“S’reee said that the danger level wouldn’t go above ‘moderate,’ “ Kit said.
“She said it shouldn’t,” Nita said.
“Probably it won’t,” Tom said. But he didn’t sound convinced. “You should bear in mind that the danger levels for humans and whales differ. Still, the manual says she was about to be promoted to Advisory status, so she’d know that…. But watch what agreements you make. And if you make any, keep them to the letter. From all indications, the Song of the Twelve’s a lovely wizardry, and 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…” There was a long pause. “All I can say is that I’m glad I wasn’t born yet. Be careful.”
I wish people would stop telling me that! Nita thought.“We will. But what’re 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 Mike Wallace 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 suspicious.”
“We’ll talk. Meanwhile, Carl—what’s the bird say?”
“Oh, it is, it is a splendid thing/To be a pirate kiiiiiiiiiiiiing!” Picchu was singing from somewhere in Tom’s living room.
“What on Earth brought this on?” Tom muttered.
“The new Pirates of the Caribbean was on cable last night,” Carl said. “Bird, come on, put that on hold a minute and make sense. What are the odds of something going south?”
“You just put me on hold for five minutes. Your turn to wait.” There was another squawk as Picchu started declaiming poetry. “’And I did the deed that all men shun, I shot the Albatross!’”
“You’re misquoting. Look, how about some extra peanuts?”
“Not listening to you! Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!”
“Okay, pirate bird, be that way. No extra peanuts. No peanuts at all. For a week.”
A moment of silence ensued during which Nita could just imagine the look that Carl and Picchu were exchanging. Picchu started squawking again. “This is barratry! Bribery!”
“Blackmail would have been my choice of term,” Carl said. “Never mind, we’re done. Tom, lock up the peanuts— “
“All right, all right!”
“Fine. Give.”
“Well.” The bird paused again, a long pause, and when she spoke her voice sounded more sober than Nita could remember hearing it for some time. “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, “This is advice? This is needlessly oracular even for you. We were just asking 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 degenerated into more loud squawking, and the excited barking of dogs, and Carl making suggestions to Picchu that were at best rather rude as he carried her out of range.
“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 headed back to the beach house.
The Blue’s Song
“Giant man-eating clams,” Nita said to Kit later, as they walked down an isolated stretch of Tiana Beach toward the surf. “Giant squid—”
“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, not even Ponch, who they’d left 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 surprisingly warm. This time Nita wasn’t able to enjoy it quite as much; the thought of undersea volcanoes was much with her. But even she couldn’t be depressed 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 laugh. “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 well he might have, for nothing in the Sea except perhaps a killer whale or 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 well; I’m running 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 was so used to being picked last for things that having to go first for anything gave her the jitters. “What do I have to do?”
“Did you have a look at your manual last night?”
“Yeah. I understand most of what we’ll 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 manual, S’reee. I think it might ha
ve 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 get in the way. 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 in 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 in general—not one particular spell. The only reason it works for you is that you know wizardry works and are willing to have it so. Belief’s 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. But like any other habit, 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. 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 ought to 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. Then, as she narrowed her eyes to more of a glare, 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 started singing idly 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 moments 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 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’d said. So it should be easy. A matter of remembering, not what you have been… but what, somewhere else, you are. Simply allow what is, somewhere else, to be what is here—and the change is done, effortless.
The thought made sense. Nita shut her eyes on the greenness and tried to relax, tried to just let go and trust to the wizardry inside her. That’s 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 yo. Not “willpower”, 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. “!t 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 water, marvelling at the sheer richness of the sound of S’reee’s words. She’d done the usual 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 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 precision, 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 spl
ash 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 she 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, prickled with the electric feeling of a live spell, tangled in the mesh and impatient to be used.
“You have to be very careful with this, Kit,” S’reee said. “This is a whalesark, and it’s rare. A sark can only be made when a whale dies, and the magic 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 death, before the life-lightning’s gone from the body’s neural pathways, 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. When he died, instead of leaving himself wholly to the Sea, Aivaaan said we should make a sark of him, because there’d be some need. Looks like he got it right. Come try it on for size, Kit.”