The Incompleat Nifft

by Michael Shea

  "Barnar! Cast off the Bounty, Barnaaaar!"

  I was still too high to be heard in any case, yet there he was when I craned back to see, swimming through the lower air from the dockside toward our Bounty, and there was the crowd in two waves rolling back along the docks and quays, recoiling from the path of the Queen, should she fall.

  She towered and teetered there, as the shifting winds scoured her bright in the blaze of noon, as the sun struck a royal largesse of gold from her fur, and painted splashes of rainbow across her great faceted eyes.

  I heard it an instant before my eye could tell: "Here she comes!" someone bellowed above me. But already I swam furiously down toward the bay. Tilting immensely forward, the Queen Bee fell, tumbling across the sun, flinging down shadow where I flew.

  I plunged toward the Bounty, where even now Barnar, Old Biter high, swept at the hawser of her stern anchor. The Queen tumbled majestically through the brilliant air, her stunted wings buzzing futilely, flashing like a thousand swords. Halfway down she smote the mountain flank, thundering, vaulting out again adown the air.

  I swooped down to Barnar as he cut the hawser with one mighty axe-stroke—and as Costard's dripping hugeness surged up from the water at Bounty's stern.

  The hapless leviathan meant, I think, a greeting, a familial embrace. Costard's huge, addled eye noting Barnar aloft at his axe work, and recognizing him. But so close he came up that Barnar leapt aloft, and I with him, recoiling wildly, as Costard's eye saw something else above him, and blinked with awe, and Barnar and I swam wildly upwards as darkness leapt down at us and struck the sea.

  Our terror put us well aloft, and we looked down from high on that awful sinking. In a towering explosion of foam the Queen snatched under a dozen vessels, our dear, doomed little Bounty dead smack in their midst. She snatched them down brusquely, in the way a gambler's hand might sweep his take off of the board. In a great cloudy fist of bubbles those ships, and Costard with them, were snatched below, sliding down the steep flank of the drowned peak, a seething whiteness dwindling, dwindling, dwindling in the blue-black deeps, then swallowed by the thousand-fathom dark.

  We hung there seeing that descent long after it had ceased to be visible. We imagined her down there, the Queen, furrowing the steep mud slope like a great ploughshare, and planting in that furrow our poor beloved Bounty. All of our immense treasure was dwindled to a little golden seed entombed where sunlight would never touch it in a million years.

  XXVIII

  Where wild winds shepherd their cloudy kine,

  Where lightnings unborn sleep sheathed in

  the blue,

  That's the bright country that I would call mine,

  And there would I do what the winged ones do!

  ALL BUNT'S QUEENS had imbibed his fateful potation. Their eruption from the earth, almost simultaneously throughout the fields, was a final frenzy heralding death, much as with Costard's cattle. The drowned Queen's demise preceeded her sisters' by less than an hour.

  Dolmen's highlands now lay utterly desolate of apian life, a vast scab of scorched dirt. Dazed-looking troops came down, and helped at harborside, where dazed Dolmen Harbor worked to mend the hole torn through its body.

  A big section of dockside, and an inn or two, had been snatched down to the deeps by the sinking Queen. Her hesitation up on the precipice had been just long enough to warn the multitudes below. The Royal Death had plucked but a few score human lives down with it. Barnar and I joined the general reconstruction. From barges and wherries we gaffed in debris from the harbor, retrieved the dead (where we could), set new pilings and planking, looked after the bereaved and the ruined.

  To Ha'Awley Bunt's credit, he came down and worked with the rest, perhaps more dazed than anyone, save Barnar and myself. A curious zone of respect enveloped the hive-master in the midst of his townfellows, that little bubble of silence and averted eyes that surrounds the sacrifice, Disaster's Chosen One.

  I do not think his precise agency in this disaster was widely understood, but this was not from any secrecy of his own in the matter, at least not now that all was destroyed. On that first eve of the tragedy we found ourselves sitting at table with him in the same mead hall where we had met. Scores of men did as we did that night, sat numbly drinking, till we laid our heads upon our arms and slept thus through the night.

  How vividly I see Bunt still as he was that evening, his tired head drooping as low as his flagon, his faint, far-off voice marvelling, as if he spoke his protests to some invisible tribunal in the air beyond us: "I put so little in their little jaws! I wet a pinhead in the pap, and touched lightly! Lightly I touched it to their tiny mouths! That one time only! Weeks ago! I still have practically the whole jar of the treacherous, insidious ichor!"

  "Perhaps in itself, in its own sphere," I dully chided, "it is neither insidious nor treacherous, but needs active cupidity to make it so."

  He looked at me, his eyes bleak beyond riposte. Still, his amazement was strongest in him. "So little, Nifft! As if but the scent of Behemoth's Queen breathed on them, as if she but whispered to then, and on that hint, that rumor only, they grew gigantic and devoured me whole! Such potency! At least, with the pap, I shall recoup some capital. No power so dangerous that someone will not crave it."

  Even numbed Barnar shuddered at that. "Where will you sell it then, oh honest merchant? We would know where to stand clear of."

  "As yet I do not know. Do you reproach me, gentlemen? I am a man of business—what would you have? You may be sure that when my fortune is but part-repaired, I'll pay indemnities aplenty here, and mend what can be mended of what's marred. . . ."

  I did not doubt him then, and do not now. I did not care. All light had left my life, all hope my heart. I stolidly drank my head heavy enough to sink, and sink, and sink until I slept.

  We rose in the early morning. I have never felt graver or grimmer, and yet at the same time I felt unaccountably refreshed, freed of some chronic weariness I had not known I suffered. We had already determined how we would proceed. At a ship chandler's we bought two of the votive wreaths which sailors cast out in open-ocean burials.

  We set out walking along the southern rim of the harbor. On the south it narrowed to a sharp little spit of rock with the sea on both sides of it; we had come round this spit on foot when we first arrived here, still wet from the maw of the glabrous, and we remembered the solitude of the place. When we reached it we found that the wind of the open channel there erased the noise of the distant docks, still swarming with repair.

  We stripped down to bathe in the sea. As I laid my arms on the rock, and then my gear and my garb, I greeted each article as a part of myself, comprising, in the aggregate, my All, my Fortune. Videlicet: old, battered, handy Ready Jack with his chipped pommel-stone, and the ghul-skin sheath I bought in Cuneate Bay; my stout jerkin that keeps me so warm in keen mountain winds and is tough enough to turn a knife blade too, with a little luck; my old moneybelt here, provisioned heftily enough now (save when I thought what had been lost!); my buskins stout and supple; tough, trusty leg armor that yet lets me sprint, withal; and my leathern amphora of the Unguent of Flight.

  I laid it all out on the rocks, and dove into the sea. We swam a furlong or two. I realized I had not until this very moment really emerged from the underworlds—that one never can until he has taken a plunge in the sea, snorted the brine. This alone can cleanse the last whiffs of subworld air from the nostrils! The morning sun touched our skins through the water's chilly velvet, and we were home again under the sky.

  At length we swam back and re-dressed, and performed the simple, homely ceremony we had conceived. The pair of us stood ourselves side by side, facing out over the harbor deeps, our little Bounty's drowning place. Barnar, in his beautiful, surprising baritone, sang Passarolle's Hymn to Having Had:

  How you gleamed! How you dazzled me,

  shone in my arms

  When I hugged you, and held you,

  and had you for mine!


  But all things that live must at length come

  to harm,

  If it's only the harm of their ceasing to shine.

  You blazed when we loved!

  You were both flame and wick.

  How meltingly glowed you your body away!

  And all our sweet nearness, we lived it up quick!

  Now, somewhere, the still-fleeing light of our days

  Wings shining along with the lie we still love,

  Though long have our hands and our hearts

  ceased to move.

  We cast out the wreaths, and watched them till they grew sodden, and sank. Only at that moment, I think, did my soul finally and fully let go of my lost fortune. It seemed to me that a transparent empire of phantom wonders flickered in the sky above me, and melted away forever—castles and splendors, steeples and towers of Exploit standing tall on history's horizons . . . all of it a thousand fathoms down now. Dark.

  And in that moment the wreaths went down, something heavy seemed to sink out of my heart as well. How much less I had now than before! But I seemed to know myself again.

  "A good fortyweight each of specie in our moneybelts," said Barnar. "Our weapons, our gear . . . And tenweight each of the Unguent of Flight . . ."

  How good it was that our eyes could meet again, Barnar and I, and we could laugh!

  "Well, old Ox-back," I suggested, "let's fly on down to the Minuskulons."

  "What a splendid idea!"

  We anointed our hands and our feet with the Unguent of Flight, and we climbed into the air.

  Back down in the subworld, when we had followed the New Queen's ravening army for some days, but had not yet grown greatly laden with our plunder, Barnar and I found ourselves almost directly under the polestar and murky sun of that region: the red-weeping Eye of Heliomphalodon Incarnadine.

  And the whim took us to fly up near that monstrous orb and see what could be seen within it.

  The demon's pupil yawned above us, a sawtoothed wheel of black. Its simple hugeness made us hang in terror, halted still some quarter mile below it, and from even this remove its dark sentience sucked with a whirlpool's force at us, irresistibly pulling our buoyancy up into itself.

  And we saw that red shadows thronged that abyss at every depth, they bloomed and melted, making those deeps as populous as a night sky is with stars. And I believe—though it stirs the hairs along my nape even to think it now—I believe the Demon noted us, and knew us for humankind. Knew us for possessors of the sun he craved, the sun he had destroyed himself to reach, his blazing Grail of exploit.

  And I will always think that I saw more, that I saw the sun 'Omphalodon dreamed of, saw it there in the gulf of his gaze: a furious contorted coal of ruby light, poisonously hot and murky, but burning colossally, a titan in its sea of blood-red worlds. I directly beheld 'Omphalodon's dream, and I pitied him. This blood-hued, scalding pustule of a sun, its rage all heat and little light—thus high was all the demon's imagining could achieve, origined as he was so deep in hell.

  Now Barnar and I, from the south lip of half-ruined Dolmen Harbor, took to the air, and climbed straight up toward the sun itself. Its inexhaustible gold bathed us in the ultimate, the only wealth—sweet Light! Where is the joy of anything else without it?

  Now in this cloudless windy noon, this scoured blue sky, we flew. And despite all the leagues we had swum the vaulted skies of the subworld, we flew now for the first time, except, perhaps for those first moments of wild discovery flying up the wall of 'Omphalodon's buried flesh.

  We felt snug and free as fish in the wind's liquidity; we soared, grabbing handfuls of the atmosphere. Dolmen's blackened crown, still leaking smoke from smouldering carcasses, dropped away beneath us.

  We spurned them, and climbed higher, and the island dwindled to let us see others of the Angalheims, strung out to the south, a great flotilla of islands cruising in to dock at Kairnheim's shore, the green scrub on their flanks all polished and glossy like new armor scoured by the wind's whetstone. Here and there other, more peaceful flower fields showed, shards of rainbow in the uplands.

  We gaped astonished on the earth, on one another. We had life, and flight, and some time left under the sun of this wide mad wealth, this World of Light.

  "We're rich!" I howled.

  "Away!" Barnar bellowed, and we pulled up into a sharp climb toward the zenith.

  The Incompleat Nifft

  Table of Contents

  Running Away With the Circus

  NIFFT THE LEAN

  Part 1

  Come Then, Mortal—

  We Will Seek Her Soul

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  Part 2

  The Pearls of the

  Vampire Queen

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  Part 3

  The Fishing of the

  Demon-Sea

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  Part 4

  The Goddess in Glass

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  The Mines of Behemoth

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  XXVIII