by Michael Shea
* * *
A central current in that titan throng caught us, and snatched us through the portal. And thus were we swept into the purview of the Nest Mother's glittery eyeglobes, and into the reach of her Royal jaws.
The Queen! Living immensity, more than planetary! Her abdomen's ribbed ellipsoid, all marbled white-and-black, bulged away in the blue shadow. It was a great island at whose shores whole seas of her progeny lapped. Her Royal head, black as a lacquered battle-casque, at first appeared a stranded thing, resembling, in its relative smallness, a different being that had been half swallowed by that abdomen's egg-laying mountain. We approached the Presence on the river of other Courtiers and Supplicants.
We learned the true hugeness of the Royal head as she received her daughters' kisses. Forager after Forager, lifting her offering, was utterly dwarfed by the Queen's receiving jaws. For an interval of awe and rapture, time vanished in our stupefaction as we drew nearer. And then our own mount lifted her filial gift up to the Royal visage. The daughter's regurgitation shook us like a silken earthquake; she cast her demon-spoil into the sky-clasping arc of the Royal mouthparts.
The Nest Mother's nearness breathed a gust of eternity on us. These jaws were the Appetite of the Nest itself, a great furnace door through which armies of demonkind marched, that Behemoth might breed and brood and build, and scour still cleaner the upper floor of hell.
Then the Royal head reared—dismissing us, summoning the next. Our mount slid aside, and cruised in a current of her sisters that coasted down along the Royal flank. We sailed past hundreds of supplicant workers, all lifting their hungry jaws to the Mother's bulging side.
And it was their jaws that helped us see something that was hard to discern at first in the densely marbled whorls of white and black that blazoned the abdominal integument. But all at once, cued by the nursing brutes, we saw them everywhere: arrays of pores across the Royal flank, pores round as a potter's jar-mouths, each delicately lipped where the chitin came up in a slight circumferential ridge.
These pores, as I say, in their harlequin mottling, played seek-me-out with our eyes, but in a short time we began to find pattern: pores of a given size lay in roughly horizontal clusters; smaller pores lay low on the abdomen, while the strata highest on the flank comprised the orifices of greatest diameter.
"See them, Barnar?" I trembled. "Each caste has its level. Is Bunt's gamble won, then?"
"See their delicacy," breathed my friend, and I shared his wonder. To drink, the Behemoths closed their mandibles, and lay the tips of them to the pores; the closed jaws, like quills' nibs touched to ink, pulled down the fluid in their cloven points.
"What tenderness," I shuddered in my turn. The nursing giants reared up, forelegs gently resting on the Royal flank, and delicately, delicately drank, as still as statues.
"Ah, look now, Nifft. Look, old friend. Foragers every one, is it not so?"
He referred to the cluster of pores that our mount now approached. Only Foragers nursed at them, drinking perhaps an ichor exclusive to themselves; drinking giants' pap, perhaps.
We'd already lashed our netted gems to the pitons. Our mount reared high, her dorsum a steep, glossy hill now. With some scrambling, we found our footing, as she softly sank the point of her closed mandibles into a slow, stickly exudation, like white honey, that we could now see oozing from the pore.
"Now, Demon, attend!" Barnar barked—and he faltered a moment, both of us startled by the strangeness of a human shout in this measureless chthonic brood-hole of the Mountain Queen. Before Barnar's exclamation, it had not seemed to be a silence that surrounded us; the march of tarsal claws on stone, the susurrus of whickering legs, the wet whisper of feedings, the slow thrum of the Queen's majestic heart—all this had not seemed to be silence until his human voice rang so sharp and alien in this speechless smithy of giants. We harkened to his echo which still hung in that vastness—distinct, eery, melancholy. It was the echo of a phantom's voice. We were phantoms, a race undreamed of by the titans; thirsty ghosts that haunted them.
"Quick then," I muttered to the Harpy. We had already emptied the gems from our amphorae into the net. We now had these leathern jars dangling from ropes, whose ends I put in the Harpy's elaborate mouthparts. "Your legs must stay bound," I told our captive. "But with your jaws you can easily manage these ropes. Drag the jars into the outflux of the ichor; if you once sink their rims in the pap, you can scrape the jars full of the stuff. You should contrive to fill them with a couple of passes. Remember how close your freedom is! Only do this well, and liberty is yours. Up now, and away."
The Harpy cringed obediently, not yet taking wing. The creature tremored with what was perhaps outrage. "Pitiless masters," it gasped, "I obey! I obey! But oh this is cruel! Do you not see the dangers—"
"Harpy," I answered, courteously gripping the imp by the throat, "had we wings of our own, we would brave these dangers ourselves. As it is, do now, or die at once."
The Harpy took wing, its malodorous pinions seizing the air like big, sinewed hands. Up it climbed, the amphorae dangling from its jaws. When it gained some two rods' altitude, we held its tether short. It tugged and gestured beggingly for more line, but we were loathe to give it more than we could firmly manage, lest the demon contrive to snag it, and work itself free.
It hovered, studying the pore where our mount still nursed.
"Oh no!" gasped Barnar. "We didn't dye it!"
It hit us like a blow. There hung the Harpy, wings toiling, high, wide and hideous, directly above our nursing Forager's glittery blue eyeglobes. In our shock we stood doltish, staring, like casual spectators.
And nothing happened. Still the Forager funneled down pap, unperturbed.
The Harpy winged cautiously lower, and eased the leathern jars down on the pore. Then it winged lower still, to tilt the jars' brims down into the pap; in a moment, it had sunk the brims into the cloudy lactescence.
Now came some delicate wingwork, as the Harpy tugged the lips of the jars deeper into the exudate. To manage the oblique angle needful for this work, the demon hovered even lower, hanging not quite two fathoms above the Royal abdomen, and tugging, coaxing the jarmouths into the pap.
Something moved, something huge and sudden and night-black surged up from the abdomen. A ragged piece of blackness hugged bristly limbs around the Harpy, and snatched it from the air.
Even as it dined loudly on our hapless subworld servitor, the monster—doubtless some Royal ectoparasite—remained more than half hidden in the pattern of the Royal hide. We made out barbed fur, like a Sucking Star's, and tree-thick palps or tentacles. The Harpy lifted once more that eerie, gull-like voice it had used with its own kind before we captured it; in this melancholy demon-song, it briefly declaimed the agonies of its demise.
We slashed the lead and flung it free. Our mount, as if dismissed by our failure, instantly ceased to imbibe the pap, and backed down from the Royal flank. She wheeled, and slid out into a current of sated workers that were out-bound from the Chamber. Throughout our long withdrawal from the Queen's immensity, we scanned the terrain of Her abdomen, and though detail faded in the murk our alerted eyes discovered—now here, now there, much that lived, and moved, upon the Queen.
Somber and silent, we crouched by the gap in our mount's legs, ready to jump, feeling broody, and rebuked by Luck, whom we had thought so wholly ours. The three hundredweight that we had just failed to earn from Bunt by obtaining the pap was more than made up by the value of the jewels we had captured, but this did not comfort me. Failure had flawed our fortune's smooth ascent. I felt betrayed. I blush now at this petulance, but so it was.
We had gone not a quarter mile out of the atrium of the Royal Chamber, when an oncoming Licker bowed low in our path, and with stroking antennae, begged our mount for food. Her crop was not empty, it seemed. She stopped, and leaned down to comply. Barnar and I tossed down our bale of gems, and jumped after it.
XIV
See how faithless Fortune bleed
s!
Our lustrous Future fast recedes . . .
See how Fortune's healed again!
Our purses wax! Our dolors wane!
HOW EASILY had our Forager borne this bale of gems! How cruelly this same bale taxed our little bodies—for we had shrunk, as it seemed to us, as small as tiny, toilsome beetles, inching down these vast corridors we'd so lately bestridden like giants. Grunting and sweating, staggering and stumbling, and cursing continually, we carried our weighty fortune. Thanks to our blazes, our route was never in doubt; our death by a misstep due to exhaustion, however, seemed highly likely.
The toil was least when we shared the load between our shoulders; we could hustle it along for good stretches this way. But this mode made us dangerously awkward at ducking, and dodging, and diving for cover. We were soon covered with bruises and lacerations, and had several near collisions with oncoming Behemoths. Each time we took cover, we lay long minutes gasping, powerless to move till our hearts slowed down.
Grimly, we lurched on. And, amazingly, towards the end, our sheer determination seemed to prevail, and we found ourselves wielding our burden with new strength and stamina. Jaws clenched in a fury of resolution, we actually jogged the last mile to our larval chamber without a single pause for rest. Jubilant, we staggered through the portal, and sprawled against the wall, gasping and exulting.
"What stamina . . . for two old dogs . . . eh?" Barnar beamed.
"By Key and Cauldron!" I wheezed boastfully, " . . . as if the bag . . . grew lighter as we went!"
We paused. An icy finger touched my nape. We seized the bundle.
It had gotten lighter—by fully a third of its weight! One corner had been slightly ruptured, probably upon dismounting. We scrambled back out into the tunnel. A gemstone sparkled from the tunnel floor. When I recovered it, I saw others winking beyond. Barnar groaned, "They'll be strung out all the way back!"
Was our Luck wound on a spool, to be spun out, and then reeled back in again? The remnant gems, which we soon cached with our gold, were of course worth a fortune, but the bitterness of our setback consumed us.
We sought out our hammocks, but lay sleeplessly brooding. "We'll have every stone of it back," I growled, "first thing on rising. . . . Do you know, Barnar, that Harpy was a luckless brute, but what power there is in a pair of wings, eh?"
Barnar nodded thoughtfully. "I believe I take your meaning." Lowering his voice, he added, "You know, Nifft, I find myself inclined to venture for the alleged Unguent. At least this part of the subworld does not seem overpopulous with demonkind."
"Just so. My very thought. Let's have our friend out of his bag, then."
So we unbagged Ostrogall and propped him on a rock. Though we brusquely silenced his obsequious effusions, the loathsome jewelry of his eyes still wooed us with a hundred oily glints of adoration.
"We wish to explore a bit further your proposition regarding the so-called Unguent of Flight," I told him. "I will begin by observing, I hope without painful bluntness, that only a fraction of you remains. How can you then yearn so vehemently to survive?"
"But I do so yearn, Masters, most strenuously! Only plant me neck-deep in my native subworld floor. In days I can release ocular spores, breeze-borne on gossamer, that will slip through the orifices of my countrymen. Soon I'll be peeping from eye-pustules on a thousand demons I've infected, and shall see many wonders as my vigilance steals outward through the subworld."
"Enough!" said Barnar. "Lead us not too vividly to know what saving you accomplishes. Nifft and I have been debating a point that wants some clarification. Vitrol the Gelded, in his Fabulary, reports of the Unguent of Flight that it is: ` . . . demon slime and demon sweat/which man by demon hand-clasp gets,/and otherwise has ne'er got yet.' We wish you to comment on the veracity of this passage."
There was a silence, in which a myriad of apologetic glances overswept Ostrogall's eyes. The silence was broken when the signal cord set up a vigorous clacking—something it had been doing, with scant respite, since our return. We ignored it. "Oh beneficent saviours," the demonstump wheedlingly began, "it torments me that I must, perforce, deny—"
"Silence!" I told him. "We do but test you. We are disposed, soon, to essay the venture you propose to us. In what manner must we prepare ourselves?"
"Oh bounteous, blessed, beautiful benefactors! Your doughty weapons, and the peerless courage that courses through your veins, are all the preparation such men as yourselves—"
"Enough! You are advised of our intent. Be sure that any treachery attempted, when once we have set out together, will be decisively repaid. Since it appears that even in fragmented state you are capable of regeneration, we propose, in the event of your malfeasance, to smear you with pitch and burn you to a crisp. Silence! We seek no further discourse at present."
"I only beg that you set me on some secure ledge, unenveloped, that I may see a bit while I await your pleasure."
There seemed no harm in this. We set him where he had a bit of a view out into the chamber, for which he effusively thanked us. It crossed my mind that his craving for vision must be great indeed, to be so glad of a view which, to him and his kind, must surely be like a vista of ultimate Nightmare.
Barnar sent a terse message on the signal cord, using the signal indicating that the tappers were shutting down for sleep. This must vex Costard, having had no work or word of us for longer than we could estimate. Bunt might at least surmise that we had been about his mission; if so, he would calm the youth if he could. If he couldn't, let Costard seethe. We returned to our hammocks.
"Are we actually going to do it, old friend?" I asked drowsily. I knew we were, and the resolution, though fraught with uncertainty, somehow soothed the anguish of imagining our spilt jewels lying strewn along miles of tunnel floor.
"It would be craven, for one setback, to cease pushing our luck. This is our time, Nifft. We're meant to win. . . ."
We both drifted toward sleep. The knowledge that divergent ambitions must still divide us, once we had all our plunder back up in the world again, was something we were tired enough, and rapt enough in imminent exploits, to put aside in our hearts for the moment. Out in the chamber the whickery whisper of Behemoth legs, the soft, wet sound of a thousand feedings, the faint gibbering of dying demons . . . already, these sounds seemed soothing music to us, home sounds. Great Behemoth, nursing Her own, cradled us like her own children in the bounty of her strength. I slept, a bright orange flea snug in the lair of the tolerant colossus who both fed and protected it.
Ostrogall's voice woke us up. His tone was urgent, wheedling, a low melody of hasty persuasion. When my fogged mind grasped that he was addressing someone else, it brought me bolt upright.
There, not five strides from our hammocks, three orange shapes crouched raptly around the voluble demon-fragment. The glittery pox of Ostrogall's eyes wetly solicited their credence, while his mouth-vent murmured busily.
We recognized two of his hearers: Costard and Bunt—both kilted and stained orange. Costard looked trim enough in the half-naked outfit of kilt, boots, and bandoliers. Ha'Awley Bunt was plump, and his ripply orange flab was not a little reminiscent of larval corpulence.
Our third visitor was a young woman with a handsome, strong-shouldered frame, big-breasted and robustly haunched. On her the short-kilt and buskins were a pleasing costume altogether, though there was nothing mincing in the way she bore her semi-nakedness. The back-sweep of her orange pompadour gave her strong-nosed face the crested look of some winged raptor, though there was an engaging candor in her eyes, which were quick to meet ours when she discovered us looking on.
"Good evening, gentlemen! Your deep sleep hints that you've been hard at work—though not, we gather, at tapping sap." I knew the pleasant alto of her voice. This was Sha'Urley, Bunt's sister, who had briefly presented herself at our supper before we took ship from Dolmen Harbor.
"Uncle!" Costard piped, jumping up from where he crouched near Ostrogall. "Uncle, I've just learned! I me
an, I've just learned what you're doing. How could you not tell me of giants' pap? How could you . . . steal from me?"
"You presumptuous young moron! How can I steal, you ask? I am a thief!" It was a measure of Barnar's fury and flusterment that he had no sharper answer than this, and I shared his rage. What an appalling intrusion, these three overwrought property-owners, fairly twitching with acquisitive impulses! Just now, as we gathered ourselves inwardly for a highly ticklish venture, here was this unruly, contentious little mob dropping down square in our laps.
"You simply refuse to grasp," Ha'Awley Bunt was reproving Costard, "that taking the pap isn't stealing." His weary contempt bespoke long battles between him and Costard since we'd come below. "A mine owner here owns his own apparatus, and owns the right to work his site. But no one owns a Nest, or anything in it! What's found here is the finder's, whoever he may be!"
"What might it be said that I own,"—Costard's voice was a croak of bitter sarcasm—"if I don't own whatever's in this Nest? I'd like you to suggest just what ownership might mean at all, if not—"
"I respectfully remind you," Sha'Urley Bunt told the young man, "that your acceptance of my investment, a substantial sum of gold specie now reposing in your vault above, grants us full partnership and right of entry here now. Let this fact suffice for the moment, honest Costard, and let us ask our tappers here," (she turned to Barnar and me) "about this new matter, this Unguent of Flight . . . ? Do you really contemplate entering the subworld to retrieve it?"
All three of them watched us. We, in turn, glared down at Ostrogall. "Effulgent Ones!" the fragment fluted, answering the menace in our eyes. "I had to speak, to account for myself, or they would have slain me. I had to explain my presence so near to your sleeping selves!"
