the time to do it. There won’t be a chance later, after we’ve passed the Gates of the Sea. Nor will there be any way to get to the surface quickly enough to breathe if you start running low. At the depths we’ll be working, even a sperm whale would get the bends and die of such an ascent. Are you all sure of your needs? Think carefully.”
No one said anything.
“All right. I remind you also, one more time, of the boundaries on the pressure-protection spell. They’re marked by this area of light around us— which will serve the added purpose of enabling us to see what’s going on around us. If we need to expand the boundaries, that’s easily done. But unless I direct you otherwise, stay inside the light. Beyond the lighted area, there’s some direction for a limited area, but it’s erratic. Don’t depend on it! Otherwise you may find yourself crushed to a pulp.”
Nita glanced at Kit; he gave her an I-don’t-care wave of the tail. Sperm whales were much less bothered by pressure changes than most of the species, and the great depths were part of their hunting grounds. “You be careful!” she sang at him in an undertone. “Don’t get cute down there.”
“Don’t you.”
“Anything else?” S’reee said. “Any questions?”
“Is there time for a fast bite?” Roots said, sounding wistful.
“Surely,” Fang said, easing up beside the beaked whale with that eternal killer-whale smile. “Where should I bite you?”
“Enough, you two. Last chance, my wizards.”
No one sang a note.
“Then forward all,” S’reee said, “and let us take the adventure the Powers send us.”
She glided forward, out into the darkness past the great curved cliff, tilted her nose down, and dived — not straight, but at a forty-five-degree angle roughly parallel to the downward slope of the canyon. The wizard-light advanced with her. Areinnye followed first; then Fang and Iniihwit, with Fluke and Roots close behind. After them came Tlhlki and Aroooon and Hotshot, and Nita, with Kit behind her as rearguard, suspiciously watching the zone of light around them. Only one of the Celebrants did not stay within that boundary, sailing above it, or far to one side, as he pleased — Ed, cruising restlessly close to the canyon walls as the group descended, or pacing them above, a ghost floating in midnight-blue water.
“I don’t like it,” Nita sang, for Kit’s hearing only, as she looked around her.
“What?”
“This.” She swung her tail at the walls — which were towering higher and higher as they cut downward through the Continental Shelf. On the nautical maps in their manuals, the canyon had looked fairly innocent; and a drop of twenty-five feet in a half-mile had seemed gentle. But Nita was finding the reality that rose in ever- steepening battlements around her much more threatening. The channel’s walls at their highest had been about three hundred feet high, comparable to the walls she’d seen in the Grand Canyon on vacation. But these walls were already five or six hundred feet high, growing steadily steeper as the canyon’s angle of descent through the shelf increased. Nita had a neck to crane back, it would already be sore.
As it was, she had something much worse — a whale’s superb sonar sense, which told her exactly how puny she was in comparison to those cliffs— exactly where loose rocks lay on them, ready to be shaken down at the slightest bottom tremor.
Kit looked up around them and sang a note of uncomfortable agreement. “Yeah,” he said. “It gives me the creeps too. It’s too tall—“
No,” Nita said softly. “It’s that this isn’t a place where we’re supposed to be. Something very large happened here once. That’s your specialty; you should be able to feel it.”
“Yeah, I should.” There was a brief pause. “I seem to have been having trouble with that lately. — But you’re right, it’s there. It’s not so much the tallness itself we’re feeling. But what it’s — what it’s a symbol of, I think —“
Nita said nothing for a moment, startled by the idea that Kit had been losing some of his talent at his specialty. There was something that could mean, some warning sign— She couldn’t think what.
“Kit, this is one of the places where Afallone was, isn’t it?”
He made a slow sound of agreement. “The whole old continental plate Atlantis stood on was ground under the new plates and buried under the Atlantic’s floor, S’reee said. But the North American plate was a lot farther west when the trouble first started, and the European one was farther east. So if I’ve got the story straight, this would have been where Afallone’s western shoreline was, more or less. Where we’re going would still have been open sea, a couple of million years ago.”
“Millions of years—“ Nita looked at him in uncomfortable wonder. “Kit — that’s much farther back than the fall of Afallone. That could—“ Her note failed her momentarily. “That could go right back to the first Song of the Twelve—“
Kit was still for a while as they kept diving. “No wonder,” he said at last, “no one travels down through the Gates of the Sea except when they’re about to do the Song. Part of the sorcery is buried in the stone. If anybody should trouble it, wake it up—“
“—like we’re doing,” Nita said, and fell silent.
They swam on. The immensities rearing up about them grew no more reassuring with time. Time, Nita thought — how long have we been down here? In this changeless cold dark, there was no telling; and even when the Sun came up, there still would be no knowing day from night. The darkness yielded only grudgingly to the little sphere of light the Celebrants carried with them, showing them not much, and too much, of what Nita didn’t want to look at — those walls, reaching so far above her now that the light couldn’t even begin to illumine them. Nita began to get a bizarre sense of being indoors — descending a winding ramp of infinite length, its walls three miles apart and now nearly a mile high.
It was at about this time that Nita felt on her skin what sounded at first like one of the Blue’s deeper notes, and stared ahead of her, wondering partly what he was saying — the note was one that made no sense to her. Then she wondered why he was curving his body upward in such surprise. But the note grew, and grew, and grew louder still, and though they were now nearly a mile from the walls on either side, to her shock and horror Nita heard the walls begin to resonate to that note.
The canyon walls sounded like a struck gong, one of such boneshaking, subterranean pitch as Nita had never imagined. She sounded, caught in the torrent of shock waves with the rest of the Celebrants. Seaquake! she thought. The sound pressed through her skin from all sides like cold weights, got into her lungs and her heart and her brain, and throbbed there, hammering her into dizziness with slow and terrible force.
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. This is the pits! 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, Lord! — 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, she 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-
