The Incompleat Nifft (39 page)

Lybis stood smiling serenely, hands restfully pocketed in her pouch, head slowly shaking a benign negative. "You don't grasp the entire picture, my friend. Toil and difficulty there'll certainly be in crossing the terrain in question. Other claimants to the herd might also be met, and need fighting. These things excrete in purified form whatever metal they ingest, along with very high-quality furnace fuel, man, and if they're noticed they won't go unclaimed! But as for resistance to our will from the flock itself, we shall encounter none at all. For a Flockwarden
will
be commanding their obedience. What you might think of as the Goddess' voice will prompt their compliance throughout the expedition. For does she not speak from my mouth, and declare her will through my presence, and shall I not be with you? Though speech, in this case, will not be the medium, nevertheless her commands will be channeled through myself and the flock will feel them. And the latter's ilk, however long at large, are so made that they can never be impervious to a Flockwarden's behests."

There was a fractional silence, in which all eyes posed a question which Lybis, by her smiling silence, benevolently challenged them to articulate, and then Nifft asked: "With apologies, Dame Lybis, do the dead, then, not only reveal hidden treasures, and discover the remote emergences of long-lost beings, but govern expeditions as well, with hourly attention and providence?"

The Aristarchs had begun to file into the shrine, a subdued group. The priestess did not turn her eyes from Nifft's, which she studied for a moment with an air of speculation. Then she said: "You know that the Goddess does the first two, sir. Whether or not you believe she can do the third is for yourself, and the rest of you gentlemen, to decide, before you accept this commission."

The assembly was silent. Aristarchs and mercenary commanders alike studied the slack folds of the drawn Veil of Solicitation, which Sexton Minor had closed behind Lybis when she had stepped within it, and before which he now stood, awaiting the priestess' word that the Solicitation had been completed, whereat it was his office to unveil her again.

Though identical in their silent concentration upon those pleated drapes, the Aristarchs watched them with a queasy premonition of painfully large capital disbursements, while the soldiers' faces betrayed a covert complacency as they kept the same vigil. But given this difference of attitude, it could still be said that for both groups, the slightest stirring of the ceremonial curtain emitted the same ghostly sound—the subliminal music of five-lictor gold pieces hefted by the palmful, a melody melancholy to half its auditors, and dulcet to the other half. Meanwhile the eyes of the men in either group showed an identical tendency—whenever they forsook that pregnant drapery—to flicker upward at the coffined giant. Her great antennal bows, plunging to receive her dwarfish petitioner's query, were given looks of uneasy calculation. Seemingly, the Goddess' active sentience was being given some thought by the congregation. A caw of triumph rose from within the Veil:

"Ha! I knew it! And you shall have it, Mistress, on my very life I swear it! Ha!"

The Sexton's feet shifted; embarrassment marred the decorous blank of his expression. Near silence followed in which a very faint noise, a soft, erratic pattering and squeaking, was audible from within the Veil. Then Lybis cried: "Her will is known! Her will be done!"

The Sexton, as his post seemed to require of him at the pronouncement of this formula, turned suavely to withdraw the Veil for the oracle's emergence, but he had no more than turned when the drapes flew apart—one of them rudely enveloping his head and shoulders—and Lybis strode out, holding a wax tablet and a stylus. The stylus she pointed vindictively at herself, while she hammered the tablet against the air at the assembly.

"Didn't I foretell you this, gentlemen? Eh? Didn't I now?" She stabbed the stylus into her hair, where it vanished. Then she patted the tablet against her free palm with a menacing smile. "Harken," she said. She read from the tablet, her voice dramatic, and clarion-clear:

From ancient murder buried deep, like seed,
 

A harvest has arisen in the sun—
 

So men may reap what once they did lay down
 

When they entombed the thing that sparked
the greed
 

Their murderous action had been meant to feed.
 

In south-most Kairnheim murder is undone;
 

If you do but restore to Anviltown
 

Her lately un-killed issue, thus you'll speed
 

The lifting of that doom that weights you down.
 

"Well, gentlemen?" Lybis burst out, as if astonished that they all sat silent after hearing this exhaustively foretold revelation. "Can you really be so chill-blooded? So unmoved by heroic sentiments and cosmic phenomena? Come, you're all playing stoic, as men so love to do. One of you, at least, must show that he has heard me, in token for the rest of you, or else I'll think you're all deaf, or dumb, or both. Mint-Master Hamp! You sir! Let it be you, of estimable, agile-witted Aristarch! Come, Lord Hamp. What did you discover from the Goddess' utterance?"

The man in question, by allowing only a grey stubble to occupy the pate of his otherwise severely shaven head and face, had made the more manifest an unusual squareness of visage. Hamp regarded Lybis morosely, the glumness of his mouth complaining in advance that his answer was going to be mistreated.

"I entreat you, Lord Hamp," the oracle urged, "can't we dispose of the obvious with more dispatch? What did the oracle tell you?"

With the prompting of many supportive gazes, Pozzle's among them, Hamp cleared his throat, and availed himself of his jaw's massive hinge. "Well, what she
means
essentially, as you predicted she was going to in the Aristarkion, is the interpretation that the way to solve the problem is to go and bring her flock back, which again as you were saying was exactly the same situation of a year ago."

Hamp cleared his throat again, with a faint note of optimism engendered by Lybis' silent, thoughtful gaze. She shook her head slowly, still looking at him. She grinned. Her head tilted back and she emitted a big, braying laugh. At length she brought herself more or less under control.

"Oh, my dear Lord Hamp," she said. "Anvil, Staff, and Hammer bless us all! Mind that I don't say this disparagingly, for knowing you and hearing your views has always given me the liveliest kind of pleasure, but that's precisely the kind of cretinous irrelevance I've come to count on from you over the years.
Obviously
she wants the flock brought back home! What could be plainer? But does no one see what the
significance
of this will be, once it is accomplished? Why has her thought and will endured throughout the countless centuries of her death? Why has she always helped us? In short, why has she held this posthumous sentinel's post
all along,
if not precisely for this moment? The return of her flock to its home, the restoration of her world as it was when, anciently, men destroyed it? And whose luck is this? Who
inherits
those long-lost mountain-makers and mountain-destroyers and mountain-
miners
now? To think that we had to be
forced
to accept this staggering enrichment! So greedy you all are in the short term, so lazy and unimaginative!"

"Yes,
forced
!" erupted Director Pozzle. "That's exactly what I'm talking about!"

"Eh? Have you been whispering to yourself, Director Pozzle?"

Pozzle had surged to his feet with an accusing finger thrust up toward the Goddess, but in the same instant that he struck this posture the huge countenance of the accused caused his legs to wobble slightly, and the voice to leak out of his throat momentarily, as if the Flockwarden's mute giantism confuted anything he could say.

"Extortion,"
he managed at last. It came out muted, like a comic attempt at confidentially addressing the whole chamber without the giant's hearing. "It's blackmail. We talked in the Aristarkion." His challenging look elicited some uncomfortable nods and murmurs of support from his fellow Aristarchs. "The Goddess
knew
about the deceptive support-vein—that it wasn't nearly as thick as it looked from outside. The lode she revealed to us lay
deeper,
and if she knew about
that,
she must have known about the support vein we were counting on to—"

Lybis had held up her hand, and was nodding calmly. "Lord Pozzle. The Goddess doesn't condescend to discuss her divine motivations with her humble servitor, but do you think I'm a fool? Isn't it more or less staring us in the face? And I will say to you what I told myself when I had the same realization:
So what
?
Will
you
gentlemen undertake to punish her? And if she has seen how to make a mountain bow down above our city, surely she's the only one who can help us
decapitate
a mountain. Who else will you go to for help? But of course, the city's purse is yours to command. I will leave you to reach whatever agreement you see fit with our military friends here. Do let me know what you decide. I'll be in the atrium."

Nifft followed the shrine-mistress from the chamber. "Dame Lybis, could I speak with you?" He held out to her a string-tied packet of vellum. "A very dear friend of mine in Karkmahn-Ra, a scholar of the highest reputation, sends you this. Perhaps you have heard of Shag Margold?"

Her brows rose and she took the packet. "Margold? His
History of the Kolodrian Migrations
stands on the shelf of my most prized books. Why has he written me?"

"He's at work on a history of the world's most prominent religious cults. He's always followed yours with interest, and has gathered a fair amount of information on it." Nifft paused, dropped his eyes, and cleared his throat. "He's asked you a number of questions which he hopes you'll be so good as to answer for him, to fill out his account of Pa—of Anvil Pastures. Forgive my impertinence, but that's a charming ring you have on. Is that an anvil?"

"Yes."

"It's a beautiful piece of silverwork—by the same artisan as made your staff and hammer?"

Lybis, whose eyes had grown rather remote, absently touched the latter two miniatures, which hung from a chain around her neck. "I presume so. They are temple heirlooms, made long before my time."

"Well. I'll be in the city for some time—frankly, I'm looking for a bit of employment—and perhaps you'll find it convenient to answer Shag's letter in time for me to take your reply back with me." Lybis nodded, not speaking. "So! Thank you again. I think I'll go stroll around a bit and take the view from this marvelous plaza outside. Good-bye for now."

Nifft had loitered outside the temple for perhaps ten minutes when the Aristarchs came out, and after them, the commanders—the former grave, the latter rather buoyant, in a decorous way. Nifft told Kandros to go on without him, and that he would meet him back at the quarters where the mercenaries had been housed. When he had been alone again for perhaps another ten minutes, Dame Lybis came hurrying from the temple, spied him, and made straight for him, wearing a rather strained smile.

"Still here, then? You know, I'm curious—have you read your friend's letter?"

Nifft straightened indignantly. "Why—well, certainly not!" His awkward expression did nothing to repair the lack of conviction in his tone.

"Naturally not," Lybis said. "Forgive me for asking. You know, I'd like to express my admiration for Margold in some more substantial way than merely answering this. You mentioned you were looking for employment? You seem to be a handy and active sort of man—it would be my pleasure to secure you a commission on our expeditionary force, at an officer's pay, if that would suit you."

"You are extremely kind! I would undertake it most gratefully and faithfully!"

The expedition, being lucky in the winds, had crossed the Sea of Catastor and found the nearest suitable anchorage to their goal by the afternoon of their ninth day out of Anvil Pastures, with seven hundred leagues of their journey accomplished. To cross the remaining fifty miles, and then re-cross it with the Goddess' flock in tow, took three weeks.

This sloth was, in part, due to the mountainous jungle they had to penetrate with every step of their inland journey. Partly, too, it was their mode of pathfinding. On the open sea, the directive emanations of the Goddess—her extended filament of sentience—though attenuated by distance, reached unobstructed over the level seas. But crossing the fernchoked gorges and vine-webbed groves—following the narrow watercourses slick with mist, mud, and moss that were often their sole means of traversing the ridges that opposed them—here, Lybis was often forced to diverge from this psychic connective to the point of so diminishing her sense of it that she must find high ground whence she could relocate its course, and correct their tedious path accordingly.

And a third circumstance retarded them—the fact that when they reached the flock, they found an army in possession of it, and a second army besieging the first.

The first army was in possession of the lucrative monsters in a technical sense only. The beasts were in a kind of fortress of their own making—they had eaten a broad, flat-bottomed gulf out of the flanks of two adjoining hills. Raggedly vertical walls some ninety feet high encompassed them, easily enough descended from the hills with ropes, but impossible as an escape route. Consequently the besiegers bent their main effort against the impressive wood-and-stone wall the defenders had strung across the pit's one open side: the narrow valley-floor whence the herd had approached the hills they found so appetizing. And the defenders possessed the giants only in the sense that those behemoths were gnawing too leisurely at the hills' flanks to be very far away by the time the battle was likely to be decided, and were too torpidly indifferent—if not, indeed, blind—to events of so small a scale as human warfare to contest the claims of the army that had strung the wall behind them.