' the

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wizards always speak of really exists, then these two should be able to get its attention.
And its attention is needed."
For the first time since the conversation began, S'reee displayed a mild annoyance. "It
exists, Pale One. How many Songs have you played Twelfth in, and you still don't admit
that—"
"More Songs than you have, young one," ed'Rashtekaresket said. "And it would take
more still to convince me of what can't be seen by anyone not a wizard. Show me the


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Sea's Heart, this Timeheart you speak of, and I'll admit it exists."
"Are you denying that wizardry comes from there?" S'reee said, sounding even more
annoyed.
"Possibly," said the shark, "if it does not. Don't be angry without reason, S'reee. You
warm-bloods are all such great believers. But there's no greater pragmatist than a shark. I
believe what I eat ... or what I see. Your power I've seen: I don't deny that. I simply
reserve decision on where it comes from. What I say further is that there's trouble in the
deep waters here-abouts, more trouble than usual—and it's as well the Song is being
enacted now, for there's need of it, wherever its virtue comes from. Will you hear my
news? For if things go on as they're going now, the High and Dry will shortly be low and
wet—and those of my Mastery will be eating very well indeed."

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 nave been
dying like clams at red tide lately."
"As if," the Master-Shark said, "someone or something did not care to nave the Song

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enacted just now." His voice sounded remote. "I'm reminded °f 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

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times. You know the moment, S'reee: when the mock-battle breaks oU{ 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

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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 is-land'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

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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

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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

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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


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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 lash-ing, she fluked away. All the telephone pole-length arms spasmed
and

                              DEEP WIZARDRY                                                                          233

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 sing-ing, 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 sec-ond 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.

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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
diminish-'ng—and now grew louder, and more ragged, until they abruptly stopped.
Wearily Nita swam upward. She broached and blew gratefully, doing noth->ng 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

234                            SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL WIZARD

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

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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 tamper-ing
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

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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

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 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 consider-

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ably 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 ifi 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

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 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 west-ward, 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.

     DEEP WIZARDRY                                                                                                   237

   Dairine.

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 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 mo-ment, 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 "What about it, Dari? Are you going to spill everything? Or
are you going to keep quiet?"

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 Dairine looked at the two of them, saying nothing. Then, "I want you t0 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 under-tow—" 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

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had better sense, Kit," he said. "We had an

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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. Under-stood?"
   "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.

Fearsong




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 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 Tcm 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 en-


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 Summer Night's Song

                              DEEP WIZARDRY                                                                          241

joyed 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, ^tending 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.


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 Summer Night's Song


Since e wasn't good at memorizing, Nita was relieved to find that when she was ln
whaleform, the Sea would remind her of the exact words. What she

1^*'

242                     SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL WIZARD

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 jokec, 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 patron-ess 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:



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                      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!

                             DEEP WIZARDRY                                                                          243

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?
  -v    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.
,-i ,i.   But past the fear lies life for all—
jim: "••         perhaps for me; and, past my dread,
'.;•!• ':   past loss of Mastery and life,
;'.; M              the Sea shall yet give up Her dead!


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 Summer Night's Song


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 direc-tions" 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 "ac-ceptance 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

244                      SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL WIZARD

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

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 Summer Night's Song


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 shud-dered 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

                              DEEP WIZARDRY                                                                          245

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."

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 Summer Night's Song

 "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

246                            SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL WIZARD

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 \ 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?"

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 Summer Night's Song


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?"

                              DEEP WIZARDRY                                                                          247

"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 re-mark about the Silent Lord's contribution to the
Song being the most impor-tant 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

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 Summer Night's Song


 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, 'etting 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!"

248                     SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL WIZARD

"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, fust 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 experi-enced wizard than
/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


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 Summer Night's Song

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.

249

DEEP WIZARDRY


"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.

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 Summer Night's Song

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 wait-ing, 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. . . .

The Gray Lord's Song




They found the whale who would sing the part of the Gray in the chill waters about Old
Man Shoals, a gloomy place strewn full of boulders above which turbulent water howled
and thundered. The current set swift through the shoals, and the remnants of its victims
lay everywhere. Old splintered spars of rotting masts, fragments of crumbled planks, bits
of rusted iron covered with barnacles or twined about with anemones; here and there a
human bone, crusted over with coral— Broken-backed ships lay all about, strangled in
weed, ominous shapes in the murk; and when Nita and Kit and the others sang to find
their way, the songs fell into the silence with a wet, thick, troubled sound utterly unlike the


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clear echoes that came back from the sandy bottoms off Long Island.
The place suited Nita's mood perfectly. She swam low among the corpses of dead ships,
thinking bitter thoughts—most of them centering on her own stupidity.
They warned me. Everybody warned me! Even Picchu warned me: "Read the fine print
before you sign!" Idiot! she thought bitterly. What do I do now? I don't want to die!
But "Any agreements you make, make sure you keep," Tom had said—and though his
voice had been kind, it had also been stern. As stern as the Blue s: "Nowhere does the
Lone Power enter in so readily as through the broken word."
She could see what she was expected to do ... and it was impossible. 1 can't die—I'm too
young, what would Kit say to Mom and Dad, I don't want to, it's not fair! But the answer
stayed the same nonetheless.
She groaned out loud. Two days. Two days left. Two days is a long time-Maybe
something will happen and I won't have to die.
  "Stop that sniveling noise!" came a sharp, angry burst of song, from practi-

                              DEEP WIZARDRY                                                                          251

cally in front of her. Nita backfinned, shocked at the great bulk rising up from the bottom
before her. The echoes of her surprised squeak came back raggedly, speaking of old
scars, torn fins and flukes, skin ripped and gouged and badly healed. And the other's
song had an undercurrent of rage to it that hit Nita like a deep dive into water so cold it
burned.
"How dare you come into my grounds without protocol?" said the new whale as she
cruised toward Nita with a slow deliberateness that made Nita back away even faster
than before. The great head and lack of a dorsal fin made it plain that this was another
sperm whale.
"Your pardon," Nita sang hurriedly, sounding as conciliatory as possible. "I didn't mean to
intrude—"
"You have," said the sperm, in a scraping phrase perilously close to the awful sperm-
whale battlecry that Nita had heard from Kit. She kept advanc-ing on Nita, and Nita kept
backing, her eye on those sharp teeth. "These are" my waters, and I won't have some
noisy krill-eating songster scaring my food—"
That voice was not only angry, it was cruel. Nita started to get angry at the sound of it.
She stopped backing up and held her ground, poising her tail for a short rush to ram the
other if necessary. "I'm not interested in your fish, even if they could hear me, which they
can't—and you know it!" she sang angrily. "Humpbacks sing higher than fish can
hear—the same as you do!"


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 The sperm kept coming, showing more teeth. "You look like a whale," she said, voice
 lowering suspiciously, "and you sing like a whale—but you don't sound like a whale. Who
 are you?"
"HNii't," Nita said, giving her name the humpback accent. "I'm a wizard. A human
wizard—"
The sperm whale cried out and rushed at her, jaws wide. Nita arrowed off to one side,
easily avoiding the sperm's rush. "Spy! Murderer!" The sperm was howling, a terrible
rasping song like a scream. It came at her again—
Again Nita rolled out of the way, her maneuverability easily defeating the other's rage-
blinded charge. "I may be a human," she sang angrily, "but I'm still a wizard! Mess with
me and I'll—"
WHAM! The sperm whale's spell hit her with an impact that made the displaced-water
explosions of Kit's shapechanges seem puny. Nita was thrown backward, literally head
over tail, thrashing and struggling for control as she swore at herself for being caught off
guard. The spell was a simple physical-violence wizardry, as contemptuous a gesture
from one wizard to another as a slap in the face . . . and as much a challenge to battle as
such a slap would have been from one human to another.
Nita went hot with rage, felt about for her inner contact with the Sea, '°und it, and
sang—only three notes, but pitched and prolonged with exqui-site accuracy to take the
power of the other's spell and turn it back on her

252                    ' SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL WIZARD

tenfold. The spell and the water thundered together. The sperm whale was blown
backward as Nita had been, but with more force, tumbling violently and trailing a song of
shock and rage behind her.
Nita held still, shaking with anger, while S'reee and Hotshot and Kit gathered around her.
"I'm all right," she said, the trembling getting into her song. "But that one needs some
lessons in manners."
"She always has," S'reee said. "HNii't, I'm sorry. I would have kept you back with us,
but—" She didn't go on.
   "It's all right," Nita said, still shaking.
"Nice shot," said a low scrape of song beside her ear, angry and apprecia-tive: Kit. She
brushed him lightly with one flank as a great pale shape came drifting down on the other
side of her, eyeing her with dark-eyed interest.
   "So," Ed said, calm as ever, "the Sprat has teeth after all. I am impressed."
"Thanks," Nita said, not up to much more conversation with Ed at the moment.
Slowly they swam forward together to where S'reee was hovering in the water, singing

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 more at than with the other whale. "—know you were out of bounds, Areinnye," she said.
 "There was no breach of protocol. We came in singing."
 "That one did not," said the sperm whale, her song so sharp with anger that it was a
 torture to the ears. "My right—"
"—does not extend to attacking a silent member of a party entering your waters within
protocols," S'reee said. "You attacked hNii't out of spite, noth-ing more. First spite, then
anger because she was human. We heard—"
"Did you indeed? And what else have you heard in these waters, you nursling wizard, you
and your little playfellows?" The sperm whale glared at them all as they gathered around
her, and the rasp of pain and hatred in her voice was terrible. "Have you seen my calf
hereabouts? For all your magics, I think not. The whalers have been through these
waters three days ago, and they served my little M'hali as they served your precious
Ae'mhnuu! Speared and left to float belly-up, slowly dying, while they hunted me—then
hauled bloated out of the water and gutted, his bleeding innards thrown overboard by bits
and pieces for the gulls and the sharks to eat!"
When S'reee spoke again, her voice was unhappy. "Areinnye, I share your grief. It's
things like this that the Song will help to stop. That's why we're here."
The sperm whale laughed, a sound both anguished and cruel. "What lies," she said. "Or
what delusions. Do you truly think anything will make them go away and stop hunting us,
S'reee?" Areinnye looked with hatred at Nita. "Now they're even coming into the water
after us, I see."
Kit glided forward ever so slowly, until he was squarely between Nita and Areinnye. "I
guarantee you don't know what she's here for, Areinnye.

                            DEEP WIZARDRY                                                            '               253

serving your life, along with those of a lot of others—though at the moment, in your case,
I can't imagine why anyone would bother."
Areinnye made a sound at Kit that was the sperm-whale equivalent of a sneer. "Oh,
indeed," Areinnye said. "What could she possibly do that would make any difference to
my life?"
   "She is the Silent Lord for the Song," S'reee said.
Areinnye turned that scornful regard on Nita.' "Indeed," the sperm said again. "Well. We
are finally getting something useful out of a human. But she doubtless had to be
compelled to it. No human would ever give up its life for one of us, wizard or not. Or did
you trick her into it?"
Gently, hardly stroking a fin, Ed soared toward Areinnye. "Unwise," he said. "Most


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 unwise, wizard, to scorn a fellow wizard so—whatever species she may belong to. And
 will you hold Nita responsible for all her species' wrong-doing, then? If you do that,
 Areinnye, I would feel no qualms about holding you responsible for various hurts done
 my people by yours over the years. Nor would I feel any guilt over taking payment for
 those hurts out of your hide, now."
 Areinnye turned her back on Ed and swam away, as if not caring what he said. "You take
 strange sides, Slayer," the sperm said at last, cold-voiced. "The humans hunt those of
 your Mastery as relentlessly as they hunt us."
 "I take no sides, Areinnye," Ed said, still following her. "Not with whales, or fish, or
 humans, or any other Power in the Sea or above it. Wizard that you are, you should know
 that." He was beginning to circle her now. "And if I sing this Song, it is for the same
 reason that I have sung a hundred others: for the sake of my Mastery—and because I am
 pleased to sing. You had best put your distress aside and deal with the business we have
 come to discuss, lest something worse befall you."
Areinnye turned slowly back toward the group. "Well, if you've come to administer me the
Oath," Areinnye said to S'reee, "you might as well get on with it. I was in the midst of
hunting when you interrupted me."
"Softly," S'reee said. "Your power is a byword all throughout these parts; I want it in the
Song. But we're not so short of wizards that I'll include one who'll bring the High and Dry
down on us. Choose, and tell me whether you can truthfully sing and leave your anger
behind."
Areinnye cruised slowly through the group, making no sound but the small ticking noises
the sperm uses to navigate. "Seeing that the human who sings with us sings for the Sea's
sake," she said at last, in that tight, flat voice, "I am content. But my heart is bitter in me
for my calf's loss, and I cannot forget that easily. Let the humans remember that, and
keep their distance."
  "If that is well for you two—" Kit and Nita both flicked tails in agreement. Well enough,
  then," said S'reee. "Areinnye t'Hwio-dheii, those who gather

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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 . . ." Areinnye sang her way through the responses with slow care, and Nita
began to relax slightly. The sperm's voice was beautiful, as pleasant as Kit's, when she
wasn't angry. Yet she couldn't help but catch a couple of Areinnye's glances at Ed—as if
she knew that she was being watched for her responses and would be watched in the

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future.
Then the third Question was asked, and Areinnye's song scaled up in the high notes of
final affirmation, a sound of tearing, chilly beauty. "Let me wander forever amid the
broken and the lost, sooner than I shall refuse the Song," Areinnye sang, "or what it
brings about for the good of those who live." But there was a faint note of scorn in the last
phrase, as if the singer already counted herself among the lost and broken; and the notes
on "those who live" twisted down the scale into a bitter diminuendo of pain that said life
was a curse.
    Now it was S'reee's turn to look dubious; but it was too late.
    "Well," the sperm said, "when is the Foregathering? And where?"
"Tomorrow dawn," said S'reee, "in the waters off the Hook. Will you be on time?"
    "Yes," Areinnye said. "So farewell." And she turned tail and swam off.
Kit flicked a glance at Ed and said quietly to Nita, "Boy, that was a close one. If those two
got started fighting. . . ."
    "It would not be anything like 'close,' " Ed said. '
"Okay, great," Kit said in mild annoyance, "she couldn't kill you. But isn't it just possible
she might hurt you a little?"
"She would regret it if she did," Ed said. "Blood in the water will call in some sharks, true.
But their Master's blood in the water will call them all in, whether they smell it or not . . .
every shark for thousands of lengths around. That is my magic, you see. And whatever
the Master-Shark might be fighting when his people arrived would shortly not be there at
all, except as rags and scraps for fingerlings to eat."
    Nita and Kit and S'reee looked at each other.
"Why do we need Areinnye in the first place?" Nita said to S'reee. "Is she really that good
a wizard?"
Turning, S'reee began to swim back the way they had come, through the now-darkening
water. Hotshot paced her; and silently, pale in the dimness, Ed brought up the rear.
"Yes," S'reee said. "In fact, by rights, she should have been Ae'mhnuu's apprentice, not
I."
    Kit looked at her in surprise. "Why wasn't she?"
S'reee made a little moan of annoyance. "I don't know," she said. "Arein-nye is a much
more powerful wizard than I am—even Ae'mhnuu agreed with me about that. Yet he
refused her request to study with him, not just once

     DEEP WIZARDRY                                                                                                   255

but several times. And now this business with her calf—" S'reee blew a few huge bubbles
out her blowhole, making an unsettled noise. "Well, we'll make it work out." "That shall yet

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be seen," Ed said from behind them.

The Moon was high when Nita and Kit came out of the water close to the jetty and went
looking for their clothes. Kit spent a while gazing longingly up at the silver-golden disc,
while Nita dressed. "We're really gonna get killed now, aren't we?" he said, so quietly that
Nita could hardly hear him.
"Uh-huh." Nita sat down on the sand and stared out at the waves while Kit went hunting
for his bathing suit and windbreaker.
  "Whaddaya think they'll do?" Kit said.
  Nita shook her head. "No idea."
Kit came up beside her, adjusting his windbreaker. "You think they're gonna send me
home?"
  "They might," she said.
They toiled up the last dune before home and looked down toward the little rough road
that ran past the house. All the upstairs lights were on. The downstairs ones were dark;
evidently Dairine had been sent to bed.
  "Neets—" Kit said. "What're you gonna do?"
   "I'm sworn, Kit. I'm in the Song. I have to be there."
   "You mean you're going to—"
"Don't," she said, in genuine pain. She didn't want him to say it, to think it, any more than
she wanted to think it herself. And to tell the absolute truth, she wasn't sure of what she
was going to do about the Song yet.
   "They don't need me for the Song," Kit said.
   "It doesn't look that way."
"Yeah." He was quiet a moment. "Look—if somehow I can get you off the hook, get your
folks to think this is all my fault somehow, so that you can still go out. . . ."
"No," Nita said, scandalized. "Anyway, they'd never buy it. I promised my mom I'd be
back on time last time—and blew it. Then I snuck out today. They know it's me as much
as you. I'm just gonna have to face the music."
   "With what?" Kit said.
"I don't know." The thought of treating her parents as enemies made her feel as if the
bottom had fallen out of the Universe.
The one good thing, she thought, is that by tomorrow, tonight will be over.
   I hope.
   "C'mon," she said. Together they went home.

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The house was deadly still when they stepped in, and the screen door closing behind
them seemed loud enough to be heard for miles around. The kitchen was dark; light
flowed into it from the living room, the subdued illumination of a couple of table lamps.
There was no sound of TV, even though Nita knew her dad's passion for late movies; no
music, despite her mom's fondness for classics and symphonic rock at any hour of day or
night.
Nita's mouth felt dry as beach sand. She stopped where she was, tried to swallow,
looked at Kit. He looked back, punched her lightly in the arm, then pushed past her and
walked into the living room.
For the rest of her life, Nita thought, she would remember the way that room looked and
felt when she walked in. The living room needed a new paint job, its rug was threadbare
in places, and the walls were hung with bargain-basement seascapes, wide-eyed
children of almost terminal cuteness, and, in one corner, something her dad called the
Piece of Resistance—a garish matador done in day-glow paint on black velvet.
Her mother and father were sitting side by side on the Coca-Cola-colored couch, their
backs straight. They looked up as Nita and Kit came through the door, and Nita saw her
mother's face tight with fear and her father's closed like a door. They had been reading
magazines; they put them aside, and the usually friendly room suddenly looked dingy as
a prison, and the matador hurt Nita's eyes.
"Sit down," her father said. His voice, quiet, calm, sounded too much like Ed's. She
managed to hold onto her composure as she headed for Dairine's favorite chair and sat
down quickly.
"Pretty slick," said her father. "My daughter appears to have a great future in breaking
and entering. Or breaking and departing."
Nita opened her mouth and shut it again. She could have dealt with a good scolding . . .
but this chilly sarcasm terrified her. And there was no way out of it.
"Well?" her father said. "You'd better start coming up with some answers, young lady.
You too," he said to Kit, his eyes flashing; and at the sight of the anger, Nita felt a wash of
relief. That look was normal. "Because what you two say is going to determine whether
we send you straight home tomorrow morning, Kit—and whether we let you and Nita see
any more of each other."
   Kit looked her father straight in the eye and said nothing.
Sperm whales! Nita thought, and it was nearly a curse. But then she took the thought
back as she realized that Kit was waiting for her to say something first, to give him a lead.
Great! Now all I have to do is do something!
   What do I do?

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"Kit," her father said, "I warn you, I'm in no mood for Latin gallantry and the whole protect-
the-lady business. You were entrusted to my care and '

257

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want answers. Your parents are going to hear about this in any case—what you say, or
don't say, is going to determine what I tell them. So be advised."
   "I understand," Kit said. Then he glanced at Nita. "Neets?"
Nita shook her head ever so slightly, amazed as always by that frightened bravery that
would wait for her to make a move, then back her utterly. It had nothing to do with the
whalesark. Kit, Nita thought, practically trembling with the force of what she felt, you're
incredible! But I don't have your guts —and I have to do something!
   Her mother and father were looking at her, waiting.
Oh, Lord, Nita thought then, and bowed her head and put one hand over her face, for she
suddenly knew what to do.
She looked up. "Mom," she said—and then had to start over, for the word came out in a
kind of strangled squeak. "Mom, you remember when we were talking the other day? And
you said you wanted to know why we were staying out so much, because you thought
something besides 'nothing' was going on?"
   Her mother nodded, frozen-faced.
"Uh, well, there was," Nita said, not sure where to go from there. Two months of wizardry,
spells wrought and strange places visited and wonders seen—how to explain it all to
nonwizards? Especially when they might not be able to see wizardry done right under
their eyes—and in the past hadn't? Never mind that, Nita told herself desperately. If you
think too much, you'll get cold feet. Just talk.
Her mother was wearing a ready-to-hear-the-worst expression. "No, not that," Nita said,
feeling downright cross that her mother was still thinking along those idiotic lines. "But this
is going to take a while."
Nita swallowed hard. "You remember in the spring," she said, "that day Kit and I went into
the city—and that night, the Sun went out?"
   Her parents stared at her, still angry, and now slightly perplexed too.
   "We had something to do with that," Nita said.

Truthsong



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And Nita began to tell them. By the time she saw from their faces just how crazy the story
must be sounding, it was already much too late for her to stop.
She told them the story from the beginning—the day she had her hand snagged by an
innocent-looking library book full of instructions for wizardry —to the end of her first great
trial, and Kit's, that terrible night when the forces of darkness got loose in Manhattan and
would have turned first the city and then the world into a place bound in eternal night and
cold, except for what she and Kit did. She told them about Advisory and Senior wizards,
though she didn't mention Tom and Carl; about places past the world where there was
nothing but night, and about the place past life where there was nothing but day.
   Not once did her parents say a word.
Mostly Kit kept quiet, except when Nita's memory about something spe-cific failed; then
he spoke up and filled in the gap, and she went on again. The look on her father's face
was approaching anger again, and her mother was well into complete consternation, by
the time Nita started telling them about the dolphin who nudged her in the back, the whale
she and Kit found on the beach, and the story the whale had told them. She told them a
little-very little, fearing for her own composure—about the Song of the Twelve and what
she was going to be doing in it.
    And then, not knowing what else to say, she stopped.
    Her mother and father looked at each other.
    Our daughter, the look said, is going to have to be hospitalized. She's sick.
Nita's mother finally turned to her. Her dad had bowed his head about a third of the way
through the story, and except for that glance at her mother seemed unable to do anything
but sit with his hands clasped tightly together. But her mother's face was stricken.

                               DEEP WIZARDRY                                                                         259

"Nita," she said, very gently—but her voice was shaking like the tightly clasped hands of
the man beside her, "you don't have to make up stories like this to keep us from being
angry with you."
Nita's mouth fell open. "Mom," she said, "are you trying to say you don't believe me?"
"Nita," her father said. His eyes were haunted, and his attempt to keep his voice sounding
normal was failing miserably. "Give us a break. How are we supposed to believe a crazy


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 story like this? Maybe you've got Kit believing jt_" He broke off, as if wanting to find a way
 to explain all this, something reasonable. "I guess it's understandable, he's younger than
 you. . . ."
 Nita glanced over at Kit for the first time in a while and gulped. His annoyed look brought
 the sperm-whale battlecry scraping through her memo-ries again.
    "/'// tell you how you're supposed to believe it," Kit said.
   Nita's mother and father looked at him.
Kit was suddenly sitting a little taller in the chair. And taller still, though he didn't move a
muscle. And taller—until Nita could see that Kit's seat and the seat of the chair no longer
had much to do with each other. He was hovering about two feet in the air.
   "Like this," Kit said.
   Holding her breath, Nita looked from Kit to her parents.
They stared at Kit, their faces absolutely unmoved, as if waiting for some-thing. Kit
glanced over at Nita, shrugged, and kept floating up until he was sitting six feet or so
above the floor. "Well?" he said.
   They didn't move a muscle.
   "Harry—" Nita's mother said, then, after what seemed forever.
   He didn't say a thing.
"Harry," her mother said, "I hate to admit it, but I think all this has gotten to me. . . ."
   Nita's father simply kept looking at the chair.
   Then, ever so slowly, he leaned his head back and looked up at Kit.
   "Hypnosis," Nita's father said.
   "Bull!" Kit said. "When did I hypnotize you?"
   Nita's father didn't say anything.
"I haven't said a thing," Kit said. "If I hypnotized you without lights or *ords or anything,
that's a pretty good trick, isn't it? You two better talk to £ach other and see if you're seeing
the same thing. If you aren't, maybe I did hypnotize you. But if you are—"
 Nita's mother and father looked away from Kit with some effort. 'Betty ..." said Nita's
 father.
   Neither of them said anything further for a few seconds.
   "Harry," her mother said at last, "if I told you that I saw . . . saw


I




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 Kit . . ." She stopped and swallowed. Then she started again, and the same feeling that
 had shaken Nita earlier about Kit took hold of her and shook her about her mother.
 Evidently bravery came in odd forms, and out of unex-pected places. "If I told you that I
 saw Kit not sitting in the chair any more," her mother said, all at once and in a rush. Then
 her voice gave out on her.
     "Above it," her dad said. And that was all he could manage.
    They stared at each other.
     "You got it," Kit said.
 Nita's dad broke away from looking at her mother and glared at Nita instead. "Hypnosis,"
 her father said. "There's no other explanation."
 "Yes, there zs/"Nita hollered at him, waving her arms in frustration, "but you don't want to
 admit it!"
     "Nita," her mother said.
 "Sorry," Nita said. "Look, Kit ... this isn't going to do it. We need something more
 impressive." She got up. "Come on," she said. "Outside. It's my turn."
 Nita yanked the front door open and ran outside, up the dune and down its far side
 toward the beach. There was a long pause before she heard the sound of footsteps
 following her down the wooden stairs. Shock, she thought, feeling both pity and
 amusement. If only there was some easier way! But there wasn't. . . . She made it down
 to the beach, picked the spot she wanted, then stood and waited for them to arrive.
 First her mother, then her father, came clambering up the dune and slid down its far side,
 to stand on the beach and stare up and down it, looking for her. Then Kit appeared
 beside them in a small clap of air that startled her mother so badly she jumped. Her
 father stared.
 "Sorry," Kit said, "I should have warned you." He was still sitting cross-legged in the air,
 and Nita noticed that he didn't sound very sorry either.
 "Oh, Lord," said Nita's father at the sight of Kit, and then turned reso-lutely away. "All
 right. Where's Nita?"
"Over here, Daddy," Nita called from where she was standing on the water, just past the
line of the breakers.
He stared at Nita. So did Nita's mother, who slowly went to stand beside her husband.
Her voice was shaking as she said, "Harry, it could be that my eyes are just going. . . ."
"Mom," Nita shouted, "give me a break; you both went to the eye doctor last month and
you were fine!" She bounced up and down on the water several times, then took a few
long strides to the west, turned, and came back. "Admit it! You see me walking on water!
Well, surprise: I am walking on water! Get it! It's like I told you: I'm a wizard!"
    "Nita," her father said, "uh, walking on water is, uh—"

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  "I know," she said. "I wouldn't want to overdo it. It makes my legs hurt.

                              DEEP WIZARDRY                                                                          261

 Nita trotted back in to shore, taking a last hop onto the curl of a flattening breaker and
 letting it push her up onto the beach and strand her there, a few feet in front of them.
 Kit uncrossed his legs, got his feet back on the ground, and came to stand beside her.
 "So what else would you like to see?" he said.
 Her parents looked at each other, then down at the two of them. "Look, Kit, Nita," her
 father said unhappily, "it's not a question of what we'd like to see. At this point I'm sure
 you two could get us to 'see' anything you wanted to ... heaven knows how. But that's not
 the point. This can't be—none of this is real!"
 "Wanna bet?" Kit said softly. "Neets, this is gonna call for drastic mea-sures."
 "I think you're right. Well, let's see what the manual says about this. Book, please," she
 said, thinking the six words of a spell she knew by heart and putting her hand out.
 Another small clap of air, about as noisy as a cap going off, and her wizard's manual
 dropped into her hand. Her mother goggled. Nita opened the manual and began
 browsing through it. "Let's see. . . ."
 "You two just stop making things pop in and out for a moment, and listen to me," Nita's
 mother said all of a sudden. "Nita, I want to know where this power came from! You two
 haven't made a pact with, with—"
Nita thought of her last encounter with the Lone Power and burst out laughing. "Oh,
Mom! Kit and I are the last people that One wants anything to do with."
Her mother looked nonplussed. "Well, that's—never mind, you'll tell me about that some
other time. But, honey, why, why?"
"You mean, 'Why are there wizards?' Or 'Why are we wizards?' " Nita said. "Or do you
really mean 'What's in it for us?' "
    "Yes," her mother said, sounding lost.
Nita and Kit looked at each other, and Kit shook his head. "We're never gonna be able to
explain this," he said.
She agreed with him. "Only one thing we can do, I guess," Nita said, musing.
    "Show them?"
Nita looked at Kit, and for the first time in what seemed days, a smile began to grow.
"Remember that place we went a week and a half ago?" she said. "The one with the
great view?"
    "I'll get my book," he said, grinning back, "and the string."
"Don't forget the chip!" Nita said, but Kit had already gone out, bang! just like a candle,

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and Nita was talking to empty air. She turned to her mother and father. "He went to get
some supplies," she said. "Most wizardry you need things for—raw materials, kind of."

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"Fine, honey," her mother said, "but does he have to keep appearing and disappearing
like that?"
"It's faster than walking," Nita said. "And we haven't got all night. He and I are going to
have to be out early again tomorrow morning—"
    "Nita!" said her father.
She went to him and put her arms around him. "Please, Dad," she said, "let it be for a
little while. We told you why. But you have to feel this first. It won't make sense unless
you do. In fact, it may never make sense. Just trust me!"
Kit popped back out of nothing, making Nita's mother jump again. "Sorry, Mrs. Callahan,"
he said. "It's fun, that's all. It's a 'beam-me-up-Scotty' spell. So's this one we're going to
do. Just a little more involved." He dropped the necessary supplies on the sand—a small
coil of cord, an old silicon chip salvaged from a broken pocket calculator, a gray stone.
Then he started going through his own manual.
Nita looked down at the stone Kit had brought. "Good idea," she said. "Shorthand, huh?"
"It remembers the way. Should save some work. Good thing, too . . . we've got two more
sets of variables this time. Get the figures for me, will you?"
"Right." Nita held out her book a bit as she went through it, so that her mother and father
could look over her shoulder. "See, Mom? Dad? It's just an instruction manual, like I
said."
"I can't read it," her father said, staring at the graceful strokes of the written form of the
Speech. "What is it, Arabic?"
"No," she said. "No Earthly language. At least, not strictly Earthly. A lot of the forces we
work with don't have names in any language on Earth—or they only have vague ones.
You can't be vague about magic."
"Good way to get killed," Kit said from where he knelt in the sand, scribbling with a stick
and sounding cheerful. "Mr. Callahan, Mrs. Callahan, don't step on any of these things I'm
writing in the sand, or we'll all be in big trouble. Mrs. Callahan, what's your birthday?"
    "April twenty-eighth," said Nita's mother.
    "Mr. Callahan?"
   "July seventh," said Nita's father.
    "Neets, how big a circle?"
"Half a second," Nita said. "Brighter," she said to her manual. Its pages began to glow
softly in the dark. "Okay, here we are. Four of us . . . about a cubic foot of air for each

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breath. Allow for excitement—say thirty breaths a minute. Times four. . . ." She turned to
another page. "Start," she said, and heard over her shoulder her mother's quick intake of
breath as the page Nita had opened to abruptly went blank. "Print one two zero times
four." A set of

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 characters appeared. "Okay, print four eight zero times twenty. . . . Good, print nine six
 zero zero divided by three. . . . Great. Cubic meters . . . uhh • • • Oh, crap. Kit, what's the
 volume of a cylinder again?"
     "V equals pi times r squared times the height."
 "That's it. Now how did I do this before?" Nita chewed her lip a little, thinking. "Okay," she
 said to the book, "print three point one four one seven times, uh, three zero." A figure
 flickered at her. "No, that is not a number," she said to the book. "Times three zero, and
 don't get cute with me. . . . Okay. Print square root parenthesis three two zero zero
 divided by nine four point two five one close parentheses. Great. End. Kit? Make it thirty-
 six feet wide."
 "Got it," Kit said. "Mrs. Callahan, would you stand on this string, please? And whatever
 happens, don't go near the edge of the circle after I close it." He started to walk around
 them all, using Mrs. Callahan and the long knot-ted string as a compass. "Neets? Come
 check your name. And theirs; they can't do it—"
 She stepped over to the circle and made sure that the Speech-characters describing
 herself and her parents were correct, then glanced over Kit's too for safety's sake.
 Everything was in order. Kit finished the circle he was making in the sand, closed it with
 the figure-eight design called a wizard's knot, and stood up. "All set," Nita said.
"Then let's go." He opened his book; Nita went looking for the page in hers on which the
spell was written. "It's a 'read' spell," Nita said to her mother and father. "That means it's
going to be a few moments before it takes. Don't say anything, no matter what you feel or
see or hear. Don't move, either."
"You might want to hang on to each other," Kit said. Nita gave him a wry grin; there had
been occasions in the past when the two of them, terrified out of their wits, had done just
that. "Ready?"
"Go ahead," said Nita's father, and reached out and pulled Nita's mother close.
Nita and Kit looked at each other and began slowly to read out loud. The strange,
listening stillness of a working spell began to settle in around the four of them, becoming
more pronounced with every word of the Speech, as the Universe in that area waited to
hear what would be required of it. The wind dropped, the sound of the surf grew softer,
even the breakers in the area became gentler, flatter, their hiss fading to a bare whisper. .

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..
The sense of expectation, of anticipation, of impatient, overwhelming po-tential grew all
around them as the silence grew . . . slowly undergoing a transformation into a blend of
delight and terror and power that could be breathed like air, or seen as a shading now
inhabiting every color, a presence •nhabiting every shape.

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Nita raised her voice into the stillness unafraid, speaking the words of the spell formula,
barely needing to look at her book. The magic was rising in her, pouring through her with
dangerous power. But with the sureness of practice she rode the danger, knowing the
wonder to which it would bring her, reveling in her defiance of her fear. And in more than
that: for Kit was across the circle from her, eyes on hers, matching her word for word and
power for power—peer and friend and fellow-wizard, afraid as she was, and still willing to
dare, for the delight of what lay on the other side of the magic—
Almost through, Nita thought, exulting. Her words and Kit's wound about one another,
wove together, binding the spell tighter around the circle-squeezing air in, squeezing
power in, pushing inward with such force that the circle and its contents had no choice
but to be somewhere else than they were.
Almost—Nita matched her words to Kit's with a laugh in her voice, rush-ing him, finding
that she couldn 't rush him because he had already matched pace to keep up with her—
She laughed at being anticipated so. Faster and faster they went, like two kids seeing
who could say the Pledge of Allegiance faster, as all around them the silence began to
sing with inturned power, the air shimmered and rang with force like a gong ringing
backward, soft at first, then louder, though without sound, without breaking that
silence—a hiss, a murmur, an outcry of something about to happen, a shout of inner
voices, a silent thunderclap. And the last not-sound, so loud it unmade the world around
them and struck them deaf and blind—
Then true silence again, with darkness above and whiteness below—but not the same
darkness or whiteness as on the beach.
"We're here," Nita whispered. "Mom, Dad, have a look around. Don't go near the edges
of the circle."
"Be careful how you move," Kit said. "khi only weigh a sixth of what you usually do. If
your muscles overreact you could bounce right out of the circle. I almost did, first time."
Nita watched her mother and father stare around them. She swallowed— partly out of
reflex, for her ears were ringing in the silence that surrounded them now. That was to be
expected; this stillness was more total than any-thing experienced on Earth. Her other
reason for swallowing was more prac-tical. The sudden transfer to one-sixth gravity

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tended to upset your stomach unless you were used to it.
Her father was staring at the ground, which had changed from wet beach sand to a
mixture of grayish gravel and pebbles, and rocks the size of fists or melons, all covered
with a gray-white dust as fine as talc. But Nita's mother was staring up at the sky with a
look of joy so great it was pain—the com-pletely bearable anguish of an impossible
dream that suddenly comes true

                             DEEP WIZARDRY                                                                            265

 after years of hopeless yearning. Tears were running down her mother's face at the sight
 of that sky, so pure a velvet black that the eye insisted on finding light in it where light
 was not—a night sky set with thousands of stars, all blazing with a cold fierce brilliance
 that only astronauts ever saw; a night sky that nonetheless had a ravening sun standing
 noonday high in it, pooling all* their shadows black and razor-sharp about their feet.
 Nita was blinking hard herself to manage the stinging of her eyes; she knew how her
 mother felt. "Over there, Mom," she said very quietly. "Off to the left. Look."
 "Off to the left" was a steep slope that plunged down and down to a deep chasm, filled
 with absolute blackness ungentled by the presence of air. On the far side of the chasm
 stretched a flat, rocky plain that seemed to stop too soon, running up against a horizon
 abnormally close. Out on the plain, not too far away, a dazzling squarish glow of gold sat
 on four spidery legs. Some thirty yards from the bright platform on legs stood a silvery
 pole with an American flag standing out from it, held straight by a rod running through
 the top of it: a necessity—for here where it stood, no wind would ever stir it.
 "No," Nita's father said, his voice hushed. "Impossible. Tranquillity Base—"
"No," Kit said, his voice soft too. "That's going to be a tourist attraction in a few years,
when they build the Hilton there—so we don't go down there for fear of leaving footprints
where somebody might find them. This is from Apollo 16. See over there?" He pointed
past the abandoned first-stage plat-form of the LEM Orion at the first Lunar Rover, which
sat parked neatly beside a boulder—a delicate-looking little dunebuggy, still in excellent
condi-tion, used only once by a couple of astronauts from Pasadena for jaunts to Stone
Mountain, on which the four of them stood.
Nita's father slowly went down on one knee and brushed his hand along the dry, pale
lunar soil, turning over the stones that lay there, then picking one up and clutching it
hard in his fist.
"Harry," Nita's mother said, still looking up. The tone of her voice made her husband
look up too—and seeing what she saw, he forgot the rock.
What they saw was part of a disk four times the size of the Moon as seen from the Earth;
and it seemed even bigger because of the Moon's foreshort-ened horizon. It was not the

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full Earth so familiar from pictures, but a waning crescent, streaked with cloud swirls and
burning with a fierce green-Wue radiance—a light with depth, like the fire held in the
heart of an opal, 'hat light banished the idea that blue and green were "cool" colors; one
could have warmed one's hands at that crescent. The blackness to which it shaded was
ever so faintly touched with silver—a disk more hinted at than seen; the new Earth in the
old Earth's arms.
    There'll be a time," Nita said softly, "when any time someone's elected

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to a public office—before they let them start work—they'll bring whoever was elected up
here and just make them look at that until they get what it means. ..."
Kit nodded. "You wanted to know where the power came from," he said to Nita's mother
and father. "The grownups who're wizards tell us that what-ever made that made the
power too. It's all of a piece."
   " 'The grownups who're wizards'?"
"And as for 'why,' " Kit said, "that's why." There was no need for him to point to "that."
"Not just for the—for what you felt on the way in. That's part of it. But because
somebody's gotta take care of that. Not just part of it —not just one country, or one set of
rules, or one species, at the expense of the others. But everything that lives, all the kinds
of 'people.' All of it, with nothing left out. One whole planet. Somebody's got to make sure
it grows as well as it can. Or just that it survives. That's what wizards do."
"Daddy," Nita said, "it's like you always say. If you don't do it yourself, it may not get done
right. And we can't afford to let that get screwed up. We have to live there. So will other
people, later."
Her father shook his head, confused. "Nita," he said, sounding unsure, "you're too young
to be thinking about this kind of thing."
She bit her lip. "Dad—that sort of thinking might be one of the reasons why things aren't
working so well back there. ..."
   "Neets," Kit said, "we have to get back. We're losing heat pretty fast."
"Mom, Dad," Nita said, "we can come back some other time. It's late, and Kit and I have
an early day tomorrow. Got the rock?" she said to Kit.
   "Uh-huh. Ready?"
Nita's mother reached out and pulled her husband close this time. "Is it going to be like it
was before?"

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"Huh? No. It just takes a lot of effort to push all this air up out of Earth's gravity well, that's
all. You have to reach escape velocity—"
Nita's father blinked. "Wait a minute. I thought this was—magic." He said the word as if
for the first time in his life.
Nita shrugged. "Even with magic," she said, "you have to obey the rules. Downhill is a lot
easier than uphill in a wizardry, same as anywhere else. Kit?"
"Ready," he said. They looked at each other, took a breath, and said one short word in
unison.
WHAM!—and air and sand and water blew outward in all directions as they left noon for
midnight, standing once again on the long dark beach silvered with moonlight. Kit stepped
to the edge of the circle, first scuffing the wizard's knot out of existence, then going
around and breaking the circle once at each compass point. "Let's go in," Nita said to her
parents. " dead."

                              DEEP WIZARDRY                                                                           267

 The four of them trudged up the stairs to the front door, back into the living room. Her dad
 plopped down onto the couch and said, "Nita, wait just a few minutes. I have to ask you
 something."
 Nita looked at him, sighed, and did as she was told. "Tell me again," her dad said, "this
 stuff about what you're doing underwater. Just very briefly."
 It turned out to be more than briefly, since much of what Nita had told her parents had
 fallen out of their heads the first time, discarded in general disbelief. And it was with
 growing dismay that Nita watched the unease in her parents' faces, as she told them
 again about the undersea tremors, the pollution of the water, the slaughter of the
 whales—and the purposes of the Lone Power, though she tried to tell them as little about
 that as she could.
 "Nita," her father said at last, "what are the chances that you could get hurt doing this
 'Song' business? The truth."
    She looked at him unhappily. "Pretty good," she said.
"And the same for Kit?" her mother said. , "Just about," Kit said.
 Nita's father shook his head. "Nita. Look. I understand ... no. I sort of understand how you
 and Kit feel about this. Magic. . . ." He raised his hands, dropped them again, in a
 helpless gesture. "If someone offered me the chance to be a magician, I'd jump at it. . . ."
"A wizard," Nita said. And, No, you wouldn't, she thought. Because if you would have,
really, you would have been offered it! There are never enough wizards. . . .
But her father was still talking. "But this business . . . endangering your-self, or
endangering Kit— Your mother and I can't permit it. You're going to have to bow out."

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For a moment, as far as Nita was concerned, everything faded out, drowned in a great
wash of relief and hope. The perfect excuse. Perfect. My mom and dad won't let me.
Sorry, S'reee, Hotshot, Ed. . . .
Opaque black eyes looked at Nita out of the scene her eager mind was already
constructing for her—and hope died. The hair stood up all over Nita —not from fear, but
from something more terrible. Without any warning, and for the first time, she understood
in her own person what had only been a word to her before: honor. I can't, she thought.
For me—for me—it's not right.
"Dad," she said unhappily, "you didn't get it. I'm sworn to the Song. If I back out now, the
whole thing will be sabotaged."
 Her father got up, a sign that he intended this argument to be over shortly. Come on,
 Neets. Surely someone else could do it—"
   "No."
"Nita," said her mother, looking stern, "you don't understand. We're not letting you do this.
Or Kit either, while he's under our roof. You're going to

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have to find a replacement. Or the—the whales will. Whoever. You're not going."
I must not have said it right, they're not understanding! "Mom—" Nita said, searching
frantically for words. "This isn't just some cute thing that Kit and I are doing because
it'll be fun! If we don't stop the forces that are beginning to move, there are going to be
massive earthquakes all up and down the East Coast. That's not a maybe. It's a will!
You think the Island would survive something like that? The whole place is nothing but
rocks and trash the glaciers dumped in the ocean; it'll break up and wash away like a
sandcastle at high tide! And you think Manhattan'11 survive? It's already got four
unstable geological faults of its own, right through the bedrock! And none of the
buildings there are earthquake-proof; one quake'll leave the place looking like
somebody kicked over a pile of blocks!" Nita was waving her arms in the air now, so
upset that she was beyond caring whether she looked silly or not. "Millions of people
could die—"
     "Could," her father said, seizing on the word. He was pacing now.
Kit shook his head. "Will," he said, and there was such a weight of cer-tainty and
misery on the word that Nita's father stopped pacing, and her mother closed her
mouth, and they both stared at Kit in amazement. "You're saying," Kit said, gazing at
them out of eyes suddenly gone dark and fierce, "that you don't care whether ten
million people, more than ten million people, would die, just so long as we two don't
get hurt."

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 Nita's mother spluttered, to Nita's great satisfaction. That one had sunk in. "No, we
 aren't, we just—"
 "You don't even care that ten million people might die," Nita said. "Just so Kit and I are
 okay, you're willing to run that risk."
 "No, I—" Nita's father saw what was being done to him. "Young lady, no more out of
 you! Just the quakes going on off the coast now, by the reports we've heard, are too
 dangerous for you to be down there."
   "Daddy, believe me, we've survived a lot worse!"
 "Yes—and your mother and I didn't know about it then! Now we do." Her father turned
 away. "The answer is no, and that's final!"
From many fights Nita had overheard between her folks, Nita knew that when her dad
said that, it never was. "Daddy," she said. "I'm sorry. I really am. I love you, and I wish
like anything I could do what you want. But I can't"
"Nita!" There was that rage again, full-blown, worse than before. Her father was on his
feet, standing right over her, glaring at her. "You will do as I tell you!"
Hot all over, Nita shot to her feet—standing on the chair—and in sheer desperation
shouted right back in his face. "Don'tyou get it? There are some things in the world
more important than doing what you tell me!"




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   Her father and mother stared at her, stunned.
   "Besides," Kit said quietly from out of her range of vision, "how would you
stop us?"
   Nita's father turned away to stare at Kit now.
"Look," Kit said. "Mr. Callahan, Mrs. Callahan—we gave our word that we'd do this."
What is this 'we'? Nita thought, bemused. "And the wizardry we're doing is mainly
directed against the One who invented the broken promise. Breaking our word will play
right into Its hands and cause a lot of people to die, at best. Maybe destroy this world,
sooner or later, at worst."
   "But we have only your word on that!" Nita's mother said.
"Uh-huh. But isn't our word any good? And why would we lie to you about this?
Considering that we're going through all this crap for the sake of telling you the truth."
   Nita's mother closed her mouth.
"She didn't have to tell you," Kit said, sounding angry for the first time. "But it would've


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 been lying, in a way—and Nita thinks you're worth not lying to." He paused, then said, "I
 do too. We may just be kids, but we're old enough to tell the truth. And to take it. Are
 you?"
The question wasn't a taunt: It was honestly meant. "Even if you're not, we'll still have to
do what we have to," Nita said, though saying it made her unhappy. "When you two wake
up in the morning, this could all seem like a dream to you—if it had to. I guess you'd
better make up your minds, because we have to get some sleep or we won't be worth
dead fish tomorrow."
   Her parents were staring at each other. "Betty . . ." said Nita's father.
   "We need more time," Nita's mother said.
   "I don't think we've got it."
Her mother looked back at her father. "If they're right about this," she said, "it would be
wrong of us to stop them if they want to help."
   "But we're responsible for them!"
"Apparently," Nita's mother said, in a peculiar mixture of pride and pain, "they've learned
that lesson better than we suspected, Harry. Because now they seem to be making
themselves responsible for us. And a lot of other People."
"I guess there comes a time when you can't do anything but trust," her father said at last,
sounding reluctant. "It just seems—so soon. . . . Nita— is all this on the level?"
"Oh, Daddy." She loved him, right then, and hurt for him, more than she could have told
him. "I wish it weren't. But it is."
Nita's father was silent for several long breaths. "Millions of lives," he said under his
breath.
      And another silence, which he finally broke as if it were a physical thing, do you
      need to be up?"

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"Sixish. I'll set my alarm, Daddy." Nita got stiffly down from the chair aching all over.
Behind her, Kit got up and brushed past her as Nita hugged first her dad good night.
Maybe the last time she would ever hug him . . or the second-to-the-last— Oh, don't think
of that now!
Her mother had caught Kit on the way past and hugged him—and now wouldn't let Nita
past without one either. She held her for a moment at arm's length. "Thank you for—up
there, baby," she said, nodding once at the ceiling. Her eyes were wet, but she was
smiling.
"It's okay, Mom. Any time." Is this what it feels like when your heart breaks? Oh, Lord,
don't let me cry.

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   "And thank you for trusting us."
Nita swallowed. "You taught me how," she said. And then she couldn't stand it any more.
She broke away and headed for her room, Kit right behind her.
She knew there was one hurdle left between her and bed. Actually, the hurdle was on the
bed: sitting there crosslegged in the dark, looking at her with cool interest as they came
in.
"Well?" Dairine said, as Nita flopped down on her stomach beside her, and the bed
bounced them both once or twice. "I saw you disappear. Where'd'ja take them?"
   "The Moon."
   "Oh, come on, Neets."
   "Dairine," Kit said from the doorway. "Catch."
Nita glanced up, saw her sister reach up and pick something out of the air: an irregular
piece of pale, grainy stone, about the size and shape of an eraser. Dairine peered at it,
rubbing it between her fingers. "What is this? Pumice?" There was a moment of shocked
silence; then Dairine's voice scaled up to an aggrieved shriek. "You did go to the Moon!
And you didn't take me! You, you —" Apparently she couldn't find anything sufficiently
dirty to call them. "I'm gonna kill you!"
"Dari, shut up, they're in shock out there!" Nita said. This argument did little to save her.
Far more effective was Kit's wrestling Dairine down flat, stuffing her under the bedcovers
and a couple of pillows, and more or less sitting on her until she shut up and stopped
struggling.
"We'll take you next time," Nita said, and then the pain hit her again. "Kit," she said, husky-
voiced. "Remind me to see that the runt here gets to the Moon in the near future. Next
week, maybe. If she behaves."
   "Right," Kit said. "You give up, runt?"
   "Hwhmffm hnnoo rrhhrhn ffwmhhnhhuh," said the blankets.
"Keep talking like that and your mouth'll get stuck that way," Kit said, and let Dairine out.
   Nita's sister extricated herself from the covers with icy dignity that lasted

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just until she was sitting where she had been, back in control and smoothing her ruffled
pajamas. "Mom 'n' Dad didn't kill you," she said to Nita.
  "Nope. You gave me good advice, runt."
   "Huh? What advice?"
"Last night, I suspect," Kit said. "That stuff about 'Either keep your mouth shut, or tell the
truth—' "
Nita nodded, looking from Kit to Dairine, while Dairine modestly polished her nails on her

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Yoda pajamas. And Nita stared at her, and then started to laugh, so hard that she got the
hiccups and fell over sideways, and Dairine looked at her as if she'd gone nuts, and Kit
sat down and punched her once or twice, worriedly, in the shoulder. "Neets? You okay?"
"Oh, Kit," she managed to gasp at last, between bubbles of laughter. "What Picchu
said—"
   "Huh?"
"What Peach said. 'Do what the night tells you—' " She went off into the giggles again.
  Kit looked down at her, perplexed. "You lost me."
Nita pushed herself upright, reached out and tugged a couple of times, weakly, at one of
Dairine's pajama-sleeves. " 'Do what the night tells you.' Not night like when it gets dark.
'Knight'! Do what the knight tells you! As in the Junior Jedi here—" She went over
sideways again and strangled her last few whoops of laughter in a convenient pillow.
  "It was good advice," he said to Dairine. "Thanks, Dari."
  "Uh, sure," said Dairine, amazed at another compliment.
Nita sat up again after a little while, wiping her eyes. "Yeah," she said. "Even if I took it
before I remembered you said it ... it was good advice." She thought she would let her
sister have just one more compliment—espe-cially since it was true, and information she
might never have another chance to give her. "You're gonna be one hot wizard
someday," Nita said.
  Dairine sat speechless.
"Neets," Kit said, "we've had a long day. And tomorrow'll be longer. I'm sacking out.
Dairine—"
"Right," Nita said. She lay down again, feeling glad, afraid, excited, shaky, light—a
hundred things at once. She never noticed when Dairine got off her bed; she never heard
Kit leave. She fell into sleep as if into a hole.

Foregathering Song




Nita sat hunched in a miserable little bundle on the beach, her arms around her
knees—staring at the bright morning sea and not seeing it.
She had gone to bed with the feeling that everything would be all right when she woke up
in the morning. But she'd awakened to a pair of parents torn among insane curiosity,

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worry, approval, and disapproval, who drank cup after cup of coffee and stared at the
lump of lunar pumice in the middle of the table, and made little sense when they talked.
She hardly knew them. Her mom and dad alternated between talking to her, hanging on
every word she said, and talking over her head about her, as if she weren't there. And
they kept touching her like a delicate thing that might break—though there was an
undercurrent of anger in the touches that said her parents had suddenly discovered she
was in some ways stronger than they were, and they didn't like it.
Nita sighed. I'd give anything for one of Dad's hugs that squeeze the air out and make
you go squeak! she thought. Or to hear Mom do Donald Duck voices at me. But fat
chance of that. . . .
She let out a long, unhappy breath. Kit was finishing his breakfast at a leisurely pace and
handling endless questions about wizardry from her parents —covering for her. Just as
well: She had other business to attend to before they left.
"Tom," she said, almost mourning, under her breath. She had been down to Friedman's
already and had "minded the store" under Dog's watchful eye for a long time, waiting for
Tom to return her call. She needed expert help, in a hurry. I've gone as far as I can on my
own, she thought. I need advice! Oh, Tom, where are you?
   As she'd expected. Nothing—
   The last thing she expected was the sudden explosion of air that occurred

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about twenty feet down the beach from her, flinging sand in all directions. No, Nita
corrected herself. The last thing she expected was what the explo-sion produced: a man
with one towel wrapped around his waist and another draped around his neck—tall,
broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted, with dark hair and the kind of face one sees in
cigarette ads, but never hopes to see smile. It was not Tom, but Carl. He looked around
him, saw Nita, and came over to her in a hurry, looking grave. "What'samatter, Nita?" he
said, casual as always, but concerned. "I heard that even though it wasn't meant for me."
She looked up at him wanly and tried to smile just a little; but the smile was a dismal
failure. "Uh, no. Look, no one was answering the phone—and then I was just thinking—"
"That wasn't what I would call 'just' thinking," Carl said, sitting down on the sand beside
her. "Sometimes I forget what kind of power wizards have when they're kids. . . ."
Nita saw that Carl's hair was wet. "I got you out of the shower," she said. "I'm sorry. ..."
  "No, I was out already. It's okay."
  "Where's Tom?" Nita said.
"He has a breakfast meeting with some people at ABC; he asked me to take his calls.


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 Not that I had much choice, in your case. . . . You've got big trouble, huh? Tell me about
 it."
 She did. It took her a while. Though she braced herself for it, the look of shock on Carl's
 face when he heard about Nita's accepting the Silent Lord's part was so terrible, she
 started to leak tears again. Carl sat still while she finished the story.
   "Do your folks know?" he said at last.
"No," Nita said. "And I don't think I'm going to tell them. I think Dad suspects—and Mom
knows he does and doesn't want to talk to him about it."
    Carl let out a long breath. "I don't know what to tell you," he said.
This was not the most encouraging thing Nita had ever heard. A Senior Wizard always
knew what to tell you. "Carl," she said, tears still thick in her voice, "what can I do? I
can't—I can't just die!"
It was the first time she had actually said the word out loud. It left her shaking all over like
the aftermath of a particularly large wizardry, and the tears started coming again.
Carl was quiet. "Well, yeah, you can," he said at last, gently. "People do it all the
time—sometimes for much less cause."
    "But there must be something I could do!"
    Carl looked down at the sand. "What did you say you were going to do?"
Nita didn't say anything; they both knew the answer very well. "You know what caused
this?" Carl said.

274

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   "What?"
"Remember the blank-check sorcery you did while in the other Manhat-tan, that time?
The open-ended request for help?"
   "Uh-huh."
"That kind of spell always says that at some later date you'll be called upon to return the
energy you use." Carl looked somber. "You got your help. But it must have taken a lot of
energy to seal a whole piece of another space away from every other space, forever. . .
."
Nita scrubbed at her eyes, not much liking this line of reasoning. "But the spell never
said anyone was going to have to die to pay back the price!"
"No. All it said was that you were going to have to pay back the exact amount of energy
used up at some future date. And it must have been a very great amount, to require

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lifeprice to be paid. There's no higher payment that can be made." Carl fell silent a
moment, then said, "Well, one." And his face shut as if a door had closed behind his
eyes.
Nita put her head down on her knees again. This wasn't working the way it was
supposed to. "Carl, there has to be something you, we could do—"
The surf crashed for a long time between her words and his. "Nita," Carl said finally, "no.
What you absolutely do not want is 'something you could do.' What you really want is for
me to get you off the hook somehow, so you don't have to carry through with your
promise."
Her head snapped up in shock. "You mean— Carl, don't you care if I die J or not?"
"I care a whole lot." The pain in Carl's voice made it plain that he did. "But unfortunately I
also have to tell you the truth. That's what Seniors are for; why do you think we're given
so much power to work with? We're paid for what we do—and a lot of it isn't pleasant."
   "Then tell me some truth! Tell me what to do—"
"No," he said gently. "Never that. Nine-tenths of the power of wizardry comes from
making up your own mind what you're going to do. The rest of it is just mechanics." Carl
looked at her with a professional calm that reminded Nita of her family doctor. "What I
can do is go over your options with you."
   She nodded.
"So first—what you'd like to do. You want to break your word and not sing the Song.
That'd be easy enough to do. You would simply disappear—stay on land for the next
week or so and not have anything further to do with the whales with whom you've been
working. That would keep you out of the Song proper; you'd be alive three days from
now."
Carl looked out to sea as he spoke, nothing in his expression or his tone of voice hinting
at either praise or condemnation. "There would naturally be results of that action. For
one, you took the Celebrant's Oath in front of witnesses and called on the Powers of
wizardry themselves to bring certain

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things about if you break the Oath. They will bring those things about, Nita —the Powers
don't forget. You'll lose your wizardry. You'll forget that there is any such thing as magic
in the world. Any relationships you have with other wizards will immediately collapse. You
would never have met Kit, for example, or me, or Tom, except for your wizardry. So we'll
cease to exist for you."
   Nita held still as stone.
"There'll also be effects on the Song itself as a result of your leaving. Even if the group

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 manages to find a replacement wizard to sing the Silent One—" Nita thought of Kit and
 froze. "—the Song itself will still have been sabo-taged by your betrayal of your Oath. It
 won't be effective. The undersea tremors, the pollution and the attacks on the whales and
 all the rest of it will continue. Or the Lone Power will enter into the wizardry and throw it
 completely out of control—in which case I don't want to think of what will happen to New
 York and the Island, sooner or later. If all the other wizards in the area worked together,
 we might be able to slow it down. But not for long."
 Carl took a breath. "And on top of everything else, breaking the Cele-brant's Oath will
 also be a violation of the Wizard's Oath, your oath to assist in slowing down the death of
 the Universe. In your last moment as a wizard, as you lose your magic, you will know
 beyond all doubt that the Universe around you is going to die sooner because of your
 actions. And all through your life there'll always be something at the bottom of your heart
 that feels sad . . . and you'll never be able to get rid of it, or even understand it."
    Nita didn't move.
"That was all the 'bad' stuff. On the 'good' side I can tell you that you probably wouldn't
die of the upheavals that will start happening. What you did in Manhattan with Kit wouldn't
be forgotten by the Powers either; they pay their debts. I imagine your folks would get a
sudden urge to go visit some relatives out of state—something like that—and be a good
distance inland when the trouble started. And after the trouble, you would go on to live
what would seem a perfectly normal life . . . after all, most people think it's normal to have
a nameless sorrow at the bottom of your soul. You'd grow up, and find a job, and get
married, or not, and work and play and do all the other things that mortals and wizards
do. And then you'd die."
   Nita was silent.
"Now the second option," Carl said. "You go down there and keep your word—though
you're not happy about it, to say the least. You sing the Song, and when the time comes
you dive into that coral or whatever and cut yourself up, and the Master-Shark comes
after you and eats you. You experi-ence about two or three minutes of extreme pain, pain
like being hit by a car or burned all over, until you go into shock, or your brain runs out of
oxygen,

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whichever comes first; and you die. Your parents and friends then have to deal with the
fact of your death."
  Nita's tears started again.
"The 'good' side to this option," said Carl, "is that the Song will be successfully
completed, millions of people will continue to live their lives untroubled, and the Lone

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Power will have suffered another severe setback. My estimate is that It couldn't interfere
in any large way with the Sea's affairs—and, to some extent, with the land's—for some
forty to fifty years thereafter. Possibly more."
   Nita nodded slowly. "So if—"
   "Wait. There's a third option," Carl said.
   "Huh?"
He looked at her with an expression she couldn't fully decipher. "Sing the Song and make
the Sacrifice—but do it willingly. Rather than just doing it because you have to, to keep
terrible things from happening."
   "Does it make a difference?"
Carl nodded. "If you can make the Sacrifice willingly, the wizardry will gain such power as
you can barely imagine. The Lone One's power is always based on Its desire to have Its
own way in everything. Nothing undermines Its workings faster than power turned toward
having something be the way someone else wants it."
Carl looked hard at her. "I have to make real sure you understand this. I'm not talking
about the sort of fakery most people mean when they talk about 'sacrifice'—none of that
'unselfishness' business, which usually has the desire for other people to feel guilty or
sad hidden at the bottom of it. No being a 'martyr.' That would sabotage a wizardry
almost as badly as running out on it. But to willingly give up one's life for the sake of the
joy and well-being of others will instantly destroy whatever power the Lone One has
currently amassed." He glanced away. "That doesn't mean you couldn't be afraid and still
have it work, by the way."
   "Great," Nita said with a nervous laugh.
"The important thing is that, other times when the Sacrifice has been made willingly, there
have been fewer wars afterward, less crime, for a long while. The Death of things, of the
world as whole, has been slowed. . . •"
Nita thought of people beating and shooting and stealing from each other; she thought of
A-bombs and H-bombs, and people starving and poor—anfl she thought of all that slowed
down. But all those troubles and possibilities seemed remote right now compared to her
own problem, her own life. "I don't know if I could do that," Nita said, scarcely above a
whisper.
There was a long pause. "I don't know if I could either," said Carl, just as quietly.
  She sat still for a long time. "I think—"

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"Don't say it," Carl said, shaking his head. "You couldn't possibly have decided already.
And even if you have—" He glanced away. "You may change your mind later . . . and

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 then you'll be saved the embarrassment of having to justify it to me."
 "Later—" She looked at him in distress and confusion. "You mean you would still talk to
 me if I—" She stopped. "Wait a minute. If I don't do it, I won't know you! And if I do do
 it—"
    "There's always Timeheart," Carl said softly.
 Nita nodded, silent. She had been there once, in that "place" to which only wizards can
 find their way while still alive; that terrible and beautiful place where things that are loved
 are preserved, deathless, perfect, yet still growing and becoming more themselves
 through moment after timeless mo-ment. "After we— After we're alive, then—"
   "What's loved," Carl said, "lives."
 She looked at him in a few moments' sorrowful wonder. "But sure," she said. "You're a
 Senior. You must go there all the time."
"No." He looked out over the sea. "In fact, the higher you're promoted, when you're a
wizard, the more work you have to do—and the less time you get to spend outside this
world, except on business." He breathed out and shook his head. "I haven't been to
Timeheart for a long time, except in dreams. ..."
Now it was his turn to sound wistful. Nita reached out and thumped Carl's shoulder once
or twice, hesitantly.
"Yeah," Carl said. Slowly he stood up and brushed the sand off his towel, then looked
down at her. "Nita," he said—and his voice was not impassive any more, "I'm sorry."
    "Yeah," she said.
"Call us before you start the song, if you can, okay?" The New York accent was
pronounced and raspy, as if Carl's nose were stuffed.
    "Right."
He turned away, then paused and looked back at her. And everything suddenly became
too much for Nita. She went to Carl in a rush, threw her arms around him at about waist
height, and began to bawl. "Oh, honey," Carl said, and got down on one knee and held
Nita tight, which was what she needed. But the helpless expression on his face, when
she finally got some control over herself and looked up, almost hurt her more than her
own pain.
After a while she pushed him away. Carl resisted her for a moment. Nita," he said. "If
you— If you do. . . ." He paused. ". . . Thank you," "e finally said, looking at her hard.
"Thank you. For the ten million lives that'll keep on living. They'll never know. But the
wizards will . . . and won't ever forget."

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"A lot of good that'd do me!" Nita said, caught between desperate laugh-ter and tears.
"Sweetheart," Carl said, "if you're in this world for comfort, you've come to the wrong
place . . . whether you're wizard or just plain mortal. And if you're doing what you're doing
because of the way other people will feel about it—you're definitely in the wrong
business. What you do has to be done because of how you 'II feel about you . . . the way
you did it last night, with your folks." His voice was rueful. "There are no other rewards ...
if only because no matter what you do, no one will ever think the things about you that
you want them to think. Not even the Powers."
   "Right," Nita said again.
They let go of each other. Carl turned and walked away quickly. The air slammed itself
shut behind him, and he was gone.
   Nita walked back to the house.

She kept her good-byes brief. "We may be back tonight," she said to her mother and
father as they stood together on the beach, "or we may not. S'reee says it'll depend on
how much of the rehearsal we get finished."
   "Rehearsal—" Her mother looked at her curiously.
"Uh-huh. It's like I told you," Kit said. "Everyone who sings has his own part—but there's
some ensemble singing, and it has to be done right."
"Kit, we're late," Nita said. "Mom—" She grabbed her mother and hugged her hard. "Don't
worry if we don't come back tonight, Mom, please," she said. "We may just go straight
into the Song—and that's a day and a half by itself. Look for us Monday morning." Us! her
mind screamed, but she ignored it. "Dad—" She turned to him, hugged him too, and saw,
out of the corner of her eye, her mother hugging Kit.
Nita glanced up and down the beach. "It's all clear, Kit," she said. She shrugged out of
the towel wrapped around her, leaving it with her mother, then sprinted for the water. A
few fast hops over several breakers, and there was depth enough to dive and stroke out
to twenty-foot water. Nita leaped into the whaleshape as if it were an escape rather than
a trap from which she might never return. Once a humpback, she felt normal again—and
felt a twinge of nervousness; there was something S'reee had warned her about that. . . .
No matter. Nita surfaced and blew good-bye at her mother and father, then turned for Kit,
who was treading water beside her, to take her dorsal fin and be towed out to depth.
Out in the fifty-foot water Kit wrapped the whalesark about him and made the change with
a swiftness that was almost savage. The sperm whale that appeared in his place had a
bitter, angry look to its movements when it began to swim away from shore.

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   "Kit," Nita said as they went, "you okay?"
 It was some time before he answered. "No," he said. "Why should I be? \Vhen you're
 going to—" He didn't finish the sentence.
   "Kit, look—"
 "No, you look. Don't you see that there's nothing I can do about all this? And I don't like
 it!" His song was another of the scraping sperm-whale battlecries, soft but very heartfelt,
 and the rage in it chattered right down Nita's skin like nails down a blackboard.
 "There's not much I can do about it myself," she said, "and I don't like it either. Let's not
 talk about it for now, please! My brain still hurts enough from last night."
    "Neets," he said, "we've got to talk about it sometime. Tomorrow's it."
 "Fine. Before tomorrow. Meanwhile, we've got today to worry about. Are
 we even going the right way?"                                   x
 He laughed at her then, a painful sound. "Boy, are you preoccupied," Kit said. "Clean
 your ears out and listen!"
 She stopped everything but the ticks and clicks a humpback uses to find its way, and
 listened—and was tempted to laugh herself. The sea had a racket hidden in it. From the
 southwest was coming an insane assortment of long, odd, wild sounds. Sweet high
 flutings that cut sharply through the interven-ing distance; clear horncalls, as if someone
 hunted under the waves; outer-spacy whistles and warbles like the electronic cries of
 orbiting satellites; deep bass scrapes and rumbles, lawn-mower buzzes and halftone
 moans and soulful sighs. And many of those sounds, sooner or later, came back to the
 same main theme—a series of long wistful notes, slowly ascending into pitches too high
 and keen for human ears, then whispering away, lost in the quiet breath-ing of the water.
Nita had never heard that main theme before, but she recognized it in-stantly from her
reading and her wizard's-sense of the Sea. It was the loss/ gain/sorrow motif that ran all
through the Song of the Twelve; and what she heard now, attenuated by distance but
otherwise clear, was the sound of its singers, tuning up for the performance in which that
mournful phrase would become not just a motif but a reality.
"Kit," Nita said with a shiver, "that's a lot more than ten whales! Who are all those other
voices?"
    He bubbled, a shrug. "Let's find out."
She whistled agreement and struck off after Kit, due west, away from the south shore of
the island and out across the Atlantic-to-Ambrose shipping aPproaches once more. Song
echoed more and more loudly in the sunlit shallows through which they swam; but
underneath them Nita and Kit were Verv aware of the depths from which no echo
returned—the abyss of Hudson Canyon, far below them, waiting.

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"This is it," Kit said at last, practically in Nita's ear, as they came to the fringes of the area
S'reee's instructions had mentioned—fifteen miles east-northeast of Barnegat, New
Jersey, right over the remains of an old sunken tanker six fathoms down in the water.
And floating, soaring, or slowly fluking through the diffuse green-golden radiance of the
water, were the whales.
Nita had to gulp once to find her composure. Hundreds of whales had gathered and were
milling about, whales of every kind—minke whales, sei whales, sperm whales, dolphins
of more kinds than she knew existed, in a profusion of shapes and colors, flashing
through the water; several blues, grave-voiced, gliding with huge slow grace; fin whales,
hardly smaller than the blues, bowhead whales and pygmy rights and humpbacks, many
of them; gray whales and pygmy sperms and narwhals with their long single spiral teeth,
like unicorn horns; belugas and killers and scamperdowns and bottle-nosed whales—
"Kit," Nita sang, faint-voiced, "S'reee didn't tell me there were going to be people here!"
 "Me either. I guess spectators at the rehearsal are so common, she forgot. . . ." Kit
 sounded unconcerned.
Easy for you, Nita thought. You like crowds! She sang a few notes of sonar, trying
nervously to hear some familiar shape. One shape at least Nita recog-nized,
accompanied by the slow, calm, downscaling note of the Blue, as Aroooon passed by, a
gold-tinged shadow in the background of greenness and the confusion of bodies. And
there was Hotshot's high chatter, some ways off, accompanied by several other dolphin
voices very like his—members of his pod.
Stillness swept over the spectators as she approached with Kit, and they recognized who
she was. And a single note began to go up from them, starting at the fringes of the circle,
working its way inward even to the Celebrants, until she heard even Aroooon's giant
voice taking it up. One note, held in every range from the dolphins' dog-whistle trilling to
the water-shaking thunder of the blues. One thought, one concept in the Speech,
trumpeting through the water with such force that Nita began to shake at the sound of it.
Praise. They knew she was the Silent One. They knew what she was going to do for
them. They were thanking her.
   Stunned, Nita forgot to swim—just drifted there in painful joy.
From behind, as the note slowly ebbed away, Kit nudged her. "Get the lead out, Neets,"
he sang, just for her hearing. "You're the star of this show-So start acting like it! Go in
there and let them know you're here."
She swam slowly through the spectator whales, into the clear water in the center of their
great circle, where the Celebrants were gathered.
One by one, as she circled above the weed-covered remnant of the trawler* Nita quickly


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identified the whales she knew. Aroooon, yes, swimming on more or less by himself to
tideward, singing his deep scrape of notes with the

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absent concentration of a perfectionist who has time to hunt perfection; Hotshot, doing
barrel rolls near the surface and chattering through the quick bright harmonies of some
part of the Wanderer's song; Areinnye, aloof from both Wanderer and Blue, running again
and again over a phrase of the Gray Lord's song and paying no further attention to Nita
after a quick glance.
There were also five other whales whom Nita didn't know, exactly as Kit had pegged
them. A beluga, dolphin-sized but whale-shaped, lazing near the surface and singing
some longing phrase from the Gazer's song; a pilot whale, long and slim and gray, silent
for the moment and looking at Nita with interest; a right whale, with its huge, strange,
bent-out-of-shape baleen mouth, listening to the beluga; a killer whale, the sharp blacks
and whites of its hide a contrast to the grays and quiet mottlings of most of the others.
And—thank Heaven! —S'reee, swimming toward Nita from beside the killer. Nita had
been shaken by the sight of the killer—killer whales being one of a humpback's most
persistent natural enemies—but just now her composure was so unraveled, there wasn't
much more damage that could be done to it. As S'reee came up to greet her, Nita
managed to sing in some-thing like a calm voice, and as if she were actually in charge,
"Well, we're late. Should we get started?"
"Good idea," said S'reee, brushing skin briefly and reassuringly with Nita. "Introductions
first, though."
   "Yes, please."
S'reee led Nita off to the north, where several of the singers were working together.
"We've been through the first part of the Song already this morn-ing," said S'reee, "the
name-songs and so forth. I've heard you do yours, so there was no need for you to be
here till late. We're up to the division now, the 'temptation' part. These are the people
singing the Undecided group—"
"Hi, Hotshot," Nita sang as she and S'reee soared into the heart of the group. The dolphin
chattered a greeting back and busied himself with his singing again, continuing his spirals
near the surface, above the heads of the right whale and a whale whose song Nita hadn't
heard on the way in, a Sowerby's beaked whale. She immediately suspected why she
hadn't heard it; the whale, undoubtedly there to celebrate the Forager's part, was busy
eating —ripping up the long kelp and redweed stirring around the shattered deck-Plates
of the wreck. It didn't even look up as she and S'reee approached. The r'ght whale was

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less preoccupied; it swam toward Nita and S'reee at a slow Pace that might have been
either courtesy or caution.
"HNii't, this is T!h!ki," said S'reee. Nita clicked his name back at him in greeting,
swimming forward to brush skin politely with him. "He's singing fhe Listener."
  Tlhlki rolled away from Nita and came about, looking at her curiously.

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When he spoke, his song revealed both great surprise and some unease. "S'reee—this is
a human!"
"Tlhlki," Nita said, wry-voiced, with a look at S'reee, "are you going to be mad at me for
things I haven't done too?"
The right whale looked at her with that cockeyed upward stare that rights have—their
eyes being placed high in their flat-topped heads. "Oh," he said, sounding wry himself,
"you've run afoul of Areinnye, have you. No fear, Silent Lord—hNii't, was it? No fear."
Tlhlki's song put her instantly at ease. It had an amiable and intelligent sound to it, the
song of a mind that didn't tend toward blind animosities. "If you're going to do the Sea
such a service as you're doing, I could hardly do less than treat you with honor. For Sea's
sake don't think Areinnye is typical. . . .
"However," Tlhlki added, gazing down at the calmly feeding beaked whale, "some of us
practically have to have a bite taken out of us to get us to start honoring and stop eating."
He drifted down a fathom or so and bumped nose-first into the beaked whale. "Roots!
Heads up, you bottom-grubber, here comes the Master-Shark!"
"Huh? Where? Where?" the shocked song came drifting up from the bottom. The kelp
was thrashed about by frantic fluking, and through it rose the beaked whale, its mouth full
of weed, streamers of which trailed back and whipped around in all directions as the
whale tried to tell where the shark was coming from. "Where—what— Oh," the beaked
whale said after a moment, as the echoes from its initial excited squeaking came back
and told it that the Master-Shark was nowhere in the area. "Ki," it said slowly, "I'm going
to get you for that."
"Later. Meantime, here's S'reee, and hNii't with her," said T!h!ki. "HNii't's singing the
Silent Lord. HNii't, this is Roots."
"Oh," said Roots, "well met. Pleasure to sing with you. Would you excuse me?" She
flipped her tail, politely enough, before Nita could sing a note, and a second later was
head-down in the kelp again, ripping it up faster than before, as if making up for lost time.
Nita glanced with mild amusement at S'reee as Hotshot spiraled down to join them.
"She's a great conversationalist," Hotshot whistled, his song con-spiratorially quiet.
"Really. Ask her about food."

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"I kind of suspected," Nita said. "Speaking of the Master-Shark, though, where is Ed this
morning?"
S'reee waved one long fin in a shrug. "He has a late appearance, as you do, so it doesn't
really matter if he shows up late. Meanwhile, we have to meet the others. Ki, are you
finished with Roots?"
"Shortly. We're going through the last part of the second duet. I'll catch up with you
people later." The right whale glided downward toward the weeds, and S'reee led Nita off
to the west, where the Blue drifted in the

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water, and the beluga beside him, a tiny white shape against Aroooon's hugeness.
"Aroooon and I are two of the Untouched," said S'reee. "The third, after the Singer and
the Blue, is the Gazer. That's Iniihwit."
   "HNii't," Aroooon's great voice hailed them as Nita approached.
Nita bent her body into a bow of respect as she coasted through the water. "Sir," she
said.
That small, calm eye dwelt gravely on her. "Are you well, Silent Lord?" said the Blue.
   "As well as I can be, sir," Nita said. "Under the circumstances."
   "That's well," said Aroooon. "Iniihwit, here is the human I spoke of."
The beluga swam away from Aroooon to touch skin with Nita. Iniihwit
was male, much smaller than Nita as whales went, though big for a beluga.
But what struck her more than his smallness was the abstracted, contempla-
tive sound of his song when he did speak. There were long silent days of calm
behind it, days spent floating on the surface alone, watching the changes of
sea and sky, saying little, seeing much. "HNii't," he said, "well met. And well
met now, for there's something you must hear. You too, Senior."           ^
   "The weather?" S'reee said, sounding worried.                            \
   "Yes indeed. It looks as if that storm is not going to pass us by."
   Nita looked at S'reee in surprise. "What storm? It's clear."
"For now," said Iniihwit. "Nevertheless, there's weather coming, and there's no telling
what it will stir up in the depths."
"Is there any chance we can beat it?" S'reee said, sounding very worried indeed.
"None," the beluga said. "It will be here in half a light. We'll have to take our chances with
the storm, I fear."
S'reee hung still in the water, thinking. "Well enough," she said. "Come on, hNii't; let's
speak to Areinnye and the others singing the Undecided. We'll start the group rehearsal,


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then go straight into the Song. Time's swim-rning."
S'reee fluked hard and soared off, leaving Nita in shock for a moment. We won't be going
home tonight, she thought. No good-byes. No last explana-tions. I'll never set foot on
land again. . . .
  "Neets?" Kit's voice said from behind her.
  "Right," she said.
She went after S'reee to see the three whales singing the Undecided. Areinnye greeted
Nita with cool cordiality and went back to her practicing. And here's the Sounder," S'reee
was saying. "Fluke, this is hNii't."
Nita brushed skin with the Sounder, who was a pilot whale; small and bottled gray, built
along the same general lines as a sperm, though barely a Quarter the size. Fluke's eyes
were small, his vision poor, and he had an

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owlish, shortsighted look about him that reminded Nita of Dairine in her glasses. The
likeness was made stronger by a shrill, ratchety voice and a tendency toward chuckles.
"Fluke?" Nita said.
"I was one," the Sounder said. "I'm a triplet. And a runt, as you can see. There was
nothing to do to hold my own with my brother and sister except become a wizard in self-
defense."
Nita made a small amused noise, thinking that there might not be so much difference
between the motivations and family lives of humans and whales. "And here's Fang," said
S'reee.
Nita found herself looking at the brilliant white and deep black of the killer whale. Her
feelings were decidedly mixed. The humpback-shape had its own ideas about the Killer,
mostly prejudiced by the thought of blood in the water. But Nita's human memories
insisted that killers were affable creatures, friendly to humans; she remembered her
Uncle Jerry, her mother's older brother, telling about how he'd once ridden a killer whale
at an aquatic park in Hawaii and had had a great time. This killer whale edged closer to
Nita now, staring at her out of small black eyes—not opaque ones like Ed's, but sharp,
clever ones, with merriment in them. "Well?" the killer said, his voice teasing. "Shark got
your tongue?"
The joke was so horrible, and somehow so funny, that Nita burst out laughing, liking this
creature instantly. "Fang, is it?"
   "It is. HNii't, is it?"
"More or less." There was a kind of wicked amusement about Fang's song, which by itself
was funny to listen to—sweet whistles and flutings peppered liberally with spits and

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fizzes. "Fang, are you from these waters originally?"
   "Indeed not. I came down from Baffin Bay for the Song."
Nita swung her tail in surprise. "That's in Canada! Fifteen hundred miles!"
"What? Oh, a great many lengths, yes. I didn't swim it, hNii't. Any more than you and K!t
there went where you went last night by swimming."
"I suppose," she said, "that a wizardry done like that—on such short notice, and taking
the wizards such a distance—might have been noticed."
Fang snorted bubbles. " 'Might'! I should say so. By everybody. But it's understandable
that you might want to indulge yourselves, anyway. Seeing that you and your partner
won't have much more time to work together in the flesh."
Fang's voice was kind, even matter-of-fact; but Nita wanted to keep away from that
subject for the moment. "Right. Speaking of which, S'reee, hadn't we better start?"
   "Might as well."
S'reee swam off to a spot roughly above the wreck, whistling, and slowly the whole group
began to drift in toward her. The voices of the whales

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gathered around to watch the Celebrants began to quiet, like those of an audience at a
concert.
"From the top," S'reee said. She paused a few seconds, then lifted up her voice in the
Invocation.

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

Joy. . . . Nita thought, trying to concentrate. But the thought of whose blood was being
sung about made it hard.
The shadow that fell over Nita somewhere in the middle of the first song of the Betrayed
whales, though, got her attention immediately. A stream-lined shape as pale as bleached
bone glided slowly over her, blocking the jade light; one dead-black, unreflecting eye
glanced down. "Nita."
"Ed," she said, none too enthusiastically. His relentless reality was no pleasant sight.
 "Come swim with me."
He arched away through the water, northward toward Ambrose Light. The gathered
spectators drew back as Nita silently followed.

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Shortly they were well to the north, still able to hear the ongoing practice Song, but out of
hearing range for standard conversation. "So, Silent Lord," Ed said, slowing. "You were
busy last night."
"Yes," Nita said, and waited. She had a feeling that something odd was going on inside
that chill mind.
   Ed looked at her. "You are angry. . . ."
"Damn right I am!" Nita sang, loudly, not caring for the moment about what Ed might think
of her distress.
"Explain this anger to me," said the Master-Shark. "Normally the Silent Lord does not find
the outcome of the Song so frightful. In fact, whales sometimes compete for the privilege
of singing your part. The Silent Lord dies indeed, but the death is not so terrible—it
merely comes sooner than it wight have otherwise, by predator or old age. And it buys
the renewal of life, and holds off the Great Death, for the whole Sea—and for years."
Ed glanced at her, sedate. "And even if the Silent One should happen to suffer
somewhat, what of it? For there is still Timeheart, is there not? . . . the Heart of the Sea."
Nita nodded, saying nothing. "It is no ending, this ^°ng, but a passage into something
else. How they extol that passage, and *hat lies at its end." There was faint, scornful
amusement in Ed's voice as he ''fted his voice in a verse of the Song—one of the Blue's
cantos—not singing, exactly, for sharks have no song; chanting, rather. " '. . . Past mortal
song—

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                   " '—that Sea whereof our own seas merely hint, poor shadows
                   sidewise-cast from what is real— where Time and swift-finned Joy
                   are foes no more, but lovers; where old friend swims by old friend,
                   senior to Death, undying evermore— partner to Songs unheard and
                   Voices hid; songs past our knowing, perilously fair—' "

Ed broke off. "You are a wizard," he said. "You have known that place, supposedly."
"Yes." Timeheart had looked like a bright city, skyscrapered in crystal and fire, power
trembling in its streets and stones, unseen but undeniably there. And beyond the city
stretched a whole universe, sited beyond and within all other worlds, beyond and within
all times. Death did not touch that place. "Yes, I was there."
"So you know it awaits you after the Sacrifice, after the change of being. But you don't
seem to take the change so calmly."
   "How can I? I'm human!"
"Yes. But make me understand. Why does that make your attitude so different? Why are

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 you so angry about something that would happen to you sooner or later anyway?"
"Because I'm too young for this," Nita said. "All the things I'll never have a chance to
do—grow up, work, live—"
"This," Ed said mildly, looking around him at the green-burning sea, the swift fish flashing
in it, the dazzling wrinkled mirror of the surface seen from beneath, "this is not living?"
"Of course it is! But there's a lot more to it! And getting murdered by a shark is hardly
what I call living!"
"I assure you," Ed said, "it's nothing as personal as murder. I would have done the same
for any wizard singing the Silent Lord. I have done the same, many times. And doubtless
shall again. . . ." His voice trailed off.
Nita caught something odd in Ed's voice. He sounded almost . . . wist-ful?
"Look," she said, her own voice small. "Tell me something. . . . Does it really have to hurt
a lot?"
"Sprat," said Ed dispassionately, "what in this life doesn't? Even love hurts sometimes.
You may have noticed. . . ."
"Love—what would you know about that?" Nita said, too pained to care about being
scornful, even to the Master-Shark.
"And who are you to think I would know nothing about it? Because I kill without remorse, I
must also be ignorant of love, is that it?"
   There was a long, frightening pause, while Ed began to swim a wide circle

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about Nita. "You're thinking I am so old an order of life that I can know nothing but the
blind white rut, the circling, the joining that leaves the joined forever scarred. Oh yes, I
know that. In its time . . . it's very good."
The rich and hungry pleasure in his voice disturbed Nita. Ed was circling closer and
closer as he spoke, swimming as if he were asleep. "And, yes ... sometimes we wish the
closeness of the joining wouldn't end. But what would my kind do with the warm-blood
sort of joining, the long companion-ships? What would I do with a mate?" He said it as if it
were an alien word. "Soon enough one or the other of us would fall into distress—and the
other partner would end it. There's an end to mating and mate, and to the love that
passed between. That price is too high for me to pay, even once. I swim alone."
He was swimming so close to Nita now that his sides almost touched hers, and she
pulled her tail and fins in tight and shrank away from the razory hide, not daring to move
otherwise. Then Ed woke up and broke the circle, gliding lazily outward and away as if
nothing had happened. "But, Sprat, the matter of my loves—or their lack—is hardly
what's bothering you."

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 Summer Night's Song


 "No," she burst out bitterly, "love! I've never had a chance to. And now— now—"
 "Then you're well cast for the Silent Lord's part," Ed said, his voice sounding far away.
 "How does the line go? 'Not old enough to love as yet,/ but old enough to die, indeed—'
 That has always been the Silent Lord's business—to sacrifice love for life . . . instead of,
 as in lesser spngs, the other way around. ..."
 Ed trailed off, paused to snap up a sea bass that passed him by too slowly. When his
 eyes were more or less sane again and the water had carried the blood away, Ed said,
 "Is it truly so much to you, Sprat? Have you truly had no time to love?"
 Mom and Dad, Nita thought ruefully. Dairine. That's not love, I don't love Dairine!—do I?
 She hardened her heart and said, "No, Pale One. Not that way. No one . . . that way."
 "Well then," said the Master-Shark, "the Song will be sung from the heart, it seems. You
 will still offer the Sacrifice?"
    "I don't want to—"
    "Answer the question, Sprat."
It was a long while before Nita spoke. "I'll do what I said I would," she said at last. The
notes of the song whispered away into the water like the last notes of a dirge.
She was glad Ed said nothing for a while, for her insides gripped and churned as she
finally found out what real, grownup fear was. Not the kind that happens suddenly, that
leaves you too busy with action to think about being afraid—but the kind that she had
been holding off by not officially

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"deciding": the kind that swims up as slowly as a shark circling, letting you see it and
realize in detail what's going to happen to you.
"I am big enough to take a humpback in two bites," Ed said into her silence. "And there is
no need for me to be leisurely about it. You will speak to the Heart of the Sea without
having to say too much to me on the way."
Nita looked up at him in amazement. "But I thought you didn't believe— I mean, you'd
never—"
"I am no wizard, Nita," Ed said. "The Sea doesn't speak to me as it does to you. I will
never experience those high wild joys the Blue sings of—the Sea That Burns, the Voices.
The only voices I hear cry out from water that burns with blood. But might I not
sometimes wonder what other joys there are? —and wish I might feel them too?"
The dry, remote pain in his voice astonished her. And Nita thought abruptly of that long
line of titles in the commentaries in her manual: as if only one shark had ever been
Master. Sharks don't die of natural causes, she thought. Could it be that, all these years,
there has been just one Master? And all around him, people die and die, and he—can't—

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 —and wants to? And so he understands how it is to want to get out of something and be
 stuck with it.
 Nita was terribly moved—she wasn't sure why. She swam close to the Pale One's huge
 head for a moment and glided side by side with him, matching his course and the
 movements of his body.
   "I wish I could help," she said.
"As if the Master could feel distress," Ed said, with good-natured scorn. The wound in his
voice had healed without a scar.
"And as if someone else might want to end it," Nita said, sarcastic, but gentle about it.
Ed was silent for a long while. "I mean, it's dumb to suffer," Nita said, rather desperately,
into that silence. "But if you have to do it, you might as well intend it to do someone some
good."
In silence they swam a few lengths more through the darkening water, while Nita's fear
began to build in her again, and one astonished part of her mind shouted at her, You 're
running around talking about doing nice things for someone who's going to kill you? You
're crazy!
Ed spoke at last. "It's well said. And we will cause it to be well made, this Sacrifice. You,
young and never loving; I, old and never loved." Calm, utterly calm, that voice. "Such a
Song the Sea will never have seen."
"HNii't?" came a questioning note through the water, from southward of Ambrose:
S'reee's voice. "It's almost your time—"
  "I have to go," Nita said. "Ed—"
   "Silent Lord?"
   She had no idea why she was saying it. "I'm sorry!"

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"This once, I think," the passionless voice said, "so am I. Go on, Sprat. I wjll not miss my
cue."
Nita looked at him. Opaque eyes, depthless, merciless, lingered on her as Ed curved
past. "Coming!" Nita sang in S'reee's direction, loud, and tore off southward.
  No pale shadow followed.

The next few hours, while the water darkened further, ran together for Nita in a blur of
music, and annoying repetitions, and words that would have been frightening if she hadn't
been too busy to be frightened. And some-thing was growing in her, slowly, but getting
stronger and stronger—an odd elation. She sang on, not questioning it, riding its tide and


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hoping it would last through what she had to do. Again and again, with the other
Celebrants listening and offering suggestions, she rehearsed what would be the last
things she would ever say:

                  ". . . Sea, hear me now, and take my words and make them ever
                  law!—"

"Right, now swim off a little. No one hears this part. Upward, and toward the center,
where the peak will be. Right there—"

        " 'Must I accept the barren Gift?
               —learn death, and lose my Mastery?        X 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,
       •••••i--         but old enough to die, indeed—' "
       ri        — Oh Lord—
       ">•• i     "—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!' "

 —and then the paleness came to circle over her, bringing with it the voice

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that chanted all on one soft hissing note, again and again, always coming back to the
same refrain—

                           " 'Master have I none, nor seek. Bring the ailing; bring the
                           weak. Bring the wounded ones to me: They shall feed my


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 Summer Night's Song

                             Mastery. . . .'"

That strange excitement was still growing in Nita. She let it drive her voice as she would
have used it to drive a wizardry, so that her song grew into something that shook the
water and almost drowned out even Ed's voice, weaving about it and turning mere
hunger to desire, disaster to triumph—

                       " 'Lone Power, I accept your Gift!
                          Freely I make death part of me; By my acceptance it is
                          bound
                              into the lives of all the Sea—
                         yet what I do now binds to it
                         a gift I feel of equal worth: I take Death with me, out of
                         Time,
                                          and make of it a path, a birth!
                   Let the teeth come! As they tear me,
                        they tear Your ancient hate for aye—
               —so rage, proud Power! Fail again,
                        and see my blood teach Death to die!' "

. . . The last time she sang it, Nita hung unmoving, momentarily ex-hausted, for the
moment aware of nothing but Kit's anxious eyes staring at her from outside the circle and
the stir of water on her skin as the Pale One circled above her.
    "That's right," S'reee said at last, very quietly. "And then—"
She fell silent and swam out of the circle of Celebrants. Behind her, very slowly, first the
Blue and then the rest of the whales began to sing the dirge for the Silent
Lord—confirmation of the transformation of death and the new defeat of the Lone Power.
Nita headed for the surface to breathe.
She came up into early evening. Westward, sunset was burning itself into scarlet embers;
eastward a Moon lacking only the merest shard of light to be full lifted swollen and amber
through the surface haze; northward, the bright and dark and bright again of Ambrose
Light glittered on the uneasily shifting waves, with the opening and closing red eyes of
Manhattan skyscraper lights low beyond it; and southward, gazing back at them, the red-
orange glow o»

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Arcturus sparkled above the water, here and there striking an answering spark off the
crest or hollow of some wave. Nita lay there gasping in the wavewash and let the water
rock her. Heaven knows, she thought, I need somebody to
doit. • • •
Beside her Kit surfaced in a great wash of water and blew spectacularly— slightly
forward, as sperms do. "Neets—"
"Hi," she said. She knew it was inane, but she could think of no other way to keep Kit
from starting what he was going to start, except by saying dumb things.
"Neets," he said, "we're out of time. They're going to start the descent as soon as
everybody's had a chance to rest a little and the protective spells are set."
"Right," she said, misunderstanding him on purpose. "We better get go-ing, then—" She
tilted her head down and started to dive.
"Neets." Suddenly Nita found that she was trying to dive through a forty-foot thickness of
sperm whale. Nita blew in annoyance and let herself float back to the surface again. Kit
bobbed up beside her—and, with great sudden-ness and a slam of air, threw off the
whalesark. He dogpaddled there in the water, abruptly tiny beside her bulk. "Neets, get
out of that for a minute."
   "Huh? Oh—"
It was a moment's work to drop the whaleshape; then she was reduced to dogpaddling
too. Kit was treading water a few feet from her, his hair slicked down with the water. He
looked strange—tight, somehow, as if he were holding onto some idea or feeling very
hard. "Neets," he said, "I'm not buying this."
Nita stared at him. "Kit," she said finally, "look, there's nothing we can do about it. I've
bought it. Literally."
"No," Kit said. The word was not an argument, not even defiance; just a simple
statement of fact. "Look, Neets—you're the best wizard I've ever worked with—"
'I'm the only wizard you've ever worked with," Nita said with a lopsided grin.
"I'm gonna kill you," Kit said—and regretted it instantly. "No need," Nita said. "Kit—why
don't you just admit that this time I've ' S°t myself into something I can't get out of." Unless
another wizard gets you out of it." She stared at him. "You loon, you can't—"
"I know. And it hurts! I feel like I should volunteer, but I just can't—" Good. 'Cause you do
and /'// kill you." ,_ That won't work either." He made her own crooked grin back at her.
        one,' remember? We both have to come out of this alive." he looked away.

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   "Let's go for both," Nita said.
   Silence.
She took a deep breath. "Look, even if we don't both get out of this, I * think it's gonna be
all right. Really—"
   "No," Kit said again, and that was that.
Nita just looked at him. "Okay," she said. "Be that way." And she meant it. This was the
Kit she was used to working with: stubborn, absolutely sure of himself—most of the time;
the person with that size-twelve courage packed into his size-ten self, a courage that
would spend a few minutes trembling and then take on anything that got in its way—from
the Lone Power to her father. If I've got to go, Nita thought in sudden irrational
determination, that sheer guts has got to survive—and I'll do whatever's necessary to
make sure he does.
   "Look," she said, "what're you gonna tell my folks when you get back?"
"I'm gonna tell them we're hungry," Kit said, "and that you'll fill 'em in on the details while
I eat."
   / did tell him to be that way. . . . "Right," Nita said.
For a long time they stayed where they were, treading water, watching the Moon inch its
way up the sky, listening to the Ambrose fog signal hooting the minutes away. A mile or
so off, a tanker making for New York Harbor went by, its green portside running lights
toward them, and let off a low groaning blast of horn to warn local traffic. From under the
surface, after a pause, came a much deeper note that held and then scaled downward
out of human hearing range, becoming nothing but a vibration in the water.
   "They're ready to leave," Kit said.
Nita nodded, slipped into whaleshape again, and looked one last time with all her heart
at the sunset towers of Manhattan, until Kit had finished his change. Then they dived.

The Song of the Twelve




Hudson Channel begins its seaward course some twenty miles south of Am-brose
Light—trending first due south, parallel to the Jersey shore, then turn-ing gradually toward
the southeast and the open sea as it deepens. Down its length, scattered over the

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channel's bottom as it slowly turns from gray-green mud to gray-black sand to naked,
striated stone, are the broken remnants of four hundred years' seafaring in these waters
and the refuse of three hundred years of human urban life, mixed randomly together.
There are new, almost whole-bodied wrecks lying dead on their sides atop old ones long
since gone to rot and rust; great dumps of incinerated wood and ash, chemical drums and
lumps of coal and jagged piles of junk metal; sunken, abandoned buoys, old cable
spindles, unexploded ordnance and bombs and torpedoes; all com-mingled with and
nested in a thick ooze of untreated, settled sewage—the garbage of millions of busy lives,
thrown where they won't have to look at it. The rugged bed of the channel starts out
shallow, barely a fathom deeper than the seabed that surrounds it. It was much deeper
once, especially where it begins; but the ooze has filled it thickly, and for some miles it is
now hard to tell that any channel at all lies under the rotting trash, under the ancient faded
beer cans and the hubcaps red with rust. Slowly, though, some twenty miles down the
channel from its head, an indentation becomes apparent—a sort of crooked rut worn by
the primordial Hudson River into the ocean floor, a mile wide at the rut's deepest, five
miles wide from edge to edge. This far down—forty fathoms under the surface and some
sixty feet below the sur-rounding ocean bed, between a great wide U of walls—the dark
sludge of human waste lies even thicker. The city has not been dumping here for some
UIrie, but all the old years' sewage has not gone away. Every stone in the deepening rut,
every pressure-flattened pile of junk on the steadily downward-sloping seabed around the
channel, is coated thick and black. Bottom-feeding

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fish are few here: There is nothing for them to eat. Krill do not live here: The water is too
foul to support the microscopic creatures they eat, and even of a summer night the thick
olive color of the sea is unchanged.
The channel's walls begin to grow less and less in height, as if the ocean is growing tired
of concealing the scar in its side. Gradually the rut flattens out to a broad shallow
depression like a thousand other valleys in the Sea. A whale hanging above the
approximate end of the channel, some one hundred thirty miles southeast of New York
Harbor, has little to see on looking back up the channel's length—just an upward-sloping
scatter of dark-slimed rocks and mud and scraps of garbage, drab even in the slate-
green twilight that is all this bottom ever sees of noon. But looking downward, southward,
where its course would run if the channel went any farther—
—the abyss. Suddenly the thinning muck, and the gentle swellings and dippings of the
sea bed, simply stop at the edge of a great steep semicircular cliff, two miles from side to

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 side. And beyond the cliff, beyond the edge of the Continental Shelf, curving away to
 northeast and southwest—nothing. Nothing anywhere but the vague glow of the ocean's
 surface three hundred feet above; and below, beyond the semicircle, the deadly stillness
 of the great deeps, and a blackness one can hear on the skin like a dirge. Icy cold, and
 the dark.
"I warn you all," S'reee said as the eleven gathered Celebrants and Kit hung there,
looking down into that darkness at the head of Hudson Canyon. "Remember the length of
this dive; take your own breathing needs carefully into consideration, and tell me now if
you think you may need more air than our spells will be taking with us. Remember that, at
the great pressures in the Below, you'll need more oxygen than you usually do—and work
will make you burn more fuel. If you feel you need to revise the breathing figures on the
group spell upward, this is the time to do it. There won't be a chance later, after we've
passed the Gates of the Sea. Nor will there be any way to get to the surface quickly
enough to breathe if you start running low. At the depths we'll be working, even a sperm
whale would get the bends and die of such an ascent. Are you all sure of your needs?
Think carefully."
   No one said anything.
"All right. I remind you also, one more time, of the boundaries on the pressure-protection
spell. They're marked by this area of light around us— which will serve the added
purpose of enabling us to see what's going on around us. If we need to expand the
boundaries, that's easily done. But unless I direct you otherwise, stay inside the light.
Beyond the lighted area, there's some direction for a limited area, but it's erratic. Don't
depend on it! Other-wise you may find yourself crushed to a pulp."
Nita glanced at Kit; he gave her an I-don't-care wave of the tail. Sperm whales were
much less bothered by pressure changes than most of the spe-

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cies, and the great depths were part of their hunting grounds. "You be care-ful/' she sang
at him in an undertone. "Don't get cute down there."
 "Don't you."
  "Anything else?" S'reee said. "Any questions?"
 "Is there time for a fast bite?" Roots said, sounding wistful.
"Surely," Fang said, easing up beside the beaked whale with that eternal killer-whale
smile. "Where should I bite you?"
 "Enough, you two. Last chance, my wizards."
  No one sang a note.
"Then forward all," S'reee said, "and let us take the adventure the Powers send us."

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She glided forward, out into the darkness past the great curved cliff, tilted her nose down,
and dived—not straight, but at a forty-five-degree angle roughly parallel to the downward
slope of the canyon. The wizard-light ad-vanced with her. Areinnye followed first; then
Fang and Iniihwit, with Fluke and Roots close behind. After them came T!h!ki and
Aroooon and Hotshot, and Nita, with Kit behind her as rearguard, suspiciously watching
the zone of light around them. Only one of the Celebrants did not stay within that
boundary, sailing above it, or far to one side, as he pleased—Ed, cruising restlessly close
to the canyon walls as the group descended, or pacing them above, a ghost floating in
midnight-blue water.
"I don't like it," Nita sang, for Kit's hearing only, as she looked around her.
   "What?"
"This." She swung her tail at the walls—which were towering higher and higher as they
cut downward through the Continental Shelf. On the nautical maps in their manuals, the
canyon had looked fairly innocent; and a drop of twenty-five feet in a half-mile had
seemed gentle. But Nita was finding the reality that rose in ever-steepening battlements
around her much more threatening. The channel's walls at their highest had been about
three hun-dred feet high, comparable to the walls she'd seen in the Grand Canyon on
vacation. But these walls were already five or six hundred feet high, growing steadily
steeper as the canyon's angle of descent through the shelf increased. " Nita had a neck
to crane back, it would already be sore.
As it was, she had something much worse—a whale's superb sonar sense, which told her
exactly how puny she was in comparison to those cliffs— exactly where loose rocks lay
on them, ready to be shaken down at the slightest bottom tremor.
 Kit looked up around them and sang a note of uncomfortable agreement. *eah," he
 said. "It gives me the creeps too. It's too tall—"
    No," Nita said softly. "It's that this isn't a place where we're supposed to

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be. Something very large happened here once. That's your specialty; you should be able
to feel it."
"Yeah, I should." There was a brief pause. "I seem to have been having trouble with that
lately. —But you're right, it's there. It's not so much the tallness itself we're feeling. But
what it's—what it's a symbol of, I think—"
Nita said nothing for a moment, startled by the idea that Kit had been losing some of his
talent at his specialty. There was something that could mean, some warning sign— She
couldn't think what.

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    "Kit, this is one of the places where Afallone was, isn't it?"
 He made a slow sound of agreement. "The whole old continental plate Atlantis stood on
 was ground under the new plates and buried under the Atlantic's floor, S'reee said. But
 the North American plate was a lot farther west when the trouble first started, and the
 European one was farther east. So if I've got the story straight, this would have been
 where Afallone" s western shoreline was, more or less. Where we're going would still
 have been open sea, a couple of million years ago."
"Millions of years—" Nita looked at him in uncomfortable wonder. "Kit —that's much
farther back than the fall of Afallone. That could—" Her note failed her momentarily. "That
could go right back to the first Song of the Twelve—"
 Kit was still for a while as they kept diving. "No wonder," he said at last, "no one travels
 down through the Gates of the Sea except when they're about to do the Song. Part of the
 sorcery is buried in the stone. If anybody should trouble it, wake it up—"
   "—like we're doing," Nita said, and fell silent.
They swam on. The immensities rearing up about them grew no more reassuring with
time. Time, Nita thought—how long have we been down here? In this changeless cold
dark, there was no telling; and even when the Sun came up, there still would be no
knowing day from night. The darkness yielded only grudgingly to the little sphere of light
the Celebrants carried with them, showing them not much, and too much, of what Nita
didn't want to look at—those walls, reaching so far above her now that the light couldn't
even begin to illumine them. Nita began to get a bizarre sense of being
indoors—descending a winding ramp of infinite length, its walls three miles apart and now
nearly a mile high.
It was at about this time that Nita felt on her skin what sounded at first like one of the
Blue's deeper notes, and stared ahead of her, wondering partly what he was saying—the
note was one that made no sense to her. Then she wondered why he was curving his
body upward in such surprise. But the note grew, and grew, and grew louder still, and
though they were now nearly a mile from the walls on either side, to her shock and horror
Nita heard the walls begin to resonate to that note.

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The canyon walls sounded like a struck gong, one of such boneshaking, subterranean
pitch as Nita had never imagined. She sounded, caught in the torrent of shock waves
with the rest of the Celebrants. Seaquake! she thought. The sound pressed through her
skin from all sides like cold weights, got into her lungs and her heart and her brain, and
throbbed there, hammer-ing her into dizziness with slow and terrible force.
The sluggish, brutal pounding against her skin and inside her body eventu-ally began to

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 die down. But the quake's effects were still going on around her, and would take much
 more time to settle. Sonar was nearly drowned; Nita was floating blind in the blackness.
 This is the pits! she thought in anguish, and concentrated everything she had on one
 good burst of sound that would cut through the terrible noise and tell her what was going
 on.
 The echoes that came back reassured her somewhat. All the Celebrants were still fairly
 close together, safe within the light of the pressure-protection spell. Kit was farther ahead
 than he had been, fighting for control and slowly finding it. Others, S'reee and Fang and
 Areinnye, were closer to Nita. And there was other movement close to them—large
 objects drifting downward, slowly, resonating with the same note, though in higher
 octaves, as the tower-ing cliffsides. Massive objects, said the echo. Solid massive
 objects. Falling faster now. One of them falling past S'reee and down toward Areinnye,
 who was twisting and struggling against the turmoil of the water for balance—
 Warn her! was Nita's first thought, but even as she let out another cry, she realized it was
 useless—Areinnye would have no time to react. The falling rock, a piece of cliff-shelf
 nearly as long as a city block, was practically on top of her. Shield spell, Nita thought
 then. Impossible—
She did it anyway. It was an old friend, that spell, long since learned by heart. When
activated, punches, or any physical object thrown at one, slid right off it. Running them
together in her haste, she sang the nine syllables of the spell that were always the same,
then added four more that set new coordinates for the spell, another three that specified
how much mass the shield would have to repel—tons and tons! Oh, Lord!—and then the
last syllable that turned the wizardry loose. She felt the magic fall away from her like a
weight on a cord, dropping toward Areinnye. Nothing to do now but hang on, she thought,
letting herself float. Faintly, through the thunder, the echoes of her spell brought Nita the
shape of Areinnye, still struggling, trying to get out from under the falling rock-shelf, and
failing. Her connection with the spell brought her the feeling of the massive slab of stone
dropping toward 't, closer, closer still. Making contact—
—crushing down and down onto her wizardry with force more terrible than she had
anticipated. The spell was failing, the shelf was settling down °n it and inexorably
pressing it closer and closer to Areinnye, who was in turn being forced down against the
battering of the shock waves, toward the floor

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of the canyon. The spell was breaking up, tearing like a rotten net filled with weights. No,
Nita thought, and strained, pouring all her concentration, all her will, down the connection
to the spell. No! It was like hanging on to a rope in a tug of war, and losing, and not letting
go—digging in, muscles popping out all over, aching, straining, blood pounding, and not
letting go-The spell firmed a little. The shelf, settling slowly down and down onto
Areinnye, forcing her closer and closer to the bottom, seemed to hesitate. "Kit!" Nita
screamed into the water. I'm gonna lose it. I'm gonna lose it! "Kit!"
The echo of her yell for help showed her another sperm-whale shape, a larger one than
Areinnye's, fighting his way against the battering shock waves and down toward the
bottom of the canyon—toward where Areinnye floundered, underneath the stone shelf,
underneath the spell. Kit rammed Areinnye head-on, hitting her squarely amidships and
punching the smaller sperm whale backward thirty or forty feet. But not out from under
the settling shelf; and now Kit was partly under it too. The spell began sagging again. Nita
panicked; she had no time or energy left for any more warnings, any more anything. She
threw herself so totally into the spell that she couldn't feel her body, couldn't hear, couldn't
see, finally became nothing but a single, none-too-coherent thought: No! But it was no
use. The spell was coming undone, the rock was coming down, this time for good. And
Kit was under it. No! No, no, NO—
   And everything went away.
The next thing Nita felt was the shock of a spell being broken by forces too great for it to
handle, as the rock-shelf came crushing down on it, smash-ing it flat against something
both soft and hard. "NO!" Nita screamed again in horror, as the diminishing thunder of the
seaquake was briefly augmented by the multiple crashes of the shelf's shattering. The
floor of the canyon was obscured even to sonar by a thick fog of rockdust and stirred-up
ooze, pierced all through by flying splinters of stone, but Nita dove into it anyway. "Kit!"
"You sang?" came a sperm whale's sharp-edged note from down in the rock-fog,
sounding tired but pleased.
Speechless with relief and shaking with effort, Nita pulled up her nose and just let herself
float in the trembling water, listening to the rumbling of the quake as it faded away and
the songs of the other whales round about as they checked on one another. She became
aware of the Master-Shark, finning slowly downcanyon not too far from her and favoring
her as he went with a look that was prolonged and indecipherable. Nita glided hurriedly
away from him, looking around her.
The light of the protection spell showed Nita the roiling of the cloud of ooze and dust in
the bottom of the canyon, and the two shapes that swam slowly up through it—first Kit,
fluking more strongly than Nita would have

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 possible for someone who'd just gone through what they all had, then Areinnye, stroking
 more weakly, and swimming with a stiffness that made it very plain just how hard Kit must
 have hit her. Kit rose to hang beside Nita. More slowly, Areinnye came swimming up to
 face her.
  "There seems to be a life between us, hNii't," the sperm whale said.
 The mixture of surprise and anger in Areinnye's song made Nita uncom-fortable. "Oh,
 no," she said, rather weakly. "Kit did it—"
 "Oh, dead fish," Kit said. "You held it for a good ten seconds after we were out from
 under. You would've managed even if I hadn't helped."
  "I had incentive," Nita muttered.
 Kit looked at her for a moment. "You didn't drop it until Ed nudged you," he said. "You
 might have gone deaf for a little, or maybe you were in spell overload. But either way, this
 was your cookie. Don't blame me."
 "Silent Lord," Areinnye said—still stiffly formal, but with an uncertain note in her voice, "I
 thank you. I had hardly given you cause for such an act."
 "You gave me plenty of cause," she said wearily. "You took the Oath, didn't you? You're
 with me. And you're welcome." She took a deep breath, feeling the respiratory part of the
 protection spell briefly surround her blow-holes with a bubble of air for her to inhale. "Kit,"
 she said, "can we get going and get this over with?"
 "That is well said" came Ed's voice. He was coming upcanyon again, fast. As Nita looked
 up she saw him arrow overhead, ghastly pale in the wizard-light, with a trail of darkness
 billowing thick behind him, and something black in his jaws. It struggled; Ed gulped it
 down. Inside his gill slits and lower body, Nita could see the swallowed thing give a last
 couple of convul-sive heaves. "And we'd best get on with it—"
Thick black sucker-tipped arms whipped up from the disturbed ooze on the bottom,
grasping, flailing in the light. "Oh, no," Nita moaned. Kit plunged past her, the first note of
the scraping sperm-whale battlecry rasping down Nita's skin as he dived for the body to
which those arms belonged. Farther down the canyon, almost out of range of the wizard-
light, there was a confused boiling-together of arms, long dark bodies, flat platterlike
yellow eyes glowing with reflected light and wild-beast hunger—not just a few kra-kens,
but a great pack of them. "To business, Silent Lord," Ed said, his voice rich with chilly
pleasure, as he swept past Nita again on his way downcanyon.
She went to business. These krakens were bigger than the last ones had been; the
smallest one Nita saw had a body the size of a stretch limousine, and arms twice that
length. True, there were more toothed whales fighting this time—not only Kit, but Fang
and Areinnye as well. And teeth weren't everything—what Aroooon or Tlhlki rammed


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didn't move afterward.
The Celebrants also had the advantage of being wizards. Nita was terrified at first when
she saw one of the krakens come at poor slow Roots—and poor

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slow Roots raised her voice in a few squeaky little notes and simply blew the giant squid
into a cloud of blood and ink and black rags of flesh. But a wizard's strength has limits;
such spells could only be worked once or twice. And since a spell has to be directed at
what you see, not even the most deadly offensive wizardry does a bit of good against the
choking tentacles that you don't notice coming up from behind you. So it was a slow,
ugly, bitter battle, that fight in the canyon. Four or five times the Celebrants were
assaulted as they made their way down between the dwarfing, twisting walls of stone;
four or five times they fought the attackers off, rested briefly, and started out again,
knowing that somewhere deeper down, more thick tentacles and hun-gry eyes waited for
them.
"This is your fault!" Areinnye cried angrily at Nita during one or another of the attacks,
while Fang and Kit and Ed and Aroooon fought off krakens coming from downcanyon and
from above, and S'reee and Tlhlki worked furiously to heal a great sucker welt torn in
Areinnye's side before Ed should notice it and turn on her.
Nita simply turned away, in no mood for it. Her face hurt from ramming krakens, she had
bruises from their suckers and a stab from one's beak, and she was sick of the smell of
blood and the galling sepia taste in the water. The problem, and the only reason Nita
didn't answer Areinnye hotly back, was that there might have been some slight truth to
the accusation. According to Carl and the manual, the same pollutants that caused
cancer in human beings, that had caused the U.S. Fish and Game Service to warn
people on the Jersey shore against eating more than one ocean-caught fish a week, were
getting concentrated in the squids' bodies, changing their DNA: changing them. The food
the krakens normally ate at the great depths was dying out, also from the pollution. They
had to come up into the shallows to survive. The changes were enabling them to do so.
And if it was starving, a hungry kraken would find a whale perfectly acceptable as food.
Nita was startled by the sudden sharpness of S'reee's answering voice. "Areinnye, don't
talk nonsense," she said after singing the last note of a spell that sealed the sperm
whale's torn flesh. "The krakens are here for the same reason the quake was—because


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the Lone Power wants them here. We're supposed to use up our air fighting them."
Tlhlki looked soberly at S'reee. "That brings up the question, Ree. we complete the
Song?"
S'reee swung her tail in a shrug, her eyes on Areinnye's healing wound. "I thought such a
thing might happen," she said, "after we were attacked the other night. So I brought extra
air, more than the group felt it needed. Even so—it'll be close."
   "We're a long way down the canyon," Nita said. "Practically down to the

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 plain. If they're all down there, waiting for us—if these attacks have just been to wear us
 down—"
 "I don't think so," T!h!ki said, glancing over at Nita. "Once out into the plain, we'll be
 practically under the shadow of the Sea's Tooth, close to the ancient site of the Song.
 And once our circle is set up, they couldn't get in unless we let them."
 "Which we won't," S'reee said. "Let's waste no more time. This is going to be the fastest
 Song on record. —Areinnye, you're done. How do you feel?"
 The sperm swayed in the water, testing her healed tail. "Well enough," she said, grim-
 voiced. "Though not as well as I would if this human were—" And Areinnye broke off.
 "Pardon me," she said, more slowly. "It was an ill thought. Let me go help Kit now."
 She went. "You now," S'reee said to Nita. She sang a few notes to start the healing spell
 going, then said, "HNii't? Are you all right otherwise?"
 The sound of Kit's battlecry came scraping along Nita's skin from down-canyon. "No,"
 she said. Kit had been fighting with a skill and, heaven help him, a relish that Nita would
 never have suspected in him. I'm not sure it's the sark doing this, she thought. I keep
 thinking that Kit might actually be this way, down deep.
Then Nita stopped. What makes me think it matters one way or another? she thought. In
a few hours, anything I think about Kit will make no differ-ence at all. But I can't stop
acting as if it will. Habit is hard to break. . . .
    "If it's something I can help with—" S'reee said, finishing up.
Nita brushed skin with her, an absent gesture. "It's not," she said. And off she went after
Areinnye—into the water fouled with stirred-up slime and ink and blood, into the reach of
grabbing, sandpapery tentacles and the glare of yellow eyes.
It went on that way for what seemed forever, until Nita was nearly blind from head-on
ramming. She gave up on sonar and concentrated on keeping just one more squid
occupied until Kit or Ed or Areinnye could deal with it. So, as the walls of the canyon,
which had been towering some six thousand feet above the Celebrants on either side,
began to decrease in height, she didn't really notice it. Eventually the bitter cold of the

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water got her atten-tion; and she also realized that the krakens' attack had stopped. Nita
sang a few notes to "see" at a distance, and squinted around her in the sea-green wizard-
light to find out where she and the other Celebrants were.
The walls closest to them were still nearly three thousand feet high. But their slope was
gentler; and the canyon had widened from some two miles across to nearly five. To left
and right of the canyon's foot, curving away northward and southward, miles past sound
or sight, stretched the rubble-strewn foothills of the Continental Shelf. Behind the
Celebrants the shelf 'tself towered, a mighty cliffwall rising to lose itself in darkness.
Outward

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before them, toward the open sea, the terrain was mostly flat, broken only occasionally
by hills so shallow they were more like dunes. The rocky bottom was turning to pale
sand. But the paleness did nothing to lighten the sur-roundings. Above it lay an
intolerable, crushing weight of water, utterly black, icy cold, weighing down on the soul no
matter what spell protected the body. And far out in the blackness could be seen the
furtive, erratic move-ments of tiny lights—eerie points of peculiar-colored fire that jittered
and clustered and hung in the cold dark, watching the whales.
Nita took a sharp breath, for some of those lights were definitely eyes. T!h!ki, hanging
motionless in the still water beside her, did the same. He was staring down the slope,
which sank past the light of the breathing-spell, and far past echo range, dropping farther
downward into more darkness. "Noth-ing can be this deep," he sang in an unnerved
whisper. "How much farther down can we go?"
"All the way," said another voice from Nita's other side. She turned, not recognizing
it—and then knew the speaker very well and was sick inside. Kit hung there, with a fey,
frightening look in his eye—a total lack of fear.
Nita swallowed once. Sperm whales took the great dives better than any other whale,
coming down this far on purpose to hunt the giant squid; but their boldness also got them
in trouble. Numerous sperm-whale skeletons had been found at these depths by
exploring bathyscaphs, the whales' tails or bodies hopelessly tangled in undersea
telephone or telegraph cables.
"We're a long way up yet," Kit said, with that cool cast to his voice that better suited
Areinnye than it did him. "Barely six thousand feet down. We'll have to go down to sixteen
thousand feet at least before we see the Sea's Tooth." And he swam off toward the
boundaries of the light.
Nita held still for a few moments as S'reee and various other of the Cele-brants went
slowly after Kit. T!h!ki went too; she barely noticed him go. This isn 't the Kit I want to say

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good-bye to.
Perhaps a hundred feet away from her, Ed glided past, staring at her. "Sprat," he said,
"come along."
She did. But the fighting in the canyon had left Nita so fatigued that much of this part of
the descent seemed unreal to her, a prolonged version of one of those dreams in which
one "falls" downstairs for hours. And there was a terrible sameness about this terrain: a
sea of white sand, here and there featuring a darker rock thrust up or thrown down into it,
or some artifact more bizarre—occasionally, great pressure-fused lumps of coal; once an
actual kitchen sink, just sitting there on the bottom by itself; another time, a lone Coca-
Cola bottle standing upright in the sand with a kind of desolate, pitiful pride. But mostly
the bottom was as undifferentiated as a mile-wide, glare-lit snowfield, one that pitched
forever downward.
  Nor was Nita's grasp on reality much helped by the strange creatures that

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lived in those waters more than a thousand fathoms down. Most everything seemed to be
either transparent as a ghost or brilliantly luminous. Long-bodied, lantern-eyed sharks
swam curiously about Nita, paid brief homage to their Master, and moved on. Anglerfish
with their luminous baits hanging on "fishlines" in front of their mouths came up to stare
Nita right in the eye and then swam dourly away, disappointed that she was too big to
eat. Long, many-segmented bottom worms and vampire squid, sporting dots or stripes of
pink or yellow or blue-white light, inched or squirted along the bottom about their affairs,
paying no attention to the Celebrants sailing overhead in their nimbus of wizard-light.
Rays fluttered, using fleshy wings to rearrange the sand in which they lay buried; tripod-
fish crutch-walked around the bot-tom like peglegged pirates on their long stiff fins. And
all the eyes circling in the black water, all the phosphorescent shapes crawling on the
bottom or undulating above it were doing one of two things—either looking for food or
eating it, in the form of one another.
Nita knew there was no other way for these creatures to live, in this deadly cold, but by
the minimum expenditure of energy for the maximum return . . . hence all the baits, traps,
hiding. But that didn't affect the dull horror of the scene—the endless crushing dark, the
ear-blinding silence, and the pale chilly lights weaving through the space-black water as
the creatures of the great depths sought and caught and ate one another with desperate,
mindless diligence.
The gruesome power of the besetting horror brought Nita wide awake. She had never
been superstitious; shadows in the bedroom had never bothered her when she was little,
and she found horror movies fun to watch. But now she started to feel more hemmed in,

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 more watched and trapped, than she suspected she'd feel in any haunted house. "Ed,"
 she sang, low as a whisper, to the pale shape that paced her, "what is it? There's
 something down here. . . ."
    "Indeed there is. We are getting close."
She would have asked To what? but as she looked down the interminable slope at the
other Celebrants—who were mostly swimming gathered close together, as if they felt
what she felt—something occurred to her, something so obvious that she felt like a
moron for not having thought of it before. "Ed
'if this is the Song of the Twelve, how come there are only eleven of us singing!"
'The Twelfth is here," Ed said. "As the Song says, the Lone Power lies "°und here, in the
depths below the depths. And It will sing Its part, as It always has. It cannot help it.
Indeed, It wants to sing. In the temptation and subversion of the Celebrants lies Its only
hope of escape from the wizardry that binds It." "And if It succeeds—" '

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   "Afallone," Ed said. "Atlantis, all over again. Or worse."
"Worse—" Then she noticed something else. "Ed, the water's getting warmer!"
"And the bottom is changing," Ed said. "Gather your wits, Sprat. A few hundred more
lengths and we are there."
The white sand was giving way to some kind of darker stuff. At first Nita thought she was
looking at the naked rock of the sea bottom. But this stuff wasn't flat, as sediment would
be. It was ropy, piled-up, ridgy-looking black stone. And here and there crystals glittered
in it. Scattered around ahead of them were higher piles of the black stone, small,
bizarrely shaped hills. Nita sounded a high note to get some sonar back, as the water
through which she swam grew warmer and began to taste odd.
The first echoes to return surprised Nita until she started to suspect what they were.
Waving frondy shapes, the hard round echoes from shelled crea-tures, a peculiar
hollowness to the echo that indicated water of lower pressure than that surrounding it—
That was a stream of sulfur-laden hot water com-ing out of an undersea "vent"; the other
echoes were the creatures that lived around it, all adapted to take advantage of the oasis
of heat and the sulfur that came up with it. And now she understood the black bottom
stone—old cooled lava, the kind called pillow lava, that oozes up through the ocean's
crust and spreads itself out in flat, ropy piles.
But from past the vent came another echo that was simply impossible. A wall, a rounded

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wall, at least a mile and a half wide at the base, rising out of the piled black stone and
spearing up, and up, and up, and up, so that fragments of the echo kept coming back to
Nita for second after second. She backfinned to hold still until all the echoes could come
back to her, and in Nita's mind the picture of the massive, fluted, narrowing pillar of stone
got taller and taller, until she actually had to sing a soft note or two to deafen herself to it.
It was, like the walls of Hudson Canyon, "too big"—only much more so. "Five Empire
State Buildings on top of each other," Kit had called it—but Empire States a mile wide:
Caryn Peak, the Sea's Tooth, the site of the Song of the Twelve.
The whales ahead of Nita were gathering near the foot of the peak. Against that gigantic
spear of stone they seemed dwarfed, insignificant. Even Aroooon looked like a toy. And
the feeling of being watched, closely, by something of malicious intent, was getting
stronger by the second.
She joined the others. The Celebrants were poised not too far from the open
vent—evidently S'reee preferred the warmer water—in clear view of the strange creatures
living about it: the twelve-foot stalks of the tubeworms, the great blind crabs, the colonies
of giant blood-red clams, opening and closing their fringed shells with mindless regularity.
No coral, Nita thought absently, looking around her. But she wouldn't need any. Several
hundred

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feet away, there on the face of the peak, were several shattered outcroppings of stone.
The outcroppings were sharp as glass knives. Those should do it, Nita thought. So sharp
I'll hardly feel anything—until Ed arrives. . . .
"If you're all prepared," S'reee sang, her voice wavering strangely where notes had to
travel suddenly from cold water to hot, "I suggest we start right now."
The Celebrants chorused muted agreement and began to spread out, form-ing the circle
with which the Song begins. Nita took her place between Fang and T!h!ki, while S'reee
went to the heart of the circle. Ed swam away, toward the far side of the peak and out of
sight. Kit glided away from the circle, off behind Nita. She looked back at him. He found
the spot from which he would watch and gazed back at her. Nita swallowed one last time,
hard. There was very little of her friend in that look. "Kit—" she said, on one low note.
    "Silent Lord," he said.
    And though it was his voice, it wasn't Kit. . . .
Nita turned away, sick at heart, and faced inward toward the circle again; and S'reee
lifted up her voice and sang the Invocation.


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               " '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
                                                                 sor-row
                                                             long ago laid to its rest
                                                             devour us tomor-row!' "

And so it began, as in song S'reee laid out the foundations of the story, which began
before lives learned to end in resistance and suffering. One by one the Celebrants drew
together, closing up the circle, named themselves to one another, and began to discuss
the problem of running the Sea to every-one's advantage. Chief among their problems at
the moment was the sudden appearance of a new whale. It was puzzling; the Sea had
given them no warning, as She had in times past, that this was about to happen. But they
were the Ni'hwinyii, the Lords of the Humors, and they would comport


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themselves as such. They would decide the question for themselves. Under whose
Mastery would the Stranger fall? . . .
Nita, who had backed out of the circle after the Invocation, hung shivering in the
currentless water as the Song shook the warm darkness about her. Part of what she felt
was the same kind of trembling with excitement she had felt a hundred times in school
when she knew she was about to be called on. I'm ready, she thought, trying to quiet
herself. This is silly. I know my part backward and forward—there's not that much of it. I'll
do all right.
. . . But there was also something else going on. She had felt it start with the Invocation
and grow stronger with every passing second—that sense of something waking up,
something rousing from sleepy malice, awakening to active, alert malevolence. It waits,

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Ed had said. It was a certainty, as sure as looking up toward a lighted window and seeing
the person who's been staring at you drop the curtain and turn away.
She wrenched her attention back to the Blue, who was at the end of one of his long
stately passages. But it was hard.

                       " '—Nay, slowly, Sounder. Slow is the wise whale's song,
                       and wise as slow; for he who hastens errs, who errs learns grief.
                       And not the Master-Shark has teeth as fierce: grief eats its prey
                       alive, and pain grows greater as the grief devours, not less. So let
                       this Stranger sing his peace: what he desires of us; there's Sea
                       enough and time
                       to hear him, though he sing the darkened Moon to full and back
                       again. Ay, let him speak. . . .' "

And to Nita's shock and fascinated horror, an answer came. The voice that raised itself in
the stillness of the great depths was the sonic equivalent of the thing one sees out the
corner of one's eye, then turns to find gone, or imag-ined. It did not shake the water; it
roused no echoes. And Nita was not alone in hearing it. She saw the encircled Celebrants
look uneasily at one another. On the far side of the circle, Kit's coolness was suddenly
broken, and he stared at Nita like someone believing a myth for the first time. The
innocent, gentle-spoken, unselfconscious evil in the new voice was terrifying. "With
Pow'rs and Dominations need I speak," sang that timbreless voice in quiet sincerity,

                       " 'the ancient Lords who hold the Sea in sway. I pray thee, Lords of
                       the Humors, hear me now,

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                       last, least and poorest of the new-made whales, new-loos'd from
                       out the Sea's great silent Heart. No Lord have I; therefore to ye I
                       come, beseeching low thy counsel and thy rule for one that's
                       homeless, lawless, mateless, lost.

"Who art thou, then, that speak'st?" sang S'reee, beginning the Singer's questioning. At
the end of her verse she was answered, in more soft-spoken, reasonable
platitudes—words meant to lull the unwary and deceive the alert. And questions and
answers continued, until Nita realized that there had been a shift. Rather than the Singer
asking the Stranger what he wanted, the Stranger was telling the Singer what he knew

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she wanted—and could offer her, if only she would take the unspecified Gift he would
give her.
Nita began shaking steadily now, and not from the cold. The insinuating power of that not-
quite-voice somehow frightened her worse than head-on conflict with the Lone Power
had, a couple of months ago. There the Power had been easily seen in its true colors. But
here it was hidden, and speaking as matter-of-factly as the voices in the back of one's
own mind, whose advice one so often tends to follow without question. "Your Mastery is
hollow," said the voice to S'reee,

                   " '—cold song, strict-ruled by law. From such bland rule
                   come no great musics. Singer, follow me, accept my Gift and what it
                   brings, and song shall truly have no Master save for you. My gift will
                   teach you lyric that will break the heart that hears it; every seaborne
                   voice will curse your newfound art, and wish that art
 ;••           its own. Take up the Gift, O foremost
  ;                     Singer. . . .' "

Nita glanced over at S'reee. She was trembling nearly as hard as Nita was, caught in the
force of the temptation. S'reee sang her refusal calmly enough; but Nita found herself
wondering how much of that refusal was the ritual's and how much S'reee's own.
She began watching the other Celebrants with as much care. Iniihwit sang the Gazer's
questioning and rejection with the outward attitude of mild unconcern that Nita had in their
brief acquaintance come to associate with him. Aroooon's refusal of the prize offered the
Blue by the Stranger, that of Power over all the other whales, was more emphatic, though
it came in his

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usual rich, leisurely manner. He sang not as if making ritual responses, but as if he
rejected someone who swam in the circle with him and dared him to do something about
it.
After that, the unheard voice sounded less certain of itself, and also impa-tient. The Song
passed on to what would for the Lone Power be more successful ground: the Wanderer
and the Killer and the Forager, all of whom would succumb to the Stranger's temptations
and become the Betrayed— those species of whales and fish to whom death would later


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 come most frequently and most quickly. One by one Roots and Fang and Hotshot sang
 with the Lone One, were tempted, and in the place of the original Masters, fell. Nita tried
 to keep herself calm, but had trouble doing it; for each time one of the Celebrants gave in
 to the Lone One's persuasion, she felt the voice grow a little more pleased with itself, a
 little more assured—as if something were finally going according to plan.
 Nita stared across at Kit. He traded looks with her and began to make his way around the
 circle toward her.
The Lone One was working on the last three whales in the circle now, the ones who
would become the Undecided. Their parts were the most difficult, being not only the
longest sung passages but also the most complex. The Undecided argued with the Lone
Power much more than did the Un-touched, who tended to refuse quickly, or the
Betrayed, who gave in without much fighting. Tlhlki sang first, the Sounder's part; and
strain began to show as the Power offered him all the hidden knowledge of the great
deeps, and the Sounder's song went from smooth flowing melodies to rumbles and
scrapes of tortured indecision. Not all that carrying on is in the Song, Nita thought
nervously. What's happening? And indeed, though the Sounder fin-ished his passage
and turned away, ostensibly to think about what the Lone Power had said to him, Nita
could see that T!h!ki looked pallid and shaken as a whale that's sick.
The Listener fared no better. Fluke sang steadily enough to begin with; but when the
voiceless voice offered him the power to hear everything that transpired in the Sea, from
the random thoughts of new-hatched fry to the secret ponderings of the continental
plates, he hesitated much too long—so long that Nita saw S'reee look at him in surprise
and almost speak up to prompt him. It was bizarre; in rehearsals Fluke had had the best
memory of any of them. He finished his verses looking troubled, and seemed relieved to
turn away.
It's what S'reee said, very early on, Nita thought. The whales picked have to be close in
temperament to the original Celebrants—loving the same kinds of things. But it makes
them vulnerable to the temptations too.
And then Areinnye began to sing, questioning the Power in her disturb-ingly sweet voice,
asking and answering. She showed no sign of the unease

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that had troubled the others. Nita glanced over at Kit, who had managed by this time to
work his way fairly close to her; he swung his tail a fraction, a whale's version of a
worried headshake. Areinnye's singing was polished, su-perb, her manner poised,
unruffled, royal. She sang her initial rebuff with the harsh certainty the Gray Lord's song
called for.

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                   " 'Stranger, no more—              give me no gift.
                      Power am I,                    fear in the water
                      as my foes flee.               I need no boon.
                      In the Below                   all bow before me.
                      Speak not to me.               Speak not of gifts.' "

 The voice that answered her was as sweet and poised as her own.

           "And do you then desire no gift of mine— you who have lost so much?
           Ah no: you have strength of your own indeed—great strength of jaw, of
           fluke, of fin; fear goes before your face. But sorrow follows after. What
           use strength when slaughtered children rot beneath the waves, when the
           sweet mouth that you gave suck is gone, rent to red tatters by the
           flensing-knives; and when the second heart that beat by yours lies
           ground for dogs' meat in a whaler's hull? Gray One, accept my Gift and
           learn of strength—"

   That's not in the Song!
Nita stared in shock at Kit, then at the other Celebrants—who, all but Areinnye, were
trading horrified looks. The sperm whale held very still, her eyes turned outward from the
circle; and she shook as violently as Tlhlki had °r, for that matter, Nita. The Lone Power
sang on:

                   "—learn power! Learn how wizardry may turn to serve your
                   purpose, sinking the whalers deep, taking the brute invaders' lives
                   to pay for that small life that swims the Sea no more; take up my
                   Gift—"

'There is—there is another life," Areinnye sang, trembling now as if storm waters battered
at her, breaking the continuity of the Song. "Saved—she saved—"

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                       "—what matter? As if brutes who fear the Sea are capable of
                       thought, much less of love! Even a shark by accident may save a
                       life—then turn and tear the newly saved! Take up my Gift and take


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                       a life for life, as it was done of old—"

Slowly Areinnye turned, and the glitter of the wizard-light in her eyes as she looked at
Nita was horrible to see. "Life," she sang, one low, thick, struggling note—
She leaped at Nita. In that second Fang, on her left, arrowed in front of Areinnye,
punching her jaws away from Nita in time for Nita to roll out of their way. But Fang didn't
recover from the blow in time to flee himself; Areinnye's head swept around and the great
teeth of her upper jaw raked frightful gashes down Fang's side. Nita pulled herself out of
her roll just in time to see something else hit Areinnye—Kit's huge bulk, slamming into her
with such force that she was knocked straight into the side of Caryn Peak. She
screamed; the water brought back echoes of the sickening sound of her impact. And then
she was fleeing—out of the wizard-light, past the bound-aries of the protective spell, out
into the darkness past the peak.
The Celebrants stirred about in terrible confusion, while S'reee hurried to Fang's side and
examined him. Nita stroked over quickly and brushed Fang's good side, very lightly. One
of those merry eyes, now slightly less merry, managed to focus on her. "We need
you—Silent One," Fang said.
"We do," S'reee said. "These wounds aren't deep, but they're bleeding a lot—and the
Master-Shark's about. I've got to handle this. Meanwhile, we're shy the Gray Lord—and I
don't think she's going to come back and take back what she said. Kit, are you willing?"
Nita looked swiftly behind her. Kit was hanging there, looking down at Fang. "I'd better
be," he said.
"Good. HNii't, administer him the Celebrant's Oath. And hurry." S'reee turned away from
them and began one of the faster healing spells.
   "Kit, are you sure—"
   "Get going," he said.
She led him through the Oath. He said it almost as quickly as Hotshot had, tripping in
only one place: ". . . and I shall weave my voice and my will and my blood with theirs if
there be need. . . ."He was looking at Nita as he said that, and the look went right through
her like a spear.
"Done," S'reee said. "Fang, mind that side—the repair is temporary-—Swiftly, now.
Everyone circle, we can't afford a delay. Kit, from 'No, ' must think—' "
  They sang. And if the Song had been frightening before, it was becoming

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frantic now. Underneath them all the Celebrants could feel some malicious force straining
to get free—

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Nita watched Kit closely. He didn't rehearse any of this stuff, she thought. \Vhat if he
slips? But Kit sang what remained of the Gray Lord's part fault-lessly; he had laid himself
wide open to the Sea and was being fed words and music directly. Nita felt a lump in her
throat—that reaction humans shared with whales—at the perfect clarity of his voice. But
she couldn't stop worry-ing. If he's this open to the Sea, he's also open to that Other—
And that Other was working on him. Kit was beginning to tremble as the second part of
the Gray Lord's rebuff came to an end. The soundless voice, when it spoke for the last
time, was all sweet reason:

                   " '—strength is no use. Give over the vain strife that saves no one,
                   keeps no old friend alive, condemns the dear to death. Take but my
                   Gift and know long years that end not, slow-burnt days under the
                   Sun and Moon; not for yourself alone, but for the other—' "

   "No," Nita said—a mere whisper of song.
 Kit looked at her from the heart of the circle, shaking. In his eyes and the way he held his
 body Nita read how easy it would be for him to desert the Song after just these few lines,
 destroy it, knowing that Nita would escape alive. Here was the out he had been looking
 for.
 "No!" she tried to say again, but something was stopping her. The malice in the water
 grew, burning her. Kit wavered, looking at her—
 —then closed his eyes and took a great breath of air from the spell, and began singing
 again—his voice anguished, but still determined. He finished the last verse of the Gray
 Lord's rebuff on a note that was mostly a squeak, and immediately turned to S'reee, for
 the next part would be the group singing—the battle.
   S'reee lifted her head for the secondary invocation.
The ocean floor began to shake. And Nita suddenly realized that it wasn't lust the Lone
Power's malice burning all around her. The water was heating up.
   "Oh, Sea about us, no!" S'reee cried. "What now?"
"Sing!" came a great voice from above them. Aroooon had lifted out of the circle, was
looking into the darkness, past the great pillar of Caryn Peak. "For ^ur lives, sing! Forget
the battle! HNii't, quickly!"
She knew what he wanted. Nita took one last great gulp of breath, tasting 't as she had
never tasted anything in her life, and fluked upward out of the Clrcle herself, locating one
of the sharp outcroppings she had noticed earlier.

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A flash of ghostly white in the background— Good, she thought. Ed's close "Sea, hear
me now," she sang in a great voice, "and take my words and make them ever law—"
   "Nitaaaaaa!"
   "HNii't, look out!"
The two cries came from opposite directions. She was glancing toward Kit, one last look,
when something with suckered arms grabbed her by the tail and pulled her down.
The moments that followed turned into a nightmare of thrashing and bellowing, arms that
whipped at her, clung to her, dragging her inexorably toward the place where they joined
and the wicked beak waited. No one was coming to help her, Nita realized, as she looked
down into that sucking mouth. The water was full of screams; and two of the voices she
heard were those of sperm whales. Two— She thrashed harder, getting a view as she did
so of S'reee fleeing before a great gray shape with open jaws—Areinnye; and coming
behind Areinnye, a flood of black shapes, bigger than any the Cele-brants had had to
handle in Hudson Canyon.
She's sold out, Nita thought miserably. She's gone over to the Lone One. She came back
and broke the circle, and let the krakens in, and everything's going to go to hell if I don't—
Nita swung her head desperately and hit the kraken with it, felt baleen plates in her mouth
crack, felt the kraken shudder. Let go of me, you disgusting thing! Nita was past working
any wizardry but one. Brute force was going to have to do it. Let go! She slammed her
head into the kraken again, sideways. It let out a shrill painful whoop that was very
satisfying to her. Your eye's sensitive, huh? she thought. One more time!
She hit it again. Something soft gave under the blow, and the kraken screamed. Nita tore
free of the loosening arms and swam upward, hard and fast, heading for her sharp
outcropping. The whole area around the base of Caryn Peak was boiling with kraken, with
Celebrants fighting them and trying desperately not to be dragged out of the boundaries
of the protective spell. The bottom was shuddering harder; hot water was shimmering
faster and faster out of the vent. It's got to be stopped, Nita thought. "Kit," she called,
looking around hurriedly. There's just time enough to say good-bye-Two things she saw.
One was that ghostly white shape soaring close by, bolting down the rear half of a kraken
about the size of a step van and gazing down at her as it passed by.
The other was Kit, turning away from a long, vicious slash he had just torn down
Areinnye's side—looking up at Nita and singing one note of heart-tearing misery—not in
the Speech—not in the human-flavored whale he had always spoken before—but in pure
whale.
Oh, no. He's lost language! Nita's heart seized. S'reee had said that if that happened, the

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whalesark was about to be rejected by Kit's brain. Unless

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something was done, it would leave him human again, naked in the cold, three miles
down.
That thought, and the echoes of Kit's cry of anguish, suddenly meant more to Nita than
any abstract idea of ten million deaths. And in that second Nita came to understand what
Carl had been talking about. She wheeled around and stared at the outcropping—then
chose to do, willingly, what she had thought she'd no choice but to do. The triumph that
instantly flared up in her made no sense: But she wouldn't have traded it for any feeling
more sensible. She turned and fluked with all her might and threw herself at the stony
knives of the peak—and hit—
—something, not stone, and reeled away from the blow, stunned and confused.
Something had punched her in the side. Tumbling over and over with the force of the
blow and the ever-increasing shockwaves blasting up from the shuddering bottom, Nita
saw that great white shape again—but much closer, soaring backward with her as she
tumbled. "Silent One," he said, "before you do what you must—give me your power!"
   "What?"
   "Only trust me! Give it me—and be quick!"
Nita could hardly react to the outrageous demand. Only with Kit had she ever dared do
such a thing. To give Ed all her power would leave her empty of it, defenseless, until he
finished whatever he wanted to do with it. Which could be hours—or forever. And he
wasn't even a wizard—
  "Nita, swiftly!"
  "But Ed, I need it for the Sacrifice. What do you want it for!"
"To call for help!" Ed hissed, arching away through the water toward Areinnye and Kit,
who was still fighting feebly to keep her busy and away from Nita. "Sprat, be quick and
choose, or it will be too late!"
He dove at Areinnye, punched Kit out of harm's way, and took a great crater of a bite out
of Areinnye's unprotected flank.
Areinnye's head snapped up and around, slashing at Ed sideways. He avoided her,
circled in again. "Nita!"
To call for help— What help? And even for Ed, to give up her power, the thing that was
keeping her safe and was also the most inside part of her—
Read the fine print before you sign, said a scratchy voice in her memory. Do what the
Knight tells you. And don't be afraid to give yourself away!

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"Ed," Nita sang at the bloody comet hurtling through the water, "take it!" then she cried
the three words that she had never spoken to anyone but Kit, the most dangerous words
in the Speech, which release one's whole Power to another. She felt the power run from
her like blood from a wound, ^he felt Ed acquire it, and demand more as he turned it
toward the begin-n'ng of some ferocious inner calling. And then, when she felt as empty
as a

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shell, Ed shook himself and dived toward the lava again, driving Areinnye away from Kit.
Areinnye refused to be driven. Swiftly she turned and her fangs found Ed's side, scoring
a long deep gash from gills to tail. The Master-Shark swept away from Areinnye, his
wound trailing a horrid boiling curtain of black blood-smoke in the failing wizard-light.
Nita flailed and gasped with exertion—and got air from the protective spell, much to her
surprise. She was still in whaleshape. And stuck in it, I bet, she thought, till I get the
power back. What in the world's Ed doing?
The sea bottom around the vent suddenly heaved—lifting like some great dark creature
taking its first breath . . . then heaved again, bulging up, with cracks spreading outward
from the center of the bulge. The cracks, or some-thing beneath them, glowed red-hot.
The sea floor thundered with another tremor. Superheated water blasted up from the
remains of the vent; rocks rained down from Caryn Peak. The red glow burst up through
the widening cracks. It was lava, burning a fever-ish, suppurating red through the murk
and the violently shimmering water. The water that came in contact with it—unable to boil
at these pressures, regardless of the heat applied to it—did the impossible, the only thing
it could do: It burst into flame. Small tongues of blue-violet fire danced and snaked along
the outward-reaching tentacles of lava.
The wizard-light remaining in the water was a failing, sickly mist. Caryn Peak shook on its
foundations. The Celebrants were scattered. Nita swam desperately upward, trying to do
what she saw Kit doing—get safe above the roasting heat of the sea floor. All the bottom
between her and the peak was a mazework of lava-filled cracks, broken stone floating on
the lava, and violet fire.
Under the stone, under the lava, in the depths of the great crack that had swallowed the
vent, something moved. Something began to shrug the stone and lava aside. A long
shape shook itself, stretched itself, swelled and shrank and swelled again—a shape

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clothed in lava and black-violet fire, burning terribly. Nita watched in horrified fascination.
What is it? Nita wondered. Some kind of buried pipeline? But no manmade pipeline was a
hundred feet across. And no pipeline would seem to breathe, or move by itself, or rear up
serpentlike out of the disintegrating sea bed with the dreadful energy of something
unbound at last.
That shape was rising now, letting go its grasp on part of that long burning body that
stretched away as far as the eye could see from east to west. A neck, Nita thought, as
the shape reared up taller, towering over the sea bottom. A neck and a head— A huge
snake's head, fringed, fanged, long and

       DEEP WIZARDRY                                                                                                  315

sleek, with dark-burning lava for a hide, and eyes the sick black-violet of water bursting
into flame—
In the guise It had first worn after betraying the whales, and wore now again in gloating
token of another victory, the Power, the many-named dark-ness that men had sometimes
called the Old Serpent, towered over the sea bed as the binding that had held It
shattered. This, Nita realized, was the terrible truth concealed under the old myths of the
Serpent that lay coiled about the foundations of the world, waiting for the day It would
crush the world in those coils.
And now Its moment was at hand: But It was stretching it, savoring it. It looked at Nita,
drifting not two hundred feet from Its immense stony jaws— looked at her out of eyes
burning with a color that would sear its way into the nightmares of anyone surviving to
remember it. And those eyes knew her.
She was frightened; but she had something to do yet. I know my verse now without
having to get it from the Sea, she thought. So maybe I won't need wizardry to pull this off.
And maybe just doing the Sacrifice will have its own power. Let's find out. . . .
Nita backfinned through the thundering water, staying out of reach of those jaws,
watching for any sudden movement. She drew what she suspected was a last
breath—the protective spell around her was fading fast—and lifted her voice into the
roaring darkness. Ed, she thought, don't blow it now!

  t.          "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!—' "


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The gloating eyes were fixed on her—letting her sing, letting Nita make the attempt. But
the Lone Power wasn't going to let her get away with it. That huge, hideous head was
bending closer to her. Nita back-finned, not too obviously, she hoped—kept her distance,
kept on singing:

                 " '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—' "

And with a low thick rumble of amusement and hunger, the Serpent's "ead thrust at Nita
in a strike that she couldn't prevent.
   This is it/
The sudden small shock in the water made her heart pound. She glanced downward as
she sang. There was Kit—battered and struggling with the

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failing whalesark as if it were actually someone else's body—but ramming the Serpent
head-on, near where the neck towered up above the slowly squeezing coils. Their
pressure was breaking the sea bed in great pieces, so that lava and superheated water
gushed up in a hundred places. But Kit ignored the heat and rammed the Old Serpent
again and again. He's trying to distract It, Nita thought, in a terrible uprush of anguish and
admiration. He's buying me time. Oh, Kit! The gift was too precious to waste. "But past
the fear lies life for them," she sang,

                       " '—perhaps for me; and past my dread, past loss of Mastery and
                       life,
                             the Sea shall yet give up Her dead!' "

Annoyed—as a human might be by a gnat—the Serpent bent Its head away from Nita to
see what was troubling It. Humor and hunger glinted in Its eyes as It recognized in Kit the
other wizard who had once given It so much trouble in Manhattan. It bent Its head to him,
but slowly, wanting him to savor the terror. Now, Nita thought, and began to sing again.


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"Lone Power—"
"No!" cried another voice through the water, and something came hur-tling at her and
punched Nita to one side. It was Areinnye—wounded, and crazy, from the looks of her. /
don't have time for this! Nita thought, and for the first time in her life rummaged around in
her mind for a spell that would kill.
Someone else came streaking in to ram. Areinnye went flying. There was blood in the
water: Ed's, pumping more and more weakly from the gash in his side. But his eyes were
as cool as ever. "Ed," Nita said, breaking off her singing, "thank you—"
He stared at her as he arrowed toward her—the old indecipherable look. "Sprat," he said,
"when did I ever leave distress uncured?" And to her complete amazement, before Nita
could move, he rammed her again, close to the head—leaving her too stunned to sing,
tumbling and helpless in pain.
Through the ache she heard Ed lift his voice in song. Nita's song—the lines that, with the
offered Sacrifice, bind Death anew and put the Lortf Power in Its place. Kit just went on
pummeling at the great shape that bent closer and closer to them all, and Nita struggled
and writhed and couldn t make a sound.
No! she thought. But it was no use. Ed was taking her part willing^' circling in on the Lone
Power. Yet even through Nita's horror, some wonoer

                              DEEP WIZARDRY                                                                           317

intruded. Where did he get such a voice? she thought. It seemed to fill the
whole Sea.

  ••''          " 'Lone Power, I accept your Gift!
                                   But take my Gift of equal worth:
   •                I take Death with me, out of time,
  ••                     and make of it a path, a birth!
                       Let the teeth come! As they tear me,
                            they tear your ancient hate for aye—
                       so rage, proud Power! Fail again,
                            and see my blood teach Death to die!' "

And the Master-Shark dived straight at the upraised neck of the Serpent, and bit it. He
made no cry as Its burning hide blasted his teeth away and seared his mouth instantly

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 black; he made no cry as the Lone Power, enraged at Its wounding, bent down to pluck
 the annoying little creature from Its neck and crush it in stony jaws.
   And then the sharks came.
Calling for help, Ed had said. Now Nita remembered what he had said to her so long ago,
on the only way he had to call his people together . . . with blood: his own. Her wizardry,
though, had lent the call power that even Ed's own Mastery could never have achieved,
just as it had lent him a whale-wizard's power of song. And brought impossible distances
by its power, the Master-Shark's people came—by dozens, by hundreds, by thousands
and tens of thousands. Maddened by the blood in the water, they fell on everything that
had a wound and tore it to shreds.
Nita found that she could swim again, and she did, fast—away from there, where all the
sharks of the world, it seemed, jostled and boiled in feeding frenzy. Areinnye vanished in
a cloud of sleek silver bodies. Ed could not be seen. And the Serpent—
A scream of astonishment and pain crashed through the water. The Lone Power, like all
the other Powers, had to obey the rules when within a universe and wear a body that
could be acted upon. The sharks—wild with their Master's blood and beyond feeling
pain—were acting upon it. The taste of Its scalding blood in the water, and their own,
drove them mad for more. I hey found more. The screaming went on, and on, and on, all
up and down the length of the thrashing, writhing Serpent. Nita, deafened, writhing her-
Se'f, felt as if it would go on forever.
Eventually forever ended. The sharks, great and small, began milling slowly about,
cruising for new game, finding none. They began to disperse.

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Of the Master-Shark, of Areinnye, there was no sign; only a roiling cloud of red that every
now and then snowed little rags of flesh.
Of the Lone Power, nothing remained but sluggishly flowing lava running over a quieting
sea bed, and in the water the hot sulfurous taste, much diluted, of Its flaming blood. The
writhing shape now defined on the bottom by cooling pillow lava made it plain that the
Unbound was bound once more by the blood of a willing victim, a wizard—no matter that
the wizardry was borrowed.
Aching all over, impossibly tired, Nita hung there for several minutes, simply not knowing
what to do. She hadn't planned to live this long.
  Now, though: "Kit?"
Her cry brought her back the echo of a sperm whale heading for the surface as quickly as


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was safe. She followed him.
Nita passed through the "twilight zone" at three hundred fathoms and saw light, the faint
green gold she had never hoped to see again. When she broke surface and drew several
long gasping breaths, she found that it was morning. Monday morning, she guessed, or
hoped. It didn't much matter. She had sunlight again, she had air to breathe—and floating
half a mile away in the wavewash, looking too tired to move a fin, the massive back of a
sperm whale bobbed and rocked.
She went to him. Neither of them did anything for a long time but lie there in the water,
side by side, skin just touching, and breathe.
"I got carried away down there," Kit said eventually. "And the whalesark started to go out
on me. I would have gone all sperm whale—and then the sark would have blown out all
the way—"
   "I noticed," Nita said.
   "And you pulled me out of it. I think I owe you one."
"After all that," Nita said, "I'm not sure who owes what. Maybe we'd better call it even."
   "Yeah. But, Neets—"
   "Don't mention it," she said. "Someone has to keep you out of trouble.
   He blew explosively, right in her face.
One by one, finding one another by song, the other Celebrants began to gather around
them. Neither Kit nor Nita had any words for them until, last of the group, S'reee surfaced
and blew in utter weariness.
  She looked at Nita. "Areinnye—"
  "Gone," Kit said.
  "And the Master-Shark—"
   "The Sacrifice," Nita said, "was accepted."
There was silence as the Celebrants looked at each other. "Well," S'reee said, "the Sea
has definitely never seen a Song quite like this—"

                              DEEP WIZARDRY                                                                           319

It will be a Song well sung, said a cool voice in Nita's head. And sung from the heart.
You, young and never loving: I, old and never loved—
   "—but the Lone One is bound. And the waters are quieting."
  "S'reee," Fang said, "don't we still need to finish the Song?"
  "It's done," Kit said.
   S'reee looked at him in silence a moment. "Yes," she said then. "It is."
   "And I want to go home," Kit said.

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 Summer Night's Song

"Well enough," said S'reee. "Kit, we'll be in these waters resting for at least a couple of
days. You know where to find us." She paused, hunting words. "And, look—"
"Please save it," Nita said, as gently as she could. She nudged Kit in the side; he turned
shoreward for the long swim home. "We'll see you later."
  They went home.

They found Nita's parents waiting for them on the beach, as if they had known where and
when they would be arriving. Nita found it difficult to care. She and Kit slogged their way
up out of the surf, into the towels that Nita's mom and dad held out for them, and stood
there shivering with reaction and early-morning cold for several moments.
   "Is it going to be all right?" Nita's father asked.
   Nita nodded.
   "Are you all right?" Nita's mother asked, holding her tight.
   Nita looked up at her mom and saw no reason to start lying then. "No."
". . . Okay," her mother said. "The questions can wait. Let's get you home."
"Okay," Kit said. "And you can ask her all the questions you like . . . while / eat."
Nita turned around then; gave Kit a long look . . . and reached out, and hugged him hard.

She didn't answer questions when she got home. She did eat; and then she went to her
room and fell onto her bed, as Kit had done in his room across the hall, to get some
sleep. But before she dropped off, Nita pulled her manual out from its spot under her
pillow and opened it to one of the general data supply areas. "I want a readout on all the
blank-check wizardries done in this area in the last six months," she said. "And what their
results were."
The list came up. It was short, as she'd known it would be. The second-to-kst entry on the
list said:

                                     BCX 85/003—CALLAHAN, Juanita T., and
                                     RODRIGUEZ, Christopher K.: open-ended "Mobius
                                     spell"

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                                      implementation.          Incurred:
                                      5/25/85. Paid: 7/15/85, by willing                    «|
                                      substitution. See "Current Events"                         \
                                      precis for details.                                            "


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 Summer Night's Song

Nita put the book back under her pillow, and quietly, bitterly, starte get caught up on her
crying.

Heartsong




Neither she nor Kit got up till well after nightfall. When Nita threw clothes on and went
downstairs, she found Kit sitting at the table, shoveling Cheer-ios into his face with the
singleminded intensity he gave to the really impor-tant things in life. In the living room,
she could hear the TV going, making crowd sounds, over which her mother was saying
indignantly, "Him? He's no hitter! Just you watch—"
  Kit looked up at Nita as she leaned on the doorsill. "You hungry?"
  "Not yet."
She sat down beside him, carefully—she still ached all over—and picked up the cereal
box, absently reading the list of ingredients on the side.
  "Business as usual in there," Kit said, between mouthfuls.
  "So I hear."
  "I'm going out in a while. Wanna come?"
  "Swimming?"
"Yeah." He paused for another mouthful. "I've got to take the whalesark back."
  "Does it still work?"
"At this point," Kit said, "I'd almost rather not get into it and find out. But it got me back."
Nita nodded, put the cereal box down, and just sat for a moment with her CW in her
hands. "I had a thought—"
   'A/ooooooo."
Nita looked brief murder at Kit, then let the look go. "We seem to have Pulled it off again,"
she said.
  "Yeah."
He said it almost a little too easily. "You notice," she said, "that our reward Or hard jobs
seems to be that we get given harder jobs even?"

322



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Kit thought, then nodded. "Problem is," he said, "that we like the hard jobs."
She made a sour face. Much as it annoyed her to admit it—her, little quje( Nita who sat in
the back of the class and made decent grades and it was true. "Kit," she said, "they're
gonna keep doing that."
   « «TT|_        >»
    They.
"The Powers. They'll keep doing it until one day we don't pull it off. of us, or both of us."
   Kit looked down at his cereal bowl. "Both, preferably," he said.
  She stared at him.
"Saves the explanations." He scooped out the last spoonful of cereal, glanced up, and
made a face. "Well, what would I have told them?"
  Nita shook her head. "We could stop," she said.
   Kit chewed, watching her: swallowed, and said, "You want to?"
She waited to see if he would give some sign of what he was thinking. Useless: Kit would
make a great poker player someday. "No," she said at last.
"Me either," Kit said, getting up and putting the bowl in the sink. "Looks like we're stuck
with being wizards, huh?"
  Very slowly, she smiled at him. "Yeah."
   "Then let's go down to the water and let them applaud."
Kit gave the screen door a good-natured kick and went pounding down the stairs. Nita
shook her head, still smiling, and followed.

It was late. The Moon was now a day past full, and about halfway up the sky; its light was
so bright the sky couldn't even manage to be totally black. The stars hung glittering in a
sky more indigo, or midnight blue. Nita and Kit walked out into the surf, feeling the wind
on them and hearing something most unusual—the sound of whales basking on the
surface, some miles out, and singing where they lay. It was, as it had been on first
hearing, a high, wild, lovely sound; but now the songs brought something extra, a catch at
the heart that hadn't been there before—sorrow, and loss, and wonder. Oh, Ed, Nita
thought, and sighed, remembering the glory of how he had sounded at the last. I'm gonna
miss you. . . .
Nita swam out far enough to take whaleshape, then took Kit in tow until they made it to
water deep enough for a sperm whale. He changed. Side by side they swam outward into
the singing, through a sea illumined in a strange green-blue radiance, moonlight diffused
and reflected. Dark shapes came to meet them; all the Celebrants but two, cruising and

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 Summer Night's Song


singing in the brigM water. S'reee came to greet them skin to skin. "Come swim with us
awhile she said. "No business tonight. Just singing."
"Just a little business," Nita said. It was hard to stop being the Silent with all her
responsibilities. "How are things down deep?"

                               DEEP WIZARDRY                                                                          323

"Quiet. Not a shake; and several of the hot-water vents seem to have reduced their
outputs to normal levels. We're going to have some peace for a while, it seems ... for
which we thank you. Both of you."
 "You're very welcome," Kit said. "We'd do it again, if we had to." Nita shot Kit a quizzical
 look, which he returned in kind. "After all, it's our world
too. . • •"
They swam, the Celebrants and Kit and Nita, for a long time, a long way out—into waters
bright with fish going about their business, peaceful with seaweed and coral, and
warm—whether with volcanism or summer, Nita couldn't tell. "This is the way it's
supposed to be," S'reee said from beside her, at one point. "Not the way you met
me—not blood in the water. Just the long nights, the singing, time to think. ..."
"It's so bright," Nita said, wondering. The krill were evidently out in force tonight; between
them and the moonlight, the water was dazzling. And there seemed to be more krill yet in
the deeper waters, for it was brighter down there; much brighter. "Look at that," Kit said,
and dived, heading for the light.
At about a hundred feet down, Nita began to realize that the light in the water had nothing
to do with krill. Of itself the water was burning, a harm-less warm radiance that grew
stronger and stronger in the greater depths. And in those depths, everything else shone
too: not just reflected light, but a fire that seemed to come from inside seaweed, shells,
branching coral. Song echoed in that water, sounding at first like whalesong—but slowly
Nita began to hear something else in the music, in a way that had nothing to do with
hearing. Expressions of growth, of power, of delight—but no note of limita-tion, pain, loss.
She found herself descending into timelessness, into a blaze of meaning and purpose so
bright it could have blinded the heart—had the heart not become stronger every moment,
more able to bear it.
Finally there was nothing but the brightness, the water all around her on nre with light.
Shapes moved in the light, swimming in it as if the water were extraneous and the light
were their true medium. There was no looking at those shapes for more than a heartbeat
before the eye was forced to turn a^ay, defeated by glory. It was in the passage of those
shapes near Nita that '* was made plain to her, in the way the Sea gave a whale-wizard
knowledge, that she and Kit were welcome indeed and had successfully completed the

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lob they'd been given.
Kit was silent, as if not knowing what to say. Nita knew, but simply considered for a
moment before singing it in one soft note that, in this place, carried as poignantly as a
trumpet-call at evening. ft hurt, she said.
  ™e know, the answer came back. We sorrow. Do you? p°r what
  happened?

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   No. For who you are now—the person you weren 't a week ago.
   . . . No.
   No, Kit said.
    Would you do the same sort of thing again?
    Yes . . . if we had to.
Then there's no guarantee this won't happen again. Not that we could offer you any.
Hope, like fear, comes from within. . . .
Nita nodded. There was nothing sorrowful about the pronouncement; it was as matter-of-
fact as anything in the manual. Kit turned away from the shape, the bright Power, that had
answered them. As always, Nita turned with him.
And, looking up in astonishment, backfinned hurriedly. Something was passing over.
Something as huge, or huger than, the unseeable shapes in the radiant water; burning as
fiercely as they did, though with a cooler flame; passing by with a silent, deadly grace that
Nita would have known anywhere. / am no wizard, he had said. But how could he, or she,
have anticipated that borrowing a wizard's power would make even a nonwizard part of
the Heart of the Sea? Or maybe there was more to it than that. What's loved, Carl had
said, survives. Nita's heart went up in a great note of unbelieving joy.
The passing shape didn't turn, didn't pause. Nita got just a glance of black eyes, the only
dark things in all this place. Yet even they burned, a fire behind that opaque look that
could mean anything.
Nita knew what it meant. And on he went, out of sight, in unhurried grace; the true dark
angel, the unfallen Destroyer, the Pale Slayer who never really dies—seeking for pain to
end.
Nita turned to Kit, wordless. He gazed back, as astonished and delighted as she.
   . . . Okay, Kit said. Bring on the next job.
   She agreed.

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