The Incompleat Nifft (29 page)

I did not want him to fall silent on this topic. "It is indeed a part of your legend, Privateer, that many of your . . . sharp practices were aimed at financing your thaumaturgic studies."

Gildmirth regarded us blandly for some moments. "Is that indeed a part of my legend? I am touched that my swindles are remembered at all. Toss. Thank you. It
was
an expensive education; I was never, before now, a glutton for mere gold itself. All my major larcenies were devoted to scholarly ends, in fact."

"I understand," Barnar said, "that just before your coming here you worked an extremely lucrative deception on your native city."

Gildmirth let a bitter eye roll across the cloud-vaults before allowing himself to sink into the obvious pleasure of boastful reminiscence. He drank, and handed me the jack with a pleased sigh. "That one bought me this boat and sail. It was a good piece of work. Sordon-Head was gearing up for yet another trade war. A major competitor of hers, the Klostermain League of Cities, had just lost half its navy in a storm, while we were just nearing completion of an admirable new navy. Our High Council suddenly recalled a gross defamation of one of our outlying shrines by a drunken Klostermain sailor. It had happened several months before that storm so disastrous for the League, if I recall rightly. We began applying diplomatic pressure on the League for trade concessions, while hinting ever more strongly of war. Our High Council was ripe for anything that might create assurance enough for us to go the last inch to candid armed aggression for profit.

"I came to them with the proposal of constructing a spearhead fleet of superlative fighting frigates, and demonstrated how such a tactical weapon could penetrate harbors and destroy ships in the docks, sparing us many chancier engagements on the high seas. I was an object of guarded civic pride for my exploits abroad, and I had always kept my in-town dealings well masked. They heaped my lap with gold. Their dreams of empire, of Klostermain plunder made them practically force on me the sum of Eleven million gold lictors."

Wimfort screeched, gull-voiced. He twisted, as if ants covered him, and under the sack we'd covered him with we could see his hands moving to rub some nameless memory off his skin. Barnar pressed a huge hand onto the boy's forehead. The boy's eyes closed again, as if that slight pressure crushed down the ugly dream behind them.

"Conceive the sum," the Privateer said after a moment, "Still it astonishes me, though I have often seen that sum quadrupled on a few hectares of the ocean's floor. Of course, it was spent a fortnight from my getting it—on this craft. It was a purchase I had studied and planned for more than a decade.

"You should have seen my shipyards in Sordon-Head. Giant, covered buildings, windowless—the danger of Klostermain spies stealing some forewarning of their fate, you see—we couldn't risk it. And in those great empty warehouses a fleet was indeed a-building. A brace of towering frigates, made of leather, paper, and feather-wood. While my crews tolled on these, I had another crew working, a crew of musicians. Their instruments were mallets, saws, augers, rusty winches. Their oratorio was woven of shouted curses, and gusty dockworker's cries: `Lower away there, easy now! Down with it—a bit more, another arse-hair—hold! Maul here, and quarter-inch spikes, prompt now!' Whenever the great men of the council passed my yards they drank in these melodies and passed on smiling.

"There was a grand harbor-side assembly to witness the launching of our raiding-frigates, as they had come to be called. The docks on all sides were crowned with walls of expectant citizens. The day was a glory—a steel-blue sky and a sweet, steady offshore wind. The council had a tiered platform at the tip of our major pier. When my flotilla came past them they would set afire a huge, wooden mock-up of the city's seal.

"I was in the shipyard. All the craft had been blocked on ramps and set to slide down by themselves to a launching in fair order. There were six of them, and I was in this boat, ramped to slide out in their midst, and so be masked by them at first. I pulled the block-pins. The great doors opened and our convoy skidded like so many fat swans onto the water.

"And they were light as swans too, at first. They were very proud ladies, my paper frigates, in the first moments of their promenading out onto the sea. They drew gasps from the crowd. But almost at once you could hear everyone saying `Eh?' `What?' Because the six of them wandered out giddily, like so many drunks reeling through the town square on their way to dance at the carnival. They bumped each other, some turned stern-first, and rocked till their masts looked like metronomes. The council buzzed. The seal was already proudly blazing, but the town orchestra was already faltering in mid-bar. The breeze jumbled the boats out to the center of the harbor. And then they began soaking up water in earnest. Here and there a sodden hull caved in like pastry left in the rain. Now a great noise arose from the multitude. The first of my ladies drank the limit. She went down so straight her masts looked like a weed being yanked under by a gopher.

"I was lying just here, in the stern. I would be unveiled on center-stage, so to speak, when the last frigate sank. Now this was the riskiest part of my venture, because for the whole five minutes it took all of them to go under, I was fighting for my life with an attack of laughter that almost killed me. That's how I was revealed to my fellow-citizens, despite my best attempts at self-command. But when the populace gave a . . . what shall I call it? A
surge
of comprehension, I struggled to the mast and pulled myself onto my feet. The rest of the fleet had at last begun to weigh anchor, and undertake my capture. Gasping and clinging to the mast, I shouted: "Citizens!"

That set me laughing again—the thought of them all. "Citizens!" I croaked again. "I can't understand it! I'm . . .
appalled
!
I used . . . the
best
. . . paper!" Getting that said nearly finished me. The fleet's lead ship was less than a hundred yards off now, and archers were forming up on its quarterdeck. I unfurled the sail. I'd researched the demon currents and they're quite strong near Sordon-Head. I departed then from the bay of my native city, and as I left I noted with satisfaction how the hard-taxed multitudes were swarming off the docks and onto the main pier, and how the entire council—at pier's end—had risen to its feet in what looked like alarm.

"It took some ingenuity to stay slow enough for the fleet to follow me. It was a point of pride, I suppose, but perhaps something less personal than that as well. At any rate I wanted my destination known, my descent witnessed. One doesn't want to leave the world of one's kind without some moment of farewell, some acknowledgment by your fellows of your kinship and your departure. I came down by the Taarg Vortex, which is a maelstrom in the Yellow Reefs. I did not think that any would come down with me, but the captain of the flagship was a zealous man and did not pull up and bring a line in time. He was pulled down after me. Those I could manage, in that raging hurricane of water, I killed with arrows, but many were taken instantly by demons, and I could do nothing for them. Wheeling in anguish, they went where I did, through the Dark Rapids, down where the whirlpool's root feeds into a subworld river which none have given a name, and which empties in the sea some thousand leagues in that direction."

At some point Gildmirth's voice must have entered Wimfort's dream-webbed brain, because when the Privateer stopped, the boy snapped open his eyes. They were large and dark, not piggy like his father's, and they now registered the clouds they stared at. With Barnar's help, he sat up. He looked at us, the boat, and us again. Seeing such astonishment as his, I couldn't think of what to tell him. It was Barnar who gave him the necessaries:

"We are men, Wimfort, not demons. This man has helped us fish you out, rescue you. Your father sent Nifft and me for you. We're taking you back up to the world of mankind."

My friend's summation struck me at first as the report of some other men's actions. I looked at my hands. They are quite presentable hands, but nothing out of the ordinary. I marveled at what Barnar and I had done thus far, even leaving aside that which the Privateer had made possible for us.

As for Wimfort's reaction to these words, it was like watching Barnar speaking sentences into a tunnel. After a long lag, answering lights of comprehension flickered from the darkness of the boy's eyes. His breathing grew stronger. More fear showed on his face, and he brought his hands up to touch it. Then, with a tremor, he thawed out. Tears bulged from the corners of his eyes—slow in emerging, then falling with that surprising quickness that tears have. Barnar patted his shoulder.

"We have a hard trek home, Wimfort," he said, "but we have an excellent chance of making it."

The boy looked at him and me, beginning to breathe more slowly. He looked at Gildmirth, whose plum-red orbs were like two terrible sunsets in the grinning ruins of his face.

"Your freedom's real, son," the Privateer said. "To talk to you of odds, of numbers, would never make clear to you the magnitude of your good fortune. So many like yourself are here forever."

"You two," Wimfort said. It was a croak, a voice almost erased. He cleared his throat. "You two. My father sent you?"

Seeing someone is half of meeting him, and hearing his voice the other half. I liked the voice—still a treble, with a gravelly shade of manhood to come. An un-selfconscious voice that said exactly what it thought. He probably had an ungentle tongue toward servants, but perhaps also a sense of humor, and imagination. He looked wonderingly about the sky and sea.

"How long have I been here?" he asked.

Barnar shrugged. "We cannot say how long we've been atraveling. Perhaps you have been here two or three months."

"Three months!" Wimfort said it hushedly. It was poignant, for we knew that he was reviewing what had filled those months for him. He shuddered, and then shuddered again more powerfully. He looked at us with what might have been panic drawing in his face.

"You two walked that long to reach me?"

"No," I said. "The trek was probably something more than a month, and you had been down here for a similar period before your father was able to . . . obtain our services."

"My father sent you . . ." echoed the boy. I was getting alarmed—his stare was so wide. "Three months here!" he groaned. "Three months. And my father sent
you.
He waited two months, and then sent a pair of baboons on foot who took another two months to get here!" His voice was rising to a howl as uncontrolled as his arithmetic was getting. "A good wizard could have had me out in a
day
!
That dung-heap! That greedy, stingy dung-heap! THREE MONTHS!!"

Wimfort recovered swiftly. My God, the resilience of the young! Within an hour to step back into your own mind and character after months of the Bonshad's intricate violation of your inmost thoughts. But that is the essence of youth—to believe soundly and fixedly in its own destruction. Soon we found, full-blown before us, the lad Charnall had described, with the same ambitions—intact, invigorated even by their grim miscarriage.

We cut the sack into a tunic for his temporary comfort. He dressed very surlily after I had told him he was a young idiot and that he was not to call us baboons. I tried not to be harsh about it, remembering he was convalescent. As he dressed, by way of setting things at ease, Gildmirth explained to him the erroneous tradition that made so many people summon Bonshads, and assured him that the Elixir of Sazmazm was nowhere near the sea, nor could any marine power hope to possess it, though such would treasure it as much as any primary demon would.

Wimfort had squatted on a rower's bench, with his back very straight and his face half-averted from us. When the Privateer finished the lad scowled and shook his head pityingly at the waters, then looked round to deliver this answer:

"I'm really an idiot, eh? As that one says? Do you think I'm so stupid I don't know the situation of the Elixir? Of course it isn't in the sea. It is obtained from somewhere outside it
by
the Bonshad, which as everyone knows lives
in
the sea."

"You just know that better than most by now," I put in, disgusted with the boy's impenetrability. He disdained to notice me and continued setting the Privateer straight:

"Just for your information, grandfather, I've read all that's known of the matter. The Elixir of Sazmazm is obtained in the prime subworld where the Giant Sazmazm, of the tertiary subworld, lies captive." Wimfort had adopted that bored off-handedness with which smart students reel off authoritative texts which they have memorized entirely and—in their opinion—mastered completely. "If you are curious as to the manner of the giant's captivity, it's relatively simple. Sazmazm sought ascension to the prime subworld where he meant to enjoy empire, and unholy feasts upon the lesser demons. He bargained with the great warlock, Wanet-ka, the greatest in all the Red Millennium, and generally held unscrupulous enough to wreak any harm for the right price, even that of bringing a tertiary power within one level of the world of men. Wanet-ka accepted the giant's advance, a stupendous sum, and then swindled Sazmazm. Using a loophole in the re-assembly clause of his pact, he transported the demon two levels up, as agreed, but everted him in so doing, and reconstituted him with fantastic whimsy and disorder. Sazmazm endures, a vast, impotent disjointment, his lifeblood pulsing through him in veins nakedly accessible to those who would brave the giant's tertiary vassals, who attend him, and laboriously transport his essence back down to his native world, fraction by fraction—a millennial labor."

Something tickled my memory. The boy's words evoked some image, too ephemeral for me to resolve, which spidered uneasily across my mind. The Privateer laughed. "Excellent. Two-thirds Ha-dadd—almost word for word—and the other third a loose rephrasing of Spinny the Elder. Both standard sources even in my day. Moreover, everything you have recited is true."

"For this feat—" Wimfort spoke with the outraged emphasis of a lecturer who has been crassly interrupted. "—the Grey League granted Wanet-ka the honorary epithet of `the Benevolent,' and included his biography in their Archive of Optimates."