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 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 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 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 fluked 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 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 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.
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 diminishing — and now grew louder, and more ragged, until they abruptly stopped.
Wearily Nita swam upward. She broached and blew gratefully, doing nothing 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 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 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 tampering 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.
