The A'Rak

by Michael Shea

  There came a pause that we all knew was to be the last. There was a taunt now in the mentation that rippled up, as it seemed, from the A'Rak's hill of eyes, while the answer from Pam'Pel's orbs was as implacable as ever, even though the power of her wing-song faltered now.

  Then there approached from behind us a shrill, clamoring voice. We turned as one. Here, up the broad boulevard full of troops and materiel, came a little wooden skiff, an oarless rowboat with some people in it, skimming through the air perhaps an ell above the ground. One of its passengers was standing in the bow, shrieking, while the others clutched the gunnels behind her. They swept nearer. The screecher was Jaundyssa, and her cry was:

  "Up! Up! We've just enough left, damn your vile demon arse! Up and at him!"

  And indeed, then, up came the skiff, grudgingly accelerating. Pandagon and I ducked on our 'plod as the boat's keel just cleared our heads and plunged—no doubt with the witch's last iota of sorcerous assistance—through the web wall still confronting us. We watched dumbfounded as the witch, with her nuncial passengers, hurtled the little craft in a rising arc, and then dove in a trajectory clearly aimed at the A'Rak's eyecluster.

  The giant, beholding them, made one flicker, one pulse of hesitation, and in that instant Pam'Pel dove, and slipped beneath his hugeness, and touched her stinger amidst his under-joints: once, twice, thrice . . . and the A'Rak was hers.

  LAGADEME X

  "Eat Keel, Hellbug!" The shriek—Jaundyssa's as we plunged toward the A'Rak—echoes still in my memory, where the vision we dove towards also lives indelible. Nothing of all the spawn we had seen had prepared us for the A'Rak himself. Pam'Pel had grown greatly in the hours since we had left her, but still he dwarfed her.

  His eyes commanded all directions, and, as we streaked towards them, though their myriad sunstruck facets flashed rainbow fragments, a deeper glint of the monster's unguarded thought sparked through them. I like to think that it was bafflement, that our tiny, bizarre assault-craft, our motley little gaggle of human shapes, disconcerted the giant, and for all our littleness, we so perplexed him that we snared his mighty limbs for just that heartbeat's time Pam'Pel required to plant paralysis within his bowels.

  For surely one brief forelimb's flicker would have swatted us into oblivion, and this he might have ministered with no lapse of his focus on Pam'Pel.

  Our power was spent even as she stung him. "Hang on!" the witch cried needlessly. We plunged into a ghastly terrain of human husks which buckled and crackled under us like hard-cured leather and brittle wood. We found our feet with loathing on this substrate, and watched the giant sinking, sinking down upon his crumbling, clenching legs.

  Citizens! To your deity's defense! Make haste! Take arms against the alien monster who assails him!

  For all the force of thought in this outcry, the A'Rak's last clear utterance, there was as well a cloudiness, a vague indirection, as if it had not aimed quite rightly at our minds. Thus he sank to incoherence, a cold sleet of mentation radiating vagrantly, indecipherably, towards the sky.

  Ah, Jaundyssa! Indefatigable, relentless witch, I had to love her, for all her odiousness, in that moment. For she clambered up one of the A'Rak's folded legs, fearlessly gripping his dense fur—climbed to a kneelike projection, perched there, and trumpeted to the town at large:

  "Bring axes, saws! Bring swords and scythes! Hack off his legs! He has no more need of them, hee-hee! No more gavottes will he gambol! No more jigs will he jiggety-jig! He embarks on a long term a-dreaming, while he's eaten alive from within! Then he goes into the tomb for a term without end!"

  We swarmed, blades flashing, like ants on the carcass. Each joint of his legs was a galleon's mainmast. We heaped the husky dead into isolated hills, and on each hill we teepeed several of the leg-joints. Then the pumpwagons drenched the dead and joints alike. Brandy, Behemoth sap, lamp oil, aquavit—every flammable stored in Big Quay's cornucopic warehouses flooded the square, fire arrows fell like rain, and all around the legless monster, pyres roared. To their smoke was joined the bright, carnival colors of the vast shroud of ghostweb burning away, released by touches of Pam'Pel's stinger. Thus did Big Quay's countless dead receive their deliverance.

  The remnant of A'Rak—a planetoid of abdomen, an infernal apparatus of eyes and fangs—though reduced, still seemed a sure impossibility for Pam'Pel to lift. But down she hovered, once we had trimmed him, and hooked the dangle of her slender legs beneath his fangs, and lift him she did. Her wings great silver clarions of clamorous power, she raised his limp immensity slowly, inexorably. A haze of delirious mentation still auraed the giant and she dragged him thus jabbering and dreaming aloft, and aloft, and away to the west, the pair of them growing tiny in the flawless blue.

  The witch, who had been in close conversation with the Ecclesiarch Pandagon, his assistant, and Nifft, now commandeered a titanoplod for a second podium, though she was the cynosure of all eyes and scarcely needed a proscenium, so strident was her voice.

  "Harken citizens! You now, it seems, confront another danger, grave and urgent, and this one you won't have me to save you from! Know, all you women and men of Big Quay, that the coming of Pam'Pel was known abroad, and that even now round the Haagsford's Estuary a flotilla of pirates and brigands floats, wolvish opportunists all, tongues a-loll for Hagia's guardless vaults! Lay not by your arms, nor unbuckle your armor, and such semblance of an army as you've muddled into, maintain! Hold ranks! Take ship! Deploy on land and sea at once, and you may nip invasion in the bud! Priests! And you, thief, come up where they can see you!. . . . These three seem able soldiers. Embrace their command, for your lives hang on it! I am no longer at your service, as I've said. Your erstwhile god now wings it to Mount Horad in my native Strega, where the great Gnarlbone and her sisters have granted Pam'Pel a lodgement for her brood, and where I too am awaited with a Triumph for the completion of my Opus Eponymous. There I will formally don the mantle of my self-made name, and enter Sorcery's deathless Annals as Jaundyssa the A'Raknicide!" (She paused to gesture as if modestly dismissing our applause, though a stunned silence lay on us all.) "Thank me not! Greatness must express itself. I am glad its byproduct has been your benefit. Farewell!"

  She was gone. By what thaumaturgic allowance this dramatic withdrawal was accomplished I cannot say. None of us dwelt on it long. A babble of talk raged, the terror of invasion flashing from every eye. The Priests, calling orders from 'plod-back, assembled the miscellaneous cohorts of citizens-in-arms around the core of mercenaries they commanded. The survivors began to take on an air of military prowess, and once the idea of a counterstrike took hold, fervor began to burn away fear in our spirits. Our blood was up for a fight, and after what we had just fought, an encounter with human cutthroats loomed like a lark, a festival, scarcely a fray at all.

  I and my crew were no exceptions. I do not think I can convey the delirious optimism that fills one who has just had a hand in slaying a giant. No form of horror or harm could now daunt us. On this summer day so near solstice, hours of light yet remained to us. What a fine thing it seemed to sail and march quick downriver and slay a few brigands and pillagers to round out the long trance of battle we had been locked in!

  Our generals developed their strategy in plain sight of all, calling questions on this detail or that to individuals in the throng. I noted that Nifft was much consulted by the churchmen on something which, by their gestures, was downriver.

  The hasty colloquy ended with the thief leading our naval arm down the Haagsford while the churchmen brought the army overland in a two-pronged march to intercept invaders already ashore and roll them back to the coast. The thief willingly took my crew aboard his vessel, a longish but yare caravel.

  "We've been fighting from boats since last night," I pleasantly told the thief, as we made sail down the open river, and we all took some rest on the foredeck. "This seems the natural way to conclude the struggle. You know, Nifft, it occurs to me to ask you about that rumor you came here a-peddling. I can't th
ink you selfishly hoarded it while en route. Did you share it with others as you came? For the, ah, theft you had in view would be facilitated—would it not?—if you were not the only thief the vaults' guardians had to deal with?"

  "I will not deny," he affably answered, "that I passed the rumor on, nor that my thinking ran very much along the lines that you suggest. You must understand, though, that I had no suspicion of the almost total overthrow of A'Rak-kind here. I imagined that the cutthroats I might bring here would all be encountered by spider-kind, not the citizens themselves."

  We were three dozen vessels (hewn free with some labor from webbing that anchored the keels) carrying ballistas, carrying even pumpwagons with the wheels off. All this armament was hid under tarps, and we kept our troops well hidden too. We came out of the estuary looking much like a miscellany of refugees fleeing with their goods. Our prey flocked to us, thinking us the quarry. By sunset a dozen brigands' vessels wandered rudderless and blazing on the tide, while a good dozen others had already gone down. We lost a brace of craft, but scarce a score of lives. The priests' forces were fighting ashore with similar result, driving routed pillagers back to the beaches in time for us to beach, and join the slaughter.

  Night fell with some few hundreds of the enemy surrounded in a coastal valley, and the skirmishing went on the next day too, but I and my crew and the thief were not to see its conclusion. To our consternation, Jaundyssa suddenly appeared at our coastal bivouac before the morrow's sun appeared, and spirited us away to Strega—literally, in an airborne coach pulled by neffrits. We must, it seemed, the odious one declared, come to stand witness on her behalf before the Sisters, who were denying certification of her Opus Eponymous because, in the last moments of its execution, she had slightly exceeded her thaumaturgic allowance.

  One shaft of the light falling down from the lofty clerestory of the Archosororion—in which cyclopaean chamber Strega's grandest, grimmest witches sit in council—fell upon Gnarlbone the Bearded, and limned in profuse detail the seamed and gullied terrain of her visage, for though her sorcery had procured her centuries of life, she disdained to banish from her face the marks of their passage. Her anthracite eyes glimmed from whorled pits of flesh. Beside her, the only other grandee present, sat the lean, ophidian Dame Eelritter.

  My crew were comfortably domiciled. Only the thief and I had been called to give testimony to the details of Jaundyssa's performance. The candidate herself stood by fatly fuming, gnashing her teeth against an imperiously commanded silence.

  When Nifft and I had done with our testimony, Gnarlbone lifted a clawed forefinger that seemed impossibly long, and crooked it at me. I approached her lofty bench. Gnarlbone had a bubbly growl like a huge old boar.

  "I note, Nuncio, that yon Ephesionite rogue finds our applicant wondrous canny. Called her a marvellously apt improvisor—did you not, rogue?"

  Nifft genuflected with studious courtesy—one is not petulant with hags of this stature. "I did indeed, great Gnarlbone. Please forgive me for suggesting that I would feel less discomfort if referred to as `Nifft,' or simply, `Ephesionite.' "

  "Forgive me for suggesting I don't give a roaring damn for a rascal's discomfort, Sir Rascal—with your permission, rogue, of course."

  "Of course, Great Gnarlbone," Nifft suavely bowed.

  The sorceress bent her brambly brows again on me. "You, on the other hand, Dame Nuncio, pronounce Jaundyssa at once brazen and devious, arrogant and sly, though you seem to concede her fervent devotion to her task. I also note that you hold this Ephesionite's thievish calling to be as odious and vile as I myself do deem it—though I will say that this thief is a good cut above the lot as regards moral fiber.

  "I will say to you both that your personal differences lend particular persuasiveness to the essential agreement of your testimony. Your very denunciations of her deviousness, Dame, are but sour testaments to what the thief calls her invention.

  "The end of our deliberations are not for the laity to know. However, I do not yet dismiss you both, but rather commission you, for I have resolved to reward your valor against the alien, Dame, by doing you a service. You are to bring back your son here from among the Hydrobani, and take him to Mount Horad, and display to him the wonder you have had a hand in. And you, thief, are especially commissioned to exert yourself to bring the Nuncio and her son into accord."

  "May I humbly inquire," Nifft said, "if my part in this commission in some way rewards my valor against the alien?"

  "Your valor against the alien, oh Ephesionite Nifft, purchases my present patience with you, for it is not my way to suffer thieves gladly."

  Nifft bowed another polite acknowledgement, but I recoiled powerfully from the proposition. "Forgive me, great Gnarlbone, but he is precisely the sort of man whose contact with my son I would most abhor!"

  "You will have the goodness to trust my wisdom, or I will convey you to the Glacial Maelstroms, Dame, where you may lie frozen for a thousand years."

  "Yes, great Gnarlbone."

  To the battlements of the Archosororion she brought us and bade us step through the skin of a great clear bubble that hung above the balustrade. Within this tenuous conveyance, we sprang skywards with no more than a gentle sense of acceleration. We shot to a height so great as to make a grand relief map of Strega's black crags.

  Indeed, our flight northeastward was a cartographer's dream, with distant glimpses of the peaks of the Ingens Cluster sinking away to our right, even as the Great Reefs began to dimple our northern horizon.

  Nifft, masking, I think, a sulkiness over my recent remarks, said he felt tired, and lay in the comfortable curve of the bubble-floor gazing on the view below. I was, however, unwilling to lose this last chance to clarify how he must proceed with my son. I opened as tactfully as possible. I observed that while his prompt military efforts against the invaders in some part atoned for the crime of luring them to Hagia, the fact that the Donative had, in all likelihood, emptied all the monastia of their gold, meant that this noble gesture of his cost him little enough. Now that his rumor was truth, and the gates of all the vaults hung unguarded, there wasn't a jot of gold to be had from them. He dismissed this—the emptiness of all the vaults—as rank conjecture.

  I turned to my real concern. Such callous adventuring with other peoples' lives as Nifft's rumor-mongering had been, I told him, was just the kind of moral contamination I feared him infecting my son with. For Persander had already ventured on his own onto a cynical path, and this had led to our break in the first place.

  With an air of patience I found somehow irritating, Nifft pressed me for the account of this break. I was loathe to give it, but considering how the witch had shackled us together in this encounter, I ended by answering his questions, some of which concerned my son's professional doings as far as I knew them.

  "Lagademe," he proposed at length, "let me speak to him first, in your hearing of course—but let me present our commission to him, more crisply than your emotional involvement would allow you to do, I think."

  I found that in part I actually preferred this. Had it been left to my will, I would have been ashamed to seek Persander out after embarrassing him professionally. It helped to think the thief would present our case to my son and point out I had not willingly come to trouble him again so soon.

  And already we were plummeting towards the great raft city that sat on the gentle turquoise swell of the Great Shallows. I had just time to wonder how we were to find Persander in this hive, when the bubble had plumped down on the boardwalk before a casino, causing the revellers—few at noontide—to jump, and placing us directly in front of my son, who was standing in the entry of the establishment—the Golden Die—apparently shilling for it. Though he'd grown to such a wonderfully self-possessed young man, the sight of us in our apparitional vehicle caused his jaw to sag noticeably.

  Nifft stepped out with a graceful salutation, and smoothly produced our tale. My son at the first stared at me in stupefaction enough, but the thief's words
soon amazed him in another manner.

  For this Ephesionite Nifft, forsooth—it soon appeared from my son's enthusiasm—was a thief of no small renown within the demimonde my son had chosen to inhabit.

  "You are Nifft the Karkmahnite, friend of Shag Margold, and also called Nifft the Lean?" my boy asked with visible delight.

  "The same, sir, at your service, and a more earnest admirer of your mother's courage and character than myself, esteemed Persander, you would have to look long and hard to find."

  My chagrin at my son's admiration for my former spearman may be imagined, though the glad warmth of my son's embrace, when he stepped into the bubble, quite banished all pain from me while it lasted.

  "Behold, dear Mother, with a hop and a skip I leave my paltry pimping post. Let us cross the ocean at once, if you need me to do so."

  "My precious Persander! They demoted you! And it was my fault entirely, wasn't it?!"

  He laughed. "Entirely! Ah Mother, what broils you can blunder up! It is your sweetest quality! I was only marking time here though—I was already restless before you dropped by."

  We were airborne again. The thief asked, "Was it glyfrig you were playing? Do you know it was my friend Margold who first noted the analogy between glyfrig's ikonic scale and the card spells of the Ikastrian Tundra shamans? He has not fully established the truth of his suspicion that glyfrig adepts are gifted pupils of that important branch of wizardry, but he tells me he expects to do so."

  "The August Margold, sir, is quite simply one of the greatest luminaries of our age. And you enjoy his friendship, and casually engage him in conversation!"

  "I do indeed, and it is undeniably a privilege to envy. And nothing would give me greater pleasure than to introduce you to him. Indeed, since you are a man of parts and clearly have hero's blood in you" (a nod at me here) "I can take the liberty of promising you he'll soon be suggesting the most interesting cartographic surveys you could perform for him! That is to say, explorations of places chancy or wholly unknown. He'll not only suggest them, but fit you out with a ship and a subsidy, sometimes. . . ."