by Michael Shea
The woman said, "Travelers." The air seared her lungs—her voice was as if made of pain. She took more breath. "You are men, as you seem? Not thralls? Sailing freely here?"
"Yes, unhappy one," I answered.
"Free me!" she cried. Her glistening corona of nerve and vein wrinkled and writhed as she cried again: "Free me!"
Gently, the Privateer said: "You are past retransformation. Your growth shows you many, many centuries a thrall."
"Do I not know this?" said the woman. She smiled, and tears slid down her temples. "How goes the world, travelers?"
Softly, the Privateer snorted. "What would you know, my lady?" I asked her. Her slow turning on the waters had brought her round so I could look her in the face. She said, still smiling and weeping:
"One thing I would know, gaunt one—does Radak still rule in Bidna-Meton? Do his catacombs of dark experiment still swallow men and women down from the light of day?"
"Radak," I said after her. The trellis of her nerves shuddered again to receive the word. "That name, sweet thrall, is now a proverb. I have heard the expression `to keep a house like Radak' used of innkeeps and ostlers with bad establishments. The name of Bidna-Meton I have never heard."
"So great a city . . ." she said. "What of the nation of Agon, mother of mighty navies, where my father was a ship-law in the capital? And what of the second moon, foretold in the heavens by fire and holocaust?"
"Unhappy one, I know of no land called Agon. There is a great ocean of that name, between Kolodria and Lúlumë. As for the moon, there is one in the heavens, sweet lady, and ever has been, so far as I have heard."
"My world has been, gaunt traveler. So free me now. Free me!"
I started to speak. Gildmirth touched my arm and turned his eyes on one of the harpoons.
It was a short cast—I have never made one with greater care. I waited till a wave lifted and turned her, so that she no longer faced me, and was on the crest. I said "Dear Lady—" as if beginning a speech, to distract her from any expectation of the cast. I threw with a great downpull, giving it a fast, flat trajectory, and pinned her below her splayed left arm. It was a smooth entry, between the third and fourth ribs, with no grating on the bone. Her eyes showed white, and the nerve-fan crumpled and writhed about her, but she did not die with the hit. Her hand came up and caressed the shaft, and only when we came alongside and I leaned over and pulled out the spear did the life leave her.
* * *
The boat rode at half-sail, in which state its only motion was a slight, incessant counter-action against the tides, which here seemed to want to bring us toward the cluster of islands before us. Thus we hung at a fixed half-mile offshore of the quincunx's largest member. A man in a meditative mood, as Gildmirth seemed to be, found much for his eye to muse on there. Apart from the five main isles—dense with verdure wherein movement swarmed, and over which clouds of winged things hovered and sketched an endless turmoil—there were many reefs and craggy ridges, and these lesser saliences of the drowned mountains also swarmed with life. The waves rushed in—oddly erratic in terms of timing and direction, but always violent—and smashed in palisades of white foam everywhere against the islands' green fringes. In particular, waves seemed to come with special force from a huge crescent of unusually dark water which lay perhaps a mile off the cluster's right as we faced it. The curve of this smoky zone paralleled that of the cluster's perimeter, and the entire zone was subject to sudden, deep puckerings which sent towering pairs of waves out in opposite directions, one of each pair always came exploding against the islands.
"I suppose," Gildmirth said, "you surmise what that dark zone overlies?"
"The Rifft," Barnar said softly. Gildmirth nodded, smiling bitterly.
"The Great Black Rifft. Ten times as strictly guarded and furiously assaulted by the denizens of this world as this world is by the ambitious beings of our own."
"And below that," Barnar muttered, "the Tertiary Subworld. Deeper and deeper. Ever greater power. Ever greater evil."
Again Gildmirth nodded. "And so on, down to what? How do you read the dreadful map of this world, my friends? It seems that an evil past name and conception must lie at its core. Was this the yolk of the egg of life? Are men the highest-climbing descendants of that deep, ultimate germ of darkness and horror? Are we the last, the frailest, and yet the least-dark, highest-soaring, of all that grim line?"
I smiled back at his bitter, sword-bright grin. "Go on," I said, "give us the rest of the question, and then tell us what you think."
Gildmirth got up and went to the great sword he had lashed under the gunwale. He unbound it, sat on one of the rowers' benches, and laid it across his knees. Almost tenderly, he ran his finger along one edge of it. "As perhaps you guess, it's the other theory I hold with—though I have not a whit more grounds for certainty than you, despite all I have experienced. Do you realize how long man has prevailed on Earth? There is no word for the number of his millennia of sowing and sailing, of building and battling, of seeking and striving and slaying, of learning and losing. In that eternity man's wielded and then utterly forgotten powers we couldn't even dream of. He's lived whole histories, garnered troves of miracles, built marvels, and then has fallen and buried all his works in the dust of his own disintegrating bones, and begun all again, and again, and again.
"Spirit, soul—it doesn't die, you know. The strenuous, fierce flames endure. The great in Evil and the great in Good—both leave an immortal residue. That's why I favor the other view. The demons are not our ancestors—we are theirs. The greeds and lusts, the wealth of horrors here, are not the archetypes of our own—they are the derivatives, the dreadful perfectings of all the evil that men have spawned and nourished. Call Man a great, roasting beast, spitted and turning above the fire of his own unending cruelty. The things of this world then, and of those yet farther down, are the drippings of the tortured giant, Man."
There was a long pause, and then Barnar ended it by asking: "Then where are the Great in Good? Where are the other half of Man's residue?"
"Ah yes!" cried Gildmirth triumphantly. "Where else but—" He had started to sweep his hand above us. He checked the gesture, and gaped up at the plains of ragged smoke, cloven here and there with shafts of unreal light. "Three hundred years," he said after a moment, shaking his head, "and still I forgot, and thought to point to the sky."
I waited a moment, then prodded gently: "The sky, great Privateer?"
"The stars, Nifft. Perhaps man's other spawn has reached them. Perhaps, somewhere past memory, we have peopled them."
"One wishes some of them had stayed here, to even the odds," Barnar mumbled.
"How do we know they have not?" cried Gildmirth. "Our greatest wizards, our noblest kings, who knows what unseen influences prop their powers, and keep them just enough ahead of the legions of chaos?"
We didn't answer him. There was no telling how sweet the world might look to him in memory by contrast to his prison. I felt that, as things go, the legions of chaos do all right for themselves. Gildmirth stood up.
"So. We will go down together. If you sight the lad, I'll bring you back up and go down for the bonshad. 'Shads keep the nerve-bundles of their flocks in their jaws, and even wounding them before prying them loose means destroying the flock. Once I've pried it loose I'll be hanging on for dear life with all four of my paws. It will be all I can do to bring it up. You must be ready in the skiff to kill it with the harpoons when I maneuver it in range. The skiff's operation is simple—it obeys your will. Practice with it while you wait for me to resurface. Please remember that the 'shad will be more than a match for my water-shape. If at any moment it should break my body-lock on it, I am dead.
"The greatest powers in the sea are concentrated near the Rifft, my friends, and yet it may even be safer there than elsewhere, given their absorption in the frontier. You'll see much activity at the chasm's brink. One league of very mighty demons has even succeeded in hauling something up from the Rifft. The entire se
a is alive with the rumor and fear of it. But do not be distracted. 'Shads keep their flocks in the seams and gullies of these islands' footslopes, and we will not be far from the doings at the chasm's edge, but concentrate on scanning for the boy's face. You will see many faces to scan."
Gildmirth set down the sword, stripped off his clothes, and leapt overboard. The waters began to roil where he had sunk, and huge, silvery limbs sprouted beneath the masking effervescence. We pulled on our helmets, and doffed all our weapons save a harpoon each. A huge saurian head thrust from the water and laid its jaw upon our prow. The beast reached a webbed-and-taloned paw into the boat and took up the sword, whose scale at last was appropriate to its wielder's size, for the water-lizard was almost thirty feet long. When Gildmirth spoke to us it was with a huge red tongue that labored between sawlike teeth, steel-bright as before though savagely reshaped. His words came out as whispery, half-crushed things which the tongue's unwieldiness had maimed:
"Cleave to my belt, good thievesss. Carry those lances couched. Hassste! Let's be down and doing!"
We leapt in. It was hard to swim up to the giant, for all our knowing who it was. Hard also to grasp the swordbelt that girt its middle and feel its scales, rough as stone, against my knuckles. But hardest of all was holding while it did a whipping dive and hauled us underwater with the terrible speed of falling through empty air. And then another world yawned under us, and as I was snatched down into the limitless swarm of it, I became eyes, and awe, and nothing more.
XIII
Sometimes, when I am in Karkmahn-Ra, I will climb at nightfall into the hills that stand behind the city. Wolves haunt them, and an occasional stalking vampire, but the sight's worth the risk. A great city sprawled in the night—it wakes up the heart in you, stirs your ambition, reminds you of the glory that can be man's and your own, for toil and daring can produce accomplishments that shine back at the stars like those million lamps and torches do.
But now I have seen—deep in a place itself deep under this world—a dazzling sprawl that's vaster than a thousand cities. Its drowned lights dot and streak the flanks of the sunken mountains and crawl like fire-ants over reefs and knolls and gullies out to the brink of an utter blackness that is fenced with flames.
The titanic blaze banners and flaps and buckles, as earth-flame does, but slower, as if weighted down by the tons of ocean on it. It rims the gulf of the Black Rifft, and masks its depths with the volumes of slow, black smoke it vomits up, like the ink of an immense squid. Meanwhile those flames dispense a poisonous luminosity for miles across the ocean floor, a ruddy fog that roils across the multicolored phosphorescences of the deep-dwelling hosts.
All the most formidable encampments of those hosts are concentrated near the fiery wall, their fortressed bivouacs often encompassing some huge machinery for siege or assault. Misshapen crews drive ensorcelled battering rams against the unyielding palisades of fire, or swing great booms from derricks to reach across the flame crests.
One such encampment dwarfs all the others—or it did, at any rate, when I went down. There is reason to think its aspect might have changed since that time. But then it was such that I could make out its form from afar while many nearer works, though huge, were still vague to me: lying quite near the brink-fire were two stupendous ovoids; these had been netted over with scaffolding, and were flanked by mammoth cranes.
Gildmirth pulled us down to search the intermediate terrain. In the manner of a hawk working a range of foothills, we swooped along the sea floor, rolling with its roll, at a fixed distance above it. At first our cruising itself was as horrible as the things it manifested to us. The saurian's speed was astonishing, absolutely unslowed by the water's crushing weight, but in eery contrast to this my spirit felt all the heaviness of nightmare, where a dreadful pressure murders the will, makes it an unheeded voice exhorting a body that is infinitely slow to move.
Our leveling off brought us first above a field of waxen cells, like a giant honeycomb laid flat. Blurred within the cells were men and women folded tight, eyes and mouths gaping. The workers on these fields were like great, slender wasps. They moved with a dancing, finicking daintiness, stopping here and there to dip their stingers into a cell and, with a shudder, squirt a black polyhedron into it. I began to notice, here and there, the fat, black, joint-legged things sharing the cells with their human occupants, tunneling gradually into their bodies, burgeoning as those bodies writhed and dwindled.
Glowing rivulets of lava bordered this infernal nursery, molten leakage that threaded downslope in all directions from a volcanic cone that pierced the surface up to our left toward the island peaks. Within this magmatic mazeway a second zone of demon enterprise began. Here lurking monsters of the breed our guide had so lately grappled with plied trowels to mold the lava into smoking walls. These demons were of the class whose use of man is artistic rather than anthropophagous, for these steaming ramparts were the matrix for human bas-reliefs, wherein the living material, variously amputated, were cemented to compose a writhing mural. The innards of these sufferers were grafted to a system of blood-pipes set in the scalding masonry so that, once troweled and tamped into place, they lived rooted, sustained by that vascular network of boiling blood. At least our guide's plunging speed, indifferent to any sight irrelevant to our goal, abbreviated our witnessing of these things.
Yet he surprised us shortly after our leaving this last zone by making a sharp detour. We had just made out what we thought must be a Bonshad not far ahead, when Gildmirth swept down into a dive upon a huge polypous growth directly beneath us. It lifted huge menacing pseudopods, each fully half as thick as the great lizard himself, to meet the latter's plunge. The Privateer brought his blade—all asmoke with bubbles from the murderous energy of the stroke—athwart the nearest pair of these scabby extrusions, and sheared them cleanly through. One of the sundered members flew, heaving and shuddering past me, giving my shoulder a glancing blow that was like being jostled by a warhorse at full gallop. Two more strokes and Gildmirth had barbered the monster clean of its last protectors. Amid their bleeding stumps were the creature's massive, five-lobed jaws—made of purest gold and crusted over with rubies as big as apples. Those hideous beaks mouthed impotent appetite as Gildmirth plunged his sword into its throat. The jaws gaped and froze. The lizard sheathed his blade, reached down, and ripped the jaws apart.
The rubies he ate greedily, crushing them like sugar-candies swiftly in its jaws. The gold he relished more, with a humiliating hunger that could not mask its own trembling. His steel fangs tore the honeybright metal, and his big, scaly gullet throbbed with the meal. When he had done he drew his sword again, planted his hind legs against the sand, and surged up toward the 'shad that hovered over a coral knoll just beyond us.
It was huge, hanging there over its flock of naked humans. Their veins and nerve-wires all sprouted from their backs and ran up like puppet-wires to join in a ball of fibers which the shaggy, hook-bellied thing was applying to its abdominal mouthparts.
The flock was grazing—after a manner—for the 'shad had them all sprawling and crawling over a system of reefs which were forested with giant anemones that bristled with man-large tongues and antennae. The waxen-fleshed, horror-eyed folk wriggled through those rippling, squeezing pastures of outrage while the Bonshad floated over them, nursing on the anguish coursing through their nerves.
It was a flock of about thirty. We had studied the miniature of Wimfort until our eyes rebelled at the sight, and we quickly made sure that he was not one of that lewdly palpated, trembling little herd. Gildmirth turned me his right eye and Barnar his left. We shook our heads. His great paws clawed us back up to our cruising speed and we plunged on, breasting out over another falling-away of the seafloor, and curving toward the right, where lay a larger stretch of anemone-carpeted terrain. Over this hung numerous 'shads, all territorially spaced, hideous, hairy little balloons in the distance, sucking each on its tether of nerve.
Our course brought us closer
to the Black Rifft's brink and as we swept toward the 'shad-meadows we coasted past a clearer view than previous of some of the siegeworks there, particularly of a thicket of derricks which thrust great lateral arms through the gapped crest of the flame-wall. From these wrought-steel arms huge hooks were lowered on the ends of massive chains. Enormous windlasses drove the movement of the booms themselves as well as paying out the fishing chain off its immense spools. Stumbling human gangs, vast in numbers, provided the power that turned those windlasses. Similar gangs powered the vehicles of the demon-bosses who oversaw the work. These were brawny toads as big as houses. They lolled in the sodden hulks of galleons—storm-taken ships all bearded and furred with bottom-life, some of their hulls half stove in. Each of these had hundreds of slave haulers dragging its keel over the ocean floor. Their eyes had been taken, their hair was longer than the ever-springing hair in graves. Their skin floated up from their arms in brine-fat tatters. Their tread was sottish, their feet hidden in clouds of sand.
But we quickly ceased attending to anything except that greatest of the works which bordered the Rifft farther down its perimeter. Though still more than a mile distant, it was now revealed to us in greater detail. Each of the ovoids—of a pale rose tint, and minutely faceted—was as big as a mountain. Near them, small hills of iron bar were being forged, amid geysering sparks, into an irregular construction that looked like the beginnings of a cage—a cage big enough to hold a mountain. Meanwhile, beneath the web of scaffolding that had been thrown over the nearer of the two titanic shapes, a large hole had been broken in its substance, which appeared to be little more than a relatively thin shell. And we had drawn just near enough to find that something was visible within that hole, a small part of what the shell contained. It was a three-taloned foot as big as a city. Gildmirth pulled us away from the Rifft, working in an upslope path that would skirt the 'shad-meadows.
