The Incompleat Nifft (20 page)

The riskier slope, the new giantism of carts and other equipment—this combination was subtly frightening, for in it you could read the city's state of spirit at that period. They were luck-drunk. The headlong grade revealed the dangerous exhilaration to which initial incredulity had yielded, while the unwieldy presumption of the machinery's new scale betrayed the tipsy acceleration of Westforge's appetite to possess its inordinate good fortune. Poor, luckless wretches! What haste they made to feast on the mountain's bowels, thereby, with precisely equal haste, delivering to demon-kind a very different feast—themselves.

The crossbeams of the tracks started to get slippery before we had pushed even a half mile beyond the gallery. Barnar took a nasty fall that snuffed his torch. As he got to his feet I interrupted his muttered blasphemies: "Look down ahead. Is it getting light?"

It was. At first it was scarcely light we saw—an oily pallor veining the dark, no more. But soon the features of the shaft before us began, unmistakably, to emerge, varnished with a glossy, jaundiced fulgor. Barnar took another fall, and then I took one worse than either of his, and suffered truly amazing pain when forced to use my elbow for an emergency anchor against the track's slimy beams.

"Barnar," I said between gasps, "beyond the collapse . . . It's
bound
to get steeper. . . . So we should just simply
string out
. . . a simple, stinking, putrid, slime-kissing, thrice-buggered
cable
. . .
to go
down
along . . ."

I was proposing more toil than I knew. Even though we could all but count on finding supplemental lengths of cable on our way down, which our line could incorporate as we descended, still we gathered, cut, coiled and packed over two miles of it before proceeding, if only because we did not yet imagine how we could reach the subworld floor from the shaft, and for all we knew a simple line might serve the need. From our supply, and what we foraged, we pieced out our safety line behind us as we stepped—steady and methodical—deeper into the sulphuric haze in which tracks, crossties, timbers and walls were manifested with gradually increasing detail, all of them like objects emerging from smoke. Four torches later—for we kept them past our need of them, for the sake of their earthly familiarity—we reached the shaft's mortal wound, the catastrophic rupture Charnall had called "the buckling." Here commenced the shaft's terminal phase, for past this point its stony matrix had partially subsided into the subworld chasm, though it had stopped just short of following the rest of the mountain's core down to the demon-infected plains. The megalith still clung to its place in the architecture of the upper world, though it hung askew of its former placement. The discontinuity this produced in the shaft was dramatic. The tunnel was brutally torqued, its rocky walls having splintered while its shoring, though wrenched, had held. The tracks had also held together, though their bending had divorced them at some points from their crossbeams. They arched gracefully through a half-spiral, then plummeted down the nearly vertical drop that followed. Hereafter we fervently rejoiced in my foresight regarding the cable, for the shaft's terminal segment often opposed slopes of sixty and seventy degrees to our progress, while the febrile subworld light, which now filled the tunnel, seemed more than ever to have the property of lubricating whatever it lit.

And yet we all but forgot the hardship of the tricky path once we had seen a certain thing awaiting us below—or more exactly, once we had suddenly
understood,
and rightly interpreted, something we had been seeing for some time. It was at the center of our vision's limit, a ragged patch of yellow, criss-crossed with grey lines. And when, all at once, it became obvious that this was a patch of subworld sky framed by our tunnel's end, our rapt scrutiny had a new puzzle to pick at—the meaning of that disorderly grey network. Down we came, planting our feet with absentminded care while our eyes strained ahead to untangle this perplexing image.

But we had drawn quite near it before we comprehended its spatiality. At last it was clear that all the strands of the meshwork hung outside of the shaft, that somehow the whole crazy rigging was strung up in the open air just beyond our tunnel's ragged issue.

And then a warning was murmured to me. I was ahead of Barnar on the cable, and I heard from behind me that one fleet syllable of premonition, a throaty hum like that of a loosed bowstring. This touched my ears, and in scarcely the time it takes a hand to clench—which my rope-hand did—it was followed by a crushing blow laid across the backs of my knees. My legs shot out from under me as neat as ninepins. My grip on the cable held—it was my shoulder that nearly came apart while, for an instant, my body was stretched out on the air like a banner in a brisk wind. Well before I hit the ground, I understood that it would be far better for me if I did
not
hit the ground, and that if I must perforce do so, the less I tarried thereon the better, since it was clearly upon the ground that this trap was designed to throw me.

Actually, the line had robbed the trap of its full effectiveness. The blow I'd taken would have flung an unanchored victim right out to the shaft's ragged lip and left him sprawled on its dizziest salience above the webbed abyss. Instinctively I riveted my eyes on that menacing spot even while—finding I had no real alternative—I gave gravity her due and yielded to my body's stubborn determination to hit the ground, will-I nill-I.

Starbursts blotted my vision, yet still I held my eyes to their target. And while my stunned frame wallowed to get its legs beneath it; while returning vision dispelled the white obscurity that filled my eyeballs; while my right hand groped for its dropped lance—throughout all the harrowing micro-pulses of precious time which these accomplishments consumed, still I fought to see, exclusive of all else, that shaft-lip and any least thing that happened there. Unmonitored by me, my palm found the haft of my spear. Precisely then, as if the touch had summoned it, a scorpion as big as a battle-chariot swarmed into the shaft-mouth, and came avalanching towards us on a great splashing racket of rattly legs. My own legs weren't quite under me yet, but Barnar's lance came plunging past my shoulder and planted its razor-edged steel a half-yard deep in the junction of her soft throat with the first of her glossy black thoracic plates.

For of course this thing was not pure scorpion. Most demons, having something of man in them, are just such hybrids as this which leered at us with an old woman's face obscenely socketed in the huge ribbed and jointed body. The shot had stopped her, by which I mean made her pause, no more. For she crouched perfectly poised, the dreadful,
limber power of her legs undiminished. Cautiously, delicately, her bulky pincers nibbled at the shaft sprouting from her gorge. And though this brought tears of pain in thick streams from her eyes, it was a look of the purest lunatic glee that her face beamed on us. It was a jowled, flabby-mouthed face, the brow fantastically gnarled—nightmare-knotted—above her crazed red eyes. Her mouth gaped—displaying not teeth but black barbs—and she paid out an endless red tongue that dangled to her wounded throat and licked it caressingly. Then, in a gurgling whisper, she said: "I'm going to lick your face clean off your skull. Slowly, thoroughly, lick it entirely off. I'm going to sting you and bind you and scoop your loins hollow and lap out your brains. And then I'm going to make you again and start over."

It was just as she finished speaking that I made my cast. Almost casually her pincers rose, their movement perfectly timed to shield her face. Unluckily for her, I wasn't aiming at her face. Crouched for attack as she was, with her tail advanced in a strike-ready arc over her back, my target was positioned several feet above her head, and I didn't miss it. Skewered, her stinger's poison bulb dropped a black bucketful of her venom onto her face.

Her agony was volcanic. She surged and crashed against the shaft walls like a stormy sea, her pincers tearing at the sizzling mess whence her howls erupted and her simmering eyes leaked out in red rivulets. We stood with broadswords drawn waiting for a safe moment to move in, but in the end we were spared that task, for after a few moments the poison seemed to reach some central nerve in her. She rose in the air, folding and unfolding spasmodically, crashed down on her back and writhed so mightily that the movement propelled her like a snake straight backward and launched her from the shaft-lip. We rushed to the lip and looked out. We learned then the obstacles that opposed our entry of this vast prison where the key to our freedom lay.

The tunnel issued from a stupendous wall of ragged bluffs, scarred by great landslides and stretching past vision to either side. The cliffs dropped sheer below us for nearly half a mile down to a zone of swampland, and all across the face of them the grey webbing spread, like a shroud crawling with grave-lice. For everywhere big multilegged shapes crouched in that dingy rigging, or ran along it with the incredible speed ants have on their own tiny scale. And other forms decorated the nasty weave—dangling bundles of webbing which stirred and twisted impotently against their anchorages. Vague though they were in their wrappings, we could see that many of these were winged things of a stature about twice that of a man, but the commonest food of the scorpion demons was themselves. Their cannibal struggles raged everywhere, including at a point not far beneath our feet, where our recent adversary, snagged in the web by her tail, offered little effective resistance to the greedy pincers of two of her confreres.

As for the swamp below us, it was apparently a kind of backwater off a river which, far to our right, flowed out from the foot of the cliffs, and divided the plain with a shallow valley. Across the valley, perhaps two leagues distant from us, a city of giant towers stood, stilt-supported platforms crowned with buildings. And, looking small as flies above a far off corpse, things numerous and fleet flew among the titanic structures.

But we gave most of our attention to the cliff that we had to descend. We could see that any rope we dropped would hang in striking range of a score of places in the webbing. We'd be picked off within ten minutes of our starting down. And when we'd brooded on this for a while, we discovered an added unpleasantness; the swamps we must cross once down were astir everywhere with the movement of submerged shapes. None broke the surface. All we could be sure of was that they were big—very big.

We sat down and rested. We were so discouraged, we couldn't speak a word. I discovered that my spear had fallen free from the demon's stinger, and that her venom had only slightly corroded its ironwood haft. I was about to exult in this luck, but then only smiled bitterly. We had so little to work with! Barnar spat vigorously out into the yellow air.

"I'd like to sweep that foulness off the rock, like cobwebs with a broom," he snarled.

"Too bad we didn't bring a broom," I sighed. "Do you think we could drop rocks big enough to break a path through the web?"

"How many do you think we could manage that were even as heavy as that demon, let alone heavier?"

This had already occurred to me. I sighed again. Then I had an idea.

When Barnar had heard me out, he sat meditating for a moment. "You know," he said, "its wildness may be the thing about it that will make it work. I mean, I don't think you can ease and creep your way into a realm like this. If you try, the first little entity will smell your uncertainty and hesitation. Horror and bad luck will converge on you. But if you barge in with all possible force, storm the gate . . . then maybe luck might just give way a few inches for you, and let you pass."

And so we started back up the shaft.

A long time after ascending—how can I know
how
long?—I counted off the first hundred paces of our second descent, measuring from the switching-yard gallery and down the main shaft's penultimate steepening. I found my mark and looked back toward the gallery. It was suddenly eerie that the sections of its walls and ceiling I could see should be stained with the lurid wash of the forge's light, braziers and many torches.

"All right!" I shouted. "Send it down!"

My voice woke the noise of the mighty windlass above, and it all felt even more like some ghostly resurrection of the mine's great, toilsome soul, so long in its grave. Dusty and smoke-stained as I was, it was not hard to feel like some reanimated Westforger—certainly, I was as far from the world of men as any ghost is.

But when the thing I had summoned rumbled into view and came easing down the tracks, my little whimsicality was badly jarred. No such conveyance as this had ever ridden these rails in the doomed city's heyday. Though one soon saw the two giant ore-carts that were its substructure, its embellishments made it look far more like some monstrous weapon than any kind of mining equipment, and of course it
was
a weapon.

We'd welded on a prow—an upswept scimitar forged from the smithy's stocks of sheet-iron and sharp as a well-honed axe-bit. We'd also welded two long horizontal vanes to the sides of both carts—these were shaped rather like an arrow's fletches and were also sharpened. Lastly, both carts had a pair of broad vanes that pivoted on pins set in the frontal segments of their boxes' rims. At present they resembled a beetle's wings half-folded over its back, but they could be pushed out to a much broader lateral spread, and locked in this position, from inside the carts.

When this huge, haftless spearhead had nosed down to my mark, I shouted: "Hold!" Barnar locked the windlass and appeared in the mouth of the shaft. When he reached me, he found me staring down the shaft ahead—rather glumly, I suppose.

"The buckling?" he asked after a moment.

"Yes," I said. It didn't bear much dwelling on. We had spent hours there fine-measuring by every trick we could think of, and the tracks at that point certainly
seemed—
throughout their contorted stretch—to have been bent perfectly in phase. At the speed we would be going when we got there, they had better be. Barnar nodded sadly, gazing where I did. He sighed.