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