The Incompleat Nifft (55 page)

The flap of stone she lifted proved flexible. It was a huge
lip
in fact, for fang-rimmed jaws appeared beneath. But the jaws were slack. From the black gap between them a stench of putrefaction rose like a geyser's effusion. Our Forager began, in a probing, testing way, to pull this laired being apart a bit, ripping up fang-crowned chunks of jawbone, and plucking out a huge, tri-forked tongue. But apparently her appetite recoiled. She dropped the tongue to lie reeking like a long-beached whale, and reared up and rushed on.

"Live demons will be swarming somewhere," gloomed Barnar, "if she scorns to take carrion in her crop."

I was squinting at the horizon when Barnar almost stopped my heart by booming, "Look out for your foot, Nifft! Jump back!"

I stumbled in my alarm and was too late, for a cold, slimy pressure slid across my buskin top and my bare calf above it. A dun-colored hemispheroid, of the approximate size and form of a Jarkkelad battle-casque, then slid hastily away across the carapace, whose mottled hue it almost precisely matched.

And in moments, our instructed eyes discovered that the Forager's rugose and fissured thorax swarmed with these creatures; they were especially thick around the oily junctures of the Behemoth's huge legs with her armored flanks. Our brief inspection proved them harmless detritivores, grazing on the giant's dermal oils and scaly debris.

A scarlet river streamed ahead, a wide, sinewy torrent, exhaling a nimbus of lavender mist where it tore itself against its living banks. Our Forager surged solid-footed through the flux, and when we crested the farther bank, we saw our goal: a distant acropolis, swarmingly besieged.

The landscape surged upward toward that embattled height, the ridged terrain converging toward it like corded sinews. We followed a crestline, and had broad vantage of the far-flung multitude of Foragers running confluently with us. They spread to sight's farthest reach beneath the bleeding, grieving gaze of our cyclopean sun.

The fortress's form and circumstance grew steadily clearer. Her tiered walls towered half a mile high, and three leagues or more in breadth. The ramparts, rising in recessed plateaus, seethed with furious war. We could just make out the roiling mantle of Behemoths that those bulwarks wore, and the splash of fire and hail of missiles hurled down by the demon defenders.

"Duck!" howled Barnar. I fell on my face, astonished—we were nowhere in range of the fray. But here indeed attackers came swooping down upon us, battering the air with sinewy wings.

But by the time our wits were regathered, our blades drawn, and ourselves afoot again, the harmless truth of the matter was plain. For these winged shapes, a croaking, stenchful flock of them, were wholly unmindful of ourselves. They were demon parasites feeding greedily upon the lice we had lately discovered infesting our great mount's leg-joints.

Big, leathery wings these new parasites had, and scrawny bodies of just under human size. Their heads were monocular, with tripart branchlike mouthparts adept at seizing the lice, as were their nether pairs of scrawny, spindle-clawed legs; with these appendages they deftly plucked up their prey, winging acrobatically amidst the hugely pumping thighs of the Forager. When any of these Harpies had a brace or three of lice in its jaws or claws, it winged up into the clear and, hovering, broke open the lice like glossy melons and greedily sucked out the pallid, oleaginous meat. Just between their haunches, where a human would be sexed, these harpies bore little, thin-lipped secondary mouths that did not feed, but spoke in shrieks and gull-like shrills to one another.

"They're pretty alert-looking vermin, wouldn't you say?" Barnar growled in my ear. I nodded. The single, pentagonal eye that crowned their skullish little heads looked quick and sharp. Concerning ourselves, they seemed both aware of us, and incurious about us. We studied them, however, with growing interest. I began toying with one end of my rope, just as Barnar murmured again in my ear. "Just suppose," he said, "that we might do a little . . . fishing with one of them?" I thrilled at the genius of the notion, for it was my own as well: I had just finished making a noose in the end of my line, and we leaned close together to hide it.

The ramparts loomed nearer now. The stench of scorched tissue and blood reached us, and the din of deathcries. We could see that a writhing, tentacular forest of demon limbs sprouted from the stone of the ramparts, and seized on the legs of the assaulting Foragers.

In moments we would be in the thick of the fray, our footing uncertain. . . . Suddenly, one of the harpies swooped carelessly close to us, rising with a just-snatched louse in its claws. With an unpremeditated snap of the wrist, I put the noose up neatly in the harpy's path. The batwinged parasitivore thrust its head home, and we yanked it down and piled onto it.

Grotesque strength lived in this loathsome pterod's scrawny form, but because we pinned its wings as it half-folded them in shock, we were able to bind those powerful pinions tightly shut, while my hand smothered the mouth between its haunches. As we bound our captive, its fellows, seeing our predation, recoiled slightly, creating a zone of safety between themselves and us. But having done thus much, all of them studiously returned to feeding on the lice.

I unmuffled our captive's nether mouth and knelt to speak to it, while Barnar stood with his axe poised to clip the demon's mouthparts from its head.

"We don't know how long we'll be stuck on the back of this beast," I told the Harpy. "Meanwhile, we've grown hungry, I'm afraid, and unless you can suggest an alternative course of action, we're going to have to eat you."

"No! No! Don't!" hissed the mouth between the Harpy's leathery haunches. It appeared that this demon could use human speech only in a ragged whisper. "I can bring you better eating, heavenly eating! I could bring you gold!"

"Excellent!" Barnar replied. "As it happens, we consider several hundredweight of gold, or a like value in gems (which are lighter and perhaps preferable) to be a completely satisfactory alternative to eating you."

In truth we would have died rather than eat one bite of that scabrous hyperparasite, but its fervor in accepting the exchange suggested that the creature did not know this.

The ramparts loomed just ahead—we could see the barbed and suckered demon tentacles get death-grips on assaulting Foragers, and break their backs. And we could see these fallen Foragers, though detained in death, still lend their backs as footing to their following sisters. Chaos would swallow us in moments. . . .

And yet at that imperiled moment, as I gazed upon that Harpy trembling in its bonds, I experienced what I can only call a kind of transformation of the spirit. Here lay this Harpy, a winged and willing agent of our enrichment, and here about us spread the subworld. The subworld, much as it breathes of horror and harm, breathes equally of wealth. The dizzying muchness of gold and gem, of sheer, raw lucre pooled and coffered there, puts intoxication in the air. Demonkind sweats gold—gold is demonkind's shite and vomitus, and lies heaped everywhere. So now a lustful hope of wealth blazed most hotly in me.

But at the same time it was more than avarice I burned with; it was a sense of miracle as well. We began to climb those ramparts atop our stupendous living vehicle, with that Harpy lying bound and compliant between us, and I
believed
that we even now rode on the crest of the greatest wave of fortune our lives would ever know. I felt then a kind of ecstasy of cosmic attunement. This was our Moment, our hour to be loved and doted on by the universe! We were now, at last, fated to have enrichment thrust on us at every turning.

"Look even there!" hissed our desperate captive. "Where we ascend the ramparts here—I know this sector! I'll find you things of value!"

We rode in giddying surges upwards across the backs of luckless Foragers gripped in the forest of demon-limbs. The Behemoths' legs smoked and crumbled wherever they were firmly in the grip of those prodigious paws and tentacles, and our own mount's legs, though they tore free of capture at every other step, were ridged with fuming welts from the contact.

"Duck!" Barnar bellowed. From the battlements, rags of green fire came flapping down around our huddled shoulders, and boulders hurtled through the rubescent gloom. Weaponry too rained on us—darts, arrows, javelins whirtled and snickered down, while everywhere the million-voiced banshee of War raved and wailed and roared, a conflagration of noise that consumed our thoughts.

But did I, in this boil of risk, this great melee of swooping doom and arrowing death, falter one instant from my ecstasy? I did not! I knew my time. Now was Fortune mine, not harm. Now were power, and sweet ambition's pinnacles, and my wild will soaring at full wingspread—now were these all mine! I could not die!

Our Forager attained the crest of the battlements, where giant batrachian demons, welded at the waist to the stone, seized the jaws or legs of the invaders in wrestler's grips. Here and there, seized three on one, Foragers' limbs buckled—they faltered and were broken, limb and skull. Elsewhere the warty titans were scissored to a spew of green tissue by juggernaut jaws. A tentacle seized our mount's foremost portside leg. She heaved and struggled, and we were shaken as by earthquake. Acid smoke hissed round the tentacle's grip. The leg was sundered, and fell away, and we surged across the crest of the ramparts.

We were through. We were over. Smoothly we plunged down toward the broad, wall-girt plains all aswarm with demonkind, and the rhythm of our mount's onrush seemed unaltered by the lost leg. "This is our time!" I bellowed to Barnar. "Our greatest hour commences with this exploit!"

Harken me Harpy, and answer me clear:
What might you find to fish out for us here
?

OUR FORAGER sped through phalanxes of demon defenders, and torn demonmeat sprayed like wake, the flying fragments trailing entrails like comet-tails. The terrain dispread before us might be called city here and there, where domes and ragged steeples seethed with tiny-distant shapes in turmoil. Jungle it was elsewhere, where towering tracts of foliage thrashed and tremored with veiled struggles. There were walled gardens where grew rows on rows of things in glittery, bright-hued soil, things with eyes and voices, and neck-cords straining with their desperate utterance. On flagstoned highways caravans fled amid armed escorts, their multibrachiate mounts all saddlebagged with bundles that twitched and bulged. Red rivers snaked through it all, plunging here and there into caverns, and all these foaming red rapids were thronged with demonkind, whether in vessels or their own aquatic nakedness, all woven in the subworld's red-clawed trafficking. And all was grievingly, weepingly beheld by the great alien Eye in the hellroof.

Foragers cruised everywhere, smiting down domes and towers, scissoring down tall-crested jungle skylines, bursting through the great plantations' walls, devouring caravans and guards and packbeasts alike, churning into the wild red rivers and rising with broken galleons dripping in their jaws. . . .

"Harken, Harpy," I cried to our captive. "What might you fish up for us here? We favor high value and relatively light weight. Gemstones come to mind."

To hear its hissed answer we had to lean low to our Harpy's hindquarters, and smell the creature's personal scent, which was not unlike a putrefying lizard's. "Use reason, sires! Can I
pilot
this monster? Gemstones and their like are easily had, they're common mulch in gardens—if this Behemoth but carry us there."

We sprawled a-tumbling, barely keeping a grip on the pinioned Harpy, which might else have gone rolling off our mount. The Forager had stopped short, and violently assaulted the earth with her jaws.

This was a stretch of rolling, rocky ground all studded with stone and steel trapdoors, burrow-mouths hugely hinged and barred, squat-built turrets, and bunkers of massy iron. Our mount began to rip out the lintel and frame of a trapdoor.

There were other Foragers assailing the many-portaled ground, and we saw one of them in particular—a silhouette at some distance—rear up to encounter an attacker. Shaken as we were by our mount's convulsive tearings at the stone, this remote encounter gripped our attention, for now we could make out the silhouette of that other Forager's attacker; it was fully as large as the Behemoth, and resembled an immense 'lurk, or running-spider.

But now beneath us gaped a corridor, deeply branching and sulfurously lit and thronged by multibrachiate creatures fleeing ever deeper. Into this, our mount plunged.

Down green-litten echo-y hallways we chased hordes of scaly, hooved brutes which, as they fled, deafened us with the trumpetings of their brazen, funiculate mouths. We swerved through a turning, and thrust into a high-vaulted chamber, richly carpeted, with facing rows of splendid doors and grand statuary. Amazingly, our mount attacked the carpet, seizing up huge flaps of it. The carpet bled copious purple gore where it was torn. She pulled mightily, and the heavy, hemorrhaging fabric slithered twitching through her jaws and into her crop. And as the carpet tore, a wave of mutation rippled down the magnificent corridor walls; doors and statues and ceiling vaults all shuddered and melted from their form, revealed in their upheaval as one continuous anatomy. Statues became probing papillae, doors the wet membraneous valves of mouths, floor and wall and ceiling all one unified, sinuous, cloacal tube of carnivorous tissue. Ridges of annular muscle swept peristaltically through the glassy demonmeat, whose labyrinthine veins surged inky-black in its death-throes.

If the weight of our Forager's huge meal had slowed her, we failed to note it, and were knocked sprawling once again by the suddenness of her wheeling round and surging surfacewards.

"List! Oh, list!" the Harpy malodorously hissed, and we crouched hearkening. "Her crop's half full now. She'll feed more, but will be soon enough returning. If you mean to use me, let us stand ready!"

We tethered the demon by the neck, and bound its legs, which, though skinny, had strength and flexibility to uncollar it once on the wing. Our mount was speeding now towards a walled orchard. "Do your gathering with your jaws," Barnar told the Harpy. "A false move and we'll break your neck. Bring us up wealth enough, and we will set you free."