The Incompleat Nifft (54 page)

After what we judged a couple miles of this, we rested in a fissure, and took wine. "I'm damned . . ." Barnar said, breathing hard, "if I can tell for sure . . . but I think we're bearing . . .
down
slope."

" . . . this run-and-stop rhythm . . . I can't be sure either . . . but I agree."

We lay catching our breath a moment. Giants thundered past. A few sour draughts of wine caught fire in our racing blood. Courage blazed in us.

"Shall we retrace and try the other way then?"

"Why not? You know, Barnar, if this is the worst of it, I think we can manage it."

"Aye to that and aye again! Look—here's a Licker." She danced bobbingly towards us, mouthing the fungal fur along our stretch of wall. We knew to sit still, our crevice being sunk in a fungal bald patch. High as a galleon's bowsprit, the Licker reared above us her spittly kiss, the arched buttresses of her legs bracketing us in that moment like some mighty temple's nave. Then she danced on.

"Think, Nifft!" Barnar growled fervently. "With such spawn as these, what must the Queen's dimensions be?"

We set to jogging back the way we'd come. "What if she proves too big for mounting and milking?" I asked. "What if we can't climb her? Is it not . . . serendipitous how the Unguent, if it be real, would answer so perfectly to this need? Surely we could turn the trick of getting the pap if we were airborne."

"I tell you, I too feel the itch of that very thought, Nifft! Ostrogall of course has every motive to lie unconstrainedly."

"Well . . . we must question him closer once we get back."

Loping along pretty briskly now, we were feeling more attuned to these tunnels with each stride. All at once we sensed the tremor of a very big weight approaching, and we looked sharp for shelter. A natural ridge of quartz ribbed the tunnel wall just ahead of us.

"Let's shin up that!" I said. We swarmed our way up it just in time to get above a fast-moving Sweeper who veered under us. But even as we sighed relief, here, oppositely bound, there surged titanically towards us a Forager.

We were almost unhinged—it was the first we'd seen. Still we kept our grips, and scrambled desperately higher, to get above her hugeness. Her jaws alone were half the size of a Nurse! Since the onrushing Sweeper never altered course, the Forager arched up accommodatingly on her legs, while the Sweeper crouched slightly and rushed right under her.

Unluckily, as the Forager lifted herself in this maneuver, she glanced against the tunnel wall just under us. The shock wave plucked us clean off the rock, and we plunged down toward the Forager's vast back, our hands and feet clawing thin air in a desperate, futile bid to be elsewhere, anywhere other than where we fell to.

Shag Margold's First
Interjection

A LITTLE MORE than a decade before the time of this present narrative, Nifft and Barnar endured a subworld sojourn in the Demon-Sea, to which Nifft alludes when they ride the bucket down the gangway. During that infernal submersion among demonry, the pair acquired the friendship-till-death of the shape-shifter Gildmirth of Sordon, whom they set at liberty from durance in that vile abyss.

Some five years after, and about as long before this present business, Nifft and Barnar had acquired—in the Great Shallows, at a gaming table in one of the raft-cities of the Hydrobani—a little flat-deck yawlp. With this and some rented harpoons, they went out next morning a-sculping. Towards mid-day, they harpooned (as they thought) a particularly large and fine-looking sculp. It was a solid hit, and took the barb deep, and they were already congratulating themselves on a very profitable venture. Then their sculp melted into the form of a giant marine reptile, who held their bloodless harpoon in one claw, and towed them for a long and merry ride through the Shallows, skimming at incredible speed above those gorgeous reefs all aflame with life and color. The pair could neither quit nor cut the harpoon cable. They ceased to try when the reptile began to sing and warble melodiously in an unknown tongue as it towed them through their crazy course. Long before Gildmirth melted down to his true form, and climbed dripping aboard, they had guessed him for who he was.

From this merry, chance meeting of friends, weighty events developed which, while they may concern us elsewhere, cannot detain us here. But it was on this occasion that Nifft heard from Gildmirth a highly particular account of Pelfer the Peerless' tomb, and of the Buskins, Cowl and Gantlets buried there with that arch-thief. These Supreme Facilitators of Felonious Appropriation are of course a by-word through the world at large; even the uncouth upland brigands of the Ingens Cluster swear by the "boots, hood and gloves of the Pilferer."

But it was Nifft's and Barnar's rare luck to hear the full and detailed truth of the matter from Gildmirth of Sordon, and what they learned enflamed their imaginations. The Buskins are popularly credited with conferring everything from the power of flight to the power to run faster that the eye can follow; in fact, my friends learned, they confer the Blessing of Bounding Absquatulation, by which is understood the power to make one-league leaps. Escape, to the thief shod with Pelfer's Buskins, is never in doubt.

The Cowl is loosely deemed to confer invisibility. In fact, they learned, it confers on its wearer the Blessing of Circumambient Similitude, or an identity of aspect to the wearer's immediate surroundings, however complex. The Cowl's function is best illustrated in the tale told of Pelfer, when he had penetrated the Art Trove of UrrGurr the Grasping. That ghastly Elemental surprised Pelfer in the very midst of his Trove, but discerned him not, for the thief, beCowled, bore a simultaneous piecemeal resemblance to no less than three of that age's great masterworks in oils: Goob's
Battle of Trumpet Plains
, the
Smiling Mimostula
by Phasri Pedofilaster, and Quonsonby's epoch-making
Still Life with Rumkins and Prooms
. From this the finesse of the Cowl's power may be surmised.

As for Pelfer's Gantlets, they confer the Blessing of Loosened Locks upon the hands they ensheathe. With regard to these Gantlets, the popular conception does not so much err as fall short. Gloved with these, the thief's touch will cause any obstacle—lock, wall, weighty door, or mass of earth—to fall asunder, so be this obstacle interposed as a barrier between the thief and the prize she craves.

From this, the fervor of Nifft's mercenary motive will be readily understood. A thief accoutered as great Pelfer was, would soon abound in wealth.

But Barnar, on his side, cherishes no merely sentimental enterprise. His family feeling, and his romantic interest in a certain beauty of the Magnass-Dryan clan, are foremost in his motives, of course. They cause in him an intransigence to match the force of Nifft's greed for Pelfer's Facilitators. But dense-wooded Chilia lies of course in the Great Shallows, just off the mainland of the Kolodrian Continent. And, like that forested Kolodrian coast, Chilia serves the timber needs of the Great Shallows—a vast broth of cultures and of thriving trade, populous with vessels of all makes. Shallows' boatyards are a bottomless maw for lumber. When the saw-mills of Barnar's clan howl at full capacity, they turn a golden harvest, and Chilite tree-jacks with lush mountain holdings, though their palms be hard with doing their own axework, grow seriously rich.

—Shag Margold

Now saddle my mount, I am riding to plunder
The Ur-hoard encoffered in caskets infernal
!
Swift my mount bears me, her footfall as thunder,
Where hell sweats its lucre in fever eternal
!

THE HORROR of being on the Forager's back made us stagger and stumble at first, now to port, now to starboard, where her legs pumped in their high-kneed ranks. But we found that our footing was not really difficult, no harder than finding your sea-legs on a big vessel that is riding a steady swell. I mean a big vessel indeed, though, for the biggest galleon we ever shipped on was less than half her size. Her abdomen bulged sternward and we could not see its tip; the immense bowsprit of her jaws loomed half eclipsed beyond her head's great spheroid. The blue-litten walls tore past us, blurred to the look of sea-foam with the speed of her passage.

"Dye!" Barnar shouted—and the sense of it brought my wits back to me. We rushed as near as we dared to her pumping legs, I to port and Barnar to starboard, and from our bottles of dye jetted out arcs of pigment against the streaming tunnel walls. These little banners of liquid we ejected grew tattered as they fell, torn by our velocity. Just so would our bodies be if we leapt or fell while moving at this rate; we would at the very least break our legs.

"If she's begged for food and she stops," I shouted back over my shoulder, "jump on the instant!"

"Do you think her crop is full?" Barnar shouted back after a heartbeat's pause. Amid the confusion of the rushing walls and the flaring cyanic fungi like sea-foam cut by a swift keel, the question hung full of significance in the air between us. If her crop was full of demon harvest, our Forager would be returning from forage, and could well be bound to our very own destination: the Royal Brood Chamber. If, on the other hand, her crop were empty, she might equally well be bound to the subworld, to re-fill it.

For a dreamlike, indefinite time, we sped along poised on this uncertainty: If another worker begged food of us, and our Forager's crop proved full, then should we jump down? Might she not go on up with her offering to the Queen?

But all too soon, our descent grew unmistakable. "Downslope she goes!" Barnar cried needlessly, as suddenly the pitch grew steeper. No other Behemoth detained us, nor would, we saw. Her nestmates would sense our mount's emptiness.

We dared not let the horror of where we were going slacken our sinews. Complex branchings of the tunnels flowed unpredictably past us, and at such intersections we must spray a frenzied profusion of dye, not to miss our turning when—luck grant it!—we might come trudging back. Dispensing dye like dervishes, we frenziedly blazed our path, as our Forager, unaccosted by any oncomer, thundered on down to the mountainroot.

Our descent was long enough to astonish us with the Nest's immense extent, yet so inexorably were we carried whither every fiber of our souls recoiled from being, that it seemed no time at all before I was crying out, "Can we doubt any longer? Do you see ahead there? A reddening of the light?"

"Yes!" Barnar's voice seemed to mourn, and I know he, with me, experienced an irrepressible qualm of pure loathing, a slither of revulsion climbing up and down the spine.

"I suppose," I called, wanly attempting optimism, "we could scarcely go down there any better guarded than we are."

"No doubt," Barnar boomed glumly.

"Ah, look there now friend! We're close! Hammer in some pitons—let's string some rope to hold by!"

Convergent tunnels had broadened to a mighty gallery which was flooded with an ever redder light. Now another Forager ran to port of us, two more to starboard . . . and now we ran amidst a thundering flux of Foragers, an outsurging armada of rampant titans. Kneeling, we hammered into the ragged, tough chitin of our Forager's dorsum several of the spikes we used to dog down spike valves. I paid line off my coil, and strung it between these spikes for hand- and foot-holds.

"There!" I shrieked. "There's the foul hellgate itself!"

The Nest-mouth framed a ragged oval of ruby light. It was a hole in the hell-sky. To exit it seemed a plunge into thin air. A rushing moment later, and the yawning portal framed a vista: far below spread the subworld plain, threaded with red rivers, and looking strangely empty and quiescent, compared to other parts of it we'd seen.

We flung ourselves down and gripped our ropes. "Hold on!"

"I am!"

The Forager erupted from the Nest-mouth, and dove down the vertiginous subworld wall. We clung to our ropes, jouncing and jolting against the rough carapace. All the plain and all its stony sky, revealed to us in crazy, shaken glimpses, dispread around us its vile grandeur. Both hellfloor and hellvault shocked us out of our expectations. The rolling plain was all but denuded. "Behemoth's scoured it clean as bone!" cried Barnar—but we cried out indeed when we looked above us.

"By the Crack and by all that crawls from it!" I yelped. "Look there! What Thing looks down on us?"

For this part of the subworld's stony sky was gigantically inhabited by a monstrous crimson Eye, socketed in the earth-bone and staring immensely down. Its pupil was a ragged fissure of utter blackness faintly measled with stars, while within the scarlet hemisphere of its half-translucent ball, pearly shapes of cloudy tissue writhed, or languidly convulsed. But most hair-raisingly, the orb attended, turned torpidly to focus here or there. It was framed in a gasketing of ophidian scales that merged with the stone. And unceasingly it bled tears that ran in branching, impossible rivers across the hell-ceiling, and down the hell-walls near and distant, to weave in red rivers through the plains' rolling denudation.

Indeed, the only things abounding on those plains were Foragers. Their multitudes tiny with distance, everywhere they rushed in broad fronts or phalanxes. As we surged down onto the plain ourselves, and the mountainroot we'd emerged from fell away behind us, we saw how poxed it was with Nest-mouths like our own, and how these bled a ceaseless stream of demonkind's nemesis.

We ran in a wide invading wave of Foragers—sparse, perhaps, here and there, but stretching from horizon to horizon. Finding our legs again, we scanned awhile in awe the waste we crossed. "It's a desert!" I breathed.

"Like a spider-hole swept by a giant broom."

"Do we not owe them"—I indicated our mount, and her congeners sweeping across the plains—"our gratitude? Even our love? Look at what they have wrought in this unclean dominion! Look at the purging they have worked!"

Not that demon vitality was utterly absent. The hellfloor was a crazy-quilt of living tissues, hides, mantlings and tegmenta: wet, barnacly stretches yielded to tough knolls and swales of plated scale that reeked like a bull Titanoplod in rut, these in turn yielding to meadows of black thorns as thick as fur. But all these anatomical terrains sprawled alike deserted. Nonetheless here and there we saw other Foragers stop, and set their jaws against this ground. We failed to draw warning from this behaviour, and thus were we knocked nine-pin-down in our doltish unreadiness when our own mount stopped dead, and drove her jaws' spiked tips against the ground she trod-—a terrain of black, glassy slag. She pried up a great, groaning section of the stubborn stone, and we danced lively for footing in the heave of her labors.