SHAG MARGOLD'S Preface to 

The Fishing of the Demon-Sea 

KAIRNHEIM, WHENCE NIFFT'S and Barnar's ill luck led them down to the
primary subworld, is as remarkable for its ethnic homogeneity as the other
two continents are for their diversity. It does not lack all racial
variety. The perimeter of Shormuth-the huge bay in its eastern coast-is
host to a miscellany of folk. But the bulk of the continent is inhabited
by Kairns, a cattle-raising people originating from the southern limb of
L£lum‰, across the Sea of Cat stor. 

The Kairns came to Kairnheim in two major waves of migration separated by
an interval of about four hundred years. It was the southeast half of the
continent that received both influxes, for east of the Ikon Mountains
luxuriant grasslands stretch practically unbroken for three hundred
leagues to the coast. This gently rolling land, thickly braided with
rivers, is the realm called Prior Kairnlaw. It is superlative grazing
land. The Kairns who held it first were loath to share it with their
late-coming cousins, and indeed, did not do so, for their cousins-more
numerous and hungrier than they-drove them out of it, and into the
northwestern plateaus, the colder, rockier, more arid half of the
continent known today as Latter Kairnlaw. 

Kine Gather lies in Latter Kairnlaw not far from the Bone Axe Mountains, a
northern branching of the Ikons. Like its sister-cities of this area-White
Lick, Crossgulch, Bailey's Yards-it grew from a cattle market on a river,
a rough-and-ready sort of place where stock could be auctioned and shipped
by enterprising men unwilling to endure tedious inquiries into their
herds' provenance or prior ownership. And, again like their neighbors,
Kine Gather's citizens retain even in the moderate prosperity they
currently enjoy all the predilections of their city's founders: raiding,
cattle-rustling, passionate quarrels over boundaries, and blood-feuds. 

Most Latter-Kairns share these traits, and this is understandable. Their
sparse-grown, harsh-wintered terrain compels their herdsmen to arduous
seasonal pilgrimages to keep their animals in pasture. Only the hostility
of that land to any other economy-combined with what might be called a
very stubborn cultural spirit-keeps them at their historic trade. And yet,
for all their pains, they can expect to raise only maculate hornbow and
dwarf-ox with any success, while in Prior Kairnlaw both these breeds
thrive and four others besides: palomino hornbow, crucicorn, plodd and
jab¢bo (of which last, more presently). If scarcity alone had not made
cattle thieves of the Latter-Kairns, their enduringly bitter sense of
dispossession would have done it. Inevitably they have robbed one another,
but they have always preferred the richer plunder and the prestige among
their fellows to be won by raiding their homeland's usurpers. 

One aspect of this historic conflict-the jab¢bo question-has proven
particularly fateful for both kairnish nations by leading them,
indirectly, to a dangerously frequent contact with the demon realms.
Wimfort's folly and consequent abduction-which compelled Nifft and Barnar
to their dire expedition-are perfectly symptomatic of this trend, and so
its cause deserves some amplification. 

Jab¢bos flourish in Prior Kairnlaw as they do nowhere else on earth. The
beasts are big quasi-bipeds, about twice the size of a man. They are
cleanly (they wash themselves in the manner of cats), short-muzzled,
small-eared and, except for their thick, stubbish tails and huge thighs,
have a rather anthropoid aspect. They are valued for their milk, not their
flesh, and no more males than are needed for breeding are ever raised. The
females have remarkably pronounced mammary developments which are, if I
may so phrase it, directly and immediately exploitable by men. The
herdsman's feeling of communion with such a breed is-imaginably-great. Not
to put too fine a point on it, jab¢bo cults-originating in various
fertility-promoting rituals informally practiced by herdsmen-now abound in
Prior Kairnlaw. Sacred herds are designated and the rituals centered on
them are reported-probably reliably-to have both dionysiac and priapic
features. (The herds are often called, by local cynics, "sacred
seraglios.") Whether the ancestors of the Latter Kairns, when they
possessed that bovine Eden, ran to similar extremes is a moot question. A
primitive purity of both rite and tenet is hotly alleged by them today,
and it may have been so. Certainly they too in their day had sacred herds,
and their doctrine holds the descendants of these beasts to be sacred
still, and still their own religious property. Hence Prior Kairnlaw cult
activities are felt by Latter Kairns as an intolerably flagrant
profanation of their lactescent icons, a heinous sacrilege daily renewed.
On this question the Latter Kairns focus all the rage and anguish of their
dispossession. And it was during the First Jab¢bo Wars that they-athirst
for a vengeance beyond the scope of torch and sword-began buying sorcery
in the cities of Shormuth. The Prior Kairns armed themselves in haste from
the same dubious arsenal, and three centuries of necromantic skirmishing,
not yet abated, were begun. 

More than one observer has remarked on the great number of subworld
portals to be found in Kairnheim. Some-like Stalwart's Quarry-resemble
Darkvent in having been opened by human inadvertence, but far more have
appeared with ominous spontaneity, unlocked by earthquake, erosion, and
even lightning. The speculation that a zone of extraordinary demon
vitality underlies the continent, while doubtless correct, misses the
heart of the matter. For surely, centuries of haphazard and indiscriminate
invocations of demonic power by the Kairns have had the effect of
concentrating the ever-alert malevolence of the subworlds beneath their
land. The Kairns lack any coherent thaumaturgical tradition, oral or
written. Impetuous and ill-informed, they offer a ready market for the
services of third-rate mages and unscrupulous spell-brokers, such as are
now to be found in great numbers in the Shormuth region. Such "wizardlets"
command powers sufficient to tap demonic forces, but inadequate to ensure
the mastery of them. In essence, the true demon highways to man's world
lie through man's spirit; to yearn for destructive power is to open a gate
to the subworlds, and from this we must conclude that the very foundation
stone of Kairnheim is by now vermiculate with the hellish traffic that her
people have kept so steadily aflowing. 

The manuscript of this narrative is in Nifft's own hand. He himself told
me he felt a particular responsibility to undertake the labor of writing
it, as an act of homage to Gildmirth, for whom he conceived an abiding
affection and regard. The Privateer surely merits some particular comment.
His birthplace-Sordon Head, on Kolodria's southern coast-is as rich and
empire-inclined a city now as it was when he swindled it three hundred
years ago to finance his journey to the Demon Sea. Indeed, Gildmirth's
ploy proves him a native son, both in his cunning and his venturesome
greed, for Sordonite policy has always leaned as heavily on deception to
gain its ends as on the strength of its navy. Many writers have held its
people's ruthless duplicity to be a shade more (or less) than human, and
subscribed to the legend that there is demon blood in the population.
There is little more than the city's proximity to Taarg Vortex-the
subworld marine portal down which Gildmirth escaped his enraged fellow
citizens-to support this tradition. More probable is the rumor that many
Sordonite families have close ties with the formidable wizards of the
Astrygal Chain southwest of the Great Shallows. Gildmirth, at least,
almost certainly enjoyed such connections, for it is unlikely he could
have obtained his shape-shifting powers in any other place. 

-Shag Margold 

The Fishing of the 

Demon-Sea 

I 

JUST AFTER DAWN, they buckled us into the strappadoes. The mechanism is
fairly simple. Your wrists and ankles are pulled toward the four corners
of the upright frame, and you're splayed in the center like a moth in a
web. Each machine has three executioners. Two work the winches until all
the joints in your body are pulled apart. The third has a long-handled
pruning scissors for starting the cuts around your separated joints. Then
the winchmen go to work again, to tear you apart at the cuts. They
alternate. It's considered good winch-and-scissors work when your trunk
falls all at once out of the splayed rack of your limbs. They don't like
thieves in Kine Gather. 

The strappadoes were set up in the courtyard of the Rod-Master of Kine
Gather. This was a place as big as a town square, for the Rod-Master was a
man of vast wealth. In this he was like his city, which was why we had
come there. As for the foundation of that wealth, it was obvious to anyone
with a nose. Even within those mosaicked walls, among those flagstoned
promenades with their potted cedars and urns of flowers, you could smell
the dung and horses' stale that laced the morning air. The aroma might
have come from any of the corrals and stockyards around the city, or it
might have come from the thousands of citizens themselves who waited in
the courtyard, chatting pleasantly, to see us die. 

Frankly, I was in a rotten mood. I saw no way out of this. The order would
be given at the first rays of sun that entered the courtyard, and the east
was already well ablaze. The bailiff climbed onto the platform we were
strung up on. He undid a scroll, and read aloud from it in a mellow voice,
which the crowd fell silent to hear: 

"The good and great lord Kamin, Rod-Master of Kine Gather, conveys
herewith his judgment to Nifft the Northron, known also as Nifft the Lean
and Nifft the Nimble, and to Barnar the Chilite, called Barnar Ox-back and
Barnar Hammer-hand. This is the judgment of lord Kamin: that you are both
egregious felons, remorseless reprobates, and sneaking thieves; that you
have entered the city of Kine Gather, and moved through the bailiwicks
thereof, in pursuit of criminal aims; that you were taken in possession of
a tool of criminal thaumaturgy; that you have merited death. You are
permitted final remarks. Do you wish to say something?" 

"I wish to say three things," I answered. 

"Speak them," said the bailiff. 

"First," I cried, "I wish to express my regret that I did not have more
than a week in this city, for then I could have given all you Kine-men
bigger horns than your cattle have. Alas, I have cuckolded scarcely more
than a dozen of you. I would have worked faster, but you Kine-women smell
so much like stockyards that I could only stand to serve two or three of
you a day." 

Nobody in the audience seemed to like this much, but on the other hand,
they didn't get very excited either. Justice is harsh there, and they're
probably old hands at hearing last remarks. 

"Secondly," I said, "I want to share with you all my conviction that the
good and great lord Kamin is a wart-peckered, dung-munching cretin whose
great wealth is a ludicrous accident, whose only talent is for vigorous
self-abuse (with either hand), and all of whose living relatives resemble
toads so strongly that I wonder they can look at each other with straight
faces." 

They seemed to enjoy this somewhat more. Here and there, amplifications
were gleefully shouted. They are a tough folk, law-abiding, but not
overawed by authority. In fact, they're not hard to like-for somebody in
freer circumstances, that is. 

"Thirdly," I said, "let me convey my fascination with Kine Gather as a
whole. I would not have believed so large a city could be built up from
nothing more than cow-flop and clods!" 

This made some of them mad. The town has great municipal spirit. I had the
sour satisfaction of rasping some of them, however slightly. It was small
comfort but I made the most of it. Barnar said he wished to make two last
remarks. The Bailiff told him to proceed. My friend produced an epic
flatulence, after which he spat on the stage voluminously, making the
bailiff hop to save his boots. The edge of the sun topped the courtyard
wall, and flung its rays like lances in our faces. The bailiff raised his
hand. At just that moment a herald burst from the big two-va1ved door in
Kamin's manse at the farthest end of the courtyard. 

The timing told me the whole tale in a heartbeat. That the herald should
burst out at precisely the last instant, crying, "Hold! Kamin bids their
death be stayed!"-it was just too stagy. It was theatrics, and for whose
benefit but our own? Kamin required some service, hard and dangerous,
which we were intended to welcome in preference to this harrowing
alternative. 

II 

Rod-Master Kamin was a big, florid man. He surely did like theatrics. He
was sitting on the chair of office in his receiving chamber, wearing a
brocaded robe and several fillets of braided gold whose ends, trailing on
his shoulders, made me think of the relaxed ruff on a fighting cock. He
sat, grand and awful, till enough of the townsfolk had filtered in to
provide an audience sufficient to witness the majesty of his rising up.
Then Kamin, Rod-Master of Kine Gather, stood. 

When this imposing spectacle had transpired, and a suitable pause had been
allowed for a hush to fall on the assembly, Kamin spoke to Barnar and
me-or rather, spoke down upon us in a ringing voice that addressed
everyone: "Outlanders, hear me! Your guilt remains, and yet your lives are
spared. This decision is not motivated by spinsterish sentiment. Your
treacherous skills, your skulking cunning are needed to save a life far
worthier than both of yours combined. Are you prepared to purchase your
lives with your daring?" 

Oh, he mouthed us roundly indeed! I wondered if my remarks about him had
been conveyed to his sanctum. Surely not, I decided. Underlings are not so
frank with a self-loving master. I made him an impeccable bow, which
caused my chains to rattle. 

"As for daring, Rod-Master, we dare such things as poor, foolish mortals
must to make their way in the world. Concerning purchases, a man may ask
to hear the price before he says yes or no-whatever he may be buying." 

Oddly, Kamin seemed caught off guard by this demand. Could he have
expected anyone to be so cowed by his dramatics that they'd take his deal
without hearing it? A man too ignorant to know that there are many things
in the world worse than death on the strappadoe is not likely to be a very
useful man on a difficult exploit. 

But Kamin's jaw made a brief, dazed movement when he heard my answer, and
I read a quick, unmistakable fear in his eyes that he was going to fail to
enlist us. He recovered himself by scowling. 

"You will be instructed in this tragedy by one whose hands are red with
the guilt of it. He is one who will pay a dreadful price if . . . if this
is not made well. Go to Charnall now! You will be brought back to Council
to give your answer." 

As we were marched down a corridor that led to a staircase, Barnar
murmured to me: 

"He was afraid we'd turn him down. It's an ugly job he wants done, Nifft."

There seemed little doubt of that. We were led into a wing of the manse.
We mounted to the third floor, and were passed through a stout door with a
double guard outside and another inside. A gaunt, balding man nodded at us
from a table where he sat devouring breakfast. This was surely he of the
guilt-red hands, though all he had on them at the moment was fish grease
and breadcrumbs. There were a lot of these on the table too. Charnall was
narrow all the way down, and ate like two men. The type is not uncommon.
He had on a costly but untidy and very well worn tunic. His short beard,
and the grey hair on the back of his head, had a tattered, plucked-at
look. His eyes were intelligent, but with a tendency to go out of focus.
He struck me as bookish, somehow. 

The leader of our guard told Charnall to stop eating. 

"Just finishing!" he gasped. He swept the rest of the bread and fish into
his face. Then he stood up licking his lips, dusting his hands. The thin
comfort of breakfast was behind him now, and regretfully he focused on his
situation, and us. He was a man profoundly depressed by his situation-you
could see it in the way his shoulders sank as his mind ran over the
information he was commanded to give us. Withal, he had the
self-possession to recall what our morning had been. He pulled out his
stool from the table for me, and motioned Barnar to sit on his cot. He
dusted off his table and sat on this, his long legs almost reaching the
floor. He folded his hands on his lap and scowled at them for a moment.
Then he looked up and said: "You are Nifft the Lean, of Karkhman-Ra. You
are Barnar Ox-back, a Chilite. I am Charnall of Farther Kornuvia. 

"You are men at the top of your profession, and in all natural skills of
wit and hand you are known masters throughout the Sea of Agon, and even in
the western waters. I am a man mediocre in his profession, though it is a
greater one. I am a student of the lore of Power. I have encompassed
certain tracts of dark knowledge. I know enough to buy wisely from true
sorcerers. So much for our resources, gentlemen. They would be
considerable for any sane task. Our task is not sane. Our task is
impossible. And yet, I will tell you that I have conceived a glimmering of
hope. Can you believe it? So intractable is human folly, so . . ." 

"I beg your pardon, Lore-Master Charnall," my friend said. "You've had a
chance to get used to the facts of the case, and we'd like to get past the
shock of them too. It's been a racking morning. Can't you begin with the
gist?" 

Charnall bowed ironically to Barnar. "You're right of course. You two will
be bearing the brunt of it, after all. My life will ride on yours, so our
risk is equal, but you will be the ones below-ah! Forgive me. The task is
this: to bring a demon's captive back from where he lies, down in the
primary subworld. The captive is a youth, Wimfort. He is the Rod-Master's
only son, and my own erstwhile . . . employer. It happens we know, very
generally, where the boy lies. We are lucky in the certainty, but unlucky
in the place. You see, Wimfort summoned a bonshad. That's what took him.
Bonshads are aquatic entities you see. . . ." 

Charnall looked at us with raised brows. Barnar nodded slowly. 

"I think I do see. The boy lies somewhere in the Demon-Sea." 

III 

Charnall showed us a miniature portrait of Wimfort which belonged to his
father. The Rod-Master's son was a handsome lad of sixteen. The artist's
rendering of his bright, scornful eyes, and saucy tilt of chin, harmonized
with the story Charnall gave us of him. The box of wrought gold that
contained the picture supported another part of the tale-discreetly
touched on, since Kamin's men were in the room-namely, the doting
indulgence of the father toward the son. 

For the past three years, young Wimfort had enjoyed so ample a competence
from his parent, that he'd been able to buy his way deep into the
mysteries of the arts of Power. He purchased no real understanding, of
course, for that's bought by the coin of toil and thought. But he hired
Charnall, and read smatteringly such texts as the scholar directed him to.
He also employed his "tutor" in obtaining texts which he knew of from
other sources. Many of these Charnall would not have recommended to one so
young and light of will, but he was as compliant as his principles allowed
him to be. He couldn't have earned half so much in the Kornuvian academy
where Wimfort's agents had found him. Nonetheless, he had repeatedly to
throw the boy into a tantrum by flat refusals of his aid in various
dangerous directions. 

Wimfort always yielded the point after such clashes. He would tolerate no
program or plan of study, but he had gained some sense of the endless
interlinkages connecting all aspects of the wizardly art. He was stubborn.
Charnall guessed that when he gave in, he made an inward vow to find his
way back to his goals by some other route. In the meanwhile he lived with
his mentor's scruples because he had to. 

His debut performance was a compromise that Charnall had agreed to as the
least perilous of several projects. The boy was ambitious to awe the
populace, and this he did. His head was steeped in cheap ballads of the
wild old days of Kine Gather when boisterous herds stormed through a town
of mud streets and corrals, and his thaumaturgy was meant to be a
commemoration of this era. With Charnall, therefore, he went to the
slaughter-house district of the city on a night of the full moon. He
intoned a very potent spell of regathered vitalities. They raised, in an
endless surging forth from the bloody earth, the spirit of every animal
that had ever died in those precincts. And as they raised them, they sent
them stampeding into the streets of the town. 

All night long the shadow-cattle with their blazing eyes panicked through
the streets, raising a boil of dust and thunder with their shadow-hooves.
The boy had flair, all right. The people woke. In their first horror, some
dozen or so died in the poorer quarters, falling downstairs, or trampled
by their tenement neighbors. But as the stampede thickened, and people
understood its immateriality, more and more of them dressed and came into
the streets. Kamin ordered the street-lamps relighted, and several of the
city's magnates were persuaded to open their cellars. An eerie, impromptu
festival was the result, with knots of staggering revelers run through by
the endless bellowing herds. At dawn the spirit horde poured streaming
back into the slaughtering yards. There the beasts plunged back into the
earth, each reiterating its death cry as it dove. 

The success intoxicated the youth. Moderation vanished from his schemes;
he proposed one heroic folly after another and fought Charnall bitterly.
Then he stopped proposing schemes altogether, and settled down to mining
Charnall for texts, references, and instruction in the pronunciation of
various tongues. The scholar could guess the direction but not the
specifics of his charge's intentions. As he feared, the boy finally sprang
his next miracle on the city all by himself. It was a dreadful fiasco. Its
only lasting result was that it left an entire pasturing slope to the west
infested with vampire grass. The incident was four months old when Barnar
and I came to town, but the hillside decorated with bleached skeletons of
stock were still a landmark for travelers approaching Kine Gather. 

The boy was formally reprimanded by his father in the presence of the full
council. This was a wrist-slap in the popular opinion. Many of the council
men wanted other parts of the boy's anatomy involved in the rebuke. Yet
still Wimfort was mortally affronted. At that age you invent extravagant
compensations for bruises to your dignity. 

The scheme he turned to was one of long-standing in his dreams, but he now
put a really coordinated effort into the realizing of it, and Charnall did
not guess his direction in time. He was determined to obtain some of the
Elixir of Sazmazm from the primary subworld. 

"Imagine it," Charnall said to us with a kind of awe. "A callow,
headstrong boy in possession of the powers of a being from the tertiary
subworld! May Almighty Chance prevent anyone from ever retrieving that
elixir . . . But for that boy to have it? Imagination boggles and averts
its eyes from the prospect! 

"He worked harder than I'd ever have thought was in him, I'll credit him
for that. He spaced and mixed the sequence of his requests. He wormed out
of me some of the intonation patterns for High Archaic, and only after a
long interval, asked for Undle Nine-fingers' Thaumaturgicon. Only after
the disaster did I realize that Undle's work includes a selection from the
Kairnish Aguademoniad. These are spells for water-demons, and Undle
provides a key for transliteration using High Archaic. 

"The short of it is he had me summoned to our study in the basement of
this house, and he was well prepared for whatever I might do. He said he
was giving me a last chance to share in his glory, which meant he would
have been glad of my guidance in the actual speaking of the spell he had
uncovered. He did well to wish guidance, and ill to go on without it! 

"He described the spell of incorporation, which was now active within his
body, and which would allow him, with a swallow, to make himself the
vessel of the elixir. Indeed this is the securest way of holding something
like the elixir, whose aura of potency must be so strong as to attract
incessant theft spells from other wizards. He had also determined the
probable truth of the belief that bonshads are unique among the marine
demons in being able to obtain the elixir, whose source lies outside the
sea, and thus out of their sphere of power. I urged him to consider why
the water demons are never called, though the spells for it are quickly
come by. It's because no one wants to call them. Not even the greatest
Mages report the fruitful employment of these entities. The limit had been
reached. I commanded him to come with me to his father, and render a
report of his intentions. The lad-that . . . pup-threw a paralytic powder
in my face, I was a powerless witness of the very brief sequel. 

"He made the classic error of the amateur; he barely managed the summoning
spell adequately, and he made a grave mispronunciation in the spell of
control that is woven into the formula of summons. The control spells are
always by far the most difficult portion of the whole. It is even said
that many entities will overlook slight errors in the summons if they
sense that there are also flaws in the control. These latter mistakes they
do not overlook. The boy stood forth boldly and spoke out loudly, and the
thing came. 

"The slurring of the intonations must have confused its course, for it
came up within the wall. The masonry is twelve feet thick down there, and
it wrenched itself out of the rock like a drenched cat clawing its way out
of water. It was a thing of fur and hooks-tarantula's fur, and hooks to
hold you with. Its head was a bouquet of three great spikes, all beaded
with the knobs of its eyes. It boomed out of the wall, spraying gravel and
dust. Wimfort's jaw dropped and swung like a tavern sign in the breeze."
Here one of our guards made a choking sound, and coughed at some length.
Charnall looked demurely at his hands for a moment. Then he went on
evenly: 

"The lad didn't produce another syllable. The thing sprang on him. By the
Crack, gentlemen-it had the quickness of a . . . a stupendous flea. It
seized him, spun him, sank its spikes into his back, neck and skull, and
sank through the floor with him. They're still shoring up the hole it left
in the wall, but the floor shows not the smallest chip or crack." 

IV 

There was silence for a moment. "You mentioned hope," I said. Charnall
looked at me, and acknowledged the irony with a thin smile. Slowly he
rubbed his palms together. 

"It sounds unlikely, does it not? As for getting down there we have, as
you surely know, our own little hellmouth not twelve leagues distant, near
the ruins of Westforge in the foothills of the Smelt Mountain range. But
once down there, you will be without maps of that terrain, and no one
knows the size or whereabouts of that sea. And yet, hope we do undeniably
have, however slight." As he turned to this topic, he brightened
considerably. His gaunt body trembled, I thought, with a scholar's
suppressed glee over a rare discovery. He looked at us, probably gauging
what we could understand of literary matters. 

"I'll spare you details," he went on. "But I began with a faint
recollection of a figure generally called the Privateer who had done some
exploit, or suffered something, in the Demon Sea long ago." 

"But that's-" Barnar said. Charnall begged silence with a gesture.
"Patience, good thief-legends, I know, but still relevant. Luckily, so far
I have been the most advanced mage that Kamin has found available, as well
as being the most intimately acquainted with the boy's plight. For a month
now Kamin's funded my efforts to find a solution. Last week I found a poem
written about a century ago. Listen to these lines, gentlemen." 

He dragged a chest out from under the table he'd been sitting on, and took
a parchment from it. What he read us was nothing more nor less than a
garbled version of the third and fourth quatrains of Parple's
"Meditation." His mention of the Privateer had half prepared us for this.
When he was done I said to Barnar, "Do you recall the rest of it, my
friend? He's just read us the middle of it, hasn't he?" 

Occasionally Barnar can be brought to display his reading. Soon after
joining with him, I knew he was fluent in three tongues, but even I was
long in learning that he could read High Archaic every bit as well as I.
And it's always a treat at such exhibitions to watch his hearer's
bewilderment at the erudition flowing from the mouth of that gruff,
battered giant. 

Barnar cocked an eyebrow and bowed slightly. " 'A Meditation on Man and
Demon,' by Curtus Parple," he intoned, Then he recited it: 

Man, for the million million years 

He's shared the earth with demonkind, 

Has asked why they, in their ageless lairs 

So lust for his frail soul and mind. 

Whatever hands set the clock of stars 

Wheeling and wheeling down through time 

Also sundered those two empires 

With barriers both now over-climb. 

That men should go down to those sunless moors 

Where Horror and Harm breed deathless forms, 

Or to the Demon-Sea's littered shores, 

Or its depths, where riches breed like worms- 

That men do this (as the Privateer 

Gildmirth of Sordon did in his pride) 

Is no surprise, save that they dare 

To sail that shape-tormented tide. 

But why are netherworld nets flung here, 

And men snagged out of their mortal terms- 

Trawled kicking down from life in the air 

To immortal drowning in monstrous arms? 

Early on in the recitation, Charnall had stopped grimacing and started
correcting his text to Barnar's version. Now he looked at us ruefully.
"Courage, Charnall," I said. "No one can read everything. Parple's work is
highly esteemed in Karkhmahn-Ra. Moreover, Gildmirth's name is prominent
in children's tales thereabouts." 

"No doubt you know all I've dug up and more," he said. "Still I won't
believe that I've followed a fool's trail, no matter what you may have
heard of the legend." 

"I won't try to tell you that you have been wrong," I answered. "For all
we know, it's one of those tales with a true core. The tradition is not
highly specific, after all. Gildmirth is depicted as a master entrepreneur
and swindler. His exploits are variously reported, but all the stories
agree as to his last feat. He swindled the city of Sordon-Head-his home
town-out of a fortune, which he used to finance an expedition down to the
Dead Sea. He did not return. Some sources say he endures in bondage, like
so many thousands of lesser souls in that place." 

Charnall was much consoled by this. "Splendid! This chimes with my further
discovery, and it seems I can tell you something after all. For no more
than three generations ago, a man descended to the sea and returned alive,
and he returned with gold which Gildmirth the Privateer had gathered for
him from the depths. The Swindler of Sordon-Head does indeed endure,
gentlemen. He lives, and moves freely in those waters, and yet bound he
surely is-time without end. He's held by a ghoulish disease of the will
that some being, slipping through his ingenious spells, infected him with.
But as he was a man of powers, so he continues to be in his captivity." 

Barnar nodded. "It's said he was a shape-shifter, and that he had five
metamorphoses-one for fire, ice, earth, air, and water." 

"He has far more than five now," Charnall answered grimly. "I will tell
you of that. The source of the information is the merchant Shalla-hedron
of Lower Adelfi. It was he who went down to the sea and retrieved some of
its wealth. His son recorded Shalla-hedron's experiences in this." 

Charnall showed us a massive leather-bound book entitled: "The Life and
Personal Recollections, as well as Many pointed Observations, of
Grahna-Shalla, son of Shalla-hedron of Lower Adelfi, who Fished in the
Demonsea and Returned with Booty Marvelous to Tell." 

The scholar threw the book on the table. "Almost every line is about
him-the son, an intolerable, vapid ninny with a turgid and interminable
style. But there are among the rest two brief pages of priceless
information. The essential thing is that the Privateer's aid can be
purchased. What the price is, Shalla-hedron did not report, or his sprout
did not remember. All we learn is that 'it is a price easy of the paying,
and not missed after.' 

"Well now-I didn't say a great hope, did I? It is something at least, to
have such an ally, if once you can find him in that place. . . ." 

V 

We talked a good deal longer before we told our guards that we were ready
with our answer. It was one of the most discouraging conversations I've
ever had. 

It had seemed unavoidable that we should make the descent to the subworld.
But there are, of course, a number of portals, and we'd heard one of them
was in Torvaal Canyon, scarcely forty leagues from Darkvent in the Smelt
Mountains, where we'd be going down. So there had been some hope that,
while we couldn't evade entering that hell, we could at least spare
ourselves the soak in the Demon Sea, and make straight for the nearest way
out. 

But it turned out that Charnall wasn't so mediocre in his craft that he
couldn't command Undle Nine-fingers' Life-Hook. The spell was the great
bibliophile's only original creation in thaumaturgy-he used it to secure
the loyalty of the slaves who worked in his vast archives. It puts your
life in the spellcaster's hand, and until it's removed he can jerk the
heart out of you at any time. It also lets him visualize where you
are-quite vaguely, but enough to distinguish between sunlight and the
subworld's lurid sky. Charnall told us regretfully that he must guard his
own life by governing ours very strictly through this means. 

It was mortifying! We'd come to the city intending a theft, of course, but
were guilty of no more than a week's general reconnoitering when we were
taken. It was clear to us now that the order to plant goods in our
inn-chamber, and ambush us by night, had come straight from Kamin. The
man, after desperate efforts, had faced the fact that wizards great enough
to retrieve his son by spells alone were rare; the few he'd managed to
approach made it clear what the attitude of the rest would be-that
amateurs played with Power at their own risk. Thus we were such things as
the stones a soldier flings at some enemy who's just shattered his lance
and sword. We were scarcely likely to make a dent on the problem, but
Kamin seized us and used us because we lay to hand, and he had nothing
else. There was a certain pathos in this, I suppose, but my eyes remained
dry. The ignominy! That Nifft the Lean, and Barnar Hammer-hand, should be
snared like a pair of wood-hens, trussed with magic, and booted below to
fight demons with swords! As we were marched to the councilroom, Barnar
and I needed only a few murmurs to agree on our course. Our dignity was
going to be salved with Rod-Master Kamin's gold. 

That impressive individual was on his feet when we were brought into the
chamber, and he turned an august scowl on us that was supposed to strike
us like a wintry blast. The man had wide cheeks and small no-nonsense
eyes, but he didn't scowl well. It made his neck bunch up on the collar of
his gold-brocaded tunic, and made you think of a pig's head on a plate in
a grocer's stall. 

The councillors were mostly older men, and their silence reflected not
Kamin's power, but their own neutrality. We'd gleaned enough of the
political picture during our week in town, to know that they were all
powerful property-holders. Because Kamin was the son of the city's most
beloved Rod-Master, he could usually count on a vital minimum of popular
acceptance, and was, within limits, deferred to by the magnates. They
would not follow him into disgrace, however, and some of them were said to
dislike the prospect of a three-generation dynasty in a post that was
traditionally elective. Wimfort's past and his predicament were thus
queasy ground for the Rod-Master, and his arrogance with us showed he knew
this. He wanted the business done, without protracted discussions
aggravating the council's sense of what a burden the boy had recently been
on the community. Kamin meant to ram it down our throats and trundle us
off quick. 

"Now you understand the terms," he said. "If you bring the boy back, your
sentences are transmuted. The council has affirmed this measure. Give us
your answer: Death, or the journey." 

I bowed. "I assure you my lord, Barnar and I are agreed on one thing: You
are very tall and impressive the way you tower and glower and glare like
that. I promise you it does make a man shake to look at you. But if you
think Barnar and I will tramp through the Primary Subworld, and wade in
the infernal lake itself, for no more pay than a
kiss-my-arse-and-fare-thee-well, then you can go hump your hat. We'll go
all right-for the terms I state and not a jot less. If you don't like our
bid you can put us back on the rack. We'd rather die than demean our
reputations by accepting the swindle you're offering." 

Kamin was one of those men who are strong mainly through the habit of
success. He had no real toughness or resilence of spirit. A dab of
insolence had him red and sputtering: 

"You impudent, skulking dog!" he said. "You arrogant gutter-sneak. I'm
going to have them . . . I'll have you . . ." 

"Oh yes, your eminence," I said, "have it done. What would you not have
done to us? You're wiser than to risk the doing yourself. But mark me. You
took us for fools once with your false arrest. Once is all. We'll go down
there all right, and you have your luck to thank that you trapped us
rather than others. We have high reputations to maintain. We dislike to
turn aside even from such a thing as this once the challenge is down. But
we'll be paid what we dictate, and heroes are expensive. And that, you
jowly sack of slops, you sagbellied sodomite, you puffed and strutting
human pimple, is that." 

In these last remarks I was mixing business with my pleasure. He had to be
roughly handled to feel our seriousness. Otherwise he would be trying to
wear us down or torture us into compliance. 

He took it hard. The council was dead still, eating up every word for
their friends afterwards. Kamin blazed like a signal fire, and glared at
the guards. They came uncertainly forward, but Kamin could bring out
neither a word or gesture of command. 

He must now either kill us or ask our terms. We all knew which he would
do. Still, he took a long time to swallow what I'd put on his plate. At
last he did it with a certain grace. He sat down. He looked at the floor a
moment, then turned to me a blank face. 

"What are your terms?" he asked. 

"Let your scribe set them down as I speak them, and then article yourself
to them in full legal form." 

"It will be done. I will article myself if the terms are . . .
acceptable." 

So I gave our terms. If we emerged from Darkvent with his son, we were to
receive mounts, a full set of new arms each, an oath of non-pursuit, the
freedom of Charnall, who was to be liberated on the spot to accompany us,
and four packbeasts. 

I rather liked Charnall, but our main motive here was to ensure our
freeing from the Life-Hook and any other ensorcellments that might be
slipped into us along with the protective spells we were going to have to
submit to before descending. As for the packbeasts, I didn't explain them
until I'd given specifications for all the other things. This took some
time, and the scribe's quill squawked and chuckled on the parchment,
keeping up with me. At last I said: "And, divided equally on the four
packbeasts, four hundredweight of pure gold, securely lashed in saddlebags
of stout leather." 

Kamin had been waiting, eyes on his hands, for the real price to be named.
Now he shook slightly, but kept silence and didn't look up. From what one
heard of the man, the price probably represented about a third of his
personal worth-and he could be sure he'd get none of it from the municipal
pocket. I'd have liked to take two thirds, but it's a fool who takes so
much that he guarantees pursuit while making fast flight impossible. The
quill scratched. Wax and taper were brought. Kamin didn't move, and I
thought the wax would harden before he did. Then, with a grunt, he jammed
his signet against it, seized the quill and slashed his signature across
the vellum. Then he sat glaring at me, as if I were some species of
pestilence his fate forced him to endure. It made my gorge rise, and I
shook my fist at him. 

"By the Black Crack, Rod-Master," I snarled. "I'd love to take you with
us. You'd think the wage a small one then." 

VI 

The subworld portal called Darkvent is an abandoned mine shaft in the
Smelt Hills. The Smelts are a bouldery, bony-looking range bordering a
desert, and we reached them in the afternoon of a windy, sun-drenched day.
As our mounts climbed the switch-backs toward the hilltops, Barnar and I
let our eyes linger on the limitless blue sky with a feeling that none of
our escort could have shared. Around us the wind muttered as it does among
rocks in a dry country-a sad, confiding sound I've always liked. 

We had neared the summits when Charnall, riding behind, nudged me and
pointed down to the desert floor. I could now see the ruins of a town
there on the range's footslopes. It had been a big town, but built mostly
of wood, and such bleached shards of its walls as remained standing-shaggy
with dead brambles-recalled those cracked husks of insects that hang in
dusty winter spiderwebs. For the rest, the townsite was marked mostly by
weed-lines, where crumbled planks and posts had fattened the stingy soil. 

"Westforge," he said. He got all the life the place must have had into the
way he said it-the shanty-taverns, the sharpers, the whores, the nights of
fierce music and lightly drawn blades. In twenty years a town doesn't take
deep root, but it can get big and lively. And then had come the day when,
up here in the hills, the miners had pushed their shaft that last yard too
far. The very mountain core which it pierced had trembled, fractured, and
plunged into the unsuspected abyss underlying it. The luckier of the
miners, who were working higher up the shaft, made it back into the light
of day, and saw the sun once more before they were taken. And then the
outwelling horror had plunged like an avalanche out of the hills and down
upon Westforge, where no warning had reached. And then human voices raised
up a new and dreadful music from the streets of that city, and many danced
there for long days and nights, clasped irresistibly in alien arms. Much
of darkness and catastrophe was vomited up from Darkvent in those days,
before one of the Elder League perceived the leakage, bestrode his winged
slave, and came to seal the breach. 

And now we approached the shaft. The sight of it was indefinably
loathsome-it carried a crude shock, as if its raw stone had literally
touched my naked eyeballs. Darkvent. A bottomless hole filled to the brim
with shadow. A diseased mouth forever spewing its one black syllable of
obscenity at the sunlight. Barnar and I dismounted and walked to its
threshold. 

It was like looking through a loophole in Time itself, for inside the
shaft, all the handiwork of the Westforge miners lay untarnished, bright
and whole despite its three generations of sleep. We looked disbelieving
back down at the splintered bones of the city, and again at what lay
within the shaft's ensorcellment, annexed therewith to the agelessness of
the subworlds. There Westforge's craft and ingenuity survived, and
testified to the vigor and hope it had once enjoyed. 

I have heard of nothing resembling their methods of mining elsewhere. They
had been great smiths, and had made their ore-carts of iron, with iron
wheels. The wheels ran in a pair of steel troughs laid perfectly parallel
and affixed to thousands of short wooden beams set into the earth, all
lying crosswise to the parallel troughs. Heavy cables hauled the carts by
means of big windlasses, one of which stood in clear view within. The
tremendous weight this system could haul-swiftly and with scarcely any
drag-was instantly obvious. 

All that gleaming wrought steel, paralyzed and silent, all swallowed and
sepulchred by forces against which the rarest works of human enterprise
are like sand-forts on a stormy beach. How keenly we felt, at that portal,
the lunatic futility of our own enterprise! Compared to all this impotent
iron, what were our own poor tools? Two short-swords, two broadswords, two
slings, two lances, two javelins, two shields. Granted, this was not all
we had-heavens no! Charnall had also laid three spells on our bodies. One,
the Wayfarer's Blessing, we felt only as a kind of blankness in gut and
throat-we would need neither food nor drink while subject to it. The
second was the Charm of Brisk Blood. This felt like a large dose of tonic
weed. My muscles were as taut and jumpy as a pack of hungry rats, and my
veins were so fat my arms felt like they were wrapped with snakes. In
situations where mere fleetness and stamina mattered, this would be an
undeniable asset. The third spell was the Life-Hook. This I experienced as
a little sore spot in my heart, the kind of pang a large, old scar
sometimes gives you-a flesh-memory of pain. The asset here was entirely
our captors'. 

A sensation of absolute aloneness touched both of us, in the same instant,
it seemed, for we both turned to look behind us. And I almost laughed to
see how alone we actually were, how far off from the shaft-mouth Kamin,
Charnall, and the fifty soldiers of our guard had stationed themselves.
Many of the soldiers, who were going to have to bivouac here to await our
return, held even their eyes averted from Darkvent. Kamin sat tall in his
saddle, his unease masked with disdain. Charnall sat slumped, avoiding our
eyes. 

Barnar grinned bitterly. "Are you all so modest?" he cried. "You stand so
removed, gentlemen! Perhaps it's delicacy? You fear we'll snub you if you
come forward to wish us luck?" 

At this, Charnall dismounted and came forward with guilty haste, stumbling
slightly. He was able to imagine our destination in far greater detail
than the others and felt, I think, a generous dread for us, beyond his
sense of his own danger. As he neared us it was his right hand he held
extended, but then he faltered, and it was his left he ended by giving us,
for on his right he wore the graven ring to which he had anchored the
control of the Life-Hooks and the other two spells he had put on us. I
could not forbear letting my gaze rest ironically an instant on the ring.
He shrugged, smiling sadly, and I found I had to smile back. 

"What clowns we are, Charnall," I told him, "with all our supposed wits.
Do you believe we are actually doing this? I mean, if I'm not dreaming the
whole thing, maybe you are." 

"And if you are," Barnar put in, "feel free to take a break any time. Why
overdo? You could just summarize the rest of the plot for us over a cozy
breakfast." 

"Nifft. Barnar. You do know that this whole idea . . . I mean that this
whole approach to the problem was the farthest thing from my remotest . .
. I mean let alone my even knowing who you were or that you were in town,
or ever planning your-" 

I clapped him on the shoulder, saying, "Peace, good wizardlet." The
epithet made him smile ruefully. "You're too well aware, good Charnall, of
what it means to enter the subworlds, ever to have hatched this scheme.
Only an arrogant ignoramus like Kamin could seriously entertain it." 

Charnall nodded, moodily twisting the control ring on his finger. "It's
ridiculous," he said, "even callous perhaps, but I keep thinking that if
only I could find more to like in the boy, all this wouldn't seem quite
such an insane waste of . . ." He checked himself, mortified. 

"Our lives," Barnar finished gently. Charnall nodded, but then angrily
shook his head. 

"No. There's Gildmirth. He is there. There's something about this
legend-from the first I heard of it it struck me as truth, and even more
than that, I could feel the man himself in it, feel a rare and vital
personality behind the deeds reported of Gildmirth. I mean, for some
reason, when I think about it, I actually feel hope, and if only you can
find him, reach him . . ." 

His own words had brought back to him the utter vagueness and
improbability of the entire project. His shoulders sagged. I squeezed his
arm consolingly and looked at Barnar, who nodded. Raising my arm in
salute, I hailed Kamin: "So down we go after your brat, cattle-king! Go
home and reflect that if you have any hope at all, it lies with two men
whose freedom you have stolen, and whose fealty you have coerced. If you
find any comfort in such an arrangement, you're welcome to it." 

A soldier came forward with two lit torches and a bundle of several dozen
more. As he neared the shaft, he made a sign against evil over his eyes,
which he tried to hold downcast, sparing them the least glimpse of our
destination. 

Thrusting our two ridiculous little flames ahead of us, we stepped inside
Darkvent. We felt a light shock of immersion, as in a very tenuous, oily
medium. Being men, we felt no more of a transition than that, and received
no hint of the hell of pain which the barrier-spell opposed to any of
demon-kind who strove to pass through it in the other direction. 

VII 

The main shaft, with its steady downward pitch and its triple course of
cart-tracks, remained unmistakable through a multitude of intersections
with branch-shafts. It was a warm, gingery darkness that we walked
through, with an elusive, sickish spice to it that you not only smelled
and tasted, but also felt with your skin, like a breath of fever. And I
could have sworn that in that darkness, the torchlight didn't fan out and
attenuate-it stopped short, enveloping us in two eerily distinct bubbles
of light outside of which the perfect blackness teemed with all the
shadows the torches had not yet summoned into form. Meanwhile, within the
light, the shadow-play made it seem that our passage called back the
long-dead will of the Westforge miners to fugitive, fretful life. Crazily
leaning carts appeared to lurch, struggle against the puddled gloom their
wheels were mired in, craving to roll again and bear ore. And, in the
little maintenance-smithies inset at intervals in the shaft walls, the
dropped sledges and toppled anvils twitched restively in the elastic nets
of darkness constraining them, as if we'd set them dreaming of the
meddlesome, relentless hands of the men who had made them. All this lay in
a huge silence that our footfalls hacked at feebly, but could not break.
It was an infested silence, wormy with almost-sounds-a great, black throat
with the noise of an anguished multitude locked inside it. 

An endless time passed, which nevertheless could not have been more than
two hours. Just as our second pair of torches was burning out, we reached
a broad gallery. It had served primarily as a switching-yard for
ore-carts, dozens of which stood in the central maze of track, sidelined
long ago for re-coupling to new cart-trains that had never rolled. These
carts were unusual in being of two sizes. Among those of the by now
familiar dimensions, there stood an equal number of more than twice this
capacity. These giants were concentrated toward the gallery's farther
side, where the shaft we had been following resumed its descent-resumed it
at a markedly steeper angle, and with a bigger gauge of track, from which
it was clear that the larger design of cart had been devoted strictly to
working this more swiftly plunging segment of the shaft. In the gallery
the giants had transferred their greedily heaped plunder to more
manageable vessels for the long climb to the sunlight. 

This place had been described to us. Here the mother vein had taken a
sudden, steep downturn, while simultaneously thickening and complexifying
to a fabulous richness. The Westforge engineers had hesitated only
fractionally, then rushed down to pursue the vein at full gallop. 

Boom times ensued. Several years of smooth progress and serene profits
unrolled before the city, just as (if we'd been told rightly) four
unflawed miles of this more cyclopean tunnelwork would now flow easily
under our footsoles before we reached the next turning of the mine's
fortunes, which was also a turning-a wrenching, really-of the shaft's
course. We were told that it continued past this rupture for one more
tortured mile, to end in a ragged edge above the subworld gulf. We crossed
the gallery's switchyard and continued downward. 

The riskier slope, the new giantism of carts and other equipment-this
combination was subtly frightening, for in it you could read the city's
state of spirit at that period. They were luck-drunk. The headlong grade
revealed the dangerous exhilaration to which initial incredulity had
yielded, while the unwieldy presumption of the machinery's new scale
betrayed the tipsy acceleration of Westforge's appetite to possess its
inordinate good fortune. Poor, luckless wretches! What haste they made to
feast on the mountain's bowels, thereby, with precisely equal haste,
delivering to demon-kind a very different feast-themselves. 

The crossbeams of the tracks started to get slippery before we had pushed
even a half mile beyond the gallery. Barnar took a nasty fall that snuffed
his torch. As he got to his feet I interrupted his muttered blasphemies:
"Look down ahead. Is it getting light?" 

It was. At first it was scarcely light we saw-an oily pallor veining the
dark, no more. But soon the features of the shaft before us began,
unmistakably, to emerge, varnished with a glossy, jaundiced fulgor. Barnar
took another fall, and then I took one worse than either of his, and
suffered truly amazing pain when forced to use my elbow for an emergency
anchor against the track's slimy beams. 

"Barnar," I said between gasps, "beyond the collapse . . . It's bound to
get steeper. . . . So we should just simply string out . . . a simple,
stinking, putrid, slime-kissing, thrice-buggered cable . . . to go down
along . . ." 

I was proposing more toil than I knew. Even though we could all but count
on finding supplemental lengths of cable on our way down, which our line
could incorporate as we descended, still we gathered, cut, coiled and
packed over two miles of it before proceeding, if only because we did not
yet imagine how we could reach the subworld floor from the shaft, and for
all we knew a simple line might serve the need. From our supply, and what
we foraged, we pieced out our safety line behind us as we stepped-steady
and methodical-deeper into the sulphuric haze in which tracks, crossties,
timbers and walls were manifested with gradually increasing detail, all of
them like objects emerging from smoke. Four torches later-for we kept them
past our need of them, for the sake of their earthly familiarity-we
reached the shaft's mortal wound, the catastrophic rupture Charnall had
called "the buckling." Here commenced the shaft's terminal phase, for past
this point its stony matrix had partially subsided into the subworld
chasm, though it had stopped just short of following the rest of the
mountain's core down to the demon-infected plains. The megalith still
clung to its place in the architecture of the upper world, though it hung
askew of its former placement. The discontinuity this produced in the
shaft was dramatic. The tunnel was brutally torqued, its rocky walls
having splintered while its shoring, though wrenched, had held. The tracks
had also held together, though their bending had divorced them at some
points from their crossbeams. They arched gracefully through a
half-spiral, then plummeted down the nearly vertical drop that followed.
Hereafter we fervently rejoiced in my foresight regarding the cable, for
the shaft's terminal segment often opposed slopes of sixty and seventy
degrees to our progress, while the febrile subworld light, which now
filled the tunnel, seemed more than ever to have the property of
lubricating whatever it lit. 

And yet we all but forgot the hardship of the tricky path once we had seen
a certain thing awaiting us below-or more exactly, once we had suddenly
understood, and rightly interpreted, something we had been seeing for some
time. It was at the center of our vision's limit, a ragged patch of
yellow, criss-crossed with grey lines. And when, all at once, it became
obvious that this was a patch of subworld sky framed by our tunnel's end,
our rapt scrutiny had a new puzzle to pick at-the meaning of that
disorderly grey network. Down we came, planting our feet with absentminded
care while our eyes strained ahead to untangle this perplexing image. 

But we had drawn quite near it before we comprehended its spatiality. At
last it was clear that all the strands of the meshwork hung outside of the
shaft, that somehow the whole crazy rigging was strung up in the open air
just beyond our tunnel's ragged issue. 

And then a warning was murmured to me. I was ahead of Barnar on the cable,
and I heard from behind me that one fleet syllable of premonition, a
throaty hum like that of a loosed bowstring. This touched my ears, and in
scarcely the time it takes a hand to clench-which my rope-hand did-it was
followed by a crushing blow laid across the backs of my knees. My legs
shot out from under me as neat as ninepins. My grip on the cable held-it
was my shoulder that nearly came apart while, for an instant, my body was
stretched out on the air like a banner in a brisk wind. Well before I hit
the ground, I understood that it would be far better for me if I did not
hit the ground, and that if I must perforce do so, the less I tarried
thereon the better, since it was clearly upon the ground that this trap
was designed to throw me. 

Actually, the line had robbed the trap of its full effectiveness. The blow
I'd taken would have flung an unanchored victim right out to the shaft's
ragged lip and left him sprawled on its dizziest salience above the webbed
abyss. Instinctively I riveted my eyes on that menacing spot even
while-finding I had no real alternative-I gave gravity her due and yielded
to my body's stubborn determination to hit the ground, will-I nill-I. 

Starbursts blotted my vision, yet still I held my eyes to their target.
And while my stunned frame wallowed to get its legs beneath it; while
returning vision dispelled the white obscurity that filled my eyeballs;
while my right hand groped for its dropped lance-throughout all the
harrowing micro-pulses of precious time which these accomplishments
consumed, still I fought to see, exclusive of all else, that shaft-lip and
any least thing that happened there. Unmonitored by me, my palm found the
haft of my spear. Precisely then, as if the touch had summoned it, a
scorpion as big as a battle-chariot swarmed into the shaft-mouth, and came
avalanching towards us on a great splashing racket of rattly legs. My own
legs weren't quite under me yet, but Barnar's lance came plunging past my
shoulder and planted its razor-edged steel a half-yard deep in the
junction of her soft throat with the first of her glossy black thoracic
plates. 

For of course this thing was not pure scorpion. Most demons, having
something of man in them, are just such hybrids as this which leered at us
with an old woman's face obscenely socketed in the huge ribbed and jointed
body. The shot had stopped her, by which I mean made her pause, no more.
For she crouched perfectly poised, the dreadful, limber power of her legs
undiminished. Cautiously, delicately, her bulky pincers nibbled at the
shaft sprouting from her gorge. And though this brought tears of pain in
thick streams from her eyes, it was a look of the purest lunatic glee that
her face beamed on us. It was a jowled, flabby-mouthed face, the brow
fantastically gnarled-nightmare-knotted-above her crazed red eyes. Her
mouth gaped-displaying not teeth but black barbs-and she paid out an
endless red tongue that dangled to her wounded throat and licked it
caressingly. Then, in a gurgling whisper, she said: "I'm going to lick
your face clean off your skull. Slowly, thoroughly, lick it entirely off.
I'm going to sting you and bind you and scoop your loins hollow and lap
out your brains. And then I'm going to make you again and start over." 

It was just as she finished speaking that I made my cast. Almost casually
her pincers rose, their movement perfectly timed to shield her face.
Unluckily for her, I wasn't aiming at her face. Crouched for attack as she
was, with her tail advanced in a strike-ready arc over her back, my target
was positioned several feet above her head, and I didn't miss it.
Skewered, her stinger's poison bulb dropped a black bucketful of her venom
onto her face. 

Her agony was volcanic. She surged and crashed against the shaft walls
like a stormy sea, her pincers tearing at the sizzling mess whence her
howls erupted and her simmering eyes leaked out in red rivulets. We stood
with broadswords drawn waiting for a safe moment to move in, but in the
end we were spared that task, for after a few moments the poison seemed to
reach some central nerve in her. She rose in the air, folding and
unfolding spasmodically, crashed down on her back and writhed so mightily
that the movement propelled her like a snake straight backward and
launched her from the shaft-lip. We rushed to the lip and looked out. We
learned then the obstacles that opposed our entry of this vast prison
where the key to our freedom lay. 

The tunnel issued from a stupendous wall of ragged bluffs, scarred by
great landslides and stretching past vision to either side. The cliffs
dropped sheer below us for nearly half a mile down to a zone of swampland,
and all across the face of them the grey webbing spread, like a shroud
crawling with grave-lice. For everywhere big multilegged shapes crouched
in that dingy rigging, or ran along it with the incredible speed ants have
on their own tiny scale. And other forms decorated the nasty
weave-dangling bundles of webbing which stirred and twisted impotently
against their anchorages. Vague though they were in their wrappings, we
could see that many of these were winged things of a stature about twice
that of a man, but the commonest food of the scorpion demons was
themselves. Their cannibal struggles raged everywhere, including at a
point not far beneath our feet, where our recent adversary, snagged in the
web by her tail, offered little effective resistance to the greedy pincers
of two of her confreres. 

As for the swamp below us, it was apparently a kind of backwater off a
river which, far to our right, flowed out from the foot of the cliffs, and
divided the plain with a shallow valley. Across the valley, perhaps two
leagues distant from us, a city of giant towers stood, stilt-supported
platforms crowned with buildings. And, looking small as flies above a far
off corpse, things numerous and fleet flew among the titanic structures. 

But we gave most of our attention to the cliff that we had to descend. We
could see that any rope we dropped would hang in striking range of a score
of places in the webbing. We'd be picked off within ten minutes of our
starting down. And when we'd brooded on this for a while, we discovered an
added unpleasantness; the swamps we must cross once down were astir
everywhere with the movement of submerged shapes. None broke the surface.
All we could be sure of was that they were big-very big. 

We sat down and rested. We were so discouraged, we couldn't speak a word.
I discovered that my spear had fallen free from the demon's stinger, and
that her venom had only slightly corroded its ironwood haft. I was about
to exult in this luck, but then only smiled bitterly. We had so little to
work with! Barnar spat vigorously out into the yellow air. 

"I'd like to sweep that foulness off the rock, like cobwebs with a broom,"
he snarled. 

"Too bad we didn't bring a broom," I sighed. "Do you think we could drop
rocks big enough to break a path through the web?" 

"How many do you think we could manage that were even as heavy as that
demon, let alone heavier?" 

This had already occurred to me. I sighed again. Then I had an idea. 

When Barnar had heard me out, he sat meditating for a moment. "You know,"
he said, "its wildness may be the thing about it that will make it work. I
mean, I don't think you can ease and creep your way into a realm like
this. If you try, the first little entity will smell your uncertainty and
hesitation. Horror and bad luck will converge on you. But if you barge in
with all possible force, storm the gate . . . then maybe luck might just
give way a few inches for you, and let you pass." 

And so we started back up the shaft. 

VIII 

A long time after ascending-how can I know how long?-I counted off the
first hundred paces of our second descent, measuring from the
switching-yard gallery and down the main shaft's penultimate steepening. I
found my mark and looked back toward the gallery. It was suddenly eerie
that the sections of its walls and ceiling I could see should be stained
with the lurid wash of the forge's light, braziers and many torches. 

"All right!" I shouted. "Send it down!" 

My voice woke the noise of the mighty windlass above, and it all felt even
more like some ghostly resurrection of the mine's great, toilsome soul, so
long in its grave. Dusty and smoke-stained as I was, it was not hard to
feel like some reanimated Westforger-certainly, I was as far from the
world of men as any ghost is. 

But when the thing I had summoned rumbled into view and came easing down
the tracks, my little whimsicality was badly jarred. No such conveyance as
this had ever ridden these rails in the doomed city's heyday. Though one
soon saw the two giant ore-carts that were its substructure, its
embellishments made it look far more like some monstrous weapon than any
kind of mining equipment, and of course it was a weapon. 

We'd welded on a prow-an upswept scimitar forged from the smithy's stocks
of sheet-iron and sharp as a well-honed axe-bit. We'd also welded two long
horizontal vanes to the sides of both carts-these were shaped rather like
an arrow's fletches and were also sharpened. Lastly, both carts had a pair
of broad vanes that pivoted on pins set in the frontal segments of their
boxes' rims. At present they resembled a beetle's wings half-folded over
its back, but they could be pushed out to a much broader lateral spread,
and locked in this position, from inside the carts. 

When this huge, haftless spearhead had nosed down to my mark, I shouted:
"Hold!" Barnar locked the windlass and appeared in the mouth of the shaft.
When he reached me, he found me staring down the shaft ahead-rather
glumly, I suppose. 

"The buckling?" he asked after a moment. 

"Yes," I said. It didn't bear much dwelling on. We had spent hours there
fine-measuring by every trick we could think of, and the tracks at that
point certainly seemed-throughout their contorted stretch-to have been
bent perfectly in phase. At the speed we would be going when we got there,
they had better be. Barnar nodded sadly, gazing where I did. He sighed. 

"Oh well," he said. 

I nodded. "Well put." 

We went to our vehicle. I climbed into the fore-cart, and Barnar into the
rear. We spent a moment adjusting ourselves in the shredded cable with
which we had packed both carts for cushioning, and checking the operation
of our folding vanes. Then we poked our heads up and looked at each other.
Barnar had his shortsword in one hand. 

"Well, old Ox," I smiled, "all I can say is, I just wish it was you riding
up front. I still think it's nose-weight we should have." 

"Tail-weight. But be comforted, Nifft. Either we'll enter that place
safely, or we'll ram ourselves so far up its arse you won't even notice
the difference." 

"Well that's true enough. Yes indeedy. You realize of course, Barnar, that
it is simply not possible that we're actually doing this?" 

"I've come to the same comforting conclusion, old friend. Therefore let's
away-an impossibility can only do us an unreal sort of harm, after all." 

I nodded. He reached his sword over the cable holding us by the stern, and
the blade whickered through it. 

The slope plucked us down. The great iron mass seemed to ride a ramp of
ice, so dreadfully smooth was its acceleration. The fetid gloom of the
tunnel surged up against us like a foul throat swallowing us ravenously. 

The racketing of the tracks rose to a howl, and in moments it had grown
light enough to see the shoring's main beams, at their thirty-foot
intervals, merging into one blurred, continuous wall. 

All that lay in our power to do, in the way of navigational control, we
had already done when we cut the cable, and nothing remained for us to do
but-when it came time-to spread our vanes as we exited the shaft. The
assumption that we would ever be called upon to perform this second task
now appeared quite clearly to me as the most extravagant folly, based on a
wild delusion conceived by a raving idiot. We would never reach the
shaft-mouth! How could we have dreamed that we would attain this velocity?
When we hit the buckling, we would quite simply be thrown up against the
roof of the shaft with enough force to wed carts with stone-and ourselves
between-in an eternally indissoluble bond. Already we were leaving the
tracks and resettling on them in long, giddy surges. The feeble subworld
light seemed to be igniting, coming on like a flare, so swiftly did we
drive toward its source. I saw the buckling just below. I pulled my head
back in and lay down. I could not forbear shouting farewell to Barnar,
though he could not have heard me over the shriek of the wheels. Then my
body, in its cushiony coffin, was seized, lifted up, pulled down, and
torqued into a tight spiral-all in the same fraction of an instant. For
another half-instant I was floating, and then the wheels were roaring
again, our speed unabated. 

I sat back up. Before I had succeeded in believing what I saw-that we
still swept down the track-I saw ahead the webbed tunnelmouth. It seemed
to howl as it yawned at us, though its voice was actually the din of our
own white-hot, fire-spitting wheels combined with the thunderstorm of
echoes we trailed behind us. I lay back. As the carts erupted from the
roaring corridor, and into the stunning silence of that sunken sky, I
slammed open my top-vanes. 

Then whips murdered the air all around us-the webbing, through which,
despite its toughness, our plunge was as smooth as the arrow's first leap
from the bow. We punched through something that made a horrible, wet
cough, but did not slow us, and three scorpion legs flopped over the nose
of my cart and hung there lifelessly. Then we were falling clear, and I
raised my head again. 

It gave me a kick in the pit of the stomach to see how steeply we plunged.
The vanes had given us even less lift than the little we had projected.
Though we would clear the heaps of landslide-rubble strewn along the base
of the crag, I found it easy to form a vivid image of being driven like a
tent stake thirty yards deep in the swamp muck. And then a vast hand
seized us from behind, and slowed us in midair. 

This was how it felt, and as I looked back it was no more than I expected
to see, in such a world as this. What I saw, and Barnar too in the same
moment, made us shout and cheer like madmen. 

We trailed an immense, twisting banner of tangled silk, and a score of
hell-shapes struggled in the undulating acres of this train of ours. It
flapped and bellied, and let fall a many-legged thing which plummeted,
scrambling for purchase on the oily air. 

In the lurch and sway of our hobbled fall, we argued over which part of
the black-scummed waters we were likeliest to hit, but in reality the
particular spot seemed to matter little. Systems of grassy silt-bars made
escape afoot possible from most points. Meanwhile the waters looked
uniformly threatening. Almost everywhere they bulged and folded with
sunken movements of a fearfully large scale. 

But now our fall took on a frightening wobble, and a sudden burst of
speed. The windstream had compacted the webbing behind us, twisting it in
a knotted skein that offered far less drag against the air. Our plunge got
fearfully steep, and the unclean waters swelled toward us. Scant hundreds
of feet from impact, we saw an immense leech-it resembled nothing else so
much-thrust sixty feet of its slime-smeared body-tube out of the swamp
brew, open a round mouth-hole with a haggle-fanged rim, and chew-blindly,
kissingly-at the sky. Others of its ilk sprouted almost simultaneously,
concentrated in the immediate vicinity of our now imminent crash. 

One of them in particular towered at what appeared to be our inevitable
point of collision. It seemed to be tracking us, by what sense I don't
know. Its mouth's groping centered ever more sharply on our line of
approach. I couldn't determine whether or not its mouth could swallow us
whole until the last instant, when I saw that it wouldn't quite manage it.
Then we hit our greedy welcomer. 

Perhaps these things had a single predatory response for all airborne
entities because they were unacquainted with any especially massive ones-I
can't say. Whatever the reason, this leech was the victim of a serious
miscalculation. We clove his mouth and the first sixteen feet of him
asunder before snagging with sufficient firmness in his blubbery
plasticity to wrench his eighty-foot bulk clean out of the water, like a
plucked root. We hit the swamp, laying the whole floundering length of him
out across the bog behind us. He had greatly cushioned our impact. We
swarmed out, snatching our bundled weapons, and thrashed thru shallow
waters to a cluster of sodden hummocks that offered a broken path out to
dry land. 

As we fled, we heard behind us a vast threshing of waters, and shrill,
agonized voices. The leeches were gathering round the tasty entanglement
of web-demons that we had strung across the lagoons, and feeding on them
with gusto. 

So we fled inland, and at length we found a zone of dry ravines where we
could crouch in safety. Here we took our first period of rest in this
world-this world so hard merely to enter, let alone survive in. Our
venture was begun, at least, and ourselves still both alive and free, no
slight feat in itself. 

But ah! what a drear hell it was we now had to venture through! What a
maelstrom of relentless gorging, one creature upon another! The claws and
jaws of the upper world are red enough-who denies it?-but the carnage has
intermissions, periods of amiable association, zones of green peace and
fructification. In the subworlds, the merciless seethe of appetites never
simmers down. Even while the leeches still fed on the web-demons, squads
of the winged beings we had distantly glimpsed round the city of platforms
swept into view. Their bodies were manlike, though scaly and of thrice
human stature, and their temperaments were, as it proved, playful. Flying
in vast and flawlessly coordinated formations, they dropped lassoes on
several of the leeches and hauled them ashore, where armies of their
fellows assembled mountainous heaps of brush. On these the winged things,
twittering volubly together, incinerated their huge, vermiform prey alive.
Cooking was not the object. The leeches were burnt to ashes while the
beings swarmed in the air above their pyres, clearly intoxicated by the
greasy smoke to which the worms were transmuted by the flames. And as for
the smell of this smoke, I earnestly beg whatever gods may be that my fate
may never again set my nose athwart such a stench. 

Dismal, eternal, remorseless gluttony. We came to see the hideous vitality
of that place as a single obscene shape, its multiform jaws forever
rooting in its own bleeding entrails-guzzling and growing strong upon
itself. 

We knew that by following the nearby river we should eventually find the
sea. As the light is never truly full there, so the darkness rarely
completely falls. We paused an indefinite time under the changeless sky,
and then rose and made our way toward the river by the best-concealed
route we could discern. 

IX 

We found the Demon-Sea. We reached it. At the time, though it was merely
the threshold of our journey, we gaped at it as if it were the
unimaginable peak of all Exploit simply to have attained its shores. Once
we had come to ourselves somewhat, and recalled that next these waters
must be entered, and plumbed, we were yet further awed. It was a moment
for taking stock of ourselves. 

The personal inventory this led us to was a sobering one. We had set out
wearing light body-mail over heavy jerkins and doublets of leather. All
three of these layers were now scorched in many places, and as ragged as
old curtains in a house full of cats. We had one spear between us, and the
head of this was half-melted. Barnar's sword lacked two feet of blade. He
kept the remnant because one throws away not even the least asset down
there. He still had his target-shield, but mine was now a fused and
corroded lump under the carcass of a thing I had killed. Our bones were
stark against our skins, our eyes were those of almost-ghosts, and our
beards told us we had been at least a month en route. This was our only
clue to a sane reckoning of time, in a world where horror, harm, and long,
eerie calms flow past the traveler in endlessly unpredictable succession. 

We sat down-fell, really, as if our legs had done their limit, and now
forever renounced their task. The feeling of futility we had then was the
heaviest weight I have ever felt upon my back. For a simple fact which we
had known all along was now striking us with its full dreadfulness: having
reached the sea, we must now turn either right or left, with no way of
knowing which was the correct direction. 

If, indeed, there was a correct direction-if even Gildmirth the Privateer
could have survived till now on the shore of this subearthly deep. The
wrong turn meant a grim eternity of plodding, another of retracing our
steps. Gildmirth's present nonexistence meant the same. And the Demon-Sea
spread before us like the very image of infernal eternity to either side. 

We had first sensed its nearness while still deep in the dunes of salt.
When we got a tang of brine, we identified a deep susurration we had been
hearing for some time as the big-breathing sound an ocean makes. The dunes
steepened, and we kept to their crests, trampling their ridgelines into
crumbling staircases, winding always higher. And then there was before us
a narrow plateau of rock salt ending in white cliffs and, beyond these,
crashing against their pallid feet, the subworld waters. 

The essential horror of its aspect you could not at first identify. The
sounds of it had an awesome musicality, and the prospect a barbarously
rich coloration, which conspired to exalt and bewilder your senses. The
shingle footing the cliffs was jet-black, seemingly composed of something
like broken obsidian, and when the cream-and-jade surf pounced up it
varnished their contrast to an ever-renewed brilliance. Moreover, a wealth
of gaudy flotsam littered the beaches, so that the breakers made them
flash every other color as well. The sea itself was bizarrely dappled, for
though a gloomy cloud-cover vaulted it over to the limits of vision, this
was abundantly rifted, and wherever it was broken it permitted avalanches
of the reddish-gold light of sunset to pour onto the water. The clouds
themselves were in many places caved in, and lay in foggy islands and
ghostly ziggurats upon the green-black waves, and these misty monoliths
had a bluish luminescence of their own lurking within them. Meanwhile the
winds on those waters were strangely various, and everywhere wrenched them
into a crazy-quilt of local turbulences. 

It did truly ravish the senses, and so it was only belatedly you felt the
horror of the enclosure of so huge a sea. For though the light that broke
through the clouds might suggest earthly sunset colors, it was quickly
recognizable as a demonic imitation-more garish less subtly shaded than
the dying sun's true radiance. Such subearthly luminosity, in varying
hues, had been our sky for weeks now-never a real sky, of course, never a
transparent revelation of endless space, but always a kind of bright paint
masking the universal ceiling of stone imprisoning this world. Now a true
ocean is the sky's open floor-that's the feeling men love in it, the
reason they venture upon it, apart from gain or exploration. But this
bottled sea, for all its terrible vastness, gave you not the awe of
liberation, but its black opposite, the awe of drear imprisonment's
infinitude. 

We sat staring at this vista for a long time. We meant to discuss our
situation, but simply failed to muster the effort of speech. At last
Barnar drew a long breath. In a voice utterly blank of feeling he said:
"To hell with everything. Let's just go right for luck." 

And so we did, both secretly grateful that we had managed even this
minimal act of decision, for neither of us had believed it impossible that
we might just sit forever on that impossible lookout. As it was, we set
out sharing the glum, unvoiced conviction that we knew where the manse of
Gildmirth was to be found: nowhere. And we would take forever getting
there, except, of course, that we would not survive nearly that long. 

Though we marched atop the salt bluffs, we found our eyes and minds
constantly entangled with the vivid jetsam cluttering the beach below. And
what we saw there had soon roused us from our despairing stupor, for
though our spirits were jaded with terrors and atrocities, those sights
revealed to us new dimensions of demonic activity. Some of that bright
tangle on the black strand was merely the detritus of lower life forms
indigenous to the sea: broken coral branches thick with budding rubies,
sapphires, and emeralds, or uprooted crinoids whose torn husks were purest
gold. Such common objects bespoke nothing beyond the ocean's grotesque
fecundity. But equally numerous were products of art, of active-and surely
malign-intelligence: wrought chalices of gold with elaborate silver inlay,
tiaras of gem-studded everbright shaped and sized to crown no human skull,
shattered triptychs whose fragmented images were vivid as hallucination.
There was a broken chair, elaborately hinged and barbed, designed to hold
unimaginable shapes in unconjecturable postures, and we saw several battle
helmets with triads of opalescent eyes inset in the visors tumbling empty
in the foam. All such evidences of active artifice serving unguessable
aims proclaimed the sea's hidden cunning, its vast, unbreathing population
aboil with a million malefic purposes. 

Yet this was only the inanimate portion of what lay scrambled on the dark
gravel. Shorelife abounded. The human form was so much a part of its
makeup that we could not always tell whether we were looking at demon
hybrids native to the place, or at the deformed thralls of demonkind. If
even half of them were captives, then truly, our race has fed multitudes
to the subworld's endless appetite for our woe. The lifeless wealth on the
beaches-clearly a slight fraction of what the depths contained-showed
plainly enough the bait that has drawn so many luckless souls within the
subworld's grip, most commonly thru ambitious and uninformed
spell-dabbling. And surely it is dangerously easy nowadays-most especially
in Kairnheim-to buy the power to call up entities which can only be
dominated and put down again by a degree of power not even generally
understood, let alone purchasable, by any overweening dilettante. 

Some of those we saw, of course, were unmistakably of the latter group:
the sea's human "catch," spoils of its malignant enterprise, its fishing
among men. Some grottoes, for example, were densely carpeted with victims
whose faces alone retained their human form. The rest of their
bodies-everted and structurally transformed-now radiated from each face's
perimeter in wormy coronas. They resembled giant sea-anemones. The souls
within those faces still-all too eloquently-lived, while every vermiculous
grotto of them had its demonic gardener: an obese, vermillion starfish
shape, all scabbed and barnacled with eyes, and which inched the
slathering mucosae of its undersides across the quasi-human meadow. Each
threatened face expected its embrace with a piteous look of loathing and
foreknowledge. 

And there were others of our species who lay in nude clusters resembling
the snarls of kelp which a northern sea will disgorge on the sand in storm
season. Their legs and hips merged in central, fleshy stalks, while their
arms and upper-bodies endlessly and intricately writhed and interlaced.
These were the very image of promiscuous lust, but the multiple voice they
raised made a hospital groan, a sick-house dirge of bitter weariness.
Crablike giants, hugely genitaled like human hermaphrodites, scuttled over
them with proprietary briskness-pausing, probing, nibbling everywhere. 

But how were we to interpret the huge terrapin forms we saw plodding
ashore to lay clutches of eggs in the black gravel? Their hatchlings,
which erupted instantly, were scaly homunculi with frighteningly
individualized human faces. We saw more than once their cannibal assault
on the parent beast, as well as their launching of the dead mother's
hollowed, meat-tattered shell-a swarming nursery-barque-through the surf,
and out into the open sea. 

It should be understood that I don't imply that the open waters themselves
were barren of vital signs. Everywhere the waves suffered swift, grotesque
distortions, and the shifting architectures of mist and fog that cluttered
them everywhere pulsed unpredictably with movement, as of shadowy things
in their depths. Once we saw what was surely a combat of invisible
entities, which occurred about half a mile offshore. The waves there
dented and sagged under massive, dancing pressures. It appeared that a
pair of feet or paws were involved on one side-each as big as a large
ship-and that a dimpling multitude of claws or tentacles were involved on
the other. At length, something huge hammered a hollow in the water. The
waves calmed, and an immense volume of saffron fluid gurgled onto the sea
from what looked like a seam in the air, and sank coiling roots into the
deeps. 

Such spectacles as these, always accompanied by the incessant, soft,
mind-seducing antiphonies of the ocean's vast noise, beguiled our sense of
time just as completely as an interval of ease and merriment might have
done. For the most insidious aspect of that place was the subtle,
instantaneous comprehensibility of what we saw and heard. It was already
halfway to madness just to realize that at the very first note, you
understood those choruses of mangled rapture, those arrogant boomings of
idiot Murder triumphing over defenseless Life. In short, slowly though we
progressed, we were swept along by all we witnessed. Days had surely
passed, though how many we could not know, when Barnar first opened my
eyes to something he had been aware of for some time. 

For out of a seemingly endless silence that had settled on us, he cried:
"I can't help it! I've got to ask you." He laid one of his great paws-all
cracked and scorched with our trials-on my shoulder. The other he aimed up
the coast where we were headed. The shoreline there was an endless white
serpent of cliff and surf, diminishing to a wisp of smoky pallor near the
horizon. Barnar's eyes, which the squareness of his face has led some to
call bovine, but which are in truth alive with acuity, he aimed at mine.
He had a haunted look. "Am I seeing a little blackish spur, which might be
a headland, about three-fourths of the way to the horizon?" 

It was a long time before I answered, my voice a hollow strangeness in my
own ears: "Yes. I think you are." 

The sinuosities of the shore protracted our approach to the apparition
almost unendurably. We were still far from it once it had resolved itself
sufficiently in our vision to become a source of hope to us, and thence of
new energy. For what had appeared as a large landspit proved to be a small
one, densely crowned with structures, opposed by a crescent of breakwater
and pilings, which also supported numerous buildings, and whose arc
mirrored the headland's, so that the two formed a pair of pincers which
enclosed a broad, shallow lagoon shaped like a teardrop. If this landmark
proved to be of human construction, it was certainly on a scale
attributable only to an entrepreneur of Gildmirth's legendary stature, and
in that class, his was the only name we or Charnall had been able to
discover. We began to toy with the belief-pretty stupefying to
ourselves-that we were going to find our man. Still the twisted coast
interminably multiplied the hours of our drawing near, and through them
all, the vivid, ersatz light never changed, and it was always sunset that
poured from the broken iron-gray of stormwrack and fog. 

But, long though we had studied the place on our approach, when we finally
crouched above it-as low in a fissure of the salt cliffs as we could get
without abandoning the land's protection from the sea's powers-it was long
again that we stared at it from near at hand. There was an indescribable
poignance in it-in the combination of its splendor and its damage. 

For the whole architectural sweep of the place was marred at the base; the
headland had been riven, and half its length was subsided several fathoms
into the sea. An imposing pyramidal structure that crowned the spit-by its
grandeur the Manse itself, if Gildmirth's place this was-was sunk with it,
and its lowest terrace was half-inundated by the swell. The sea's weirdly
spasmodic surf climbed triumphantly up the sculpted pediments flanking its
doorways, and went rummaging inside through its gaping windowframes. 

Yet the rest-the bulk of the establishment-looked remarkably intact. The
jetty and rank of pilings that opposed the headland's curve supported an
elegant and various procession of architecture that didn't look in the
least derelict or decayed. It was a splendid defiance, this parabola of
human workmanship that pierced-stood kneedeep in-the Demon-Sea itself.
Such a flamboyant trespass upon so deep a universe of malignant power!
That fragile ring of earthly art was a lunatic declaration of empire, a
flagrant challenge to all that swam there. And yet, withal, there was this
half-drowning of the manse. Seeing this, we no longer truly doubted that
we had found-if not Gildmirth-at least his fortress, for the spectacle
tallied with the report. If, in his bondage, the Privateer indeed lived
freely here, his outpost's general soundness reflected it; while, if it
were equally true that he suffered bondage, his broken manse proclaimed
that just as clearly. 

That a man should choose to come to such a place, and to abide in it,
astonished us. That he should have done so for so long on his own terms
moved us to awe. That he should endure here now on demonic terms made us
grieve for him-for whatever kind of man he was, he had dared much, and
alone. 

"What impudence!" Barnar rumbled, smiling softly. 

"And a hundred years of freedom and power before he was taken." 

"So you accept that part, then?" 

I nodded. "I feel it. If men do age here, it's far more slowly than they
do under the sun." 

"For everyone, captive or not," Barnar muttered, nodding in his turn. "I
confess I feel it too. Somehow it's part of the . . . weariness of being
here. So I suppose, if we assume thralls are protected by their
possessors, we can also assume he still survives." 

"I think so. After all, who else could be maintaining that . . . that zoo
down there." 

"If it is a zoo. If those aren't invaders of the place, new tenants." 

The notion startled me. For some time we had been studying the water
enclosed by the headland and pier. This was shallow and quite clear, and
its floor was a sunken labyrinth of scarps, reefs and grottoes. And in
each pit and den of that maze shapes crouched, or restively stirred. And
despite the irregularity of the maze's structure, it gave an impression of
design which made me still incline to see it as a menagerie, and not an
enclave of demon usurpers. 

"They're too various," I pointed out. "Demons don't usually form
coalitions. One species might have invaded him, but not a mob, surely. It
looks much more like a sampling, a specimen collection." 

Truly, a collection of more infernal rarities than those would be hard to
imagine. It was like looking in a fair booth through a Glass of Piercing
Sight at a drop of pond-scum. Many of those beings are now a merciful blur
in my mind's eye, but others I am doomed to remember. There was a globular
explosion of spikes and spines, like an immense sea-urchin, and from the
tip of each of its spines oozed a yellow human tongue like a drop of
poison. Another of them was a crystalline blob of veined but otherwise
transparent material in which hung a constellation of anguished human
faces. And there was one demon that resembled nothing so much as a huge
lurk. Just as I was studying this one, I made an unnerving discovery. 

"Look up there," I said to Barnar, "on the pier about halfway out." 

"By the Crack. Is it a lurk?" 

"It's a twin of that demon down there in the water, in the grotto just
below where it's crouching." 

X 

The shape on the pier clarified for us the murkier features of its
submerged counterpart. These demons differed most strikingly from lurks in
that their flat forebodies were studded, not with the onyx eye-buttons of
lurk-kind, but with a freckling of human eyes. Their feeding-legs too-that
shortest and foremost pair that cleanse or hold prey to their bristly
fangs-were tipped, not with hook-and-barb feet, but with clawed hands on
the human model. Their color was a phosphorescent green marbled with
scarlet. Their movement-for both were restive with mutual awareness-was
lurkish, both in its steel-spring quickness and its overall liquidity. 

Then the monster on the pier-it appeared to be somewhat smaller than that
in the water-heaved itself up onto the balustrade, its hairy bulb of a
body teetering as its legs bunched to spring. It launched itself into the
air. Its dive seemed sensuous, floating, and its multitude of eyes closed
dreamily as it plunged. Its counterpart reared and tore the water with its
forelegs, and met the leaper's impact with a frenzied counterassault. 

Bubbles thick as smoke masked their struggle, but when at length the water
stilled and cleared, we saw the attacker had mastered the larger demon.
Locking the latter's forelegs in a cross-grip with its own, it pushed
upward. This hoisted the other's forward half off the sea floor, keeping
its fangs out of striking range while its hind legs scrabbled impotently
for counter-leverage. From the attacker's underside a brilliant red coil
extruded. Its twisting length touched a slot in its pinioned opponent's
underside and slid into it. For several seconds the linkage was
maintained, the coil pulsing with the transmission of unimaginable
essences. Then the coil was retracted. The attacker released the other,
which had grown oddly quiet, and began to swim toward the manse just below
us. During its progress all the monstrosities it overswam, including many
far larger than itself, shrank down and cowered in their craggy cells. It
accelerated, gathered itself tight, and rode a swell through one of the
manse's gaping doors. 

Barnar and I exchanged a long look, each waiting for the other to say
something that would clarify his own excited thoughts. 

"He was renowned as a shifter of shapes even before his expedition here,"
my friend said at last. That enabled me to take the next step. 

"Yes. And maybe, in all this time, he has gone over." 

It was some relief to have spoken what we both feared, but not much.
Without much hope Barnar countered after a moment: "Yet Charnall did say
that half his passion to come here was for exploration, for knowledge of
the ocean's demon forms." 

"Knowledge," I snorted. We looked at the lagoon and Barnar shuddered. 

"Let's hail him," he said, "from here. We're still technically outside the
sea's zone of influence." 

I agreed. Barnar cupped his hand to his mouth and cried down upon the
manse: "Gildmirth! Privateer! Gildmirth of Sordon-Head! Two men of upper
earth ask your hospitality!" The words rolled down and broke in echoes
that reverberated in the empty, tilted terraces of the great ruin. It felt
exceedingly strange to shout a summons here. The human voice, human
speech-they were tools that were utterly unavailing in this world, and for
long weeks we had struggled through it without using them, mute invaders
who simply fought or fled whatever they encountered. So it almost made my
flesh crawl to hear an unmistakable response to Barnar's words: a small,
watery commotion within the manse's sea-level tier. From the door through
which the lurkish demon had swum, a naked man swam out. 

He had a squat frame, and moved with quick intensity-ferocity almost. He
whipped round in the water, seized the luxuriant bas-reliefs framing the
doorway, and-monkey-deft-hauled himself up to the next higher tier. Here
he stood scanning the sky, as if he thought Barnar's voice had literally
penetrated to him through the eternal cloud-ceiling, direct from the world
of the sun. I looked at Barnar, hefting my spear. He gave me his target
shield and I gave him my sword, thus wordlessly agreeing to what had been
our armed strategy of recent days-I would be advance harrier, and my
friend, with his one-and-a-half blades, my back-up. We stood up and hailed
the small, solitary shape on the terrace. 

He turned in our direction then, and dispelled our last doubt that he was
Gildmirth, for the eyes with which he met ours were-both pupil and ball-a
lush red. The purplish red of summer plums splitting with ripeness.
"Bloody-eyed" was an epithet two textual references had applied to the
Privateer in describing his post-capture condition. For the rest, he had a
full-lipped, goatish face, was fleece-haired and fleece-bearded. Though
his stature was small he had the feet, sex, and hands of a larger man, and
his knotted limbs, chest, and stomach bespoke an unusual vigor. He grinned
when his eyes had targeted ours, and we caught the flash of a second demon
detail that set our own teeth on edge, for his teeth were large and
splendid, and made of the brightest steel. 

He laughed. "Are you real? Come down! Make me believe it!" 

We climbed down the bluffs to a point from which we could leap to the tier
of the manse next above the one where Gildmirth stood. Still grinning, he
motioned us down. We jumped. By the time we reached the railing, the
Privateer was clambering over it. 

We both made him a reverence when we greeted him. It was instinctive; the
heart will honor excellence where it meets it. Sardonically, he bowed in
return. 

"Do I merit such a salute? If so, you merit the same, my friends. For it
seems you have walked here. If so, you are the fourth and fifth to have
done so this hundred years and more. Believe me, if I could feel amazement
at all any more, my jaw would be dropping off my face at the sight of
you." 

In fact, his jaw-a powerful one, fit to drive the dreadnaught teeth that
filled it-scarcely stirred with his speech. "Do you know what you are to
me?" he concluded, as if in afterthought. 

"What are we to you?" Barnar asked obligingly. 

"You are two brief escapes from here. You are two lives in whose light I
can live for a while, before returning to this." He gestured at large. "I
refer to the payment I will ask for any service you may be seeking from
me. Unless, of course, you've just come down to clasp my hand. That
service is free." 

I took the hand he mockingly extended. This wasn't a simple act, for I had
not yet decided that he was still on the human side of the line he had
drawn here in the days of his freedom and expeditionary pride. His hand
was as cold as a month on a Jarkeladd glacier, but innocent of any
malevolent aura. I said: "I am honored. I am Nifft of Karkham-Ra, a master
thief. It is likewise with my friend Barnar Hammer-hand, who is a
Chilite." 

He took Barnar's hand. "Your honor honors me. I smell no great sorcery
about you. In reaching me, you have done much with little." 

"We are here," Barnar said, "to buy our lives out of mortgage by
retrieving a certain lad from your puddle out there. It took all we had
just to get here, and we have neither hook, nor line, nor rod." 

The Privateer smiled pleasantly. "You seem to have little of anything at
all besides determination. Yet still you carry with you the price of my
services. I don't promise success, mind you, but once I have made my best
effort, if I survive that effort, pay me you must-which is to say, you
must admit me to the treasury of your personal memories. It is done in a
moment, but afterward I will possess every jot of your lives as intimately
as I do my own, including many things you might yourselves not even
recall, in the riot and variety of your freedom. For an absolute lover of
privacy, it is much to pay, but a trifle otherwise, while for me it is a
blessed mental oasis in the desert of my bondage. Can you accept the
terms?" We nodded. "Then what was it that took the youth you're looking
for?" 

"A bonshad," I told him. He nodded slowly. 

"Heavy work, both the finding and the killing. But feasible. We'll cross
over to my armory. Kindly bear in back, gentlemen, that henceforth your
safety lies solely in your nearness to my protection. You already stand
within the surf-line, and are now fair game to all the wet half of hell." 

He gestured slightly with one hand. From the swamped doorway two tiers
below a coracle-made of hide stretched on a bone frame-drifted out. We
climbed down after Gildmirth, waded to this craft, and boarded it. It
seemed to propel itself, and as we crossed the enclosed waters we watched
the pier we approached, not to be looking at the monstrosities crouched so
near below us. 

"Gildmirth," Barnar said abruptly. "That was you, just now, swimming
here?" 

The Privateer smiled a thin, cold smile, and answered without turning to
face us. "Swimming. Indeed I was, and more than that, though I don't think
you'd really care to hear about it. I'll tell you what you do want to
hear, though it's for you to decide if you trust my word or not. But no. I
have not altered. I am still a man in my essence and allegiance." 

Barnar nodded. There was much more we wished to know about him, but we
held our tongues. We felt ashamed to have doubted him in his adversity,
thereby discovering that we did trust him. But presently, in concession to
our unvoiced perplexity, Gildmirth added: "You must understand that I am
not bound here by an external compulsion. It is my own will that has been
captured . . . infected. I may not leave because certain of my own
appetites will not permit it. They have been exaggerated, distorted,
rendered insatiable. And only here can I even begin to feed them. One of
my appetites earned me a title in Sordon-Head. Curator, they called me. A
subject of jest. It was my larceny I grew famous for among them,
especially my great swindle of the city itself-not a subject of jest. They
never knew that I robbed them for the Curator. Lesser, periodic thefts
would have sated my mere cupidity-I was never impatient. It was only the
Curator's secret ambition, long-cherished, that needed so huge a
grub-stake. That quaint old Curator. Is it really three hundred years and
more since he came here? He had the zoographer's passion for living form,
its precarious and infinite complexity, its stupendous diversity. And
these seas teem as none above ground with unmined marvels. This is an
empire of discovery such as no savant ever hoarded to buy posterity's
undying thanks. . . ." 

He fell silent, and brought the coracle to a ladder up one of the pier's
pilings. He climbed this, his movement forgetful, that of a man who thinks
himself alone. We followed in silence. 

We set out atop the pier, flanked either side by the imposing facades of
his handiwork. These reflected the catholicity of his tastes, for they
presented every variety of architectural style-high-arched temples of the
Aristoz school, monolithic shrines in the Jarkeladd mode, triple-columned
stoai with the austere grace of Ephesion public building-an encyclopedia
of traditions passed in review on either hand, and yet their endless
contrasts were so cunningly orchestrated that the whole medley of styles
flowed pleasingly. Meanwhile we walked on an equally various succession of
pavements, and often looked down to find ornate tiles or lavish mosaics
underfoot which snagged our eyes and made us stumble. From Gildmirth's
terse indications of this or that building's function it appeared that
most were repositories for artifacts, specimens, or texts, and that their
builder still made regular use of them. 

And they looked anything but derelict, were all in excellent repair. And
yet after a while I noticed that they all shared a certain unobtrusive
mark of decay-or perhaps vandalism-in common. For wherever their facades
bore friezework, intaglio, sculpted cornices, cartouches of bas-relief,
you could see-by bright tatters of metal still lodged in the deeper angles
and convolutions-that these features had once been richly inlaid with gold
foil. Catching Gildmirth's eye on me, I saw he had observed my notice of
this detail. 

His look discouraged questions, and he said nothing till he had brought us
inside the armory that was our destination. I had taken this building for
a shrine or mausoleum from the severe grandeur of its design. It was a
pleasing shock to see its huge, unpartitioned interior thronged with
weapon racks. Its ceiling was just as crowded-with boats. Small craft of
every description dangled in chain harnesses. Each harness was anchored in
a system of slotted ceiling tracks, which converged at a steepening pitch
toward a huge bayed door in the armory's seaward wall. 

While we were gaping at everything, Gildmirth found some steel-bossed
leather breeches and a corselet of light mail, and pulled them on. "Arm
yourselves, gentlemen," he said when he was done. His tone parodied an
ostler's convivial welcome. "You see what there is-we have everything.
Equip yourselves as suits your tastes. Mail and body-armor are here, and
there is another rack yonder, just beyond the spears and harpoons. Blades
of all types there, helms and casques there, greaves and the like here,
clubs, maces, axes as you see them. Now for myself, I find that today I'm
taken with a fancy for yon cuirass." 

He gave an odd stress to this last remark, and though I was greedily
pawing some fine ironwood lances I kept half an eye on him as he went to a
rack of body-armor. The cuirass he took down was a marvel, of everbright
lavishly filigreed with gold. He carried it to a rack of knives, plucked
down a poniard, and started prying the filigree off the breastplate. 

We stood staring, understanding that this was something he wanted us to
watch. He grasped the filaments he had worked free and ripped the golden
skein off the everbright. Letting the cuirass drop, he stared at us with
his wound-colored eyes as his thick fingers wadded the network into a lump
as big as an apple. He held this up, not ceasing to stare at us. 

"Forgive me for taking my customary refreshment, which your arrival
forestalled. The exertion of my zoological studies always leaves me
feeling peckish." His jaws gaped, and sank their great, inhuman teeth into
the nugget. Ravenously he chawed, crushing the buttery, pliant meal,
bolting it down. We watched him dine while he watched us watch him, his
eyes bright with sharp hunger and sharper misery. When he was done he just
stood there before us for a time, as if in simple presentation of himself,
his diseased captivity. We struggled for something to say and found
nothing. Smiling slightly, the Privateer nodded, agreeing with our
silence. 

"But I want you to understand, my friends-" he spoke casually, as if we
had been conversing all along-"that it has been my choice to despoil my
own works. The open sea offers infinite pasture to this hunger of mine,
but pride demanded that I deface what I'd wrought. Its beauty was a boast
I was no longer entitled to make. Gilt walls are for conquerors, not
prisoners. Well then. Shall we proceed? Take what pleases you, but I must
ask you both to take one of those full-visored helmets there, and two
heavy harpoons as well. Is either of you skilled with a spear?" 

Barnar rubbed his mouth to hide a smile. I confined myself to assuring
Gildmirth that any harpoon work our mission required could with reasonable
confidence be left in my hands. 

"Then choose two that please you," he said, "and kindly make any last
additions to your equipage now, for it only remains to unsling our craft
and pick up a few needfuls at my quarters." 

At the room's center a platform towered amid the legioned weaponry. This
he mounted, and started working an arrangement of winches that crowned it.
The boat slings began to move along the maze of ceiling track from which
they hung and, to a music of groaning chains and grinding gears, the
dangling armada commenced a slow aerial quadrille. 

While Barnar meditated on a case of battleaxes-his favorite weapon-I
hefted harpoons till I found two that felt promising. Then I tried on one
of the helmets Gildmirth had prescribed for us. It resembled the antique
Aristoz casque-and-vizard, a slot-eyed brazen mask with a wolf-muzzle
shape. As I buckled the neckstrap tight, my lungs turned to stone. The
slightest breath-in or out-was impossible. I clawed at the strap in panic,
but then discovered I had ceased to crave breath and-after a moment's
anxious experiment-that my strength and mental clarity were unaffected by
this suffocation. When I had taken it off I called to Barnar: "By the
Crack, Ox! These helmets here-they exempt a man from breathing! What a
wealth of exemptions we're getting lately! We needn't eat, we needn't
drink, we needn't sleep-and now we needn't even breathe. But you know,
somehow it's not making my life feel any more secure. In fact, it's
beginning to make me feel less and less sure that I'm still alive at all."

"I still feel one need," he rumbled, "and that's to get my arse utterly
and forever out of this filthy, infested basement of a world. And from
this I conclude that I am not yet dead. It isn't much to go on, but it'll
have to do." 

The Privateer laughed. It was a shocking sound-a bark of feral glee whose
echoes rang like yelps of pain. "Ah, you are wise indeed, dear Chilite.
Though a man here might in time lose the entire self he started with, lose
mind's and heart's identity, so long as he still feels that need, he
lives, and in that simple need the germ of him survives." Perhaps
Gildmirth thought he had sounded self-pitying, for after a pause he
snorted, spat on the platform, and cranked the gears more fiercely. In a
more offhand voice he added: "Will you come up now gentlemen, and board?" 

We complied, though dubiously; the vessel just then gliding into position
over the platform, shaped like a war-canoe, was made of scaly hide
stretched on a riblike rack of bones. Its prow was a huge skull with long,
fang-jammed jaws that snapped and gnashed furiously at the air, while its
stern was a skeletal tail that whipped with futile, metronomic force. 

But when we reached the platform this had overpassed it and Gildmirth had
docked the vessel just behind it. This looked oddly normal to belong to so
grotesque a fleet: a slender little sloop with one mast and one gracefully
tapered outrigger pontoon on its port side. We got aboard. There was no
cabin, just a bare deck built a scant two feet below the gunwales, and
some rower's benches. The mast was bare of sail, and there was no tiller.
Gildmirth shifted some levers which moved all the boats in our path to
side-tracks, then set both hands to a crank. As he worked it, the big
steel door down to which our trackline plunged purred open, spreading to
receive us that blue quilt where blurred nightmares were bedded,
Gildmirth's watery stableyard. The Privateer got aboard, motioning us to
take the rowers' benches. He sat himself in the stern, and took hold of a
handring attached to a steel pin that knit the chains of our boatsling
together. 

"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. 

XI 

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. 

In beauties what man is my lover's peer? 

For, as in gold, so is he rich in graces. 

None hath a form so various and rare, 

Nor charm that shineth from so many faces. 

Gildmirth, still sedate and unattending, had stepped into the skull-bone
skiff floating alongside the boat. He stood serenely as this bore him
toward the wall of instruments. His whole manner had the absolute
concentration of a veteran gladiator's moves in a close fight, and
certainly this was a duel he had been fighting for many scores of years,
his own sanity always the prize at stake. The little cyclops pursued its
song, giving it an ever more voluptuous prolongation of tempo and
articulation: 

Mayhap another's eyes are stars-both clear 

as diamonds are-still they are but a pair! 

My love's as constellations blaze 

Wherefrom a host of figures gaze 

Whose features are so manifold 

That tongue must leave them unextolled. . . . 

But past this point, where the voice's honeyed languor deepened, mellowed
toward diapason, the verses were lost to us, for a tenor squallpipe which
Gildmirth had musingly taken from the wall here commenced a traditional
South-Kolodrian jump-up. It was a vigorously impudent piece, even brisker
than most of its ilk, the melody overlaid with irresistibly nimble and
saucy fugal embellishments. The Privateer's fingering was consummate and
his coloration, in a hundred different shades of irresponsible levity, was
unerring. He had keyed his tune to the demon's, and while the phrasing of
the two pieces was entirely incongruous, Gildmirth's had an accent whose
stresses erratically coincided with the demon's, to produce a variety of
emphatic discordances. Between these points of energetic collision, the
jump-up's busy note-swarms ran amok in the roomy, pompous resonances of
the Demon's lyrics, trampling his words past comprehension. They thronged
through the shamadka's extravagant architecture of moods like a convivial
mob of ne'er-do-wells who heedlessly affront refined environs by engaging
in a perfect orgy of gaffes, crass conversation, accidental vase-breaking
and crude personal habits. 

Neither duellist faltered for an instant; each wove his half of the
mismatch with unflawed continuity. Gildmirth seamlessly grafted a medley
of other jump-ups onto his tune's conclusion as the demon prolonged the
coda of its piece. The tumult of impacting notes was like swordplay, their
relentless profusion chilling me with the thought that such a combat could
be protracted to inhuman lengths, while we must wait however long it took
the Privateer to fight his way out of danger. 

And just then the music stopped. First the demon, and then Gildmirth
swerved into ingeniously improvised resolutions, and stilled their
instruments. For a moment none of us moved. We listened to the surfnoise
as it repossessed the huge building. Slick as snail-bellies, the tentacles
unwove from the shamadka till one plume only touched it. With this the
demon pushed it underwater till its bowl filled, and it sank. 

Then the demon lay almost inert. Its lax fronds, floating frontally
extended, made slight, teasing undulations in Gildmirth's direction. At
length it cocked its peak more upright. Its optic jelly regarded the
Privateer, the honey-colored corpulence sagging and beginning to branch
through its ragged socket. The steady sloth of this process put me in mind
of a sand-clock's drainage. Pupillary buds began multiplying in the
jelly's central depths, converging like glittery, dark hornets to torment
the man with their scrutiny. Smiles and smirks of coquettish reprimand
rippled out over the multifoliate mouth like water-rings fleeing a dropped
stone. 

"My precious pet!" it fluted. "Still so untidy? Oh gentlemen!"-the eye now
swung to us, pupillaries scattering to read us separately-"My stubborn
little plum-eyed poppet here, he will not tidy up! I tell him if he's
going to stay somewhere, he ought to tidy up. He's supposed to be a man of
consequence or was long ago at least. He's told me so at any rate. Just
listen. What's your name? Are you still who you said yesterday you were?"
The pupil-swarm recondensed, gnawed busily at the Privateer's impassive
face. 

"I am, oh Spaalgish weft, the man you well know me be. I am Gildmirth of
Sordon-Head in southern Kolodria, also called the Privateer." 

"Still this Gildmirth, today as well? What about tomorrow?" 

"I am who I have been, and I'll remain so, while I live." 

The Spaalg abandoned this seemingly ritual banter as abruptly as it had
opened it. Plumes swirling, it whipped round in the water, and traveled
squidlike, in head-first zig-zags to hang above the map of the seafloor.
From here it resumed its fretful confidings to Barnar and myself: 

"This exquisite map for instance, see how he leaves it sunken. How are all
his guests and visitors to read it there? As it is, only he himself, when
he swims out to play in other shapes, can consult it conveniently. And he
has no need to do so. When the gorging lust has been on him he's gotten as
intimately familiar with the seafloor as the well-known louse in the
proverb got with the bumps on the drunkard's arse. I'm sure that in sum my
precious pet has spent more years groping on alien feet across these hills
and plains"-it let the tip of one languid plume sink, and drew it
ticklingly across the facsimile terrain-"than any alleged Gildmirth ever
spent in any such a place as this so called Sordon-Head that he clings to
in his stubborn fantasy. My goodness though. . . ." Its voice deepened
with musing to the sound of a well-seasoned old wood-horn, and the
caressing plume scribbled graceful whimsies on the map. "Whatever the name
of the man who made this map, what a swaggering little pup he must have
been, don't you think? I mean, did he expect to finish it? And fit it all
in this room? How callow! What a dwarfish conception! This is not genuine
scholarship! Real research is a coming-to-grips with phenomena. This, as a
transcription of the ocean's infinitely various text, is a fraud, an
egregious counterfeit, which partly reduces the Primary Sea's endlessness
to a cozy finitude, such as it pleased this puny entity to regard it, for
he must have had but a feeble stomach for enterprise of a dark or
difficult kind. Why indeed, behold! It was some dwarf, for is not this
little city over here his former habitation?" 

The Spaalg flashed through another turn, and hung buoyed above the
Privateer's architectural micropolls. The fact that the creature was a
Spaalg, when I learned it, had meant little to me beyond the fact that the
breed was relatively insignificant in terms of the threat they posed as
predators on humankind. The conventional expression "dimwebbers, meeps,
and ropy spaalgs," connoting the whole class of minor demonry, told me
this much. But now, watching that plumed slug-swift and graceful as a
fine-muscled cloud of oil-pour one lithe tickler down into a little agora,
and tease with its membraneously tufted tip the minutely fluted columns of
a colonnade no higher than a gold kairnish half-nilling set on
edge-watching the Spaalg doing this, I recalled another jot of
information. Undle Nine-fingers refers to them somewhere as being
"vermicles," which, in his nomenclature, designates the class of demons
that are internally parasitic upon their prey. A cold squirming,
originating from some point in the back of my head, made a fast, nasty
trip down my back. Gildmirth's body was so solid-square and hale. Did his
composure mask the deep gall of worm-work, neat, lethal tunnelings serving
somehow as the pathways of this Spaalg's influence within him? 

The Spaalg, keying up now to melodious contempt, continued. "How touching,
in a way! Such diminutive presumption, such minuscule pomp! Such an
imperious fellow too, this tit-bit tyrant. Things would be thus and so,
done this way, that way, and this other way"-the plume flicked silkily
among the toy rooftops-"in precisely that order, and immediately! How
could such a proud-ling fail to deem his ambitious appetite too large for
less than empire to sate? So innocent he was of the endless, orgiastic
feast of exploration and discovery he was proposing for himself. The poor
tot! He elbowed his way up to the table, and now he is surely gorging
still, willy-nilly, on that stupendous repast. I'll wager his sides are
splitting with the meal's abundance. And surely by now, through the ages
of his engorgement with this-to him-alien universe, the bubble of whatever
self he formerly had-so briefly and so long before-has burst, and is less
to him now than the idlest imagining. Oh dear! Look! Oh, most horrible!
Defacement unspeakable!" 

The Spaalg's body-sausage folded, thrusting its eye from the water, the
pupillaries cohering toward a painting across the room, one of Gildmirth's
rather grandiose self-chroniclings in oils. "What has befallen my babekin
now?" Its voice had a grieving crack in it, "His face! What obscene
infections have obliterated it?" 

The demon sped to the picture. Lifting and fanning out its plumes upon the
canvas, it slid caressingly up its surface, holding its body arched upward
to gaze pityingly at the encrusted canvas it climbed. 

It might have chosen any of the other pictures, for in all of them the
Privateer's face showed the same staining, erosion and motley overgrowth
as marked the rest of the imagery. The scene the Spaalg unctuously
ascended appeared to involve some wizardly ceremony of subjugation
performed by Gildmirth upon a shadowy knot of manacled demons. A large,
metallic gladiator's net enveloped the subworlders. There was a chain
attached to the drawstring closing the net's mouth, and the figure of
Gildmirth held its free end firmly with several bights wrapped round the
wrist for surer purchase. It was all crazily dappled and blurred with
tidal growths, but their obscuration didn't quite look like an impartial
vegetable proliferation. To some extent it seemed to edit, to revise the
painted forms. You could just make out how Gildmirth had made his face
sternly judicial, brows threatening storm, while the netted crew had a
crouched and huddled posture as a whole. But now, bright lichens
highlighted and contorted his cheeks and brow while a diffuse smokiness of
fine black moss darkened mouth, eyes and throat-hollow to a necrotic
black. On his arms the oils themselves, crumbling and damp, suggested
tomb-flesh. No longer the solemn arbiter, he now stood in horror and
recoil, a mortally damaged moribund. The hand that had been painted as
reaching magisterially toward a table stocked with some kind of
instruments, or texts perhaps, was now plunged into a plane of
indecipherable dark shapes, and shadow had erased his hand along with what
it sought. Meanwhile the demons' net was half-dissolved and their
postures, due to subtle re-emphases and re-delineations, glowered, and
crouched more as if to spring than cringe. In the revised work, the chain
seemed more Gildmirth's fetter than a leash he held. 

"Oh my little treasure-ling, my little toy-let! Who has treated you this
way?" The voice was all wine and honey again. Two tremulous plume-tips
grievingly caressed the painted Privateer's fungus-whiskered temples. 

I felt a pang of rage that twisted like a sword in me. I'd watched the
Spaalg feeding on its nobler prey, probing for the taste of despair with
its tongue, long enough for the shock of comprehension to pass, and all at
once I felt myself its prey as well, my soul as much the object of its
defilements as Gildmirth's was. Looking round I saw the Privateer's face
looking tormentedly from a dozen masks of putrefaction and blight. The
Demon-Sea's revision of his self-image was galleried around us like a
chorus of jeers. That he had been arrogant the paintings themselves, so
huge and bravely framed, proved plainly. But it was an arrogance he more
than redeemed by the straightness of his back now, surrounded by his
enemies' vandalisms of his spirit. He unremittingly met the Spaalg's eye,
clearly meaning to endure it till he died, or was free. 

Yes! Still he waited to be free, defying the centuries of multiform
turmoil that had rolled across him to erase that ever-receding little span
of his independent existence-that comparative pittance of years containing
all he had been, and all he had resolved to be. It was too much. It
overflowed my capacity for outrage. The Spaalg had begun to speak again,
and I roared: 

"Silence!" Among my new gear was a battle-axe. I pulled this from my belt,
not so much with intent to attack as a pure expression of feeling. "You
feather-legged maggot," I hissed. "Is it that your pin-head simply lacks
the circumference to contain the truth? We surface-folk are easy enough to
kill the bodies of, but as for our wills, the heart-and-mind of us, we can
be harder to kill than ghosts. Because we are ghosts. Believe it,
Privateer." I turned to face that impassive prisoner of his own ambition's
ruin. "You know I speak the truth. You in your sunless bondage, though
starved of your world and glutted with this cosmic cloacum, remain no whit
less real than any man free to walk under the sun. For we're none of us
more than wisps of desire and imagining! What man is not, at the center of
his mind, a ghostly wish-to-be haunting the jerry-built habitation of his
imperfect acts? Haunting the maze of what-has-been?" 

The Privateer answered nothing. He stared back at me, his pain-colored
eyes huge with all the things he knew about what I spoke of-things I could
not know, and hopefully never will. I suddenly felt foolish, useless to
help him. I found I had been waving my axe as I harangued, and still held
it brandished. The Spaalg gave a buttery little chuckle and said: "He has
from me prolonged vitality. No man's memory is made of so tough a fabric
that sufficient-" 

I only knew I was going to throw the axe in the instant that I let it fly.
The Spaalg, unflustered, dropped like a stone. The axe sank half its bit
into the demon's late position on the canvas, while the creature turned
its plunge into a neat, splashless dive, and surfaced smiling. It began-at
once-to sing: 

I once was a man with a heart and a face, 

And while this heart and face were mine- 

Even as it sang Gildmirth stretched forth his hand, and the Spaalg was
plucked from the water by its plumes, as a turnip is uprooted by its top.
The process did not disturb the demon's singing: 

I had two eyes that I lived behind 

In a place for hoarding the things I'd seen, 

And I had two ears that I lived between- 

Gildmirth made a second gesture and, still hanging inverted, the Spaalg
moved through the air toward the doorway by which our boat had entered.
Throughout its aerial progress it continued its song, nor had it ceased
when its exit from the manse made the verses inaudible: 

Where the things I heard could be brought 

to mind. 

But now, where my heart stood is empty space 

Where sights lack anything to mean, 

And my ears' reportings echo to waste, 

All lacking a place for taking. . . . 

"What did you do with it?" Barnar asked vaguely, his eyes still watching
its form dwindle against the clouds framed by the distant doorway. 

"I'm having it dropped in the Fenkrakken Mangles, a coastal zone disturbed
by tidal torments, winds, and water-avalanches, about two thousand leagues
downshore. It'll be back tomorrow." 

"I'm sorry about your canvas," I told him, finding nothing else to say.
This drew his eyes to it and he started slightly, as if he'd not
remembered that the axe had stuck there. His mouth, as though not quite
yet ready to smile, made a little rictus, and the plentiful irony-wrinkles
around his eyes deepened a shade. His eyes were not blood now, but a murky
carnelian. 

"Who knows?" he asked with a slight shrug. He turned and went to his
larder chest, from which he started filling a provision-sack. I didn't
understand, and looked to Barnar. He, with one blunt digit, mutely
redirected my eyes to the canvas. 

I saw it this time. It was the axe's accidental pertinence to the image my
throw had attached it to. Its scale and angle of lodgment were such that
if you squinted a bit it looked painted in with the rest. And it was the
chain that the axe lodged in, shearing it through at a point just below
Gildmirth's hand. 

I said to Barnar-quietly, not to torment Gildmirth with it-"Let it be so,
then, by every power that stands higher than this hell." Barnar solemnly
nodded. 

"Gentlemen," our guide called, "please get aboard. I must move now if I'm
to take this on at all. There is a painful blackness on my mood just now."

We boarded. Gildmirth raised the sail, lashing a corner to the mast's top.
It bulged and bellied out. The Privateer, though sitting in the stern,
didn't visibly steer us as we slid away from the table and smoothly
recrossed the windless, chambered pool with the skull-skiff tagging after
us. 

We surged breasting through the doorway. The cloudy vaulting of
Gildmirth's prison-cosmos felt like freedom after the entombment of his
private cell. Our sail swelled dead against the on-shore wind and we
skated onto the field of Gildmirth's living plunder in their sunken
oubliettes, aimed for a gate sealing the gap between the pier's tip and
the headland's. Inside the manse it had seemed impossible to probe
Gildmirth's pain with questions, but in the invigoration of this
setting-forth it seemed less cruel. Still, I spoke from the bow, not quite
turning back sternwards to meet his eyes. 

"You cannot kill the Spaalg then, Privateer?" 

"No. And would not if I could. It alone could ever free me." 

"It occurred to me that Undle says somewhere that Spaalgs are vermicles. .
. ." 

Barnar glanced at me. He too looked forwards out of compassion. We stood
watching the gate to the open sea draw nearer as the Privateer replied,
his voice remote, carefully even, as if the recitation were a duty he had
set himself always to perform without shirking: 

"Spaalgs have a technique for infecting shape-shifters. Their larvae lie
integrated in the body of a larger demon. If a man, or any creature, would
acquire another being's shape, he or it must enter a specimen and become
congruent with its form, to learn it. If a Spaalg infects the
study-specimen, it can transfer to the shape-shifter, and infect him by
any means it devises. Some of the Spaalg's nerves it engrafted onto mine,
at places where they were naturally suited to receive the amplification of
its own passions. Now, raving lunacy would follow my loss of either the
sea's gold, or its sorceries and the infinity of shapes it offers me on
which to practice them. Here my spirit dies at length, by attrition.
Above, insane hungers would tear it to pieces within days." 

XII 

We were sprawled on the deck amidships, backs propped against opposite
gunwales. Barnar reached into the provisions sack near him, and withdrew
another jack of wine. He smiled at it, hefting it lovingly, then snorted:
"Elixir. Huh! The only real elixir is right here, as far as I'm
concerned." 

"I don't know. The stuff the boy was after must be pretty potent. He
didn't even touch it, and it transported him all the way down here." I had
quite a good laugh at the wit of this, though my own. Barnar shook his
head gravely. 

"Potent. Maybe so. This, on the other hand, is miraculous. It transports
me all the way out of here without even moving me an inch." Barnar repaid
my favor, and laughed for me, but I joined him anyway. "Plain truth, oh
canny Chilite, and that's a miracle worth having. Toss. Thank you." 

"Don't mention it. Merely permit me to reiterate: henceforth, as regards
this Sazmazm matter, kindly elixir me no elixirs. It's only what you're
guzzling there that deserves the name, and that's all I'll say of the
matter. Toss. Thank you." 

"Certainly. By the Crack, the aftertaste is splendid!" 

"Mmmm. Yes. Almost as splendid as the taste itself." 

"Not to mention the bouquet. Toss." 

"Indeed. Because, to get to the heart of the matter, the wine itself is
splendid, as was Gildmirth's forethought in providing it." 

"You've put your finger on it. And you know, while we're on the subject,
when you really see the matter in perspective, this is really a rather
splendid exploit we're on. It has a noble, undeniable splendidness about
it. Toss." 

"You're quite right, really. A hapless young lad, abducted by demons,
lying in torment, all that. And two reckless dare-devils trekking after
him, only their wits and their swords against all the might of the Primary
Subworld. There is something splendid about it. Toss." 

There was a mellow pause as we savored all this newly discovered splendor.
I gazed about us, suddenly groping toward a kind of inspiration. "Hang it,
Barnar, you know what else? Toss. Thanks. . . ." 

"What else, Nifft?" 

"Even this . . . this vast pool of sewage-even this festering corpse of an
ocean is splendid . . . is rather splendid, in a way?" 

". . . Yes? . . . Yes, in a way I suppose. . . ." 

We looked uncertainly toward Gildmirth, who had sat brooding in the bow
for so many hours we had almost forgotten him. If he'd been following our
talk he didn't show it, nor withdraw his sullen gaze from the sea's
crazy-quilt of surface patterns whereon, just ahead, yet another collapse
of the cloud-ceiling had dumped smoky avalanches of fog. 

Barnar sighed. I tossed him the jack and he drained it. The winds in their
ceaseless, tormented shifting whipped round and cut a chill keen as a
poniard across my back. Even as Barnar pointed behind me and said-"Watch
out! Another howler!"-I heard the careening approach of a furious noise,
and looked behind. A track of town water snaked toward us. An instant
later it ripped across our decks, a little cyclone of pandemonium. Our
minds were blotted out by a thousand voices whose desperate unison
compounded their words into one stupefying roar of gibberish. For an
eternal instant it obliterated our thoughts and sensations alike, and left
only their torn edges in our minds in the silence after it veered away
over the sea to spread its urgent, indecipherable alarms. 

It may convey some sense of its impact to say that, though it surrounded
us for less than two seconds, it was an absolutely sobering experience.
The radiance which wine had almost given the ocean was killed, if it had
lived at all. The waters we were left gaping at remained what they had
seemed from the first-wormy with an infinite, multiform anguish. Jittery
zones, all spikes and fangs of chop, were sharply bordered by areas of
perfectly smooth water in greasy bulges seamed and puckered here and there
as with the deep maneuvers of large masses, while adjoining both we saw
tracts where great galactic sprawls of scum wheeled sluggishly, all
overswarmed by bug-sized multitudes at war, slaying and dying with cries
like cricketsong. And above all the fever and convulsion of the maggoty
main, the livid clouds dispread their slow decay, their many fissures
bloody-rimmed with the demon light that streamed from them, while
everywhere their bloated substance was sloughing off to lie in clammy
heaps upon the waves, like those we now began to thread among. Gildmirth
had told us that our sail snared other currents than those of the
wind-rivers of subworld force impalpably tangling through the air which it
netted according to its master's will. For all his mastery of this method,
which kept us smoothly centered in the twisting corridors of clear water,
it sank my spirit a notch deeper to remember that the very atmosphere was
worm-holed with demonic disease. 

Barnar was feeling the same oppression, for he burst out with a question
which his compassion would have spared our guide, but which his weary
loathing could not bite back: "What is it in us that feeds them,
Privateer? Can't they be sated on each other's flesh?" 

His eyes apologized when Gildmirth met them, but he waited for the answer,
as did I. Though the Privateer's eyes were blood-bright again with the
pain of his long introspection, his voice was gentle: 

"Who more than they, Barnar, are their hungers' slaves? Whatever it is
their natures arise from, they are absolute and unalloyed with any purpose
but the predation their breed assigns them. Their essence is an eternal,
joyless toil of feeding." 

(As I listened I watched a small crack opening in the nearest fogbank's
wall. Its opening revealed a little, crooked shaftway ascending from the
misty deeps.) 

"And what beings more than human kind have a will that far outreaches
their given nature? A willful dream of Self that can contradict, or defy
outright, their actual circumstances, and past performances?" 

(A small, shadowy something was toiling frantically up the crooked
tunnel-a blur just visible through the mist's opacity.) 

"It's just this the demons crave to taste, this unique faculty of
superordinate desire that sheds lustre and significance on the brute
machinery of uncontested reality. In the violation and destruction of a
man's will, a demon tastes a rare drug, gets one delirium-inducing whiff
of the unimaginably rich world of human experience." 

(A tiny homunculus, naked and sweaty-bright, came plunging up the shaft.
It dove for the opening and had actually thrust its clutching hands into
the open air, when a scaly paw shot from the tunnel, closed round its
waist, and hauled it back within, the fissure closing behind it.) 

The longer my footsoles felt it through the deck-those waters panting and
shivering in their vast sickbed-the more obsessed I grew with Gildmirth's
extravagant rashness in ever choosing this realm as a challenge to his
powers of mastery. I held my tongue until a certain glimpse of what teemed
below us loosened it. Most such hints of the deeps had been in the way of
flotsam, or brief eruptions of conflicts that quickly sank again, but this
was a trio of structures, gallows standing sixty feet above the surface.
Two men and a woman dangled from them, nude, with that idle, dejected
posture the hanged have. In the course of our approach, a huge,
coffin-jawed reptile set all three swinging with the wing-work of banking
its dive to throw a short swerve that grazed the nearest gallows. It
encoffined the corpse on the wing, pulled up, and was yanked short and
hammered back-first on the water. The corpse in its jaws was genuine, but
had been endowed with bizarre plasticity and adhesiveness. The dead man's
fang-broken shape was stretched to a breadth of seven or eight feet by the
reptile's efforts to separate its jaws. The rumble of massive chains
sounded underwater. The gallows smoothly sank, as did the reptile, though
less smoothly. 

As this place fell astern, I burst out: "Most noble Privateer. By the
Crack, by all that falls in or crawls out of the Crack, why here? Why must
this place be your chosen ground of exploit? For me, with all respect,
it's a question beyond the reach of the most delirious conjecture." 

Gildmirth smiled, something he hadn't done for quite a while. "Can you
really not imagine? Perhaps you know the lines-is Quibl still read these
days?-the lines: 

'For all who may will seek to know 

Whence they've grown, or whither grow.' " 

I was a shade slower to understand than Barnar, who nodded and quoted in
his turn: 

" 'Are we their ancestors or heirs? 

. . . Are they our children, or we theirs?' 

-And have you got an answer then, Privateer?" 

Gildmirth shook his head. "I have an opinion. As for firm proof, or even
clear evidence-" 

I had touched his arm. "Look there-the water's seething." 

Gildmirth reefed the net and we stood off the turbulence. Shapes popped
out of it, jostling furiously in the boil. Before we could make anything
out the Privateer said: "Ah! Surely a grove of sessiles has been attacked,
probably by a big Dand bulon. We won't see the combatants, just the
wreckage. Look there now! Do you see?" 

We saw. The boil of battle drifted erratically away, and the wreckage that
choked it began dispersing through the calmer waters. Shards of giant
fan-corals they seemed at first-trellises of fiber red and green and
tar-black. And then we made out the torn parts of men and women woven into
these shards. Here a hand, there a man from the diaphragm up-they spun
bleeding on their attachments of trellis-work. The half-man ejected one
loud fragment of voice from his mouth-an incomprehensibility, the last
thing in him-and died. Gildmirth let out a little sail and brought us
slowly around the widening patch of breakage and blood. 

"A survivor! A whole one!" said Barnar. "Over there." 

It was a woman. The great fan she was splayed against was unbroken, and we
could see how it originated from her flesh. Her extended spine was its
center-rib. From her sides the grey of nerves and red-and-blue map of
veins entered the fan's weave. So did her long black hair, spreading out
on it like a vine on a wall. Nerve-threads from her nipples, and the
abundant dark fern-curls of her loins, complicated her bondage above and
below. The fan spun slowly, trailing a torn-out root stalk. Her eyes knew
and clung to us as she turned. She had been very beautiful. We looked at
Gildmirth. He shook his head. "She cannot be remade, nor even kept alive
for long. The 'dabulon will eat her, or the Hurdok whose flock this is
will replant her." 

The woman said, "Travelers." The air seared her lungs-her voice was as if
made of pain. She took more breath. "You are men, as you seem? Not
thralls? Sailing freely here?" 

"Yes, unhappy one," I answered. 

"Free me!" she cried. Her glistening corona of nerve and vein wrinkled and
writhed as she cried again: "Free me!" 

Gently, the Privateer said: "You are past retransformation. Your growth
shows you many, many centuries a thrall." 

"Do I not know this?" said the woman. She smiled, and tears slid down her
temples. "How goes the world, travelers?" 

Softly, the Privateer snorted. "What would you know, my lady?" I asked
her. Her slow turning on the waters had brought her round so I could look
her in the face. She said, still smiling and weeping: 

"One thing I would know, gaunt one-does Radak still rule in Bidna-Meton?
Do his catacombs of dark experiment still swallow men and women down from
the light of day?" 

"Radak," I said after her. The trellis of her nerves shuddered again to
receive the word. "That name, sweet thrall, is now a proverb. I have heard
the expression 'to keep a house like Radak' used of innkeeps and ostlers
with bad establishments. The name of Bidna-Meton I have never heard." 

"So great a city . . ." she said. "What of the nation of Agon, mother of
mighty navies, where my father was a ship-law in the capital? And what of
the second moon, foretold in the heavens by fire and holocaust?" 

"Unhappy one, I know of no land called Agon. There is a great ocean of
that name, between Kolodria and L£lum‰. As for the moon, there is one in
the heavens, sweet lady, and ever has been, so far as I have heard." 

"My world has been, gaunt traveler. So free me now. Free me!" 

I started to speak. Gildmirth touched my arm and turned his eyes on one of
the harpoons. 

It was a short cast-I have never made one with greater care. I waited till
a wave lifted and turned her, so that she no longer faced me, and was on
the crest. I said "Dear Lady-" as if beginning a speech, to distract her
from any expectation of the cast. I threw with a great downpull, giving it
a fast, flat trajectory, and pinned her below her splayed left arm. It was
a smooth entry, between the third and fourth ribs, with no grating on the
bone. Her eyes showed white, and the nerve-fan crumpled and writhed about
her, but she did not die with the hit. Her hand came up and caressed the
shaft, and only when we came alongside and I leaned over and pulled out
the spear did the life leave her. 

The boat rode at half-sail, in which state its only motion was a slight,
incessant counter-action against the tides, which here seemed to want to
bring us toward the cluster of islands before us. Thus we hung at a fixed
half-mile offshore of the quincunx's largest member. A man in a meditative
mood, as Gildmirth seemed to be, found much for his eye to muse on there.
Apart from the five main isles-dense with verdure wherein movement
swarmed, and over which clouds of winged things hovered and sketched an
endless turmoil-there were many reefs and craggy ridges, and these lesser
saliences of the drowned mountains also swarmed with life. The waves
rushed in-oddly erratic in terms of timing and direction, but always
violent-and smashed in palisades of white foam everywhere against the
islands' green fringes. In particular, waves seemed to come with special
force from a huge crescent of unusually dark water which lay perhaps a
mile off the cluster's right as we faced it. The curve of this smoky zone
paralleled that of the cluster's perimeter, and the entire zone was
subject to sudden, deep puckerings which sent towering pairs of waves out
in opposite directions, one of each pair always came exploding against the
islands. 

"I suppose," Gildmirth said, "you surmise what that dark zone overlies?" 

"The Rifft," Barnar said softly. Gildmirth nodded, smiling bitterly. 

"The Great Black Rifft. Ten times as strictly guarded and furiously
assaulted by the denizens of this world as this world is by the ambitious
beings of our own." 

"And below that," Barnar muttered, "the Tertiary Subworld. Deeper and
deeper. Ever greater power. Ever greater evil." 

Again Gildmirth nodded. "And so on, down to what? How do you read the
dreadful map of this world, my friends? It seems that an evil past name
and conception must lie at its core. Was this the yolk of the egg of life?
Are men the highest-climbing descendants of that deep, ultimate germ of
darkness and horror? Are we the last, the frailest, and yet the
least-dark, highest-soaring, of all that grim line?" 

I smiled back at his bitter, sword-bright grin. "Go on," I said, "give us
the rest of the question, and then tell us what you think." 

Gildmirth got up and went to the great sword he had lashed under the
gunwale. He unbound it, sat on one of the rowers' benches, and laid it
across his knees. Almost tenderly, he ran his finger along one edge of it.
"As perhaps you guess, it's the other theory I hold with-though I have not
a whit more grounds for certainty than you, despite all I have
experienced. Do you realize how long man has prevailed on Earth? There is
no word for the number of his millennia of sowing and sailing, of building
and battling, of seeking and striving and slaying, of learning and losing.
In that eternity man's wielded and then utterly forgotten powers we
couldn't even dream of. He's lived whole histories, garnered troves of
miracles, built marvels, and then has fallen and buried all his works in
the dust of his own disintegrating bones, and begun all again, and again,
and again. 

"Spirit, soul-it doesn't die, you know. The strenuous, fierce flames
endure. The great in Evil and the great in Good-both leave an immortal
residue. That's why I favor the other view. The demons are not our
ancestors-we are theirs. The greeds and lusts, the wealth of horrors here,
are not the archetypes of our own-they are the derivatives, the dreadful
perfectings of all the evil that men have spawned and nourished. Call Man
a great, roasting beast, spitted and turning above the fire of his own
unending cruelty. The things of this world then, and of those yet farther
down, are the drippings of the tortured giant, Man." 

There was a long pause, and then Barnar ended it by asking: "Then where
are the Great in Good? Where are the other half of Man's residue?" 

"Ah yes!" cried Gildmirth triumphantly. "Where else but-" He had started
to sweep his hand above us. He checked the gesture, and gaped up at the
plains of ragged smoke, cloven here and there with shafts of unreal light.
"Three hundred years," he said after a moment, shaking his head, "and
still I forgot, and thought to point to the sky." 

I waited a moment, then prodded gently: "The sky, great Privateer?" 

"The stars, Nifft. Perhaps man's other spawn has reached them. Perhaps,
somewhere past memory, we have peopled them." 

"One wishes some of them had stayed here, to even the odds," Barnar
mumbled. 

"How do we know they have not?" cried Gildmirth. "Our greatest wizards,
our noblest kings, who knows what unseen influences prop their powers, and
keep them just enough ahead of the legions of chaos?" 

We didn't answer him. There was no telling how sweet the world might look
to him in memory by contrast to his prison. I felt that, as things go, the
legions of chaos do all right for themselves. Gildmirth stood up. 

"So. We will go down together. If you sight the lad, I'll bring you back
up and go down for the bonshad. 'Shads keep the nerve-bundles of their
flocks in their jaws, and even wounding them before prying them loose
means destroying the flock. Once I've pried it loose I'll be hanging on
for dear life with all four of my paws. It will be all I can do to bring
it up. You must be ready in the skiff to kill it with the harpoons when I
maneuver it in range. The skiff's operation is simple-it obeys your will.
Practice with it while you wait for me to resurface. Please remember that
the 'shad will be more than a match for my water-shape. If at any moment
it should break my body-lock on it, I am dead. 

"The greatest powers in the sea are concentrated near the Rifft, my
friends, and yet it may even be safer there than elsewhere, given their
absorption in the frontier. You'll see much activity at the chasm's brink.
One league of very mighty demons has even succeeded in hauling something
up from the Rifft. The entire sea is alive with the rumor and fear of it.
But do not be distracted. 'Shads keep their flocks in the seams and
gullies of these islands' footslopes, and we will not be far from the
doings at the chasm's edge, but concentrate on scanning for the boy's
face. You will see many faces to scan." 

Gildmirth set down the sword, stripped off his clothes, and leapt
overboard. The waters began to roil where he had sunk, and huge, silvery
limbs sprouted beneath the masking effervescence. We pulled on our
helmets, and doffed all our weapons save a harpoon each. A huge saurian
head thrust from the water and laid its jaw upon our prow. The beast
reached a webbed-and-taloned paw into the boat and took up the sword,
whose scale at last was appropriate to its wielder's size, for the
water-lizard was almost thirty feet long. When Gildmirth spoke to us it
was with a huge red tongue that labored between sawlike teeth,
steel-bright as before though savagely reshaped. His words came out as
whispery, half-crushed things which the tongue's unwieldiness had maimed: 

"Cleave to my belt, good thievesss. Carry those lances couched. Hassste!
Let's be down and doing!" 

We leapt in. It was hard to swim up to the giant, for all our knowing who
it was. Hard also to grasp the swordbelt that girt its middle and feel its
scales, rough as stone, against my knuckles. But hardest of all was
holding while it did a whipping dive and hauled us underwater with the
terrible speed of falling through empty air. And then another world yawned
under us, and as I was snatched down into the limitless swarm of it, I
became eyes, and awe, and nothing more. 

XIII 

Sometimes, when I am in Karkmahn-Ra, I will climb at nightfall into the
hills that stand behind the city. Wolves haunt them, and an occasional
stalking vampire, but the sight's worth the risk. A great city sprawled in
the night-it wakes up the heart in you, stirs your ambition, reminds you
of the glory that can be man's and your own, for toil and daring can
produce accomplishments that shine back at the stars like those million
lamps and torches do. 

But now I have seen-deep in a place itself deep under this world-a
dazzling sprawl that's vaster than a thousand cities. Its drowned lights
dot and streak the flanks of the sunken mountains and crawl like fire-ants
over reefs and knolls and gullies out to the brink of an utter blackness
that is fenced with flames. 

The titanic blaze banners and flaps and buckles, as earth-flame does, but
slower, as if weighted down by the tons of ocean on it. It rims the gulf
of the Black Rifft, and masks its depths with the volumes of slow, black
smoke it vomits up, like the ink of an immense squid. Meanwhile those
flames dispense a poisonous luminosity for miles across the ocean floor, a
ruddy fog that roils across the multicolored phosphorescences of the
deep-dwelling hosts. 

All the most formidable encampments of those hosts are concentrated near
the fiery wall, their fortressed bivouacs often encompassing some huge
machinery for siege or assault. Misshapen crews drive ensorcelled
battering rams against the unyielding palisades of fire, or swing great
booms from derricks to reach across the flame crests. 

One such encampment dwarfs all the others-or it did, at any rate, when I
went down. There is reason to think its aspect might have changed since
that time. But then it was such that I could make out its form from afar
while many nearer works, though huge, were still vague to me: lying quite
near the brink-fire were two stupendous ovoids; these had been netted over
with scaffolding, and were flanked by mammoth cranes. 

Gildmirth pulled us down to search the intermediate terrain. In the manner
of a hawk working a range of foothills, we swooped along the sea floor,
rolling with its roll, at a fixed distance above it. At first our cruising
itself was as horrible as the things it manifested to us. The saurian's
speed was astonishing, absolutely unslowed by the water's crushing weight,
but in eery contrast to this my spirit felt all the heaviness of
nightmare, where a dreadful pressure murders the will, makes it an
unheeded voice exhorting a body that is infinitely slow to move. 

Our leveling off brought us first above a field of waxen cells, like a
giant honeycomb laid flat. Blurred within the cells were men and women
folded tight, eyes and mouths gaping. The workers on these fields were
like great, slender wasps. They moved with a dancing, finicking
daintiness, stopping here and there to dip their stingers into a cell and,
with a shudder, squirt a black polyhedron into it. I began to notice, here
and there, the fat, black, joint-legged things sharing the cells with
their human occupants, tunneling gradually into their bodies, burgeoning
as those bodies writhed and dwindled. 

Glowing rivulets of lava bordered this infernal nursery, molten leakage
that threaded downslope in all directions from a volcanic cone that
pierced the surface up to our left toward the island peaks. Within this
magmatic mazeway a second zone of demon enterprise began. Here lurking
monsters of the breed our guide had so lately grappled with plied trowels
to mold the lava into smoking walls. These demons were of the class whose
use of man is artistic rather than anthropophagous, for these steaming
ramparts were the matrix for human bas-reliefs, wherein the living
material, variously amputated, were cemented to compose a writhing mural.
The innards of these sufferers were grafted to a system of blood-pipes set
in the scalding masonry so that, once troweled and tamped into place, they
lived rooted, sustained by that vascular network of boiling blood. At
least our guide's plunging speed, indifferent to any sight irrelevant to
our goal, abbreviated our witnessing of these things. 

Yet he surprised us shortly after our leaving this last zone by making a
sharp detour. We had just made out what we thought must be a Bonshad not
far ahead, when Gildmirth swept down into a dive upon a huge polypous
growth directly beneath us. It lifted huge menacing pseudopods, each fully
half as thick as the great lizard himself, to meet the latter's plunge.
The Privateer brought his blade-all asmoke with bubbles from the murderous
energy of the stroke-athwart the nearest pair of these scabby extrusions,
and sheared them cleanly through. One of the sundered members flew,
heaving and shuddering past me, giving my shoulder a glancing blow that
was like being jostled by a warhorse at full gallop. Two more strokes and
Gildmirth had barbered the monster clean of its last protectors. Amid
their bleeding stumps were the creature's massive, five-lobed jaws-made of
purest gold and crusted over with rubies as big as apples. Those hideous
beaks mouthed impotent appetite as Gildmirth plunged his sword into its
throat. The jaws gaped and froze. The lizard sheathed his blade, reached
down, and ripped the jaws apart. 

The rubies he ate greedily, crushing them like sugar-candies swiftly in
its jaws. The gold he relished more, with a humiliating hunger that could
not mask its own trembling. His steel fangs tore the honeybright metal,
and his big, scaly gullet throbbed with the meal. When he had done he drew
his sword again, planted his hind legs against the sand, and surged up
toward the 'shad that hovered over a coral knoll just beyond us. 

It was huge, hanging there over its flock of naked humans. Their veins and
nerve-wires all sprouted from their backs and ran up like puppet-wires to
join in a ball of fibers which the shaggy, hook-bellied thing was applying
to its abdominal mouthparts. 

The flock was grazing-after a manner-for the 'shad had them all sprawling
and crawling over a system of reefs which were forested with giant
anemones that bristled with man-large tongues and antennae. The
waxen-fleshed, horror-eyed folk wriggled through those rippling, squeezing
pastures of outrage while the Bonshad floated over them, nursing on the
anguish coursing through their nerves. 

It was a flock of about thirty. We had studied the miniature of Wimfort
until our eyes rebelled at the sight, and we quickly made sure that he was
not one of that lewdly palpated, trembling little herd. Gildmirth turned
me his right eye and Barnar his left. We shook our heads. His great paws
clawed us back up to our cruising speed and we plunged on, breasting out
over another falling-away of the seafloor, and curving toward the right,
where lay a larger stretch of anemone-carpeted terrain. Over this hung
numerous 'shads, all territorially spaced, hideous, hairy little balloons
in the distance, sucking each on its tether of nerve. 

Our course brought us closer to the Black Rifft's brink and as we swept
toward the 'shad-meadows we coasted past a clearer view than previous of
some of the siegeworks there, particularly of a thicket of derricks which
thrust great lateral arms through the gapped crest of the flame-wall. From
these wrought-steel arms huge hooks were lowered on the ends of massive
chains. Enormous windlasses drove the movement of the booms themselves as
well as paying out the fishing chain off its immense spools. Stumbling
human gangs, vast in numbers, provided the power that turned those
windlasses. Similar gangs powered the vehicles of the demon-bosses who
oversaw the work. These were brawny toads as big as houses. They lolled in
the sodden hulks of galleons-storm-taken ships all bearded and furred with
bottom-life, some of their hulls half stove in. Each of these had hundreds
of slave haulers dragging its keel over the ocean floor. Their eyes had
been taken, their hair was longer than the ever-springing hair in graves.
Their skin floated up from their arms in brine-fat tatters. Their tread
was sottish, their feet hidden in clouds of sand. 

But we quickly ceased attending to anything except that greatest of the
works which bordered the Rifft farther down its perimeter. Though still
more than a mile distant, it was now revealed to us in greater detail.
Each of the ovoids-of a pale rose tint, and minutely faceted-was as big as
a mountain. Near them, small hills of iron bar were being forged, amid
geysering sparks, into an irregular construction that looked like the
beginnings of a cage-a cage big enough to hold a mountain. Meanwhile,
beneath the web of scaffolding that had been thrown over the nearer of the
two titanic shapes, a large hole had been broken in its substance, which
appeared to be little more than a relatively thin shell. And we had drawn
just near enough to find that something was visible within that hole, a
small part of what the shell contained. It was a three-taloned foot as big
as a city. Gildmirth pulled us away from the Rifft, working in an upslope
path that would skirt the 'shad-meadows. 

We found the boy in the fourth flock we surveyed. Almost in the first
instant of my scanning, the victim my eye had lit on wrenched his head
around in some access of suffering, and the face of Wimfort was flashed at
me. I tugged Gildmirth's belt and pointed. He looked at Barnar, who
confirmed our quarry. The Privateer bucked and heaved and plunged straight
for the water's ceiling. 

I felt each instant of that swift climb as a distinct and individual joy.
We surfaced to find the boat awaiting us at a spot halfway around the
island-cluster from our starting point. We were not far from the crest of
the volcano we had seen. The cone's steaming rim, which barely over-topped
the waves, swarmed with activity. Gildmirth laid his jaw on the boat's
stern and we climbed aboard along his body, joyfully shucking our helmets,
eager more for the act of breathing than the air itself, such that it felt
sweet to draw in even that tomblike atmosphere. 

"Practisss the ssskiff!" the lizard enjoined me. Its squamous head
glittered and ducked under. The waters bulged with the force of his dive. 

Taking both harpoons, I stepped into the little bone coracle. I willed it
twenty yards to starboard of the boat. I sped so swiftly thither I was
toppled, and clung aboard only with undignified difficulty. Barnar's
braying followed me as I thought the skiff through several other
maneuvers, standing better braced now, more fluid at the hips. 

"You might well laugh," I shouted to my friend as I zigzagged ever more
skillfully over the swell. "See how far we've come! Impossibly far. We've
found the young idiot-actually reached him and ferreted out his
squirming-place in this infernal stew!" 

Barnar merely whooped and waved his arms for a reply, and I myself felt
giddy and nonsensical enough with our continuing good luck. I made a quick
excursion toward the crater-top to view the siege in progress there. Rafts
of batrachian demons, reminiscent of the larger breed I had seen being
charioted below by human gangs, were beached on the crater's flanks and
mining at it furiously, using battering-irons or huge hammers and steel
wedges. Their assault was countered by fire-elementals within the magmatic
cauldron they sought to inundate and conquer. These shapeless, smoldering
beings catapulted avalanches of lava on their besiegers, driving them by
the score to quench their sizzling skin in the sea. Meanwhile with this
same material the elementals ceaselessly caulked and re-knit the breaches
broken by their enemies' tools. 

I heard Barnar shout, and sped back toward the boat. Not far from it there
was a milky spot in the water, like a cataract in an old dog's eye. I
swung near just in time to be drenched by the explosion of Gildmirth in
battle with the Bonshad. 

I should actually say "Gildmirth hanging onto the Bonshad," for he gripped
its back with all four paws and his locked jaws, and by wrestling mightily
steered his opponent to some degree, but all the rest of the motive power
of that struggle came from the 'shad. Its hook-rimmed mouth-hole gaped
from its underside, which the lizard's grip on its in-hooking legs exposed
uncharacteristically to view. Such a wad of muscle was its lumpish body
that you could clearly see the freeing of just one of its pinioned legs
would enable it to compact itself with a power that must surely break the
reptile's desperate grip. The speed with which it would then be able to
sink its mouthparts into the Privateer's flank was amply attested to now
by the monster's volcanic convulsions, which sent the pair of them
cartwheeling insanely over the waves. 

I began gathering speed with a series of quick swings into their zone of
combat and then sharply out again, after each such approach pulling
immediately round to make a new and more driving interception. My nearest
glimpses of the Privateer told me that he was bone-tired-his paws showed
their tendons stark as an oak's roots against rocky ground. His snakish
neck bulged so full with strain that its scales jutted out, like
wind-lifted shingles in a storm. I swung out to my widest retreat thus
far, then pulled in, driving for a peak speed from which to make my cast. 

The saurian made a mighty effort, and so far controlled the 'shad's tumble
as to keep it belly-out in my direction. I balanced the harpoon by my ear,
taking the skiff's buffets with loose knees, for now we sheared,
half-flying, straight through the crests of the chop. I saw, some moments
ahead of me, the spot and instant of my cast, which I would make at the
apex of the skiff's turn, so that the cast would have a sling's momentum
behind it, augmenting the strength of my arm. I saw too just where that
haggle-rim mouth-hole would be, and my spirit welled up in me with that
prescient certainty that precedes many of the greatest feats of weaponry. 

I drew back to full cock for the throw, then hit my turn. Obediently, the
mouth-hole tumbled precisely to its foreseen spot and I pumped that shaft
dead into it, not even grazing the hooks that twisted so furiously round
its border. The shaft sprouted full half its length out of the demon's
back, and grazed Gildmirth's flank, for he was not quick enough in letting
go. The 'shad flopped and churned across the swell for a full minute of
storm-wild, crazy force before it realized it was dead, and settled, and
sank. 

We had to dive again with the Privateer, and be quick in pulling on our
gear for it. The abandoned flock below was a free confection for any
drifting entities that scented it. Being pulled under again felt like a
burial-alive-no part of me desired it, and I scarcely kept my grip. 

We swooped upon the meadow in time to drive off a many-mouthed, ray-shaped
demon, which for all its mouths had no stomach to face the lizard's sword.
The nerve-ball still hung above the little herd it tethered, just where
its savorer had hung, and the flock remained as powerless as if the demon
still hovered over them. 

The saurian took the wadded skein of tissue and began to bounce and jiggle
it in his paws, the way you have to do to untangle snarled rope. The
fibers began to open out. We helped, teasing strands apart. Toward the end
it became a gossamer-light labor. We had to swim more than fifty feet
above the pasture to make room for the endless unraveling, which we
accomplished with gentle upward sweeps of our arms. Our work caused the
flock to lurch and spasm in the lubricious embrace of their pasture. 

But suddenly, just when the ball was entirely combed apart, the slick web
of innards snapped simultaneously back down to its flock of donors and
vanished inside their spines, which sealed up like sprung traps. Then the
truly terrible dances began, as they awakened to their freedom in that
grisly place. We came down quick on Wimfort. Gildmirth began plunging his
sword into the things that held the boy-cloven tongues and shattered
antennae recoiled from their prey. Barnar and I plucked him up, and I
helped my friend get him tucked securely under his left arm. We cleaved to
the Privateer and he sprang skyward with us all. 

When we were settled with our unconscious charge in the boat, the
Privateer took time to bind the wound which crossed half the left side of
his ribs, a more considerable wound in his human stature than it bad
appeared on the lizard's huge bulk. Smiling with a sudden, strange
cordiality, Gildmirth told me: 

"That was a remarkable cast, Nifft." 

In temperate language I replied, as candor compelled me to do, that it had
indeed been one of the finest feats of spear-work that it had ever been my
fortune to witness. 

XIV 

For much of our voyage back the lad lay in the bow, his glazed eyes aimed
at the clouds, or stirring mindlessly at sudden lurches of the craft. We
had emptied the provision sack to make him a blanket, and had fallen to
sharing the wine this had brought to light. Gildmirth, after musing on the
boy's face awhile, said, "He's a handsome lad. What are his chances of
growing to a good man?" 

Barnar sighed, and spat gently into the sea. I looked cheerlessly at the
boy. My friend and I had had much time to reflect that all our toil was
for a resurrection which, while it might not turn out to do the world
great harm, wasn't likely to do it any good either. Wimfort's features had
the fine symmetry that adolescence can show right up to the brink of
adulthood's emergent emphases and distortions. A certain heaviness of
cheek and jaw was already just beginning to suggest the sire. 

"I'm afraid, good Privateer, that the signs are discouraging," I answered.
"He's here, of course, strictly through his own ambitious carelessness." 

"Prime flaws of youth, of course-but also its strengths, this carelessness
and ambition." 

I nodded. "He has imagination and boldness. You wouldn't expect him to
temper a rich boy's arrogance with much thought of others. He's the
Rod-Master's son, as I've told you. But maybe with this-" I gestured at
the sea "-and all he'll have to endure going back, he might get that
needed awakening to the world around him." 

"If you get him back it will be your business to hope he has been wakened.
Ambitious dabblers in sorcery add much to the hell that is on earth. In my
origins of course I am just such a go-to-market meddler in the arts as I
speak of. But at least for every spell I purchased I bought the best
tutors in its use and meaning, and I sought no new spell until I had
faithfully learned all lore foundational to the last I had bought, or
anywise tangent to it. Nor have I ever, to get to the essence of it,
brought accidental doom upon my fellows through the casual practice of
arts for which my wits were premature." 

I did not want him to fall silent on this topic. "It is indeed a part of
your legend, Privateer, that many of your . . . sharp practices were aimed
at financing your thaumaturgic studies." 

Gildmirth regarded us blandly for some moments. "Is that indeed a part of
my legend? I am touched that my swindles are remembered at all. Toss.
Thank you. It was an expensive education; I was never, before now, a
glutton for mere gold itself. All my major larcenies were devoted to
scholarly ends, in fact." 

"I understand," Barnar said, "that just before your coming here you worked
an extremely lucrative deception on your native city." 

Gildmirth let a bitter eye roll across the cloud-vaults before allowing
himself to sink into the obvious pleasure of boastful reminiscence. He
drank, and handed me the jack with a pleased sigh. "That one bought me
this boat and sail. It was a good piece of work. Sordon-Head was gearing
up for yet another trade war. A major competitor of hers, the Klostermain
League of Cities, had just lost half its navy in a storm, while we were
just nearing completion of an admirable new navy. Our High Council
suddenly recalled a gross defamation of one of our outlying shrines by a
drunken Klostermain sailor. It had happened several months before that
storm so disastrous for the League, if I recall rightly. We began applying
diplomatic pressure on the League for trade concessions, while hinting
ever more strongly of war. Our High Council was ripe for anything that
might create assurance enough for us to go the last inch to candid armed
aggression for profit. 

"I came to them with the proposal of constructing a spearhead fleet of
superlative fighting frigates, and demonstrated how such a tactical weapon
could penetrate harbors and destroy ships in the docks, sparing us many
chancier engagements on the high seas. I was an object of guarded civic
pride for my exploits abroad, and I had always kept my in-town dealings
well masked. They heaped my lap with gold. Their dreams of empire, of
Klostermain plunder made them practically force on me the sum of Eleven
million gold lictors." 

Wimfort screeched, gull-voiced. He twisted, as if ants covered him, and
under the sack we'd covered him with we could see his hands moving to rub
some nameless memory off his skin. Barnar pressed a huge hand onto the
boy's forehead. The boy's eyes closed again, as if that slight pressure
crushed down the ugly dream behind them. 

"Conceive the sum," the Privateer said after a moment, "Still it
astonishes me, though I have often seen that sum quadrupled on a few
hectares of the ocean's floor. Of course, it was spent a fortnight from my
getting it-on this craft. It was a purchase I had studied and planned for
more than a decade. 

"You should have seen my shipyards in Sordon-Head. Giant, covered
buildings, windowless-the danger of Klostermain spies stealing some
forewarning of their fate, you see-we couldn't risk it. And in those great
empty warehouses a fleet was indeed a-building. A brace of towering
frigates, made of leather, paper, and feather-wood. While my crews tolled
on these, I had another crew working, a crew of musicians. Their
instruments were mallets, saws, augers, rusty winches. Their oratorio was
woven of shouted curses, and gusty dockworker's cries: 'Lower away there,
easy now! Down with it-a bit more, another arse-hair-hold! Maul here, and
quarter-inch spikes, prompt now!' Whenever the great men of the council
passed my yards they drank in these melodies and passed on smiling. 

"There was a grand harbor-side assembly to witness the launching of our
raiding-frigates, as they had come to be called. The docks on all sides
were crowned with walls of expectant citizens. The day was a glory-a
steel-blue sky and a sweet, steady offshore wind. The council had a tiered
platform at the tip of our major pier. When my flotilla came past them
they would set afire a huge, wooden mock-up of the city's seal. 

"I was in the shipyard. All the craft had been blocked on ramps and set to
slide down by themselves to a launching in fair order. There were six of
them, and I was in this boat, ramped to slide out in their midst, and so
be masked by them at first. I pulled the block-pins. The great doors
opened and our convoy skidded like so many fat swans onto the water. 

"And they were light as swans too, at first. They were very proud ladies,
my paper frigates, in the first moments of their promenading out onto the
sea. They drew gasps from the crowd. But almost at once you could hear
everyone saying 'Eh?' 'What?' Because the six of them wandered out
giddily, like so many drunks reeling through the town square on their way
to dance at the carnival. They bumped each other, some turned stern-first,
and rocked till their masts looked like metronomes. The council buzzed.
The seal was already proudly blazing, but the town orchestra was already
faltering in mid-bar. The breeze jumbled the boats out to the center of
the harbor. And then they began soaking up water in earnest. Here and
there a sodden hull caved in like pastry left in the rain. Now a great
noise arose from the multitude. The first of my ladies drank the limit.
She went down so straight her masts looked like a weed being yanked under
by a gopher. 

"I was lying just here, in the stern. I would be unveiled on center-stage,
so to speak, when the last frigate sank. Now this was the riskiest part of
my venture, because for the whole five minutes it took all of them to go
under, I was fighting for my life with an attack of laughter that almost
killed me. That's how I was revealed to my fellow-citizens, despite my
best attempts at self-command. But when the populace gave a . . . what
shall I call it? A surge of comprehension, I struggled to the mast and
pulled myself onto my feet. The rest of the fleet had at last begun to
weigh anchor, and undertake my capture. Gasping and clinging to the mast,
I shouted: "Citizens!" 

That set me laughing again-the thought of them all. "Citizens!" I croaked
again. "I can't understand it! I'm . . . appalled! I used . . . the best .
. . paper!" Getting that said nearly finished me. The fleet's lead ship
was less than a hundred yards off now, and archers were forming up on its
quarterdeck. I unfurled the sail. I'd researched the demon currents and
they're quite strong near Sordon-Head. I departed then from the bay of my
native city, and as I left I noted with satisfaction how the hard-taxed
multitudes were swarming off the docks and onto the main pier, and how the
entire council-at pier's end-had risen to its feet in what looked like
alarm. 

"It took some ingenuity to stay slow enough for the fleet to follow me. It
was a point of pride, I suppose, but perhaps something less personal than
that as well. At any rate I wanted my destination known, my descent
witnessed. One doesn't want to leave the world of one's kind without some
moment of farewell, some acknowledgment by your fellows of your kinship
and your departure. I came down by the Taarg Vortex, which is a maelstrom
in the Yellow Reefs. I did not think that any would come down with me, but
the captain of the flagship was a zealous man and did not pull up and
bring a line in time. He was pulled down after me. Those I could manage,
in that raging hurricane of water, I killed with arrows, but many were
taken instantly by demons, and I could do nothing for them. Wheeling in
anguish, they went where I did, through the Dark Rapids, down where the
whirlpool's root feeds into a subworld river which none have given a name,
and which empties in the sea some thousand leagues in that direction." 

At some point Gildmirth's voice must have entered Wimfort's dream-webbed
brain, because when the Privateer stopped, the boy snapped open his eyes.
They were large and dark, not piggy like his father's, and they now
registered the clouds they stared at. With Barnar's help, he sat up. He
looked at us, the boat, and us again. Seeing such astonishment as his, I
couldn't think of what to tell him. It was Barnar who gave him the
necessaries: 

"We are men, Wimfort, not demons. This man has helped us fish you out,
rescue you. Your father sent Nifft and me for you. We're taking you back
up to the world of mankind." 

My friend's summation struck me at first as the report of some other men's
actions. I looked at my hands. They are quite presentable hands, but
nothing out of the ordinary. I marveled at what Barnar and I had done thus
far, even leaving aside that which the Privateer had made possible for us.

As for Wimfort's reaction to these words, it was like watching Barnar
speaking sentences into a tunnel. After a long lag, answering lights of
comprehension flickered from the darkness of the boy's eyes. His breathing
grew stronger. More fear showed on his face, and he brought his hands up
to touch it. Then, with a tremor, he thawed out. Tears bulged from the
corners of his eyes-slow in emerging, then falling with that surprising
quickness that tears have. Barnar patted his shoulder. 

"We have a hard trek home, Wimfort," he said, "but we have an excellent
chance of making it." 

The boy looked at him and me, beginning to breathe more slowly. He looked
at Gildmirth, whose plum-red orbs were like two terrible sunsets in the
grinning ruins of his face. 

"Your freedom's real, son," the Privateer said. "To talk to you of odds,
of numbers, would never make clear to you the magnitude of your good
fortune. So many like yourself are here forever." 

"You two," Wimfort said. It was a croak, a voice almost erased. He cleared
his throat. "You two. My father sent you?" 

Seeing someone is half of meeting him, and hearing his voice the other
half. I liked the voice-still a treble, with a gravelly shade of manhood
to come. An un-selfconscious voice that said exactly what it thought. He
probably had an ungentle tongue toward servants, but perhaps also a sense
of humor, and imagination. He looked wonderingly about the sky and sea. 

"How long have I been here?" he asked. 

Barnar shrugged. "We cannot say how long we've been atraveling. Perhaps
you have been here two or three months." 

"Three months!" Wimfort said it hushedly. It was poignant, for we knew
that he was reviewing what had filled those months for him. He shuddered,
and then shuddered again more powerfully. He looked at us with what might
have been panic drawing in his face. 

"You two walked that long to reach me?" 

"No," I said. "The trek was probably something more than a month, and you
had been down here for a similar period before your father was able to . .
. obtain our services." 

"My father sent you . . ." echoed the boy. I was getting alarmed-his stare
was so wide. "Three months here!" he groaned. "Three months. And my father
sent you. He waited two months, and then sent a pair of baboons on foot
who took another two months to get here!" His voice was rising to a howl
as uncontrolled as his arithmetic was getting. "A good wizard could have
had me out in a day! That dung-heap! That greedy, stingy dung-heap! THREE
MONTHS!!" 

XV 

Wimfort recovered swiftly. My God, the resilience of the young! Within an
hour to step back into your own mind and character after months of the
Bonshad's intricate violation of your inmost thoughts. But that is the
essence of youth-to believe soundly and fixedly in its own destruction.
Soon we found, full-blown before us, the lad Charnall had described, with
the same ambitions-intact, invigorated even by their grim miscarriage. 

We cut the sack into a tunic for his temporary comfort. He dressed very
surlily after I had told him he was a young idiot and that he was not to
call us baboons. I tried not to be harsh about it, remembering he was
convalescent. As he dressed, by way of setting things at ease, Gildmirth
explained to him the erroneous tradition that made so many people summon
Bonshads, and assured him that the Elixir of Sazmazm was nowhere near the
sea, nor could any marine power hope to possess it, though such would
treasure it as much as any primary demon would. 

Wimfort had squatted on a rower's bench, with his back very straight and
his face half-averted from us. When the Privateer finished the lad scowled
and shook his head pityingly at the waters, then looked round to deliver
this answer: 

"I'm really an idiot, eh? As that one says? Do you think I'm so stupid I
don't know the situation of the Elixir? Of course it isn't in the sea. It
is obtained from somewhere outside it by the Bonshad, which as everyone
knows lives in the sea." 

"You just know that better than most by now," I put in, disgusted with the
boy's impenetrability. He disdained to notice me and continued setting the
Privateer straight: 

"Just for your information, grandfather, I've read all that's known of the
matter. The Elixir of Sazmazm is obtained in the prime subworld where the
Giant Sazmazm, of the tertiary subworld, lies captive." Wimfort had
adopted that bored off-handedness with which smart students reel off
authoritative texts which they have memorized entirely and-in their
opinion-mastered completely. "If you are curious as to the manner of the
giant's captivity, it's relatively simple. Sazmazm sought ascension to the
prime subworld where he meant to enjoy empire, and unholy feasts upon the
lesser demons. He bargained with the great warlock, Wanet-ka, the greatest
in all the Red Millennium, and generally held unscrupulous enough to wreak
any harm for the right price, even that of bringing a tertiary power
within one level of the world of men. Wanet-ka accepted the giant's
advance, a stupendous sum, and then swindled Sazmazm. Using a loophole in
the re-assembly clause of his pact, he transported the demon two levels
up, as agreed, but everted him in so doing, and reconstituted him with
fantastic whimsy and disorder. Sazmazm endures, a vast, impotent
disjointment, his lifeblood pulsing through him in veins nakedly
accessible to those who would brave the giant's tertiary vassals, who
attend him, and laboriously transport his essence back down to his native
world, fraction by fraction-a millennial labor." 

Something tickled my memory. The boy's words evoked some image, too
ephemeral for me to resolve, which spidered uneasily across my mind. The
Privateer laughed. "Excellent. Two-thirds Ha-dadd-almost word for word-and
the other third a loose rephrasing of Spinny the Elder. Both standard
sources even in my day. Moreover, everything you have recited is true." 

"For this feat-" Wimfort spoke with the outraged emphasis of a lecturer
who has been crassly interrupted. "-the Grey League granted Wanet-ka the
honorary epithet of 'the Benevolent,' and included his biography in their
Archive of Optimates." 

"Just for your information, grandchild, in the Benevolent Wanet-ka, you
have chosen from the past the worst possible hero on whom to model your
ambitions. A great man and warlock he surely was. But such a one as only
greybeards like myself, who understand how to distinguish his triumphs
from his lunacies, can intelligently honor. Wanet-ka! For the reasons you
admire him, you might as well choose some great demon chief from these
deeps to idolatrize." 

"I don't idolatrize," the boy said hotly, "and you can just keep your jaw
locked from now on." 

The Privateer's jaw did indeed tighten shut. He reached forth his hand
toward the boy. He was back in the stern, and so the boy didn't move,
thinking the gesture a senseless one-until the Privateer's arm elongated
impossibly, and a huge webbed claw half-engulfed the lad's head. Wimfort's
horror was plain. Gildmirth said, "Your father didn't send me after you,
boy. I live here, and may do so forever. For a false copper I'd take you
back down and hand you to another Bonshad. Don't yank on my old grey
beard, boy. I hurt all over in ways you'll never learn enough to
understand. I'm in a nasty mood, grandson, and you watch your tongue most
carefully with me, at all times." 

Gildmirth's pique was surely forgivable. To hear such a squall as the boy
had made raised over a three-month term in hell, for one who has stoically
borne a sentence of three centuries, must be unimaginably
irritating-especially when the short-term wailer makes his complaint en
route to his freedom. Perhaps he regretted his anger, however, for he
brought his arm back to its proper form, and went on in a gentler tone:
"You must grasp, my boy, that I'm not disparaging your ambition. I admire
your spirit. And when I force unwelcome information on you, I'm just
trying to amplify your understanding, give you vital data on whose basis
you can proceed to fulfill your dreams of sorcerous power. Do you think
that I or my friends here are jealous of the greatness you propose for
yourself? Why should we care one way or the other? We have our own
pressing concerns. Since I happen to know something of the matter-a
circumstance I regard as purely an accident of time and experience, and of
which I am no-wise vain-I'm simply telling you that no serious wizard,
save for some hard to imagine and highly specific aim, would meddle with
the Elixir of Sazmazm. Its power is far too unwieldy-too great for
accurate mastery and utilization-while its immense attractiveness to all
the demons of this world makes the mere transport of it highly dangerous,
assuming that it could be wrested from Sazmazm's vassals in the first
place. I am told that you bear a spell of incorporation for the Elixir.
Can you believe that making your body a jar for this substance could be
anything but the rankest suicide down here? The first demon that caught
you would make a fire and render the Elixir from you as casually as if you
were a chunk of whale fat. 

"You must understand. This Elixir is a powerful drug to the denizens of
this world. It enhances their sensual and cerebral universe to a pitch of
paradisiacal ecstasy. From even the most vanishingly small potations of
it, they taste an amplification of spirit to which the intoxications of
human prey are but the feeblest premonition. 

"But leave all this aside. Suppose you brought the Elixir safely back to
the surface-world? Your plans for its use might be
unexceptionable-temperate, benign, creative-still the smell of it would be
on you, so to speak. Within the first day of your homecoming, all the most
powerful wizards on earth would know you had it-know who you were, and how
to find you. Consider that phrase, please: 'all the most powerful wizards
on earth.' In my day, that was a crew that contained some great and
remorseless predators. Whether or not many of those men still live-and
many might-their like have surely been appearing throughout the
intervening centuries. I'll say no more than to remind you of the chunk of
whale fat." 

The boy said nothing, but clearly it was only the demonstration that his
preceptor was no mean magus that stilled his tongue. He squirmed and
twitched with unspoken rebuttal throughout the Privateer's remarks.
Gildmirth sighed, and the three of us returned to our wine while the boat,
under his covert direction, returned us to his manse. 

I sat facing the sea through an archway in the colonnade where we sat. The
Privateer, sitting behind me, touched the back of my head. A whiteness and
nothingness occurred. Then again, there was the archway and the sea beyond
it. I was faintly dizzy, but this passed almost at once. I looked around,
and saw that a cloudiness was just clearing from Gildmirth's bloody orbs.
When he spoke his jaw at first moved numbly. 

"You've lived much, Nifft. You leave me quite a world to be explored once
I'm alone again." 

His eyes mused a moment, and he chuckled and swore. I felt my past had
been as air to his present imprisonment, and it made me glad. Barnar took
his turn, and I saw that Gildmirth's touch lasted less than a minute.
Again the Privateer rested, and marveled. When at last he looked at us,
there was no self-consciousness in our looking-back. What would have been
the point? Gildmirth smiled and said: "How tired I am of what I know of
this world, my friends. How I crave to return to the learning of that more
evanescent and various lore, the lore of living men." 

"Listen," Barnar said, "Nifft and I have talked. We've agreed that if
there's any way in which we could help you win your freedom from this
place, we will put off our return until this is accomplished." 

Gildmirth smiled again, and shook his head. A loud snort from Wimfort
reminded us all of his presence. The Privateer had given the boy leather
leggins and a byrnie of light mail from his own stores. The gear hung a
bit roomily on his frame, which caused him an irritation that betrayed a
habit of infallibly correct fitting-out-something the Rod-Master's pride
of place would surely have seen to. 

The snort was a prelude. The boy had been developing his strategy, and was
now going to expostulate with us as though we were rational beings with at
least as much say in the course of events as he had. He made a reasoning
gesture with both arms, a very political bit of flourish which he almost
had the hang of, and which a few more years of observing his father would
make him perfect in. He addressed himself to the Privateer. 

"I'm convinced that you aren't seeing the true advantages of an expedition
for the Elixir. You've probably been down here a while. You seem to know
your way around down here, you have some powers-guide us from here to
scout inland for the Elixir! You have yourself, sir, given a hint of the
immeasurable value it would have, even here among demon-kind. What could
it not purchase? Impressive though your establishment here might be,
surely you don't have absolutely everything you wish! Surely there is
something you lack that you desire. Who has everything he wants?" 

The Privateer had paled. Knots of murderous intention were forming at the
corners of his jaw. Then, in his eyes, I could see the dull rage give way
to more self-command-to a realization that the irony of the boy's words
was accidental, and that Wimfort had no conception of our protector's
situation-indeed, had surprisingly scant attention to spare for it,
considering that Gildmirth manifestly commanded an outpost of influence in
the sea itself. The Privateer expelled the last of his wrath in a deep
sigh. Looking earnestly for a moment into the boy's eyes, he ended by
laughing. "Oh Junior Rod-Master, it is truly well for you that you have
these men for your escorts. If anyone, on your route home, can protect you
from the consequences of your fatal misapprehensions, they can. Pray for
the wit to appreciate their services, and to aid them in every way you
can. Gentlemen-" Here he took our hands in turn. "-I honor you for your
worth, which just lately I have come to know in detail. I thank you for
your generous offer to help me. May all luck go with you. I cannot
hope-for your sakes-that I will see you again, though the affection I bear
you makes me wish it. For the trifling service I have done you-" (Here he
glanced at Wimfort.) "-I am amply repaid." 

Walking away from the Privateer was as hard as disarming would have
been-piling my weapons on the ground and setting forth without them. When
we had scaled the salt cliffs we raised our hands to him. He was far
below, but I saw him nod very slightly as he stared back up at us. Then he
turned and entered the manse-I think to spare himself the spectacle of our
endlessly gradual disappearance as we dwindled from view along his
clifftop skyline. 

XVI 

On first reaching the sea we had noted an offshore crag for a landmark,
and thither we now doggedly bent our return course. We knew that by
walking a diagonal path inland from the manse we could cut many weary
leagues off our march, but the convenience of this was not worth the risk
it entrailed. The route we knew offered dangers we had proven to be
survivable, and for all we knew it was, in this, unique. 

Naturally, Wimfort began gaping at the baubles down on the beaches, and
immediately started demanding we stop, and go down for this or that
trinket. I say "naturally" because I believe I understood him perfectly.
He didn't really need to hear the answer we gave him: that such
treasure-hunting would mean a dangerous re-entry of the sea's zone of
influence, and that most of those riches were merely bait for man and
demon alike. He didn't truly want those baubles; what he couldn't forbear
to do was push at us. He was furious with us-not for anything we had done,
but simply because we were the tardy, powerless drudges that we were. What
he wanted was rescue by a wizard astride a golden griffon-an immediate
plucking from the imprisoning waters (and not three months late, thank
you) followed by a swift jaunt to pick up some of the Elixir of Sazmazm,
and concluding with a prompt, painless return home, and the heating of
Master Wimfort's bath. 

And after all, how could the boy be otherwise? All he knew was to order us
to do what he wanted. Reality, for him, did not run any other way than
that. And here we were, telling him he was going to have to walk with us,
through mire and peril, for more than a month, and that there was going to
be no stop for some elixir en route. We offered mere escape-ignominious,
arse-bare escape escorted by two scoundrels of unromantic appearance. 

Rage and wounded pride look painful on a young face. Sixteen is a
difficult age to get on with. There's much to like-the freshness, the
force of conviction. But there is also a certain arrogance, an inevitable
concomitant of development, perhaps, which one must always struggle to
forgive. Wimfort had a great deal of freshness and enterprise, but he also
required huge amounts of forgiving. He lashed us with pejorative epithets
and sneers when we denied his will and bade him march on. 

Verbal rebukes were powerless to curb his hectoring. At length Barnar and
I conferred aside. We took some of the rope which Gildmirth had included
in our provisions and rigged a humane though not extremely comfortable
cradle. In this we trussed the boy. We hung him from one of our spears and
carried him between us as hunters will a bush-pig they've bagged
upcountry. An hour of this convinced him of our sincerity in telling him
that henceforth he would cease to vilify us, or he would make the entire
journey thus. Though successful in the short range, this ploy proved a
mistake. When liberated the boy did, strictly speaking, stop vilifying us,
but in insult's stead be muttered endlessly varied rehearsals of our
punishment and death at the hands of his father, the august Kamin,
Rod-Master of Kine Gather. Whenever this paled, the boy had only to scan
the beach till he found some new thing there to demand and be denied. This
accomplished, he was able to resume his vengeful soliloquy with fresh
gusto. 

Meanwhile his surroundings, the fabulous nature of his present position,
were dawning on him. At times he fell silent, and caught his eyes
marveling at the sea's horizon, exulting in its shore's tangled wonders.
At these moments we glimpsed an impressive strength of will in the boy-an
ambition sharp and forceful as a man's hatching within a heart and mind
still childish in their scope and capacity. These glimpses did not
increase our peace of mind. 

When at last we approached our landmark Wimfort, gathering that we were
near our inland-turning, began to find the attractions of the beach ever
more urgent. I could feel him winding himself tight for some absolutely
peremptory requirement that could give occasion to an outright defiance of
our will. Then he saw some amphorae of burnished copper. 

We were above a particularly lush stretch of beach. The cliffs here were
luminously white. On the shingle footing their waxen wall, on the
wave-worn stones as black as boiling tar, a flock of thralls lay in the
surf. Each of the flock was two-a man and a woman, fused at the waist into
a limbless, two-headed sausage-and each of these, when the surf came in,
bent up in a U of revulsion, hoisting its heads out of reach of the
erratic, leap-frogging foam. On all sides of this flock tide pools dappled
the rocks, and these were clogged with such lurid riches as would mock the
greediest imagination with its littleness. The amphorae were strewn
through several such pools, and some were battered and ruptured, like
storm-wrack. The plug sealing each of them bore a deeply graven, S-shaped
rune. Wimfort stood stock-still, then opened his mouth. Furious in
advance, I forestalled him: "Can you be such a fool, Wimfort?" I shouted.
"Would it be sealed in jars and stamped like a bottle in a perfumer's
stall?" 

"Yes!" he shrilled. "If it were some demon's booty-some Elixir
successfully stolen, and jarred for storage in the demon's cellars!" 

Barnar groaned. "Wimfort! Did they all lie to us when they called you
well-read? That could be a snake-rune! It could be the High-Archaic
demi-sigil. I mean who even knows how 'Sazmazm' is rendered in demon
callig-" 

"Look!" shrieked Wimfort in horror. I blush to report that Barnar and I,
green as bumpkins at a fair, whirled round as one man, and the boy
sprinted for the cliff. 

The bluffs were mostly sheer, but above the amphorae a deep gully split
the cliff. Wimfort jumped into it and rode down it on a little avalanche
of loose salt. He was halfway down before I could uproot my feet. As I ran
for the cliff I called back to Barnar: "A line! And brace yourself, I want
a good haul coming back!" I jumped into the gully and skied down as
Wimfort had done. 

The boy was nimble as a fox pup. He took some tumbles I vowed to myself
had killed him, only to see him get his feet beneath him at the last
instant. I couldn't match his speed, and saw the inevitability of the
thing I least desired-a struggle with him on the shore, down in the reach
of the surf, and whatever lived in it. He hit the cove and pelted for the
amphorae. I sprang off the bluff and took the last fifteen feet by air.
Wimfort was wrestling a jar from one of the pools, and I saw how suddenly
the surf came in, like an extended paw, to swirl teasingly round his
ankles. He dragged the jar-half his own size-onto the shingle and began
frantically to pry at its stopper with a sharp stone. 

I was on him, seizing his shoulders. He hugged the jar with both legs and
arms. I was in urgent dread of the sea, and so I gave up trying to pry him
off the jar, and dragged them both back toward the cliff. Meanwhile just
offshore, the water was beginning to fold and peak in a dozen places. The
peaks were sharp, and did not move with the rhythm of water, but fitfully,
like things scurrying around under a sheet, all of them coming erratically
but steadily nearer the beach. I looked up at the clifftop. Barnar stood
and brandished a noose, beginning to move down the gully for a nearer
cast. I nodded and bent down to pry at Wimfort's grip in earnest. I would
have to stun his arm with a blow to the shoulder. It was not going to be
an entirely disagreeable task. The boy sensed my preparatory movement and
wrenched himself with unexpected violence to one side, dragging the
amphora down with him to the shingle, and knocking the stopper out of it. 

What poured out of it was a reeking black fluid-and far more than that.
For in the fumes that instantly tangled up through the air, my mind and
soul went twisting and reeling into an utterly other being. The sky over
me, though it did not alter physically, became something different, became
an agelessly familiar thing. The black and white shingle was the only
floor my feet had ever known, except that I did not possess feet, but some
giant raptor's talons. And my tongue was charged with curses in a language
never heard in the world of the sun. I poured these curses from my hooked
beak upon my deadly adversary. 

This enemy of mine was a crablike thing, half my size. Fluid fire were his
eye-knobs upon their ghastly stalks, and his pincers were likewise of
flame. We joined battle, as we had done, world without end, whenever we
had met in the long eons of our being. He clawed and tore at my chest and
legs as I took his eye-stalks in my forepaws and lifted him, shaking him
in the air. 

When my mind goes back, now, to that battle, it is like stepping into a
great shadowed corridor endless in either direction, a hall of memories
and dark hates. For in those moments I possessed the entire past of that
other being-its shape and senses, its deeds and lusts, all were mine, and
I fought for them all. There was a touch, a pressure around my upper body,
and then a tightening around my neck and under one of my forelegs. As this
was happening, so was something else. The surf arched itself up off the
stones, just like a carpet lifted by children who are playing beneath.
Crouched forms with merry red sharp-cornered eyes rode mats of coiling
slime out from under the shadow of the lifted water blanket. They winked
at us. I knew them, and I knew what they wanted, but I was powerless to do
anything other than fight my close-embraced enemy to the death. 

And then something began to lift me. Haltingly, I rose up the cliff face,
and my enemy, whom I could not loose, rose with me, clawing wildly at my
body all the while. The sharp-eyed things swarmed onto the shingle. My
heels rose just barely clear of their ropy palps, entreatingly upreached. 

Somewhere in that jerky climb I began to shed somewhat the being which had
engulfed my own, but the madness of battle remained upon both of us. When
Barnar landed us on the clifftop he had to act fast to save Wimfort's
life. The lad, who had the fight of a drenched cat, was obliviously
kicking my shins and clawing my face as I, singlemindedly, throttled him,
while trying to grab his hands and stifle their assault. His face swelled
above my fist, purple as an eggplant, but he didn't seem to care about
being strangled-he wanted my life and nothing else. I began doing my
lunatic all to fold him up small enough so I could pound him flat with a
rock. My legs had more lumps on them than a mile of city street has
cobbles, and the little beast had clawed my arms to such a tatters they
looked like I'd been scrubbing them with rose-bushes. I'm not sure how my
friend managed to pull us apart, but fortunately the fit waned almost
immediately after we were separated. 

The boy sat up groggily and set about, cautiously, trying to get some
breath through his bruised windpipe. He sounded like a bellows with the
nozzle rusted half-shut. I limped about until some of my blood had
forsaken my many bruises and returned to my veins. I hobbled to and fro,
marveling at the disastrous condition of my shins. 

When Barnar saw we were at peace, he sat down to rest from his exertions.
As he sat there, he started to laugh. Once he got started, he warmed right
up to it. He set himself to laugh in a big, methodical way, sending a
great, stately braying sound out across that festering sea. It took more
and more of his strength, that laugh, and finally he had to lie on his
back and give it his all. I didn't join him at first. 

"Just look at you there," I snapped, "just haw-hawing away, snug as a hog
in muck." 

Barnar fought to breathe, to speak: "You should have . . ." (Some further
struggle) " . . . You should have seen yourself!" (A gurgle, and some more
braying.) "You looked like two puppets . . . whose handler was having a
seizure! . . . I almost . . . dropped you!" 

This last amusing thought was too much for him, and he went off again. I
began to join him, half just to irritate the boy, who was taking on a pout
of bitterness and injury as he came back to himself. "You rotten,
swaggering bullies!" he shouted at us. It was meant as a preamble, but he
stopped short, snagged on the fact that we had just pulled him out of a
very deadly mistake. It didn't soften him toward us. As any spoiled child
will do, he punished us for making him feel guilty by hating us more. The
incident didn't really prove anything to him, since he had only half
disbelieved our warnings against the amphorae in the first place. And it
left intact the hateful fact of our control over him. After staring at us
a moment, he said bitterly: "You just refuse to see the importance of the
Elixir! It's worth any risk. Don't you see that if we brought some back,
you would be rich beyond your most insanely greedy dreams?" 

Barnar and I traded a look, and then stared back at him. Our humor had
left us. It was more than sad, the eternal unteachabillty of youth. 

"Wimfort," I said at last, "I speak this with all gravity-without malice
or ill will. But may all the nameless dwellers in the Black Crack itself
prevent you from ever accomplishing your desire. I swear that we will
always do our utmost to thwart your efforts in that direction. And now we
must march. We crave the sun, Barnar and I, and the wind and the stars.
Our souls are perishing to take up the thread of our proper lives. And so
would yours be too, if you were not the young idiot you are." 

XVII 

The essence of nightmare lies less in the simple experience of horrors
than in the unpreventable fruition of horrors foreknown. And when we
turned inland from the sea, we entered our ordeal's most nightmarish
phase. 

We knew, in large part, what awaited us, and consequently we advanced
armed with strategies-bleak-hearted, but murderously determined to
dispense more damage than we endured, and to endure far less than our
coming hither had caused us. In such a spirit, I say, we advanced. We
advanced to encounter a perfect series of disasters-to meet each of our
wisely prepared-for enemies with collision force, and come off twice as
scathed as our first encounters with them had left us. The reason? The
reason, in a word, was Master Wimfort, Rod-Master-apparent of the city of
Kine Gather. 

To evoke that train of extravagant missteps in any detail is a task from
which my hand rebels. Calamity struck us with such ruthless regularity
that those hours of fevered scrambling achieved-for me-the quality of
Damnation itself, of entrapment beneath the Wheel of Woe where it grinds
out its eternal reiterations of misery and peril. 

The boy lost no time hitting his stride. The salt dunes' only predators
were big-jawed beings which laired like ant-lions in plainly visible
funnels whose avoidance was easy. Then we hit the first rough spot,
announced by greasy black smoke which overlay and stained the dunes for
miles in advance of its actual frontier. And the roaring of it outreached
its smoke, for it was a place of furious conflagration. Flesh was the
universal material of that jumbled terrain, knit of welded bodies both
human and demonic, and all that flesh was toweringly aflame. Crazed,
veering winds raised the flame into peaks and harvested it, tearing it up
by its sizzling roots of skin and blowing flesh and flame alike to rags
and tatters that came driving at you like a blizzard. The living fuel
sundered, body fragments wheeled before the gale till they were re-welded
by impact against the first feature of that landscape that intercepted
their flight, while roaring within the roaring of the fire were these
victims' million voices, which rose in grieving unison, intact above their
molten, broken bodies. 

Our tactic here was to run shoulder to shoulder ahead of the boy, the two
of us forming a kind of prow to cleave the wind, while the fire-clots
splashed off our joined shields. Wimfort ran close behind in the lee we
made him. The wind's shifting had us staggering and stumbling. We had to
run as much as possible against the wind in order to keep our shields
between us and the burning flesh. This, when it struck us, clung to
us-sometimes in the most literal way when hands, claws or entire limbs of
it hit us and tried to wrestle the shields from our grips, and wherever
that flesh touched ours, ours came away. 

We were well across this zone, and were keeping the bulk of the fiery
carnage off our charge, when a few bits of flame began to get round to him
on a back-draft-negligible bits, no more than we were constantly being
singed with all over our bodies, but they caused Wimfort such a lively
sense of discomfort that he panicked, and bolted from our cover. He began
a lateral drive which he almost immediately aborted at the onslaught of a
big fragment-a whole blazing torso, in fact, which spun toward him, its
arms spread to wrap him in a crackling hug. Barnar had turned and reached
out his free arm to pull the boy back to cover, and when Wimfort ducked,
the burning body sailed over him and smashed into my friend's embrace. The
boy, mindful only of his own stinging flesh now that we no longer covered
him, seized my shield and tried to wrestle it from me while I was helping
Barnar peel the pyro-nomad from his chain mail, which was already
cherry-red with the heat. Whole steaks of our skin came off in that grisly
grappling, while the boy's wild assaults endlessly frustrated my efforts
to use my sword as a prybar on Barnar's tormentor without killing my
friend in the process. When pain and desperation grew too much, I knocked
Wimfort senseless, and then I was able to help Barnar to a quick
disentanglement. I tossed the boy across my shoulder and we fled. 

The fields of fire gave place to orchard country-squat trees of
leatherlike, veiny foliage studded with wrinkled blue fruit that gave off
a delicious fragrance. We had no unguents, and our burns were an agony
beneath our armor. With scant ceremony we told Wimfort that he was not to
pluck or even touch this fruit-that we were going to make a brisk, direct
march through this territory, that he was going to hold the position we
assigned him throughout, and that there was no more to the affair than
that. 

Naturally, there proved to be a great deal more to it than that. We'd cut
Wimfort a staff for the trek, and he expressed his resentment of things in
general by prodding curiously with it at this fruit or that whenever our
eyes were not on him. We learned he was doing this because, inevitably,
one of his idle, resentful little pokes brought the fruit down. That which
we had been too weary and curt to describe to him came to pass-with the
first fruit, every other one on the tree dropped off. The leaves came with
them, for these were the wings of those plump little monsters, all of
whose bodies split open in fang-rimmed mouths as they converged in a
ravenous swarm upon the three of us. 

For this particular eventuality we had formulated a very clear strategy,
and Barnar communicated this to Wimfort: "Run for your life!" he bellowed,
and he and I set the boy an example which, at that moment, we didn't
really care whether he followed or not. But in fact, he outstripped us,
and nearly knocked me off my feet in so doing. 

By the Crack, how that lad could run! He was, in all seriousness, an
unusually gifted runner-just how gifted we had yet, to our sorrow, to
learn, though we were beginning to realize it. He was long-legged and,
though not quite yet at his full frame-size, already deep-lunged. In him,
we saw the image of our own plight ahead of us during that long sprint
beneath those trees all fat and gravid with the clustered swarms of
razor-fanged hungers. Given even the briefest contact, they clipped a bite
of skin off you as big as an Astrygal twenty-gelding piece. They taxed us
sorely, though we swatted them with our shields, which grew heavier with
their fig-soft, impact-flattened bodies, and dragged at our flight. When
near at hand, the loathsome things smelt putrescent, and as they swooped
at us they hissed feverish little curses, and derogatory personal remarks.
Even when we had thinned them out till they posed no further danger, it
remained a pleasure-indeed, a vindictive obsession-to smash them, and when
we were at last outside the frontier of the orchard-land, we shed our
gear, arranged ourselves back to back, and proceeded, methodically, to
hammer every last one of the stubborn little abominations flat. We stood
thus-our arms, cheeks, shins all spotted with red bites, our eyes insanely
bright-and feasted on their annihilation. Wimfort, finding himself
similarly beset with hangers-on, ran back to us and howled at us to kill
his too, and so enthralled were we by the task, that we actually did this
for him. 

After that we rested, hid, and lay still for a time. It was perhaps a day
or two, for our wounds had begun to scab, and the sharpest edges of their
pain had dulled when we again proceeded. Just before we set out, we had an
earnest talk with Wimfort. We were in a gully in a low hillside, and I
pointed out to the plain before us. 

"Do you see, Wimfort, yonder there, where those flatlands get so much
paler?" 

"I suppose so." 

"Well, that's where we start running into the bog. It's a kind of swamp,
teeming with men and women, you understand? With males and females. Tens
of thousands of them, all of them . . . moving together." I paused,
feeling that this sounded lame. "Listen Wimfort," I said, "don't be
offended, but I must ask you. Do you know how babies are made?" 

He gave me a look of enormous scorn. He looked up at the luminous murk
that was our sky, as if to call witness to his trials at the hands of
dolts. He disdained to answer. 

I was relieved. He didn't know, then, or at least, knew only in a remote
way. At his age the question is tricky, but I had read him as a prudish
boy like many privately extravagant and ambitious types-no young
tom-about-town he, fascinated by the flesh perhaps, but still feeling some
compromise to his dignity in it. I handed him a cudgel I had whiffled him
from a thorn root. 

"Well," I said, "that's what the men and women and girls and boys and
other assorted creatures in the bog are all doing-that, and variations of
it. The danger is not really great, if you just remember not to be
attracted into their activities. Anyone who's really trying can make his
way through them, though it takes some hard struggling in the thickest
places. Just remember that the fun is all on the surface there-if you let
yourself be pulled deeper into the matter, you'll find yourself being
swiftly destroyed. As before, momentum is everything. Don't pause, just
drive forward, whacking away like a thousand devils." 

It seems to me now that I hardly need to describe what ensued. When we
reached it, we entered the swamp at a run, zigzagging among the mossy
knolls and black, weed-slick pools where the small, outlying knots of nude
humanity mingled with miscellaneous demonry in orgiastic combination. 

And our momentum held even after the orgiasts grew in number, lay ever
more profusely heaped till sweaty hills of them coalesced, and the muddy
earth was blanketed by their lascivious coalition. A whinnying, jabbering
clamor arose from that voluptuary fen, a vast, ragged oratorio of lust,
with a muffled accompaniment of something else. We reached the thick of
it, and it was time to clear ourselves a path with club-work. 

Coming down, we'd lacked knouts and had used our spear-butts. On either
trip our swords would have been the most efficient weapons, but it was
humanly impossible to use them. It was horrible enough using the clubs,
even on the men, and inexpressibly so on the women. To stir the arm for
such an act-not once, but countless times-was dead contrary to what every
fiber of my being wanted-nay, demanded. In a certain way, that may have
been the worst mauling I got on the entire journey-wading through the
slippery shoals, hammering through the hot, coaxing embraces of urgent
arms and pleading fingers. It was a violence to my soul. Each bruise I
gave, my own nerves wore. 

For the first long moments of this excruciating immersion, we kept a fair
pace. Then the lad, who went between us, started lagging. He would fall
behind me until Barnar would catch up to him and thrust him on. Ever more
balkily he advanced. Then I looked back and saw his eyes, even as I
watched them, grow rapt, his gaze become dangerously entangled in the
carnal weave. Snap! He came to a full stop, dropped his club, and dove
into the squirming heap. 

The succeeding frenzy, just at its fullest pitch, caused me an eerily calm
moment of remembrance. I had done fisher-work on the Ahnook trawlers when
I was young, and there had been one late afternoon when we made a
stupendous strike. Our greedy skipper plied the nets with epileptic ardor
and buried our decks with a spill-over haul, in a mad race to ship every
possible ounce before it grew dark. Half of us had to stand the decks with
spars in our hands and club the fish like a devil with his arse afire.
They were shadfinns, big as dogs with the fight of wild pigs. In the
dimming light, on the heaving, slithering decks, walloping and dancing
berserkly, I had for a short eternity fore-lived what I lived now. 

The boy hadn't noticed anything below the upper layers, and kicked at us
furiously as he wormed himself into the endless grapple. Instantly, he had
a dozen allies aiding his immersion. I felt for a horrified time the
certainty that we wouldn't get him out in time. For even in our
distraction, we got many glimpses of the deeper action of the fiendish
congress. Several layers down you saw a kissing mouth that suddenly
grinned and sank its teeth in flesh. A hand with a thumb and four bleeding
stumps was seen to pound helplessly against a massive thigh. A rib broke
under a powerful knee. From down there you heard the smothered
undercurrent of a different oratorio, one of horror covered by the chorus
of lust. 

Wimfort gave us great thumping kicks of painful authority. When we could
spare a blow from the rest, we parried him and struck at his legs to stun
them. He sank under the first layer of stroking hands and worshipful lips,
and suddenly pain stamped his face, and he howled. He began to fight like
mad to become free, but now his allies had become his captors. 

In desperation I drew my sword. I lopped off a man's arm, another's foot.
Mercifully, this sent a shock through the massed orgy-arms recoiled and
torsos writhed away. This helped Barnar as much as it did Wimfort, for
several thralls had gotten arm-locks on my friend's neck, and in the last
instant before he was freed I saw his left ear bitten off flush with his
head. 

I must say that Wimfort, when he had his feet under him again and his club
restored him, began to ply this weapon with a vigor that greatly sped our
passage through and exit from that region. This performance had purchased
him a measure of forgiveness from our hearts by the time we had sat down
in a safe place to bind Barnar's wound. 

But then Wimfort, that prodigal youth, managed to squander all he had
purchased in a few brief words. He was looking at us absentmindedly when
suddenly his eyes narrowed, and a look of pleased discovery dawned on his
features. He laughed triumphantly, in innocent enjoyment of his enemies'
defects-for I must mention that, some years prior to this time, I had had
the misfortune to lose most of my own left ear. 

"Your ears!" Wimfort cried, and laughed again. "Now the two of you match!"

XVIII 

We gave ourselves another, shorter period of rest, until Barnar's wound
had scabbed cleanly and stopped throbbing, and then, once again, we
marched. Endlessly. 

Long and long we marched. Unendingly we marched. We marched, and Wimfort
nagged us. 

The boy was unquestionably a great natural talent, if not an outright
genius, in the art of complaint-tirelessly inventive, and completely
shameless in the matter of interpreting his dissatisfactions as someone
else's-anyone else's-criminal failures to content him. 

And so we marched, and Wimfort, marching too, also nagged us, and at
length the sheer influx of his voice, relentless as the surf's assault on
the rock, began to expunge my mind, scour away any thought of my own that
tried to sprout from my fast-eroding brain. 

"STOP!" I bellowed. "Stop right here, sit down, shut up, and listen." 

Wimfort skidded down the slick, pink knoll I had just descended, and
obeyed three of my commands. Given the loathsome wetness of this spongy
terrain, I didn't insist on his sitting down. I said to him, "Now. Your
mouth will remain shut, and your ears open, until I'm finished; First: you
are aware of the Life-Hooks in us which hind us to Charnall, who is in
your father's power. Second: you were present-though you may not have been
listening, since the discussion concerned persons other than yourself-when
we asked Gildmirth to remove the hooks for us. He told us that, as the
hook is a primitive, strongly talisman-linked spell, we stood a two-to-one
chance of having our hearts ripped out if he removed the hooks from us
without using the control-ring. Now here is the new bit of information I
want you to have. A while ago Barnar and I had a lengthy conversation out
of your hearing in which we pondered, at length, the relative merits of
abandoning you, returning to the Privateer and taking our chances on the
operation, so that we could win the freedom to escape this place without
the burden of yourself encumbering our efforts. We weighed the merits of
this course of action for a long time, Wimfort. Do you understand my
meaning? I am in no manner joking." 

We marched on. I knew my speechmaking had bought us only a morose and
temporary silence from the boy. I was undefinably uneasy, aware of a
peculiarly sharpened rancor toward the boy, and aware that my patience
with him was dangerously frayed, while at the same time I acknowledged
that, though intolerable, he had been no worse than usual lately.
Moreover, I deeply disliked this zone we had recently entered, and yet so
far it had been remarkably free of dangers and difficulties alike. 

I couldn't discover what it was about the place that had my back up like
this. It had quickly become clear that the impossibility of precisely
retracing the path of our descent had resulted in the deeper penetration
of an area which, evidently, we had encountered only peripherally before.
And though this left the dangers of the leagues ahead an unknown factor,
at least the unfamiliar territories were proving no more perilous than the
remembered one had been. Here, for instance, in these wet, pillowy fields
of rosy tissue, it was easy enough to fall, so ridged and seamed the stuff
was, so scalloped, wrinkled and whorled-but then it was nearly impossible
to suffer hurt from a fall on such moist, blubberous ground. The prospect
was wide and unthreatening. Here and there from the twisted, velvety
billows rose huge buttes and mesas of the whitest, smoothest stone we had
ever seen. Out toward the limit of our vision the plains could be seen to
grow smoother and paler, and to be thinly forested with some kind of
growth. 

We found that whiter zone to be sharply demarcated from the pink one. It
was a wholly different material, tough and dry, and faintly resilient. And
it was quite smooth, save for a system of shallow striations that printed
on its surface vast, swirled patterns reminiscent of the wave lines the
wind engraves on untrodden sands. 

As for the treelike things that sprouted from it-quite sparsely at
first-they were harmless things, but inexplicably repellent. Their
substance-wet, purple twists of bundled fiber-resembled nothing so much as
raw meat, thick strips of it all torqued and braided together in rubbery
stalks and flaccid branchings. Pythons of translucent, silvery cord were
complexly spliced throughout this tree-meat, and their network corruscated
faintly, with a rhythm roughly matching that of the trees' movement. For
all these growths stirred vaguely in the windless air, and faint,
intricate shudders of torsion incessantly agitated their limber frames. 

The ground began to rise. The trees grew ever denser and ever bigger. As
the sticky forest closed in above and around us, my oppression of spirit
grew almost crushing. 

"Listen," Barnar said. "Do you hear something?" I shook my head angrily,
and didn't answer. I had been hearing something, a slow-cadenced
booming-vast, but also soft, diffuse. The grade got steeper. We wound
through the carnal jungle up toward what promised to be a major
ridge-crest. 

When we topped that crest, I saw everything in an instant-my own stupidity
first and clearest of all. The land fell away before us in a broad,
shallow valley more thickly forested than the ridge, and with a different
growth-with black hair, jungle-high. Erupting from the valley's basin at
its farther end was an immense mountain. Its crest was lost in the
phosphorescent gloom of the subworld's vaulted ceiling, but its smooth and
tapered shape was immediately identifiable. One stark vein ran up across
this mountain's face, and a swarm of aerial entities hovered near the vein
at about its midway point 

It was the mountain we had been hearing, and whose thunder now rolled
unhindered across the shaggy lowlands-a thrumming, buzzing knell; a sound
as of a million bowstrings simultaneously loosed. Wonderingly, Barnar
said: "We've found-we are in-the giant Sazmazm." I nodded, still gazing.
Then we jumped, our wits returning to us at the same moment. We whirled
around. Wimfort was gone. 

Though we failed to pick up his trail, there was at least no doubt about
the direction the boy would be taking. He would be impossible to spot
until he reached the clear ground at the mountain's foot, the very
threshold of his lunatic desire. Seeking him en route in the giant's
snarled pectoral pelt would be futility itself, giving the young idiot
plenty of time to destroy himself-and thereby us-unhindered when he
reached the perimeter protected by Sazmazm's tertiary slaves. 

So down we went, and threw ourselves into the arduous, oily struggle,
which was hard enough to let us hope that our greater strength would
enable us to reach the mountain before the boy. Our bejungled approach
denied us any chance to view the situation we were nearing. When at length
we stepped onto clear ground again, we were in a scorched, war-torn zone,
hideously heaped with the wreckage of war, and beyond these intervening
dunes of dead, the visible part of the mountain bulked huge, fearsome in
its nearness. 

We stood numb awhile. Some high point had to be reached from which we
could overlook this cyclopaean disorder. 

"The best thing seems to be to look at what we're dealing with," Barnar
said bleakly. "And then try to anticipate where he'll choose to make his
rush." 

I nodded, and another silence passed. I answered: "If he has formed a plan
at all, and doesn't just rush in on a blind faith in his luck." 

We sighed. All was speed now, but a melancholy languor was on us.
Insistent despair, soliciting yet again our weary hearts, woke no more
fight in us. We were almost emptied, and beginning at last to accept our
destruction. 

Glumly, with audible loathing, Barnar said, "That seems to be our only
adequate vantage." He nodded toward the hirsute carcass of a gigantic
slothlike beast that lay on a debris-hill of smaller corpses and their
broken chariots of war. Somehow, we started walking toward it. "Yes," I
said, "we can climb up that spike it has strapped to its head." 

It appeared that the beast had died among-upon-its own cavalry. The
eyeless, beetle-jawed apes whose multitudes underlay it had died in a
wreckage of chariots whose prows projected great spikes identical in all
but size to that the giant wore. These eyeless charioteers were small only
beside their monstrous ally, for their vehicles were the size of galleons,
and they, when standing, could have spread their nasty jaw-scythes and
clipped the crow's nest off an Astrygal windjammer's mainmast. 

The sloth's flesh, puddling in cheesy wrinkles around each huge shaft of
its hair, stank. Dead fleas the size of yearling horn-bows lay half sunk
in the charnal mire. We kept to the spine-ridge, which was a little balder
of this stinking pelt. "Corpse-fleas!" Barnar raged as we clambered past
an ear, and stumbled onto the knoll-top of the cranium. "That vile,
willful little moron makes corpse-fleas of us!" 

Death had frozen the giant's head at only a slight forward droop, and the
steel spike strapped to his forehead jutted a hundred feet farther out at
the half-vertical. We started shinning up the bright needle. Already we
saw all we needed to, but we climbed mechanically, up and out, our eyes
lost in what confronted us. 

The dreadful grandeur of that monstrous, chambered muscle, shapely as a
Shallows wine-jar, bottling the colossal vintage of the demon-giant's
vitality, thundering endlessly with the stoppered power of these
contents-it was more than a life of looking could truly take in. The great
vein serpenting up its flank was itself a thing of awe. The pulse and
volume of more than one mighty river charged through that gargantuan blue
pipe. 

And we now saw just how that vein was tapped, and saw more clearly too the
genesis of those things which tapped it. A tough, glassy capsule both
sheathed and vaguely displayed the fibers of the heart's underlying sinew.
And all this inmost, toiling demon-meat was infested-riddled with encysted
shapes, slimly tapered ellipsoids like sarcophagi of carven wood. 

These could be seen at every stage of growth, in fluid-filled bubbles that
slowly swelled with their growth, sundering the muscle of the giant's
tortured, consenting heart. Ultimately the bubbles' swelling ruptured the
heart-sheath. Everywhere across the living wall, stilt-legged, stingered
monsters were to be seen wrenching their drenched and folded wings from
broken natal husks. They hatched, they spread and dried their wings, they
took flight, and moved toward the vein. 

Around halfway up its length, at perhaps half a dozen different places,
the vein had been clamped by vast brazen collars, each of which bristled
with steel couplings. It was upon these couplings that the winged
Regatherers converged. Each one in its turn sank its caudal barb into one
of those sockets and waited as its hive-mates worked spigot-wheels, which
diverted into its tail-bulb its alloted iota of the Master's blood. Not
infrequently, the strength of the current they tapped mocked their
precautions. Spigot-wheels would stick, and helplessly coupled individuals
would claw the air with panicked legs, their bodies swiftly burgeoning,
then exploding in a fine, red mist. Then every nearby worker flew crazily,
lapping the bright spray from the air till others succeeded in reclosing
the spigot, whereat-unfalteringly-another would take its turn at the
coupling. 

They had emerged only to drink in this manner, and, having drunk, each
immediately set about the work of its return. Each engorged Regatherer
began a steady, hovering descent toward the war-strewn flesh that floored
this cosmos. Each settled on this floor in the zone closest to the heart
and clearest of debris. Settling on this floor, each sank its jaws into
its master's skin and chewed until its head was wholly buried. While its
front end ate this anchorage, each monster's stern half compacted-its legs
and wings folding up tight-and started a rhythmic convulsion. Swiftly, the
folded body began to split. Now it was a husk. A great, shining maggot's
body moulted from the husk and started worming its way underground after
its sunken head. The obscene, ribbed barrel of its new body was little
more than a cistern, a tiny-legged tank wherein to convey another jot of
the tyrant back to his dominions. And though these grubs ate their way all
the way under with truly sickening speed, their tapered body-casks did
protrude defenseless for several minutes during the process of their
descent. We came to this realization at about the same time. 

"Hmph," Barnar muttered. "Notice the next-highest ones waiting their turn
to settle down and moult-they hover on guard over their siblings while
they wait for them to dig in." 

"Yes. Still, it has that first-glance look of feasibility. If the boy
takes note of it, his eagerness will see it as a sure-fire tactic." 

Barnar nodded, somewhat disinterestedly. It was the spectacle as a whole
that absorbed him. "Such a labor," he mused. "Since the Red Millennium,
did he say?" 

"Yes." 

"Did they ever sing you that cradle song when you were small?" Amazingly,
he began to sing me the song he meant. His frayed basso rendered the
simple tune with surprising sweetness: 

". . . And that Neverquit bird, though small 

and weak, 

Lights again and again on Neverend Strand. 

And he packs into his narrow beak 

One little bite of that infinite beach, 

And recrosses the sea till he reaches that land- 

That land of his own he is building to stand 

In a sun-blessed place beyond harm's reach, 

That land he is making with stolen sand 

And a will that will not be denied what it seeks." 

It made me smile to hear those lines, which I knew, sung here by my friend
as we hung there dreamingly, hugging the great sloth's spike-tip, looking
rather like sloths ourselves, I suppose. 

"And when they've regathered his essence," I asked, "when the Elixir's
been brought below again? Though Sazmazm's spirit might live in the brew,
what freedom will the titan have if he must lie in a vat, a bottled ocean
of bodiless soul?" 

"You know, I asked Gildmirth that question. He didn't have an answer. He'd
heard a rumor that the giant's slave-hosts have long been at work building
him a second body out of stone." 

I shuddered, trying to throw off the stupor that lay on me. "Come on," I
said. "We have to try. The effort is utterly pointless, but inaction seems
an even greater agony." 

We shinned down the spike, and repeated the verminous traversal of our
dead host. We reached the major claw of its left hind paw and, with a
leap, departed from its rankly meadowed slopes. We jogged toward the naked
mountain, carrying our shields and spears at half-ready, watching for
ambuscades-for we had noted that many of the giant dead surrounding us had
been quarried for their meat. The carrion-appetites that haunt all
battlefields most surely haunted this one. Mechanically we jogged toward
the moulting grounds, near the heart of the thunder that filled this
morgue-ish world. 

And we had almost reached it when we came across a corpse worth pausing
over. It was one of the stingered, stilt-legged giants, a dead Regatherer.
A toppled siege-tower had, in falling, sunk a spur of its broken beamwork
through the middle segment of the creature, which was the segment its legs
and wings were jointed to. The spur had pierced it laterally so that the
corpse lay on its side. It was huge partly in its great lengths of leg and
wing, for its slim-built, tri-part body had perhaps somewhat less overall
bulk to it that the hull of a mid-sized merchantman. 

We took our lances to it, climbing to prod its body for vulnerable
features. It was everywhere as supple as leather and as unpierceable as
steel. Finally we stood near its head, looking up bitterly at its face. I
saw in the black moons of its eye-bulbs, in the cruel barbs and shears of
its mouth-tool, a pitiless amusement with our littleness, our urgent,
dwarfish ambition to do its demon hugeness harm. In my gloom and
mortification I contrived, unthinkingly, an excuse to hurl my hate against
the thing. 

"You see between its eyes and jaws that 'X' of muscles, or nerves, or
whatever they are? X marks the spot." 

I got a lot of run behind my throw, and heaved the stick up toward the
alien planets of its extinguished eyes. 

Instant death missed Barnar by somewhat less than a handsbreadth, for that
was how far he chanced to be standing beyond the arc of the stinger's
thrust. Whip-quick, the great, pinned corpse folded in half on the iron
axis of its implement. Its caudal barb stabbed forward with a force that
imbedded it deep in the chestplates its legs were jointed to. I saw, above
the spasmic working of its mouth-tool, the butt of my spear protruding
from the softness it had found to en-scabbard more than two-thirds of its
length. 

We did not risk the convulsions that might attend retrieving my spear, and
found me another among the weapons so profusely littering that waste of
carcasses and martial engines. 

A short time later we were edging out to the limits of our cover amid the
battle-debris, and viewing the more barren moulting-ground's vast
perimeter. Looking out over the impossibly broad frontier we planned to
prevent the nimble, determined Wimfort from crossing, Barnar burst out
with a short, disgusted laugh. "Let him be damned," he said. "He'll break
cover where we can see him in time to catch him, or he won't. I'm going to
sit here awhile, and sooner or later we'll find out which of these it is
to be. To hell with everything else. I'm going to enjoy the simple
pleasure of sitting still for as long as the opportunity lasts." 

I thwacked his shoulder consolingly, but couldn't come up with any
comforting reply. I wandered around a bit, looking listlessly along the
frontier. And, a quarter-mile or so down that border, across a little
clearing that separated two large heaps of wreckage, a small shape moved.
The movement was abrupt and dodgy, like that of a lizard sprinting from
covert to covert. I was already running, half-crouched, weaving toward the
place, keeping all the cover I could manage between me and it. 

So fast I went, more flying than afoot! On what strength, drawn from
where, I'll never know. I'd more than half reached him when I saw my
quarry again-back of a last trash heap bordering the open grounds. There
Master Wimfort crouched, and gathered himself for the spring. Just then he
put me in mind of a young lion on a first kill. There was that clownish
lack of finesse alloyed with mortal seriousness in precisely equal
measure. The boy was no longer, in strict truth, a boy. He was abundantly
ridiculous, and he was also truly kill-ready. He had been at work on a
weapon of scavenged parts. He'd gotten a seven-foot fragment of heavy
spear-haft. He'd lashed a battle-ax by the handle to one end of this, and
had spiked and lashed to the other the broken blade of a splendid
sword-like a falchion, broad and razor-edged at the point. Around his
haft's balance point he'd wrapped himself two hand-grips of leather
cording. His strategy was plain from his weapon's design. This was no
casting-spear-it was to be used like a jousting-lance, the ax at the other
end providing an option of chopping blows as well. 

Even as I studied him I neared him at a mute-foot sprint, praying for the
few seconds' luck that would suffice to get me within range to outrun him
before he could bolt far enough onto the moulting-ground to bring the
titan slaves down on us. Four seconds would have done it, and of course, I
didn't get them. He saw me, and without the shadow of a hesitation, leapt
out on the wounded, wormy plain below the mountain. We pounded across that
meaty resilience, our desperate drives converging toward one of the
tertiary monsters lying in full moult a scant three-hundred strides ahead
of me. 

Alas! A scant two hundred and fifty strides ahead of Wimfort. But our ruin
was already accomplished-I saw it then, though I couldn't curb the insane
persistence of my legs' pursuit. The boy was oblivious. Still running at
full tilt, he raised and couched his lance. Beyond and above him, a
stingered giant hanging five hundred feet off the plain swung around to us
the remorseless black globes of its eyes, and sank gigantically toward us.

The great abdominal cask that was Wimfort's target had thrashed itself
clear of its parent-husk and gotten about half-submerged. Up-ended, it
towered ponderously, rocking with its gluttonous labor. The boy, uttering
a shout of rapture, drove his point full against it. 

Obliquely, I noted his weapon's fragmentation, his collision with the
grub, his stunned fall-foreseeable details. Primarily, I watched the
Regatherer's dive toward the boy as I ran to intercept it. It loomed down,
its spike drawn up and under, strike-ready. I vaulted up with the cast,
flung myself into free-fall after it to put some heft behind the stick's
flight. My eyes popped with the snap I put into the toss. My fall back to
the ground seemed almost leisurely as I watched my spear take root,
watched the giant's dive become a death plunge as it folded convulsively
in the air and sank its stinger hilt-deep in its own swollen underbelly. I
tucked my head, hit the ground, rolled to my feet. The Regatherer's cargo
spilled in black cascades behind it as it tumbled toward its ruin. I ran
toward the boy, stumbling once at the shock of the giant's fall. 

The Regatherer's torrential wound had drenched him, yet he was almost dry
by the time I got to him. Not from that black brew's running off him, but
from its soaking into him. It drained into his skin as quick as water
melts into dry sand. But his hair was still half soaked, and in picking
him up, I slipped my left hand under the back of his head to support it,
and the demon blood sizzled on my palm. 

I had to put him down again-he was coming around in any case-and dance
around trying to shake the pain off my hand. The stuff couldn't be rubbed
off; it burnt me for a bit, and then it became a painless black dust which
I blew on, and was cleansed of. Yet I must testify to an unnatural thing
the Elixir bred in the part of me it touched-for since that occasion I
have been what I never was before-perfectly ambidexterous, and have long
behaved right-handedly from habit only. 

Seeing the boy gain his feet, I seized his arm and hauled him back toward
the cover of the battle-zone's mortuary maze. He promptly had his legs
well under him and was running with a will. Having what he sought, and
craving to get it safely home, the boy now became scrupulously
cooperative. At least two Regatherers were moving toward their fallen
sibling already, and scanning around for an enemy. I told Wimfort where to
dive and he did it instantly and flawlessly-under a toppled chariot. I
flung myself supine on a heap of relatively anthropoid dead, and ceased to
move. 

We were not discerned-the stingered giants were soon patroling the area in
force, but not knowing what they sought, they seemingly spared scant
lookout for things of our order of magnitude. How many whales ever die of
fleas? And once a second squad of Regatherers had completed our victim's
obsequies-completed, that is, the lapping-up of all that its broken belly
had spilled-these patrollers retired, and returned to their
hovering-places above the moulting-grounds. 

Just as we were setting out to find Barnar, he came stealing into the
clearing. Together we guided our now obedient charge to a clearing farther
back from the unspeakable mountain. Barnar had seen what had happened, and
we found nothing to say to each other. We sat ourselves down, not knowing
what else to do. Listlessly, I began a minor repair of my boot-binding. My
friend sprawled back against a broken battering-ram. He balanced his ax on
the toe of its handle on his fingers' ends. He would hold it upright
awhile, shifting his hand to keep the balance, and then he would let it
fall forward through one full turn and bite into the cheesy white
world-floor-into Sazmazm's vastly mislaid skin. Then he would pry it free,
and repeat the process. 

For a while, Wimfort poked around cheerfully in the debris, savoring his
deed, his successful rite of passage into the pantheon of heroes. He sang,
he whistled, he whispered to himself, like a carefree child gathering
shells in a beach. 

But soon his exaltation began to fill him, swelled in him unendurably. Big
with the sense of being already in possession of everything the Elixir
could obtain for him, continued calm became a visible agony for Wimfort.
He'd been poking with a mace he'd found among a heap of armor, and
muttering ever more feverishly. I saw him pry out of the heap a
particularly fine piece of work-a brazen shield, graven with a stylized
earth-wheel surrounded by astronomical symbols. I thought he was going to
try its weight. Instead, he began to hit it with the mace. Each blow
released an even greater shout of triumph from him. He danced like a
demon, whooping and smiting the shield till it rang like a gong, marring
the artful metalwork. By the time Barnar had wrenched the mace from his
hands, he was entirely transported. He grinned unseeingly at us, who were
at that moment in his eyes but two more of the legion of scoffing oafs who
had long mocked and thwarted his ambitions, and who were now, with the
rest, about to witness his vindication. 

"Ha!" he shouted. "Ha! Now who's going to be laughing, and who's going to
be gnashing his teeth, eh? How's it going to be now? What about the
jab¢bos, hey my friends? Do those slimy Priors argue and debate with us
about our ancestors' sacred herds? Do they presume to tell us who our
herds belong to? Will they still presume, now that there's no tract of
earth I can't encompass with the mere spreading out of my ten fingers
here? Oh, mark me now, my friends: Let my return be on First Market Day;
and if that's the day I get back home, then on Second Market Day, let them
step outdoors and look about their countryside, and see if they can find
anywhere in all Prior Kairnlaw one jab¢bo, one blade of grass, or even one
muddy streamlet in all their parched dominions. They won't find any of
those things-but then, they won't even get outside their doors to look for
them either. Because before first light on that same morning, their own
swords will jump from the scabbards on their wall-pegs, and hew them all
to pieces in their beds, and spare not a babe or a greybeard among them!" 

There was more, much more. When his histrionics ceased to be dangerously
loud, they abated nothing in intensity, and we sat down again, unspeakably
melancholy, and let them roll through our ears. There was a lot about
Kine-Gather's great future as its nation's capital of rivers, prime
pasture-land, and jab¢bo herds. There was a good deal about which of
Kine-Gather's sister cities would share but subordinately in her fortune,
and expiate their various crimes against her with shovel-work in her
offal-yards. Following this, there was abundant information about every
folk or city the wide world over which had ever had dealings with Latter
Kairnlaw, and about how their fates were to accord with their treatment of
his beloved fatherland. 

We sat morosely as this wealth of data was lavished on us. With our eyes
we questioned one another, and saw no answers. 

XIX 

Freedom! That belabored word! It is a big, empty word, and yet, when some
experience reminds us what freedom is, how clear and particular its
meaning becomes, how unspeakably sweet, and full! I once had the
experience of walking up to that word, and gazing into its measureless
amplitude, upon all that it contains. I could see the word as I approached
it-it looked like a small, raggedly square patch of blue. I walked through
a stony, steel-paved dimness. My mind was mostly numb, with little more
than one idea in it, which I muttered to myself for my own instruction:
"That is freedom." 

I kept walking, and as I got closer to the word it began to fill out. A
minute blackness swam into the blue patch. Its shape told me it was a
hawk, and its size-in telling me its distance-reminded me of the depth of
that blueness. With a pang, I remembered that depth. 

"That is the sky," I pointed out to myself. I began to walk faster. Beyond
the hawk-far beyond-was one small, gauzy scarf of cloud. Steadily I
approached. Distant mountains sprouted from the bottom of the sky's frame,
then the intervening plains unrolled toward me from their feet. 

And then I stood on freedom's very doorstep, and looked directly into it.
It was made of stone and sand and tough, green scrub, and was studded with
blunt, grey mountains on whose crests unmelting snows lay, sugar-white.
And over these lay a blueness so deep and rich you felt it like a chill
down to your bones. Across all of this the winds moved at liberty, and
these winds were inhabited by japes and corbies and hawks and
crooked-winged finches. 

"The thief! The lanky one! He's back!" 

The garrison, all rousing at once to the soldier's cry, swarmed to
assemble. I nodded to myself. The thief, the gaunt one, was back, and the
thick one too. I believe I beamed down at them one brief, idiotic smile
before I went back to beholding freedom. I viewed the inching movement of
a herd of horn-bow being driven across a stream out on the plain. I noted
the low, tender hum the wind made crossing a patch of dry spar-grass just
down the slope from Darkvent. And, observing that the sun was westering
toward a fragile net of cloud-wisps on the horizon, I foresaw the
red-and-gold fire-trellis that would frame its setting in half an hour or
so. After these few brief discernments, it startled me to find that the
garrison was all mounted and drawn up a few yards below the shaft-mouth,
with Charnall and Kamin mounted at their head, and Kamin looking as if
he'd been waiting awhile for my attention. The necessity of focusing my
attention on the Rod-Master caused me to heave a deep sigh. I did it
unthinkingly, and the moment after, realized its agonizing ambiguity to a
father all coiled up to seize on my first expressions for the report of
his son's fate. I almost smiled. 

"We've got your boy back for you, Rod-Master." 

Perhaps some private resolution had frozen his jaw till I should speak the
first word, for it thawed now and his lips parted. Still, nothing came out
of them. 

"Hello Charnall," I smiled. "How does it go with you, my friend?" 

He looked absently into my eyes, rubbing his baldness gently with his left
hand, as if to force into his brain the reality of my return. 

"We knew you were near," he said slowly. "I knew it through the
Life-Hooks." Suddenly, he smiled back at me. "Didn't I foretell it? Didn't
I have a feeling about it? You found the Privateer of Sordon-Head?" 

"We did indeed. He is a rare man, Charnall. A great man." 

"Yes. So I thought he must have been-must be." 

"Show me my son!" It was a choking roar. We looked at Kamin. His beefish
face was congested with rage. He thought we were playing with him-that
there was nothing else in the wide world but his particular concern to
occupy anyone's mind. So like his son he was! But his concern, at least,
was for someone other than himself. 

"I'll show you your son," I told him quietly. "And only that-show him to
you. When our Life-Hooks are removed, your men withdrawn and our payment
arranged before us, when these things are done, we will release him to
you." I turned, and called back down the shaft: "Barnar! Bring him out to
the light!" I turned to Kamin. "Come in, you and Charnall. You can bring
two guards for your person if you distrust us, but no more." 

I almost laughed at the needlessness of the last admonition. Kamin had to
use his most compelling scowl to get even his captain and one other man to
attend him. I led them in, and felt them grow tense behind me when they
heard a rumble welling out toward us. I led them a few strides within and
bade them halt. We watched a murky bubble of torchlight rise at us from
Darkvent's gullet. In the bubble was Barnar, the torch in one hand, and
his other hand on a rope across his shoulder. Beyond him you could just
make out the ore-cart he was hauling up the gentle grade. 

He stopped a short distance from us, lashed the rope to a beam, and waved
cheerily to Charnall. To Kamin he said: "Here's your boy, Rod-Master."
Holding his torch above it, he reached one arm into the cart and sat the
neatly trussed boy upright on the shredded cable we'd packed him in, so
Kamin could see him plainly. 

"Father," the boy said. 

Barnar drew his sword. "And here is our safeguard against any treachery
you might intend. Note the tautness of this rope." He laid the sword's
edge upon it. "The slope here is gentle, but constant. In a few seconds he
would be rolling right along. Farther down, the pitch grows exceedingly
steep." 

"Before anything else," I said to Kamin, "the Life-Hooks Here and now."
The Rod-Master nodded to Charnall. The mage plucked from his tunic a bit
of parchment which his lips voicelessly rehearsed before he set his hand
to my chest and spoke the spell. I did not despise this in him. On the
contrary, in matters of sorcery give me every time the careful plodder
over the slap-dash man. I felt a terrible pain which at first made me
think I had been betrayed. It was the hook coming loose from my heart like
a rusted-fast spike from dried wood, and I recognized what had seemed
agony to be an intense pang of relief. When Charnall had done the same
service for Barnar, my friend took the control-ring from him and pocketed
it. 

From the mouth of the shaft, I showed Kamin where we wanted beasts with
our gold and weapons drawn up, and how far off his men must be deployed,
before we'd let him lead his boy out of the shaft. The Rod-Master didn't
move at first. He looked at me with hate and scorn. "How cooly you
carrion-birds barter with the life of a defenseless boy." 

I was paralyzed with rage myself a moment. All that I might say to him
surged into my throat, and died away there, since I knew its futility. At
last I said: "I tell you this, Oh Rod-Master, and no more than this. In
paying what you do, you underpay us shamelessly. I do not cavil-we asked
as much as we could carry and still outrun you if you proved treacherous.
I don't expect to convince you, but I simply tell you, for the record, we
shall always consider you and your people to be greatly in our debt. And
now, let us have done with one another, for in all truth, I loathe the
very sight of you." 

Stolidly, Kamin turned, then checked himself and, as if in afterthought,
disdainfully waved to Charnall his dismissal. The mage jumped up, clicked
his heels in the air, and then solemnly bowed to his former captor. Kamin
strode out into the waning light-all red and gold on the hillside-and the
three of us, as from another world, watched his arms waving and his
soldiers dispersing to his will. 

Then Charnall looked at us. "I do not believe you have done this," he
said. "And I never really believed you could do it, save in brief flashes
of irrational excitement." 

"We've just had a great deal of irrational excitement," Barnar nodded.
"We'll tell you about it on the way to Shormuth Gate." 

Charnall nodded, smiling. "Shormuth Gate sounds just fine." He turned to
notice the boy then, and made a half-step to approach him. I stayed him
gently. 

"Best not, my friend. He is in a serious kind of shock-as you might
imagine." 

The mage's face darkened. He nodded gravely. "It was something I thought
of when I went so far as to imagine you might find him. How . . . much of
him, psychically speaking, you would be able to bring back after he had
suffered such a captivity." The three of us regarded the boy, who sat in
the cart and stared back at us, his eyes dark and frightened. 

"We've brought you back as much as you see," Barnar said solemnly. The
answer grieved the mage. It startled me-though I had never doubted the
man's bigness of heart-to see his eyes fill with tears just short of
spilling over. He brought himself a little straighter and cleared his
throat, sighed and wiped his eyes briskly on his sleeve. "I remember," he
said, "once having a particularly clear thought about the boy. He was, at
the time, unwillingly practicing his High Archaic hand by copying over one
of the spells I had just procured him. If he had a copy of the spell and
knew how to read it aloud, he had all he needed, he would tell me. He saw
no point in learning how to form the letters on the page. 

"So I was watching him there. He sat hunched over, scowling closely at his
hand as it performed the detested calligraphy, and the thought came to me:
He carries selfish ambition almost to the point of selflessness. And now,
poor boy, he is selfless indeed." 

I squeezed Charnall's shoulder. "Don't feel so badly. The boy's full self
persists, undestroyed, although the rigor of his experiences may have
rendered it remote from us at present." 

The sun had set. The movements of men and beasts, framed for us in
Darkvent's mouth, seemed-in the gold-shot cerulean light-a kind of
swimming, as if the frame held a window into an immense tank of oceanic
light. Their liquid jostling began to show pattern-the mounted forms
retired, and a rank of riderless beasts remained, hobbled together near
the shaftmouth. Three of them were saddled and had packets of arms lashed
to their pommels, and the rest were saddle-bagged, and tight-legged with
the strain of heavy loads. 

I nodded to Barnar. He lifted the boy from the cart, cut his bonds, and
brought him to stand between us on Darkvent's threshold. Kamin was already
climbing toward us. We stood aside from the boy and urged him forward. 

He stepped out uncertainly, seeming to cringe from the open air, as if it
was thronged with harmful presences. "Father," he said to the man who sped
to embrace him; his voice was small, its tone wavering eerily. "I was with
the Bonshad, Father. I was his. I breathed the water, and all the black
smoke that was in it." 

Kamin reached him, grasped his shoulders. Strangely, the boy was not
looking at him now, but at the full moon which had just risen from the
ridgeline directly opposite the still blood-smeared zone of the sun's
vanishing. His father, frightened by the oddness of his look, embraced
him. 

It was an embrace from which the Rod-Master quickly recoiled. The boy's
limbs never stirred, but his whole frame made a terrible, fierce movement,
a growth. His body swelled to almost twice its mass, and lost an inch of
its height. His eyes grew bigger, his mouth sank within a pale, brambly
beard that sprouted twisting from his jaw. 

Kamin took a slow, staggering backwards step; his soldiers, across the
dale, reached uncertainly for their swords, all of them watching Gildmirth
as he drew a dagger hanging from what had been Wimfort's middle, and
slashed the front of the boy's doublet to give himself breathing-room.
Then, reaching behind him, he made two vertical slashes in the fabric
covering his shoulders. The Privateer, turning his plum-red eyes to Kamin,
then smiled courteously, and said: "Be at ease. I'll do none of you any
harm." 

Kamin lunged, and his soldiers started forward. Gildmirth raised his left
hand, and all of them froze-the very beasts they bestrode became as stone.
Kamin's sword, which his arm had been in the act of swinging forward,
spilled from his petrifled fingers. Barnar and I signed Charnall to follow
us. We went down to our pack-train, got him mounted, and mounted
ourselves. 

Gildmirth stepped close to Kamin, whose eyes alone could move. Those eyes
blazed-they all but clawed-at the hideous face that had usurped the face
of the boy. 

"I am heartily sorry for you, Rod-Master." The bloody pools of his sad
eyes looked more than deep enough to contain the Kamin's outrage. "Your
son was rescued in good faith, and brought halfway back to you. And then
an accident endowed him with a large quantity of what he had been seeking
all along-the Elixir of Sazmazm. Rise if you can for an instant above the
terrible pain I know you feel. Fight for the detachment to ask yourself:
would you bring the Great Plague to the cities of your fellow men? Would
you be the man to do this, even supposing that this deed purchased the
freedom of someone dear to you-of a son? Would you make such a fool's
bargain, and buy his release into a world universally blighted by your
act? Liberate him into a raging inferno of catastrophe that has been
enkindled solely by your loving emancipation of him?" 

The father's eyes wavered, seeming dazed by these words. They sharpened
again. They explored the face of the Privateer, wonder and loathing
shining from them. They said, as plain as words: "You are not my son. You
stole his chance of escape from him. You are here in his stead." Gildmirth
sighed, and patted his shoulder. He turned away and, his eyes
rediscovering the moon, forgot Kamin-instantly and completely. 

I roused my mount, and came around where Kamin and I might look eye to
eye. I said, "I'm sorry, Rod-Master. Truly I am. We got him out for
you-and we only did it through the Privateer's help, which be gave us
gratis-we got him out, and all but got him back to you. And then, in an
evil moment, your son became something which-listen. If Wimfort had simply
resided in your city, undertaking none of the cataclysmic things he
planned-if he had simply stayed here for the space of a day, possessing
what he possessed, then your precious Kine-Gather, by the second day of
his residence, would have been nothing but a smoking blister, a black
death-scab on the face of a total desert. Such are the powers of those
whom your son's booty must inevitably have brought down upon himself and
all near him." 

I faltered, searching the magnate's eyes for some way to break through his
hate to his dispassion. Barnar geed his mount up the slope, and into
Darkvent. Kamin's eyes followed him, and so I watched with him, as all the
rest of us save Gildmirth were doing-fettered and free-and so fixedly
there was nothing to choose between the two groups. 

A grinding noise began to swell from the shaft. Barnar emerged, a line
stretched taut behind him, his mount's legs etched with effort. He spurred
the beast down the slope. Just as the cart he was towing came plunging
from the shaft, he cleared his pommel of the line, tossed it free and
wheeled leftward from its line of fall. The big steel box turned turtle as
it dove. It crashed just above us and settled crazily on the glittering
heap of its vomited cargo: a hillock of barbarous splendors-subworld
artifacts of wrought gold and everbright, weapons scabbed with jeweled
onlays, gear and gauds of rarest demon-work. 

I sighed, mortified by the inadequacy of the gesture. Unwillingly, I met
Kamin's eyes again: "It's yours. Twenty times the worth of what we take
from you on these beasts. Your bullion is enough for us, and its
portability is a convenience, for which we thank you. This doesn't buy
your son back, I know. Take heart at least in the fact that, though he is
a thrall, he suffers no torment. He lies like a . . . wine bottle in the
cellar of a minor demon, a reclusive weft. This keeper of his hides and
secures the boy with fanatical care, you may be sure. Wimfort suffers at
worst an endless ennui, as a jar for his master's most treasured potation.
Meanwhile the boy, who couldn't safely be returned to the sunlight, has at
least restored to it a man of great and deserving spirit. He's one whose
liberation will surely bring men more good than harm." 

"Some day," the Privateer said, "I'll bring him back for you, Rod-Master.
But when-forgive me-I cannot say." 

In facing round to say this, Gildmirth turned his eyes from the moon for
the first time since it captured them. His cheeks were wet. The red of his
eyes had a terrible, vivid purity I had not seen before, and, in some
subtle way, his body was quieter. "Master Charnall," he said with a slight
bow, "I have spoken with your friends of you. There is a certain post
which, before very long, I will be seeking a man to fill-that of
scribe-apprentice. It requires a mastery of High and Paleo-Archaic, as
well as the five primary branches of Runic scripture. Would you perhaps be
a man of latent ambition? The post involves a great deal of work, but is
handsomely paid both in gold and in advanced instruction in major
thaumaturgies. Do you have some spit left, honest Charnall, for grueling
and chancy work if it offers you the power to walk the sky and the ocean's
floor as easily as you could these hills we stand in?" 

"Yes, Privateer. And again, yes." 

"Then, after a time, I'll come seeking you in Shormuth Gate. This gold
will maintain you opulently until I come. In the interval, you can do no
better than to read-anything and everything, though always bearing in mind
that neither Ninefingers nor the immortal Pandector ever fails to repay a
thoroughgoing review." 

The Privateer turned now to Barnar and me. "So now it's time to part
ways," he said. As he smiled into our eyes he raised his right hand as for
oath-taking. "Let it be witnessed, by all the powers that bind men to
their vows, that I salute as my saviour this Nifft, called 'the Lean' (and
justly so as anyone will swear who's seen what a weasely, gaunt oddity he
is); and that I likewise most feelingly salute this Chilite hulk, Barnar
his name, whose measure of ungreedy goodwill is more than great-who is a
cask, a very vat of that . . . Elixir. And also let my promise to them be
witnessed, that my life will never be worth more to me than their
salvation, whatsoever danger I might chance to find them in." 

As he turned away he paused by Kamin, but whatever he meant to say could
be seen to die on his tongue, and he murmured only: "Be of good heart.
You'll find yourselves free to move at sunrise." 

The Privateer walked away from us now, out onto the open slope. As he
walked, his back swelled, and his legs wasted and shriveled under him. But
instead of falling, he thrust from the slits he had made in his doublet
two broad, tar-black wings. The wings bowed, then pressed down powerfully
on the night air. His legs-talons now-tucked themselves up under his
chest. He half-turned his griffon's head and sent back to us a brazen hiss
of farewell. And then the Privateer rose up against the moon, and sped
from our sight in its direction, as if its silver hugeness were the home
he had for so long been denied.