The Incompleat Nifft

by Michael Shea

  But it was Nifft's and Barnar's rare luck to hear the full and detailed truth of the matter from Gildmirth of Sordon, and what they learned enflamed their imaginations. The Buskins are popularly credited with conferring everything from the power of flight to the power to run faster that the eye can follow; in fact, my friends learned, they confer the Blessing of Bounding Absquatulation, by which is understood the power to make one-league leaps. Escape, to the thief shod with Pelfer's Buskins, is never in doubt.

  The Cowl is loosely deemed to confer invisibility. In fact, they learned, it confers on its wearer the Blessing of Circumambient Similitude, or an identity of aspect to the wearer's immediate surroundings, however complex. The Cowl's function is best illustrated in the tale told of Pelfer, when he had penetrated the Art Trove of UrrGurr the Grasping. That ghastly Elemental surprised Pelfer in the very midst of his Trove, but discerned him not, for the thief, beCowled, bore a simultaneous piecemeal resemblance to no less than three of that age's great masterworks in oils: Goob's Battle of Trumpet Plains, the Smiling Mimostula by Phasri Pedofilaster, and Quonsonby's epoch-making Still Life with Rumkins and Prooms. From this the finesse of the Cowl's power may be surmised.

  As for Pelfer's Gantlets, they confer the Blessing of Loosened Locks upon the hands they ensheathe. With regard to these Gantlets, the popular conception does not so much err as fall short. Gloved with these, the thief's touch will cause any obstacle—lock, wall, weighty door, or mass of earth—to fall asunder, so be this obstacle interposed as a barrier between the thief and the prize she craves.

  From this, the fervor of Nifft's mercenary motive will be readily understood. A thief accoutered as great Pelfer was, would soon abound in wealth.

  But Barnar, on his side, cherishes no merely sentimental enterprise. His family feeling, and his romantic interest in a certain beauty of the Magnass-Dryan clan, are foremost in his motives, of course. They cause in him an intransigence to match the force of Nifft's greed for Pelfer's Facilitators. But dense-wooded Chilia lies of course in the Great Shallows, just off the mainland of the Kolodrian Continent. And, like that forested Kolodrian coast, Chilia serves the timber needs of the Great Shallows—a vast broth of cultures and of thriving trade, populous with vessels of all makes. Shallows' boatyards are a bottomless maw for lumber. When the saw-mills of Barnar's clan howl at full capacity, they turn a golden harvest, and Chilite tree-jacks with lush mountain holdings, though their palms be hard with doing their own axework, grow seriously rich.

  —Shag Margold

  XI

  Now saddle my mount, I am riding to plunder

  The Ur-hoard encoffered in caskets infernal!

  Swift my mount bears me, her footfall as thunder,

  Where hell sweats its lucre in fever eternal!

  THE HORROR of being on the Forager's back made us stagger and stumble at first, now to port, now to starboard, where her legs pumped in their high-kneed ranks. But we found that our footing was not really difficult, no harder than finding your sea-legs on a big vessel that is riding a steady swell. I mean a big vessel indeed, though, for the biggest galleon we ever shipped on was less than half her size. Her abdomen bulged sternward and we could not see its tip; the immense bowsprit of her jaws loomed half eclipsed beyond her head's great spheroid. The blue-litten walls tore past us, blurred to the look of sea-foam with the speed of her passage.

  "Dye!" Barnar shouted—and the sense of it brought my wits back to me. We rushed as near as we dared to her pumping legs, I to port and Barnar to starboard, and from our bottles of dye jetted out arcs of pigment against the streaming tunnel walls. These little banners of liquid we ejected grew tattered as they fell, torn by our velocity. Just so would our bodies be if we leapt or fell while moving at this rate; we would at the very least break our legs.

  "If she's begged for food and she stops," I shouted back over my shoulder, "jump on the instant!"

  "Do you think her crop is full?" Barnar shouted back after a heartbeat's pause. Amid the confusion of the rushing walls and the flaring cyanic fungi like sea-foam cut by a swift keel, the question hung full of significance in the air between us. If her crop was full of demon harvest, our Forager would be returning from forage, and could well be bound to our very own destination: the Royal Brood Chamber. If, on the other hand, her crop were empty, she might equally well be bound to the subworld, to re-fill it.

  For a dreamlike, indefinite time, we sped along poised on this uncertainty: If another worker begged food of us, and our Forager's crop proved full, then should we jump down? Might she not go on up with her offering to the Queen?

  But all too soon, our descent grew unmistakable. "Downslope she goes!" Barnar cried needlessly, as suddenly the pitch grew steeper. No other Behemoth detained us, nor would, we saw. Her nestmates would sense our mount's emptiness.

  We dared not let the horror of where we were going slacken our sinews. Complex branchings of the tunnels flowed unpredictably past us, and at such intersections we must spray a frenzied profusion of dye, not to miss our turning when—luck grant it!—we might come trudging back. Dispensing dye like dervishes, we frenziedly blazed our path, as our Forager, unaccosted by any oncomer, thundered on down to the mountainroot.

  Our descent was long enough to astonish us with the Nest's immense extent, yet so inexorably were we carried whither every fiber of our souls recoiled from being, that it seemed no time at all before I was crying out, "Can we doubt any longer? Do you see ahead there? A reddening of the light?"

  "Yes!" Barnar's voice seemed to mourn, and I know he, with me, experienced an irrepressible qualm of pure loathing, a slither of revulsion climbing up and down the spine.

  "I suppose," I called, wanly attempting optimism, "we could scarcely go down there any better guarded than we are."

  "No doubt," Barnar boomed glumly.

  "Ah, look there now friend! We're close! Hammer in some pitons—let's string some rope to hold by!"

  Convergent tunnels had broadened to a mighty gallery which was flooded with an ever redder light. Now another Forager ran to port of us, two more to starboard . . . and now we ran amidst a thundering flux of Foragers, an outsurging armada of rampant titans. Kneeling, we hammered into the ragged, tough chitin of our Forager's dorsum several of the spikes we used to dog down spike valves. I paid line off my coil, and strung it between these spikes for hand- and foot-holds.

  "There!" I shrieked. "There's the foul hellgate itself!"

  The Nest-mouth framed a ragged oval of ruby light. It was a hole in the hell-sky. To exit it seemed a plunge into thin air. A rushing moment later, and the yawning portal framed a vista: far below spread the subworld plain, threaded with red rivers, and looking strangely empty and quiescent, compared to other parts of it we'd seen.

  We flung ourselves down and gripped our ropes. "Hold on!"

  "I am!"

  The Forager erupted from the Nest-mouth, and dove down the vertiginous subworld wall. We clung to our ropes, jouncing and jolting against the rough carapace. All the plain and all its stony sky, revealed to us in crazy, shaken glimpses, dispread around us its vile grandeur. Both hellfloor and hellvault shocked us out of our expectations. The rolling plain was all but denuded. "Behemoth's scoured it clean as bone!" cried Barnar—but we cried out indeed when we looked above us.

  "By the Crack and by all that crawls from it!" I yelped. "Look there! What Thing looks down on us?"

  For this part of the subworld's stony sky was gigantically inhabited by a monstrous crimson Eye, socketed in the earth-bone and staring immensely down. Its pupil was a ragged fissure of utter blackness faintly measled with stars, while within the scarlet hemisphere of its half-translucent ball, pearly shapes of cloudy tissue writhed, or languidly convulsed. But most hair-raisingly, the orb attended, turned torpidly to focus here or there. It was framed in a gasketing of ophidian scales that merged with the stone. And unceasingly it bled tears that ran in branching, impossible rivers across the hell-ceiling, and down the hell-walls near and dist
ant, to weave in red rivers through the plains' rolling denudation.

  Indeed, the only things abounding on those plains were Foragers. Their multitudes tiny with distance, everywhere they rushed in broad fronts or phalanxes. As we surged down onto the plain ourselves, and the mountainroot we'd emerged from fell away behind us, we saw how poxed it was with Nest-mouths like our own, and how these bled a ceaseless stream of demonkind's nemesis.

  We ran in a wide invading wave of Foragers—sparse, perhaps, here and there, but stretching from horizon to horizon. Finding our legs again, we scanned awhile in awe the waste we crossed. "It's a desert!" I breathed.

  "Like a spider-hole swept by a giant broom."

  "Do we not owe them"—I indicated our mount, and her congeners sweeping across the plains—"our gratitude? Even our love? Look at what they have wrought in this unclean dominion! Look at the purging they have worked!"

  Not that demon vitality was utterly absent. The hellfloor was a crazy-quilt of living tissues, hides, mantlings and tegmenta: wet, barnacly stretches yielded to tough knolls and swales of plated scale that reeked like a bull Titanoplod in rut, these in turn yielding to meadows of black thorns as thick as fur. But all these anatomical terrains sprawled alike deserted. Nonetheless here and there we saw other Foragers stop, and set their jaws against this ground. We failed to draw warning from this behaviour, and thus were we knocked nine-pin-down in our doltish unreadiness when our own mount stopped dead, and drove her jaws' spiked tips against the ground she trod-—a terrain of black, glassy slag. She pried up a great, groaning section of the stubborn stone, and we danced lively for footing in the heave of her labors.

  The flap of stone she lifted proved flexible. It was a huge lip in fact, for fang-rimmed jaws appeared beneath. But the jaws were slack. From the black gap between them a stench of putrefaction rose like a geyser's effusion. Our Forager began, in a probing, testing way, to pull this laired being apart a bit, ripping up fang-crowned chunks of jawbone, and plucking out a huge, tri-forked tongue. But apparently her appetite recoiled. She dropped the tongue to lie reeking like a long-beached whale, and reared up and rushed on.

  "Live demons will be swarming somewhere," gloomed Barnar, "if she scorns to take carrion in her crop."

  I was squinting at the horizon when Barnar almost stopped my heart by booming, "Look out for your foot, Nifft! Jump back!"

  I stumbled in my alarm and was too late, for a cold, slimy pressure slid across my buskin top and my bare calf above it. A dun-colored hemispheroid, of the approximate size and form of a Jarkkelad battle-casque, then slid hastily away across the carapace, whose mottled hue it almost precisely matched.

  And in moments, our instructed eyes discovered that the Forager's rugose and fissured thorax swarmed with these creatures; they were especially thick around the oily junctures of the Behemoth's huge legs with her armored flanks. Our brief inspection proved them harmless detritivores, grazing on the giant's dermal oils and scaly debris.

  A scarlet river streamed ahead, a wide, sinewy torrent, exhaling a nimbus of lavender mist where it tore itself against its living banks. Our Forager surged solid-footed through the flux, and when we crested the farther bank, we saw our goal: a distant acropolis, swarmingly besieged.

  The landscape surged upward toward that embattled height, the ridged terrain converging toward it like corded sinews. We followed a crestline, and had broad vantage of the far-flung multitude of Foragers running confluently with us. They spread to sight's farthest reach beneath the bleeding, grieving gaze of our cyclopean sun.

  The fortress's form and circumstance grew steadily clearer. Her tiered walls towered half a mile high, and three leagues or more in breadth. The ramparts, rising in recessed plateaus, seethed with furious war. We could just make out the roiling mantle of Behemoths that those bulwarks wore, and the splash of fire and hail of missiles hurled down by the demon defenders.

  "Duck!" howled Barnar. I fell on my face, astonished—we were nowhere in range of the fray. But here indeed attackers came swooping down upon us, battering the air with sinewy wings.

  But by the time our wits were regathered, our blades drawn, and ourselves afoot again, the harmless truth of the matter was plain. For these winged shapes, a croaking, stenchful flock of them, were wholly unmindful of ourselves. They were demon parasites feeding greedily upon the lice we had lately discovered infesting our great mount's leg-joints.

  Big, leathery wings these new parasites had, and scrawny bodies of just under human size. Their heads were monocular, with tripart branchlike mouthparts adept at seizing the lice, as were their nether pairs of scrawny, spindle-clawed legs; with these appendages they deftly plucked up their prey, winging acrobatically amidst the hugely pumping thighs of the Forager. When any of these Harpies had a brace or three of lice in its jaws or claws, it winged up into the clear and, hovering, broke open the lice like glossy melons and greedily sucked out the pallid, oleaginous meat. Just between their haunches, where a human would be sexed, these harpies bore little, thin-lipped secondary mouths that did not feed, but spoke in shrieks and gull-like shrills to one another.

  "They're pretty alert-looking vermin, wouldn't you say?" Barnar growled in my ear. I nodded. The single, pentagonal eye that crowned their skullish little heads looked quick and sharp. Concerning ourselves, they seemed both aware of us, and incurious about us. We studied them, however, with growing interest. I began toying with one end of my rope, just as Barnar murmured again in my ear. "Just suppose," he said, "that we might do a little . . . fishing with one of them?" I thrilled at the genius of the notion, for it was my own as well: I had just finished making a noose in the end of my line, and we leaned close together to hide it.

  The ramparts loomed nearer now. The stench of scorched tissue and blood reached us, and the din of deathcries. We could see that a writhing, tentacular forest of demon limbs sprouted from the stone of the ramparts, and seized on the legs of the assaulting Foragers.

  In moments we would be in the thick of the fray, our footing uncertain. . . . Suddenly, one of the harpies swooped carelessly close to us, rising with a just-snatched louse in its claws. With an unpremeditated snap of the wrist, I put the noose up neatly in the harpy's path. The batwinged parasitivore thrust its head home, and we yanked it down and piled onto it.

  Grotesque strength lived in this loathsome pterod's scrawny form, but because we pinned its wings as it half-folded them in shock, we were able to bind those powerful pinions tightly shut, while my hand smothered the mouth between its haunches. As we bound our captive, its fellows, seeing our predation, recoiled slightly, creating a zone of safety between themselves and us. But having done thus much, all of them studiously returned to feeding on the lice.

  I unmuffled our captive's nether mouth and knelt to speak to it, while Barnar stood with his axe poised to clip the demon's mouthparts from its head.

  "We don't know how long we'll be stuck on the back of this beast," I told the Harpy. "Meanwhile, we've grown hungry, I'm afraid, and unless you can suggest an alternative course of action, we're going to have to eat you."

  "No! No! Don't!" hissed the mouth between the Harpy's leathery haunches. It appeared that this demon could use human speech only in a ragged whisper. "I can bring you better eating, heavenly eating! I could bring you gold!"

  "Excellent!" Barnar replied. "As it happens, we consider several hundredweight of gold, or a like value in gems (which are lighter and perhaps preferable) to be a completely satisfactory alternative to eating you."

  In truth we would have died rather than eat one bite of that scabrous hyperparasite, but its fervor in accepting the exchange suggested that the creature did not know this.

  The ramparts loomed just ahead—we could see the barbed and suckered demon tentacles get death-grips on assaulting Foragers, and break their backs. And we could see these fallen Foragers, though detained in death, still lend their backs as footing to their following sisters. Chaos would swallow us in moments. . . .

  And y
et at that imperiled moment, as I gazed upon that Harpy trembling in its bonds, I experienced what I can only call a kind of transformation of the spirit. Here lay this Harpy, a winged and willing agent of our enrichment, and here about us spread the subworld. The subworld, much as it breathes of horror and harm, breathes equally of wealth. The dizzying muchness of gold and gem, of sheer, raw lucre pooled and coffered there, puts intoxication in the air. Demonkind sweats gold—gold is demonkind's shite and vomitus, and lies heaped everywhere. So now a lustful hope of wealth blazed most hotly in me.

  But at the same time it was more than avarice I burned with; it was a sense of miracle as well. We began to climb those ramparts atop our stupendous living vehicle, with that Harpy lying bound and compliant between us, and I believed that we even now rode on the crest of the greatest wave of fortune our lives would ever know. I felt then a kind of ecstasy of cosmic attunement. This was our Moment, our hour to be loved and doted on by the universe! We were now, at last, fated to have enrichment thrust on us at every turning.

  "Look even there!" hissed our desperate captive. "Where we ascend the ramparts here—I know this sector! I'll find you things of value!"

  We rode in giddying surges upwards across the backs of luckless Foragers gripped in the forest of demon-limbs. The Behemoths' legs smoked and crumbled wherever they were firmly in the grip of those prodigious paws and tentacles, and our own mount's legs, though they tore free of capture at every other step, were ridged with fuming welts from the contact.