Fathom by Cherie Priest

Author:Cherie Priest [Priest, Cherie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780765318404
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2008-12-09T06:00:00+00:00

What You Pray For

And all the while, for all its stuttering incompleteness, the call was sounding.

And all the while, in the distance below the black waters, something was struggling against the summons. Something huge and angry was preparing to respond even as she was pulled up to the pier where the little ferry docked itself day in and day out.

She was coming because she was furious and possibly frightened, because she had been brought to the surface twice in as many nights. Prior to those events, no one had been ignorant enough or stupid enough to attempt a call in a thousand years, and now she was at the beck and call of the tiny and corrupt.

It did not matter that the success was all but accidental. It did not matter that the call was only partial and imperfect.

It mattered that there was a call. It mattered that someone or something believed it ought to have control over her. Arahab did not agree.

So despite the fragile and fractured nature of the song, the old thing with a thousand names gathered her strength—and there was much of it to gather—and she pulled herself into the Gulf of Mexico again, and across it. She followed the melody’s little lasso and let it lead her, for it was too feeble to force her.

Her fear was this: that someone was experimenting, and learning.

A fragment of a song that had first been sung when the sky was divided from the water was not enough to compel her. But the whole song, and assisted by a focusing object, and cast into the brine with intent . . . that was something else altogether.

If someone knew a part, then the whole could yet be gleaned. If someone knew even the basest germ of the facts, then the rest could be grown as if from a seed.

Unless she put a stop to it.

It was much better to cut it off now, while the will of the practitioners was weak and imprecise.

As she closed in upon them, she used the eyes she could gather—a snoozing pelican that awoke with a start, a jumping fish that slapped itself against the surface. She borrowed the sharp face of the nearest dolphin and bade it rise enough to spy.

Two people. No, three. One was a woman.

And the alpha of them, a man with a candle that burned a flame as short as a fingernail, knelt on the wooden slats in his semicircle of borrowed power and chanted wordlessly. He murmured the shape of the notes and they fluttered around him.

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