by Michael Shea
The seethe amid her servitors quickened. So did the circulation of her Suitors.
The rate of her wings' tremoring increased. They gave off a silver-blue sheen, flashing ever so slightly in the cyanic glow. Still more her Suitors quickened, and her retainers—among these, Diggers, who surged into the tunnel and began to attack its walls with shovelling strokes of their huge jaws.
The note of the Young Queen's wings rose higher, like a plucked lute-string now, a thrilling, silvery tone, while the wings themselves were ablaze with reflected light. The Suitors now began to rush among the mob of retainers, herding them, hastening them, it seemed, toward the tunnel. And there the mass of workers now surged, an auger with a thousand jaws. Filling their crops with earth, they chewed away the tunnel walls with incredible speed, leaving a grander corridor in their wake.
The Young Queen stirred. Her immobile legs arched, and lifted her. She stood a moment, a marvel of nature and yet so burnished, so sculpted, that she seemed also like some great and ingenious engine of war. Then she ran in the wake of her army.
She plunged into a half-darkness, for her servitors devoured half the fungal light source as they carved a larger way for their mistress. The boiling vanguard of workers and Princes gnawed away at the rim of light far ahead, and the Young Queen was a running shadow eerily sketched here and there in the following dark: a flashing thigh-joint, the glinting hull of her tapered thorax, the cerulean corruscation of one eyeglobe.
Until the tunnels in their descending confluence grew grander. Then under the high, blue vaults, the Young Queen ran with her army coalescing around her. Shoulder to shoulder, dense like some glittery fluid, the army of workers poured flanking her, trailing her, running ahead to the limit of vision. She ran high-prowed, towering amid them, her silver wings shimmering, two mighty swords about to be wielded. Diggers and Foragers were prominent in the legions most closely surrounding her. In the vanguard where the Princes ran, the army was a perfect mix of castes, all moving locked in their single furious rhythm of onslaught.
Here came the onrushing Nest-mouth, a crimson window on a rolling plain. The army poured out of it unhesitant, a mad cascade. The Princes plunged out onto the air, which their wakening wings, militant sabres, assaulted.
The Young Queen swept toward the portal. 'Omphalodon's Eye appeared in the distant vault. It had turned, by an unmistakable fraction, and its alien immensity—undeniably, inscrutably—noted the Young Monarch mounting on the subworld air, her imperial wings coming alive with the hum of a million bowstrings.
And out we flew after her, Barnar and I, though we swooped down the face of the hell-wall, hanging close above the army itself. Out in the gulf beyond us the Young Queen, in what seemed a dance of pure exuberance, swept through great arcs and counter-arcs, flew arabesques across the demon sky. The Suitors, nimble black acrobats, streaked near her and away, near and away, like boys vying for notice, seeming to woo her with a kind of comic verve. Their gamesome hectoring inspired the Young Queen to even dizzier sweeps. The Royal rout of courtship rolled out across the plain, as the army poured glittering below, a pursuing river.
This was how to harrow hell—we had the trick of it at last! We each had coils of line, and stoutly tied swag-nets, and we had all our limbs free for flying because of the stout leathern harnesses round our middles, to hang our bags from and our other gear. This included a quiver of light harpoons and fishing tridents, furnished from Dry Hole by Sha'Urley's swordswomen, a small service deducted from the fiftyweight still owed us by the Bunts. Thus geared, we had sought out the Nuptial Chamber, and lingered there through seven sleeps before this hour had arrived. We took our ease, and stored up rest, trusting Ostrogall's vigilance to wake us at need.
Now the army rivered below us out onto the plain. High behind us it still poured from the Nest-mouth. Two miles of Behemoths branching across the subworld floor. "You behold the most dreaded catastrophe that can befall my race," wailed Ostrogall from his holster on my hip. "Look! Look to the Talons of 'Omphalodon!"
Though far down along the horizon, the Talons towered plainly visible, the more so in that they were all white bone now—that is, wherever they could be glimpsed through the enveloping boil of Behemoths. The colossal skeleton still clenched and thrashed, and now around its wrist the Behemoths' heaped dead rose in a small mountain of crushed debris. Slight slaughter! Behemoth's fecundity, as we now understood, was inexhaustible, and, although the Tertiary demon's claws displayed a powerful vitality that seemed undiminished by their decortication, we could see where the swarm was beginning to gnaw chunks from the very bones themselves.
"Every Nest in a hundred leagues of here's drawing meat from it," Barnar said. "That Tertiary flesh will have been coming to our own Nest these five or six days past."
"I think we can trust Behemoth's stomach to conquer whatever her jaws have conquered," I answered.
Yet who could know? I believe we both rued an accident of which, though wholly innocent, we were the unwitting causes, and which had brought such perilous sustenance to the jaws of the Behemoths we had grown to hold in awe, and almost to revere.
"Oh luminous masters," cried Ostrogall, "how can you think demonkind profits from this meal? Behold 'Omphalodon's Eye—do you see triumph there?" The great Eye's bloody leakage was profuse—indeed, everywhere on the plains, the rubescent streams and rivers seemed to be in spate, and thickly foaming within their channels. It was only later that this facile riposte of Ostrogall's began to echo unpleasantly in my thoughts. What, after all, were it best for him that we should think, if not that Behemoth had demonkind in full retreat, and that there was no ultimate harm in letting a certain particular demon be re-planted and continue his existence?
At that moment, though, prodigious 'Omphalodon's grieving gaze calmed our fears, buoyed our hearts, even as his Unguent buoyed our bodies. We'd stolen this bliss of flight from the Tertiary's very hide—what else could live down here that we need dread?
The forces thundering below us mantled the open plain like a shuddery, glossy garment. The army's first plunder was a league-long caravan of giant wains. The cargo of each wain was a single huge cottony sphere, each one perhaps twice the size of an Angalheim mead hall.
This caravan's course had been head-on to ours. It had wheeled about at the army's first appearance, but so sudden was the legions' onset that only now was the last of the great line of vehicles sluggishly wheeling round, its scaly drovers lashing their huge batrachian teams to a retreat.
"These A'Rak eggsacs are purchased from the Secondary Subworld, for the defense of fortresses," Ostrogall told us.
"Purchased with what commodity?" I asked.
"I, ah, frankly do not know."
"Purchased with human captives then, I'd guess," said Barnar.
"Candidly I tell you, I do not know, effulgent ones!"
But already the vanguard of Behemoths broke like a wave on the wains; the great cottony spheroids spilled out and were overswarmed. A thousand jaws sliced the slack bags to ribbons—and a spill of infant spiders, each no bigger than a war chariot-and-pair, leaked wiggling and twiddling out. "They grow to hunt my countrymen and Behemoth indiscriminately," enlarged Ostrogall, "but we tolerate them because, one time in four, they can bring a Forager down."
What a feast ensued upon the hatchlings! The Behemoths seemed to find their prey a choice confection—each spiderling just three bites large—and they gorged with every evidence of gusto.
Above, the Queen and her eager consorts were unconcerned, showing appetite for love alone; gigantically they cavorted in the subworld sky, the Suitors still swooping close to their belusted, then away, while the young Nest Mother in her mad majesty impassioned them with ever more dizzying aerobatics. We watched enthralled the plenipotency of our great guides and allies. Above us great Heliomphalodon wept. All demonkind, it seemed to us in that moment, lay belly up, surrendered for the taking.
Shag Margold's Second
Interjection
S
AZMAZM, A GREAT DEMON WARRIOR of the Tertiary Subworld, was betrayed by the wizard Wanet-Ka, whom he engaged to convey him up to the Prime Subworld, past the immemorial locks and guards that constrain his titanic ilk to their benthonic bastions. Once elevated to that lesser hell, Sazmazm purposed to win easy empire, thence afterwards to scourge the surface world. How the wizard tricked the demon is related in The Fishing of the Demon-Sea.
Sazmazm's lust to rise from his domain was, like 'Omphalodon's, a lust for light. And monstrous though these Tertiaries were, who can fail to find a grandeur in their doomed upward striving? Some authorities aver that these ambitions were in any case suicidal; that sunlight would be instant death to these deepest-born of demonkind. We have not as yet—Thanks be!—had occasion to test this proposition.
Arguably, Nifft's fever to enter the Manse of Mhurdaal is a species of just this sort of light-lust. Mhurdaal, in the austerest, ice-blasted heights of the Kolodrian Ghaanack range, Earth's awful pinnacle, built his Manse near the end of the Amber Millennium. This awesome citadel he conceived expressly to house his precious Library.
The rare and ancient tomes which this legendary bibliotrove of Mhurdaal's comprises are only half its fabled wonder. It holds as well no less than a hundred of the Peripatextual Parchments, also called the Nomad Books and the Vella Viatica. These folios of immortal vellum, blank of any permanent imprintation, are haunted by the ghosts of great works lost in lost millennia. Between these Parchments' undying bindings those epochal, obliterated books find intermittent housing, and take the form of print again. More, the reader, on beholding, is instantaneously endowed with perfect comprehension of whatever vanished tongue the migrant tome is writ in. Thus what is said of Mhordaal's Library may be credited, that it is our world's deepest labyrinth of lore, a maze of windows looking out upon a wider cosmos, whence the raptured reader may gaze out across the rooftops of a thousand histories.
Nevertheless Nifft's ardor for the Library does not seem entirely bent upon scholarly illumination. Indeed, I must blush for the predominantly commercial ambitions which those catacombs of sapience seem to awaken in my friend.
But he is, after all, a thief, and one in the throes of a transport of avarice.
—Shag Margold
XXII
Darkness fell about my feet,
A mantle I had shed.
My face the gladsome breeze did greet—
I'd lost hope of a joy so sweet
Among the worse-than-dead.
I CANNOT describe us as footsore, when at last we swam the air wearily Nest-wards again from that foray, from that ransacking of whole demon nations, from that long, delirious fugue of discovery and plunder, the like of which I know life will never again afford me.
Since our setting-forth in the Young Queen's train, nigh on two months had passed, as we later learned to reckon the time. All we knew at that juncture was that the interval we had endured below was a series of little eternities, each one nested in the next like those cunning boxes crafted in the Minuskulons.
No, footsore we were not. But sore in every other fibre of ourselves we surely were. For we flew laden to the very limit of the Unguent's power to lift us. From our middles hung our hempen nets bulging with ten times our weight in demon-loot. We looked like the loaded booms of cargo cranes, dangling our pendant bales of infernal swag.
Flying this heavy was a labor every bit as hard as swimming, and swimming, I might add, in cold water that saps your heat, for both our physical strength and the lifting power of the Unguent were burned off us at a fierce rate. Our only way of resting was a liberal reanointment with the Unguent. When we re-smeared our hands and feet, we could, for a while, tread air with little labor, and regain our breath.
But the drag of our weight wore down the Unguent merely in keeping us aloft, whether we trod air, or swam full-out. Rests were relatively brief, then, and toil was the rule, for we were loathe to use up Unguent unless we were near the limit of our strength. League after league we grunted through the ruby gloom, pulling with our solid sinews at the melting substance of the air, the two of us like a pair of laborious apes clambering along miles of invisible vines.
This was most unlike what one thinks of as "flying." How clearly, at moments, did I recall that stab of delirious jubilation in the heart when we first climbed the air beside the wall of 'Omphalodon's buried palm. This long labor was nothing like that joy.
Now we again had, not too distantly in view, the wall of the Broken Axle Mountain-roots; indeed, we even now began to discern in that far wall the particular purplish smudge of darkness that might be the mouth of our own Nest.
Such was our anger with one another, however, Barnar's and mine, that I might almost say we were indifferent to this vision of our journey's accomplishment. I scarcely saw the actual mountain wall because my erstwhile friend's brute, immovable will was like a wall before my eyes. I'd been hammering at it for weeks now.
"Of the Corcyrene Codex, I will cease to speak," I told him. "Let us forget the fact that, among those who know, there is absolute consensus that in the Corcyrene Codex the Star-Ladder is to be found. But let the Star-Ladder pass, I say! We have no interest in walking the Galactic Path, nor in going to the Mill of Time, the white-hot engine where Eternity's ground out, and a skilled thief can scoop up years of new life with his hands. . . .
"But let that pass, I say—it is perhaps too slight a thing to be prized. Let us rather consider a different volume that is, like the Codex, also to be found in Mhurdaal's Library. Let us confine our computations to one sole volume—the Handbook of Hapidamnos. Inscribed therein by Dastardosthenes is the command spell of the Auric Plague.
"Just weigh this with me a moment Barnar, please! Picture it with me. An entire town—a city stricken with the Auric Pest. This plague strikes all, in hours! Not a man or woman standing, all lying helpless in fever, all of them, sweating gold! Little nuggets bead out from their pores! They lie sodden for days, shedding a bright golden gravel till their bed-slats groan with its weight! Now picture ourselves, with some choice companions, going round, filling pokes and bags and bales with purest gold, tidying the citizens' beds and collecting the municipal effluvium of wealth. It's incalculable, the yield of this plague! And all the stricken fold heal, they stand up fine and healthy—though gaunt and hungry to be sure—after three days' time. What a beneficent form of pillage, and how stupendously lucrative!
"Barnar, with all respect, I merely urge you to weigh more carefully the kind of wealth you so peremptorily dismiss! The Auric Plague is costly to deploy, I grant this candidly. It must be windborn, and so we must engage a witch to capture an elemental in the Harakan Hills of Hagia. But once deployed—"
"Have done, Nifft! Will you not desist? How your voice has come to grate on my nerves! Spare me these mad fugues of ambition. To squeeze gold from others is the thief's vocation and essential art. The difference between us, it seems, is that I am a Thief-for-a-time, a Thief-while-I-must-be kind of thief, while you are a thief down to the least lizardly bone of you!"
We swam—with already toilsome strokes—across a wetland of red pools fringed by polypous stalks and plumes and tentacles which were freckled with eyes and writhing ceaselessly. Airborne shapes—a polyglot rabble of pterid demons—haunted the wetland, swooping down at the crimson pools, spearing up swallows from the wine-red lagoons. Jawed things leapt out of the pools and dragged down careless drinkers. We swam a bit higher in the air to get above the buffeting of the the thirsty prey's wings and the din of their cries.
"With a little help from you," Barnar resumed, his eyes not meeting mine, his tone resolute and tired of the whole debate, "I can summon the means, and deploy the seed, to make all northern Chilia, every foot of her most barren heights included, into an unbroken garden of majestic timber. This is a different art from the Thief's, Nifft, and in choosing this art, the art of cultivation, I have done with, put away and depart from, the Guild of Thieves. And in so doing, I dower the world around me. The city-conju
ring, ship-launching treasure of Timber is bestowed by me—not stolen—bestowed on the whole Great Shallows. The largesse of lumber, from a Chilia re-garbed in her mantle of green. This feat, you see, this grand reforestation, would be a getting and a giving. Meanwhile look at your obsessions! I can't help it Nifft—I must really think less of you! Look at these deliria of insatiable greed that possess you, even to the point of reneging on a personal vow!"
My temper snapped with his. "You bull-necked—"
"Gentlemen! I beg you! Mercy!" So shrill was Ostrogall we startled, at first thinking him injured somehow. "My awe is yours," he resumed, "my reverence, my utter fealty! Yet please tolerate my humble, most apologetic suggestion—Though I am utterly dazzled by your virtues and excellences in all else!—my suggestion that you lose the profit of your recent travels when you are so absorbed in a debate about the future! Your nets bulge with your loot, of course, but what of all the sights and sounds, the spectacles you have beheld? Distracted as you are, will you even remember these wonders? You have seen so much of my world—far more than I had seen, even through my most far-flung eye-spores. By the Crack, what things we have seen, eh Gentlemen? I never guessed the multiplicity of my nation! May I be frank, revered benefactors? You even lose the, well, glee of having these riches, by being so embroiled in recrimination."
The dreariness of this world was all I could see of it now—I saw no wonders. We overflew a new terrain, a great prairie of huge tubeworms, their ciliated mouths making incessant, lascivious osculations. A winged parasite of our Harpy's make—though a bigger, more carniverous breed—infested these tubeworms, hanging above them like carrion flies, diving to get past the worms' darting, seeking mouths. When they got down among the lower stalks, they battened on the tubeworms' undefended root muscles and sucked their blood. Perhaps every second or third Harpy was caught and devoured by the worms as it plunged. A sufficiency survived: everywhere, studding the worms' root muscles like warts, shone the pallid egg-clusters which the Harpies laid.
