The Incompleat Nifft

by Michael Shea

  "Do I merit such a salute? If so, you merit the same, my friends. For it seems you have walked here. If so, you are the fourth and fifth to have done so this hundred years and more. Believe me, if I could feel amazement at all any more, my jaw would be dropping off my face at the sight of you."

  In fact, his jaw—a powerful one, fit to drive the dreadnaught teeth that filled it—scarcely stirred with his speech. "Do you know what you are to me?" he concluded, as if in afterthought.

  "What are we to you?" Barnar asked obligingly.

  "You are two brief escapes from here. You are two lives in whose light I can live for a while, before returning to this." He gestured at large. "I refer to the payment I will ask for any service you may be seeking from me. Unless, of course, you've just come down to clasp my hand. That service is free."

  I took the hand he mockingly extended. This wasn't a simple act, for I had not yet decided that he was still on the human side of the line he had drawn here in the days of his freedom and expeditionary pride. His hand was as cold as a month on a Jarkeladd glacier, but innocent of any malevolent aura. I said: "I am honored. I am Nifft of Karkham-Ra, a master thief. It is likewise with my friend Barnar Hammer-hand, who is a Chilite."

  He took Barnar's hand. "Your honor honors me. I smell no great sorcery about you. In reaching me, you have done much with little."

  "We are here," Barnar said, "to buy our lives out of mortgage by retrieving a certain lad from your puddle out there. It took all we had just to get here, and we have neither hook, nor line, nor rod."

  The Privateer smiled pleasantly. "You seem to have little of anything at all besides determination. Yet still you carry with you the price of my services. I don't promise success, mind you, but once I have made my best effort, if I survive that effort, pay me you must—which is to say, you must admit me to the treasury of your personal memories. It is done in a moment, but afterward I will possess every jot of your lives as intimately as I do my own, including many things you might yourselves not even recall, in the riot and variety of your freedom. For an absolute lover of privacy, it is much to pay, but a trifle otherwise, while for me it is a blessed mental oasis in the desert of my bondage. Can you accept the terms?" We nodded. "Then what was it that took the youth you're looking for?"

  "A bonshad," I told him. He nodded slowly.

  "Heavy work, both the finding and the killing. But feasible. We'll cross over to my armory. Kindly bear in back, gentlemen, that henceforth your safety lies solely in your nearness to my protection. You already stand within the surf-line, and are now fair game to all the wet half of hell."

  He gestured slightly with one hand. From the swamped doorway two tiers below a coracle—made of hide stretched on a bone frame—drifted out. We climbed down after Gildmirth, waded to this craft, and boarded it. It seemed to propel itself, and as we crossed the enclosed waters we watched the pier we approached, not to be looking at the monstrosities crouched so near below us.

  "Gildmirth," Barnar said abruptly. "That was you, just now, swimming here?"

  The Privateer smiled a thin, cold smile, and answered without turning to face us. "Swimming. Indeed I was, and more than that, though I don't think you'd really care to hear about it. I'll tell you what you do want to hear, though it's for you to decide if you trust my word or not. But no. I have not altered. I am still a man in my essence and allegiance."

  Barnar nodded. There was much more we wished to know about him, but we held our tongues. We felt ashamed to have doubted him in his adversity, thereby discovering that we did trust him. But presently, in concession to our unvoiced perplexity, Gildmirth added: "You must understand that I am not bound here by an external compulsion. It is my own will that has been captured . . . infected. I may not leave because certain of my own appetites will not permit it. They have been exaggerated, distorted, rendered insatiable. And only here can I even begin to feed them. One of my appetites earned me a title in Sordon-Head. Curator, they called me. A subject of jest. It was my larceny I grew famous for among them, especially my great swindle of the city itself—not a subject of jest. They never knew that I robbed them for the Curator. Lesser, periodic thefts would have sated my mere cupidity—I was never impatient. It was only the Curator's secret ambition, long-cherished, that needed so huge a grub-stake. That quaint old Curator. Is it really three hundred years and more since he came here? He had the zoographer's passion for living form, its precarious and infinite complexity, its stupendous diversity. And these seas teem as none above ground with unmined marvels. This is an empire of discovery such as no savant ever hoarded to buy posterity's undying thanks. . . ."

  He fell silent, and brought the coracle to a ladder up one of the pier's pilings. He climbed this, his movement forgetful, that of a man who thinks himself alone. We followed in silence.

  We set out atop the pier, flanked either side by the imposing facades of his handiwork. These reflected the catholicity of his tastes, for they presented every variety of architectural style—high-arched temples of the Aristoz school, monolithic shrines in the Jarkeladd mode, triple-columned stoai with the austere grace of Ephesion public building—an encyclopedia of traditions passed in review on either hand, and yet their endless contrasts were so cunningly orchestrated that the whole medley of styles flowed pleasingly. Meanwhile we walked on an equally various succession of pavements, and often looked down to find ornate tiles or lavish mosaics underfoot which snagged our eyes and made us stumble. From Gildmirth's terse indications of this or that building's function it appeared that most were repositories for artifacts, specimens, or texts, and that their builder still made regular use of them.

  And they looked anything but derelict, were all in excellent repair. And yet after a while I noticed that they all shared a certain unobtrusive mark of decay—or perhaps vandalism—in common. For wherever their facades bore friezework, intaglio, sculpted cornices, cartouches of bas-relief, you could see—by bright tatters of metal still lodged in the deeper angles and convolutions—that these features had once been richly inlaid with gold foil. Catching Gildmirth's eye on me, I saw he had observed my notice of this detail.

  His look discouraged questions, and he said nothing till he had brought us inside the armory that was our destination. I had taken this building for a shrine or mausoleum from the severe grandeur of its design. It was a pleasing shock to see its huge, unpartitioned interior thronged with weapon racks. Its ceiling was just as crowded—with boats. Small craft of every description dangled in chain harnesses. Each harness was anchored in a system of slotted ceiling tracks, which converged at a steepening pitch toward a huge bayed door in the armory's seaward wall.

  While we were gaping at everything, Gildmirth found some steel-bossed leather breeches and a corselet of light mail, and pulled them on. "Arm yourselves, gentlemen," he said when he was done. His tone parodied an ostler's convivial welcome. "You see what there is—we have everything. Equip yourselves as suits your tastes. Mail and body-armor are here, and there is another rack yonder, just beyond the spears and harpoons. Blades of all types there, helms and casques there, greaves and the like here, clubs, maces, axes as you see them. Now for myself, I find that today I'm taken with a fancy for yon cuirass."

  He gave an odd stress to this last remark, and though I was greedily pawing some fine ironwood lances I kept half an eye on him as he went to a rack of body-armor. The cuirass he took down was a marvel, of everbright lavishly filigreed with gold. He carried it to a rack of knives, plucked down a poniard, and started prying the filigree off the breastplate.

  We stood staring, understanding that this was something he wanted us to watch. He grasped the filaments he had worked free and ripped the golden skein off the everbright. Letting the cuirass drop, he stared at us with his wound-colored eyes as his thick fingers wadded the network into a lump as big as an apple. He held this up, not ceasing to stare at us.

  "Forgive me for taking my customary refreshment, which your arrival forestalled. The exertion of my zoolo
gical studies always leaves me feeling peckish." His jaws gaped, and sank their great, inhuman teeth into the nugget. Ravenously he chawed, crushing the buttery, pliant meal, bolting it down. We watched him dine while he watched us watch him, his eyes bright with sharp hunger and sharper misery. When he was done he just stood there before us for a time, as if in simple presentation of himself, his diseased captivity. We struggled for something to say and found nothing. Smiling slightly, the Privateer nodded, agreeing with our silence.

  "But I want you to understand, my friends—" he spoke casually, as if we had been conversing all along—"that it has been my choice to despoil my own works. The open sea offers infinite pasture to this hunger of mine, but pride demanded that I deface what I'd wrought. Its beauty was a boast I was no longer entitled to make. Gilt walls are for conquerors, not prisoners. Well then. Shall we proceed? Take what pleases you, but I must ask you both to take one of those full-visored helmets there, and two heavy harpoons as well. Is either of you skilled with a spear?"

  Barnar rubbed his mouth to hide a smile. I confined myself to assuring Gildmirth that any harpoon work our mission required could with reasonable confidence be left in my hands.

  "Then choose two that please you," he said, "and kindly make any last additions to your equipage now, for it only remains to unsling our craft and pick up a few needfuls at my quarters."

  At the room's center a platform towered amid the legioned weaponry. This he mounted, and started working an arrangement of winches that crowned it. The boat slings began to move along the maze of ceiling track from which they hung and, to a music of groaning chains and grinding gears, the dangling armada commenced a slow aerial quadrille.

  While Barnar meditated on a case of battleaxes—his favorite weapon—I hefted harpoons till I found two that felt promising. Then I tried on one of the helmets Gildmirth had prescribed for us. It resembled the antique Aristoz casque-and-vizard, a slot-eyed brazen mask with a wolf-muzzle shape. As I buckled the neckstrap tight, my lungs turned to stone. The slightest breath—in or out—was impossible. I clawed at the strap in panic, but then discovered I had ceased to crave breath and—after a moment's anxious experiment—that my strength and mental clarity were unaffected by this suffocation. When I had taken it off I called to Barnar: "By the Crack, Ox! These helmets here—they exempt a man from breathing! What a wealth of exemptions we're getting lately! We needn't eat, we needn't drink, we needn't sleep—and now we needn't even breathe. But you know, somehow it's not making my life feel any more secure. In fact, it's beginning to make me feel less and less sure that I'm still alive at all."

  "I still feel one need," he rumbled, "and that's to get my arse utterly and forever out of this filthy, infested basement of a world. And from this I conclude that I am not yet dead. It isn't much to go on, but it'll have to do."

  The Privateer laughed. It was a shocking sound—a bark of feral glee whose echoes rang like yelps of pain. "Ah, you are wise indeed, dear Chilite. Though a man here might in time lose the entire self he started with, lose mind's and heart's identity, so long as he still feels that need, he lives, and in that simple need the germ of him survives." Perhaps Gildmirth thought he had sounded self-pitying, for after a pause he snorted, spat on the platform, and cranked the gears more fiercely. In a more offhand voice he added: "Will you come up now gentlemen, and board?"

  We complied, though dubiously; the vessel just then gliding into position over the platform, shaped like a war-canoe, was made of scaly hide stretched on a riblike rack of bones. Its prow was a huge skull with long, fang-jammed jaws that snapped and gnashed furiously at the air, while its stern was a skeletal tail that whipped with futile, metronomic force.

  But when we reached the platform this had overpassed it and Gildmirth had docked the vessel just behind it. This looked oddly normal to belong to so grotesque a fleet: a slender little sloop with one mast and one gracefully tapered outrigger pontoon on its port side. We got aboard. There was no cabin, just a bare deck built a scant two feet below the gunwales, and some rower's benches. The mast was bare of sail, and there was no tiller. Gildmirth shifted some levers which moved all the boats in our path to side-tracks, then set both hands to a crank. As he worked it, the big steel door down to which our trackline plunged purred open, spreading to receive us that blue quilt where blurred nightmares were bedded, Gildmirth's watery stableyard. The Privateer got aboard, motioning us to take the rowers' benches. He sat himself in the stern, and took hold of a handring attached to a steel pin that knit the chains of our boatsling together.

  "That wire," he told me—"dangling just off the bow from the ceiling. Reach out and give it a sharp pull. Tell me, was this boy you're after looking for the Elixir of Sazmazm?"

  My hand stopped halfway to its task. "You know of him?" Gildmirth laughed and gestured at the wire. I pulled it. This freed the ball-joint from which we hung, and our boat in its little steel basket began the plunge.

  "I know of his type, no more," Gildmirth said. "Almost all of those whom bonshads bring here have themselves summoned the things to procure them the Elixir."

  The whisper of the track grew steely and shrill. We swooped through the door and out along a boom projecting some sixty feet above the lagoon. Gildmirth pulled the ring-bolt when we had almost reached the boom's end. The bottom fell out of our sling, the chains racketed free of our hull. We skated out upon the golden air, and down to the bright, infested waters.

  XI

  We had to row the boat across to the manse. "Our sail," Gildmirth explained, "is one of the things we must pick up from my quarters. You'll forgive my resting now when you understand the labor I have undertaken for you."

  "We are delighted to help," I grunted. "And so? Please go on. What can you tell us about Wimfort?"

  "Wimfort?"

  "The boy we're after."

  "Oh. Little more than why he made his mistake about bonshads. You see, Balder Xolot's Thaumaturge's Pocket Pandect has a mistake in it. And in the hundred and twelve years since he published it, it's been disastrous to all that class of people who study not at all, and yet buy serious spells by the lot. For all such go-to-market magi are quite correctly informed that of all abridgers and condensers of Power Lore, Xolot is unquestionably the best. Alas, he was human. In his transcription of the Paleo-Archaic texts concerning Sazmazm, he misread the word parn-shtadha. This is a rare variant of the more usual sh't-parndha, which one need have no Paleo-Archaic to recognize as meaning no one, so close is it to High Archaic's hesha't pa-harnda. But Xolot decided it was a scribal error for parnsht'ada, which is to say, bonshad. What a crop of ruin from so small a seed! One little sentence. `And no one'—it says—`hath power to bring it'—meaning the Elixir—`from where it lieth up into the sun.' Give one more pull please, gentlemen, and ship your oars."

  We obeyed. The boat's momentum carried it across the terrace and through the flooded doorway.

  Till now we had only glimpsed the pain of the Privateer's imprisonment. But here, inside his manse, the ruin of his spirit was starkly visible in the ruin he inhabited. You could see that formerly, this great chamber had been the throne room of his pride, both the showroom of his past achievements and the workroom where be shaped new projects. At present it was an indoor lagoon which the low swell filled with echoes, and everything in it was the sea's. Even the canvases arrayed along the walls to either side of us, though only the bottoms of their ornate frames hung in the water, had all been invaded and colonized by sea growth. The bright imagery was spotted with leprous mosses; shell life scabbed and sea-grass whiskered it. Gildmirth figured in all these pictures and in them it seemed he had recorded—with great artistry—key events in his history here. Now you saw his face everywhere—crusted, bearded, or grotesquely blurred, like a drowned corpse.

  Much more in there was literally drowned, of course. The ceiling was hung with luminous globes whose light sifted down to the sunken floor, and we could see that this—which we crossed so smoothly now—had been a crowded place to
weave your way across before the waters had possessed it: Low platforms and daises stood everywhere. Many of them supported taxidermic displays, various demon forms arranged in tableaux—surrounded by simulations of their environment—which illustrated their feedings habits, modes of combat, nesting techniques, and the like. Amid these was a larger dais supporting a multitude of architectural models. In this beautiful micro-metropolis of the Privateer's ambitious designs were many structures we recognized—dreams fulfilled and standing large as life out on the pier—and many others which would doubtless never exist on any larger scale than this.

  But the largest of all these platforms, near the hall's center, testified to an even broader ambition than the little sunken city did. What it held was a topographic map sculpted from stone, a landscape of wildly various terrain where mountains bordered chasms and volcanic cones thrust up from gullied plains. This lay between us and a large table standing just clear of the water near the hall's far end and toward which Gildmirth, using one oar as a stern-paddle, seemed to be heading us. Crossing it gave us a queer shudder, for we quickly understood what it was: at one edge of it was a tiny, perfect model of the manse and pier. The irony of its now being under water had a disturbing savor of conscious malevolence about it, and the wavelets rolling over it had an eerie, triumphing quality in their movement.

  "That is a model of the ocean floor?" Barnar asked. Gildmirth back-paddled and our prow nudged up against the tabletop.

  "Of a little piece of it. Let's take some wine, and I'll show you where we're going to start our search."

  We disembarked. A hundred men could have stepped out onto that massive board and milled around quite comfortably. It stood clear because the pitch of the broken manse left this end of the hall shallower, so that by the time the little surf reached the great fireplace in its inmost wall, the water was barely deep enough to overleap the fender. In his bitterness, his self-punishing pride, the Privateer had done no more than place the table's downslope legs on blocks, and encamp on it. He had a bed there, a larder-cabinet, a chair and writing desk, a drawing table, a rack for writing materials, some bookshelves, and no more.