by Diane Duane
The dry, remote pain in his voice astonished her. And Nita thought abruptly of that long line of titles in the commentaries in her manual: as if only one shark had ever been Master. Sharks don’t die of natural causes, she thought. Could it be that, all these years, there has been just one Master? And all around him, people die and die, and he — can’t— and wants to? And so he understands how it is to want to get out of something and be stuck with it.
Nita was terribly moved — she wasn’t sure why. She swam close to the Pale One’s huge head for a moment and glided side by side with him, matching his course and the movements of his body.
“I wish I could help,” she said.
“As if the Master could feel distress,” Ed said, with good-natured scorn. The wound in his voice had healed without a scar.
“And as if someone else might want to end it,” Nita said, sarcastic, but gentle about it.
Ed was silent for a long while. “I mean, it’s dumb to suffer,” Nita said, rather desperately, into that silence. “But if you have to do it, you might as well intend it to do someone some good.”
In silence they swam a few lengths more through the darkening water, while Nita’s fear began to build in her again, and one astonished part of her mind shouted at her, You’re running around talking about doing nice things for someone who’s going to kill you? You ‘re crazy!
Ed spoke at last. “It’s well said. And we will cause it to be well made, this Sacrifice. You, young and never loving; I, old and never loved.” Calm, utterly calm, that voice. “Such a Song the Sea will never have seen.”
“HNii’t?” came a questioning note through the water, from southward of Ambrose: S’reee’s voice. “It’s almost your time—“
“I have to go,” Nita said. “Ed—“
“Silent Lord?”
She had no idea why she was saying it. “I’m sorry!”
“This once, I think,” the passionless voice said, “so am I. Go on, Sprat. I will not miss my cue.”
Nita looked at him. Opaque eyes, depthless, merciless, lingered on her as Ed curved past. “Coming!” Nita sang in S’reee’s direction, loud, and tore off southward.
No pale shadow followed.
The next few hours, while the water darkened further, ran together for Nita in a blur of music, and annoying repetitions, and words that would have been frightening if she hadn’t been too busy to be frightened. And something was growing in her, slowly, but getting stronger and stronger — an odd elation. She sang on, not questioning it, riding its tide and hoping it would last through what she had to do. Again and again, with the other Celebrants listening and offering suggestions, she rehearsed what would be the last things she would ever say:
“… Sea, hear me now, and take my words and make them ever law!—“
“Right, now swim off a little. No one hears this part. Upward, and toward the center, where the peak will be. Right there—“
“ ‘Must I accept the barren Gift?
learn death, and lose my Mastery?
Then let them know whose blood and breath
will take the Gift and set them free:
whose is the voice and whose the mind
to set at naught the well-sung Game—
when finned Finality arrives
and calls me by my secret Name.
Not old enough to love as yet,
but old enough to die, indeed— (“— Oh Lord—“)
the death-fear bites my throat and heart,
fanged cousin to the Pale One’s breed.
But past the fear lies life for all—
perhaps for me: and, past my dread, p
ast loss of Mastery and life,
the Sea shall yet give up Her dead!’ “ and then the paleness came to circle over her, bringing with it the voice that chanted all on one soft hissing note, again and again, always coming back to the same refrain—
“ ‘Master have I none, nor seek.
Bring the ailing; bring the weak.
Bring the wounded ones to me:
They shall feed my Mastery…’”
That strange excitement was still growing in Nita. She let it drive her voice as she would have used it to drive a wizardry, so that her song grew into something that shook the water and almost drowned out even Ed’s voice, weaving about it and turning mere hunger to desire, disaster to triumph—
“ ‘Lone Power, I accept your Gift!
Freely I make death part of me;
By my acceptance it is bound
into the lives of all the Sea—
yet what I do now binds to it
a gift I feel of equal worth:
I take Death with me, out of Time,
and make of it a path, a birth!
Let the teeth come! As they tear me,
they tear Your ancient hate for aye—
so rage, proud Power! Fail again,
and see my blood teach Death to die!’ “
… The last time she sang it, Nita hung unmoving, momentarily exhausted, for the moment aware of nothing but Kit’s anxious eyes staring at her from outside the circle and the stir of water on her skin as the Pale One circled above her.
“That’s right,” S’reee said at last, very quietly. “And then—“
She fell silent and swam out of the circle of Celebrants. Behind her, very slowly, first the Blue and then the rest of the whales began to sing the dirge for the Silent Lord — confirmation of the transformation of death and the new defeat of the Lone Power. Nita headed for the surface to breathe.
She came up into early evening. Westward, sunset was burning itself into scarlet embers; eastward a Moon lacking only the merest shard of light to be full lifted swollen and amber through the surface haze; northward, the bright and dark and bright again of Ambrose Light glittered on the uneasily shifting waves, with the opening and closing red eyes of Manhattan skyscraper lights low beyond it; and southward, gazing back at them, the red-orange glow of Arcturus sparkled above the water, here and there striking an answering spark off the crest or hollow of some wave. Nita lay there gasping in the wavewash and let the water rock her. Heaven knows, she thought, I need somebody to do it.
Beside her Kit surfaced in a great wash of water and blew spectacularly— slightly forward, as sperms do. “Neets—“
“Hi,” she said. She knew it was inane, but she could think of no other way to keep Kit from starting what he was going to start, except by saying dumb things.
“Neets,” he said, “we’re out of time. They’re going to start the descent as soon as everybody’s had a chance to rest a little and the protective spells are set.”
“Right,” she said, misunderstanding him on purpose. “We better get going, then—“ She tilted her head down and started to dive.
“Neets.” Suddenly Nita found that she was trying to dive through a forty-foot thickness of sperm whale. Nita blew in annoyance and let herself float back to the surface again. Kit bobbed up beside her — and, with great suddenness and a slam of air, threw off the whalesark. He dogpaddled there in the water, abruptly tiny beside her bulk. “Neets, get out of that for a minute.”
“Huh? Oh—“
It was a moment’s work to drop the whaleshape; then she was reduced to dogpaddling too. Kit was treading water a few feet from her, his hair slicked down with the water. He looked strange — tight, somehow, as if he were holding onto some idea or feeling very hard. “Neets,” he said, “I’m not buying this.”
Nita stared at him. “Kit,” she said finally, “look, there’s nothing we can do about it. I’ve bought it. Literally.”
“No,” Kit said. The word was not an argument, not even defiance; just a simple statement of fact. “Look, Neets — you’re the best wizard I’ve ever worked with—“
“I’m the only wizard you’ve ever worked with,” Nita said with a lopsided grin.
“I’m gonna kill you,” Kit said — and regretted it instantly.
“No need,” Nita said. “Kit — why don’t
you just admit that this time I’ve got myself into something I can’t get out of.”
“Unless another wizard gets you out of it.”
She stared at him. “You loon, you can’t—“
“I know. And it hurts! I feel like I should volunteer, but I just can’t—“
“Good. ‘Cause you do and I’ll kill you.”
“That won’t work either.” He made her own crooked grin back at her.
“ ‘All for one,’ remember? We both have to come out of this alive.” he looked away.
”Let’s go for both,” Nita said.
Silence.
She took a deep breath. “Look, even if we don’t both get out of this, I think it’s gonna be all right. Really—“
“No,” Kit said again, and that was that.
Nita just looked at him. “Okay,” she said. “Be that way.” And she meant it. This was the Kit she was used to working with: stubborn, absolutely sure of himself — most of the time; the person with that size-twelve courage packed into his size-ten self, a courage that would spend a few minutes trembling and then take on anything that got in its way — from the Lone Power to her father. If I’ve got to go, Nita thought in sudden irrational determination, that sheer guts has got to survive — and I’ll do whatever’s necessary to make sure he does.
“Look,” she said, “what’re you gonna tell my folks when you get back?”
“I’m gonna tell them we’re hungry,” Kit said, “and that you’ll fill ‘em in on the details while I eat.”
I did tell him to be that way… “Right,” Nita said.
For a long time they stayed where they were, treading water, watching the Moon inch its way up the sky, listening to the Ambrose fog signal hooting the minutes away. A mile or so off, a tanker making for New York Harbor went by, its green portside running lights toward them, and let off a low groaning blast of horn to warn local traffic. From under the surface, after a pause, came a much deeper note that held and then scaled downward out of human hearing range, becoming nothing but a vibration in the water.
“They’re ready to leave,” Kit said.
Nita nodded, slipped into whaleshape again, and looked one last time with all her heart at the sunset towers of Manhattan, until Kit had finished his change. Then they dived.
The Song of the Twelve
Hudson Channel begins its seaward course some twenty miles south of Ambrose Light — trending first due south, parallel to the Jersey shore, then turning gradually toward the southeast and the open sea as it deepens. Down its length, scattered over the channel’s bottom as it slowly turns from gray-green mud to gray-black sand to naked, striated stone, are the broken remnants of four hundred years’ seafaring in these waters and the refuse of three hundred years of human urban life, mixed randomly together. There are new, almost whole-bodied wrecks lying dead on their sides atop old ones long since gone to rot and rust; great dumps of incinerated wood and ash, chemical drums and lumps of coal and jagged piles of junk metal; sunken, abandoned buoys, old cable spindles, unexploded ordnance and bombs and torpedoes; all commingled with and nested in a thick ooze of untreated, settled sewage — the garbage of millions of busy lives, thrown where they won’t have to look at it.
The rugged bed of the channel starts out shallow, barely a fathom deeper than the seabed that surrounds it. It was much deeper once, especially where it begins; but the ooze has filled it thickly, and for some miles it is now hard to tell that any channel at all lies under the rotting trash, under the ancient faded beer cans and the hubcaps red with rust. Slowly, though, some twenty miles down the channel from its head, an indentation becomes apparent — a sort of crooked rut worn by the primordial Hudson River into the ocean floor, a mile wide at the rut’s deepest, five miles wide from edge to edge. This far down — forty fathoms under the surface and some sixty feet below the surrounding ocean bed, between a great wide U of walls — the dark sludge of human waste lies even thicker. The city has not been dumping here for some years, but all the old years’ sewage has not gone away. Every stone in the deepening rut, every pressure-flattened pile of junk on the steadily downward-sloping seabed around the channel, is coated thick and black. Bottom-feeding fish are few here: There is nothing for them to eat. Krill do not live here: The water is too foul to support the microscopic creatures they eat, and even of a summer night the thick olive color of the sea is unchanged.
The channel’s walls begin to grow less and less in height, as if the ocean is growing tired of concealing the scar in its side. Gradually the rut flattens out to a broad shallow depression like a thousand other valleys in the Sea. A whale hanging above the approximate end of the channel, some one hundred thirty miles southeast of New York Harbor, has little to see on looking back up the channel’s length — just an upward-sloping scatter of dark-slimed rocks and mud and scraps of garbage, drab even in the slate-green twilight that is all this bottom ever sees of noon. But looking downward, southward, where its course would run if the channel went any farther— the abyss. Suddenly the thinning muck, and the gentle swellings and dippings of the sea bed, simply stop at the edge of a great steep semicircular cliff, two miles from side to side. And beyond the cliff, beyond the edge of the Continental Shelf, curving away to northeast and southwest — nothing. Nothing anywhere but the vague glow of the ocean’s surface three hundred feet above; and below, beyond the semicircle, the deadly stillness of the great deeps, and a blackness one can hear on the skin like a dirge. Icy cold, and the dark.
“I warn you all,” S’reee said as the eleven gathered Celebrants and Kit hung there, looking down into that darkness at the head of Hudson Canyon. “Remember the length of this dive; take your own breathing needs carefully into consideration, and tell me now if you think you may need more air than our spells will be taking with us. Remember that, at the great pressures in the Below, you’ll need more oxygen than you usually do — and work will make you burn more fuel. If you feel you need to revise the breathing figures on the group spell upward, this is 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 he
r 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.
