The Incompleat Nifft (67 page)

"Just weigh this with me a moment Barnar, please! Picture it with me. An entire town—a city stricken with the Auric Pest. This plague strikes all, in hours! Not a man or woman standing, all lying helpless in fever, all of them, sweating gold! Little nuggets bead out from their pores! They lie sodden for days, shedding a bright golden gravel till their bed-slats groan with its weight! Now picture ourselves, with some choice companions, going round, filling pokes and bags and bales with purest gold, tidying the citizens' beds and collecting the municipal effluvium of wealth. It's incalculable, the yield of this plague! And all the stricken fold heal, they stand up fine and healthy—though gaunt and hungry to be sure—after three days' time. What a beneficent form of pillage, and how stupendously lucrative!

"Barnar, with all respect, I merely urge you to weigh more carefully the kind of wealth you so peremptorily dismiss! The Auric Plague is costly to deploy, I grant this candidly. It must be windborn, and so we must engage a witch to capture an elemental in the Harakan Hills of Hagia. But once deployed—"

"Have done, Nifft! Will you not desist? How your voice has come to grate on my nerves! Spare me these mad fugues of ambition. To squeeze gold from others is the thief's vocation and essential art. The difference between us, it seems, is that I am a Thief-for-a-time, a Thief-while-I-must-be kind of thief, while you are a thief down to the least lizardly bone of you!"

We swam—with already toilsome strokes—across a wetland of red pools fringed by polypous stalks and plumes and tentacles which were freckled with eyes and writhing ceaselessly. Airborne shapes—a polyglot rabble of pterid demons—haunted the wetland, swooping down at the crimson pools, spearing up swallows from the wine-red lagoons. Jawed things leapt out of the pools and dragged down careless drinkers. We swam a bit higher in the air to get above the buffeting of the the thirsty prey's wings and the din of their cries.

"With a little help from you," Barnar resumed, his eyes not meeting mine, his tone resolute and tired of the whole debate, "I can summon the means, and deploy the seed, to make all northern Chilia, every foot of her most barren heights included, into an unbroken garden of majestic timber. This is a different art from the Thief's, Nifft, and in choosing this art, the art of cultivation, I have done with, put away and depart from, the Guild of Thieves. And in so doing, I dower the world around me. The city-conjuring, ship-launching treasure of Timber is bestowed by me—not stolen—bestowed on the whole Great Shallows. The largesse of lumber, from a Chilia re-garbed in her mantle of green. This feat, you see, this grand reforestation, would be a getting and a giving. Meanwhile look at your obsessions! I can't help it Nifft—I must really think less of you! Look at these deliria of insatiable greed that possess you, even to the point of reneging on a personal vow!"

My temper snapped with his. "You bull-necked—"

"Gentlemen! I beg you! Mercy!" So shrill was Ostrogall we startled, at first thinking him injured somehow. "My awe is yours," he resumed, "my reverence, my utter fealty! Yet please tolerate my humble, most apologetic suggestion—Though I am utterly dazzled by your virtues and excellences in all else!—my suggestion that you lose the profit of your recent travels when you are so absorbed in a debate about the future! Your nets bulge with your loot, of course, but what of all the sights and sounds, the spectacles you have beheld? Distracted as you are, will you even remember these wonders? You have seen so much of my world—far more than I had seen, even through my most far-flung eye-spores. By the Crack, what things we have
seen
, eh Gentlemen? I never guessed the multiplicity of my nation! May I be frank, revered benefactors? You even lose the, well, glee of having these riches, by being so embroiled in recrimination."

The dreariness of this world was all I could see of it now—I saw no wonders. We overflew a new terrain, a great prairie of huge tubeworms, their ciliated mouths making incessant, lascivious osculations. A winged parasite of our Harpy's make—though a bigger, more carniverous breed—infested these tubeworms, hanging above them like carrion flies, diving to get past the worms' darting, seeking mouths. When they got down among the lower stalks, they battened on the tubeworms' undefended root muscles and sucked their blood. Perhaps every second or third Harpy was caught and devoured by the worms as it plunged. A sufficiency survived: everywhere, studding the worms' root muscles like warts, shone the pallid egg-clusters which the Harpies laid.

"What I mean, Effulgent Ones," Ostrogall ventured, sounding both encouraged and worried by our silence, "is that you haven't even, well,
gloated
over this wealth. You haven't laughed and exulted and run your hands over it, you've neither cavorted nor capered nor crowed. You are fabulously rich, but—I grovel in apology!—you don't seem to know it! Surely you are glad of these incredible riches, gentlemen? And surely you feel now that I have truly benefitted you, enriched you beyond the shadow of a doubt? By any sane reckoning of your present abundance, and my unstinting assistance?"

Seeing his drift, I found myself to be instantly and peevishly disposed against it.

"Oh inexpressible ones," diapasoned Ostrogall, "oh my Rescuers, wise and just and mighty, oh dare I, in my utter humility, frame the word?—
friends
!"

"Forgive me," I snapped, "but you may not frame the word. You are a demon, part of the Quintessential Excremescence from the Cosmic Bowel. I think you presume most offensively upon the bond of obligation placed on you by our saving of your odious life!"

"Oh please, Effulgent Ones, I utterly retract the term, how could I have
presumed
, madness took me!—but
please
Effulgent ones, do not now again show a relenting of your good resolve to honor our bargain! Think not of returning me to those remorseless larval jaws. Please bethink yourselves how at every turn I have guided and enriched you!"

And indeed he had. But perversely, at that moment, our wealth seemed as much a burden as a boon—a dangerous, arduous cargo we must shepherd over many miles, through many nights in the open, with leisure and peace of mind a thing of the past, till we could make our little mountains of loot secure. And to add to the onus of it all, we must be very careful—more than careful, as a matter of fact—in using the Unguent of Flight once we had brought our treasure to the upper world. For if thieves saw us in mid-air, they would not rest until they had our courses marked—marked and, likely enough, followed to whatever destination Barnar and I might have in mind. It was one more burdensome accountability.

We paused above the tubeworm prairie; we trod the air and unlimbered our jars of Unguent. We had to reach deep to dip with careful, sparing fingertips, and freshly anoint our palms and our bootsoles. It was clear our jars would be half emptied by the time we reached the surface world. Chance thus cunningly cozened us of the extra flight we had filched, for our remainder looked to equal the two bowlfuls formally alloted us by the secondary keepers of the Talons.

"You are right, demon," I answered at last, "in noting that I am not ecstatic. And frankly, I feel no grateful warmth toward you, though your advice on some occasions has been arguably fruitful, I suppose. . . ."

"Oh please don't waver from your good resolve, gentlemen! We are so near my natural home. Those plains not one mile hence beyond these leechfields, just rightwards there a bit from your course. But set me there, I beg, and I'll take instant root! We'll be quits! I'll bless your holy names eternally, my radiant saviours!"

And indeed the plains he indicated were not far off from the field of tubeworms we still overflew. "Your language is really quite shamelessly fulsome," I reproved him, though I won't deny I felt the demon had a way with words. Sensing a pause in our resistance, Ostrogall gushed, his voice all flutes and oboes, "Oh do not extinguish me, I beg. Gentlemen! Is not my Being like a fine-wrought bowl of crystal that brims with the cosmos around me? Do I not hold life's brief drink of wonders—hold it in my senses like a chalice, as do you? What boots inquisition into our individual deeds? We share Life's brief excursion from the vasty dark. We soar a short trajectory through wheeling infinities of form, and then plunge gone again!"

Well, I will confess, he moved us. In a word, we felt for the demon. Is it not amazing, what mere prolonged association can inure us to? But in that moment Ostrogall struck a true chord; life, after all, is a short flight, a few centuries long at the utmost. Barnar and I traded a look, and found, with surprise, that we were agreed to relent.

"Very well, then," Barnar said. "Give him here, Nifft. I'll veer over and back—no need that we both waste Unguent."

"Right," I said. "Here he is."

"Oh you paragons of human beauty!" the demon-stump ululated. "Oh you Archetypes, angelically strong and wise—
Aieeeee
!"

Our weariness, coupled perhaps with a failure to adjust to the new lift of our freshened Unguent, caused me to falter, and fumble the transfer of Ostrogall's head; I released it before Barnar had quite securely gripped it. It plunged.

The demon squawled with rage as he plummeted down through the harpy-swarms thick as flies: "Rot and roast you, human scum!" he shrilled. "Better the grub had me! Now I'll wait three hundred years for my spores to—" Here a tubeworm flickered up, and swallowed him.

We flew on, a little bemused. "There is something poignant, isn't there, about his mishap?" I asked Barnar. "How he loved seeing things! Such a devoted witnesser. Now he'll be blind three times longer than if the grub had eaten him."

"The irony is poignant, as you say."

We swam along in a silence somehow loud with the unspoken bitterness between us. The demon's absence seemed to throw our tacit controversy into stark relief. A last recrimination burst out of me: "I would never have believed it possible that Barnar Hammer-hand might tell me he was not a thief, or that, hearing him say it, I might fail to swear he lied. But now when you tell me you are not a thief, I am shamefully compelled to nod assent, and say, `In truth, no thief is he!'"

Barnar answered nothing. Far to our left, like a winter-slain tree, the stark, branching bones of 'Omphalodon's Talons, gnawed down to stumps now, still valiantly battled the living mantle of Foragers feeding on them. I looked up briefly at 'Omphalodon's Eye. We had flown close to that Eye not long past, and glimpsed things in its gulf that I disliked to remember. Now in that bloody orb I thought I saw a glint of the demon's grief for a part of himself too briefly resurrected; he seemed to pity that ruined limb which once had burned to seize the sun.

After a time, I said, "It won't be long now," meaning the black constellation of Nest-mouths we swam toward. There was deadly-hard work ahead of us, getting our plunder back up through the Nest.

It was a nightmare of toil. High in the vaulting of the Nest's great entry chamber, we webbed one of our bales in a crevice with pitons and line. We flew up-Nest one-handed, a shared grip on the second bale between us. Shifting and veering our burden's bulk clear of sudden traffic was killing labor. Our dye blazes were half worn off the tunnel walls, eroded to nothing in places. We blundered and groped, sweat-blind, through miles of tunnel.

We reached our larval chamber, and stowed our plunder. Then we flew back down, and did it all again.

When it was done at last, we fell into our hammocks. We could go up the gangway right now if we chose, breathe the wind and see the sun again. . . . We didn't move. We were stupendously rich men, and above us lay a world of thieves. We would sleep first, and come out careful. In truth, we felt like troglodytes still, twisted and stunted to this underworld, the sun and sky alien things we knew only from tales. Through another long dark we slept safe in the earth, lullabyed by Behemoth's unsleeping maternal bustle.

Adhesions of the hell just left,
A feeling that the will is cleft
A taste for darkness in the soul
While hideous images unscroll
Before my staring Inner Eye.
Am I still I
?
Did I not . . . die
?

ALL WAS PREPARED. I was armed. Our fortune was assembled in the nook, and Barnar standing by it, where I would send down to him packing materials, and whence he would send up our bundled wealth when I had transport secured above.

He watched me standing before the gangway hatch, watched me still hesitating to step into the bucket. I think he understood. I gestured at our netted gems, glinting bitterly like captured beasts' eyes, their otherworldly lusters biting through Behemoth's cyanic hue, and at our bales of infernal artifacts, bulging and jutting against their shroudings like the little bundled corpses of alien monsters. "I half feel it's real only down here in the dark," I told Barnar. "I half believe that when we raise it up there, it will vanish, evaporate into the sky."

"Be comforted, Nifft. I've seen demon gems traded in sunlight, right enough. In the Shallows' bazaars I've seen one of them buy a whole ship, with its cargo and crew!" Barnar smiled as he said this, knowing it was something deeper that was giving me pause. Knowing that what panged me now was a fear that I myself—transformed by too long and lustful a sojourn below—might evaporate into the sky, no longer a proper citizen of the sunlight.

I had—we both had—faced such a return a decade past. But that reascension from the Demon-Sea was an escape from constant battle for our lives. We had hewed and hacked and dodged our way through the subworld, and the desperate toil of it purged us of that realm's infections.

Now we were coming from a long, delirious bacchanal of plunder. From the great red furrow of ruin ploughed by a conquering army, we had gleaned obscene riches, hanging for the most part free and clear of the unspeakabilities we viewed. Here, at little personal risk, we plucked hell's fruit and savored it. In consequence, our hearts and souls were deeper-dyed with the demons' lurid gloom; half my will still swam in that dark like a hungry eel, nosing for infernal wealth.