“Kit, this is one of the places where Afallone was, isn’t it?”
He made a slow sound of agreement. “The whole old continental plate Atlantis stood on was ground under the new plates and buried under the Atlantic’s floor, S’reee said. But the North American plate was a lot farther west when the trouble first started, and the European one was farther east. So if I’ve got the story straight, this would have been where Afallone’s western shoreline was, more or less. Where we’re going would still have been open sea, a couple of million years ago.”
“Millions of years—“ Nita looked at him in uncomfortable wonder. “Kit — that’s much farther back than the fall of Afallone. That could—“ Her note failed her momentarily. “That could go right back to the first Song of the Twelve—“
Kit was still for a while as they kept diving. “No wonder,” he said at last, “no one travels down through the Gates of the Sea except when they’re about to do the Song. Part of the sorcery is buried in the stone. If anybody should trouble it, wake it up—“
“—like we’re doing,” Nita said, and fell silent.
They swam on. The immensities rearing up about them grew no more reassuring with time. Time, Nita thought — how long have we been down here? In this changeless cold dark, there was no telling; and even when the Sun came up, there still would be no knowing day from night. The darkness yielded only grudgingly to the little sphere of light the Celebrants carried with them, showing them not much, and too much, of what Nita didn’t want to look at — those walls, reaching so far above her now that the light couldn’t even begin to illumine them. Nita began to get a bizarre sense of being indoors — descending a winding ramp of infinite length, its walls three miles apart and now nearly a mile high.
It was at about this time that Nita felt on her skin what sounded at first like one of the Blue’s deeper notes, and stared ahead of her, wondering partly what he was saying — the note was one that made no sense to her. Then she wondered why he was curving his body upward in such surprise. But the note grew, and grew, and grew louder still, and though they were now nearly a mile from the walls on either side, to her shock and horror Nita heard the walls begin to resonate to that note.
The canyon walls sounded like a struck gong, one of such boneshaking, subterranean pitch as Nita had never imagined. She sounded, caught in the torrent of shock waves with the rest of the Celebrants. Seaquake! she thought. The sound pressed through her skin from all sides like cold weights, got into her lungs and her heart and her brain, and throbbed there, hammering her into dizziness with slow and terrible force.
The sluggish, brutal pounding against her skin and inside her body eventually began to die down. But the quake’s effects were still going on around her, and would take much more time to settle. Sonar was nearly drowned; Nita was floating blind in the blackness. This is the pits! she thought in anguish, and concentrated everything she had on one good burst of sound that would cut through the terrible noise and tell her what was going on.
The echoes that came back reassured her somewhat. All the Celebrants were still fairly close together, safe within the light of the pressure-protection spell. Kit was farther ahead than he had been, fighting for control and slowly finding it. Others, S’reee and Fang and Areinnye, were closer to Nita. And there was other movement close to them — large objects drifting downward, slowly, resonating with the same note, though in higher octaves, as the towering cliffsides. Massive objects, said the echo. Solid massive objects. Falling faster now. One of them falling past S’reee and down toward Areinnye, who was twisting and struggling against the turmoil of the water for balance—
Warn her! was Nita’s first thought, but even as she let out another cry, she realized it was useless — Areinnye would have no time to react. The falling rock, a piece of cliff-shelf nearly as long as a city block, was practically on top of her. Shield spell, Nita thought then. Impossible—
She did it anyway. It was an old friend, that spell, long since learned by heart. When activated, punches, or any physical object thrown at one, slid right off it. Running them together in her haste, she sang the nine syllables of the spell that were always the same, then added four more that set new coordinates for the spell, another three that specified how much mass the shield would have to repel — tons and tons! Oh, Lord! — and then the last syllable that turned the wizardry loose. She felt the magic fall away from her like a weight on a cord, dropping toward Areinnye. Nothing to do now but hang on, she thought, letting herself float. Faintly, through the thunder, the echoes of her spell brought Nita the shape of Areinnye, still struggling, trying to get out from under the falling rock-shelf, and failing. Her connection with the spell brought her the feeling of the massive slab of stone dropping toward it, closer, closer still. Making contact— crushing down and down onto her wizardry with force more terrible than she had anticipated. The spell was failing, the shelf was settling down on it and inexorably pressing it closer and closer to Areinnye, who was in turn being forced down against the battering of the shock waves, toward the floor of the canyon. The spell was breaking up, tearing like a rotten net filled with weights. No, Nita thought, and strained, pouring all her concentration, all her will, down the connection to the spell. No! It was like hanging on to a rope in a tug of war, and losing, and not letting go — digging in, muscles popping out all over, aching, straining, blood pounding, and not letting go-The spell firmed a little. The shelf, settling slowly down and down onto Areinnye, forcing her closer and closer to the bottom, seemed to hesitate. “Kit!” Nita screamed into the water. I’m gonna lose it. I’m gonna lose it! Kit!”
The echo of her yell for help showed her another sperm-whale shape, a larger one than Areinnye’s, fighting his way against the battering shock waves and down toward the bottom of the canyon — toward where Areinnye floundered, underneath the stone shelf, underneath the spell. Kit rammed Areinnye head-on, hitting her squarely amidships and punching the smaller sperm whale backward thirty or forty feet. But not out from under the settling shelf; and now Kit was partly under it too. The spell began sagging again. Nita panicked; she had no time or energy left for any more warnings, any more anything. She threw herself so totally into the spell that she couldn’t feel her body, couldn’t hear, couldn’t see, finally became nothing but a single, none-too-coherent thought: No! But it was no use. The spell was coming undone, the rock was coming down, this time for good. And Kit was under it. No! No, no, NO—
And everything went away.
The next thing Nita felt was the shock of a spell being broken by forces too great for it to handle, as the rock-shelf came crushing down on it, smashing it flat against something both soft and hard. “NO!” Nita screamed again in horror, as the diminishing thunder of the seaquake was briefly augmented by the multiple crashes of the shelf’s shattering. The floor of the canyon was obscured even to sonar by a thick fog of rockdust and stirred-up ooze, pierced all through by flying splinters of stone, but Nita dove into it anyway. “Kit!”
“You sang?” came a sperm whale’s sharp-edged note from down in the rock-fog, sounding tired but pleased.
Speechless with relief and shaking with effort, Nita pulled up her nose and just let herself float in the trembling water, listening to the rumbling of the quake as it faded away and the songs of the other whales round about as they checked on one another. She became aware of the Master-Shark, finning slowly down canyon not too far from her and favoring her as he went with a look that was prolonged and indecipherable. Nita glided hurriedly away from him, looking around her.