by Michael Shea
"Thou, Thief, seek out that Ecclesiast of thine that put gold in thy pouch. Seek him straight without delay, and have him tell the god you are a thief desiring amnesty and audience that you might deliver him tidings urgent for his safety. If he gives ye safe conduct, it's likelier than not the monster will honor it. He's still trying to play patron and protector down in the city, lest his townsfolk fodder should flee before they are boxed in for feeding on. Mind now ye rig yourselves tight to the 'shaw, or ye may not survive the neffrit's conveyance. Now be off!"
Mav and Nifft had to grip the gunnels, for the witch's dismissing wave sent the skiff skimming off towards the village she'd summoned it from, rocking as it went with the neffrit's invisible struggles in the traces. But then it was our own gunnels we had to grip, as the witch leapt into the yawl with Bantril and me and shrilled, "Stand steady!" and waved again, and our yawl, and Shinn and Olombo's skiff, surged up into the moonlit air.
"Thou, puller!" she called to Shinn, "stand at stern, thou hast the piloting. Push with thy feet, lean with thy body, and find the way of it now! Thou, spearman! Stand in the bows, and the two of ye, hold your weapons thus!" She gripped her sword-tipped oar by the haft like a harpoon when held two-handed for planting at close quarters.
Meanwhile the airy loom she had set in motion never ceased to work. It was manufacturing from our Pompilla's paralyzed host a growing dome of ghostsilk in the air above him, and its skirts dangled ever lower, now circumferencing our raft and hanging not two fathoms from the water—but we were snatched away from the sight as our keels swerved, and clove the air in the direction of the shore.
And here it came below, our pursuer, shattering the silver water-pane with the thorny turmoil of his laboring legs. It was not an apt swimmer—its bulge of abdomen was a drag on its progress, and its legs' movement wrongly rhythmed for efficient swimming.
Still, its awkwardness did not lessen the horror of its gemstone eyes flashing with the drench of torn waters, and now down upon that infernal constellation of soulless ocular knobs the witch, with a thrust of her legs and a cant of her body, swooped our yawl. Down we arced and she, with her oar gripped like the elongate sword-hilt it was, swept a blazing stroke that lopped off all four left-side legs of the spawn, which was sized but thrice our yawl. The spawn made for the bottom, then, but—its stroking now all unilateral—beat instead a frothy circle on the lakesurface.
"Use yours like stabbing-harpoons on its eyes!" Jaundyssa shrilled to Bantril and Olombo in their skiff, and Bantril, lithe monkey that he was, kicked the skiff into a dive, then pulled it up to a hover just over the fangs. The oars—as I felt with my own—were witchly lightened and fairly manageable, and they stabbed ruin into its eyes, while our yawl rose away to make its second swoop.
Our second plunge was astern of her abdomen, and Shinn and I added our blades to Jaundyssa's, slashing wide chasms in the monster's abdomen, and sundering her spinnerettes till, up from these welled the ghostly storm, and a glad, unpent tumult of spirits rocked our airborne craft on a great gust of joy.
And in all this swift battle, no surge of the spawn's thought touched us. It seemed the water bottled in the mental outreach of the monsters.
Our own prey, however, dry on his raft, remained a beacon to his hungry brothers, though already a great dome of ghost-silk, flowing from his own innards, canopied both him and raft, its skirts sinking even now into the water as our new victim sank under the lake beneath us.
"His meat will not stop drawing them," said the witch—she'd hung us right on the breeze beside the skiff—"even after his cocoon's closed up beneath the raft. And they're groping along the lakefloor by now as well as swimming, and soon they'll be bobbing up from the bottom, hit or miss—some far off, while others will attain the cocoon and seize hold. And I tell ye gravely, if they assault the webwall itself, then but let them come big enough, or numerous enough, and they will tear their way through with their fangs and feed on Pompilla before she can rise in her own defence."
Already, in several directions, we saw the glitter of toiling spiderlegs denting the silver lake-surface—there, and there, and there, and all, though uncertainly, converging toward us. The towering ghost-silk eggshell was shot with feverish flashes of unearthly rainbow—a huge polychrome gem ripening in the black and white waste of moonlit water, with whispery gusts of voices coming off it like cold off of ice. Meanwhile, just then, the shoreline shadow swallowed up the skiff that was taking Nifft and Mav and their demon-drawn 'shaw to the highway.
NIFFT VIII
We made a smooth but rocking progress over the lake, for the neffrit, invisible to us, surged powerfully against the yokepoles of the 'shaw where the witch had chained it. It made our skiff wobble as we skimmed into the dark of forest shadow that veiled the fishing village.
Fishing hamlet, really. Even in silhouette we clearly saw its littleness: two docks and a half score of little motley craft. Not one of these but was still moored. The terror came upon them too fast to allow them even to cast off. The dead littered the docks and sprawled amidships of the craft, pitiful splayed husks that were here and there buckled and bent to the shape of the gunnel or bollard or pierpost they'd lain across when they were pierced and drained.
The 'shaw in its undercarriage had slats and clamps for enlarging the cargo board, very ticklish to extract and install, what with the heavings of our sullen, shapeless demon engine. At its biggest the platform offered just room enough for two riders to lie face-down on. We rigged lashings with just slack enough to slip ourselves—legs, hips, and shoulders—underneath them. I thought of previous fast, jostling rides I had taken, and said, "Padding. Padding between us and the platform."
How unwillingly did we advance down the little pier, our legs unwilling to walk where spawn might lurk crouched to spring. From the nearest source—a moored yawl with three dead, caught in a heap and their husks thus fused amidships—we slashed quick jagged swatches of sailcloth.
Tucking ourselves under the lashings, with the canvas between our fronts and the boards, was tricky. We got me wedged in, and my swordhilts clear for pulling from my back, and then I stretched the lashings wide to let Mav slip, a bit easier, in beside me. I reached my swordblade down under the platform between it and the wheel towering by my shoulder. I gingerly laid my steel's edge on the cable that lashed our wheels to the bottom of the skiff. Mav gave me a nudge and I turned to find myself meeting the cool stare of her pale eyes from very close range. "I have caught you noticing, honest thief," she told me, "that though I am slightish of stature, I have a mickle weighty pair of teats bound up in my bodice." Her icy eyes conveyed no clue to how she took what she reported.
I answered suavely, "I—" and cleared my throat. "I must apologize, then, respected Mav, for a wholly unintended solecism."
"Just watch yourself in future, then. Cut away!"
Cut I did. The 'shaw sprang clean out of the skiff. Its wheels touched the planks of the docks but fleetingly, with a crunching beneath of the prey-husks. There was a blur of sparse cottages, of an inn whose shingle creaked in the wind of our passage, and the next instant there was highway beneath us, a roaring blur of pavement which, still, our wheels touched only now and then.
We floated, made bone-rattling contact with canvas and wood beneath, flattening our faces each time, and then floated once more. I felt like just such a piece of roast as a cook is seen hammering to make it more tender. Painfully, we developed a sense of the rhythm and how to brace for it, but that ride remained gruelling hard work none the less.
At such a velocity, scant hours must bring us whence three days of travel had brought us, and our ambush by hungry spawn seemed most unlikely. Not so. As we plunged toward the floor of a valley, and the forest loomed near, the neffrit stunned us by snatching the 'shaw high in air—a leap that might have cleared a middling tall tree. Right below, an a'rakspawn big as a cottage sprang onto the highway just where we would have been, and even as we saw it the 'shaw dropped straight down on it, crush
ing the abdomen, and disgorging a pallid effusion of escaping ghosts who rushed with a sound like glad breathing up into the sky, though that airy acclamation was instantly lost behind us as we rocketed on down the highway.
I won't drag you, dear Shag, through each league of that jaw-rattling, rib-cracking ride through the moonlight's long delirium. The subworld brute that pulled us brought us so sharply to halt at Mav's Haggis that we nigh shot straight out of our lashings. Stunned and sore she eased out of her perch, her eyes already looking hungrily in the direction of her 'stead and her daughters. "I'll have folk, and no less than tenscore—" she was shouting now as I was whirled off "some hours past noon in the ridge above Big Quay. . . ."
And it seemed, blessedly, but a scant time after that I was whirled into Big Quay itself—and still some two hours before dawn, it appeared. I careened down near empty streets—yet streets more awake than they should at that hour have been, with more muffled lamplight behind curtains, and a sense of people everywhere, secretly, sleeplessly talking. I was yet—though soon—to learn of the golden donative prepared for the morning.
The instant he reached the plaza before the A'Rak Fane, the demon was released—so abruptly, indeed, that the poles were dropped in mid-flight, snagged on the cobbles, and flipped the whole 'shaw arse-over-teakettle, slamming me to hang with my back but a span from the pavement, and two broken wheels to either side of me.
I was so furious at this rude handling that I utterly forgot my larger situation. Snarling, I slashed off my lashings, and crawled, a crook-boned cripple, out from under the wreckage. I brought myself, painfully, to an upright posture, and glared furiously and belligerently about me at the empty plaza. And then it slowly came back to me where I was and what I was about.
I could not help but reflect that if these travel accommodations indicated the witch's general level of concern for my survival, then I had ample grounds for worry about the actual outcome of my mission, specifically, about my survival of a personal audience with the dire deity himself.
And thus it was with slow, thoughtful steps that I advanced between the great pylons of the portal, and into the half-gloom of a lobby but sparsely candled. I crossed it to the corridor—dimmer yet—into the Ecclesial quarters. When I stood outside Pandagon's doorless chamber, I found that I had him, unsuspecting, under my observation. He was in the vestmentary, doing squats and slow stretching twists of the torso. Though a light bronze corselet was laid aside, the churchman was otherwise under arms, kilted and short-sworded and battleshod in buskins, and looking quite the field commander, in fact. I could see from his profile that Pandagon's mind was inwardly working and weighing, and his body moving by habit.
"Forgive me," I softly said. "Once more forgive my intrusion, friend Pandagon." I eked a stiff bow from my tortured frame. So alight was his mind with his work that he took me in with utter unsurprise.
"Nifft! I rejoice! My quarters are yours, and I'll brook no apology." High danger, lofty purpose, iron resolve blazed from his eyes. Paanja Pandagon had arrived at that hour of heroism which perhaps he had cherished in his heart all his life. There was a scent of impending cataclysm in the air, and a mad note of gaiety in his voice. I resolved to learn all that had passed here before playing the witch's catspaw as ordered.
"Then if this is my chamber, friend Pandagon, I invite us to sit in your study, with wine. Let me learn what has passed here, for there has truly been wildness abroad in the hills and vales of Hagia."
We took the wine neat, a venerable port, sweet fire that melted the knots from my muscles. I learned, in the course of three goblets, what I have already told you, Shag, in its place.
At the end of this I knew, of course, that our aims were one: the torch and the blade for the spidergods, come what may. But just as I was on the point of laying all I knew before him, a fateful impulse of caution stayed me.
Much I must tell him to facilitate the interview I sought with the god. But the imminence of battle I decided I must withhold. That the priest was the spidergod's foe, I did not doubt, but how far might not the god see into his mind? I must withhold how very much upon the cusp things stood. The illusion of some time to spare must make the monster's response less summary.
That Mav's force was on the march, that the witch strove to wage war upon the morrow, these I withheld. Minim was bringing the priests' own forces north, but only to deploy south of the city, to stand in readiness. Had I spoken all, who knows what horrors might have been evaded? But who can peer even one moment's depth into the future?
That I did a witch's work, and that it was she who worked to bring the A'Rak's Foe upon him, I told Pandagon. That I was a thief, had first come hither with a thievish aim, and came now from the witch for parley with the god and therefore needed amnesty arranged, I also told the priest.
Pandagon cocked his brow, and met my eye with more than a glint of humor in his own. "My old friend Minim, while engaging mercenaries, in fact became acquainted with the rather considerable reputation of one Nifft the Lean of Karkmahn-Ra. . . .
"I was not wholly surprised by the news, nor yet surprised, though having known you but briefly, to learn the stature universally accorded you in your guild."
What could I do but blush, and bow in modest acknowledgement? I tendered him the torn vellum, writ in spiderblood. "I am to read the god the words on this parchment, that the witch wrote in the blood of one of the A'Rak's bigger sons. I have not myself read them yet. Will you do the honors?"
He had not read aloud the first three words when recognition unknotted his brow. What he read to me was the rest of the ballad I'd sold him a piece of.
But 'ware that thou be not the garment
Of one whose style out-braves thine own!
One who does not dread interment
Where thy murdered prey have gone!
For howso thick thou be appareled
in thy woven web of woe,
Thou may'st find thyself ensnarled
At the onslaught of thy Foe.
When the wing-song of her hunger
serenades thee from the sky,
and the bright barb of her anger
seeks thy life (thou knowest why!)
Then, Oh A'Rak, thou might'st cower
When thy shield becomes thy chain
And Pam'Pel in all her power
Shall thee slay—At last! Again!
The lines rang for us again as we took the parchment between us and reread them silently. Then he looked at me. The soldierly prelate had that best gift for command in the field—quick grasp, fluid shift of tactic.
"I believe it is meant to hold him here to his center, to make him think her advent too nigh to risk a counter foray of his own. That he senses her there is no mistake, though he senses her but darkly still. Here will be my pretext. I will go to the altarpit and declare the first quatrains you brought, then say you demand an audience to deliver the rest, hoping a special bounty of gold will reward your concern for his peril. He'll believe and bounty you, I think—" (this wryly) "—for the god's in a gold-giving vein at present."
I waited in the corridor of the priestly quarters, listening to Pandagon's soft firm tread across the lobby, down into the echoy silk-webbed vault. He mounted the dais. He stood at the very rim of the black stone-walled abyss.
He did not imagine the god could be simply summoned. He resolved merely to speak down into the pit, drop his preamble, then the declamation of the lines themselves. Then he would wait and repeat his performance—a patient rite of humble invocation.
"Father A'Rak," he intoned, "a stranger has come to me bearing us tidings of danger to yourself. He has given me part of his tidings, reserving the rest till you grant him amnesty and audience to present them personally, for I am afraid, Sire, that this petitioner is a thief. He begs, for his risk and his service, some golden boon of you."
Speak the tidings, priest. I praise your promptness in my service. Disclose to me the fragment that you bear.
It all but unma
nned him, the dreadful promptitude, the nearness of that mighty, inhumanly hungering mind. The god hugged his center indeed, and Pandagon's skin crawled at the nearness of the monster whose most recent gluttony still haunted his mind. Collecting himself, he intoned the verses that I had first brought him, three days before.
He ended. There was silence.
Bring forth this praiseworthy footpad, priest. He has my gracious amnesty, and more—my gratitude. Gold will be his when he reads me the rest of these verses. Bring him hither, and let us all three commune together.
Back came Paanja Pandagon to fetch me, as if I had not stood in the hallway eavesdropping, and I stood nerving myself, but was still all apprehension when it came to walking down under the echosome, silk-shrouded vault, approaching, at the priest's side, the dais and the yawning altar-pit. At once, the god's presence invisibly welled from the abyss:
A thief indeed you are, deep-dyed with greed and black with felonies, but your solicitude for my safety quite persuades my forgiveness, and gladly I grant you your life, and a golden meed besides, when you have shared with me your lines of . . . portent. Speak, Thief, and experience great A'Rak's gratitude!
"Awesome one!" I effused, with a fervor not altogether feigned, "your goodness quite outgoes your name for graciousness and liberality! I beg forgiveness in advance for the tenor of the lines I here repeat. Their impious, threatful tone is in itself a specimen of the enmity that lurks abroad against you; I offer you its insult solely to warn you and avert its fulfillment. Here then are the remaining verses:
But 'ware that thou be not the garment
Of one whose style out-braves thine own,
One who does not dread interment
Where thy murdered prey have gone. . . ."
The verses, as I intoned them, reverberated down the shaft, received by one still mercifully unrevealed to me, received by that laired, hungering, otherworldly mind, that Intruder from Beneath that had haunted the basements and vaults of this nation for well over two hundred years. . . . Were my words sowing terror in that ancient, unguessable soul? To sow terror in a titan that lurks just under your feet is itself quite terrifying, I can report—if fear indeed I did sow. All the monster's frantic feeding seemed to point to desperation. Yet the titan's mind touched us next in a note of sly, teasing humor.