The A'Rak

by Michael Shea

  The A'rak

  Michael Shea

  SHAG MARGOLD'S PREFACE TO THE A'RAK

  One densely foggy morning not many months before the events here recorded, the witch Gnarl-Bone the Bearded walked along the rocky shore of her native Strega. She was attended by two of her myrmidames who were, shortly, to assist in her conveyance, for Gnarl-Bone purposed to go seeking something which her researches—researches prosecuted over several decades—had at last persuaded her lay not far off.

  Strega is the westernmost isle of the Astrygal Island Chain, and while witches in their varied collegia, cloisters, bibliotroves and incunabularia have dominated most of the islands time out of mind, it is on Strega in particular that the sisterhood's greatest archivists have founded their fastnesses. Strega is the Lore-hoard of the Astrygals, and is, in consequence, home to the Lore's most potent adepts. And among these gathered prodigies, Gnarl-Bone is, by any reckoning, among the two or three Preeminents.

  Indeed, this search towards whose conclusion she now bestrode the surf-scoured shingle (with a visage—always fierce—contorted by hope to a near demon-ferocity)—this search had been stimulated by clues which, to any other eyes than hers, would have been mere fragments of enigma: a couplet from an obscure Angrian epode seven thousand lines in length; a half dozen words of digression in Skatagary's mad, visionary Geophobion; a never previously noticed inconsistency in Punktil's Digitary of Dead Stars. These had individually (let alone the connection between them) eluded the greatest scholars; in greater Gnarl-Bone, they had sparked the hope of a priceless acquisition, and on this misty, moisty Stregan morning she marched, in a rage of suspenseful eagerness, either to embrace her prize, or to know herself deluded these long years.

  "Here!" she boomed, midway across a surf-lashed cove of shingle. She faced the sea, and her myrmidames crouched ready at her either side. She and they marched into the breakers' foamy onslaught, trudging stolidly out until, waist-deep, Gnarl-Bone made a peremptory gesture at the next incoming wave. The obedient billow surged up to a great height, and, just as it neared the trio, arched over their heads and back around them, enveloping them in a great bubble. Now they strode offshore within this air-globe, the myrmidames dropping to all fours to trundle it forward along the seafloor at their mistress' direction. As their sphere sank under the surface, the sorceress with a second gesture filled it with light, which spilled out far beyond their vehicle in all directions, and draped in brilliance the seafloor's weedy, undulous terrain.

  Gnarl-Bone stood on air, thoughtfully stroking her tattered beard, directing her dog-trotting minions now here, now there. These two dames, with not four centuries of age between them, were mere pups beside their venerable mistress, but still they found it toilsome negotiating the history-strewn slopes and ravines of the circum-Stregan sea-bottom. The Astrygals have fought off more than one invasion (many of these from the air) and the seafloors round those isles are crowded with the hulks and bones of beaten Ambition.

  Their search was long, but at length came a moment when Gnarl-Bone's eyes narrowed, and the harsh crags of her visage slowly softened with an emotion she had nearly forgotten in her long years of dark endeavor and recondite inquiry: awe.

  Their radiant globe trundled toward what, in its weedy raiment, could only be a giant, crook-legged skeleton of unearthly anatomy. They circled it, spilling light across a long body like jointed armor, and the jagged jut of broken, blade-like wings. Within the ruin of the central body, whose form might be likened to a stove-in hull (though no Kolodrian war-galley, nor even ten such, matched its size) a much smaller, compact shape lay nested. At sight of this the sorceress' cragged and gullied countenance contorted in a ghastly ecstasy. Witchcraft's intricate speculations, and anfractuous inductions, are so often inconclusive, that confirmation savors sweet indeed.

  From Gnarl-Bone's discovery flowed all the momentous events herein related. The narrative is presented by two of its chief actors: my dear friend Nifft the Lean, the Ephesionite thief, and Lagademe the Nuncio, a woman of irreproachable courage and character—as, indeed, any Nuncio of her reputation is likely to be. I have inter-leaved their accounts, regularly alternating between their testimonies. This, I believe, allows the reader a readier grasp of developments on several fronts.

  While I have reproduced Nuncio Lagademe's testimony very nearly in its entirety, I have had to trim Nifft's account, for my friend was familiar with the Nuncio's account, and included in his own many remarks upon hers. As these were largely in the nature of self-justifications or retorts to some of the Nuncio's observations, I have pruned them off of the plausible thief's narrative. Such deletions can be assumed to have been made on every other page of Nifft's chapters. Where I have excised a particularly lengthy one of Nifft's divagations, I indicate the lacuna with the following typographical mark: ( . . . )

  Hagia—our grim drama's setting—is the third largest of the nine Astrygals, but the thaumaturgic sorority have for unknown reasons never settled in the island's northern half. North Hagia, all hills and river-valleys, has anciently been home to a pastoral nation. In recent centuries, of course, its metropolis, Big Quay, on the Haagsford River, is a mighty entrepot of warehousing and banking concerns, one of the great hubs of trade and speculation dominating the commerce that swarms across the southern Sea of Agon. While the city's situation, midway between the bustling economies of the Ingens Cluster, the Ephesion Chain, and the Great Shallows' southern rim, has always suited it for this role, its era of commercial hegemony only began, of course, with the coming of the A'Rak, whose temples came to stand among the proudest of the rising nation's majestic financial edifices.

  It ill behooves the historiographer to pass judgement on a nation's choice of gods, nor do I wish to anticipate further that which Nifft and Lagademe provide in detail hereafter. Whatever one's private estimation of the North Hagians' bargain, their Covenant with the A'Rak, no person of any humanity will deny that its final cost, recorded in these pages, was such as to still the tongue of Reprobation, and fill Reproof's stern eye with Pity's tears.

  Targvad's A'Rak-on-Epos, as rendered from the High Archaic by Roddish the Minusk, provides perhaps the best brief evocation of that monstrous deity's aura of menace, as it has been attested to by generations of foreign observers and commentators:

  A'Rak-on-Epos

  Through a crack A'Rak crawled in the sky of his world

  Out to oceans of space where the great star-wheels whirled;

  He tiptoed across this white pavement of stars,

  and up through the floor of his new world—ours.

  The first world he'd feasted on festered and bled,

  A charnel house heaped with his harvests of dead,

  till his undying hunger was driven to flee

  by the scourge of a Foe more immortal than he.

  Now lowly he lurks here, a tenant discreet,

  And sparingly, modestly sups at his meat—

  Sends his spawn out a-hunting and hides 'neath the soil,

  then devours his sons and possesses their spoils.

  But once he ran rampant, and will never forget

  the untrammelled slaughter that fevers him yet

  in dreams when he rears up his gore-crusted jaws,

  and feeds at his will without limits or laws.

  Now pious he crouches in churches and whispers

  of riches his vassals may reap from their Vespers,

  and devours them in nibbles, by alms and by tithes,

  though worlds were once fields that his fangs swept like scythes.

  As he once in abundance of butchery bathed

  when from his greed escaped nothing that breathed,

  Howso pious and sparing he shepherd and shear thee,

  Forget not! His lust is to slaughter
and tear thee!

  —Shag Margold

  Table of Contents

  SHAG MARGOLD'S PREFACE TO THE A'RAK

  LAGADEME I

  NIFFT I

  LAGADEME II

  NIFFT II

  LAGADEME III

  LAGADEME IV

  NIFFT III

  LAGADEME V

  NIFFT IV

  LAGADEME VI

  NIFFT V

  LAGADEME VII

  NIFFT VI

  NIFFT VII

  LAGADEME VIII

  NIFFT VIII

  A'RAK I

  A'RAK II

  NIFFT IX

  LAGADEME IX

  NIFFT X

  LAGADEME X

  The A'rak

  PROSPEROUS HAGIA'S VAULTS

  BRIMMED WITH GOLD.

  HER WAREHOUSES BULGED WITH

  THE GOODS OF THE SOUTHERN SEAS.

  SHE HAD THE SPIDER-GOD TO

  THANK FOR HER PROSPERITY.

  But beneath Hagia's ancient bargain with the A'Rak lay the direst danger. That mercenary kingdom had mortgaged its soul in its pact with the giant arachnoid. When the note fell due, death of the most hideous kind awaited the multitudes of that affluent and bustling nation.

  As Hagia's debt falls due, two foreigners arrive in Big Quay, her capital: Lagademe and her team, foremost among the world's Nuncios 'deliverers of anything to anywhere' and Nifft the Lean, thief and rogue extraordinaire.

  Nifft and Lagademe, strangers to one another at the outset, will soon be struggling side by side for their lives-and a nation's survival-against the most hideous foe in the annals of Sword and Sorcery fiction.

  "[Shea combines] the exotic style of Jack Vance plus the ingenuity of Fritz Leiber's Gray Mouser stories to produce an extravagant quest novel.The Encyclopedia of Fantasy

  ". . . dark, hallucinatory . . . impressive work." The Science Fiction Source Book

  Cover art by Gary Ruddell

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  First printing, October 2000

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN: 0-671-31947-7

  Copyright © 2000 by Michael Shea

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  http://www.baen.com

  Typeset by Windhaven Press

  Auburn, NH

  Electronic version by WebWrights

  http://www.webwrights.com

  To my dearly beloved

  Linda, Della, and Jake

  BAEN BOOKS by Michael Shea

  The Incompleat Nifft

  LAGADEME I

  We made a delivery to some herb-haags in the Carnalin Mountains, not far upcoast from Lebanoi on the eastern shore of the Great Shallows, and it was from them that we obtained the commission for our Hagian delivery.

  We delivered to the haags—with no small trouble up the crooked roads to their steep-perched little hamlet—a gryf-gryf, for the haags use these monsters' urine to catalyze many of their most efficacious infusions. When the delivery was accomplished, the senior haag had me in to her study—a plank table in the midst of one of their overwhelmingly odorous potting sheds.

  "Gryf's got a biter broke," she observed sullenly, referring to a severe crack in one of our delivery's tusks.

  "Yes," I said shortly, my mouth still puckered by the exceeding sour wine she had poured me. "Brute got his claws through the bars, broke that spoke on the clanker's wheel there." (We use the two-axle clanker for heavy deliveries, rather than the two-wheel quickshaw we much prefer.) "Two of my men—Raschle and Olombo there, had to club it near senseless to save the vehicle. That's how his biter got cracked."

  This senior haag, Radax, had canines so outgrown they weren't unlike little tusks themselves. "Hard cargo," she conceded. She hefted a poke of Kolodrian lictors, our honorarium, in her soil-blackened paw, gimleting me with a sullen look that was meant, I thought, to convey a grave doubt of some kind—perhaps about proposing what she then, after paying me, proposed:

  "Happen a near gossip of a dear clansister half removed of mine hath need on a crew o' Nuncers yourselfs-like, good Dame. Needs them down to North Hagia. Thrice pay to this here is proposed, as the wayfaring's to be done down in the spidergod's webby wolds an' what-all."

  That the stipend was princely was not my first thought on hearing this proposed commission. Nor did I first note that the isle was a part of the world I had not yet seen, though this is a consideration that weighs with me, as a rule. What struck me at once, rather, was the geography of the proposition. With Hagia lying south-southeast of this coast, and our course hence a diagonal down the length of the Great Shallows, we must, if we took this commission, pass hard by the raft cities of the Hydrobani Archipelago, in whose great hive of brothels and gaming dens my sole and precious son Persander had perversely apprenticed himself to acquire the most reverend arts of Gaming, to wit: shilling, sharping, dealing, duping, dicing, finessing and fleecing.

  My beloved Persander, my precious but willful son whom I, in my helpless outrage, had denounced and forever banished from my sight! There was a poignant humor in this banishing of course, for since Persander grew to his young manhood, I scarcely saw him once in a year. But the break itself, and my own harsh, denouncing words to him—this was a galling pain in my heart, as it would be in any mother's. I can run mountain trail all day and night long with the toughest, but a woman in her full maturity knows that the years must be counted like precious coin, and that a broken love long unmended can quick enough turn to a broken love forever unmended.

  How I had grieved in the two years since for my rash absoluteness! No day passed that I did not in my heart unspeak my spiteful petulance a dozen ways. Two years lost between us already! With every life uncertain enough but a Nuncio's doubly unsure . . . it had begun to seem possible that we would never meet again, my precious son and I.

  And here now offered itself this irreproachably fortuitous turning of my professional fortunes, that would allow me to seek out Persander at last—to tell him without deceit that chance had brought me near him, and that my grieving heart had taken me the final steps, and here I was to unsay my hard words, and embrace my precious child again.

  "Well, who might this client be precisely," I inquired blandly, "and what would she have conveyed, and whither?"

  "Seemly a dame lately widowed and wanting her mate's remainders took acrosst country to be tombed in that particular one of the spidergod's temples as he was whelped and raised nigh. Seemly he was pious in the A'Rakishite warshup and rittles an such-lot, while this widow dame, to hear my clan-sister tell it, is quite the agnosticator and unbeliever—as indeed 'tis noised that most Hagish folk are, beyond the formalities."

  "The husband is already deceased?" I asked carefully.

  "Yes indeed."

  "And . . . embalmed, or the like?"

  "Boxed and 'balmed. Him in his coffin just need wheeling cross-country and tucking in one of them temple nooches."

  "She's . . . sent word rather far abroad, hasn't she, and will have been waiting quite some time before we could possibly arrive to—"

  "Well she trusts this gossip of hers that's clan-sister of mine, now doesn't she? And on our side, as she trusts a clan-sister, we want her to have a first-water Nuncio, don't we, as the A'Rakish wolds don't lack in danger now and again, do they?"

  Though it seemed an odd sort of commission, I accepted it pending my crew's approval, which I straightway received. My crew—Shinn and Bantril (our pullers on the quickshaw, and our plod drovers on this clanker) and Olombo and Raschle (our men-a
t-arms)—were as much taken with the stipend as I, and, as crack nuncials tend to be, were unwilling to acknowledge any uneasiness about a risky destination, so they promptly ratified my acceptance. Radax at once presented us with ship money to Hagia, and half the stipend, of which Pompilla—the widow commissioning us—would pay us the rest on our arrival at Big Quay.

  I could not help reflecting that Radax had just laid out a very substantial sum from her own pocket, on this distant widow's behalf. For how could this Pompilla have forwarded her own funds to Radax at this stage of her inquiries? I let the thought go. I had mainly my son on my mind, and this commission created the pretext for seeing him again.

  We went down to Lebanoi on the coast, and among that great milltown's thronging wharves, found a caravel cargoed with casks and tuns of pickled polyp and marinaded bi-valves, bound to Hagia by way of the Hydrobani Archipelago, at whose raft towns stopovers by out-bound bottoms are common. Shipmasters have found that a hard go at drinking and gambling settles a crew down for long hauls, the more if they have been picked clean and put doubly in need of their pay. We made Glamara, grandest of all the Hydrobani's floating shearing pens, by nightfall, when its colored lights dapple the soft swells it rides, and its timbers reverb like a vast complex drum with the clamors and capers of fevered fools vying to be fleeced. Glamara, when last I'd heard, was where my Persander had 'prenticed himself.

  Our shipmaster, Plectt, who struck me as rather a cynic and dandy—though polished enough—suggested the glyfrig and runeriddle parlors. "A young blade carving a niche, Nuncio—if I may express it so?—if he is bold and sharp-witted, works the glyfs or the runes, where they'll give him a pit of his own and a cut of the table to lure in the talent."

  I was supping some wine, a practice I'm little given to, but I intended it as a precaution to maintain affability. To betray my contempt for this place would be to assure my inquiries met only rebuff, and the mere sight of those gaudy-lanterned laneways where the raucous toppers reeled tipsily from den to den, made me grit my teeth in scorn. My crew seemed annoyingly inclined to hang about me, meanwhile, making mellowness hard to maintain.