"I don't think she's going to be with us today," Kit said. S'reee didn't reply immediately, but that thoughtful little eye dwelt on Kit. As whales went, S'reee wasn't that much older than Kit or Nita, but the increased responsibilities she'd been pushed into had been making her perceptive—maybe more perceptive than Kit exactly cared for right now, especially since he still wasn't sure that he hadn't misstepped somehow.
"Well," S'reee said after a moment, "is that a problem? Can we manage, or should we reschedule?"
Kit thought about that. "I've got something that might be worth looking at," he said. "We may as well lay it out in place and have a look at it."
"All right."
Kit reached into the pocket of his jeans, which was also the way into his own storage pocket of space, and came out with a little ball of light, a spell in compacted form, which he dropped to the concrete he was standing on. As the compaction routine came loose and let the spell expand, he shoved his manual down into the pocket, then picked up the spell and shook it out.
It was a webwork of interconnected statements in the Speech, all of which briefly flared bright and then, dimming, settled and spread themselves into a form that could have been mistaken for a cloak made of plastic wrap. Kit whirled it around him, then held still while the spell sealed itself shut all about him and completed its access to its air supply, also tucked away in the spatiotemporal claudication in his pocket. Normally this spell was used as a space suit, for occasions when moving or working in a large "bubble" of air wasn't desirable, but Kit had adapted it for use as a wet suit. He glanced back at the beach to make sure no one was watching—the last thing he wanted was for someone to think some kid out here was suicidal—and jumped well away from the rocks, into the water next to S'reee.
The two of them submerged. Kit took a moment to adjust the wizardry he was wearing, to add weight as necessary so that it would counteract the buoyancy of the air in the wet suit and his lungs, then he took hold of S'reee's dorsal fin, and she towed him away from the jetty, southward.
The waters were getting murky this time of year, but not murky enough to hide something that Kit was beginning to get tired of looking at: an irregular cluster of humped, sinister shapes, half buried in sludge, not far from where the sewerage outfall from Tobay Beach tailed off. Half a century ago, some ship had dropped or dumped a cargo of mines on the bottom, in about fifty fathoms of water. But as far as Kit was concerned, that wasn't half deep enough.
"We really need to do something about that," Kit said, glancing at the mines as they passed them by. "Somebody seriously exceeded their recommended stupidity levels the day they dumped those here."
"I wouldn't argue the point," S'reee said as they headed out to the point where they had been preparing to anchor their wizardry. "But one thing at a time, cousin. Do you really think you have a solution for our present problem?"
"I've got something," Kit said. "You tell me." "Shortly."
It took them a few minutes more to reach the spot, due south of Point Lookout, where the three of them had been contemplating anchoring the wizardry once they'd settled on what it was going to be. Here the tides came out of Jones Inlet with most force, helping keep the dredged part of the ship channel clean; but here also the pollution from inside the barrier islands came out in its most concentrated form, and this, Kit and Nita had thought, would be a good place to stop it. "The day before yesterday, I spent a little while checking the currents here," S'reee said, as she paused to let Kit slip off, "and I'd say you two were right about the location. Also, the bottom's pretty bare. There isn't too much life to be inconvenienced by tethering a spell here, and what there is won't mind being relocated. Let's see what you've got."
Kit pulled out his manual, turned to the workbook section, and instructed it to replicate the structure of the proposed spell in the water, where they could see it. A few seconds later he and S'reee were looking together at the faintly glowing schematic, a series of concentric and intersecting circles full of the "argument" of the wizardry.
S'reee swam slowly around it, examining it. "I have to confess," she said at last, "this makes more sense than what the three of us were looking at earlier. All those complex chemical-reaction subroutines... they'd have taken us weeks to set up, and exhausted us when we tried to fuel them. Besides, it was too much of a brute-force solution. It's no good shouting at the Sea, as our people say; you won't hear what it has to say to you, and it won't listen until you do."
"You think it'll listen to this?"
S'reee swung her tail thoughtfully. "Let's find out," she said. "If nothing else, it's going to be quicker to test to destruction, if it fails at all. And between you and me—and I hate to say it—it's a more elegant solution than what Nita was proposing."
Kit felt uneasy agreeing with her. "Well," he said, "if it doesn't work, it won't matter how elegant it is. Let's get set up."
He started laying out the spell for real. It contained a simplified version of one of the circles he and Nita had been arguing about two days before—there was no point in wasting a perfectly good section of diagram that could be tied into the revision. Kit drew a finger through the water, and the graceful curves and curlings of the written Speech followed after as he drifted around in a circle about twenty yards across, reinstating the first circle as he'd held it in memory.
"Is this how the second great circle looks?" S'reee said, describing the circle with a long slow motion of body and tail. Fire filled the water, following her gesture, writing itself in pulsing curls and swirls of light — all the power statements and the conditionals that were secondary parts of the spell.
"You've got it," Kit said. "One thing, though..." He looked ruefully at the place where Nita's name was written. Carefully he reached out and detached the long string of characters in the Speech that represented Nita's wizardly power and personality, and let it float away into the water for the time being. A wizard doesn't just casually erase another wizard's name, any more than you would casually look down the barrel of a gun, even when you were sure that the chamber was empty. Changing a name written in the Speech could change the one named. Erasing a name could be more dangerous still.
"You'll need to knit that circle in a little tighter to compensate," S'reee said. "Taking care of that now."
It took only a few moments to finish tightening the structure. Kit looked it over one more time; S'reee did the same. Then they looked at each other. "Well?" Kit said.
"Let's see what happens," said S'reee. Together they began to recite—Kit in the human, prose-inflected form of the Speech; S'reee in the sung form that whale-wizards prefer. Kit stumbled a couple of times until he got the rhythm right—though the pace was quicker than that at which whales sing their more formal and ritual wizardries, it was still fairly slow by human standards. One word at a time, he thought, resorting to humming the last syllables when he needed to let S'reee catch up with him; and as they spoke together and fed power to it, the wizardry began to light up around them like a complex, many-colored neon sculpture in the water, a hollow sphere of curvatures and traceries, at the center of which they hung, waiting for the sense of the presence they were summoning.
And slowly, as the wizardry came alive around them, the presence was there, making itself felt more strongly each passing moment as Kit and S'reee worked together toward the last verse—the wizard's knot, in this case a triple-stranded braid, which would seal together three great circles' worth of spell. The pressure came down around them, the weight of tons of water and millions of years of time, hard to bear; but Kit hunched himself down a little, got his shoulders under the weight and bore it up. The water went from the normal dusky green of these depths to a flaring bluegreen, like a liquid set on fire. All around them, if it was possible for water to feel wetter than water already was, it did. The personality of the local ocean, partly aware, washed through both Kit and S'reee, intent on washing away resistance over time, as it always had.