by Diane Duane
She leaped at Nita. In that second Fang, on her left, arrowed in front of Areinnye, punching her jaws away from Nita in time for Nita to roll out of their way. But Fang didn’t recover from the blow in time to flee himself; Areinnye’s head swept around and the great teeth of her upper jaw raked frightful gashes down Fang’s side. Nita pulled herself out of her roll just in time to see something else hit Areinnye — Kit’s huge bulk, slamming into her with such force that she was knocked straight into the side of Caryn Peak. She screamed; the water brought back echoes of the sickening sound of her impact. And then she was fleeing — out of the wizard-light, past the boundaries of the protective spell, out into the darkness past the peak.
The Celebrants stirred about in terrible confusion, while S’reee hurried to Fang’s side and examined him. Nita stroked over quickly and brushed Fang’s good side, very lightly. One of those merry eyes, now slightly less merry, managed to focus on her. “We need you — Silent One,” Fang said.
“We do,” S’reee said. “These wounds aren’t deep, but they’re bleeding a lot — and the Master-Shark’s about. I’ve got to handle this. Meanwhile, we’re shy the Gray Lord — and I don’t think she’s going to come back and take back what she said. Kit, are you willing?”
Nita looked swiftly behind her. Kit was hanging there, looking down at Fang. “I’d better be,” he said.
“Good. HNii’t, administer him the Celebrant’s Oath. And hurry.” S’reee turned away from them and began one of the faster healing spells.
“Kit, are you sure—“
“Get going,” he said.
She led him through the Oath. He said it almost as quickly as Hotshot had, tripping in only one place: “… and I shall weave my voice and my will and my blood with theirs if there be need…” He was looking at Nita as he said that, and the look went right through her like a spear.
“Done,” S’reee said. “Fang, mind that side — the repair is temporary — Swiftly, now. Everyone circle, we can’t afford a delay. Kit, from ‘No, ‘ must think—‘ “
They sang. And if the Song had been frightening before, it was becoming frantic now. Underneath them all the Celebrants could feel some malicious force straining to get free—
Nita watched Kit closely. He didn’t rehearse any of this stuff, she thought. What if he slips? But Kit sang what remained of the Gray Lord’s part faultlessly; he had laid himself wide open to the Sea and was being fed words and music directly. Nita felt a lump in her throat — that reaction humans shared with whales — at the perfect clarity of his voice. But she couldn’t stop worrying. If he’s this open to the Sea, he’s also open to that Other—
And that Other was working on him. Kit was beginning to tremble as the second part of the Gray Lord’s rebuff came to an end. The soundless voice, when it spoke for the last time, was all sweet reason:
“ ‘—strength is no use. Give over the vain strife that saves no one, keeps no old friend alive, condemns the dear to death. Take but my Gift and know long years that end not, slow-burnt days under the Sun and Moon; not for yourself alone, but for the other—‘ “
“No,” Nita said — a mere whisper of song.
Kit looked at her from the heart of the circle, shaking. In his eyes and the way he held his body Nita read how easy it would be for him to desert the Song after just these few lines, destroy it, knowing that Nita would escape alive. Here was the out he had been looking for.
“No!” she tried to say again, but something was stopping her. The malice in the water grew, burning her. Kit wavered, looking at her— then closed his eyes and took a great breath of air from the spell, and began singing 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 as the eye could see from east to west. A neck, Nita thought, as the shape reared up taller, towering over the sea bottom. A neck and a head— A huge snake’s head, fringed, fanged, long and sleek, with dark-burning lava for a hide, and eyes the sick black-violet of water bursting into flame—
In the guise It had first worn after betraying the whales, and wore now again in gloating token of another victory, the Power, the many-named darkness that men had sometimes called the Old Serpent, towered over the sea bed as the binding that had held It shattered. This, Nita realized, was the terrible truth concealed under the old myths of the Serpent that lay coiled about the foundations of the world, waiting for the day It would crush the world in those coils.
And now Its moment was at hand: But It was stretching it, savoring it. It looked at Nita, drifting not two hundred feet from Its immense stony jaws— looked at her out of eyes burning with a color that would sear its way into the nightmares of anyone surviving to remember it. And those eyes knew her.
She was frightened; but she had something to do yet. I know my verse now without having to get it from the Sea, she thought. So maybe I won’t need wizardry to pull this off. And maybe just doing the Sacrifice will have its own power. Let’s find out…
Nita backfinned through the thundering water, staying out of reach of those jaws, watching for any sudden movement. She drew what she suspected was a last breath — the protective spell around her was fading fast — and lifted her voice into the roaring darkness. Ed, she thought, don’t blow it now!
“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! — ‘ “
The gloating eyes were fixed on her — letting her sing, letting Nita make the attempt. But the Lone Power wasn’t going to let her get away with it. That huge, hideous head was bending closer to her. Nita back-finned, not too obviously, she hoped — kept her distance, kept on singing:
“ ‘Not old enough to love as yet,
but old enough to die, indeed—
the death-fear bites my throat and heart,
fanged cousin to the Pale One’s breed—‘ “
And with a low thick rumble of amusement and hunger, the Serpent’s head thrust at Nita in a strike that she couldn’t prevent.
This is it!
The sudden small shock in the water made her heart pound. She glanced downward as she sang. There was Kit — battered and struggling with the failing whalesark as if it were actually someone else’s body — but ramming the Serpent head-on, near where the neck towered up above the slowly squeezing coils. Their pressure was breaking the sea bed in great pieces, so that lava and superheated water gushed up in a hundred places. But Kit ignored the heat and rammed the Old Serpent again and again. He’s trying to distract It, Nita thought, in a terrible uprush of anguish and admiration. He’s buying me time. Oh, Kit! The gift was too precious to waste.
“But past the fear lies life for them,” she sang,
“ ‘—perhaps for me; and past my dread,
past loss of Mastery and life,
the Sea shall yet give up Her dead!’ “
Annoyed — as a human might be by a gnat — the Serpent bent Its head away from Nita to see what was troubling It. Humor and hunger glinted in Its eyes as It recognized in Kit the other wizard who had once given It so much trouble in Manhattan. It bent Its head to him, but slowly, wanting him to savor the terror. Now, Nita thought, and began to sing again. “Lone Power—“
“No!” cried another voice through the water, and something came hurtling at her and punched Nita to one side. It was Areinnye — wounded, and crazy, fr
om the looks of her. I don’t have time for this! Nita thought, and for the first time in her life rummaged around in her mind for a spell that would kill.
Someone else came streaking in to ram. Areinnye went flying. There was blood in the water: Ed’s, pumping more and more weakly from the gash in his side. But his eyes were as cool as ever. “Ed,” Nita said, breaking off her singing, “thank you—“
He stared at her as he arrowed toward her — the old indecipherable look. “Sprat,” he said, “when did I ever leave distress uncured?” And to her complete amazement, before Nita could move, he rammed her again, close to the head — leaving her too stunned to sing, tumbling and helpless in pain.
Through the ache she heard Ed lift his voice in song. Nita’s song — the lines that, with the offered Sacrifice, bind Death anew and put the Lortf Power in Its place. Kit just went on pummeling at the great shape that bent closer and closer to them all, and Nita struggled and writhed and couldn’t make a sound.
No! she thought. But it was no use. Ed was taking her part willingly, circling in on the Lone Power. Yet even through Nita’s horror, some wonder intruded. Where did he get such a voice? she thought. It seemed to fill the whole Sea.
“ ‘Lone Power, I accept your Gift!
But take my Gift 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!’ “
And the Master-Shark dived straight at the upraised neck of the Serpent, and bit it. He made no cry as Its burning hide blasted his teeth away and seared his mouth instantly black; he made no cry as the Lone Power, enraged at Its wounding, bent down to pluck the annoying little creature from Its neck and crush it in stony jaws.
And then the sharks came.
Calling for help, Ed had said. Now Nita remembered what he had said to her so long ago, on the only way he had to call his people together… with blood: his own. Her wizardry, though, had lent the call power that even Ed’s own Mastery could never have achieved, just as it had lent him a whale-wizard’s power of song. And brought impossible distances by its power, the Master-Shark’s people came — by dozens, by hundreds, by thousands and tens of thousands. Maddened by the blood in the water, they fell on everything that had a wound and tore it to shreds.
