quality as it began to accept the spell.

The shimmer of the wizardry's outer shell began to dissolve into splashes of green and gold brilliance, the catalytic reactions that would make the

pollutants snow down as inert salts onto the ocean bottom as fast as they built up. That inert "garbage" would still have to be cleaned up, but the Sea

itself had routines for that, older than human wizardry and just as effective for this particular job.

Kit and S'reee watched the wizardry spread away in great ribbony tentacles, diffusing itself, dissolving slowly into the water one long current drifting

away southward, another running up the channel, with the rising flood tide, toward the inland waters and the main sources of the pollution. After three

or four minutes there was nothing left to be seen but the most subtle shimmer, a radiance like diluted moonlight.

Then even that was gone, leaving the waters nearly dark, but someone sensitive to the power they had released could still have felt it, a tingle and

prickle on the skin, the feel of advice taken and being acted upon. The silence faded away, leaving Kit and S'reee listening to the wet-clappered bonk,

bonk of the nun buoy half a mile away, the chain-saw ratchet of motorboat propellers chopping at the water as they passed through Jones Inlet.

Kit, hovering in the water, looked over at S'reee. The dimly seen humpback hung there for a long moment, just finning the water around her, then dropped

her jaw and took a long gulp of the water, closing her mouth again and straining it back out through the thousands of plates of baleen.

"Well " Kit said.

She waved her flukes from side to side, a gesture of slow satisfaction. "It tastes better already," she said. "It worked!"

S'reee laughed at him. "Come on, Kit, a spell always works. You know that."