by Michael Shea
But as their senses in some degree shook off this stunned remembrance, they became aware of an underlayer of fevered business to this emptiness, of fevered whisperings to this silence. The houses—where many a furtive light winked from crevices in shuttered windows—were secretly alive with the news of A'Rak's hecatomb. Terror was abroad in Big Quay.
The two friends saw that the whole metropolis was poised on a cusp of danger—that panic must breed slaughter, while control might channel this horror into fighting spirit. They remembered their own hopeful resolutions then—resolutions whispered how softly, how cautiously between them!—and it helped them to regain that earlier resolve. They began to speak in a careful murmur.
The upshot of their colloquy was that they turned their steps towards a destination unheard-of, in the normal course of things, for either of them. They wound their way to the porte-cochere of one of Big Quay's grandest manses, a place that Fursten Minim had not visited for nearly twenty years, albeit it was the residence of Fursten Major, his father.
Though so long out of contact with his parent, the son did not fear to find that licentious old croesus abed, though it was the very pit of night. Or, if old Fursten Major was abed, it would not be a-sleeping. And indeed, when the night porter had carried in the prelates' names, they were speedily conveyed to the chambers of that execrable old patriarch. On their passage thither, their steps resounded on polished marble down halls athrong with gaudy, costly canvases and statuary that ranged in theme from prurient to pornographic. Fursten Minim's jaw was clenched and his gaze fixed straight ahead, while Paanja gave his shoulder a grip of mute allegiance and affection.
Fursten Major was Old Guard, Old Money. Besides his warehouses he owned a controlling interest in one of Hagia's largest Monastia; his hand had for a lifetime wielded the wand of wealth that A'Rak had bestowed upon their nation. He was, in a sense, an old crony of the god's, though he had never beheld A'Rak, being one of those citizens of means so vast he had been able to purchase the almost unpurchasable: a substitute to stand his place at the Choosing, when his turn came round. Of late, as his corpulence and venereal afflictions edged him ever nearer death, old Major slept less and less, slept scarcely at all, but lay as Paanja and his son now found him, in his vast bed, fanned by comely catamites loinclothed in satin, a tray of wines and drugs within the reach of his blotched and swollen hands, and naked dancers and musicians performing for him, with slow and strenuous undulation, dances designed to wake the old man's inextinguishable—but now incapable—lust.
"Little churchmice! Come sit on my bed!" Old Major's voice was the sprightly tenor of a younger, healthier man. "It's Paanja, is it not? First among churchmice? Old Kurttle's nephew. And my own little prig, sprig of my loins! He's still not forgiven me for sodomizing him a time or thrice when he was small and comely, and not the wiry-whiskered brutish block he's grown to! There there, my Minnie! Be reconciled to your doting Daddums! After all, is not fatherly affection esteemed by all the world? Come sit on my bed!"
Though Minor had been braced for this, he surprised himself with a response that he had not intended: he hawked a gob of spittle, and spat it on his father's satin coverlet. Then he and Paanja, trading a little smile, offered old Major a frigid, smiling bow in unison.
The old monster lived far outside the shams of decency, but his anger now showed that he deemed outrageous behaviour to be his own, not others' prerogative. From his swollen face, beaded with the little buds of poxworms, his little eyes looked out with a dangerous black glitter. His lips trembled with wrath (the reddish lesions of some other disease were constellated round his mouth, like stains from a blood-meal) and he bellowed for his bodyguard. A pair of Kolodrian wrestlers waddled fiercely into the chamber, scattering squeaking catamites from their path. The two friends coolly turned, moving their cloaks aside from their shortswords, and Paanja addressed them with lordly insolence. "My lord the A'Rak hungers still, and I am sent to choose him further food. Do ye come to volunteer, my fine fellows?"
News that had not yet reached their master was, plainly, current in the servants' quarters. The ruffians dropped in terror to their knees, and squeaked their supplications. "Instruct your master in the current state of things," Fursten Minim ordered them, "and then quit this chamber on the instant. You there! Out! Out, or you will feed our god!" This promptly cleared the chamber of its acrobatic ecdysiasts. Fursten Minim picked up his father's tray of powders and potations, and casually dumped it on the floor. When the bodyguard had scuttled bowing off, they faced the old magnate again.
Old Major's gaze, though it glittered with new calculation, was unabashed. He chose to strike an attitude of brittle glee: "You witless babes!" he crowed. "Are you shocked at this turn of events? Shaken? I marvel it's not happened sooner! What sort of being do you conceive that we stand covenanted with, we of Hagia, this two hundred years and more? The A'Rak's heart is a hot coal of appetite; his will is to drain all lives into his own; his procreation is a barren budding—his simulacra swell from his flesh and fall to scuttle off and feed as he does, a mere multiplication of his central gluttony, you see, for when they've fed fat he summons them and devours them, possessing thus all that they have hunted down. He is a vortex of hunger, and the soul of his victims he doth appropriate along with their flesh, and his mind is thus a labyrinth of captured lives, all they have sensed and seen, sung and suffered, compose his garden of millennial span; he knits the web of his inner empire from the hosts he has butchered.
"We are told there are great black suns that suck in other suns, and augment their murky furnaces with slaughtered stars, swelling thus with slow eternal growth. Such is A'Rak—he is, that he might be more, time without end!"
"Thank you," smiled Paanja coldly, "for this instruction. As it happens, we know far more of A'Rak than do you, though we have not come to share our knowledge. We have come with the simpler aim of extorting from you five thousand-weight in specie."
Old Major bridled. "Do you think me a puling babe? Do you think to brandish the spidergod at me like a bugabear, and make me puke forth money? The A'Rak's greed will, after all, never warp his wits! Think you he would lightly kill the old guard of established wealth? We are his bulwark, disbursers of his gold through those commercial channels that bind the populace at large in thrall! However he may indulge his gluttony, he will never devour his herdsmen with his flock!"
"It is not greed impels the god, old man, but mortal peril." Here Paanja drew his blade, and touched its tip so brusquely to old Major's throat that blood flowed and the old swine squealed with pain. "I will condescend," said Paanja, "to use one further word of argument with you, oh most reverend and respected bag of pus and pestilence—which failing, I will slash your gullet to the spine, and rob your gilded sty of what we want. This sole information will I grant you first: One day hence, the god will disburse among the citizens a donative exceeding a hundred million gold lictors—in reparation for this Choosing, as he represents it. I leave the likely import of this gesture to your own cynical surmise. . . . Now. Are we to have the gold we come for?"
Now there was a different light in old Major's eye. He sat stunned a moment, inwardly surveying a very different reality from that he had been used to contemplate. But he was nothing if not a tough old realist, and a quick adapter. "Yes. Ply yon bell-pull for my clerk—you'll have it, and be damned by it, I hope. And for myself, it is time, I see, to repair to my island villa."
"If so, make haste, for we are by this dawn to interdict the casting off of any vessel from the quayside."
And so they parted, the two friends carrying four weighty satchels of gold specie whose weight even their muscled fitness found a strain to bear.
There was much further business in that epochal night's last hours, conferences with harbormasters and other municipal functionaries. In his sunrise audience at the A'Rak Fane altar, the Ecclesiarch was able to report to the god his closure of all naval traffic from the quayside. He then smoothly requested, and obtained, a
sole exemption for his fellow prelate, Fursten Minim, whom he asked permission to dispatch downcoast, where further mercenaries for the god's defense could be engaged from encampments established to supply the armies engaged in the Shamnean wars. Thus did Minim sail with the god's blessing, but on an errand of his and Pandagon's own.
Minim took ship in a fleet war-galley with full cohorts of cutlass and ballista men to render it formidable, for he knew already that the seas just offshore of Hagia were even then beginning to swarm with piratical vessels lying at anchor. I myself was not unaware that by the very day of my arrival here, and in the days since, a number of hungry predators had begun assembling offcoast, and lying-to with an ear cocked shorewards. When one catches a rumor, one always thinks he has just caught the first whisper of it, while in fact, at that very moment, half the world is hearing it as well. I even had slight acquaintance, my dear Shag, with certain of these nautical ruffians (which I blush of course to confess), and thus it happened that I eventually learned something of old Fursten Major's doings that same night after his son and Pandagon had left with his gold.**
The old libertine, it seems, upon his son's departure, at once set his household hopping, gathering his portable goods into several bulky wains, and hastening, two hours before dawn and just ahead of the harbour's closure, down to his yacht at the quayside. That a hundred million-lictor donative was interpretable as sweetened fodder set for a flock to hold them for the slaughter, had not been lost on the old reprobate.
By sunrise, the Hagian coastline was falling astern of him, as he lounged, lavishly cushioned and couched, high in the poop of his yacht, bound for his villa on an islet a few hours off the coast of Hagia.
He made landfall without incident, and had himself and his holdings borne up the long flights of stone steps to his residence. But when his grunting bearers had lofted his litter to the villa's wide veranda, their first act was to drop him like a stone and take to their heels, though their flight was swiftly prevented, for the veranda was crowded with lounging brigands resting from their morning's sup of aquavit.
They were in fact Dond cannibals from the Glacial Maelstroms. Their chief, a certain Shalagastra (the one I had occasion to converse with since—a cheery, voluble fellow even though he was bleeding to death as he spoke) had a brief chat with Old Major before he and his crew roasted him alive and ate him.
Shalagastra brought the old libertine to the balustrade, and bade him scan the open sea with close attention.
"You see, you'd have fared no better had you struck for open ocean," he consoled Old Major. "See those carracks there just south of east? Gulag freebooters. And more easterly yet? Those specks? A flotilla of Lamian privateers. Others ride anchored just out of view. Word's gone wide, you see. Your spidergod's in peril . . . or so we hope. Your Monastia are rumored soon to become pregnable, and interest among my fellow entrepreneurs is—understandably—intense.
"Well, well, look here! It seems your bed of coals is bright and ready! Come come! Cease this unsightly blubbering, these shameful whinings! A manly resignation's best! Some help here, lads, he's a hefty one for sure! We must see he's well roasted, for plainly he's sickish meat!"
* * *
**[[Editor's Note:
Here, I believe, is a passage of Nifft's narrative which requires expansion rather than deletion. My friend has made only a very oblique reference to a matter he was confident that I would understand. Nifft, while travelling down to Hagia to sell his rumor, took timely advantage of the voyage to disseminate it among his guildfellows and the practitioners of various related professions. Always a keen strategist, Nifft saw that if the rumors proved true, he stood likeliest to made great gains if the civic forces of the nation were heavily engaged by a massive assault on their vaults.
—Shag Margold]]
LAGADEME VII
We gained the Ribbonrill Valley's eastern ridgeline as the swollen moon reached zenith. We were bone-tired, the way only terror and battle can make you. I chose a high curve of highway that had a bit of shoulder beside it to give shelter from the night wind to the 'shaw and my men sleeping round it. I put Mav and Nifft on first watch with me, all three of us faced outward from the sleepers and each other, I up on the shoulder, Mav and Nifft faced up and down the highway.
I leaned on the butt of my spear, feeling light and pithless as a dead vine. For our whole climb up the valley's flank—all at a dead run, in truth—my rage at this thief we had hired burned in me, fuelled me in fact with the strength to run. But so tired was I now that my anger had little heat in it—it seemed an almost theoretical anger. I felt a certain slack acceptance of the fact that a thief had wormed himself into my mission; how could this surprise me, when the mission itself was a witch's game and I its bonded dupe? Plainly, I was fate's fool. Was I not neck-deep in spider country on some trickster-hag's blind gambit? That I'd hire a thief to run point here, where the gods hunt thieves, merely stood to reason!
After an hour or so of silence I said, "Ephesionite."—I spoke softly, for our ears kept watch as much as our eyes—"Ephesionite, we have met the gods now. Surely, against such creatures as these, all humankind are fundamentally allied. Surely, every moment we stand on this soil, we share a risk that makes us one. Tell us what it was you knew of the a'rak that you sold to the churchman."
Without preamble, then, Nifft recited a poem, an almost impenetrably enigmatic threat directed at the A'Rak, containing one cryptic reference to an exterminating entity named Pam'Pel. "I encountered this lyric," he said when he had done, "on a pennysheet I found in a Kolodrian market. And I encountered elsewhere in the Shallows repeated rumors of some catastrophic civic overthrow in Hagia, specifically of `unguarded vaults.' . . ."
"Unguarded vaults. . . ." murmured Mav. "Yes. . . ."
Down on the floor of the valley we'd just crossed, there were indications that folk were—inexplicably, at first—much on the move this Shortest Night. Around at least three of the villages we could make out, there was a movement of tiny, wavery lights that had to be torches. These lights didn't have a processional, or even organized appearance, but had a fitful, frenetic movement, suggesting folk roused from sleep to a panic. Then, in the largest of these little firefly storms, the torches, with a jerky rhythm, all began to go out.
"List! Oh, hark to the poor souls!" hissed Mav, and I heard rather than saw her tears. And sure enough, up from the Valley's great bowl of moonlight, rose the frail, scattered echoes of agonal cries.
"They kept to their houses like good citizens, you see," she said after a time, "but tonight it wasn't enough. I have never heard speak of such a savage-fierce feeding like this one. It strikes me the odious bug might be in a terror, mayhap is gorging in panic for power. . . ."
The other two little turmoils of torches were soon extinguished. Somewhat later, a straggling line of torches could be seen—far, far a-down the highway we had just done climbing. How terrible their haste must have been, to be advancing as they were, and yet how pitifully, hopelessly slow did their flight appear so far below! And presently, the line halted and recoiled, and broke into a scatter of light-specks like errant stars, only to be snuffed out one by one in the environing darkness.
Near moonset Olombo and our pullers took watch and we curled down for some sleep of our own. I woke to the iron-gray sky of full dawn.
Grainy-eyed and shivering in the dawn chill, we squatted round trail biscuit and watered wine. When the sun's rim kindled on the eastern hills, and the first wash of light turned the blown grass golden, Shinn and Bantril took up the poles, our spearmen stepped out to point position—and Mav said, "Hold! Look where someone comes after us, round that last switchback downslope there!"
And indeed there came a smallish figure, marching with a kind of stolid energy up the grade. We mutely watched, marvelling at one who should come marching so matter-of-factly up from that valley that had been so lately aboil with death. And almost in that same instant of marvel, I knew who this was.
Now that I w
as rested and fed a bit, I once more found heat for anger—heat aplenty. The sun rose two spans from the skyline before she was up on the ridge and trudging directly for us, rising to and sinking from our view with the dips of the highway between. Unveiled she was now, though toweringly coiffed, her hair an angular turret of pinned and tied and braided tresses, this hair of yellowish tint shot with black. Unchanged, though, was that plump, implacable energy of her walk. Snugged in a slovenly belted tunic, her plumpness was revealed indeed to be as much muscle as fat. It was that walk of hers that enraged me most, that same relentless march with which she had led us up hill and down dale to the dairy farm, and back again. By the time she stood fronting me, I was so full of wrathful indictment I stood perfectly speechless. Her skin was a startling and offputting pale lemon-yellow in tint, and her eyes were an unpleasant yellowish orange. She held up a plump, peremptory palm, needlessly silencing the invective that I found myself tongueless to utter.
"Spare me your trite remonstrations!" she cawed. "You were duped and jackassed to a worthy end—for a nobler work than you had wit to guess at, my nuncials! And you were faithfully paid! Hold your tongues please and learn the lie of it, because by all the nasty crooklegged gods, we're full of urgent business this morning! First! I am not Pompilla. She is!"
And she pointed at our cracked and cord-bound coffin. All our mouths sagged open at once, I believe, and she cut us all off at once: "Silence! Each thing in its measure, and order. I am Jaundyssa the Fat, a Stregan walking-witch by birth, a disadvantaged orphan. I will not long remain Jaundyssa the Fat, because I am now embarked—and all of you are embarked with me of course—upon my Opus Eponymous! Yes! Even to that high plateau of scholarship in Lore am I risen! And when we are done, I will be newly named with a name of glory, a name of my fashioning, my earning: I will be called Jaundyssa the A'Raknicide! Or it may be, Jaundyssa the Hammer of Spiders, or perhaps—I am weighing them all—Jaundyssa the A'Rak's Bane!"
