The Incompleat Nifft (24 page)

"That wire," he told me—"dangling just off the bow from the ceiling. Reach out and give it a sharp pull. Tell me, was this boy you're after looking for the Elixir of Sazmazm?"

My hand stopped halfway to its task. "You
know
of him?" Gildmirth laughed and gestured at the wire. I pulled it. This freed the ball-joint from which we hung, and our boat in its little steel basket began the plunge.

"I know of his type, no more," Gildmirth said. "Almost all of those whom bonshads bring here have themselves summoned the things to procure them the Elixir."

The whisper of the track grew steely and shrill. We swooped through the door and out along a boom projecting some sixty feet above the lagoon. Gildmirth pulled the ring-bolt when we had almost reached the boom's end. The bottom fell out of our sling, the chains racketed free of our hull. We skated out upon the golden air, and down to the bright, infested waters.

We had to row the boat across to the manse. "Our sail," Gildmirth explained, "is one of the things we must pick up from my quarters. You'll forgive my resting now when you understand the labor I have undertaken for you."

"We are delighted to help," I grunted. "And so? Please go on. What can you tell us about Wimfort?"

"Wimfort?"

"The boy we're after."

"Oh. Little more than
why
he made his mistake about bonshads. You see, Balder Xolot's
Thaumaturge's Pocket Pandect
has a mistake in it. And in the hundred and twelve years since he published it, it's been disastrous to all that class of people who study not at all, and yet buy serious spells by the lot. For all such go-to-market magi are quite correctly informed that of all abridgers and condensers of Power Lore, Xolot is unquestionably the best. Alas, he was human. In his transcription of the Paleo-Archaic texts concerning Sazmazm, he misread the word
parn-shtadha.
This is a rare variant of the more usual
sh't-parndha,
which one need have no Paleo-Archaic to recognize as meaning
no one,
so close is it to High Archaic's
hesha't pa-harnda.
But Xolot decided it was a scribal error for
parnsht'ada,
which is to say, bonshad. What a crop of ruin from so small a seed! One little sentence. `And no one'—it says—`hath power to bring it'—meaning the Elixir—`from where it lieth up into the sun.' Give one more pull please, gentlemen, and ship your oars."

We obeyed. The boat's momentum carried it across the terrace and through the flooded doorway.

Till now we had only glimpsed the pain of the Privateer's imprisonment. But here, inside his manse, the ruin of his spirit was starkly visible in the ruin he inhabited. You could see that formerly, this great chamber had been the throne room of his pride, both the showroom of his past achievements and the workroom where be shaped new projects. At present it was an indoor lagoon which the low swell filled with echoes, and everything in it was the sea's. Even the canvases arrayed along the walls to either side of us, though only the bottoms of their ornate frames hung in the water, had all been invaded and colonized by sea growth. The bright imagery was spotted with leprous mosses; shell life scabbed and sea-grass whiskered it. Gildmirth figured in all these pictures and in them it seemed he had recorded—with great artistry—key events in his history here. Now you saw his face everywhere—crusted, bearded, or grotesquely blurred, like a drowned corpse.

Much more in there was literally drowned, of course. The ceiling was hung with luminous globes whose light sifted down to the sunken floor, and we could see that this—which we crossed so smoothly now—had been a crowded place to weave your way across before the waters had possessed it: Low platforms and daises stood everywhere. Many of them supported taxidermic displays, various demon forms arranged in tableaux—surrounded by simulations of their environment—which illustrated their feedings habits, modes of combat, nesting techniques, and the like. Amid these was a larger dais supporting a multitude of architectural models. In this beautiful micro-metropolis of the Privateer's ambitious designs were many structures we recognized—dreams fulfilled and standing large as life out on the pier—and many others which would doubtless never exist on any larger scale than this.

But the largest of all these platforms, near the hall's center, testified to an even broader ambition than the little sunken city did. What it held was a topographic map sculpted from stone, a landscape of wildly various terrain where mountains bordered chasms and volcanic cones thrust up from gullied plains. This lay between us and a large table standing just clear of the water near the hall's far end and toward which Gildmirth, using one oar as a stern-paddle, seemed to be heading us. Crossing it gave us a queer shudder, for we quickly understood what it was: at one edge of it was a tiny, perfect model of the manse and pier. The irony of its now being under water had a disturbing savor of conscious malevolence about it, and the wavelets rolling over it had an eerie, triumphing quality in their movement.

"That is a model of the ocean floor?" Barnar asked. Gildmirth back-paddled and our prow nudged up against the tabletop.

"Of a little piece of it. Let's take some wine, and I'll show you where we're going to start our search."

We disembarked. A hundred men could have stepped out onto that massive board and milled around quite comfortably. It stood clear because the pitch of the broken manse left this end of the hall shallower, so that by the time the little surf reached the great fireplace in its inmost wall, the water was barely deep enough to overleap the fender. In his bitterness, his self-punishing pride, the Privateer had done no more than place the table's downslope legs on blocks, and encamp on it. He had a bed there, a larder-cabinet, a chair and writing desk, a drawing table, a rack for writing materials, some bookshelves, and no more.

It had been weeks since we had swallowed anything but our own spit. The first draught I took from the flask Gildmirth brought us was a shock close to pain. Sweet sensation raged like flame in my fossilized mouth and gullet. The second draught was uncompounded bliss. All in my vision wore new radiance, as if the wine had bathed my horror-scorched eyes. Speaking of the first thing I fixed on, I marveled inanely: "What beautiful instruments! Do you play them all?"

The wall to the left of the fireplace was hung with a great variety of them, their lacquered wood, silver strings, brazen keys all gleaming with magic in my eyes. The Privateer's glance at them was odd, perhaps ironic.

"Some of them. Not all are mine. Please finish that my friends, here is another—I know how pleasant it must taste. Shall we view our destination? We can see it from the end of the table. May I borrow a harpoon, Nifft?"

He led us to the edge of his island. "It's not too distant from here," he said, sinking the steel barb toward a point not quite half the map's length from the model of the manse. Barnar and I marveled anew at the little landscape as we shared the second flask. It seemed a wonderland, and ourselves lucky titans whom some enchantment would shortly enable to shrink and enter it, and there disport ourselves by probing the crests and gulfs of its barbaric grandeur. The bright barb hovered near a cluster of very sharply rising peaks.

"These four steep-sided mountains that you see here," Gildmirth said, "overtop the water. Their peaks form the islands that we'll be anchoring near. And this chasm half-circling the base of the mountain-cluster. The only feature of this map that is not to scale is the depth of this gulf. It's the Great Black Rifft, and its depth cannot be ascertained, for it goes all the way down to the Secondary Subworld. Its perimeter is a scene of intense demonic activity. And here, quite near, is a major bonshad territory, in fact the only large aggregation of them I've ever found."

We had drained the second flask. The factitious lustre and charm which the wine had shed on the whole grim project was so far from having worn off that it seemed to me I heard a faint, delicious music as my eyes roamed the miniature ocean floor.

"What light will we search by?" I heard Barnar ask. I still heard the music—a minute sound, it seemed properly scaled to belong to the miniature realm I was still peering into.

"Near the Rifft there is light in plenty. Few parts of the sea floor lack some kind of a poison glow to work by, but
there—
well, it is as you will see. We must prepare."

Gildmirth returned me my harpoon and turned away with an abruptness that would have startled me had not an unmistakably audible fragment of music already done so—one isolated, silvery arpeggio. It came from inside the manse, somewhere on this level, though from what point was hard to tell amid the hollow, many-chambered grieving of the sea against the walls.

Gildmirth jumped off the table's shallow end and waded toward the wall on the side of the fireplace opposite that on which the instruments hung. From the miscellany of gear displayed here he took down what looked like some fishing net tied in a bundle. This he tossed onto the table. "Gildmirth!" I cried. "Do you hear the music? Strings?"

The Privateer turned back to the wall and took down from it a monstrous broadsword—nine feet long at least, pommel to point. This too he laid on the table, ignoring me still.

By now I heard the music much less brokenly, finding its melodic line engraved more sharply now in the shapeless oceanic echoes. Lute music . . . no,
shamadka.
On each plangent string of it I could now discriminate individually the clustered notes sweetly ripening under the musician's provocative dexterity. Wanderingly, it wove nearer, meandering through lush elaborations while yet never lacking elan, a backbone of stark and resonant melancholy. Such music! With the shock you might feel to discover that one of your limbs—long unnoticed by yourself in any context—suppurates transfixed by a dirk already rusting in its lodgment. I realized that music's utter absence up till now had been a sharp and crippling part of the subworld's tormenting ugliness, a wound I'd lacked the mental leisure to note that I had, and bled from.

It was now clear Gildmirth heard the music, and willfully ignored both it and us. We watched him as impassively as we could, loath to seem we felt entitlement to anything he did not choose to offer. He approached the wall a third time, and took down a very small, dishlike craft, no more than one man might stand knee-deep in. It had no more than a slight flattening for a stern, and the gentlest tapering for a prow. On either side of the latter two indentations marked the vessel's rim. A moment's looking identified these as the edges of two eye-sockets, and the craft as a whole as a cranial dome sawn from some huge skull. Setting this on the water, Gildmirth made a shooing gesture; the skull-skiff slid round the table and nudged itself against the stern of our boat.

The music had grown distinct, directional; it poured—long rills of it now—into the hall through a wide doorway in the left-hand wall. Gildmirth remounted the table, his eyes blank to ours. Taking the bundle onto our boat he unbound and began anchoring it to the boom. It
was
a net. Through the left-hand doorway, a shamadka came gliding like a tiny ship—the polished bowl its bows, the silver strings its rigging—full to overflowing with its cargo of music.

The instrument was strangely festooned with what at first seemed a sea vine, shaggy purplish stalks draping both bowl and fretboard. But almost at once we realized their supple muscularity, and that it was their caress extracting these limpid euphonies from the shamadka. A voice began to sing, a soprano that was icy-sweet like children's temple choirs:

What man in wealth excels my lover's state
?

He hath no cause to dread lest others find
 

Where all his mountained spoil doth fecundate,
 

His breeding gold that spawneth its own kind
 

And sprawleth uncomputed, unconfined
!

The Privateer was still anchoring the netting to the boom, his eyes remotely overseeing his patient fingers. As the singing continued the shamadka coasted through a dreamy curve toward the table, disgorging treasures of polyphony under the intricate coercion of the things embracing it, tough, snake-muscled things despite their looking nerveless as drenched plumes, with the water swirling and billowing their silky shag.

For what argosies of argosies,
 

Though numberless they churned the seas,
 

And endlessly did gorge their holds
 

With loot from his lockless vaults of gold,
 

Could make him rue their paltry decrement
?

His
eyes these dunes of splendors desolate—
 

They've scorched his palate for emolument,
 

And they make him call `a tomb' his vast estate.
 

Gildmirth was methodically lashing the great broadsword and its harness beneath the portside gunwale. His eyes, still fixed on his task, looked as red as fresh blood. The water chuckled. We turned and looked our minstrel in the face.

It trailed astern of the instrument, where a flabby, tapered sack of skin ballooned along just under the surface. Near its peak this bruise-colored bag of flesh—bald as bone and blubber-soft—was puckered into a jagged-rimmed crater. Half cupped in this and half leaking into a maze of bays and channels branching from it, was the being's eye—a viscous, saffron puddle all starred within by black, pupillary nodes that burgeoned, coalesced, diminished or multiplied by fissure into smaller wholes, their evolution as incessant as the whole eye's melting flux within its mazy orbit.

A mouth the thing had as well, down near the juncture of the skin-sack with the tentacular fronds. It was an obese blossom of multiple lips like concentrically packed petals. All of them moved, and you couldn't pinpoint among them the exact source of their utterance.

A face you had to call it, though the stomach rebelled, and, for all the ambiguity of the features, it was a poisonously expressive face, always conveying something searching and sardonic in the way its pupillaries constellated. A veritable chorus of derisive smiles rippled across its lips as it sang on.