The Incompleat Nifft (16 page)

We looked back, and learned in one glance that there
is
something faster than a basiliscus. Whatever its name is—for that we never learned—there was one of them bursting from the cloud-broth just where we had exited. It had one human rider. Even at that moment I marveled that any man should venture to sit astride the spiny neck of such a thing.

I have seen its kind in little—stiltlegged bugs with long bodies and two forelegs it uses as arms, barbed along their insides for piercing what they snatch. Their flat, triangular heads have two globelike eyes and dainty greedy mouths, whose hunger the barbed arms must constantly serve. This one's head was big enough for a man to dance on, and it was dead white all over. Only the furious power of its wings—two shining blurs at its sides—set off its form against the white background of clouds. The thing was big enough to kill our basiliscus, though it probably wouldn't be able to eat more than two thirds of him. Of course it would start with us.

There was no hurrying our mount, which sped its maximum as a matter of course. Meanwhile, the Queen's rider guided the huge, pale insect into a long, sloping climb which would intersect our course, for we had leveled off. I remembered seeing the lightning deftness of the little cousins of this thing—they can snatch a spider out of its web without leaving a tremor among the silk threads. This thing would have a fifteen-foot reach if an inch, and to cap the mess, I could only defend our rear with one hand; it was imperative for both of us to keep one hand dug into the lizard's scales, or the wind or our passage would sweep us off.

We were over the steppes now. Hopelessly I chose a stabbing-grip on our spear with my free hand. The look of the hell-bug as it rose behind us was all fragility and grace. Its two lower pairs of legs hung trailing in dainty curves under its long body, which looked as smooth and balanced as the war-canoes of the southeastern savages. It was getting so near you could make out the faceting of its eyeglobes, a taunting reminder of the pearls in our bags. I could even see the face of the soldier guiding the thing.

It's strange to see a man's face through the screaming wind of that speed, with the whole sky around you and the whole world beneath, a barren floor, and still to get as clear a feel for his past and his character as if the two of you were sitting at mugs in a cozy tavern. But I did feel I knew the man in that glance—plain sense said that it would be a tough and tried soldier, for an important mission like this. The face said that and more—the scars above and below the steady bright eyes, squinted against the wind, the mouth shut and thoughtful. It added up to a sturdy, cool professional who thinks ahead and then kills you without slip-ups when it's his job to do so and he has the edge.

Good soldiers stay alive by being unsentimental and having a quick eye for the main chance. There was no time to chew it over. That quirky peek into the man's nature showed me our only longshot hope, and without a pause for thought I did the hardest thing I've ever done. I grabbed a bag by the bottom, and with a snap of the arm that forced open its drawstrings, I flung its whole contents into the air behind us. I groaned as I did it, looking back. The pearls sped earthward in a glistering black clot, scattering slowly, seeming to swarm as they fell like bees do before hive-making. Our speed and theirs made the jewels flee the faster from sight, and I still see them sometimes in memory, a thousand black stars, tumbling down through the wide blaze of noon.

If betrayal of his Queen was on the soldier's mind before, I do not know. Perhaps if he'd caught us and had the whole two thousand, the habit of loyalty would have stayed firm and he would have smoothly completed his mission. But seeing the pearls there, stark and dazzling in the sky, and knowing that they could be his or they could be who knew whose—it shocked him into realizing the wealth he was pursuing. If he did not follow them down, and finished the chase, they would be leagues behind, and he might never find them. Almost without hesitation, he reined his mount into a dive.

It had to be a whole thousand, you see, for some would be lost, and there must be enough even so to purchase swift escape and a new life. The Queen would eventually work a spell of recall on the mount he rode, and in the meantime he could use it to his advantage. Luck go with the man, I bear him no grudge! Still, as I say I see them tumbling, tumbling, those thousand dazzling, jetblack pearls, sometimes in memory.

Ah well! Having a share of a full thousand would simply have meant more squandering to do. The soldier was a career man, a maker of plans and investments, and is probably cherishing his coffers right now, and dreading thieves. For me, it was work enough to rid myself of the five hundred I came away with. Think—I did it in two years! Surely, that's a feat as great as any involved in the winning of those black beauties!

KAIRNHEIM, WHENCE NIFFT'S and Barnar's ill luck led them down to the primary subworld, is as remarkable for its ethnic homogeneity as the other two continents are for their diversity. It does not lack all racial variety. The perimeter of Shormuth—the huge bay in its eastern coast—is host to a miscellany of folk. But the bulk of the continent is inhabited by Kairns, a cattle-raising people originating from the southern limb of Lúlumë, across the Sea of Catástor.

The Kairns came to Kairnheim in two major waves of migration separated by an interval of about four hundred years. It was the southeast half of the continent that received both influxes, for east of the Ikon Mountains luxuriant grasslands stretch practically unbroken for three hundred leagues to the coast. This gently rolling land, thickly braided with rivers, is the realm called Prior Kairnlaw. It is superlative grazing land. The Kairns who held it first were loath to share it with their late-coming cousins, and indeed, did not do so, for their cousins—more numerous and hungrier than they—drove them out of it, and into the northwestern plateaus, the colder, rockier, more arid half of the continent known today as Latter Kairnlaw.

Kine Gather lies in Latter Kairnlaw not far from the Bone Axe Mountains, a northern branching of the Ikons. Like its sister-cities of this area—White Lick, Crossgulch, Bailey's Yards—it grew from a cattle market on a river, a rough-and-ready sort of place where stock could be auctioned and shipped by enterprising men unwilling to endure tedious inquiries into their herds' provenance or prior ownership. And, again like their neighbors, Kine Gather's citizens retain even in the moderate prosperity they currently enjoy all the predilections of their city's founders: raiding, cattle-rustling, passionate quarrels over boundaries, and blood-feuds.

Most Latter-Kairns share these traits, and this is understandable. Their sparse-grown, harsh-wintered terrain compels their herdsmen to arduous seasonal pilgrimages to keep their animals in pasture. Only the hostility of that land to any other economy—combined with what might be called a very stubborn cultural spirit—keeps them at their historic trade. And yet, for all their pains, they can expect to raise only maculate hornbow and dwarf-ox with any success, while in Prior Kairnlaw both these breeds thrive and four others besides: palomino hornbow, crucicorn, plodd and jabóbo (of which last, more presently). If scarcity alone had not made cattle thieves of the Latter-Kairns, their enduringly bitter sense of dispossession would have done it. Inevitably they have robbed one another, but they have always preferred the richer plunder and the prestige among their fellows to be won by raiding their homeland's usurpers.

One aspect of this historic conflict—the jabóbo question—has proven particularly fateful for both kairnish nations by leading them, indirectly, to a dangerously frequent contact with the demon realms. Wimfort's folly and consequent abduction—which compelled Nifft and Barnar to their dire expedition—are perfectly symptomatic of this trend, and so its cause deserves some amplification.

Jabóbos flourish in Prior Kairnlaw as they do nowhere else on earth. The beasts are big quasi-bipeds, about twice the size of a man. They are cleanly (they wash themselves in the manner of cats), short-muzzled, small-eared and, except for their thick, stubbish tails and huge thighs, have a rather anthropoid aspect. They are valued for their milk, not their flesh, and no more males than are needed for breeding are ever raised. The females have remarkably pronounced mammary developments which are, if I may so phrase it, directly and immediately exploitable by men. The herdsman's feeling of communion with such a breed is—imaginably—great. Not to put too fine a point on it, jabóbo cults—originating in various fertility-promoting rituals informally practiced by herdsmen—now abound in Prior Kairnlaw. Sacred herds are designated and the rituals centered on them are reported—probably reliably—to have both dionysiac and priapic features. (The herds are often called, by local cynics, "sacred seraglios.") Whether the ancestors of the Latter Kairns, when they possessed that bovine Eden, ran to similar extremes is a moot question. A primitive purity of both rite and tenet is hotly alleged by them today, and it may have been so. Certainly they too in their day had sacred herds, and their doctrine holds the descendants of these beasts to be sacred still, and still their own religious property. Hence Prior Kairnlaw cult activities are felt by Latter Kairns as an intolerably flagrant profanation of their lactescent icons, a heinous sacrilege daily renewed. On this question the Latter Kairns focus all the rage and anguish of their dispossession. And it was during the First Jabóbo Wars that they—athirst for a vengeance beyond the scope of torch and sword—began buying sorcery in the cities of Shormuth. The Prior Kairns armed themselves in haste from the same dubious arsenal, and three centuries of necromantic skirmishing, not yet abated, were begun.

More than one observer has remarked on the great number of subworld portals to be found in Kairnheim. Some—like Stalwart's Quarry—resemble Darkvent in having been opened by human inadvertence, but far more have appeared with ominous spontaneity, unlocked by earthquake, erosion, and even lightning. The speculation that a zone of extraordinary demon vitality underlies the continent, while doubtless correct, misses the heart of the matter. For surely, centuries of haphazard and indiscriminate invocations of demonic power by the Kairns have had the effect of
concentrating
the ever-alert malevolence of the subworlds beneath their land. The Kairns lack any coherent thaumaturgical tradition, oral or written. Impetuous and ill-informed, they offer a ready market for the services of third-rate mages and unscrupulous spell-brokers, such as are now to be found in great numbers in the Shormuth region. Such "wizardlets" command powers sufficient to tap demonic forces, but inadequate to ensure the mastery of them. In essence, the true demon highways to man's world lie through man's spirit; to yearn for destructive power is to open a gate to the subworlds, and from this we must conclude that the very foundation stone of Kairnheim is by now vermiculate with the hellish traffic that her people have kept so steadily aflowing.

The manuscript of this narrative is in Nifft's own hand. He himself told me he felt a particular responsibility to undertake the labor of writing it, as an act of homage to Gildmirth, for whom he conceived an abiding affection and regard. The Privateer surely merits some particular comment. His birthplace—Sordon Head, on Kolodria's southern coast—is as rich and empire-inclined a city now as it was when he swindled it three hundred years ago to finance his journey to the Demon Sea. Indeed, Gildmirth's ploy proves him a native son, both in his cunning and his venturesome greed, for Sordonite policy has always leaned as heavily on deception to gain its ends as on the strength of its navy. Many writers have held its people's ruthless duplicity to be a shade more (or less) than human, and subscribed to the legend that there is demon blood in the population. There is little more than the city's proximity to Taarg Vortex—the subworld marine portal down which Gildmirth escaped his enraged fellow citizens—to support this tradition. More probable is the rumor that many Sordonite families have close ties with the formidable wizards of the Astrygal Chain southwest of the Great Shallows. Gildmirth, at least, almost certainly enjoyed such connections, for it is unlikely he could have obtained his shape-shifting powers in any other place.

—Shag Margold

JUST AFTER DAWN, they buckled us into the strappadoes. The mechanism is fairly simple. Your wrists and ankles are pulled toward the four corners of the upright frame, and you're splayed in the center like a moth in a web. Each machine has three executioners. Two work the winches until all the joints in your body are pulled apart. The third has a long-handled pruning scissors for starting the cuts around your separated joints. Then the winchmen go to work again, to tear you apart at the cuts. They alternate. It's considered good winch-and-scissors work when your trunk falls all at once out of the splayed rack of your limbs. They don't like thieves in Kine Gather.

The strappadoes were set up in the courtyard of the Rod-Master of Kine Gather. This was a place as big as a town square, for the Rod-Master was a man of vast wealth. In this he was like his city, which was why we had come there. As for the foundation of that wealth, it was obvious to anyone with a nose. Even within those mosaicked walls, among those flagstoned promenades with their potted cedars and urns of flowers, you could smell the dung and horses' stale that laced the morning air. The aroma might have come from any of the corrals and stockyards around the city, or it might have come from the thousands of citizens themselves who waited in the courtyard, chatting pleasantly, to see us die.

Frankly, I was in a rotten mood. I saw no way out of this. The order would be given at the first rays of sun that entered the courtyard, and the east was already well ablaze. The bailiff climbed onto the platform we were strung up on. He undid a scroll, and read aloud from it in a mellow voice, which the crowd fell silent to hear: