The Incompleat Nifft (2 page)

And I would not have compromised him now, as these volumes must do were Nifft ever to reenter the world of men. I would have delayed this work interminably out of reluctance to acknowledge his loss by completing this verbal monument to his life and deeds. But I am old, and my health is more than a little imperfect. No one knows his term, and I have been compelled to accomplish this labor while labor lay still within my power. From this, the great importance I attach to this work should be obvious. At the same time I must confess that during the months I have devoted to these documents, I have been no stranger to the despairing cynicism with which all men must grapple in the winter of their lives. Mockingly I have asked myself my labor's aim. Is it to set my friend's excellence before the eyes of Posterity? But "Posterity"—what a hair-raising gulf of time is masked by that word! An illimitable boneyard of Histories lies already behind us. Worlds on worlds of men have flowered, died and drifted on their time-islands into the desolation of eternity, and worlds more lie ahead of us—that, or the end of all. I have seen archaic maps which showed me the faces of earths utterly different from this, minutely rendered geographies which no man will find today in any of the five seas. Whither, on what unguessable currents, do I launch this man's fame, and what eddy will it end in, an impenetrable fragment in a tongue unknown to the wisest scholars, if it is preserved at all?

But I have set aside this cynical lassitude as a wasteful and childish mistake. Though a light burn comparatively small in the darkness, its first and consuming necessity is to broadcast all the illumination in its power. While it is foolish to deny the dark around us, it is futile to exaggerate it. And I make bold to say that I am not the only one of my countrymen who could profit from taking this admonition to heart.

I have in mind the notion that is so fashionable nowadays, namely that we live in a Dark Age where puny Science quails before many a dim Unknown on every hand. Surely this sort of facile pessimism dampens the energy of inquiry even as it leads to obscurantism—toward a despair of certainty which encourages us to embrace truth's, half-truths, and the most extravagant falsehoods with a promiscuous lack of discrimination.

What responsible person denies—to speak only of the cartographic science—that vast tracts of land and sea remain mysterious to the wisest? The great Kolodrian mountain systems are an instance. The Thaumeton Island Group, the hinterlands of the Jarkeladd tundras, are further examples. But mark in this how clearly we can define our ignorance. The fact is, our world's main outlines—coasts and climes, seas and currents—are known. It is the same in other disciplines. We have sufficient fragments of sufficient histories to know that man has been both far more powerful and far more abject than he is today. If our tools and techniques are crude compared to the fabulous resources of ages past, they are also marvels of efficacy to what our race has muddled through within yet other periods.

Granting that our knowledge be limited, what can it profit us to traffic in lurid fantasies and errant imaginings? When—certainty failing us—we
must
speculate, let us recognize the difference between careful enumeration of reasonable hypotheses, and the reckless multiplication of bizarre conceptions. To illustrate with a classic instance, we cannot say what demons are. If the knowledge ever existed, it is lost to us now. Consequently, we must acknowledge several theories which continue to dominate the discussions of serious students of the question. Demons, few of whom lack some human component, may have been the parent stock of Man. Or they may have been spawned by man, his degenerate progeny. Possibly, they are his invention run wild, artifacts of a potent but diseased sorcery he once possessed. And, conceivably, the subworlds were populated according to Undle Ninefingers' suggestion, which holds that the demons arose as a "spiritual distillate" of human evil, a "coagulation" of psychic energies into the material entities we know today. The judicious man, though he have his private leaning, must grant all of these some claim to credence. But must he entertain the idea that demons come from seeds which are rained upon the earth at each full moon? Or that each demon is the "vital shadow" of a living man, engendered below in the instant of that man's conception, and extinguished in the moment of his death?

The spirit in which I offer my prefatory notes to each of the following narratives should now be clear. I shall present as certain only those data corroborated by exhaustive research, or by my own personal investigations, as I am not untraveled for a bookish man. Wherever doubt exists, I shall unambiguously state its degree and nature, along with whatever grounds I may have for preferring one hypothesis over another. If, despite all I have said, the reader disdains such honest ambiguity, and stubbornly prefers the unequivocal assertiveness to be found in factitious travelogues penned by raffish "explorers," or in the specious "natural histories" compiled by crapulous and unprincipled hacks who have never left their squalid lofts in Scrivener's Row, then there is nothing further I can do, and I leave him, with apologies, to his deception.

Herewith, then, I dedicate these volumes to the memory of Nifft the Lean. Had there been a funerary stone marking his remains, I would have had it inscribed in accordance with the only preference he was ever heard to voice on the subject—namely, with those verses he loved above all others, written by the immortal Parple, the bard's "Salutation to the World." So let them be written here, since the stone is lacking.

Salutation To The World As Beheld At Dawn
From Atop Mount Eburon
 

Long have your continents drifted and merged,
 

Jostled like whales on the seas,
 

Then cloven, and sundered, and slowly diverged,
 

While your mountains arose and sank to
 

their knees.
 

Long and long were your eons of ice,
 

Long were your ages of fire.
 

Long has there been
 

The bleeding of men
 

And the darkness that cancels desire.
 

What hosts of hosts—born, grown, and gone—
 

Have swarmed your million Babylons
?

How many pits has Mankind dug
?

How many peaks has he stood upon
?

Many and long were your empires of blood,
 

Fewer your empires of light.
 

Now their wisdoms and wars
 

Lie remote as the stars,
 

Stone-cold in the blanketing night.
 

Now even your wisest could never restore
 

One tithe of the truths Man's lost,
 

Nor even one book of the radiant lore
 

That so many treasured so long, at such cost.
 

For it's many the pages the wind has torn
 

And their hoarded secrets blown—
 

Tumbled and chased
 

Through the eyeless wastes
 

Where the wreckage of history's thrown.
 

THE MANUSCRIPT OF this account is in a professional scribe's hand, but it is unmistakably of Nifft's own composition. This is not automatically the case, even though a given history be recounted as if in Nifft's voice, for two of his dearest friends, in repeating tales he told them but did not himself record, enjoyed adopting his persona and reproducing—or so they conceived—his narrative manner. (See, for example, the chapter concerning his encounter with the vampire Queen Vulvula.) In the present instance, however, I am convinced we have our information direct from the master-thief himself.

The Great Cleft Lake lies in Lúlumë, near the center of that continent's northern limb, and Lurkna Downs is the only really large city on its extensive perimeter, occupying The Jut, a sharp salience of the southern shoreline which extends to within half a mile of the northern shore, almost bisecting the vast body of water. Numerous small fishing hamlets rim the lake, for its waters teem with many delectable or otherwise valuable species, the most notable being speckled ramhead, skad, grapple, deepwater lumulus and pygmy hull-breaker. But as the great size of most of these creatures might suggest, fishing those waters on a commercial scale requires large vessels and elaborate equipment, and northern Lúlumë as a whole is too poor and thinly populated to mount such enterprise. Lurkna Downs owes its beginning to the wealth of Kolodria, whence entrepreneurs from the Great Shallows came some two centuries ago and endowed the then-minor settlement with its first large fishing fleet. And, having seeded the Great Cleft Lake with ships, it is Kolodrian merchants who today bear its finny harvest back across the Sea of Agon in their argosies, and market it throughout the Shallows.

These economic matters are not entirely remote from the love of Dalissem for Defalk, and its dreadful issue. Everything Nifft tells us of that volcano-hearted temple child marks her as a classic specimen of northern Lúlumë's self-styled First Folk, a people who, though not truly aboriginal, migrated from the Jarkeladd tundras in the north of the Kolodrian continent more than a millennium ago. They came across the Icebridge Island Chain, and brought into Lúlumë a nomad stoicism and uncouth but potent sorcery with which, where it survives today, the fiercest Jarkeladd shaman would still feel an instantaneous kinship and empathy.

But indeed, this tundra-born culture is now half-eclipsed in the Cleft Lake region. The habit of wealth and property which the Kolodrian merchants brought to Lurkna Downs, the urbanity and cosmopolitan conceits which two centuries of trade with Kolodria have since fostered there, have deprived the First Folk values—their ferocious passions and proud austerities—of the general reverence they once enjoyed. And Defalk belonged to this latter-day Lurkna Downs just as surely as Dalissem did to the First Folk. That she was a temple child in itself argues this. This cult—to which Dalissem would have been born, and not admitted through any voluntary candidacy—is one of the few still-vigorous First Folk institutions that is allowed a conspicuous existence in Lurkna Downs. The cult's name is never uttered by its initiates in the hearing of the uninitiated, and its tenets remain obscure. But the learned Quall of Hursh-Himín is probably correct in saying that it centers on a rigorous votive asceticism—virginity paramount among the self-abnegations required—and that its annual mysteries involve further physical rigors. These trance-inducing group ordeals' aim is a visionary ecstasy (one sees again the tundra influence) wherein is revealed—to herself and her sisters at once—the identity of the worshipper to be honored as that year's sacramental suicide. Dalissem's actions—though rebelliously secular in their frame of expression—undeniably tend to corroborate this report.

Though this is the extent of our reliable information about the cult, I feel I must go out of my way to point out that we have no reason to credit the usually trustworthy Arsgrave's preposterous assertion that the cultists' alleged virginity masks the most unvirginal practice—the cult's "chief end" he calls it!—of mass orgiastic copulation with water demons in the lake's deeps. No serious student of the
Aquademoniad
can be unaware that fresh-water demons have been extinct for at least three millennia. My own opinion is that Arsgrave's sexual pride—which he seems incapable of suppressing, even in contexts utterly remote from that issue—renders him powerless to believe that the pleasures of "normal" copulation can be forgone by any but those devoted to wholly grotesque passions.

Finally, as to the world of the dead, I will neither misrepresent my faith—which is absolute—in Nifft's veracity by expressing doubt of its existence, nor compromise my editorial impartiality by expressing conviction thereof. It is, however, perhaps relevant to note that both Undle Ninefingers and the great Pandector—drawing on wholly independent sources and writing without knowledge of one another—affirm its existence; and that Pandector's account in particular describes a mode whereby the living may enter that realm which in every essential feature agrees with Nifft's description.

—Shag Margold

NIFFT THE LEAN and Barnar the Chilite had agreed not to sleep that night. Darkness had overtaken them in the swamp. They might rest their bodies, but not their vigilance—not here.

They climbed up in the groin of one of the massive, wide-spreading swamp trees. Here there was room to recline, and to build a small fire which seemed scarcely to affect the tough, reptilian bark of the giant supporting them. They did not risk a fire big enough to warm them against the numbing, clammy air. At the spare little flame they dried their boots and kept the blood in their hands and feet, but came no closer than this to comfort.

The two friends talked quietly, pausing often to read—brows intent—the wide, wet noise of the swamp, and to listen for the silken progress of a treelurk down one of the branches they sat on. Both were men inured to hard and various terrain, and in the manner of such men they seemed able to achieve a subtle bodily harmony with whatever surroundings they had to endure. Nifft sat with his arms folded across his knees. His gauntness, his loose, jut-limbed repose, called to mind the big carrion-eating birds they had seen so many of during their day's march across the fens. Barnar was more suggestive of the water-bulls of the region. He sat foursquare, thick and still as a boulder, yet following everything with flick of eye and nostril.

There came a long pause in their talk. Barnar squinted at the wet darkness around them for a long time, and shrugged, as if to throw off ugly thoughts. "Study it how you will, it's a foul piece of the world and not meant for men, not sane ones."