The Incompleat Nifft (10 page)

I mean to say we expected to step out onto a plateau. In fact, what we'd had premonitions of was closer than we knew. It's a rare shock to put a gulf behind you, rise up, stride forward, and find a gulf a thousand times as deep before you, and you on its very edge. Plateau there was none. We'd mounted the rim of a giant crater.

Just for a moment, as you looked down into it, you thought that the crater's bottom was covered by a glittering black lake. But the wind that came dodging up out of it, and the roll of echoes through chambers past measuring, taught you to see better. The lake was a hole broken in the crater's bowl. Beneath was a dark cavern system, endlessly deep, where powerful winds drove clots of fire like a blizzard underground.

A flight of stairs cut from the stone descended the wall of the crater—it was a long flat-arching flight, and the steps were narrow. The Guide was halfway down it already, and be waved us after him impatiently. We started down.

There's no conveying how light and breakable you feel, stepping into a dim cauldron of gales like that, and on such a slender track. It was like following an icy goat path crossing the Imau Mountains in a winter storm. But here the winds wrestled and surged and blew in constant contradictions. You scarcely dared brace yourself against them for fear of leaping off with the next shift.

Our downward progress did not reveal much within the gulf. The infinite traffic of fire there showed you flashes of ragged vaulting, or tunnelmouths. The fire itself seemed like a fabric. It flew in mighty banners or was caught in crosswinds and torn to tatters, and we had glimpses of the pit's inhabitants whenever their flight was entangled with the flames. They were too swift and deep to be more than wheeling shapes, smaller than moths to the eye.

Some half-dozen of the last steps marched past the brink and formed a ramp down into the void. The Guide stopped well above this point, and bade us pass him.

"It is for you to call her—stand down."

We eased past the immortal—Haldar was first, Defalk between us. My friend stepped down the last steps, and I thought he moved with an uncanny assurance, a steadiness that did not dread this depth.

"Dalissem!" he shouted. His voice was as nothing in the wind. "Dalissem of Lurkna Downs. Approach. Defalk is delivered to your hands!"

The puny words were erased even as they left his lips, but a freezing updraft followed them like a response, an icy column of wind that pushed against our faces without wavering. Very deep, but directly below the last step's broken edge, there was a small and constant movement. It grew. It was a figure swimming upward.

And that's how she came to us, Barnar, clawing upward out of the dark, her eyes stark, raving bright, her hair twisting in snakes upon her shoulders, her nakedness like a torch in the pit.

Here, movement was no labor to her. She sprang upon the foot of the stairs as light and lithe as a winged cat. She stood arms akimbo, and after nodding to the Guide, she grinned at Haldar and me, and seemed not even to see the man we had brought her. He called to her—his voice had a crack in it: "Dalissem! Forgive me, and take me!"

Even Haldar was surprised enough to tear his eyes off her and look back at Defalk. For my part, when I'd grasped what he'd said, I gaped at him. But Dalissem spoke as if nothing had been said.

"You have brought him then! I chose my men well. Truly, you two are among the greatest of your brotherhood, to have accomplished this!" (I promise you, Barnar, those were her words to the letter.) "Alas, good henchmen, who will ever believe you, if you tell them of this exploit?"

Haldar answered her with a tremor of feeling:

"Lady, for myself, the payment of the exploit is this second sight of you. And I here renounce the Key—let it be wholly Nifft's. Please deign to receive this tender of my chaste and absolute love."

She laughed. "Chaste and otherwise, Haldar Dirkniss. Oh, I'll receive this tender, and far more! As for the key, there is none to renounce. You were deceived with a simulacrum." She laughed again, with ravenous long looks in Haldar's face, and gleeful looks in mine. She was a beauty in truth, with her fat paps, and her loins' black patch, as charged with energy as a cat's hackles. Defalk made a drunken movement but said nothing. I think he was dazed a bit, with the shame of her ignoring him. I was fairly fuddled myself with a shock that was half recognition—the fulfillment of a suspicion I hadn't known I had.

Dalissem raised her arms triumphantly above her and grinned skywards: "Oh, how I've outwitted you, King Death! Great Thief, you are not half so sly as poor Dalissem, poor Dalissem dead these seven years, cheated of love she paid her life for. For look now what she's done! She sneaked
back,
Your Majesty, and stole the love she had a right to. Oh dear little hawk-faced mortal. Your life on earth is at an end. I chose you instantly I sensed you through the portal of my dying-place, and instantly I knew how much you'd love me. You're mine now—admit the truth!"

"Yes!" cried Haldar, and his voice rang like the harbor bell of Karkhman-Ra.

Then Defalk cried out in his turn:

"Dalissem! Will you speak to me? Will you take me? I was less than you thought—you were more than I understood! But take me now. This man is nothing to you. Remember how we were!"

He looked quite fine then, Barnar, with his one red tear-track, and a new uprightness in his body. He put me in mind of an aging dolphin I once saw sporting, making clumsy leaps out of the water. Defalk's soul was just such a fat old fish, yet here this fleshly fop was managing, with supreme feeling, to heave himself up, and catch a flash of sun upon his back. Dalissem looked at him then. Perhaps she had meant not to, and now gave him this much tribute.

"Well, it is you Defalk! This is pleasant luck, to find you here. I am as you see me."

Defalk hung his head. "I was a little man who assumed he was great. I learned better!"

"But what is this, Defalk. You ask me to take you? You ask me to receive you to my love-in-death? Can it be your spirit does not thrive? Can it be you've weighed your life of kissing arse and crouching before fat purses, and have found it wanting? Can it be that your lady's paintpots and her witless rodent's chatter oppress you?"

"She is a small woman, Dalissem. I am small, and I have not helped her to be more. I ask you to forgive—"

She cut him off: "I readily forgive what is forgotten. You are forgotten, Defalk, now that I have the two minor things I wanted from you: your self-contempt and your jealousy. Thus I am released from the shame of having loved you. Now, Haldar Dirkniss, stand nearer, for I mean to take you to me."

My friend nodded, and stepped down. He wore leather and stout wool, but she put her hands to his chest, and tore away his clothes, and they rent to tatters as easily as dead leaves. She stripped him babe-naked and looked on him with smiling lust and pride. My friend was in a manly state. So, indeed, was I. She gave off desire that pressed physically against you, fierce and steady as the wind. She clasped her hands behind his neck and sprang backwards.

Her leap carried them both far—impossibly far out over the blizzards of fire. They didn't fall, but drifted out, as if gliding on ice—and he mounted her. Then, coupling, they fell in wide, smooth sweeps, wheeling as they slid, then banking, diving, gone.

There was a shout as deep as a bull's. Defalk slowly raised his fists overhead. He roared again, wordless, as if merely trying to break the instrument of his voice. Then he jumped out into the gulf.

Surely the rage of that last cry should have gained him entry into that furious place. But the firestorm did not receive him. As he sprawled out upon the void he did not drift, but hung there, bouncing and jolting and skidding horribly upon the invisible surface of the wind. He could not enter it—the gale's cold, speeding mass erased his substance as he jounced atop it. His hands vanished in a smooth smear of white; his face was rubbed to nothing in an instant; he was gone.

I turned to face the Guide. Slowly but firmly, I climbed to stand before him.

"Lord Guide," I said, looking up into the smoky craters of his eyes, "a great swindle had been worked upon two of the age's foremost thieves. One of them is cheated of his life, though he would not describe it so. But as for me, my lord, I believe some further time up in the sunlight still belongs to me, before I must see your face, and your servant's, a second time. Let this much faith be kept, at least: take me back
now
to the world of living men."

THIS ACCOUNT IS the work of Ellen Errin (known perhaps equally well as Greymalkin Mary)—something I flatter myself I would know even were the manuscript not written in her unmistakable script, which is both exceedingly minuscule and almost preternaturally legible. For just as distinctive to me as her hand, is her subtle, incessant parody of Nifft's voice. That the two were lovers for many years need not be concealed. Ellen herself certainly regards the fact with outspoken pride, and Nifft always did likewise. It is probably best understood, then, as a lover's liberty that she takes when she invariably, in adopting Nifft's voice, makes him sound twice the boaster that he ever really was. It is never his tone she distorts, but only the measure of his bragging. In the present instance she was sharing the jest with Taramat Lighttouch, who did indeed receive it as a missive from Chilia, where Ellen had been staying with Nifft and Barnar for more than six months before she relayed his adventure to their mutual friend in Karkhman-Ra. In sum, I find I must confess that these gentle parodies of hers always make me smile, for truly, Nifft was never
over
modest.

Fregor Ingens, where this chapter of Nifft's career has its setting, is still referred to by certain intransigent members of the cartographic guild as the "fourth continent." It is scarcely a sixth the size of Lúlumë, and it is clearly part of an island system, namely the Ingens Cluster, which lies halfway between Kolodria's southern tip and the Glacial Maelstroms of the southern Pole. But because it is the largest island known, it seems there will always be some contentious souls ambitious to promote it to continental status. In my view these commentators could toil more fruitfully on other ground, such as the amplification of our extremely sparse information on the geography and inhabitants of Fregor's central highlands, which are spectacularly mountainous—thought indeed to contain several of the earth's highest peaks—and shrouded in perpetual clouds.

The lowlands of Fregor's northern coast are at least rather better known and it is here, some hundred leagues inland of Cuneate Bay, that the swamplands of the Vampire Queen lie. Indeed, the bay's cities owe their modestly active shipping trade largely to the proximity of Queen Vulvula's pearl-rich domains, which are productive of little else and in consequence draw heavily on the resources of the teeming Kolodrian continent. The swamp pearls—like a ceaseless, glittering black rivulet—trickle northward overland in heavily armed caravans: the Kolodrian merchant argosies river southward from the Great Shallows; the two streams meet in the ports of Cuneate Bay, mingle turbulently in clearing houses and brokerage halls, and resume their flow, the pearls northward overseas, the goods southward overland to the royal vampire's hungry fens and tarns.

But to speak of hunger is to raise the issue that must be foremost in the mind of anyone who has perused this record of Nifft's Fregorian exploit: can a vampire's rule be a just rule? I confess that the question is still so "alive" for me—that is to say, unconcluded—that more than eleven years of diligent inquiry have left me as destitute of any certain answer as I was when Taramat first showed me the manuscript. Perhaps as close as I have come to any such thing is in considering the case of a realm near Vulvula's which is just as trade-dependent as her own, that of Gelidor Ingens. Gelidor is the second-largest (it is the size of Chilia) and southernmost island of the Ingens Chain. During the season of the sirikons it is only five days' sail from Samádrios, the western-most isle of my native Ephesion Chain. Whether Samádrios' need nourished an infant industry in Gelidor, or Gelidor's natural abundance of the resource in question nurtured Samádrios' inclination to rely on it must rank as one of the most venerable controversies in Ephesion academic tradition. (That it has been so since the Aboriginal Trade Wars suggests—to me at least—that the answer lies either beyond the reach of formal inquiry, or beneath its notice.) But past any dispute is Gelidor's preeminence as a nursery of arms, especially since the decline of Anvil Pastures (elsewhere detailed), and Samádrios' centuries-long dependence on those arms for the prosecution of her interminable bid for empire in the islands of the Kolodrian Tail. And Samádrios is far from being Gelidor's only customer. Her mercenaries are the highest paid in the world. The skill and bellicosity of her army and navy have not only made her mistress of half the islands of the dense and disparate Ingens cluster, they have also caused war to become her prime export. The Hipparch of Gelidor subjects his teeming island to a painful diminution of prosperity—always swiftly and vigorously deplored by the populace—whenever he fails to dispense at least two-thirds of his annual crop of academy-trained officers among the globe's annual crop of red and rampant battlefields. And so we might fairly ask: Who drinks more blood—the Hipparch, or Queen Vulvula?

—Shag Margold

To Taramet Light-touch

Sow-and-Farrow Inn

Karkhman-Ra

WARMEST SALUTATIONS, O Prince of Scoundrels! Dear deft-fingered felon, Paragon of Pilferers, Nabob of Knaves—good morrow, good day or good night, whichever suits the hour this finds you! Do you guess who I am that greets you thus? Eh? Of course you do. Who else but your own nimble, narrow-built, never-baffled Nifft—inimitable Nifft of the knife-keen wits!

Has it been two years since we've been out of touch? That much and more, by the Black Crack! I'm sure you thought me dead or something like it, and I promise you, Taramat, I came close to it, for the haul that Barnar and I made in Fregor Ingens has taken us all of twenty-six months of breakneck squandering to dissipate, and if it had been just a jot richer, we would certainly have died of our vices before we'd wasted it all.