The Incompleat Nifft (38 page)

"It's that one yonder."

"Most impressive! Could you show me the interior of it? We might even be so lucky as to hear some of the priestess' remarks to the Aristarchs."

Smiling slightly, Kandros answered: "That would probably not be difficult. Though theirs is not strictly a public meeting, there are many galleries that should allow a discreet vantage on the proceedings."

The Aristarkion was the only building on the acropolis larger than the FIockwarden's temple. For a seat of governmental deliberations, it was rather an open structure—an extensive, roofed system of porticoes and pillared promenades with a single great chamber, the Aristarkion proper, at its center. There was a broad and doorless portal in each of the chamber's walls, and thus from almost anywhere in the galleried periphery a view of its interior could be had, as well as a clear hearing of what was said under its echoing vault. Nifft remarked on this before they had fairly mounted the steps up from the plaza, and Kandros smiled family.

"The design," he said, "expresses the oligarchy's uprightness. The Aristarchs, you see, since they never allow considerations of personal gain to bias their legislative policies, have never had anything to fear from public audience of their proceedings. Besides, it's long been their custom to do the real work of governing at informal convocations in the privacy of their homes, and when they gather here it's usually to solemnize enactments whose awkward elements they have weighed beforehand, and worded in the seemliest, least troublesome terms possible."

They found the corridors and forested columns surrounding the assembly chamber were populous. Talk was subdued among all these strollers and loiterers. Most seemed to be listening to a woman's voice that came spilling out of the Aristarkion—strident, though not yet distinct to the pair.

"Nevertheless," Kandros concluded, "certain persons, under certain conditions, can oblige the Aristarchs to assemble here even when their sense of delicacy might prompt them to prefer a more discreet kind of conference. The forgemen's Guildmaster, for instance, can demand one session yearly to debate forge conditions. And the Goddess' oracle can convoke them whenever an important communication from the Flockwarden seems to her to require it."

They were making for the nearest of the assembly room's portals, and the voice of the woman within now grew distinct amid the reverberations it spawned among the marble shafts and pavements without.

" . . . because once again it's
money
I'm talking to you about, gentlemen. And you needn't fidget and squirm, because we've talked about money before—we talked about it a little over a year ago, for instance, do you recall the occasion? Anvil, Staff, and Hammer! What possessed you then, gentlemen? Our heaven-born Flockwarden, whom you all revere, whom you have thanked for a score of benefits within my term of service alone!—our Goddess asked something of us, and that led—did it not?—to this previous occasion I refer to when we also talked about
money,
just as we're doing now—you
do
recall the occasion, gentlemen? What's that you say, Director Pozzle? Forgive me but I didn't catch your remark—will you repeat that a bit louder, please?"

If any voice other than the woman's had sounded within the chamber, no peep of it had reached Nifft and Kandros. They turned into a promenade that approached the chamber's portal straight-on, and saw the speaker for the first time. She stood on a high rostrum, half-ringed by marble tiers where the Aristarchs sat. She was wild-haired, short. She had her fists thrust into the pouch of an apron, below which hung her shabby tunic, its skirts crookedly caught up with pins to mid-shin, perhaps to free the movement of her restless, sandaled feet. She leaned forward, her posture elaborately solicitous to hear Pozzle's alleged remark repeated, and even in this attitude, she paced, her impatient feet shifting her leftward, rightward, leftward. A florid man in the center of the highest tier shook his head gloomily. In a voice resigned to harassment he said, "You're mistaken, Dame Lybis—I said nothing."

"You said nothing? Oh, you mean just
now
you said nothing! I see! Because in last year's discussion about money you said a great deal—perhaps that's why I mistook you, for I thought you might be going to quote to us now the very elegantly worded remarks with which you
closed
last year's discussion. And dear me, but that
was
an effective little speech you made, Pozzle; one point in it I particularly remember. You were helping us to appreciate just how great the
cost
of bringing the Goddess' flock to her would be. You'd computed that, if the beasts of her flock were as big as she had indicated, then it would cost more to retrieve just one of them from southern Kairnheim than it would to construct three large public buildings. Very cogent, that was, a very telling way of putting it, especially since you gentlemen at that time were so eager to subsidize the building of a new guildhall for the forge-men—and heaven knows you had good reason for wanting to appease them, considering the remarkably creative ways you'd been putting their portion of the municipal revenues to work for yourselves! Ah me! How perspectives change! Each one of the Flockwarden's beasts would cost three buildings to bring home to her. And how many buildings will it cost us if, a second time, we do nothing? How many buildings are there in Anvil Pastures?"

She had, in asking this, turned aside from her audience, but now she whirled, fiercely re-confronting them. "Note well!"
she almost bellowed. "Mark me, and mark what I do
not
say to you!" She grinned at them a moment, savoring the opacity of this admonition. Her hair was the color of dirty honey. She wore a kind of skull-net of wire. Long past containing her pelt, it was deeply sunk in it, and her hair thrust from its gridwork in soft spikes reminiscent of the half-erected feathers of an angry hawk. Her nose was, like most of her person, small, but strongly aquiline, and due to the neighborhood of her eyes—large, black, bright and restless—had the look of being a keen nose for trouble. Her compact mouth was delicately ripe of lip, and would have been sensual in repose, but it was always either tight with purpose or ironically awry. Both Nifft and Kandros, leaning against opposite sides of the portal, could be seen idly discovering within her tunic the womanly emphasis of her pelvic curves and the plump bouyancy of her little breasts.

"What I do
not
say," she all but crowed, "is that the Goddess intends to send us after her flock as the means to our city's salvation. I am the Flockwarden's humble servant—I do not presume to foretell her will.
But what seems more likely,
eh? And if she does send us to Kairnheim, what more perfect reparation than that for your criminal stinginess a year ago, eh?

"Enough, then. I have but one thing of importance to tell you. You've commissioned the mercenaries, as she demanded. Thus much, at least, you've paid up, and without inordinate whining, I must confess. Therefore, beware lest you falter now. Whatever use she should direct you to make of them, see you do it and damn the cost. I'm going now to talk with their commanders. I don't plan to do any dickering or mealy-mouthing about costs. They are crack professionals from Gelidor Ingens. When they learn their task, they'll bid the highest figure that a reasonable and well-informed customer could be expected to pay for the work in question. And it will be your business, gentlemen, to accept their bid, and muster the funds for them with all dispatch. Since there's nothing more that lies in your power to do for your own salvation, then you must do nothing less.

"I will make the Solicitation in one hour. Please be prompt."

As the pair re-crossed the plaza toward the temple, they saw the oracle's litter already some ways ahead of them, and they quickened their pace. Nifft, watching the palanquin, smiled, saying, "I like her manners."

"Yes. They were perfectly suited to her audience."

They walked. Nifft's eyes grew abstracted. "Tell me what you know of the historical circumstances, Kandros. How was it that the flock came to be lost in the first place, and that it still survives?"

"They were lost in the same assault that exterminated the Flockwarden and all her race."

"Competitive visitants from . . . abroad?" He waved skyward. Kandros shook his head.

"Men. Seemingly, this was one of our race's epochs of greatness. I've even heard that in those days men tolerated such visitants as the Flockwardens the more equably because they themselves had crossed to and colonized worlds not their own."

"Hmm. But toward the Flockwardens, toleration ran out?"

"Apparently, greed supplanted it. It is said the colony here prospered mightily. One tradition has it that this was a kind of smithy servicing the great steel vessels that conveyed men and gods alike from world to world among the stars. At any rate the men of some neighboring city—then great, since vanished without a trace—attacked the Pastures. Such was their onslaught that the Flockwardens were obliterated. In fact, the Goddess in the temple yonder, having died in one piece, was unique. Hence her preservation—a kind of monumental trophy, I suppose. Anyway, the battle caused a tremendous landslide above the slopes where the flock were grazing. The beasts were buried en masse, and in consequence, the conquerors took command of a ghost-smithy starved of metal and fuel alike. But as for the flock itself, these lithivores needed no air, it seems, and burial was not death to them."

"And so they fled underground? And since then have dwelt subterraneously, until their recent emergence?"

"Apparently."

"And there was none with them to . . . shepherd them?"

Kandros raised his brows at the question, and Nifft laughed by way of retracting it. "If you mean to suggest," said Kandros, "that a Flockwarden might have escaped destruction by burrowing down with her flock, you will have only to behold the Goddess within to know that hers was not a digging breed."

At the entry they were met and ushered within by an acolyte, an exceedingly elderly man who muttered and groaned faintly as he moved. As Nifft stepped into the Wardenshrine—an immense, softly lit room at the temple's heart—he faltered just perceptibly. Both the Goddess' form and her posture had the effect of making her hugeness seem to leap toward the beholder.

She resembled a titanic dragonfly. Her long, slender stern segment curved up and forward above the four angular archways created by her eight impossibly delicate-seeming, jointed legs. She filled the block of glass containing her, and this was at least six stories high. She had two pairs of antennae. Two were short and fanlike, intricate trellises that antlered her spheroid head just back of her faceted, pyramidal eyes. The other two were slender, plumate, and tremendously elongated. These bowed forward and down, their tips plunging to within inches of the glass surface at a point close enough to the floor to lie within the enclosure of a small cubicle of drapery. The drapes were at present drawn back.

From a postern near one corner of the glass monolith Dame Lybis marched, her hands still completing behind her head the knot of an embroidered fillet with which she had bound her brow. Coming to stand directly before the first row of pews, and plunging her hands into her apron pouch, she bowed gravely, meeting every man's eyes.

"Gentlemen, you are most welcome here, and that is putting it mildly. Please forgive a haste that might resemble discourtesy, but this isn't the time for a genuine conference. It's a chance for me to give you the outlines of our situation, and answer the most general kind of question, no more.

"So first: When I've made the Solicitation and you've learned the task for which we'll want to engage you, then set yourselves the most generous wage that fairness allows you. The Aristarchs will only remain cooperative if they are dealt with firmly and unequivocally from the start.

"Second: Though we don't strictly
know
the Flockwarden's will until I
have
made the Solicitation, I can't pretend to have the least doubt of what it is, and so I can acquaint you with the parameters of the task. For surely, the Goddess' flock is what she herself has wanted since the day their re-emergence became known to her more than a year ago, while they are also the only credible antidote to what ails our city." Lybis gestured ceilingward without withdrawing her eyes from those of the mercenary commanders.

"So what is the flock? Its numbers aren't clearly known—hundreds, but nowhere near a thousand. They are giant lithivores. I gather they stand about knee-high to the Goddess." (Eyes rose gaugingly. Each of the Flockwarden's legs had three major joints. The lowest was fifteen feet from the floor.) "Their bulk is that of a good-sized whale. They are highly tractable. They've surfaced in the hills of Kairnheim's southern promontory—a region both so mountainous and so jungled that the Prior Kairns have never troubled to annex it. This season it's a ten-day crossing over the Sea of Catastor. And before you start computing the number of crossings needed, know that the beasts are phenomenally tough-bodied, all but undamageable, and that they can live entirely without air. They can, in fact, be lashed together in groups of four or five, buoyed, and towed behind a transport of moderate size, which the while can be carrying one or two more of the beasts packed in its hold."

She paused and raised her brows to invite remark. One of the infantry commanders, Menodon, murmured: "Twenty ships could carry a hundred and forty a trip. Will we have twenty ships?"

"We'll have thirty-five. The Aristarchs can levy twenty from our own merchant fleets alone, and they'll willingly underwrite the procural of fifteen more from the Shallows or the Aristoz Islands."

"Mmm. Forgive me, Dame Lybis, but you must let me rephrase some of your remarks in what I can't help feeling is a more accurate manner. Ages past, the remote
ancestors
of this flock
were
highly tractable to the commands of their
Flockwardens"—
he nodded significantly at the frozen colossus—"but what we must deal with will be beasts which have never known either a Warden or her rule. In this rather different light, let me repeat a question you have already answered by implication. Will the collection and transport of these huge things involve any dangerous difficulty? Please be frank. We don't shrink from danger or hardship, we merely seek to assess it properly and price it fairly. Surely these nomadic, long-ungoverned behemoths will not be tamely tethered, marched into the sea, bound and dragged across it, without offering some opposition. With no offense intended, how can you plausibly promise such a thing?"