The Incompleat Nifft (12 page)

"Not a single flatboat did we see all day," he crowed. "So few people realize, Nifft, how clear it gets here for poaching at this season—of course if it got around they'd get poached so hard in the fall that they'd take action and the easy times would be over. But we are here now, that's the great thing!"

"You said its the Year King ceremony that caused it," I said. "So what's that all about then, friend Kerkin?"

Kerkin was eager to talk of this. In matters of the Queen's government his information far exceeded ours, and every man likes to be expert in something.

"The ceremony's called the god-making of the Year King. It means that the Queen ends his year's reign by immortalizing him, as they say." He paused and chuckled, and so I played along and asked:

"And how does she do that for him?"

"How else? She drains his body of every last drop of his blood, before the eyes of her assembled people. She's very thorough too, for she has to get all of it. If even a cup is lost to her, the charm of the blood is imperfect, and its magic fails."

"And what is its magic for her, Kerkin?"

"It erases from her body the entire year's aging! Of course like all great magic it carries a terrible penalty for failure in its execution. Starting from the sacred night, for every single night that she is in default of the Year King's blood, she will age an entire year. And this aging, if subsequently she repairs the charm, can never be erased; thereafter, the Year King's blood will restore her only to the age to which she advanced while in default. A month's default, you see, would then make a hag of her, and a hag she would stay ever after, with the charm reinstated."

Kerkin was a river of information, and I encouraged him to
flow on—it does not hurt to gather what one can, when it's being offered free. The Queen's feeding was not confined to this yearly rite alone, though this was the bare minimum essential to her needs. She fed sporadically on random subjects—seldom fatally, to encourage her citizen's toleration. The natives of the swamp had received her as their ruler for over three hundred years now, because she had provided the necessary sorcery to expel the ghul, who are also originals of the swamp, and with whom the swampfolk have been immemorially at war.

Kerkin grew warm with his tale. We should kill a ghul, or take the lurk he'd killed, and go to Vulvula's palace to collect the bounty, he said. The great pyramid at the swamp's heart would be alive with folk. Think of the spectacle, and of the jest of being there with a fortune in poached pearls under our doublets! We could sneak a look at the doomed Year King in his chamber before the god-making, for the guards routinely granted a peek for a small bribe—it was almost a tradition. He rattled on, describing the labyrinthine interior of Vulvula's palace as if he knew it at first hand.

Poor Kerkin didn't live past noon of the next day. He fell behind us as we were seeking the day's second polyp. The first had taken all morning, nearly tired us to death and yielded only a runt. Kerkin didn't have our stamina, and swam in a tired daze. Having lost sight of us, he took a side-channel by mistake, and drifted off his guard into a pool he thought we had crossed ahead of him. The violent splashing he made in his misfortune brought us back. We were stunned by what we found. He had blundered into a very deep pool where grew a grandfather polyp so big it raised the hair of my nape—at least fifteen feet from root to palp-tips. And seemingly it hadn't waited provocation, but had seized Kerkin's dangling leg in palps thicker than his body. We got there just as it pulled him under. It enfolded his head between two immense palps and wrenched violently.

Kerkin's whole body spasmed as if lightning was going through it, then he hung from the thing's grip like a sodden log, and the polyp began to feed with a tearing and grinding that bared his armbone in a sickening few seconds. We did not even try to get the pearls off his body. We swam to a silt bar and crawled onto the mud.

We felt glum as a northern winter. Now our labors must increase, and we'd begun to appreciate the full range of accidents that could befall a man here. We counted our pearls again. We had enough to live well on for a year—enough to buy expensive magic from the best sorcerers; enough to buy women of the rarest accomplishments. But there was so much
more
all around us. You know the feeling. I was racked by it once before. I had just robbed the Earl of Manxlaw and was passing through his seraglio on my way out of his villa, in the dead of night. I was beckoned by a lovely thing. Reckless with success, I paused to serve her with a will. But as soon as I rose a half-dozen others had wakened, and they hotly persuaded me in whispers. I was profoundly moved. I felt filled with the power to stay there and serve them all. But I had a king's ransom in my bag, and left with a wrenching of the heart.

This was worse. The pearls are worth far more than gold by weight—a fortune of them is so marvelously portable for a man who lives on the move! Still, we stared at the dirty clouds and each of us waited for the other to be the first to suggest that we rest content with what we had.

"Well," I sighed, just to be saying something, "we have to thank the Queen for making this place as safe as it is. Think if we had ghuls here too!"

"At least they breathe air and have blood," Barnar growled. "They're not this nasty, mud-crawling kind of thing. Polyps, lurks,
pah
!" I was only half seeing him as he spoke, for at that moment a plan was being born in my mind. This plan was a thing of unspeakable beauty and finesse I was almost awed by my own ingenuity.

"By the Black Crack," I said quietly. "Barnar. I have an idea that will make us staggeringly rich. We must get that lurk Kerkin killed, and we must kill a ghul as well, and take them both to the pyramid of the Queen in time for the god-making of the Year King. Kerkin said that would be in five days. We can get there two days early at the least, and that will be perfect!"

You might pay me high and press me hard, but I couldn't say which was worse—killing a lurk in a lagoon with a seven-foot spear, or hunting a ghul in the black hills west of the swamps. We had to do both.

What? you'll say, we couldn't find that lagoon again? No, we found it fast enough. Our polyp had turned black, with half its palps fallen off. The lurk was there too. Unfortunately, its whole hind section had been eaten away. We were saved the trouble at least of hunting out another lurk, because it
was
another lurk that had eaten the dead one's body away, and it was still right there. I hope my fate never again puts such a sight as that before my eyes, black as the mud it crouched on, and looking half as big as the whole pond bottom. I was swimming lead because I was quicker with the spear, and that thing came straight up off its meal at me.

Now as to the spear, it was luck we'd met Kerkin and had it all, but two feet should have been sawn off its haft and the thing should have been rebalanced for aquatic use. The thing was too unwieldy, what with the water's drag. If I hadn't been carrying it head down under water, despite the way it slowed my swimming, I would have died right there. That lurk's fangs were as long as my forearms and before I could even react they were close enough to my thighs for me to count the thorny hairs they were covered with. I had time only to brace my arms—the lurk's own thrust carried him up and pushed the spearhead through the flat part of his body, amongst all those black, knobby eyes. I clung to that spear-haft like an ant to straw in a hurricane, and the buck of that big hell-spider lifted me so far out of the water that I was standing on top of it for an instant.

A handy thing about lurks is that all their hard parts are outside, and these by themselves are not very heavy. They will even moult like snakes, and when they do they leave entire perfect shells of themselves, light as straw. This lurk was a monster, big as a pony, but when we'd bled it we reduced it to half its weight. We milked the bulk of its poison out too—the bushes where it splattered yellowed and died before our eyes.

We towed the carcass out of the swamps to the foothills we had entered from the day before. We scrounged enough dead scrub to make a fire in an arroyo. We found that by slitting the abdomen and shoving coals and heated rocks inside, the rest of its guts could be liquefied and drained out. We worked over it the rest of the day and finally had reduced both parts of the body to a bare husk, mere shells of a tough, flexible stuff that was too dark to reveal its hollowness. The whole thing now weighed no more than a small man, though it was unwieldy. We lashed it to the spear and carried it between us like game. We carried it all night, moving toward the hills in the west.

By dawn we had reached them. Here the ghuls have retreated, to lurk near the swamp, just outside the reach of Vulvula's sorcery. We hid the lurk in a gully and covered it with stones, even though nothing will eat a lurk but another lurk, and they seldom leave the water. We found a place to sleep nearby, well hidden though ghuls never come out in the day. They hunt at night, and we slept till then, for that's the time they must be hunted too.

The things can only be pierced through the sternum, which is narrow, while their backward-folding knees give them the quickness and dodging power of hares. You know me as a man who'll take your money at any kind of a javelin match, but for ghuls I ask a good clear set and a chance to launch before it knows I'm there.

We tried an unusual approach. It was Barnar's plan, and a lovely piece of wit it was. He spun it out of the well-known melancholy of ghuls. They frequently commit suicide by flinging themselves against Vulvula's barriers—one finds them, it's said, hanging dead in mid-air, snared in the Queen's invisible nets of power, and crawling with the blue worms which her spell engenders in its victims. Barnar reasoned that given this sad temperament, a ghul would believe a man claiming to have come to him seeking death.

We found one high in the hills by the light of its cookfire. We studied it carefully from among the rocks. It had a man's leg and haunch on a spit—the skin was flaking away in ash, and the thigh-muscle swollen with its juices. The rest of the man lay in pieces by its side, limbs and head pulled from the trunk like a torn fowl's—for ghuls use neither steel nor stone. The huge hands that had done the tearing were crusted with black blood.

Let's say you were to take our friend Grimmlat. Leave his arms the same length but start his hands at his mid-forearms, and crowd all his muscles into the shortened arm that's left. Give him feet of the same proportions with toes like fingers and knees jutting backward. Double the size of his poppy eyes, undersling his jaw an inch and give him haggle teeth as long as your thumb, and you've got a ghul.

I picked my position in the shadows. Barnar heaved a loud sigh and called out: "Hail there! Is that a ghul?" He trudged noisily into the ghul's camp and under the cover of his noise I moved up into the spot I'd picked. The ghul sprang up at Barnar's entry.

"May I sit down, friend ghul?" my friend asked. "I want you to do me the service of ending my life."

The ghul, for all its ugliness, had a profoundly sad expression due to the way its great eyes droop at the corners, and you rather feel for them when you're not involved. This one was in a defensive crouch, otherwise I would have had my shot at once. In almost all postures the things keep their shoulders folded forward, with their breastbone sunk in between their chest-muscles. They're only vulnerable at the moment of attack. That was the point of Barnar's scheme. He sat down crosslegged, like a man who means to stay. Anger began to replace wariness in the ghul's face.

"Are you deaf?" snapped Barnar. "Why do you hang drooling like an idiot? Kill me!"

The ghul didn't like this. It snorted and sat down again, and resumed turning the spit with a stubborn glare.

"Why should I?" it said. They have small, spidery voices, like a hag's.

"Why
not?" boomed Barnar. "You could eat me! Are you so stupid you can't see that I'm a man like the one you're cooking there?" He gestured indignantly at the head that lay on its side by the ghul. The man had had an enviable black moustache. "You'd kill me quick enough if I didn't ask—you make no sense!" Barnar complained.

"I'm no idiot, you're one," the ghul quavered bitterly. "You'd rot before I got hungry again. Don't you know anything? And anyway I'll do whatever I please and I won't take any orders from you, you big sack of horse-flop!" And it licked its ragged teeth loudly to drive the insult home.

"Insults!" cried Barnar, "and I thought I'd be doing you service for service." He heaved a great sigh, and rested his forehead on his hands. The ghul looked interested now.

"Why do you want to die?" it asked grudgingly.

"Why?" Barnar's head came up in disbelief. "The world so grey and spongy and futile and cold as it is—life so short and nasty and poor and hemmed in on all sides by destruction—and you ask why? I've had enough of it all, that's why!"

The ghul looked musingly. It stood up slowly and took its supper's head in its hand—the hand was big enough for the head to roll several times over from the blood-black claws to the heel of the shovel-wide palm. It rolled the head thoughtfully for a moment, and then drew back its arm to throw. That was my shot.

I pinned it so solid that half the haft re-emerged from its spine, but ghul vitality is terrible, and it actually finished the throw with my spear in it. Barnar moved in time, and the head struck the rock behind him so hard that it flew in pieces like a burst earthen jar.

We took the ghul back to where we had cached the lurk, getting there by dawn. Now we had to build up the lurk's body. We were sure it could be considerably collapsed, and with some experimenting we found how to fold back the legs over the head part, and flatten and fold the back part. We tied it snugly into this reduced position with thongs, and wrapped the whole thing in oilskin. The finished bundle was about the size of a small man who has folded himself up to sleep. We bled the ghul, too, but didn't prepare it any more than by tying the wrists and ankles together. Barnar slung it crosswise over his shoulder and back, and we entered the swamp again. We walked the mudbars openly now, hustling the lurk through the water where we had to, making fairly quick time.