The Incompleat Nifft (46 page)

I will perhaps be forgiven a smile at this. If Behemoth be the scion of some thaumaturgic science man once wielded, then how much less at fault we must feel to play the vampire in her nests, even as she scours the subworld of our demon foes? For if the Mountain Mother be the fruit of philanthropic wizardry, where's the flaw in getting double good of her? Is it denied a man to use his own wagon or draybeast to his profit?

Kairnish folk might have the most need of this balm to guilt; in the northern reaches of their continent (as I have noted in my preface to
The Fishing of the Demon-Sea
) the subworld preys upon the overworld all too vigorously, and men there fall in great numbers to demonic predation. Meanwhile in southern Kairnheim, where Behemoth nests under the Broken Axle Mountains, the demon nation still reels under a millenial defeat at the jaws of the Mountain Mother's legions, even while the southern Kairns most vigorously steal her sap from her nests.

Yet those of the opposing mind, who argue that Behemoth was born naturally of the Earth, point to her form which, in all but the scale of it, is so common through the natural world. Many scholars of unimpeachable erudition take this side of the controversy. Etiolatus the Praiseworthy notes, "How can those who go open minded on the earth, feeling the heart of the planet murmuring against their footsoles, ever think that Queen Earth in her Robe of Stars could fail to breed of herself the cure for any ill that blights her? Demons infested her; she gave birth to Behemoth."

For my part, though I have profound respect for the Earth's powers of invention, I think the answer is unknowable. My awe and love for the beasts, in any case, is great. I find cause for rejoicing in the fact that the sinking of a new sap-mine is the difficult and costly task that it is. The lithivorous ferrecks used to dowse for larval chambers, and then used to sink the first shafts down to those larval chambers, are creatures akin to certain brood parasites within Behemoth nests, and are both fierce and highly dangerous to manage. In consequence, these ferrecks have been almost entirely preempted by the sorcerous sisterhoods of the Astrygals, who have the means to command the beasts' angry energies. The ferrecks then being hard and costly to procure from the witches, the proliferation of new sap-mines throughout the Broken Axle Mountains has slowed almost to the rate of replacement for old mines fallen defunct through the phenomenon of "nest wander." Perhaps the sorcerers of the Astrygals intentionally sustain this equilibrium. In any case, our rapacity is shackled, and we plunder Behemoth less gravely than we might.

All that lives is flux, and a question Nifft raises disturbs me: might Demonkind grow to engulf Behemoth? The black yeast of demon vitality cooks unsleeping in its planetary cloaca; its vapors of infection float up fine as finest soot, soundlessly, steadily blackening, blackening what they blanket. Its patient twisting tendrils imperceptibly find purchase. . . . The reader will perhaps—when the fate of Heliomphalodon Incarnadine is learned, and Nifft's fears thereat—share my own unease.

Having touched on the question of human rapacity, I cannot close without confessing that it is with some misgiving I make public Nifft's account of the so-called "giants' pap" produced by Behemoth Queens, and of its apparent powers. Two considerations have persuaded me it is safe to expose this powerful substance to the greedy attention of entrepreneurs. In the first place, Nifft's narrative must tend to discourage exploitation. In the second, who but Nifft and Barnar, endowed as they were with rarest luck, could contrive to milk a Queen?

While I naturally shrink from burdening my dear friend's narrative (and the present manuscript is unmistakably of Nifft's own composition) with an excess of commentary or exegesis, I cannot leave certain lacunae unglossed. But since a prefatory voice must fade from memory as the history unfolds, the best procedure seems to be to deploy a brief Interjection or two within the narrative. Thus commentary can lie nearer what it touches.

We were still wet from Mayhem's maw
When first those golden glades we saw
 

MY FIRST STEPS along the path that led me to the greatest fortune I have ever won, or could sanely hope to equal in the future, were inauspicious enough. That twisted and darkling journey commenced, for Barnar Hammer-hand and me, with an indignity, and then led straight to a disaster.

The indignity was that we were contracted to a stint of hard, dirty toil in a sap mine. The disaster fell when we were two weeks at sea en route to this uncouth endeavor. For just as we hove almost in sight of our inglorious goal, our vessel was swallowed by a bull glabrous.

One often hears this sort of thing about "inauspicious beginnings" from people relating strokes of great good fortune. It is my belief that Luck schools those she is about to bless by dealing them a preliminary box or two about the ears. Thus, with a draught of bile, she reminds their palates of the taste of woe, that Fortune's sweetness might ravish them the more.

Barnar's nephew Costard owned the sap mine we were bound for. Our dreary underground labor there would be in the way of a family favor, for young Costard had written that the mine was in difficulties. Our route lay northwards along the Angalheim Island chain, and the northerlies that scour these isles all summer long had set our sails a-spanking, and chased us smartly along. Now the Isle of Hadron dropped astern, and we were drawing close to Dolmen, the northernmost isle. Beyond Dolmen, we already had in view the rim of the Kairnish continent. There, in the Broken Axle Mountains, our destination lay.

Our vessel was the carrack of a Minusk cloth-and-oils merchant. She was a yare but smallish craft, scarcely six rods from stem to stern. She skipped from crest to crest, outrunning the swell, frolicsome as a shimfin when it runs breaching from sheer exuberance. The vessel's surge, the sunstruck sea around us and the gem-blue sky, were almost enough to cheer us out of the gloom that our coming toils had sunk us in.

Then someone shouted from the mizzen-mast lookout, and we turned and saw a long black-and-tan slick strung out in the milky jade of our wake. Every man-jack of us went cold at the sight. That slick was the length of our vessel, and we knew it was only part of a glabrous' dorsal ridge, breaching as the brute came sinuously up to attack our stern.

We had no sooner seen it than the sea erupted, and the beast was alongside us, and was seizing our hull in his huge, dripping crab-legs, while his long, eel-slick body bowed and bowed and bowed at the loins with his fierce, lecherous thrustings. He had clusters of stalked eyes on his great blunt head, and these writhed and rotated in his ecstasy. The brute was in rut—the worst kind of glabrous to meet; sure death. Amidships and aft a dozen men were instantly crushed by his legs. His sinewy tail scourged the sea behind him in his lust, driving us forward even as he embraced us. The steep, stony shore of Dolmen loomed towards us at incredible speed.

The impenetrability of our hull timbers quickly drove the ardent giant to a fury. He flung our ship clean out of the water, toppling Barnar and me back onto the deck just as we had mounted the gunwale to abandon ship. The carrack sailed creakily through twenty fathoms of thin air, and crashed down at Dolmen's very shore, and even as it did so, the glabrous surged up behind the vessel—a benthic fetor welling from his mossy, gaping jaws—and swallowed it whole.

The glabrous did this with the blind, uncalculating rage his breed is so well known for. Barnar and I, tumbled to the prow by the bow's impact with the shore, saw the darkness of the brute's maw loom over us, and saw his huge teeth bite off the sky. Only the carrack's stout bowsprit extruded beyond the reach of the monster's bite. This bowsprit doomed the beast.

For even as it engulfed us, the glabrous' onrush drove us hard aground; the bowsprit lodged against a boulder, and the whole craft was rammed a fatal two fathoms deeper into the monster's throat. The glabrous at once began to choke to death.

His jaws gnawed frantically at the sky, trying to gobble down air, and in the intermittent floods of sunlight we saw our craft crumpling in the black velvet fist of his convulsing throat, the timbers cracking with a noise like fire, as the purple blood welled out of the huge, spar-torn tongue and drenched us to the knees.

The glabrous—desperately climbing toward the air he could not have—heaved himself half ashore, and as his struggles slowed toward extinction, hammered himself against the steep, rocky slope of the island. We were so tumbled about by these great concussions we could not leap out of his jaws when he opened them. Then his jaws fell slack, and crashed shut in death.

In the utter darkness, we could hear the beast's mouth still bleeding from a dozen wounds. Back in the utterly crushed stern of the vessel, muffled human death-moans briefly droned, and were snuffed out. Still the hot velvet blood inched up around our legs, with a trickling noise in the perfect blackness.

Not quite perfect. A feeble star of light grew slowly visible. We slogged groping through the sticky, inching rise of blood. Already the air felt hot and dead and hard to breathe. We groped our way out along the bowsprit—foul, slippery work—as good as blind. Our hands encountered the huge mossy teeth of the glabrous, clamped not quite shut on the bowsprit's stump. "I think we might just worm through," I said. "Then we might just hack our way out through one of the lips."

The cusps of the teeth were like oiled boulders reeking of carrion. We bruised our ribs wriggling between them. Had the splintered bowsprit slipped out, the simple weight of the teeth falling shut would have crushed us flat.

Our emergence from between the teeth was a head-first drop into the blood pooled within the glabrous' lips, whose rubbery meat was teetery footing for us once we stood up, calf-deep in the blood. It would have taken a titanoplod and a block-and-tackle to hoist those lips apart. The bowsprit's tip had been pinched between them and a faint ray of light leaked in along the spar. "At least it gives us an aiming point," Barnar muttered. "I'll go first. Stay clear."

And I heard him go to work with Old Biter, his broad-axe, on the lip-meat. "Ugh!" he grunted, hewing. "Loathsome! Slimy! Here's a gobbet free.
Huh
! . . .
Huh
! . . ."

"How he bleeds! I'm thigh-deep in blood! Here, give me a turn now—you sound winded. Set my hand to the spar . . . got it! Now Biter's haft . . . got it! Stand clear.
Huh
! . . .
Huh
! . . ."

I couldn't match stroke to stroke in the dark. I had to hew blindly, then grapple the wet meat for what chunks I could pull free. Barnar mused moodily as I worked.

"You know, Nifft, dying would be bad enough, of course. But by the Crack it would gall me, after all we've done, all we've seen, to die on this . . . demeaning, pedestrian errand of ours!"

"I have to . . . agree. . . . To think of them . . . talking . . . back in the Tankard and Titbit. . . ."

"Or over mulled tartle at the Thirsty Knave. `Did you hear about poor Barnar and Nifft, then? Dead and done for at last, it seems! What were they about, you ask? Well, it appears the poor lackwits were northbound to Kairnheim to work in a sap mine!' `What? Work in a
sap mine
you say? Well then, their best years were already past, it would seem!' "

"Peace, Barnar . . . you're using up . . . air . . ."

"Here, give me old Biter back—I'll do a turn."

The hot blood was up to our waists, and the unbreathable darkness choked out all conversation quick enough. We hewed the invisible meat, groping the sticky wedges from the wound. Toward the end we were gasping stertorously, and it seemed we dug ourselves a bottomless grave of flesh. Then I struck that blessed stroke that bit out a little wedge of sunlight, which bled a delicious trickle of salt sea air into our nostrils.

With light and air, our butchery progressed apace, and at length we had a carnal tunnel we could wriggle through. Reborn beneath the sky, we lay exulting, and roared with laughter to look on one another, both of us slick and sticky as fresh turds.

But as we bathed and washed our gear in the sea, and reclothed ourselves, we came to feel sobered, reduced. We had emerged from that monstrous sepulchre with our arms, the slender contents of our moneybelts, and nothing else. The joy of escape soon yielded to a sense of ill-luck, and a nagging conviction that we were entirely too impoverished for men of our years and expertise. A dozen men lay dead in the glabrous' throat, yet somehow our destitution loomed larger to us than our miraculous evasion of their tomb. There is a tide in men's spirits, and ours had perhaps been at ebb for some time now, even before our half-hearted undertaking to rescue nephew Costard's mine.

Glumly we trekked along the shore, and reached Dolmen Harbor by mid-afternoon. This was like most Angalheim ports, less an actual bay than a smallish cleft in a steep shoreline. Most observers agree that the whole Angalheim chain is just a slowly drowning mountain range, and its harbors thus merely embayments in the flanks of the sinking peaks. Above the docks, most of the harbor's buildings and houses climbed on stilts up the slopes.

We found a mead house and bespoke an ample jar of the fiery-sweet potation that the Angalheims are famed for over half the world. Still, our hearts remained gloomy as we drank. The mead house itself was somber—a former clan hall from the islands' piratical days, long since converted to its present commercial use, but proud of its smoke-blackened roofbeam and the crude traditional weaponry racked on its wall; the battered bucklers and unwieldy falchions of a privateering era. Throughout the Angalheims folk hold a similar reverence for a squalid and villainous past.

Mead has of course long replaced piracy as these islands' livelihood, and from the windows we could view the colorful bustle of a vigorous economy. Men bearing panniers of bright seaweed, and plod-trains laden with the same briny cargo, streamed upland. This seaweed was mulch for the flower-pastures on the island's heights, where the sonorous blizzards of bees hummed in the pursuit of their golden harvest. The harbor thronged with island trade; Kairnish vessels laden with hides, salt meat and sap waited at anchor for dock-space, while Angalheim scows scudded outbound riding low with the weight of mead casks. Out in the open channel beyond the harbor, the wind curdled the jade water with veins of foam. There, where the big shoals of 'silvers ran, rode the fishing ketches all at their stern anchors, and we could see tiny men on them toiling at windlasses, and gaffing aboard nets bulging with glittery catch.