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 experienced wizard than I 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 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.
”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.
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 waiting, 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 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. I 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 practically 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 advancing 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!”
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
