by Michael Shea
Again the line jerked—recoilingly this time. I stood uncertain for a moment, a sickening suspicion growing swiftly in me. A moment more, and there was no mistaking. The grub was swelling back up—swelling up rapidly, my meaty floor rising underfoot. "The idiot's on blow!" I bellowed. "Reverse pump! Reverse pump! He's got it on blow!"
Again Barnar dove into the operations nook. I scanned the chamber. Had one of those distant Nurses twitched her antennae in my direction? Perhaps not. The larva still swelled alarmingly, lifting me. I knew that the pump's plod-driven bellows were gated to blow out the lines when declogging was wanted. Now the air, at cruel pressure, was a swelling bubble in the larva's innards that crushed out what might remain of her vitality. Her tapered head and tail tremored, and were still. Up, up, up bulged her oily, pliant integument. Already she was half again the size of her largest neighbor.
"Still on blow!" I howled.
"No acknowledgement!" Barnar boomed back to me. "I've signaled four times! Look at it, Nifft! Jump, by the Crack! Jump!"
And jump I did, right on the instant. Afterwards, my incompetence was glaringly, comically plain to me. A single swordstroke would have saved the grub, and still left suck-lines a-plenty to work with.
But flustered as I was, I jumped—and at the last possible moment. Before I'd even reached the ground the larva exploded, her dorsum erupting in jagged tatters and a spew of cloudy oils and fatty tissue that sprayed almost ceiling-high, and then came smacking down in loathsome abundance. A great rag of fat fell on me and pinned me to the ground.
I fought up through the weight of my greasy mantle. I had scarcely cleared my face to see about me, when two Nurses filled my little sky, their eyeglobes glinting, their jaws and antennae probing.
Their decision was swift. They instantly fell to devouring every tatter of the burst grub. I lurched to rise, and very plainly I saw that one Nurse noticed me. I froze at once, understanding: smeared with tissue, I was a visible piece of moving larva-meat. Moreover, moving or not, I was something to be eaten systematically as soon as the Nurse got to me.
Fixed where I lay, I dared to start scraping—carefully, carefully!—the fat from my face and hair, and then off my neck, and, inchingly, down my chest . . . From the head down I stealthily became orange again, cautiously sculpting off my adventitious larval luster.
All the while the great jaws whickered and clicked and flensed. Seizing, sectioning, sucking in, the Nurse's jaws were the frugal hands of the Nest, gathering in the waste life to stoke the still-living. The impersonal grandeur of it moved me, even in the terror of my predicament. I felt Behemoth and her inscrutable providence all around me, felt the Nest-life like a single spirit filling every tunnel, glinting from every worker's eye, feeding with a million-million jaws.
I had not stripped the last betraying slime from my legs and boots until the Nurses were scouring the very stone beside me for larval tatters, their jaws rattling like weaponry on the rock. Then, a last scrape, and I was up, and diving into the shadows of the larval shoals.
"One more grub," Barnar vowed, back in the nook, as I sluiced myself down with a waterskin. "If that idiot subjects us to the slightest further mishap, we leave forthwith on Bunt's mission." I touched up my coat of dye from one of the flasks with which we were plentifully supplied, and we went forth and made our third pick.
Well versed as I already was in this trade's catastrophes, I felt like a seasoned tapper as we clambered up our next larva's flank, and I marked her midpoint with my spur. We rammed the spike valve home, and dogged it down, then both of us dismounted. "I'm damned," I grumbled, "if I'll `man the valve' until I see that they can work the pump!" I accompanied Barnar back to the nook and he signalled for half suction on line five.
Comfortably removed from the point of impact of any further mishap, I enjoyed a pleasant, detached curiosity about what the suck-line might do next.
It gave a twitch, a shudder, and went stiff. A little dimple of suction surrounded the spike. The larva shuddered a little, and settled. Her drainage was in progress at the proper, painless rate.
Barnar sighed. "This means, I suppose, that we must set other lines now. Why delay?"
VIII
Begged a demon with many a radiant eye,
"Plant my poor head, and I'll teach you to fly!"
AS A LARVA'S DRAINAGE progresses, and she sags flatter and flatter, she grows more likely to be noted as debris, and consumed by a Nurse. A tapper might set one grub draining, then go spike a second, even a third, but by then he had to go unhook his first set before it got perilously flat-looking. We were constantly climbing up and down the huge babes, and the work was extremely tiring. When we took our first sleep we'd drained only seven.
Though dead weary, I hung sleepless a while in my hammock. When a man lacks that glimpse of stars or moon that makes him feel it is truly night, then sleep seems to him an airless, casketed state, and his soul slips less willingly into it. Now and henceforth, of course, "night" would be merely a synonym for exhaustion, and "day" would mean the longest stretch of time we could work before dropping.
Unspeaking we hung there. At any other such time, pausing together on the brink of sleep, Barnar and I would have talked, lazily tossing our thoughts back and forth till one of us fell off oblivion's edge. Our silence now I understood too well. The terrors of the Nest were met and managed. Today's first fruitful labors proved we could work down here and win what we sought from Behemoth. The giants' pap now seemed far more obtainable, and we hung silent, remembering that in the matter of our coming wealth, our ambitions had utterly parted ways.
Six hundredweight of gold, our combined shares, could just suffice for Barnar's great vision. It would buy the Witches' Seed, and the little fleet to ship it from Strega (darkest of the Astrygals in lore and sorcerous resource). What was left would pay the same witches for the loan of a gryph-gryph, for this monster must micturate on each and every Witches' Seed as soon as it has been sledgehammered into the earth; lacking these effusions, the virtue of the seed remains immured, and the tree will not leap forth. The six hundredweight would also just cover the cost of hiring a troop of bog Ghuuns (from Strega's nightmarish swamps) to control the gryph-gryph, to bring the monster constant drink, and to hold it shackled to its work.
On my side it was the same. However obscenely rich we shortly grew by means of the great Pelfer's Buskins, Cowl and Gantlets, our outlay in the first instance must be huge. We could not hope to cross the Cidril Steppes without three hundred men-at-arms, with enough engineers among them for deploying heavy weaponry on the march, and for doing siege work when the Tomb was reached. Men of the quality we must use, and for the time we must have them, would cost no less than four hundredweight to keep them loyal. Added to this must be the cost of the ships to carry them; then there was the cost of shipping them, from the Great Shallows (where the best recruiting was), thence through the Taarg Straits, and thence eight hundred leagues north, across the Sea of Cidril.
We must act together to fulfil either dream. And, shackled as we were by the finitude of our expected fortune, we could not help but brood, neither able to forget that the other had gravely vowed to undertake his project. With equal ire, we felt each other in default; we had both put second a deed we had sworn to make our prime concern.
Ever more smoothly and skilfully did we set our larvae draining: fifteen on our second day, eighteen on our third. At that day's end we took some wine and hardtack and had a strolling meal, supping and wandering the chamber at large; it was a practice which, for one, helped divert us from our provisions' vile taste, and, two, which constantly added to our knowledge of our hosts.
We were agreeing, with some complacency, that we really had the hang of this work now, and could call ourselves pretty tolerable tappers, on the whole, when Barnar interrupted himself to cry, "Look there!"
A flux of larval feeding was just then tapering off—an after-ripple, no doubt, of a wave of Foragers returning to the Nest with their plunder. Ever
ywhere the larvae's jaws worked furiously with a wet noise of mastication. This meaty murmur was embellished by demon utterance, muttered or shrill, as tough subworld entities surrendered fragment by fragment to larval greed. What had caught Barnar's eye was a huge chunk of torso, a blackish meat marbled with veins of incandescent green, which still writhed in the jaws of the Nurse that staggered under its mass. The size of the creature it had been bitten from must have been immense.
"The Foragers are surely dire indeed," I murmured, "to have slain whatever that was part of." We had been told, of course, that members of the Forager caste were made on a scale that dwarfed all other workers.
"You there! Hu-u-umans! Help me!"
Barnar and I spun around. Another Nurse was just then passing behind us, and for a dizzying instant it seemed that this giantess had hailed us with this reedy outcry. But after an instant's stupefaction, we saw that the voice proceeded from the wad of mangled demonmeat which she bore in her jaws.
From a hash of several demons chewed into one pulpy ball, there thrust out the head, shoulders, and one writhing limb of a still-living demon whose body had been mangled in with the others. It was this creature whose warbly voice accosted us. His head was encrusted with an opulent jewelry of eyes, whose glint pierced the fungal gloom as he was borne past us. "Stalwart tappers! L-u-uminous Heroes! Save me, and I will make you rich past the wildest dreams of avarice!"
Barnar and I exchanged a look. Did I appear as startled, as nakedly greedy, as he did? We both hastily assumed suitably grave and skeptical countenances. "What else would it say, after all?" I noted.
"Of course!"
"Still," I prevaricated, "As the old saw has it: `Who knows the bournes of demon pelf?' "
" . . . `Neither Man nor demon self.' " Barnar finished, nodding. So we trotted after the Nurse, reassuring each other we would merely indulge our curiosity by inquiring of the demon precisely what he was offering.
"We should keep firmly in mind," I urged, "that we already have a wildly lucrative enterprise in hand. We must not be seduced by desperate promises. Because almost surely, whatever this demon has to offer, the payment will lie in the subworld and will somehow involve our carrying him thither."
"Precisely," Barnar nodded. "On the other hand . . . what can be lost by interrogating this demon? His kind are studious of Behemoth lore. Demons know their conquerors in detail. We may learn a bit, if nothing else."
"Let's hurry, then," I said. "It looks like it'll have two grubs on it."
The Nurse had bestowed her burden between two larvae, which mouthed up to it on either side. The eye-jewelled demon writhed on the crest of this food-lump, his broken hindquarters inextricably anchored in the mass. His limb (a tentacle with a three-clawed tip) desperately signaled us. His mouth was a membranous vent in his throat, whence once more came his ululant voice. "Quick! Oh quickly, Exalted Ones! Wealth past telling I promise you! Oh, hurry! If they eat my head, I'll be blind!"
"That sounds highly probable," I told the demon. The Nurse had left—we had a clear field of action. "But I'm afraid we must require you to define precisely what you mean by `wealth past telling.' And you'd best be quick about it, I think."
The demon gaped a moment. His eyes were a wild mix, each distinctly charactered, and a little multitude of individually evil minds looked out from these mixed eyes. His mouth-vent moaned, and then renewed his reedy plea:
"The Unguent of Flight! I can put in your possession the Unguent of Flight! If I prove to lie, feed me back to these brutes!"
Who would not have called us credulous, in acting as we then did? But what is great luck, if not highly unlikely? We advanced on the food-clump, sword and axe drawn. "Oh yes!" the demon cried. "Cut me free at the ribs! Oh, hurry!"
I reached the demon my left arm, which he powerfully gripped. The sucking larval jaws now scissored quite close to him from either side. I pulled him outward, and Barnar chopped through his chest's mangled axis with one shearing stroke of Old Biter.
We took our demonic fragment to a little recess in the chamber wall and laid him on the stone. The bleeding stump of his amputation scabbed over almost as we spoke, and in moments his stump was sheathed in a tough, dry bark. Head and shoulders, one limb—he lay there and glittered up at us his eyes of a hundred different beings, a hundred alien hungers. His mouth-vent, moist and urgent, pleaded, "Plant me! Just plant me, anywhere in subworld soil. I'll root! The Unguent of Flight, in return, is easy to be had, and not deep in the subworld at all, by a safe path I know." Barnar and I shared a knowing look here. The demon grew more urgent. "Bear me for your guide, oh Radiant Ones, and I will give you power to swim the air! I am your humblest, most abject servant, your doting Ostrogall by name!"
Well, sure enough, here was the proposition we'd foreseen: a quick little journey down to the nest-mouth, and out into the subworld. And for what prize now? The Unguent of Flight, a priceless treasure in itself, and a ready means to further wealth! The sheer, mad unlikeliness of the prospect perversely made me feel it might be genuine.
"We can promise no more than to think it over," I answered our truncated interlocutor, this abbreviated Ostrogall. "You will have to abide our leisure to consider your proposition, and in the interim you must vow to cause no mischief."
Ostrogall fervently agreed. He then set to slathering us with effusive flattery, and though he was silent at our command, his vigilant presence, riding in a loop of my loosened weapons belt, still compromised our sense of privacy. Thus, when we returned to our operations nook, I popped Ostrogall (with his effusive assurances that he would be "quite comfortable") into a stout leather supply bag, and hung this from a peg on the wall.
IX
Through years and years a young lad flees
And whips his team that breasts the seas.
WE SAGGED into our hammocks, and into the silence that had grown our habit at this hour. But tonight we could almost hear each other's minds racing. "How chances multiply, sometimes," I ventured, "and set us branching off from our first intent!"
"Aye. Though surely we must stay on the branching that leads to the Royal Brood Chamber, and the giants' pap, for there our least doubtful fortune lies?"
"Of course! But in this pattern of constantly emergent opportunity . . . I feel something here I scarcely dare put into words, Barnar. I feel Our Time is coming!"
"By Crack, Key and Cauldron, Nifft, you speak my very mind!" We both sat upright in our hammocks now. Barnar's eyes revealed to mine a glint of cautious glee. "We've both been feeling it, haven't we?" he went on. "Here and now has come to us that truly golden moment in our professional lives. When we came down through that gangway—nay, when we first contracted to help my feckless nephew, with that first inauspicious step—we passed through that Door that is only once opened to a craftsman in all his life. Luck herself invited us down here under the earth, and down here, Luck means to do us well beyond our power to imagine!"
"I have felt the same, old friend," I solemnly answered. "The very same."
One must not speak too much aloud of Luck, most especially when She hovers nearest, but when we'd lain back again, Barnar could not forbear giving his suppressed excitement some vent in speech. "Suppose we get even a little luckier than what we now contemplate? Say we made just one or two hundredweight more than six hundred? With eight hundredweight, we could forest the heights and the barrens as well as my clan's holdings, just as you said, Nifft. Then, if the Ham-Hadryan, and the Magnass-Dryan clans should, through some accord, unite their endeavors, our mills would reap such wealth from Shallows' shipyards, (See Shag Margold's Interjection) that your venture to the Tomb of Pelfer could be undertaken within a twelvemonth's time."
I was stung to find him still so placidly putting in second place the glorious exploit that I burned to undertake. "We would be prudent, I think," I sneered gently, "to bank nothing on the desperate promises of a demon. Lucky we may feel, but we might not prove so, stumping down to the subworld with that polyocular abomination
tucked under one arm."
"I mean only," Barnar said patiently (but I could tell he was stung in turn), "that opportunities seem to be opening to us at every turn, and among them may well come something which makes us richer yet."
I was not of a mind to answer. After a moment, Barnar said, "Let me tell you a story, Nifft, about a man we both know—a man who is dear as a brother to my heart. This man is called Nifft the Karkmanhite, but though Karkmahn-Ra, Jewel of Pardash, herself the Queen of the Ephesion Chain, is his chosen home, he was in fact born at the little harbor of Ladrona Bay on Samadrios, a lesser Ephesion and the southernmost isle of the Chain."
"Spare me," I complained, though I knew he must have his turn.
"Winds from the glacial maelstroms frost Samadrios' southern shores," Barnar resumed, "but little Ladrona with her cosy bay on the isle's northern coast had a brisk but temperate clime, and bustled with trade. Ladrona's dire fate in the end was conversely the making of Nifft. To know the man, you must know the boy who saw that city's death.
"His family ran a harborside hostel, and it was Nifft's fortune on the morning of his city's death to have driven his father's wagon up into the hills on the weekly trip to the brewery. The lad had taken on the casks of ale and small beer he had been sent for, and had just started along the ridge road back down to the harbor, when he felt the earth jolt under him. The whole island did several sharp dance steps on the ocean floor, and the wide sea around it convulsed like flesh that shudders.
"The lad stood amazed, fighting the reins of his rearing team. And then he saw the ocean rise into a single mountain of infinite width, and march toward his world.
"Now he lashed his team on again, plunging down harborwards, while his unbelieving mind still hung behind him, hawklike on the sky, beholding the sea's vast, glittery onslaught. In his blind haste it insanely seemed to him that if he just reached home before the wave smote it—if he could just burst into the hostel and cry, `Father! Mother! The Ocean is coming!'—if he could just reach them with a warning, then the disaster would be halted.
