Диана Дуэйн: Deep Wizardry

''Oh. Well then. . . ." Nita opened her book, found the word to kill the wizard's-wall spell, and said it. Then she looked up at S'reee. "Are you sure you're gonna be all right?"
S'reee looked mildly at her from one huge eye. "We'll find out tomorrow," s he said. "Dai'stiho."
"Dai," Nita and Kit said, and walked slowly off the sandbar, across the w ater, and toward the lights of home.
A Song of Choice
Nita got up late, and was still yawning and scrubbing her eyes even after she'd washed and dressed and was well into her second bowl of cereal. Her mother, walking around the kitchen in her bathrobe and watering the plants that hung all over, looked at Nita curiously.
"Neets, were you reading under the covers again last night?"
"No, Mom." Nita started to eat faster. Her mother watered another plant, then headed for the sink. On the way, she put a hand against Nita's forehead. "You feel okay? Not coming down with anything, are you?" "No, I'm fine." Nita made an annoyed face when her mother's back was turned. Her mom loved the beach, but at the same time was sure that there were hundreds of ways to get sick there: too much heat, too much cold, too much time in the water; splinters, rusty nails, tar. . . . Nita's little sister Dairine had kicked off a tremendous family fight last week by insisting that the blueness of her lips after a prolonged swim was actually caused by a grape Popsicle.
"Is Kit having a good time?" her mother said. "Wow, yeah, he says it's the best," Nita said. Which was true enough: Kit had never been at the beach for more than a day at a time before. Nita suspected that if he could, he'd dig into the sand like a clam and not come out for months.
"I just wanted to make sure. His dad called last night . . . wanted to see how his 'littlest' was."
" 'El Nino,'" Nita said, under her breath, grinning. It was what Kit s family called him sometimes, a pun—both the word for "the baby" and the name for a Pacific current that caused storms that could devastate whole countries. The name made Kit crazy, and Nita loved to use it on him.
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"Be careful he doesn't hear you," Nita's mom said mildly, "or he'll deck vou again. —How have you two been getting along?"
"Huh? We're fine. Kit's great." Nita saw a slightly odd look come into her mother's eyes. "For a boy," she added hurriedly.
"Well," her mother said, "be careful." And she took the watering can off j n to the living room.
Now what was that about? Nita thought. She finished her cornflakes at high speed, rinsed the bowl and spoon in the sink, and hurried out of the house to find Kit. Halfway across the sparse sandy grass of the front yard, another voice spoke up. "Aha," it said. "The mystery lady."
"Put a cork in it, Dairine," Nita said. Her sister was hanging upside down from the trapeze swing of the rusty swing set, her short red hair rufHing in the breeze. Dairine was a tiny stick of a thing and an all right younger sister, though (in Nita's estimation) much too smart for her own good. Right now entirely too much smart was showing in those sharp gray eyes. Nita tried not to react to it. "Gonna fall down and bust your head open," she said. "Proba-bly lose what few brains you have all over the ground." Dairine shook her head, causing herself to swing a little. "Naaah," she said, "but I'd sooner"—she started pumping, so as to swing harder—"fall off the swing—than fall out the window—in the middle of the night!"
Nita went first cold, then hot. She glanced at the windows to see if anyone was looking out. They weren't. "Didyou tell?" she hissed.
"I—don't tell anybody—anything," Dairine said, in time with her swing-ing. This was true enough. When Dairine had needed glasses, when she'd started getting beaten up at school, and when she was exposed to German measles, nobody had heard about it from
her.
"Y'like him, huh?" Dairine said. Nita glared at Dairine, opened her mouth to start shouting, then remem-bered the open windows.
"Yeah, I like him," Nita said, and turned red at having to make the admission. The problem was, there was no lying to Dairine. She always found °ut the truth sooner or later and made your life unbearable for having tried to h 'de it from her.
You messing around?" Dairine said. 'Dairiiiiiiiine!" Nita said, quietly, but with murder in it. "No, we are not Kessing around!" Okay. I just wondered. You going swimming?"
No," Nita said, snapping the strap of her bathing suit very obviously at " er sister, "I thought I'd go skiing. Wake up, lamebrain." Dairine grinned at Nita upside down. "Kit went west," she said.
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"Thanks," Nita said, and headed out of the yard. "Tell Mom and Dad I']] be back for supper."
"Be careful," Dairine called after Nita, in a perfect imitation of their mother. Nita made a face.
"And watch out for sharks!" Dairine added at the top of her lungs. "Oh, great," Nita said to herself, wondering if her mom or dad had heard She took off at a dead run in case they had.
She found Kit waiting about a mile down the beach, playing fetch with Ponch to tire him out, as he'd told her he was going to. "Otherwise he gets crazy if I go away. This way he'll just lie down and sack out." And sure enough, after some initial barking and dancing around Nita when she arrived, Ponch flopped panting on the sand beside them where they sat talking and finally rolled over on one side and began to snore. They grinned at each other and headed out into the water. It was un-nerving at first, to swim straight out into the ocean, past the breakers and the rollers, past the place where the bottom fell away, and to just keep going as if they never intended to come back. Nita had uncomfortable thoughts about undertow and how it might feel to drown. But just when she was at her twitchiest, she saw a long floppy fin tip up out of the water. S'reee was lolling there in the wavewash, her long pale barnacled belly upward. The night before, when S'reee had been injured and immobile, it had been hard to tell much of anything about her. Now Nita was struck by the size of her—S'reee was at least forty feet from the tips of her flukes to her pointy nose. And last night she had been a wheezing hulk. Now she was all grace, floating and gliding and rolling like some absurd, fat, slim-winged bird—for her long swimming fins looked more like wings than anything else.
"Did you sleep well?" she sang at them, a weird cheerful crescendo like something out of a happy synthesizer. "I slept wonderfully. And I ate well too. I think I may get back most of the weight I lost yesterday."

Kit looked at the healed place, treading water. "What do you eat?" "Krill, mostly. The littlest things that live in the water, like little shrimp-But some fish too. The blues are running, and the little ones are good. Of they have been until now. . . ." She sighed, spraying water out her blow-hole. "That's in the story I have to tell you. Come on, we'll go out to one or the Made Rocks."
They took hold of her dorsal fin, and she towed them. The "Made Rock turned out to be an old square fishing platform about three miles south oj Tiana Beach: wooden pilings topped by wooden slats covered with tarred canvas and with bland-faced seagulls. Most of the gulls immediately took ou and began flying around and screaming about the humans sitting on thet spot, despite Nita's and Kit's polite apologies. Some of the other gulls
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less annoyed, especially after they found out the visitors were wizards. Later on > whenever Nita thought of her first real conversation with S'reee, what she remembered best were the two seagulls who insisted on sitting in her lap the whole time. They were heavy, and not housebroken.
"I guess the best place to start," S'reee said when Nita and Kit were settled, "is with what you already know, that there's been trouble for wizards on the land lately. The trouble's been felt in the sea too. Out here we've been having quakes on the sea floor much more often than we should be having them—severe ones. And some other old problems have been getting worse. The dirt they throw into the water from the High and Dry, especially: there's more of it than ever—"
" The High and Dry'?"
"The place with all the high things on it."
"Oh," Kit said. "New York City. Manhattan, actually." "The water close to it is getting so foul, the fish can't breathe it for many thousands of lengths out. Those that can are mostly sick. And many more of the boats-that-eat-whales have been out here recently. The past few months, there's been a great slaughter—" Nita frowned at the thought of other creatures suffering what S'reee had been through. She had heard all the stories about the hungry people in Japan, but at the moment she found herself thinking that there had to be something else to eat. "Things have not been good," S'reee said. "I know less about the troubles on land, but the Sea tells us that the land wizards have been troubled of late, that there was some great strife of powers on the High and Dry. We saw the Moon go out one night—" "So did we," Kit said. There was fear in his eyes at the memory, and pride in his voice. "We were in Manhattan when it happened."
"We were part of it," Nita said. She still didn't know all of how she felt about what had happened. But she would never forget reading from the book that kept the world as it should be, the Book of Night with Moon, while around her and Kit the buildings of Manhattan wavered like a dream about to break—and beyond a barrier of trees brought to life, and battling statues, the personification of all darkness and fear, the Lone Power, fought to get at toem and destroy them.
S'reee looked at them somberly from one eye. "It's true then what Ae mhnuu used to tell me, that there are no accidents. You've met the Power that created death in the beginning and was cast out for it. All these things— toe lost Moon, that night, and the
earthquakes, and the fouled water, and " e whale-eating ships—they're all Its doing, one way or another."
Kit and Nita nodded. "It took a defeat in that battle you two were in," re ee said. "It's angry, and the problems we've been having are symptoms of
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that anger. So we have to bind It, make It less harmful, as the first sea people bound It a long time ago. Then things will be quiet again for a while."
"Bind It how?" Nita said. "No, wait a minute," Kit said. "You said something about the Sea telling you things—" S'reee looked surprised for a moment. "Oh, I forgot that you do it differ-ently. You work your wizardry with the aid of those things you carry—" "Our books."
"Right. The whales who are wizards get their wizardry from the Sea. The water speaks to you when you're ready, and offers you the Ordeal. Then if you pass it, the Heart of the Sea speaks whenever you need to hear it and tells you what you need to know." Nita nodded. The events in that "other" Manhattan had been her Ordeal, and Kit's; and after they passed it, their books had contained much more information than before. "So," she said, "bind the Lone Power how?"
"The way the first whale-wizards did," S'reee said. "The story itself is the binding. Or rather, the story's a song: the Song of the Twelve. In the long form it takes—will take—hours to sing."
"I'm glad I had breakfast," Kit muttered. S'reee spouted good-naturedly. Nita wondered whether it was accidental that the wind turned at that exact moment, threw the spray straight at Kit, and soaked him to the skin. At any rate, Nita laughed.
"I won't take quite that long," S'reee said. "You know about the great War of the Powers, at the beginning of everything; and how the Lone Power invented death and pain, and tried to impose them on the whole universe, and the other Powers wouldn't let It, and threw It out."
"Even regular human beings have stories about it," Kit said. He took off his windbreaker and shook it out, mostly on Nita.
"I'm not surprised," S'reee said. "Everything that lives and tells stories has this story in one form or another. Well. After that war in the Above and Beyond, the Lone Power spent a long while in untraveled barren universes, recouping Its strength. Then It came back to our native universe, looking for some quiet, out-of-the-way place to try out Its new inventions. Right then the only place vulnerable to It, because thinking life was very new here, was this world; and the only place thinking life existed as yet was the Sea. So the
Lo" e One came here to trick the Sea into accepting Death. Its sort of death, anyway—where all power and love are wasted into an endless darkness, lost forever." "Entropy," Nita said.
"Yes. And any sea people It succeeded in tricking would be stuck with thai death, the Great Death, forever. —Now there was already a sort of death «J the Sea, but only the kind where your body stops. Everyone knew it wasn ~
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permanent, and it didn't hurt much; you might get eaten, but you would go O n as part of someone else. No one was afraid of not being his own self any m0re —I guess that's the simplest way of putting it. That calm way of life drove the Lone Power wild with hate, and It swore to attach fear and pain to it and make it a lot more interesting." S'reee sighed. "The whales' job then was what it is now: to be masters and caretakers for the fish and the smaller sea people, the way you two-leggers are for the dry-land beasts. So naturally, the only wizards in the Sea were whales, just as humans were originally the only ones on land. That early on, there were only ten whale-wizards, all Seniors. Ni'hwinyii, they were called, the Lords of the Humors—"
Nita was puzzled. "It's the old word for emotions, sort of," Kit said. "Not like 'funny' humor."
"I know," Nita said, annoyed. She hadn't. S'reee blew, laughing. The spray missed Kit this time. "Those ten whales ruled the Sea, under the Powers," she said. "If the Lone Power wanted to trick the Sea into the Great Death, It had to trick the Ten—then all the life they ruled would be stuck with the Great Death too. So the Lone One went to the Ten in disguise, pretending to be a stranger, a new whale sent to them so that they could decide under which of their Masteries it fell. And as each one questioned the Lone Power, the Stranger whale offered each of them the thing he wanted most, if he would only accept the 'Gift' the Stranger would give him. And he showed them just enough of his power to prove that he could do it." "Uh-oh," Kit said softly. "I've heard that one before." "Apples and snakes," Nita said.