The Incompleat Nifft (64 page)

"I rejoice for you!" I answered. "In your present extremity, what comfort you must draw from this reflection!"

A pause. "I will not conceal," Ostrogall sighed, "that I'd prefer a quicker restoration of my interrupted life, and one that did not involve the workings of those loathsome larval jaws upon what remains of my person."

"Do you know, Ostrogall, your saying this is most opportune! Barnar and I were only lately musing how your expertise in matters Behemothine might be of use to us in our upcoming venture. And we even agreed we could offer you your restoration to your native soil as recompense for this service. What stymied us was our fear that you would now mistrust our offer, and refuse it!"

"Mistrust?" fluted Ostrogall, his voice quavering as he strove for a honied tone. "Mistrust your irreproachable selves? I won't deny I
hesitate
. I won't deny your . . . recent decisions give me
pause
. But how could I mistrust such paragons of rectitude, such patterns, such epitomes as your peerless selves? Still, may I humbly hope that you really
will
re-plant me, if I aid you in the, ah, milking of the Royal Mother?"

"Ostrogall, if you aid our enrichment in this next foray, there is nothing on earth or under it so firm as our intention of re-planting you!"

Barnar and I slept—how can we say how long, beyond that it was long enough to purge the poisons of fatigue from our muscles and minds? When we woke, and ravenously breakfasted, we found our thoughts not so much engaged by the milking of the Queen, as by that even more lucrative project we contemplated—dared to contemplate!—after the milking was accomplished. To follow the Young Queen, and her conquering army, across the hell-floor. The question that consumed us was, in essence: how much wealth could we fly with? At the outset, we burned with a delirium of possibility, for we had seen the Unguent put Foragers aloft.

So we looped some line around the tapered ends of a grub, and strove to fly with it. We could not budge it from the ground. At this juncture Ostrogall warbled from his perch, "It is said that the Unguent allows the flier to carry ten times his own weight into the air, and that, be he light or heavy, this is the limit of what he may bring aloft with him. I forebore to speak before you'd tried it for yourselves, feeling sure you'd insist on a personal test."

It galled us to find our hunger for gain thus trammelled, but we made our peace with it at length, reflecting that with selectivity, more than a ton apiece of subworld plunder could amount to a wealth vast by any standards, especially when added to what we had already won.

But any thought of what this wealth might purchase led us straight to that gulf that yawned between us. Some airborne exploration of the Nest seemed preferable to reopening this controversy.

Hovering ghosts, we haunted our way through another nursery, then through several Incubaria, where lay pearly troves of eggs, which Nurses incessantly turned, and groomed of parasites. The hatchlings from these eggs, smaller versions of the grubs we knew, were fed up to size with lumps of a pale food of cheesy softness. We tracked a Nurse to the source of this substance—chambers full of a fungus unlike the growth which gave the Nest its light. This stenchful mold sprouted obese fruiting bodies like giant, hairy strawberries, which, macerated in the Nurses' jaws, became the hatchlings' nutriment. This fungus crop grew from a substrate of demon mulch, a coarse mash of chopped bodies, of bone and limb, talon, wing, fin, skull and thorny muzzle (some of it still a-twitch and astir with stubborn vitality) which melted slowly, consumed in the slow fire of the fungal growth. Here and there melting mouths still muttered, and fragmented visages alertly flashed at us their shards of eyes. . . .

"This fungus perhaps provides a kind of predigested demon pabulum," Barnar hazarded.

"Can we wonder," I answered, "that a diet of demon meat must be eased up to?"

We were chary of our Unguent, or we might have pushed exploration further. We found besides that, once returned to our operations nook, we were more than ready for more sleep, such had been our recent exertions. And when we awoke for the second time, it was to the voices of our returning partners.

Airily wander the Royal terrain
Where profit and pasture so vastly abound.
But warily plunder when findest thy Gain,
For the taking may break thee, and drag thee
a-down
!

THE QUEEN'S abdominal surface was oceanic; between the broad, glossy undulations of her major ribs were endless local texturings of the mottled hide, lesser vales and knolls, troughs and tumuli. We flew, and viewed the wonder of Her planetary scope.

The abdomen's harlequin puzzle of black and white was—as we had been prepared to find it—alive with parasites and hyperparasites. "There now!" warned Barnar. Side-stroking through the air, we veered leftward above a little valley-bottom whence, with a glittery ripple of their jointed backs, a host of hound-sized crustaceiods arose on glassy wings. These airborne lice moved in a low, mazy cloud to a neighboring swale, where we knew they would resettle, for they grazed on the sebaceous oils the Queen's back sweated out, and these lay thickest on low ground. Their flight had the slow-rolling movement you see in flocks of starlls when they're gleaning the winter fields, blowing like gusted leaves from plot to plot.

The spectacle did not lack a certain ghastly charm. Indeed, it was not these creatures themselves we avoided, but rather their larger, grimmer predators, a triad of which now surged up in pursuit of the flock. Of reptilian make, with jaws extravagantly fanged, these hunters dined on the wing, and when they struck their flustered quarry, fragments of the sundered lice—body plates and bleeding legs—drizzled down.

We were learning as we went. Not many moments before, flying incautiously close to a flock of these lice, we'd been attacked by one of these same predators. I lopped off half the brute's jaw for him with Ready Jack, and Barnar clove his pate with Biter, but we were both set spinning and whirling by the violence of our own battle-blows. We tumbled so helplessly at first it seemed our weapons must fly from our hands, and Ostrogall wailed with terror from his precarious holster on my hip.

So we paused aloft to practice executing sword and axe strokes. We learned that any blow required a simultaneous countering, cancelling blow from an opposite limb, otherwise we were left spinning, or see-sawing madly, like skiffs in jumpy water. Shortly, we caught the trick of standing on the air, and pulling up with our legs as we down-swept with our weapons; this gestural symmetry let us chop hard, yet be left standing steady enough on the air.

We cruised, wary, taking a look about the Queenly terrain and consciously putting off—perhaps even pointedly putting off—our task at hand.

In some measure we were still peeved (if the whole truth be told) at the Bunts' poor performance of their bond. For they'd come back down with only two and a half hundredweight of gold, alleging that they'd found mead prices depressed in Dry Hole by a momentary glut of the beverage from other Angalheim hiveries, and in consequence they had liquidated their warehoused stock at a loss.

"Surely this won't be a sticking point, gentlemen?" Bunt blandly urged. "The lacking sum, which you may confidently expect within a week, is but a scant sixth of what is owed—a paltry fraction."

"This proportional way of viewing the deficit," I replied, "gravely misses the point." I was finding it hard to keep a civil tone. "A fiftyweight of gold is first to be considered in its absolute value, in concrete terms. With a fiftyweight, for instance, a man might hire a quartet of Stregan gaunts for siegework on the Cidril steppes."

There was a pause. Bunt seemed to find the example baffling.

"Or the same fiftyweight might," Barnar put in with equal heat, and an oblique glance at me, "buy the service of a brace of bog giants for a four-month, to manage the shackles of a gryph-gryph, and see the monster has water to sustain its micturations."

This left them all staring. Sha'Urley, recovering first, reasoned, "Surely the lacking sum is as secure in our temporary keeping, as it would be if added to your cache here with what must be another half a ton of gems and specie—safely buried no doubt, but nevertheless reposing in a place where restless giants continually dig the earth. Meanwhile, we may be infallibly trusted for payment. I have rightly called your demands exorbitant. I have never said Bunt Hivery cannot meet them, and handily. We are even extending your nephew a twentyweight or so to finance the venture he envisions with his giants' pap."

"And what might that venture be, Nephew?" Barnar asked.

"Alas," snapped tight-lipped Costard, "the harshly mercenary mood you've shown me warns me to guard my secret."

I had a qualm, just then, thinking that if giants' pap proved potent in upper-world applications, then selling Costard some of it was reckless folly. It was at the very least a serious disservice to the young man's immediate neighbors. I then dismissed the notion. Thus lightly, sometimes, does prescience touch our thoughts with her wing-tips.

But it wasn't just the fiftyweight that peeved me as we cruised above the Queen's abdomen, far inland from her busy flanks where the pap pores were. "It galls me! I cannot shake it!" I burst out at Barnar. "Look how we fly. See what effortless access we now have to these wonders, and to wealth that outgoes computation! And in the midst of it, in the very blaze of all this fortune, all this glory, I cannot rejoice! I am tormented by bitterness, when my heart might otherwise be lifted on the wings of joy! And why? Because your damned, ox-necked
stubbornness
, Barnar! You won't even grant two months—three at the very most; three paltry months! Your sullen, bovine, belligerent balkiness will not grant even so tiny a delay of your seed-whacking, tree-tilling obsession! How can you be so selfish!? Only think what your madness defers! Pelfer's Buskins! His Cowl!"

Barnar snorted, sounding, I felt, exactly like an ox. "Oh, in truth you are a nervy weasel to upbraid me with my honor's core, my love of kith and clan and hearth-land! I'm truly sorry to find you can be such an odious reptile, Nifft, with all your selfish, supple twistings to wriggle loose of your bonded word! To slither out of the obligations of your own sworn oath!"

"Barnar, I was half drunk! How many sentimental, half-drunk quests have you sworn to? You
hold
me to this one! And in truth, I do acknowledge the vow, I will perform it! But why does it have to come first?"

Below us, in the pale parts of the Queen's hide, a subtle blue network of veins, sunk in Her oily translucence, grew visible. For some moments now a running pack of brutes, back-legged like grasshoppers, their jaws bouquets of thorny tentacles, had run beneath our line of flight, studying us with glinting, metallic eye-bumps. We dropped down across a rib crest in the dorsal topography just as these creatures, cresting it, sprang up at us.

Their legs had hellish thrust; we must needs wheel back hard as a brace of them surged up ravening at our legs. With my feet thrusting for counter-purchase on the air, I two-armed Ready Jack wide left, wide right. Tentacles and twitching leg-stumps rained back down on the marbled valley, where, with a liquid slide, a half-transparent amoebal mass engulfed and dissolved them.

"How," I asked Barnar, "can you have missed seeing what the possession of Pelfer's Facilitators could bring to us!? With the Buskins, Cowl and Gantlets, we could break into Mhurdaal's Manse. We could steal . . .
his library
."

I know I shuddered at my own words; I had scarce, ere this, allowed myself to look in the face of my own greatest ambition—an ambition steadily a-kindling in me (I now realized) since our capture of the Unguent of Flight had shown me the scope of wealth that we might aspire to. Nor could Barnar hear so fine and wild and moon-drunk a scheme as stealing the Library of Mhurdaal spoken without visible emotion. But in his selfish impatience he shrugged it off, striking the noble thought aside. "You are addicted to chasing legends, Nifft! It is a madness that can yield no final fruit!"

"Gentlemen! Luminous Benefactors!" the demon-head oboed from my hip. "With your forbearance, I beg you to be wiser! All this fury for futurities? Gentlemen, look where you are! Even to me, for whom this is the very hearth of Hell—here, where the armies spawn who sack my kindred's habitation, and 'spoil us of our lives—even to me this is a mighty hall of wonder, and my every eye most avidly imbibes the Muchness and the Suchness of it all! Let me urge you to be where you are, in the moment, and partake of its magnificence."

"You urge a truth there, I suppose," I had to concede. Down in the terrain's crevasses, around licks and ponds of Royal sebum, flocks of winged things jostled amicably enough with multibrachiate competitors, like plains life at the waterholes in the Lulumean savannahs. Big, black shapes crouched half-distinguishable in the blacknesses, with an occasional twitch of importunate hunger. Where the Royal dorsum was white, the buried veins were visible, and down there in the cloudy luminosity of the Queen's deep meat, huge forked arteries convulsed with the slow, implacable authority of Earthquake as somewhere, far deeper, Her colossal heart propounded her relentless vitality.

"How do you, then, Ostrogall," I musingly asked him, "believe that Behemoth came to be?"

"My race, sire, generally feel Mankind could not have fashioned any weapon of such power as She. And therefore we also believe, that as Behemoth is Earthborn, so it must inevitably come to pass that in Her time, She shall be half-conquered, half-possessed by demonkind, as Earth herself has been."

"It makes me love you less to think on this possibility, oh fragmentary demon," Barnar said, "though of course we thank you for your candor."

"But gentlemen," our cephalic cicerone melodiously remonstrated, "we are Life, and live its laws! Why, look here! Is this not living proof leaping thus directly to our gaze? These nastra-haagen, do you not see them? They are demonkind! Living on the very flank of our nation's destroyer!"