The Incompleat Nifft

by Michael Shea

  Nifft had refilled their glasses, and Minor paused to empty his at a breath, before concluding: "Well, my friends, shall we go? Dame Lybis will be quite harsh if we are too late. . . ."

  As they left the inn, Kandros raised a hand to detain the Sexton, who was opening the door of their landau. "A moment more, if you please," he said. "I want Nifft to see the Hammer."

  The pair had approached the inn from the direction opposite that in which Kandros now led Nifft. They rounded the corner of the tall, old building and Nifft saw that it adjoined a major gate in the city-wall. The wall was ninety feet high, and the gateposts more than forty feet higher still, supporting battlemented towers designed for the gate's defense against siege. But, while the left post's entire bulk was of massive stonework, the right post as well as much of the tower that topped it, was of a single piece, an immense block of iron, roughly rectangular in profile, which stood on one of its narrow ends. It was starkly distinct from the stonework that embraced it, and made the inn that abutted it—grand and venerable though that structure was, seem an inconsequential thing, hastily made, and destined to be dust when that immense ferrolith still stood unaltered by milllennia of storm and sun.

  And a hammer it plainly was, for from a point somewhat less than halfway up its height there sprouted a horizontal bar of iron which ran for more than half the distance to the wall's sea-ward turning—incorporated in the wall, yet seeming rather to pierce and destroy it than to contribute to its substance.

  "And that," said Nifft after he had gazed a moment, "is Pastures' Hammer?"

  "It is indeed," Kandros replied, his own eyes dwelling on it with fresh awe and appreciation that contradicted his cicerone's role in this revelation. Nifft nodded, and looked to Sexton Minor, who had followed them round the corner, and who was not so nervous at this delay as he was gratified by Nifft's query: "Forgive my troubling you with what must be a boring question, good Sexton, but I am not a well-schooled man, though your city fascinates me. This is called Pastures' Hammer, as who should say, the hammer of the Pastures?"

  "That is perfectly correct, my friend, in every detail." The Sexton smiled at the wit of his reply, and blandly awaited further droll questions. But the one which Nifft murmured a moment later, gazing at the mountains, appeared at first to baffle, and then to irritate him: "It is hard to imagine terrain that looks less like pastureland than this, don't you think?"

  Minor shrugged, frowned. "No doubt, in the usual sense. Naturally, the city's name refers to the historical facts. The Flockwardens' herds were lithivores. Their grazings carved the bay and made these mountains where before there were only great cliffs of metaliferous stone. The flocks' excreta provided purified metal for the Flockwardens' industry, as well as a kind of coal to fuel their forges. These are pastures, though not such as born-bow or jabóbos graze on. Please, gentlemen—we really should be on our way."

  III

  Near its inland border, the city rose toward a central eminence, a great table-topped monolith crowned with its most august edifices. These surrounded a vast, colonnade-bordered plaza, in which Minor's landau discharged its three passengers. Minor turned to guide the other two toward a huge, blunt-terraced building, the acropolis' second-largest structure. Nifft, however, set out rather dreamily in the opposite direction, walking a ways out toward the center of the square, and stopping at the tip of a jagged blade of shadow that lay upon the flagstones. This was the greatest salience of a vast wedge of shadow which the noonday sun printed upon the plaza, darkening more than half of its upland side. Minor lifted his arm and began to call some remonstration, when he and Kandros saw the gaunt Karkmahnite lift his gaze from the shadow's tip toward the megalith that cast it. The Sexton's arm fell, and for a moment the three stood looking silently up at the hammer of ill fate that overhung the prosperous city.

  The half-destroyed—and potentially all-destroying—mountain was so like its grotesque fellows that its condition endowed them all with added menace. They would not have lacked this quality in any case. The noon sunlight blazoned forth the dynamic of their making, showing well over half their material to be disparate metallic veins, wildly torqued and twisted together, as if the varied metals had once been molten in one cauldron together, and stirred there by some cosmic ladle. This structure was the source of the mountains' tormented and skeletal shapes, for it had been gnawed into prominence by millennia of "peeling"—spiral quarrying of various individual veins, as well as of the rock between the veins. This latter material was not so variegated as the metals which it interleaved. Most of it was a dense, fine-textured stone of brownish black—the fecal coal, in fact, which Minor had mentioned. This had been as heavily quarried as any of the metals were.

  The damaged peak resembled many others in having been so deeply scored that the intact veins supporting the mass of its higher parts were clearly discernible. At a place perhaps four-fifths up the mountain, just about where its "neck" might be said to be, a large landslide had exposed the scrawny spinal veins holding up the massive, gnarled summit. The three twisted shafts of metal ore that did this looked surprisingly slight for the task, and indeed, had buckled under it—had bent to an angle halfway between the vertical and the horizontal, bowing titanically in the city's direction. Raggedly surrounding the point of breakage, a system of wood-and-steel buttresses had been built—colossal enough on the human scale, but pathetically inadequate to sustain the mass they encircled.

  Nifft turned and rejoined his companions. As Minor led them toward the temple, Nifft murmured: "Those supports. They must have been undertaken more as a psychological palliative than a seriously-believed-in preventive measure?"

  Minor nodded sourly. Nifft went on: "How big is it, in terms of the city? I mean, if it hit the city—or say, if it were just set down on the city—would it cover it?"

  Minor gave Nifft a look of wide-eyed irony. "Heavens no! It's been carefully computed, you understand. Look out there, down near the harbor. Do you see that little bit of shanty-town by that farthest corner of the wall?"

  "That little brownish-grey patch, like huts of weathered wood?"

  "Precisely! Well, if that—" (he pointed at the peak without needing to look toward it) "were set down here—" (he spread his arms to indicate the city around them) "then that—" (he again indicated the little harborside zone) "would be entirely uncovered. As for the rest . . ." Minor shrugged, as who should say that one couldn't have everything.

  The pair waited by the temple's entry while the Sexton stepped within and conferred with one of the shrine's attendants. He came back out to report.

  "The other officers are already within. Shrine-mistress Lybis is just now conferring with the Aristarchs. If you'll join the party inside she will be with you quite soon."

  Kandros nodded, but Nifft laid a hand on his arm and said, "I wonder if Kandros here might be prevailed upon to indulge a bumpkin's curiosity and give me a brief tour of this magnificent acropolis of yours while we're waiting for the oracle's arrival."

  "Very well. Please be conscious of the time. The attendant just within will direct you to the Warden-shrine when you get back."

  When Minor had gone inside Nifft said, "Is not the Aristarkion one of these buildings?"

  "It's that one yonder."

  "Most impressive! Could you show me the interior of it? We might even be so lucky as to hear some of the priestess' remarks to the Aristarchs."

  Smiling slightly, Kandros answered: "That would probably not be difficult. Though theirs is not strictly a public meeting, there are many galleries that should allow a discreet vantage on the proceedings."

  The Aristarkion was the only building on the acropolis larger than the FIockwarden's temple. For a seat of governmental deliberations, it was rather an open structure—an extensive, roofed system of porticoes and pillared promenades with a single great chamber, the Aristarkion proper, at its center. There was a broad and doorless portal in each of the chamber's walls, and thus from almost anywhere in the galleried peripher
y a view of its interior could be had, as well as a clear hearing of what was said under its echoing vault. Nifft remarked on this before they had fairly mounted the steps up from the plaza, and Kandros smiled family.

  "The design," he said, "expresses the oligarchy's uprightness. The Aristarchs, you see, since they never allow considerations of personal gain to bias their legislative policies, have never had anything to fear from public audience of their proceedings. Besides, it's long been their custom to do the real work of governing at informal convocations in the privacy of their homes, and when they gather here it's usually to solemnize enactments whose awkward elements they have weighed beforehand, and worded in the seemliest, least troublesome terms possible."

  They found the corridors and forested columns surrounding the assembly chamber were populous. Talk was subdued among all these strollers and loiterers. Most seemed to be listening to a woman's voice that came spilling out of the Aristarkion—strident, though not yet distinct to the pair.

  "Nevertheless," Kandros concluded, "certain persons, under certain conditions, can oblige the Aristarchs to assemble here even when their sense of delicacy might prompt them to prefer a more discreet kind of conference. The forgemen's Guildmaster, for instance, can demand one session yearly to debate forge conditions. And the Goddess' oracle can convoke them whenever an important communication from the Flockwarden seems to her to require it."

  They were making for the nearest of the assembly room's portals, and the voice of the woman within now grew distinct amid the reverberations it spawned among the marble shafts and pavements without.

  " . . . because once again it's money I'm talking to you about, gentlemen. And you needn't fidget and squirm, because we've talked about money before—we talked about it a little over a year ago, for instance, do you recall the occasion? Anvil, Staff, and Hammer! What possessed you then, gentlemen? Our heaven-born Flockwarden, whom you all revere, whom you have thanked for a score of benefits within my term of service alone!—our Goddess asked something of us, and that led—did it not?—to this previous occasion I refer to when we also talked about money, just as we're doing now—you do recall the occasion, gentlemen? What's that you say, Director Pozzle? Forgive me but I didn't catch your remark—will you repeat that a bit louder, please?"

  If any voice other than the woman's had sounded within the chamber, no peep of it had reached Nifft and Kandros. They turned into a promenade that approached the chamber's portal straight-on, and saw the speaker for the first time. She stood on a high rostrum, half-ringed by marble tiers where the Aristarchs sat. She was wild-haired, short. She had her fists thrust into the pouch of an apron, below which hung her shabby tunic, its skirts crookedly caught up with pins to mid-shin, perhaps to free the movement of her restless, sandaled feet. She leaned forward, her posture elaborately solicitous to hear Pozzle's alleged remark repeated, and even in this attitude, she paced, her impatient feet shifting her leftward, rightward, leftward. A florid man in the center of the highest tier shook his head gloomily. In a voice resigned to harassment he said, "You're mistaken, Dame Lybis—I said nothing."

  "You said nothing? Oh, you mean just now you said nothing! I see! Because in last year's discussion about money you said a great deal—perhaps that's why I mistook you, for I thought you might be going to quote to us now the very elegantly worded remarks with which you closed last year's discussion. And dear me, but that was an effective little speech you made, Pozzle; one point in it I particularly remember. You were helping us to appreciate just how great the cost of bringing the Goddess' flock to her would be. You'd computed that, if the beasts of her flock were as big as she had indicated, then it would cost more to retrieve just one of them from southern Kairnheim than it would to construct three large public buildings. Very cogent, that was, a very telling way of putting it, especially since you gentlemen at that time were so eager to subsidize the building of a new guildhall for the forge-men—and heaven knows you had good reason for wanting to appease them, considering the remarkably creative ways you'd been putting their portion of the municipal revenues to work for yourselves! Ah me! How perspectives change! Each one of the Flockwarden's beasts would cost three buildings to bring home to her. And how many buildings will it cost us if, a second time, we do nothing? How many buildings are there in Anvil Pastures?"

  She had, in asking this, turned aside from her audience, but now she whirled, fiercely re-confronting them. "Note well!" she almost bellowed. "Mark me, and mark what I do not say to you!" She grinned at them a moment, savoring the opacity of this admonition. Her hair was the color of dirty honey. She wore a kind of skull-net of wire. Long past containing her pelt, it was deeply sunk in it, and her hair thrust from its gridwork in soft spikes reminiscent of the half-erected feathers of an angry hawk. Her nose was, like most of her person, small, but strongly aquiline, and due to the neighborhood of her eyes—large, black, bright and restless—had the look of being a keen nose for trouble. Her compact mouth was delicately ripe of lip, and would have been sensual in repose, but it was always either tight with purpose or ironically awry. Both Nifft and Kandros, leaning against opposite sides of the portal, could be seen idly discovering within her tunic the womanly emphasis of her pelvic curves and the plump bouyancy of her little breasts.

  "What I do not say," she all but crowed, "is that the Goddess intends to send us after her flock as the means to our city's salvation. I am the Flockwarden's humble servant—I do not presume to foretell her will. But what seems more likely, eh? And if she does send us to Kairnheim, what more perfect reparation than that for your criminal stinginess a year ago, eh?

  "Enough, then. I have but one thing of importance to tell you. You've commissioned the mercenaries, as she demanded. Thus much, at least, you've paid up, and without inordinate whining, I must confess. Therefore, beware lest you falter now. Whatever use she should direct you to make of them, see you do it and damn the cost. I'm going now to talk with their commanders. I don't plan to do any dickering or mealy-mouthing about costs. They are crack professionals from Gelidor Ingens. When they learn their task, they'll bid the highest figure that a reasonable and well-informed customer could be expected to pay for the work in question. And it will be your business, gentlemen, to accept their bid, and muster the funds for them with all dispatch. Since there's nothing more that lies in your power to do for your own salvation, then you must do nothing less.

  "I will make the Solicitation in one hour. Please be prompt."

  IV

  As the pair re-crossed the plaza toward the temple, they saw the oracle's litter already some ways ahead of them, and they quickened their pace. Nifft, watching the palanquin, smiled, saying, "I like her manners."

  "Yes. They were perfectly suited to her audience."

  They walked. Nifft's eyes grew abstracted. "Tell me what you know of the historical circumstances, Kandros. How was it that the flock came to be lost in the first place, and that it still survives?"

  "They were lost in the same assault that exterminated the Flockwarden and all her race."

  "Competitive visitants from . . . abroad?" He waved skyward. Kandros shook his head.

  "Men. Seemingly, this was one of our race's epochs of greatness. I've even heard that in those days men tolerated such visitants as the Flockwardens the more equably because they themselves had crossed to and colonized worlds not their own."

  "Hmm. But toward the Flockwardens, toleration ran out?"

  "Apparently, greed supplanted it. It is said the colony here prospered mightily. One tradition has it that this was a kind of smithy servicing the great steel vessels that conveyed men and gods alike from world to world among the stars. At any rate the men of some neighboring city—then great, since vanished without a trace—attacked the Pastures. Such was their onslaught that the Flockwardens were obliterated. In fact, the Goddess in the temple yonder, having died in one piece, was unique. Hence her preservation—a kind of monumental trophy, I suppose. Anyway, the battle caused a tremendous landslid
e above the slopes where the flock were grazing. The beasts were buried en masse, and in consequence, the conquerors took command of a ghost-smithy starved of metal and fuel alike. But as for the flock itself, these lithivores needed no air, it seems, and burial was not death to them."

  "And so they fled underground? And since then have dwelt subterraneously, until their recent emergence?"

  "Apparently."

  "And there was none with them to . . . shepherd them?"

  Kandros raised his brows at the question, and Nifft laughed by way of retracting it. "If you mean to suggest," said Kandros, "that a Flockwarden might have escaped destruction by burrowing down with her flock, you will have only to behold the Goddess within to know that hers was not a digging breed."

  At the entry they were met and ushered within by an acolyte, an exceedingly elderly man who muttered and groaned faintly as he moved. As Nifft stepped into the Wardenshrine—an immense, softly lit room at the temple's heart—he faltered just perceptibly. Both the Goddess' form and her posture had the effect of making her hugeness seem to leap toward the beholder.

  She resembled a titanic dragonfly. Her long, slender stern segment curved up and forward above the four angular archways created by her eight impossibly delicate-seeming, jointed legs. She filled the block of glass containing her, and this was at least six stories high. She had two pairs of antennae. Two were short and fanlike, intricate trellises that antlered her spheroid head just back of her faceted, pyramidal eyes. The other two were slender, plumate, and tremendously elongated. These bowed forward and down, their tips plunging to within inches of the glass surface at a point close enough to the floor to lie within the enclosure of a small cubicle of drapery. The drapes were at present drawn back.