Funny how real life seems to get in the way right after you promise not to make long delays! As it is, sorry once again. One chapter left, and hopefully there won't be nearly as long a delay.

Please note, as always, that anything you recognize isn't mine; it's all Diane Duane's.

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He came late to the rehearsal the next day. S'reee had already sung the Invocation and Aroooon was singing the first of the Blue's long passages when he swam toward the circle.

"HNii't was asking where you were earlier," S'reee murmured at his greeting. "She's over there." The humpback gestured with one fin toward Nita before turning her focus back to Aroooon's singing.

"Nita," he greeted as his shadow fell over her.

"Ed." She was calm.

"Come swim with me." He turned without waiting for her answer, wondering if perhaps she would refuse. After all, her shock from yesterday had to be over by now.

She followed.

"So, Silent Lord. You were busy last night," he said once they were away from where others might hear their conversation. He thought he saw Kit watching them anxiously, but the other young wizard apparently decided to just let it go.

"Yes."

He waited for her to say something else, but apparently she wasn't going to. So he reached out to find what was lurking beneath that outward calm. The realization was not a good thing, and his stomach roiled within him. "You are angry . . . "

"Damn right I am!"

Be careful, he wanted to warn her. He couldn't very well eat her just yet. "Explain this anger to me," he said, hoping that would get her thoughts in a more composed direction. He paused—she might as well know just how unusual her case was. "Normally the Silent Lord does not find the outcome of the song so frightful. In fact, whales sometimes compete for the privelege of singing your part. The Silent Lord dies indeed, but the death is not so terrible—it merely comes sooner than it might have otherwise, by predator or old age. And it buys the renewal of life, and holds off the Great Death, for the whole Sea—for years."

She stayed silent, still angry, but thinking. She probably knew her sacrifice would be worth it in the long run. But that didn't solve the fear of death. Well, nothing would, he knew. H'roonhiit had been afraid of death right to the very end.

"And even if the Silent One should suffer somewhat," he continued, "what of it? For there is still Timeheart, is there not? . . . The Heart of the Sea. It is no ending, this Song, but a passage into something else. How they extol that passage, and what lies at its end." It was poor comfort, he knew, made even poorer by the fact that he just didn't believe in Timeheart. He never would, either, for as a nonwizard, he would never be able to see it for himself. But he had accepted that unbelief long ago, and belief would help Nita.

He found himself reciting one of the Blue's passages. He knew the Song so well, he didn't need the Sea to whisper it to him, as the wizards said it did for them. "You are a wizard," he told Nita at the end of the passage. "You have known that place, supposedly."

"Yes," she said, soft and subdued. "Yes, I was there."

That calm assurace shook his doubt far more than any of S'reee's long arguments. But he put his own feelings aside, as per usual. "So you know it awaits you after the Sacrifice," he pointed out, "after the change." Other Silent Lords had taken this position firmly, using it to hold off their fear (although, he observed sardonically, it never quite dissipated the fear). Others faced the Sacrifice calmly and bravely, if a little self-righteously. What, then, was Nita's excuse? "But you don't seem to take the change so calmly."

"How can I? I'm human!"

Well, that had very little to do with it. Did she think so much of the boundaries between species that she assumed no whale had known what she was feeling? But truth be told, no Silent Lord had reacted quite the way she was. Human, indeed. "Yes. But make me understand. Why does that make your attitude so different? Why are you so angry about something that would happen to you sooner or later anyway?"

She had an immediate answer for that one. "Because I'm too young for this. All the things I'll never have a chance to do—grow up, work, live—"

"This is not living?" he asked wryly. Did she really think so much of life? Well, she was young. Perhaps that justified it. But he rather thought it would be better to die when one was still young and in love with life than when old and disaffected by it.

"Of course it is!" she answered. "But there's a lot more to it! And getting murdered by a shark is hardly what I call living!"

His thoughts churned darkly at that. It's not murder. I would never have murdered H'roonhiit, and I wouldn't murder Nita, either. I'm just doing what I'm supposed to do. I'm just ending distress. With more difficulty this time, he cast the emotions out and answered her calmly. "I assure you, it's nothing as personal as murder. I would have done the same for any wizard singing the Silent Lord. I have don't the same, many times. And doubtless shall again." Not that I want to, he thought but didn't say. Why couldn't one Song fix the Sea forever? It would almost have been worth H'roonhiit's death if no one ever had to die again.

And there has to be a better way of ending pain than death. The thought came suddenly to him. It was so alien he immediately cast it out. But it only came clawing back into his mind again. Despite what his body was telling him, he didn't want to taste Nita's blood.

"Look," Nita said in a small voice after the silence between them had reigned long enough, "Tell me something. . . . Does it really have to hurt a lot?"

"Sprat, what in this life doesn't?" he asked scornfully. The question had merited the renewed use of his nickname for her. "Even love hurts sometimes," he pointed out. "You may have noticed. . . . " After all, she was a warm-blood. There was no doubt she'd encountered love before. Probably more than he had, even given his age and her youth . . .

"Love—what would you know about that?"

The question struck him like a set of teeth. "And who are you to think I would know nothing about it?" he returned angrily, letting a rare emotion seep through him. "Because I kill without remorse, I must also be ignorant of love, is that it? You're thinking I am so old an order of life that I can know nothing but the blind white rut, the circling, the joining that leaves the joined forever scarred. Oh yes, I know that. In its time . . . it's very good. And yes . . . sometimes we wish the closeness of the joining wouldn't end. But what would my kind do with the warm-blood sort of joining, the long companionships? What would I do with a mate?" He said the word disdainfully, but the truth was, he knew. He could still taste s'Reshkaltet's blood, the same as he could still taste H'roonhiit's and the other creatures whose distress had brought their own end.

"Soon enough one or the other of us would fall into distress," he said calmly, describing it to Nita as it would be, but really as it had been. "And the other would partner would end it." I ended it. "There's an end to mating and mate, and to the love that passed between." She screamed at me in the end. She had the fear, but mostly it was rage and hatred that led to her death. Anything resembling love was gone. I knew when I tasted her blood that she had never really loved me. "That price," he told Nita, "is too high for me to pay, even once. I swim alone."

He had asked H'roonhiit about love once, when the word had been a foreign one to him. He'd asked if it meant more than the joining all species knew. And her answer still left him thinking, all these ages later. It's not so much a joining of bodies, Ed, but a joining of souls

Finally, he was able to cast the feelings out again. The rant had ended on the logical, reasonable note, I swim alone. That was true, and truth was nothing to fear, nothing to be angry at. He would accept it an move on. That was the way of life.

"But, Sprat," he said, "the matter of my loves—or their lack—is hardly what's bothering you." She was bothered at leaving some love or other behind, wasn't she? He wondered briefly about her relationship with her partner, Kit.

"No, love! I've never had a chance to. And now—now—"

Never? "Then you're well cast for the Silent Lord's part." She had never loved, though she was looking for it and it didn't seem too far off. How often did she tell me . . . "How does the line go? 'Not old enough to love as yet,/ but old enough to die, indeed—' That has always been the Silent Lord's business—to sacrifice love for life . . . instead of, as in lesser songs, the other way around. . . . " He sacrificed love for life. And there were times, in the darkest corners of his mind, when he wondered whether it was all a big mistake. But his body would keep swimming, kee feeding, keep ending distress.

"Is it truly so much to you, Sprat? Have you truly had no time to love?" he had to know.

She was silent for a moment, considering. "No, Pale One. Not that way. No one . . . that way."

The words were an echo of someone else, so long ago. "Well then," he said calmly, brusquely, "the Song will be sung from the heart, it seems. You will still offer the Sacrifice?" Will I still have to eat you?

"I don't want to—"

"Answer the question, Sprat," he said impatiently.

A pause. "I'll do what I said I would."

She was going to die. She was going to end her own life, and for what? A few years' worth of peace in the Sea? A few more lives than would otherwise have been saved, lives she would never see? But she knew the story of Atlantis. She knew it was necessary.

She was too much like H'roonhiit. And he realized he didn't want to go through it again.

But he had to. He was part of the Song, even if he never did much singing. Her blood would call to him, and he wouldn't be able to resist it. Her pain would end . . .

"I am big enough to take a humpback in two bites," he said slowly. "And there is no need for me to be leisurely about it. You will speak to the Heart of the Sea without having to say too much to me on the way." Just as long as he didn't hear her last words, as he had H'roonhiit's, he might be able to do it.

"But I thought you didn't believe—I mean, you'd never—"

"I am no wizard, Nita." Did she really think he was saying it because he believed it? It was her belief that was important now. "The Sea doesn't speak to me as it does to you. I will never experience those high wild joys the Blues sing of—the Sea That Burns, the Voices. The only voices I hear cry out from water that burns with blood. But might I not sometimes wonder what other joys there are—and wish I might feel them too?" Why couldn't I be a wizard, he had asked H'roonhiit, so long ago. Why can't I hear the Sea singing to me Is it because of my cold blood that I won't see Timeheart when one of the others ends my distress? She hadn't answered.

"I wish I could help."

The words were unexpected, as were the implications behind them. "As if the Master could feel distress," he said, denying the pain he'd learned to hide so well. Not even another shark could catch the scent of his pain.

"And as if someone else might want to end it," she said, matching his sarcasm, but there was something gentle about it.

What did that mean? As if someone else might want to end it? It was as if she was saying that while no one could love the Master-Shark's outward self, she had seen inside him. She knew he was haunted by some old distress. But since he denied it, she wouldn't say anything. Was that what it meant to be a warm-blood—that you acknowledged distress in each other and comforted each other in it? Did you let the distress last, but somehow, through that magic of warm-bloods, make it less than it was simply through that odd compassion he could never quite understand? Whereas he would simply end the distress when he found it. No wonder H'roonhiit had hate him at the end. He hadn't fixed her distress, merely ended it.

As if someone else might want to end it . . . Nita almost made it sound as though she thought it would be a kindness.

"I mean," she said into the long silence, "it's dumb to suffer. But if you have to do it, you might as well intend it to do someone some good."

She was going to suffer. She intended to do everyone good. He had suffered long and quietly and never helped anyone. Not even those few he had loved. "It's well said," he managed to tell her finally. "And we will cause it to be well made, the Sacrifice. You, young and never loving; I, old and never loved. Such a Song the Sea will never have seen." Not even with H'roonhiit, he thought, and there was something close to regret before he denied all feeling again.

S'reee's voice interrupted them. "HNii't? It's almost your time—"

Nita turned to him. "I have to go. Ed—"

"Silent Lord?" She wasn't really the Sprat to him any longer.

"I'm sorry!"

Sorry? For what? one part of his mind wondered. She was the one who was going to die. The other part of his mind knew exactly what she was saying, and in that moment he respected her more than he had H'roonhiit. No, not respected . . . Something else, something stronger, something he never dared to assign to himself.

She was sorry?

"This once, I think, so am I," he said softly. "Go on, Sprat. I will not miss my cue."

She met his eyes for a long moment, then hurried off.