by Diane Duane
Nita held still for a few moments as S’reee and various other of the Celebrants went slowly after Kit. Tlhlki went too; she barely noticed him go. This isn’t the Kit I want to say good-bye to.
Perhaps a hundred feet away from her, Ed glided past, staring at her. “Sprat,” he said, “come along.”
She did. But the fighting in the canyon had left Nita so fatigued that much of this part of the descent seemed unreal to her, a prolonged version of one of those dreams in which one “falls” downstairs for hours. And there was a terrible sameness about this terrain: a sea of white sand, here and there featuring a darker rock thrust up or thrown down into it, or some artifact more bizarre — occasionally, great pressure-fused lumps of coal; once an actual kitchen sink, just sitting there on the bottom by itself; another time, a lone Coca-Cola bottle standing upright in the sand with a kind of desolate, pitiful pride. But mostly the bottom was as undifferentiated as a mile-wide, glare-lit snowfield, one that pitched forever downward.
Nor was Nita’s grasp on reality much helped by the strange creatures that lived in those waters more than a thousand fathoms down. Most everything seemed to be either transparent as a ghost or brilliantly luminous. Long-bodied, lantern-eyed sharks swam curiously about Nita, paid brief homage to their Master, and moved on. Anglerfish with their luminous baits hanging on “fishlines” in front of their mouths came up to stare Nita right in the eye and then swam dourly away, disappointed that she was too big to eat. Long, many-segmented bottom worms and vampire squid, sporting dots or stripes of pink or yellow or blue-white light, inched or squirted along the bottom about their affairs, paying no attention to the Celebrants sailing overhead in their nimbus of wizard-light. Rays fluttered, using fleshy wings to rearrange the sand in which they lay buried; tripod-fish crutch-walked around the bottom like peglegged pirates on their long stiff fins. And all the eyes circling in the black water, all the phosphorescent shapes crawling on the bottom or undulating above it were doing one of two things — either looking for food or eating it, in the form of one another.
Nita knew there was no other way for these creatures to live, in this deadly cold, but by the minimum expenditure of energy for the maximum return… hence all the baits, traps, hiding. But that didn’t affect the dull horror of the scene — the endless crushing dark, the ear-blinding silence, and the pale chilly lights weaving through the space-black water as the creatures of the great depths sought and caught and ate one another with desperate, mindless diligence.
The gruesome power of the besetting horror brought Nita wide awake. She had never been superstitious; shadows in the bedroom had never bothered her when she was little, and she found horror movies fun to watch. But now she started to feel more hemmed in, more watched and trapped, than she suspected she’d feel in any haunted house. “Ed,” she sang, low as a whisper, to the pale shape that paced her, “what is it? There’s something down here…”
“Indeed there is. We are getting close.”
She would have asked To what? but as she looked down the interminable slope at the other Celebrants — who were mostly swimming gathered close together, as if they felt what she felt — something occurred to her, something so obvious that she felt like a moron for not having thought of it before. “Ed, if this is the Song of the Twelve, how come there are only eleven of us singing!”
“The Twelfth is here,” Ed said. “As the Song says, the Lone Power lies bound here, in the depths below the depths. And It will sing Its part, as It always has. It cannot help it. Indeed, It wants to sing. In the temptation and subversion of the Celebrants lies Its only hope of escape from the wizardry that binds It.”
“And if It succeeds—“ ‘
”Afallone,” Ed said. “Atlantis, all over again. Or worse.”
“Worse—“ Then she noticed something else. “Ed, the water’s getting warmer!”
“And the bottom is changing,” Ed said. “Gather your wits, Sprat. A few hundred more lengths and we are there.”
The white sand was giving way to some kind of darker stuff. At first Nita thought she was looking at the naked rock of the sea bottom. But this stuff wasn’t flat, as sediment would be. It was ropy, piled-up, ridgy-looking black stone. And here and there crystals glittered in it. Scattered around ahead of them were higher piles of the black stone, small, bizarrely shaped hills. Nita sounded a high note to get some sonar back, as the water through which she swam grew warmer and began to taste odd.
The first echoes to return surprised Nita until she started to suspect what they were. Waving frondy shapes, the hard round echoes from shelled creatures, a peculiar hollowness to the echo that indicated water of lower pressure than that surrounding it— That was a stream of sulfur-laden hot water coming out of an undersea “vent”; the other echoes were the creatures that lived around it, all adapted to take advantage of the oasis of heat and the sulfur that came up with it. And now she understood the black bottom stone — old cooled lava, the kind called pillow lava, that oozes up through the ocean’s crust and spreads itself out in flat, ropy piles.
But from past the vent came another echo that was simply impossible. A wall, a rounded wall, at least a mile and a half wide at the base, rising out of the piled black stone and spearing up, and up, and up, and up, so that fragments of the echo kept coming back to Nita for second after second. She backfinned to hold still until all the echoes could come back to her, and in Nita’s mind the picture of the massive, fluted, narrowing pillar of stone got taller and taller, until she actually had to sing a soft note or two to deafen herself to it. It was, like the walls of Hudson Canyon, “too big”—only much more so. “Five Empire State Buildings on top of each other,” Kit had called it — but Empire States a mile wide: Caryn Peak, the Sea’s Tooth, the site of the Song of the Twelve.
The whales ahead of Nita were gathering near the foot of the peak. Against that gigantic spear of stone they seemed dwarfed, insignificant. Even Aroooon looked like a toy. And the feeling of being watched, closely, by something of malicious intent, was getting stronger by the second.
She joined the others. The Celebrants were poised not too far from the open vent — evidently S’reee preferred the warmer water — in clear view of the strange creatures living about it: the twelve-foot stalks of the tubeworms, the great blind crabs, the colonies of giant blood-red clams, opening and closing their fringed shells with mindless regularity. No coral, Nita thought absently, looking around her. But she wouldn’t need any. Several hundred feet away, there on the face of the peak, were several shattered outcroppings of stone. The outcroppings were sharp as glass knives. Those should do it, Nita thought. So sharp I’ll hardly feel anything — until Ed arrives…
“If you’re all prepared,” S’reee sang, her voice wavering strangely where notes had to travel suddenly from cold water to hot, “I suggest we start right now.”
The Celebrants chorused muted agreement and began to spread out, forming the circle with which the Song begins. Nita took her place between Fang and Tlhlki, while S’reee went to the heart of the circle. Ed swam away, toward the far side of the peak and out of sight. Kit glided away from the circle, off behind Nita. She looked back at him. He found the spot from which he would watch and gazed back at her. Nita swallowed one last time, hard. There was very little of her friend in that look. “Kit—“ she said, on one low note.
“Silent Lord,” he said.
And though it was his voice, it wasn’t Kit…
Nita turned away, sick at heart, and faced inward toward the circle again; and S’reee lifted up her voice and sang the Invocation.
“ ‘Blood in the water I sing,
and one who shed it:
deadliest hunger I sing,
and one who fed it—
weaving the ancientmost tale
of the Sea’s sending:
singing the tragedy,
singing the joy unending.
“This is our shame—
this is the whole Ocean’s glory:
; this is the Song of the Twelve.
Hark to the story!
Hearken, and bring it to pass;
swift, lest the sorrow
long ago laid to its rest
devour us tomorrow!’ “
And so it began, as in song S’reee laid out the foundations of the story, which began before lives learned to end in resistance and suffering. One by one the Celebrants drew together, closing up the circle, named themselves to one another, and began to discuss the problem of running the Sea to everyone’s advantage. Chief among their problems at the moment was the sudden appearance of a new whale. It was puzzling; the Sea had given them no warning, as She had in times past, that this was about to happen. But they were the Ni’hwinyii, the Lords of the Humors, and they would comport themselves as such. They would decide the question for themselves. Under whose Mastery would the Stranger fall?…
Nita, who had backed out of the circle after the Invocation, hung shivering in the currentless water as the Song shook the warm darkness about her. Part of what she felt was the same kind of trembling with excitement she had felt a hundred times in school when she knew she was about to be called on. I’m ready, she thought, trying to quiet herself. This is silly. I know my part backward and forward — there’s not that much of it. I’ll do all right.
… But there was also something else going on. She had felt it start with the Invocation and grow stronger with every passing second — that sense of something waking up, something rousing from sleepy malice, awakening to active, alert malevolence. It waits, Ed had said. It was a certainty, as sure as looking up toward a lighted window and seeing the person who’s been staring at you drop the curtain and turn away.
She wrenched her attention back to the Blue, who was at the end of one of his long stately passages. But it was hard.
“ ‘—Nay, slowly, Sounder. Slow is the wise whale’s song, and wise as slow; for he who hastens errs, who errs learns grief. And not the Master-Shark has teeth as fierce: grief eats its prey alive, and pain grows greater as the grief devours, not less. So let this Stranger sing his peace: what he desires of us; there’s Sea enough and time to hear him, though he sing the darkened Moon to full and back again. Ay, let him speak…’ “
And to Nita’s shock and fascinated horror, an answer came. The voice that raised itself in the stillness of the great depths was the sonic equivalent of the thing one sees out the corner of one’s eye, then turns to find gone, or imagined. It did not shake the water; it roused no echoes. And Nita was not alone in hearing it. She saw the encircled Celebrants look uneasily at one another. On the far side of the circle, Kit’s coolness was suddenly broken, and he stared at Nita like someone believing a myth for the first time. The innocent, gentle-spoken, unselfconscious evil in the new voice was terrifying. “With Pow’rs and Dominations need I speak,” sang that timbreless voice in quiet sincerity,
“ ‘the ancient Lords who hold the Sea in sway. I pray thee, Lords of the Humors, hear me now, last, least and poorest of the new-made whales, new-loos’d from out the Sea’s great silent Heart. No Lord have I; therefore to ye I come, beseeching low thy counsel and thy rule for one that’s homeless, lawless, mateless, lost.
“Who art thou, then, that speak’st?” sang S’reee, beginning the Singer’s questioning. At the end of her verse she was answered, in more soft-spoken, reasonable platitudes — words meant to lull the unwary and deceive the alert. And questions and answers continued, until Nita realized that there had been a shift. Rather than the Singer asking the Stranger what he wanted, the Stranger was telling the Singer what he knew she wanted — and could offer her, if only she would take the unspecified Gift he would give her.
Nita began shaking steadily now, and not from the cold. The insinuating power of that not-quite-voice somehow frightened her worse than head-on conflict with the Lone Power had, a couple of months ago. There the Power had been easily seen in its true colors. But here it was hidden, and speaking as matter-of-factly as the voices in the back of one’s own mind, whose advice one so often tends to follow without question. “Your Mastery is hollow,” said the voice to S’reee,
“ ‘—cold song, strict-ruled by law. From such bland rule come no great musics. Singer, follow me, accept my Gift and what it brings, and song shall truly have no Master save for you. My gift will teach you lyric that will break the heart that hears it; every seaborne voice will curse your newfound art, and wish that art its own. Take up the Gift, O foremost Singer…’ “
Nita glanced over at S’reee. She was trembling nearly as hard as Nita was, caught in the force of the temptation. S’reee sang her refusal calmly enough; but Nita found herself wondering how much of that refusal was the ritual’s and how much S’reee’s own.
She began watching the other Celebrants with as much care. Iniihwit sang the Gazer’s questioning and rejection with the outward attitude of mild unconcern that Nita had in their brief acquaintance come to associate with him. Aroooon’s refusal of the prize offered the Blue by the Stranger, that of Power over all the other whales, was more emphatic, though it came in his usual rich, leisurely manner. He sang not as if making ritual responses, but as if he rejected someone who swam in the circle with him and dared him to do something about it.
After that, the unheard voice sounded less certain of itself, and also impatient. The Song passed on to what would for the Lone Power be more successful ground: the Wanderer and the Killer and the Forager, all of whom would succumb to the Stranger’s temptations and become the Betrayed— those species of whales and fish to whom death would later come most frequently and most quickly. One by one Roots and Fang and Hotshot sang with the Lone One, were tempted, and in the place of the original Masters, fell. Nita tried to keep herself calm, but had trouble doing it; for each time one of the Celebrants gave in to the Lone One’s persuasion, she felt the voice grow a little more pleased with itself, a little more assured — as if something were finally going according to plan.
Nita stared across at Kit. He traded looks with her and began to make his way around the circle toward her.
The Lone One was working on the last three whales in the circle now, the ones who would become the Undecided. Their parts were the most difficult, being not only the longest sung passages but also the most complex. The Undecided argued with the Lone Power much more than did the Untouched, who tended to refuse quickly, or the Betrayed, who gave in without much fighting. Tlhlki sang first, the Sounder’s part; and strain began to show as the Power offered him all the hidden knowledge of the great deeps, and the Sounder’s song went from smooth flowing melodies to rumbles and scrapes of tortured indecision. Not all that carrying on is in the Song, Nita thought nervously. What’s happening? And indeed, though the Sounder finished his passage and turned away, ostensibly to think about what the Lone Power had said to him, Nita could see that Tlhlki looked pallid and shaken as a whale that’s sick.
The Listener fared no better. Fluke sang steadily enough to begin with; but when the voiceless voice offered him the power to hear everything that transpired in the Sea, from the random thoughts of new-hatched fry to the secret ponderings of the continental plates, he hesitated much too long — so long that Nita saw S’reee look at him in surprise and almost speak up to prompt him. It was bizarre; in rehearsals Fluke had had the best memory of any of them. He finished his verses looking troubled, and seemed relieved to turn away.
It’s what S’reee said, very early on, Nita thought. The whales picked have to be close in temperament to the original Celebrants — loving the same kinds of things. But it makes them vulnerable to the temptations too.
And then Areinnye began to sing, questioning the Power in her disturbingly sweet voice, asking and answering. She showed no sign of the unease that had troubled the others. Nita glanced over at Kit, who had managed by this time to work his way fairly close to her; he swung his tail a fraction, a whale’s version of a worried headshake. Areinnye’s singing was polished, superb, her manner poised, unruffled, royal. She san
g her initial rebuff with the harsh certainty the Gray Lord’s song called for.
“ ‘Stranger, no more—
give me no gift.
Power am I,
fear in the water as my foes flee.
I need no boon.
In the Below
all bow before me.
Speak not to me.
Speak not of gifts.’ “
The voice that answered her was as sweet and poised as her own.
“And do you then desire no gift of mine— you who have lost so much? Ah no: you have strength of your own indeed — great strength of jaw, of fluke, of fin; fear goes before your face. But sorrow follows after. What use strength when slaughtered children rot beneath the waves, when the sweet mouth that you gave suck is gone, rent to red tatters by the flensing-knives; and when the second heart that beat by yours lies ground for dogs’ meat in a whaler’s hull? Gray One, accept my Gift and learn of strength—“
That’s not in the Song!
Nita stared in shock at Kit, then at the other Celebrants — who, all but Areinnye, were trading horrified looks. The sperm whale held very still, her eyes turned outward from the circle; and she shook as violently as Tlhlki had or, for that matter, Nita. The Lone Power sang on:
“—learn power! Learn how wizardry may turn to serve your purpose, sinking the whalers deep, taking the brute invaders’ lives to pay for that small life that swims the Sea no more; take up my Gift—“
“There is — there is another life,” Areinnye sang, trembling now as if storm waters battered at her, breaking the continuity of the Song. “Saved — she saved—“
“—what matter? As if brutes who fear the Sea are capable of thought, much less of love! Even a shark by accident may save a life — then turn and tear the newly saved! Take up my Gift and take a life for life, as it was done of old—“
Slowly Areinnye turned, and the glitter of the wizard-light in her eyes as she looked at Nita was horrible to see. “Life,” she sang, one low, thick, struggling note—