The Incompleat Nifft (56 page)

Barnar and I traded a covert look here, for we had both, in the same instant, seen a further way the Harpy might be useful to us.

"Agreed!" the Harpy gasped. "Look how she makes for that plantation—your wish for jewels may well bear fruit, oh Honest Masters! I hope I may without offense, and fervently, ask you for solemn assurance of your intent to reward my earnest endeavors with the restoration of my freedom."

"We would not dream of denying you such assurance," I told the demon distractedly. Our course towards the orchard was bringing us nearer the silhouetted combat we had glimpsed just before plunging underground. But it was combat no longer. The Forager crouched paralyzed. The spider straddled it, the tip of its abdomen waggling as it bound its prey in shadowy shrouds of webbing. We shuddered at the sight, but were soon enough distracted, as the orchard wall towered swiftly near. "Down!" I bellowed. "Hold fast!"

We dropped, and gripped our harness. The wall exploded; its huge ashlars tumbled across our dreadnaught's dorsum like giant dice. We were through the wall, and speeding across a soil of purest gemstones that crunched like gravel underfoot.

True demon jewels, their colors blazed completely unaltered by the vinous hue of the subworld's light—colors for which no earthly names exist, colors like lascivious caresses, prurient osculations of the optic orbs.

From this dazzling soil of gems grew rows of taut-muscled saplings, each one rooted at the groin in the brilliant substrate. These trees were multiply headed, though every head mouthless; their branching necks strained to give utterance to a voiceless woe; their polyglot limbs futilely grappled the air.

Our Forager was not bent upon this crop itself, but toward a cluster of huge shapes in the middle distance. Finding her steady in her course, we unbound the Harpy's wings. "We can work off her shoulder at the gap in her legs!" Barnar cried. Though her seared-off leg-stump rowed powerfully in rhythm with the other limbs, its truncation gave us a gap to play our line through. The Harpy took to the air, and we paid out some two hundred strides of line, about as much as we could easily manage the drag of.

"Don't let the line foul in its legs," I shouted to the Harpy, "or you'll be pulled in and trampled." Disdaining to reply, the demon executed an out-arcing, in-sweeping dive. It seized up jewels in the ample grip of its jaws, and we hauled in slack as it swooped up and back.

Again and again our Harpy angler dove, and with each return it streaked low in front of us and spat down a hefty spill of gemstones. While Barnar managed the Harpy's tether, I began to collect the gems in the leathern, lidded amphorae we had brought for the giants' pap.

Our mount neared her quarry; the demon agriculturalists, or at least harvesters, of this infernal orchard. They were giant slugs, moving in slow formation, inching down parallel lines of the struggling trees. Their slick, mottled hide was just such flesh as we had seen being fed to the grubs in our larval chamber. Each slug glided down one line of plantings, feeding. It slid sudsing along on a tongue of slime, engulfing its slow, savoring way down its row, leaving behind black stumps where movement and struggle had been, and every so often, emitting from its anal pore a flatulent spew of fresh, bright gems.

"We're closing," rasped the Harpy, hovering near us. We allowed it to alight, till the first shock of impact was past. The foremost slug, its stalked eyes thrusting belatedly toward our Forager, was jolting ponderously to a halt, trying to reverse direction amid a great froth of agitated mucus, but our mount was upon it, shearing off half the huge molluscoid's back in one bite, exposing the wet work of its globular heart, toiling nakedly in its broken cavern of innards. The Harpy, looking behind us, was flapping furiously, and hissing.

A huge spider approached us, abdomen bobbing amid the graceful arches of its dancing legs. Above the twiddling, shaggy-sleeved horror of its fangs, its eyeknobs were mounted like a wall of merciless black gems, the biggest topmost.

"Batten down!" Barnar and I shouted at each other. We lay flat and hugged our jewels. The Harpy spread a wing to help contain the heap that was as yet unbagged. Our Forager, though a leg light on her port side, nonetheless wheeled majestically to do battle.

Looking up some thirty degrees of inclination along our mount's lifted head, we saw the rearing spider loom above us, saw it strike.

And as it struck, the Forager's great fighting jaws scissored. They seized the fangs crosswise and sheared them off. The fang-stumps bled venom which smoked ruinously down on the Forager's jaws, melting great wounds in those huge, spiked mandibles.

Our Forager, unfazed, ducked and thrust more deeply under our attacker. The spider, seized at the waist where flat thorax joined bulging abdomen, was lifted off half its legs; the foremost quartet of them trod the air, all tractionless.

But hoisted thus, the spider could reach down along the Forager's ridgeline, and strike her carapace with its sheared-off, unequal fangs. Had these been undamaged, they might have punched through even our mount's adamantine exoskeleton. Even as it was, when the wounded fangs struck, the splash of poison fanned hissing and smoking across her back, and some of her armor cracked deeply with a stress-groan like a ship's hull half stove in by a rock.

We scuttled frantically back to the Forager's waist, dragging as best we could our spill of jewels. Our little world heaved as the Forager flexed her abdomen for leverage and counter-thrust. In her jaws' slow, grinding pressure, the spider's mid-joint crumpled. Still the monster's fang-strokes fell, their strength and venom dwindling, though the relentless murder never faded from the eight black ice-moons of its eyes.

Then the arachnid broke; its legs crumpled into a crookedly twitching bouquet. It was flung down. The hairy bag of its abdomen, undefended, our Behemoth ripped wide open with her poison-scarred jaws. Thrusting her head into the bristly bag, the Forager guzzled long glutinous coils of pallid stuff which appeared to be connected to the twitching monster's spinnerettes. Apparently, our Forager feasted on that which would have mummied her, had she fallen prey.

At length, she turned from this feeding back to the sundered slug, and fed on this molluscoid until her crop could hold no more. We made a few more passes with the Harpy, but once the Forager set out on her return, her sole aim was to bear her precious booty of nourishment back to the Nest, and such was the undeviating energy of her onrush, that Barnar re-bound the Harpy, and set to helping me cut lengths of line, and weave them into a sturdy net to hold our swag, which now formed an effulgent pile of heart-stopping bigness.

"It's as if . . ." he marvelled at our dazzling hoard while we worked, " . . . as if we've snatched a piece of the sun!"

Behold them kiss their mother's side,
A-suckling of her pap.
They wash against her like a tide
That at its shore doth lap.
 

THE RAMPART was crossed, and fell away behind us, almost unregarded, so raptly we gazed on our lucent loot. Our mount surged over the plains unopposed, like the embodiment of our henceforth triumphant fate. Three hundredweight of demon gems! I felt immortal. Wherever my desire turned its eye, obstacles toppled, while stern Impossibilities bowed obsequiously, and withdrew. We could now afford a fleet of ships, and five hundred picked mercenaries. More! A flock of Gaunts could now be hired from the Astrygals—even Stregan or Hagian gaunts could be hired, damn the cost! And with these obedient horrors on the wing for us, Pelfer's tomb could be sacked in a single day's siege. I might stand actually
shod
in the Buskins of Bounding Absquatulation before two months were out!

And then, with Pelfer's triad of Facilitators, how swiftly could we plant our names, Barnar's and mine, among the very greatest in the Annals of Thievery! So bright could we shine that, when we were long gone to dust, our names would be sung in admiring melodies, by tongues whose languages are yet unborn.

I lifted my jubilant eyes to that looming, lunar Eye that wept its red rivers through every corner of this piece of hell. An indecipherable passion blazed from that eye, and bathed all below as in a warm mist of blood. How could I hope to read the emotion in that awesome orb? The black gulf of its pupil was a World-leak, a hole in the shell of the Cosmos of Man, where the winds off the stars breathed through.

Yet at that moment, I did feel I could read it. I thought I saw in that Eye a glee like my own. I thought I saw glee, along with that fierce absolute hunger of a hawk's eye that is reading a far field for food: the gaze of a power both random and absolute. I saw in that Eye in the hellroof the gaze of Luck herself telling me: "
Yes
."

I stole looks at Barnar, afraid to confront the different dreams I knew were enkindled in him. And he seemed on his part unwilling to encounter my gaze.

The Harpy, its legs still bound and its neck short-tethered to a piton, began in its ragged whisper to entreat us for its freedom. Barnar answered it kindly.

"Regrettably, oh Demon, we find that we require your help in one small further matter. You have but to render us this bit of additional aid, and you may expect your freedom with perfect confidence, and every—"

The Harpy interrupted with a heated burst of obscenity. It hissed some personal remarks so grotesquely disparaging to Barnar and myself, that I drew Ready Jack and clipped off a punitive inch from one of the creature's elaborate mouthparts. The Harpy's pentagonal pupil contracted in pain. "You have my silence!" it humbly hissed. "I wait to do your bidding, for I must."

Barnar and I traded one quick look, and spoke no more. Why compound the mad extravagance of what we hoped for, by speaking it aloud? Yet no hope seemed utterly mad for men who had just been carried through the subworld on a Behemoth's back, and laden with jewels, and brought back out again. Already the hell-wall loomed nearer, the mountain-roots darkly mouthed with Behemoth Nests.

"In this abyss we find our apogee of Luck." I whispered this to myself, like a prayer. We gripped our harness and our bale of gems. Our Forager surged up the mountain-wall.

"The instant she branches off our blazes," was all Barnar said, and "Yes," was my only answer. The mountain-wall snatched us steeply upwards. We hung gripping the harness and our gems, our sinews cracking. In the Nest, the instant our mount left our marked path we must grip the Harpy's tether and jump, and let the sturdy demon slow our fall as best it could with its wings.

On the other hand, our Forager's course might lie straight back up to the apex of the Nest, perhaps even by the path it had brought us down. . . .

Here was our Nest-mouth, vomiting and swallowing giants, looming larger, larger, yawning to ingest us. . . . We were in, and cruising through the multitudes in its entryway. We jumped to our feet and dragged our gems and the Harpy over to the gap where the Forager's foremost portside leg had been. I wrenched the Harpy's neck to have its whole attention.

"If we jump, demon, wing it hard for the tunnel wall. If you let us break our legs, we'll see that you're crushed to death with us on the tunnel floor."

"Is that our blaze?" Barnar cried.

"Yes, by Key and Cauldron! And she turns!"

Silently we watched the miracle unfold. The Forager hugged our dye-blazed path at every turn. Up and up she sped, never diverging, till at length we ceased to fear she would. This Nest, this vault of Power—our Forager was its key, a key delivered into our hands.

And at length, when we did branch from our marked trail, we'd followed it so high we knew the point of our divergence must be very near our larval chamber. Why dismount now, when the Forager's goal was so sure to be our own? With jets of dye, we blazed this newest path.

The tunnel climbed more steeply, and began to yawn bigger and bigger, as gallery after gallery merged with ours from every side. The multitude of workers was even greater here than down at the Nest's entry hall, but this throng was more various in make and size, for workers of every caste were here, converging—we could not doubt it now, surely?—upon their millenial Mother.

Still we worked gently up-slope, the thousands thronging around us in rivers of opposing flow, till there ahead of us we saw the yawning portal of a chamber which dwarfed even this great concourse of confluent tunnels. And within that colossal cavern yonder, nested in its cyanic gloom, there lay a pallid, breathing hugeness that was Awe itself.

A central current in that titan throng caught us, and snatched us through the portal. And thus were we swept into the purview of the Nest Mother's glittery eyeglobes, and into the reach of her Royal jaws.

The Queen! Living immensity, more than planetary! Her abdomen's ribbed ellipsoid, all marbled white-and-black, bulged away in the blue shadow. It was a great island at whose shores whole seas of her progeny lapped. Her Royal head, black as a lacquered battle-casque, at first appeared a stranded thing, resembling, in its relative smallness, a different being that had been half swallowed by that abdomen's egg-laying mountain. We approached the Presence on the river of other Courtiers and Supplicants.

We learned the true hugeness of the Royal head as she received her daughters' kisses. Forager after Forager, lifting her offering, was utterly dwarfed by the Queen's receiving jaws. For an interval of awe and rapture, time vanished in our stupefaction as we drew nearer. And then our own mount lifted her filial gift up to the Royal visage. The daughter's regurgitation shook us like a silken earthquake; she cast her demon-spoil into the sky-clasping arc of the Royal mouthparts.

The Nest Mother's nearness breathed a gust of eternity on us. These jaws were the Appetite of the Nest itself, a great furnace door through which armies of demonkind marched, that Behemoth might breed and brood and build, and scour still cleaner the upper floor of hell.

Then the Royal head reared—dismissing us, summoning the next. Our mount slid aside, and cruised in a current of her sisters that coasted down along the Royal flank. We sailed past hundreds of supplicant workers, all lifting their hungry jaws to the Mother's bulging side.