The Incompleat Nifft (33 page)

It appeared that the beast had died among—
upon—
its own cavalry. The eyeless, beetle-jawed apes whose multitudes underlay it had died in a wreckage of chariots whose prows projected great spikes identical in all but size to that the giant wore. These eyeless charioteers were small only beside their monstrous ally, for their vehicles were the size of galleons, and they, when standing, could have spread their nasty jaw-scythes and clipped the crow's nest off an Astrygal windjammer's mainmast.

The sloth's flesh, puddling in cheesy wrinkles around each huge shaft of its hair, stank. Dead fleas the size of yearling horn-bows lay half sunk in the charnal mire. We kept to the spine-ridge, which was a little balder of this stinking pelt. "Corpse-fleas!" Barnar raged as we clambered past an ear, and stumbled onto the knoll-top of the cranium. "That vile, willful little moron makes corpse-fleas of us!"

Death had frozen the giant's head at only a slight forward droop, and the steel spike strapped to his forehead jutted a hundred feet farther out at the half-vertical. We started shinning up the bright needle. Already we saw all we needed to, but we climbed mechanically, up and out, our eyes lost in what confronted us.

The dreadful grandeur of that monstrous, chambered muscle, shapely as a Shallows wine-jar, bottling the colossal vintage of the demon-giant's vitality, thundering endlessly with the stoppered power of these contents—it was more than a life of looking could truly take in. The great vein serpenting up its flank was itself a thing of awe. The pulse and volume of more than one mighty river charged through that gargantuan blue pipe.

And we now saw just how that vein was tapped, and saw more clearly too the genesis of those things which tapped it. A tough, glassy capsule both sheathed and vaguely displayed the fibers of the heart's underlying sinew. And all this inmost, toiling demon-meat was infested—riddled with encysted shapes, slimly tapered ellipsoids like sarcophagi of carven wood.

These could be seen at every stage of growth, in fluid-filled bubbles that slowly swelled with their growth, sundering the muscle of the giant's tortured, consenting heart. Ultimately the bubbles' swelling ruptured the heart-sheath. Everywhere across the living wall, stilt-legged, stingered monsters were to be seen wrenching their drenched and folded wings from broken natal husks. They hatched, they spread and dried their wings, they took flight, and moved toward the vein.

Around halfway up its length, at perhaps half a dozen different places, the vein had been clamped by vast brazen collars, each of which bristled with steel couplings. It was upon these couplings that the winged Regatherers converged. Each one in its turn sank its caudal barb into one of those sockets and waited as its hive-mates worked spigot-wheels, which diverted into its tail-bulb its alloted iota of the Master's blood. Not infrequently, the strength of the current they tapped mocked their precautions. Spigot-wheels would stick, and helplessly coupled individuals would claw the air with panicked legs, their bodies swiftly burgeoning, then exploding in a fine, red mist. Then every nearby worker flew crazily, lapping the bright spray from the air till others succeeded in reclosing the spigot, whereat—unfalteringly—another would take its turn at the coupling.

They had emerged only to drink in this manner, and, having drunk, each immediately set about the work of its return. Each engorged Regatherer began a steady, hovering descent toward the war-strewn flesh that floored this cosmos. Each settled on this floor in the zone closest to the heart and clearest of debris. Settling on this floor, each sank its jaws into its master's skin and chewed until its head was wholly buried. While its front end ate this anchorage, each monster's stern half compacted—its legs and wings folding up tight—and started a rhythmic convulsion. Swiftly, the folded body began to split. Now it was a husk. A great, shining maggot's body moulted from the husk and started worming its way underground after its sunken head. The obscene, ribbed barrel of its new body was little more than a cistern, a tiny-legged tank wherein to convey another jot of the tyrant back to his dominions. And though these grubs ate their way all the way under with truly sickening speed, their tapered body-casks did protrude defenseless for several minutes during the process of their descent. We came to this realization at about the same time.

"Hmph," Barnar muttered. "Notice the next-highest ones waiting their turn to settle down and moult—they hover on guard over their siblings while they wait for them to dig in."

"Yes. Still, it has that first-glance look of feasibility. If the boy takes note of it, his eagerness will see it as a sure-fire tactic."

Barnar nodded, somewhat disinterestedly. It was the spectacle as a whole that absorbed him. "Such a labor," he mused. "Since the Red Millennium, did he say?"

"Yes."

"Did they ever sing you that cradle song when you were small?" Amazingly, he began to sing me the song he meant. His frayed basso rendered the simple tune with surprising sweetness:

". . . And that Neverquit bird, though small
 

and weak,
 

Lights again and again on Neverend Strand.
 

And he packs into his narrow beak
 

One little bite of that infinite beach,
 

And recrosses the sea till he reaches that land—
 

That land of his own he is building to stand
 

In a sun-blessed place beyond harm's reach,
 

That land he is making with stolen sand
 

And a will that will not be denied what it seeks."
 

It made me smile to hear those lines, which I knew, sung here by my friend as we hung there dreamingly, hugging the great sloth's spike-tip, looking rather like sloths ourselves, I suppose.

"And when they've regathered his essence," I asked, "when the Elixir's been brought below again? Though Sazmazm's spirit might live in the brew, what freedom will the titan have if he must lie in a vat, a bottled ocean of bodiless soul?"

"You know, I asked Gildmirth that question. He didn't have an answer. He'd heard a rumor that the giant's slave-hosts have long been at work building him a second body out of stone."

I shuddered, trying to throw off the stupor that lay on me. "Come on," I said. "We have to try. The effort is utterly pointless, but inaction seems an even greater agony."

We shinned down the spike, and repeated the verminous traversal of our dead host. We reached the major claw of its left hind paw and, with a leap, departed from its rankly meadowed slopes. We jogged toward the naked mountain, carrying our shields and spears at half-ready, watching for ambuscades—for we had noted that many of the giant dead surrounding us had been quarried for their meat. The carrion-appetites that haunt all battlefields most surely haunted this one. Mechanically we jogged toward the moulting grounds, near the heart of the thunder that filled this morgue-ish world.

And we had almost reached it when we came across a corpse worth pausing over. It was one of the stingered, stilt-legged giants, a dead Regatherer. A toppled siege-tower had, in falling, sunk a spur of its broken beamwork through the middle segment of the creature, which was the segment its legs and wings were jointed to. The spur had pierced it laterally so that the corpse lay on its side. It was huge partly in its great lengths of leg and wing, for its slim-built, tri-part body had perhaps somewhat less overall bulk to it that the hull of a mid-sized merchantman.

We took our lances to it, climbing to prod its body for vulnerable features. It was everywhere as supple as leather and as unpierceable as steel. Finally we stood near its head, looking up bitterly at its face. I saw in the black moons of its eye-bulbs, in the cruel barbs and shears of its mouth-tool, a pitiless amusement with our littleness, our urgent, dwarfish ambition to do its demon hugeness harm. In my gloom and mortification I contrived, unthinkingly, an excuse to hurl my hate against the thing.

"You see between its eyes and jaws that `X' of muscles, or nerves, or whatever they are? X marks the spot."

I got a lot of run behind my throw, and heaved the stick up toward the alien planets of its extinguished eyes.

Instant death missed Barnar by somewhat less than a handsbreadth, for that was how far he chanced to be standing beyond the arc of the stinger's thrust. Whip-quick, the great, pinned corpse folded in half on the iron axis of its implement. Its caudal barb stabbed forward with a force that imbedded it deep in the chestplates its legs were jointed to. I saw, above the spasmic working of its mouth-tool, the butt of my spear protruding from the softness it had found to en-scabbard more than two-thirds of its length.

We did not risk the convulsions that might attend retrieving my spear, and found me another among the weapons so profusely littering that waste of carcasses and martial engines.

A short time later we were edging out to the limits of our cover amid the battle-debris, and viewing the more barren moulting-ground's vast perimeter. Looking out over the impossibly broad frontier we planned to prevent the nimble, determined Wimfort from crossing, Barnar burst out with a short, disgusted laugh. "Let him be damned," he said. "He'll break cover where we can see him in time to catch him, or he won't. I'm going to sit here awhile, and sooner or later we'll find out which of these it is to be. To hell with everything else. I'm going to enjoy the simple pleasure of sitting still for as long as the opportunity lasts."

I thwacked his shoulder consolingly, but couldn't come up with any comforting reply. I wandered around a bit, looking listlessly along the frontier. And, a quarter-mile or so down that border, across a little clearing that separated two large heaps of wreckage, a small shape moved. The movement was abrupt and dodgy, like that of a lizard sprinting from covert to covert. I was already running, half-crouched, weaving toward the place, keeping all the cover I could manage between me and it.

So fast I went, more flying than afoot! On what strength, drawn from where, I'll never know. I'd more than half reached him when I saw my quarry again—back of a last trash heap bordering the open grounds. There Master Wimfort crouched, and gathered himself for the spring. Just then he put me in mind of a young lion on a first kill. There was that clownish lack of finesse alloyed with mortal seriousness in precisely equal measure. The boy was no longer, in strict truth, a boy. He was abundantly ridiculous, and he was also truly kill-ready. He had been at work on a weapon of scavenged parts. He'd gotten a seven-foot fragment of heavy spear-haft. He'd lashed a battle-ax by the handle to one end of this, and had spiked and lashed to the other the broken blade of a splendid sword—like a falchion, broad and razor-edged at the point. Around his haft's balance point he'd wrapped himself two hand-grips of leather cording. His strategy was plain from his weapon's design. This was no casting-spear—it was to be used like a jousting-lance, the ax at the other end providing an option of chopping blows as well.

Even as I studied him I neared him at a mute-foot sprint, praying for the few seconds' luck that would suffice to get me within range to outrun him before he could bolt far enough onto the moulting-ground to bring the titan slaves down on us. Four seconds would have done it, and of course, I didn't get them. He saw me,
and without the shadow of a hesitation, leapt out on the wounded, wormy plain below the mountain. We pounded across that meaty resilience, our desperate drives converging toward one of the tertiary monsters lying in full moult a scant three-hundred strides ahead of me.

Alas! A scant two hundred and fifty strides ahead of Wimfort. But our ruin was already accomplished—I saw it then, though I couldn't curb the insane persistence of my legs' pursuit. The boy was oblivious. Still running at full tilt, he raised and couched his lance. Beyond and above him, a stingered giant hanging five hundred feet off the plain swung around to us the remorseless black globes of its eyes, and sank gigantically toward us.

The great abdominal cask that was Wimfort's target had thrashed itself clear of its parent-husk and gotten about half-submerged. Up-ended, it towered ponderously, rocking with its gluttonous labor. The boy, uttering a shout of rapture, drove his point full against it.

Obliquely, I noted his weapon's fragmentation, his collision with the grub, his stunned fall—foreseeable details. Primarily, I watched the Regatherer's dive toward the boy as I ran to intercept it. It loomed down, its spike drawn up and under, strike-ready. I vaulted up with the cast, flung myself into free-fall after it to put some heft behind the stick's flight. My eyes popped with the snap I put into the toss. My fall back to the ground seemed almost leisurely as I watched my spear take root, watched the giant's dive become a death plunge as it folded convulsively in the air and sank its stinger hilt-deep in its own swollen underbelly. I tucked my head,
hit the ground, rolled to my feet. The Regatherer's cargo spilled in black cascades behind it as it tumbled toward its ruin. I ran toward the boy, stumbling once at the shock of the giant's fall.

The Regatherer's torrential wound had drenched him, yet he was almost dry by the time I got to him. Not from that black brew's running off him, but from its soaking into him. It drained into his skin as quick as water melts into dry sand. But his hair was still half soaked, and in picking him up, I slipped my left hand under the back of his head to support it, and the demon blood sizzled on my palm.

I had to put him down again—he was coming around in any case—and dance around trying to shake the pain off my hand. The stuff couldn't be rubbed off; it burnt me for a bit, and then it became a painless black dust which I blew on, and was cleansed of. Yet I must testify to an unnatural thing the Elixir bred in the part of me it touched—for since that occasion I have been what I never was before—perfectly ambidexterous, and have long behaved right-handedly from habit only.

Seeing the boy gain his feet, I seized his arm and hauled him back toward the cover of the battle-zone's mortuary maze. He promptly had his legs well under him and was running with a will. Having what he sought, and craving to get it safely home, the boy now became scrupulously cooperative. At least two Regatherers were moving toward their fallen sibling already, and scanning around for an enemy. I told Wimfort where to dive and he did it instantly and flawlessly—under a toppled chariot. I flung myself supine on a heap of relatively anthropoid dead, and ceased to move.