The Incompleat Nifft (26 page)

Even as it sang Gildmirth stretched forth his hand, and the Spaalg was plucked from the water by its plumes, as a turnip is uprooted by its top. The process did not disturb the demon's singing:

I had two eyes that I lived behind
 

In a place for hoarding the things I'd seen,
 

And I had two ears that I lived between—
 

Gildmirth made a second gesture and, still hanging inverted, the Spaalg moved through the air toward the doorway by which our boat had entered. Throughout its aerial progress it continued its song, nor had it ceased when its exit from the manse made the verses inaudible:

Where the things I heard could be brought
to mind.
 

But now, where my heart stood is empty space
 

Where sights lack anything to mean,
 

And my ears' reportings echo to waste,
 

All lacking a place for taking. . . .
 

"What did you do with it?" Barnar asked vaguely, his eyes still watching its form dwindle against the clouds framed by the distant doorway.

"I'm having it dropped in the Fenkrakken Mangles, a coastal zone disturbed by tidal torments, winds, and water-avalanches, about two thousand leagues downshore. It'll be back tomorrow."

"I'm sorry about your canvas," I told him, finding nothing else to say. This drew his eyes to it and he started slightly, as if he'd not remembered that the axe had stuck there. His mouth, as though not quite yet ready to smile, made a little rictus, and the plentiful irony-wrinkles around his eyes deepened a shade. His eyes were not blood now, but a murky carnelian.

"Who knows?" he asked with a slight shrug. He turned and went to his larder chest, from which he started filling a provision-sack. I didn't understand, and looked to Barnar. He, with one blunt digit, mutely redirected my eyes to the canvas.

I saw it this time. It was the axe's accidental pertinence to the image my throw had attached it to. Its scale and angle of lodgment were such that if you squinted a bit it looked painted in with the rest. And it was the chain that the axe lodged in, shearing it through at a point just below Gildmirth's hand.

I said to Barnar—quietly, not to torment Gildmirth with it—"Let it be so, then, by every power that stands higher than this hell." Barnar solemnly nodded.

"Gentlemen," our guide called, "please get aboard. I must move now if I'm to take this on at all. There is a painful blackness on my mood just now."

We boarded. Gildmirth raised the sail, lashing a corner to the mast's top. It bulged and bellied out. The Privateer, though sitting in the stern, didn't visibly steer us as we slid away from the table and smoothly recrossed the windless, chambered pool with the skull-skiff tagging after us.

We surged breasting through the doorway. The cloudy vaulting of Gildmirth's prison-cosmos felt like freedom after the entombment of his private cell. Our sail swelled dead against the on-shore wind and we skated onto the field of Gildmirth's living plunder in their sunken oubliettes, aimed for a gate sealing the gap between the pier's tip and the headland's. Inside the manse it had seemed impossible to probe Gildmirth's pain with questions, but in the invigoration of this setting-forth it seemed less cruel. Still, I spoke from the bow, not quite turning back sternwards to meet his eyes.

"You cannot kill the Spaalg then, Privateer?"

"No. And would not if I could. It alone could ever free me."

"It occurred to me that Undle says somewhere that Spaalgs are vermicles. . . ."

Barnar glanced at me. He too looked forwards out of compassion. We stood watching the gate to the open sea draw nearer as the Privateer replied, his voice remote, carefully even, as if the recitation were a duty he had set himself always to perform without shirking:

"Spaalgs have a technique for infecting shape-shifters. Their larvae lie integrated in the body of a larger demon. If a man, or any creature, would acquire another being's shape, he or it must enter a specimen and become congruent with its form, to learn it. If a Spaalg infects the study-specimen, it can transfer to the shape-shifter, and infect him by any means it devises. Some of the Spaalg's nerves it engrafted onto mine, at places where they were naturally suited to receive the amplification of its own passions. Now, raving lunacy would follow my loss of either the sea's gold, or its sorceries and the infinity of shapes it offers me on which to practice them. Here my spirit dies at length, by attrition. Above, insane hungers would tear it to pieces within days."

We were sprawled on the deck amidships, backs propped against opposite gunwales. Barnar reached into the provisions sack near him, and withdrew another jack of wine. He smiled at it, hefting it lovingly, then snorted:
"Elixir.
Huh! The only real elixir is right here, as far as I'm concerned."

"I don't know. The stuff the boy was after must be pretty potent. He didn't even touch it, and it transported him all the way down here." I had quite a good laugh at the wit of this, though my own. Barnar shook his head gravely.

"Potent. Maybe so. This, on the other hand, is miraculous. It transports
me
all the way
out
of here without even moving me an inch." Barnar repaid my favor, and laughed for me, but I joined him anyway. "Plain truth, oh canny Chilite, and that's a miracle worth having. Toss. Thank you."

"Don't mention it. Merely permit me to reiterate: henceforth, as regards this Sazmazm matter, kindly elixir me no elixirs. It's only what you're guzzling there that deserves the name, and that's all I'll say of the matter. Toss. Thank you."

"Certainly. By the Crack, the aftertaste is splendid!"

"Mmmm. Yes. Almost as splendid as the taste itself."

"Not to mention the bouquet. Toss."

"Indeed. Because, to get to the heart of the matter, the wine itself is splendid, as was Gildmirth's
forethought in providing it."

"You've put your finger on it. And you know, while we're on the subject, when you really see the matter in perspective, this is really a rather splendid exploit we're on. It has a noble, undeniable splendidness about it. Toss."

"You're quite right, really. A hapless young lad, abducted by demons, lying in torment, all that. And two reckless dare-devils trekking after him, only their wits and their swords against all the might of the Primary Subworld. There
is
something splendid about it. Toss."

There was a mellow pause as we savored all this newly discovered splendor. I gazed about us, suddenly groping toward a kind of inspiration. "Hang it, Barnar, you know what else? Toss. Thanks. . . ."

"What
else, Nifft?"

"Even this . . . this vast pool of sewage—even this festering corpse of an ocean is splendid . . . is rather splendid, in a way?"

". . . Yes? . . . Yes, in a way I suppose. . . ."

We looked uncertainly toward Gildmirth, who had sat brooding in the bow for so many hours we had almost forgotten him. If he'd been following our talk he didn't show it, nor withdraw his sullen gaze from the sea's crazy-quilt of surface patterns whereon, just ahead, yet another collapse of the cloud-ceiling had dumped smoky avalanches of fog.

Barnar sighed. I tossed him the jack and he drained it. The winds in their ceaseless, tormented shifting whipped round and cut a chill keen as a poniard across my back. Even as Barnar pointed behind me and said—"Watch out! Another howler!"—I heard the careening approach of a furious noise, and looked behind. A track of town water snaked toward us. An instant later it ripped across our decks, a little cyclone of pandemonium. Our minds were blotted out by a thousand voices whose desperate unison compounded their words into one stupefying roar of gibberish. For an eternal instant it obliterated our thoughts and sensations alike, and left only their torn edges in our minds in the silence after it veered away over the sea to spread its urgent, indecipherable alarms.

It may convey some sense of its impact to say that, though it surrounded us for less than two seconds, it was an absolutely sobering experience. The radiance which wine had almost given the ocean was killed, if it had lived at all. The waters we were left gaping at remained what they had seemed from the first—wormy with an infinite, multiform anguish. Jittery zones, all spikes and fangs of chop, were sharply bordered by areas of perfectly smooth water in greasy bulges seamed and puckered here and there as with the deep maneuvers of large masses, while adjoining both we saw tracts where great galactic sprawls of scum wheeled sluggishly, all overswarmed by bug-sized multitudes at war, slaying and dying with cries like cricketsong. And above all the fever and convulsion of the maggoty main, the livid clouds dispread their slow decay, their many fissures bloody-rimmed with the demon light that streamed from them, while everywhere their bloated substance was sloughing off to lie in clammy heaps upon the waves, like those we now began to thread among. Gildmirth had told us that our sail snared other currents than those of the wind—rivers of subworld force impalpably tangling through the air which it netted according to its master's will. For all his mastery of this method, which kept us smoothly centered in the twisting corridors of clear water, it sank my spirit a notch deeper to remember that the very atmosphere was worm-holed with demonic disease.

Barnar was feeling the same oppression, for he burst out with a question which his compassion would have spared our guide, but which his weary loathing could not bite back: "What is it in us that
feeds
them, Privateer? Can't they be sated on each other's flesh?"

His eyes apologized when Gildmirth met them, but he waited for the answer, as did I. Though the Privateer's eyes were blood-bright again with the pain of his long introspection, his voice was gentle:

"Who more than they, Barnar, are their hungers' slaves? Whatever it is their natures arise from, they are absolute and unalloyed with any purpose but the predation their breed assigns them. Their essence is an eternal, joyless toil of feeding."

(As I listened I watched a small crack opening in the nearest fogbank's wall. Its opening revealed a little, crooked shaftway ascending from the misty deeps.)

"And what beings more than human kind have a will that far outreaches their given nature? A willful dream of Self that can contradict, or defy outright, their actual circumstances, and past performances?"

(A small, shadowy something was toiling frantically up the crooked tunnel—a blur just visible through the mist's opacity.)

"It's just this the demons crave to taste, this unique faculty of superordinate desire that sheds lustre and significance on the brute machinery of uncontested reality. In the violation and destruction of a man's will, a demon tastes a rare drug, gets one delirium-inducing whiff of the unimaginably rich world of human experience."

(A tiny homunculus, naked and sweaty-bright, came plunging up the shaft. It dove for the opening and had actually thrust its clutching hands into the open air, when a scaly paw shot from the tunnel, closed round its waist, and hauled it back within, the fissure closing behind it.)

The longer my footsoles felt it through the deck—those waters panting and shivering in their vast sickbed—the more obsessed I grew with Gildmirth's extravagant rashness in ever choosing this realm as a challenge to his powers of mastery. I held my tongue until a certain glimpse of what teemed below us loosened it. Most such hints of the deeps had been in the way of flotsam, or brief eruptions of conflicts that quickly sank again, but this was a trio of structures, gallows standing sixty feet above the surface. Two men and a woman dangled from them, nude, with that idle, dejected posture the hanged have. In the course of our approach, a huge, coffin-jawed reptile set all three swinging with the wing-work of banking its dive to throw a short swerve that grazed the nearest gallows. It encoffined the corpse on the wing, pulled up, and was yanked short and hammered back-first on the water. The corpse in its jaws was genuine, but had been endowed with bizarre plasticity and adhesiveness. The dead man's fang-broken shape was stretched to a breadth of seven or eight feet by the reptile's efforts to separate its jaws. The rumble of massive chains sounded underwater. The gallows smoothly sank, as did the reptile, though less smoothly.

As this place fell astern, I burst out: "Most noble Privateer. By the Crack, by all that falls in or crawls
out
of the Crack, why
here
?
Why must
this
place be your chosen ground of exploit? For me, with all respect, it's a question beyond the reach of the most delirious conjecture."

Gildmirth smiled, something he hadn't done for quite a while. "Can you really not imagine? Perhaps you know the lines—is Quibl still read these days?—the lines:

`For all who may will seek to know
 

Whence they've grown, or whither grow.'
"
 

I was a shade slower to understand than Barnar, who nodded and quoted in his turn:

"
`Are we their ancestors or heirs
?

. . . Are they our children, or we theirs
?
'
 

—And have you got an answer then, Privateer?"

Gildmirth shook his head. "I have an opinion. As for firm proof, or even clear evidence—"

I had touched his arm. "Look there—the water's seething."

Gildmirth reefed the net and we stood off the turbulence. Shapes popped out of it, jostling furiously in the boil. Before we could make anything out the Privateer said: "Ah! Surely a grove of sessiles has been attacked, probably by a big Dandábulon. We won't see the combatants, just the wreckage. Look there now! Do you see?"

We saw. The boil of battle drifted erratically away, and the wreckage that choked it began dispersing through the calmer waters. Shards of giant fan-corals they seemed at first—trellises of fiber red and green and tar-black. And then we made out the torn parts of men and women woven into these shards. Here a hand, there a man from the diaphragm up—they spun bleeding on their attachments of trellis-work. The half-man ejected one loud fragment of voice from his mouth—an incomprehensibility, the last thing in him—and died. Gildmirth let out a little sail and brought us slowly around the widening patch of breakage and blood.