The Incompleat Nifft (59 page)

I think life's profoundest joys are just such simple pleasures, simply had, as Sha'Urley and I partook together while the Nurses wheeled and glided through the larval host, and those huge white loaves of living tissue baked and swelled in the great Nest's genial womb! We sang the paean of life together, none more surprised than I to be given this delight. We ended with some nuzzling and laughing together, and at length stood up with happy sighs, and regirt our loins. And I remember quite distinctly having at that moment a genuine glint of clairvoyance. For at that moment, the thought came to me:
This is the most pleasant thing that is going to happen to me for quite some time to come.
 

Again we walked, and shared the marvels of the place. Sha'Urley poked a friendly fist in my shortribs. "Let's not be stiff and formal in our dealings now, Nifft. Let's talk bluntly, as good friends should. Not to put too fine a point on it, don't you feel you are charging us rather . . . stiffly, for your guide services?"

"Sweet Sha'Urley! It's not that long a walk in miles, but it is long indeed in perils. And when we show you the Royal Chamber, you will understand the princely fee we set."

Behold thy babe, that doth beseech a crown,
And would go mantled in thy majesty.
Bestow on her an army of thy spawn,
Or else reweave her in thy tapestry
.

WHEN THE SIX OF US finally set out (the fractional but loquacious Ostrogall, riding holstered on my hip and bagged for silence, being the sixth) the Bunts and Costard went in such awe of the tunnels, and of the titans that trafficked them, that they hung well back of our lead, and clung to the tunnel wall as they crept along. We also gave them the responsibility of blazing our course with additional dye marks, which task further deflected their attention. Thus for a while we recollected our dropped gems without being noticed by our newcomers.

But after they had experienced the first few surges of Behemoths, had weathered the terror of those encounters and caught on to the stop-and-start rhythmn of our travel, they began taking note of our gem-gleaning. Costard, spotting a gem we'd missed, leapt on it. Barnar roared, "Desist! Is it not plain? These gems, which you can see we have come equipped to regather, are
ours
, lost here by us scant hours ago!"

"Yours, Uncle!?" shrilled Costard. "Is every damned thing now
yours
down here in
my mine
?"

So we had to stop in a safe recess, and reveal to our visitors our recent foray through the subworld. "So you have seen it then," Sha'Urley mused. "The subworld. Is it, ah, lively?"

"We have seen it more than once," I answered stiffly. "In this sector, at least, wide tracts of it seem virtually deserted, save for the Foragers coming and going." I was uneasily aware that this determined young woman had far from abandoned her interest in a venture for the Unguent of Flight.

"Our main point, at least, is clear, is it not?" Barnar asked the three of them. "If you really wish to own demon jewels, as we own these, you must needs go down and get your own, as we did."

They respected our property after this, though they kept a tactless, sullen eye on us as we regathered it. I had for a moment the strangest feeling as they watched me; that, vigorously gathering my gems as I was, I cut a somehow grotesque figure—that there was something, well . . . piggish, even swinish about my thrifty diligence! The bizarre delusion quickly passed, however.

The traffic grew thicker, the galleries bigger, and the tremor of footfalls unceasing. Then, long before we thought we could be near that ultimate Chamber, the ground-vibrations grew sharper, and we breathed a gust of raw fecundity. The echo-y sound of a huge and thronging interior was audible not far ahead. We huddled for a penultimate conference, eye-to-eye in a narrow cranny.

"You are about to understand how much we have dared in bringing you here. You will behold, and cease to cavil at our fee," Barnar told them. "We will keep to the chamber wall, following it leftward from the entryway. Wherever we are forced to cross open ground, you must keep moving. If you let the dread of where you are freeze your legs, you will surely be crushed."

And in the next moment, we were running all-out, caught in the contagion of furious momentum that surged around us. In heartbeats, the great antechamber of the Royal room engulfed us in a turmoil of legs that churned the gloom like the ranked oars of war galleys. High overhead, blue light corruscated across all those faceted Behemoth eyes, great ocular nets too coarse to catch the images of our little selves.

There was the Royal Brood Chamber. Within, the Queen's immensity lay upon the sea of her dwarfed, adoring spawn. We crossed the threshold, and plunged along the wall. Mad dodges, fierce, quick climbs above onrushers, footwork, footwork, footwork, and our hearts and lungs laboring, laboring—for a time these struggles engulfed us.

Then a ridged seam of harder stone jutted into our path. "Up this one!" I called, and up we clambered.

High above the Chamber floor, the rough stone gave us secure and even restful perches, whence we drank in the stupefaction of the Queen amidst her generations. For a timeless time, speech seemed impiety. I mutely pointed where the nuzzling workers nursed, in clusters of like caste. We gazed, and supped the vintage of pure Awe. Once Sha'Urley spoke, as she watched a stream of workers—issuing from the gloom that shrouded the Queen's caudal region—carrying the Royal eggs high in their jaws. These eggs streamed like pearls through the underwater light, rivering toward the Incubaria, whence the larvae would be borne to the Nurseries. Sha'Urley surprised me by reciting: "Great mother, deathless Demiurge,/Mankind's nurse and demon's scourge/Our hopes are hammered in thy forge!"

"By the Black Crack!" gasped Barnar. "What is that they are bringing Her?"

We looked where he pointed, and our jaws hung ajar. Something easily ten times the size of the largest Forager was being carried on the flood of workers. Lying on its back, like a rudderless vessel it moved veeringly towards the Royal Presence. It was surely a Behemoth but, apart from its great size, it was of a make we had not seen before. Its abdomen was tapered toward a caudal point; its folded legs were inordinately massive and long. It had as well, jutting from its thoracic segment, a pair of long, bladelike wings, and by these its bearers gripped it.

They staggered under their mighty burden. The throng melted from their path and closed behind them, seeming to urge them forward toward the Queen. The Queen, for her part, twitched her jaws and tilted her head as if inquiringly towards the approaching bearers and their offering.

I unbagged Ostrogall, and cut short his effusive thanks. "Tell us, Demon," I bade him, "if you know what approaches the Queen."

"By all the Powers," fluted the unctuous fragment. "This is the Presentation of the Scions! Do you not grasp what passes here? In the Mythos that surrounds our dire predators, this scene, most darkly figured, forms the central horror. And now I find it literally, fully true! O woe for my tormented homeland! Woe for all my murdered kindred! Woe and wail!"

"The Presentation of the Scions . . ." muttered Costard. "You mean that's a, a
princess
there being carried to the Queen?"

"It is a Queen in bud," the demon answered. "Whether the Queen approves its investiture or not falls according to a law none understand. But somehow, in just such confrontations as we now behold, the Queen determines which of her Royal infants shall go forth with a conquering army to extend, by one more Nest, her species' empire in my helpless land! Now is the recent stir in the Nest explained! The army of the New Queen is a-forging!"

Now the Royal babe had arrived at the only point in the Chamber where she might seem small; directly under the Queen's jaws. Could there have been in actual fact the ripple of tension that I sensed throughout the host? Could the sea of giants, with their hundred thousand individual aims and errands, have shuddered as one—as it seemed to me they did—a restive rearing of heads, a palpitant pause of pistoning legs, a stir like the horripilation of a single flesh? We scarcely breathed, our minds wholly given to this chthonian epiphany.

The Queen's globed head tilted left, then right, the blue light flaring across the facets of Her eye-spheres. Within those globes She seemed to view all Time, all Space. Her mouthparts moved, tasting the air above Her supine daughter, while that Royal Scion, with an infant's unknowing urgency, wrestled in her bearers' grip. The terrible beauty of her slender, bladelike wings cut my heart—their veins pulsed with the insurgent sap of her nascent power. Her great legs plucked gracefully at the air. The Queen bowed Her head.

She bowed Her head, and declared Her Royal will by plucking off Her daughter's head and devouring it with a loud, wet crunching. She ate Her daughter's thorax in three bites—ate it and its kicking legs, these uprooted limbs jutting briefly from the Royal jaws and twitching there before they were crunched into the multifoliate maternal maw. . . .

"And so the young Queen is not to be," intoned Ostrogall solemnly. So rapt was I in the spectacle I did not even mind the demon's unsolicited declamation from the podium of my hip. "The daughter is to re-sinew the Nest's ever-multiplying body. She is to become jaw and leg-joint, Forager and Nurse and gluttonous grub, her flesh re-fashioned into theirs! The Queen disgorges them in their thousands, and in their thousands She devours them."

Barnar, with an effort, broke our trance. "I suggest we bend our thoughts to the business at hand. We invite you to note a certain system in the pap pores' arrangement. By now you have surely perceived how different castes imbibe at different levels on the maternal flank?"

"It is most encouraging!" assented Ha'Awley Bunt. "Plainly, there is a pap specific to the Foragers' caste!"

"Whether that which they drink," I admonished them, "is as specific to their caste as the fonts they drink it from, is of course uncertain. And if the beverage be different, can we still be sure that bigness is a specific property that it imparts? Even to the Foragers, I mean—let alone to . . . other living things?"

I spoke with some sense of rectitude, for my profit, after all, did not lie in discouraging our companions' lust for the pap. In any case, their lust seemed unaffected by these reminders. "All these things," I continued, "about the pap are uncertain, while the dangers of obtaining it are past doubt. Firstly, how is the Queen to be climbed? And if she be climbed, how is the climber to survive? For I note that you three have been as slow to see your ultimate obstacle as Barnar and I were to see it. Study the Royal flanks more closely. Look for movement, especially in the black parts."

And just then, a brace of low-flying creatures made a fortuitous swoop above the Queen and, in the next instant, a ragged blackness surged up and dragged one squawking down. All now gazed with wakened eyes.

"By the Crack" gasped Sha'Urley after a moment. "She's crawling with . . . vermin! Look there! And there, in that tangle of marbling!"

The essence of the situation was soon clear to our companions: the Royal pap-pores might or might not be oases of liquid wealth, but they were most certainly environed by armies of monsters.

"Well, it seems our course is plain enough," Ha'Awley Bunt announced, his tone resolute, yet not without a quaver in it. "The Unguent of Flight would offer us the only feasible means of harvesting the pap."

"Why do you willfully misunderstand us?" Barnar barked. "You are not
invited
to join our pursuit of the alleged Unguent. This demon here is ours—he even affirms it himself!"

"What will you do, good Chilite?" Sha'Urley drily asked. "If we follow you, will you drive us back with your drawn blades? Will you kill us if we refuse to be repulsed from following you?"

What, in the end, could we do? "We have reached a juncture," I said at last, "where some sharp lines must be drawn. Of course we cannot prevent your following us on a subworld venture whose object we regard as highly dubious—be silent!" (This to Ostrogall's attempt at protestation) "—though naturally if you thrust your presence on us you cannot expect our protection on the journey, and must fend for yourselves in that regard. But you must understand that the Unguent of Flight is to be ours, mine and Barnar's, exclusively. If it is to be had in abundance, of course, then how could we object to your having some? But if the supply is limited, we most firmly declare it now in advance to be ours alone."

"Do you know, Nifft," Sha'Urley said, "leaving aside questions of claim and title, don't you feel it's a bit churlish, a bit knavish, a bit villainous of you not to grant me even a
little
of the Unguent, if only in affectionate acknowledgement of the intimacies we have shared?"

"Let the heavens witness that I cherish those joys as you do, my dear!" I protested. "But you are over-wrought. What assurance do we have of the Unguent's reality? And supposing it real, well, to speak plainly, there is a kind of fever that thieves are prone to—perhaps never experienced by persons of business like yourself—and this is the fever of concupiscence. Barnar and I, dear Sha'Urley, are in its throes. The augmentation of our personal gain is our obsession and all-mastering aim."

"Your charming frankness disarms me," she answered with a little bow and a cool smile. "I accept your terms because I must. As for lacking your protection, I can bear it. I do not wear this sword of mine for ornament alone. Brother? Partner Costard? Are we of one will in this?"

They were, though one wouldn't say they looked blithe about it. And what shame in this? Who lightly undertakes a journey into the subworld?

"Look there," piped Ostrogall, "where they bear another Scion to the Queen!"

Her clawed feet plucked the air, as her sister's had. Her wings twitched in the grip of her bearers—did she dream she was airborne? Leading her legions on their sweep of plunder to fuel the digging of a new Nest in the hell-wall? More awesome than this princess' size—and she might have plucked a town aloft and carried it away—was the limitless fecundity that could fashion such as she and, on a regal whim, swallow her up again. She drifted in her dreamy struggle till she lay beneath her mighty Mother's jaws.