again — his voice anguished, but still determined. He finished the last verse of the Gray Lord’s rebuff on a note that was mostly a squeak, and immediately turned to S’reee, for the next part would be the group singing — the battle.
S’reee lifted her head for the secondary invocation.
The ocean floor began to shake. And Nita suddenly realized that it wasn’t lust the Lone Power’s malice burning all around her. The water was heating up.
“Oh, Sea about us, no!” S’reee cried. “What now?”
“Sing!” came a great voice from above them. Aroooon had lifted out of the circle, was looking into the darkness, past the great pillar of Caryn Peak. “For your lives, sing! Forget the battle! HNii’t, quickly!”
She knew what he wanted. Nita took one last great gulp of breath, tasting it as she had never tasted anything in her life, and fluked upward out of the Circle herself, locating one of the sharp outcroppings she had noticed earlier.
A flash of ghostly white in the background— Good, she thought. Ed’s close “Sea, hear me now,” she sang in a great voice, “and take my words and make them ever law—“
“Nitaaaaaa!”
“HNii’t, look out!”
The two cries came from opposite directions. She was glancing toward Kit, one last look, when something with suckered arms grabbed her by the tail and pulled her down.
The moments that followed turned into a nightmare of thrashing and bellowing, arms that whipped at her, clung to her, dragging her inexorably toward the place where they joined and the wicked beak waited. No one was coming to help her, Nita realized, as she looked down into that sucking mouth. The water was full of screams; and two of the voices she heard were those of sperm whales. Two— She thrashed harder, getting a view as she did so of S’reee fleeing before a great gray shape with open jaws — Areinnye; and coming behind Areinnye, a flood of black shapes, bigger than any the Celebrants had had to handle in Hudson Canyon.
She’s sold out, Nita thought miserably. She’s gone over to the Lone One. She came back and broke the circle, and let the krakens in, and everything’s going to go to hell if I don’t— Nita swung her head desperately and hit the kraken with it, felt baleen plates in her mouth crack, felt the kraken shudder. Let go of me, you disgusting thing! Nita was past working any wizardry but one. Brute force was going to have to do it. Let go! She slammed her head into the kraken again, sideways. It let out a shrill painful whoop that was very satisfying to her. Your eye’s sensitive, huh? she thought. One more time!
She hit it again. Something soft gave under the blow, and the kraken screamed. Nita tore free of the loosening arms and swam upward, hard and fast, heading for her sharp outcropping. The whole area around the base of Caryn Peak was boiling with kraken, with Celebrants fighting them and trying desperately not to be dragged out of the boundaries of the protective spell. The bottom was shuddering harder; hot water was shimmering faster and faster out of the vent. It’s got to be stopped, Nita thought. “Kit,” she called, looking around hurriedly. There’s just time enough to say good-bye-Two things she saw. One was that ghostly white shape soaring close by, bolting down the rear half of a kraken about the size of a step van and gazing down at her as it passed by.
The other was Kit, turning away from a long, vicious slash he had just torn down Areinnye’s side — looking up at Nita and singing one note of heart-tearing misery — not in the Speech — not in the human-flavored whale he had always spoken before — but in pure whale.
Oh, no. He’s lost language! Nita’s heart seized. S’reee had said that if that happened, the whalesark was about to be rejected by Kit’s brain. Unless something was done, it would leave him human again, naked in the cold, three miles down.
That thought, and the echoes of Kit’s cry of anguish, suddenly meant more to Nita than any abstract idea of ten million deaths. And in that second Nita came to understand what Carl had been talking about. She wheeled around and stared at the outcropping — then chose to do, willingly, what she had thought she’d no choice but to do. The triumph that instantly flared up in her made no sense: But she wouldn’t have traded it for any feeling more sensible. She turned and fluked with all her might and threw herself at the stony knives of the peak — and hit— something, not stone, and reeled away from the blow, stunned and confused. Something had punched her in the side. Tumbling over and over with the force of the blow and the ever-increasing shockwaves blasting up from the shuddering bottom, Nita saw that great white shape again — but much closer, soaring backward with her as she tumbled. “Silent One,” he said, “before you do what you must — give me your power!”
“What?”
“Only trust me! Give it me — and be quick!”
Nita could hardly react to the outrageous demand. Only with Kit had she ever dared do such a thing. To give Ed all her power would leave her empty of it, defenseless, until he finished whatever he wanted to do with it. Which could be hours — or forever. And he wasn’t even a wizard—
“Nita, swiftly!”
“But Ed, I need it for the Sacrifice. What do you want it for!”
“To call for help!” Ed hissed, arching away through the water toward Areinnye and Kit, who was still fighting feebly to keep her busy and away from Nita. “Sprat, be quick and choose, or it will be too late!”
He dove at Areinnye, punched Kit out of harm’s way, and took a great crater of a bite out of Areinnye’s unprotected flank.
Areinnye’s head snapped up and around, slashing at Ed sideways. He avoided her, circled in again. “Nita!”
To call for help— What help? And even for Ed, to give up her power, the thing that was keeping her safe and was also the most inside part of her—
Read the fine print before you sign, said a scratchy voice in her memory. Do what the Knight tells you. And don’t be afraid to give yourself away!
“Ed,” Nita sang at the bloody comet hurtling through the water, “take it!” then she cried the three words that she had never spoken to anyone but Kit, the most dangerous words in the Speech, which release one’s whole Power to another. She felt the power run from her like blood from a wound, she felt Ed acquire it, and demand more as he turned it toward the beginning of some ferocious inner calling. And then, when she felt as empty as a shell, Ed shook himself and dived toward the lava again, driving Areinnye away from Kit.
Areinnye refused to be driven. Swiftly she turned and her fangs found Ed’s side, scoring a long deep gash from gills to tail. The Master-Shark swept away from Areinnye, his wound trailing a horrid boiling curtain of black blood-smoke in the failing wizard-light.
Nita flailed and gasped with exertion — and got air from the protective spell, much to her surprise. She was still in whaleshape. And stuck in it, I bet, she thought, till I get the power back. What in the world’s Ed doing?
The sea bottom around the vent suddenly heaved — lifting like some great dark creature taking its first breath… then heaved again, bulging up, with cracks spreading outward from the center of the bulge. The cracks, or something beneath them, glowed red-hot.
The sea floor thundered with another tremor. Superheated water blasted up from the remains of the vent; rocks rained down from Caryn Peak. The red glow burst up through the widening cracks. It was lava, burning a feverish, suppurating red through the murk and the violently shimmering water. The water that came in contact with it — unable to boil at these pressures, regardless of the heat applied to it — did the impossible, the only thing it could do: It burst into flame. Small tongues of blue-violet fire danced and snaked along the outward-reaching tentacles of lava.
The wizard-light remaining in the water was a failing, sickly mist. Caryn Peak shook on its foundations. The Celebrants were scattered. Nita swam desperately upward, trying to do what she saw Kit doing — get safe above the roasting heat of the sea floor. All the bottom between her and the peak was a mazework of lava-filled cracks, broken stone floating on the lava, and violet fire.
Under the stone, under the lava, in the depths of the great crack that had swallowed the vent, something moved. Something began to shrug the stone and lava aside. A long shape shook itself, stretched itself, swelled and shrank and swelled again — a shape clothed in lava and black-violet fire, burning terribly. Nita watched in horrified fascination. What is it? Nita wondered. Some kind of buried pipeline? But no manmade pipeline was a hundred feet across. And no pipeline would seem to breathe, or move by itself, or rear up serpentlike out of the disintegrating sea bed with the dreadful energy of something unbound at last.
That shape was rising now, letting go its grasp on part of that long burning body that stretched away as far
