The Incompleat Nifft

by Michael Shea

  The Aristarchs recoiled from the Warden's smooth approach, which accompanied these words. Minor began to retire in equal confusion.

  "What?" boomed the priestess. "Do you think you would survive residence in this vast slave camp, now that your complicity with me is thus widely published? Climb aboard or die here, it's as simple as that. Pastur has greater work in hand than the guarding of one miserable life."

  The Sexton's passionate denials died in his throat. Gaping, he climbed up via one of the Warden's spiny legs. The Goddess bore them upward, and Lybis shouted: "Now, farewell. Your new master will be setting to work now, and he will need his tools. You near the gate would do well to clear the wall when he comes for his hammer!"

  Pastur swept his hands across his anviltop. This one brief gesture cleared it of all that crowned it. The Aristarkion mingled with the temple in the general wreckage he sent cascading down. Then, setting his feet with titanic delicacy upon the broadest open places amid the buildings, very few of which he crushed in his progress, he walked down to the harbor. He reached over the sea for his staff. His hand slipped into the same waters from which it had so recently been raised, and with a great tearing and sucking noise the rod came uprooted from the harbor-floor and towered in the starlight, shedding in fragments the dockworks that encrusted it. Its upper end, immemorially masked by the waters, was arched like a shepherd's crosier. A dozen of the Flock-wardens swarmed upward and perched atop the crook of the staff. The giant turned the beacons of his eyes upon the north wall of the city, and gestured toward it. The Wardens sped thither, and commenced clearing it of the astonished Anvilians, while Pastur advanced to take up his hammer, so long laid down.

  * * *

  "And so none of them had ever read that ancient variant of their city's name? Nor of Pastur himself? How very curious."

  "Hm! I'll tell you, Shag, it's always been an exceedingly curious thing to me, just how incurious most people are about all save their own little island of time and place in the world."

  "Yes. If the cult was guilty of systematically obscuring its own origins and traditions, it was at least not hiding anything that anyone was inquiring into very energetically. Indeed, the scholarly community at large has been none too vigorous in recording that temple's history. . . . Well! You've come well out of it at least. You understand of course that there's absolutely no question of my accepting a gift of that size." The scholar sternly indicated a little stack of gold bullion on the floor in one corner of the study. "The way you spend money, you're going to need that yourself before long."

  "Well, if you're going to be stonefaced about it, you're just going to have to get rid of it yourself. Those bricks are heavy. I recommend that you only carry them out of here one at a time, and at long intervals. And anyway, what about this new treatise—has the Academy gotten richer, or aren't you going to have to help subsidize the printing of this excellent work, wherein my own humble name appears repeatedly, in ample footnotes?"

  Margold glowered mulishly at his square, rather battered-looking hands. After a while, glancing up at Nifft's eyes and finding them both sarcastic and resolute, the historian sighed.

  "And so. Where is Dame Lybis now?"

  "Somewhere in the Aristoz Chain."

  The scholar nodded, impressed. "I see. She sounds like one who will go far with that caliber of thaumaturgic training."

  Nifft's assent to this was accompanied by marked restiveness. He got up and went to the window as he answered. "Absolutely my own opinion. It's caused me some worries, too, I'll confess to you. I love Dame Lybis dearly—I have the highest admiration for her person, her pluck and her artistry. But then too, she doesn't lack cynicism. Power she'll surely gain. She has the love of achievement, and the will to drive herself. If she will remain benign as she grows in power, that's the question I can't confidently answer."

  Margold guffawed. His thick grey hair was wispy in a flame-like way, and for a moment his sea-weathered face seemed to corruscate with his enjoyment of Nifft's remark. "Remain benign, you say? By the Crack and all that crawls out of it—by Anvil Staff and Hammer! I like that! I truly do. Remain benign. When I tell that to my colleagues, I'll have to get it just right, the earnest way you said that!" The cartographer sat chuckling. Nifft arched a brow at his nails. Presently he chuckled a bit himself.

  "I don't deny it was a grim game. Though they didn't suffer the death they marketed abroad so blithely, some of them at least might have learned what it was like to wish they would." The pair enjoyed this sally equally, and at some length.

  "You know," Margold said at last, "your description of the giant, his bones' lightness . . . it is an odd thought, but perhaps those bones of his never did have flesh on them. Perhaps he was himself . . . the product of a forge, some distant foundry far vaster even than his own?"

  "You mean, that he was some kind of vast . . . automaton?"

  The historian nodded. "Remember, if we may trust the tradition, how he was destroyed. It is said that the landslide created by his ambushers did not . . . kill him—that he'd worked both hand and staff clear of the rubble, and would have used that formidable weapon to free himself in a short time more, had not their amputation of his hand broken his bodily integrity, and therewith his life. Care was taken to remove the hand far from the body, and cast it in the sea. A man who loses a hand does not necessarily die of it. But a clock with even one spring removed ceases to work, and will start up again should the spring be restored to the rest of the mechanism."

  Nifft looked dreamily from the window. "So that all his work was for yet greater masters on a greater world? Why not? A slave himself? But a terrible and beautiful creation all the same, Shag. I recall the last look I had of him—like some of those engravings you showed me of scenes from Parple's Pan-Demonion—whose were they again?"

  "You mean Rotto Starv's woodcuts."

  "Starv's. The same. Anyway, a day before we set sail, Kandros and I took Minor and Krekkit up on a Flockwarden just after sunset, to take a sort of good-bye look at the city, I suppose—as much for ourselves as for the old man and Minor, both of whom we'd come to like. At any rate, we flew up over the peaks to the south of town, and hung there looking at it as the light faded. It was something to fill you with awe, Shag, the armies of them, their desperate unison.

  "The townspeople, I mean. They thronged the streets, and moved in that steady, always-changing-yet-the-same way a stream has. They served the same forges and foundries the town has always served—but they all served them. The flocks were off working a distant mountain, quite near Ossuaridon, in fact. Half the Flockwardens were with the flock, and the other half were patrolling the streets and the perimeter where the rubble of the walls was heaped. They were scarcely needed. Pastur's sole presence commanded every man and woman of them. He was resting from his labors. His anvil still hummed with the recent blows of his hammer, and glowing crumbs of metal were strewn atop it. He sat back on the hillside, his huge arms draped over his knees, the hammer held casually in his right hand. He was watching the city as a sightseer might watch a view. The chimneys smoked and the firestacks flamed as I, nor anyone else, had never seen them do before. His eyebeams played across the rooftops and the crowded streets, and from time to time, he raised them toward the stars."

  After a silence, Margold murmured: "He had the flock working where he was buried with their ancestors? Perhaps even then he was beginning his preparations to return home."

  "Yes. One wonders what he will find there, after so long an absence. He seemed to be wondering too."

  The Mines of Behemoth

  For Linda, sweet Beloved!

  For Della and Jake, so dear to us.

  Shag Margold's

  Introduction to

  The Mines of Behemoth

  MY OLD FRIEND, NIFFT, with a perhaps unintentional candor, has displayed a personal flaw or two in this narrative. I honor his memory none the less for it. The good of Nifft always overbalanced the ill, and just so here where, whatever slight mor
al shortcomings may appear in our narrator, he gives us in his tale the most vivid and enlightening natural history of the Behemoth's life-cycle yet put on record.

  Hadaska Broode, a Minusk historian, has penned the following tetrameters in homage to Behemoth. While I cannot pretend the lines are accomplished poetry, they are at least heartfelt:

  What dread Being dares to farm

  where every breed of demon swarms?

  Who dares till there? Who shall go

  and scythe the harvest row on row?

  Who in that sunless gulf of harms

  could drive the plow? Would dare to sow?

  Behemoth's jaws alone the share

  to carve the flinty furrow there.

  Behemoth's strength the reaper's blade,

  her bowels the barn where harvest's laid.

  To hers, what husbandry compares,

  that has half demonkind unmade?

  Broode's ardor for Behemoth is understandable in one of his nation. His native Minuskulons, though the smallest of the major island chains, loom large in the Behemoth sap trade, for they are the only landfall the Sea of Agon affords between southern Kairnheim, where sap is mined, and the sap's two greatest overseas markets: the Ephesion Chain to the south, and the Great Shallows to the east. The sap in its cake form is of course excellent fodder for kine and draybeasts the world over. In the Ephesions—on my native Pardash, for example—it is also used in its fluid state; a dilution is sprayed on our fields to enrich our somewhat lean soils. Meanwhile the Great Shallows' many sea-dwelling races use sap cake to mulch their mariculture and nourish their polyp patches, whelk beds, crab pastures, bivalve grottoes, and every kind of raft garden. The Minusk mariners who have flourished in this sap trade all know Broode's little poem by heart.

  Given Behemoth's incredible utility to men—both in the havoc she wreaks on the demon race, and in the boon of her stolen sap—it is not surprising she inspires such paeans. The work of Kairnish scholars (theirs another race especially in her debt) abounds with similar encomiums. Both these schools of Behemoth's most ardent admirers share a further accord. On the question of Behemoth's origins, Minusk and Kairnish authorities alike aver that the Mountain Mother was born of some now forgotten human sorcery.

  I will perhaps be forgiven a smile at this. If Behemoth be the scion of some thaumaturgic science man once wielded, then how much less at fault we must feel to play the vampire in her nests, even as she scours the subworld of our demon foes? For if the Mountain Mother be the fruit of philanthropic wizardry, where's the flaw in getting double good of her? Is it denied a man to use his own wagon or draybeast to his profit?

  Kairnish folk might have the most need of this balm to guilt; in the northern reaches of their continent (as I have noted in my preface to The Fishing of the Demon-Sea) the subworld preys upon the overworld all too vigorously, and men there fall in great numbers to demonic predation. Meanwhile in southern Kairnheim, where Behemoth nests under the Broken Axle Mountains, the demon nation still reels under a millenial defeat at the jaws of the Mountain Mother's legions, even while the southern Kairns most vigorously steal her sap from her nests.

  Yet those of the opposing mind, who argue that Behemoth was born naturally of the Earth, point to her form which, in all but the scale of it, is so common through the natural world. Many scholars of unimpeachable erudition take this side of the controversy. Etiolatus the Praiseworthy notes, "How can those who go open minded on the earth, feeling the heart of the planet murmuring against their footsoles, ever think that Queen Earth in her Robe of Stars could fail to breed of herself the cure for any ill that blights her? Demons infested her; she gave birth to Behemoth."

  For my part, though I have profound respect for the Earth's powers of invention, I think the answer is unknowable. My awe and love for the beasts, in any case, is great. I find cause for rejoicing in the fact that the sinking of a new sap-mine is the difficult and costly task that it is. The lithivorous ferrecks used to dowse for larval chambers, and then used to sink the first shafts down to those larval chambers, are creatures akin to certain brood parasites within Behemoth nests, and are both fierce and highly dangerous to manage. In consequence, these ferrecks have been almost entirely preempted by the sorcerous sisterhoods of the Astrygals, who have the means to command the beasts' angry energies. The ferrecks then being hard and costly to procure from the witches, the proliferation of new sap-mines throughout the Broken Axle Mountains has slowed almost to the rate of replacement for old mines fallen defunct through the phenomenon of "nest wander." Perhaps the sorcerers of the Astrygals intentionally sustain this equilibrium. In any case, our rapacity is shackled, and we plunder Behemoth less gravely than we might.

  All that lives is flux, and a question Nifft raises disturbs me: might Demonkind grow to engulf Behemoth? The black yeast of demon vitality cooks unsleeping in its planetary cloaca; its vapors of infection float up fine as finest soot, soundlessly, steadily blackening, blackening what they blanket. Its patient twisting tendrils imperceptibly find purchase. . . . The reader will perhaps—when the fate of Heliomphalodon Incarnadine is learned, and Nifft's fears thereat—share my own unease.

  Having touched on the question of human rapacity, I cannot close without confessing that it is with some misgiving I make public Nifft's account of the so-called "giants' pap" produced by Behemoth Queens, and of its apparent powers. Two considerations have persuaded me it is safe to expose this powerful substance to the greedy attention of entrepreneurs. In the first place, Nifft's narrative must tend to discourage exploitation. In the second, who but Nifft and Barnar, endowed as they were with rarest luck, could contrive to milk a Queen?

  While I naturally shrink from burdening my dear friend's narrative (and the present manuscript is unmistakably of Nifft's own composition) with an excess of commentary or exegesis, I cannot leave certain lacunae unglossed. But since a prefatory voice must fade from memory as the history unfolds, the best procedure seems to be to deploy a brief Interjection or two within the narrative. Thus commentary can lie nearer what it touches.

  I

  We were still wet from Mayhem's maw

  When first those golden glades we saw

  MY FIRST STEPS along the path that led me to the greatest fortune I have ever won, or could sanely hope to equal in the future, were inauspicious enough. That twisted and darkling journey commenced, for Barnar Hammer-hand and me, with an indignity, and then led straight to a disaster.

  The indignity was that we were contracted to a stint of hard, dirty toil in a sap mine. The disaster fell when we were two weeks at sea en route to this uncouth endeavor. For just as we hove almost in sight of our inglorious goal, our vessel was swallowed by a bull glabrous.

  One often hears this sort of thing about "inauspicious beginnings" from people relating strokes of great good fortune. It is my belief that Luck schools those she is about to bless by dealing them a preliminary box or two about the ears. Thus, with a draught of bile, she reminds their palates of the taste of woe, that Fortune's sweetness might ravish them the more.

  Barnar's nephew Costard owned the sap mine we were bound for. Our dreary underground labor there would be in the way of a family favor, for young Costard had written that the mine was in difficulties. Our route lay northwards along the Angalheim Island chain, and the northerlies that scour these isles all summer long had set our sails a-spanking, and chased us smartly along. Now the Isle of Hadron dropped astern, and we were drawing close to Dolmen, the northernmost isle. Beyond Dolmen, we already had in view the rim of the Kairnish continent. There, in the Broken Axle Mountains, our destination lay.

  Our vessel was the carrack of a Minusk cloth-and-oils merchant. She was a yare but smallish craft, scarcely six rods from stem to stern. She skipped from crest to crest, outrunning the swell, frolicsome as a shimfin when it runs breaching from sheer exuberance. The vessel's surge, the sunstruck sea around us and the gem-blue sky, were almost enough to cheer us out of the gloom that our coming toils had sunk u
s in.

  Then someone shouted from the mizzen-mast lookout, and we turned and saw a long black-and-tan slick strung out in the milky jade of our wake. Every man-jack of us went cold at the sight. That slick was the length of our vessel, and we knew it was only part of a glabrous' dorsal ridge, breaching as the brute came sinuously up to attack our stern.

  We had no sooner seen it than the sea erupted, and the beast was alongside us, and was seizing our hull in his huge, dripping crab-legs, while his long, eel-slick body bowed and bowed and bowed at the loins with his fierce, lecherous thrustings. He had clusters of stalked eyes on his great blunt head, and these writhed and rotated in his ecstasy. The brute was in rut—the worst kind of glabrous to meet; sure death. Amidships and aft a dozen men were instantly crushed by his legs. His sinewy tail scourged the sea behind him in his lust, driving us forward even as he embraced us. The steep, stony shore of Dolmen loomed towards us at incredible speed.

  The impenetrability of our hull timbers quickly drove the ardent giant to a fury. He flung our ship clean out of the water, toppling Barnar and me back onto the deck just as we had mounted the gunwale to abandon ship. The carrack sailed creakily through twenty fathoms of thin air, and crashed down at Dolmen's very shore, and even as it did so, the glabrous surged up behind the vessel—a benthic fetor welling from his mossy, gaping jaws—and swallowed it whole.

  The glabrous did this with the blind, uncalculating rage his breed is so well known for. Barnar and I, tumbled to the prow by the bow's impact with the shore, saw the darkness of the brute's maw loom over us, and saw his huge teeth bite off the sky. Only the carrack's stout bowsprit extruded beyond the reach of the monster's bite. This bowsprit doomed the beast.

  For even as it engulfed us, the glabrous' onrush drove us hard aground; the bowsprit lodged against a boulder, and the whole craft was rammed a fatal two fathoms deeper into the monster's throat. The glabrous at once began to choke to death.