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 L£lum‰, 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 L£lum‰ 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
L£lum‰'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 L£lum‰ 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-Him¡n 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 Bag g
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 all 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." 

Sadly, easily, he waved away my words. "You're fooling yourself, Nifft.
The great tricks are gone now, don't you see? Those feats of deep cunning
and brave flair-we're all alloted a few of them, and we get no more, no
matter what our longing is. And you know, you're lucky if you even
recognize when you're having your best moments. Half the time your soul is
looking the other way when they come. And you never grow wise enough to
know what they were until you have passed the hope of having more. Then,
the rest of life is this-" he waved at the moonlit plain "-greedy
four-legged scavenging through a desolation." 

Well normally I can turn a sharp retort to such elegiac horse-flop, and so
too, surely, could Haldar himself at another time. But just then I hadn't
the spit for it. I felt such a freezing, putrid sadness! And all at once I
understood that it was-still-the place we were camped. For the feeling was
seeping into me. These boulders and this gravel were giving it off the way
ice gives off cold. There was something here, and its presence was getting
stronger moment by moment. 

Haldar, it was clear, was reacting to it without realizing its source. He
sat jabbing a stick into the fire, as if trying to stab it to death. I
tried to speak but my throat caught, and it seemed for a moment I couldn't
find even the simplest words. My friend threw down his stick, rubbed his
forehead, and then jumped up and shook his fist at the sky. 

"By the Crack," he shouted, "I'd give my life to work just one great feat
more-one greater than any I've yet accomplished. My life! I swear it by
the Wizard's Key!" 

Well his words shocked me. Even though my dread of this place hung heavier
and heavier from my heart, like a poison fruit that would fall and break
and cause something foul and dark to be born-I still had the wit to be
both alarmed and startled. I was alarmed because Haldar wasn't a man to
bandy oaths, and if he spoke one he was dead serious about it. And I was
startled by the oddity of the oath itself. Have you ever heard anyone but
some Kairnish outlander swear by the Wizard's Key? It certainly wasn't
Haldar's custom. We stared at each other and he looked as surprised as I
was. And then I got a feeling. 

"There's something here," I said. "Do you feel it? Not far. Under us maybe
. . . but approaching." 

Halder looked around, nodding grimly, scowling at the shadows. "Mark me!"
he cried aloud, "who- or whatever you are that stand near us now. You have
put a thought in my mind, and a word in my mouth. But I defy you! I claim
my oath as my own. I stand by it as mine. So stand forth now, if you mean
to offer what I ask!" 

That was the man all over, Barnar. No one spoke straighter to the point.
Let nameless things skulk, if he heard them in the woodwork he'd call them
out to state their business. 

We waited in silence. The ugly weight still dragged on my heart. I was so
absorbed I didn't realize my hand was on my swordhilt until I had the
blade half out of the sheath. I remember hearing, as I listened, a sound
of toenails on stone, and thinking to myself, No, that's only a wolf. 

So in a way I wasn't surprised when Haldar's mount screamed and we turned
to see its legs buckling as two huge wolves dragged it down by the throat.
Two more swarmed onto it while my mount rose and stove in the skull of a
fifth with its forehoof. I was already launched toward it when I saw the
wolf above and behind us on the rock overhanging our fire. I shouted to
Haldar and as I completed my spring, I had a last sight of the wolf
leaping down on him: a giant silver dog that hung above him on the firelit
air. 

Then there was only the work at hand. After that cold, festering dread,
the bloody uproar was like fresh air. I brought down a two-handed stroke
on one of the beasts, and no more than half clove its neck, though I had
my broad-blade then, and a full swing. That's how big those brutes were.
Its spine held my blade almost too long as a new wolf plunged in from the
dark, but I got my point up to its throat and its own leap killed it,
though both my shoulders were nearly unsocketed. I slashed my mount's
hobble and it stood its ground unhindered. Halder's already had four
beasts sunk to their shoulders in its opened belly, while it still
screamed. My friend shouted. 

That leaping wolf had taken his blade in its open jaws, but the thing was
so big that its heart wasn't cleft till its jaws had reached the hilt, and
Haldar had had to drop the sword or lose his hand. The animal lay
twitching now, the sword-pommel between its teeth, and Haldar had only a
brand from the fire in one hand, and a knife in the other, with which to
face a new attacker up on the rock. I swear, this wolf was two-thirds as
big as a horse. It had shoulders like a northron bear. Its ribs showed as
distinctly as so many peals of a deathknell-ours. Its eyes were as yellow
as honey and insane with hunger and from the dark behind it, in the
intervals between the horse's screams, came the sound of other paws
scrabbling on stone. 

Then the giant, instead of springing, scrambled desperately backward from
the edge of the rock. The bush of its tail glinted in the firelight as it
turned, and it was gone. A noise of many hard, fleet paws scattered away
through the dark around us, and the ones that were feeding plucked their
drenched heads from the horse's ribs and fled away, their sticky ears
flattened in fear. The horse still screamed, but with less strength. I
almost clung to the sound, in my fear of the silence it covered, but pity
won and I split its skull. 

"It's coming," Haldar said in the silence. "But from where?" He sounded
hushed, fascinated. There was no mistaking the terrible nearness of
something. The air swarmed with ticklish sensation. The very stones were
crawling with premonitions like a million invisible ants. I felt
fascinated too; but far more strongly I felt loathing. I could not wish to
leave-you can't, you know, if you come as near as we were, and if you have
any enterprise or fire of soul in you. But I could not bear to wait in
stillness. Like some housekeeper in a frenzy, I began, insanely, to tidy
up. I freed Haldar's blade and wiped it on the beast's coat. I began to
drag wolf corpses out of our clearing. I cursed and snarled and hauled on
them with furious strength and with each instant I felt the air swarming
and breathing more intensely. Halder shouted: "Nifft! Look at the rock!" 

Even as I turned, one of the big boulders near our fire bulged. It swelled
out sharply, just as pliant as a mother's belly where a child, impatient
to be born, gives a kick and a shove. It settled back. Then it bulged a
second, and a third time. Then it peaked out again, and this time, did not
return to shape. The thing within stretched it unrelentingly now, with all
its force. A crack appeared in the apex of the bulge and with it, as if
pouring out of the crack, a charnel stink entered the air. The crack
widened with a snap, and a skeleton hand thrust out. 

It had just enough yellow gristle and tendon on it to keep the bones
together. It clutched and plucked at the air like some nightmare crab
feeding on a kelp-leaf. Then the rock heaved again, split farther, and the
entire forearm sprouted out with its one straight and one curving bone.
Arm and hand flailed and scooped at the air, and the stone tore
again-mightily this time. Our knees buckled in the reeking gust that hit
us. The other hand and arm thrust out-this hand grasping a large golden
key. A being of bone and parched ligament dragged itself out onto the
gravel. Its skull was patched with swatches of black, rotten hair that
looked wet and flattened like the womb-licked hair of babes just born. 

The boulder lay in halves now, and the thing writhed toward us, its ribs
leaving scalloped furrows in the earth. It moved like a spent swimmer
hauling himself from a punishing surf-from an icy, stinking sea. The chill
those bones gave off was as powerful as their stench. When the thing
collapsed near the fire, the flames turned red and shrank, as if crushed
by the cold. 

But have I talked of stench? By the Crack, I did not yet know the meaning
of the word. For as it lay, weakly stirring, the thing began to change,
and as it changed, it seemed our noses and throats were being crammed with
grave-dirt, so fiercely did the thing reek. We leaned against the rocks
and stared, our wills not ours. Flesh had begun to web and drape the
bones. 

Not flesh, mind you-but just such gluey rags as comes before it's utterly
gone. This foul paste spread. Lumps of it rose within the ribs' cage like
loaves in an oven, and the festoons on the rest of the skeleton thickened,
and wove, and knit into skin. And that skin began to stir, and then to
crawl, and then to boil-with worms. 

In my heart I thanked the fire's weakness, for I had no power to look
away. Both of us had our hands covering nose and mouth, but the stench
came through mine as though they weren't there. The thing rolled onto its
back. 

The twisting maggots covered it so thick that it shed clumps of them as
the swimmer might shed the foam he's crawled from. The worms dripped, and
then drained down. Here and there they fell away completely, and left
patches of fresh, pale skin. Over the ribs they rose in a pair of
squirming domes, and then avalanched away and left behind two fat,
rose-nippled breasts as luminous as full moons. And at the same time,
luscious thighs and loins shed their foulness and glowed, and her skull
sockets spilled out their contents as great black eyes filled them. 

A woman had been born, nude and whole. The earth she lay on was clean, and
the air was pure again, though when she moved she still gave off a gust of
cold like wind off a glacier. She touched her cheek with one hand. With
the other, the one that held the key, she touched one of her nipples. She
smiled up at the sky. Her teeth were clenched and there was a bitter joy
in her eyes. She began to run her fingertips all over her body. Her hands
were swift and trembly, like those of a miser searching over a treasure he
had thought lost. Two great tears slid out of her eyes, and drenched the
black hair at her temples. She rolled her head to stare at us across the
fire. For several heartbeats she only stared at us, smiling that
clench-jawed smile, her breasts surging softly. Then she said: "Raise me,
mortals. My strength is nearly spent with climbing up to you. There will
be little time." 

Her voice, Barnar! It entered your thoughts like cold silk scarves being
pulled through your ears-one sounds mad describing it! I moved to obey
her, but leadenly, and I'd hardly stirred before Haldar was at her side.
He reached his hands down to her, this woman of the living dead, just as
promptly as a thirsty man might reach to pluck his flagon from the
counter. 

But he had to bite back a cry as she took his hands. Heroically, he held
on as she rose, and in the end fell to one knee so she could steady
herself, totteringly, by putting her hands on his shoulders. He was
hard-put to mask the pain of her touch. And she-her body was full, smooth,
and sturdy as a woman's in her twenties. But it seemed she could only hold
it upright with the greatest concentration. She kept one hand on the
boulder beside her to steady her, once she had gained her feet. Haldar,
still kneeling, bowed his head and said shamefacedly: "Forgive my outcry,
Lady. It was . . ." 

"It was cold, Haldar Dirkniss," she said, looking down at him as a
spirited queen might look down on one of her favored young earls. "It was
the cold, and the sorcery of the key, which you touched. But you must
stand away now, little hawk-faced mortal. I must speak quickly." 

Oh well-beloved Haldar! He never lost the power to astonish me, Barnar! He
was always correct, but seldom courtly with women. The way he was acting
could only mean that he had been . . . smitten by this grave-delivered
ghost. There could be no mistaking. The way he jumped up at the word
"little," and drew himself up to full height, and stared at her with deep
reproach and bitterness-and the way he had called her "Lady." He was no
hypocrite with terms. He would have called her Darkling, as is generally
prescribed, but for some sudden, special passion. 

Not that she wasn't harrowingly female. She was fine, ample and free, even
in her tired stance. Her face was small and square, with animal-black eyes
and strong teeth. The eyes were wide-set and she had the planed-back
cheekbones of a Sargalese peasant, or a Green Plains woman. Her lips were
full, restless. She smiled ironically at Haldar's eyes. "Dear mortal, it
is deadly, unendingly hard to rise. It is a long way up and a long way
back through the paths of decay. Merely to stand and speak in the living
air is a titan's work. The moonlight scorches me. Sweet thief, don't balk
at trifles. Stand away and hear me." Haldar stepped back, bowing his
contrition. 

She nodded to me. "Hail to you, northron Nifft, called also Nifft the
Lean. You and Haldar both are known to me-your qualities of craft and
soul. It is your luck that you chose this camp, and mine that I reached
you in it. Know, gentle thieves, that your fortune has turned. I am your
gate to fame, to wealth and power past the tongue's telling. If you go
through me you will go, at first, through terrible darkness, but at the
last you will go in brightest daylight, amid pomp and acclamation. I am
Dalissem. I was a temple-child of Lurkna Downs. I have been dead these
seven years." 

It seemed that I heard each thing she said one instant before her lips
finished forming it. I felt her voice twice with each word-a double echo
of no sound at all. Haldar made a half step toward her, meaning to swear
unconditional fealty then and there, no doubt. She thrust out her hand
warningly and shook her head, causing her black hair to move in snakes
upon her shoulders. 

"Listen only! I cannot stand up long against the pull of the Underground.
It is true I put a thought in your mind, Haldar-but you were not betrayed.
I caused you to swear by the Key, because I have the Key, the Key itself
of the Marmian Wizard's Manse. It is this one. Now I come to you to offer
what you seek. I'll give you your life's transcendent feat-your greatest
exploit-and I will not ask your life in fee, though you have sworn it.
Instead, I shall fee you-I'll give you the Wizard's Key. For this, you
must bring down to me one living man, one man still living down to me in
the Winds of Warr, down where I dwell in the Place of the Raging Dead." 

She pointed again and again to the ground as she spoke. Haldar and I
exchanged a look. It cost him something, I believe, to tear his eyes off
her, and his face held no doubts of this exploit. His look said simply:
What fortune, eh Nifft? What colossal luck! 

And I confess I was no more than a shade off feeling the same. Imagine
being presented with Sark's Wand, say, or the Sandals of Speedy Flight.
You don't really believe that they must exist in one particular place or
another. It's dumbfounding to consider that some one person actually
possesses the Key of the Marmian Wizard's Manse-let alone that he might be
standing before you, holding it in his hand! She brandished it to us now,
the way you hold a sword up in anger and challenge to someone who stands
far off. The head of it was a quincunx of wrought-gold roses-just as the
tales have it. It was so massive that the holding of it etched little
lines of strain in Dalissem's forearm. Of course there was only one good
test of the key, lacking the door of the Manse to fit it into. I said,
courteously, 

"May I touch it, Darkling, to be sure?" I forced myself not to say "Lady"
which, once spoken, seemed so right for what she was. I wanted to irk her
slightly, interrupt her, to loose the trance she was weaving in my mind.
This you must remember to do when you talk with the more-than-mortal.
Dalissem chuckled. It felt like being grinned at by a big mountain
cat-delightful for the beauty of the animal, disturbing for the possible
sequel. Her face now was showing the wear of a continued effort, along
with its bitterness and black delight. She said: "Dear Nifft, your
insolence is what this work requires. I honor your impudence, for you'll
need it all. Come here and touch it, then. Come and feel the power in it."

I approached her, sinking deeper into her cold with each step. The cold
drenched you-even through the bone-but it did not freeze your movement. As
I stood near her I feared to smell the grave, and smelt instead a
rainstorm, the smell of wet wind, chill and lightning-purged. By the
Crack, her eyes were dark and deep. I looked at the key, and gently,
gently, put my finger to it. 

Though prepared, I almost cried out in my turn at the fierce charge
humming and grinding within the gold. I pulled my hand back, but the
briefest contact sent towering hallucinations skidding across vast
polished floors in my mind. I nodded and stepped back. 

Dalissem now swayed slightly on her legs. She'd locked her knees, the way
a strongman at a fair will do when he's holding a weight aloft. She
pressed the key against her belly and it vanished within her substance.
She put both hands to the boulder for support, and smiled at us haggardly.

"You're just men. It will matter to you that the life of him I seek stands
forefeit by the oldest laws of every land and subworld. It is Defalk of
Lurkna Downs I want. He swore away his life in pledge to me, as I did mine
to him. I paid my debt to death, swiftly on the promised hour. He has
these seven years turned his back upon his oath, and cherished his flesh,
and walked in the light of the world. You may ask any of that city for my
story, and know my truth. 

"My mother is a Purgatrix, one of the chief seven of Lurkna's temple. She
still lives. She swore me to the white tunic at my first blood. Because
she hated me. Because I told her that I wished to know the love of men. I
found Defalk, Defalk and I found ways. And we had much together. 

"Until I was followed, and we were taken at a trysting. Upon that bed, as
they were breaking in the door, we swore our deaths. Their ways and hour.
For we were sure not to meet again. He would be freed, with reprimand. I,
who had stained the Tunic, stood liable to death at my mother's hand on
the next Purgation's eve. I meant to forestall her." 

Dalissem had begun to sweat. To see the drops snake down her flanks
reminded me of horrible earlier sights. She hugged the boulder now, rested
her head against it, while her back registered the earth's pull with
shadow-lines of strain. She grinned with an exquisite, almost savored
hate. 

"But my mother did not mean I should escape her in Death. She condemned me
to grow old and die in a small room that had one window too high to reach.
But I . . . escaped." 

She let her legs go. Her bare knees hit the gravel with a painful sound.
She still hugged the rock with arms too small by far to encompass it. 

"My guard, still raw. I killed her on her second day of duty, a Post she'd
thought . . . she'd have for life. . . . Indeed, she did. That morning of
my escape. The world seemed almost in my arms. 

"I got a mount. I rounded Lurkna's walls to reach Defalk. I did not keep
well off. I was sighted. A patrol set on me. I rode all day. I could not
circle back. They contained me though they could not close my lead. My
mount was strong, but he must die at last. Near here. It was near the hour
of my vow. I had time to strip, to bind my hair, to raise the knife, and
cry my lover hail and farewell. The captain was so close I read his eyes.
He saw his death in mine. Behind him I saw, with joy, my mother's rage. I
must lie down, I cannot choose, I must lie down." 

She fell from the rock then. "Come near me, Haldar Dirkniss." She looked
up at him from the gravel, and smiled at his haste. Though she lay on her
back her body seemed still tensed against the earth. Her head she rested
there, but the rest fought back. 

"The door to my world lies through the death of another." She spoke more
easily now, glancing at me as well as Haldar. "There is a man in Lurkna
sure to die soon. Arrangements would be easier, of course, if you caught
and killed some alley-trash. With the spell I shall give you, you will
have passage through the death of anyone at all." 

"We are not butchers," cried Haldar, pained. He needed no backward glance
to know he spoke for me as well. "We relish difficulty. We'll come to you
through the door that offers." 

Dalissem nodded with slow, harsh-eyed approval. "Well spoken little
mortal. You know, Haldar Dirkniss, that you are not a little man." She
said this sharply as my friend was bridling again. "Others have passed
this way through even these few years. I have let them pass. Sent up no
feelers of my thought. Would I have cast my nets entire, and climbed this
infinite, high climb for little men? Come nearer, and I will put in your
memory the manner of your coming, and the spell." 

My friend put his ear to her lips. She whispered for a long while, and my
friend looked outward as he listened, but you could see from the dazed
shifts of his eyes, strange spaces opening in his mind. 

She let her head roll to the side when she had done. Her body gave an
exhausted shudder, and just barely regained its tension. "Stand away," she
hissed. "Turn your backs. I must return the way I came. In the face of
horror, keep your thoughts on the Key. It will be yours." 

We turned away. The reeking cold washed over us. The foaming sound of ten
thousand little maggot jaws got louder and louder. Two fat tears jumped
out of my friend's eyes and sank into his beard. That night we slept
without guard. Death's presence was so strong in the place no wolf would
come near it for many days. 

My horse had stayed within the boulderfall, its nose having quickly told
it of the wolves' departure. We rose before the sun and saddled up, having
decided to run and ride in shifts. I took the first turn running. As we
started out in the first light of day, Haldar said musingly: "You know,
Nifft. She told me far more than the spell, and the information about
Defalk and Shamblor. There were a thousand other things too, endless they
seemed." 

"Well what were they?" I asked. 

"I don't know! She left them all there inside me, just past the reach of
my thought." 

He rode and I trotted on. I left it to him to call the time. I ran all
morning long, so far away his mind was. I didn't object to it for three or
four hours, greyhound though I am. But at length I had to rouse him. He
swore he had not thought an hour gone. 

III 

Defalk of Lurkna Downs went to many inns and taverns in the course of a
day. He went to the fashionable ones in the Exchange district, which
stands on giant floats upon the lake, just off shore; he went to the more
colorful ones in the wharfside district ashore; he went to the ones in the
old center of the city where the chambers of law stood. Where he went
depended on whether he was talking to a broker, or negotiating the sale of
a haul of his father-in-law's fishing fleet, or cajoling a judge in
Maritime Equity to smile upon a renewed charter to fish some particularly
rich zone of the vast Great Cleft Lake. I promise you the pair of us
learned Lurkna Downs well in the course of dogging the fellow and marking
his ways and times. We worked with an ear always pricked to the news of
Fleetmaster Shamblor's progress. He didn't command a fleet, you
understand, he owned one-one of the city's largest. Gossip about his
condition was abundant and we sifted it carefully, for his death was to be
the door through which we took our quarry. The Fleetmaster rallied briefly
shortly after our arrival, and gave us a week that we did not waste. 

The upshot was that on our chosen afternoon, I crouched in an alley
alongside the Quill and Scroll Inn. This is in the center of the city and
the narrowness of the streets there decided our choice, for it compels
passersby, if they wish to ride, to use one of the runner-drawn chariots
that are the district's only feasible form of taxi. Defalk never walked
when he could ride, and he lunched here almost every day. 

On the previous night I had been inside the inn-after hours, you
understand-and improved a crack high in the wall through which I could
command the side of the inn our quarry almost always sat on. Empty crates
in the alley screened me from any who glanced into it as they passed. I
mounted a barrel and applied myself to the opening. I meant to watch for
his entry, but he was already inside, at the table nearest my vantage. He
had only a flagon before him, and seemed to be waiting for someone. 

He was a tall, blond man. His wide shoulders recalled an active youth, but
his belly and hips now matched the shoulders' girth. His face still had
the habit of handsomeness, though soft living had already blurred its
lines. But after all, the habit of beauty is the essential thing. He would
still be a favorite among the women in his world. His world was that of
the no-longer-young, would-be rich. His father-in-law was middling
wealthy, but we knew he kept Defalk on a short leash. Our quarry was a man
who could expect to be comfortably off eventually, after his youth was
well past, and he had served a decade or so as a go-between and adjutant
in the world of finance. And you could see at a glance that Defalk was a
simple man who wanted no more than to be brilliantly rich, admired, and
unencumbered with work. His face said it so plainly: "I'm an excellent
fellow. Isn't such a life no more than my proper portion?" I assure you, I
half agreed with him, his conviction was so uncomplicated and sincere. At
one point in our observation of him, Haldar had turned to me and said with
strange bitterness: "By the Crack, even the best women love just such men
in their inexperience. A brainless complacency must be one of the great
secrets of winning women's hearts!" 

A burly man, black-bearded and doubleted in burgundy silk, came into the
inn, and Defalk signaled to him. The man was Defalk's age, but his
movement had verve and his eyes flashed a swinish vitality. Both men wore
the insignia of wealth-most notably the fur-trimmed short-capes then in
vogue-but when you looked at Defalk's lax shoulders and slightly vague
blue eyes, and then at the other's energy, you knew at once that the
bearded man was born to the world which the other was still scrambling to
enter. 

The man strode to Defalk's table and dealt him a hearty shoulder-clap
whose familiarity bordered on offense in that relatively staid little
tavern. He stood for quite a while, bantering boisterously, drawing lots
of eyes, which he enjoyed and Defalk obviously didn't. At last he sat
down, still gusty and hail-fellow in all he said. There was some small
talk. Defalk kept his voice pointedly low and at the same time tried to
return a toned-down version of his guest's conviviality. His awkward
insincerity was painful to watch. Kramlod, his friend, drank it in
greedily. 

At length Defalk set his flagon aside and leaned toward Kramlod. "We've
known each other long enough for me to be blunt," he said. "Bespeak what
you'll have, and I'll come out with what's on my mind." He signaled the
keep. Kramlod smiled. 

"Ah, Defalk, you're just the man to speak out what's on your mind! I
remember you as a young man, chasing temple skirts, no less, for your
pleasure. We all thought you such a daring romantic then, and so outspoken
about all us more conventional souls! Remember what you used to say about
the world of business? All toadying and chicanery, lean purses fawning on
fat ones for favors? Were those not the days? How far we wander from our
youthful views!" 

He made only the thinnest pretense of speaking at large. He sat grinning
in Defalk's face as the latter chuckled-a sickly and unpleasant little
cackle, I judged it, but obviously music to Kramlod. The keep appeared and
Kramlod made a stridently jovial affair out of ordering-prodding
recommendations from Defalk, echoing them, rallying the keep for his
reactions. At last he ordered a small glass of punch. Defalk ordered a
double firewater and I didn't blame him. 

"Favor-seeking you mentioned," Defalk said when the keep was gone. "By
coincidence, Kramlod, that's precisely my own role now! Perhaps you
guessed it! There's no dimming your eyes, old buck! In a word then, noble
fellow, you must ask us to this evening of yours! It would help us greatly
and harm you not at all. Lurissil sends her pleas with mine-very pretty
ones, I promise you, they'd charm you in a minute. Come then, I know you
simply overlooked us!" 

Kramlod smiled with childlike wonder. "I'm baffled!" he said. "I'm
nonplused. I'm robbed of speech. You and Lurissil, music lovers! For
surely it's the orchestra on the raft-the prospect of waterborn music
under the stars-that starts your saliva regarding our little evening!
There you have it-one thinks one knows someone, only to have them reveal
utterly unsuspected traits of character!" 

The drinks came. Kramlod took up his and looked blandly about the inn, as
if the topic had been disposed of. Defalk smiled wryly and took a pull on
his firewater, no doubt to take a certain taste out of his mouth. "You're
like one's elder brother," he chuckled, shaking his head as if Kramlod
indeed recalled to him some affectionate memory. "You hold the candy out
of one's reach, just for the joy of being taller! Look here, this is
really unconscionable, old man. And you know very well I'm no music lover!
You rogue!" He smiled in relish of Kramlod's roguishness. The crinkles
round his eyes looked more like pain than mirth, and Kramlod studied them
avidly. 

"But really, Defalk. I'm absolutely adrift. What but the music could make
you beg so hotly for an invitation to my little evening? I'm forced to
think you're teasing, that you don't really want to come at all." 

Slowly Defalk shook his head, displaying further relish for his friend's
humor. "Well, well, I see you'll insist on playing the fox, Kramlod. I
don't hide my motive. It will give Lurissil the opportunity of inviting
the Lady Squamash to her afternoon next week. Lord Squamash's fleets have
the charter for the waters adjoining my father-in-law's. We have a
negotiation in view. There. A man can't be plainer. You see I don't seek
to minimize the indebtedness we'd feel for this little favor from you." 

"By the Crack I understand. I'm terribly thick, Defalk-ludicrously so. To
make a mystery of a thing I might have seen in an instant if I'd put my
mind to it. Lord Squamash! Of course! Darla swears I'm far too dim for
public duties. I deny it, but in my heart I confess I think her right!
This was delicious, Defalk. What was the name of it again?" 

"Red-posset punch." 

"Indeed. Well, I've had great amusement here, dear friend. I must get away
now-Darla is hiring the music all day today, and wants my help. Convey my
heartiest kisses to Lurissil." 

Kramlod stood up, beaming. Defalk looked up at him blankly-getting his
gorge down, I suppose, so he could speak. Kramlod waited in obliging
silence, giving him the time he needed. At last Defalk said: "And your
evening, Kramlod-will you invite us to it?" His voice was flat, and he
didn't manage or bother to get all the hate out of it. This apparently was
the last treat Kramlod was waiting for. He smiled with a pleasure which it
must have felt downright obscene to have given him. He gave a brightening
start of recollection and thrust his hand into his doublet. 

"Now see the decay of this noble memory! Here we've been talking on and on
about it, and all the time I had this for you from Darla! Here! Spare my
dignity, Defalk-don't tell anyone else of this humiliating display . . .
of my forgetfulness!" He tossed a little beribboned scroll on the table
and left with a cheery wave. 

Defalk sat still for a while, looking blank-looking like a man who was
busy not thinking or feeling anything. I felt as embarrassed for him as if
I'd been sharing the table with him during the brown-nosing. I was so
ashamed of him I wanted to hit him. An odd thing that. I'd never have felt
it, of course, if I hadn't known that Dalissem had died for this man. He
picked up his drink and drained it, and sat still again. His eyes got
meditative. He took on a rapt look of vengeful fantasy, and his lip's
stirred, with triumphant rebukes, I guessed. At length he sighed, and
ordered another drink. He never touched the invitation till he had
finished his second drink and gotten up. Then he pocketed it quick and
strode out. 

I knew his route from the inn to the main thoroughfare, and I got ahead of
him on it, glancing back to be sure of his following. Haldar waited just
past the first turning I took. As you've guessed, he stood by a chariot.
He was barebacked and oiled against the cold-all in the mode of a Lurkna
taximan. He stood far nearer the Quill and Scroll than Defalk could
usually hope to find a vehicle, as the tavern was in a commercially dead
zone. We could be sure of his taking our accommodations. 

"He's a minute back," I told Haldar. My friend threw me a leather sack. I
sprinted ahead to the next lane, and turned down it. I ran, light and
fast, to a cul-de-sac between two abandoned buildings. It was deep enough
to look like a through-way when you first turned into it, but after a
slight veer you saw it was blind. I passed this turn and crouched down. 

After a few moments I heard the chariot coming, and then Defalk's voice:
"Is this a through way? I think not." 

"It is, my lord, and dodges the snarl of the carts on Vertig lane." 

"I don't want to lose time . . ." 

The chariot whirled past me. I jumped out to stand behind it while Haldar
stopped short and heaved upward on the traces. Defalk spilled headfirst
and backwards out of the cart. I brought up my sack's mouth to catch him
and he tucked himself into it all the way to the waist, just as neat as
your foot thrusts into your boot of a morning. Then Haldar was by me. We
got the bagmouth to Defalk's ankles and knotted the heavy drawstrings. He
was bellowing to bring the walls down. We righted him, and I punched him
in the center of the ribs' arch, just enough to knock his breath out. He
sagged, and we put him in the cart, folding him to fit the bottom. I got
in the seat. Haldar turned the chariot and trotted us off to our lodgings
in the wharfside district. 

Hitting him had been a relief-it felt like revenge. How could he be what
he was, when he had had Dalissem before him, beckoning him to all he could
have been? I found I was as angry with him as Haldar was. 

But, not being an idealist like Haldar, I couldn't help seeing it in a
saner way too. The man had only been vain and weak. Cold-blood killing is
bad enough, is it not? But to drag a living man down there . . . he was an
oath-breaker. He'd sworn his life away, and it stood forfeit by all laws
known in this world and the subworlds alike. I kept a firm grip on this
fact in my heart, you may be sure. And wouldn't you have done the same,
gritted your teeth and dragged away-for the Key of the Marmion Wizard's
Mansion? 

IV 

Two days after taking Defalk, we lay in readiness for our descent. Our
captive lay between us, tied hands and feet, with Haldar's dirk-point in
the hollow of his throat. 

I've said a great deal in saying we lay in readiness. Here's what it
meant: We lay on top of a great velvet canopy that overhung the bed of
Shamblor. The Fleetmaster himself was below us, in the bed, busy dying.
Half a dozen other people were in the room. We were invisible to them all,
due to the canopy's height, so long as we did not sit up, but the room was
so quiet that even the growl of a man's stomach was clearly audible. I
knew from some carefully stolen peeks, and from following their
conversation, how they were situated. 

Two of them were druggists, and wore their sable cowls up in sign of
professional engagement. They did not sit down, as their guild rules
forbade this at a deathbed. Of the other four, two were seated. One was a
dried-out woman, Gladda, the magnate's spinster daughter and only child.
The other was her nurse-companion, a burly, short-haired woman with an
oddly beautiful face. The remaining two were a cousin of Shamblor and his
wife. They might have found chairs, for the room was full of opulent
furniture, but they stood with a stoicism that conveyed a fitting sense of
humility and gratitude in advance. The man, a long rickety fellow,
insisted on being the one who ministered Shamblor's medication when his
breathing got rough. This was a posset in a gold cup that stood on a table
by the bed. 

We had got Defalk into the house the day before by delivering him,
drugged, inside a gaudy funerary memento sent to the house with the
condolences of a fictitious earl. It was a great ceramic tombstone, all
bewreathed with black-dyed plumes. Defalk, folded, just fit within the
"stone." 

The memento was accepted with perplexity by the daughter. Within the hour
I followed it, properly garbed, as the said earl, I spoke to Gladda with
moist intensity, wringing her unwilling hand. When I had been a mere
fopling, before the days of my family's increased fortunes (we were a
great house latterly decayed) a jovial old gentleman had once given me a
copper for some sweets. He clapped my little shoulder, and spoke words of
encouragement and good cheer which had lit a little blaze that had warmed
me ever since. 

But one always forgets precisely these small yet precious debts. The march
of time, the whirl of events, the flow of circumstance! I had long known
the kindly old man's name-Fleetmaster Shamblor-and still had never called,
never squeezed that gruff but giving hand. And now I came too late! I had
learned of the great man's death. And so I had sent that poor token she
had already received, and had come myself with a plaque of graven silver
commemorating his good deed to me. 

What? He still lived?! There was still a chance to meet those eyes, still
a moment in which to-you get the drift. Within five minutes Gladda was
leading me up to Shamblor's chamber, and with a fairly good grace too,
considering the dry and suspicious woman that she was. She was no fool,
either. People will sometimes lose sight of the most fundamental truths
merely through the long habit of them. I'd tinctured my tale with
circumstantialities, I'd done my research, but Gladda momentarily forgot
what she'd never have doubted an instant if you'd asked her about it
directly. Namely, that Fleetmaster Shamblor wouldn't give a fly a swat
without something in return. The plaque was a costly thing-the silversmith
we got it from was paying for it himself, though he didn't know it-and
perhaps the spinster was persuaded by its value. Mind you, I gave her a
perfect version of the rich man who has nothing better to do than go
around making himself look soulful. 

At the magnate's bed, I laid the plaque tenderly beside him, sprinkled
some more drivel on it, and wrung his suety hand. Shamblor peered up at me
like a fish through ice. While all this went on, I did the thing I'd come
for. I let a rat pellet fall from my codpiece, and as I rose from the bed,
much affected, I crushed the pellet with my heel. 

I asked for the conveniences. Gladda blushed and directed me, remaining in
the room. But out in the hall, I went no farther than the next bedroom
door. This room was the only suitable place for lodging the sick man, once
the other became unbearable, and the other room would become unbearable
some time near midnight. I pulled some light, strong climbing cord from my
doublet, anchored it to a window mullion, and let it fall outside. We had
dyed it the color of the stone of Shamblor's walls. I reclosed the window
but left it unlatched. I returned to the sickroom and took my wordy leave.

Our plan was loose and chancy. In such a big house, they might choose
another room. Or the rats might come too soon, and Shamblor be moved
before we could get ourselves into it. 

Well, every big house, however fine, has plenty of rats in it, especially
in damp waterside towns like Lurkna. But the staff was well paid and
hard-driven by Gladda, and the bait was as slow as we'd hoped in bringing
the invasion. Haldar and I climbed in just after dark. We chose our hiding
place and lay listening till we had a good sense of how many servants were
about, and what was the frequency of their movements. 

As soon as activities appeared to be tapering off for the night, we stole
out. Without trouble we slipped downstairs, got Defalk out of the mock
tombstone, and brought him back to the bedroom. Once we were all settled
on top of the canopy, there was time left for a half hour's sleep apiece.
Then we brought Defalk round with a restorative herb. He must not suddenly
awake in the midst of things. He had been prepared for his situation, but
given no explanation of any kind. He knew only that we meant to ransom
him, and that he would emerge unharmed, providing he did nothing, no
matter how bizarre the circumstances he found himself in. So when he woke,
he only glared at both of us, and said nothing. Haldar and I lay
listening. 

Sometime near midnight we heard the first hasty footsteps and shouts of
disgust in the corridor. Soon after, we heard the skittering little feet
of drug-maddened rats charging past. The rat-sounds got even thicker and
never wavered, not even when several pairs of feet hammered up and down
the hall. Ripe concussions, the squalls and coughs of slaughtered rats,
reached us. The reaction was as we'd hoped. The passionate fixation of the
rats on that one door alone was observed. Two wheezing grooms burst into
our room with the sick man on his mattress between them, and the burly
nurse like a harpy from hell on their heels. Rats, after all, are a
groom's business. 

Down the hall the storm raged, and would till the pellet faded. The
apothecaries and the relatives quickly left the battle and cleanup to the
servants and resettled in our chamber. Strong beverages were brought
which, by the sound of it, none of the watchers refused. Conversation was
attempted several times, but it did not thrive. 

And thus we'd lain in our readiness for two hours and more, when I decided
we'd have to take a hand in things. Shamblor had settled into a snore that
sounded like restorative sleep. He'd gurgle now and then and some posset
would be dribbled into him, and he would sleep on. It began to seem he'd
rally again. I was not about to meet the Taker of Souls with my nerves
worn and raw from a grueling wait. I reached across Defalk to warn Haldar
with a touch, but before I'd moved farther, Gladda broke the long silence.
Quietly she asked: "Do you suppose they came . . . for father?" 

"No," said the nurse crisply. You felt, hearing them, that they'd
forgotten everyone else. "They haven't followed him, have they? There's
your answer," she concluded. There was a pause. 

"So many of them. . . ." Gladda said. 

Thus was a ploy pointed out to me. I eased a copper out of my breeches,
the room's carpet being dark brown. I flipped it through the air so it
struck the farthest wall. At the sound, the old cousin screeched and
someone jumped up from her chair so fast it fell over backwards. The
Druggists were made to inspect the other side of the room, and everyone
else gathered at their backs. I sat up and flicked a pellet of poison at
the goblet on the stand. It was as adept a move as I've ever brought off
in a tight spot. It landed with a plurk in the posset-the noise raised
more gasps, but no one could fix its source. They didn't find my copper
either. They returned nervously to their positions. We had only to wait
for the magnate to gurgle again. 

Poisoning the cup made it all realer. The man would now die, sure and
soon. Which meant the door to that world would open, sure and soon. None
in the room but ourselves would see it open, and only we would see what
entered. And roast me if I didn't nearly throw a fit then and there,
Barnar. I was taken so fiercely with a shout of laughter that the canopy
quivered with my holding it in. 

It was Defalk, you see. The grimness of what stood now so near him,
coupled with the ridiculousness of all he had just been through! How
grotesque his puzzled theories must be, and how far off! I remembered the
last thing I'd heard him say before we took him: I don't want to lose any
time. Alas, Defalk! Haldar, at that very instant, was wheeling you to
Eternity! I know you'll not think that because I laughed I did not pity
him. Pity was half the reason of that laugh. I barely managed to wrestle
it down-a bad omen, considering the bout I'd have to fight shortly. 

The sick man wheezed, and there followed the sound of a dram administered.
Hearing the sound was like having a key turned in the pit of the stomach,
letting in dread. Haldar touched my shoulder to sign his readiness. We
clasped hands over Defalk's chest, and Haldar began to whisper the spell.
The breathing noise of the magnate suddenly grew spastic and harsh. The
nurse said: "Your father! Look!" Her voice was crisp and alert, a sensuous
tremor in it, as if the moment of passage were a physical pleasure to her.
And I felt her voice as if it had slithered across me. My skin was
unnaturally alive. I was feeling everyone in the room, as if they were
moving through my nerves. I felt the quiver in the nurse's loins, and in
Gladda's cry of "Father!" I felt the doubt mixed equally with hope.
Everyone was gathering toward the bed murmuring. . . . 

And then the room was absolutely soundless except for the dying man's
breath. Nothing moved. So strong was the sense of the chamber's emptiness
that I sat bolt-upright on the canopy, and got a bad shock to find
everyone still there, frozen mute in postures of approach to the bed.
Gladda faced us directly, but her face had stiffened in a look of heavenly
appeal, and her eyes registered nothing. And then there was a sound
outside the door. A progression of sounds. Footsteps. 

Oddly, the steps seemed to scuff on stone, not carpet, and to echo in a
cavern, not a corridor. The door of the chamber drifted open-inward,
against the way it was hinged. A naked manlizard, six feet high and a yard
wide, stalked in, shoulders swinging. Since it grasped a leather sack in
one hand, it would be the Soul-taker, my opponent. I shuddered at the
leverage in that cold, leathery frame. Its tail was short and massive,
better than a third leg with its flexibility. The Taker would have
tremendous stability in a tussle. 

But when the Guide of Ghosts followed his servant into the room, I
breathed a prayer of gratitude that it was only the henchman I had to
fight. The Guide was a wild-haired barbarian. He had to stoop through the
door-more than seven feet I'd put him. He wore a ragged and muddy kilt,
and battle-sandals, also muddy, whose thongs wrapped his calves. He wore
nothing else but a traveler's cape, under which his trunk bristled as
hairy as an ape's. His eyes were black slots, his cheeks like glacier
slopes, flat and cold. His mouth was a restless chasm deep in the brambles
of his beard. All he carried was a staff, but its crook was a living
serpent as thick as my arm. 

The two of them stood looking up at us, pausing without surprise in their
approach to the deathbed, waiting. I cleared my throat. 

"Hail, Guide of Ghosts," I said. "We beg you to take us with you, alive,
on your journey back down with the life of Shamblord Castertaster." 

Slowly, the Guide said, "Come down." He had the voice to give those two
words their ultimate expression. His tones seemed to fall endlessly-his
speech echoed and fell away within him, and it drew you after it, into
him. I jumped down onto legs that almost buckled under me, what with our
long lying. Haldar handed Defalk down-he'd started to struggle when he
heard our aim, and Haldar had stunned him with a blow to the neck. Haldar
jumped down in his turn. We were in the midst of the watchers. Gladda
still looked heavenward, the nurse hung poised nearest the bed like a
hunting dog, the apothecaries exchanged an endless grave expression, the
old couple wrung their hands, making paralyzed haste to their benefactor's
side. 

Alone among them, Shamblord was awake to us. His eyes moved with dismay
from one to another of us, and real sweat shone on his face. He knew his
moment, and was alive in it. 

The giant stared at us; I believed I saw him smile, noting Defalk's bonds.
As he stared, the serpent that sprouted from his staff leaned near us, and
its tongue flickered with inquiry near my face. Its impudent obsidian eyes
scanned us as a toad scans flies. Shamblord Castertaster spoke, it was the
first time I had heard his voice. It was scratchy, and thin as a
mosquito's whine: "What? Now?" 

The Guide turned his eyeslots on the manlizard. He gestured at Shamblord.
The Taker of Souls marched to the deathbed with its wrestler's waddle. It
climbed onto the bed and crawled over the magnate's legs. Shamblord
thrashed weakly amid his sheets. The lizard demon lowered its head and
butted the sick man's belly-at least I thought it only butted. But in fact
its blunt scaly snout, and then its whole head, sank right through the
blanket. Then the whole damned squamous beast crawled through the
belly-bulge of the old man, leather sack and all. For a moment it was
gone. Shamblord gaped, and a bizarre, liquid convulsion moved through him.
Then his face split asunder like a rent fig, and the bulky reptile poured
out of the wound. 

The Taker jumped off the bed where Shamblord now lay whole and untorn, but
stone dead. The manlizard now held his leather bag down near the base,
trapping something in a tiny bulge, while most of the sack hung slack. The
Guide of Ghosts nodded at the sack. "Observe, mortals," he said. "He
hardly had a spirit at all-just that little clot of ectoplasm. He'll
hardly make a ripple when he's dumped in the sewers of the world beneath."

What could one reply? I bowed. "Great Guide, what is your answer? Will you
bring us down to the place of the Raging Dead and bring us, or two of us
at least, back again?" 

"You must fight for passage," said the Guide. His words fell with a dire
resonance into his emptiness. "One of you must wrestle my Taker of Souls
to a standstill." 

"I am prepared to do that, great one," I answered. "I would forgo it
willingly, should you decide it was not really necessary." 

"It is necessary," said the Guide. 

V 

It was indeed necessary to wrestle the Soul-taker without delay, because
it handed its sack to the Guide-who grasped it in the same place-threw
itself at my middle, and drove me to the floor. 

It was like fighting a wave. The only way to survive the assault was to
roll with the surge, to twist and scramble to stay out of its holds.
Forget attacking! The thing had not only a third leg in its tail, but a
third hand in its jaws. They were toothless, but bone-edged, and could
crush muscle. Look here at my forearm-these two marks. The Taker made
them. Yes, see the breadth of his bite? To this day I don't know how I got
my other arm free to throat-punch the beast, for all the rest of me was
writhing across the floor, one heartbeat ahead of a chest-lock that could
have staved in my ribs like a rotten cask. I flattened its gullet and just
as I freed my arm we piled up against the legs of Gladda. It was like
colliding with stone-planted bronze. It knocked me half silly, but I got
both hands up to one of her arms and hauled myself free of the manlizard,
whose head had taken more of the impact of collision. 

The thing shook off its daze in a blink, but I had time to find my feet
and as it came curving round the statue-woman I threw a side kick to its
chest. Full force mind you, with all my leg and all my weight behind it.
The thing reeled back to its three-point stance. I hit my feet again and
skipped back and fired another kick to its sex. 

Now my target was problematical. Lizards' privates lie under one of many
identical slat-like scales on their bellies. I chose the broadest slat and
hoped for the best. 

With my greater experience, I can now advise against this tactic with
large reptiles or quasi-reptiles. The Taker rocked with the blow and then
exploded forward, as if I'd fired it with new power. For an instant I
thought I'd outwitted it when I leaned aside from its dive, and threw a
neck-lock on it from behind with my arm. Then I was just holding on as the
Taker stormed through the room, hammering the floor and walls and
time-frozen people with my body. 

I had such desperate work keeping my body tight against the crushing and
the blows, that I had no strength to strangle it with, the best I could
manage being to keep its head and jaws out of action against me. We
crashed into the old woman-her abundant skirts were like cement-and
careened from her to a great oaken wardrobe. The Taker rammed me into it
dead on to break my hold on its throat. We smashed right through and into
the wardrobe-through an inch of solid oak! Wait. Look here on the back of
my shoulder where I took the blow. That's where it cut me as it broke. 

And then it was like fighting underwater, drowning and blinded in the
heavy coats and cloaks. The Taker worked its head halfway around and its
jaws gaped right under my face. I thought I would suffocate in its swampy
breath. Meanwhile it had twisted up the length of its body and was
pounding at my head with its tail. It had me pinned in the box, and could
well hope to pound me senseless, given time. I was forced to keep one arm
up to protect my head, and my shoulder was being beaten numb. 

Then, the next time his tail came up, I grabbed it with my blocking-hand
and shoved it down the Soul-taker's own gaping throat. That freed my hands
for an instant, which I used to get a double strangle-grip of its throat,
locking its tail in its gullet. Its body was bent in a hoop around me,
now, and I kept it pinned with my weight. 

If the Taker had a weak point, it was its hands. They were as big as a
man's, but only three-fingered, and had the scaly delicacy of a reptile's.
Plucking a soul off its rack of meat takes dexterity and finesse, I
suppose. The Taker couldn't break my grip on its throat, and in its
extremity for air, it at last lay still, conceding the match. 

I staggered back to the Guide. My opponent got up swiftly and moved to a
position by the door, showing no slightest sign of fatigue or pain. He
could have fought again, at this instant, I realized, and annihilated me
in a moment. The Guide said to me: "It is Dalissem, the temple child of
Lurkna Downs, who has called you." 

Haldar and I assented. Defalk stared at the Guide fixedly, but without
shock. Surely he had guessed who had sent for him. One could not be as
close to such a woman as he had been, and come away without a feeling of
her power to work her will. 

"Come then, mortals," the Guide said. "We will seek her soul." He handed
the leather sack to the manlizard. The servant preceded the giant out the
door. The three of us followed, after slashing Defalk's ankle-bonds. The
wardrobe, I saw, stood whole and undamaged. The people, it seemed, began
to soften, and to stir. We stepped out the door, and into a spacious
gloom. The torch-lit corridor was gone. We'd entered a vast, rawly
stinking sewer. 

It was arch-vaulted, hundreds of yards across, and its only light was a
kind of glow from the scummy river that filled it wall to wall. We were on
a rickety wooden staircase that led down to a tiny pier. There was a raft
of tarred logs moored at the pier. 

The Taker and the Guide stepped onto the raft. We forced Defalk after, and
got on ourselves. The Guide said: 

"You may unbind your captive. You are within the realm of Death. If any of
you leave my protection, you are forefeit unto Death, forever." 

We freed Defalk's wrists. Up at the head of the stairs the ornately carved
bedroom door of Shamblord Castertaster swung shut and, with the stairs,
vanished from the muddy sewer wall. Our raft was afloat, riding the
hideous flood. The lizardman had taken up a pole and was pushing us out to
center stream. 

Those waters teemed, Barnar. They glowed, patchily, with a rotten orange
light, and in those swirls of light you could see them by the score:
little bug-faced ectoplasms that lifted wet, blind eyes against the gloom,
and twiddled their feelers imploringly; and others like tattered snakes of
leper's-flesh with single human eyes and lamprey mouths. And there were
bigger things too, much bigger, which swam oily curves through the
light-blotched soup. One of these lifted a complete human head from the
waters on a neck like a polyp's stalk. It drooled and worked its mouth
furiously, but could only babble at us. All these things feared the raft,
but you could feel the boil and squirm of their thousands, right through
your feet. The heavy logs of the raft seemed as taut and ticklish as a
drumskin to the movement of the dead below. 

The Guide said: "Defalk. This is a journey you should have taken in
another form, and long ago." 

"You know our companion then, Great One?" I asked. Defalk looked away from
the Guide and said nothing. 

"Whose name do I not know, northron Nifft? I learn every living being's
name as it is given. When the mother first speaks her infant's name, she's
whispering it in my ear too. She is saying, though she does not know it,
'Here, O Guide, is my Defalk, another job for you someday.' " The giant
chuckled gently. There was silence for a while. The stink of the place was
so entire and all-enveloping I found I could ignore it-like a waterfall's
roar when you're near it long enough. It seemed to me that the current of
the turgid flood was moving a bit faster. 

"But even if I had not known him early," the Guide said abruptly, "I would
have learned of him later. Did I not carry down Dalissem? Oh, that stroke
she gave herself meant business, mortals. No hesitation in that
thrust-between the ribs and through the heart. She split it sharp and firm
as a kitchen maid will cleave an apple. There was a woman! Her soul filled
this whole sack! It bulged with her spirit! That's rare enough, I promise
you. Most of what we take is a dwindled-down and wretched little clot of
greed and complacency and fear-like this! We let such slugs worm their own
way down to the floor of hell. Thus!" The Guide shook out the bag over the
side of the raft. Something rat-sized clawed the air and splashed into the
flood. Shortly, a whiskered snout without eyes surfaced and squeaked
lugubriously at us. The Soul-taker drove the pole against it and it swam
off. 

"But Dalissem," said the Guide. "Dalissem was one of those who won a
place. Souls that burn hot enough, you see, stay lit in death, and win
eternal being in this kingdom-being you can call being, I mean, not
buglife in scum. Rage was the fire she endured by. Therefore her place of
endurance is with the Raging Dead, amid the Winds of Warr." 

"Rage?" burst out Defalk. His speaking surprised us all. He looked at the
Guide. "Why in a place of Rage? She died for love-for our love!" I caught
in his voice both his guilt, and his more terrible secret vanity. 

"To your own shame you speak it!"-it was Haldar who said this, seizing
Defalk's arm and shaking it. "But it was rage much more than love. Could
you have known her so little? I knew her entirely with one glance-such is
her fineness! She would have killed her enemies with her own hands, she
would far rather have wreaked her rage than died! But she was powerless
except against herself. So she struck there, scorning a life in chains." 

Quietly, tenderly, the guide asked, "She is beautiful, is she not, Haldar
Dirkniss?" 

"She is, lord Guide." 

"You, Defalk," said the Guide, "you should have seen her journey down. You
should have seen her birth from the Soul-taker's bag. Such splendor out of
the foul, dark thing. True souls emerge with the shapes they had. She lay
here on this deck, seven years ago, and she barely stirred when she
understood where she was. Her first movement was to stretch her arm beside
her, as a sleeping woman will do in the early morning, to be sure of her
man in the bed by her. Dalissem found no one to her right, nor to her
left. Then she sat up slowly and looked about her. I looked away to spare
her shame in her disillusionment. 

"She never said anything. After a while she stood up and watched what
passed. Through all her journey, she stood by me and watched, and her
expression scarcely changed. At the very last, when we stood by the chasm
of the Winds of Warr, I pointed to the staircase that led down their brim.
She stepped from the chariot gravely. She turned back to me and gave me a
deep reverence, dropping to one knee. She did it like a queen! Then she
strode down those steps, elegant and grim. But at the bottom, on the brink
of the pit, hauteur alone was not enough to express her wrath. She stopped
and raised both fists above her head and shook them. Throwing back her
head, she howled. Then she dove from the steps, head-first into the black
hurricane." 

While the giant spoke, Defalk sat down on the deck and rested his head in
his hands. How much can you hate weakness? I felt sorry for him. But then
the first thing he said was: 

"What does she want with me now? Is she going to take my life?" 

"We don't know," said Haldar. Strictly speaking, we didn't. But could
there be any doubt? 

After a moment Defalk, still not looking up, asked: "What has she paid you
for this service?" 

Haldar gave a disgusted snort. The reaction was odd-after all, we were
working for hire, weren't we? I answered: 

"She is giving us the key to the Marmion Wizard's Mansion. It is, somehow,
in her possession. She showed it to us." I looked hopefully toward the
Guide as I said this. He volunteered nothing about how one of the dead
might obtain the Key. After a silence, barely audibly, Defalk said: "I
see." 

VI 

The soul-sewer branched and veered and branched. We steered through the
reeking maze for an endless time. Defalk sat hunched, no doubt remembering
things. Haldar stood rapt at the Guide's side, his eyes straining with an
avid light at the semi-dark. 

I could not share his calm rapture. It seemed to me the current had begun
to quicken, and that the gloom was thinning . . . and somewhere ahead
there was a sound, too faint to read, but growing. I was not at ease. It
made me realize how separate our thoughts had really been in the days just
past, even during our closest planning. For my friend this exploit was,
from its first proposing, a feat of devotion, a chivalrous quest. He loved
me well, and made a point of gloating over the prize we would win-but he
did this out of concern for my feelings, lest he should seem to scorn the
baseness of my motive by proclaiming the disinterest of his. Splendid
Haldar! He was transparent to me. I saw then that when the moment came he
would, on oath, renounce his share in the Key, and would demand that
Dalissem bestow it formally on me alone. Thus did he mean to declare his
love to that queenly ghost. For him, Defalk was a cur, and Dalissem nearly
a divinity. 

But I was in it for the Key. For me, Defalk's suffering was an ugly
necessity, and Dalissem was a splendid but utterly self-willed spirit. And
most important, nothing was to be taken for granted in that place. In
Death's world, any covenant, no matter how mighty, can fall null-any
spell, however cogent, can be abrogated. The only certain law in that
place is Death itself. 

Just then my uneasiness was getting a lot of encouragement. The current
was unmistakably increasing, for the ectoplasmic sewage had begun to
seethe with alarm and resistance. At the same time it was getting
lighter-a yellowish light that thickened like mist. The ribbed vaults
above us showed clearer. I discovered, with horror, that the Guide had no
eyes. His sockets were wrinkled craters filled with grey smoke. 

I was sure he had eyes in the death room-or had he? I can't explain why it
unnerved me so-I gaped at him. He looked back at me, waiting. 

"What is that noise, Lord Guide?" I stammered. 

"It is the entrance to Death's domain," he said. That it well might be. It
was a holocaust of cottony sound-a mumbling roar of waters. The Taker
shipped his pole. All around us, the soul-trash-all the bugfaces and
rotten monocular snouts and desperate feelers-made a mindless noise of
woe, and churned up the speeding scum with their struggles. The sewer fell
abruptly to a steeper pitch, and took a turn. 

As we slid out of that turn we saw the terminal arch of the tunnel far
ahead, framing a burst of yellow light. We knew the hugeness of the smutty
gulf beyond the arch by the way it swallowed up the howl of the falls. The
giant reverberations fled away to unguessable distances beyond. At that
point I knew-knew that we had been tricked, and all three of us were being
abducted into the land of death forever. It was my blessed luck to be too
stunned by the thought of the falls ahead to make any move at all.
Therefore I did not draw my blade and assault the Guide of Ghosts. Woe if
I had! Down that last slope the raft seemed hardly to rest upon the
leaping, jostling waters, so smooth and fast we went. Then we plunged into
the dreadful jaundiced sky that yawned out and down. 

We sledded out upon the empty air, and saw that we had issued from the
face of a wall stretching past vision, with a hundred tunnelmouths to
either side, puking and groaning their currents down. These waters braided
in a vast feculent tapestry, whose lower reaches hung hidden in boiling
fog. Into that fog we ourselves settled, the raft spinning, tilting,
swooping-descending with the crazy zigzag of revelers staggering down a
street, and falling no faster than a wind-buoyed leaf. The fog wrapped us
close. 

We spun through the mist so long I thanked its being there to hide the
drop from us as we first went over. Then we broke down into clean air, and
found under us a huge black lake. We knew by the sound that we had moved
far out from the falls, but even here the laketop danced and jittered like
a tubful of shaken slops. As we dropped to the water it stirred my nape to
see, under the surface below us, a blurred eye half as big as the raft. It
blinked and submerged. The waters were alive. 

The shore was not far-a line of crags against the sky-but we saw much
getting there. We moved steadily, by what means did not appear, and the
water's denizens, as they saw us, all dodged our course. Some were rooted
and could not: men whose legs fused and tapered to a stem and whose bodies
hung just under the surface with every vein and nerve sprouting out of
them, like fan-corals red and grey, and with their brains branching out
above like little trees. Crabs with human lips scuttled up and down these
nerve-festoons. And everywhere in the water were shoals of armless, bald
homunculi, fat as sausages, kicking through the darkness. Scores more of
these same creatures were to be seen bandaged in silk and trailed in
wriggling, staring bunches by water-skating spiders big as dogs-though not
spiders entirely, for men's faces were set in their flat forebodies, just
behind the fangs. 

So many combats broke the surface, what must those depths have been like?
Men backed with great limpet shells emerged here and there in a grisly
wrestling that entangled their limbs and their slithersome, ropy innards
as well, everted for the fight. Off to port something as big as a whale
heaved up, foaming. All along its length ranks of spindly limbs flailed
pitifully-they were human arms. We shortly understood their panic when
that island of skin was over-swarmed by scorpion men and pinchers like
flensing knives. With these they busily lopped the waving arms. 

Some shacks stood at the foot of the crag we drifted toward. Beyond that
ridgeline which marched with the shore, was empty yellow sky, promising
that the land fell away past the lake's brim. The Taker of Souls jumped
out and beached us. We stepped onto the soil of Death's domain. It had an
ugly resilience to the foot, a bruised and sweaty texture. The manlizard
waddled toward the shacks, and disappeared between two of them. The Guide
stood by the water, turning the smoky nothingness of his gaze on each of
us in turn. 

"Mortals, to pass through this place, you must meet one hard condition.
The Master's lieutenants dwell everywhere. To pass those places where they
have the Right of Toll, you must pay them a morsel of your flesh." 

I asked him, "Does the Master have . . . many Lieutenants?" 

"As many," he said, "as there are ways to enter this world. But no man
must pay toll more than once. Nor may the toll be lethal in its nature." 

Having come through what we had, we couldn't let this ghoulish necessity
be an obstacle. We nodded-Defalk said nothing, knowing that consent was
not required of him. There was a banging from behind the shacks, and a
noise of wheels and harness. The Taker reappeared, leading a pair of
shrouded beasts hitched to a giant black chariot. 

The wheels were high as a man, the body like the prow of a fighting sloop,
black as obsidian but ribbed inside with ivory. Of the team we could see
two hairy tails and eight massive paws with nails as long as my fingers.
The beasts' heavy shrouds of black canvas were bound snug with leather
straps. 

The Guide mounted the car, took up the reins and drew them tight. 

"Mount," be said, "and grip the rail. You must hold fast before we loose
the team." 

We got up into the chariot-but Defalk stayed on the ground. "It is
unfair!" he shouted. "How many oaths are made and broken by how many
thousands of young lovers?!" None of us answered, only waited, for we all
knew he had to come-he too knew it. We couldn't grudge him the thin
comfort of making his moan before descending to his fate. "I loved her
well-I loved her greatly-none of your sneering can alter that. But love is
life, not swords in the heart! How could I know she would do what she
swore?" 

"Oh yes," Haldar said, "I'm sure you thought her as trifling as yourself,
you had to to save your pride. So you missed your sworn hour. What about
after, when you knew what she had done? You had seven years to make it
good." 

"Kill myself! Cleave my bowels with a dirk! Oh yes, thief-what easier
done? She was dead. Her pain was past. With or without me she faced her
mother's hate and imprisonment. She'd have loved any man she had the
chance to, just to spite her mother, and she'd have died for the same
spite whoever had been her man." 

"Climb aboard, courtier," said the Guide. "Our way is hard, and we must
start." 

Defalk let his shoulders hang, and looked at the ground. Then he got
aboard. The Guide tightened the reins and grasped his staff near the butt,
stretching it out over the shrouded pair. The serpent coiled restlessly,
and its tongue flickered. The Taker of Souls unbelted the shrouds, and
leapt away as he pulled them off. 

Two immense black hounds sprang up against the light, and howled. Then
they fell on each other like famished sharks. Their knotted, lean-strung
bodies were not of living flesh, but something more like clay, for their
red jaws tore great clots of it from one another, and there was no blood.
Only a giant's strength could have held them within the traces. The
chariot rocked and swayed. The serpent began to strike down upon the
beasts. 

With a hammer's power and a whip's speed it sank its fangs into their
heads and shoulders. The hounds wailed with pain and raised their fangs
against the snake's, always too slow. With flicks of his wrist, the Guide
administered pain to the beasts, till their fighting ceased, and they
cringed apart. Then he shook the reins, and the dogs bounded to his will.
The Taker of Souls bowed his farewell to the Guide, but we did not see him
rise from his salute, so swiftly were we whirled away. 

We thundered up the lakeside ridge, and poured across it. All hell spread
out before us, far below. A score of rivers foamed down into those black
badlands, which were all tunneled and canyoned and chasmed with the
branching waters, till the terrain looked like the worm-gnawed wood you
find on beaches. Then we were plunging down into it. 

Ye powers dark and light! What a ride, Barnar! There was no road-there
needed none. Though we favored high ground, following ridgelines, we cut
just as readily across the flanks of hills, or dove down the steepest
canyon walls and charged through fordings with our great wheels tearing
the water to spray. 

And one had no wish to linger down in those gulfs either. From above you
saw only forests of branched things that stirred slowly, or the roofs of
bizarre dwellings. But within the valleys you could see the victims
splayed upon what had looked like trees, feeding their foul, slow
appetites-and you could see that those roofs were thatched with bones, and
caulked with black blood. I was glad of every hamlet, every thicket of
rooted shapes, which we steered clear of. At the same time, it was
impossible not to exult-even to rejoice-in the power of our passage
through a place of such infinite, endless captivities. To surge through
league on league of darkness, where a whole world is doomed to endure
forever, and be yourself exempt, on fire with life! I caught Haldar's eye;
he smiled and nodded. Drinking the dead air like wine, we rocked and
soared behind those dead titans which the viper scourged on. 

But our glorious detachment was not to last. We crested yet another ridge
and saw that it broadened to a wide field which ended, far ahead, at a
chasm. This field bore a crop of big, tough bramble-vines, and in each of
the vines was entangled a man or a woman. The feet of these sufferers
merged with the dry roots, while their bodies were pinned and pierced in a
hundred places. Little buckets hung from the vines to catch the rivulets
of unexhausted blood that twisted through the thorns. Three hags moved
among these plants-pruning, or tying the vines, or guzzling from the
buckets. As we drew near they sighted us, and dropped their work. They
began to race for the chasm, toward the point we seemed to head for
ourselves. 

They moved their crooked limbs with ghastly speed, shrieking like daws as
they went, and waving. The dogs pounded past the bleeding thousands-our
spokes hummed in the dead air. But the hags came before us to our goal: a
bridgehead at the chasm's edge. 

They blocked the bridge, bobbing and leering as the hounds were reined up
in a scramble of paws. Stooped as these crones were, their height matched
the Guide's. They were huge in their stench too, charnel house mixed with
the smell of a brothel's slop room. Their eyes were flat and opaque, like
glazed snot in the wrinkled cups of their sockets. They all had torn-out
patches in their hair, and what showed was not scalp, but yellowed
skullbone. Yet their faces were fleshed-wenned and warted. They wore
grave-rags cinched with gallows rope at the waist. A glimpse through the
robe of one, where a cancered breast showed a tumor-pit you could get your
fist into, was enough to tell us that their rags were a mercy to our eyes.
The fiercest of the three came forward, grinning. One of the hounds leaped
on her with a roar. She gave it a clout to the skull with her fist that
sprawled it shivering in the traces. 

"Skin, Guide!" she shrilled. "Manskin with blood in it, living blood. We
want a piece or you can't cross. We want a piece now!" 

"Hail, Famine-sisters," the Guide said. "We shall pay your toll." He
turned to us. Haldar and I traded a look, and turned to Defalk. He saw our
intent to make him pay first. His hopeless expression gave me a twinge of
guilt, and so I said: 

"I'll pay it, Lord Guide." I'd have to settle up sooner or later, after
all. The Guide nodded, and motioned me to jump down. 

"What piece of this man do you want, starving ones?" he asked. They flew
into a raucous discussion. They squawked, hissed, cursed and
counter-cursed with a force that sent out gusts of their vampire-breath.
They named every part you might think of and there were moments when I
blanched and promised myself to draw my sword and be damned. Then at last
the chief one came forward again. 

"We want an ear," she shouted. "A nice, fat red ear hot and juicy with
blood we want. A left ear." 

"No!" shrieked a sister behind her. "A right ear. We want a right ear, you
scabby sack of tombslime!" 

"A left ear," insisted the first. She snatched some rusty shears from her
waist. The blades were furred with mold where the blood was crusted, but I
took the tool almost gratefully. It was only an ear, you understand, and
the hole would still be there for hearing. Look. Here's my work-I spared
myself a bit, you see, but I had to give them all the lobe, for that's
where the blood is, and they'd have noticed a cheat there. Seeing through
a bright red haze, I tossed them the shears, and then the morsel.
Instantly they were a screeching heap, fighting for the prize. Hair was
rent, and strips of flesh torn from lean flanks. They fought like famished
gulls, while I remounted, and the Guide lashed the dogs. Haldar bound my
head with a strip from my sleeve as we whirled across the bridge. It
seemed endlessly long. The gulf beneath was a dreadful one. A groaning of
deep waters filled its darkness. 

Even before my brain had swum clear of nausea and pain, I discovered I was
hearing things most deep and hidden and distant-hearing, impossibly clear,
the secretest sounds of this world. The smallest whispers from the gulf
floor entered my brain as if little rat-mouths were murmuring directly
through the ruined gate in the side of my head. Pleadings in a mindless
speech of moans; torturing giggles and chuckles from dry throats of bone;
babbles of devil-confession; the liquid noise of strange stews; the scuff
of hooves, claws clicking-even the silken sweep of deep fins. That gulf
and all the canyons beyond said much to me as we pounded through them, and
hinted countless things I did not wish to know. 

VII 

I think that Haldar caught my cue of pity. For after a while, he said, "I
will pay next, Lord Guide." 

"Then you will pay soon," said the Guide. 

We had run for some time through a deep canyon whose walls overhung and
whose course was branched and mazy. The light on the river and the wide
banks was dim and shadow-crossed. The hounds raged forward, tireless, like
a destroying wave that comes pushing through miles of ocean. But the grey
chasm mocked our speed by seeming endlessly the same. 

We watched for changes at the Guide's hint, but at first saw only familiar
things. There were huts with door-curtains of strung teeth still
chattering from the denizens' quick hiding. (I alone heard also their rank
breathing within, and the groans of their tightly muffled victims.) There
were ghoulish smithies too, where toad-bodied giants hammered smoking
limbs onto struggling souls stretched on anvils, and other shops as well
where similar giants with pipes blew screaming dwarves into being from
cauldrons of molten flesh. There were rat-men struggling in thickets of
tarantula weed, and there were groves of dung-bearing trees with twisted
trunks translucent like gut. Soulcreeps such as Shamblor inhabited these
groves, grazing endlessly. Their drear whining said it was not by choice. 

I was the first to sense the new thing ahead. I began to hear the
guzzlings and growls of ten thousand carrion-eating throats. It was the
noise of a great host, tearing and gulping. 

My companions were alerted shortly after by the sooty cloud of birds
swooping and wheeling beyond the next bend in the river. We flew through
the curve. Before us a mammoth dyke stretched to the river from either
wall of the canyon. It was a little mountain range of the freshly
killed-fifty feet high and a hundred wide, they were piled. Jackals tugged
and shouldered and fought all along the fringes of that wall, while its
upper slopes were glittery black with birds. Necrophage insects hung thick
as coal dust in the air, and I heard with intolerable distinctness the wet
working of their mandibles. 

On our bank there was a gateway through the heap. It was overlooked by a
guard-tower made of bones. As we neared, something big could be seen
moving in the tower. We could also see that most of the corpses in that
wall were those of women and children. Their torn faces looked out
everywhere from the black swarming of wings and jaws and pincers. 

The tower was an insane jumble of the reknit skeletons of everything you
could think of. In fact it was more a monkey's perch than a tower, and the
giant that came swinging down from it moved more like an ape than a man.
He bellowed as he came, with thick, fang-hindered speech: 

"Skin! You've got living manskin, Guide! I want some!" 

The guide reined up, crying, "Hail, War-father. We shall pay your toll." 

The ape wore as a helmet the top half of a man's skull-a giant's, you
understand, for the ape was as big as the hags and yet the skull's sockets
came all the way down over its red eyes. The immortal also wore epaulets
of braided human hair, but nothing else. It carried a battle axe with a
bit as wide as an infantry shield. It rolled up to us, enlisting its free
fist as a foot. Both of the hounds instantly leapt upon it. It pummeled
them with vigor, but it seemed a long time before they lay still in their
harness. 

Haldar leapt down from the chariot. The Guide said: "What piece do you
want, starving one?" 

The immortal answered decisively. "I want an index finger." It shifted its
stance restlessly, poised on feet and knuckles. Haldar held out his left
arm, the finger extended. 

The ape began an incredible preliminary dance of strokes and feints and
flourishes. It hopped and postured in a great, dust-raising circle around
Haldar, whooping with every loop it cut in the air. It dodged and ducked
and parried and, at the climactic moment, took a soaring bound at Haldar,
and brought the axe in an heroic arc down upon his finger. 

Haldar was jolted through by the shock, but stood firm. The finger was
clipped off as neat as a daisy at the base, the other knuckles not even
grazed. 

The ape rolled the finger thoroughly on the ground. "Best with dust," it
growled companionably. It popped the treat in its jaws and crunched it
with gusto for a long time. I helped Haldar bind his hand. He was drenched
with the sweat of pain, as was I. Regretfully, the War-father swallowed
the last of the finger and sighed. 

"I wish I could take more," the immortal rumbled wistfully. "What do you
say, fellow? Let me have one more finger, hey?" It poked Haldar cajolingly
in the shoulder. 

"No more, beast!" snapped Haldar. "Damn your greed!" The ape stamped
furiously, and smote the ground so hard with its axe that the chariot
rattled. I helped Haldar back aboard. The Guide stung the hounds, and we
surged through the gateway. Our passage sent up a cloud of panicked birds
and insects. For a time they hung seething above the dyke, like the black
smoke of some great city's sack. Then they settled back down on the hill
of torn faces. Soon we were driving for high ground. 

VIII 

I heard the nearness of our goal before the Guide said anything. I heard
wind, wind and fire in measureless, empty places, yet nothing was as dead
as the air of this world. Haldar too knew something-he said only that he
sensed a chill, but I had seen his shudderings since paying the toll. He
had a way of rubbing the skin on his arms as if to erase grotesque
sensations, and sometimes he looked with amazement at his hands, as if he
expected to find something in them, or crawling over them. I guessed his
skin's premonitions matched those my ears received. Then the Guide pointed
to a region of rocky outcrops which thrust up from a clay mesa to form a
higher and more ragged mesa of stone. "Up there," he said, "are the gates
of the Winds of Warr." 

It appeared Defalk would be spared the payment of Toll, and it heartened
him, I think. He began to stare ironically at the two of us. I said: "You
look amused. What sunny ray has pierced your horizon?" 

"I was only thinking, friend assassin," he said. I let this pass. "I was
thinking how very like Dalissem it would be to show me her contempt by
spurning my life. I mean once she'd proven it to be in her hand, for a
nature like hers, the mere killing of me would seem too puny a conclusion.
She would need a more exquisite gesture of scorn. To spit in my face,
perhaps, and then to send me back to my little life-as she would call it.
. . ." I thought I saw as much self-disgust as amusement in his smile, but
my friend got growling mad. It was easy to understand because Defalk's
guess sounded so likely. Indeed, the man was not far off the mark, as
things ended. 

"How can you bear your own miserable littleness?" Haldar asked him. His
body shuddered with a sick wave of sensation that his aroused mind seemed
not to notice. "You bank so smugly on her heroism! How gratefully you'd
creep away with your face only spat in! If it saved your rat's hide, you'd
wear her contempt with joy." 

"You're a life-stealing, sneaking dog!" Defalk raged. He was beside
himself, and did not even notice that the Guide gave him a dreadful look.
"You've practiced skulking and back-stabbing all your scummy life. You
swagger and beat your chest about heroism and nobility-" His voice was
shrill, and words failed him. It was plain to me that he was as badly
infected with high-mindedness as the man who taunted him. Poor Defalk
agreed with Haldar in his heart. To my friend's credit, he contained
himself. He did not even answer. Perhaps he glimpsed the same truth. 

Now, just as the mesas towered quite near, we saw that a last canyon lay
between us and them. We were nearly upon it before it appeared. As we spun
down into it, we found a road beneath us, and saw a small city down on the
canyon floor. Our road dove down the chasm wall and through the city's
heart. Black smoke hung over the rooftops, and there were towers here and
there in the streets supporting the braziers that produced it. Even from
on high we breathed a reek like a druggist's shop afire. We noticed beyond
the city a field of great square pits, where the smoke hung even denser,
but our descent was swift, and we only had a moment's vantage of this.
Defalk murmured, as to himself, "A pestilence . . . ?" 

It was indeed a place of pestilence, but different from all plague-struck
cities that I have heard of in being thronged and active. The Guide did
not rein up as we tore into the streets, but our team at once began
colliding with the citizens of that place. 

All went thickly muffled-double hooded, with even hands and face wrapped.
At a glance it seemed a drowsy place, for people sat or sprawled in
doorways, and on the cobblestones with their backs to the walls. We even
saw them lying in the raingutters under upper-story casement windows. The
foot traffic usurped even the middle of the lane, for everyone walked
quickly and gave everyone else a wide berth. The hounds snarled and bit,
and the Guide plied his serpent on the heads of the people who blocked us.
The drivers of other vehicles treated obstruction just as high-handedly,
but our dire team made the other carters and wainsmen rein up. The wains
were full of the dead, tied up in their sheets. 

So we moved in surges through the streets, parts of which were narrowed by
improvised spitals which were scarcely more than cots under canopies. The
doctors who sat in these were coweled, and the limbs that poked from their
sleeves were like barbed and jointed sticks. They did nothing, and seemed
to watch eagerly while things like crablice, but big as cats, crawled from
cot to cot laying eggs in the patients' open sores. 

More than one man, in the extremity of sickness, ran raving through the
crowd, trailing bedclothes. One such seized a mother who was hastening her
child along; he tore her scarves aside and kissed her wetly. He did the
same to the child, not relaxing his grip even as the woman hammered him to
his knees with a stone. Another man who ran in delirium was chased by
several apothecaries. He was nude, straight from his bed, and as he fled,
huge swellings in his groin and neck split open. Wet young wasps the size
of doves crawled out of them and clung to his body, waving their wings to
dry them. 

Meanwhile, above the street level, women in boarded-up houses conducted
business from upper windows. Some used broomsticks to roll the night's
dead off their eaves and down into the waiting wains. Others traded with
cart-men below. We saw one lower a bucket to a man with a covered grocery
cart. As she fished in her purse for coins, the man thrust his hand into
his doublet and pulled out a handful of struggling cockroaches. He threw
these into the milk he'd filled her bucket with, winked at me, and covered
it. 

For Defalk the worst spectacle came as we put the town behind us. It was
the gate that stood before the field of smoldering pits outside the city.
Our road lay through this gate, and a giant figure, all wound with foul
bandages, sat in our way. It was weeping, and cradling a swaddled object.
Past the gate, a second bandaged figure emptied a wain into a smoking pit,
using a pitchfork that speared up three men at a stroke. The mourning
giant sprang up. Its voice told the female sex which its pus-stained
wrappings hid. 

"Guide!" she sobbed. "He is so hungry and ill, our poor babe! Manflesh is
what he needs. Give our starving babykins manflesh, please!" The
worker-her husband by his greater size-was already out of the wain and
running toward us. "Yes!" he shouted. "Manskin for our little sweetling,
Guide!" 

"Hail, Parents of Plague!" the Guide said. "Step down to them, courtier.
What piece of him will you have, great ones?" 

The parents fell into a doting conference with their precious one. They
teased aside the swaddling rags, and questioned their child with
twiddlings of their fingers: 

"What does be want then? What does Babekin wants at all, at all?"-until
the mother raised her head, and crowed: "An eye! Sweetkins wants an eye,
he does he does he does!" 

Defalk had stepped down and stood forth, and steady enough, too. But at
this he reeled back. Faster than he moved, the Plague-father shot forth
his hand. His black, gnarled fingers seemed to fumble against Defalk's
face. Defalk shouted and his knees gave, and then the Plague-father held
something teasingly above the swaddled bundle. "See? See? Does he wants
it, hmmm? Does he wants it?" 

The mother opened the swaddling wider, revealing not a face, but a boil of
bugs, teeming and scrambling in the fetid caul. 

"See? See? Does little lord love-kins wants it at all at all?" 

Then the black fingers opened, and an eye fell, trailing red strings, into
the anthill turmoil. As if floating on some liquid it bobbed there a
moment. Defalk clutched his face and bellowed. The insects foamed over the
bright ball, and it sank amid them. Defalk howled again. He held his face
less in pain, it seemed, than in the way of one who tries not to see
something. 

IX 

When we'd topped the first mesa, and reached the foot of the smaller one,
the Guide reined up. He drove his staff in the earth and hitched the
hounds to it, under the Snake's guard. With a gesture, he told us to
follow him, and began to climb the rocks. 

Defalk's worst agony had barely subsided. He no longer raved aloud, but he
kept wiping his hand across his face and jabbering rapidly, in the barest
whisper, like a man speaking spells he doesn't want overheard. He scarcely
had his legs under him, and the rockface was hundreds of feet high and not
far off vertical. There were deep seams and chimneys to climb in, and we
kept him between us, but I thought a dozen times he'd topple out, and
waste all our toils in a single plunge. 

But I'm damned if his giddiness came of fear or a slack will. The man was
fighting off the drunkenness of pain and shock. He was in a fierce hurry
to clear his head, and soon he was shaking off our hands when we reached
to help him. He got steadier as he struggled. Hate and remorse drove him,
I suppose. Rack me, Barnar, if I didn't admire poor Defalk then. I even
stopped feeling sorry for what I'd had to do to him-I'd brought him his
finest hour, you see. He meant not to be dragged before Dalissem. He meant
to walk up to her like a man. So he clawed and clutched his way upward,
like a daw with a torn wing fighting its way into the sky. I suppose
actually he was like a draggled jag, with his fine clothes all rumpled. As
for his face, it was something very different now. The soft, self-loving
man was gone. What was left was a gaunter face, a vision-troubled face, a
bit like a prophet's or a seer's. A smudgy line of blood ran from his
puckered lids down to his jaw. 

Visions no doubt he was having, images of the place we were now so close
to. For I know I was hearing it as we climbed. The cleanness and
simplicity of that sound!-the sound of fire and wind. And there was
something else, fleeing through that roar, obscured within it, but
recognizable. It was a multitude of voices. Voices, I say, not the croaks
and chuckles of soultrash, but bursts of thought and passion. I was
hearing speech from entire and vital souls celebrating some cryptic,
furious triumph. The space and clarity in that sound was intoxicating here
in this world of foul, drear pain. I saw Haldar rub his arms and smile
with a kind of recognition. Defalk climbed with growing vigor. When we
reached the top, and stepped out onto the plateau, he was as firm on his
legs as we. 

I mean to say we expected to step out onto a plateau. In fact, what we'd
had premonitions of was closer than we knew. It's a rare shock to put a
gulf behind you, rise up, stride forward, and find a gulf a thousand times
as deep before you, and you on its very edge. Plateau there was none. We'd
mounted the rim of a giant crater. 

Just for a moment, as you looked down into it, you thought that the
crater's bottom was covered by a glittering black lake. But the wind that
came dodging up out of it, and the roll of echoes through chambers past
measuring, taught you to see better. The lake was a hole broken in the
crater's bowl. Beneath was a dark cavern system, endlessly deep, where
powerful winds drove clots of fire like a blizzard underground. 

A flight of stairs cut from the stone descended the wall of the crater-it
was a long flat-arching flight, and the steps were narrow. The Guide was
halfway down it already, and be waved us after him impatiently. We started
down. 

There's no conveying how light and breakable you feel, stepping into a dim
cauldron of gales like that, and on such a slender track. It was like
following an icy goat path crossing the Imau Mountains in a winter storm.
But here the winds wrestled and surged and blew in constant
contradictions. You scarcely dared brace yourself against them for fear of
leaping off with the next shift. 

Our downward progress did not reveal much within the gulf. The infinite
traffic of fire there showed you flashes of ragged vaulting, or
tunnelmouths. The fire itself seemed like a fabric. It flew in mighty
banners or was caught in crosswinds and torn to tatters, and we had
glimpses of the pit's inhabitants whenever their flight was entangled with
the flames. They were too swift and deep to be more than wheeling shapes,
smaller than moths to the eye. 

Some half-dozen of the last steps marched past the brink and formed a ramp
down into the void. The Guide stopped well above this point, and bade us
pass him. 

"It is for you to call her-stand down." 

We eased past the immortal-Haldar was first, Defalk between us. My friend
stepped down the last steps, and I thought he moved with an uncanny
assurance, a steadiness that did not dread this depth. 

"Dalissem!" he shouted. His voice was as nothing in the wind. "Dalissem of
Lurkna Downs. Approach. Defalk is delivered to your hands!" 

The puny words were erased even as they left his lips, but a freezing
updraft followed them like a response, an icy column of wind that pushed
against our faces without wavering. Very deep, but directly below the last
step's broken edge, there was a small and constant movement. It grew. It
was a figure swimming upward. 

And that's how she came to us, Barnar, clawing upward out of the dark, her
eyes stark, raving bright, her hair twisting in snakes upon her shoulders,
her nakedness like a torch in the pit. 

Here, movement was no labor to her. She sprang upon the foot of the stairs
as light and lithe as a winged cat. She stood arms akimbo, and after
nodding to the Guide, she grinned at Haldar and me, and seemed not even to
see the man we had brought her. He called to her-his voice had a crack in
it: "Dalissem! Forgive me, and take me!" 

Even Haldar was surprised enough to tear his eyes off her and look back at
Defalk. For my part, when I'd grasped what he'd said, I gaped at him. But
Dalissem spoke as if nothing had been said. 

"You have brought him then! I chose my men well. Truly, you two are among
the greatest of your brotherhood, to have accomplished this!" (I promise
you, Barnar, those were her words to the letter.) "Alas, good henchmen,
who will ever believe you, if you tell them of this exploit?" 

Haldar answered her with a tremor of feeling: 

"Lady, for myself, the payment of the exploit is this second sight of you.
And I here renounce the Key-let it be wholly Nifft's. Please deign to
receive this tender of my chaste and absolute love." 

She laughed. "Chaste and otherwise, Haldar Dirkniss. Oh, I'll receive this
tender, and far more! As for the key, there is none to renounce. You were
deceived with a simulacrum." She laughed again, with ravenous long looks
in Haldar's face, and gleeful looks in mine. She was a beauty in truth,
with her fat paps, and her loins' black patch, as charged with energy as a
cat's hackles. Defalk made a drunken movement but said nothing. I think he
was dazed a bit, with the shame of her ignoring him. I was fairly fuddled
myself with a shock that was half recognition-the fulfillment of a
suspicion I hadn't known I had. 

Dalissem raised her arms triumphantly above her and grinned skywards: "Oh,
how I've outwitted you, King Death! Great Thief, you are not half so sly
as poor Dalissem, poor Dalissem dead these seven years, cheated of love
she paid her life for. For look now what she's done! She sneaked back,
Your Majesty, and stole the love she had a right to. Oh dear little
hawk-faced mortal. Your life on earth is at an end. I chose you instantly
I sensed you through the portal of my dying-place, and instantly I knew
how much you'd love me. You're mine now-admit the truth!" 

"Yes!" cried Haldar, and his voice rang like the harbor bell of
Karkhman-Ra. 

Then Defalk cried out in his turn: 

"Dalissem! Will you speak to me? Will you take me? I was less than you
thought-you were more than I understood! But take me now. This man is
nothing to you. Remember how we were!" 

He looked quite fine then, Barnar, with his one red tear-track, and a new
uprightness in his body. He put me in mind of an aging dolphin I once saw
sporting, making clumsy leaps out of the water. Defalk's soul was just
such a fat old fish, yet here this fleshly fop was managing, with supreme
feeling, to heave himself up, and catch a flash of sun upon his back.
Dalissem looked at him then. Perhaps she had meant not to, and now gave
him this much tribute. 

"Well, it is you Defalk! This is pleasant luck, to find you here. I am as
you see me." 

Defalk hung his head. "I was a little man who assumed he was great. I
learned better!" 

"But what is this, Defalk. You ask me to take you? You ask me to receive
you to my love-in-death? Can it be your spirit does not thrive? Can it be
you've weighed your life of kissing arse and crouching before fat purses,
and have found it wanting? Can it be that your lady's paintpots and her
witless rodent's chatter oppress you?" 

"She is a small woman, Dalissem. I am small, and I have not helped her to
be more. I ask you to forgive-" 

She cut him off: "I readily forgive what is forgotten. You are forgotten,
Defalk, now that I have the two minor things I wanted from you: your
self-contempt and your jealousy. Thus I am released from the shame of
having loved you. Now, Haldar Dirkniss, stand nearer, for I mean to take
you to me." 

My friend nodded, and stepped down. He wore leather and stout wool, but
she put her hands to his chest, and tore away his clothes, and they rent
to tatters as easily as dead leaves. She stripped him babe-naked and
looked on him with smiling lust and pride. My friend was in a manly state.
So, indeed, was I. She gave off desire that pressed physically against
you, fierce and steady as the wind. She clasped her hands behind his neck
and sprang backwards. 

Her leap carried them both far-impossibly far out over the blizzards of
fire. They didn't fall, but drifted out, as if gliding on ice-and he
mounted her. Then, coupling, they fell in wide, smooth sweeps, wheeling as
they slid, then banking, diving, gone. 

There was a shout as deep as a bull's. Defalk slowly raised his fists
overhead. He roared again, wordless, as if merely trying to break the
instrument of his voice. Then he jumped out into the gulf. 

Surely the rage of that last cry should have gained him entry into that
furious place. But the firestorm did not receive him. As he sprawled out
upon the void he did not drift, but hung there, bouncing and jolting and
skidding horribly upon the invisible surface of the wind. He could not
enter it-the gale's cold, speeding mass erased his substance as he jounced
atop it. His hands vanished in a smooth smear of white; his face was
rubbed to nothing in an instant; he was gone. 

I turned to face the Guide. Slowly but firmly, I climbed to stand before
him. 

"Lord Guide," I said, looking up into the smoky craters of his eyes, "a
great swindle had been worked upon two of the age's foremost thieves. One
of them is cheated of his life, though he would not describe it so. But as
for me, my lord, I believe some further time up in the sunlight still
belongs to me, before I must see your face, and your servant's, a second
time. Let this much faith be kept, at least: take me back now to the world
of living men."