The huge jaw of a sperm whale abruptly opened right in front of Hotshot and closed before he could react — so that a moment later the dolphin was keeping quite still, while Kit held him with great delicacy in his huge fangs. Kit’s eyes looked angry, but the tone of his song was casual enough. “Hotshot,” he said, not stopping, just swimming along with casual deliberateness, “I’m probably singing too. And even if I’m not, I am a sperm whale. Don’t push your luck.”
Hotshot said nothing. Kit swam a few more of his own lengths, then opened his mouth and let the dolphin loose. “Hey,” he said then, “no hard feelings.”
“Of course not,” Hotshot said in his usual recklessly merry voice. But Nita noticed that the dolphin made his reply from a safe distance. “No problem, Mi”—Kit looked at Hotshot, silent—“ah, Kit.”
“Minnow it is,” Kit said, sounding casual himself. The four of them swam on; Nita dropped back a few lengths and put her head up beside Kit’s so that she could sing her quietest and not be heard too far off.
“What was that all about?”
“I’m not sure,” Kit said — and now that only Nita was listening, he sounded a bit shaken. “S’reee might have been right when she said this body doesn’t actually have what’s-his-voice’s—“
“Aivaaan.”
“His memories, yeah. But the body has its own memories. What it’s like to be a sperm. What it means to be a sperm, I guess. You don’t make fun of us — of them.” He paused, looking even more shaken. “Neets — don’t let me get lost!”
“Huh?”
“Me. I don’t beat people up, that’s not my style!”
“You didn’t beat him up—“
“No. I just did the ocean equivalent of pinning him up against the wall and scaring him a good one. Neets, I got into being a wizard because I wanted other people not to do that kind of stuff to me! And now—“
“I’ll keep an eye on you,” Nita said, as they began to come up on another foghorn, a loud one. And there was something odd about that foghorn. Its note was incredibly deep. That has to be almost too deep for people to hear at all. What kind of—
The note sounded again, and Nita shot Kit an amazed look as she felt the water all around her, and even the air in her lungs, vibrate in response to it. One note, the lowest note she could possibly imagine, held and held until a merely human singer would have collapsed trying to sing it… and then slurred slowly down through another note, and another, and holding on a last one of such profound depth that the water shook as if with thunder.
S’reee slowed her pace and answered the note in kind, the courtesy of one species of whale to another on meeting or parting — singing the same slow, somber sequence, several octaves higher. There was a pause; then she was answered with a humpback’s graceful fluting, but sung in a bottom-shaking baritone.
“Come on,” S’reee said, and dived.
The waters around Sandy Hook boil with krill in the spring and summer, so that by night the krill’s swarming luminescence defines every current and finstroke in a blaze of blue-green light; and by day the sun slants through the water, brown with millions of tiny bodies, as thickly as through the air in a dusty room. As the group dived, they began to make out a great dark shape in the cloudy water, moving so slowly it barely did more than drift. A last brown-red curtain of water parted before them in a swirl of current, and Nita found herself staring down at her first blue whale.
He was hardly even blue in this light, more a sort of slaty maroon; and the faint dapples on his sides were almost invisible. But his color was not what impressed Nita particularly. Neither was his size, though blues are the biggest of all whales; this one was perhaps a hundred twenty feet from nose to tail, and Kit, large for a sperm, was almost as big. That voice, that stately, leisurely, sober, sorrowful voice that sounded like a storm in mourning, that mattered to her; and so did the tiny eye, the size of a tennis ball, which looked at her from the immense bulk of the head. That eye was wise. There was understanding in it, and tolerance, and sadness: and most of all, great age.
Age was evident elsewhere too. The blue’s flukes were tattered and his steering fins showed scars and punctures, mementos of hungry sharks. Far down his tail, the broken stump of a harpoon protruded, the wood of it rotting, the metal crumbling with rust; yet though the tail moved slowly, it moved with strength. This creature had been through pain and danger in his long life, and though he had learned sadness, it had not made him bitter or weak.
Nita turned her attention back to the others, noticing that Kit was holding as still as she was, though at more of a distance; and even Hotshot was holding himself down to a slow glide. “Eldest Blue about the Gates,” S’reee sang, sounding more formal than Nita had ever heard her, “I greet you.”
“Senior for the Gatewaters,” said the Blue in his deep voice, with slow dignity, “I greet you also.”
“Then you’ve heard, Aroooon.”
“I have heard that the Sea has taken Ae’mhnuu to its Heart,” said the Blue, “leaving you Senior in his place, and distressed at a time when there’s distress enough. Leaving you also to organize a TwelveSong on very short notice.”
“That’s so.”
“Then you had best be about it,” said the Blue, “while time still remains for singing, and the bottom is still firm under us. First, though, tell me who comes here with you. Swift-Fire-In-The-Water I know already—“
Hotshot made the closest sound Nita could imagine to an embarrassed delphine cough. She smiled to herself; now she knew now what to tease him with if he got on her case.
“Land wizards, Aroooon,” S’reee said. “HNii’t—“ Nita wasn’t sure what to do, so she inclined the whole front of her body in the water in an approximation of a bow. “—and K!t.” Kit followed Nita’s suit. “They were the ones who went into the Dark High-And-Dry after the Naming of Lights— “
To Nita’s utter astonishment, Aroooon inclined his own body at them, additionally curling his flukes under him in what she abruptly recognized as a gesture of congratulation. “They’re calves,” S’reee added, as if not wanting to leave anything out.
“With all due respects, Senior, they are not,” Aroooon said. “They came back from that place. That is no calf’s deed. Many who were older than they did not come back — You will sing with us then? What parts?”
“I’m not sure yet,” Kit said. “S’reee needs to see if all her people come in.”
“The Silent Lord,” Nita said.
“Indeed.” Aroooon looked at her for several long moments. “You are a good age for it,” he said. “And you are learning the song—“
“I got most of the details from my manual,” she said. She had been up studying late the night before, though not as late as Kit had; a lot of exertion in salt air always left her drained, and she’d put the book aside after several hours, to finish the fine details of her research later. “The Sea will give me the rest, S’reee says, as we go along.”
“So it will. But I would have you be careful of how you enact your part, young HNii’t.” Aroooon drifted a bit closer to her, and that small, thoughtful eye regarded her carefully. “There is old trouble, and old power, about you and your friend… as if blood hung in the water where you swim. The Lone Power apparently knows your names. It will not have forgotten the disservice you did It recently. You are greatly daring to draw Its attention to you again. Even the Heart of the Sea — Timeheart as your kind calls it — will not be quiet for one who has freely attracted the Lone One’s enmity. Beware what you do. And do what you say; nowhere does the Lone Power enter in so readily as through the broken word.”