her. Now Nita was struck by the size of her — S’reee was at least forty feet from the tips of her flukes to her pointy nose. And last night she had been a wheezing hulk. Now she was all grace, floating and gliding and rolling like some absurd, fat, slim-winged bird — for her long swimming fins looked more like wings than anything else.
“Did you sleep well?” she sang at them, a weird cheerful crescendo like something out of a happy synthesizer. “I slept wonderfully. And I ate well too. I think I may get back most of the weight I lost yesterday.”
Kit looked at the healed place, treading water. “What do you eat?”
“Krill, mostly. The littlest things that live in the water, like little shrimp. But some fish too. The blues are running, and the little ones are good. Of they have been until now…” She sighed, spraying water out her blowhole. “That’s in the story I have to tell you. Come on, we’ll go out to one of the Made Rocks.”
They took hold of her dorsal fin, and she towed them. The “Made Rock” turned out to be an old square fishing platform about three miles south of Tiana Beach: wooden pilings topped by wooden slats covered with tarred canvas and with bland-faced seagulls. Most of the gulls immediately took off and began flying around and screaming about the humans sitting on their spot, despite Nita’s and Kit’s polite apologies. Some of the other gulls were less annoyed, especially after they found out the visitors were wizards. Later on, whenever Nita thought of her first real conversation with S’reee, what she remembered best were the two seagulls who insisted on sitting in her lap the whole time. They were heavy, and not housebroken.
“I guess the best place to start,” S’reee said when Nita and Kit were settled, “is with what you already know, that there’s been trouble for wizards on the land lately. The trouble’s been felt in the sea too. Out here we’ve been having quakes on the sea floor much more often than we should be having them — severe ones. And some other old problems have been getting worse. The dirt they throw into the water from the High and Dry, especially: there’s more of it than ever—“
“ ‘The High and Dry’?”
“The place with all the high things on it.”
“Oh,” Kit said. “New York City. Manhattan, actually.”
“The water close to it is getting so foul, the fish can’t breathe it for many thousands of lengths out. Those that can are mostly sick. And many more of the boats-that-eat-whales have been out here recently. The past few months, there’s been a great slaughter—“
Nita frowned at the thought of other creatures suffering what S’reee had been through. She had heard all the stories about the hungry people in Japan, but at the moment she found herself thinking that there had to be something else to eat.
“Things have not been good,” S’reee said. “I know less about the troubles on land, but the Sea tells us that the land wizards have been troubled of late, that there was some great strife of powers on the High and Dry. We saw the Moon go out one night—“
“So did we,” Kit said. There was fear in his eyes at the memory, and pride in his voice. “We were in Manhattan when it happened.”
“We were part of it,” Nita said. She still didn’t know all of how she felt about what had happened. But she would never forget reading from the book that kept the world as it should be, the Book of Night with Moon, while around her and Kit the buildings of Manhattan wavered like a dream about to break — and beyond a barrier of trees brought to life, and battling statues, the personification of all darkness and fear, the Lone Power, fought to get at them and destroy them.
S’reee looked at them somberly from one eye. “It’s true then what the mhnuu used to tell me, that there are no accidents. You’ve met the Power that created death in the beginning and was cast out for it. All these things— the lost Moon, that night, and the earthquakes, and the fouled water, and the whale-eating ships — they’re all Its doing, one way or another.”
Kit and Nita nodded. “It took a defeat in that battle you two were in,” S’reee said. “It’s angry, and the problems we’ve been having are symptoms of that anger. So we have to bind It, make It less harmful, as the first sea people bound It a long time ago. Then things will be quiet again for a while.”
“Bind It how?” Nita said.
“No, wait a minute,” Kit said. “You said something about the Sea telling you things—“
S’reee looked surprised for a moment. “Oh, I forgot that you do it differently. You work your wizardry with the aid of those things you carry—“
“Our books.”
“Right. The whales who are wizards get their wizardry from the Sea. The water speaks to you when you’re ready, and offers you the Ordeal. Then if you pass it, the Heart of the Sea speaks whenever you need to hear it and tells you what you need to know.”
Nita nodded. The events in that “other” Manhattan had been her Ordeal, and Kit’s; and after they passed it, their books had contained much more information than before. “So,” she said, “bind the Lone Power how?”
“The way the first whale-wizards did,” S’reee said. “The story itself is the binding. Or rather, the story’s a song: the Song of the Twelve. In the long form it takes — will take — hours to sing.”
“I’m glad I had breakfast,” Kit muttered.
S’reee spouted good-naturedly. Nita wondered whether it was accidental that the wind turned at that exact moment, threw the spray straight at Kit, and soaked him to the skin. At any rate, Nita laughed.
“I won’t take quite that long,” S’reee said. “You know about the great War of the Powers, at the beginning of everything; and how the Lone Power invented death and pain, and tried to impose them on the whole universe, and the other Powers wouldn’t let It, and threw It out.”
“Even regular human beings have stories about it,” Kit said. He took off his windbreaker and shook it out, mostly on Nita.
“I’m not surprised,” S’reee said. “Everything that lives and tells stories has this story in one form or another. Well. After that war in the Above and Beyond, the Lone Power spent a long while in untraveled barren universes, recouping Its strength. Then It came back to our native universe, looking for some quiet, out-of-the-way place to try out Its new inventions. Right then the only place vulnerable to It, because thinking life was very new here, was this world; and the only place thinking life existed as yet was the Sea. So the Lone One came here to trick the Sea into accepting Death. Its sort of death, anyway — where all power and love are wasted into an endless darkness, lost forever.”
“Entropy,” Nita said.
“Yes. And any sea people It succeeded in tricking would be stuck with that death, the Great Death, forever. — Now there was already a sort of death in the Sea, but only the kind where your body stops. Everyone knew it wasn’t permanent, and it didn’t hurt much; you might get eaten, but you would go on as part of someone else. No one was afraid of not being his own self anymore — I guess that’s the simplest way of putting it. That calm way of life drove the Lone Power wild with hate, and It swore to attach fear and pain to it and make it a lot more interesting.”
S’reee sighed. “The whales’ job then was what it is now: to be masters and caretakers for the fish and the smaller sea people, the way you two-leggers are for the dry-land beasts. So naturally, the only wizards in the Sea were whales, just as humans were originally the only ones on land. That early on, there were only ten whale- wizards, all Seniors. Ni’hwinyii, they were called, the Lords of the Humors—“
Nita was puzzled. “It’s the old word for emotions, sort of,” Kit said. “Not like ‘funny’ humor.”
“I know,” Nita said, annoyed. She hadn’t.
S’reee blew, laughing. The spray missed Kit this time. “Those ten whales ruled the Sea, under the Powers,” she said. “If the Lone Power wanted to trick the Sea into the Great Death, It had to trick the Ten — then all the life they ruled would be stuck with the Great Death too. So the Lone One went to the Ten in disguise, pretending to be a stranger, a new whale sent to them so that they could decide under which of their Masteries it fell. And as each one questioned the Lone Power, the Stranger whale offered each of them the thing he wanted most, if he would only accept the ‘Gift’ the Stranger would give him. And he showed them just enough of his power to prove that he could do it.”
“Uh-oh,” Kit said softly. “I’ve heard that one before.”
“Apples and snakes,” Nita said.
“Yes. The pattern repeats. One after another, the Lone One tempted the Ten. The Sea was silent then and gave them no advice — some people say that the Powers wanted the Ten to make up their own minds. But however
