The sluggish, brutal pounding against her skin and inside her body eventually began to 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. Can’t stand this, can’t hear, can’t see! 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 towering 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, God!—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, Nita 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 towards, 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 on 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 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, smashing 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 down-canyon 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 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 uncomfortable. “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 blowholes 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 up-canyon 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 convulsive 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 platter-like yellow eyes glowing with reflected light and wild-beast hunger—not just a few krakens, 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 down-canyon.
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 T!h!ki rammed didn’t move afterwa
rd.
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 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 assailed 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 hungry 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 T!h!ki 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 government to warn people about eating too many local ocean-caught fish in a week,were getting concentrated in the squids’ bodies, and over time was changing them. And the food the krakens normally ate at the great depths was dying out. They had to come up into the shallows to survive… 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 the Lone Power wants them here. We’re supposed to use up our air fighting them.”
T!h!ki 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 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 difference at all. But I can’t stop acting like 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 water got her attention; 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 itself towered, a mighty cliffwall rising to lose itself in darkness. Outward 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 surroundings. 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 movements of tiny lights—eerie points of peculiar-colored fire that jittered and clustered as they 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. “Nothing 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 deep-dive subs, 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 Celebrants went slowly after Kit. T!h!ki went too; she barely noticed him go. This isn’t the Kit I want to say 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-f
used 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 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. Pallid rays fluttered, using fleshy wings to rearrange the sand in which they lay buried; tripod-fish crutch-walked around the bottom like peg-legged 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, 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...”