the First Three Books by Diane Duane

Author:Diane Duane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

The Gray Lord’s Song

THEY FOUND THE WHALE who would sing the part of the Gray in the chill waters about Old Man Shoals, a gloomy place strewn full of boulders above which turbulent water howled and thundered. The current set swift through the shoals, and the remnants of its victims lay everywhere. Old splintered spars of rotting masts, fragments of crumbled planks, bits of rusted iron covered with barnacles or twined about with anemones; here and there a human bone, crusted over with coral— Broken-backed ships lay all about, strangled in weed, ominous shapes in the murk; and when Nita and Kit and the others sang to find their way the songs fell into the silence with a wet thick, troubled sound utterly unlike the clear echoes that came back from the sandy bottoms off Long Island.

The place suited Nita’s mood perfectly. She swam low among the corpses of dead ships, thinking bitter thoughts—most of them centering on her own stupidity.

They warned me. Everybody warned me! Even Picchu warned me: “Read the fine print before you sign!” Idiot! she thought bitterly. What do I do now? I don’t want to die!

But, “Any agreements you make, make sure you keep,” Tom had said—and though his voice had been kind, it had also been stern. As stern as the Blue’s: “Nowhere does the Lone Power enter in so readily as through the broken word.”

She could see what she was expected to do . . . and it was impossible. I can’t die—I’m too young; what would Kit say to Mom and Dad; I don’t want to; it’s not fair! But the answer stayed the same nonetheless.

She groaned out loud. Two days. Two days left. Two days is a long time. Maybe something will happen and I won’t have to die.

“Stop that sniveling noise!” came a sharp, angry burst of song, from practically in front of her. Nita back-finned, shocked at the great bulk rising up from the bottom before her. The echoes of her surprised squeak came back raggedly, speaking of old scars, torn fins and flukes, skin ripped and gouged and badly healed. And the other’s song had an undercurrent of rage to it that hit Nita like a deep dive into water so cold it burned.

“How dare you come into my grounds without protocol?” said the new whale as she cruised toward Nita with a slow deliberateness that made Nita back away even faster than before. The great head and lack of a dorsal fin made it plain that this was another sperm whale.

“Your pardon,” Nita sang hurriedly, sounding as conciliatory as possible. “I didn’t mean to intrude—”

“You have,” said the sperm, in a scraping phrase perilously close to the awful sperm-whale battle cry that Nita had heard from Kit. She kept advancing on Nita, and Nita kept backing, her eye on those sharp teeth. “These are my waters, and I won’t have some noisy krill-eating songster scaring my food—”

That voice was not only angry, it was cruel. Nita started to get angry at the sound of it.

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