The Incompleat Nifft (60 page)

The Queen's inspection, as before, was long protracted. With little movements of Her mouthparts, She seemed to feed upon Her offspring's aura. Then slowly, slowly, She brought down Her jaws and touched them to the infant's lesser mouth, sustaining for a trembling time a contact not unlike a kiss.

"She is chosen!" cried Ostrogall, his voice a croon of tender terror. "Chosen! She now imbibes the Mother's all-empowering regurgitation. She will be sequestered in a Royal chamber, and her growth to her full flying size will be swift. In not a score of days, flanked by royal consorts winged like herself, she and her army will stream from the Nest and scourge a path of conquest through my world, till they are fed to readiness, and she has mated. Then will they go to ground, and another Nest of Death be planted in my homeland. Oh my embattled nation! Woe to my fatherland, fair to behold!"

The coronation of her Mother's kiss complete, the Royal Princess—unstruggling now, as if sated or sleepy—was borne out. "Quick!" I cried, and Barnar in the same breath cried, "Let's see where they take her!" Thus did our ambitious thoughts leap perfectly together, for my friend and I had, in the same heartbeat, imagined the incalculable loot to be had by anyone who followed the wake of a conquering army of Behemoths through the subworld. What resistance could be left standing? What riches, unregarded by the giants, would not lie spilt from their shattered coffers, shining all unguarded?

"Peace!" intoned the knowing demonstump. "I understand your urgency to be on hand when she sallies forth upon her Nesting Flight. But be at ease, my benevolent masters! All royal Incubaria lie close at hand here to the Brood Chamber. She may easily be found again, and followed, when you come back . . . on the wing."

"Well then," I said. "It seems we are all bound to the same place now. Is there any reason we should not be on our way?"

Heliomphalodon Incarnadine
Did crave to clutch the splendor of the sun. . . .
 

NEAR THE NEST-MOUTH, we knew, the light of the subworld discolored the light of the tunnels. This was our greatest fear through that long downward journey. Through the dodging, and dashing, and diving for cover, it came back to us, and haunted our talk when we rested. Would our orange hue, outside the blue gloom of the Nest, remain invisible to Behemoth eyes? Going out astride our Forager, Barnar and I had invisibility by our position. Down on the tunnel floor, where every Behemoth eye bent automatic scrutiny for parasites, would our cloaks of dye still conceal us? Before we must worry about finding cover in the demonrealm, we must worry about managing to exit the Nest at all.

We had a full "day" of trekking behind us, and a bone-tired sleep in a cramped crevice, and almost another day again of the quick-march (to judge by the weariness in our muscles) when, as we crouched together for a rest, Barnar said, "There's no doubt we're near. You can smell it, can't you?"

For the Nest-smell, though rank in places, was a vital fetor, an oven aroma of life a-rising; the poisoned carrion scent of the demon-realm came coldly twisting through this womb-smell like a venemous reptile.

So we trotted the last leg of our descent with a fated, falling feeling, that hollow-gutted sensation of knowing you're launched, a loosed arrow.

We passed a turning, and there was the atrium, thunderous with traffic, awash with purple light, and windowed at its far end by the Nest-mouth raggedly framing the blood-red void of the demon-realm beyond.

"Can you run all-out? A half mile and more?" I asked the Bunts and Costard. The three of them were in the condition to be expected: eyes glazed with weariness, blistered and breathing hard. They nodded gamely, even soft Ha'Awley, but still I silently cursed them. They must surely die on us! Because—Cauldron scald them!—Barnar and I were damned if we'd let them slow us up by even one stride! "Hold close to the wall then," I gritted, "have a scent flask in hand, and
run
!"

The downward pitch was helpful, and the terror like a wave that lifts you from behind. From the giants that rushed towering by us too there came a kind of impetus, as if the gust of their passage pulled us along. Even so we slogged through the wine-red air as if submerged, our limbs and lungs fighting the drag of a thickening dread. I couldn't believe we ran unseen, though the Behemoths rushed past unheeding, high knees pumping.

"Faster! Nearly there!" I looked back to bellow—and saw a Digger, overtaking us with her jaws full of tailings, suddenly drop her burden and tilt an alert eyeglobe at Bunt and Sha'Urley, who were bringing up our rear.

Horror thrilled me, stopped me, spun me round. The Bunts still owed us a fiftyweight of specie, and should we lose the pair of them, there was no hope of extracting the sum from feckless Costard. Doubling back, I bellowed "Faster! Faster!" and, meeting the Digger, I flung my flask of brood-scent. It burst between her eyes, as I doubled round yet again, and sprinted for my life after the others.

The Digger thundered after me, her jaws thrust almost to my back (I dared not turn, but felt the whelm of air their hugeness shoved before them) and then a mighty scuffling resounded behind me and I pelted on unseized.

Just short of the Nest-mouth's threshold, I dared to look back. Two Foragers had lifted the struggling Digger in their jaws. Almost comic was the labor that she gave them, herself not far inferior to a Forager in size. But the Foragers' strength prevailed as, staggeringly, they carried her up-tunnel, returning (as the scent persuaded them) a strayed babe to the safety of its nursery.

Out the Nest-mouth we leapt, and slid down the steep pitch of the hell-wall. For a short eternity the stone ate us alive. And then, as Ostrogall had promised, a fissure, transecting our descent, stopped our plunge.

It was just deep enough to hunker down in, and it deepened as we followed it downslope. At length we could crouch and catch our breath. The Foragers pouring out of the Nest overstrode us, their hard claws loud against the stone. I lifted Ostrogall from his holster on my hip, so that we might speak eye-to-eyes.

"Thus far, you prove a faithful guide, oh Fractional Demon. We urge you to remain so—else you suffer swift incineration."

"Ineffable benefactor! My adoration and my gratitude aside, you remain indispensable to my humble survival! I must be planted in some safe recess. Repose yourselves in my complete devotion. Press on, and trust those measures I've described."

There was nothing else to do, of course. The seam, as it descended to the plain, grew into an arroyo of moderate depth, which wound away as far as we could see. While it sank us below the line of sight of errant Foragers, this arroyo was no haven, for demon lair-mouths, gates, hatches and doorways honeycombed its walls. Yet Ostrogall had suggested a countermeasure, and we implemented it at once.

Every tapper's equipage included jacks of brood-scent. From one of his, Barnar wetted a clout-tipped knout he had prepared for the purpose. Bearing this scented cudgel aloft like a flameless torch, he walked in the lead down the arroyo, while we followed, arms at the ready.

This scent-torch, while to an adult Behemoth it signified specifically the presence of a misplaced egg or larva, to be hastily returned to safety, signified to demonkind nothing so specific. To demons it simply declared the nearness of one of their devourers. And the hellspawn's sensitivity to the scent proved quite extreme, with the result that Barnar's flameless brand thrust, as it were, a phantom Behemoth before us, an invisible vanguard, as we advanced. Far ahead down the defile, the invisible, olfactory Behemoth awoke panic in the laired demons who might have hunted us. Far ahead we saw vague, busy movement in the ruddy gloom. We heard the boom of distant hatchways slammed shut and secured, and as we advanced, long stretches of emptiness received us, where we found every portal sealed up tight against our coming.

Our ploy's danger was that the brood-scent summoned an occasional Forager from her quest for food. But these randomly attracted few were always announced by the noise and tremor of their tread. Barnar then only had to fling the torch from the ravine. We would take cover, the Forager would solicitously rush back Nestwards with its minute wooden foundling, and we would anoint another knout and resume the ploy.

Here and there were things that eyed us before nosing us, especially airborne things. Harpies of a huger, more wolfish make than our late assistant swooped shrieking down on us. I swung Ready Jack in great, whistling circles, while Barnar's axe and Sha'Urley's surprisingly deft broadsword wrought equal havoc. That stalwart young woman, when it came to a stand-and-fight, made a very good account of herself. She swung powerful two-handed overhead eights, in the Jarkeladd nomads' style, and our attackers' lopped talons danced clattering down around her in showers of smoking blood; these stubborn claws still clutched at our feet when their shorn possessors had winged shrieking off.

Long and far we travelled this ravine. We slept, and woke, and travelled long and far again, till once more we most sorely craved our rest. Once more we found a recess in the ravine wall, and stretched out our leaden limbs.

Even the sour wine of the Supreme Sap Mine's rations glowed on our palates like the most exquisite vintage, such was our weary loathing of this place, and our craving for all things born beneath the sun. Barnar and I gave the others first sleep, and they dropped straight into it.

"The approach to the Unguent of Flight seems relatively easy," I said to Ostrogall. "Even, I mean, considering this admirable evasion of the brood-scent you have so cunningly suggested."

An evasive ripple moved through the jewelry of the demon's eyes. "The approach to Unguent," Ostrogall conceded, "does, as it happens, present few dangers from my kind—at least since the spread of Behemoth into this region. But the tunnels down to the Talons of 'Omphalodon—for I may tell you now that the Talons of Heliomphalodon Incarnadine are the source of the Unguent—the Talons of 'Omphalodon themselves are guarded by demons from the Second Subworld."

We bent our most menacing scowls on him at hearing this, and the demon hastily bleated, "Access to the Unguent is readily obtainable from the Secondaries, oh Luminous Masters! They merely require a toll, you see, from suitors for that treasure. And while I confess I don't know precisely what this toll is, it is at least absolutely certain that one may pay this toll, and still live!"

Barnar nodded thoughtfully. "Yet this is far," he said, "from assuring us that this toll is slight enough to pay. Perhaps, good Ostrogall, you should now share with us all that you know regarding the Unguent of Flight."

"I assent wholeheartedly! The matter lies thus: Less than an eon past, Heliomphaladon Incarnadine, a demon of the Tertiary Subworld, was enkindled by myths and legends of the sun sufficiently to covet that world-bathing orb for his own. 'Omphalodon reasoned that the sun's radiance, once seized and brought below by a greatsouled act of daring, would melt away the binding spells and thaumaturgic toils that chained his giant nation within the planet's bowels. His folly was his faith that the sun, once had by daring raid, would enlighten and liberate his baneful, chthonian breed—would free them to do their awful will abroad upon the earth, and possess the planet entirely and forever.

"The demon knew, of course, the fate of his great compatriot Sazmazm (see Shag Margold's Second Interjection) and knew that his Tertiary dungeon was direful hard to rise from. Nonetheless, the lure of heroism, of one great shining deed that blazons forth one's being to the ages, still held 'Omphalodon's huge heart fast in thrall.

"All the Tertiary Ceiling's natural portals have been long eons sealed, but 'Omphalodon reasoned that a cunning egress might be found by a bold drive straight up through the lithic world-bone itself—by brute penetration of the superincumbent subworlds' floors and ceilings. He devised, with long and cunning brood-time, a balm which, once it bathed his limbs and his extremities, would imbue them with a melting energy, that he might swim through leagues of primal stone as liquid-easy as an eel through water.

"Wild was the will, ancient the art, and unbounded the bravery, of Heliomphalodon Incarnadine! When he broke sunwards in his daring surge, he veritably soared through solid stone, breaching the floor of the Secondary Subworld, and plunging upwards through its massy vault.

"But here alas, his furious energies bogged down, snared in the sinewy nets of Sorcery that Wizardkind have knit so deeply in your over-world's foundations. So utterly, however, did 'Omphalodon's will imbue his every part, that these sorcerous detentions sundered him, and fragments of him mounted higher than the rest, before they in their turn were snared by stasis. His sun-craving eye, lofted by most fierce desire, was embedded in yonder vault, and became itself a kind of sun to this region of our world. And one clutch of his Talons reached almost all the way up through our floor. This grim paw of his, now frozen in the stone just under us, is still besmeared, of course, with his levitative ointment, whose stone-spurning virtues lend, in upper air, the power to stride the sky. This, of course, is what the world has come to call the Unguent of Flight.

"My kind, you may be sure, were quick to dig down to it. Secondary demons, however, were nearly as quick to come up and usurp our diggings. And, while it may be contended that 'Omphalodon's Talons lie as much in our floor as they do in the lower world's ceiling, we have always found that when dispute occurs between us, our deeper cousins oftenest prevail."

We weighed Ostrogall's words through a long silence, in which we heard a distant, ragged noise of war, the ethereal chirring and shrilling of demon rage and death-cry. We became aware that, if we clambered to the top of our ravine, yet another embattled fortress would be visible far off.

"Your knowledge of this," Barnar said at length, "is so thorough, Ostrogall! Your vagueness as regards the nature of the toll stands in strange contrast with such detailed sapience."

"It also troubles me," I put in, "that you assured us that our journey to the Unguent would be relatively brief."