by Michael Shea
all their host a-marching came
from chaos toward the beckoning flame,
All sparked to life by starry fire,
Some were dainty, some were dire,
all were random, none were pointless
bent on being, gargoyles dauntless
each clung to its borrowed stuff
until their flesh was vortexed off
their borrowed stuff was repossessed
their every shape at once unfleshed
(Their shapes survive one nano-tick
like candleflames without the wicks!
The pure design hangs there a blink
before it back to Nothing sinks!)
Hail mad contrivance, yeasty dust!
Winged, finned, footed, on ye thrust!
Contraptions! pushing snout, maw, muzzle,
each in its bit of the puzzle.
Eyed antennaed, tongued and fingered,
Barb'd, tusk'd, horn'd, claw'd, fang'd and stingered. . . .
For those black millstones, Null and Void
reclaim all dust in lives deployed.
(Woe that lives should coalesce!
Woe that dust should effervesce!)
Grind them out and grind them back,
to dust a-vortexing in black:
Tyrant ghouls and martyrs crimeless!
Genocides and saviors timeless!
Grind out gallows bravely mounted
dungeoned innocents uncounted
Implacably all dust reclaim
that found a shape, a wish, a name.
Those black millstones, Void and Null,
grind the thoughts from every skull.
grind out stars, then grind them back
to dust a-vortexing in black . . .
Grind out sinewed wings a-winging
grind out corded throats a-singing
grind out gembright brimming eyes
and ardent tongues in colloquies
and hearts engorged with little hoards
of suns and moons, of touches, words . . .
grind them out and grind them back
to dust a-vortexing in black. . . .
((Ye ghostly hordes of lives that were
in starry cauldrons once a-stir
even echoes now ye lack
in the unreporting black
that reclaimed ye once again
when your spirits had their spin . . . ))
Oh have mercy, Void and Null!
That is empty which was full!
Grind out abysses overleapt,
grim peaks conquered, death-vows kept,
grind out mourner and bewept
grind out deeds, and deeps they dare,
heroes and the hells they harrow
grind out plague and wondrous cure
ambition's bow and conquest's arrow
Saints and torments they endure. . . .
NIFFT IX
The spidergod's donative, indemnifying the cruel tax taken at the Choosing, was sited in Keelyard Square, an extensive plaza, and the largest such that this city afforded, so thronged with its proud towers and swelling vaults and domes was Big Quay, where a hundred great bonding and banking concerns jostled for architectural preeminence.
I'd helped Paanja Pandagon to his quarters, given him wine, and left him sleeping, with promises to come and wake him in the second hour after sunrise. I walked the predawn streets. The streets themselves were empty, but lamps burned everywhere behind the curtained windows, and the rumor of free gold, to be dispensed mere hours from now, raged like a fever through those muffled hearthside conversations.
At the Fobb and Weskitt I bespoke a hot breakfast posset and sweet wine, and the man who served me, though courteous enough, seemed dazed, in a dreamy suspension between greed and apprehension, and I guessed his state to be typical of many of his fellow citizens' condition this morning.
Having breakfasted, I bethought me of a much-needed bath, but after a moment's thought I instantly rejected the notion. I returned to the streets instead, for, battered and exhausted as I was, sleep would have been impossible for me.
As the sun came up, I wound my way to Keelyard Square, and reached it as the first flood of light spilled across it. The beginnings of a multitude were already gathering round the perimeter of the square. An inner perimeter of Bailiffs and Reeves and some few of Pandagon's mercenaries stood tranquilly and chatted with the folk they fenced from the center of the plaza. And there in the center, on three dozen open freight wagons drawn up side by side, was a most terrifying sight.
I refer, of course, to the great naked heaps of gold coin, with, embedded in them, great open casks and bags of more gold coin, all vomiting brightly out to join the golden spill of ruddy wealth. A miniature mountain range of gold crested those big wagons. I am sure you have grasped, Shag, the kind of terror they caused me. When bait is so flagrantly strewn as this, look up sharp, for the trap's practically a-falling on you already!
And all those watching folk felt a bit of this too, I think. It was less clear in their minds because their hearts were half-purchased already by this blatant pelf, but the buried doubt showed in their quiet, in the absence of tension round the perimeter formed by the Bailiffs and their men. There was nothing restive about the steadily growing crowd. There was a cautious patience about them, rather, a tentativeness that was listening as it approached the lure. All that naked gold! No one can know it like a thief, old friend—when it's shown that crassly, you can bet that it will cost you your life to try actually getting away with any of it.
I longed to go up to the Stadium and find Mav already there with even a few score tough highlanders under arms, but she would never have reached it this soon. And though we might stretch hope so far as to expect Fursten Minim, down-coast acquiring titanoplod cohorts and pikemen, to return by late in the day, we could look for no backing from that quarter any sooner. The sky was an utterly cloudless blue—I never saw a more splendidly candid sky, and it seemed to me swollen to bursting with mortal danger.
I went back and woke Pandagon as I'd promised, and I followed him and his sacerdotal staff at full muster back to the square. I listened with the now fully assembled multitude to his ringing introduction of the rite. As a bit of priestly drama, the spidergod could not have faulted it, nor doubted his loyalty. The Ecclesiarch declared that this great public gift expressed the god's love, and his grief for the lives his dire necessity had compelled him to consume at the Choosing, and his present resolve to stand in their defence against the dread Enemy that might menace Hagia's frontier in the not distant future.
This sparked a somewhat stronger buzz of conversation in the multitude, and yet still their voices had a dazed and murmurous quality. Then the largesse commenced. The citizens moved forward in parallel files, carrying their own receptacles. In each, the priests cast a quart scoop of fine gold coin.
Gold dealt by the scoop like dry beans! I won't deny the glorious audacity of that bit of theater. The A'Rak was a wily old alien after all. There is an answering lust awakened by the sight of so much raw gold, and it cannot be suppressed entirely. Besides this mesmeric effect, the crowd was further lulled to see trestles being set up in preparation for the great banquet to follow the donative—such homely preparations of ale-kegs and bread baskets are irresistibly calmative.
But my fear came back soon enough—my fear of that empty blue sky, and my fear of the crags that towered like a rear wall to Big Quay, crowding the city up against the river. Just how many spiders might suddenly scuttle out of those crags, and pour in a thorny cascade through every boulevard and alley and lane? My legs refused to be still, so I slipped out of the square. Inevitably, loathing the sight of the crags, I trended riverwards in my rambling.
What madness! To stand so placid as those crowds did to accept their golden bribe! If it weren't that I had two allies vaguely due here under arms, and now had the Ecclesiarch's facade of collaboration to support, it would have seemed an excellent stratagem for me to defy the doc
kside impoundment of all moored craft, unmoor some handy vessel, and await my friends offshore at least.
In this mood, my walk quickly became a canvassing for secure retreats from the doom I sensed impended. I soon determined that the great quayside rank of warehouses—their high roofs broad and parapeted—were an ideal site to stand siege, and one to which a very large portion of the crowd I had just seen in Keelyard Square, might safely recoil, and find space in which to mount a serious defence.
That long archipelago of rooftops, fronting the quay as it did, was most promising in other ways too, I noted. Look at all these cargo booms right down on quayside—on wheeled, plod-drawn platforms. Look too at what could be hoisted right up to those rooftops: casks of Kairnish sap, and glabrous oil in tuns, and Bellagravian Brandies there in pyramided casks! All marvellous flammables! And those pavingstones heaped there for re-flagging the quay! Excellent missiles for smashing eye-knobs! And was that not mast stock there in that naval supply yard? Dressed poles bound in faggots of twenty for quick hoisting? What perfect sarissas and thrusting lances, scaled to suit our enemy, if handled by pairs or trios of defenders!
To be standing down here on Big Quay's streets, trapped in narrow channels among her buildings, how foolhardy! Hunting spawn, fleet as cats and big as chariots, could scour these streets bare of human flesh in one irresistible sweep. Every nerve of me was on fire to get on high ground if I had to stay in this city and here, along Warehouse Row, was a situation I could make secure with just a handful of able men and women.
But it is an odd catch in human nature, that mere awkwardness and embarrassment can deflect us even from measures that might save our lives. How undignified I should look taking the role of one whom an odd panic has seized, and going to the Ecclesiarch for a detachment of men to begin craning casks of oil and crates of paving stones and bundles of mast stock up onto the rooftops of Warehouse Row!
Well then, let Big Quay be damned. Come the dreaded ambush, I would take to the river. I'd lately learned how a vessel could be a floating fort against the relative ineptitude of surface-swimming spawn.
So down to the nearest small craft slips I went for a boat to unmoor and discreetly set ready. The Quayside was deserted. The crews held in port by the A'Rak's moratorium on water traffic had been summoned to receive a "guest" donative decreed for foreigners by the beneficent deity, and then to be given choice seats at the following banquet.
I saw an old wherry with one of the warehouse's rune on it, a service vessel for maintenance of the dock. Nearby at the base of the Quay's wall was the grated mouth of a big drain whence the city streets' drainage entered the river. I could row the wherry to the grate and moor it there, out of sight from the quayside above.
I reached the wherry still unobserved. Indeed, no shipping had yet heaved in sight from downriver today. Surely this was unusual—the wind had long turned upriver. I slipped the wherry's painter from the bollard and stepped in, tripping slightly as I did so.
The water beneath me felt wrong. It lacked give. The wherry didn't settle into it under my weight, as if the hull were entangled in something just under water. I jumped up and down and there was still no give. Then I tripped again.
And here, when I knelt down to it, was a strand of almost invisible webbing crossing the gunnels. This wasn't the ghost-silk material, but a very tough, almost perfectly transparent filament. My exploring hands weren't long in learning that the whole underside of the boat was thickly netted in these strands and lashed to the dock with them.
There followed some frantic verifications of the situation that had already dawned on me: every boat I tried, and surely every craft moored in Big Quay, was clandestinely ensnared at its anchorage.
The scale of this sly maneuver, and its plain purpose, were equally terrifying. Utterly gone was any scruple about seeming ludicrous. I returned on winged feet to Keelyard Square. How the crowd filled it, folk close-standing as the stalks of the wheat in the field! A broad acreage of boards and trestles were heaped with smoking food, and up and down the aisles of it the folk rivered, filling their platters and pannikins. At the table for Notables, Pandagon had taken up the central station. He picked me out of the dense crowd at quite a distance—perhaps it was something showing in my face that stood me out. I was certainly the only man in Big Quay who knew what I knew. He got up and advanced to meet me, displaying smiles and courtesies to those he moved among.
I was blank-faced and brief: every ship in the docks was webbed fast to its moorage, and not a single vessel had come up the river all morning.
I was on my way in moments with two Bailiffs and eight Reeves at my back, and a larger party shortly to follow. We had not yet threaded our way out of the square before Pandagon, on a pretext murmured to the functionaries flanking him, had made his exit in another direction. Once out of public view, he summoned an escort of his mercenaries and led them post haste by the south trail from the Crags. If Minim had yet returned with his forces to their prearranged rendezvous downriver at Hyssop's Bight, it was plainly time, and past time, to have his muster brought up to the city.
The biggest cargo cranes the quayside afforded took three men on each handle of the geared crank. The thinner of my Bailiffs, Samption, was a plain-spoken man who led by doing, and he got his countrymen (they were all a soberer than usual lot since the Choosing) smartly to work on trundling the wheeled hoists to the side of our chosen warehouse, which had the greatest concentration of timbers and mast stock near it on the Quayside. "Do I rightly understand," he asked me, "that we are going to construct fortifications up topside there, to hold against the A'Rak's . . . enemies? And that these enemies are expected soon to arrive?"
I could not speak candidly. These men had their families, their everything here. If I told them the truth they would run to their wives and their children with it, and I desperately needed them to help secure a refuge here to which those wives and children could be brought while there was still time.
"Few doubt the enemy's coming," I told him, "but its form is unknown. Since we must establish some footing against its coming, we are gambling that high ground which also commands the line of the river will be useful against it."
"Well, spit for luck, and let's set to," said Samption.
Bundled mast stock and wire-netted half-tons of paving stones we hoisted up to the roof, load after load of them. Shortly there joined us another score of the local constabulary, dispatched by Pandagon from their perimeter post when he passed it going south. With Samption showing them the tricks of it, these men got two more cranes hoisting goods to the roof of our neighboring warehouse on the north. More masts, more stones, tuns and casks of sap and brandy and other flammables swung upwards through the morning sunshine. The whirr of our crane cranks and the soft clatter of the slings touching down on the rooftiles sounded almost loud in the Quay's vast emptiness and silence, while, for all our grim diligence, the work had the most ludicrous appearance imaginable. To an unprepared witness our endeavor must have seemed the grotesque error of a horde of solemn lunatics, madmen who had found the Quay deserted, usurped its business, and set to doing its work wildly awry. Here they were stowing cargo like real longshoremen—but on top of the warehouses instead of inside them. Surely at any moment some properly constituted citizen of this town would step out of the silent streets, and tactfully set us right. . . .
But he failed to appear, and, as was inevitable if unchecked, we madmen extended our folly. We set a crew to stacking supply-heaps of stones and flammables at intervals along the balustrade, set others to putting crude points on the mast-blanks with framer's axes, and malleted logger's spikes into the butts of said masts for grips. We lashed masts side to side in five-mast widths and laid these as footbridges between the neighboring rooftops. The wood was tough Kolodrian Gnarl-cone, creaky but firm as we lightfooted across the eight-story chasms between our fortresses.
"Why, you can see right into Keelyard from here," marvelled Samption mildly, for from one corner of the n
ortherly warehouse a gap in the intervening buildings allowed us to look straight on to one of the corners of the mile-distant square, along a broad boulevard that crossed the square on the diagonal. What showed of the plaza was a sea of folk, though at the center, the empty freight wagons still had some sacred space around them. In that morning's clarity the wagons seemed a group of child's toys, their freight-wells little black pits of shadow now, the golden dunes melted away.
"They're still feasting—see the trestles there? Still packed with folk forking it," said a Reeve.
"Folk drinking now too," said Samption. "Such a delicious bitter ale—and so many kegs of it!" There was a detectable unease now in the stolid Bailiff's voice. The man was seeing just what a box his fellow citizens had all packed themselves into.
"Mark you," I offered, indicating the street right below our perch, "how we might bridge this lane—"
"Cavil Crossing."
"How we might span Cavil, right over to that solarium's balcony there, while the next street inward—"
"Lesser Cavil."
"—looks to be as readily spanned as this one. We have to provide all possible means for maneuver here, my friends. We need to run stout catwalk as many ways out as we can, and quick—to any other buildings that can get us safe down to the street. We want ways to bring our friends up here and to get ourselves down. Some of us should start lashing five-mast widths of rampway and others start laying it. I have a flair for rooftop travel. Help me lodge this section on the balcony, Samption, and let's cross Cavil, and see what other buildings we can get into."
"Better to bridge to that gutter on the next house, which has a bakery on the street floor for provisions, and has one of the armories of the district constabulary on the second floor."
"Good! Choose our path for us, with just such considerations in mind."
