The Incompleat Nifft (28 page)

Yet he surprised us shortly after our leaving this last zone by making a sharp detour. We had just made out what we thought must be a Bonshad not far ahead, when Gildmirth swept down into a dive upon a huge polypous growth directly beneath us. It lifted huge menacing pseudopods, each fully half as thick as the great lizard himself, to meet the latter's plunge. The Privateer brought his blade—all asmoke with bubbles from the murderous energy of the stroke—athwart the nearest pair of these scabby extrusions, and sheared them cleanly through. One of the sundered members flew, heaving and shuddering past me, giving my shoulder a glancing blow that was like being jostled by a warhorse at full gallop. Two more strokes and Gildmirth had barbered the monster clean of its last protectors. Amid their bleeding stumps were the creature's massive, five-lobed jaws—made of purest gold and crusted over with rubies as big as apples. Those hideous beaks mouthed impotent appetite as Gildmirth plunged his sword into its throat. The jaws gaped and froze. The lizard sheathed his blade, reached down, and ripped the jaws apart.

The rubies he ate greedily, crushing them like sugar-candies swiftly in its jaws. The gold he relished more, with a humiliating hunger that could not mask its own trembling. His steel fangs tore the honeybright metal, and his big, scaly gullet throbbed with the meal. When he had done he drew his sword again, planted his hind legs against the sand, and surged up toward the 'shad that hovered over a coral knoll just beyond us.

It was huge, hanging there over its flock of naked humans. Their veins and nerve-wires all sprouted from their backs and ran up like puppet-wires to join in a ball of fibers which the shaggy, hook-bellied thing was applying to its abdominal mouthparts.

The flock was grazing—after a manner—for the 'shad had them all sprawling and crawling over a system of reefs which were forested with giant anemones that bristled with man-large tongues and antennae. The waxen-fleshed, horror-eyed folk wriggled through those rippling, squeezing pastures of outrage while the Bonshad floated over them, nursing on the anguish coursing through their nerves.

It was a flock of about thirty. We had studied the miniature of Wimfort until our eyes rebelled at the sight, and we quickly made sure that he was not one of that lewdly palpated, trembling little herd. Gildmirth turned me his right eye and Barnar his left. We shook our heads. His great paws clawed us back up to our cruising speed and we plunged on, breasting out over another falling-away of the seafloor, and curving toward the right, where lay a larger stretch of anemone-carpeted terrain. Over this hung numerous 'shads, all territorially spaced, hideous, hairy little balloons in the distance, sucking each on its tether of nerve.

Our course brought us closer to the Black Rifft's brink and as we swept toward the 'shad-meadows we coasted past a clearer view than previous of some of the siegeworks there, particularly of a thicket of derricks which thrust great lateral arms through the gapped crest of the flame-wall. From these wrought-steel arms huge hooks were lowered on the ends of massive chains. Enormous windlasses drove the movement of the booms themselves as well as paying out the fishing chain off its immense spools. Stumbling human gangs, vast in numbers, provided the power that turned those windlasses. Similar gangs powered the vehicles of the demon-bosses who oversaw the work. These were brawny toads as big as houses. They lolled in the sodden hulks of galleons—storm-taken ships all bearded and furred with bottom-life, some of their hulls half stove in. Each of these had hundreds of slave haulers dragging its keel over the ocean floor. Their eyes had been taken, their hair was longer than the ever-springing hair in graves. Their skin floated up from their arms in brine-fat tatters. Their tread was sottish, their feet hidden in clouds of sand.

But we quickly ceased attending to anything except that greatest of the works which bordered the Rifft farther down its perimeter. Though still more than a mile distant, it was now revealed to us in greater detail. Each of the ovoids—of a pale rose tint, and minutely faceted—was as big as a mountain. Near them, small hills of iron bar were being forged, amid geysering sparks, into an irregular construction that looked like the beginnings of a cage—a cage big enough to
hold
a mountain. Meanwhile, beneath the web of scaffolding that had been thrown over the nearer of the two titanic shapes, a large hole had been broken in its substance, which appeared to be little more than a relatively thin shell. And we had drawn just near enough to find that something was visible within that hole, a small part of what the shell contained. It was a three-taloned foot as big as a city. Gildmirth pulled us away from the Rifft, working in an upslope path that would skirt the 'shad-meadows.

We found the boy in the fourth flock we surveyed. Almost in the first instant of my scanning, the victim my eye had lit on wrenched his head around in some access of suffering, and the face of Wimfort was flashed at me. I tugged Gildmirth's belt and pointed. He looked at Barnar, who confirmed our quarry. The Privateer bucked and heaved and plunged straight for the water's ceiling.

I felt each instant of that swift climb as a distinct and individual joy. We surfaced to find the boat awaiting us at a spot halfway around the island-cluster from our starting point. We were not far from the crest of the volcano we had seen. The cone's steaming rim, which barely over-topped the waves, swarmed with activity. Gildmirth laid his jaw on the boat's stern and we climbed aboard along his body, joyfully shucking our helmets, eager more for the act of breathing than the air itself, such that it felt sweet to draw in even that tomblike atmosphere.

"Practisss the ssskiff!" the lizard enjoined me. Its squamous head glittered and ducked under. The waters bulged with the force of his dive.

Taking both harpoons, I stepped into the little bone coracle. I willed it twenty yards to starboard of the boat. I sped so swiftly thither I was toppled, and clung aboard only with undignified difficulty. Barnar's braying followed me as I thought the skiff through several other maneuvers, standing better braced now, more fluid at the hips.

"You might well laugh," I shouted to my friend as I zigzagged ever more skillfully over the swell. "See how far we've come! Impossibly far. We've
found
the young idiot—actually reached him and ferreted out his squirming-place in this infernal stew!"

Barnar merely whooped and waved his arms for a reply, and I myself felt giddy and nonsensical enough with our continuing good luck. I made a quick excursion toward the crater-top to view the siege in progress there. Rafts of batrachian demons, reminiscent of the larger breed I had seen being charioted below by human gangs, were beached on the crater's flanks and mining at it furiously, using battering-irons or huge hammers and steel wedges. Their assault was countered by fire-elementals within the magmatic cauldron they sought to inundate and conquer. These shapeless, smoldering beings catapulted avalanches of lava on their besiegers, driving them by the score to quench their sizzling skin in the sea. Meanwhile with this same material the elementals ceaselessly caulked and re-knit the breaches broken by their enemies' tools.

I heard Barnar shout, and sped back toward the boat. Not far from it there was a milky spot in the water, like a cataract in an old dog's eye. I swung near just in time to be drenched by the explosion of Gildmirth in battle with the Bonshad.

I should actually say "Gildmirth hanging onto the Bonshad," for he gripped its back with all four paws and his locked jaws, and by wrestling mightily
steered
his opponent to some degree, but all the rest of the motive power of that struggle came from the 'shad. Its hook-rimmed mouth-hole gaped from its underside, which the lizard's grip on its in-hooking legs exposed uncharacteristically to view. Such a wad of muscle was its lumpish body that you could clearly see the freeing of just one of its pinioned legs would enable it to compact itself with a power that must surely break the reptile's desperate grip. The speed with which it would then be able to sink its mouthparts into the Privateer's flank was amply attested to now by the monster's volcanic convulsions, which sent the pair of them cartwheeling insanely over the waves.

I began gathering speed with a series of quick swings into their zone of combat and then sharply out again, after each such approach pulling immediately round to make a new and more driving interception. My nearest glimpses of the Privateer told me that he was bone-tired—his paws showed their tendons stark as an oak's roots against rocky ground. His snakish neck bulged so full with strain that its scales jutted out, like wind-lifted shingles in a storm. I swung out to my widest retreat thus far, then pulled in, driving for a peak speed from which to make my cast.

The saurian made a mighty effort, and so far controlled the 'shad's tumble as to keep it belly-out in my direction. I balanced the harpoon by my ear, taking the skiff's buffets with loose knees, for now we sheared, half-flying, straight through the crests of the chop. I saw, some moments ahead of me, the spot and instant of my cast, which I would make at the apex of the skiff's turn, so that the cast would have a sling's momentum behind it, augmenting the strength of my arm. I saw too just where that haggle-rim mouth-hole would be, and my spirit welled up in me with that prescient certainty that precedes many of the greatest feats of weaponry.

I drew back to full cock for the throw, then hit my turn. Obediently, the mouth-hole tumbled precisely to its foreseen spot and I pumped that shaft dead into it, not even grazing the hooks that twisted so furiously round its border. The shaft sprouted full half its length out of the demon's back, and grazed Gildmirth's flank, for he was not quick enough in letting go. The 'shad flopped and churned across the swell for a full minute of storm-wild, crazy force before it realized it was dead, and settled, and sank.

We had to dive again with the Privateer, and be quick in pulling on our gear for it. The abandoned flock below was a free confection for any drifting entities that scented it. Being pulled under again felt like a burial-alive—no part of me desired it, and I scarcely kept my grip.

We swooped upon the meadow in time to drive off a many-mouthed, ray-shaped demon, which for all its mouths had no stomach to face the lizard's sword. The nerve-ball still hung above the little herd it tethered, just where its savorer had hung, and the flock remained as powerless as if the demon still hovered over them.

The saurian took the wadded skein of tissue and began to bounce and jiggle it in his paws, the way you have to do to untangle snarled rope. The fibers began to open out. We helped, teasing strands apart. Toward the end it became a gossamer-light labor. We had to swim more than fifty feet above the pasture to make room for the endless unraveling, which we accomplished with gentle upward sweeps of our arms. Our work caused the flock to lurch and spasm in the lubricious embrace of their pasture.

But suddenly, just when the ball was entirely combed apart, the slick web of innards snapped simultaneously back down to its flock of donors and vanished inside their spines, which sealed up like sprung traps. Then the truly terrible dances began, as they awakened to their freedom in that grisly place. We came down quick on Wimfort. Gildmirth began plunging his sword into the things that held the boy—cloven tongues and shattered antennae recoiled from their prey. Barnar and I plucked him up, and I helped my friend get him tucked securely under his left arm. We cleaved to the Privateer and he sprang skyward with us all.

When we were settled with our unconscious charge in the boat, the Privateer took time to bind the wound which crossed half the left side of his ribs, a more considerable wound in his human stature than it bad appeared on the lizard's huge bulk. Smiling with a sudden, strange cordiality, Gildmirth told me:

"That was a remarkable cast, Nifft."

In temperate language I replied, as candor compelled me to do, that it had indeed been one of the finest feats of spear-work that it had ever been my fortune to witness.

For much of our voyage back the lad lay in the bow, his glazed eyes aimed at the clouds, or stirring mindlessly at sudden lurches of the craft. We had emptied the provision sack to make him a blanket, and had fallen to sharing the wine this had brought to light. Gildmirth, after musing on the boy's face awhile, said, "He's a handsome lad. What are his chances of growing to a good man?"

Barnar sighed, and spat gently into the sea. I looked cheerlessly at the boy. My friend and I had had much time to reflect that all our toil was for a resurrection which, while it might not turn out to do the world great harm, wasn't likely to do it any good either. Wimfort's features had the fine symmetry that adolescence can show right up to the brink of adulthood's emergent emphases and distortions. A certain heaviness of cheek and jaw was already just beginning to suggest the sire.

"I'm afraid, good Privateer, that the signs are discouraging," I answered. "He's here, of course, strictly through his own ambitious carelessness."

"Prime flaws of youth, of course—but also its strengths, this carelessness and ambition."

I nodded. "He has imagination and boldness. You wouldn't expect him to temper a rich boy's arrogance with much thought of others. He's the Rod-Master's son, as I've told you. But maybe with this—" I gestured at the sea "—and all he'll have to endure going back, he might get that needed awakening to the world around him."

"If you get him back it will be your business to hope he
has
been wakened. Ambitious dabblers in sorcery add much to the hell that is on earth. In my origins of course I am just such a go-to-market meddler in the arts as I speak of. But at least for every spell I purchased I bought the best tutors in its use and meaning, and I sought no new spell until I had faithfully learned all lore foundational to the last I had bought, or anywise tangent to it. Nor have I ever, to get to the essence of it, brought accidental doom upon my fellows through the casual practice of arts for which my wits were premature."