by Michael Shea
Barnar snorted, sounding, I felt, exactly like an ox. "Oh, in truth you are a nervy weasel to upbraid me with my honor's core, my love of kith and clan and hearth-land! I'm truly sorry to find you can be such an odious reptile, Nifft, with all your selfish, supple twistings to wriggle loose of your bonded word! To slither out of the obligations of your own sworn oath!"
"Barnar, I was half drunk! How many sentimental, half-drunk quests have you sworn to? You hold me to this one! And in truth, I do acknowledge the vow, I will perform it! But why does it have to come first?"
Below us, in the pale parts of the Queen's hide, a subtle blue network of veins, sunk in Her oily translucence, grew visible. For some moments now a running pack of brutes, back-legged like grasshoppers, their jaws bouquets of thorny tentacles, had run beneath our line of flight, studying us with glinting, metallic eye-bumps. We dropped down across a rib crest in the dorsal topography just as these creatures, cresting it, sprang up at us.
Their legs had hellish thrust; we must needs wheel back hard as a brace of them surged up ravening at our legs. With my feet thrusting for counter-purchase on the air, I two-armed Ready Jack wide left, wide right. Tentacles and twitching leg-stumps rained back down on the marbled valley, where, with a liquid slide, a half-transparent amoebal mass engulfed and dissolved them.
"How," I asked Barnar, "can you have missed seeing what the possession of Pelfer's Facilitators could bring to us!? With the Buskins, Cowl and Gantlets, we could break into Mhurdaal's Manse. We could steal . . . his library."
I know I shuddered at my own words; I had scarce, ere this, allowed myself to look in the face of my own greatest ambition—an ambition steadily a-kindling in me (I now realized) since our capture of the Unguent of Flight had shown me the scope of wealth that we might aspire to. Nor could Barnar hear so fine and wild and moon-drunk a scheme as stealing the Library of Mhurdaal spoken without visible emotion. But in his selfish impatience he shrugged it off, striking the noble thought aside. "You are addicted to chasing legends, Nifft! It is a madness that can yield no final fruit!"
"Gentlemen! Luminous Benefactors!" the demon-head oboed from my hip. "With your forbearance, I beg you to be wiser! All this fury for futurities? Gentlemen, look where you are! Even to me, for whom this is the very hearth of Hell—here, where the armies spawn who sack my kindred's habitation, and 'spoil us of our lives—even to me this is a mighty hall of wonder, and my every eye most avidly imbibes the Muchness and the Suchness of it all! Let me urge you to be where you are, in the moment, and partake of its magnificence."
"You urge a truth there, I suppose," I had to concede. Down in the terrain's crevasses, around licks and ponds of Royal sebum, flocks of winged things jostled amicably enough with multibrachiate competitors, like plains life at the waterholes in the Lulumean savannahs. Big, black shapes crouched half-distinguishable in the blacknesses, with an occasional twitch of importunate hunger. Where the Royal dorsum was white, the buried veins were visible, and down there in the cloudy luminosity of the Queen's deep meat, huge forked arteries convulsed with the slow, implacable authority of Earthquake as somewhere, far deeper, Her colossal heart propounded her relentless vitality.
"How do you, then, Ostrogall," I musingly asked him, "believe that Behemoth came to be?"
"My race, sire, generally feel Mankind could not have fashioned any weapon of such power as She. And therefore we also believe, that as Behemoth is Earthborn, so it must inevitably come to pass that in Her time, She shall be half-conquered, half-possessed by demonkind, as Earth herself has been."
"It makes me love you less to think on this possibility, oh fragmentary demon," Barnar said, "though of course we thank you for your candor."
"But gentlemen," our cephalic cicerone melodiously remonstrated, "we are Life, and live its laws! Why, look here! Is this not living proof leaping thus directly to our gaze? These nastra-haagen, do you not see them? They are demonkind! Living on the very flank of our nation's destroyer!"
He referred to a greenish patch like a thick scab of lichen all forested over with stalks that ended in starburst clusters of sticky red droplets. These honeydew clusters thrust and darted, snatching winged lice smartly from the air with their instant adhesion, and then bending to feed ragged mouths gaping open in the lichen-scab. As we drew more directly overhead we saw some of these adhesive droplets contained inhuman eyes, and only the look of these eyes was needed to prove them demonkind. Ostrogall uttered a crickety, chitinous yodel, and down in the demonpatch ragged lichen-mouths opened, and warbled answers.
As we hovered to allow this colloquy, two large shapes rushed over the next abdominal rib-crest. They were a pair of miniature Behemoths, roughly like the Digger caste in jaw and build but not a tenth the size, though still a match for the biggest parasites. In an instant they had set upon Ostrogall's interlocutors, ripping up great shaggy mats of lichen, crunching the adhesive honeydew stalks like sweet confections. The ragged mouths made a shriller music. A third of the patch was devoured at once, and two more of these little abdominal-patrol Behemoths rushed hither over the rib-line.
I could not help exulting a little. "So! See how rich in strategies and powers abound is your mighty Nemesis! See how Behemoth outgoes your deepest inroads, how she finds you and feeds on you after all!"
Still, I didn't at all like seeing demons flourishing on the Queen's very back—it gave me that sick-kneed, rotten-flooring feeling one gets from brooding too much over demon invasiveness, demon infiltration.
How long can one wrestle such imponderables? "Come on," said Barnar. "Let's go a-milking."
The milking of the giants' pap went swimmingly, until we committed a stupidity that I writhe and blush to report.
We hung above the Queen's flank, looking down on the lapping tides of her spawn. We identified a stratum of Forager pores, both by location and by the succession of Foragers that drank there. Selecting a pore which a sated Forager had just withdrawn from, we came circling carefully down to some five or six fathoms above the abundantly lactescent orifice.
Carefully, we dangled our slender, lidded jars of reinforced leather (dyed orange of course, as were the lines we lowered them by). I dipped mine first into the slow flux of viscosity. I lowered the jar's lip into it, and pulled straight upward. The jar grew heavier, and easier to dip, with each pull. In four passes, my jar was full.
Barnar moved into position and began following suit. Then another Forager reared up to the pore, and began drinking, just below where Barnar was dipping.
Barnar still had just enough room to work, and he did so with wonderful coolness; but in his instinct to work away from the Forager's huge eyes, Barnar began to drop back a bit over the abdominal wall, and pull at his jar more obliquely to fill it. He was working too low, just as our Harpy had done, and I was not alert enough to grasp this right away. Almost at once, one of the same species of spiny horror that had devoured our Harpy vaulted high in an explosive bid to seize Barnar's legs. Ostrogall's shriek of warning gave Barnar an instant's lead, and he swam powerfully ceilingwards.
But he was just a blink too late, for, with the slender, utmost tip of one of its arms, the parasite threw one wrap around Barnar's left ankle.
I flew to his back, seized his collar, and added my power of ascent to his, and very slowly, with terrible effort, we lifted the stubbornly gripping parasite upward, outward from the Queen's flank. Barnar wore stout buskins, but the pain of the monster's grip was unbearably urgent for him.
"No use! Drop down and cut it through," he grunted.
The instant I let go to fly lower, Barnar began inexorably to sink with the parasite's huge weight. I dropped down to hang near the gripping tentacle, and I swung a one-handed stroke against the tentacle with Ready Jack. I maintained my balance, but could not deliver the power I would have managed braced on firm ground. Jack bit only two fingers' depth. The dangling monster writhed, Barnar groaned, and toilsomely swam, and inexorably sank yet more.
The jaws of the nursing Be
hemoth were scarcely two fathoms below us, and we were sinking dead upon them.
I swung another stroke—a deeper bite but still the tentacle would not sunder. Then the Forager sprang up under us.
The parasite of course was not invisible to her—it danced before her eyes and now the great black sabers of her jaws closed slicing through the air. I somersaulted backward, and Barnar rocketed ceilingward, suddenly gripped only by a lightweight fragment of one tentacle. So hard had he been pulling to ascend, that he almost brained himself against the Chamber ceiling before he managed to stop his climb. I chopped the tentacle's writhing remnant free and it plummeted into the Forager's jaws after the rest of the parasite. The Forager consumed the morsel, and returned to her nursing, and Barnar dangled his jar down again, and this time drew it full, and sealed and secured it.
"Oh radiant Benefactors," Ostrogall chirruped, "may I now make bold to beg that you will take me straight from here to the Nest-mouth, and out to my re-planting? I know the straightest way from here, and then you would have done with that little matter, and thenceforth be unencumbered with my humble self."
"You know," mused Barnar, "on this foray, you gave us a bit of moral advice, some theorizing, and a warning that was not untimely. But we made our own way, mostly. You did not even translate for us your squawkings with that mold patch of your kinfolk back there."
"A thousand apologies! They said that takings were rich on the Queen, that there was nothing here to threaten them, and that their kin were colonizing the Royal Dorsum everywhere. I gathered from their dying exclamations that the little breed of Behemoth that devoured them was not previously known to them. It seems as you said, Effulgent One, that the Queen truly abounds in strategies, and swiftly molds her progeny to the great Nest's needs. But most revered gentlemen, I remind you that I shouted you first warning of the thorny star, and I earnestly beseech you not to deny me the re-plantation which my sharing of your dangers here has earned."
We made him, for a while, no answer, rapt as we were in our slow flight out of the Chamber, taking our last leave of this hall of titans. We began to negotiate the tunnels, feeling quite practiced now, deft as fish dodging through rapids. Ostrogall had grown tremulously quiet. "We just don't feel that you really, substantially added to our profit," I told him gently.
"Gentlemen," said the demonstump after a silence, in a tone of ineffable melancholy, "permit me to anticipate you. May I presume to . . . hasten ahead in this conversation, as it were? For somehow I feel there is a question you wish to come to. May we entertain this question at once, without a preliminary visit to the jaws of some loathsome grub?"
In part, I was almost moved to smile at this, and in equal part the demon's cynical certainty irked me. "I'm afraid," I began, "I find your tone a bit—"
"Please, Oh Effulgent Saviour! Only hear if I do not touch your very thought!"
"Speak on, then."
"The two of you rightly imagine great wealth to be had in the subworld by such airborne privateers as you now are. And you have also, I venture to guess, rightly seen that you will shortly have a unique opportunity for such a plundering tour of my world. For soon a New Queen will go forth on a Nesting Flight, with her own terrible army of Foragers and other castes thundering in the van.
"Their pillage and rapine will leave a raw and bleeding swathe, fertile like a furrow cut in rich soil. Naked wealth will sprawl from broken walls and toppled vaults and hoards exhumed, and all this wealth's defenders will be gone, consumed as in a ravening holocaust. It is an opportunity beyond the wildest dreams of any thief, if you will pardon the expression.
"The question, then, that I have mentioned, is: might not my company on this plundering tour, and my expertise in demonry, greatly speed your self-enrichment on this foray? My answer, revered Masters, is Yes! And might I not agree to do this, you further ask? And again, I answer Yes! I will do this, if only you will at last and in earnest swear to plant me in my native home again! May, oh may I beg you to promise this sincerely at the last?"
Nettled by something unflattering in the way the demon framed these propositions, we were very slow to answer, though we knew at once, of course, that we would strike the bargain.
When the Bunts and Costard had brought down our payment, Sha'Urley had brought Niasynth with her, for aboveground the sunlight had exhausted her, carefully though they shaded her, and she craved this brief respite underground. We found her at the ancient-young woman's side in the operations nook when we returned with our Royal plunder. Bunt and Costard snored in our hammocks, worn by days of hard driving and hasty dealing. We paid our respects to Niasynth, who lay propped at a resting but wakeful angle in a bed Sha'Urley had improvised for her. I felt a kind of kinship with this pale, resurrected woman, lying just-delivered from the gulf we were bound to. We both knew what Time was in the worlds below.
"I rejoice, sister," I told her low, meaning it, "that we have worked your liberation."
"You have worked mine as well, I think," Sha'Urley smiled. "Will you believe that I am suddenly weaned of this strange ambition of my brother's? For one lump consideration, I have relinquished to him all further revenues from our familial holdings. So let's say good-bye, Nifft, as friends only, with no business in it."
And indeed we embraced most sweetly, though I confess that her defection cost me a qualm. Was Bunt bound for mishap, and his sister sensing it? Should I not, after all, get the remaining fiftyweight in hand before yielding the pap?
We helped her get Niasynth into the bucket with her; she supported that frail escapee in her arms, for Niasynth seemed barely strong enough to stand unaided. "I know it is hard at first to bear," I told that antique nymph, "but is it not glorious to feel the sun again?"
She took my hand between her own and kissed it. So cool her hands and lips! So smooth! "It is a joy so severe," she said, "it fills me with terror that I cannot hold such life, that it will tear my heart!"
Before Sha'Urley bade us close the hatchway on them, she nodded toward the snoring Bunt and Costard. "They are close as death about their projects for the pap. My brother's is perhaps not hard to guess, though henceforth I'll know as little as I can of it. Costard, in making much of his own secrecy, has let slip enough to indicate that he is interested in the `cattle-raising business' as he puts it. I would not wither enterprise in bud by speaking words of ill omen. I'll just say I'm glad we have other fish to fry, Niasynth and I."
When we had pulled the lever that sent down the counterweights, and the bucket had climbed rattling away, we stood gazing on the sleeping Bunt and Costard. Slick and shiny in their dye, they seemed to sweat through fevered dreams. I felt the strangest little touch of fear to wake them, to put them in possession of our jars of Nest-Magic.
* * *
And when we had wakened them, still we temporized. We nagged them about the fiftyweight still owing; we reiterated our right to a tithe of their future revenues; we stressed that we wanted caretakers topside to assure we could make our eventual exit without trouble.
"We've hired two men from a neighboring mine," Bunt soothed. "Hatchways and pulleys and lines and such will be ship-shape. They know of your eventual emergence—we've told them you'll be bringing up larval scrapings, for sale to the perfumeries of the Great Shallows. Come now—may we hold what we've so dearly purchased?"
"Yes Uncle!" Costard chimed. "Come now—fair's fair!"
There was nothing else to do. I felt the jar's heft—I saw a stickiness about its lip that breathed out a breath of the Brood Chamber's awe to my nostrils. Sheer, delirious sorcery! It felt like doom, it felt like danger, to surrender it to these men—to Bunt with his urbane smile of thanks, ambition burning deep within his thoughtful eyes, to Costard with his bright vindictive gaze, his smile of youthful triumph. . . .
"No fakery here," Bunt beamed at us, too elated for complete tact. "I feel it past doubt, the Mother's power humming in this ichor! You are remarkable men, my friends—the things you have accomplished!"
"Our greatest deeds, we hope," I bowed, "are still to come."
"So, indeed, are ours!" Bunt answered, bowing in his turn.
XXI
The Chosen One's wings cleave the air like bright swords
That scythe down a harvest of doomed demon lords.
The Chosen One's jaws carve her empire-to-be.
Her glittering eyes possess all that they see!
IN THE LAST few hours before setting forth on her Nesting Flight, the Young Queen was courted by her suitors. These males had a madcap air. They weren't a fourth her size; they were blacker, glossier-bodied, and more tapered and slender than she. Their wings (which would lift them, or one of them, to the raptures of actual mating during the Nesting Flight) were like the blades of slim poniards, and their bodily movements were darting and veering and hectic to a degree conspicuously surpassing all the handmaids seething round the young Monarch, though the suitors in their turn dwarfed these worker castes.
On the whole the young Princes put one in mind of court-gallants at a Jarkeladd wedding feast, with their caps raffishly aslant, the bright, chased hilts of their shortswords conspicuously agleam on their hips, their eyes bright with wine and readiness for a wrestle, a sprightly jump-up, or some other such jovial exploit.
The Young Queen, by contrast, seemed to sit in state. She all but filled her half of the titanic chamber alloted her pre-nuptial growing time. And grown she had, till her passage through the tunnels looked in doubt. But the Princes were not shy of her. Incessantly they courted her; each in turn proferred a gallant obeisance, and shared with her a quick, lascivious antennal touching, then darted down along her body, touching her further, tasting her, it seemed, with little lovers' nibbles at her legs, her thorax, her elegantly slender abdomen. They were powerless, it seemed, to get enough of her divine effluvium.
It was a relatively subtle thing which first signalled the imminence of the Nesting Flight. The Young Queen's wings began to vibrate. The amplitude of their oscillation was minute, but immensely powerful. A faint hum sounded through the chamber.
