by Michael Shea
"Duck!" Barnar bellowed. From the battlements, rags of green fire came flapping down around our huddled shoulders, and boulders hurtled through the rubescent gloom. Weaponry too rained on us—darts, arrows, javelins whirtled and snickered down, while everywhere the million-voiced banshee of War raved and wailed and roared, a conflagration of noise that consumed our thoughts.
But did I, in this boil of risk, this great melee of swooping doom and arrowing death, falter one instant from my ecstasy? I did not! I knew my time. Now was Fortune mine, not harm. Now were power, and sweet ambition's pinnacles, and my wild will soaring at full wingspread—now were these all mine! I could not die!
Our Forager attained the crest of the battlements, where giant batrachian demons, welded at the waist to the stone, seized the jaws or legs of the invaders in wrestler's grips. Here and there, seized three on one, Foragers' limbs buckled—they faltered and were broken, limb and skull. Elsewhere the warty titans were scissored to a spew of green tissue by juggernaut jaws. A tentacle seized our mount's foremost portside leg. She heaved and struggled, and we were shaken as by earthquake. Acid smoke hissed round the tentacle's grip. The leg was sundered, and fell away, and we surged across the crest of the ramparts.
We were through. We were over. Smoothly we plunged down toward the broad, wall-girt plains all aswarm with demonkind, and the rhythm of our mount's onrush seemed unaltered by the lost leg. "This is our time!" I bellowed to Barnar. "Our greatest hour commences with this exploit!"
XII
Harken me Harpy, and answer me clear:
What might you find to fish out for us here?
OUR FORAGER sped through phalanxes of demon defenders, and torn demonmeat sprayed like wake, the flying fragments trailing entrails like comet-tails. The terrain dispread before us might be called city here and there, where domes and ragged steeples seethed with tiny-distant shapes in turmoil. Jungle it was elsewhere, where towering tracts of foliage thrashed and tremored with veiled struggles. There were walled gardens where grew rows on rows of things in glittery, bright-hued soil, things with eyes and voices, and neck-cords straining with their desperate utterance. On flagstoned highways caravans fled amid armed escorts, their multibrachiate mounts all saddlebagged with bundles that twitched and bulged. Red rivers snaked through it all, plunging here and there into caverns, and all these foaming red rapids were thronged with demonkind, whether in vessels or their own aquatic nakedness, all woven in the subworld's red-clawed trafficking. And all was grievingly, weepingly beheld by the great alien Eye in the hellroof.
Foragers cruised everywhere, smiting down domes and towers, scissoring down tall-crested jungle skylines, bursting through the great plantations' walls, devouring caravans and guards and packbeasts alike, churning into the wild red rivers and rising with broken galleons dripping in their jaws. . . .
"Harken, Harpy," I cried to our captive. "What might you fish up for us here? We favor high value and relatively light weight. Gemstones come to mind."
To hear its hissed answer we had to lean low to our Harpy's hindquarters, and smell the creature's personal scent, which was not unlike a putrefying lizard's. "Use reason, sires! Can I pilot this monster? Gemstones and their like are easily had, they're common mulch in gardens—if this Behemoth but carry us there."
We sprawled a-tumbling, barely keeping a grip on the pinioned Harpy, which might else have gone rolling off our mount. The Forager had stopped short, and violently assaulted the earth with her jaws.
This was a stretch of rolling, rocky ground all studded with stone and steel trapdoors, burrow-mouths hugely hinged and barred, squat-built turrets, and bunkers of massy iron. Our mount began to rip out the lintel and frame of a trapdoor.
There were other Foragers assailing the many-portaled ground, and we saw one of them in particular—a silhouette at some distance—rear up to encounter an attacker. Shaken as we were by our mount's convulsive tearings at the stone, this remote encounter gripped our attention, for now we could make out the silhouette of that other Forager's attacker; it was fully as large as the Behemoth, and resembled an immense 'lurk, or running-spider.
But now beneath us gaped a corridor, deeply branching and sulfurously lit and thronged by multibrachiate creatures fleeing ever deeper. Into this, our mount plunged.
Down green-litten echo-y hallways we chased hordes of scaly, hooved brutes which, as they fled, deafened us with the trumpetings of their brazen, funiculate mouths. We swerved through a turning, and thrust into a high-vaulted chamber, richly carpeted, with facing rows of splendid doors and grand statuary. Amazingly, our mount attacked the carpet, seizing up huge flaps of it. The carpet bled copious purple gore where it was torn. She pulled mightily, and the heavy, hemorrhaging fabric slithered twitching through her jaws and into her crop. And as the carpet tore, a wave of mutation rippled down the magnificent corridor walls; doors and statues and ceiling vaults all shuddered and melted from their form, revealed in their upheaval as one continuous anatomy. Statues became probing papillae, doors the wet membraneous valves of mouths, floor and wall and ceiling all one unified, sinuous, cloacal tube of carnivorous tissue. Ridges of annular muscle swept peristaltically through the glassy demonmeat, whose labyrinthine veins surged inky-black in its death-throes.
If the weight of our Forager's huge meal had slowed her, we failed to note it, and were knocked sprawling once again by the suddenness of her wheeling round and surging surfacewards.
"List! Oh, list!" the Harpy malodorously hissed, and we crouched hearkening. "Her crop's half full now. She'll feed more, but will be soon enough returning. If you mean to use me, let us stand ready!"
We tethered the demon by the neck, and bound its legs, which, though skinny, had strength and flexibility to uncollar it once on the wing. Our mount was speeding now towards a walled orchard. "Do your gathering with your jaws," Barnar told the Harpy. "A false move and we'll break your neck. Bring us up wealth enough, and we will set you free."
Barnar and I traded a covert look here, for we had both, in the same instant, seen a further way the Harpy might be useful to us.
"Agreed!" the Harpy gasped. "Look how she makes for that plantation—your wish for jewels may well bear fruit, oh Honest Masters! I hope I may without offense, and fervently, ask you for solemn assurance of your intent to reward my earnest endeavors with the restoration of my freedom."
"We would not dream of denying you such assurance," I told the demon distractedly. Our course towards the orchard was bringing us nearer the silhouetted combat we had glimpsed just before plunging underground. But it was combat no longer. The Forager crouched paralyzed. The spider straddled it, the tip of its abdomen waggling as it bound its prey in shadowy shrouds of webbing. We shuddered at the sight, but were soon enough distracted, as the orchard wall towered swiftly near. "Down!" I bellowed. "Hold fast!"
We dropped, and gripped our harness. The wall exploded; its huge ashlars tumbled across our dreadnaught's dorsum like giant dice. We were through the wall, and speeding across a soil of purest gemstones that crunched like gravel underfoot.
True demon jewels, their colors blazed completely unaltered by the vinous hue of the subworld's light—colors for which no earthly names exist, colors like lascivious caresses, prurient osculations of the optic orbs.
From this dazzling soil of gems grew rows of taut-muscled saplings, each one rooted at the groin in the brilliant substrate. These trees were multiply headed, though every head mouthless; their branching necks strained to give utterance to a voiceless woe; their polyglot limbs futilely grappled the air.
Our Forager was not bent upon this crop itself, but toward a cluster of huge shapes in the middle distance. Finding her steady in her course, we unbound the Harpy's wings. "We can work off her shoulder at the gap in her legs!" Barnar cried. Though her seared-off leg-stump rowed powerfully in rhythm with the other limbs, its truncation gave us a gap to play our line through. The Harpy took to the air, and we paid out some two hundred strides of line, about as much
as we could easily manage the drag of.
"Don't let the line foul in its legs," I shouted to the Harpy, "or you'll be pulled in and trampled." Disdaining to reply, the demon executed an out-arcing, in-sweeping dive. It seized up jewels in the ample grip of its jaws, and we hauled in slack as it swooped up and back.
Again and again our Harpy angler dove, and with each return it streaked low in front of us and spat down a hefty spill of gemstones. While Barnar managed the Harpy's tether, I began to collect the gems in the leathern, lidded amphorae we had brought for the giants' pap.
Our mount neared her quarry; the demon agriculturalists, or at least harvesters, of this infernal orchard. They were giant slugs, moving in slow formation, inching down parallel lines of the struggling trees. Their slick, mottled hide was just such flesh as we had seen being fed to the grubs in our larval chamber. Each slug glided down one line of plantings, feeding. It slid sudsing along on a tongue of slime, engulfing its slow, savoring way down its row, leaving behind black stumps where movement and struggle had been, and every so often, emitting from its anal pore a flatulent spew of fresh, bright gems.
"We're closing," rasped the Harpy, hovering near us. We allowed it to alight, till the first shock of impact was past. The foremost slug, its stalked eyes thrusting belatedly toward our Forager, was jolting ponderously to a halt, trying to reverse direction amid a great froth of agitated mucus, but our mount was upon it, shearing off half the huge molluscoid's back in one bite, exposing the wet work of its globular heart, toiling nakedly in its broken cavern of innards. The Harpy, looking behind us, was flapping furiously, and hissing.
A huge spider approached us, abdomen bobbing amid the graceful arches of its dancing legs. Above the twiddling, shaggy-sleeved horror of its fangs, its eyeknobs were mounted like a wall of merciless black gems, the biggest topmost.
"Batten down!" Barnar and I shouted at each other. We lay flat and hugged our jewels. The Harpy spread a wing to help contain the heap that was as yet unbagged. Our Forager, though a leg light on her port side, nonetheless wheeled majestically to do battle.
Looking up some thirty degrees of inclination along our mount's lifted head, we saw the rearing spider loom above us, saw it strike.
And as it struck, the Forager's great fighting jaws scissored. They seized the fangs crosswise and sheared them off. The fang-stumps bled venom which smoked ruinously down on the Forager's jaws, melting great wounds in those huge, spiked mandibles.
Our Forager, unfazed, ducked and thrust more deeply under our attacker. The spider, seized at the waist where flat thorax joined bulging abdomen, was lifted off half its legs; the foremost quartet of them trod the air, all tractionless.
But hoisted thus, the spider could reach down along the Forager's ridgeline, and strike her carapace with its sheared-off, unequal fangs. Had these been undamaged, they might have punched through even our mount's adamantine exoskeleton. Even as it was, when the wounded fangs struck, the splash of poison fanned hissing and smoking across her back, and some of her armor cracked deeply with a stress-groan like a ship's hull half stove in by a rock.
We scuttled frantically back to the Forager's waist, dragging as best we could our spill of jewels. Our little world heaved as the Forager flexed her abdomen for leverage and counter-thrust. In her jaws' slow, grinding pressure, the spider's mid-joint crumpled. Still the monster's fang-strokes fell, their strength and venom dwindling, though the relentless murder never faded from the eight black ice-moons of its eyes.
Then the arachnid broke; its legs crumpled into a crookedly twitching bouquet. It was flung down. The hairy bag of its abdomen, undefended, our Behemoth ripped wide open with her poison-scarred jaws. Thrusting her head into the bristly bag, the Forager guzzled long glutinous coils of pallid stuff which appeared to be connected to the twitching monster's spinnerettes. Apparently, our Forager feasted on that which would have mummied her, had she fallen prey.
At length, she turned from this feeding back to the sundered slug, and fed on this molluscoid until her crop could hold no more. We made a few more passes with the Harpy, but once the Forager set out on her return, her sole aim was to bear her precious booty of nourishment back to the Nest, and such was the undeviating energy of her onrush, that Barnar re-bound the Harpy, and set to helping me cut lengths of line, and weave them into a sturdy net to hold our swag, which now formed an effulgent pile of heart-stopping bigness.
"It's as if . . ." he marvelled at our dazzling hoard while we worked, " . . . as if we've snatched a piece of the sun!"
XIII
Behold them kiss their mother's side,
A-suckling of her pap.
They wash against her like a tide
That at its shore doth lap.
THE RAMPART was crossed, and fell away behind us, almost unregarded, so raptly we gazed on our lucent loot. Our mount surged over the plains unopposed, like the embodiment of our henceforth triumphant fate. Three hundredweight of demon gems! I felt immortal. Wherever my desire turned its eye, obstacles toppled, while stern Impossibilities bowed obsequiously, and withdrew. We could now afford a fleet of ships, and five hundred picked mercenaries. More! A flock of Gaunts could now be hired from the Astrygals—even Stregan or Hagian gaunts could be hired, damn the cost! And with these obedient horrors on the wing for us, Pelfer's tomb could be sacked in a single day's siege. I might stand actually shod in the Buskins of Bounding Absquatulation before two months were out!
And then, with Pelfer's triad of Facilitators, how swiftly could we plant our names, Barnar's and mine, among the very greatest in the Annals of Thievery! So bright could we shine that, when we were long gone to dust, our names would be sung in admiring melodies, by tongues whose languages are yet unborn.
I lifted my jubilant eyes to that looming, lunar Eye that wept its red rivers through every corner of this piece of hell. An indecipherable passion blazed from that eye, and bathed all below as in a warm mist of blood. How could I hope to read the emotion in that awesome orb? The black gulf of its pupil was a World-leak, a hole in the shell of the Cosmos of Man, where the winds off the stars breathed through.
Yet at that moment, I did feel I could read it. I thought I saw in that Eye a glee like my own. I thought I saw glee, along with that fierce absolute hunger of a hawk's eye that is reading a far field for food: the gaze of a power both random and absolute. I saw in that Eye in the hellroof the gaze of Luck herself telling me: "Yes."
I stole looks at Barnar, afraid to confront the different dreams I knew were enkindled in him. And he seemed on his part unwilling to encounter my gaze.
The Harpy, its legs still bound and its neck short-tethered to a piton, began in its ragged whisper to entreat us for its freedom. Barnar answered it kindly.
"Regrettably, oh Demon, we find that we require your help in one small further matter. You have but to render us this bit of additional aid, and you may expect your freedom with perfect confidence, and every—"
The Harpy interrupted with a heated burst of obscenity. It hissed some personal remarks so grotesquely disparaging to Barnar and myself, that I drew Ready Jack and clipped off a punitive inch from one of the creature's elaborate mouthparts. The Harpy's pentagonal pupil contracted in pain. "You have my silence!" it humbly hissed. "I wait to do your bidding, for I must."
Barnar and I traded one quick look, and spoke no more. Why compound the mad extravagance of what we hoped for, by speaking it aloud? Yet no hope seemed utterly mad for men who had just been carried through the subworld on a Behemoth's back, and laden with jewels, and brought back out again. Already the hell-wall loomed nearer, the mountain-roots darkly mouthed with Behemoth Nests.
"In this abyss we find our apogee of Luck." I whispered this to myself, like a prayer. We gripped our harness and our bale of gems. Our Forager surged up the mountain-wall.
"The instant she branches off our blazes," was all Barnar said, and "Yes," was my only answer. The mountain-wall snatched us steeply upwards. We hung gripping the harness and ou
r gems, our sinews cracking. In the Nest, the instant our mount left our marked path we must grip the Harpy's tether and jump, and let the sturdy demon slow our fall as best it could with its wings.
On the other hand, our Forager's course might lie straight back up to the apex of the Nest, perhaps even by the path it had brought us down. . . .
Here was our Nest-mouth, vomiting and swallowing giants, looming larger, larger, yawning to ingest us. . . . We were in, and cruising through the multitudes in its entryway. We jumped to our feet and dragged our gems and the Harpy over to the gap where the Forager's foremost portside leg had been. I wrenched the Harpy's neck to have its whole attention.
"If we jump, demon, wing it hard for the tunnel wall. If you let us break our legs, we'll see that you're crushed to death with us on the tunnel floor."
"Is that our blaze?" Barnar cried.
"Yes, by Key and Cauldron! And she turns!"
Silently we watched the miracle unfold. The Forager hugged our dye-blazed path at every turn. Up and up she sped, never diverging, till at length we ceased to fear she would. This Nest, this vault of Power—our Forager was its key, a key delivered into our hands.
And at length, when we did branch from our marked trail, we'd followed it so high we knew the point of our divergence must be very near our larval chamber. Why dismount now, when the Forager's goal was so sure to be our own? With jets of dye, we blazed this newest path.
The tunnel climbed more steeply, and began to yawn bigger and bigger, as gallery after gallery merged with ours from every side. The multitude of workers was even greater here than down at the Nest's entry hall, but this throng was more various in make and size, for workers of every caste were here, converging—we could not doubt it now, surely?—upon their millenial Mother.
Still we worked gently up-slope, the thousands thronging around us in rivers of opposing flow, till there ahead of us we saw the yawning portal of a chamber which dwarfed even this great concourse of confluent tunnels. And within that colossal cavern yonder, nested in its cyanic gloom, there lay a pallid, breathing hugeness that was Awe itself.