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.