To Luce’s surprise the voices calmed down a little, as if they were considering this. She lay squeezed against the pebbled seabed. A spindly gray crab stalked just in front of her eyes while above her the water rippled like a low ceiling of molten glass. Luce watched the surface boil as one voice oozed back out of her ear, followed by another, then another. The tearing pressure in her head began to ease a little, and Luce broke the surface again. She was determined to hold back the screams that seemed to snake inside her throat until she couldn’t be sure if they belonged to her or to the voices. She could feel whispering presences clinging around the edges of her face, nosing at her with hostile curiosity, but at least most of them were out of her head. There were just a few buzzing, muttering stragglers still wandering through her brain.

“Child of Proteus,” the same weary voice she’d heard before groaned. It seemed to be flicking around the rim of her left ear. “We do not want you here! You hurt the memories. You hurt the man.” The tone became snappish, impatient, as if the voice felt terribly put out at having to explain something so obvious. “Leave us.”

“What are you?” Luce demanded. She strained for selfcontrol, fought a mass of tangled impulses to shout and weep and beg for mercy all at once. “I’m not leaving, so just tell me what you are!”

“Leave!” the voice retorted fretfully. “Leave! With you here the man forgets sometimes to remember. With you here he thinks of the world he sees before him, of whether your face will appear in the water! We have the memories,” it added, and this time it sounded almost plaintive.

Around Luce the other voices babbled in agreement. She couldn’t make out words, but she could feel a chorus of eager emotions, all nagging and wheedling with the urge to drive her away. Luce began to feel a little less frightened. There was something pitiful about the voices, sick and uncanny as they were.

“I’ve got as much right to be here as you do,” Luce snapped, then tried to think up some reason they would have to accept. There was one thing they definitely seemed to know about her. “Proteus gave his children the oceans. I have the right to stay wherever I want as long as I don’t leave the water!” Luce didn’t actually know if this was true or not, but the voices reacted instantly. She could hear them bubbling over with consternation, squeaking and hissing to one another like a litter of blind puppies that someone was poking with a stick. “You don’t want to make Proteus angry,” Luce added, then stopped abruptly, afraid she’d gone too far.