Диана Дуэйн - Deep Wizardry

Summer Night's Song
had better sense, Kit," he said. "We had an 239
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agreement that while you stayed with us, you'd do as we said. Here it is hours a nd hours after dark—"
"I know, sir," Kit said. "I forgot—and by the time I remembered, it was too late. It won't happen again."
"Not for a while, anyway," Nita's mother said, sounding grim. "I don't want you two going out of sight of the house until further notice. Under-stood?" "Yes, Mrs. Callahan." "Nita?" her mother said sharply. There it was: the answer she wasn't going to be able to get around. "Okay, Mom," she said. Her stomach turned over inside her at the sound of the lie. Too late now. It was out, not to be recalled. "That also means staying out of the water," her father said. Why me? Why me! Nita thought. She made a face. "Okay." "Okay," Kit said too, not sounding very happy. "We'll see how you two behave in the next few days," Nita's mother said. "And whether that shark clears out of here. Maybe after that we'll let you swim again. Meanwhile—you two get home."
They went. Just once Nita looked over her shoulder and was sure she saw, far out on the water, a tall pale fin that stood high as a sail above the surface, then slid below it, arrowing off toward Montauk—distress ended for the moment, and a job done. Nita felt the miserable place in her gut and thought it was just as well that Ed couldn't come up on the land.
Fearsong
Nita lay awake in the dark, staring at the ceiling. It was three thirty in the morning, by the glow of the cheap electric clock on the dresser. She would very much have liked to turn over, forget about the clock, the time, and everything else, and just sack out. But soon it would be false dawn, and she and Kit would have to be leaving.
Changes. ..
Only last week, her relationship with her folks had seemed perfect. Now all that was over, ruined—and about to get much worse, Nita knew, when her mom and dad found her and Kit gone again in the morning.
And the changes in Kit— She rolled over on her stomach unhappily, not wanting to think about it. She had a new problem to consider, for when everyone was in bed, Dairine had come visiting. Nita put her face down into her pillow and groaned. Dairine had gone right through Nita's wizard's manual, staring at all the strange maps and pictures. It was annoying enough to begin with that Dairine could see the book at all; nonwizards such as her mother and father, looking at it, usually saw only an old, beat-up copy of something called So You Want to Be d Wizard, apparently a kids' book. But Dairine saw what was there, and was fascinated.
The aptitude for wizardry sometimes runs through a whole generation of a family. Several famous "circles" of wizards in the past had been made up of brothers or sisters or cousins, rather than unrelated people such as she and Kit, or Tcm and Carl, who met by accident or in some other line of work and came to do wizardry together by choice. But families with more than one wizard tended to be the exception rather than the rule, and Nita hadn't been expecting this. Also, Nita was beginning to realize that she had rather en-

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joyed having her wizardry be a secret from everybody but the other wizards she worked with. That secret, that advantage, was gone now too. Dairine had the aptitude for wizardry as strongly as Nita herself had had it when she started. In fact, she's got it more strongly than I did, Nita thought glumly. The book had to get my attention by force, that first time I passed it in the library. But Dairine noticed it herself, as soon as I brought it home.
For several years Nita had kept her advantage over her sister by only the slimmest of margins. She knew quite well that Dairine was a lot smarter than she was in most things. Wizardry had been a large and satisfying secret she'd felt sure Dairine would never catch on to. But that advantage was now gone too. The youngest wizards were the strongest ones, according to the book; older ones might be wiser but had access to less sheer power. Dairine had gotten the better of her again. Nita turned over on her back, staring at the ceiling once more. Kit …
He just wasn't himself in the whalesark. When he's in his own skin, she told herself fiercely, he's fine. But she couldn't quite make herself believe that. His look, his stance, were too different in just the past day or two.
She had thought that having a best friend at last would be great fun. And she and Kit had enjoyed each other's company immensely in their first couple months of wizardry, after the terror and sorrow of their initial encounter with the Art had worn off a bit. But sometimes things just didn't work. Kit would get moody, need to be by himself for days at a time. Or he would say sudden things that Nita thought cruel—except that it was Kit saying them, and Kit wasn't cruel; she knew that.
I wish I'd had some friends when I was younger, she thought. Now I've got one who really matters—and I don't know what to do so he stays my friend. He changes. . . . And Kit was going to be in that whalesark for more and more time in the next couple of days. Would she even know him if this kept up?
Would he know her? Or want to? Humpbacks and sperms were different. Her own aggressiveness had frightened her badly enough, after the fight with the krakens. Kit's had been worse. And he had been enjoying it. …

241
Listless, Nita reached under her pillow for her wizard's manual and a flashlight. She clicked the light on and started paging through the book, lending to kill some time doing "homework"—finishing the study of her Parts of the Song, the Silent Lord's parts. They were mostly in what whales us ed for verse—songs with a particular rhythm and structure, different for e ach species, but always more formal than regular conversational song.

Since e wasn't good at memorizing, Nita was relieved to find that when she was ln whaleform, the Sea would remind her of the exact words. What she
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needed to study were the emotions and motivations behind each song, the way they were sung.
She riffled through the book. There was a lot of background material—the full tale of the first Song, and of others, including the disastrous "Drowned Song" that ended in the downfall of Atlantis; the names of famous whale-wizards who had sung and how they had sung their parts; "stage direction" for the Song itself; commentary, cautions, permitted variations, even jokec, for evidently though the occasion was serious, it didn't have to be somber. Then the Song proper, in verse, with the names of the ten Lords of the Humors: the Singer, the Gazer, the Blue, the Sounder, the Gray Lord, the Listener, the Killer, the Wanderer, the Forager, and of course the Silent Lord. Each of them ruled a kind of fish and also a kind of temperament.
Some of them struck Nita as odd; the Killer, for example, was the patron-ess of laughter, always joking: the Gazer looked at everything and hardly ever said what he saw. And the Silent Lord— Nita paused at the lines that described "the one who ruled seas with no songs in them, and hearts that were silent; but in her own silence, others would sing forever. . . ."
And of course there was the Pale Slayer. And another odd thing; though the names of all the whales ever to sing the Song were listed, there was no listing for the Master-Shark, except the mere title, repeated again and again. Maybe he's like an executioner in the old days, Nita thought. Anonymous. The commentaries weren't very illuminating. "The Master of the lesser Death," one of them called him, "who, mastering it, dieth not. For wizardry toucheth not one to whom it hath not been freely given: nor doth the messenger in any wise partake of the message he bears."
The manual was like that sometimes. Nita sighed and skimmed down to the first canto: S'reee's verse, it would be, since the Singer opens the Song as the other Ten gather around the lonely seamount Caryn Peak, the Sea's Tooth. Alongside the musical and movement notations for a whale singing the Song, the manual had a rough translation into the Speech: