The Incompleat Nifft (35 page)

I nodded to Barnar. He lifted the boy from the cart, cut his bonds, and brought him to stand between us on Darkvent's threshold. Kamin was already climbing toward us. We stood aside from the boy and urged him forward.

He stepped out uncertainly, seeming to cringe from the open air, as if it was thronged with harmful presences. "Father," he said to the man who sped to embrace him; his voice was small, its tone wavering eerily. "I was with the Bonshad, Father. I was his. I breathed the water, and all the black smoke that was in it."

Kamin reached him, grasped his shoulders. Strangely, the boy was not looking at him now, but at the full moon which had just risen from the ridgeline directly opposite the still blood-smeared zone of the sun's vanishing. His father, frightened by the oddness of his look, embraced him.

It was an embrace from which the Rod-Master quickly recoiled. The boy's limbs never stirred, but his whole frame made a terrible, fierce movement, a growth. His body swelled to almost twice its mass, and lost an inch of its height. His eyes grew bigger, his mouth sank within a pale, brambly beard that sprouted twisting from his jaw.

Kamin took a slow, staggering backwards step; his soldiers, across the dale, reached uncertainly for their swords, all of them watching Gildmirth as he drew a dagger hanging from what had been Wimfort's middle, and slashed the front of the boy's doublet to give himself breathing-room. Then, reaching behind him, he made two vertical slashes in the fabric covering his shoulders. The Privateer, turning his plum-red eyes to Kamin, then smiled courteously, and said: "Be at ease. I'll do none of you any harm."

Kamin lunged, and his soldiers started forward. Gildmirth raised his left hand, and all of them froze—the very beasts they bestrode became as stone. Kamin's sword, which his arm had been in the act of swinging forward, spilled from his petrifled fingers. Barnar and I signed Charnall to follow us. We went down to our pack-train, got him mounted, and mounted ourselves.

Gildmirth stepped close to Kamin, whose eyes alone could move. Those eyes blazed—they all but
clawed—
at the hideous face that had usurped the face of the boy.

"I am heartily sorry for you, Rod-Master." The bloody pools of his sad eyes looked more than deep enough to contain the Kamin's outrage. "Your son was rescued in good faith, and brought halfway back to you. And then an accident endowed him with a large quantity of what he had been seeking all along—the Elixir of Sazmazm. Rise if you can for an instant above the terrible pain I know you feel. Fight for the detachment to ask yourself: would you bring the Great Plague to the cities of your fellow men? Would you be the man to do this, even supposing that this deed purchased the freedom of someone dear to you—of a son? Would you make such a fool's bargain, and buy his release into a world universally blighted by your act? Liberate him into a raging inferno of catastrophe that has been enkindled solely by your loving emancipation of him?"

The father's eyes wavered, seeming dazed by these words. They sharpened again. They explored the face of the Privateer, wonder and loathing shining from them. They said, as plain as words: "You are not my son. You stole his chance of escape from him. You are here in his stead." Gildmirth sighed, and patted his shoulder. He turned away and, his eyes rediscovering the moon, forgot Kamin—instantly and completely.

I roused my mount, and came around where Kamin and I might look eye to eye. I said, "I'm sorry, Rod-Master. Truly I am. We got him out for you—and we only did it through the Privateer's help, which be gave us gratis—we got him out, and all but got him back to you. And then, in an evil moment, your son became something which—listen. If Wimfort had simply
resided
in your city, undertaking none of the cataclysmic things he planned—if he had simply
stayed
here for the space of a day,
possessing what he possessed, then your precious Kine-Gather, by the second day of his residence, would have been nothing but a smoking blister, a black death-scab on the face of a total desert. Such are the powers of those whom your son's booty must inevitably have brought down upon himself and all near him."

I faltered, searching the magnate's eyes for some way to break through his hate to his dispassion. Barnar geed his mount up the slope, and into Darkvent. Kamin's eyes followed him, and so I watched with him, as all the rest of us save Gildmirth were doing—fettered and free—and so fixedly there was nothing to choose between the two groups.

A grinding noise began to swell from the shaft. Barnar emerged, a line stretched taut behind him, his mount's legs etched with effort. He spurred the beast down the slope. Just as the cart he was towing came plunging from the shaft, he cleared his pommel of the line, tossed it free and wheeled leftward from its line of fall. The big steel box turned turtle as it dove. It crashed just above us and settled crazily on the glittering heap of its vomited cargo: a hillock of barbarous splendors—subworld artifacts of wrought gold and everbright, weapons scabbed with jeweled onlays, gear and gauds of rarest demon-work.

I sighed, mortified by the inadequacy of the gesture. Unwillingly, I met Kamin's eyes again: "It's yours. Twenty times the worth of what we take from you on these beasts. Your bullion is enough for us, and its portability is a convenience, for which we thank you. This doesn't buy your son back, I know. Take heart at least in the fact that, though he is a thrall, he suffers no torment. He lies like a . . . wine bottle in the cellar of a minor demon, a reclusive weft. This keeper of his hides and secures the boy with fanatical care, you may be sure. Wimfort suffers at worst an endless ennui, as a jar for his master's most treasured potation. Meanwhile the boy, who couldn't safely be returned to the sunlight, has at least restored to it a man of great and deserving spirit. He's one whose liberation will surely bring men more good than harm."

"Some day," the Privateer said, "I'll bring him back for you, Rod-Master. But when—forgive me—I cannot say."

In facing round to say this, Gildmirth turned his eyes from the moon for the first time since it captured them. His cheeks were wet. The red of his eyes had a terrible, vivid purity I had not seen before, and, in some subtle way, his body was quieter. "Master Charnall," he said with a slight bow, "I have spoken with your friends of you. There is a certain post which, before very long, I will be seeking a man to fill—that of scribe-apprentice. It requires a mastery of High and Paleo-Archaic, as well as the five primary branches of Runic scripture. Would you perhaps be a man of latent ambition? The post involves a great deal of work, but is handsomely paid both in gold and in advanced instruction in major thaumaturgies. Do you have some spit left, honest Charnall, for grueling and chancy work if it offers you the power to walk the sky and the ocean's floor as easily as you could these hills we stand in?"

"Yes, Privateer. And again, yes."

"Then, after a time, I'll come seeking you in Shormuth Gate. This gold will maintain you opulently until I come. In the interval, you can do no better than to read—anything and everything, though always bearing in mind that neither Ninefingers nor the immortal Pandector ever fails to repay a thoroughgoing review."

The Privateer turned now to Barnar and me. "So now it's time to part ways," he said. As he smiled into our eyes he raised his right hand as for oath-taking. "Let it be witnessed, by all the powers that bind men to their vows, that I salute as my saviour this Nifft, called `the Lean'
(and justly so as anyone will swear who's seen what a weasely, gaunt oddity he is); and that I likewise most feelingly salute this Chilite hulk, Barnar his name, whose measure of ungreedy goodwill is more than great—who is a cask, a very
vat
of that . . . Elixir. And also let my promise to them be witnessed, that my life will never be worth more to me than their salvation, whatsoever danger I might chance to find them in."

As he turned away he paused by Kamin, but whatever he meant to say could be seen to die on his tongue, and he murmured only: "Be of good heart. You'll find yourselves free to move at sunrise."

The Privateer walked away from us now, out onto the open slope. As he walked, his back swelled, and his legs wasted and shriveled under him. But instead of falling, he thrust from the slits he had made in his doublet two broad, tar-black wings. The wings bowed, then pressed down powerfully on the night air. His legs—talons now—tucked themselves up under his chest. He half-turned his griffon's head and sent back to us a brazen hiss of farewell. And then the Privateer rose up against the moon, and sped from our sight in its direction, as if its silver hugeness were the home he had for so long been denied.

PERHAPS THE ONLY pertinent information I can offer about the source of this document is that I am not its author—for some of my acquaintance have charged this, on the grounds, I suppose, of my own brief appearance in it. Who its author was, or even when and how it came among my papers, I do not know. Nifft himself could have secreted it in my (securely locked) files, but so could a number of our mutual friends. Certainly none of them lacked the particular skills requisite for such chicanery, and neither the manuscript's style, nor its hand—some scribe's of indeterminate nationality—offers any clues to its authorship.

As to what it reports, there must by now be few who have not caught wind of Anvil Pastures' misfortunes, and many will doubtless find here much to render comprehensible what must have seemed an utterly fantastic and unaccountable rumor. Perhaps it will seem callous in me to say that I do not grieve for that city. My feelings about merchants of war are made plain enough, I think, by my prefatory remarks to
The Pearls of the Vampire Queen.
Even granting this prejudice in me, I doubt any informed person would deny that, among purveyors of arms, Anvil Pastures' commercial history has been the most shameful of the century. So decayed are the morals governing the professional activities of merchants of arms, that the mere simultaneous sale of arms to both belligerents in an ongoing war is such a matter as only the ignorant or naive would take the trouble to deplore in print. Witness the offhandedness with which Anvil Pastures served Hallam and Baskin-Sharpz. But the records of Anvil's activities afford more than one instance of what even the most cynical cosmopolite would blush to countenance. I will presume only so far as to remind the reader of the most publicized of these travesties to occur in recent decades. The occasion I refer to was Pythna's "crusade" against the city of Taarg.

Pythna's posture in the conflict was undeniably laughable. She
is
an Astrygal, but one of the chain's cluster of small islands that is often called the Seven Little Sisters. The wizardry that prevails on Pythna—as on any of the Little Sisters—is by no means comparable to that of Strega, Shamna or Hagia, for it is the thaumaturgy of the three mountainous Big Sisters that gives the Astrygals their deserved name as the world's great nursery of the lore of Power. Indeed, little Pythna is quite aptly described by Deenwary the Traveler in his otherwise sensationalized and distorted (though, admittedly, highly diverting) account of his experiences in the seas off southern Kolodria. "The inhabitants of Pythnia," he says, "are a motley, half-wise, half-crackpot lot."

Pythna's much-trumpeted
causus belli
was also laughable. An edition of an obscure Pythnan philosopher's summa (all four volumes of which I have read, and which piracy of any kind could only flatter) was pirated by an equally obscure publisher in Taarg, to what end I have not been able to discover. And perhaps most laughable of all was the ambition which Pythna's seizure upon this pretext was meant to mask: to snatch some thaumaturgic renown and status by crushing a power so wormholed and rotten with invasive demon influences as Taarg. Pythnans, every half-wise crackpot of them, were tired of being little sister to Strega, Shamna, and Hagia.

One might smile, but perhaps only moderately, and then, reflect. Taarg, so near the Vortex that bears its name (see
The Fishing of the Demon-Sea)
is, in the estimation of all informed commentators on the subject, and all those who have been there (and I am one of the latter, howbeit some might contest my being one of the former)—is, I say, eaten all but hollow by the demon influence that flows out with the rotten exhalations of the Vortex's ragged, spuming mouth. If crusades are to be mounted, whatever fools may mount them, let their blades be drawn against such a city Taarg was then, and to some extent continues to be. So I feel, at least, though the reader must, of course, side as he chooses.

Anvil Pastures entertained the embassies of both parties, exercising her traditional discretion, which spared either party the painful knowledge of its rival's entertainment. The Pythnans purchased from the Aristarchs a formidable weapon: a flock of spring-steel harpies, clockwork airborne carnivores guided by such basic spells as their field marshals could command, and able to scour the largest ramparts bare of defenders in mere moments. The Taarg embassy, with its demon-augmented coffer—and all the world knew the subworld source of those coffers' content—purchased from Anvil Pastures a perfect defense against
any
aerial assault, for thus much had they divined of their enemy's tactical plans: a marvelously light, strong system of steel netting, erectable on a vast framework by spring-powered spreaders that could operate in mere seconds.

Taarg's fleet lay prepared for a counterassault, which it launched the moment the Pythnan assault had been crushed. The Pythnans reeled home with an armada quite large enough for a full-scale invasion scant miles astern. And indeed, the failure of its crusade against Taarg threatened to be followed directly by its homeland's invasion and conquest. Taarg's pursuing flotilla must, in truth, have offered a spectacle of grim majesty, for Dami-ergs commanded the flagships, and a century of their Galgath Assaulters stood in every prow. Before this many-hulled marine juggernaut Pythna's broken navy fled, lacking even enough lead once they reached home to blockade their harbor before the Taargian fleet broke through. And, as is widely known, Pythna was not then saved by any powers of her own, but by powers that came down from Strega. These latter, incensed that demon-kind should presume to touch their keels to any shore in the Astrygals, bent upon those invaders such attentions as shortly sent them wheeling and bleeding straight back to the Vortex, and back down its clamorous throat.