The Incompleat Nifft (18 page)

"He described the spell of incorporation, which was now active within his body, and which would allow him, with a swallow, to make himself the vessel of the elixir. Indeed this is the securest way of holding something like the elixir, whose aura of potency must be so strong as to attract incessant theft spells from other wizards. He had also determined the probable truth of the belief that bonshads are unique among the marine demons in being able to obtain the elixir, whose source lies outside the sea, and thus out of their sphere of power. I urged him to consider why the water demons are never called, though the spells for it are quickly come by. It's because no one
wants
to call them. Not even the greatest Mages report the fruitful employment of these entities. The limit had been reached. I commanded him to come with me to his father, and render a report of his intentions. The lad—that . . .
pup
—threw a paralytic powder in my face, I was a powerless witness of the very brief sequel.

"He made the classic error of the amateur; he barely managed the summoning spell adequately, and he made a grave mispronunciation in the spell of control that is woven into the formula of summons. The control spells are always by far the most difficult portion of the whole. It is even said that many entities will overlook slight errors in the summons if they sense that there are also flaws in the control. These latter mistakes they do not overlook. The boy stood forth boldly and spoke out loudly, and the thing came.

"The slurring of the intonations must have confused its course, for it came up within the wall. The masonry is twelve feet thick down there, and it wrenched itself out of the rock like a drenched cat clawing its way out of water. It was a thing of fur and hooks—tarantula's fur, and hooks to hold you with. Its head was a bouquet of three great spikes, all beaded with the knobs of its eyes. It boomed out of the wall, spraying gravel and dust. Wimfort's jaw dropped and swung like a tavern sign in the breeze." Here one of our guards made a choking sound, and coughed at some length. Charnall looked demurely at his hands for a moment. Then he went on evenly:

"The lad didn't produce another syllable. The thing sprang on him. By the Crack, gentlemen—it had the quickness of a . . . a stupendous
flea.
It seized him, spun him, sank its spikes into his back, neck and skull, and sank through the floor with him. They're still shoring up the hole it left in the wall, but the floor shows not the smallest chip or crack."

There was silence for a moment. "You mentioned hope," I said. Charnall looked at me, and acknowledged the irony with a thin smile. Slowly he rubbed his palms together.

"It sounds unlikely, does it not? As for getting down there we have, as you surely know, our own little hellmouth not twelve leagues distant, near the ruins of Westforge in the foothills of the Smelt Mountain range. But once down there, you will be without maps of that terrain, and no one knows the size or whereabouts of that sea. And yet, hope we do undeniably have, however slight." As he turned to this topic, he brightened considerably. His gaunt body trembled, I thought, with a scholar's suppressed glee over a rare discovery. He looked at us, probably gauging what we could understand of literary matters.

"I'll spare you details," he went on. "But I began with a faint recollection of a figure generally called the Privateer who had done some exploit, or suffered something, in the Demon Sea long ago."

"But that's—" Barnar said. Charnall begged silence with a gesture. "Patience, good thief—legends, I know, but still relevant. Luckily, so far I have been the most advanced mage that Kamin has found available, as well as being the most intimately acquainted with the boy's plight. For a month now Kamin's funded my efforts to find a solution. Last week I found a poem written about a century ago. Listen to these lines,
gentlemen."

He dragged a chest out from under the table he'd been sitting on, and took a parchment from it. What he read us was nothing more nor less than a garbled version of the third and fourth quatrains of Parple's "Meditation." His mention of the Privateer had half prepared us for this. When he was done I said to Barnar, "Do you recall the rest of it, my friend? He's just read us the middle of it, hasn't he?"

Occasionally Barnar can be brought to display his reading. Soon after joining with him, I knew he was fluent in three tongues, but even I was long in learning that he could read High Archaic every bit as well as I. And it's always a treat at such exhibitions to watch his hearer's bewilderment at the erudition flowing from the mouth of that gruff, battered giant.

Barnar cocked an eyebrow and bowed slightly. " `A Meditation on Man and Demon,' by Curtus Parple," he intoned, Then he recited it:

Man, for the million million years
 

He's shared the earth with demonkind,
 

Has asked why they, in their ageless lairs
 

So lust for his frail soul and mind.
 

Whatever hands set the clock of stars
 

Wheeling and wheeling down through time
 

Also sundered those two empires
 

With barriers both now over-climb.
 

That men should go down to those sunless moors
 

Where Horror and Harm breed deathless forms,
 

Or to the Demon-Sea's littered shores,
 

Or its depths, where riches breed like worms—
 

That men do this (as the Privateer
 

Gildmirth of Sordon did in his pride)
 

Is no surprise, save that they
dare

To sail that shape-tormented tide.
 

But why are netherworld nets flung here,
 

And men snagged out of their mortal terms—
 

Trawled kicking down from life in the air
 

To immortal drowning in monstrous arms
?

Early on in the recitation, Charnall had stopped grimacing and started correcting his text to Barnar's version. Now he looked at us ruefully. "Courage, Charnall," I said. "No one can read everything. Parple's work is highly esteemed in Karkhmahn-Ra. Moreover, Gildmirth's name is prominent in children's tales thereabouts."

"No doubt you know all I've dug up and more," he said. "Still I won't believe that I've followed a fool's trail, no matter what you may have heard of the legend."

"I won't try to tell you that you
have
been wrong," I answered. "For all we know, it's one of those tales with a true core. The tradition is not highly specific, after all. Gildmirth is depicted as a master entrepreneur and swindler. His exploits are variously reported, but all the stories agree as to his last feat. He swindled the city of Sordon-Head—his home town—out of a fortune, which he used to finance an expedition down to the Dead Sea. He did not return. Some sources say he endures in bondage, like so many thousands of lesser souls in that place."

Charnall was much consoled by this. "Splendid! This chimes with my further discovery, and it seems I can tell you something after all. For no more than three generations ago, a man descended to the sea and returned alive, and he returned with gold which Gildmirth the Privateer had gathered for him from the depths. The Swindler of Sordon-Head does indeed endure, gentlemen. He lives, and moves freely in those waters, and yet bound he surely is—time without end. He's held by a ghoulish disease of the will that some being, slipping through his ingenious spells, infected him with. But as he was a man of powers, so he continues to be in his captivity."

Barnar nodded. "It's said he was a shape-shifter, and that he had five metamorphoses—one for fire, ice, earth, air, and water."

"He has far more than five now," Charnall answered grimly. "I will tell you of that. The source of the information is the merchant Shalla-hedron of Lower Adelfi. It was he who went down to the sea and retrieved some of its wealth. His son recorded Shalla-hedron's experiences in this."

Charnall showed us a massive leather-bound book entitled: "The Life and Personal Recollections, as well as Many pointed Observations, of Grahna-Shalla, son of Shalla-hedron of Lower Adelfi, who Fished in the Demonsea and Returned with Booty Marvelous to Tell."

The scholar threw the book on the table. "Almost every line is about him—the
son,
an intolerable, vapid ninny with a turgid and interminable style. But there are among the rest two brief pages of priceless information. The essential thing is that the Privateer's aid can be purchased. What the price is, Shalla-hedron did not report, or his sprout did not remember. All we learn is that `it is a price easy of the paying, and not missed after.'

"Well now—I didn't say a great hope, did I? It is something at least, to have such an ally, if once you can find him in that place. . . ."

We talked a good deal longer before we told our guards that we were ready with our answer. It was one of the most discouraging conversations I've ever had.

It had seemed unavoidable that we should make the descent to the subworld. But there are, of course, a number of portals, and we'd heard one of them was in Torvaal Canyon, scarcely forty leagues from Darkvent in the Smelt Mountains, where we'd be going down. So there had been some hope that, while we couldn't evade entering that hell, we could at least spare ourselves the soak in the Demon Sea, and make straight for the nearest way out.

But it turned out that Charnall wasn't so mediocre in his craft that he couldn't command Undle Nine-fingers' Life-Hook. The spell was the great bibliophile's only original creation in thaumaturgy—he used it to secure the loyalty of the slaves who worked in his vast archives. It puts your life in the spellcaster's hand, and until it's removed he can jerk the heart out of you at any time. It also lets him visualize where you are—quite vaguely, but enough to distinguish between sunlight and the subworld's lurid sky. Charnall told us regretfully that he must guard his own life by governing ours very strictly through this means.

It was mortifying! We'd come to the city intending a theft, of course, but were guilty of no more than a week's general reconnoitering when we were taken. It was clear to us now that the order to plant goods in our inn-chamber, and ambush us by night, had come straight from Kamin. The man, after desperate efforts, had faced the fact that wizards great enough to retrieve his son by spells alone were rare; the few he'd managed to approach made it clear what the attitude of the rest would be—that amateurs played with Power at their own risk. Thus we were such things as the stones a soldier flings at some enemy who's just shattered his lance and sword. We were scarcely likely to make a dent on the problem, but Kamin seized us and used us because we lay to hand, and he had nothing else. There was a certain pathos in this, I suppose, but my eyes remained dry. The ignominy! That Nifft the Lean, and Barnar Hammer-hand, should be snared like a pair of wood-hens, trussed with magic, and booted below to fight demons with swords! As we were marched to the councilroom, Barnar and I needed only a few murmurs to agree on our course. Our dignity was going to be salved with Rod-Master Kamin's gold.

That impressive individual was on his feet when we were brought into the chamber, and he turned an august scowl on us that was supposed to strike us like a wintry blast. The man had wide cheeks and small no-nonsense eyes, but he didn't scowl well. It made his neck bunch up on the collar of his gold-brocaded tunic, and made you think of a pig's head on a plate in a grocer's stall.

The councillors were mostly older men, and their silence reflected not Kamin's power, but their own neutrality. We'd gleaned enough of the political picture during our week in town, to know that they were all powerful property-holders. Because Kamin was the son of the city's most beloved Rod-Master, he could usually count on a vital minimum of popular acceptance, and was, within limits, deferred to by the magnates. They would not follow him into disgrace, however, and some of them were said to dislike the prospect of a three-generation dynasty in a post that was traditionally elective. Wimfort's past and his predicament were thus queasy ground for the Rod-Master, and his arrogance with us showed he knew this. He wanted the business done, without protracted discussions aggravating the council's sense of what a burden the boy had recently been on the community. Kamin meant to ram it down our throats and trundle us off quick.

"Now you understand the terms," he said. "If you bring the boy back, your sentences are transmuted. The council has affirmed this measure. Give us your answer: Death, or the journey."

I bowed. "I assure you my lord, Barnar and I are agreed on one thing: You are very tall and impressive the way you tower and glower and glare like that. I promise you it does make a man shake to look at you. But if you think Barnar and I will tramp through the Primary Subworld, and wade in the infernal lake itself, for no more pay than a kiss-my-arse-and-fare-thee-well, then you can go hump your hat. We'll go all right—for the terms I state and not a jot less. If you don't like our bid you can put us back on the rack. We'd rather die than demean our reputations by accepting the swindle you're offering."

Kamin was one of those men who are strong mainly through the habit of success. He had no real toughness or resilence of spirit. A dab of insolence had him red and sputtering:

"You impudent, skulking dog!" he said. "You arrogant gutter-sneak. I'm going to have them . . . I'll have you . . ."

"Oh yes, your eminence," I said,
"have
it done. What would you not
have
done to us? You're wiser than to risk the doing yourself. But mark me. You took us for fools once with your false arrest. Once is all. We'll go down there all right, and you have your luck to thank that you trapped us rather than others. We have high reputations to maintain. We dislike to turn aside even from such a thing as this once the challenge is down. But we'll be paid what we dictate, and heroes are expensive. And that, you jowly sack of slops, you sagbellied sodomite, you puffed and strutting human pimple, is that."