by Michael Shea
In our reaching downward to besmear our bootsoles, the Unguent's power was revealed to us, for the downthrust of our hands lifted us half a fathom off the ground.
"Without exertion of your conscious will to move earthward," Ostrogall told us, "your almost every movement spurns the ground beneath, and lifts you."
Our feet anointed, yelping and laughing with discovery like boys, arms and legs dogpaddling, we climbed into the torchlit gloom of the cavern. What fierce, rare joy it was! We quickly learned a swimming motion that drove us with increasing accuracy wherever we listed. "Let's try the tunnel, for speed," I cried. Were we preparing for what followed? I cannot think so—it did not seem so. We found we could swim up the tunnel we had come down much faster than either of us could run it.
Lust to possess this power in quantity soon turned our flight back down toward the cavern. The trick of swimming groundwards we brought off with some few bruises, discovering that we must will the specific rate of descent as well as the mere direction. Now, bowls ready, facing the scaly wall . . . we paused.
"You know, Barnar," I said, "what would be simpler for the Secondaries than to post a rumor of dire consequences? What could be easier than, by mere rumor, to minimize the taking of all seekers here, and thus prolong the cannibal profit of those same Secondaries' enterprise?"
"The very notion gnaws my thoughts as well!" my friend exclaimed.
Ostrogall's sharp bleat of protest was muffled when I sheathed him in his bag. "I'll be completely frank with you, Barnar," I went on. "I feel a powerful, unshakeable conviction that we are safe to fill our jars completely with this glorious ointment. How unlikely it is, after all, that the Secondaries would actually annihilate this huge source of profit, in punishment of pilferage!"
Barnar nodded vigorously, eyes shining. "You speak my very mind and heart, old friend! I will say more. I will tell you that in this inexplicable yet all-compelling conviction that I share with you, in this I recognize one of those moments of truth given to all men, one of those life-altering gambles that the soul must make to lift itself to greater destiny than was at first ordained it!"
Ostrogall grew shrill in his pouch, and I cried him, "Peace, thou hellish fragment! You have yourself allowed that none have dared to try this vaunted limit! It is a threat, no more, a bugbear whose sole potency lies in that none have ventured to assay it! Now be mute, or die herewith!"
Perhaps some half conscious vestige of caution led Barnar and me to trade a look, then swiftly act in tandem, abbreviating as fully as might be the act of harvesting the Unguent. With shaving sweeps of our swords' edges, we scraped off bladefuls of the waxen goo, and these in turn we scraped off into our jars. Twice, thrice . . . four sweeps, and we had filled and stoppered these containers, sheathed our blades, snatched up our torches, and swum into the air towards the tunnel we'd come down by.
This spontaneous haste of our departure proved fortunate. Almost at once, the vaulted stone entombing us groaned, and cracked, and hugely shuddered. A ripple of movement passed along the scaly wall of demonskin.
Madly we swam the air up-tunnel, bellowing, "Bunt! Costard! Make for the surface!" These shouts evinced more fellow-feeling than common sense, for the shriek of splintering stone, and the clamor of flying shards through which we flew, must render needless such verbal warnings.
Our tunnel collapsed behind us as we flew into the antechamber, and the gust of air it squeezed out after us set us tumbling, our torches blown out like candles. Here came Bunt and Costard sprawling out of their own tunnel, likewise collapsing behind them, as even now the antechamber shuddered and heaved and spilled out towering fragments from its riven walls in colossal slow collapse around us. We swooped towards the fallen pair. Their dropped bowls of Unguent skittered away across the convulsing floor as we seized them one-handed by their belts—I Costard, Barnar Bunt—and swam one-handed with them for the entryway.
Our flight proved only slightly hampered by the burden of our companions. We arrowed still quicker than a man might sprint on firm ground, which was far faster than any man might actually run across that heaving, buckling stone.
Yet the "O" of the entryway was still far, too far to reach. Then the gallery's roof and walls and floor heaved violently together like a clenching fist. Again a surge of squeezed-out air accelerated us—shot us wheeling out the collapsing entry, as a dart is powered from a blowpipe's muzzle.
Ahead, across the dancing subworld floor, Sha'Urley had got clear a hundred strides or so, though she labored with the slack and blood-bright shape of Niasynth across her shoulder.
"Get a grip on them as we swoop near!" I shouted at Bunt and Costard. With both their hands free, they got a firm though awkward hold on the struggling women, and we had all four of them aloft. We swam one-handed through the ruddy air, and dared to glance back. We saw the accursed hill of stone erupt, spraying wheeling boulders through the subworld sky.
Four black, titanic Talons sprouted from the subworld floor. Shedding stone, they thrust up, and up, and up—reached near a third the distance to the stony sky. There, though rooted at the wrist, they stirred and swayed, free, after an eon's burial, to move once more.
And it seemed the great star-pupiled eye, bloody sun to this fiendish domain, beheld with grieving joy this fragment of its former self, resurgent in its captive sight.
XVIII
Reach up thy claw!
To rise one world is given.
Live still in woe,
Still one stone sky from heaven.
"THUS," SHA'URLEY TOLD US. "Pluck them sharp like roots . . . see how her flesh heals whole and scarless where I've pulled them out?"
We had laid Niasynth in a recess of the ravine wall, having retreated some few miles from the Talons. These Talons of 'Omphalodon filled half our sky, sluggishly clawing the air, as if still disbelievingly testing their disinterment. The Unguent of Flight, for any others who might now come seeking it, must be a prize obtained more through a mountain climber's than a spelunker's skills.
The sundered network of demon veins that pierced Niasynth's body dribbled her own bright human blood until we plucked them out. We all worked intently at this, while Sha'Urley, with her poignard's edge, tenderly shaved off the last slabs of demonmeat from the young captive's limbs. As the Secondary's putrid substance fell away, Niasynth's skin, though still drawn and pale, resumed a youthful luster, a glow it must have worn long centuries gone when she was taken. Thus she resumed a beauty destined to be dust in ages past, but for the nefandous immortality that had engulfed it here, time out of mind. At length, her groanings done, her brow unknotted, clean and whole, she slept.
We moved away from her, as present business brought the five of us all eye to eye. Bunt had evidently prepared some grave remonstration, but Costard, forestalling him, bleated out, "Uncle Barnar, by the Crack, how could you?"—his very voice cracking on the question.
Barnar and I did trade—I do confess—one quick look that weighed denial. But we chose in the end a manly frankness. I showed Costard a condolent smile, and thwacked his shoulder. "We took a gamble, and lost."
"You took a gamble, and we lost our Unguent of Flight!" The petulant young dolt seemed really to be losing his voice, so badly was it breaking, his little ferret's eyes fairly popping under his low-slung brows. "You two came flying out! You can hardly keep on the ground right now!"
"It's hard getting the knack of willing oneself down, Nephew," Barnar explained to him. "With our extremities anointed, most casual movements act to thrust us aloft. We are just now learning to think ourselves steadily aground without being wholly occupied with the thinking."
"Let's just come to the point," urged Sha'Urley, managing a fairly friendly smile. "It's pretty plain you've come out packing a gluttonous excess of the Unguent—whence else the catastrophe? Whence that?"
She swept her hand towards the towering Talons. And just then, as we looked, three Foragers swarmed up one of 'Omphalodon's digits. We saw the flash of their comparativel
y tiny jaws, saw little bright rills of the demon's blood—and then saw what we might have expected, but were stunned to view: the Foragers swam, legs flailing, into the air.
Airborne, a madness seized them—nothing in their nature prepared them for this. Their legs pumped wildly and they careened away into the ruby gloom, their frenzy for the solid ground lofting them ever higher. Yet even as we watched, a dozen more Foragers converged on the Talons, drawn perhaps by the smell of 'Omphalodon's blood. Of these, some two or three—treading where the demon flesh was torn or washed with gore—maintained their footing, and fed. Meanwhile, we saw in the widespread flux of Behemoths—formerly converging toward the distant fortress—a rippling directional change towards a new cynosure: the Talons of 'Omphalodon.
Awesome though this spectacle was, narrow questions of property very soon re-engrossed our companions. "The only real question here, then," resumed Sha'Urley, "is will you, or will you not, give the three of us some Unguent, we whose shares of it your greed foreclosed?"
"Can we properly speak of `shares,' " I asked, "of something whose having lies wholly in the chance of the taking? You, for instance, were detained not by us, but by—most creditably, to be sure!—young Niasynth in her extremity. Meanwhile, the esteemed Ha'Awley, and young Costard here, were prevented of their so-called shares by their failure to keep their footing, and their Unguent, when the ground became unsteady. As you will readily grant, we did everything we could to aid you during that upheaval, but to put it bluntly, it is the first rule of adventuring that each man must look to his own take."
Costard had more squawking to do, and the Bunts, both of them, had further casuistries to propound. We remained firm, though it grew increasingly difficult to remain civil at the same time. Scanning about me for some relief, I saw the Talons' lower portions now all befurred with Foragers, while the upper joints were beclouded with more Foragers in scrambling flight. The immense digits flexed furiously, and flexed again, and we could hear the faint splintery report of crushed Behemoths, whose minuscule debris fell from the workings of those giant joints. But still the flood of Foragers converged. I looked skywards.
Did 'Omphalodon's blood-weeping Eye up there, moon of this lower place—did his Eye move slightly? Scan more particularly this long-hid, new-born part of himself? And weep the more to see it freed but partly, still one sky lower than the sun-burnished heaven that was his ancient aim?
"Enough, Costard," Sha'Urley cried—for only he still harangued us now. "You deafen us all to no good! Is it not plain that our friends here would sooner leap naked into flames than surrender the least tittle of their takings?" She turned to me. "Do you know, Nifft, looking at you now, I almost have to smile, even to laugh. . . ." And indeed, first she smiled, and then she laughed—quite genuinely, it seemed. "You must forgive my saying it," she added when she could, "but I see you there, such an intense, crouched, piggish, greedy apparition at this moment, all tightened up right down to your bunghole at the bare notion of letting one tenth-pennyweight of your possession go!"
"I'm a little saddened," was my moderate response, "that you deem this crass turn of tongue to be warranted with me. I can only declare the simple truth, that Barnar and I have acted at every step with the best intentions toward yourselves. And we stand ready even now—that is, if we fail not of your standards of transportation—to carry you all back to the Nest's comparative safety. There awaits, after all, that first endeavor we stand contracted for, and from which, I believe, you projected the only profit that we engaged to bring you? For now, indeed, we plainly have power to earn that further payment you stand sworn to, Ha'Awley? Eh? While we stand dithering, the milking of the Royal Mother remains to do."
This moved them, though it did not silence Costard, who cavilled as we tied our climbing line into harnesses. "It's just so unthinkably unfair, Uncles! You steal a piece of demon from my nursery, you use my property to locate and obtain this marvellous Unguent, and then (ignoring for the moment how you greedily ruined everybody else's takings) then you refuse—"
Here Barnar gently clamped the young man's mouth and the back of his head between two huge, scarred hands. "Hear me now, Costard," he said with an almost tender urgency. "You do not own the Nest. Once and for all, you own only the shafts and hoses and pumps wherewith you rob the Nest. And had you been presented with this piece of demon, you would not have thought to make any use of it whatever. And had you learned from it of the Unguent, you would never have survived the going after. And had you survived the going after, would you have paid an arm or a leg to the Tolltaker?
"So hear me now. If you speak a single word more—a single word!—I will set you afoot and let you walk back by yourself as best you can." Experimentally, he took his hand off Costard's mouth. At last, nothing came out.
We tied loops of line that the Bunts and Costard could sit in. For Niasynth we tied a more complex harness that she might lie in. Her eyes came open as we laid her in it.
She took Sha'Urley's tenderly proferred sips of wine. At the feel of terrestrial vintage in her throat, Niasynth's face convulsed as with a painful sweetness. At the taste of the wine, her wondering gaze seemed to remember earthly soil, and sky, and sun. Tears swelled and spilled from her eyes. "Oh sweet powers, what have I become in this Eternity? Have I not grown most loathsome to look on?"
Sha'Urley leaned near her smiling. In truth, that comely Dolmenite had a warm-hearted streak in her, whatever cross-grained tempers she might show.
"No, sweet Niasynth, you are lovely still. A lean and vulpine beauty's yours, as though you'd not passed thirty summers' age. Drink more. Thus. Now rest. You are with friends. You will go up and live under the sun once more. . . ."
I tied the men's two lines to the front of my belt, as Barnar did those of the women to his. I stood aside a moment to unbag Ostrogall, and though ill use and outrage flashed from his hundred dissimilar eyes, his speech was flutes and hautboys once again. "Ineffable ones! We now may equally rejoice, may we not? You to have the marvel I promised you, and I am to be re-planted in my natal soil—in some suitable little streambed not far from here, perhaps?"
"We do rejoice, estimable demonstump!" I answered. "And we regard you with the fondest gratitude. Up and away then, Barnar?"
"Up and away with a will," Barnar cried. We had begun learning how to stay aground by maintaining a half-conscious thought of doing so, a kind of mental anchor in the earth that yet let us turn our thoughts elsewhere. Now, with one swimming motion and a will to soar, we smoothly climbed up through the wine-red gloom. We flew along the ravine, at perhaps a half a furlong's altitude above it.
"Please note, my Masters," Ostrogall quaveringly ventured, "how I've served you. I've brought you here safe and enriched you, O my luminous benefactors! Surely you would not dream of denying me the simple, easy re-plantation I—"
"Peace, Oh Fractional One!" I answered. "The fact is, Ostrogall, now that it comes to the point of honoring our contract, we find an insuperable revulsion arising in our hearts at the bare notion of doing anything to prolong your execrable demon life for even one instant, now that we securely possess the Unguent we craved, and can find our own unaided way back to the Nest."
"It is a deep instinctual loathing," Barnar elaborated, "of human for demonkind. We find that we cannot, even with the best will in the world, withstand its atavistic ferocity."
"On the other hand," I added, "it seems unfair to inflict on you anything other than your true fate, the one we saved you from. Therefore, in a gesture of decency, and respectful acknowledgment of your honesty with us, we will bear the labor of carrying you back to the Nursery, and the jaws of your destined grub."
I will confess that Barnar and I were not entirely without a certain policy in saying what we did. The eye-studded demon seemed extremely upset. His vocal oboe had a cracked reed. "I must say, oh most effulgent Karkmahnite, most august Chilite—I must say, and of course I apologize most abjectly for doing so, I must say that you—and I say it in all cringing
humility—that you take a really vile, verminous, villanous, odious, shameful and despicable advantage of my relative powerlessness in your hands. I say this with the profoundest and most reverent respect for yourselves, of course."
"Of course." I nodded as I swam, as though we were speaking face-to-face. I was growing quite used to conversations with this monstrous eye-crusted head that rode on my hip. "Nonetheless, I don't think I would be judged over-villainous by anyone who studiously reflects on this question: What could I rightfully be said to owe to the headpiece of a polyocular balloon of demonslime like yourself, whose pestilent life I plucked from death's jaws in the first place?"
A Forager hurtled above us, mad legs milling the air. Far ahead of us, two others plunged, describing long, flat parabolae toward the plain. Their smattering of the Unguent, acquired by climbing up 'Omphalodon's palm, dwindled in power, it seemed, with use. And indeed we ourselves could feel a diminution of the lift engendered by each stroke of our hands and feet. Though we carried a pair of adults apiece, and some fiftyweight of gems each, the work of flight had been at first easier than swimming. Already we felt that we breasted a more laborious medium, and were stroking harder for the same buoyancy.
"It would seem," Barnar offered, "that the Unguent is consumed proportionably to the weight it bears." And with this discovery, it panged me to the heart to think that we must surely dip into our precious store of the marvellous ointment to finish our present journey. But I can report with some well merited pride that I resisted the very powerful urge to set our companions afoot and thereby conserve our treasure. We toiled on—and more and more toilsome it grew—and at length we did indeed dip into our treasured hoards, and re-anoint our hands and feet.
Meanwhile Ostrogall had not fallen mute. "Only consider, venerated ones!" he urged, "how I have produced for you that which I promised! Have I not undeniably benefitted you? See how you fly! Consider what other treasures you now have power to take unscathed! How, therefore, can you not feel some shred of . . . let's not call it honor, let's call it simple equity? Eh?"
