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