by Michael Shea
—Shag Margold
The Goddess in Glass
I
WHEN THE THIEF Nifft, of Karkmahn-Ra was near thirty (which side of it is not known), he had achieved the first plateau of mastery in his art. That is, his style had been defined but he still lacked certainty about the proper canvases for his efforts. He knocked around more than he worked.
And one summer when he was hunting hill-pig with Barnar Ox-back in the highlands of Chilia, a letter reached him from his friend Shag Margold, the Karkmahnite cartographer and historian. Margold, knowing that Nifft meant to strike out westward across the Sea of Agon when he left Chilia, entreated his friend to stop in Anvil Pastures on the Southern Spur of Lúlumë on his way out. Margold had an important treatise in hand, to which information on that city's primary religious cult would be highly pertinent, and he had enclosed a packet in inquiries he wished Nifft to give the oracle of the Flockwarden's shrine.
The most current news in the scholar's quarter of the world was that the city had for more than a year been enjoying a period of astonishing prosperity, resulting from a revelation made to the citizens by the Goddess through her Oracle. The city was supposed to have benefited throughout its history from similar benevolent theophanies on the part of the Flockwarden, and the present boom period in Anvil Pastures seemed an excellent time to make some respectful investigations of this matter.
So from Chilia Nifft took ship, some two weeks later, for Anvil Pastures. He had already been aware of its prosperity. Anvil's weaponry had dominated the Great Shallows markets for decades, and quite strikingly so during the last nine months. Blades, body-armor, arbalests, seige-machinery—everything from byrnies to scabbard-chapes, and all of a superlative quality of steel both impossibly flexible and all but unbreakable, had been pouring from its foundries and forges at such modest prices that all competition on both sides of the Sea of Agon was overwhelmed. Nifft expected no trouble finding ships bound for that port.
But it did surprise him that the most convenient option that he found was a big Gelidorian troop-shuttle bound for the city with no less than seven hundred mercenaries requisitioned by the Aristarchs of Anvil Pastures. These troops included a large contingent of pioneers and field-engineers. None of these troops knew the city's object in retaining them, but they had other news for him. Anvil Pastures' luck had just recently taken a very nasty turn. One of the huge, contorted mountains flanking the city had suffered an uncanny form of collapse. Its peak had been fractured and the entire mass of it had for some weeks lain poised on the brink of a collapse that must utterly obliterate the city beneath it. The Aristarchs—the body of commercial oligarchs which governed the city—had beseeched the Oracle of the Flockwarden for some remedy to the civic anguish. The Goddess-in-Glass—for this she was called as often as Flockwarden by the mercenaries—had, through the oracle, declared that her aid in this crisis could be procured, but first the Aristarchs must, in pledge of earnest allegiance on their part, procure for the Goddess this sizable expeditionary force of first-quality professionals.
At the evening mess Nifft sought a seat by the First Captain of Pioneers, a man named Kandros, whom he had found the most concise and enlightening of his informants about Anvil Pastures' dilemma. By the time the grog ration went round the two men had exchanged a variety of anecdotes and philosophical perspectives, and had found that they rather liked each other. Kandros was a slight, leathery man, not quite forty, but with the eye-wrinkles of a desert tortoise, the wrinkles of eyes that had studied two eventful decades' worth of encampments, fortifications, seigeworks and battles. The hands that hung from his wiry arms were great knobbed and tendoned pincers. These big, hammer-knuckled paws which he seemed to move so seldom were uncommonly direct and neat in the movements they did make. Nifft sipped his aqua vitae and said:
"Kandros. Am I right in feeling that this company of yours presents an unusually strong component of engineers and sappers and the like, given the number of combat forces?"
"Quite right. We've conjectured no end what place we might be hired to besiege, but we are too few to attack any city of real consequence. Besides this, it's hard to see what help for Anvil Pastures there'd be in the capture of some fortress or town."
"Though the Aristarkion has engaged you, I gather that august body is as much in the dark about your precise commission as you are."
"So I conceive it. The Aristarkion is not always piously prompt to fulfill a directive of the Flockwarden. For instance, more than a year ago, the Goddess announced through her oracle that her flock had returned to the world of the sun, and that—I quote exactly now—she must have them by her, every one, for it's long and long that they have been gone. The oracle asked, in the Goddess' behalf, for an expedition to bring her flock back to her from somewhere on the southeast coast of Kairnheim, where apparently they had reemerged from some long burial under the earth. And the Aristarchs, after mature consideration, declined to undertake so great an expense for so vague a behest."
"It would seem that the Goddess is forgiving. It must have been shortly after that refusal that she pointed the city the way to its recent bonanza."
A certain watchfulness had entered Nifft's manner, as if Kandros' last remarks had a connotative undertone that he was not quite catching. The captain's reply was in a meditative voice.
"In religious matters, my understanding is that the city-fathers are somewhat inconsistent. When the Goddess gives them oracles that hint of profit, they are piously convinced of the deity's potency. There resides in her corpse a strange attunement to the earth, its deep and secret structures, and the oracles have preserved the secret of interpreting the Flockwarden's revelations, though their mysteries remain inviolate. You're right about the Goddess' generosity. Her revelation to the Aristarkion followed its rejection of her demand by little more than a week."
Nifft was smiling absently at his cup. "I get the feeling," he said, "that there is a certain irony in the city's state of affairs which you have yet to reveal to me."
Kandros nodded, conceding. "To someone not intimately affected by the situation it might be amusing that it was the Aristarkion's intemperate haste to capitalize on the bonanza the Goddess revealed to them which, through an unforseeable fluke, created the deadly flaw in the structure of the mountain which now threatens the city."
* * *
Nifft and Kandros stood by the rail amidships. "You know," Nifft said, "no matter how I tried to imagine it, it all sounded preposterous." Gazing at the mountains surrounding the bay into which they sailed, and smiling, Nifft shook his head. Kandros nodded.
"Descriptions never convey it."
"What is that jetty made of?"
"Steel, or something like it. It's called Pastures' Staff. It is a relic of the age of the Flockwarden."
"Pastures' Staff . . . And how remote was that age?"
Kandros shrugged. "It was when this bay was formed, and these mountains gnawed from the coastal massif. It was when these mountains were almost twice as high as you see them now, and far more terrible in their form."
The Staff, jutting a quarter mile into the bay, was the spine of the harbor's system of docks. The gentle slope of the bay-floor submerged its seaward end, so that its full length was not determinable. Though entirely caged within the skeleton of masonry and timber that crowned and branched from it, the cyclopean axis immediately engrossed the eye, as though all that encumbered it—not quite as real as its immemorial metal—lacked the necessary solidity to obscure it. It drew the viewer's gaze shoreward, to its inland end, which the city's architects had incorporated in the foundation of one of the towers of the imposing city-wall. But once there, the eye again neglected the nobly-proportioned masonry of Anvil Pastures, and was drawn upward to the mountains that embowered the city.
Kandros was not given to fanciful turns of speech, and he had called the mountains no more than what they were—terrible in form. The Southern Spur as a whole was essentially one vast block of extremely metal-rich stone
two hundred leagues in length, opposing huge, blunt cliffs to the Sea of Agon's troublous waters. Erosion had flawed and featured those cliffs, but nowhere really breached the general smoothness of their mighty wall. But at the site of Anvil Pastures something more powerful than the wind and tides had torn into it—had gouged the deep embayment that was the harbor, hewn the rocky niche that was the city's seat, and chewed the continental buttress into mountains stark as a rack of bones, and stretching sixty miles inland in all directions. They reared up two miles and more with fearful steepness from the sea's threshold. They were gaunt, disjointed peaks. Something in their contorted multitude suggested pain and calamity.
Nifft said, "I remember a certain battlefield I saw some years ago. The war had moved on from it two weeks before, and many cavalry had died in that engagement. It was a fiercely hot mid-summer. I remember those acres of sun-hardened, leathery carcasses, their crooked legs sticking up from the earth at every angle."
Kandros made a mouth of wry assent, and nodded at the peaks. "Imagine them twice this stature, their carving not yet softened by eons of rain and wind."
The two men lounged on the rail absently watching the harbor as they approached their berth in it. They passed a pair of warships which, while ignoring in-bound craft, appeared to be stopping and boarding every outbound vessel, once it had cast off and pulled into the bay.
"Hallamese," Kandros said in answer to Nifft's look of inquiry. "Rather an amusing matter. Hallam is at war with Baskin-Sharpz, near the equator upcoast here on Lúlumë. I suppose you've heard of the conflict?"
"Yes. Hallam's on Moira, the next isle east of Chilia. A trade war, no?"
"Correct. You'd think the Sea of Agon big enough to share between them. Anyway, it turns out they only went to war because both had discreetly sent diplomats to Anvil Pastures and both sets of diplomats negotiated what they thought were exclusively advantageous arms contracts with the Aristarkion. So they find themselves at each others' throats, and each finds the other twice as well-armed as he had been gambling on. If their war wasn't going so hot and heavy the discovery would've made a truce between them and they'd have joined forces to enslave Anvil here, despite her mighty walls. Even as it is, this harbor is now a zone of truce for both belligerents. In a few days two Baskinon warships will probably arrive here to relieve these Hallamese vessels. There are to be no emigrants from Anvil, you see. They intend that the inhabitants of the Pastures will stay here to fulfill those arms contracts they so doubly sold. Naturally both belligerents have staffs of diplomats obligatorily hosted by the Aristarchs in the comfort of their own homes, and these diplomats keep a daily roll-count of all the city's rich and powerful men and of their liquid assets, to ensure that both remain at home. It's the only reason that splendid metropolis there isn't a ghost town."
They regarded the ramparts under which they were now docking. Wealth and power radiantly incarnate—such were the hugeness and the resplendent masonry of the walls, as well as of the great buildings which, farther upslope within the city, overtopped them. Nifft, musingly, said, "Pastures' Staff. Is that the name of that thing in the water, precisely? I mean, I have the impression I've heard it referred to, but pronounced differently."
"No, Pastures' Staff is what I've always heard it called."
"Well. Shall we share a maxim of wine while we're waiting to go to the temple?"
"I'll take you to the Hammerside Inn, but I insist on the privilege of buying the maxim."
"That is kindly spoken, and gladly accepted."
II
The wiry captain was to join the rest of the mercenary commanders when they reported to the oracle of the Flockwarden to learn their commssion. Kandros was of the opinion that Nifft's interview with the oracle stood a better chance of success if she first met him in company with the military gentlemen whose services her Goddess had enjoined her to procure, and Nifft thought this very likely.
"We probably have time for another of these before we must leave," Kandros said, hefting the empty maxim. He signaled the ostler of the Hammerside.
"Only if it comes from my purse this time," Nifft said.
"Absolutely not. If you are obssessed with repaying me, you can do so on some other occasion."
Nifft smiled thoughtfully. "Very well. On some other occasion."
"Your eye dwells on the fireplace," Kandros said a bit after the fresh wine had been brought.
"Its odd to see one whose inner wall is of iron rather than brick." Indeed, the wall glowed with the heat of the blaze. Kandros nodded with the satisfied smile of one who has achieved a calculated effect. "It is in fact a far larger piece of iron than the little fragment of it visible there. That whole wall of the inn is built against it."
"The Hammerside Inn. . . ."
"I will show you when we go out."
"So be it, oh thou military man of mystery."
A large, sleek man in a fur-hemmed robe came into the common-room, his manner one of dignity in haste. He stood in the entryway, simultaneously clapping to summon the ostler, and scanning the room for him. The ostler was not overly quick to terminate his conversation with some patrons at a corner table, and when he came, exhibited only a perfunctory deference. Kandros nudged his friend and said, "I think this fellow is from the temple." Indeed, the ostler directed the stranger's eyes to their table. The smooth-faced could be seen to consider summoning them to him from their table, but something in their aspect decided the stranger to approach their table.
"Good afternoon, gentlemen. Which of you is Captain Kandros?"
"That's me. And you are Sexton Minor, are you not?"
The man nodded, looking both pleased and vaguely miffed, as if announcing his identity were one of his habitual pleasures. "The shrine-mistress would have her interview with you a trifle earlier than she indicated. I told your fellow officers of this, and they asked me to bring you to the shrine. My conveyance waits outside."
"Will you have a glass with us?" Nifft asked. "It seems shameful to waste so much good wine."
The Sexton's oily black eyes, resting on the maxim, plainly agreed. "Dame Lybis bade me hurry. . . ." He hesitated. His own words decided him. "Bah! I'm her Sexton, not her lackey. Thank you, gentlemen." He took a chair and signaled the ostler for a cup. With evident relish he decanted and sampled the wine. Kandros said, "I heard from one of the other captains, friend Minor, that your shrine-mistress is an irascible sort. I hope she doesn't make the honor of your office a burdensome one."
This sally visibly warmed the Sexton. He grimaced confidingly and leaned nearer his hosts, regaling them more liberally with the scent of his pomade.
"The honor, as you so graciously term it, is positively onerous. I thank the stars that I'm a near connection of Aristarch Hamp—through whom I have the sextonship—and that I can make some modest claim to civic position and consequence without it. My first cousin, in point of fact—"
"Indeed I have heard a great deal about you, Master Minor, and I'm pleased I have a chance to benefit from your knowledge of the situation here. I've passed through your city several times, but have to confess I have no deep understanding of Anvil's affairs."
The Sexton nodded sympathetically, a great depth of understanding shining in his large, black eyes. Nifft refilled all three cups.
"One puzzlement of mine has never been resolved," Kandros went on. "Dame Lybis, for all her eccentricity, must be a priestess of genuine power, for is not the Goddess she serves, and speaks for, dead?"
"How could the Flockwarden not be dead?" asked Minor. "Have you seen her?"
Kandros nodded. "Precisely. And how then does Dame Lybis obtain her insights from the divine corpse? How do the dead, though they be gods, communicate anything at all?"
Minor smiled indulgently at his glass, and drained it with gusto. "You must forgive my amusement, Captain, but your talk of divinity—though we call the Flockwarden a goddess—strikes me as naive. What is a god or goddess? The notion is so vague! Surely you are aware that the consensus
of enlightened opinion holds these beings popularly called gods to be visitors to our world from the stars? Their alien attributes, their powers so incommensurate with our own, are the source of the mysteriousness which the cults make so much of. The Flockwarden while she lived was not unique, but one of many others of her breed. Her body has by chance survived the holocaust that killed the rest of her fellow-colonists on our world. Whatever faculties her kind possessed for reading deep into the structures of stone and earth are preserved in her body, and through some means the shrine-mistresses over the generations have kept secret, the dead alien's eyes—so to speak—can still be looked through, and some of her powers of geologic insight can, erratically, be tapped. You noticed that the Goddess' antennae extend forward, and their tips reach to a point quite near the surface of the glass block?"
"Indeed, it was as you say."
"Well, the oracle's mode of communion with the Goddess is not known, since the operation is veiled, but it is generally believed that it involves placing her hands against the glass at just the aforementioned place. This action, by the way, is called the Solicitation of the Goddess. What passes between Dame Lybis and the Flockwarden is not known outside the guild of the shrine-keepers. You may be sure that many an Anvilian entrepreneur has put his hands to the glass in the small hours of the morning, when the temple is empty, and strained to feel some million-lictor clue of the Goddess' posthumous knowledge—" Here the Sexton raised his eyebrows in an expression of ironic self-communion. "—but to no avail. But is this divinity we are dealing with here? Surely it is technique, historical knowledge—mysterious to most of us, surely, but mere technique, in essence, nonetheless."