The Incompleat Nifft

by Michael Shea

  We found the boy in the fourth flock we surveyed. Almost in the first instant of my scanning, the victim my eye had lit on wrenched his head around in some access of suffering, and the face of Wimfort was flashed at me. I tugged Gildmirth's belt and pointed. He looked at Barnar, who confirmed our quarry. The Privateer bucked and heaved and plunged straight for the water's ceiling.

  I felt each instant of that swift climb as a distinct and individual joy. We surfaced to find the boat awaiting us at a spot halfway around the island-cluster from our starting point. We were not far from the crest of the volcano we had seen. The cone's steaming rim, which barely over-topped the waves, swarmed with activity. Gildmirth laid his jaw on the boat's stern and we climbed aboard along his body, joyfully shucking our helmets, eager more for the act of breathing than the air itself, such that it felt sweet to draw in even that tomblike atmosphere.

  "Practisss the ssskiff!" the lizard enjoined me. Its squamous head glittered and ducked under. The waters bulged with the force of his dive.

  Taking both harpoons, I stepped into the little bone coracle. I willed it twenty yards to starboard of the boat. I sped so swiftly thither I was toppled, and clung aboard only with undignified difficulty. Barnar's braying followed me as I thought the skiff through several other maneuvers, standing better braced now, more fluid at the hips.

  "You might well laugh," I shouted to my friend as I zigzagged ever more skillfully over the swell. "See how far we've come! Impossibly far. We've found the young idiot—actually reached him and ferreted out his squirming-place in this infernal stew!"

  Barnar merely whooped and waved his arms for a reply, and I myself felt giddy and nonsensical enough with our continuing good luck. I made a quick excursion toward the crater-top to view the siege in progress there. Rafts of batrachian demons, reminiscent of the larger breed I had seen being charioted below by human gangs, were beached on the crater's flanks and mining at it furiously, using battering-irons or huge hammers and steel wedges. Their assault was countered by fire-elementals within the magmatic cauldron they sought to inundate and conquer. These shapeless, smoldering beings catapulted avalanches of lava on their besiegers, driving them by the score to quench their sizzling skin in the sea. Meanwhile with this same material the elementals ceaselessly caulked and re-knit the breaches broken by their enemies' tools.

  I heard Barnar shout, and sped back toward the boat. Not far from it there was a milky spot in the water, like a cataract in an old dog's eye. I swung near just in time to be drenched by the explosion of Gildmirth in battle with the Bonshad.

  I should actually say "Gildmirth hanging onto the Bonshad," for he gripped its back with all four paws and his locked jaws, and by wrestling mightily steered his opponent to some degree, but all the rest of the motive power of that struggle came from the 'shad. Its hook-rimmed mouth-hole gaped from its underside, which the lizard's grip on its in-hooking legs exposed uncharacteristically to view. Such a wad of muscle was its lumpish body that you could clearly see the freeing of just one of its pinioned legs would enable it to compact itself with a power that must surely break the reptile's desperate grip. The speed with which it would then be able to sink its mouthparts into the Privateer's flank was amply attested to now by the monster's volcanic convulsions, which sent the pair of them cartwheeling insanely over the waves.

  I began gathering speed with a series of quick swings into their zone of combat and then sharply out again, after each such approach pulling immediately round to make a new and more driving interception. My nearest glimpses of the Privateer told me that he was bone-tired—his paws showed their tendons stark as an oak's roots against rocky ground. His snakish neck bulged so full with strain that its scales jutted out, like wind-lifted shingles in a storm. I swung out to my widest retreat thus far, then pulled in, driving for a peak speed from which to make my cast.

  The saurian made a mighty effort, and so far controlled the 'shad's tumble as to keep it belly-out in my direction. I balanced the harpoon by my ear, taking the skiff's buffets with loose knees, for now we sheared, half-flying, straight through the crests of the chop. I saw, some moments ahead of me, the spot and instant of my cast, which I would make at the apex of the skiff's turn, so that the cast would have a sling's momentum behind it, augmenting the strength of my arm. I saw too just where that haggle-rim mouth-hole would be, and my spirit welled up in me with that prescient certainty that precedes many of the greatest feats of weaponry.

  I drew back to full cock for the throw, then hit my turn. Obediently, the mouth-hole tumbled precisely to its foreseen spot and I pumped that shaft dead into it, not even grazing the hooks that twisted so furiously round its border. The shaft sprouted full half its length out of the demon's back, and grazed Gildmirth's flank, for he was not quick enough in letting go. The 'shad flopped and churned across the swell for a full minute of storm-wild, crazy force before it realized it was dead, and settled, and sank.

  We had to dive again with the Privateer, and be quick in pulling on our gear for it. The abandoned flock below was a free confection for any drifting entities that scented it. Being pulled under again felt like a burial-alive—no part of me desired it, and I scarcely kept my grip.

  We swooped upon the meadow in time to drive off a many-mouthed, ray-shaped demon, which for all its mouths had no stomach to face the lizard's sword. The nerve-ball still hung above the little herd it tethered, just where its savorer had hung, and the flock remained as powerless as if the demon still hovered over them.

  The saurian took the wadded skein of tissue and began to bounce and jiggle it in his paws, the way you have to do to untangle snarled rope. The fibers began to open out. We helped, teasing strands apart. Toward the end it became a gossamer-light labor. We had to swim more than fifty feet above the pasture to make room for the endless unraveling, which we accomplished with gentle upward sweeps of our arms. Our work caused the flock to lurch and spasm in the lubricious embrace of their pasture.

  But suddenly, just when the ball was entirely combed apart, the slick web of innards snapped simultaneously back down to its flock of donors and vanished inside their spines, which sealed up like sprung traps. Then the truly terrible dances began, as they awakened to their freedom in that grisly place. We came down quick on Wimfort. Gildmirth began plunging his sword into the things that held the boy—cloven tongues and shattered antennae recoiled from their prey. Barnar and I plucked him up, and I helped my friend get him tucked securely under his left arm. We cleaved to the Privateer and he sprang skyward with us all.

  When we were settled with our unconscious charge in the boat, the Privateer took time to bind the wound which crossed half the left side of his ribs, a more considerable wound in his human stature than it bad appeared on the lizard's huge bulk. Smiling with a sudden, strange cordiality, Gildmirth told me:

  "That was a remarkable cast, Nifft."

  In temperate language I replied, as candor compelled me to do, that it had indeed been one of the finest feats of spear-work that it had ever been my fortune to witness.

  XIV

  For much of our voyage back the lad lay in the bow, his glazed eyes aimed at the clouds, or stirring mindlessly at sudden lurches of the craft. We had emptied the provision sack to make him a blanket, and had fallen to sharing the wine this had brought to light. Gildmirth, after musing on the boy's face awhile, said, "He's a handsome lad. What are his chances of growing to a good man?"

  Barnar sighed, and spat gently into the sea. I looked cheerlessly at the boy. My friend and I had had much time to reflect that all our toil was for a resurrection which, while it might not turn out to do the world great harm, wasn't likely to do it any good either. Wimfort's features had the fine symmetry that adolescence can show right up to the brink of adulthood's emergent emphases and distortions. A certain heaviness of cheek and jaw was already just beginning to suggest the sire.

  "I'm afraid, good Privateer, that the signs are discouraging," I answered. "He's here, of course, strictly throu
gh his own ambitious carelessness."

  "Prime flaws of youth, of course—but also its strengths, this carelessness and ambition."

  I nodded. "He has imagination and boldness. You wouldn't expect him to temper a rich boy's arrogance with much thought of others. He's the Rod-Master's son, as I've told you. But maybe with this—" I gestured at the sea "—and all he'll have to endure going back, he might get that needed awakening to the world around him."

  "If you get him back it will be your business to hope he has been wakened. Ambitious dabblers in sorcery add much to the hell that is on earth. In my origins of course I am just such a go-to-market meddler in the arts as I speak of. But at least for every spell I purchased I bought the best tutors in its use and meaning, and I sought no new spell until I had faithfully learned all lore foundational to the last I had bought, or anywise tangent to it. Nor have I ever, to get to the essence of it, brought accidental doom upon my fellows through the casual practice of arts for which my wits were premature."

  I did not want him to fall silent on this topic. "It is indeed a part of your legend, Privateer, that many of your . . . sharp practices were aimed at financing your thaumaturgic studies."

  Gildmirth regarded us blandly for some moments. "Is that indeed a part of my legend? I am touched that my swindles are remembered at all. Toss. Thank you. It was an expensive education; I was never, before now, a glutton for mere gold itself. All my major larcenies were devoted to scholarly ends, in fact."

  "I understand," Barnar said, "that just before your coming here you worked an extremely lucrative deception on your native city."

  Gildmirth let a bitter eye roll across the cloud-vaults before allowing himself to sink into the obvious pleasure of boastful reminiscence. He drank, and handed me the jack with a pleased sigh. "That one bought me this boat and sail. It was a good piece of work. Sordon-Head was gearing up for yet another trade war. A major competitor of hers, the Klostermain League of Cities, had just lost half its navy in a storm, while we were just nearing completion of an admirable new navy. Our High Council suddenly recalled a gross defamation of one of our outlying shrines by a drunken Klostermain sailor. It had happened several months before that storm so disastrous for the League, if I recall rightly. We began applying diplomatic pressure on the League for trade concessions, while hinting ever more strongly of war. Our High Council was ripe for anything that might create assurance enough for us to go the last inch to candid armed aggression for profit.

  "I came to them with the proposal of constructing a spearhead fleet of superlative fighting frigates, and demonstrated how such a tactical weapon could penetrate harbors and destroy ships in the docks, sparing us many chancier engagements on the high seas. I was an object of guarded civic pride for my exploits abroad, and I had always kept my in-town dealings well masked. They heaped my lap with gold. Their dreams of empire, of Klostermain plunder made them practically force on me the sum of Eleven million gold lictors."

  Wimfort screeched, gull-voiced. He twisted, as if ants covered him, and under the sack we'd covered him with we could see his hands moving to rub some nameless memory off his skin. Barnar pressed a huge hand onto the boy's forehead. The boy's eyes closed again, as if that slight pressure crushed down the ugly dream behind them.

  "Conceive the sum," the Privateer said after a moment, "Still it astonishes me, though I have often seen that sum quadrupled on a few hectares of the ocean's floor. Of course, it was spent a fortnight from my getting it—on this craft. It was a purchase I had studied and planned for more than a decade.

  "You should have seen my shipyards in Sordon-Head. Giant, covered buildings, windowless—the danger of Klostermain spies stealing some forewarning of their fate, you see—we couldn't risk it. And in those great empty warehouses a fleet was indeed a-building. A brace of towering frigates, made of leather, paper, and feather-wood. While my crews tolled on these, I had another crew working, a crew of musicians. Their instruments were mallets, saws, augers, rusty winches. Their oratorio was woven of shouted curses, and gusty dockworker's cries: `Lower away there, easy now! Down with it—a bit more, another arse-hair—hold! Maul here, and quarter-inch spikes, prompt now!' Whenever the great men of the council passed my yards they drank in these melodies and passed on smiling.

  "There was a grand harbor-side assembly to witness the launching of our raiding-frigates, as they had come to be called. The docks on all sides were crowned with walls of expectant citizens. The day was a glory—a steel-blue sky and a sweet, steady offshore wind. The council had a tiered platform at the tip of our major pier. When my flotilla came past them they would set afire a huge, wooden mock-up of the city's seal.

  "I was in the shipyard. All the craft had been blocked on ramps and set to slide down by themselves to a launching in fair order. There were six of them, and I was in this boat, ramped to slide out in their midst, and so be masked by them at first. I pulled the block-pins. The great doors opened and our convoy skidded like so many fat swans onto the water.

  "And they were light as swans too, at first. They were very proud ladies, my paper frigates, in the first moments of their promenading out onto the sea. They drew gasps from the crowd. But almost at once you could hear everyone saying `Eh?' `What?' Because the six of them wandered out giddily, like so many drunks reeling through the town square on their way to dance at the carnival. They bumped each other, some turned stern-first, and rocked till their masts looked like metronomes. The council buzzed. The seal was already proudly blazing, but the town orchestra was already faltering in mid-bar. The breeze jumbled the boats out to the center of the harbor. And then they began soaking up water in earnest. Here and there a sodden hull caved in like pastry left in the rain. Now a great noise arose from the multitude. The first of my ladies drank the limit. She went down so straight her masts looked like a weed being yanked under by a gopher.

  "I was lying just here, in the stern. I would be unveiled on center-stage, so to speak, when the last frigate sank. Now this was the riskiest part of my venture, because for the whole five minutes it took all of them to go under, I was fighting for my life with an attack of laughter that almost killed me. That's how I was revealed to my fellow-citizens, despite my best attempts at self-command. But when the populace gave a . . . what shall I call it? A surge of comprehension, I struggled to the mast and pulled myself onto my feet. The rest of the fleet had at last begun to weigh anchor, and undertake my capture. Gasping and clinging to the mast, I shouted: "Citizens!"

  That set me laughing again—the thought of them all. "Citizens!" I croaked again. "I can't understand it! I'm . . . appalled! I used . . . the best . . . paper!" Getting that said nearly finished me. The fleet's lead ship was less than a hundred yards off now, and archers were forming up on its quarterdeck. I unfurled the sail. I'd researched the demon currents and they're quite strong near Sordon-Head. I departed then from the bay of my native city, and as I left I noted with satisfaction how the hard-taxed multitudes were swarming off the docks and onto the main pier, and how the entire council—at pier's end—had risen to its feet in what looked like alarm.

  "It took some ingenuity to stay slow enough for the fleet to follow me. It was a point of pride, I suppose, but perhaps something less personal than that as well. At any rate I wanted my destination known, my descent witnessed. One doesn't want to leave the world of one's kind without some moment of farewell, some acknowledgment by your fellows of your kinship and your departure. I came down by the Taarg Vortex, which is a maelstrom in the Yellow Reefs. I did not think that any would come down with me, but the captain of the flagship was a zealous man and did not pull up and bring a line in time. He was pulled down after me. Those I could manage, in that raging hurricane of water, I killed with arrows, but many were taken instantly by demons, and I could do nothing for them. Wheeling in anguish, they went where I did, through the Dark Rapids, down where the whirlpool's root feeds into a subworld river which none have given a name, and which empties in the sea some thousand league
s in that direction."

  At some point Gildmirth's voice must have entered Wimfort's dream-webbed brain, because when the Privateer stopped, the boy snapped open his eyes. They were large and dark, not piggy like his father's, and they now registered the clouds they stared at. With Barnar's help, he sat up. He looked at us, the boat, and us again. Seeing such astonishment as his, I couldn't think of what to tell him. It was Barnar who gave him the necessaries:

  "We are men, Wimfort, not demons. This man has helped us fish you out, rescue you. Your father sent Nifft and me for you. We're taking you back up to the world of mankind."

  My friend's summation struck me at first as the report of some other men's actions. I looked at my hands. They are quite presentable hands, but nothing out of the ordinary. I marveled at what Barnar and I had done thus far, even leaving aside that which the Privateer had made possible for us.

  As for Wimfort's reaction to these words, it was like watching Barnar speaking sentences into a tunnel. After a long lag, answering lights of comprehension flickered from the darkness of the boy's eyes. His breathing grew stronger. More fear showed on his face, and he brought his hands up to touch it. Then, with a tremor, he thawed out. Tears bulged from the corners of his eyes—slow in emerging, then falling with that surprising quickness that tears have. Barnar patted his shoulder.

  "We have a hard trek home, Wimfort," he said, "but we have an excellent chance of making it."

  The boy looked at him and me, beginning to breathe more slowly. He looked at Gildmirth, whose plum-red orbs were like two terrible sunsets in the grinning ruins of his face.

  "Your freedom's real, son," the Privateer said. "To talk to you of odds, of numbers, would never make clear to you the magnitude of your good fortune. So many like yourself are here forever."