The walls closest to them were still nearly three thousand feet high. But their slope was gentler; and the canyon had widened from some two miles across to nearly five. To left and right of the canyon’s foot, curving away northward and southward, miles past sound or sight, stretched the rubble-strewn foothills of the Continental Shelf. Behind the Celebrants the shelf itself towered, a mighty cliffwall rising to lose itself in darkness. Outward before them, toward the open sea, the terrain was mostly flat, broken only occasionally by hills so shallow they were more like dunes. The rocky bottom was turning to pale sand. But the paleness did nothing to lighten the surroundings. Above it lay an intolerable, crushing weight of water, utterly black, icy cold, weighing down on the soul no matter what spell protected the body. And far out in the blackness could be seen the furtive, erratic movements of tiny lights — eerie points of peculiar-colored fire that jittered and clustered and hung in the cold dark, watching the whales.
Nita took a sharp breath, for some of those lights were definitely eyes. Tlhlki, hanging motionless in the still water beside her, did the same. He was staring down the slope, which sank past the light of the breathing-spell, and far past echo range, dropping farther downward into more darkness. “Nothing can be this deep,” he sang in an unnerved whisper. “How much farther down can we go?”
“All the way,” said another voice from Nita’s other side. She turned, not recognizing it — and then knew the speaker very well and was sick inside. Kit hung there, with a fey, frightening look in his eye — a total lack of fear.
Nita swallowed once. Sperm whales took the great dives better than any other whale, coming down this far on purpose to hunt the giant squid; but their boldness also got them in trouble. Numerous sperm-whale skeletons had been found at these depths by exploring bathyscaphs, the whales’ tails or bodies hopelessly tangled in undersea telephone or telegraph cables.
“We’re a long way up yet,” Kit said, with that cool cast to his voice that better suited Areinnye than it did him. “Barely six thousand feet down. We’ll have to go down to sixteen thousand feet at least before we see the Sea’s Tooth.” And he swam off toward the boundaries of the light.
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.