by Michael Shea
Herewith, then, I dedicate these volumes to the memory of Nifft the Lean. Had there been a funerary stone marking his remains, I would have had it inscribed in accordance with the only preference he was ever heard to voice on the subject—namely, with those verses he loved above all others, written by the immortal Parple, the bard's "Salutation to the World." So let them be written here, since the stone is lacking.
Salutation To The World As Beheld At Dawn
From Atop Mount Eburon
Long have your continents drifted and merged,
Jostled like whales on the seas,
Then cloven, and sundered, and slowly diverged,
While your mountains arose and sank to
their knees.
Long and long were your eons of ice,
Long were your ages of fire.
Long has there been
The bleeding of men
And the darkness that cancels desire.
What hosts of hosts—born, grown, and gone—
Have swarmed your million Babylons?
How many pits has Mankind dug?
How many peaks has he stood upon?
Many and long were your empires of blood,
Fewer your empires of light.
Now their wisdoms and wars
Lie remote as the stars,
Stone-cold in the blanketing night.
Now even your wisest could never restore
One tithe of the truths Man's lost,
Nor even one book of the radiant lore
That so many treasured so long, at such cost.
For it's many the pages the wind has torn
And their hoarded secrets blown—
Tumbled and chased
Through the eyeless wastes
Where the wreckage of history's thrown.
Part 1
SHAG MARGOLD'S Preface to
Come Then, Mortal—
We Will Seek Her Soul
THE MANUSCRIPT OF this account is in a professional scribe's hand, but it is unmistakably of Nifft's own composition. This is not automatically the case, even though a given history be recounted as if in Nifft's voice, for two of his dearest friends, in repeating tales he told them but did not himself record, enjoyed adopting his persona and reproducing—or so they conceived—his narrative manner. (See, for example, the chapter concerning his encounter with the vampire Queen Vulvula.) In the present instance, however, I am convinced we have our information direct from the master-thief himself.
The Great Cleft Lake lies in Lúlumë, near the center of that continent's northern limb, and Lurkna Downs is the only really large city on its extensive perimeter, occupying The Jut, a sharp salience of the southern shoreline which extends to within half a mile of the northern shore, almost bisecting the vast body of water. Numerous small fishing hamlets rim the lake, for its waters teem with many delectable or otherwise valuable species, the most notable being speckled ramhead, skad, grapple, deepwater lumulus and pygmy hull-breaker. But as the great size of most of these creatures might suggest, fishing those waters on a commercial scale requires large vessels and elaborate equipment, and northern Lúlumë as a whole is too poor and thinly populated to mount such enterprise. Lurkna Downs owes its beginning to the wealth of Kolodria, whence entrepreneurs from the Great Shallows came some two centuries ago and endowed the then-minor settlement with its first large fishing fleet. And, having seeded the Great Cleft Lake with ships, it is Kolodrian merchants who today bear its finny harvest back across the Sea of Agon in their argosies, and market it throughout the Shallows.
These economic matters are not entirely remote from the love of Dalissem for Defalk, and its dreadful issue. Everything Nifft tells us of that volcano-hearted temple child marks her as a classic specimen of northern Lúlumë's self-styled First Folk, a people who, though not truly aboriginal, migrated from the Jarkeladd tundras in the north of the Kolodrian continent more than a millennium ago. They came across the Icebridge Island Chain, and brought into Lúlumë a nomad stoicism and uncouth but potent sorcery with which, where it survives today, the fiercest Jarkeladd shaman would still feel an instantaneous kinship and empathy.
But indeed, this tundra-born culture is now half-eclipsed in the Cleft Lake region. The habit of wealth and property which the Kolodrian merchants brought to Lurkna Downs, the urbanity and cosmopolitan conceits which two centuries of trade with Kolodria have since fostered there, have deprived the First Folk values—their ferocious passions and proud austerities—of the general reverence they once enjoyed. And Defalk belonged to this latter-day Lurkna Downs just as surely as Dalissem did to the First Folk. That she was a temple child in itself argues this. This cult—to which Dalissem would have been born, and not admitted through any voluntary candidacy—is one of the few still-vigorous First Folk institutions that is allowed a conspicuous existence in Lurkna Downs. The cult's name is never uttered by its initiates in the hearing of the uninitiated, and its tenets remain obscure. But the learned Quall of Hursh-Himín is probably correct in saying that it centers on a rigorous votive asceticism—virginity paramount among the self-abnegations required—and that its annual mysteries involve further physical rigors. These trance-inducing group ordeals' aim is a visionary ecstasy (one sees again the tundra influence) wherein is revealed—to herself and her sisters at once—the identity of the worshipper to be honored as that year's sacramental suicide. Dalissem's actions—though rebelliously secular in their frame of expression—undeniably tend to corroborate this report.
Though this is the extent of our reliable information about the cult, I feel I must go out of my way to point out that we have no reason to credit the usually trustworthy Arsgrave's preposterous assertion that the cultists' alleged virginity masks the most unvirginal practice—the cult's "chief end" he calls it!—of mass orgiastic copulation with water demons in the lake's deeps. No serious student of the Aquademoniad can be unaware that fresh-water demons have been extinct for at least three millennia. My own opinion is that Arsgrave's sexual pride—which he seems incapable of suppressing, even in contexts utterly remote from that issue—renders him powerless to believe that the pleasures of "normal" copulation can be forgone by any but those devoted to wholly grotesque passions.
Finally, as to the world of the dead, I will neither misrepresent my faith—which is absolute—in Nifft's veracity by expressing doubt of its existence, nor compromise my editorial impartiality by expressing conviction thereof. It is, however, perhaps relevant to note that both Undle Ninefingers and the great Pandector—drawing on wholly independent sources and writing without knowledge of one another—affirm its existence; and that Pandector's account in particular describes a mode whereby the living may enter that realm which in every essential feature agrees with Nifft's description.
—Shag Margold
Come Then, Mortal—
We Will Seek Her Soul
I
NIFFT THE LEAN and Barnar the Chilite had agreed not to sleep that night. Darkness had overtaken them in the swamp. They might rest their bodies, but not their vigilance—not here.
They climbed up in the groin of one of the massive, wide-spreading swamp trees. Here there was room to recline, and to build a small fire which seemed scarcely to affect the tough, reptilian bark of the giant supporting them. They did not risk a fire big enough to warm them against the numbing, clammy air. At the spare little flame they dried their boots and kept the blood in their hands and feet, but came no closer than this to comfort.
The two friends talked quietly, pausing often to read—brows intent—the wide, wet noise of the swamp, and to listen for the silken progress of a treelurk down one of the branches they sat on. Both were men inured to hard and various terrain, and in the manner of such men they seemed able to achieve a subtle bodily harmony with whatever surroundings they had to endure. Nifft sat with his arms folded across his knees. His gauntness, his loose, jut-limbed repose, called to mind the big carrion-eating birds they had seen so many of during their day's
march across the fens. Barnar was more suggestive of the water-bulls of the region. He sat foursquare, thick and still as a boulder, yet following everything with flick of eye and nostril.
There came a long pause in their talk. Barnar squinted at the wet darkness around them for a long time, and shrugged, as if to throw off ugly thoughts. "Study it how you will, it's a foul piece of the world and not meant for men, not sane ones."
Nifft waved his hand vaguely and didn't answer, gazing at the swamp with more complacency than his friend. Barnar poked the fire discontentedly. Talk was what he needed; he was in too glum a mood for silent musing. He cast about for a subject. He found one which he would have shunned as indiscreet in a less gloomy mood—for one did not ask even one's esteemed partner about his past; among thieves such information must be volunteered.
"You used to know a man from these regions, didn't you? A guidefellow who'd won a high name—Halder it was, wasn't it?"
"Haldar Dirkniss." Nifft answered him with a look of benign humor. This prodding was sufficiently unlike Barnar's style to make Nifft aware of its cause, and after a moment he sat up a little straighter and spoke more expansively. "He was my partner for six years, Barnar. You would have loved him. He had a marvelous imagination, and withal he was so solemn. You should have seen him at work laying the groundwork for some exploit—grave, intense. . . . he was so studious! And he loved the form as much as the dross, loved an inspired trick as much as the gold it won. We would have made the Black Crack's own trio!"
"Where is he now?"
"In the land of the dead." Nifft said this with an odd intensity, looking at Barnar with a watchfulness the Chilite didn't understand. Nifft's metaphorical turn of speech also seemed out of place.
"My regrets," Barnar said uncertainly. "It's where we'll all go sure enough and all too soon."
"But never in the same way, Barnar—never as Haldar—and I—went there. We went down alive!"
If Nifft had said this gravely Barnar would have known he jested. But he said it with the evil smile he reserved for true and terrible matters, a taunting smile that dared his hearer's disbelief. Barnar knew his friend's humor: a scoffing reply now, and Nifft would laugh, as if in acknowledgment of fraud, and say no further word. Barnar had seen him do as much amid colleagues at more than one tavern where the men of the guild drank and gossiped. He'd seen skeptical laughter lose men the hearing of several adventures which perhaps he would have mocked himself, had he not experienced them at Nifft's side.
Still Nifft grinned at him, his last words hanging like a challenge that must be taken up if he was to proceed. So at last the Chilite rumbled grudgingly:
"Well, if such a thing can be done, you're as likely a man for the job as any I know, though in truth it's a hard matter to swallow. Does the Guide of Ghosts pass traffic thru his gates, then?"
This was enough—Nifft sat up, warming to speech. "Now that it's said, I find it easy to tell. All the time I've known you I've hesitated to try. I was afraid you'd mock the notion and anger me and bad blood would be made between us. I've been remembering that exploit ever since we entered the swamps.
"You see, Barnar, there is no gate to that place. You enter it through an instant of time. You must stand near someone when his death comes, and in the instant before he goes there is a spell you must speak which lets you into the dying man's moment. And then, you see, you are present when the Guide of Ghosts, and the Soul-taker, come for him.
"And though there may be other living men around the deathbed, they will be to you as statues. For them, the man's passing is a single blink of time. You who have entered his moment through the spell move within the Time beneath time—the Time where the dead endure."
Barnar opened his mouth to ask a question, but closed it again on seeing his friend's self-absorbed stare. Nifft would give the whole tale now, and would not like interruptions. The Chilite settled himself a bit more comfortably. Leaving an ear open to the noises of the swamp, he gave the rest of his mind to Nifft's words, smiling slightly to himself.
"But it goes further—much further than this, Barnar. For if you meet the Guide's minion in combat—if you grapple with the Soul-taker, and pin him—then the Guide will bring you with him on his journey below. He will bring you to any soul you seek, wherever it lies in death's domain. And he'll bring you out again too if you're lucky. . . ."
II
We were crossing the great steppes when the night caught us short, Haldar and me—just as it's done us tonight. In case you don't know it, that's wolf country, and I'm not talking about your carrion-eating skulkers of the foothills, but big, red-jawed man-eaters as high at the shoulder as a two-year colt.
Our mounts were bone-tired with staying ahead of them all day long. We'd drawn no steady pursuit, but the price of that was holding a pace that would kill our horses if we kept it up the next day. Even so, we rode long past sunset, encouraged by the full moon that rose at dusk. It bought us nothing—there are no safe camps on those plains—and we finally had to take what offered. We wound our way into a boulderfall on the flank of a ridge. We settled into a narrow clearing well-overhung by the big moon-pale rocks, and we hobbled the mounts at its mouth. The rocks were polished granite, and were something to set your back against if it came to swordwork against wolves. But they had none of the friendly feel of something that gives you shelter. The very gravel we crouched on had a nastiness to it—a kind of sick smell. You know such spots; a fear inhabits them over and above any fear you may be feeling for this reason or that. We made a small fire, broke out a loaf and cheese. We didn't talk.
The mean little prairie towns we'd just come through, and the ill luck we'd had in them had left us bruised and black of spirit. All our tricks had been small and mean, our purses were flat, our bellies vacant and our skins unwashed. Lurkna Downs, on the shore of the Great Cleft Lake, was little more than a day distant—a city large and rich and old. Assuming we survived the night, we had an even or better chance of reaching it. But we took no consolation in this. Our gloom had gotten to the philosophical stage, you see. Or rather Haldar's had first, and I'd caught it from him, as usual. The upshot was we felt so leaden that it was damned unlikely we ever would reach Lurkna. We sat chewing slowly and glaring resentfully at the plains that fell away below the ridge.
The land itself there is wolfish. The boulders, pale and smooth, were like earth's bones jutting from her starved soil. Out on the prairie the moon-silvered grass grew lank and patchy, like a great mangy hide. And if you want to stretch the comparison, the wolves themselves were the lice moving through the patches of silver, or merging with the moon-shadows. We saw more than a few such, too, though at the time no comic view of them suggested itself.
At length, Haldar sighed bitterly and threw down the crust he'd been gnawing. He glared at me, then at the fire.
"You know, we're not a jot different from those wolves," he snarled. "We walk on our hind paws, and pull leggin's on over our arses, but that's all."
To one who'd shared Haldar's thoughts for years, this said much in little. I must tell you my friend was terribly idealistic. I loved him as a brother, and tried to cure him of it, but I never did. And when I say terribly, I mean it. You want an instance? We once turned a trick in Bagág Marsh. It was a fine and nimble-witted piece of work, I promise you. We galloped out of town on the night of our take with near a hundredweight each of wrought gold. We were galloping out of sheer exuberance, you understand. Our canniness had guaranteed a delayed pursuit.
Well, we came to a bridge crossing a very fast-moving river to the north of the city. Suddenly Haldar reined up at mid-bridge, and stood in his stirrups. He was a light man—wiry like me, but middling short. He had a hatchet face—his nose and chin formed a ridge-line which his black eyes and black beard crowded up to. It was a fierce little face, hawkish, and as he stood there in his stirrups he thrust it up greedily against the starlight. He seemed to want to breathe the whole night into himself, and you almost believed he could fit it a
ll in, so intent and still he was. Suddenly he dismounted, pulled his saddlebag off the pommel, and dumped his hundredweight of gold into the river. I died a little at that moment, Barnar. No! I died a great deal! Thanks be to the Crack, I was professional enough to hold my tongue about what a partner does with his own share of a take. But I nearly had to bite it through to hold it.
Yet even in my shock, I understood. The only fitting celebration of his pride in his work was to show that beside it, the gold was nothing. Oh, he was a craftsman too, every bit as fine as we are, Barnar, and I honored him truly for the passion of his gesture. But couldn't he have made some poetic statement, such as: "Beside the wealth of my art, this gold is but dross to me!"—and then squandered it on lowly things—flesh and feasts—to show his contempt for it?
Well of course the point is that for Haldar, there was no substitute for the absolute. If he got pessimistic, as he did not seldom, he might not just talk about it. He was capable of jumping up and striding out onto the plain and fraternizing with the wolves, just to express his sarcasm and disgust with a thief's way of living.
The cold and sickly feeling of our camp hadn't left it. The lure of Haldar's furious despair was strong.
"Roast you!" I growled. "Will you eat? Blast and damn you Haldar, you've got no right to go sour. If you sink I'm almost surely gone. I'm not a wolf! If I were, I'm sure I'd like my life that way just as much as I like the one I've got, and I mean to keep the one I've got."