“Well enough,” S’reee said, moving for the first time, to break out of the Pale One’s circle. “Let’s get to it.”
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 me the Oath at your leisure. But first you must tell me who the Silent One 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, put it into her mind that this would be a bad idea. Gulping, Nita 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 was, 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 paused for a moment: then 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 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 showing.
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 till you know your new shape better. It has its own fierce ways, I hear; but a sperm whale is still no match for me.” The shark 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 from below and crush your lower 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 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 anywhere 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 Manhattan,” 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 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 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 hereabouts, 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 have been dying like clams at red tide lately.”
“As if,” the Master-Shark said, “someone or something did not care to nave the Song enacted just now.” His voice sounded remote. “I’m reminded of that Song enacted, oh, a hundred thirty thousand moons ago—when the bottom shook as it does now, and the Lone One had newly lost the Battle of the Trees. One wizard was injured by rockfall while they made the journey down through the Gates of the Sea. And when they began the Singing proper, first the Killer and then the Blue lost control of their spells at crucial times. You know the moment, S’reee: when the mock-battle breaks off 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 swa
m 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 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.
“Afállonë,” 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 Afállonë were so terrible that they tore straight through the first level of the land-under-Sea—the crust, I think humans call it—and right down to the mantle, the molten stuff beneath. The whole island plate on which Afállonë stood was broken in pieces and pushed down into the lava of the mantle—utterly destroyed. The plates of your continent and that of Europe have since drifted together over the island’s old location, covering its grave… But even after the Downfall, there was trouble for year: mostly with the atmosphere, because of all the ash the volcanoes spat into the air. It got cold, and whole species of land creatures died for lack of their food. It was thousands of Moons before things were normal again. So we tend to be very careful about the Song. ‘Lest the Sea become the Land, and the Land become the Sea—’ ”
“And the krakens are breeding,” the Pale One said as they swam. “Well. I’m for the Northern Rips tonight; there’s trouble in the water there.”
What kind of creature, Nita wondered, can hear something in distress when it’s two hundred miles away? Or maybe 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. “But 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. “Oh, wow, we are 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. She glanced at Kit as they swam. “Maybe you should go ahead and let them know we’re okay. Tell them I’m coming—”
“No,” Kit said, also at pains to sound calm. “I’ll take my chances with you, Neets. ‘All for one…’ ”
“Sprat,” Ed said to Nita, “this is an odd thing, that your sire and dam impose restrictions on you when you’re doing a wizardry of such weight.”
“They don’t know we’re wizards,” Kit said.
S’reee was so surprised by this that she backfinned to a dead stop in the water. Ed, as if nothing took him by surprise, merely circled about the group, while Kit and Nita coasted close by. “They don’t know!” S’reee said. “How do you do anything? How do you prepare wizardries? Let alone the matter of singing the Song without the full support of the people close to you—and when you’re singing the Silent One’s part, no less!”
There had been something about that last part in the manual. Nita had thought she had all the support she needed in Kit. She was becoming less sure. Tom, got to call Tom— “I know,” she said out loud. “S’reee, let’s swim, we’re late enough as it is.”
The four of them headed west again. “It can’t be helped,” Kit said. “It’s not like it is here, where wizardry is something respectable and useful that most everybody knows about. Up on the land, they used to burn people for it. Nowadays—well, it’s safer to hide what you’re up to. People would think you were nuts if you tried to tell them you were a wizard. Most people don’t believe in magic.”
“What do they believe in?” S’reee said, unnerved.
“Things,” Nita said unhappily. “S’reee, it’s too complicated. But doing wizardry and keeping everybody from noticing is a problem.”
“I’m no wizard,” Ed said, “but only a fool would try to deny a wizard’s usefulness. It must be a crippled life your people live up there, without magic, without what can’t be understood, only accepted—”
For all her concern about being late, Nita looked wryly sideways at Ed. “This from someone who won’t admit Timeheart exists unless he sees it himself?”
“Sprat,” Ed said, “if it does in fact exist, can my not believing in it make the slightest difference? And as for understanding—I’m not interested in understanding Timeheart. What use is spending time figuring out, say, why water is wet? Will it make breathing it any— ’Ware, all!”
The warning came so conversationally that it took Nita precious moments to realize what the problem was. The sea around them was dark to begin with. But in the black water, darker shapes were moving. One of them, writhing and growing, reached up dimly-seen arms at them. Nita let out a squeak of surprise, and the returning echoes hit her skin and told her, to her terror, what her eyes couldn’t. A long torpedo-shaped body, a great mass of arms that squirmed like snakes, and a long wicked beak-fang hidden at the bottom of them. She backfinned desperately as those writhing arms with all their hooked suckers reached for her.
The sound that began rumbling through the water probably upset the krakens as much as it did her. Nita had never heard the battlecry of an enraged sperm whale—a frightful scrape of sound, starting at the highest note a human being can hear and scaling down with watershaking roughness to the lowest note, then past it. It was hard to see what was going on, but Nita kept singing so her radar would tell her. She would have preferred not to; the echo-“sight” of Kit in the whalesark, arrowing toward the leading kraken, jaws open, all his sharp teeth showing, was a horror. Suckered arms whipped around him, squeezing; and the giant squid had its own noise, a screech so high it sounded like fingernails being scraped down a blackboard.
Before she really knew what she was doing, Nita circled off to pick up speed, and then swam straight toward the kraken’s head-ruffle, the thick place where the tentacles joined behind mouth and tooth. She sang for aim as she charged, then lost the song when she rammed the kraken. The squid’s long porous backbone crunched and broke under her blow. Rolling, tail lashing, she fluke
d away. All the telephone pole-length arms spasmed and squeezed Kit hard one last time, then fell away limp. Kit shot in toward the head of the broken squid. Jaws opened, crunched closed, opened again to slash once or twice with wild ferocity. Then Kit fluked powerfully, still singing, and arched away through the water.
“Kit!” Nita cried, but his only answer was the sperm-whale battlecry. The water was dark with night, thick with squid ink, and scratchy with stirred sand. Through it all a pallid shape came cruising at speed, jaws open, circling in. The patch of darkness he circled threw out a score of arms to grapple with him. Ed let the arms draw him closer to his prey, then bit, and blood and ink billowed everywhere in the frantic rush of water expelled by the shrieking squid. Severed chunks of kraken arm spun and swirled in the water, and sank through it. Ed swept forward, jaws wide, and bit again. The shriek cut off. Out of the cloud of blood and ink Ed came silently sailing, cool, untroubled, graceful: the Pale Slayer, a silent ghost looking calmly about him for his next victim. Nita held very still and sang not a note until he passed her by.
S’reee was ramming another kraken as Nita had. But one more closed on her from behind. Kit came swimming, singing his battlecry. He bit the second squid amidships, hanging onto that bullet-shaped body like a bulldog as its struggles shook him from side to side. Between her and Kit and S’reee, Ed was circling a third kraken. It flailed at him, trying to bind his mouth shut so that it could get a better grip on him and squeeze him to death.
It might as well not have bothered. As a fourth kraken came for her, Nita saw Ed break his circling pattern to dart in and slash, then curve away. Again and again he feinted, again and again his teeth tore, until the kraken was reduced to a tattered, screaming storm of blood and ink and flailing tentacles. Blank-eyed, Ed soared straight at the finned rear end of the doomed creature and opened his mouth. When his jaws scissored shut, all that was left to drift downward were the tips of several tentacles. The kraken had been about the size of a station wagon.