a gesture from one wizard to another as a slap in the face… and as much a challenge to battle as such a slap would have been from one human to another.
Nita went hot with rage, felt about for her inner contact with the Sea, found it, and sang — only three notes, but pitched and prolonged with exquisite accuracy to take the power of the other’s spell and turn it back on her tenfold. The spell and the water thundered together. The sperm whale was blown backward as Nita had been, but with more force, tumbling violently and trailing a song of shock and rage behind her.
Nita held still, shaking with anger, while S’reee and Hotshot and Kit gathered around her. “I’m all right,” she said, the trembling getting into her song. “But that one needs some lessons in manners.”
“She always has,” S’reee said. “HNii’t, I’m sorry. I would have kept you back with us, but—“ She didn’t go on.
“It’s all right,” Nita said, still shaking.
“Nice shot,” said a low scrape of song beside her ear, angry and appreciative: Kit. She brushed him lightly with one flank as a great pale shape came drifting down on the other side of her, eyeing her with dark-eyed interest.
“So,” Ed said, calm as ever, “the Sprat has teeth after all. I am impressed.”
“Thanks,” Nita said, not up to much more conversation with Ed at the moment.
Slowly they swam forward together to where S’reee was hovering in the water, singing more at than with the other whale. “—know you were out of bounds, Areinnye,” she said. “There was no breach of protocol. We came in singing.”
“That one did not,” said the sperm whale, her song so sharp with anger that it was a torture to the ears. “My right—“
“—does not extend to attacking a silent member of a party entering your waters within protocols,” S’reee said. “You attacked HNii’t out of spite, nothing more. First spite, then anger because she was human. We heard —“
“Did you indeed? And what else have you heard in these waters, you nursling wizard, you and your little playfellows?” The sperm whale glared at them all as they gathered around her, and the rasp of pain and hatred in her voice was terrible. “Have you seen my calf hereabouts? For all your magics, I think not. The whalers have been through these waters three days ago, and they served my little M’hali as they served your precious Ae’mhnuu! Speared and left to float belly-up, slowly dying, while they hunted me — then hauled bloated out of the water and gutted, his bleeding innards thrown overboard by bits and pieces for the gulls and the sharks to eat!”
When S’reee spoke again, her voice was unhappy. “Areinnye, I share your grief. It’s things like this that the Song will help to stop. That’s why we’re here.”
The sperm whale laughed, a sound both anguished and cruel. “What lies,” she said. “Or what delusions. Do you truly think anything will make them go away and stop hunting us, S’reee?” Areinnye looked with hatred at Nita. “Now they’re even coming into the water after us, I see.”
Kit glided forward ever so slowly, until he was squarely between Nita and Areinnye. “I guarantee you don’t know what she’s here for, Areinnye. She’s saving your life, along with those of a lot of others — though at the moment, in your case, I can’t imagine why anyone would bother.”
Areinnye made a sound at Kit that was the sperm-whale equivalent of a sneer. “Oh, indeed,” Areinnye said. “What could she possibly do that would make any difference to my life?”
“She is the Silent Lord for the Song,” S’reee said.
Areinnye turned that scornful regard on Nita. “Indeed,” the sperm said again. “Well. We are finally getting something useful out of a human. But she doubtless had to be compelled to it. No human would ever give up its life for one of us, wizard or not. Or did you trick her into it?”
Gently, hardly stroking a fin, Ed soared toward Areinnye. “Unwise,” he said. “Most unwise, wizard, to scorn a fellow wizard so — whatever species she may belong to. And will you hold Nita responsible for all her species’ wrongdoing, then? If you do that, Areinnye, I would feel no qualms about holding you responsible for various hurts done my people by yours over the years. Nor would I feel any guilt over taking payment for those hurts out of your hide, now.”
Areinnye turned her back on Ed and swam away, as if not caring what he said. “You take strange sides, Slayer,” the sperm said at last, cold-voiced. “The humans hunt those of your Mastery as relentlessly as they hunt us.”
“I take no sides, Areinnye,” Ed said, still following her. “Not with whales, or fish, or humans, or any other Power in the Sea or above it. Wizard that you are, you should know that.” He was beginning to circle her now. “And if I sing this Song, it is for the same reason that I have sung a hundred others: for the sake of my Mastery — and because I am pleased to sing. You had best put your distress aside and deal with the business we have come to discuss, lest something worse befall you.”
Areinnye turned slowly back toward the group. “Well, if you’ve come to administer me the Oath,” Areinnye said to S’reee, “you might as well get on with it. I was in the midst of hunting when you interrupted me.”
“Softly,” S’reee said. “Your power is a byword all throughout these parts; I want it in the Song. But we’re not so short of wizards that I’ll include one who’ll bring the High and Dry down on us. Choose, and tell me whether you can truthfully sing and leave your anger behind.”
Areinnye cruised slowly through the group, making no sound but the small ticking noises the sperm uses to navigate. “Seeing that the human who sings with us sings for the Sea’s sake,” she said at last, in that tight, flat voice, “I am content. But my heart is bitter in me for my calf’s loss, and I cannot forget that easily. Let the humans remember that, and keep their distance.”
“If that is well for you two—“ Kit and Nita both flicked tails in agreement. Well enough, then,” said S’reee. “Areinnye t’Hwio-dheii, those who gather to sing that Song that is the Sea’s shame and the Sea’s glory desire you to be of their company. Say, for my hearing, whether you consent to that Song.”
“I consent…” Areinnye sang her way through the responses with slow care, and Nita began to relax slightly. The sperm’s voice was beautiful, as pleasant as Kit’s, when she wasn’t angry. Yet she couldn’t help but catch a couple of Areinnye’s glances at Ed — as if she knew that she was being watched for her responses and would be watched in the future.
Then the third Question was asked, and Areinnye’s song scaled up in the high notes of final affirmation, a sound of tearing, chilly beauty. “Let me wander forever amid the broken and the lost, sooner than I shall refuse the Song,” Areinnye sang, “or what it brings about for the good of those who live.” But there was a faint note of scorn in the last phrase, as if the singer already counted herself among the lost and broken; and the notes on “those who live” twisted down the scale into a bitter diminuendo of pain that said life was a curse.
Now it was S’reee’s turn to look dubious; but it was too late.
“Well,” the sperm said, “when is the Foregathering? And where?”
“Tomorrow dawn,” said S’reee, “in the waters off the Hook. Will you be on time?”
“Yes,” Areinnye said. “So farewell.” And she turned tail and swam off.
Kit flicked a glance at Ed and said quietly to Nita, “Boy, that was a close one. If those two got started fighting…”
“It would not be anything like ‘close,’ “ Ed said. ‘
“Okay, great,” Kit said in mild annoyance, “she couldn’t kill you. But isn’t it just possible she might hurt you a little?”
“She would regret it if she did,” Ed said. “Blood in the water will call in some sharks, true. But their Master’s blood in the water will call them all in, whether they smell it or not… every shark for thousands of lengths around. That is my magic, you see. And whatever the Master-Shark might be fighting when his people arrived would shortly not be there at all, except as rags and scraps for fingerlings to eat.”
Nita and Kit and S’reee looked at each other.
“Why do we need Areinnye in the first place?” Nita said to S’reee. “Is she really that good a wizard?”
Turning, S’reee began to swim back the way they had come, through the now-darkening water. Hotshot paced her; and silently, pale in the dimness, Ed brought up the rear. “Yes,” S’reee said. “In fact, by rights, she should have been Ae’mhnuu’s apprentice, not I.”
Kit looked at her in surprise. “Why wasn’t she?”
S’reee made a little moan of annoyance. “I don’t know,” she said. “Areinnye is a much more powerful wizard than I am — even Ae’mhnuu agreed with me about that. Yet he refused her request to study with him, not just
