The Incompleat Nifft (19 page)

In these last remarks I was mixing business with my pleasure. He had to be roughly handled to feel our seriousness. Otherwise he would be trying to wear us down or torture us into compliance.

He took it hard. The council was dead still, eating up every word for their friends afterwards. Kamin blazed like a signal fire, and glared at the guards. They came uncertainly forward, but Kamin could bring out neither a word or gesture of command.

He must now either kill us or ask our terms. We all knew which he would do. Still, he took a long time to swallow what I'd put on his plate. At last he did it with a certain grace. He sat down. He looked at the floor a moment, then turned to me a blank face.

"What are your terms?" he asked.

"Let your scribe set them down as I speak them, and then article yourself to them in full legal form."

"It will be done. I will article myself if the terms are . . . acceptable."

So I gave our terms. If we emerged from Darkvent with his son, we were to receive mounts, a full set of new arms each, an oath of non-pursuit, the freedom of Charnall, who was to be liberated on the spot to accompany us, and four packbeasts.

I rather liked Charnall, but our main motive here was to ensure our freeing from the Life-Hook and any other ensorcellments that might be slipped into us along with the protective spells we were going to have to submit to before descending. As for the packbeasts, I didn't explain them until I'd given specifications for all the other things. This took some time, and the scribe's quill squawked and chuckled on the parchment, keeping up with me. At last I said: "And, divided equally on the four packbeasts, four hundredweight of pure gold, securely lashed in saddlebags of stout leather."

Kamin had been waiting, eyes on his hands, for the real price to be named. Now he shook slightly, but kept silence and didn't look up. From what one heard of the man, the price probably represented about a third of his personal worth—and he could be sure he'd get none of it from the municipal pocket. I'd have liked to take two thirds, but it's a fool who takes so much that he guarantees pursuit while making fast flight impossible. The quill scratched. Wax and taper were brought. Kamin didn't move, and I thought the wax would harden before he did. Then, with a grunt, he jammed his signet against it, seized the quill and slashed his signature across the vellum. Then he sat glaring at me, as if I were some species of pestilence his fate forced him to endure. It made my gorge rise, and I shook my fist at him.

"By the Black Crack, Rod-Master," I snarled. "I'd love to take you with us. You'd think the wage a small one then."

The subworld portal called Darkvent is an abandoned mine shaft in the Smelt Hills. The Smelts are a bouldery, bony-looking range bordering a desert, and we reached them in the afternoon of a windy, sun-drenched day. As our mounts climbed the switch-backs toward the hilltops, Barnar and I let our eyes linger on the limitless blue sky with a feeling that none of our escort could have shared. Around us the wind muttered as it does among rocks in a dry country—a sad, confiding sound I've always liked.

We had neared the summits when Charnall, riding behind, nudged me and pointed down to the desert floor. I could now see the ruins of a town there on the range's footslopes. It had been a big town, but built mostly of wood, and such bleached shards of its walls as remained standing—shaggy with dead brambles—recalled those cracked husks of insects that hang in dusty winter spiderwebs. For the rest, the townsite was marked mostly by weed-lines, where crumbled planks and posts had fattened the stingy soil.

"Westforge," he said. He got all the life the place must have had into the way he said it—the shanty-taverns, the sharpers, the whores, the nights of fierce music and lightly drawn blades. In twenty years a town doesn't take deep root, but it can get big and lively. And then had come the day when, up here in the hills, the miners had pushed their shaft that last yard too far. The very mountain core which it pierced had trembled, fractured, and plunged into the unsuspected abyss underlying it. The luckier of the miners, who were working higher up the shaft, made it back into the light of day, and saw the sun once more before they were taken. And then the outwelling horror had plunged like an avalanche out of the hills and down upon Westforge, where no warning had reached. And then human voices raised up a new and dreadful music from the streets of that city, and many danced there for long days and nights, clasped irresistibly in alien arms. Much of darkness and catastrophe was vomited up from Darkvent in those days, before one of the Elder League perceived the leakage, bestrode his winged slave, and came to seal the breach.

And now we approached the shaft. The sight of it was indefinably loathsome—it carried a crude shock, as if its raw stone had literally touched my naked eyeballs. Darkvent. A bottomless hole filled to the brim with shadow. A diseased mouth forever spewing its one black syllable of obscenity at the sunlight. Barnar and I dismounted and walked to its threshold.

It was like looking through a loophole in Time itself, for inside the shaft, all the handiwork of the Westforge miners lay untarnished, bright and whole despite its three generations of sleep. We looked disbelieving back down at the splintered bones of the city, and again at what lay within the shaft's ensorcellment, annexed therewith to the agelessness of the subworlds. There Westforge's craft and ingenuity survived, and testified to the vigor and hope it had once enjoyed.

I have heard of nothing resembling their methods of mining elsewhere. They had been great smiths, and had made their ore-carts of iron, with iron wheels. The wheels ran in a pair of steel troughs laid perfectly parallel and affixed to thousands of short wooden beams set into the earth, all lying crosswise to the parallel troughs. Heavy cables hauled the carts by means of big windlasses, one of which stood in clear view within. The tremendous weight this system could haul—swiftly and with scarcely any drag—was instantly obvious.

All that gleaming wrought steel, paralyzed and silent, all swallowed and sepulchred by forces against which the rarest works of human enterprise are like sand-forts on a stormy beach. How keenly we felt, at that portal, the lunatic futility of our own enterprise! Compared to all this impotent iron, what were our own poor tools? Two short-swords, two broadswords, two slings, two lances, two javelins, two shields. Granted, this was not all we had—heavens no! Charnall had also laid three spells on our bodies. One, the Wayfarer's Blessing, we felt only as a kind of blankness in gut and throat—we would need neither food nor drink while subject to it. The second was the Charm of Brisk Blood. This felt like a large dose of tonic weed. My muscles were as taut and jumpy as a pack of hungry rats, and my veins were so fat my arms felt like they were wrapped with snakes. In situations where mere fleetness and stamina mattered, this would be an undeniable asset. The third spell was the Life-Hook. This I experienced as a little sore spot in my heart, the kind of pang a large, old scar sometimes gives you—a flesh-memory of pain. The asset here was entirely our captors'.

A sensation of absolute aloneness touched both of us, in the same instant, it seemed, for we both turned to look behind us. And I almost laughed to see how alone we actually were, how far off from the shaft-mouth Kamin, Charnall, and the fifty soldiers of our guard had stationed themselves. Many of the soldiers, who were going to have to bivouac here to await our return, held even their eyes averted from Darkvent. Kamin sat tall in his saddle, his unease masked with disdain. Charnall sat slumped, avoiding our eyes.

Barnar grinned bitterly. "Are you all so modest?" he cried. "You stand so removed, gentlemen! Perhaps it's delicacy? You fear we'll snub you if you come forward to wish us luck?"

At this, Charnall dismounted and came forward with guilty haste, stumbling slightly. He was able to imagine our destination in far greater detail than the others and felt, I think, a generous dread for us, beyond his sense of his own danger. As he neared us it was his right hand he held extended, but then he faltered, and it was his left he ended by giving us, for on his right he wore the graven ring to which he had anchored the control of the Life-Hooks and the other two spells he had put on us. I could not forbear letting my gaze rest ironically an instant on the ring. He shrugged, smiling sadly, and I found I had to smile back.

"What clowns we are, Charnall," I told him, "with all our supposed wits. Do
you
believe we are actually doing this? I mean, if
I'm
not dreaming the whole thing, maybe
you
are."

"And if you are," Barnar put in, "feel free to take a break any time. Why overdo? You could just summarize the rest of the plot for us over a cozy breakfast."

"Nifft. Barnar. You
do
know that this whole idea . . . I mean that this whole approach to the problem was the farthest thing from my remotest . . . I mean let alone my even knowing who you were or that you were in town, or ever planning your—"

I clapped him on the shoulder, saying, "Peace, good wizardlet." The epithet made him smile ruefully. "You're too well aware, good Charnall, of what it means to enter the subworlds, ever to have hatched this scheme. Only an arrogant ignoramus like Kamin could seriously entertain it."

Charnall nodded, moodily twisting the control ring on his finger. "It's ridiculous," he said, "even callous perhaps, but I keep thinking that if only I could find more to like in the boy, all this wouldn't seem quite such an insane
waste
of . . ." He checked himself, mortified.

"Our lives," Barnar finished gently. Charnall nodded, but then angrily shook his head.

"No.
There's Gildmirth. He
is
there. There's something about this legend—from the first I heard of it it struck me as truth, and even more than that, I could feel the man himself in it, feel a rare and vital personality behind the deeds reported of Gildmirth. I mean, for some reason, when I think about it, I actually feel
hope,
and if only you can
find
him,
reach
him . . ."

His own words had brought back to him the utter vagueness and improbability of the entire project. His shoulders sagged. I squeezed his arm consolingly and looked at Barnar, who nodded. Raising my arm in salute, I hailed Kamin: "So down we go after your brat, cattle-king! Go home and reflect that if you have any hope at all, it lies with two men whose freedom you have stolen, and whose fealty you have coerced. If you find any comfort in such an arrangement, you're welcome to it."

A soldier came forward with two lit torches and a bundle of several dozen more. As he neared the shaft, he made a sign against evil over his eyes, which he tried to hold downcast, sparing them the least glimpse of our destination.

Thrusting our two ridiculous little flames ahead of us, we stepped inside Darkvent. We felt a light shock of immersion, as in a very tenuous, oily medium. Being men, we felt no more of a transition than that, and received no hint of the hell of pain which the barrier-spell opposed to any of demon-kind who strove to pass through it in the other direction.

The main shaft, with its steady downward pitch and its triple course of cart-tracks, remained unmistakable through a multitude of intersections with branch-shafts. It was a warm, gingery darkness that we walked through, with an elusive, sickish spice to it that you not only smelled and tasted, but also felt with your skin, like a breath of fever. And I could have sworn that in that darkness, the torchlight didn't fan out and attenuate—it stopped short, enveloping us in two eerily distinct bubbles of light outside of which the perfect blackness teemed with all the shadows the torches had not yet summoned into form. Meanwhile, within the light, the shadow-play made it seem that our passage called back the long-dead will of the Westforge miners to fugitive, fretful life. Crazily leaning carts appeared to lurch, struggle against the puddled gloom their wheels were mired in, craving to roll again and bear ore. And, in the little maintenance-smithies inset at intervals in the shaft walls, the dropped sledges and toppled anvils twitched restively in the elastic nets of darkness constraining them, as if we'd set them dreaming of the meddlesome, relentless hands of the men who had made them. All this lay in a huge silence that our footfalls hacked at feebly, but could not break. It was an infested silence, wormy with almost-sounds—a great, black throat with the noise of an anguished multitude locked inside it.

An endless time passed, which nevertheless could not have been more than two hours. Just as our second pair of torches was burning out, we reached a broad gallery. It had served primarily as a switching-yard for ore-carts, dozens of which stood in the central maze of track, sidelined long ago for re-coupling to new cart-trains that had never rolled. These carts were unusual in being of two sizes. Among those of the by now familiar dimensions, there stood an equal number of more than twice this capacity. These giants were concentrated toward the gallery's farther side,
where the shaft we had been following resumed its descent—resumed it at a markedly steeper angle, and with a bigger gauge of track, from which it was clear that the larger design of cart had been devoted strictly to working this more swiftly plunging segment of the shaft. In the gallery the giants had transferred their greedily heaped plunder to more manageable vessels for the long climb to the sunlight.

This place had been described to us. Here the mother vein had taken a sudden, steep downturn, while simultaneously thickening and complexifying to a fabulous richness. The Westforge engineers had hesitated only fractionally, then rushed down to pursue the vein at full gallop.

Boom times ensued. Several years of smooth progress and serene profits unrolled before the city, just as (if we'd been told rightly) four unflawed miles of this more cyclopean tunnelwork would now flow easily under our footsoles before we reached the next turning of the mine's fortunes, which was also a turning—a wrenching, really—of the shaft's course. We were told that it continued past this rupture for one more tortured mile, to end in a ragged edge above the subworld gulf. We crossed the gallery's switchyard and continued downward.