Nita gulped. “Ed,” she said, “the Song, the whole thing… I thought it was just sort of, sort of a play…”
“Indeed not.” Ed seemed unconcerned by her terror. “There’s always blood in the water at the end of the Song. I am no wizard, but even I know that nothing else will keep the Lone Power bound. Nothing but the willing sacrifice, newly made by the Celebrant representing the Silent One — by a wizard who knows the price he is paying and what it will buy. The spells worked during the Song would be powerless otherwise, and the Lone Power would rise again and finish what It once began.”
“But—“ Off on her right, she saw Kit looking curiously at her. But at the moment Kit meant nothing to her, and neither did Ed, or the chill silver light dawning in the water, or anything else. The manual’s words, which she’d skimmed over so casually: those were what mattered now. The whale singing the Silent One then enacts the Sacrifice in a manner as close to the original enactment as possible, depending on the site where the Song is being celebrated. The shark singing the Pale Slayer then receives the Sacrifice… With frightful clarity she could remember sitting on the fishing platform off Tiana Beach and S’reee saying, “The Silent One dived into a stand of razor coral; and the Master-Shark smelled her blood in the water, and… Well…”
Nita started to swim, without any real idea of where she was going, or why she was going there. She went slowly at first, then faster. “Neets,” Kit was singing behind her, “what’s wrong, what is it?”
“HNii’t!” sang another voice, farther away. “Wait! What’s the matter?”
That voice she wanted to hear some more from. Nita wheeled about and hurtled back the way she had come, almost ramming Kit, and not caring, letting him get out of her way as best he could. S’reee saw Nita coming and simply stopped swimming. “S’reee!” Nita cried, one long note that was more a scream than a song. “Why didn’t you tell me!”
“Oh, HNii’t,” S’reee sang, desperate and hurried, “the Master-Shark is about — for Sea’s sake, control yourself!”
“Never mind him! Why didn’t you tell me!”
“About what the Silent One does?” S’reee said, sounding confused and upset as Nita braked too late and almost hit her too. “But you said you knew!”
Nita moaned out loud. It was true, just about finished with my reading, she remembered herself saying. Only one thing I don’t understand; everything else is fairly straightforward… And, I got it, S’reee, let’s get on with it… But the truth didn’t break her rage. “You should have made sure I knew what you were talking about!”
“Why?” S’reee cried, getting angry herself now. “You’re a more experienced wizard than I am! You went into the Otherworlds and handled things by yourself that it’d normally take whole circles of wizards to do! And I warned you, make sure you know what you’re doing before you get into this! But you went right ahead!”
Nita moaned again, and S’reee lost her anger at the sound and moaned too. “I knew something bad was going to happen,” she sang unhappily. “The minute I found Ae’mhnuu dead and me stuck with organizing the Song, I knew! But I never thought it’d be anything as bad as this!”
Kit looked from one of them to the other, somewhat at a loss. “Look,” he said to S’reee, “are you telling me that the whale who sings the Silent One actually has to die?”
S’reee simply looked at him. Nita did not look at him, could not.
“That’s horrible,” Kit said in a hushed voice. “Nita, you can’t—“
“She must,” S’reee said. “She’s given her word that she would.”
“But couldn’t somebody else—“
“Someone else could,” S’reee said. “If that person would be willing to take the Oath and the role of the Silent Lord in HNii’t’s place. But no one will. What other wizard are we going to be able to find in the space of a day and a half who would be willing to die for Nita’s sake?”
Kit was silent with shock.
“Anyway, HNii’t took the Oath freely in front of witnesses,” S’reee said unhappily. “Unless someone with a wizard’s power freely substitutes himself for her, she has to perform what she’s promised. Otherwise the whole Song is sabotaged, useless — can’t be performed at all. And if we don’t perform it, or if something goes wrong…”
Nita closed her eyes in horror, remembering the time the Song failed. What Atlantis couldn’t survive, she thought in misery, New York and Loni Island sure won’t. Millions of people will die. Including Mom and Dad, Dairine, Ponch, Kit’s folks—
“But the Song hasn’t started yet,” Kit protested.
”Yes, it has,” Nita said dully. That she remembered very clearly from her reading; it had been in the commentaries, one of the things she found strange. “The minute the first Celebrant takes the Oath, the Song’s begun— and everything that happens to every Celebrant after that is part of it.”
“HNii’t,” S’reee said in a voice so small that Nita could barely hear her, “what will you do?”
A shadow fell over Nita, and a third and fourth pair of eyes joined the first two: Hotshot, grinning as always, but with alarm behind the grin; Ed, gazing down at her out of flat black eyes, emotionless as stones. “I thought I sensed some little troubling over here,” said the Master-Shark.
Kit and S’reee held still as death. “Yes,” Nita said with terrible casualness, amazed at her own temerity.
“Is the pain done?” said the Master-Shark.
“For the moment,” Nita said. She could feel herself slipping into shock, an insulation that would last her a few hours at least. She’d felt something similar, several years before, when her favorite uncle had died. The shock had gotten Nita through the funeral; but afterward, it had been nearly two weeks before she had been able to do much of anything but cry. I won’t have that option this time, she thought. There’s work to be done, a Song to sing, spells to work… But all that seemed distant and unimportant to her, since in a day and a half, it seemed, a shark was going to eat her. Kit looked at Nita in terror, as if he suddenly didn’t know her.
She stared back, feeling frozen inside. “Let’s go,” she said, and turned to start swimming east-northeast again, their original course. “The Gray is waiting, isn’t she?”
By the sound of her way-song Nita could hear S’reee and Kit and Hotshot following after her; and last of all, silent, songless, came Ed.
I’m going to die, Nita thought.
She had thought that before, occasionally. But she had never believed it.
She didn’t believe it now.
And she knew it was going to happen anyway.
Evidently, Nita thought, Ed had been right when he’d said that belief made no difference to the truth…
The Gray Lord’s Song
They found the whale who would sing the part of the Gray in the chill waters about Old Man Shoals, a gloomy place strewn full of boulders above which turbulent water howled and thundered. The current set swift through the shoals, and the remnants of its victims lay everywhere. Old splintered spars of rotting masts, fragments of crumbled planks, bits of rusted iron covered with barnacles or twined about with anemones; here and there a human bone, crusted over with coral— Broken-backed ships lay all about, strangled in weed, ominous shapes in the murk; and when Nita and Kit and the others sang to find their way, the songs fell into the silence with a wet, thick, troubled sound utterly unlike the clear echoes that came back from the sandy bottoms off Long Island.