The Incompleat Nifft (21 page)

"Oh well," he said.

I nodded. "Well put."

We went to our vehicle. I climbed into the fore-cart, and Barnar into the rear. We spent a moment adjusting ourselves in the shredded cable with which we had packed both carts for cushioning, and checking the operation of our folding vanes. Then we poked our heads up and looked at each other. Barnar had his shortsword in one hand.

"Well, old Ox," I smiled, "all I can say is, I just wish it was
you
riding up front. I still think it's
nose-
weight we should have."

"Tail-weight. But be comforted, Nifft. Either we'll enter that place safely, or we'll ram ourselves so far up its arse you won't even notice the difference."

"Well that's true enough. Yes indeedy. You realize of course, Barnar, that it is simply not possible that we're actually doing this?"

"I've come to the same comforting conclusion, old friend. Therefore let's away—an impossibility can only do us an unreal sort of harm, after all."

I nodded. He reached his sword over the cable holding us by the stern, and the blade whickered through it.

The slope plucked us down. The great iron mass seemed to ride a ramp of ice, so dreadfully smooth was its acceleration. The fetid gloom of the tunnel surged up against us like a foul throat swallowing us ravenously.

The racketing of the tracks rose to a howl, and in moments it had grown light enough to see the shoring's main beams, at their thirty-foot intervals, merging into one blurred, continuous wall.

All that lay in our power to do, in the way of navigational control, we had already done when we cut the cable, and nothing remained for us to do but—when it came time—to spread our vanes as we exited the shaft. The assumption that we would ever be called upon to perform this second task now appeared quite clearly to me as the most extravagant folly, based on a wild delusion conceived by a raving idiot. We would never reach the shaft-mouth! How could we have dreamed that we would attain this velocity? When we hit the buckling, we would quite simply be thrown up against the roof of the shaft with enough force to wed carts with stone—and ourselves between—in an eternally indissoluble bond. Already we were leaving the tracks and resettling on them in long, giddy surges. The feeble subworld light seemed to be igniting, coming on like a flare, so swiftly did we drive toward its source. I saw the buckling just below. I pulled my head back in and lay down. I could not forbear shouting farewell to Barnar, though he could not have heard me over the shriek of the wheels. Then my body, in its cushiony coffin, was seized, lifted up, pulled down, and torqued into a tight spiral—all in the same fraction of an instant. For another half-instant I was floating, and then the wheels were roaring again, our speed unabated.

I sat back up. Before I had succeeded in believing what I saw—that we still swept down the track—I saw ahead the webbed tunnelmouth. It seemed to howl as it yawned at us, though its voice was actually the din of our own white-hot, fire-spitting wheels combined with the thunderstorm of echoes we trailed behind us. I lay back. As the carts erupted from the roaring corridor, and into the stunning silence of that sunken sky, I slammed open my top-vanes.

Then whips murdered the air all around us—the webbing, through which, despite its toughness, our plunge was as smooth as the arrow's first leap from the bow. We punched through something that made a horrible, wet cough, but did not slow us, and three scorpion legs flopped over the nose of my cart and hung there lifelessly. Then we were falling clear, and I raised my head again.

It gave me a kick in the pit of the stomach to see how steeply we plunged. The vanes had given us even less lift than the little we had projected. Though we would clear the heaps of landslide—rubble strewn along the base of the crag, I found it easy to form a vivid image of being driven like a tent stake thirty yards deep in the swamp muck. And then a vast hand seized us from behind, and slowed us in midair.

This was how it felt, and as I looked back it was no more than I expected to see, in such a world as this. What I saw, and Barnar too in the same moment, made us shout and cheer like madmen.

We trailed an immense, twisting banner of tangled silk, and a score of hell-shapes struggled in the undulating acres of this train of ours. It flapped and bellied, and let fall a many-legged thing which plummeted, scrambling for purchase on the oily air.

In the lurch and sway of our hobbled fall, we argued over which part of the black-scummed waters we were likeliest to hit, but in reality the particular spot seemed to matter little. Systems of grassy silt-bars made escape afoot possible from most points. Meanwhile the waters looked uniformly threatening. Almost everywhere they bulged and folded with sunken movements of a fearfully large scale.

But now our fall took on a frightening wobble, and a sudden burst of speed. The windstream had compacted the webbing behind us, twisting it in a knotted skein that offered far less drag against the air. Our plunge got fearfully steep, and the unclean waters swelled toward us. Scant hundreds of feet from impact, we saw an immense leech—it resembled nothing else so much—thrust sixty feet of its slime-smeared body-tube out of the swamp brew, open a round mouth-hole with a haggle-fanged rim, and chew—blindly, kissingly—at the sky. Others of its ilk sprouted almost simultaneously, concentrated in the immediate vicinity of our now imminent crash.

One of them in particular towered at what appeared to be our inevitable point of collision. It seemed to be tracking us, by what sense I don't know. Its mouth's groping centered ever more sharply on our line of approach. I couldn't determine whether or not its mouth could swallow us whole until the last instant, when I saw that it wouldn't quite manage it. Then we hit our greedy welcomer.

Perhaps these things had a single predatory response for all airborne entities because they were unacquainted with any especially massive ones—I can't say. Whatever the reason, this leech was the victim of a serious miscalculation. We clove his mouth and the first sixteen feet of him asunder before snagging with sufficient firmness in his blubbery plasticity to wrench his eighty-foot bulk clean out of the water, like a plucked root. We hit the swamp, laying the whole floundering length of him out across the bog behind us. He had greatly cushioned our impact. We swarmed out, snatching our bundled weapons, and thrashed thru shallow waters to a cluster of sodden hummocks that offered a broken path out to dry land.

As we fled, we heard behind us a vast threshing of waters, and shrill, agonized voices. The leeches were gathering round the tasty entanglement of web-demons that we had strung across the lagoons, and feeding on them with gusto.

So we fled inland, and at length we found a zone of dry ravines where we could crouch in safety. Here we took our first period of rest in this world—this world so hard merely to enter, let alone survive in. Our venture was begun, at least, and ourselves still both alive and free, no slight feat in itself.

But ah! what a drear hell it was we now had to venture through! What a maelstrom of relentless gorging, one creature upon another! The claws and jaws of the upper world are red enough—who denies it?—but the carnage has intermissions, periods of amiable association, zones of green peace and fructification. In the subworlds, the merciless seethe of appetites never simmers down. Even while the leeches still fed on the web-demons, squads of the winged beings we had distantly glimpsed round the city of platforms swept into view. Their bodies were manlike, though scaly and of thrice human stature, and their temperaments were, as it proved, playful. Flying in vast and flawlessly coordinated formations, they dropped lassoes on several of the leeches and hauled them ashore, where armies of their fellows assembled mountainous heaps of brush. On these the winged things, twittering volubly together, incinerated their huge, vermiform prey alive. Cooking was not the object. The leeches were burnt to ashes while the beings swarmed in the air above their pyres, clearly intoxicated by the greasy smoke to which the worms were transmuted by the flames. And as for the smell of this smoke, I earnestly beg whatever gods may be that my fate may never again set my nose athwart such a stench.

Dismal, eternal, remorseless gluttony. We came to see the hideous vitality of that place as a single obscene shape, its multiform jaws forever rooting in its own bleeding entrails—guzzling and growing strong upon itself.

We knew that by following the nearby river we should eventually find the sea. As the light is never truly full there, so the darkness rarely completely falls. We paused an indefinite time under the changeless sky, and then rose and made our way toward the river by the best-concealed route we could discern.

We found the Demon-Sea. We
reached
it.
At the time, though it was merely the threshold of our journey, we gaped at it as if it were the unimaginable peak of all Exploit simply to have attained its shores. Once we had come to ourselves somewhat, and recalled that next these waters must be entered, and plumbed, we were yet further awed. It was a moment for taking stock of ourselves.

The personal inventory this led us to was a sobering one. We had set out wearing light body-mail over heavy jerkins and doublets of leather. All three of these layers were now scorched in many places, and as ragged as old curtains in a house full of cats. We had one spear between us, and the head of this was half-melted. Barnar's sword lacked two feet of blade. He kept the remnant because one throws away not even the least asset down there. He still had his target-shield, but mine was now a fused and corroded lump under the carcass of a thing I had killed. Our bones were stark against our skins, our eyes were those of almost-ghosts, and our beards told us we had been at least a month en route. This was our only clue to a sane reckoning of time, in a world where horror, harm, and long, eerie calms flow past the traveler in endlessly unpredictable succession.

We sat down—fell, really, as if our legs had done their limit, and now forever renounced their task. The feeling of futility we had then was the heaviest weight I have ever felt upon my back. For a simple fact which we had known all along was now striking us with its full dreadfulness: having reached the sea, we must now turn either right or left, with no way of knowing which was the correct direction.

If, indeed, there
was
a correct direction—if even Gildmirth the Privateer could have survived till now on the shore of this subearthly deep. The wrong turn meant a grim eternity of plodding, another of retracing our steps. Gildmirth's present nonexistence meant the same. And the Demon-Sea spread before us like the very image of infernal eternity to either side.

We had first sensed its nearness while still deep in the dunes of salt. When we got a tang of brine, we identified a deep susurration we had been hearing for some time as the big-breathing sound an ocean makes. The dunes steepened, and we kept to their crests, trampling their ridgelines into crumbling staircases, winding always higher. And then there was before us a narrow plateau of rock salt ending in white cliffs and, beyond these, crashing against their pallid feet, the subworld waters.

The essential horror of its aspect you could not at first identify. The sounds of it had an awesome musicality, and the prospect a barbarously rich coloration, which conspired to exalt and bewilder your senses. The shingle footing the cliffs was jet-black, seemingly composed of something like broken obsidian, and when the cream-and-jade surf pounced up it varnished their contrast to an ever-renewed brilliance. Moreover, a wealth of gaudy flotsam littered the beaches, so that the breakers made them flash every other color as well. The sea itself was bizarrely dappled, for though a gloomy cloud-cover vaulted it over to the limits of vision, this was abundantly rifted, and wherever it was broken it permitted avalanches of the reddish-gold light of sunset to pour onto the water. The clouds themselves were in many places caved in, and lay in foggy islands and ghostly ziggurats upon the green-black waves, and these misty monoliths had a bluish luminescence of their own lurking within them. Meanwhile the winds on those waters were strangely various, and everywhere wrenched them into a crazy-quilt of local turbulences.

It did truly ravish the senses, and so it was only belatedly you felt the horror of the
enclosure
of so huge a sea. For though the light that broke through the clouds might suggest earthly sunset colors, it was quickly recognizable as a demonic imitation—more garish less subtly shaded than the dying sun's true radiance. Such subearthly luminosity, in varying hues, had been our sky for weeks now—never a real sky, of course, never a transparent revelation of endless space, but always a kind of bright paint masking the universal ceiling of stone imprisoning this world. Now a true ocean is the sky's open floor—that's the feeling men love in it, the reason they venture upon it, apart from gain or exploration. But this bottled sea, for all its terrible vastness, gave you not the awe of liberation, but its black opposite, the awe of drear imprisonment's infinitude.

We sat staring at this vista for a long time. We meant to discuss our situation, but simply failed to muster the effort of speech. At last Barnar drew a long breath. In a voice utterly blank of feeling he said: "To hell with everything. Let's just go right for luck."

And so we did, both secretly grateful that we had managed even this minimal act of decision, for neither of us had believed it impossible that we might just sit forever on that impossible lookout. As it was, we set out sharing the glum, unvoiced conviction that we
knew
where the manse of Gildmirth was to be found: nowhere. And we would take forever getting there, except, of course, that we would not survive nearly that long.

Though we marched atop the salt bluffs, we found our eyes and minds constantly entangled with the vivid jetsam cluttering the beach below. And what we saw there had soon roused us from our despairing stupor, for though our spirits were jaded with terrors and atrocities, those sights revealed to us new dimensions of demonic activity. Some of that bright tangle on the black strand was merely the detritus of lower life forms indigenous to the sea: broken coral branches thick with budding rubies, sapphires, and emeralds, or uprooted crinoids whose torn husks were purest gold. Such common objects bespoke nothing beyond the ocean's grotesque fecundity. But equally numerous were products of art, of active—and surely malign—intelligence: wrought chalices of gold with elaborate silver inlay, tiaras of gem-studded everbright shaped and sized to crown no human skull, shattered triptychs whose fragmented images were vivid as hallucination. There was a broken chair, elaborately hinged and barbed, designed to hold unimaginable shapes in unconjecturable postures, and we saw several battle helmets with triads of opalescent eyes inset in the visors tumbling empty in the foam. All such evidences of active artifice serving unguessable aims proclaimed the sea's hidden cunning, its vast, unbreathing population aboil with a million malefic purposes.