that might have been, three of the Ten took the Gift, and fell. Three of them were undecided. Three of them rejected the Gift. And the Lone Power needed a majority of the Lords to accept Death, or Its victory would only be Partial.”
“Those were only nine Lords, though,” Kit said.
“Yes, and here the Tenth comes in: the Silent Lord, they called her. She was the youngest of them, and each of the other Nine tried to bring her around to his own way of thinking. The Lone One came to her too and tempted her as It had tempted the others. You know, though, that it’s the youngest wizard who has the most power, and where the other Lords were deceived, the Silent Lord wasn’t. She realized what the Stranger was and what It was trying to do.
She was faced with a difficult choice. She knew that even if she rejected the Stranger, the fighting would only go on among the other Nine. Sooner or later they or their successors would accept the Gift and doom the whole Sea to the Great Death. But she also knew something else that the Sea had told her long before, and that others have found out since. If one knows death is coming — any death, from the small ones to the Great one — and is willing to accept it fully, and experience it fully, then the death becomes something else — a passage, not an ending: not only for himself, but for others.”
S’reee’s voice got very soft. “So the Silent Lord did that,” she said. “Luck, or the Powers, brought one more creature into the singing, uninvited. It was the one fish over whom no mastery was ever given — the Pale Slayer, whom we call the Master-Shark. The Silent Lord decided to accept the ‘Gift’ that the Stranger offered her — and then, to transform the Gift and make it ‘safe,’ she gave herself up willingly to die. She dived into a stand of razor coral; and the Master-Shark smelled her blood in the water, and… well.” S’reee blew. “He accepted the sacrifice.”
Nita and Kit looked at each other.
“When that happened, the Lone Power went wild with rage,” S’reee said. “But that did It no good. The Silent One’s sacrifice turned death loose in some of the Sea, but not all; and even where it did turn up, death was much weaker than it would have been otherwise. To this day there are fish and whales that have astonishing lifespans, and some that never seem to die of natural causes. The sharks, for instance: some people say that’s a result of the Master-Shark’s acceptance of the Silent Lord’s sacrifice. But the important thing is that the Lone Power had put a lot of Its strength into Its death-wizardry. It had become death Itself, in a way. And when death was weakened, so was the Lone One. It fell to the sea floor, and it opened for It and closed on It afterward. And there It lies bound.”
“ ‘Bound’?” Kit said. “S’reee, when we had our last run-in with the Lone Power, It didn’t seem very bound to us. It had a whole alternate universe of Its own, and when It came into this one to get us, It went around tearing things up any way It liked. If It is bound, how could It have also been running loose in Manhattan?”
S’reee blew, a sober sound. “It’s the usual confusion about time,” she said. “All the great Powers exist outside it, and all we usually see of Them are the places and moments where and when They dip into the timeflow we’re inhabiting. This world has always been an annoyance to the Lone One. Its gets frustrated here a lot — so It visits often, in many forms. From inside our timeflow, it can look as if the Lone Power is bound in one place-time and free in another… and both appearances are true.” S’reee rolled and stretched in the water. “Meanwhile, outside the timeflow, where things don’t have to happen one after another, the Lone One is eternally rebelling and eternally defeated—“
“We gave It a chance to do something else, when we fought last,” Nita said. “We offered It the option to stop being a dark power—“
“And it worked,” S’reee said, sounding very pleased. “Didn’t you know? It’s also eternally redeemed. But meantime we have to keep fighting the battles, even though the war’s decided. The Lone One’s going to take a long while to complete Its choice, and if we get lazy or sloppy about handling Its thrashing around, a lot of people are going to die.”
“The sea floor,” Nita said, “has been shaken up a lot lately.”
“That’s one symptom that tells us the Twelve Song needs to be reenacted,” S’reee said. “We do the Song at intervals anyway, to make sure the story’s never forgotten. But when the Lone Power gets troublesome — as It seems to be doing now — we reenact the Song, and bind It quiet again.”
“Where do you do this stuff?” Kit said.
“Down the coast a ways,” S’reee said, “off the edge of the plateau, in the Great Deep past the Gates of the Sea. Ae’mhnuu was getting ready to call the Ten together for a Song in three days or so. He was training me for the Singer’s part — before they blew him in two pieces and boiled him down for oil.”
Her song went bitter, acquiring a rasp that hurt Nita’s ears. “Now I’m stuck handling it all myself. It’s not easy: You have to pick each whale wizard carefully for each part. I don’t know who he had in mind to do what. Now I have to work it out myself — and I need help, from wizards who can handle trouble if it comes up.” She looked up at them. “You two can obviously manage that. And the Ten will listen to you, they’ll respect you, after what you went through up in the High and Dry. You’ve fought the Lone Power yourselves and gotten off—“
“It was luck,” Kit muttered. Nita elbowed him.
“Singing, huh,” Nita said, smiling slightly. “I don’t have much of a singing voice. Maybe I’d better take the Silent One’s part.”
S’reee looked at Nita in amazement. “Would you?”
“Why not?”
“Not me,” Kit said. “I’m even worse than she is. But I’ll come along for the ride. The swim, I mean.”
S’reee looked from Kit to Nita. “You two are enough to make me doubt all the stories I’ve heard about humans,” she said. “HNii’t, best check that book’thing and make sure this is something you’re suited for. The temperaments of the singers have to match the parts they sing — but I think this might suit you. And the original Silent Lord was a humpback. The shapechange would come easily to you, since we’ve shared blood—“
“Wait a minute! Shapechange?” Nita cried. “You mean me be a whale?”
Kit laughed. “Why not, Neets? You have been putting on a little weight lately…”
She elbowed him again, harder. “Oh, you’d shapechange too, Kit,” S’reee said. “We couldn’t take you down in the Great Deeps otherwise. — Look, you two, there’s too much to tell, and some of it’s going to have to be handled as we go along. We’ve got three days to get everyone together for the Song, so that it happens when the Moon’s round. Otherwise it won’t keep the sea bottom quiet—“
Kit looked suddenly at Nita. “Did you see that thing on the news the other night? About the volcano?”
“The what?”
“There was some scientist on. He said that hot-water vents had been opening up all of a sudden off the Continental Shelf. And he said that if those little tremors we’ve been having keep getting worse, it could open the bottom right up and there’d be a volcano. The least it’d do would be to boil the water for miles. But it could also break Long Island in two. The beaches would go right under water. And Manhattan skyscrapers aren’t built for earthquakes.” Kit was quiet for a moment, then said, “The rocks remembered. That’s why they were upset…”
Nita wasn’t thinking about rocks, or Manhattan. She was thinking that her folks were planning to be there for another week and a half at least — and she saw a very clear picture of a tidal wave of dirty, boiling water crashing down on the beach house and smashing it to driftwood.
“When should we start, S’reee?” she said.
“Dawn tomorrow. There’s little time to waste. Hotshot will be going with us — he’ll be singing the Fourth Lord, the Wanderer, in the Song.”
“Dawn—“ Nita chewed her lip. “Could it be a little later? We’ve got to have breakfast with my parents or they’ll freak out.”
“Parents?” S’reee looked from Nita to Kit in shock. “You’re still calves, is that what you’re telling me? And you went outworld into a Dark Place and came back! I’d thought you were much older—“
“We wished we were,” Nita said under her breath.
“Oh, well. No matter. Three hours after dawn be all right? The same place? Good enough. Let me take you back. I have something to fetch so that you can swim with us, Kit. And, look—“ She gazed at them for some time from that small, worried, gentle eye; but longer at Nita. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you very much indeed.”
“Think nothing of it,” Kit said grandly, slipping into the water and patting S’reee on one big ribbed flank.
Nita slid into the water, took hold of S’reee’s dorsal fin, and thought something of it all the way home.
