Shag Margold's 

Introduction to 

The Mines of Behemoth 

MY OLD FRIEND, NIFFT, with a perhaps unintentional candor, has displayed a
personal flaw or two in this narrative. I honor his memory none the less
for it. The good of Nifft always overbalanced the ill, and just so here
where, whatever slight moral shortcomings may appear in our narrator, he
gives us in his tale the most vivid and enlightening natural history of
the Behemoth's life-cycle yet put on record. 

Hadaska Broode, a Minusk historian, has penned the following tetrameters
in homage to Behemoth. While I cannot pretend the lines are accomplished
poetry, they are at least heartfelt: 

What dread Being dares to farm 

where every breed of demon swarms? 

Who dares till there? Who shall go 

and scythe the harvest row on row? 

Who in that sunless gulf of harms 

could drive the plow? Would dare to sow? 

Behemoth's jaws alone the share 

to carve the flinty furrow there. 

Behemoth's strength the reaper's blade, 

her bowels the barn where harvest's laid. 

To hers, what husbandry compares, 

that has half demonkind unmade? 

Broode's ardor for Behemoth is understandable in one of his nation. His
native Minuskulons, though the smallest of the major island chains, loom
large in the Behemoth sap trade, for they are the only landfall the Sea of
Agon affords between southern Kairnheim, where sap is mined, and the sap's
two greatest overseas markets: the Ephesion Chain to the south, and the
Great Shallows to the east. The sap in its cake form is of course
excellent fodder for kine and draybeasts the world over. In the
Ephesions-on my native Pardash, for example-it is also used in its fluid
state; a dilution is sprayed on our fields to enrich our somewhat lean
soils. Meanwhile the Great Shallows' many sea-dwelling races use sap cake
to mulch their mariculture and nourish their polyp patches, whelk beds,
crab pastures, bivalve grottoes, and every kind of raft garden. The Minusk
mariners who have flourished in this sap trade all know Broode's little
poem by heart. 

Given Behemoth's incredible utility to men-both in the havoc she wreaks on
the demon race, and in the boon of her stolen sap-it is not surprising she
inspires such paeans. The work of Kairnish scholars (theirs another race
especially in her debt) abounds with similar encomiums. Both these schools
of Behemoth's most ardent admirers share a further accord. On the question
of Behemoth's origins, Minusk and Kairnish authorities alike aver that the
Mountain Mother was born of some now forgotten human sorcery. 

I will perhaps be forgiven a smile at this. If Behemoth be the scion of
some thaumaturgic science man once wielded, then how much less at fault we
must feel to play the vampire in her nests, even as she scours the
subworld of our demon foes? For if the Mountain Mother be the fruit of
philanthropic wizardry, where's the flaw in getting double good of her? Is
it denied a man to use his own wagon or draybeast to his profit? 

Kairnish folk might have the most need of this balm to guilt; in the
northern reaches of their continent (as I have noted in my preface to The
Fishing of the Demon-Sea) the subworld preys upon the overworld all too
vigorously, and men there fall in great numbers to demonic predation.
Meanwhile in southern Kairnheim, where Behemoth nests under the Broken
Axle Mountains, the demon nation still reels under a millenial defeat at
the jaws of the Mountain Mother's legions, even while the southern Kairns
most vigorously steal her sap from her nests. 

Yet those of the opposing mind, who argue that Behemoth was born naturally
of the Earth, point to her form which, in all but the scale of it, is so
common through the natural world. Many scholars of unimpeachable erudition
take this side of the controversy. Etiolatus the Praiseworthy notes, "How
can those who go open minded on the earth, feeling the heart of the planet
murmuring against their footsoles, ever think that Queen Earth in her Robe
of Stars could fail to breed of herself the cure for any ill that blights
her? Demons infested her; she gave birth to Behemoth." 

For my part, though I have profound respect for the Earth's powers of
invention, I think the answer is unknowable. My awe and love for the
beasts, in any case, is great. I find cause for rejoicing in the fact that
the sinking of a new sap-mine is the difficult and costly task that it is.
The lithivorous ferrecks used to dowse for larval chambers, and then used
to sink the first shafts down to those larval chambers, are creatures akin
to certain brood parasites within Behemoth nests, and are both fierce and
highly dangerous to manage. In consequence, these ferrecks have been
almost entirely preempted by the sorcerous sisterhoods of the Astrygals,
who have the means to command the beasts' angry energies. The ferrecks
then being hard and costly to procure from the witches, the proliferation
of new sap-mines throughout the Broken Axle Mountains has slowed almost to
the rate of replacement for old mines fallen defunct through the
phenomenon of "nest wander." Perhaps the sorcerers of the Astrygals
intentionally sustain this equilibrium. In any case, our rapacity is
shackled, and we plunder Behemoth less gravely than we might. 

All that lives is flux, and a question Nifft raises disturbs me: might
Demonkind grow to engulf Behemoth? The black yeast of demon vitality cooks
unsleeping in its planetary cloaca; its vapors of infection float up fine
as finest soot, soundlessly, steadily blackening, blackening what they
blanket. Its patient twisting tendrils imperceptibly find purchase. . . .
The reader will perhaps-when the fate of Heliomphalodon Incarnadine is
learned, and Nifft's fears thereat-share my own unease. 

Having touched on the question of human rapacity, I cannot close without
confessing that it is with some misgiving I make public Nifft's account of
the so-called "giants' pap" produced by Behemoth Queens, and of its
apparent powers. Two considerations have persuaded me it is safe to expose
this powerful substance to the greedy attention of entrepreneurs. In the
first place, Nifft's narrative must tend to discourage exploitation. In
the second, who but Nifft and Barnar, endowed as they were with rarest
luck, could contrive to milk a Queen? 

While I naturally shrink from burdening my dear friend's narrative (and
the present manuscript is unmistakably of Nifft's own composition) with an
excess of commentary or exegesis, I cannot leave certain lacunae
unglossed. But since a prefatory voice must fade from memory as the
history unfolds, the best procedure seems to be to deploy a brief
Interjection or two within the narrative. Thus commentary can lie nearer
what it touches. 

I 

We were still wet from Mayhem's maw 

When first those golden glades we saw 

MY FIRST STEPS along the path that led me to the greatest fortune I have
ever won, or could sanely hope to equal in the future, were inauspicious
enough. That twisted and darkling journey commenced, for Barnar
Hammer-hand and me, with an indignity, and then led straight to a
disaster. 

The indignity was that we were contracted to a stint of hard, dirty toil
in a sap mine. The disaster fell when we were two weeks at sea en route to
this uncouth endeavor. For just as we hove almost in sight of our
inglorious goal, our vessel was swallowed by a bull glabrous. 

One often hears this sort of thing about "inauspicious beginnings" from
people relating strokes of great good fortune. It is my belief that Luck
schools those she is about to bless by dealing them a preliminary box or
two about the ears. Thus, with a draught of bile, she reminds their
palates of the taste of woe, that Fortune's sweetness might ravish them
the more. 

Barnar's nephew Costard owned the sap mine we were bound for. Our dreary
underground labor there would be in the way of a family favor, for young
Costard had written that the mine was in difficulties. Our route lay
northwards along the Angalheim Island chain, and the northerlies that
scour these isles all summer long had set our sails a-spanking, and chased
us smartly along. Now the Isle of Hadron dropped astern, and we were
drawing close to Dolmen, the northernmost isle. Beyond Dolmen, we already
had in view the rim of the Kairnish continent. There, in the Broken Axle
Mountains, our destination lay. 

Our vessel was the carrack of a Minusk cloth-and-oils merchant. She was a
yare but smallish craft, scarcely six rods from stem to stern. She skipped
from crest to crest, outrunning the swell, frolicsome as a shimfin when it
runs breaching from sheer exuberance. The vessel's surge, the sunstruck
sea around us and the gem-blue sky, were almost enough to cheer us out of
the gloom that our coming toils had sunk us in. 

Then someone shouted from the mizzen-mast lookout, and we turned and saw a
long black-and-tan slick strung out in the milky jade of our wake. Every
man-jack of us went cold at the sight. That slick was the length of our
vessel, and we knew it was only part of a glabrous' dorsal ridge,
breaching as the brute came sinuously up to attack our stern. 

We had no sooner seen it than the sea erupted, and the beast was alongside
us, and was seizing our hull in his huge, dripping crab-legs, while his
long, eel-slick body bowed and bowed and bowed at the loins with his
fierce, lecherous thrustings. He had clusters of stalked eyes on his great
blunt head, and these writhed and rotated in his ecstasy. The brute was in
rut-the worst kind of glabrous to meet; sure death. Amidships and aft a
dozen men were instantly crushed by his legs. His sinewy tail scourged the
sea behind him in his lust, driving us forward even as he embraced us. The
steep, stony shore of Dolmen loomed towards us at incredible speed. 

The impenetrability of our hull timbers quickly drove the ardent giant to
a fury. He flung our ship clean out of the water, toppling Barnar and me
back onto the deck just as we had mounted the gunwale to abandon ship. The
carrack sailed creakily through twenty fathoms of thin air, and crashed
down at Dolmen's very shore, and even as it did so, the glabrous surged up
behind the vessel-a benthic fetor welling from his mossy, gaping jaws-and
swallowed it whole. 

The glabrous did this with the blind, uncalculating rage his breed is so
well known for. Barnar and I, tumbled to the prow by the bow's impact with
the shore, saw the darkness of the brute's maw loom over us, and saw his
huge teeth bite off the sky. Only the carrack's stout bowsprit extruded
beyond the reach of the monster's bite. This bowsprit doomed the beast. 

For even as it engulfed us, the glabrous' onrush drove us hard aground;
the bowsprit lodged against a boulder, and the whole craft was rammed a
fatal two fathoms deeper into the monster's throat. The glabrous at once
began to choke to death. 

His jaws gnawed frantically at the sky, trying to gobble down air, and in
the intermittent floods of sunlight we saw our craft crumpling in the
black velvet fist of his convulsing throat, the timbers cracking with a
noise like fire, as the purple blood welled out of the huge, spar-torn
tongue and drenched us to the knees. 

The glabrous-desperately climbing toward the air he could not have-heaved
himself half ashore, and as his struggles slowed toward extinction,
hammered himself against the steep, rocky slope of the island. We were so
tumbled about by these great concussions we could not leap out of his jaws
when he opened them. Then his jaws fell slack, and crashed shut in death. 

In the utter darkness, we could hear the beast's mouth still bleeding from
a dozen wounds. Back in the utterly crushed stern of the vessel, muffled
human death-moans briefly droned, and were snuffed out. Still the hot
velvet blood inched up around our legs, with a trickling noise in the
perfect blackness. 

Not quite perfect. A feeble star of light grew slowly visible. We slogged
groping through the sticky, inching rise of blood. Already the air felt
hot and dead and hard to breathe. We groped our way out along the
bowsprit-foul, slippery work-as good as blind. Our hands encountered the
huge mossy teeth of the glabrous, clamped not quite shut on the bowsprit's
stump. "I think we might just worm through," I said. "Then we might just
hack our way out through one of the lips." 

The cusps of the teeth were like oiled boulders reeking of carrion. We
bruised our ribs wriggling between them. Had the splintered bowsprit
slipped out, the simple weight of the teeth falling shut would have
crushed us flat. 

Our emergence from between the teeth was a head-first drop into the blood
pooled within the glabrous' lips, whose rubbery meat was teetery footing
for us once we stood up, calf-deep in the blood. It would have taken a
titanoplod and a block-and-tackle to hoist those lips apart. The
bowsprit's tip had been pinched between them and a faint ray of light
leaked in along the spar. "At least it gives us an aiming point," Barnar
muttered. "I'll go first. Stay clear." 

And I heard him go to work with Old Biter, his broad-axe, on the lip-meat.
"Ugh!" he grunted, hewing. "Loathsome! Slimy! Here's a gobbet free. Huh! .
. . Huh! . . ." 

"How he bleeds! I'm thigh-deep in blood! Here, give me a turn now-you
sound winded. Set my hand to the spar . . . got it! Now Biter's haft . . .
got it! Stand clear. Huh! . . . Huh! . . ." 

I couldn't match stroke to stroke in the dark. I had to hew blindly, then
grapple the wet meat for what chunks I could pull free. Barnar mused
moodily as I worked. 

"You know, Nifft, dying would be bad enough, of course. But by the Crack
it would gall me, after all we've done, all we've seen, to die on this . .
. demeaning, pedestrian errand of ours!" 

"I have to . . . agree. . . . To think of them . . . talking . . . back in
the Tankard and Titbit. . . ." 

"Or over mulled tartle at the Thirsty Knave. 'Did you hear about poor
Barnar and Nifft, then? Dead and done for at last, it seems! What were
they about, you ask? Well, it appears the poor lackwits were northbound to
Kairnheim to work in a sap mine!' 'What? Work in a sap mine you say? Well
then, their best years were already past, it would seem!' " 

"Peace, Barnar . . . you're using up . . . air . . ." 

"Here, give me old Biter back-I'll do a turn." 

The hot blood was up to our waists, and the unbreathable darkness choked
out all conversation quick enough. We hewed the invisible meat, groping
the sticky wedges from the wound. Toward the end we were gasping
stertorously, and it seemed we dug ourselves a bottomless grave of flesh.
Then I struck that blessed stroke that bit out a little wedge of sunlight,
which bled a delicious trickle of salt sea air into our nostrils. 

With light and air, our butchery progressed apace, and at length we had a
carnal tunnel we could wriggle through. Reborn beneath the sky, we lay
exulting, and roared with laughter to look on one another, both of us
slick and sticky as fresh turds. 

But as we bathed and washed our gear in the sea, and reclothed ourselves,
we came to feel sobered, reduced. We had emerged from that monstrous
sepulchre with our arms, the slender contents of our moneybelts, and
nothing else. The joy of escape soon yielded to a sense of ill-luck, and a
nagging conviction that we were entirely too impoverished for men of our
years and expertise. A dozen men lay dead in the glabrous' throat, yet
somehow our destitution loomed larger to us than our miraculous evasion of
their tomb. There is a tide in men's spirits, and ours had perhaps been at
ebb for some time now, even before our half-hearted undertaking to rescue
nephew Costard's mine. 

Glumly we trekked along the shore, and reached Dolmen Harbor by
mid-afternoon. This was like most Angalheim ports, less an actual bay than
a smallish cleft in a steep shoreline. Most observers agree that the whole
Angalheim chain is just a slowly drowning mountain range, and its harbors
thus merely embayments in the flanks of the sinking peaks. Above the
docks, most of the harbor's buildings and houses climbed on stilts up the
slopes. 

We found a mead house and bespoke an ample jar of the fiery-sweet potation
that the Angalheims are famed for over half the world. Still, our hearts
remained gloomy as we drank. The mead house itself was somber-a former
clan hall from the islands' piratical days, long since converted to its
present commercial use, but proud of its smoke-blackened roofbeam and the
crude traditional weaponry racked on its wall; the battered bucklers and
unwieldy falchions of a privateering era. Throughout the Angalheims folk
hold a similar reverence for a squalid and villainous past. 

Mead has of course long replaced piracy as these islands' livelihood, and
from the windows we could view the colorful bustle of a vigorous economy.
Men bearing panniers of bright seaweed, and plod-trains laden with the
same briny cargo, streamed upland. This seaweed was mulch for the
flower-pastures on the island's heights, where the sonorous blizzards of
bees hummed in the pursuit of their golden harvest. The harbor thronged
with island trade; Kairnish vessels laden with hides, salt meat and sap
waited at anchor for dock-space, while Angalheim scows scudded outbound
riding low with the weight of mead casks. Out in the open channel beyond
the harbor, the wind curdled the jade water with veins of foam. There,
where the big shoals of 'silvers ran, rode the fishing ketches all at
their stern anchors, and we could see tiny men on them toiling at
windlasses, and gaffing aboard nets bulging with glittery catch. 

But this loveliness and liveliness of sea and sky failed to cheer us. We
felt the dejection of men who are imperfectly employed, whose work-in-hand
is mediocre and indifferently paid. In point of fact we had only a general
notion of the specific duties of a tapper in a sap mine. But it was paid
labor, drudgery, and that was enough to put this touch of autumn in our
hearts, to make us brood on the long years behind us, and make us ask
ourselves where our lives were drifting to. 

Barnar downed a third jack of mead, and sighed. His melodious baritone
broke a long silence. "It's not so much the toil of it," he mused. "It's
the . . . ignominy." 

"Why mince words? Mining is wage-work, and from this your soul recoils
instinctively, of course! All we can do is try to fix our minds on the
charity of it. Your nephew's in a pickle, and his mother would never
forgive you for failing to help him." 

"Do I rightly infer that you two gentlemen are discussing tapping?" 

A sleek-fed man, wearing a green velvet fez, had turned on the bench and,
leaning near us, presented us with this query, wearing a smile of prying
amity. 

"I will be frank," I told him, straining for civility. "My friend and I
are far from keen that you should infer anything, rightly or wrongly, from
what we are discussing." 

"Oh!" He gaped his concern. "Do I intrude? Forgive me!" And he turned back
on the bench. 

"Anhyldia would break my neck," Barnar resumed, answering my previous
remark, "if I didn't help Costard. That's the long and short of it." 

I nodded. "And you are wise to remember that she is quite strong enough to
do so." Barnar's formidable elder sister had, about two years before this,
settled her sap mine on her son and gone off a-pirating. 

"But what I keep sticking on," Barnar said, "is that poor Costard is such
a dolt! I say it utterly without bias against the boy! He has a sweet,
affectionate vein towards his kin, but he is such a petulant young
jackass!" 

"Yes," I sighed. "At least he'll be topside while we're underground. And
mark you that after all, the wage is not stingy. You could do worse
a-thieving, half the time." 

Barnar dismissed this feeble solace with the snort it merited. "Of course!
The pay is more than many a prize I've worked twice as hard to steal, but
at least I was thieving, not grubbing!" 

"Would it be overbold of me"-again the green velvet fez bobbed just
starboard of my shoulder-"to suggest that, if it's a tapper's wage you
speak of, I know a way to quintuple even that handsome sum, and at cost to
yourselves of no more effort than a brief detour taken through the tunnels
of the nest." 

Barnar held up one hand in a gesture of polite prevention. Swordwelts
veined my old friend's knuckles, rather in the way that veins of smooth
quartz sometimes run through rough granite. "You have so lavished your
attention on us, sir, that I cannot tamely bear any further generosity.
Please. Attend to something other than ourselves!" 

The stranger's fezzed brow crumpled with apology. "I have, in my elan to
serve, offended you! Accept my most abject apologies!" He turned away
again. 

"This minework is not just undignified, it's clownish!" Barnar at length
resumed. "To be stripped and painted! Orange! And then tapping itself is .
. . grotesque! Inherently ludicrous! And we'll be novices, prone to all
the humiliating missteps that entails." 

"There's more to it of course, eh?" I nudged him gently. "I know at least
that I for one just plain don't like being deep underground in
Kairnheim-in any part of it."1 

Barnar gave that a bit of a sigh. "Sure enough. The flesh of me recoils,
right to the bone. At least on this venture, we may count on coming
nowhere near the subworld; the only demons we meet will be those the
Behemoths bring into the Nest as food." 

"Forgive me a thousand times, but I cannot contain an impulse of
hospitality toward yourselves!" Here was green fez yet again bobbing near
us. "Let me show you my hives!" 

We gaped at him for a heartbeat, aghast. "My beehives!" he added. He had a
chinlet of black beard-it was barbered close and neat as a tatoo. His
plump face crinkled with hostly fervor. 

"Sir," I told him, "you bring me to the point of speaking bluntly. We must
know why you focus your regard with such tenacity upon ourselves in
particular." 

"The fairest of questions! Apart from what I could not help but
overhear-that you seem to be bound to work in a sap mine-I am motivated by
a certain look of competence you have about you. You yourself, Sir, for
one, so long and limber yet with a lizardly muscularity (if I may say so),
and you Sir, of bulky sinew, with the mass to exert prodigious leverage.
The two of you have, as well-how shall I put it? . . . an air of
enterprise. You strike me as thoughtful, original spirits, men who can see
the world from many points of view. Please, gentlemen. May I have the
honor of showing you my flower pastures? And of giving you to sample the
comb of my Centennial Hive?" 

It seemed an acquaintance with the man was not to be avoided. He
introduced himself as Ha'Awley Bunt, a mead magnate with his own hiveries,
cooperage and casking plants, and trading fleet; owner also of seven
hundred hectares of Scarlet Croppies, Devils-garters and Umber Dandinnias
right here on Dolmen. Owner too of the almost ten thousand hives these
flower pastures sustained. We decided that, at the least, the man would
divert and inform us, whether or not his proposal proved profitable. 

His open carriage, hitched to three matched skinnies, stood outside the
mead house. We all got in, he flicked the reins, and we sped up the
switchbacks of the upland highway toward the flower pastures on the
island's crest. 

Bunt had an amiable and tactful way about him, explaining that when he
made his proposition to us, he must in the same breath disclose a
lucrative secret. To satisfy himself that this chancy disclosure was
warranted, Bunt begged us to indicate, at least, our destination and
projected doings. Accordingly, we conceded that we might indeed be going
into the Broken Axle Mountains, and there taking work as tappers in a sap
mine. The Broken Axles had in fact just then become visible as we climbed
the island's heights in the wind-scoured afternoon: beyond a blue reach of
sea to our north, on the coast of the Kairnish continent's southern rim,
the Broken Axles were a pale pimpling of low peaks. 

"You should know one thing more, Hive-Master Bunt," Barnar told him,
"before disclosing your business to us. It is our policy, Nifft's and
mine, never to undertake ventures proposed by strangers without a
substantial surety in raw gold or specie, on account of services to be
rendered." 

"This is highly sensible, and acceptable!" Bunt enthused. Then he dropped
the business for the moment, and fell to suavely annotating the windswept,
scalp-tingling beauty of the prospect that our ascent was opening out
below us. The northerlies polished the sky like glass, and its blue was an
infinite flame. South of us the other Angalheims rode formationed on the
blazing sea, their surf-collared crests like a great docking fleet,
cruising in to moor in the mothering underbelly of the Kairnish continent.
The windlicked channels, tufted with blown spray, were molten silver
rouged with copper fire. Barnar and I traded looks. We were feeling some
zest for life return to us. Raw gold (or specie), in substantial excess of
the stipend we had but lately, forlornly contemplated, now glowed before
us, above a changed horizon. 

Dolmen's uplands are all gorgeously crested and pelted by flower pastures.
How they ravished the eyes in the slant gold light, those meadowed acres
of silken wildfire! Bunt drew a gauzy curtain round our carriage now. The
bees thronged every inch of air, hanging stubborn in the wind's sweep,
dropping to the blossoms like a steady rain, a rain that hovered, fell,
rose, and fell again. 

As we toured the pastures, the last of our gloom fell from us like a
moulting. Smooth paths brought us to breathtaking vistas, or sank us deep
in meadows where we spun along, walled in by choirs of living rainbow, all
the colors uniting with the scents, and with the bees' sweet, sonorous
hymn, to ravish our senses. Many other tourists were likewise being
carriaged through the aromatic maze in similar vehicles bearing the crest
of the Bunt Hivery, but the pathways were so cunningly designed and
artfully laid out that we glimpsed these fellow travellers but rarely, and
felt we had the flowerfields for our own. 

"My Centennial Hive is unrivalled here on Dolmen," Bunt told us. "It is
equalled only by five or six others throughout the Astrygals. My
Centennial Hive shelters seven dynasties of queens, the youngest of them a
hundred generations long." 

Younger hives, we had seen, were housed in polyhedral wooden cabins, their
panels of dark, oiled harmony wood all gorgeously carved with bas-relief
motifs of comb and bee and blossom. These structures could be walked
through, and were labyrinthed inside with carpentered frames all solid
with comb and densely furred with working bees. 

The Centennial Hive was thrice the size of any of these others. Inside, we
found that skylights of stained glass admitted a murky amber light,
allowing maintenance and cultivation. Gossamer netting formed diaphanous
tunnels for us to move through in the sweet-scented gloom and deafening
primeval song of sleeplessly vibrating wings. 

"Hadra-Archonia the Sixteenth," quavered Bunt, drawing us to a deeply
grottoed vault. We stood beholding her. This queen was a titan of her
race; her restless, gravid abdomen alone was larger than my hand. Her
gaster, ever-probing, ceaselessly planted the seeds of workers in new-made
cells. Her attendants were not a tenth her size. They flanked her like
busy sycophants, seeming to kiss her flanks, speaking to her with touches
of jaw and antenna, ceaselessly coming and going, always replaced,
worshipping at her side in clusters constantly renewed. 

If Bunt had meant some disclosure to accompany this portentous viewing, he
changed his mind. He wore an air of inward debate as we drove back to the
Hivery. There we retired to the comfortable armchairs of his private
office, and he served us some very impressive mead. He drank with us, and
sighed. 

"Gentlemen. There is much I might explain, but I feel a reticence I cannot
overcome. Will you forgive a vagueness that might be mistaken for
distrust? Merely specifying what I seek puts my purpose within the reach
of inference to any thoughful hearer. 

"Well. Here, then, is my proposition. Your work as tappers will put you in
the larval nurseries of a Behemoth nest. In your work's normal course you
would find no cause to venture from that nursery chamber. 

"But it is my hope that you will agree, with the inducement of three
hundredweight apiece of gold specie, to venture at large through the nest
till you have found the Royal Brood Chamber, where the Queen lies a-laying
her eggs, and there to retrieve some twenty gills or so of a certain ichor
which the Queen exudes from her body, and bring it up to me when your
tapping tour is done." 

Barnar and I exchanged a look. We both did an almost superhuman job of
concealing our astonishment and delight at the enormous sum that Bunt had
just named. "Let us banish ambiguity completely," I said. "You are telling
us you will pay us three hundredweight of gold before we leave here, a
hundred and fifty apiece, in exchange for our undertaking to attempt your
task? That this three hundred will be inalienably ours for the attempt
alone, and that a like sum will be paid us if we succeed?" 

Bunt's hesitation was quickly overcome; we saw only the briefest quiver of
a merchant's haggling reflex. "Just so!" 

With some further struggle, Barnar and I hid our elation. That very
morning we had been but a single swallow from an agonizing metamorphosis
into glabrine fecal matter. And this afternoon, we were already rich. 

II 

Oh let us bathe, and put away dissension- 

Let's with lissom ladies of the Bath 

Explore what joys the golden Present hath, 

For Now is Having's only real dimension. 

Let not Phantasmic Future wake our wrath! 

OUR DEPARTURE was set for the tide's turn, not long past nightfall, and
Ha'Awley Bunt would be going with us. Barnar and I would have liked to
knock around on our own before setting out, asking questions here and
there, gathering our own judgment of the strange work we'd agreed to. But
Bunt proved adhesive, loath to leave our sides. Perhaps he feared
precisely such inquiries as we might make, and what these inquiries might
suggest to those who heard them. He took us with him to see to the
outfitting of a ferry he owned, which would convey us to the Kairnheim
coast. He involved us in the choosing and bringing aboard of the carriage
and team that would whisk us from KairnGate Harbor up to Costard's
Superior Sap Mine in the Broken Axle Mountains. Then, as the sun westered,
he took us to his imposing harborside residence. 

Here, safe within his guarded doors, his sturdy retainers stood ready to
transfer to our possession two compact but weighty pairs of leathern
saddlebags. Bunt then, before repairing upstairs to see to our further
entertainment, put his opulent baths at our disposal. He was perhaps not
surprised-though he arched a brow-when we told him we would take our pay
with us into the baths. 

A lissome bath attendant-a gauzily clad woman wearing a tantalizing citron
scent-conducted us to a sweat-room, and at our request left us there with
an amphora of water to splash on the embers glowing in the huge brazier.
At last we had some blessed privacy. We un-shouldered the saddlebags, and
stripped down to sweat the last traces of glabrous slime from our pores. I
flipped open one of my bags, as Barnar did one of his. 

"Oh my," I murmured. I chuckled as my fingers plunged into the coins, and
the rattly coins seemed to chuckle with me. The ruddy light of the coals
warmed them, and made them glow rich as butter. "Look Barnar," I burbled.
"Kolodrian lictors! Such a wonderful mintage!" Admittedly this was the
fatuous utterance of mindless glee, but the hefty octagonal coin is indeed
a handsome one, bearing the profile of Jarkel VII, conqueror of the Laddga
Tundras. The monarch was an indifferent soldier who triumphed through his
generals, but his plump, prosperous cheeks look wonderfully apt on a coin,
as does, on the verso, the imprint of the fatted sacrifice, a kaurok
(ancestral, most agree, to the Kairnish hornbow), its horns wreathed in
garlands. 

"Mine too!" Barnar chortled, "With Kairnish quadroons mixed in!" I had to
laugh to see my friend looking so like a child with his basket of sweets
at an Ephesion harvest-fest (although so, I daresay, did I). Barnar's eyes
are the dense, smoky grey of the always-rainy skies of his native Chilia,
and the glow of our gold brought out the flecks of green in them too, like
the forest green that clothes that same great isle of his nativity. His
broad, flat, not unbattered nose seemed like a bull's who snuffs
excitement in the morning air. Barnar is a man with great laughter in him,
though his stolid face is seldom seen to brim with it, as it did now. "Do
you know, old waybrother," I told him, "in this fine, ruddy heat, I feel
that the gold and we ourselves could melt together, refashioning us into
utterly new, shining beings, lustrous and immortal." 

"The words," Barnar beamed, "of a perfect lunatic. I too am quite mad, you
know, to find myself so rich. So very rich, in fact, Nifft, that . . ."
His look turned graver; he was about to broach some serious matter, but I
cut him off, such excitement did my own sudden thought bring me. 

"Do you realize, Barnar, that now we can do that great deed we have been
sworn to these five years past and more?" The look he gave me was so
blank, I faltered. "Can you fail to understand me? The Buskins and
Gantlets and Cowl of Pelfer the Peerless! To be had by storming his tomb
and subduing its deathless guardians.2 Surely you see that now, once we
have the remaining three hundredweight, we can actually hire six good
ships and a hundred first-class mercenaries. We could be fighting our way
across the steppes before autumn was half out, if we're done in your
nephew's mine in a fortnight or so." 

Barnar's brow, to my bafflement, had taken on an injured look. "You may be
right to reproach my memory, Nifft, for forgetting your ardor to have the
great Pelfer's accoutrements of power. But I think I have even better
reason to reproach your memory in turn. For did we not, two years ago, at
the Pickpockets' Ball in Karkmahn-Ra, most solemnly vow that if ever we
could afford the Witches' Seed to do it, we would infallibly go forth to
Chilia and there reforest the Ham-Hadryan Vale, so long in the holding of
my family's line, and so cruelly despoiled during its long captivity?" 

I all but snapped at him, What, will you hold me to drunken promises? For
I remembered the occasion the instant he reminded me of it; a bit too much
wine had made me vow with sentimental fervor that I would regard the
reforestation of Barnar's native valley as my solemn duty, as soon as
circumstances warranted the exploit. And of course I was indeed bound to
help my friend in an enterprise so near to him as the rejuvenation of his
homeland and his clan, and I had every intention of doing so, at a more
convenient time. "Old friend," I urged him, "when Gildmirth's path crossed
ours a second time, and when that great mage put in our possession the
whereabouts of Pelfer's fabled tomb-was this not five years and more ago?
Did not the vow we swore to one another to seek his tomb as soon as we had
wealth enough to mount the effort-well, did not this vow antedate our vow
to reforest your family's valley? And look you! With Pelfer's Gantlets,
Cowl, and Buskins in our possession, we would shortly be the richest
thieves on earth! The reforesting of the Ham-Hadryan Vale with Witches'
Seed would be childsplay to us then!" 

For answer Barnar gave me a steady, mournful look. He felt himself ill
treated-there was no getting around it. On my part, I felt a keen
resentment of my friend which it was hopeless to conceal from myself. How
could Barnar allow this golden moment of ours to run aground on this shoal
of his stubbornness? 

"Look you," he sighed at length. "The other three hundredweight is not yet
ours, is it? Indeed, can this ichor of Bunt's be so easy in the taking
that we can be wholly sure of managing it? Would he have offered such a
huge sum outright for something that was lightly had? Let's go bathe, and
put away dissension. Let's enjoy what we have, and the moment we have it
in." 

"Fairly spoken!" 

As soon as we emerged from the sweat room, our bags once again on our
shoulders, three bath attendants materialized-the slender one who had
first ushered us in, and two others as gauzily clad and shapely as
herself. These second two swiftly persuaded Barnar to undergo a massage
which began with the pair of them walking up and down on him, treading the
length of his recumbent bulk with their bare, scented feet. The first, a
sloe-eyed woman with a wise, wicked smile, conducted me to a pool a bit
apart. "Oh sinewy traveller," she teased (her voice was slow, gritty
honey), "you seem to be entirely made of tendon and tight, snaky muscles!
You will need a thorough soaping, and a most meticulous scrubbing, to get
all the creases and ridges of you clean. . . ." 

I replied, my voice cracking only slightly, that I would be deeply
grateful for any such hygienic assistance as she would be pleased to lend
me. 

A rapturous interval ensued. 

Her name was Higaia. We were chortling like children when at length we
rinsed each other off. She told me she had freelanced in bath houses and
dancing troupes three decades now on both sides of the Sea of Agon, and
clearly she had seen the world and drawn sweet wisdom from it. Knowing we
could not meet again before our setting out tonight, I asked if she meant
to stay on Dolmen a while. "Well," she said, "the wanderlust is coming on
me again, and I'm thinking of seeing the Minuskulons. I suppose I might
stay here another fortnight or so." 

"Then I have good hope of finding you here again. Perhaps we might travel
together for a time." 

So little did I forsee how our present venture would detain us under the
earth. 

Bunt's balconied dining room, four floors up, opened onto an unobstructed
view of the harbor and the channel beyond. We viewed the windlicked waters
all purple in the dusk, and dined sumptuously. Bunt proposed that we
present him to Costard as a chance-met traveller, a man in the market for
sap whom we'd brought along so Costard could sell him some. Bunt needn't
hide he was a Hive-Master. Hiveries used plods, skinnies, and other
draybeasts for mulching and transporting mead and the like, and were
always buying sap as bulk fodder. Meanwhile Costard's financial straits
might make him open to partnership. Bunt, by investment, might secure a
stable source of the ichor he sought-the substance, that is, we were to
obtain for him from a Queen, and which he also referred to as "giants'
pap." 

I listened patiently, toeing my gold beneath the table, feeling the shifty
coin within its leather swaddling. This morning, I was waist-deep in blood
in the stenchful glabrous' maw; this afternoon, I was in a dazzling world
of breeze-licked flowers; this evening, there was Higaia in the baths,
this rich food, and wealth. I had to be on guard at moments, to stop
myself from breaking out into a stupid grin of delight and disbelief. 

But then my glance kept meeting Barnar's, as if by some odd synchrony in
our inner musings. And each time our eyes met, I felt pass between us that
little chill of mutual disappointment that had first struck us in the
sweat-room's warmth. Our difference would not leave us, but was an icy
spark our eyes struck off each time they met. I knew that Barnar's will
still clasped as stubbornly his pet ambition, as mine clung to my own. 

"The opulence of your entertainment," Barnar told Bunt jocularly,
"somewhat troubles me as I reflect on it. We must affirm that your stipend
is princely. Yet I find myself asking key questions too late. How
dangerous must it be to penetrate the Royal Brood Chamber of a Behemoth
nest? Let alone to gather some sort of exudate from the Queen's own body?
I have never heard such an exploit even conceived of, much less
undertaken. Nifft and I naturally regard ourselves as bound," (I bowed
here my assent) "but for all we know of what we've undertaken, even six
hundredweight might be too little payment." 

Just at this juncture, a tall, robust young woman marched into the room,
caped against the dusk winds outside, her back-swept pompadour of brazen
hair still charmingly mussed by those same winds. 

"Sha'Urley! Dearest!" cried Bunt. "My sister, Sha'Urley, gentlemen! Please
dine with us, my dear!" There was a grit of irritation in his voice that
all his attempt at honey could not quite candy over. Bunt presented us to
her as a pair of wayfaring fellows who had agreed to guide him on a ramble
into Kairnheim. For he was feeling stale with work, he told her, and we
were to be his breath of fresh air. Sha'Urley did not uncloak, but she sat
to take a brief, amiable chalice of wine with us. 

"You look quite fit and . . . trail-wise, gentlemen," she told us. Her
pale eyes smiled at us with a frosty little light of irony in them. "My
brother is well met with you. And how richly he deserves a stroll abroad!
He is too much at business. It is a business which our mother left to our
joint direction, but which Ha'Awley dreads to burden me withal, and so he
strives to manage it almost single-handed. Dear brother! You fret to spare
me burdens, yet you treat your own health villainously. Look how fat you
have grown! But nothing I say makes the least bit of difference to you,
does it?" Already she was rising, and kissing her brother good-bye, at
which Bunt wore a look both nettled and relieved. 

She paused at the door before stepping out. "I am lucky at least," she
said, "that Ha'Awley would not dream of making any major investment
without my prior and full involvement in the decision. With this certainty
I rest content. It was a pleasure to meet you, gentlemen. Good night,
all!" 

III 

If we are still to manage deeds that shine, 

We must be up and doing them. First, mine! 

WE TOOK SHIP not long after dark. There was the bustle of boarding, and
getting under way, and then Bunt retired at once to his hammock, and lay
snoring within moments of our casting off. It was true he had partaken
liberally of mead and viands at table, but his haste to bed down smacked
of evasion too, for we had discreetly urged on him our wish to know more
of our errand to the Royal Chamber in the Behemoth's nest. 

Barnar and I stood at the rail of the creaky craft, an old pirates'
caravel re-decked to ferry beasts and carriages like our own to and from
the Kairnish coast. The half moon, zenithed in the early dark, made
spectral statuary of the bare-masted vessels in the harbor. These fell
astern of us, and the bright-windowed houses of the harbor dwindled to a
little crescent-shaped constellation on the moon-silvered sea, as the wind
took us out in the open channel. We leaned at the rail, enjoying the
rickety dance of the old tub on the smoothly rolling waters. 

"Well," Barnar ventured. " 'giants' pap'. . . . Have you ever heard of it
before?" 

"I've heard Behemoth workers nurse or feed in some way at the flanks of
the Queen, but I have also heard that same notion mocked as myth." 

"It smacks of myth to me," Barnar said. "Who's ever been in a Royal Brood
Chamber and seen a Queen? If it's been done, I've not heard of it." 

"Well, we'll get what else we can out of Bunt. The rest, I suppose, we'll
learn first hand in the attempt. . . ." 

We stood at the rail through a long silence, our separate dreams wide
awake in us, roaming through our minds. The night wind chased us, and set
our scow creaking and lumbering through the easy swells. Above the shadow
of the Kairnish coast ahead were thick-strewn stars only a little dimmed
by the high half moon, and blazing as if they were coals that the wind
blew to life. 

"Barnar," I said, "I'm feeling lucky. I'm getting a feeling that luck is
gathering itself under us like a great wave. Like a rising tide. I should
have known it this morning, even before we came by this gold, for are not
men who are swallowed by a glabrous, and emerge alive, among the world's
luckiest imaginable? 

"Let me tell you a story, old friend," I went on, "about a man we both
know, a man who is dear as a brother to my heart. This man has nine living
uncles and seven living aunts, and cousins uncountable, and thirteen
brothers and sisters of his own"-Barnar made to interrupt me but I thrust
up my palm-"and all four of his grandparents living and great aunts and
great uncles at least half a score, and no less than four of his great
grandparents still stepping most lively on the skorse-scented,
needle-carpeted mountain slopes of his native valley, Ham-Hadryan Vale,
the immemorial holding of the Ham-Hadryan clan. Can any doubt remain that
the man I speak of is Barnar Ham-Hadryan, called, only half facetiously,
Barnar Hammer-Hand, and Barnar Ox-back? Don't answer! Hear me. 

"This Barnar, whose beloved kin thrive near as thick on his natal slopes
as does the timber that is their livelihood, is an earth-loving man, who
wielded an axe from his earliest youth, who winched the howling blades of
his family's sawmill since he was a stripling, and who, long before he
came a man, had by his own sweat and skill done his part to set many a
straight-keeled ship afloat, many a stout-walled home a-standing, many a
strong-axled wagon a-rolling. 

"And, when the Kragfasst clan of the Lulumean Highlands began its
depredations in the Great Shallows, and thrust its blade of conquest down
half the length of Ham-Hadryan Vale, who exchanged a tree-jack's axe for a
battle-axe with half the furious will that this our Barnar did? Nine years
of war transformed him from a fresh youth to a seasoned veteran, tough as
an axe-haft of ironwood, but still with the same tender heart for his kin
and his homeland beating in his formidable body. 

"But when the invaders were repulsed at last, they left a clear-cut waste,
and these shorn slopes were a torment to the eye of this same Barnar
Hammer-hand who, having fought for his valley till its deliverance, turned
away from it when he had helped to win it back. He went abroad a-thieving
over the earth, too grieved by his hearth-land's despoliation to long
abide in it. 

"In the decades since, he has lavished the better part of all his takings
on his kin, refurbishing their faltering saws, replenishing their teams of
plods, and generally nourishing along their laborious husbandry of the
trees remaining to them. 

"How can we not think, then-we who love and honor this same Barnar
Ham-Hadryan-that his eyes may have grown . . . too fixed upon the earth?
Of course it will most infallibly come to pass, that Barnar Hammer-hand
will drive home the Witches' Seed in the flanks of his native hills. Most
surely he will do this, and call up his homeland's vanished hosts of
skorse to stand tall again out of the soil! This will come to pass! But
if, beforehand, an incalculable enrichment may be had-if, first, this
Barnar-" 

"Enough, Nifft! Stop it. Do you not realize, my friend, that you and I are
at that point in years where, if a great thing lie in hand, then we must
do it, then and there? We are not made of immortal stuff, old waybrother.
If we are still to manage deeds that shine, then we must be straight about
them when they offer. And this dream of the Witches' Seed I have held so
long, it is not a thing I will set by for any other venture, now that it
has come at last within my reach . . . or almost in my reach." 

"Use reason, Barnar! If we possessed the Gantlets, Cowl and Buskins of
Pelfer the Peerless, then we could shortly make ourselves so rich we could
reforest all of Chilia, make even her stoniest ridges green with skorse,
have the great trees growing thick as grass even in the high barrens of
Magnass-Dryan." 

That last shaft made him startle just a bit, for in the high barrens still
dwelt Marnya-Dryan, whom Barnar had loved since boyhood; Marnya was the
daughter of a proud but tree-poor clan. How might she not be wooed with
Witches' Seed, and the forestation of her natal highlands? He repossessed
himself, however, and smiled wanly. "Look at us, jarring over the spending
of phantom gold!" He hauled his bags of gold up onto his shoulder and,
before trudging off to his hammock, he thwacked my shoulder in his old
friendly manner. But I knew him; though he was carefully concealing it in
his well-bred way, he was hurt and resentful. 

I lingered at the rail, bitterly resenting my friend's stubbornness. I was
so vexed it ended by surprising me. I struggled for composure. 

And I could admit, after a while, to feeling this same sad, mortal urgency
Barnar had confessed to. While I'd trudged around Dolmen's shore this
morning, shivering from the briny bath that left us still smelling of
glabrous blood, this same bony finger of Time had indeed touched my own
heart, and the Specter had murmured with lean lips at my ear that I was a
vagabond who had achieved nothing, and now, never would. 

But by the Crack, Key and Cauldron, under it all, I did indeed feel . . .
lucky. Strange fortune had come to us, and was still coming. I looked
north, to our future's unfolding. There, unveiled by the moon's decline,
the blaze of stars brightened above the dark line of the Kairnish
mainland. Those stars swarmed as thickly as I imagined Behemoths might
swarm, down the subworld walls, and across the subworld plain, a-hunting
the fleeing hosts of demons. . . . 

IV 

With beverage that giants sip 

Fill up my beaker to the lip 

But how to tap that brew Below 

I cannot tell. I do not know. 

WE DOCKED at KairnGate Harbor in the first light, and by the time of the
sun's rising, our barouche had already whirled a league out of town up a
north-trending highway. The highway was a fine, smooth-flagged
thoroughfare that thrived with commerce. 

Across the river-knit southern plains of Latter Kairnlaw, Bunt cracked the
whip above his thoroughbred skinnies and set us racing through the honeyed
spill of morning light. He kept the wheels rattling, and the wind
ruckusing in our ears, perhaps to forestall the questions he sensed in us.

But I insisted on a sit-down at an ale house we glimpsed in a riverside
hamlet, one that Bunt would have galloped past had we let him. The
establishment had a pleasant garden fenced with proom trees and rumkin
vines. We chose our table in a nook amidst these fragrant growths, and
decanted a delicious honey-wine, a drink as golden as the grassy prairies
that unrolled across the river from us. 

"I believe this is our own vintage," Bunt murmured, tonguing a sup of the
wine judiciously. 

"May we speak of other beverages?" Barnar prompted. "This giants' pap for
instance. Must we, as it were, milk a Queen Behemoth for it? Kindly share
with us now what you know of this thing you send us after." 

"I may not share my sources," Bunt gravely answered. "This would-forgive
me-give away too much to those who might wish to emulate my venture. But
the gist of it I will give you, though it is admittedly slight. Adult
Behemoth workers, all castes of them, nurse in an unspecified manner at
the flanks of the Queen. They do it occasionally, you understand, but they
all do it. They drink from Her. 

"From a documentary source unknown even to the erudite, I have learned
that, in all likelihood, each Behemoth by this nursing imbibes an ichor
specific to her caste and form of body. The exudate, it seems, prompts and
sustains the several shapes and orders of the Queen's progeny. The
specific ichor I would have you obtain is that particular pap consumed by
the Forager caste, far and away the giants of all workers, and the
scourges of demonkind. The precise How of the obtaining, I'm afraid, is
completely unknown to me." 

"Would it be fair to infer," I ventured after a silence, "that this
giants' pap is believed specifically to promote the Foragers' hugeness?
And might I further guess that it is specifically this giantizing property
of the sap which you crave it for?" 

"This much I will admit, if you will be so kind as not to press for any
further particulars." 

"Well and good, Bunt. Still, assuming this pap to be what you think it is,
what virtue would it necessarily have outside the Nest?" 

"Well," smiled Bunt cooly. "That would be the question, wouldn't it?" 

The highway, swinging northwestward, cut a course to intersect the
north-trending line of the Broken Axle Mountains. This was a low, pale
mountain range, the peaks blunt and knuckly, a bony old range rounded down
by a million winters. 

Yet I seemed to sense a movement, an unrest in their eroded eminences.
These old mountains were alive within, were the swarming wombs of
uncounted Behemoth Nests, each Nest itself uncountably aswarm. As we drew
towards our night's rest in the city of Dry Hole, which lies half in the
plain and half in the foothills of the Broken Axle Range itself, it seemed
I could almost feel the faint vibration of this activity. We lodged in a
hostel in the city's upland half, and here, perched on the mountain's very
flanks, I fancied I felt the faintest tremoring through the floor
underfoot, and almost heard the sleepless giants rivering through the
mountain-bone. 

Dry Hole (named for a sap mine that went bust in the days before the place
thrived as a cattle town and crossroads of commerce) is a comely city,
especially when viewed from the heights. From our hostel we could enjoy
the sweep of Dry Hole's rooftops down to the plain, where the Broken Axle
River, issuing from the mountains just to the north, stitches its silver
thread through the city's outskirts. Most of the feedlots, corrals,
tanning yards and slaughterhouses lie along the river, and thus up in the
hills we were spared the smell of dung and stale blood, and the flies,
that haunt all cattle towns. Not that even up in the hills a certain
carnal perfume was lacking, for I nosed a waft of raw hides, of salt meat
and new barrels at the picklers' yards, of hay, and the dry scent of dust
raised by ten thousand hooves. 

We watched the sun sink past the vast, straight prairie horizon, watched
the plain's sea of golden grasses blaze fiery copper, then turn amber,
then silver, while the window lamps freckled alight all down the slopes,
and the lamps on the bridges over the Broken Axle River sparked white
above the sword-steel thread of the water. 

Then I went to my bed with a will. On the boat last night my brain so
blazed with golden ambition I had but a fitful sleep of it, what with the
sea, too, restless under me. I lay listening for a while. No sense is more
doubtful than the hearing, wherein the thought so imperceptibly becomes
the sensation, but I could have sworn the mountain under me faintly
hummed. Then I slipped snug into oblivion, like a sheathed sword. 

V 

High in the peaks She hides the treasure troves 

That nest Her newborn spawn as rife as stars, 

As numberless as shingles on earth's shores. 

Down in the deeps Her warlike daughters rove 

Where demons flee them in their bleeding droves, 

But high in the peaks, 

Her sleeping young ones are. . . . 

WE SET OUT into the mountains at first light. A viaduct plunged up into
the range not far from our hostel; it ran, where needed, on piers or
arched bridges, and made a smooth, safe climb of it for our carriage. We
rolled amid slopes thinly wooded with black skorse and dwarf-cone: the
arid, thin-soiled old mountains were balding, as it were, the peaks and
ridgelines bare, polished by steady winds. 

Sap-mines were nestled everywhere on the flanks of the heights. They were
rather plain, sprawly installations of bleached wood, and conformed to a
basic pattern. Typically, they comprised a large central building-which
housed the drill site, the pumps, and the barrelling operation-and an
array of smaller structures that housed the offices and the miners'
dormitories. 

They were, on the whole, shabby structures, but their numbers testified to
Behemoth's multitudes at work within the peaks. At nightfall, we withdrew
from the highway into a ravine to take our rest. I lay in my blanket on
the soft sand listening for the thrum of Behemoth's vast business deep in
the mountain-bone. 

Next day at midmorning we reached Barrelful Heights. This was a nexus of
ridgelines and saddles, in whose canyoned and arroyoed flanks half a dozen
sap mines flourished. No one knew how many separate Nests sustained these
mines. Though more than a mile separated even the closest mines, it was
still quite possible that at least some of them fed off a single Nest; any
one Nest has dozens of the larval nurseries that are sap's source. 

The Superior Sap Mine did not flourish. It stood utterly silent. We walked
our team into the main building, and the click of their hooves and the
rattle of their harness echoed from the lofty rafters. The building's rear
wall was the bare flank of the living mountain, and inset into it were
huge brass petcocks, designed to pour the pumped sap into three brazen
vats, big as houses. Regiments of casks stood ranked below the vats. 

But no one was barrelling. No one was here. The whole plant was void of
humanity. In its echoey silence we could hear a faint, drumlike rumor, and
after a moment, we were able to identify it: it was the noise of the
barrel chutes over in the nearest neighboring mine, a thriving place clear
on the other side of the ridge from us. 

"Difficulties with his crew," Barnar rumbled bitterly. This was how
Costard's letter had described his dilemma to his mother, Barnar's
formidable elder sister. She, Anhyldia, with doting faith in her sole
issue's every word, had enjoined her brother to supply that youthful
paragon with the "fortnight's help or so" that was plainly all Costard
needed to have things "running right as rain again." "Difficulties with
his crew," Barnar repeated, his exasperation mounting. 

"Dear old Uncle Barnar! Oh, this is a joy!" And in ran the young man in
question, hurling himself against my huge friend and hugging him. I had to
smile at seeing, in the grizzled granite of Barnar's weathered cheekbones,
the crinkling of a smile despite his vexation. Perhaps he was remembering
Costard as a loud little boy coaxing him for presents, or demanding a
shoulder-ride. Indeed, Costard looked small enough hugging his uncle. He
was a trim young man just a handsbreadth less than tall, and just a
ten-weight or so more than slight. His hair was short, and shaved in a
spiral pattern that was locally modish. Crossing his forehead diagonally
was the recent scar of a sizeable laceration. The injury was garish rather
than severe, pebbly now with old scab about to flake away. He made his
courtesies to me, and we introduced Bunt as a trail-met merchant out
shopping for sap. 

"Knowing your difficulties," Barnar added, "we told good Bunt here that
you might perhaps give him a slightly discounted rate if he would tarry
here to be your first customer, once we've gone down and started tapping."

"Absolutely not!" Costard's refusal had startling resonance in the vaulted
emptiness. "It's plainly and simply unthinkable that the yield of a mine
like the Superior should sell for less that ninety lictors to the ghyll!"
Costard uttered this with a level stare, his brows raised, as at a
suggested outrage. One sensed that the young man had rehearsed this
response for use in any discussion of price. Apparently, Costard favored a
very strict Manner and Method when doing business. 

The embarrassed Bunt sought only a pretext to abide here until Barnar and
I had been underground long enough to execute his secret errand. With five
other mines at hand to fill Bunt's sap order without delay, his patience
in waiting around here would not seem plausible without some slight
bargain on the price. But now the hive-master bleated hastily, "Of course!
I have certainly heard the high quality of the Superior's sap most
feelingly reported, and will gladly wait for it at your stated price!" 

Costard nodded, baffled-even piqued-by this prompt and unconditional
compliance. Apparently he yearned to employ some more Manner and Method on
this lone petitioner for the product of his paralyzed mine. 

"Well," he said, re-collecting himself after a moment. "Let's go to my
quarters now for some refreshment!" 

The main building of the mine had been thin-walled and drafty, and the
deserted barracks which had housed the miners looked still more weathered
and ramshackle, but Costard's residence was lavishly carpeted, tapestried,
and furnished with very cushiony divans and lounges. He served us
delicacies from a gilded salver, describing his labor troubles with rising
fervor. 

"How did Mama handle this crew? I've asked myself a hundred times. They
were all such greedy idiots! I tried to make them understand that a wage
reduction was an absolute necessity! The current sag in sap prices
demanded austerities-Another pickled quiffle, Uncle? They're quite
delicious, imported from Kolodria!-demanded that we suck in our stomachs
and tighten our belts, so to speak." 

"So the crew decamped in a body, all of them, just like that?" Barnar
asked. "Where did they go?" 

"They actually had the gall to threaten me! To say they'd go work for my
competitors!" 

"And that's what they did? They are all now employed at other mines?"
Barnar's voice was fainter; the extent of his nephew's folly was beginning
at last to dawn on all of us. 

"And how long will their jobs there last?" Costard snorted with contempt.
"I alone have understood long-range trends in the sap market; I alone have
seen the need for mine owners to amass large cushions of surplus capital
against the harder times ahead! When the Superior is the only operating
mine in the region, my workers will return in humble pilgrimage, upon
their knees!" 

"I see," murmured Barnar. "When you are the only operating mine in the
region. . . ." In the following silence, once again we faintly heard the
drumlike jostle of barrels being filled in the operation across the ridge.

Had we not come with the lucrative secret enterprise of the giants' pap
already in hand, we would have left the doomed Superior Sap Mine then and
there, Anhyldia's wrath be damned. This formidable woman was not to be
lightly crossed, of course, but she was quite unlikely to cross paths with
us. Anhyldia had been touched by a restlessness of middle life, a haunting
sense of paths not taken, and two years ago she'd gone a-pirating. Since
then she'd sent Barnar several enthusiastic epistles recounting the peace
and joy she'd found in hewing heads and plundering merchantmen on the high
seas. 

But her attention to sap-mining had been wavering even before her
setting-forth, and she'd bequeathed to her son a mine that drew from only
one larval nursery chamber. Behemoth Nests are subject to what miners call
"nest wander"; nursery chambers in use through four or five human
generations will, in the mysterious tidal ebbs and fluxes of the Nest's
life, be abruptly abandoned. A new nursery chamber is invariably
established near the abandoned one, and usually still in range of the
mine's "drilling field," its legally owned piece of mountain. 

But sinking new gangways and pipelines to the new larval chamber required
hard work at great expense, which Anhyldia had not cared to muster, and
which her son had been unable to. And now that his own greed and folly had
lost him his labor force, and pinched off the flow of his remaining
profit, Costard's whole enterprise looked as good as dead. 

Barnar and I, with our covert motives, must now do what we could to
prolong the foundering mine's death throes. Through that long afternoon we
lounged, gathering strength for the morrow, and suffering Costard to
entertain us with his theories on global trade, his views on effective
business management, with his opinions on every conceivable subject, in
fact. Even the pleasant view of the mountains we enjoyed from his office
balcony, and the abundant food and wine he served, could only partly
palliate the torment of his monologue. 

The urbane Bunt tried now and then to deflect the youth's pontifications
into the more adult channels of congenial conversational exchange. At some
reference to Behemoth, Bunt ventured, "One can't help but wonder, can one,
about the giants' origins? Are they our natural allies, or our offspring?
Are they our earth-born benefactors, evolved over time, or are they a
living weapon wrought by our ancestors through a thaumaturgy that is now
long lost to us? It's a question, I suppose, as old-" 

"As all informed people agree," Costard announced, "Behemoths were
fashioned by a wizard, of whose name not even an echo now survives." For
Costard, the contrived perplexities and feigned bafflements by which
polished folk set conversation going were plain and simple entreaties for
instruction. Having made this pronouncement, he studied Bunt for any
failure to agree; the young man seemed still vaguely nettled by Bunt's
earlier acquiescence in the matter of the sap's price. 

"Surely, esteemed Costard," Bunt answered, irked in spite of himself, "if
it is to the sorcerous hypothesis that you incline, then its proponents
generally agree that the great Hermaphrod was Behemoth's creator. His
legendary words are often cited: 'Behold my Behemoths, my Watchdogs,
Diners on Demonry.' " 

"Impossible." Costard shook his scabbed brow serenely from side to side.
The helix of his cropped hair seemed, at this moment, to bring his head
towards a point. "I have never heard this name anywhere."3 

I burst out laughing here, and had to struggle for self-command. I soothed
the youth, "Perhaps, good Costard, this is because you have not yet
learned all there is to know of the subject." 

While scowling Costard struggled to digest this preposterous suggestion,
Bunt regained his poise, and resumed the work of self-ingratiation. "Well,
whatever those titans' provenance," he offered, searching for a
distraction, "your place here in the very heartland of their domain is
enviable, good Costard!" He waved an enthusiastic hand at the peaks around
us, whose wrinkled barrenness the sun's decline had accentuated with
shadows. "These very peaks seem to bulge and buckle with Behemoth's busy
energies! Their-" 

"We are far from the heartland of their domain," snapped the captious
young man. "The great bulk of their Nests lie far below us. Only their
highest and most protected chambers lie in reach of the peaks here." 

Who is not aware that Behemoth Nests back their way up into the mountains?
That their Nest-mouths open in the stony walls of the subworld, where the
giants descend to forage and to feed on demonkind, and that their brood
chambers and larval nurseries are recessed high into the peaks at the
greatest possible remove from the demon realms they ravage? Costard's
petulant pedantry at last conquered our efforts at adult discourse. We
gave our attention to the wine and viands, and let the youth resume his
monologue until we could decently retire. 

VI 

I met a Titan in the earth 

Where Mountain Queen gives endless birth, 

And though so terribly She glowered, 

Her helpless babe I half-devoured. 

And then (I am afraid you'll laugh!) 

I met what ate the other half. 

WE ROSE well before the sun to make our elaborate and irksome preparations
for our descent into the mine. While thus engaged, we questioned Costard
closely for all he could tell us about working in the Nest. The young man
had himself done a brief stint of tapping, back at the beginning of his
"labor troubles," when he still had a few employees left to help him
topside working the pumps. Naturally we were eager for the most
circumstantial details he could give us about surviving down in the larval
chamber. 

But Costard proved evasive; specifically, he avoided direct answers about
the abrasion on his head, which we felt almost certain he had suffered
while he was tapping, and thus concerned us very closely. At last Barnar
lost his temper. 

"Out with it, Costard, at once! Tell us the circumstances, or we abandon
you on the instant!" Costard stood blinking and gaping at his uncle's
anger. At this point we were all standing at the very mouth of the
gangway, which was the narrow, steeply inclined shaft down which we were
to ride a wheeled bucket-car to the larval chamber. 

Barnar and I were now fully outfitted for tapping, and were both feeling
most keenly mortified by the personal indignities this outfitting had
inflicted on us. We were near naked, clad only in stout buskins, leathern
short-kilts, and bandoliers that bore our gear and weapons. And we were
dyed. Our hair, skin, clothing, weapons-every square inch of us-was dyed a
screaming-bright orange. We'd had to step into a tub of the tint, like
plods into a tick-dip. We had known-who does not?-of this practice. It is
only this strange "hole in the eyes" of Behemoth, the giants' perfect
blindness to orange (or to the color that orange becomes in the bluish
light of the Nest) that makes tapping possible in the first place, and
potentiates the whole sap industry. This defect in Behemoth's vision has,
time out of mind, profited humankind and their livestock the world over. 

But knowing of the dyeing was nothing like suffering it-nothing like
standing there at the gangway half naked and pumpkin-hued, gaudy as
carnival clowns in the morning light that streamed through the rafters of
the mine's main building. To stand thus chagrined and discomfitted, on the
very point of being bucketed down a dark shaft to the mountain's bowel-to
stand thus on the brink of our peril and still be denied by Costard the
information we sought, was too infuriating. 

"You will tell us," Barnar boomed, "precisely how you received those
abrasions to your head, or we will now and forever leave your mine to its
fate! You were picked up, were you not? Though dyed, you were seen, and
seized by a Behemoth? Why did this occur?" 

"I slipped," said the young man with frigid dignity, "in some larval
excrement." 

We shortly had the gist of it from the testy young man. Costard, after his
little fall in some excreta, had neglected to wash his boots, whose
movements then grew visible where the fecal stains obscured their dye. One
of the ever-vigilant Nurses who feed and tend the larvae had rushed to
devour him as a brood parasite, and Costard had burst his flask of brood
scent (a precautionary measure every tapper goes equipped for) at the last
possible instant. Doused with this aroma, an unlucky tapper is instantly
perceived by a Behemoth as an infant of its own kind, and is tenderly
reinstalled among the larval shoals. That Costard had received only such
minor lacerations as he suffered was testament to the finesse of a
Behemoth's giant jaws in the handling of so relatively minute a morsel as
a man. 

We found it most vexing that Costard would have allowed his personal
vanity to deny us the useful lesson to be drawn from this incident: we
must be alert to the danger of casual befoulments of our persons, for such
besmirchings had power to make us fragmentarily visible to the titans we
robbed. 

Too soon arrived the moment when we must step down into the bucket-car,
and divest ourselves of sky and sunlight, of winds and rains and stars.
But before Barnar slid the hatch-cover over us, he could not forbear a
final scolding of his nephew. "Look that you take full advantage of Bunt's
generously offered help," he admonished. "We'll have our hands full
getting the knack of it below-things must go smoothly up here." Costard's
frigid nod was not reassuring. He still regarded Bunt with a look of
unappeased distrust, as if the young ass sensed some dissembled opponency
in the hive-master's unfailing affability and compliance. 

"Look here, Costard," I put in. "Accept the help Bunt offers. You need
help. Doesn't the failure of this once-great concern-" (and here I thrust
an arm up from the bucket, and swept it at the empty building around us)
"-suggest to you that perhaps you have shown some ineptness in your
management of this mine?" 

Costard stood apalled, thunderstruck, his wildest imaginings outdone by
this grotesque suggestion. 

"Enough!" boomed Barnar. "Let's be down and have done. Two weeks, no more,
Nephew! Ready, Nifft?" 

"I am," I sighed. Barnar pulled shut the gangway door. The pulleys fed us
rattling down into the dark. 

The stony sinus that swallowed us breathed a faint organic stench, a
lair-smell that grew stronger the deeper we sank. Some years before, and
some hundreds of leagues away, Barnar and I had made another trip together
under Kairnish mountains (as recounted in The Fishing of the Demon-Sea)
and it was an experience we were both remembering as we stood sinking into
that creaking, rattling darkness. 

But now it was decidedly not a demon aura we sank into. The Nest smell was
a more vital fetor that breathed of fecundity and relentless energies. Our
descent felt not like an infernal entombment, but rather like entering the
domain of deities, where an elemental vitality surged and swarmed. 

When we clanked to a stop we had long expected it, as the Nest-aura hummed
ever more strongly around us, yet the actual jolt of arrival sent a pulse
of fear through me. 

There before us was a rectangle delicately outlined in faint blue light:
the hatchway to the larval chamber. I groped, and found the latch, and
thrust the hatchway open. 

Only when I felt the pang of anticlimax did I learn the pitch of my
expectancy. Here were no giants, but only an equipment-filled nook, a deep
natural recess in what must be the wall of the nursery chamber. Here, in
our operations center, were racks of tools, supply lockers, bales and
boxes of provisions, a pair of hammocks. All were orange like ourselves-or
rather, in the pale blue light of this place, were of a smoky, smouldery
hue that matched our own. 

"Come on then!" I blurted. We all but ran out into the chamber, in haste
to front our fears, and have them faced. 

Human constructions, even the greatest of wizard-raised manses, are
utterly dwarfed by even one chamber of Behemoth's fashioning. A
luminescent fungus marbled the walls and limned the chamber's vastness
with its cyanic sheen. 

Even empty, that great void of chewn-out stone would have stunned us by
its scope alone. But filled with that larval trove. . . ? By Crack, Key,
and Cauldron! Our hair stood up upon our bodies! Each pale grub was as big
as a trading sloop, and shoals of them shimmered in that great lagoon of
blue light, their obesities heaped in glossy hillocks, like seadogs
sunning on rocks. In the rich gloom, barrel-ribbed and oily-bright, the
numberless larvae looked to be exactly what they were: bulging casks of
purest nutriment. 

"An adult! A Nurse!" Barnar seized my arm and turned me. The Nurse's
hugeness swam nearer through the larval sea. She was bigger than an
ocean-crossing galleon, and yet so eerily swift and nimble! Her complex
jaws-black, antler-like mandibles-were delicately scissoring, mincing some
fleshy mass they held. She tenderfooted through the nurslings to a point
not distant from us, and thrust the masticated mass down into the
supplicant jaws of a grub. The meal would be demon-flesh, of course. 

The grub fed greedily. Only the tapering head and tail ends of the grub
were capable of moving very much; this one's tail wriggled in sympathy
with her busy little black jaws at the other end. 

We stood long, and again long, gazing at the Nurses coming and going, and
at the Lickers, almost as large, that patrolled the chamber walls, and fed
the luminous fungus with their saliva. There was an ebb and flux to the
ministrations of these adults, who were at times few and far, while at
other times scores of them swarmed at once in view, each feeding grubs by
the dozens. 

The torn demon fragments that these Nurses bore were received, we knew,
out in the tunnels from the mighty Foragers who harvested the subworld far
below. These piecemealed prey were sometimes still conscious, and gave
voice, cackling and jabbering as they were borne to their doom in a larval
gut. But, their infernal utterances apart, all this huge life moved in
relative silence, with a whispery friction of chitinous abdomens, and a
muffled click of tarsal claws on stone. 

We gazed and gazed, aghast. The brutal, plundering work we had come here
to do seemed to us in those first moments to be the most arrant lunacy
imaginable. How dared we slay the babes of such awesome brutes even while
they came and went in plainest view? We stood frozen. 

When we essayed some movement, we were timorous and tentative in the
extreme. We grew bolder by only the tiniest degrees. At length, though,
when we had grown confident enough to dance and jig and wave our arms at a
Nurse who stood not four rods distant from us, we saw in her eyes' black,
faceted globes her utter nescience of our existence. 

We could no longer doubt our freedom to begin the awful work we'd come to
do for Costard. Only after we had provided him with some sap could we
absent ourselves on Bunt's far more lucrative errand. With fear and
loathing, then, we turned to the task. 

The tap lines, or "suck lines" as they are also called (all eight of them
of course dyed orange), radiated like spiderlegs from the drill-hole's
port in the chamber ceiling. The lines, at regular intervals along their
lengths, were attached to ceiling bolts by tough, elastic tethers. Using a
long, hooked pole known as a crook, a tapper could snag and pull down a
given line over his chosen larva; when he was done with it and released
it, or if it slipped from his control by any accident, the tethers
snatched the line safely back up against the ceiling and out of harm's
way, for though these hoses were invisible to them, Nurses blundering
against them would quickly tear them down in a natural litter-clearing
reflex. 

Our task, in brief, was to mount a grub with the help of steel climbing
spurs, hook a line down from the ceiling, drive home the line's Spike (or
"suck-nozzle") into the larval dorsum, and then use the signal cord in our
operations nook to tell our partners topside to start pumping. 

We disburdened ourselves of our bandoliers of gear, and bore only our
weapons strapped to our backs. We awkwardly lashed the climbing spurs to
our insteps and calves, and hefted our crooks. "Well. . . ." My voice
sounded hopeless, hesitant. "What about that smallish one there? It looks
quieter too, less twitchy than the others." 

"Good idea," rumbled Barnar. "Start small and easy." 

Though by now we already felt deeply submerged in this inhuman realm, we
did not truly enter Behemoth's world until that moment when we touched her
flesh. The grub's hide was finegrained, translucent, and supple, like
oiled parchment to our palms. We slipped and floundered till we learned to
drive our spurs home fiercely. I was slow to believe in the young giant's
indifference to my steel's negligible bite. Climbing her, I felt her slow,
seismic heartbeat, and withal, something else: a gurgly unrest, as of
troubled digestion, within her. 

At length, we stood unsteady on the grub's dorsal hump; the blubberous
footing made us falter, and our first efforts with the Crooks were
awkward. But at length we pulled down the nearest suck-line, with the
suction spike on its tip. I gripped the line at mid-length to give Barnar
a slack end. Two-handed, he raised the Spike high. "All right then," he
grunted, and drove it home in the grub's blubbery hide. 

Our terrified suspense as to the outcome of this stroke may be imagined,
as may the depth of our relief when we felt scarcely a tremor of response
in the larva under our feet. Its heart thrummed steadily away; its guts
gurgled perhaps a shade more vigorously, but that was the grub's sole
reaction to the setting of the spike. 

One heartbeat . . . two . . . three thrummed away. We heaved a sigh and
grinned at one another-and then I saw Barnar's jaw drop. I turned,
squawked with terror, and hauled out Ready Jack from his scabbard between
my shoulders. 

Almost too late, as a brambly black bug-shape, twice the size of the
biggest 'lurk, loomed down on me, fangs high. I swung Jack with not an
eyelash of space to spare, and clipped a fang and foreleg from the
fearsome larval parasite-for such it was, a Sucking Star, the brood-bag on
its abdomen swollen fat with eggs. It retreated scarce one step, rearing
high, full of fight, its thorny palps darting for me. The Star was not
about to quit this host; we had found the parasite with its bag full, just
on the point of burrowing inside the luckless larva, there to hatch its
eggs hidden from Nurses. With its clutch of eggs ripe and its habitat
secured, the monster was not about to retreat. Barnar, freeing the spike
and flinging the line ceilingward, swept out his mace, Jolly Breaker, and
crippled two more of the Star's left legs. Then, seeing something I did
not, he bellowed, "Nifft! Jump!" 

I have more than once dodged death by instantly heeding that tone of voice
in my friend. I vaulted backwards and trod thin air. We plunged down into
the shadows between two neighboring larvae. High overhead, a Nurse's
globed eyes peered down. Her jaws plunged and reared aloft again, the
Sucking Star between them, a writhing meal that dwindled as those jaws
scissored. 

But this was the least of the Nurse's sanitary labors. She bent as if to
sniff the flaccid grub, her antennae making dainty-quick inquiries. Then
with jaws and forelegs she seized up her infested grub and began to devour
her outright. The larva hung in that terrible grip, its slack meat like a
moon above us that dwindled as we watched, while its rich larval sap
drizzled and spattered down to the stone before us. 

Such was the remorseless, perfect economy of the Nest, the failed spawn
consumed, regathered to the tribal body, not one pulse of energy wasted.
The Nurse even lowered her jaws and grazed up the debris from the chamber
floor. One of her eyeglobes hovered not five strides away from us. Her
eyesight touched us, and possessed us not. When she was done, she rose and
sped away. 

VII 

Where Aim and Act do inadvertent battle, 

Unsteady is the hand that robs the cradle! 

WE MADE a glum meal in our operations nook: execrable jerky, chalky
hardtack, and sour wine. Apparently, the Superior Sap Mine, when it came
to its workers' provisions, spared every expense. After this repast Barnar
and I took a second stroll along the margins of the larval shoals. Our
eyes were now alerted, and we began to discern significant details. 

To our more searching gaze, larval parasites proved not uncommon, once we
learned their trick of attaching themselves to the shadowed under-surfaces
of the grubs. And, as often as not, the parasitized grubs displayed clear
symptoms of their affliction: flaccidity, dulled color, deficient size. A
further discovery, once we had watched a while longer and strolled a
little farther, was that the Nurses not infrequently seized and devoured
parasitized larvae which showed these symptoms to a marked degree. This
gave us double reason to identify and avoid infested grubs. 

After spotting another loathsome Sucking Star, its brood-bag swollen with
eggs, in the very act of eating its way into its host's flank, I was moved
to shudder, and remark, "Our competitor-parasites are an ugly lot." 

"Yet their work has exactly the same result as ours: an empty bag of
larval skin." 

"Be as philosophical as you like," I rejoined, "but our vampirism is in
every way more elegant than what these spiny horrors do. Ugh!" 

"Yes. Or at least, our way would be more elegant if we got around to doing
it." 

But still we delayed, wandering through the larval trove, watching. We
learned it was well to avoid areas where the natural nest-litter (larval
droppings, and the feeding debris of such tougher demon parts as horns,
barbs, hooves, spikes, and jaws) had not recently been cleared up. Nurses
were likely to visit these untidy areas to devour the mess. Similarly,
those parts of the chamber's walls where the patches of luminous fungi had
most recently been nourished with the Lickers' spittle gave off a more
robust light; these more visible areas seemed also likelier to draw
Nurses. 

Having made these useful observations, we could no longer delay making our
next attempt at tapping. Our second choice was a large, healthy-looking
grub lying in a litter-free area that was not over-well illuminated, and
was neighbored by equally healthy-looking grubs exhibiting no visible
parasites. 

We spurred our way up her flank with creditable address, and trod pretty
steadily across her dorsal hump. Determining the exact midline, I marked
the spot with a spur-sliced "X" in her hide. Again our crooks plucked down
the nearest suck-line. Again Barnar lofted the spike, and drove it home.
The larva didn't even twitch. I dogged down the suck-valve with four
little hooked pitons hammered into the hide. 

Tapping protocol now required me to stay on the grub, standing by the
spike-valve and maintaining its security, while Barnar went back to our
operations nook and used the signal cord to call for the pumps to start. I
watched him go. I was uneasy standing alone atop the larva, and I kept a
restless eye about me. I recalled certain most unsettling descriptions of
the Crab Rat, the Sucking Star's chief parasitic competitor for Behemoth
broodmeat. 

Barnar emerged from the nook, and waved to indicate that it was done, that
the pattern of pulls on the signal cord, calling for suction on line
three, had been performed, and acknowledged by the appropriate pattern of
clicks from Costard. 

Long moments passed without event. It was a pause protracted enough to
reawaken in me gloomy fears of Costard's incompetence in the above-ground
part of the operation. I was about to signal Barnar to repeat his sending,
when the suck-line surged powerfully, and the larva shuddered under me. 

The pump was geared far too high; it drank with such fierce greed that it
deeply dented the grub's dorsum, and threatened my footing-the more so
because the galvanized infant began wriggling powerfully. Dropping to all
fours to keep from toppling, I bellowed, "Half power! Half power! The
grub's throwing fits!" 

The instant I'd howled this out, I shrank in fear of what my outcry might
draw down on me, coupled with the Nurse-beckoning effect of the grub's
convulsions. For half an eternity I clung to that heaving hill of oily
flesh. 

Then the pump cut off-in time, apparently, since none of the Nurses moving
in the distance seemed to be heading my way. Now our victim lay far
slacker than she had, almost a quarter diminished in her mass. She still
twitched, but far more feebly than before. We waited, Barnar and I, our
suspense uniting us across the chamber. 

Again the line jerked-recoilingly this time. I stood uncertain for a
moment, a sickening suspicion growing swiftly in me. A moment more, and
there was no mistaking. The grub was swelling back up-swelling up rapidly,
my meaty floor rising underfoot. "The idiot's on blow!" I bellowed.
"Reverse pump! Reverse pump! He's got it on blow!" 

Again Barnar dove into the operations nook. I scanned the chamber. Had one
of those distant Nurses twitched her antennae in my direction? Perhaps
not. The larva still swelled alarmingly, lifting me. I knew that the
pump's plod-driven bellows were gated to blow out the lines when
declogging was wanted. Now the air, at cruel pressure, was a swelling
bubble in the larva's innards that crushed out what might remain of her
vitality. Her tapered head and tail tremored, and were still. Up, up, up
bulged her oily, pliant integument. Already she was half again the size of
her largest neighbor. 

"Still on blow!" I howled. 

"No acknowledgement!" Barnar boomed back to me. "I've signaled four times!
Look at it, Nifft! Jump, by the Crack! Jump!" 

And jump I did, right on the instant. Afterwards, my incompetence was
glaringly, comically plain to me. A single swordstroke would have saved
the grub, and still left suck-lines a-plenty to work with. 

But flustered as I was, I jumped-and at the last possible moment. Before
I'd even reached the ground the larva exploded, her dorsum erupting in
jagged tatters and a spew of cloudy oils and fatty tissue that sprayed
almost ceiling-high, and then came smacking down in loathsome abundance. A
great rag of fat fell on me and pinned me to the ground. 

I fought up through the weight of my greasy mantle. I had scarcely cleared
my face to see about me, when two Nurses filled my little sky, their
eyeglobes glinting, their jaws and antennae probing. 

Their decision was swift. They instantly fell to devouring every tatter of
the burst grub. I lurched to rise, and very plainly I saw that one Nurse
noticed me. I froze at once, understanding: smeared with tissue, I was a
visible piece of moving larva-meat. Moreover, moving or not, I was
something to be eaten systematically as soon as the Nurse got to me. 

Fixed where I lay, I dared to start scraping-carefully, carefully!-the fat
from my face and hair, and then off my neck, and, inchingly, down my chest
. . . From the head down I stealthily became orange again, cautiously
sculpting off my adventitious larval luster. 

All the while the great jaws whickered and clicked and flensed. Seizing,
sectioning, sucking in, the Nurse's jaws were the frugal hands of the
Nest, gathering in the waste life to stoke the still-living. The
impersonal grandeur of it moved me, even in the terror of my predicament.
I felt Behemoth and her inscrutable providence all around me, felt the
Nest-life like a single spirit filling every tunnel, glinting from every
worker's eye, feeding with a million-million jaws. 

I had not stripped the last betraying slime from my legs and boots until
the Nurses were scouring the very stone beside me for larval tatters,
their jaws rattling like weaponry on the rock. Then, a last scrape, and I
was up, and diving into the shadows of the larval shoals. 

"One more grub," Barnar vowed, back in the nook, as I sluiced myself down
with a waterskin. "If that idiot subjects us to the slightest further
mishap, we leave forthwith on Bunt's mission." I touched up my coat of dye
from one of the flasks with which we were plentifully supplied, and we
went forth and made our third pick. 

Well versed as I already was in this trade's catastrophes, I felt like a
seasoned tapper as we clambered up our next larva's flank, and I marked
her midpoint with my spur. We rammed the spike valve home, and dogged it
down, then both of us dismounted. "I'm damned," I grumbled, "if I'll 'man
the valve' until I see that they can work the pump!" I accompanied Barnar
back to the nook and he signalled for half suction on line five. 

Comfortably removed from the point of impact of any further mishap, I
enjoyed a pleasant, detached curiosity about what the suck-line might do
next. 

It gave a twitch, a shudder, and went stiff. A little dimple of suction
surrounded the spike. The larva shuddered a little, and settled. Her
drainage was in progress at the proper, painless rate. 

Barnar sighed. "This means, I suppose, that we must set other lines now.
Why delay?" 

VIII 

Begged a demon with many a radiant eye, 

"Plant my poor head, and I'll teach you to fly!" 

AS A LARVA'S DRAINAGE progresses, and she sags flatter and flatter, she
grows more likely to be noted as debris, and consumed by a Nurse. A tapper
might set one grub draining, then go spike a second, even a third, but by
then he had to go unhook his first set before it got perilously
flat-looking. We were constantly climbing up and down the huge babes, and
the work was extremely tiring. When we took our first sleep we'd drained
only seven. 

Though dead weary, I hung sleepless a while in my hammock. When a man
lacks that glimpse of stars or moon that makes him feel it is truly night,
then sleep seems to him an airless, casketed state, and his soul slips
less willingly into it. Now and henceforth, of course, "night" would be
merely a synonym for exhaustion, and "day" would mean the longest stretch
of time we could work before dropping. 

Unspeaking we hung there. At any other such time, pausing together on the
brink of sleep, Barnar and I would have talked, lazily tossing our
thoughts back and forth till one of us fell off oblivion's edge. Our
silence now I understood too well. The terrors of the Nest were met and
managed. Today's first fruitful labors proved we could work down here and
win what we sought from Behemoth. The giants' pap now seemed far more
obtainable, and we hung silent, remembering that in the matter of our
coming wealth, our ambitions had utterly parted ways. 

Six hundredweight of gold, our combined shares, could just suffice for
Barnar's great vision. It would buy the Witches' Seed, and the little
fleet to ship it from Strega (darkest of the Astrygals in lore and
sorcerous resource). What was left would pay the same witches for the loan
of a gryph-gryph, for this monster must micturate on each and every
Witches' Seed as soon as it has been sledgehammered into the earth;
lacking these effusions, the virtue of the seed remains immured, and the
tree will not leap forth. The six hundredweight would also just cover the
cost of hiring a troop of bog Ghuuns (from Strega's nightmarish swamps) to
control the gryph-gryph, to bring the monster constant drink, and to hold
it shackled to its work. 

On my side it was the same. However obscenely rich we shortly grew by
means of the great Pelfer's Buskins, Cowl and Gantlets, our outlay in the
first instance must be huge. We could not hope to cross the Cidril Steppes
without three hundred men-at-arms, with enough engineers among them for
deploying heavy weaponry on the march, and for doing siege work when the
Tomb was reached. Men of the quality we must use, and for the time we must
have them, would cost no less than four hundredweight to keep them loyal.
Added to this must be the cost of the ships to carry them; then there was
the cost of shipping them, from the Great Shallows (where the best
recruiting was), thence through the Taarg Straits, and thence eight
hundred leagues north, across the Sea of Cidril. 

We must act together to fulfil either dream. And, shackled as we were by
the finitude of our expected fortune, we could not help but brood, neither
able to forget that the other had gravely vowed to undertake his project.
With equal ire, we felt each other in default; we had both put second a
deed we had sworn to make our prime concern. 

Ever more smoothly and skilfully did we set our larvae draining: fifteen
on our second day, eighteen on our third. At that day's end we took some
wine and hardtack and had a strolling meal, supping and wandering the
chamber at large; it was a practice which, for one, helped divert us from
our provisions' vile taste, and, two, which constantly added to our
knowledge of our hosts. 

We were agreeing, with some complacency, that we really had the hang of
this work now, and could call ourselves pretty tolerable tappers, on the
whole, when Barnar interrupted himself to cry, "Look there!" 

A flux of larval feeding was just then tapering off-an after-ripple, no
doubt, of a wave of Foragers returning to the Nest with their plunder.
Everywhere the larvae's jaws worked furiously with a wet noise of
mastication. This meaty murmur was embellished by demon utterance,
muttered or shrill, as tough subworld entities surrendered fragment by
fragment to larval greed. What had caught Barnar's eye was a huge chunk of
torso, a blackish meat marbled with veins of incandescent green, which
still writhed in the jaws of the Nurse that staggered under its mass. The
size of the creature it had been bitten from must have been immense. 

"The Foragers are surely dire indeed," I murmured, "to have slain whatever
that was part of." We had been told, of course, that members of the
Forager caste were made on a scale that dwarfed all other workers. 

"You there! Hu-u-umans! Help me!" 

Barnar and I spun around. Another Nurse was just then passing behind us,
and for a dizzying instant it seemed that this giantess had hailed us with
this reedy outcry. But after an instant's stupefaction, we saw that the
voice proceeded from the wad of mangled demonmeat which she bore in her
jaws. 

From a hash of several demons chewed into one pulpy ball, there thrust out
the head, shoulders, and one writhing limb of a still-living demon whose
body had been mangled in with the others. It was this creature whose
warbly voice accosted us. His head was encrusted with an opulent jewelry
of eyes, whose glint pierced the fungal gloom as he was borne past us.
"Stalwart tappers! L-u-uminous Heroes! Save me, and I will make you rich
past the wildest dreams of avarice!" 

Barnar and I exchanged a look. Did I appear as startled, as nakedly
greedy, as he did? We both hastily assumed suitably grave and skeptical
countenances. "What else would it say, after all?" I noted. 

"Of course!" 

"Still," I prevaricated, "As the old saw has it: 'Who knows the bournes of
demon pelf?' " 

" . . . 'Neither Man nor demon self.' " Barnar finished, nodding. So we
trotted after the Nurse, reassuring each other we would merely indulge our
curiosity by inquiring of the demon precisely what he was offering. 

"We should keep firmly in mind," I urged, "that we already have a wildly
lucrative enterprise in hand. We must not be seduced by desperate
promises. Because almost surely, whatever this demon has to offer, the
payment will lie in the subworld and will somehow involve our carrying him
thither." 

"Precisely," Barnar nodded. "On the other hand . . . what can be lost by
interrogating this demon? His kind are studious of Behemoth lore. Demons
know their conquerors in detail. We may learn a bit, if nothing else." 

"Let's hurry, then," I said. "It looks like it'll have two grubs on it." 

The Nurse had bestowed her burden between two larvae, which mouthed up to
it on either side. The eye-jewelled demon writhed on the crest of this
food-lump, his broken hindquarters inextricably anchored in the mass. His
limb (a tentacle with a three-clawed tip) desperately signaled us. His
mouth was a membranous vent in his throat, whence once more came his
ululant voice. "Quick! Oh quickly, Exalted Ones! Wealth past telling I
promise you! Oh, hurry! If they eat my head, I'll be blind!" 

"That sounds highly probable," I told the demon. The Nurse had left-we had
a clear field of action. "But I'm afraid we must require you to define
precisely what you mean by 'wealth past telling.' And you'd best be quick
about it, I think." 

The demon gaped a moment. His eyes were a wild mix, each distinctly
charactered, and a little multitude of individually evil minds looked out
from these mixed eyes. His mouth-vent moaned, and then renewed his reedy
plea: 

"The Unguent of Flight! I can put in your possession the Unguent of
Flight! If I prove to lie, feed me back to these brutes!" 

Who would not have called us credulous, in acting as we then did? But what
is great luck, if not highly unlikely? We advanced on the food-clump,
sword and axe drawn. "Oh yes!" the demon cried. "Cut me free at the ribs!
Oh, hurry!" 

I reached the demon my left arm, which he powerfully gripped. The sucking
larval jaws now scissored quite close to him from either side. I pulled
him outward, and Barnar chopped through his chest's mangled axis with one
shearing stroke of Old Biter. 

We took our demonic fragment to a little recess in the chamber wall and
laid him on the stone. The bleeding stump of his amputation scabbed over
almost as we spoke, and in moments his stump was sheathed in a tough, dry
bark. Head and shoulders, one limb-he lay there and glittered up at us his
eyes of a hundred different beings, a hundred alien hungers. His
mouth-vent, moist and urgent, pleaded, "Plant me! Just plant me, anywhere
in subworld soil. I'll root! The Unguent of Flight, in return, is easy to
be had, and not deep in the subworld at all, by a safe path I know."
Barnar and I shared a knowing look here. The demon grew more urgent. "Bear
me for your guide, oh Radiant Ones, and I will give you power to swim the
air! I am your humblest, most abject servant, your doting Ostrogall by
name!" 

Well, sure enough, here was the proposition we'd foreseen: a quick little
journey down to the nest-mouth, and out into the subworld. And for what
prize now? The Unguent of Flight, a priceless treasure in itself, and a
ready means to further wealth! The sheer, mad unlikeliness of the prospect
perversely made me feel it might be genuine. 

"We can promise no more than to think it over," I answered our truncated
interlocutor, this abbreviated Ostrogall. "You will have to abide our
leisure to consider your proposition, and in the interim you must vow to
cause no mischief." 

Ostrogall fervently agreed. He then set to slathering us with effusive
flattery, and though he was silent at our command, his vigilant presence,
riding in a loop of my loosened weapons belt, still compromised our sense
of privacy. Thus, when we returned to our operations nook, I popped
Ostrogall (with his effusive assurances that he would be "quite
comfortable") into a stout leather supply bag, and hung this from a peg on
the wall. 

IX 

Through years and years a young lad flees 

And whips his team that breasts the seas. 

WE SAGGED into our hammocks, and into the silence that had grown our habit
at this hour. But tonight we could almost hear each other's minds racing.
"How chances multiply, sometimes," I ventured, "and set us branching off
from our first intent!" 

"Aye. Though surely we must stay on the branching that leads to the Royal
Brood Chamber, and the giants' pap, for there our least doubtful fortune
lies?" 

"Of course! But in this pattern of constantly emergent opportunity . . . I
feel something here I scarcely dare put into words, Barnar. I feel Our
Time is coming!" 

"By Crack, Key and Cauldron, Nifft, you speak my very mind!" We both sat
upright in our hammocks now. Barnar's eyes revealed to mine a glint of
cautious glee. "We've both been feeling it, haven't we?" he went on. "Here
and now has come to us that truly golden moment in our professional lives.
When we came down through that gangway-nay, when we first contracted to
help my feckless nephew, with that first inauspicious step-we passed
through that Door that is only once opened to a craftsman in all his life.
Luck herself invited us down here under the earth, and down here, Luck
means to do us well beyond our power to imagine!" 

"I have felt the same, old friend," I solemnly answered. "The very same." 

One must not speak too much aloud of Luck, most especially when She hovers
nearest, but when we'd lain back again, Barnar could not forbear giving
his suppressed excitement some vent in speech. "Suppose we get even a
little luckier than what we now contemplate? Say we made just one or two
hundredweight more than six hundred? With eight hundredweight, we could
forest the heights and the barrens as well as my clan's holdings, just as
you said, Nifft. Then, if the Ham-Hadryan, and the Magnass-Dryan clans
should, through some accord, unite their endeavors, our mills would reap
such wealth from Shallows' shipyards, (See Shag Margold's Interjection)
that your venture to the Tomb of Pelfer could be undertaken within a
twelvemonth's time." 

I was stung to find him still so placidly putting in second place the
glorious exploit that I burned to undertake. "We would be prudent, I
think," I sneered gently, "to bank nothing on the desperate promises of a
demon. Lucky we may feel, but we might not prove so, stumping down to the
subworld with that polyocular abomination tucked under one arm." 

"I mean only," Barnar said patiently (but I could tell he was stung in
turn), "that opportunities seem to be opening to us at every turn, and
among them may well come something which makes us richer yet." 

I was not of a mind to answer. After a moment, Barnar said, "Let me tell
you a story, Nifft, about a man we both know-a man who is dear as a
brother to my heart. This man is called Nifft the Karkmanhite, but though
Karkmahn-Ra, Jewel of Pardash, herself the Queen of the Ephesion Chain, is
his chosen home, he was in fact born at the little harbor of Ladrona Bay
on Samadrios, a lesser Ephesion and the southernmost isle of the Chain." 

"Spare me," I complained, though I knew he must have his turn. 

"Winds from the glacial maelstroms frost Samadrios' southern shores,"
Barnar resumed, "but little Ladrona with her cosy bay on the isle's
northern coast had a brisk but temperate clime, and bustled with trade.
Ladrona's dire fate in the end was conversely the making of Nifft. To know
the man, you must know the boy who saw that city's death. 

"His family ran a harborside hostel, and it was Nifft's fortune on the
morning of his city's death to have driven his father's wagon up into the
hills on the weekly trip to the brewery. The lad had taken on the casks of
ale and small beer he had been sent for, and had just started along the
ridge road back down to the harbor, when he felt the earth jolt under him.
The whole island did several sharp dance steps on the ocean floor, and the
wide sea around it convulsed like flesh that shudders. 

"The lad stood amazed, fighting the reins of his rearing team. And then he
saw the ocean rise into a single mountain of infinite width, and march
toward his world. 

"Now he lashed his team on again, plunging down harborwards, while his
unbelieving mind still hung behind him, hawklike on the sky, beholding the
sea's vast, glittery onslaught. In his blind haste it insanely seemed to
him that if he just reached home before the wave smote it-if he could just
burst into the hostel and cry, 'Father! Mother! The Ocean is coming!'-if
he could just reach them with a warning, then the disaster would be
halted. 

"He was still high in the hills when the great maw of foam thunderously
swallowed Ladrona Bay at a gulp. Still Nifft lashed his mad team downward,
as if moved by the same unstoppable fury as moved the sea. As the road
crossed a little upland valley, the leaping sea came avalanching up over
the ridge and snatched him, wagon and all, up into a boiling cauldron of
weedy brine. 

"For long, unbelievable moments his team crested the boil and dragged his
wagon through it, he wielding his whip like Benthodagon in his sea-chariot
of Aristoz legend. It was the wave's highest reach; it receded, leaving in
the valley a salt lake where, nostrils flaring, eyes glaring, the team at
length drowned and dragged the wagon down, and Nifft, a lifetime older
than he had been seconds earlier, swam dazedly to higher ground. 

"Ladrona was scoured from the shore. Not even the foundations of his
family's hostel remained. Not long after this, Nifft apprenticed himself
to a travelling acrobatic troupe, and he has never once returned to the
isle of his birth. But perhaps it is equally true to say that he has never
left that foaming lake in the hills above drowned Ladrona-has never ceased
lashing his team through the waves, to stay ahead of drowning. 

"For when has Nifft ceased from wandering? When has he ceased to push
restlessly from exploit to exploit? Whatever he has, he seeks always a
further prize. And it is with just this in mind that his good friend,
Barnar Ham-Hadryan, urges him: at some point even the greatest craftsmen
must say of someplace: Here I will abide-this place I will cherish as my
own. For what will Pelfer's Buskins and all the rest bring, but further
wandering, further seeking? Whereas on Chilia, in my natal mountains, we
have a paradise to resurrect, and then, inhabit!" 

I had to endure in patience a ploy I'd used myself, but I was hard put to
hold my tongue. When I answered, I struggled to hide my irritation. "Isn't
it enough, Barnar, that we first vowed to seek Pelfer's Tomb, and that my
vow of the Witches' Seed came second? Can we not lay this painful
controversy to rest on this simple principle of priority?" 

"Come to that, Nifft, why should not the more recent undertaking be the
more binding?" 

Discussion was useless. Silence fell again on us. Out in the nursery
chamber echoed the whicker and whisper of huge chitinous legs most
delicately a-dancing, and the sounds of grubs wetly mouthing, and of
demons faintly crooning their annihilation. The murmur of the Nest's
mighty life gradually, gently rubbed my thoughts away, and I sank into
sleep. 

But some time later, from the deeps of that sleep, a little noise tickled
me awake. I lay for a moment listening to it. When I stealthily arose, I
found that Ostrogall had got his whole limb thrust out of the mouth of his
bag; his industrious little claws had almost untied the bag's binding. 

I roused Barnar and we held judgement over the fractional demon. His gush
of verbose apology was silenced by Barnar's gesturings with his axe. 

"Already you have abused our trust," I told Ostrogall. "You now swear you
will suffer any punishment to reinstate our tentative agreement. Very
well. We must insist on precaution. You must be quit of that remaining
limb of yours if we are to keep you here in our quarters. If this is
unacceptable to you, we will be glad to return you to those grubs." 

Ostrogall scarcely paused. "Agreed! Agreed, if it must be! I need only my
neck, and just a bit of chest to be planted by, but that's quite enough,
as long as you will plant me. I humbly accept the precaution. Just give me
a fair hearing on the matter of the Unguent when you are so inclined.
Question me, and I swear you will be persuaded. And once you are
aloft-once, Oh Effulgent Ones, you have the Unguent, and are soaring at
will high up among the winds, you will bless the day our paths crossed
down here. You will see, my Benefactors!" 

So he extended his limb, and Barnar lopped it off. We returned him to his
bag, bound this double tight, hung it high, and went back to our hammocks,
and our interrupted sleep. 

X 

Who goeth to the Mother's breast 

Of greater Life to sup, 

Oh, tread ye nimbly through the Nest! 

Oh, firmly grip thy cup! 

EARLY ON OUR FOURTH DAY in the chamber, I teetered atop a half-deflated
grub, waiting to free the valve and ease the line back up to the ceiling.
As the grub gently, steadily sank under me, I gazed over the larval
shoals. Barnar, returning from signalling for suction on this our third
larva of the day, came climbing up to keep me company. 

"It's more than a momentary flux," I told him. "I'll swear it! The place
is . . . seething! Look where one comes for the empty already." A Nurse,
just a spearcast off, loomed down to devour the plundered bag of our
second larva of the morning. The whole chamber bustled with activity;
feeding was going on everywhere. Nurses and Lickers sped in every
direction. We'd found things in this state on our awaking, and for hours
now the spate had not slackened. 

Barnar agreed. "It's all the pupae that impress me most. It has to mean a
. . . population surge, does it not?" 

We stood thoughtful as the grub deflated. What else could it mean? On our
first days here we only occasionally saw the pupae carried out by Nurses.
Pupae were constantly forming; matured, full-fed grubs grew quiet and
developed a thick sheen of exudate which, in a day or so, hardened into
the pupal husk. These pupae were carried off by Nurses to the eclosia (so
we had been told), where the callows would hatch and be nursed up to adult
size. 

But now, any time and anywhere we looked, we saw more pupae being carried
out. Correspondingly, new larvae were being incessantly brought in from
the Incubaria. Barnar hesitated, before adding, "Our friend in the bag is
most urgent for an audience with our effulgent selves. While I was
signalling just now he was wheedling me through the leather, telling me
there is a very 'significant stir' in the Nest." 

This awareness in the demon-nub, bagged as he was, reminded us that
demonkind possessed valuable insights into Behemoth's ways. "Well," I
suggested, "let's go back and chat with him." We untethered the suck-line
from the empty we stood on, and went back to the nook. 

Hanging blind in his bag, still Ostorgall was aware of us, though we
approached quietly to test him. "O Effulgent Ones! Dare I address you?
Dare I share with you my humble concern for your safety?" 

What could we lose by hearing his gambits? Unbagged and propped on a
ledge, Ostrogall looked as healthy as ever. His recent amputation was
smoothly and toughly scabbed over. An oily light of alien solicitude
sparkled in his hundred eyes. 

"Gentlemen, only my fears for your safety make me thus importunate, for is
not your salvation also my own? As my liberation is your enrichment? I
urge only this: if you mean at all to travel through the Nest, then
undertake it boldly and at once, for past all doubt, I sense some great
business is astir in this Nest. A yeasty ferment is at work, their numbers
grow-I feel it! And at such times, sirs, the corridors thunder with
traffic, and grow ever more perilous for travellers of our slight size!" 

"You seem to imply," I answered, "that our carrying you down to the
subworld is a settled thing, but I, for one, am far from decided. Tell me
this, Ostrogall: Do the Younger Umbral's verses, describing the Flight of
Forkbeard, accurately represent the Unguent as being obtained by squeezing
certain tubers grubbed up from the garden of a giant swamp-waddle?" 

"Forgive me," meekly fluted the demon-nub, "but I really cannot say." 

"You really can't say?" Barnar raised his brows. "What of Cogiter's
dactyls? Do these rightly report the Unguent as being the product of a
hirsute, odoriferous fruit that grows on the walls of caverns in the floor
of the primary subworld, as expressed in the couplet: 'Deep grottoes
papilla-ed with bulbulous swellings-fruits better for squeezing and
draining than smelling'?" 

"I must, with inexpressible regret," Ostrogall faintly piped, "profess
myself powerless to respond to your query." 

"Well, what can you tell us then?" I urged. I seized him up by the neck
stump and we went out into the open chamber with him. "I so far find no
reason not to tuck you back into the larval jaws from which we so
imprudently plucked you! What think you, Barnar? Which one looks hungriest
to you?" 

"Gentle saviors! Sagacious paladins!" Ostrogall bleated. "I can do no
other than cling to my sole poor means of purchasing your aid. Men of your
bold make would dare the place without my guidance if you knew where and
how to look." 

"That grub over there," Barnar suggested, "looks extremely hungry. See how
she works her jaws? We want the demon's end to be quick as possible of
course-we're not cruel men. Let's pop him in there." 

"If you are bent on doing so, Masters, I must suffer it," the demon cried.
"The grub's loathsome gut will reduce me to a mash of quaternary spores,
which will escape in its fecal matter. By little and little, some of these
spores of mine will be tracked out in the tunnels, and thence to the
subworld floor. It will take perhaps a century before I seed, and root,
and bloom, and see again, but I will bear this long blindness if I must!" 

In the end we rebagged him. Why not hang him up blind for a while, and see
if his attitude evolved? Moreover, in the last analysis, we did not feel
his desperate reticence was wholly out of character for one who had a true
treasure to protect. 

At the same time, Ostrogall had succeeded in persuading us, though not to
the quest he craved. He had convinced us of the danger of this rising
pulse in the Nest-life, this fermentation. If we were to explore at large,
it must be done now before this tempo grew any quicker. Costard must rest
content with the sap we'd sent him. We must be off on our own greater
mission, for two jarsful of juice worth three hundredweight of gold. 

Our equipage was soon assembled: our arms, oiled and sharpened, strapped
to our backs; two bandoliers each, these hung with some provisions, but
primarily laden with dozens of the little skin bladders of orange dye that
all tappers carry on their belts for touch-ups of their invisibility. We
brought a large surplus of these, for splashes of the dye on the walls of
the Nest tunnels could also serve us as path markers. In addition we had
two hundred ells of tough, limber climbing-line each, and, most to the
point, two leathern amphorae, stoutly lidded, discreetly provided us by
Bunt for filling with the giants' pap. 

When all was ready, Barnar sent the "pause-for-rest" code on the signal
cord. No simple acknowledgement came back, but rather an impatient clatter
of inquiry. We disdained to answer, but we did grow mindful of the gold in
our lockless provisions chests, should bumptious Costard be moved to come
down if we were long on our errand. So we staggered a half mile or so
along the chamber wall with our wealth, till we found a safe nook to bury
it in. 

And so we stepped for the first time out into a Nest tunnel. We stepped
out cringing, recoiling in advance from monstrosities which . . . did not
materialize. We stood in high-vaulted emptiness, scanning a cerulean gloom
that yawned away in both directions. 

"Well," said Barnar, "let's be off. What is the slope, would you say? It
looks dead level here." We were concerned in our explorations always to
move up-slope, following the principle that Behemoth's most protected
chambers lie highest in the mountains. By this reasoning, the Royal Brood
Chamber must lie at the Nest's apex, above even these lofty strata of the
larval chambers. 

"Doesn't this way seem just fractionally . . . ?" 

"Yes, I suppose so. Let's cover ground while it's clear like this." We
were off at a jog-trot, squirting arcs of dye every few rods against the
gallery walls. The emptiness of the tunnel grew ominous, almost
unbearable. Then . . . was that a tremoring underfoot? "Barnar, do you
feel-" 

"By Crack, Key and Cauldron!" 

"Dive into this crevice!" 

Thus began our introduction to the larger worker castes. That first
one-for we came to recognize their features with some repetition-was a
Digger, with huge, blunt, earth-breaking jaws. Its body had half again the
bulk of a Nurse's. In moments, the unnatural void that had greeted our
entry was obliterated by the thunder of repeated passings. Diggers,
Sweepers, Carriers (whose immense crops made them provision-vessels to
other castes), the colossal size of all these workers was only half their
impact. Their speed was the other half-their speed and their reckless
elan. Two workers running abreast might charge headlong at three others
oppositely bound, and none would hesitate a jot. All of them would
thunderously merge, and sunder, with not a bristle's width to spare, their
glossy flanks whickering with glancing frictions, their giant, sharp-kneed
legs pumping miraculously free of entanglement. Incessantly though these
thunderous mergings occurred, they did not fail to awe us every time. 

Equal to the awe of their onrush was the awe of their stopping. It seemed
impossible such hugeness could come to such precise and absolute a halt as
these giants could when confronted with a fellow worker's begging. We
learned that an individual of any caste could detain any other by bowing,
as it were, and, in a crouched posture, twiddle her antennae in a
ritualized gesture of supplication. The accosted one then either shared
with the beggar food she carried in her jaws, or regurgitated into the
beggar's mouth the macerated nourishment she carried in her crop. By such
exchange, of course, does a subworld harvest reach every hungry one of a
Nest's million mouths. 

These sudden pauses in the flux threatened our rhythm, and we learned not
to slow down for anything-to run hard when we were in the clear, to read
tremors through our footsoles, and to dive sharp or shin quick up a
veining in the wall at the very first vibration of oncomers. We learned to
guess the numbers and course of these oncomers, and move decisively before
the danger was in view, for by then it might well be too late. 

After what we judged a couple miles of this, we rested in a fissure, and
took wine. "I'm damned . . ." Barnar said, breathing hard, "if I can tell
for sure . . . but I think we're bearing . . . downslope." 

" . . . this run-and-stop rhythm . . . I can't be sure either . . . but I
agree." 

We lay catching our breath a moment. Giants thundered past. A few sour
draughts of wine caught fire in our racing blood. Courage blazed in us. 

"Shall we retrace and try the other way then?" 

"Why not? You know, Barnar, if this is the worst of it, I think we can
manage it." 

"Aye to that and aye again! Look-here's a Licker." She danced bobbingly
towards us, mouthing the fungal fur along our stretch of wall. We knew to
sit still, our crevice being sunk in a fungal bald patch. High as a
galleon's bowsprit, the Licker reared above us her spittly kiss, the
arched buttresses of her legs bracketing us in that moment like some
mighty temple's nave. Then she danced on. 

"Think, Nifft!" Barnar growled fervently. "With such spawn as these, what
must the Queen's dimensions be?" 

We set to jogging back the way we'd come. "What if she proves too big for
mounting and milking?" I asked. "What if we can't climb her? Is it not . .
. serendipitous how the Unguent, if it be real, would answer so perfectly
to this need? Surely we could turn the trick of getting the pap if we were
airborne." 

"I tell you, I too feel the itch of that very thought, Nifft! Ostrogall of
course has every motive to lie unconstrainedly." 

"Well . . . we must question him closer once we get back." 

Loping along pretty briskly now, we were feeling more attuned to these
tunnels with each stride. All at once we sensed the tremor of a very big
weight approaching, and we looked sharp for shelter. A natural ridge of
quartz ribbed the tunnel wall just ahead of us. 

"Let's shin up that!" I said. We swarmed our way up it just in time to get
above a fast-moving Sweeper who veered under us. But even as we sighed
relief, here, oppositely bound, there surged titanically towards us a
Forager. 

We were almost unhinged-it was the first we'd seen. Still we kept our
grips, and scrambled desperately higher, to get above her hugeness. Her
jaws alone were half the size of a Nurse! Since the onrushing Sweeper
never altered course, the Forager arched up accommodatingly on her legs,
while the Sweeper crouched slightly and rushed right under her. 

Unluckily, as the Forager lifted herself in this maneuver, she glanced
against the tunnel wall just under us. The shock wave plucked us clean off
the rock, and we plunged down toward the Forager's vast back, our hands
and feet clawing thin air in a desperate, futile bid to be elsewhere,
anywhere other than where we fell to. 

Shag Margold's First 

Interjection 

A LITTLE MORE than a decade before the time of this present narrative,
Nifft and Barnar endured a subworld sojourn in the Demon-Sea, to which
Nifft alludes when they ride the bucket down the gangway. During that
infernal submersion among demonry, the pair acquired the
friendship-till-death of the shape-shifter Gildmirth of Sordon, whom they
set at liberty from durance in that vile abyss. 

Some five years after, and about as long before this present business,
Nifft and Barnar had acquired-in the Great Shallows, at a gaming table in
one of the raft-cities of the Hydrobani-a little flat-deck yawlp. With
this and some rented harpoons, they went out next morning a-sculping.
Towards mid-day, they harpooned (as they thought) a particularly large and
fine-looking sculp. It was a solid hit, and took the barb deep, and they
were already congratulating themselves on a very profitable venture. Then
their sculp melted into the form of a giant marine reptile, who held their
bloodless harpoon in one claw, and towed them for a long and merry ride
through the Shallows, skimming at incredible speed above those gorgeous
reefs all aflame with life and color. The pair could neither quit nor cut
the harpoon cable. They ceased to try when the reptile began to sing and
warble melodiously in an unknown tongue as it towed them through their
crazy course. Long before Gildmirth melted down to his true form, and
climbed dripping aboard, they had guessed him for who he was. 

From this merry, chance meeting of friends, weighty events developed
which, while they may concern us elsewhere, cannot detain us here. But it
was on this occasion that Nifft heard from Gildmirth a highly particular
account of Pelfer the Peerless' tomb, and of the Buskins, Cowl and
Gantlets buried there with that arch-thief. These Supreme Facilitators of
Felonious Appropriation are of course a by-word through the world at
large; even the uncouth upland brigands of the Ingens Cluster swear by the
"boots, hood and gloves of the Pilferer." 

But it was Nifft's and Barnar's rare luck to hear the full and detailed
truth of the matter from Gildmirth of Sordon, and what they learned
enflamed their imaginations. The Buskins are popularly credited with
conferring everything from the power of flight to the power to run faster
that the eye can follow; in fact, my friends learned, they confer the
Blessing of Bounding Absquatulation, by which is understood the power to
make one-league leaps. Escape, to the thief shod with Pelfer's Buskins, is
never in doubt. 

The Cowl is loosely deemed to confer invisibility. In fact, they learned,
it confers on its wearer the Blessing of Circumambient Similitude, or an
identity of aspect to the wearer's immediate surroundings, however
complex. The Cowl's function is best illustrated in the tale told of
Pelfer, when he had penetrated the Art Trove of UrrGurr the Grasping. That
ghastly Elemental surprised Pelfer in the very midst of his Trove, but
discerned him not, for the thief, beCowled, bore a simultaneous piecemeal
resemblance to no less than three of that age's great masterworks in oils:
Goob's Battle of Trumpet Plains, the Smiling Mimostula by Phasri
Pedofilaster, and Quonsonby's epoch-making Still Life with Rumkins and
Prooms. From this the finesse of the Cowl's power may be surmised. 

As for Pelfer's Gantlets, they confer the Blessing of Loosened Locks upon
the hands they ensheathe. With regard to these Gantlets, the popular
conception does not so much err as fall short. Gloved with these, the
thief's touch will cause any obstacle-lock, wall, weighty door, or mass of
earth-to fall asunder, so be this obstacle interposed as a barrier between
the thief and the prize she craves. 

From this, the fervor of Nifft's mercenary motive will be readily
understood. A thief accoutered as great Pelfer was, would soon abound in
wealth. 

But Barnar, on his side, cherishes no merely sentimental enterprise. His
family feeling, and his romantic interest in a certain beauty of the
Magnass-Dryan clan, are foremost in his motives, of course. They cause in
him an intransigence to match the force of Nifft's greed for Pelfer's
Facilitators. But dense-wooded Chilia lies of course in the Great
Shallows, just off the mainland of the Kolodrian Continent. And, like that
forested Kolodrian coast, Chilia serves the timber needs of the Great
Shallows-a vast broth of cultures and of thriving trade, populous with
vessels of all makes. Shallows' boatyards are a bottomless maw for lumber.
When the saw-mills of Barnar's clan howl at full capacity, they turn a
golden harvest, and Chilite tree-jacks with lush mountain holdings, though
their palms be hard with doing their own axework, grow seriously rich. 

-Shag Margold 

XI 

Now saddle my mount, I am riding to plunder 

The Ur-hoard encoffered in caskets infernal! 

Swift my mount bears me, her footfall as thunder, 

Where hell sweats its lucre in fever eternal! 

THE HORROR of being on the Forager's back made us stagger and stumble at
first, now to port, now to starboard, where her legs pumped in their
high-kneed ranks. But we found that our footing was not really difficult,
no harder than finding your sea-legs on a big vessel that is riding a
steady swell. I mean a big vessel indeed, though, for the biggest galleon
we ever shipped on was less than half her size. Her abdomen bulged
sternward and we could not see its tip; the immense bowsprit of her jaws
loomed half eclipsed beyond her head's great spheroid. The blue-litten
walls tore past us, blurred to the look of sea-foam with the speed of her
passage. 

"Dye!" Barnar shouted-and the sense of it brought my wits back to me. We
rushed as near as we dared to her pumping legs, I to port and Barnar to
starboard, and from our bottles of dye jetted out arcs of pigment against
the streaming tunnel walls. These little banners of liquid we ejected grew
tattered as they fell, torn by our velocity. Just so would our bodies be
if we leapt or fell while moving at this rate; we would at the very least
break our legs. 

"If she's begged for food and she stops," I shouted back over my shoulder,
"jump on the instant!" 

"Do you think her crop is full?" Barnar shouted back after a heartbeat's
pause. Amid the confusion of the rushing walls and the flaring cyanic
fungi like sea-foam cut by a swift keel, the question hung full of
significance in the air between us. If her crop was full of demon harvest,
our Forager would be returning from forage, and could well be bound to our
very own destination: the Royal Brood Chamber. If, on the other hand, her
crop were empty, she might equally well be bound to the subworld, to
re-fill it. 

For a dreamlike, indefinite time, we sped along poised on this
uncertainty: If another worker begged food of us, and our Forager's crop
proved full, then should we jump down? Might she not go on up with her
offering to the Queen? 

But all too soon, our descent grew unmistakable. "Downslope she goes!"
Barnar cried needlessly, as suddenly the pitch grew steeper. No other
Behemoth detained us, nor would, we saw. Her nestmates would sense our
mount's emptiness. 

We dared not let the horror of where we were going slacken our sinews.
Complex branchings of the tunnels flowed unpredictably past us, and at
such intersections we must spray a frenzied profusion of dye, not to miss
our turning when-luck grant it!-we might come trudging back. Dispensing
dye like dervishes, we frenziedly blazed our path, as our Forager,
unaccosted by any oncomer, thundered on down to the mountainroot. 

Our descent was long enough to astonish us with the Nest's immense extent,
yet so inexorably were we carried whither every fiber of our souls
recoiled from being, that it seemed no time at all before I was crying
out, "Can we doubt any longer? Do you see ahead there? A reddening of the
light?" 

"Yes!" Barnar's voice seemed to mourn, and I know he, with me, experienced
an irrepressible qualm of pure loathing, a slither of revulsion climbing
up and down the spine. 

"I suppose," I called, wanly attempting optimism, "we could scarcely go
down there any better guarded than we are." 

"No doubt," Barnar boomed glumly. 

"Ah, look there now friend! We're close! Hammer in some pitons-let's
string some rope to hold by!" 

Convergent tunnels had broadened to a mighty gallery which was flooded
with an ever redder light. Now another Forager ran to port of us, two more
to starboard . . . and now we ran amidst a thundering flux of Foragers, an
outsurging armada of rampant titans. Kneeling, we hammered into the
ragged, tough chitin of our Forager's dorsum several of the spikes we used
to dog down spike valves. I paid line off my coil, and strung it between
these spikes for hand- and foot-holds. 

"There!" I shrieked. "There's the foul hellgate itself!" 

The Nest-mouth framed a ragged oval of ruby light. It was a hole in the
hell-sky. To exit it seemed a plunge into thin air. A rushing moment
later, and the yawning portal framed a vista: far below spread the
subworld plain, threaded with red rivers, and looking strangely empty and
quiescent, compared to other parts of it we'd seen. 

We flung ourselves down and gripped our ropes. "Hold on!" 

"I am!" 

The Forager erupted from the Nest-mouth, and dove down the vertiginous
subworld wall. We clung to our ropes, jouncing and jolting against the
rough carapace. All the plain and all its stony sky, revealed to us in
crazy, shaken glimpses, dispread around us its vile grandeur. Both
hellfloor and hellvault shocked us out of our expectations. The rolling
plain was all but denuded. "Behemoth's scoured it clean as bone!" cried
Barnar-but we cried out indeed when we looked above us. 

"By the Crack and by all that crawls from it!" I yelped. "Look there! What
Thing looks down on us?" 

For this part of the subworld's stony sky was gigantically inhabited by a
monstrous crimson Eye, socketed in the earth-bone and staring immensely
down. Its pupil was a ragged fissure of utter blackness faintly measled
with stars, while within the scarlet hemisphere of its half-translucent
ball, pearly shapes of cloudy tissue writhed, or languidly convulsed. But
most hair-raisingly, the orb attended, turned torpidly to focus here or
there. It was framed in a gasketing of ophidian scales that merged with
the stone. And unceasingly it bled tears that ran in branching, impossible
rivers across the hell-ceiling, and down the hell-walls near and distant,
to weave in red rivers through the plains' rolling denudation. 

Indeed, the only things abounding on those plains were Foragers. Their
multitudes tiny with distance, everywhere they rushed in broad fronts or
phalanxes. As we surged down onto the plain ourselves, and the
mountainroot we'd emerged from fell away behind us, we saw how poxed it
was with Nest-mouths like our own, and how these bled a ceaseless stream
of demonkind's nemesis. 

We ran in a wide invading wave of Foragers-sparse, perhaps, here and
there, but stretching from horizon to horizon. Finding our legs again, we
scanned awhile in awe the waste we crossed. "It's a desert!" I breathed. 

"Like a spider-hole swept by a giant broom." 

"Do we not owe them"-I indicated our mount, and her congeners sweeping
across the plains-"our gratitude? Even our love? Look at what they have
wrought in this unclean dominion! Look at the purging they have worked!" 

Not that demon vitality was utterly absent. The hellfloor was a
crazy-quilt of living tissues, hides, mantlings and tegmenta: wet,
barnacly stretches yielded to tough knolls and swales of plated scale that
reeked like a bull Titanoplod in rut, these in turn yielding to meadows of
black thorns as thick as fur. But all these anatomical terrains sprawled
alike deserted. Nonetheless here and there we saw other Foragers stop, and
set their jaws against this ground. We failed to draw warning from this
behaviour, and thus were we knocked nine-pin-down in our doltish
unreadiness when our own mount stopped dead, and drove her jaws' spiked
tips against the ground she trod--a terrain of black, glassy slag. She
pried up a great, groaning section of the stubborn stone, and we danced
lively for footing in the heave of her labors. 

The flap of stone she lifted proved flexible. It was a huge lip in fact,
for fang-rimmed jaws appeared beneath. But the jaws were slack. From the
black gap between them a stench of putrefaction rose like a geyser's
effusion. Our Forager began, in a probing, testing way, to pull this
laired being apart a bit, ripping up fang-crowned chunks of jawbone, and
plucking out a huge, tri-forked tongue. But apparently her appetite
recoiled. She dropped the tongue to lie reeking like a long-beached whale,
and reared up and rushed on. 

"Live demons will be swarming somewhere," gloomed Barnar, "if she scorns
to take carrion in her crop." 

I was squinting at the horizon when Barnar almost stopped my heart by
booming, "Look out for your foot, Nifft! Jump back!" 

I stumbled in my alarm and was too late, for a cold, slimy pressure slid
across my buskin top and my bare calf above it. A dun-colored
hemispheroid, of the approximate size and form of a Jarkkelad
battle-casque, then slid hastily away across the carapace, whose mottled
hue it almost precisely matched. 

And in moments, our instructed eyes discovered that the Forager's rugose
and fissured thorax swarmed with these creatures; they were especially
thick around the oily junctures of the Behemoth's huge legs with her
armored flanks. Our brief inspection proved them harmless detritivores,
grazing on the giant's dermal oils and scaly debris. 

A scarlet river streamed ahead, a wide, sinewy torrent, exhaling a nimbus
of lavender mist where it tore itself against its living banks. Our
Forager surged solid-footed through the flux, and when we crested the
farther bank, we saw our goal: a distant acropolis, swarmingly besieged. 

The landscape surged upward toward that embattled height, the ridged
terrain converging toward it like corded sinews. We followed a crestline,
and had broad vantage of the far-flung multitude of Foragers running
confluently with us. They spread to sight's farthest reach beneath the
bleeding, grieving gaze of our cyclopean sun. 

The fortress's form and circumstance grew steadily clearer. Her tiered
walls towered half a mile high, and three leagues or more in breadth. The
ramparts, rising in recessed plateaus, seethed with furious war. We could
just make out the roiling mantle of Behemoths that those bulwarks wore,
and the splash of fire and hail of missiles hurled down by the demon
defenders. 

"Duck!" howled Barnar. I fell on my face, astonished-we were nowhere in
range of the fray. But here indeed attackers came swooping down upon us,
battering the air with sinewy wings. 

But by the time our wits were regathered, our blades drawn, and ourselves
afoot again, the harmless truth of the matter was plain. For these winged
shapes, a croaking, stenchful flock of them, were wholly unmindful of
ourselves. They were demon parasites feeding greedily upon the lice we had
lately discovered infesting our great mount's leg-joints. 

Big, leathery wings these new parasites had, and scrawny bodies of just
under human size. Their heads were monocular, with tripart branchlike
mouthparts adept at seizing the lice, as were their nether pairs of
scrawny, spindle-clawed legs; with these appendages they deftly plucked up
their prey, winging acrobatically amidst the hugely pumping thighs of the
Forager. When any of these Harpies had a brace or three of lice in its
jaws or claws, it winged up into the clear and, hovering, broke open the
lice like glossy melons and greedily sucked out the pallid, oleaginous
meat. Just between their haunches, where a human would be sexed, these
harpies bore little, thin-lipped secondary mouths that did not feed, but
spoke in shrieks and gull-like shrills to one another. 

"They're pretty alert-looking vermin, wouldn't you say?" Barnar growled in
my ear. I nodded. The single, pentagonal eye that crowned their skullish
little heads looked quick and sharp. Concerning ourselves, they seemed
both aware of us, and incurious about us. We studied them, however, with
growing interest. I began toying with one end of my rope, just as Barnar
murmured again in my ear. "Just suppose," he said, "that we might do a
little . . . fishing with one of them?" I thrilled at the genius of the
notion, for it was my own as well: I had just finished making a noose in
the end of my line, and we leaned close together to hide it. 

The ramparts loomed nearer now. The stench of scorched tissue and blood
reached us, and the din of deathcries. We could see that a writhing,
tentacular forest of demon limbs sprouted from the stone of the ramparts,
and seized on the legs of the assaulting Foragers. 

In moments we would be in the thick of the fray, our footing uncertain. .
. . Suddenly, one of the harpies swooped carelessly close to us, rising
with a just-snatched louse in its claws. With an unpremeditated snap of
the wrist, I put the noose up neatly in the harpy's path. The batwinged
parasitivore thrust its head home, and we yanked it down and piled onto
it. 

Grotesque strength lived in this loathsome pterod's scrawny form, but
because we pinned its wings as it half-folded them in shock, we were able
to bind those powerful pinions tightly shut, while my hand smothered the
mouth between its haunches. As we bound our captive, its fellows, seeing
our predation, recoiled slightly, creating a zone of safety between
themselves and us. But having done thus much, all of them studiously
returned to feeding on the lice. 

I unmuffled our captive's nether mouth and knelt to speak to it, while
Barnar stood with his axe poised to clip the demon's mouthparts from its
head. 

"We don't know how long we'll be stuck on the back of this beast," I told
the Harpy. "Meanwhile, we've grown hungry, I'm afraid, and unless you can
suggest an alternative course of action, we're going to have to eat you." 

"No! No! Don't!" hissed the mouth between the Harpy's leathery haunches.
It appeared that this demon could use human speech only in a ragged
whisper. "I can bring you better eating, heavenly eating! I could bring
you gold!" 

"Excellent!" Barnar replied. "As it happens, we consider several
hundredweight of gold, or a like value in gems (which are lighter and
perhaps preferable) to be a completely satisfactory alternative to eating
you." 

In truth we would have died rather than eat one bite of that scabrous
hyperparasite, but its fervor in accepting the exchange suggested that the
creature did not know this. 

The ramparts loomed just ahead-we could see the barbed and suckered demon
tentacles get death-grips on assaulting Foragers, and break their backs.
And we could see these fallen Foragers, though detained in death, still
lend their backs as footing to their following sisters. Chaos would
swallow us in moments. . . . 

And yet at that imperiled moment, as I gazed upon that Harpy trembling in
its bonds, I experienced what I can only call a kind of transformation of
the spirit. Here lay this Harpy, a winged and willing agent of our
enrichment, and here about us spread the subworld. The subworld, much as
it breathes of horror and harm, breathes equally of wealth. The dizzying
muchness of gold and gem, of sheer, raw lucre pooled and coffered there,
puts intoxication in the air. Demonkind sweats gold-gold is demonkind's
shite and vomitus, and lies heaped everywhere. So now a lustful hope of
wealth blazed most hotly in me. 

But at the same time it was more than avarice I burned with; it was a
sense of miracle as well. We began to climb those ramparts atop our
stupendous living vehicle, with that Harpy lying bound and compliant
between us, and I believed that we even now rode on the crest of the
greatest wave of fortune our lives would ever know. I felt then a kind of
ecstasy of cosmic attunement. This was our Moment, our hour to be loved
and doted on by the universe! We were now, at last, fated to have
enrichment thrust on us at every turning. 

"Look even there!" hissed our desperate captive. "Where we ascend the
ramparts here-I know this sector! I'll find you things of value!" 

We rode in giddying surges upwards across the backs of luckless Foragers
gripped in the forest of demon-limbs. The Behemoths' legs smoked and
crumbled wherever they were firmly in the grip of those prodigious paws
and tentacles, and our own mount's legs, though they tore free of capture
at every other step, were ridged with fuming welts from the contact. 

"Duck!" Barnar bellowed. From the battlements, rags of green fire came
flapping down around our huddled shoulders, and boulders hurtled through
the rubescent gloom. Weaponry too rained on us-darts, arrows, javelins
whirtled and snickered down, while everywhere the million-voiced banshee
of War raved and wailed and roared, a conflagration of noise that consumed
our thoughts. 

But did I, in this boil of risk, this great melee of swooping doom and
arrowing death, falter one instant from my ecstasy? I did not! I knew my
time. Now was Fortune mine, not harm. Now were power, and sweet ambition's
pinnacles, and my wild will soaring at full wingspread-now were these all
mine! I could not die! 

Our Forager attained the crest of the battlements, where giant batrachian
demons, welded at the waist to the stone, seized the jaws or legs of the
invaders in wrestler's grips. Here and there, seized three on one,
Foragers' limbs buckled-they faltered and were broken, limb and skull.
Elsewhere the warty titans were scissored to a spew of green tissue by
juggernaut jaws. A tentacle seized our mount's foremost portside leg. She
heaved and struggled, and we were shaken as by earthquake. Acid smoke
hissed round the tentacle's grip. The leg was sundered, and fell away, and
we surged across the crest of the ramparts. 

We were through. We were over. Smoothly we plunged down toward the broad,
wall-girt plains all aswarm with demonkind, and the rhythm of our mount's
onrush seemed unaltered by the lost leg. "This is our time!" I bellowed to
Barnar. "Our greatest hour commences with this exploit!" 

XII 

Harken me Harpy, and answer me clear: 

What might you find to fish out for us here? 

OUR FORAGER sped through phalanxes of demon defenders, and torn demonmeat
sprayed like wake, the flying fragments trailing entrails like
comet-tails. The terrain dispread before us might be called city here and
there, where domes and ragged steeples seethed with tiny-distant shapes in
turmoil. Jungle it was elsewhere, where towering tracts of foliage
thrashed and tremored with veiled struggles. There were walled gardens
where grew rows on rows of things in glittery, bright-hued soil, things
with eyes and voices, and neck-cords straining with their desperate
utterance. On flagstoned highways caravans fled amid armed escorts, their
multibrachiate mounts all saddlebagged with bundles that twitched and
bulged. Red rivers snaked through it all, plunging here and there into
caverns, and all these foaming red rapids were thronged with demonkind,
whether in vessels or their own aquatic nakedness, all woven in the
subworld's red-clawed trafficking. And all was grievingly, weepingly
beheld by the great alien Eye in the hellroof. 

Foragers cruised everywhere, smiting down domes and towers, scissoring
down tall-crested jungle skylines, bursting through the great plantations'
walls, devouring caravans and guards and packbeasts alike, churning into
the wild red rivers and rising with broken galleons dripping in their
jaws. . . . 

"Harken, Harpy," I cried to our captive. "What might you fish up for us
here? We favor high value and relatively light weight. Gemstones come to
mind." 

To hear its hissed answer we had to lean low to our Harpy's hindquarters,
and smell the creature's personal scent, which was not unlike a putrefying
lizard's. "Use reason, sires! Can I pilot this monster? Gemstones and
their like are easily had, they're common mulch in gardens-if this
Behemoth but carry us there." 

We sprawled a-tumbling, barely keeping a grip on the pinioned Harpy, which
might else have gone rolling off our mount. The Forager had stopped short,
and violently assaulted the earth with her jaws. 

This was a stretch of rolling, rocky ground all studded with stone and
steel trapdoors, burrow-mouths hugely hinged and barred, squat-built
turrets, and bunkers of massy iron. Our mount began to rip out the lintel
and frame of a trapdoor. 

There were other Foragers assailing the many-portaled ground, and we saw
one of them in particular-a silhouette at some distance-rear up to
encounter an attacker. Shaken as we were by our mount's convulsive
tearings at the stone, this remote encounter gripped our attention, for
now we could make out the silhouette of that other Forager's attacker; it
was fully as large as the Behemoth, and resembled an immense 'lurk, or
running-spider. 

But now beneath us gaped a corridor, deeply branching and sulfurously lit
and thronged by multibrachiate creatures fleeing ever deeper. Into this,
our mount plunged. 

Down green-litten echo-y hallways we chased hordes of scaly, hooved brutes
which, as they fled, deafened us with the trumpetings of their brazen,
funiculate mouths. We swerved through a turning, and thrust into a
high-vaulted chamber, richly carpeted, with facing rows of splendid doors
and grand statuary. Amazingly, our mount attacked the carpet, seizing up
huge flaps of it. The carpet bled copious purple gore where it was torn.
She pulled mightily, and the heavy, hemorrhaging fabric slithered
twitching through her jaws and into her crop. And as the carpet tore, a
wave of mutation rippled down the magnificent corridor walls; doors and
statues and ceiling vaults all shuddered and melted from their form,
revealed in their upheaval as one continuous anatomy. Statues became
probing papillae, doors the wet membraneous valves of mouths, floor and
wall and ceiling all one unified, sinuous, cloacal tube of carnivorous
tissue. Ridges of annular muscle swept peristaltically through the glassy
demonmeat, whose labyrinthine veins surged inky-black in its death-throes.

If the weight of our Forager's huge meal had slowed her, we failed to note
it, and were knocked sprawling once again by the suddenness of her
wheeling round and surging surfacewards. 

"List! Oh, list!" the Harpy malodorously hissed, and we crouched
hearkening. "Her crop's half full now. She'll feed more, but will be soon
enough returning. If you mean to use me, let us stand ready!" 

We tethered the demon by the neck, and bound its legs, which, though
skinny, had strength and flexibility to uncollar it once on the wing. Our
mount was speeding now towards a walled orchard. "Do your gathering with
your jaws," Barnar told the Harpy. "A false move and we'll break your
neck. Bring us up wealth enough, and we will set you free." 

Barnar and I traded a covert look here, for we had both, in the same
instant, seen a further way the Harpy might be useful to us. 

"Agreed!" the Harpy gasped. "Look how she makes for that plantation-your
wish for jewels may well bear fruit, oh Honest Masters! I hope I may
without offense, and fervently, ask you for solemn assurance of your
intent to reward my earnest endeavors with the restoration of my freedom."

"We would not dream of denying you such assurance," I told the demon
distractedly. Our course towards the orchard was bringing us nearer the
silhouetted combat we had glimpsed just before plunging underground. But
it was combat no longer. The Forager crouched paralyzed. The spider
straddled it, the tip of its abdomen waggling as it bound its prey in
shadowy shrouds of webbing. We shuddered at the sight, but were soon
enough distracted, as the orchard wall towered swiftly near. "Down!" I
bellowed. "Hold fast!" 

We dropped, and gripped our harness. The wall exploded; its huge ashlars
tumbled across our dreadnaught's dorsum like giant dice. We were through
the wall, and speeding across a soil of purest gemstones that crunched
like gravel underfoot. 

True demon jewels, their colors blazed completely unaltered by the vinous
hue of the subworld's light-colors for which no earthly names exist,
colors like lascivious caresses, prurient osculations of the optic orbs. 

From this dazzling soil of gems grew rows of taut-muscled saplings, each
one rooted at the groin in the brilliant substrate. These trees were
multiply headed, though every head mouthless; their branching necks
strained to give utterance to a voiceless woe; their polyglot limbs
futilely grappled the air. 

Our Forager was not bent upon this crop itself, but toward a cluster of
huge shapes in the middle distance. Finding her steady in her course, we
unbound the Harpy's wings. "We can work off her shoulder at the gap in her
legs!" Barnar cried. Though her seared-off leg-stump rowed powerfully in
rhythm with the other limbs, its truncation gave us a gap to play our line
through. The Harpy took to the air, and we paid out some two hundred
strides of line, about as much as we could easily manage the drag of. 

"Don't let the line foul in its legs," I shouted to the Harpy, "or you'll
be pulled in and trampled." Disdaining to reply, the demon executed an
out-arcing, in-sweeping dive. It seized up jewels in the ample grip of its
jaws, and we hauled in slack as it swooped up and back. 

Again and again our Harpy angler dove, and with each return it streaked
low in front of us and spat down a hefty spill of gemstones. While Barnar
managed the Harpy's tether, I began to collect the gems in the leathern,
lidded amphorae we had brought for the giants' pap. 

Our mount neared her quarry; the demon agriculturalists, or at least
harvesters, of this infernal orchard. They were giant slugs, moving in
slow formation, inching down parallel lines of the struggling trees. Their
slick, mottled hide was just such flesh as we had seen being fed to the
grubs in our larval chamber. Each slug glided down one line of plantings,
feeding. It slid sudsing along on a tongue of slime, engulfing its slow,
savoring way down its row, leaving behind black stumps where movement and
struggle had been, and every so often, emitting from its anal pore a
flatulent spew of fresh, bright gems. 

"We're closing," rasped the Harpy, hovering near us. We allowed it to
alight, till the first shock of impact was past. The foremost slug, its
stalked eyes thrusting belatedly toward our Forager, was jolting
ponderously to a halt, trying to reverse direction amid a great froth of
agitated mucus, but our mount was upon it, shearing off half the huge
molluscoid's back in one bite, exposing the wet work of its globular
heart, toiling nakedly in its broken cavern of innards. The Harpy, looking
behind us, was flapping furiously, and hissing. 

A huge spider approached us, abdomen bobbing amid the graceful arches of
its dancing legs. Above the twiddling, shaggy-sleeved horror of its fangs,
its eyeknobs were mounted like a wall of merciless black gems, the biggest
topmost. 

"Batten down!" Barnar and I shouted at each other. We lay flat and hugged
our jewels. The Harpy spread a wing to help contain the heap that was as
yet unbagged. Our Forager, though a leg light on her port side,
nonetheless wheeled majestically to do battle. 

Looking up some thirty degrees of inclination along our mount's lifted
head, we saw the rearing spider loom above us, saw it strike. 

And as it struck, the Forager's great fighting jaws scissored. They seized
the fangs crosswise and sheared them off. The fang-stumps bled venom which
smoked ruinously down on the Forager's jaws, melting great wounds in those
huge, spiked mandibles. 

Our Forager, unfazed, ducked and thrust more deeply under our attacker.
The spider, seized at the waist where flat thorax joined bulging abdomen,
was lifted off half its legs; the foremost quartet of them trod the air,
all tractionless. 

But hoisted thus, the spider could reach down along the Forager's
ridgeline, and strike her carapace with its sheared-off, unequal fangs.
Had these been undamaged, they might have punched through even our mount's
adamantine exoskeleton. Even as it was, when the wounded fangs struck, the
splash of poison fanned hissing and smoking across her back, and some of
her armor cracked deeply with a stress-groan like a ship's hull half stove
in by a rock. 

We scuttled frantically back to the Forager's waist, dragging as best we
could our spill of jewels. Our little world heaved as the Forager flexed
her abdomen for leverage and counter-thrust. In her jaws' slow, grinding
pressure, the spider's mid-joint crumpled. Still the monster's
fang-strokes fell, their strength and venom dwindling, though the
relentless murder never faded from the eight black ice-moons of its eyes. 

Then the arachnid broke; its legs crumpled into a crookedly twitching
bouquet. It was flung down. The hairy bag of its abdomen, undefended, our
Behemoth ripped wide open with her poison-scarred jaws. Thrusting her head
into the bristly bag, the Forager guzzled long glutinous coils of pallid
stuff which appeared to be connected to the twitching monster's
spinnerettes. Apparently, our Forager feasted on that which would have
mummied her, had she fallen prey. 

At length, she turned from this feeding back to the sundered slug, and fed
on this molluscoid until her crop could hold no more. We made a few more
passes with the Harpy, but once the Forager set out on her return, her
sole aim was to bear her precious booty of nourishment back to the Nest,
and such was the undeviating energy of her onrush, that Barnar re-bound
the Harpy, and set to helping me cut lengths of line, and weave them into
a sturdy net to hold our swag, which now formed an effulgent pile of
heart-stopping bigness. 

"It's as if . . ." he marvelled at our dazzling hoard while we worked, " .
. . as if we've snatched a piece of the sun!" 

XIII 

Behold them kiss their mother's side, 

A-suckling of her pap. 

They wash against her like a tide 

That at its shore doth lap. 

THE RAMPART was crossed, and fell away behind us, almost unregarded, so
raptly we gazed on our lucent loot. Our mount surged over the plains
unopposed, like the embodiment of our henceforth triumphant fate. Three
hundredweight of demon gems! I felt immortal. Wherever my desire turned
its eye, obstacles toppled, while stern Impossibilities bowed
obsequiously, and withdrew. We could now afford a fleet of ships, and five
hundred picked mercenaries. More! A flock of Gaunts could now be hired
from the Astrygals-even Stregan or Hagian gaunts could be hired, damn the
cost! And with these obedient horrors on the wing for us, Pelfer's tomb
could be sacked in a single day's siege. I might stand actually shod in
the Buskins of Bounding Absquatulation before two months were out! 

And then, with Pelfer's triad of Facilitators, how swiftly could we plant
our names, Barnar's and mine, among the very greatest in the Annals of
Thievery! So bright could we shine that, when we were long gone to dust,
our names would be sung in admiring melodies, by tongues whose languages
are yet unborn. 

I lifted my jubilant eyes to that looming, lunar Eye that wept its red
rivers through every corner of this piece of hell. An indecipherable
passion blazed from that eye, and bathed all below as in a warm mist of
blood. How could I hope to read the emotion in that awesome orb? The black
gulf of its pupil was a World-leak, a hole in the shell of the Cosmos of
Man, where the winds off the stars breathed through. 

Yet at that moment, I did feel I could read it. I thought I saw in that
Eye a glee like my own. I thought I saw glee, along with that fierce
absolute hunger of a hawk's eye that is reading a far field for food: the
gaze of a power both random and absolute. I saw in that Eye in the
hellroof the gaze of Luck herself telling me: "Yes." 

I stole looks at Barnar, afraid to confront the different dreams I knew
were enkindled in him. And he seemed on his part unwilling to encounter my
gaze. 

The Harpy, its legs still bound and its neck short-tethered to a piton,
began in its ragged whisper to entreat us for its freedom. Barnar answered
it kindly. 

"Regrettably, oh Demon, we find that we require your help in one small
further matter. You have but to render us this bit of additional aid, and
you may expect your freedom with perfect confidence, and every-" 

The Harpy interrupted with a heated burst of obscenity. It hissed some
personal remarks so grotesquely disparaging to Barnar and myself, that I
drew Ready Jack and clipped off a punitive inch from one of the creature's
elaborate mouthparts. The Harpy's pentagonal pupil contracted in pain.
"You have my silence!" it humbly hissed. "I wait to do your bidding, for I
must." 

Barnar and I traded one quick look, and spoke no more. Why compound the
mad extravagance of what we hoped for, by speaking it aloud? Yet no hope
seemed utterly mad for men who had just been carried through the subworld
on a Behemoth's back, and laden with jewels, and brought back out again.
Already the hell-wall loomed nearer, the mountain-roots darkly mouthed
with Behemoth Nests. 

"In this abyss we find our apogee of Luck." I whispered this to myself,
like a prayer. We gripped our harness and our bale of gems. Our Forager
surged up the mountain-wall. 

"The instant she branches off our blazes," was all Barnar said, and "Yes,"
was my only answer. The mountain-wall snatched us steeply upwards. We hung
gripping the harness and our gems, our sinews cracking. In the Nest, the
instant our mount left our marked path we must grip the Harpy's tether and
jump, and let the sturdy demon slow our fall as best it could with its
wings. 

On the other hand, our Forager's course might lie straight back up to the
apex of the Nest, perhaps even by the path it had brought us down. . . . 

Here was our Nest-mouth, vomiting and swallowing giants, looming larger,
larger, yawning to ingest us. . . . We were in, and cruising through the
multitudes in its entryway. We jumped to our feet and dragged our gems and
the Harpy over to the gap where the Forager's foremost portside leg had
been. I wrenched the Harpy's neck to have its whole attention. 

"If we jump, demon, wing it hard for the tunnel wall. If you let us break
our legs, we'll see that you're crushed to death with us on the tunnel
floor." 

"Is that our blaze?" Barnar cried. 

"Yes, by Key and Cauldron! And she turns!" 

Silently we watched the miracle unfold. The Forager hugged our dye-blazed
path at every turn. Up and up she sped, never diverging, till at length we
ceased to fear she would. This Nest, this vault of Power-our Forager was
its key, a key delivered into our hands. 

And at length, when we did branch from our marked trail, we'd followed it
so high we knew the point of our divergence must be very near our larval
chamber. Why dismount now, when the Forager's goal was so sure to be our
own? With jets of dye, we blazed this newest path. 

The tunnel climbed more steeply, and began to yawn bigger and bigger, as
gallery after gallery merged with ours from every side. The multitude of
workers was even greater here than down at the Nest's entry hall, but this
throng was more various in make and size, for workers of every caste were
here, converging-we could not doubt it now, surely?-upon their millenial
Mother. 

Still we worked gently up-slope, the thousands thronging around us in
rivers of opposing flow, till there ahead of us we saw the yawning portal
of a chamber which dwarfed even this great concourse of confluent tunnels.
And within that colossal cavern yonder, nested in its cyanic gloom, there
lay a pallid, breathing hugeness that was Awe itself. 

A central current in that titan throng caught us, and snatched us through
the portal. And thus were we swept into the purview of the Nest Mother's
glittery eyeglobes, and into the reach of her Royal jaws. 

The Queen! Living immensity, more than planetary! Her abdomen's ribbed
ellipsoid, all marbled white-and-black, bulged away in the blue shadow. It
was a great island at whose shores whole seas of her progeny lapped. Her
Royal head, black as a lacquered battle-casque, at first appeared a
stranded thing, resembling, in its relative smallness, a different being
that had been half swallowed by that abdomen's egg-laying mountain. We
approached the Presence on the river of other Courtiers and Supplicants. 

We learned the true hugeness of the Royal head as she received her
daughters' kisses. Forager after Forager, lifting her offering, was
utterly dwarfed by the Queen's receiving jaws. For an interval of awe and
rapture, time vanished in our stupefaction as we drew nearer. And then our
own mount lifted her filial gift up to the Royal visage. The daughter's
regurgitation shook us like a silken earthquake; she cast her demon-spoil
into the sky-clasping arc of the Royal mouthparts. 

The Nest Mother's nearness breathed a gust of eternity on us. These jaws
were the Appetite of the Nest itself, a great furnace door through which
armies of demonkind marched, that Behemoth might breed and brood and
build, and scour still cleaner the upper floor of hell. 

Then the Royal head reared-dismissing us, summoning the next. Our mount
slid aside, and cruised in a current of her sisters that coasted down
along the Royal flank. We sailed past hundreds of supplicant workers, all
lifting their hungry jaws to the Mother's bulging side. 

And it was their jaws that helped us see something that was hard to
discern at first in the densely marbled whorls of white and black that
blazoned the abdominal integument. But all at once, cued by the nursing
brutes, we saw them everywhere: arrays of pores across the Royal flank,
pores round as a potter's jar-mouths, each delicately lipped where the
chitin came up in a slight circumferential ridge. 

These pores, as I say, in their harlequin mottling, played seek-me-out
with our eyes, but in a short time we began to find pattern: pores of a
given size lay in roughly horizontal clusters; smaller pores lay low on
the abdomen, while the strata highest on the flank comprised the orifices
of greatest diameter. 

"See them, Barnar?" I trembled. "Each caste has its level. Is Bunt's
gamble won, then?" 

"See their delicacy," breathed my friend, and I shared his wonder. To
drink, the Behemoths closed their mandibles, and lay the tips of them to
the pores; the closed jaws, like quills' nibs touched to ink, pulled down
the fluid in their cloven points. 

"What tenderness," I shuddered in my turn. The nursing giants reared up,
forelegs gently resting on the Royal flank, and delicately, delicately
drank, as still as statues. 

"Ah, look now, Nifft. Look, old friend. Foragers every one, is it not so?"

He referred to the cluster of pores that our mount now approached. Only
Foragers nursed at them, drinking perhaps an ichor exclusive to
themselves; drinking giants' pap, perhaps. 

We'd already lashed our netted gems to the pitons. Our mount reared high,
her dorsum a steep, glossy hill now. With some scrambling, we found our
footing, as she softly sank the point of her closed mandibles into a slow,
stickly exudation, like white honey, that we could now see oozing from the
pore. 

"Now, Demon, attend!" Barnar barked-and he faltered a moment, both of us
startled by the strangeness of a human shout in this measureless chthonic
brood-hole of the Mountain Queen. Before Barnar's exclamation, it had not
seemed to be a silence that surrounded us; the march of tarsal claws on
stone, the susurrus of whickering legs, the wet whisper of feedings, the
slow thrum of the Queen's majestic heart-all this had not seemed to be
silence until his human voice rang so sharp and alien in this speechless
smithy of giants. We harkened to his echo which still hung in that
vastness-distinct, eery, melancholy. It was the echo of a phantom's voice.
We were phantoms, a race undreamed of by the titans; thirsty ghosts that
haunted them. 

"Quick then," I muttered to the Harpy. We had already emptied the gems
from our amphorae into the net. We now had these leathern jars dangling
from ropes, whose ends I put in the Harpy's elaborate mouthparts. "Your
legs must stay bound," I told our captive. "But with your jaws you can
easily manage these ropes. Drag the jars into the outflux of the ichor; if
you once sink their rims in the pap, you can scrape the jars full of the
stuff. You should contrive to fill them with a couple of passes. Remember
how close your freedom is! Only do this well, and liberty is yours. Up
now, and away." 

The Harpy cringed obediently, not yet taking wing. The creature tremored
with what was perhaps outrage. "Pitiless masters," it gasped, "I obey! I
obey! But oh this is cruel! Do you not see the dangers-" 

"Harpy," I answered, courteously gripping the imp by the throat, "had we
wings of our own, we would brave these dangers ourselves. As it is, do
now, or die at once." 

The Harpy took wing, its malodorous pinions seizing the air like big,
sinewed hands. Up it climbed, the amphorae dangling from its jaws. When it
gained some two rods' altitude, we held its tether short. It tugged and
gestured beggingly for more line, but we were loathe to give it more than
we could firmly manage, lest the demon contrive to snag it, and work
itself free. 

It hovered, studying the pore where our mount still nursed. 

"Oh no!" gasped Barnar. "We didn't dye it!" 

It hit us like a blow. There hung the Harpy, wings toiling, high, wide and
hideous, directly above our nursing Forager's glittery blue eyeglobes. In
our shock we stood doltish, staring, like casual spectators. 

And nothing happened. Still the Forager funneled down pap, unperturbed. 

The Harpy winged cautiously lower, and eased the leathern jars down on the
pore. Then it winged lower still, to tilt the jars' brims down into the
pap; in a moment, it had sunk the brims into the cloudy lactescence. 

Now came some delicate wingwork, as the Harpy tugged the lips of the jars
deeper into the exudate. To manage the oblique angle needful for this
work, the demon hovered even lower, hanging not quite two fathoms above
the Royal abdomen, and tugging, coaxing the jarmouths into the pap. 

Something moved, something huge and sudden and night-black surged up from
the abdomen. A ragged piece of blackness hugged bristly limbs around the
Harpy, and snatched it from the air. 

Even as it dined loudly on our hapless subworld servitor, the
monster-doubtless some Royal ectoparasite-remained more than half hidden
in the pattern of the Royal hide. We made out barbed fur, like a Sucking
Star's, and tree-thick palps or tentacles. The Harpy lifted once more that
eerie, gull-like voice it had used with its own kind before we captured
it; in this melancholy demon-song, it briefly declaimed the agonies of its
demise. 

We slashed the lead and flung it free. Our mount, as if dismissed by our
failure, instantly ceased to imbibe the pap, and backed down from the
Royal flank. She wheeled, and slid out into a current of sated workers
that were out-bound from the Chamber. Throughout our long withdrawal from
the Queen's immensity, we scanned the terrain of Her abdomen, and though
detail faded in the murk our alerted eyes discovered-now here, now there,
much that lived, and moved, upon the Queen. 

Somber and silent, we crouched by the gap in our mount's legs, ready to
jump, feeling broody, and rebuked by Luck, whom we had thought so wholly
ours. The three hundredweight that we had just failed to earn from Bunt by
obtaining the pap was more than made up by the value of the jewels we had
captured, but this did not comfort me. Failure had flawed our fortune's
smooth ascent. I felt betrayed. I blush now at this petulance, but so it
was. 

We had gone not a quarter mile out of the atrium of the Royal Chamber,
when an oncoming Licker bowed low in our path, and with stroking antennae,
begged our mount for food. Her crop was not empty, it seemed. She stopped,
and leaned down to comply. Barnar and I tossed down our bale of gems, and
jumped after it. 

XIV 

See how faithless Fortune bleeds! 

Our lustrous Future fast recedes . . . 

See how Fortune's healed again! 

Our purses wax! Our dolors wane! 

HOW EASILY had our Forager borne this bale of gems! How cruelly this same
bale taxed our little bodies-for we had shrunk, as it seemed to us, as
small as tiny, toilsome beetles, inching down these vast corridors we'd so
lately bestridden like giants. Grunting and sweating, staggering and
stumbling, and cursing continually, we carried our weighty fortune. Thanks
to our blazes, our route was never in doubt; our death by a misstep due to
exhaustion, however, seemed highly likely. 

The toil was least when we shared the load between our shoulders; we could
hustle it along for good stretches this way. But this mode made us
dangerously awkward at ducking, and dodging, and diving for cover. We were
soon covered with bruises and lacerations, and had several near collisions
with oncoming Behemoths. Each time we took cover, we lay long minutes
gasping, powerless to move till our hearts slowed down. 

Grimly, we lurched on. And, amazingly, towards the end, our sheer
determination seemed to prevail, and we found ourselves wielding our
burden with new strength and stamina. Jaws clenched in a fury of
resolution, we actually jogged the last mile to our larval chamber without
a single pause for rest. Jubilant, we staggered through the portal, and
sprawled against the wall, gasping and exulting. 

"What stamina . . . for two old dogs . . . eh?" Barnar beamed. 

"By Key and Cauldron!" I wheezed boastfully, " . . . as if the bag . . .
grew lighter as we went!" 

We paused. An icy finger touched my nape. We seized the bundle. 

It had gotten lighter-by fully a third of its weight! One corner had been
slightly ruptured, probably upon dismounting. We scrambled back out into
the tunnel. A gemstone sparkled from the tunnel floor. When I recovered
it, I saw others winking beyond. Barnar groaned, "They'll be strung out
all the way back!" 

Was our Luck wound on a spool, to be spun out, and then reeled back in
again? The remnant gems, which we soon cached with our gold, were of
course worth a fortune, but the bitterness of our setback consumed us. 

We sought out our hammocks, but lay sleeplessly brooding. "We'll have
every stone of it back," I growled, "first thing on rising. . . . Do you
know, Barnar, that Harpy was a luckless brute, but what power there is in
a pair of wings, eh?" 

Barnar nodded thoughtfully. "I believe I take your meaning." Lowering his
voice, he added, "You know, Nifft, I find myself inclined to venture for
the alleged Unguent. At least this part of the subworld does not seem
overpopulous with demonkind." 

"Just so. My very thought. Let's have our friend out of his bag, then." 

So we unbagged Ostrogall and propped him on a rock. Though we brusquely
silenced his obsequious effusions, the loathsome jewelry of his eyes still
wooed us with a hundred oily glints of adoration. 

"We wish to explore a bit further your proposition regarding the so-called
Unguent of Flight," I told him. "I will begin by observing, I hope without
painful bluntness, that only a fraction of you remains. How can you then
yearn so vehemently to survive?" 

"But I do so yearn, Masters, most strenuously! Only plant me neck-deep in
my native subworld floor. In days I can release ocular spores,
breeze-borne on gossamer, that will slip through the orifices of my
countrymen. Soon I'll be peeping from eye-pustules on a thousand demons
I've infected, and shall see many wonders as my vigilance steals outward
through the subworld." 

"Enough!" said Barnar. "Lead us not too vividly to know what saving you
accomplishes. Nifft and I have been debating a point that wants some
clarification. Vitrol the Gelded, in his Fabulary, reports of the Unguent
of Flight that it is: ' . . . demon slime and demon sweat/which man by
demon hand-clasp gets,/and otherwise has ne'er got yet.' We wish you to
comment on the veracity of this passage." 

There was a silence, in which a myriad of apologetic glances overswept
Ostrogall's eyes. The silence was broken when the signal cord set up a
vigorous clacking-something it had been doing, with scant respite, since
our return. We ignored it. "Oh beneficent saviours," the demonstump
wheedlingly began, "it torments me that I must, perforce, deny-" 

"Silence!" I told him. "We do but test you. We are disposed, soon, to
essay the venture you propose to us. In what manner must we prepare
ourselves?" 

"Oh bounteous, blessed, beautiful benefactors! Your doughty weapons, and
the peerless courage that courses through your veins, are all the
preparation such men as yourselves-" 

"Enough! You are advised of our intent. Be sure that any treachery
attempted, when once we have set out together, will be decisively repaid.
Since it appears that even in fragmented state you are capable of
regeneration, we propose, in the event of your malfeasance, to smear you
with pitch and burn you to a crisp. Silence! We seek no further discourse
at present." 

"I only beg that you set me on some secure ledge, unenveloped, that I may
see a bit while I await your pleasure." 

There seemed no harm in this. We set him where he had a bit of a view out
into the chamber, for which he effusively thanked us. It crossed my mind
that his craving for vision must be great indeed, to be so glad of a view
which, to him and his kind, must surely be like a vista of ultimate
Nightmare. 

Barnar sent a terse message on the signal cord, using the signal
indicating that the tappers were shutting down for sleep. This must vex
Costard, having had no work or word of us for longer than we could
estimate. Bunt might at least surmise that we had been about his mission;
if so, he would calm the youth if he could. If he couldn't, let Costard
seethe. We returned to our hammocks. 

"Are we actually going to do it, old friend?" I asked drowsily. I knew we
were, and the resolution, though fraught with uncertainty, somehow soothed
the anguish of imagining our spilt jewels lying strewn along miles of
tunnel floor. 

"It would be craven, for one setback, to cease pushing our luck. This is
our time, Nifft. We're meant to win. . . ." 

We both drifted toward sleep. The knowledge that divergent ambitions must
still divide us, once we had all our plunder back up in the world again,
was something we were tired enough, and rapt enough in imminent exploits,
to put aside in our hearts for the moment. Out in the chamber the whickery
whisper of Behemoth legs, the soft, wet sound of a thousand feedings, the
faint gibbering of dying demons . . . already, these sounds seemed
soothing music to us, home sounds. Great Behemoth, nursing Her own,
cradled us like her own children in the bounty of her strength. I slept, a
bright orange flea snug in the lair of the tolerant colossus who both fed
and protected it. 

Ostrogall's voice woke us up. His tone was urgent, wheedling, a low melody
of hasty persuasion. When my fogged mind grasped that he was addressing
someone else, it brought me bolt upright. 

There, not five strides from our hammocks, three orange shapes crouched
raptly around the voluble demon-fragment. The glittery pox of Ostrogall's
eyes wetly solicited their credence, while his mouth-vent murmured busily.

We recognized two of his hearers: Costard and Bunt-both kilted and stained
orange. Costard looked trim enough in the half-naked outfit of kilt,
boots, and bandoliers. Ha'Awley Bunt was plump, and his ripply orange flab
was not a little reminiscent of larval corpulence. 

Our third visitor was a young woman with a handsome, strong-shouldered
frame, big-breasted and robustly haunched. On her the short-kilt and
buskins were a pleasing costume altogether, though there was nothing
mincing in the way she bore her semi-nakedness. The back-sweep of her
orange pompadour gave her strong-nosed face the crested look of some
winged raptor, though there was an engaging candor in her eyes, which were
quick to meet ours when she discovered us looking on. 

"Good evening, gentlemen! Your deep sleep hints that you've been hard at
work-though not, we gather, at tapping sap." I knew the pleasant alto of
her voice. This was Sha'Urley, Bunt's sister, who had briefly presented
herself at our supper before we took ship from Dolmen Harbor. 

"Uncle!" Costard piped, jumping up from where he crouched near Ostrogall.
"Uncle, I've just learned! I mean, I've just learned what you're doing.
How could you not tell me of giants' pap? How could you . . . steal from
me?" 

"You presumptuous young moron! How can I steal, you ask? I am a thief!" It
was a measure of Barnar's fury and flusterment that he had no sharper
answer than this, and I shared his rage. What an appalling intrusion,
these three overwrought property-owners, fairly twitching with acquisitive
impulses! Just now, as we gathered ourselves inwardly for a highly
ticklish venture, here was this unruly, contentious little mob dropping
down square in our laps. 

"You simply refuse to grasp," Ha'Awley Bunt was reproving Costard, "that
taking the pap isn't stealing." His weary contempt bespoke long battles
between him and Costard since we'd come below. "A mine owner here owns his
own apparatus, and owns the right to work his site. But no one owns a
Nest, or anything in it! What's found here is the finder's, whoever he may
be!" 

"What might it be said that I own,"-Costard's voice was a croak of bitter
sarcasm-"if I don't own whatever's in this Nest? I'd like you to suggest
just what ownership might mean at all, if not-" 

"I respectfully remind you," Sha'Urley Bunt told the young man, "that your
acceptance of my investment, a substantial sum of gold specie now reposing
in your vault above, grants us full partnership and right of entry here
now. Let this fact suffice for the moment, honest Costard, and let us ask
our tappers here," (she turned to Barnar and me) "about this new matter,
this Unguent of Flight . . . ? Do you really contemplate entering the
subworld to retrieve it?" 

All three of them watched us. We, in turn, glared down at Ostrogall.
"Effulgent Ones!" the fragment fluted, answering the menace in our eyes.
"I had to speak, to account for myself, or they would have slain me. I had
to explain my presence so near to your sleeping selves!" 

I looked at our visitors. "If you will be so kind as to explain why you
have come down here," I told them, "then perhaps we can proceed to a
discussion of where we mean to go from here." 

What we next learned was not had without trouble. In the verbal pouring
forth that followed, Ha'Awley Bunt and Costard flared up at each other
with a lively rancor. Luckily, Sha'Urley had the knack of silencing them
both, and maintaining order amidst contention. Through her crisp
narrative, with some vituperative amplifications from Bunt and Costard, we
had the gist of what had transpired up in the mine compound these last few
days. 

Before Ha'Awley had even left Dolmen with us, Sha'Urley, ever alert to her
brother's speculations (for she seemed to feel some affectionate contempt
for his business acumen) had sensed that he had some costly venture afoot.
She engaged two armed retainers, trusted swordswomen long in her service,
and took ship for KairnGate Harbor the night after we did. She had arrived
at the Superior Sap Mine bare hours after Barnar and I went rattling down
the Gangway in the bucket. 

Only her power to debunk Bunt's own false persona compelled him, at her
warning glances, to a temporary connivance in her fiction. She presented
herself to Costard as a businesswoman of Dry Hole who had heard of the
Superior Sap Mine's fiscal straits, and had seen opportunity for
investment in an industry she had long craved to assay. 

Despite the eye-play and the awkwardness that must have passed between the
brother and sister during this first encounter, and despite the
improbability of a wandering investor seeking Costard out like this, that
young man, implacably self-important, heard everything with judicious nods
and complete belief. Sha'Urley, after all, shared her brother's polished
manners and persuasive skill. 

Thus we learned that the catastrophic handling, topside, of our first
attempts at tapping, were caused in part by Costard's and Bunt's
distraction with Sha'Urley's arrival. 

Costard speedily accepted Sha'Urley's hefty pouch of specie, and tendered
to her the freshly drawn up instrument of partnership in the Superior Sap
Mine, which he had signed with a flourish. 

Sha'Urley immediately expressed interest in a tour of the operations down
in the larval chamber. Costard fatuously declined to subject one of the
"fair sex" to those subterranean rigors. Sha'Urley, piqued, made Costard
aware of fundamental realities-that she now had a legal propriety in the
mine, and that she had as well, unlike Costard, two resolute young women,
skilled at arms, in her employ. 

The three retired that night on uneasy terms. Sha'Urley and her brother
took a nocturnal ramble through the main building, and were shortly
plunged into an argument that echoed in the empty structure. Bunt fumed
that, for all his sister's doubt of his acumen, she herself had foolishly
over-invested in the mine. Why secure a source of giants' pap before its
worth was known? Sha'Urley, however, had ascertained the sum that her
brother had withdrawn from the Hivery's assets to pay Barnar and me. She
snapped that she had just secured partnership for a fraction of that sum,
and that now, if the pap proved out, they stood ready to make a fortune at
once-for if the pap worked, how could its effects long be hidden from
competitors? 

Meanwhile, she continued, if she and Ha'Awley now went down and harvested
the pap themselves, before Barnar and I went after it, they could save the
huge second payment promised us. 

The upshot was of course that Costard, overhearing, came discreetly out of
his chambers, harkened, and learned all. 

The three of them plunged into furious controversy, and arrived at
stalemate, since Sha'Urley refused remittance of her investment, and had,
with her armed retainers, the means to enforce her partnership. They
quarreled for days. Our long cessation of tapping activity was what
finally brought them to a concerted action. They imagined the pair of us
down here, bottling the Royal pap; perhaps they began to picture us
purloining it for ourselves by some contrivance. Costard, still denying
them an iota of ownership of the pap, agreed to their all going down
together, with the swordswomen posted above to protect the compound. 

When we'd heard all this, Barnar and I excused ourselves, and retired a
few paces to confer. "Here's a mess indeed, eh?" "Suddenly, everything we
had in view looks ten times harder!" Barnar sighed. 

"But perhaps not without added profit. Look at them. They came down all in
a flutter and a clatter of contention. But see how they look uneasily
about them? They're beginning to feel where they are. Suppose they saw the
Queen for themselves? How much more do you think they'd be willing to pay
us to get the pap for them, once they understood the task? Let's offer to
guide them to the Brood chamber for a hundredweight of specie. We'll
re-collect our jewels on the way." This idea greatly cheered us; the
prospect of easy profit warmed us like a sunbeam. 

"What of the Unguent?" Barnar asked. "What if they want to come with us in
pursuit of that?" 

"Can you see them, any of them, actually walking into the subworld of
their own free will? They are all administrators, adepts of accounts, of
panelled chambers, and letters of draft." 

The three of them had drawn together slightly as we watched them,
unconsciously huddling up a bit as they felt the grandeur and danger of
this place. Costard, moreover, was probably recalling the terror and
indignity of that mishap which ended his very brief career as a tapper. 

Barnar and I became the gracious hosts. We urged our vile wine and jerky
on them, and anxiously saw to it that they were comfy on the bales and
lockers we'd assembled to seat them. When they were settled, Barnar
beamed. "Here is how Nifft and I have reasoned the matter out, my friends.
The three hundredweight we have received of Bunt we consider fully earned
by our entry of the Brood Chamber, followed by our attempt in good faith
to execute your commission, at the near loss of both our lives. Naturally
we are despondent at losing the second three hundredweight which was to
have rewarded our success. Still, at present we cannot contemplate a
second attempt on the pap. More obtainable goals claim our thoughts just
now. Nevertheless we may yet have occasion to assist your own pursuit of
the ichor. We will guide you to the Royal Brood Chamber for the sum of one
hundredweight of prime specie, if you will all assent to leave at once,
and to provide us with a fiftyweight of specie in advance . . . do I sense
hesitation?" 

"Honest thief," Sha'Urley answered, "my brother started by giving you
impossibly large sums of money. Bunt Cellars is an old and prosperous
House. We 'still our mead at no less than seven 'stilleries throughout the
Angalheims. But to speak as casually as you do of hundredweights of specie
is a wild exaggeration, both of our resources, and of this pap's real
value. You must drastically scale down your expectations." 

"But we won't, you see," I told her as amiably as I could. "We would as
soon be on our own way, come to that, so I'm afraid our price is firm, and
you must take or leave it. I hope you don't think me unpleasant. It just
happens that my friend and I are in a very acquisitive frame of mind of
late." 

Some haggling followed, a twenty-fiveweight was offered as advance, more
time was requested before departure, the price was vainly protested as
inordinate, the doubtfulness of the pap's real value was urged, and the
like. They already knew we would yield them nothing. At bottom, they
dickered mainly for delay, as a way to ease into the fact of where they
were about to go. When the talk wound down at last, the three of them
seemed slightly dazed, trying to digest the fact that they had just agreed
to pay a huge sum of money to be led on foot into the unimaginable dangers
of the Royal Brood Chamber. 

"Well, then," I said. "It's settled. Before we disperse, though, I feel I
must say a few words about this alleged Unguent of Flight. We, who plucked
this demon from a larva's jaws, regard him as strictly our own, along with
any information of value he may possess about any Unguents real or
putative." 

"Luminous Ones!" fluted Ostrogall. "I affirm myself yours! It is only to
your two revered selves I will divulge the Unguent's source!" 

No doubt the demon was sincere in yielding himself to the most
battle-ready of his potential escorts. On the other hand he had done his
cause no harm by arousing the competing interest of our colleagues as a
stimulus to commit us to his expedition. Costard piped, "Surely,
Good-uncle Barnar, the demon had just been brought into my larval chamber
by one of my Nurse Behemoths when you found him, and just as surely he is
at least as much mine as he is yours! Moreover, this means in principle
that, should he lead you to the Unguent, that Unguent too is at least as
much mine as yours." 

"One of your Nurse Behemoths," Barnar echoed him. "What? Will you call one
of them to heel for you now? That one there, for instance. Is that Nurse
yours? Make her do something, then! Bid her dance you a jump-up in
obedience to your august ownership of her! What? You can't do this?
Nephew, I will put the matter concisely. You will not be a part of our
search for the Unguent. And, if we obtain it, we are keeping every jot for
ourselves. Now, if you don't go up and get us our advance fairly soon, we
will grow impatient, and go follow our own concerns." 

So, back up the gangway bucket went Costard and Ha'Awley Bunt, to get our
fiftyweight of specie and to alert Sha'Urley's two retainers to our
setting forth from the larval chamber. Barnar sat down to oiling and
sharpening his weapons. Mine I deemed still sharp enough from our
preparations for our last setting-forth. And while I wished to be civil
and hostly to Sha'Urley, I was anxious to have another look at my cache of
gems and specie. So I airily excused myself, saying I was going for a
ramble. 

But a moment later as I strode along the chamber wall, here was Sha'Urley
catching up to me. "Will you show me all this, honest Thief? Be sociable,
good Karkmahnite. Negotiation's done for a while." 

"Well, why not? Come, then, and let me guide you into the midst of our
little sap-skins, and their wondrous Nurses." 

So I showed Sha'Urley this and that. The chamber was still a-boil with the
heightened activity that had moved us to our recent foray. New larvae were
borne in, new pupae rushed out, and demon-meat distributed, in a turmoil
that would have paralyzed Barnar and me had we confronted it on our first
days down here. 

I liked Sha'Urley for her unfeigned awe at the spectacle, when sharp
dealing would demand that she should scant the challenges we faced down
here. At the same time, I could not help but feel that her eyes, when they
met mine, were playing a kind of smiling game with me. 

I wondered if she had noticed that, while we were all talking, I had
forgetfully allowed my gaze to dwell upon the lovely abundance of her
body. She gestured at the larvae, her eyes playing with mine again. "Are
these sap-swollen creatures . . . hard to mount?" 

"Some tremble when we set the Spike in them, but in the main they are at
ease beneath us." 

"Unlucky for them," she smiled. "Oh, what a piece of work they are, Nifft!
We are blessed indeed to enjoy even the fraction of their bounty that we
are able to extract." 

"It's a miracle we can steal so much, yet never cause them harm. Indeed we
cannot speak of ownership down here-only of lucky theft." 

"Yes. And, since we are speaking plainly, Nifft, I see no reason not to
tell you that I have always had a keen carnal appetite for men of your
veiny, sinewy make." Now she was looking me straight in the eyes. 

"Nor can I conceal," I croaked, "an equal craving for women of your
opulent design." 

"Indeed you cannot conceal it," she smiled more broadly, "short-kilted as
you are. Are we safe here to indulge ourselves-here in this nook of soft
earth perhaps?" 

"Oh yes! Perfectly safe!" I answered her, for we had wound our way back
out to the perimeter again, where a fissure in the wall offered its safety
near at hand. 

I think life's profoundest joys are just such simple pleasures, simply
had, as Sha'Urley and I partook together while the Nurses wheeled and
glided through the larval host, and those huge white loaves of living
tissue baked and swelled in the great Nest's genial womb! We sang the
paean of life together, none more surprised than I to be given this
delight. We ended with some nuzzling and laughing together, and at length
stood up with happy sighs, and regirt our loins. And I remember quite
distinctly having at that moment a genuine glint of clairvoyance. For at
that moment, the thought came to me: This is the most pleasant thing that
is going to happen to me for quite some time to come. 

Again we walked, and shared the marvels of the place. Sha'Urley poked a
friendly fist in my shortribs. "Let's not be stiff and formal in our
dealings now, Nifft. Let's talk bluntly, as good friends should. Not to
put too fine a point on it, don't you feel you are charging us rather . .
. stiffly, for your guide services?" 

"Sweet Sha'Urley! It's not that long a walk in miles, but it is long
indeed in perils. And when we show you the Royal Chamber, you will
understand the princely fee we set." 

XV 

Behold thy babe, that doth beseech a crown, 

And would go mantled in thy majesty. 

Bestow on her an army of thy spawn, 

Or else reweave her in thy tapestry. 

WHEN THE SIX OF US finally set out (the fractional but loquacious
Ostrogall, riding holstered on my hip and bagged for silence, being the
sixth) the Bunts and Costard went in such awe of the tunnels, and of the
titans that trafficked them, that they hung well back of our lead, and
clung to the tunnel wall as they crept along. We also gave them the
responsibility of blazing our course with additional dye marks, which task
further deflected their attention. Thus for a while we recollected our
dropped gems without being noticed by our newcomers. 

But after they had experienced the first few surges of Behemoths, had
weathered the terror of those encounters and caught on to the
stop-and-start rhythmn of our travel, they began taking note of our
gem-gleaning. Costard, spotting a gem we'd missed, leapt on it. Barnar
roared, "Desist! Is it not plain? These gems, which you can see we have
come equipped to regather, are ours, lost here by us scant hours ago!" 

"Yours, Uncle!?" shrilled Costard. "Is every damned thing now yours down
here in my mine?" 

So we had to stop in a safe recess, and reveal to our visitors our recent
foray through the subworld. "So you have seen it then," Sha'Urley mused.
"The subworld. Is it, ah, lively?" 

"We have seen it more than once," I answered stiffly. "In this sector, at
least, wide tracts of it seem virtually deserted, save for the Foragers
coming and going." I was uneasily aware that this determined young woman
had far from abandoned her interest in a venture for the Unguent of
Flight. 

"Our main point, at least, is clear, is it not?" Barnar asked the three of
them. "If you really wish to own demon jewels, as we own these, you must
needs go down and get your own, as we did." 

They respected our property after this, though they kept a tactless,
sullen eye on us as we regathered it. I had for a moment the strangest
feeling as they watched me; that, vigorously gathering my gems as I was, I
cut a somehow grotesque figure-that there was something, well . . .
piggish, even swinish about my thrifty diligence! The bizarre delusion
quickly passed, however. 

The traffic grew thicker, the galleries bigger, and the tremor of
footfalls unceasing. Then, long before we thought we could be near that
ultimate Chamber, the ground-vibrations grew sharper, and we breathed a
gust of raw fecundity. The echo-y sound of a huge and thronging interior
was audible not far ahead. We huddled for a penultimate conference,
eye-to-eye in a narrow cranny. 

"You are about to understand how much we have dared in bringing you here.
You will behold, and cease to cavil at our fee," Barnar told them. "We
will keep to the chamber wall, following it leftward from the entryway.
Wherever we are forced to cross open ground, you must keep moving. If you
let the dread of where you are freeze your legs, you will surely be
crushed." 

And in the next moment, we were running all-out, caught in the contagion
of furious momentum that surged around us. In heartbeats, the great
antechamber of the Royal room engulfed us in a turmoil of legs that
churned the gloom like the ranked oars of war galleys. High overhead, blue
light corruscated across all those faceted Behemoth eyes, great ocular
nets too coarse to catch the images of our little selves. 

There was the Royal Brood Chamber. Within, the Queen's immensity lay upon
the sea of her dwarfed, adoring spawn. We crossed the threshold, and
plunged along the wall. Mad dodges, fierce, quick climbs above onrushers,
footwork, footwork, footwork, and our hearts and lungs laboring,
laboring-for a time these struggles engulfed us. 

Then a ridged seam of harder stone jutted into our path. "Up this one!" I
called, and up we clambered. 

High above the Chamber floor, the rough stone gave us secure and even
restful perches, whence we drank in the stupefaction of the Queen amidst
her generations. For a timeless time, speech seemed impiety. I mutely
pointed where the nuzzling workers nursed, in clusters of like caste. We
gazed, and supped the vintage of pure Awe. Once Sha'Urley spoke, as she
watched a stream of workers-issuing from the gloom that shrouded the
Queen's caudal region-carrying the Royal eggs high in their jaws. These
eggs streamed like pearls through the underwater light, rivering toward
the Incubaria, whence the larvae would be borne to the Nurseries.
Sha'Urley surprised me by reciting: "Great mother, deathless
Demiurge,/Mankind's nurse and demon's scourge/Our hopes are hammered in
thy forge!" 

"By the Black Crack!" gasped Barnar. "What is that they are bringing Her?"

We looked where he pointed, and our jaws hung ajar. Something easily ten
times the size of the largest Forager was being carried on the flood of
workers. Lying on its back, like a rudderless vessel it moved veeringly
towards the Royal Presence. It was surely a Behemoth but, apart from its
great size, it was of a make we had not seen before. Its abdomen was
tapered toward a caudal point; its folded legs were inordinately massive
and long. It had as well, jutting from its thoracic segment, a pair of
long, bladelike wings, and by these its bearers gripped it. 

They staggered under their mighty burden. The throng melted from their
path and closed behind them, seeming to urge them forward toward the
Queen. The Queen, for her part, twitched her jaws and tilted her head as
if inquiringly towards the approaching bearers and their offering. 

I unbagged Ostrogall, and cut short his effusive thanks. "Tell us, Demon,"
I bade him, "if you know what approaches the Queen." 

"By all the Powers," fluted the unctuous fragment. "This is the
Presentation of the Scions! Do you not grasp what passes here? In the
Mythos that surrounds our dire predators, this scene, most darkly figured,
forms the central horror. And now I find it literally, fully true! O woe
for my tormented homeland! Woe for all my murdered kindred! Woe and wail!"

"The Presentation of the Scions . . ." muttered Costard. "You mean that's
a, a princess there being carried to the Queen?" 

"It is a Queen in bud," the demon answered. "Whether the Queen approves
its investiture or not falls according to a law none understand. But
somehow, in just such confrontations as we now behold, the Queen
determines which of her Royal infants shall go forth with a conquering
army to extend, by one more Nest, her species' empire in my helpless land!
Now is the recent stir in the Nest explained! The army of the New Queen is
a-forging!" 

Now the Royal babe had arrived at the only point in the Chamber where she
might seem small; directly under the Queen's jaws. Could there have been
in actual fact the ripple of tension that I sensed throughout the host?
Could the sea of giants, with their hundred thousand individual aims and
errands, have shuddered as one-as it seemed to me they did-a restive
rearing of heads, a palpitant pause of pistoning legs, a stir like the
horripilation of a single flesh? We scarcely breathed, our minds wholly
given to this chthonian epiphany. 

The Queen's globed head tilted left, then right, the blue light flaring
across the facets of Her eye-spheres. Within those globes She seemed to
view all Time, all Space. Her mouthparts moved, tasting the air above Her
supine daughter, while that Royal Scion, with an infant's unknowing
urgency, wrestled in her bearers' grip. The terrible beauty of her
slender, bladelike wings cut my heart-their veins pulsed with the
insurgent sap of her nascent power. Her great legs plucked gracefully at
the air. The Queen bowed Her head. 

She bowed Her head, and declared Her Royal will by plucking off Her
daughter's head and devouring it with a loud, wet crunching. She ate Her
daughter's thorax in three bites-ate it and its kicking legs, these
uprooted limbs jutting briefly from the Royal jaws and twitching there
before they were crunched into the multifoliate maternal maw. . . . 

"And so the young Queen is not to be," intoned Ostrogall solemnly. So rapt
was I in the spectacle I did not even mind the demon's unsolicited
declamation from the podium of my hip. "The daughter is to re-sinew the
Nest's ever-multiplying body. She is to become jaw and leg-joint, Forager
and Nurse and gluttonous grub, her flesh re-fashioned into theirs! The
Queen disgorges them in their thousands, and in their thousands She
devours them." 

Barnar, with an effort, broke our trance. "I suggest we bend our thoughts
to the business at hand. We invite you to note a certain system in the pap
pores' arrangement. By now you have surely perceived how different castes
imbibe at different levels on the maternal flank?" 

"It is most encouraging!" assented Ha'Awley Bunt. "Plainly, there is a pap
specific to the Foragers' caste!" 

"Whether that which they drink," I admonished them, "is as specific to
their caste as the fonts they drink it from, is of course uncertain. And
if the beverage be different, can we still be sure that bigness is a
specific property that it imparts? Even to the Foragers, I mean-let alone
to . . . other living things?" 

I spoke with some sense of rectitude, for my profit, after all, did not
lie in discouraging our companions' lust for the pap. In any case, their
lust seemed unaffected by these reminders. "All these things," I
continued, "about the pap are uncertain, while the dangers of obtaining it
are past doubt. Firstly, how is the Queen to be climbed? And if she be
climbed, how is the climber to survive? For I note that you three have
been as slow to see your ultimate obstacle as Barnar and I were to see it.
Study the Royal flanks more closely. Look for movement, especially in the
black parts." 

And just then, a brace of low-flying creatures made a fortuitous swoop
above the Queen and, in the next instant, a ragged blackness surged up and
dragged one squawking down. All now gazed with wakened eyes. 

"By the Crack" gasped Sha'Urley after a moment. "She's crawling with . . .
vermin! Look there! And there, in that tangle of marbling!" 

The essence of the situation was soon clear to our companions: the Royal
pap-pores might or might not be oases of liquid wealth, but they were most
certainly environed by armies of monsters. 

"Well, it seems our course is plain enough," Ha'Awley Bunt announced, his
tone resolute, yet not without a quaver in it. "The Unguent of Flight
would offer us the only feasible means of harvesting the pap." 

"Why do you willfully misunderstand us?" Barnar barked. "You are not
invited to join our pursuit of the alleged Unguent. This demon here is
ours-he even affirms it himself!" 

"What will you do, good Chilite?" Sha'Urley drily asked. "If we follow
you, will you drive us back with your drawn blades? Will you kill us if we
refuse to be repulsed from following you?" 

What, in the end, could we do? "We have reached a juncture," I said at
last, "where some sharp lines must be drawn. Of course we cannot prevent
your following us on a subworld venture whose object we regard as highly
dubious-be silent!" (This to Ostrogall's attempt at protestation) "-though
naturally if you thrust your presence on us you cannot expect our
protection on the journey, and must fend for yourselves in that regard.
But you must understand that the Unguent of Flight is to be ours, mine and
Barnar's, exclusively. If it is to be had in abundance, of course, then
how could we object to your having some? But if the supply is limited, we
most firmly declare it now in advance to be ours alone." 

"Do you know, Nifft," Sha'Urley said, "leaving aside questions of claim
and title, don't you feel it's a bit churlish, a bit knavish, a bit
villainous of you not to grant me even a little of the Unguent, if only in
affectionate acknowledgement of the intimacies we have shared?" 

"Let the heavens witness that I cherish those joys as you do, my dear!" I
protested. "But you are over-wrought. What assurance do we have of the
Unguent's reality? And supposing it real, well, to speak plainly, there is
a kind of fever that thieves are prone to-perhaps never experienced by
persons of business like yourself-and this is the fever of concupiscence.
Barnar and I, dear Sha'Urley, are in its throes. The augmentation of our
personal gain is our obsession and all-mastering aim." 

"Your charming frankness disarms me," she answered with a little bow and a
cool smile. "I accept your terms because I must. As for lacking your
protection, I can bear it. I do not wear this sword of mine for ornament
alone. Brother? Partner Costard? Are we of one will in this?" 

They were, though one wouldn't say they looked blithe about it. And what
shame in this? Who lightly undertakes a journey into the subworld? 

"Look there," piped Ostrogall, "where they bear another Scion to the
Queen!" 

Her clawed feet plucked the air, as her sister's had. Her wings twitched
in the grip of her bearers-did she dream she was airborne? Leading her
legions on their sweep of plunder to fuel the digging of a new Nest in the
hell-wall? More awesome than this princess' size-and she might have
plucked a town aloft and carried it away-was the limitless fecundity that
could fashion such as she and, on a regal whim, swallow her up again. She
drifted in her dreamy struggle till she lay beneath her mighty Mother's
jaws. 

The Queen's inspection, as before, was long protracted. With little
movements of Her mouthparts, She seemed to feed upon Her offspring's aura.
Then slowly, slowly, She brought down Her jaws and touched them to the
infant's lesser mouth, sustaining for a trembling time a contact not
unlike a kiss. 

"She is chosen!" cried Ostrogall, his voice a croon of tender terror.
"Chosen! She now imbibes the Mother's all-empowering regurgitation. She
will be sequestered in a Royal chamber, and her growth to her full flying
size will be swift. In not a score of days, flanked by royal consorts
winged like herself, she and her army will stream from the Nest and
scourge a path of conquest through my world, till they are fed to
readiness, and she has mated. Then will they go to ground, and another
Nest of Death be planted in my homeland. Oh my embattled nation! Woe to my
fatherland, fair to behold!" 

The coronation of her Mother's kiss complete, the Royal
Princess-unstruggling now, as if sated or sleepy-was borne out. "Quick!" I
cried, and Barnar in the same breath cried, "Let's see where they take
her!" Thus did our ambitious thoughts leap perfectly together, for my
friend and I had, in the same heartbeat, imagined the incalculable loot to
be had by anyone who followed the wake of a conquering army of Behemoths
through the subworld. What resistance could be left standing? What riches,
unregarded by the giants, would not lie spilt from their shattered
coffers, shining all unguarded? 

"Peace!" intoned the knowing demonstump. "I understand your urgency to be
on hand when she sallies forth upon her Nesting Flight. But be at ease, my
benevolent masters! All royal Incubaria lie close at hand here to the
Brood Chamber. She may easily be found again, and followed, when you come
back . . . on the wing." 

"Well then," I said. "It seems we are all bound to the same place now. Is
there any reason we should not be on our way?" 

XVI 

Heliomphalodon Incarnadine 

Did crave to clutch the splendor of the sun. . . . 

NEAR THE NEST-MOUTH, we knew, the light of the subworld discolored the
light of the tunnels. This was our greatest fear through that long
downward journey. Through the dodging, and dashing, and diving for cover,
it came back to us, and haunted our talk when we rested. Would our orange
hue, outside the blue gloom of the Nest, remain invisible to Behemoth
eyes? Going out astride our Forager, Barnar and I had invisibility by our
position. Down on the tunnel floor, where every Behemoth eye bent
automatic scrutiny for parasites, would our cloaks of dye still conceal
us? Before we must worry about finding cover in the demonrealm, we must
worry about managing to exit the Nest at all. 

We had a full "day" of trekking behind us, and a bone-tired sleep in a
cramped crevice, and almost another day again of the quick-march (to judge
by the weariness in our muscles) when, as we crouched together for a rest,
Barnar said, "There's no doubt we're near. You can smell it, can't you?" 

For the Nest-smell, though rank in places, was a vital fetor, an oven
aroma of life a-rising; the poisoned carrion scent of the demon-realm came
coldly twisting through this womb-smell like a venemous reptile. 

So we trotted the last leg of our descent with a fated, falling feeling,
that hollow-gutted sensation of knowing you're launched, a loosed arrow. 

We passed a turning, and there was the atrium, thunderous with traffic,
awash with purple light, and windowed at its far end by the Nest-mouth
raggedly framing the blood-red void of the demon-realm beyond. 

"Can you run all-out? A half mile and more?" I asked the Bunts and
Costard. The three of them were in the condition to be expected: eyes
glazed with weariness, blistered and breathing hard. They nodded gamely,
even soft Ha'Awley, but still I silently cursed them. They must surely die
on us! Because-Cauldron scald them!-Barnar and I were damned if we'd let
them slow us up by even one stride! "Hold close to the wall then," I
gritted, "have a scent flask in hand, and run!" 

The downward pitch was helpful, and the terror like a wave that lifts you
from behind. From the giants that rushed towering by us too there came a
kind of impetus, as if the gust of their passage pulled us along. Even so
we slogged through the wine-red air as if submerged, our limbs and lungs
fighting the drag of a thickening dread. I couldn't believe we ran unseen,
though the Behemoths rushed past unheeding, high knees pumping. 

"Faster! Nearly there!" I looked back to bellow-and saw a Digger,
overtaking us with her jaws full of tailings, suddenly drop her burden and
tilt an alert eyeglobe at Bunt and Sha'Urley, who were bringing up our
rear. 

Horror thrilled me, stopped me, spun me round. The Bunts still owed us a
fiftyweight of specie, and should we lose the pair of them, there was no
hope of extracting the sum from feckless Costard. Doubling back, I
bellowed "Faster! Faster!" and, meeting the Digger, I flung my flask of
brood-scent. It burst between her eyes, as I doubled round yet again, and
sprinted for my life after the others. 

The Digger thundered after me, her jaws thrust almost to my back (I dared
not turn, but felt the whelm of air their hugeness shoved before them) and
then a mighty scuffling resounded behind me and I pelted on unseized. 

Just short of the Nest-mouth's threshold, I dared to look back. Two
Foragers had lifted the struggling Digger in their jaws. Almost comic was
the labor that she gave them, herself not far inferior to a Forager in
size. But the Foragers' strength prevailed as, staggeringly, they carried
her up-tunnel, returning (as the scent persuaded them) a strayed babe to
the safety of its nursery. 

Out the Nest-mouth we leapt, and slid down the steep pitch of the
hell-wall. For a short eternity the stone ate us alive. And then, as
Ostrogall had promised, a fissure, transecting our descent, stopped our
plunge. 

It was just deep enough to hunker down in, and it deepened as we followed
it downslope. At length we could crouch and catch our breath. The Foragers
pouring out of the Nest overstrode us, their hard claws loud against the
stone. I lifted Ostrogall from his holster on my hip, so that we might
speak eye-to-eyes. 

"Thus far, you prove a faithful guide, oh Fractional Demon. We urge you to
remain so-else you suffer swift incineration." 

"Ineffable benefactor! My adoration and my gratitude aside, you remain
indispensable to my humble survival! I must be planted in some safe
recess. Repose yourselves in my complete devotion. Press on, and trust
those measures I've described." 

There was nothing else to do, of course. The seam, as it descended to the
plain, grew into an arroyo of moderate depth, which wound away as far as
we could see. While it sank us below the line of sight of errant Foragers,
this arroyo was no haven, for demon lair-mouths, gates, hatches and
doorways honeycombed its walls. Yet Ostrogall had suggested a
countermeasure, and we implemented it at once. 

Every tapper's equipage included jacks of brood-scent. From one of his,
Barnar wetted a clout-tipped knout he had prepared for the purpose.
Bearing this scented cudgel aloft like a flameless torch, he walked in the
lead down the arroyo, while we followed, arms at the ready. 

This scent-torch, while to an adult Behemoth it signified specifically the
presence of a misplaced egg or larva, to be hastily returned to safety,
signified to demonkind nothing so specific. To demons it simply declared
the nearness of one of their devourers. And the hellspawn's sensitivity to
the scent proved quite extreme, with the result that Barnar's flameless
brand thrust, as it were, a phantom Behemoth before us, an invisible
vanguard, as we advanced. Far ahead down the defile, the invisible,
olfactory Behemoth awoke panic in the laired demons who might have hunted
us. Far ahead we saw vague, busy movement in the ruddy gloom. We heard the
boom of distant hatchways slammed shut and secured, and as we advanced,
long stretches of emptiness received us, where we found every portal
sealed up tight against our coming. 

Our ploy's danger was that the brood-scent summoned an occasional Forager
from her quest for food. But these randomly attracted few were always
announced by the noise and tremor of their tread. Barnar then only had to
fling the torch from the ravine. We would take cover, the Forager would
solicitously rush back Nestwards with its minute wooden foundling, and we
would anoint another knout and resume the ploy. 

Here and there were things that eyed us before nosing us, especially
airborne things. Harpies of a huger, more wolfish make than our late
assistant swooped shrieking down on us. I swung Ready Jack in great,
whistling circles, while Barnar's axe and Sha'Urley's surprisingly deft
broadsword wrought equal havoc. That stalwart young woman, when it came to
a stand-and-fight, made a very good account of herself. She swung powerful
two-handed overhead eights, in the Jarkeladd nomads' style, and our
attackers' lopped talons danced clattering down around her in showers of
smoking blood; these stubborn claws still clutched at our feet when their
shorn possessors had winged shrieking off. 

Long and far we travelled this ravine. We slept, and woke, and travelled
long and far again, till once more we most sorely craved our rest. Once
more we found a recess in the ravine wall, and stretched out our leaden
limbs. 

Even the sour wine of the Supreme Sap Mine's rations glowed on our palates
like the most exquisite vintage, such was our weary loathing of this
place, and our craving for all things born beneath the sun. Barnar and I
gave the others first sleep, and they dropped straight into it. 

"The approach to the Unguent of Flight seems relatively easy," I said to
Ostrogall. "Even, I mean, considering this admirable evasion of the
brood-scent you have so cunningly suggested." 

An evasive ripple moved through the jewelry of the demon's eyes. "The
approach to Unguent," Ostrogall conceded, "does, as it happens, present
few dangers from my kind-at least since the spread of Behemoth into this
region. But the tunnels down to the Talons of 'Omphalodon-for I may tell
you now that the Talons of Heliomphalodon Incarnadine are the source of
the Unguent-the Talons of 'Omphalodon themselves are guarded by demons
from the Second Subworld." 

We bent our most menacing scowls on him at hearing this, and the demon
hastily bleated, "Access to the Unguent is readily obtainable from the
Secondaries, oh Luminous Masters! They merely require a toll, you see,
from suitors for that treasure. And while I confess I don't know precisely
what this toll is, it is at least absolutely certain that one may pay this
toll, and still live!" 

Barnar nodded thoughtfully. "Yet this is far," he said, "from assuring us
that this toll is slight enough to pay. Perhaps, good Ostrogall, you
should now share with us all that you know regarding the Unguent of
Flight." 

"I assent wholeheartedly! The matter lies thus: Less than an eon past,
Heliomphaladon Incarnadine, a demon of the Tertiary Subworld, was
enkindled by myths and legends of the sun sufficiently to covet that
world-bathing orb for his own. 'Omphalodon reasoned that the sun's
radiance, once seized and brought below by a greatsouled act of daring,
would melt away the binding spells and thaumaturgic toils that chained his
giant nation within the planet's bowels. His folly was his faith that the
sun, once had by daring raid, would enlighten and liberate his baneful,
chthonian breed-would free them to do their awful will abroad upon the
earth, and possess the planet entirely and forever. 

"The demon knew, of course, the fate of his great compatriot Sazmazm (see
Shag Margold's Second Interjection) and knew that his Tertiary dungeon was
direful hard to rise from. Nonetheless, the lure of heroism, of one great
shining deed that blazons forth one's being to the ages, still held
'Omphalodon's huge heart fast in thrall. 

"All the Tertiary Ceiling's natural portals have been long eons sealed,
but 'Omphalodon reasoned that a cunning egress might be found by a bold
drive straight up through the lithic world-bone itself-by brute
penetration of the superincumbent subworlds' floors and ceilings. He
devised, with long and cunning brood-time, a balm which, once it bathed
his limbs and his extremities, would imbue them with a melting energy,
that he might swim through leagues of primal stone as liquid-easy as an
eel through water. 

"Wild was the will, ancient the art, and unbounded the bravery, of
Heliomphalodon Incarnadine! When he broke sunwards in his daring surge, he
veritably soared through solid stone, breaching the floor of the Secondary
Subworld, and plunging upwards through its massy vault. 

"But here alas, his furious energies bogged down, snared in the sinewy
nets of Sorcery that Wizardkind have knit so deeply in your over-world's
foundations. So utterly, however, did 'Omphalodon's will imbue his every
part, that these sorcerous detentions sundered him, and fragments of him
mounted higher than the rest, before they in their turn were snared by
stasis. His sun-craving eye, lofted by most fierce desire, was embedded in
yonder vault, and became itself a kind of sun to this region of our world.
And one clutch of his Talons reached almost all the way up through our
floor. This grim paw of his, now frozen in the stone just under us, is
still besmeared, of course, with his levitative ointment, whose
stone-spurning virtues lend, in upper air, the power to stride the sky.
This, of course, is what the world has come to call the Unguent of Flight.

"My kind, you may be sure, were quick to dig down to it. Secondary demons,
however, were nearly as quick to come up and usurp our diggings. And,
while it may be contended that 'Omphalodon's Talons lie as much in our
floor as they do in the lower world's ceiling, we have always found that
when dispute occurs between us, our deeper cousins oftenest prevail." 

We weighed Ostrogall's words through a long silence, in which we heard a
distant, ragged noise of war, the ethereal chirring and shrilling of demon
rage and death-cry. We became aware that, if we clambered to the top of
our ravine, yet another embattled fortress would be visible far off. 

"Your knowledge of this," Barnar said at length, "is so thorough,
Ostrogall! Your vagueness as regards the nature of the toll stands in
strange contrast with such detailed sapience." 

"It also troubles me," I put in, "that you assured us that our journey to
the Unguent would be relatively brief." 

"Why, so it has been, Effulgent One!" fluted the Demonstump. "We are as
good as arrived already. Let us climb above and I will show you!" 

And so we climbed up to the rim of the ravine. From here we saw the source
of the noise we'd heard-a far, embattled fortress, as we'd thought. But
Ostrogall, with a tilting of his head, said, "Look that way, along the
line our ravine runs. Do you see that high ground there?" 

"Can you mean that low hill yonder?" I asked. 

"Not hill, but bulge," the demon said, "born of the upthrust of the
giant's Talons, which were stone-frozen just underneath it an eon ago." 

Though it was surely wisdom to doubt our demon's every word, I will
confess a thrill went through me, to think what might lie just beneath
that hill, and what power we might be soon to borrow from it. 

Barnar took watch to give me first sleep, but when I snapped awake (after
who knows how long?) he lay snoring like the rest. Ostrogall-that spheroid
of glittery eyes-had been our guard. Perhaps he had as much to fear from
his countrymen as we had. 

XVII 

. . . Nor take no more than is alloted you, 

Else huge Convulsions, and your deaths, ensue. 

THERE WAS no need to mount even briefly to the open plain. As we neared
the low hill capping 'Omphalodon's stone-pent Talons, a shallow defile
branched off from our ravine. We followed this a quarter mile or so,
arrived at the flank of the hill, and thus quickly confronted one of the
portals to those talons. 

More precisely, we confronted what filled the portal-filled it utterly,
and bulged forth from it. 

This Tolltaker, or at least that portion of one here presented to our
view, was like nothing so much as a giant bud, whose tight-clenched petals
were of a viscid, purplish meat that smelled like sun-cooked carrion. It
lay as still as carrion too, until Ostrogall, startling me, gave utterance
to a shrill ululation, apparently a greeting in some demon-speech. 

At this, the bud delicately shivered. One of its petals stirred, and
extruded from the rest like a great, reeking tongue. Embedded within was a
ratlike demon-more like a captive than an anatomical feature, for it was
netted to the tongue by purple veins that pierced and pinioned it. It
opened a whiskered, edentulous maw and emitted an unearthly warble that
answered Ostrogall's in pitch and cadence. 

With an instant impulse of distrust, I slipped the carrying bag over
Ostrogall's head, crying, "Silence, stump! We are the seekers here! Make
known to us, oh Tolltaker, what we must do to partake of the Unguent of
Flight." Assuming that this demon was tongued for human speech, as
Ostrogall was, I was unprepared for the Secondary's readiness to meet all
comers. The entire petal retracted, re-entombing the embedded demon, and
another petal thrust forth. 

Beside me, Sha'Urley gasped. Perhaps we all did. A beautiful young woman
lay half sunk in this demon tongue, likewise netted in a piercing mesh of
veins. The pallor of her face, her lovely breasts, had a womb-licked
wetness, a natal sheen. I think the most piercing horror of this epiphany
was her eyes, all dark and lustrous, knowing us, a living mind behind
them, yet long centuries vacant of all hope. Her voice was an echo in an
empty habitation: 

"Each seeker's toll," she hollowly pronounced, "is one of his limbs. You
are five, and might alternatively render one of your number entire, to pay
for the other four." Now another of the Secondary's petals protruded-this
one the lowest of the cluster. It split open, presenting us a steamy,
fanged mouth that drizzled caustic drool. Evidently it was to this
esurient orifice the owed limbs were to be tendered. 

The proposition took us several stunned heartbeats to digest. I answered
her. "You err, oh fair and luckless captive! We are six. And this demon
here, though he lack a limb or two, is all entire of mind and wit. The
life of him, the nasty devious will of him, the gist of him is quite
intact. What if we render him? Surely he would pay for all of us? Or pay
for my partner and me, at least?" 

"His wholeness of mind is of slight import to my master," she intoned. "He
is a head, no more. He would pay for one." 

I had expected little more; meanwhile my offer outraged our companions,
and woke a bag-muffled wail from Ostrogall. "Peace, all of you!" I cried.
"One must test one's ground!" 

Barnar leaned near me. What he murmured in my ear was purest inspiration.
I beamed. I gripped his hand. Again I addressed our tragic interpreter,
while Barnar whispered to our companions, taking something from each of
them. 

"Unhappy young woman!" I said. "I herewith make it known to your possessor
that its hellish inflexibility awakes my wrath. I have determined to slay
your master, and pay no toll at all!" 

"My master hears you with indifference," she emptily reported. 

"Well, we shall see," I huffed, unlimbering the quiver of throwing-steel
I'd brought. This comprised four in-close javelins, heavy-butted for
thrusting weight, and four spears, three-quarter hafted for carrying, with
the plume-shaped head I like for penetration and the short bronze neck for
resilience on impact that lets a rightly-thrown stick snake its way deeper
into tough spots. I hoisted and hefted a javelin, making a great show of
adjusting my throwing stance. Meanwhile Barnar and Ha'Awley
inconspicuously retired to where they could climb the defile's opposite
walls and, unseen, re-approach the Tolltaker along higher ground. There
they would deploy a weapon of their own. 

"By all the powers, beautiful one!" It was Sha'Urley, just behind me-and
by her tender tone I knew she did not speak merely to assist our
distraction of the Tolltaker, but rather spoke outright from her heart.
"Who are you? Ah my poor sister! How came you to this vile durance?" 

This in some measure seemed to stun the beauteous thrall of the
puppeteering demon. Her startled eyes seemed to stare into wastes of time
we could not know, as if, in melancholy horror, she only now remembered
she had had a name, a native home, a soul. . . . 

"I was Niasynth . . ." she said, wonderingly. "I was born in Saradown of
world-wide fame for ships, and sailing folk. . . ." 

"Alas, poor fair one," Sha'Urley breathed. Were those tears in her eyes?
"It is a name unknown to me." 

"I came to the infamous port of Bawd, renowned for decadence. . . . I lay
with a handsome stranger, who drugged me and sold me to a demon-broker . .
." 

"Fair sufferer!" I cried, "your liberation is at hand!" I knew as I spoke
that I lied, unless her likely death were liberation. I pitched the
javelin mightily. It slipped through the tiny aperture of the bud where
the petalpoints met, vanishing utterly, waking scarce a tremor from that
mountainous demonmeat. 

"My master bids me mock the paltriness of your power to do it harm,"
Niasynth emptily intoned. 

"Indeed!" I raged, hefting now a spear. Now Barnar and Ha'Awley had crept
into view above, and at opposite sides of, the defile. "Make known to that
heap of reeking meat," I raged, "that I herewith repay its callous
tyrannies!" I gave my spear-cast a goodly wind-up dance, to allow my
friends to coincide their assault precisely with what slight distraction
my weapon's impact might afford, lest the Tolltaker detect their weapon's
approach. 

I sank my shaft near all its length straight down the throat of the jaws
the demon had thrust out to take our toll. The jaws engulfed the shaft
without a tremor, but simultaneously my colleagues squeezed out the whole
contents of four full flasks of brood-scent on the demon's dorsal surface.

I waited through several heartbeats, strung tight, expecting the demon's
surge of panic at the whelm of Behemoth-scent, and sudden withdrawal.
Surely so powerful a gust of spoor, coming from above and behind, must
throw the demon into an upheaval of escape. It did not even stir. Though
it were a secondary demon, how could it be indifferent to Behemoth's
scent? 

Here came Bunt and Barnar tumbling pell-mell back into the ravine. At a
loss, I began deploying a third cast, with further declamations of wrath
and resolution. But I had scarce cocked to throw when I sensed a fleet
approaching tremor in the ground. I flung my spear to work what last
diversion it could, and dove to hug the ground. From overhead, huge jaws
thrust down into the defile, and seized the demon just where its
blubberous mass sprouted from the stone. 

In the instant of seizure the Forager's aim had merely been to lift and
bear away what she had taken for a misplaced infant. But the furious power
of the demon's reaction quickly galvanized her to an answering rage.
Undoubtedly some taste of demonmeat-for the Tolltaker wounded itself with
its struggles-counteracted the delusion of the brood-scent. The hungry
Forager pulled mightily, her clawed feet shrieking on the stone. Three
rods of writhing demon was hauled twisting from its shaft. Incredibly,
such seemed its subworld strength, it balked at further extraction,
despite the Forager's mightiest pullings. 

And then a second Forager came pistoning up the draw, and added its jaws
to the demon's uprooting. More heaving, bucking demon-thew came out. 

A third Forager loomed above. We fled the ravine and found more distant
cover, while vast jaws tore, demon-blood sprayed, and the vermiform
Tolltaker writhed and thrashed and hammered the stone with its
ever-diminishing bulk. Did luck not love us? How we had blundered to
success! 

Soon, crops full, our huge assistants sped away. Returning up the ravine,
we found it sprayed with purple gore and littered with torn flesh-and
found the tunnelmouth open and unguarded. 

"Look there!" Sha'Urley cried. "Niasynth lives!" 

If live she did, it could not be for long. Poor demon-thrall, poor human
puppet! Though the slab of hellmeat she was bound to had indeed fallen
clear of the Foragers' feast, it had bled out a purple pond already, and
it seemed that she, too, dwindled with the bleeding. Sha'Urley, kneeling
by her, began with her sword's edge to shave the demon tissue from
Niasynth, though still that beauteous thrall bled her own blood from the
stubs of sundered demon veins that pierced her everywhere. Her voice came
dreamy with her waning strength: 

"Thanks, dear sister, but I die apace. Hear me, earthfellows. Each of you
may scrape off of 'Omphalodon's uncovered flesh no more Unguent than will
fill one of the bowls you will find within the shaft. Should any one take
more, it will be known. The Secondaries' spells enmesh the Talons. Huge
convulsions, and your deaths, will follow any act of greedy excess by any
one of you. One bowl each, no more. With all my heart I thank you for this
death's sweet . . . sweet . . . deliverance." 

"We too rejoice for you. Away then!" I cried. 

"First help me!" Sha'Urley urged. "I think she may be saved!" 

"Alas, fond hope!" I cried. Already my whole spirit was below, in a
rapture of near-achieved delight. The four of us plunged into the
shaft-mouth, while still Sha'Urley knelt by bleeding Niasynth, plying her
swordblade with surgical tenderness. 

An antechamber received us, where the light of torches socketed in the
wall mixed with dim, vinous light leaking down from the subworld above.
Here where his eyes might help, and his treacheries could no longer
hinder, I unhooded Ostrogall. "Please, gentlemen!" he cried, "Take her
admonition firm to heart! For the least excess in harvest of the Unguent
will be known. And such is the savage rigor of the Secondaries' spirit
that they have provided for these tunnels' ruin, sooner than bear
pilferage past what they prescribe!" 

Half-hearkening, we scanned an inscription chiselled in the wall, above a
heap of carven stone bowls. These lines of High Archaic were known to us.
Their best-known description is found in Finnik of Minuskulon's Iambical
Ditties: 

Heliomphaladon Incarnadine 

Sunken in his Dark did long repine, 

And craved to clutch the splendor of the sun 

Whose glow and grandeur, legended in lore, 

The mighty demon ne'er laid eye upon, 

Mured as he was in his Third Subworld lair. 

Crouched where fang-tormented myriad moan 

And Universe is but a rumored light, 

The demon gnawed Forever like a bone 

Whilst solar phantoms scorched his murky sight, 

Till was more real this storied star to him 

Than were his world's inexorable walls. 

His molten hands did through the 

world-bone swim. . . . 

Now behold where all disjoint he sprawls! 

On sunless hell his eye forever shines, 

Heliomphalodon Incarnadine. 

I hefted one of the bowls. It was capacious enough, perhaps, if one but
knew the concentration of the Unguent's power. I could not repress the
thought, however, that it would not hold half the capacity of one of the
leathern jars that we had brought to bear our harvest away in. Perhaps
Ostrogall sensed my disappointment, for he elaborated: 

"The Secondaries, oh Luminous Masters, have involved the Talons in trigger
spells. Take but an iota of excess and the Talons are fractionally
released from the detaining sorcery ensnaring them. They surge upward. All
this tunnelwork meets grinding annihilation in one claw-twitch. Believe
me, none in all this time, not even the grimmest of my own compatriots,
has ever dared to flout this iron limit. Should even one of us let greed
over-rule him here, we all shall die together." 

The four of us nodded solemnly at one another. "Well, then," Barnar said,
scanning the several tunnels that branched from this chamber, "Nifft and I
will take this way, you two that one, and the first to find our quarry can
halloo the others." 

As Costard's and Bunt's torches dwindled down the central shaft, we took
the leftward one. We began going at a jog-trot, the pair of us moved by a
wordless accord-Barnar, I am sure, mutely assessing distances and times,
as I was. 

Cut by demon art, the shaft walls had a melted smoothness, and were amply
diametered to allow much larger beings than ourselves an easy passage. Our
going down, though somewhat steep, was neither difficult, nor long. 

The cavernous gallery we shortly came to was vaulted so high that our
torchlight could not show us its upper reaches. And one entire wall of it
was a glittery expanse of ophidian scales. 

Barnar and I had once stood before the naked hugeness of everted Sazmazm.
It may be that this stone-bound 'Omphalodon was a being less immense, but
in the wholeness, the intact design of this grasping limb of his, there
was an equal awe. Above, at the ragged limit of our torchlight, we
discerned a seam in the scaly fabric, just such a fold as one's palm shows
where it articulates. Fossiled in its sunward reach, this grasping
extremity was the brute embodiment of the great demon's will; the very
shape of his ambition loomed above us. Terror and exaltation filled us
equally, as did simultaneous inspiration. "Let's try it out!" we cried,
almost together. 

"What must we do?" I asked Ostrogall. 

"Besmear your hands and bootsoles. And please remember that this
application must be deducted from your alloted bowl-ful." 

Perhaps we feared the giant would feel, and move in answer to, our touch,
for almost cringingly did we stroke our palms adown the waxy sheen that
lacquered all its scales. But these scales were dense and hard as stone;
ourselves it was who shuddered at the contact. 

In our reaching downward to besmear our bootsoles, the Unguent's power was
revealed to us, for the downthrust of our hands lifted us half a fathom
off the ground. 

"Without exertion of your conscious will to move earthward," Ostrogall
told us, "your almost every movement spurns the ground beneath, and lifts
you." 

Our feet anointed, yelping and laughing with discovery like boys, arms and
legs dogpaddling, we climbed into the torchlit gloom of the cavern. What
fierce, rare joy it was! We quickly learned a swimming motion that drove
us with increasing accuracy wherever we listed. "Let's try the tunnel, for
speed," I cried. Were we preparing for what followed? I cannot think so-it
did not seem so. We found we could swim up the tunnel we had come down
much faster than either of us could run it. 

Lust to possess this power in quantity soon turned our flight back down
toward the cavern. The trick of swimming groundwards we brought off with
some few bruises, discovering that we must will the specific rate of
descent as well as the mere direction. Now, bowls ready, facing the scaly
wall . . . we paused. 

"You know, Barnar," I said, "what would be simpler for the Secondaries
than to post a rumor of dire consequences? What could be easier than, by
mere rumor, to minimize the taking of all seekers here, and thus prolong
the cannibal profit of those same Secondaries' enterprise?" 

"The very notion gnaws my thoughts as well!" my friend exclaimed. 

Ostrogall's sharp bleat of protest was muffled when I sheathed him in his
bag. "I'll be completely frank with you, Barnar," I went on. "I feel a
powerful, unshakeable conviction that we are safe to fill our jars
completely with this glorious ointment. How unlikely it is, after all,
that the Secondaries would actually annihilate this huge source of profit,
in punishment of pilferage!" 

Barnar nodded vigorously, eyes shining. "You speak my very mind and heart,
old friend! I will say more. I will tell you that in this inexplicable yet
all-compelling conviction that I share with you, in this I recognize one
of those moments of truth given to all men, one of those life-altering
gambles that the soul must make to lift itself to greater destiny than was
at first ordained it!" 

Ostrogall grew shrill in his pouch, and I cried him, "Peace, thou hellish
fragment! You have yourself allowed that none have dared to try this
vaunted limit! It is a threat, no more, a bugbear whose sole potency lies
in that none have ventured to assay it! Now be mute, or die herewith!" 

Perhaps some half conscious vestige of caution led Barnar and me to trade
a look, then swiftly act in tandem, abbreviating as fully as might be the
act of harvesting the Unguent. With shaving sweeps of our swords' edges,
we scraped off bladefuls of the waxen goo, and these in turn we scraped
off into our jars. Twice, thrice . . . four sweeps, and we had filled and
stoppered these containers, sheathed our blades, snatched up our torches,
and swum into the air towards the tunnel we'd come down by. 

This spontaneous haste of our departure proved fortunate. Almost at once,
the vaulted stone entombing us groaned, and cracked, and hugely shuddered.
A ripple of movement passed along the scaly wall of demonskin. 

Madly we swam the air up-tunnel, bellowing, "Bunt! Costard! Make for the
surface!" These shouts evinced more fellow-feeling than common sense, for
the shriek of splintering stone, and the clamor of flying shards through
which we flew, must render needless such verbal warnings. 

Our tunnel collapsed behind us as we flew into the antechamber, and the
gust of air it squeezed out after us set us tumbling, our torches blown
out like candles. Here came Bunt and Costard sprawling out of their own
tunnel, likewise collapsing behind them, as even now the antechamber
shuddered and heaved and spilled out towering fragments from its riven
walls in colossal slow collapse around us. We swooped towards the fallen
pair. Their dropped bowls of Unguent skittered away across the convulsing
floor as we seized them one-handed by their belts-I Costard, Barnar
Bunt-and swam one-handed with them for the entryway. 

Our flight proved only slightly hampered by the burden of our companions.
We arrowed still quicker than a man might sprint on firm ground, which was
far faster than any man might actually run across that heaving, buckling
stone. 

Yet the "O" of the entryway was still far, too far to reach. Then the
gallery's roof and walls and floor heaved violently together like a
clenching fist. Again a surge of squeezed-out air accelerated us-shot us
wheeling out the collapsing entry, as a dart is powered from a blowpipe's
muzzle. 

Ahead, across the dancing subworld floor, Sha'Urley had got clear a
hundred strides or so, though she labored with the slack and blood-bright
shape of Niasynth across her shoulder. 

"Get a grip on them as we swoop near!" I shouted at Bunt and Costard. With
both their hands free, they got a firm though awkward hold on the
struggling women, and we had all four of them aloft. We swam one-handed
through the ruddy air, and dared to glance back. We saw the accursed hill
of stone erupt, spraying wheeling boulders through the subworld sky. 

Four black, titanic Talons sprouted from the subworld floor. Shedding
stone, they thrust up, and up, and up-reached near a third the distance to
the stony sky. There, though rooted at the wrist, they stirred and swayed,
free, after an eon's burial, to move once more. 

And it seemed the great star-pupiled eye, bloody sun to this fiendish
domain, beheld with grieving joy this fragment of its former self,
resurgent in its captive sight. 

XVIII 

Reach up thy claw! 

To rise one world is given. 

Live still in woe, 

Still one stone sky from heaven. 

"THUS," SHA'URLEY TOLD US. "Pluck them sharp like roots . . . see how her
flesh heals whole and scarless where I've pulled them out?" 

We had laid Niasynth in a recess of the ravine wall, having retreated some
few miles from the Talons. These Talons of 'Omphalodon filled half our
sky, sluggishly clawing the air, as if still disbelievingly testing their
disinterment. The Unguent of Flight, for any others who might now come
seeking it, must be a prize obtained more through a mountain climber's
than a spelunker's skills. 

The sundered network of demon veins that pierced Niasynth's body dribbled
her own bright human blood until we plucked them out. We all worked
intently at this, while Sha'Urley, with her poignard's edge, tenderly
shaved off the last slabs of demonmeat from the young captive's limbs. As
the Secondary's putrid substance fell away, Niasynth's skin, though still
drawn and pale, resumed a youthful luster, a glow it must have worn long
centuries gone when she was taken. Thus she resumed a beauty destined to
be dust in ages past, but for the nefandous immortality that had engulfed
it here, time out of mind. At length, her groanings done, her brow
unknotted, clean and whole, she slept. 

We moved away from her, as present business brought the five of us all eye
to eye. Bunt had evidently prepared some grave remonstration, but Costard,
forestalling him, bleated out, "Uncle Barnar, by the Crack, how could
you?"-his very voice cracking on the question. 

Barnar and I did trade-I do confess-one quick look that weighed denial.
But we chose in the end a manly frankness. I showed Costard a condolent
smile, and thwacked his shoulder. "We took a gamble, and lost." 

"You took a gamble, and we lost our Unguent of Flight!" The petulant young
dolt seemed really to be losing his voice, so badly was it breaking, his
little ferret's eyes fairly popping under his low-slung brows. "You two
came flying out! You can hardly keep on the ground right now!" 

"It's hard getting the knack of willing oneself down, Nephew," Barnar
explained to him. "With our extremities anointed, most casual movements
act to thrust us aloft. We are just now learning to think ourselves
steadily aground without being wholly occupied with the thinking." 

"Let's just come to the point," urged Sha'Urley, managing a fairly
friendly smile. "It's pretty plain you've come out packing a gluttonous
excess of the Unguent-whence else the catastrophe? Whence that?" 

She swept her hand towards the towering Talons. And just then, as we
looked, three Foragers swarmed up one of 'Omphalodon's digits. We saw the
flash of their comparatively tiny jaws, saw little bright rills of the
demon's blood-and then saw what we might have expected, but were stunned
to view: the Foragers swam, legs flailing, into the air. 

Airborne, a madness seized them-nothing in their nature prepared them for
this. Their legs pumped wildly and they careened away into the ruby gloom,
their frenzy for the solid ground lofting them ever higher. Yet even as we
watched, a dozen more Foragers converged on the Talons, drawn perhaps by
the smell of 'Omphalodon's blood. Of these, some two or three-treading
where the demon flesh was torn or washed with gore-maintained their
footing, and fed. Meanwhile, we saw in the widespread flux of
Behemoths-formerly converging toward the distant fortress-a rippling
directional change towards a new cynosure: the Talons of 'Omphalodon. 

Awesome though this spectacle was, narrow questions of property very soon
re-engrossed our companions. "The only real question here, then," resumed
Sha'Urley, "is will you, or will you not, give the three of us some
Unguent, we whose shares of it your greed foreclosed?" 

"Can we properly speak of 'shares,' " I asked, "of something whose having
lies wholly in the chance of the taking? You, for instance, were detained
not by us, but by-most creditably, to be sure!-young Niasynth in her
extremity. Meanwhile, the esteemed Ha'Awley, and young Costard here, were
prevented of their so-called shares by their failure to keep their
footing, and their Unguent, when the ground became unsteady. As you will
readily grant, we did everything we could to aid you during that upheaval,
but to put it bluntly, it is the first rule of adventuring that each man
must look to his own take." 

Costard had more squawking to do, and the Bunts, both of them, had further
casuistries to propound. We remained firm, though it grew increasingly
difficult to remain civil at the same time. Scanning about me for some
relief, I saw the Talons' lower portions now all befurred with Foragers,
while the upper joints were beclouded with more Foragers in scrambling
flight. The immense digits flexed furiously, and flexed again, and we
could hear the faint splintery report of crushed Behemoths, whose
minuscule debris fell from the workings of those giant joints. But still
the flood of Foragers converged. I looked skywards. 

Did 'Omphalodon's blood-weeping Eye up there, moon of this lower place-did
his Eye move slightly? Scan more particularly this long-hid, new-born part
of himself? And weep the more to see it freed but partly, still one sky
lower than the sun-burnished heaven that was his ancient aim? 

"Enough, Costard," Sha'Urley cried-for only he still harangued us now.
"You deafen us all to no good! Is it not plain that our friends here would
sooner leap naked into flames than surrender the least tittle of their
takings?" She turned to me. "Do you know, Nifft, looking at you now, I
almost have to smile, even to laugh. . . ." And indeed, first she smiled,
and then she laughed-quite genuinely, it seemed. "You must forgive my
saying it," she added when she could, "but I see you there, such an
intense, crouched, piggish, greedy apparition at this moment, all
tightened up right down to your bunghole at the bare notion of letting one
tenth-pennyweight of your possession go!" 

"I'm a little saddened," was my moderate response, "that you deem this
crass turn of tongue to be warranted with me. I can only declare the
simple truth, that Barnar and I have acted at every step with the best
intentions toward yourselves. And we stand ready even now-that is, if we
fail not of your standards of transportation-to carry you all back to the
Nest's comparative safety. There awaits, after all, that first endeavor we
stand contracted for, and from which, I believe, you projected the only
profit that we engaged to bring you? For now, indeed, we plainly have
power to earn that further payment you stand sworn to, Ha'Awley? Eh? While
we stand dithering, the milking of the Royal Mother remains to do." 

This moved them, though it did not silence Costard, who cavilled as we
tied our climbing line into harnesses. "It's just so unthinkably unfair,
Uncles! You steal a piece of demon from my nursery, you use my property to
locate and obtain this marvellous Unguent, and then (ignoring for the
moment how you greedily ruined everybody else's takings) then you refuse-"

Here Barnar gently clamped the young man's mouth and the back of his head
between two huge, scarred hands. "Hear me now, Costard," he said with an
almost tender urgency. "You do not own the Nest. Once and for all, you own
only the shafts and hoses and pumps wherewith you rob the Nest. And had
you been presented with this piece of demon, you would not have thought to
make any use of it whatever. And had you learned from it of the Unguent,
you would never have survived the going after. And had you survived the
going after, would you have paid an arm or a leg to the Tolltaker? 

"So hear me now. If you speak a single word more-a single word!-I will set
you afoot and let you walk back by yourself as best you can."
Experimentally, he took his hand off Costard's mouth. At last, nothing
came out. 

We tied loops of line that the Bunts and Costard could sit in. For
Niasynth we tied a more complex harness that she might lie in. Her eyes
came open as we laid her in it. 

She took Sha'Urley's tenderly proferred sips of wine. At the feel of
terrestrial vintage in her throat, Niasynth's face convulsed as with a
painful sweetness. At the taste of the wine, her wondering gaze seemed to
remember earthly soil, and sky, and sun. Tears swelled and spilled from
her eyes. "Oh sweet powers, what have I become in this Eternity? Have I
not grown most loathsome to look on?" 

Sha'Urley leaned near her smiling. In truth, that comely Dolmenite had a
warm-hearted streak in her, whatever cross-grained tempers she might show.

"No, sweet Niasynth, you are lovely still. A lean and vulpine beauty's
yours, as though you'd not passed thirty summers' age. Drink more. Thus.
Now rest. You are with friends. You will go up and live under the sun once
more. . . ." 

I tied the men's two lines to the front of my belt, as Barnar did those of
the women to his. I stood aside a moment to unbag Ostrogall, and though
ill use and outrage flashed from his hundred dissimilar eyes, his speech
was flutes and hautboys once again. "Ineffable ones! We now may equally
rejoice, may we not? You to have the marvel I promised you, and I am to be
re-planted in my natal soil-in some suitable little streambed not far from
here, perhaps?" 

"We do rejoice, estimable demonstump!" I answered. "And we regard you with
the fondest gratitude. Up and away then, Barnar?" 

"Up and away with a will," Barnar cried. We had begun learning how to stay
aground by maintaining a half-conscious thought of doing so, a kind of
mental anchor in the earth that yet let us turn our thoughts elsewhere.
Now, with one swimming motion and a will to soar, we smoothly climbed up
through the wine-red gloom. We flew along the ravine, at perhaps a half a
furlong's altitude above it. 

"Please note, my Masters," Ostrogall quaveringly ventured, "how I've
served you. I've brought you here safe and enriched you, O my luminous
benefactors! Surely you would not dream of denying me the simple, easy
re-plantation I-" 

"Peace, Oh Fractional One!" I answered. "The fact is, Ostrogall, now that
it comes to the point of honoring our contract, we find an insuperable
revulsion arising in our hearts at the bare notion of doing anything to
prolong your execrable demon life for even one instant, now that we
securely possess the Unguent we craved, and can find our own unaided way
back to the Nest." 

"It is a deep instinctual loathing," Barnar elaborated, "of human for
demonkind. We find that we cannot, even with the best will in the world,
withstand its atavistic ferocity." 

"On the other hand," I added, "it seems unfair to inflict on you anything
other than your true fate, the one we saved you from. Therefore, in a
gesture of decency, and respectful acknowledgment of your honesty with us,
we will bear the labor of carrying you back to the Nursery, and the jaws
of your destined grub." 

I will confess that Barnar and I were not entirely without a certain
policy in saying what we did. The eye-studded demon seemed extremely
upset. His vocal oboe had a cracked reed. "I must say, oh most effulgent
Karkmahnite, most august Chilite-I must say, and of course I apologize
most abjectly for doing so, I must say that you-and I say it in all
cringing humility-that you take a really vile, verminous, villanous,
odious, shameful and despicable advantage of my relative powerlessness in
your hands. I say this with the profoundest and most reverent respect for
yourselves, of course." 

"Of course." I nodded as I swam, as though we were speaking face-to-face.
I was growing quite used to conversations with this monstrous eye-crusted
head that rode on my hip. "Nonetheless, I don't think I would be judged
over-villainous by anyone who studiously reflects on this question: What
could I rightfully be said to owe to the headpiece of a polyocular balloon
of demonslime like yourself, whose pestilent life I plucked from death's
jaws in the first place?" 

A Forager hurtled above us, mad legs milling the air. Far ahead of us, two
others plunged, describing long, flat parabolae toward the plain. Their
smattering of the Unguent, acquired by climbing up 'Omphalodon's palm,
dwindled in power, it seemed, with use. And indeed we ourselves could feel
a diminution of the lift engendered by each stroke of our hands and feet.
Though we carried a pair of adults apiece, and some fiftyweight of gems
each, the work of flight had been at first easier than swimming. Already
we felt that we breasted a more laborious medium, and were stroking harder
for the same buoyancy. 

"It would seem," Barnar offered, "that the Unguent is consumed
proportionably to the weight it bears." And with this discovery, it panged
me to the heart to think that we must surely dip into our precious store
of the marvellous ointment to finish our present journey. But I can report
with some well merited pride that I resisted the very powerful urge to set
our companions afoot and thereby conserve our treasure. We toiled on-and
more and more toilsome it grew-and at length we did indeed dip into our
treasured hoards, and re-anoint our hands and feet. 

Meanwhile Ostrogall had not fallen mute. "Only consider, venerated ones!"
he urged, "how I have produced for you that which I promised! Have I not
undeniably benefitted you? See how you fly! Consider what other treasures
you now have power to take unscathed! How, therefore, can you not feel
some shred of . . . let's not call it honor, let's call it simple equity?
Eh?" 

"We grant we are not unmindful of this perspective on the matter," Barnar
answered him. "But Nifft and I, you see, are simply overborn by a native
loathing for yourself-your very race of being! For instance, by way of
illustration, I would venture to hazard that the cycle of your life thus
far has been one unbroken sequence of the most appalling parasitisms and
loathsome plunderings of other beings. Please correct me if I err in
this." 

"Well," said the demon impatiently, "how else would I have reached
adulthood? The larval forms which bore my spores across the desert, these
tunnel to the forebrains of their hosts, and their little eyes feast as
directly upon their hosts' nightmares as do their little jaws upon their
hosts' cerebral tissues. Then too, my cercarial shapes for aqueous
transmission strip the host's spinal cord as they ascend it. The predators
that devour the emptied husks of these hosts engulf as well my nymphal
instars, and these eat those second hosts as well quite hollow, before we
fly out like thistledown across the wind and light upon our rooting
places. 

"But what of this, gentlemen? Surely all things that live and breathe are
entirely fed, shod, garbed and girded with the bodies of their many
victims? What being lives, down here or in the over-world, whose blood is
not the stolen sap of other lives?" 

"I grant," I said, "you say no more than truth. But, you see, you offer
mere reason to confute in us what is not reasoned, but is a brute,
unarguable revulsion. And yet, do you know . . . ? It now occurs to me
that this sullen and retrograde emotion of ours, though it can't be argued
with, might be appeased, might be bought off so to speak, if you could
think of some further service you could do that would increase our profit
from our sojourn here below." 

This produced, at last, a silence in my subworld side-piece. And indeed it
scarcely needed further talk to assure us Ostrogall's guidance would be
ours on our return to the Royal Chamber's awesome precincts. 

Now the terrain rose towards the mountain roots. We turned to take our
last look at 'Omphalodon's Talons. Even thus distant from them now we
could see they swarmed, wholly furred with Foragers. The great claws
struggled with awesome and undiminished vigor-clenching again and again,
crushing hundreds with each grip then flailing side to side, smiting the
plain with distant thunder. But though whole armies of Behemoths died at
each stroke, their convergent tides neither slackened nor diminished. 

"Have the Foragers ever before brought Tertiary meat back to the Nests?"
Ha'Awley Bunt mused below us, with a note of something like fear. No one
had an answer. 

We turned a parting look to 'Omphalodon's Eye. Its ragged black pupillary
hole seemed contracted in agony, while its glossy orb bled even more
copious crimson rivulets across the seamed ceiling vault, and down to the
stream-netted plains. 

Then we turned our flight up to the mountain wall, and began to swim
through the air with a will, gathering speed for the perils of re-entry. 

XIX 

What say we sally forth once more, 

A-scouring the subworld floor? 

What say we cast our nets again, 

And bring more shining riches in? 

OUR LARVAL CHAMBER-how homelike it seemed to us now, after the greater
terrors we had tasted! Barnar saw to our companions' entertainment in the
operations nook while I discreetly added our re-collected gems to our
cache. We then wasted no time in coming to business. 

"Here's how we reckon relative values," Barnar told them cheerily. "For
two amphorae of giants' pap, we will require no more than the stipulated
three hundredweight of gold specie, in consideration of your misfortunes
with the Unguent. In addition, however, it seems only fair to require an
annual tithe, in perpetuity, of all your earnings from the pap's use." 

I think they literally gasped in unison, so equal were they in the little
arts of haggling. We did not budge of course, and of course, ultimately,
they had to agree. Nonetheless, they really made quite a convincing
display of outrage and vexation, and, for all that we knew it was mere
art, we could not help but find these remonstrations a bit offensive. 

Their reckonings among themselves were fierce. We courteously abstained
from eavesdropping, but it was clear from his half-muffled bleatings that
the cashless Costard was inexorably squeezed down to yielding outright
what we knew to be his only asset, the mine itself, in consideration of
the Bunts' providing his share of the specie, which we, of course,
required in advance. 

It happened that the Bunts' Hivery had many casks of mead warehoused in
Dry Hole, and these could be liquidated within a day or so. The requisite
sum might reach our hands in a little more than three days, " . . . if we
ride without sleeping," Sha'Urley concluded, rather stiffly. 

"That is highly convenient," I told her warmly. "We don't mind waiting a
bit for you to muster the gold, but we don't want to cool our heels down
here any longer than necessary." In fact we had a further, far more
lucrative enterprise in mind, and this was the real reason for our
impatience. 

As Costard and Ha'Awley Bunt trudged toward the gangway bucket, I gave
Sha'Urley a tender little signal to draw her a bit aside. Her face
inscrutable, she came a few paces away with me. "Oh beauteous Dolmenite,"
I smiled to her, "is it overbold of me to remember the joys we took
together here, not so long ago?" 

She gave me an indefinable look of shock, and stared a moment, emotion
struggling in her face. Then she laughed-a little stridently, I thought. 

"Dear Miser," she grinned at me. "Can you actually suggest lovemaking? Let
me try somehow to express to you how little I am inclined to make love to
you. Let me describe what I would rather do to you! Not beat your head
repeatedly with a knout or cudgel, no-not actually crack your skull, I
suppose. But let's say, tie you on your knees, and then take a good
two-handed grip on the tail of a large, dead fish-a fish some two or three
days dead-and then spend a leisurely half hour or so smacking your long,
broken-nosed, greedy face with it." 

"Forgive me. I've chosen an unpropitious moment." 

"Come, please, and help me get Niasynth into the bucket with us. We'll be
back with your gold as fast as we can." 

Niasynth, the pallid sojourner-below, sat upright now, and her eyes saw us
more steadily, less often lost in inner vistas of nightmare. Looking in
Barnar's eyes, and mine, she said, her voice shaking slightly, "I am going
to see the sunlight again." She gave us her hands. Cold and infinitely
frail they seemed, those sun-starved hands of hers! 

When they were gone, I wished I had gone with them. How I craved the
sunlight, longed for the wide cerulean sky and its sweet, cool breath
against my face, for the night's jewelled black, sailed by a slim-hulled
moon. . . . But Barnar and I were agreed that our attunement to these
subterranean realms was a precious asset, and that it would be folly to
interrupt our acclimation here with a heady but disorienting sojourn in
the upper world. 

"Now for a good long sleep," Barnar enthused, readying his hammock. 

"Yes, " I said, "I suppose I should feed the rest of this demon back to
the grub I took it from." 

Ostrogall, in what for him amounted to a transport of rage, had been
absolutely silent since our return to the Nest. We had placed his stump in
his usual nook where he could look about him, and he had sat there dead
mute from that moment. 

"You might as well," Barnar boredly assented. "Mind your hands putting him
in-you might get them bitten off." 

"Well bethought. I know! If I skewer him on a spearpoint, I can poke him
in from a safe distance." 

"Excellent idea." 

I made a business of choosing my longest spear. Then I tucked Ostrogall in
his holster on my hip, took up the spear, and strolled off down the
nearest lane-way amid the larval shoals. At last Ostrogall broke the
silence. 

"In mere point of information, I must remind you that if you . . .
consummate that larval meal you interrupted, then I will emerge in the
form of minute eye-spores mingled with the grub's feces. I can then exist
as an exiguous brood infection till some adult, or series of them, tracks
me out again to the subworld's floor. In no more than a century I will be
growing on the plain once more, greeting the Eye of 'Omphalodon with my
gladsome gazes!" 

"I rejoice for you!" I answered. "In your present extremity, what comfort
you must draw from this reflection!" 

A pause. "I will not conceal," Ostrogall sighed, "that I'd prefer a
quicker restoration of my interrupted life, and one that did not involve
the workings of those loathsome larval jaws upon what remains of my
person." 

"Do you know, Ostrogall, your saying this is most opportune! Barnar and I
were only lately musing how your expertise in matters Behemothine might be
of use to us in our upcoming venture. And we even agreed we could offer
you your restoration to your native soil as recompense for this service.
What stymied us was our fear that you would now mistrust our offer, and
refuse it!" 

"Mistrust?" fluted Ostrogall, his voice quavering as he strove for a
honied tone. "Mistrust your irreproachable selves? I won't deny I
hesitate. I won't deny your . . . recent decisions give me pause. But how
could I mistrust such paragons of rectitude, such patterns, such epitomes
as your peerless selves? Still, may I humbly hope that you really will
re-plant me, if I aid you in the, ah, milking of the Royal Mother?" 

"Ostrogall, if you aid our enrichment in this next foray, there is nothing
on earth or under it so firm as our intention of re-planting you!" 

Barnar and I slept-how can we say how long, beyond that it was long enough
to purge the poisons of fatigue from our muscles and minds? When we woke,
and ravenously breakfasted, we found our thoughts not so much engaged by
the milking of the Queen, as by that even more lucrative project we
contemplated-dared to contemplate!-after the milking was accomplished. To
follow the Young Queen, and her conquering army, across the hell-floor.
The question that consumed us was, in essence: how much wealth could we
fly with? At the outset, we burned with a delirium of possibility, for we
had seen the Unguent put Foragers aloft. 

So we looped some line around the tapered ends of a grub, and strove to
fly with it. We could not budge it from the ground. At this juncture
Ostrogall warbled from his perch, "It is said that the Unguent allows the
flier to carry ten times his own weight into the air, and that, be he
light or heavy, this is the limit of what he may bring aloft with him. I
forebore to speak before you'd tried it for yourselves, feeling sure you'd
insist on a personal test." 

It galled us to find our hunger for gain thus trammelled, but we made our
peace with it at length, reflecting that with selectivity, more than a ton
apiece of subworld plunder could amount to a wealth vast by any standards,
especially when added to what we had already won. 

But any thought of what this wealth might purchase led us straight to that
gulf that yawned between us. Some airborne exploration of the Nest seemed
preferable to reopening this controversy. 

Hovering ghosts, we haunted our way through another nursery, then through
several Incubaria, where lay pearly troves of eggs, which Nurses
incessantly turned, and groomed of parasites. The hatchlings from these
eggs, smaller versions of the grubs we knew, were fed up to size with
lumps of a pale food of cheesy softness. We tracked a Nurse to the source
of this substance-chambers full of a fungus unlike the growth which gave
the Nest its light. This stenchful mold sprouted obese fruiting bodies
like giant, hairy strawberries, which, macerated in the Nurses' jaws,
became the hatchlings' nutriment. This fungus crop grew from a substrate
of demon mulch, a coarse mash of chopped bodies, of bone and limb, talon,
wing, fin, skull and thorny muzzle (some of it still a-twitch and astir
with stubborn vitality) which melted slowly, consumed in the slow fire of
the fungal growth. Here and there melting mouths still muttered, and
fragmented visages alertly flashed at us their shards of eyes. . . . 

"This fungus perhaps provides a kind of predigested demon pabulum," Barnar
hazarded. 

"Can we wonder," I answered, "that a diet of demon meat must be eased up
to?" 

We were chary of our Unguent, or we might have pushed exploration further.
We found besides that, once returned to our operations nook, we were more
than ready for more sleep, such had been our recent exertions. And when we
awoke for the second time, it was to the voices of our returning partners.

XX 

Airily wander the Royal terrain 

Where profit and pasture so vastly abound. 

But warily plunder when findest thy Gain, 

For the taking may break thee, and drag thee 

a-down! 

THE QUEEN'S abdominal surface was oceanic; between the broad, glossy
undulations of her major ribs were endless local texturings of the mottled
hide, lesser vales and knolls, troughs and tumuli. We flew, and viewed the
wonder of Her planetary scope. 

The abdomen's harlequin puzzle of black and white was-as we had been
prepared to find it-alive with parasites and hyperparasites. "There now!"
warned Barnar. Side-stroking through the air, we veered leftward above a
little valley-bottom whence, with a glittery ripple of their jointed
backs, a host of hound-sized crustaceiods arose on glassy wings. These
airborne lice moved in a low, mazy cloud to a neighboring swale, where we
knew they would resettle, for they grazed on the sebaceous oils the
Queen's back sweated out, and these lay thickest on low ground. Their
flight had the slow-rolling movement you see in flocks of starlls when
they're gleaning the winter fields, blowing like gusted leaves from plot
to plot. 

The spectacle did not lack a certain ghastly charm. Indeed, it was not
these creatures themselves we avoided, but rather their larger, grimmer
predators, a triad of which now surged up in pursuit of the flock. Of
reptilian make, with jaws extravagantly fanged, these hunters dined on the
wing, and when they struck their flustered quarry, fragments of the
sundered lice-body plates and bleeding legs-drizzled down. 

We were learning as we went. Not many moments before, flying incautiously
close to a flock of these lice, we'd been attacked by one of these same
predators. I lopped off half the brute's jaw for him with Ready Jack, and
Barnar clove his pate with Biter, but we were both set spinning and
whirling by the violence of our own battle-blows. We tumbled so helplessly
at first it seemed our weapons must fly from our hands, and Ostrogall
wailed with terror from his precarious holster on my hip. 

So we paused aloft to practice executing sword and axe strokes. We learned
that any blow required a simultaneous countering, cancelling blow from an
opposite limb, otherwise we were left spinning, or see-sawing madly, like
skiffs in jumpy water. Shortly, we caught the trick of standing on the
air, and pulling up with our legs as we down-swept with our weapons; this
gestural symmetry let us chop hard, yet be left standing steady enough on
the air. 

We cruised, wary, taking a look about the Queenly terrain and consciously
putting off-perhaps even pointedly putting off-our task at hand. 

In some measure we were still peeved (if the whole truth be told) at the
Bunts' poor performance of their bond. For they'd come back down with only
two and a half hundredweight of gold, alleging that they'd found mead
prices depressed in Dry Hole by a momentary glut of the beverage from
other Angalheim hiveries, and in consequence they had liquidated their
warehoused stock at a loss. 

"Surely this won't be a sticking point, gentlemen?" Bunt blandly urged.
"The lacking sum, which you may confidently expect within a week, is but a
scant sixth of what is owed-a paltry fraction." 

"This proportional way of viewing the deficit," I replied, "gravely misses
the point." I was finding it hard to keep a civil tone. "A fiftyweight of
gold is first to be considered in its absolute value, in concrete terms.
With a fiftyweight, for instance, a man might hire a quartet of Stregan
gaunts for siegework on the Cidril steppes." 

There was a pause. Bunt seemed to find the example baffling. 

"Or the same fiftyweight might," Barnar put in with equal heat, and an
oblique glance at me, "buy the service of a brace of bog giants for a
four-month, to manage the shackles of a gryph-gryph, and see the monster
has water to sustain its micturations." 

This left them all staring. Sha'Urley, recovering first, reasoned, "Surely
the lacking sum is as secure in our temporary keeping, as it would be if
added to your cache here with what must be another half a ton of gems and
specie-safely buried no doubt, but nevertheless reposing in a place where
restless giants continually dig the earth. Meanwhile, we may be infallibly
trusted for payment. I have rightly called your demands exorbitant. I have
never said Bunt Hivery cannot meet them, and handily. We are even
extending your nephew a twentyweight or so to finance the venture he
envisions with his giants' pap." 

"And what might that venture be, Nephew?" Barnar asked. 

"Alas," snapped tight-lipped Costard, "the harshly mercenary mood you've
shown me warns me to guard my secret." 

I had a qualm, just then, thinking that if giants' pap proved potent in
upper-world applications, then selling Costard some of it was reckless
folly. It was at the very least a serious disservice to the young man's
immediate neighbors. I then dismissed the notion. Thus lightly, sometimes,
does prescience touch our thoughts with her wing-tips. 

But it wasn't just the fiftyweight that peeved me as we cruised above the
Queen's abdomen, far inland from her busy flanks where the pap pores were.
"It galls me! I cannot shake it!" I burst out at Barnar. "Look how we fly.
See what effortless access we now have to these wonders, and to wealth
that outgoes computation! And in the midst of it, in the very blaze of all
this fortune, all this glory, I cannot rejoice! I am tormented by
bitterness, when my heart might otherwise be lifted on the wings of joy!
And why? Because your damned, ox-necked stubbornness, Barnar! You won't
even grant two months-three at the very most; three paltry months! Your
sullen, bovine, belligerent balkiness will not grant even so tiny a delay
of your seed-whacking, tree-tilling obsession! How can you be so selfish!?
Only think what your madness defers! Pelfer's Buskins! His Cowl!" 

Barnar snorted, sounding, I felt, exactly like an ox. "Oh, in truth you
are a nervy weasel to upbraid me with my honor's core, my love of kith and
clan and hearth-land! I'm truly sorry to find you can be such an odious
reptile, Nifft, with all your selfish, supple twistings to wriggle loose
of your bonded word! To slither out of the obligations of your own sworn
oath!" 

"Barnar, I was half drunk! How many sentimental, half-drunk quests have
you sworn to? You hold me to this one! And in truth, I do acknowledge the
vow, I will perform it! But why does it have to come first?" 

Below us, in the pale parts of the Queen's hide, a subtle blue network of
veins, sunk in Her oily translucence, grew visible. For some moments now a
running pack of brutes, back-legged like grasshoppers, their jaws bouquets
of thorny tentacles, had run beneath our line of flight, studying us with
glinting, metallic eye-bumps. We dropped down across a rib crest in the
dorsal topography just as these creatures, cresting it, sprang up at us. 

Their legs had hellish thrust; we must needs wheel back hard as a brace of
them surged up ravening at our legs. With my feet thrusting for
counter-purchase on the air, I two-armed Ready Jack wide left, wide right.
Tentacles and twitching leg-stumps rained back down on the marbled valley,
where, with a liquid slide, a half-transparent amoebal mass engulfed and
dissolved them. 

"How," I asked Barnar, "can you have missed seeing what the possession of
Pelfer's Facilitators could bring to us!? With the Buskins, Cowl and
Gantlets, we could break into Mhurdaal's Manse. We could steal . . . his
library." 

I know I shuddered at my own words; I had scarce, ere this, allowed myself
to look in the face of my own greatest ambition-an ambition steadily
a-kindling in me (I now realized) since our capture of the Unguent of
Flight had shown me the scope of wealth that we might aspire to. Nor could
Barnar hear so fine and wild and moon-drunk a scheme as stealing the
Library of Mhurdaal spoken without visible emotion. But in his selfish
impatience he shrugged it off, striking the noble thought aside. "You are
addicted to chasing legends, Nifft! It is a madness that can yield no
final fruit!" 

"Gentlemen! Luminous Benefactors!" the demon-head oboed from my hip. "With
your forbearance, I beg you to be wiser! All this fury for futurities?
Gentlemen, look where you are! Even to me, for whom this is the very
hearth of Hell-here, where the armies spawn who sack my kindred's
habitation, and 'spoil us of our lives-even to me this is a mighty hall of
wonder, and my every eye most avidly imbibes the Muchness and the Suchness
of it all! Let me urge you to be where you are, in the moment, and partake
of its magnificence." 

"You urge a truth there, I suppose," I had to concede. Down in the
terrain's crevasses, around licks and ponds of Royal sebum, flocks of
winged things jostled amicably enough with multibrachiate competitors,
like plains life at the waterholes in the Lulumean savannahs. Big, black
shapes crouched half-distinguishable in the blacknesses, with an
occasional twitch of importunate hunger. Where the Royal dorsum was white,
the buried veins were visible, and down there in the cloudy luminosity of
the Queen's deep meat, huge forked arteries convulsed with the slow,
implacable authority of Earthquake as somewhere, far deeper, Her colossal
heart propounded her relentless vitality. 

"How do you, then, Ostrogall," I musingly asked him, "believe that
Behemoth came to be?" 

"My race, sire, generally feel Mankind could not have fashioned any weapon
of such power as She. And therefore we also believe, that as Behemoth is
Earthborn, so it must inevitably come to pass that in Her time, She shall
be half-conquered, half-possessed by demonkind, as Earth herself has
been." 

"It makes me love you less to think on this possibility, oh fragmentary
demon," Barnar said, "though of course we thank you for your candor." 

"But gentlemen," our cephalic cicerone melodiously remonstrated, "we are
Life, and live its laws! Why, look here! Is this not living proof leaping
thus directly to our gaze? These nastra-haagen, do you not see them? They
are demonkind! Living on the very flank of our nation's destroyer!" 

He referred to a greenish patch like a thick scab of lichen all forested
over with stalks that ended in starburst clusters of sticky red droplets.
These honeydew clusters thrust and darted, snatching winged lice smartly
from the air with their instant adhesion, and then bending to feed ragged
mouths gaping open in the lichen-scab. As we drew more directly overhead
we saw some of these adhesive droplets contained inhuman eyes, and only
the look of these eyes was needed to prove them demonkind. Ostrogall
uttered a crickety, chitinous yodel, and down in the demonpatch ragged
lichen-mouths opened, and warbled answers. 

As we hovered to allow this colloquy, two large shapes rushed over the
next abdominal rib-crest. They were a pair of miniature Behemoths, roughly
like the Digger caste in jaw and build but not a tenth the size, though
still a match for the biggest parasites. In an instant they had set upon
Ostrogall's interlocutors, ripping up great shaggy mats of lichen,
crunching the adhesive honeydew stalks like sweet confections. The ragged
mouths made a shriller music. A third of the patch was devoured at once,
and two more of these little abdominal-patrol Behemoths rushed hither over
the rib-line. 

I could not help exulting a little. "So! See how rich in strategies and
powers abound is your mighty Nemesis! See how Behemoth outgoes your
deepest inroads, how she finds you and feeds on you after all!" 

Still, I didn't at all like seeing demons flourishing on the Queen's very
back-it gave me that sick-kneed, rotten-flooring feeling one gets from
brooding too much over demon invasiveness, demon infiltration. 

How long can one wrestle such imponderables? "Come on," said Barnar.
"Let's go a-milking." 

The milking of the giants' pap went swimmingly, until we committed a
stupidity that I writhe and blush to report. 

We hung above the Queen's flank, looking down on the lapping tides of her
spawn. We identified a stratum of Forager pores, both by location and by
the succession of Foragers that drank there. Selecting a pore which a
sated Forager had just withdrawn from, we came circling carefully down to
some five or six fathoms above the abundantly lactescent orifice. 

Carefully, we dangled our slender, lidded jars of reinforced leather (dyed
orange of course, as were the lines we lowered them by). I dipped mine
first into the slow flux of viscosity. I lowered the jar's lip into it,
and pulled straight upward. The jar grew heavier, and easier to dip, with
each pull. In four passes, my jar was full. 

Barnar moved into position and began following suit. Then another Forager
reared up to the pore, and began drinking, just below where Barnar was
dipping. 

Barnar still had just enough room to work, and he did so with wonderful
coolness; but in his instinct to work away from the Forager's huge eyes,
Barnar began to drop back a bit over the abdominal wall, and pull at his
jar more obliquely to fill it. He was working too low, just as our Harpy
had done, and I was not alert enough to grasp this right away. Almost at
once, one of the same species of spiny horror that had devoured our Harpy
vaulted high in an explosive bid to seize Barnar's legs. Ostrogall's
shriek of warning gave Barnar an instant's lead, and he swam powerfully
ceilingwards. 

But he was just a blink too late, for, with the slender, utmost tip of one
of its arms, the parasite threw one wrap around Barnar's left ankle. 

I flew to his back, seized his collar, and added my power of ascent to
his, and very slowly, with terrible effort, we lifted the stubbornly
gripping parasite upward, outward from the Queen's flank. Barnar wore
stout buskins, but the pain of the monster's grip was unbearably urgent
for him. 

"No use! Drop down and cut it through," he grunted. 

The instant I let go to fly lower, Barnar began inexorably to sink with
the parasite's huge weight. I dropped down to hang near the gripping
tentacle, and I swung a one-handed stroke against the tentacle with Ready
Jack. I maintained my balance, but could not deliver the power I would
have managed braced on firm ground. Jack bit only two fingers' depth. The
dangling monster writhed, Barnar groaned, and toilsomely swam, and
inexorably sank yet more. 

The jaws of the nursing Behemoth were scarcely two fathoms below us, and
we were sinking dead upon them. 

I swung another stroke-a deeper bite but still the tentacle would not
sunder. Then the Forager sprang up under us. 

The parasite of course was not invisible to her-it danced before her eyes
and now the great black sabers of her jaws closed slicing through the air.
I somersaulted backward, and Barnar rocketed ceilingward, suddenly gripped
only by a lightweight fragment of one tentacle. So hard had he been
pulling to ascend, that he almost brained himself against the Chamber
ceiling before he managed to stop his climb. I chopped the tentacle's
writhing remnant free and it plummeted into the Forager's jaws after the
rest of the parasite. The Forager consumed the morsel, and returned to her
nursing, and Barnar dangled his jar down again, and this time drew it
full, and sealed and secured it. 

"Oh radiant Benefactors," Ostrogall chirruped, "may I now make bold to beg
that you will take me straight from here to the Nest-mouth, and out to my
re-planting? I know the straightest way from here, and then you would have
done with that little matter, and thenceforth be unencumbered with my
humble self." 

"You know," mused Barnar, "on this foray, you gave us a bit of moral
advice, some theorizing, and a warning that was not untimely. But we made
our own way, mostly. You did not even translate for us your squawkings
with that mold patch of your kinfolk back there." 

"A thousand apologies! They said that takings were rich on the Queen, that
there was nothing here to threaten them, and that their kin were
colonizing the Royal Dorsum everywhere. I gathered from their dying
exclamations that the little breed of Behemoth that devoured them was not
previously known to them. It seems as you said, Effulgent One, that the
Queen truly abounds in strategies, and swiftly molds her progeny to the
great Nest's needs. But most revered gentlemen, I remind you that I
shouted you first warning of the thorny star, and I earnestly beseech you
not to deny me the re-plantation which my sharing of your dangers here has
earned." 

We made him, for a while, no answer, rapt as we were in our slow flight
out of the Chamber, taking our last leave of this hall of titans. We began
to negotiate the tunnels, feeling quite practiced now, deft as fish
dodging through rapids. Ostrogall had grown tremulously quiet. "We just
don't feel that you really, substantially added to our profit," I told him
gently. 

"Gentlemen," said the demonstump after a silence, in a tone of ineffable
melancholy, "permit me to anticipate you. May I presume to . . . hasten
ahead in this conversation, as it were? For somehow I feel there is a
question you wish to come to. May we entertain this question at once,
without a preliminary visit to the jaws of some loathsome grub?" 

In part, I was almost moved to smile at this, and in equal part the
demon's cynical certainty irked me. "I'm afraid," I began, "I find your
tone a bit-" 

"Please, Oh Effulgent Saviour! Only hear if I do not touch your very
thought!" 

"Speak on, then." 

"The two of you rightly imagine great wealth to be had in the subworld by
such airborne privateers as you now are. And you have also, I venture to
guess, rightly seen that you will shortly have a unique opportunity for
such a plundering tour of my world. For soon a New Queen will go forth on
a Nesting Flight, with her own terrible army of Foragers and other castes
thundering in the van. 

"Their pillage and rapine will leave a raw and bleeding swathe, fertile
like a furrow cut in rich soil. Naked wealth will sprawl from broken walls
and toppled vaults and hoards exhumed, and all this wealth's defenders
will be gone, consumed as in a ravening holocaust. It is an opportunity
beyond the wildest dreams of any thief, if you will pardon the expression.

"The question, then, that I have mentioned, is: might not my company on
this plundering tour, and my expertise in demonry, greatly speed your
self-enrichment on this foray? My answer, revered Masters, is Yes! And
might I not agree to do this, you further ask? And again, I answer Yes! I
will do this, if only you will at last and in earnest swear to plant me in
my native home again! May, oh may I beg you to promise this sincerely at
the last?" 

Nettled by something unflattering in the way the demon framed these
propositions, we were very slow to answer, though we knew at once, of
course, that we would strike the bargain. 

When the Bunts and Costard had brought down our payment, Sha'Urley had
brought Niasynth with her, for aboveground the sunlight had exhausted her,
carefully though they shaded her, and she craved this brief respite
underground. We found her at the ancient-young woman's side in the
operations nook when we returned with our Royal plunder. Bunt and Costard
snored in our hammocks, worn by days of hard driving and hasty dealing. We
paid our respects to Niasynth, who lay propped at a resting but wakeful
angle in a bed Sha'Urley had improvised for her. I felt a kind of kinship
with this pale, resurrected woman, lying just-delivered from the gulf we
were bound to. We both knew what Time was in the worlds below. 

"I rejoice, sister," I told her low, meaning it, "that we have worked your
liberation." 

"You have worked mine as well, I think," Sha'Urley smiled. "Will you
believe that I am suddenly weaned of this strange ambition of my
brother's? For one lump consideration, I have relinquished to him all
further revenues from our familial holdings. So let's say good-bye, Nifft,
as friends only, with no business in it." 

And indeed we embraced most sweetly, though I confess that her defection
cost me a qualm. Was Bunt bound for mishap, and his sister sensing it?
Should I not, after all, get the remaining fiftyweight in hand before
yielding the pap? 

We helped her get Niasynth into the bucket with her; she supported that
frail escapee in her arms, for Niasynth seemed barely strong enough to
stand unaided. "I know it is hard at first to bear," I told that antique
nymph, "but is it not glorious to feel the sun again?" 

She took my hand between her own and kissed it. So cool her hands and
lips! So smooth! "It is a joy so severe," she said, "it fills me with
terror that I cannot hold such life, that it will tear my heart!" 

Before Sha'Urley bade us close the hatchway on them, she nodded toward the
snoring Bunt and Costard. "They are close as death about their projects
for the pap. My brother's is perhaps not hard to guess, though henceforth
I'll know as little as I can of it. Costard, in making much of his own
secrecy, has let slip enough to indicate that he is interested in the
'cattle-raising business' as he puts it. I would not wither enterprise in
bud by speaking words of ill omen. I'll just say I'm glad we have other
fish to fry, Niasynth and I." 

When we had pulled the lever that sent down the counterweights, and the
bucket had climbed rattling away, we stood gazing on the sleeping Bunt and
Costard. Slick and shiny in their dye, they seemed to sweat through
fevered dreams. I felt the strangest little touch of fear to wake them, to
put them in possession of our jars of Nest-Magic. 

And when we had wakened them, still we temporized. We nagged them about
the fiftyweight still owing; we reiterated our right to a tithe of their
future revenues; we stressed that we wanted caretakers topside to assure
we could make our eventual exit without trouble. 

"We've hired two men from a neighboring mine," Bunt soothed. "Hatchways
and pulleys and lines and such will be ship-shape. They know of your
eventual emergence-we've told them you'll be bringing up larval scrapings,
for sale to the perfumeries of the Great Shallows. Come now-may we hold
what we've so dearly purchased?" 

"Yes Uncle!" Costard chimed. "Come now-fair's fair!" 

There was nothing else to do. I felt the jar's heft-I saw a stickiness
about its lip that breathed out a breath of the Brood Chamber's awe to my
nostrils. Sheer, delirious sorcery! It felt like doom, it felt like
danger, to surrender it to these men-to Bunt with his urbane smile of
thanks, ambition burning deep within his thoughtful eyes, to Costard with
his bright vindictive gaze, his smile of youthful triumph. . . . 

"No fakery here," Bunt beamed at us, too elated for complete tact. "I feel
it past doubt, the Mother's power humming in this ichor! You are
remarkable men, my friends-the things you have accomplished!" 

"Our greatest deeds, we hope," I bowed, "are still to come." 

"So, indeed, are ours!" Bunt answered, bowing in his turn. 

XXI 

The Chosen One's wings cleave the air like bright swords 

That scythe down a harvest of doomed demon lords. 

The Chosen One's jaws carve her empire-to-be. 

Her glittering eyes possess all that they see! 

IN THE LAST few hours before setting forth on her Nesting Flight, the
Young Queen was courted by her suitors. These males had a madcap air. They
weren't a fourth her size; they were blacker, glossier-bodied, and more
tapered and slender than she. Their wings (which would lift them, or one
of them, to the raptures of actual mating during the Nesting Flight) were
like the blades of slim poniards, and their bodily movements were darting
and veering and hectic to a degree conspicuously surpassing all the
handmaids seething round the young Monarch, though the suitors in their
turn dwarfed these worker castes. 

On the whole the young Princes put one in mind of court-gallants at a
Jarkeladd wedding feast, with their caps raffishly aslant, the bright,
chased hilts of their shortswords conspicuously agleam on their hips,
their eyes bright with wine and readiness for a wrestle, a sprightly
jump-up, or some other such jovial exploit. 

The Young Queen, by contrast, seemed to sit in state. She all but filled
her half of the titanic chamber alloted her pre-nuptial growing time. And
grown she had, till her passage through the tunnels looked in doubt. But
the Princes were not shy of her. Incessantly they courted her; each in
turn proferred a gallant obeisance, and shared with her a quick,
lascivious antennal touching, then darted down along her body, touching
her further, tasting her, it seemed, with little lovers' nibbles at her
legs, her thorax, her elegantly slender abdomen. They were powerless, it
seemed, to get enough of her divine effluvium. 

It was a relatively subtle thing which first signalled the imminence of
the Nesting Flight. The Young Queen's wings began to vibrate. The
amplitude of their oscillation was minute, but immensely powerful. A faint
hum sounded through the chamber. 

The seethe amid her servitors quickened. So did the circulation of her
Suitors. 

The rate of her wings' tremoring increased. They gave off a silver-blue
sheen, flashing ever so slightly in the cyanic glow. Still more her
Suitors quickened, and her retainers-among these, Diggers, who surged into
the tunnel and began to attack its walls with shovelling strokes of their
huge jaws. 

The note of the Young Queen's wings rose higher, like a plucked
lute-string now, a thrilling, silvery tone, while the wings themselves
were ablaze with reflected light. The Suitors now began to rush among the
mob of retainers, herding them, hastening them, it seemed, toward the
tunnel. And there the mass of workers now surged, an auger with a thousand
jaws. Filling their crops with earth, they chewed away the tunnel walls
with incredible speed, leaving a grander corridor in their wake. 

The Young Queen stirred. Her immobile legs arched, and lifted her. She
stood a moment, a marvel of nature and yet so burnished, so sculpted, that
she seemed also like some great and ingenious engine of war. Then she ran
in the wake of her army. 

She plunged into a half-darkness, for her servitors devoured half the
fungal light source as they carved a larger way for their mistress. The
boiling vanguard of workers and Princes gnawed away at the rim of light
far ahead, and the Young Queen was a running shadow eerily sketched here
and there in the following dark: a flashing thigh-joint, the glinting hull
of her tapered thorax, the cerulean corruscation of one eyeglobe. 

Until the tunnels in their descending confluence grew grander. Then under
the high, blue vaults, the Young Queen ran with her army coalescing around
her. Shoulder to shoulder, dense like some glittery fluid, the army of
workers poured flanking her, trailing her, running ahead to the limit of
vision. She ran high-prowed, towering amid them, her silver wings
shimmering, two mighty swords about to be wielded. Diggers and Foragers
were prominent in the legions most closely surrounding her. In the
vanguard where the Princes ran, the army was a perfect mix of castes, all
moving locked in their single furious rhythm of onslaught. 

Here came the onrushing Nest-mouth, a crimson window on a rolling plain.
The army poured out of it unhesitant, a mad cascade. The Princes plunged
out onto the air, which their wakening wings, militant sabres, assaulted. 

The Young Queen swept toward the portal. 'Omphalodon's Eye appeared in the
distant vault. It had turned, by an unmistakable fraction, and its alien
immensity-undeniably, inscrutably-noted the Young Monarch mounting on the
subworld air, her imperial wings coming alive with the hum of a million
bowstrings. 

And out we flew after her, Barnar and I, though we swooped down the face
of the hell-wall, hanging close above the army itself. Out in the gulf
beyond us the Young Queen, in what seemed a dance of pure exuberance,
swept through great arcs and counter-arcs, flew arabesques across the
demon sky. The Suitors, nimble black acrobats, streaked near her and away,
near and away, like boys vying for notice, seeming to woo her with a kind
of comic verve. Their gamesome hectoring inspired the Young Queen to even
dizzier sweeps. The Royal rout of courtship rolled out across the plain,
as the army poured glittering below, a pursuing river. 

This was how to harrow hell-we had the trick of it at last! We each had
coils of line, and stoutly tied swag-nets, and we had all our limbs free
for flying because of the stout leathern harnesses round our middles, to
hang our bags from and our other gear. This included a quiver of light
harpoons and fishing tridents, furnished from Dry Hole by Sha'Urley's
swordswomen, a small service deducted from the fiftyweight still owed us
by the Bunts. Thus geared, we had sought out the Nuptial Chamber, and
lingered there through seven sleeps before this hour had arrived. We took
our ease, and stored up rest, trusting Ostrogall's vigilance to wake us at
need. 

Now the army rivered below us out onto the plain. High behind us it still
poured from the Nest-mouth. Two miles of Behemoths branching across the
subworld floor. "You behold the most dreaded catastrophe that can befall
my race," wailed Ostrogall from his holster on my hip. "Look! Look to the
Talons of 'Omphalodon!" 

Though far down along the horizon, the Talons towered plainly visible, the
more so in that they were all white bone now-that is, wherever they could
be glimpsed through the enveloping boil of Behemoths. The colossal
skeleton still clenched and thrashed, and now around its wrist the
Behemoths' heaped dead rose in a small mountain of crushed debris. Slight
slaughter! Behemoth's fecundity, as we now understood, was inexhaustible,
and, although the Tertiary demon's claws displayed a powerful vitality
that seemed undiminished by their decortication, we could see where the
swarm was beginning to gnaw chunks from the very bones themselves. 

"Every Nest in a hundred leagues of here's drawing meat from it," Barnar
said. "That Tertiary flesh will have been coming to our own Nest these
five or six days past." 

"I think we can trust Behemoth's stomach to conquer whatever her jaws have
conquered," I answered. 

Yet who could know? I believe we both rued an accident of which, though
wholly innocent, we were the unwitting causes, and which had brought such
perilous sustenance to the jaws of the Behemoths we had grown to hold in
awe, and almost to revere. 

"Oh luminous masters," cried Ostrogall, "how can you think demonkind
profits from this meal? Behold 'Omphalodon's Eye-do you see triumph
there?" The great Eye's bloody leakage was profuse-indeed, everywhere on
the plains, the rubescent streams and rivers seemed to be in spate, and
thickly foaming within their channels. It was only later that this facile
riposte of Ostrogall's began to echo unpleasantly in my thoughts. What,
after all, were it best for him that we should think, if not that Behemoth
had demonkind in full retreat, and that there was no ultimate harm in
letting a certain particular demon be re-planted and continue his
existence? 

At that moment, though, prodigious 'Omphalodon's grieving gaze calmed our
fears, buoyed our hearts, even as his Unguent buoyed our bodies. We'd
stolen this bliss of flight from the Tertiary's very hide-what else could
live down here that we need dread? 

The forces thundering below us mantled the open plain like a shuddery,
glossy garment. The army's first plunder was a league-long caravan of
giant wains. The cargo of each wain was a single huge cottony sphere, each
one perhaps twice the size of an Angalheim mead hall. 

This caravan's course had been head-on to ours. It had wheeled about at
the army's first appearance, but so sudden was the legions' onset that
only now was the last of the great line of vehicles sluggishly wheeling
round, its scaly drovers lashing their huge batrachian teams to a retreat.

"These A'Rak eggsacs are purchased from the Secondary Subworld, for the
defense of fortresses," Ostrogall told us. 

"Purchased with what commodity?" I asked. 

"I, ah, frankly do not know." 

"Purchased with human captives then, I'd guess," said Barnar. 

"Candidly I tell you, I do not know, effulgent ones!" 

But already the vanguard of Behemoths broke like a wave on the wains; the
great cottony spheroids spilled out and were overswarmed. A thousand jaws
sliced the slack bags to ribbons-and a spill of infant spiders, each no
bigger than a war chariot-and-pair, leaked wiggling and twiddling out.
"They grow to hunt my countrymen and Behemoth indiscriminately," enlarged
Ostrogall, "but we tolerate them because, one time in four, they can bring
a Forager down." 

What a feast ensued upon the hatchlings! The Behemoths seemed to find
their prey a choice confection-each spiderling just three bites large-and
they gorged with every evidence of gusto. 

Above, the Queen and her eager consorts were unconcerned, showing appetite
for love alone; gigantically they cavorted in the subworld sky, the
Suitors still swooping close to their belusted, then away, while the young
Nest Mother in her mad majesty impassioned them with ever more dizzying
aerobatics. We watched enthralled the plenipotency of our great guides and
allies. Above us great Heliomphalodon wept. All demonkind, it seemed to us
in that moment, lay belly up, surrendered for the taking. 

Shag Margold's Second 

Interjection 

SAZMAZM, A GREAT DEMON WARRIOR of the Tertiary Subworld, was betrayed by
the wizard Wanet-Ka, whom he engaged to convey him up to the Prime
Subworld, past the immemorial locks and guards that constrain his titanic
ilk to their benthonic bastions. Once elevated to that lesser hell,
Sazmazm purposed to win easy empire, thence afterwards to scourge the
surface world. How the wizard tricked the demon is related in The Fishing
of the Demon-Sea. 

Sazmazm's lust to rise from his domain was, like 'Omphalodon's, a lust for
light. And monstrous though these Tertiaries were, who can fail to find a
grandeur in their doomed upward striving? Some authorities aver that these
ambitions were in any case suicidal; that sunlight would be instant death
to these deepest-born of demonkind. We have not as yet-Thanks be!-had
occasion to test this proposition. 

Arguably, Nifft's fever to enter the Manse of Mhurdaal is a species of
just this sort of light-lust. Mhurdaal, in the austerest, ice-blasted
heights of the Kolodrian Ghaanack range, Earth's awful pinnacle, built his
Manse near the end of the Amber Millennium. This awesome citadel he
conceived expressly to house his precious Library. 

The rare and ancient tomes which this legendary bibliotrove of Mhurdaal's
comprises are only half its fabled wonder. It holds as well no less than a
hundred of the Peripatextual Parchments, also called the Nomad Books and
the Vella Viatica. These folios of immortal vellum, blank of any permanent
imprintation, are haunted by the ghosts of great works lost in lost
millennia. Between these Parchments' undying bindings those epochal,
obliterated books find intermittent housing, and take the form of print
again. More, the reader, on beholding, is instantaneously endowed with
perfect comprehension of whatever vanished tongue the migrant tome is writ
in. Thus what is said of Mhordaal's Library may be credited, that it is
our world's deepest labyrinth of lore, a maze of windows looking out upon
a wider cosmos, whence the raptured reader may gaze out across the
rooftops of a thousand histories. 

Nevertheless Nifft's ardor for the Library does not seem entirely bent
upon scholarly illumination. Indeed, I must blush for the predominantly
commercial ambitions which those catacombs of sapience seem to awaken in
my friend. 

But he is, after all, a thief, and one in the throes of a transport of
avarice. 

-Shag Margold 

XXII 

Darkness fell about my feet, 

A mantle I had shed. 

My face the gladsome breeze did greet- 

I'd lost hope of a joy so sweet 

Among the worse-than-dead. 

I CANNOT describe us as footsore, when at last we swam the air wearily
Nest-wards again from that foray, from that ransacking of whole demon
nations, from that long, delirious fugue of discovery and plunder, the
like of which I know life will never again afford me. 

Since our setting-forth in the Young Queen's train, nigh on two months had
passed, as we later learned to reckon the time. All we knew at that
juncture was that the interval we had endured below was a series of little
eternities, each one nested in the next like those cunning boxes crafted
in the Minuskulons. 

No, footsore we were not. But sore in every other fibre of ourselves we
surely were. For we flew laden to the very limit of the Unguent's power to
lift us. From our middles hung our hempen nets bulging with ten times our
weight in demon-loot. We looked like the loaded booms of cargo cranes,
dangling our pendant bales of infernal swag. 

Flying this heavy was a labor every bit as hard as swimming, and swimming,
I might add, in cold water that saps your heat, for both our physical
strength and the lifting power of the Unguent were burned off us at a
fierce rate. Our only way of resting was a liberal reanointment with the
Unguent. When we re-smeared our hands and feet, we could, for a while,
tread air with little labor, and regain our breath. 

But the drag of our weight wore down the Unguent merely in keeping us
aloft, whether we trod air, or swam full-out. Rests were relatively brief,
then, and toil was the rule, for we were loathe to use up Unguent unless
we were near the limit of our strength. League after league we grunted
through the ruby gloom, pulling with our solid sinews at the melting
substance of the air, the two of us like a pair of laborious apes
clambering along miles of invisible vines. 

This was most unlike what one thinks of as "flying." How clearly, at
moments, did I recall that stab of delirious jubilation in the heart when
we first climbed the air beside the wall of 'Omphalodon's buried palm.
This long labor was nothing like that joy. 

Now we again had, not too distantly in view, the wall of the Broken Axle
Mountain-roots; indeed, we even now began to discern in that far wall the
particular purplish smudge of darkness that might be the mouth of our own
Nest. 

Such was our anger with one another, however, Barnar's and mine, that I
might almost say we were indifferent to this vision of our journey's
accomplishment. I scarcely saw the actual mountain wall because my
erstwhile friend's brute, immovable will was like a wall before my eyes.
I'd been hammering at it for weeks now. 

"Of the Corcyrene Codex, I will cease to speak," I told him. "Let us
forget the fact that, among those who know, there is absolute consensus
that in the Corcyrene Codex the Star-Ladder is to be found. But let the
Star-Ladder pass, I say! We have no interest in walking the Galactic Path,
nor in going to the Mill of Time, the white-hot engine where Eternity's
ground out, and a skilled thief can scoop up years of new life with his
hands. . . . 

"But let that pass, I say-it is perhaps too slight a thing to be prized.
Let us rather consider a different volume that is, like the Codex, also to
be found in Mhurdaal's Library. Let us confine our computations to one
sole volume-the Handbook of Hapidamnos. Inscribed therein by
Dastardosthenes is the command spell of the Auric Plague. 

"Just weigh this with me a moment Barnar, please! Picture it with me. An
entire town-a city stricken with the Auric Pest. This plague strikes all,
in hours! Not a man or woman standing, all lying helpless in fever, all of
them, sweating gold! Little nuggets bead out from their pores! They lie
sodden for days, shedding a bright golden gravel till their bed-slats
groan with its weight! Now picture ourselves, with some choice companions,
going round, filling pokes and bags and bales with purest gold, tidying
the citizens' beds and collecting the municipal effluvium of wealth. It's
incalculable, the yield of this plague! And all the stricken fold heal,
they stand up fine and healthy-though gaunt and hungry to be sure-after
three days' time. What a beneficent form of pillage, and how stupendously
lucrative! 

"Barnar, with all respect, I merely urge you to weigh more carefully the
kind of wealth you so peremptorily dismiss! The Auric Plague is costly to
deploy, I grant this candidly. It must be windborn, and so we must engage
a witch to capture an elemental in the Harakan Hills of Hagia. But once
deployed-" 

"Have done, Nifft! Will you not desist? How your voice has come to grate
on my nerves! Spare me these mad fugues of ambition. To squeeze gold from
others is the thief's vocation and essential art. The difference between
us, it seems, is that I am a Thief-for-a-time, a Thief-while-I-must-be
kind of thief, while you are a thief down to the least lizardly bone of
you!" 

We swam-with already toilsome strokes-across a wetland of red pools
fringed by polypous stalks and plumes and tentacles which were freckled
with eyes and writhing ceaselessly. Airborne shapes-a polyglot rabble of
pterid demons-haunted the wetland, swooping down at the crimson pools,
spearing up swallows from the wine-red lagoons. Jawed things leapt out of
the pools and dragged down careless drinkers. We swam a bit higher in the
air to get above the buffeting of the the thirsty prey's wings and the din
of their cries. 

"With a little help from you," Barnar resumed, his eyes not meeting mine,
his tone resolute and tired of the whole debate, "I can summon the means,
and deploy the seed, to make all northern Chilia, every foot of her most
barren heights included, into an unbroken garden of majestic timber. This
is a different art from the Thief's, Nifft, and in choosing this art, the
art of cultivation, I have done with, put away and depart from, the Guild
of Thieves. And in so doing, I dower the world around me. The
city-conjuring, ship-launching treasure of Timber is bestowed by me-not
stolen-bestowed on the whole Great Shallows. The largesse of lumber, from
a Chilia re-garbed in her mantle of green. This feat, you see, this grand
reforestation, would be a getting and a giving. Meanwhile look at your
obsessions! I can't help it Nifft-I must really think less of you! Look at
these deliria of insatiable greed that possess you, even to the point of
reneging on a personal vow!" 

My temper snapped with his. "You bull-necked-" 

"Gentlemen! I beg you! Mercy!" So shrill was Ostrogall we startled, at
first thinking him injured somehow. "My awe is yours," he resumed, "my
reverence, my utter fealty! Yet please tolerate my humble, most apologetic
suggestion-Though I am utterly dazzled by your virtues and excellences in
all else!-my suggestion that you lose the profit of your recent travels
when you are so absorbed in a debate about the future! Your nets bulge
with your loot, of course, but what of all the sights and sounds, the
spectacles you have beheld? Distracted as you are, will you even remember
these wonders? You have seen so much of my world-far more than I had seen,
even through my most far-flung eye-spores. By the Crack, what things we
have seen, eh Gentlemen? I never guessed the multiplicity of my nation!
May I be frank, revered benefactors? You even lose the, well, glee of
having these riches, by being so embroiled in recrimination." 

The dreariness of this world was all I could see of it now-I saw no
wonders. We overflew a new terrain, a great prairie of huge tubeworms,
their ciliated mouths making incessant, lascivious osculations. A winged
parasite of our Harpy's make-though a bigger, more carniverous
breed-infested these tubeworms, hanging above them like carrion flies,
diving to get past the worms' darting, seeking mouths. When they got down
among the lower stalks, they battened on the tubeworms' undefended root
muscles and sucked their blood. Perhaps every second or third Harpy was
caught and devoured by the worms as it plunged. A sufficiency survived:
everywhere, studding the worms' root muscles like warts, shone the pallid
egg-clusters which the Harpies laid. 

"What I mean, Effulgent Ones," Ostrogall ventured, sounding both
encouraged and worried by our silence, "is that you haven't even, well,
gloated over this wealth. You haven't laughed and exulted and run your
hands over it, you've neither cavorted nor capered nor crowed. You are
fabulously rich, but-I grovel in apology!-you don't seem to know it!
Surely you are glad of these incredible riches, gentlemen? And surely you
feel now that I have truly benefitted you, enriched you beyond the shadow
of a doubt? By any sane reckoning of your present abundance, and my
unstinting assistance?" 

Seeing his drift, I found myself to be instantly and peevishly disposed
against it. 

"Oh inexpressible ones," diapasoned Ostrogall, "oh my Rescuers, wise and
just and mighty, oh dare I, in my utter humility, frame the
word?-friends!" 

"Forgive me," I snapped, "but you may not frame the word. You are a demon,
part of the Quintessential Excremescence from the Cosmic Bowel. I think
you presume most offensively upon the bond of obligation placed on you by
our saving of your odious life!" 

"Oh please, Effulgent Ones, I utterly retract the term, how could I have
presumed, madness took me!-but please Effulgent ones, do not now again
show a relenting of your good resolve to honor our bargain! Think not of
returning me to those remorseless larval jaws. Please bethink yourselves
how at every turn I have guided and enriched you!" 

And indeed he had. But perversely, at that moment, our wealth seemed as
much a burden as a boon-a dangerous, arduous cargo we must shepherd over
many miles, through many nights in the open, with leisure and peace of
mind a thing of the past, till we could make our little mountains of loot
secure. And to add to the onus of it all, we must be very careful-more
than careful, as a matter of fact-in using the Unguent of Flight once we
had brought our treasure to the upper world. For if thieves saw us in
mid-air, they would not rest until they had our courses marked-marked and,
likely enough, followed to whatever destination Barnar and I might have in
mind. It was one more burdensome accountability. 

We paused above the tubeworm prairie; we trod the air and unlimbered our
jars of Unguent. We had to reach deep to dip with careful, sparing
fingertips, and freshly anoint our palms and our bootsoles. It was clear
our jars would be half emptied by the time we reached the surface world.
Chance thus cunningly cozened us of the extra flight we had filched, for
our remainder looked to equal the two bowlfuls formally alloted us by the
secondary keepers of the Talons. 

"You are right, demon," I answered at last, "in noting that I am not
ecstatic. And frankly, I feel no grateful warmth toward you, though your
advice on some occasions has been arguably fruitful, I suppose. . . ." 

"Oh please don't waver from your good resolve, gentlemen! We are so near
my natural home. Those plains not one mile hence beyond these leechfields,
just rightwards there a bit from your course. But set me there, I beg, and
I'll take instant root! We'll be quits! I'll bless your holy names
eternally, my radiant saviours!" 

And indeed the plains he indicated were not far off from the field of
tubeworms we still overflew. "Your language is really quite shamelessly
fulsome," I reproved him, though I won't deny I felt the demon had a way
with words. Sensing a pause in our resistance, Ostrogall gushed, his voice
all flutes and oboes, "Oh do not extinguish me, I beg. Gentlemen! Is not
my Being like a fine-wrought bowl of crystal that brims with the cosmos
around me? Do I not hold life's brief drink of wonders-hold it in my
senses like a chalice, as do you? What boots inquisition into our
individual deeds? We share Life's brief excursion from the vasty dark. We
soar a short trajectory through wheeling infinities of form, and then
plunge gone again!" 

Well, I will confess, he moved us. In a word, we felt for the demon. Is it
not amazing, what mere prolonged association can inure us to? But in that
moment Ostrogall struck a true chord; life, after all, is a short flight,
a few centuries long at the utmost. Barnar and I traded a look, and found,
with surprise, that we were agreed to relent. 

"Very well, then," Barnar said. "Give him here, Nifft. I'll veer over and
back-no need that we both waste Unguent." 

"Right," I said. "Here he is." 

"Oh you paragons of human beauty!" the demon-stump ululated. "Oh you
Archetypes, angelically strong and wise-Aieeeee!" 

Our weariness, coupled perhaps with a failure to adjust to the new lift of
our freshened Unguent, caused me to falter, and fumble the transfer of
Ostrogall's head; I released it before Barnar had quite securely gripped
it. It plunged. 

The demon squawled with rage as he plummeted down through the harpy-swarms
thick as flies: "Rot and roast you, human scum!" he shrilled. "Better the
grub had me! Now I'll wait three hundred years for my spores to-" Here a
tubeworm flickered up, and swallowed him. 

We flew on, a little bemused. "There is something poignant, isn't there,
about his mishap?" I asked Barnar. "How he loved seeing things! Such a
devoted witnesser. Now he'll be blind three times longer than if the grub
had eaten him." 

"The irony is poignant, as you say." 

We swam along in a silence somehow loud with the unspoken bitterness
between us. The demon's absence seemed to throw our tacit controversy into
stark relief. A last recrimination burst out of me: "I would never have
believed it possible that Barnar Hammer-hand might tell me he was not a
thief, or that, hearing him say it, I might fail to swear he lied. But now
when you tell me you are not a thief, I am shamefully compelled to nod
assent, and say, 'In truth, no thief is he!'" 

Barnar answered nothing. Far to our left, like a winter-slain tree, the
stark, branching bones of 'Omphalodon's Talons, gnawed down to stumps now,
still valiantly battled the living mantle of Foragers feeding on them. I
looked up briefly at 'Omphalodon's Eye. We had flown close to that Eye not
long past, and glimpsed things in its gulf that I disliked to remember.
Now in that bloody orb I thought I saw a glint of the demon's grief for a
part of himself too briefly resurrected; he seemed to pity that ruined
limb which once had burned to seize the sun. 

After a time, I said, "It won't be long now," meaning the black
constellation of Nest-mouths we swam toward. There was deadly-hard work
ahead of us, getting our plunder back up through the Nest. 

It was a nightmare of toil. High in the vaulting of the Nest's great entry
chamber, we webbed one of our bales in a crevice with pitons and line. We
flew up-Nest one-handed, a shared grip on the second bale between us.
Shifting and veering our burden's bulk clear of sudden traffic was killing
labor. Our dye blazes were half worn off the tunnel walls, eroded to
nothing in places. We blundered and groped, sweat-blind, through miles of
tunnel. 

We reached our larval chamber, and stowed our plunder. Then we flew back
down, and did it all again. 

When it was done at last, we fell into our hammocks. We could go up the
gangway right now if we chose, breathe the wind and see the sun again. . .
. We didn't move. We were stupendously rich men, and above us lay a world
of thieves. We would sleep first, and come out careful. In truth, we felt
like troglodytes still, twisted and stunted to this underworld, the sun
and sky alien things we knew only from tales. Through another long dark we
slept safe in the earth, lullabyed by Behemoth's unsleeping maternal
bustle. 

XXIII 

Adhesions of the hell just left, 

A feeling that the will is cleft 

A taste for darkness in the soul 

While hideous images unscroll 

Before my staring Inner Eye. 

Am I still I? Did I not . . . die? 

ALL WAS PREPARED. I was armed. Our fortune was assembled in the nook, and
Barnar standing by it, where I would send down to him packing materials,
and whence he would send up our bundled wealth when I had transport
secured above. 

He watched me standing before the gangway hatch, watched me still
hesitating to step into the bucket. I think he understood. I gestured at
our netted gems, glinting bitterly like captured beasts' eyes, their
otherworldly lusters biting through Behemoth's cyanic hue, and at our
bales of infernal artifacts, bulging and jutting against their shroudings
like the little bundled corpses of alien monsters. "I half feel it's real
only down here in the dark," I told Barnar. "I half believe that when we
raise it up there, it will vanish, evaporate into the sky." 

"Be comforted, Nifft. I've seen demon gems traded in sunlight, right
enough. In the Shallows' bazaars I've seen one of them buy a whole ship,
with its cargo and crew!" Barnar smiled as he said this, knowing it was
something deeper that was giving me pause. Knowing that what panged me now
was a fear that I myself-transformed by too long and lustful a sojourn
below-might evaporate into the sky, no longer a proper citizen of the
sunlight. 

I had-we both had-faced such a return a decade past. But that reascension
from the Demon-Sea was an escape from constant battle for our lives. We
had hewed and hacked and dodged our way through the subworld, and the
desperate toil of it purged us of that realm's infections. 

Now we were coming from a long, delirious bacchanal of plunder. From the
great red furrow of ruin ploughed by a conquering army, we had gleaned
obscene riches, hanging for the most part free and clear of the
unspeakabilities we viewed. Here, at little personal risk, we plucked
hell's fruit and savored it. In consequence, our hearts and souls were
deeper-dyed with the demons' lurid gloom; half my will still swam in that
dark like a hungry eel, nosing for infernal wealth. 

"Well," I said, heaving a sigh, "I'll send down a warning, if the sunlight
starts melting me." I stepped into the bucket, and Barnar winked at me,
and slid the hatch closed. Down came the counterweight. 

The clank and rattle of the climbing bucket put me in mind of a windlass
weighing a heavy anchor. I fancied I was some stubborn, millenial root
that could only with great mechanical force be pulled free of the earth. 

And my will clung to the earth, to the dark. The smell of stone was like a
home-scent to me; my heart rebelled at leaving it. I prayed it would be
night above; that the stars, like distant demon eyes, might greet me with
their gentler scrutiny-anything but the great fiery eye of the sun! 

The sun! When I did step out into it at last, flinging back the hatchway
with a desperate abandon, like one who steps off some high brink, my sick
hesitations were in an instant burnt and purged away. For one heartbeat,
light was pain-and then it was pure joy, was itself my heart. 

I had emerged into early morning, and this first sunlight that I saw came
in golden spears, piercing the rafters of the main building's vast roof. 

I stepped out onto the rampway; the smell of open air overwhelmed me. A
breeze, scented faintly with sun-warmed stone and skorse trees, moved
through the building. Then tears of happiness sprang to my eyes. Tears of
relief. I ran down the ramp, ran a beeline to the gaping bay doors nearest
me, ran out and stood under the open sky again. 

I climbed a half mile up the mountain side, and stood gazing for a long
time at the sweep of the mountain ridges, their canyons and crevices
brimming with velvety purple shadows, and their high ground all burnished
with the young sun's slanting gold. Above them all the big blue bell of
the sky rang its soundless peal, its reverberant azure note of
boundlessness. 

For a while I was wrenched out of time by the raw beauty of it all; I
utterly forgot where I had just come from, and where I meant to go next. I
wholly forgot that I possessed wealth to awe kings. I was filled with a
floating freedom, newborn into a new world. 

Faint music reached me, and I collected myself. It was a frail thread of
melody, a jump-up falteringly rendered on a pennywhistle. I went back down
to the compound. 

Out below the balcony of Costard's office, where Anhyldia had planted a
little greensward, two men at arms lounged, one man's cape spread between
them with loaves and cheese on it. Two hefty fellows they were, taking
their ease, their pikes and bucklers laid by. They were men of only
middling talent in the trade of arms, perhaps, since they appeared wholly
oblivious to my approach. Still, we could use them on the road. They would
have orders to stand to their posts, but then, I reflected, these men had
been hired by miserly Costard. I smiled, and eased open one of the smaller
pouches of my money-belt. 

"Greetings, stout fellows!" I heartily cried. They jumped; the musician
nearly swallowed his pennywhistle. "The ineffable Costard," I told them
with a courtly salute, "sends me to you with the first installment of your
augmented salary, and with your new instructions." 

They stared at me, a bright-orange savage in a brutish nomad's kilts and
bandoliers, and armed to a perhaps disturbing degree. I had Ready Jack's
pommel at my left shoulder and Old Biter's haft at my right, four javelin
butts sprouting from the quiver aslant on the small of my back. I had
besides, on my belt, a poignard, a knout-and-knuckles for close work, and
a sling and a poke of lead shot. Their eyes moved toward their weapons,
and abandoned the thought. They looked relieved when I placed hefty stacks
of lictors in their hands. "Costard sends you with our new instructions,"
one of them echoed, nodding hesitantly. I could see him almost ask me if
Costard was down in the mine I had obviously just stepped out of. But he
felt of the weight of the gold, and nodded more decisively. 

This was Klaskat, the calmer of the pair. Both he and Klopp were tonsured
in the severely barbered style of the young stockyard bloods down in Dry
Hole, their hair sparingly confined to the crown of the head, like a
treed, short-furred cat. Klaskat allowed that Master Costard had mentioned
a couple of associates still down in the mine. "But he didn't mention, or
rather I'm not sure he mentioned, ah, new orders. . . ." 

"Banish your doubts. This additional stipend-Oh you're quite welcome!-is
to remunerate you for the travel involved. We'll be taking a wagon of
heavy freight down to KairnGate Harbor. You'll be riding escort-and it's
wonderful weather for journeying, don't you think? So fresh! So bright!" 

"The, ah, day is fine indeed. And what shall we call you, sir?" 

"Nifft, call me Nifft. And you'll call my associate Barnar, for that is
his name. Our first task is to send him down some baling canvas and
cinching straps. He'll be sending us back up the bundles we'll be
carrying. These contain a waxy exudate we have scraped off of larval
hides. Exotic pomatums and perfumes are manufactured of the stuff." They
nodded knowingly at this. I resumed, "I will tell you frankly our load is
worth almost a hundredweight of gold-You see how I trust you?-and this is
why we want a couple of stout men-at-arms with us." 

"Well, Honor Nifft, Klopp and I have been twice or thrice around the
corral," Klaskat modestly smiled, by which he meant, in Dry Hole's
cattle-town parlance, that they'd had some taste of doughty deeds and
peril. 

"I knew it when I first clapped eyes on you," I said. 

XXIV 

Gravely is old Dry Hole smitten: 

Toppled, trampled, and beshitten. 

KLASKAT AND KLOPP had many Dry Hole kin and acquaintance working for
neighboring sap mines-whence, indeed, Costard had hired them. They went
over to the Lucky Gasket Mine across the ridge and leased a dray team and
some mounts; with their cattletown savvy they brought over nine skinnies,
six for yoking to one of the Superior's freight wagons, three for mounts.
These light-built plods are quick afoot, but big in the shoulders for
heavy pulling. 

Barnar and I knew the joys of a bath in fresh mountain water, and the
intoxication of the sky and sun, which draped our bodies like royal
garments whose splendor we could not get used to. Even after we'd set to
loading the wagon with the bales Barnar had bucketed up from the mine, we
could not stop interrupting ourselves to stop and gaze about us, wave our
arms and exclaim at the glory of the morning. Klaskat and Klopp gave us an
odd look or two, but proved both discreet and industrious. Though Barnar
and I did all the loading, the massy bales of precious artefacts, wrought
metals, gemstones, coin and bullion, were noisy in the handling; they
knocked and rattled and chinked as we hefted them in place and tied them
down. They sounded most unlike bales of larval skinwax. Klaskat and Klopp
politely disattended, but acted a bit more impressed with their work
thereafter. 

By late afternoon we got rolling, Barnar at the reins, I riding point,
Klasket and Klopp flanking behind. My fortune, my stupendous,
fever-inducing wealth, now had wheels under it. Any child who could manage
a team could possess it all in one opportune moment. Now I knew in full
what it was to fear thieves. I felt more danger on this sunny, empty
mountain highway than I had in any corner of the world of demons. 

We'd hired two mediocre men-at-arms to help us guard a fortune that might
buy an island chain: villages, fortresses, trading fleets and all; a
fortune that-if not halved-could accomplish the wildest reachings of my
imagination. The mediocrity of these hirelings of ours meant there was
less to fear from them should they prove treacherous, of course, but it
also meant less to hope for from their prowess if we should be attacked. 

Ah to take wing with it all-what safety we'd felt in the air! But we
grudged using any more of the precious Unguent for haulage-and as our
combined loot's weight now exceeded the Unguent's lift, we must fly twice
to the coast and back, leaving it in unguarded halves at either end of the
transit. More than this, should we once be seen in flight, the report of
it must fly as well. We could not thereafter come to ground with the
anonymity we now enjoyed, and in this anonymity lay our best security. 

The day declined. Big, black-winged krawks circled in the perfect blue,
above canyons brimming with purple shadow. The sun's all-gilding,
all-ennobling eye, for which great 'Omphalodon lies bound in stone, blazed
gloriously, though I had scant attention for it now. Potential ambushes
loomed everywhere along a highway that wound through so many ravines and
defiles. I rode so tensed for action that I was slow to wonder at the
highway's emptiness, but our Dry Holers were less so. 

"Not one soul all afternoon!" cried Klaskat. "This is rare indeed, Honor
Nifft." 

"And do you know," Klopp added, "it's been a few days since we saw anyone
passing up at the mine. The boys at the Lucky Gasket remarked on it too, I
think." 

We retired up a sandy wash to pass the night. I sat my watch under the
stars, savoring the sight of them now and then, but more and more
wondering at the unbroken emptiness of this broad, smooth, moonlit
highway. If we once attained Dry Hole, we would be within a day and a
half's dash of the coast, where four hundred lictors could buy us a
slender carrack of Minuskulon make. But why came there no trafic from Dry
Hole? That city thronged with mountain trade. The vacant highway grew ever
more ominous. 

Our wagon was rolling at first light, and before dawn we met, at last,
another vehicle-a freight wagon of sap-barrels, returning with its load
undelivered. We were sure now of trouble, even before speaking with the
driver, a red-bearded lout in ill humor. "The causeway's collapsed! A
league and more above the city! The span across Dead Plod Arroyo is
fallen, and as far as I could see beyond it, all the stretches on pilings
are fallen to rubble in the canyon-bottoms! They don't pay me enough to
haul these barrels into town on my back, thank you!" 

The incurious fellow had only a shrug for our anxious questions. Who knew
the why of it? Not he. Full of his choler and his refusal of further
responsibility, he geed up and sped on, rehearsing some choice things to
say when his barrel-boss reproached him for his undelivered load. 

Hurrying now to know the worst, we pushed on. A panicky notion took root
in my mind that our huge wealth cried aloud through its canvas shrouds.
The sheer mass of it called danger down upon us, summoned perils of
commensurate size. Some grave disaster lay ahead and it seemed fitting,
even inevitable that a prize such as ours must challenge Misfortune's
mightiest manifestations. I almost cringed from this silent outcry I felt
emanating from those canvas bundles, as though it would call something out
of the sky any moment now. 

Further enlightenment came just after sunrise, when there approached us a
creaky wain of the high-gated style that hauls hay. This one was heaped
with furniture, and textiles, and caged fowls squawking. There were even
suckling pigs, in makeshift cages of house shutters, befouling one corner
of the van. In hammocks strung between the heavier pieces of furniture,
three tousled and haggard children snored the throaty sleep of infantile
exhaustion. A compact little bald man with sinewy hands was driving. A
mound of blankets in the box beside him was probably an exhausted wife.
Hanging from the box at his right hand, a belt of joiner's tools had equal
place with an old shortsword that looked long out of use. 

Klaskat hailed him excitedly. "You're the Wainwright Brattle, down on
Cloven Lane, are you not?" 

"Aye, I was he!" So loud and brassy did the man shout, we wondered that
none of his family was wakened. His face looked drained and fatigued, but
his body was taut and trembly, and a kind of madness simmered in his eyes.

"What news of 'Hole, sir?" Klaskat urged him. "We've met a drayman says
the highway down into 'Hole is all collapsed." 

"Collapsed it is. Oh, yes indeedy! Not a span or a piling but is all
collapsed!" Brattle smiled, his mad eyes almost merry. "It's in ruins full
three miles up into the mountains from 'Hole. It was wiped out in the
first great stampede, a week ago now! We left the next day. I've been five
days dragging what's left of our livelihood up dry gulches and down narrow
old prospector's trails. I just reached the highway last night! I mean to
make time, now that I can, and put god-cursed Dry Hole, befouled past
remedy, far far behind us! Somewhere a new life awaits me and my family,
and by the Crack and all that crawls from it, we'll find it! Stand away!"
He'd talked himself into a bellowing wrath. He stood up and made his whip
crack like lightning; his quartet of plods, weary but strong, surged
ahead-Barnar had to pull our wagon smartly aside. 

We let Klaskat and Klopp ride foremost, more schooled in the roadway. They
set a quick pace, fearing now for kinfolk and family property. I tried to
imagine what disaster might produce a "god-cursed Dry Hole, befouled past
remedy." 

I became aware of a buzzing noise and a wafting stench; a moment after, we
reached Dead Plod Arroyo. The bridge that had spanned it was now two
stumps of stonework; the dry ravine yawning between them a hundred feet
deep. 

"What is that smell! Is it manure? Are those flies I hear?" 

"He spoke of a stampede. . . ." 

"What can we do as a packtrain through these last few miles?" Barnar asked
Klaskat. 

"We could do it. The terrain can be managed." 

"We will pack the beasts," I told him. "You two scout our trail through
this ravine and see what you can beyond it." 

When they were well down into the arroyo we remade our bundles. Our string
of nine beasts bore less than four hundredweight each, a heavy load, but
not cruelly so. In the re-packing, our subworld loot flashed luridly; in
sunlight it had a corrupt and somehow shameful brilliance. From the unseen
terrain beyond the arroyo wafted the scent of shite and the noise of
myriad flies, sensations mundane enough, yet sinister, that teased us as
we worked. Just as we finished we heard the amazed cries of Klaskat and
Klopp, who had ascended the arroyo's far wall, and now viewed beyond it. 

"Key, Cauldron and Calipers!" Klopp distantly bellowed. "It's . . . it's a
hornbow! It's as big as a whale!" 

They came back and met us down in the arroyo to help us lead the packtrain
across. They prepared us for what we would see, but this did not lessen
the impact of it when we saw it for ourselves. Down in the next gulch,
amid the tumbled arches of the viaduct, the stupendous ruminant lay
rotting. Farther down the ravine another bovine colossus putrefied. Not
this alone set the fog of flies dancing (thicker than the bees in the
flowerfields of Dolmen!) but also little hills of bovine ordure beckoned
them to their buzzing bacchanal. 

More of these giant cattle littered the canyons filled by the toppled
highway's rubble. They were hornbow, crucicorn, palomanes-every common
breed lay in the gulches and gullies amid the shattered stonework, whose
ruin their combined weight had clearly caused. Their corpses looked hale
enough, if a bit obese, even discounting for their ripeness. Their
nostrils, big as doorways, had spewed white froth in death. Twice, where
the vast carcasses spanned difficult ground, we used them for bridges,
though our skinnies were uneasy at such footing. Barnar and I exchanged
just one look that said all. Costard's little venture with his share of
the giants' pap was now revealed to us. We did not share our insight with
our employees. 

At length, a last ravine opened out ahead, and Dry Hole was revealed,
spread below us. 

XXV 

Oh lead thy kine to Cattle Town, 

But feed them not too full! 

Lest Cattle Town should rattle down 

And break upon thy skull. 

I REMEMBERED this vista as it had appeared not many weeks before, all Dry
Hole's handsomely carpentered homes sweeping downslope to the distant
river, their rooftiles burnished by the setting sun. Upon this lovely
panorama blight and ruin had fallen. A blanket of flies buzzed and boiled
above it; the quiltwork of its rooftops was cratered with shattered
structures and strewn debris, and heaped with dung in mounds so copious as
to bury entire buildings. Klaskat and Klopp groaned aloud. 

"Out on the plain beyond the river-what are those heaps, and those black
clouds of things above them?" Barnar asked. "They're thick as flies, but
at this distance must be something much bigger-carrion birds, perhaps?
Feeding on more carcasses?" But Klaskat and Klopp had eyes only for their
own sectors of the city. To prevent their outright defection from our
employ, we had to agree to seek out their families and learn their state.
They agreed they would continue in our service if they possibly could. In
truth their company was dangerous, for they could link us with Costard
whose name, if known, must be purest poison here; at the same time, two
natives could best steer us through this stricken city. 

Bound kerchiefs excluded the flies from our mouths and nostrils, but they
bombarded every other inch of our bodies, bumping into us like carnival
revelers reeling with surfeit. We followed a maze of undamaged streets
where the only hindrances were the flies and the crush of traffic. Dray
wagons hauling dung and broken buildings slowed our progress to a crawl,
and had we not been able to thread our beasts single file, we might have
been stopped altogether. At one pause to let debris wagons pass, Klopp
hailed a man, an unhoused grocer by the look of the barrels and sacks and
crated foodstuffs in his buckboard. "Ho, Roddle! What happened? Is your
shop destroyed?" 

"The ground floor's intact! But my top floor was bitten off! The accursed
brutes grazed all through the town before they went mad! They crunched up
thatched roofs and shingles and stone slates alike, munched wooden walls
like jackstraw!" 

"But what happened? Where did they come from?" 

"Some pestiferous square-head, some outlander, some sap miner came down
and leased the pasturage in Sparse Meadow Vale just out of town. He bought
a few head here and there-bought some of your uncle's hornbow I think,
said he wanted to experiment with a small herd of mixed breeds. The fool
had some boughten wizardry it seems. His cattle came wandering out of the
valley a week ago, and stayed near the river at first, drinking and
drinking. How we all went and gawked! You could almost see them growing,
one hour to the next! I must be off-your uncle's stables survived; talk to
him!" 

The pulse of civic energy was strong in Dry Hole. All was clearance and
repair, improvisation, shared resources. It took two hours to reach
Klopp's Uncle Hebneb's stables, a place still well up in the foothills,
and whence, through the clouds of flies, the seethe of activity down on
the plain was not much more visible, save that the huge mounds around
which the activity boiled became unmistakably identifiable as more of the
giant cattle carcasses. 

Bald, bulky Hebneb and three of his sons were unharnessing a dung-wagon's
sweating team, and mustering fresh plods to the traces. He greeted his
nephew with a sharp look, and came out to us. 

"Your employer, Klopp! Bragg came down from the Lucky Gasket and told us
you'd hired out to that fool, that Costard, that's just managed the
Superior Mine to ruin! Guarding the mine for him, was it? So the idiot
could come down and do this!" 

"Yes, but Uncle, I . . . how could we . . . I never had any idea that . .
. I mean we just guarded his mine, Uncle Hebneb! We work for these men
here, now, Uncle-they work for Costard too!" 

"We did indeed," I affably affirmed, "work for young Costard. We tapped
for him, and when he proved-most infuriatingly, I assure you-unable to pay
us, we agreed to take payment in larval aromatics. We've only now come
above-ground. I promise you we never dreamed he had anything to do with
cattle-raising. We thought him a respectable sap miner, at least till we
tried to get paid." 

"Oh that pompous little milksop!" The stabler's thick neck corded with
anger. "I actually sold him twenty head of hornbow from our own pasture
down-river! Our own kine, raised by our own hands, to have them come crush
our houses and befoul our streets! Your father sold him some too,
Klaskat-you'll find him down by Third Bridge where they're curing the
meat. The fool went to see everyone and bought a few head from a dozen
different cattlemen, making a big display of secrecy about marvels he was
working! The callow dolt! How could we have guessed he had real power of
any kind? Oh, we had a good laugh about him down at the Dusty Hoof. 'I'm
dabbling in carniculture,' he tells me! Carniculture! 'I wish to assess
the, ah, responsiveness and potentialities of all the common breeds,' he
tells me! Who could have guessed the ninny's power to harm? He came down
to the taverns to sup through the first week or so, fairly swollen with
mysterious importance, hinting wonders. Why weren't we more curious? If
only someone had gone up to Sparse Meadow for a look early on! But no, we
must wait till ten days ago, when a crucicorn the size of a rich man's
house walks out of the hills! We went up to him then, quick enough, but
what could be done with him? He threw a hay wagon at us!" 

"What!?" Barnar cried. 

"He-hold there! Harv! Give them the dapples! The debris wagons need the
heavies!" 

Hebneb rushed back to work, as two more dray-wagons pulled into his yard,
one still heaped with its load of dung and bringing a veritable blizzard
of flies with it. We huddled in their battering onslaught while Klopp
secured his uncle's assurance that he could be spared to serve us, as his
wage would be useful in the hard times ahead. 

The hardy, stoic Dry Holers, working furiously, gave questions short
shrift, but we pieced together most of the tale as we wound our way down
to the river. By the time the crowd of citizens roused by advent of the
giant crucicorn had gone halfway up to Sparse Meadow Valley, full three or
four score more cattle of equal size had come ambling down the hills,
grazing on trees, which they munched down to stumps, and on various
cottages and ranchers' domiciles, whose wooden walls and shingles they
seemed to find acceptable as fodder. Men who had set out as a confused
committee of inquiry arrived at Sparse Meadow as an outraged mob. "We were
ready to hang that pipe-neck shorthorn," a saddler told us. "We found his
whole range a sea of flops raging with flies, the forest clean gone-just
stumps-halfway up the hills all around. The ranch house was burst open
like an egg, and that Costard, as big as a house, had his arms round the
barn and was struggling to sit himself up. The sight fair paralyzed us
where we stood! 'Help!' he blubbers. He looks like a giant baby, all fat
and hideous naked, for he's split his clothes long past. 'Help me! I ate
some by accident! I didn't wash my hands!' His very words, if you can find
sense in them. The madness of it! Some men who'd lost property began to
shout at him and shake their fists and threaten him-to what end, I ask
you? But we were all in shock. His eyes went mad then-we were to see it in
his cattle later. He frothed and bellowed and flung a hay wagon clear up
the hill at us!" 

No more was to be learned of Costard. Dry Hole's defense immediately
absorbed her citizens. The giants were drawn first to the river, where
they lingered a day or so, drinking prodigiously. They were vague and
torpid-even for cattle-and utterly indifferent to what they trod upon, and
they continued to grow, almost visibly. While they hugged the river,
crossbows and torches and catapults were tried on them; it was learned
that assault elicited most unbovine behavior-they seized attackers in
their jaws and chewed them. Then the giants began slowly dispersing to
graze-most out on the plain, destroying corrals and feedlots and
scattering herds-and a hundred or so up into the city, eating buildings.
The salvation of property was now the city's sole labor. "There were some
wild rescues of moveable goods," the saddler told us, "for the brutes
would only step on you by accident. Remember Klaagi, the smith? He'd got a
whole wagon of his gear, even loaded his littler forge, and made his break
up Cedril Street, flogging the team. He got almost clear, and flop-poor
Klaagi, his wagon, his team, were buried alive by a patty-and his smithy
was spared in the end, unscathed!" 

Then came the morning when a madness struck the giants, all of them almost
simultaneously, it seemed. Bellowing, frothing, glassy-eyed, they ran in
ponderous stampede-scattering, re-converging, trying to escape some inner
agony. Some fled up the highway into the mountains; its great supports
sustained them for a while until the massed vibrations of their tread
shattered several miles of it at once. If the fall killed these, it took
but little life from them, for all the other giants out on the plain had
dropped dead by that day's close. 

The grit and resolution of Dry Hole's citizens were not fully known to us
till we reached the highway by the river and saw how the townsfolk had
turned the huge carcasses that littered the plain into a meat quarry.
Kites and krawks and guzzlars thronged the sky, indignant at this human
thievery of their alloted feast. Men with every butcher's tool, with saws
and swords to boot, swarmed scaffolding upon the giant dead. Hide was
being stripped and tanned in sections big as mainsails. Vast shavings from
the marbled walls of meat were being smoked above beds of coals on frames
improvised from broken corral posts. The highway thronged with wagons from
the south bearing barrels, and salt, and pickling brine, and charcoal for
the curing fires. And equal traffic ran the other way, bearing smoked meat
and hides back to KairnGate Harbor, whence it would be shipped south to
help recoup Dry Hole's civic losses. 

Klaskat found his father receiving these shipments in one of his
stockyards, collecting bills of lading, sending his assistants off with
the teamsters to guide them to their points of delivery out on the
swarming plain. This Clyster was a big, peremptory man with an aura of
status and property, and a probing, glittery eye. 

"Worked for Costard, did you? Well, I can't well blame you when my son's
made the same mistake. Yes, I'll rent you a wagon-he can bring us back
barrels and salt. You say Costard paid you in 'aromatic scrapings'? I've
never heard of these." 

"Nor had we, though of course we were novices at tapping. He assured us
the waxen scrapings from larval hides are quite valuable to perfumers of
the Ephesion Isles." My heart hammering, I strove to look simple, a man
imposed on, now touched by doubt. "Surely he would not have told us . . .
an untruth?" 

Clyster shrugged; it suited him to send a wagon south with us for his son
to bring back laden, and earn a wage as well. "No doubt he knew more about
sap mines than cattle. Mayhap you'll meet him-it's said he's dragging
himself south through the hills. If so, you can tell him we intend to
teach him, by demonstration upon his person, some of the fundamentals of
cattle-raising, to wit, notching, branding, castrating, flaying, and
butchering-not necessarily in that order. Inform him his instruction
commences the instant we can find the time for it." 

The highway snaked silvery across the tawny grass, rolling into and out of
gentle valleys. Soon it would reach the steep cliffs of the coast, and
turn to run along them where they sloped down to KairnGate Harbor. Before
nightfall we would have our wealth in a trim little carrack, and anchored
safe offshore. 

At last there ahead lay the sweeping turn the highway made to follow the
coastal cliffs. But just at this turning, we beheld a crowd of travellers
and their vehicles clustered at the roadside. They were looking down into
a narrow valley whose farther slope levelled to clifftop, with the empty
air and the shining sea beyond. 

"What are they looking at?" I foreknew, with dread, the question's answer
even as I asked it. 

Costard, almost as big as a whale, his ghastly nudity besmeared with earth
and crushed foliage, had crawled halfway up the valley's seaward slope. It
seemed, by the quiverings of his blubbery limbs, that he still struggled
to reach the clifftop, but could muster no further propulsion. Barnar
reined up and the rest of us dismounted. We stood and stared-how could we
do otherwise? 

Then Costard's glassy gaze, roving desperately between earth and sky, lit
on the crowd above him, and grew sharper. "Uncle Barnar! Nifft!" he
boomed. "Help me!" How huge his voice was! The crowd looked at us oddly.
Never have I known such mortification! 

"But how can we help you!?" Barnar despairingly bellowed back. 

"I can make it up with just the slightest pull, and then I can roll the
rest of the way! Oh hurry, before I grow bigger! I must reach the sea! I
can't breathe! I must float! I'm crushing myself!" 

A freight hauler, his load of rock salt and charcoal bespeaking his Dry
Hole destination, geed his heavy team and drew his wagon next to ours. "He
seems to be kin of yours. I'll be glad to assist you, no charge, if you'd
kindly help him drown himself, like he wants." And he held up several
coils of heavy hauling cable. 

We eased our wagons off the highway, and out along the grassy rim of the
cliff. Twenty strides to our right, white-bearded ocean grumbled at the
precipice four hundred feet straight down. And here now was the great
pallid face of Costard directly below us, a moon of dirt-daubed anguish,
sweating to rise. His vast legs churned sluggishly; he rose fractionally
up the slope, then slithered back again. "By all the powers," groaned
Barnar, "you headlong young idiot, what have you done?" 

"It was an accident, Uncle! I failed to wash my hands of the ichor, and it
impregnated some bread and pickled quiffles that I ate . . . Oh hurry,
please hurry, if I get heavier I'll never reach the sea." 

Costard's gross, ballooning nudity was a powerful added inducement of an
aesthetic kind to dump him into the sea as soon as possible, and hide him
from sight. The hauler, a red-haired man who did not mask his bitter
amusement as he worked, rigged his cables in a "Y" whose branches he
anchored to the axle trees of our wagons. 

"Your mother, my sister Anhyldia," Barnar told the youth mournfully, "will
kill me for this. I mean that quite literally. I dare not face her again
in this life!" 

"Now look you, Costard," I told him quite urgently as we prepared to give
him his end of the cable. "You must release this cable before you tilt
over the cliff-you must." He nodded, but his mooncalf eyes looked blank of
comprehension. He gripped the cable and wrapped several bights around his
wrist. Klaskat and Klopp, with rope from their pommels to the yoke-tree,
prepared to add their pull to our team's efforts, but I rode free. I drew
Ready Jack, and tested his edge. We turned the wagons to run along the
clifftop, and geed up, giving Costard a diagonal pull slantwise up the
last bit of slope to the cliff. 

Our beasts strained, every thew etched. Costard's frantic feet and fingers
churned the grassy loam of the hillside. Perhaps our jot of help made the
difference, or perhaps it merely woke some last reserve of the bloated
young wretch's will, but up he heaved, floundering and quivering, his free
hand gaining the level clifftop. He heaved again, and he slithered his
middle up. 

"Let go of the cable!" I bellowed. He heard me not, or cared not. He
thrust both hands towards the brink of the precipice, and his effort
jerked the wagons after, the teams screeching and stumbling. 

My whole career of thieving rose before my eyes in that instant, when I
saw our wagon dancing backward toward the cliff. Every great prize in a
long career, every failure, whipped past my eyes like wind-driven
phantoms, and all were as nothing to the colossal fortune in that lurching
buckboard with Barnar reeling helpless at the reins. 

I spurred my mount forward. Costard reached again, and this time got a
grip on the brink, wrenching the wagons yet nearer the abyss. I charged
the cable, which was taut as bowstring, and I sheared through it with one
mighty sweep of Ready Jack. In the same instant Costard heaved himself
outwards, off the precipice. 

It seemed he hung forever in the air, slowly, slowly falling with an
indescribable fatty shimmy all over his hugeness, fleetingly putting me in
mind of Behemoth larvae wriggling in the brood-mass. 

"Will he float, do you think?" Klaskat awedly asked, just before Costard
smote the ocean with a burst of foam and sank like a stone, his wobbly
pallor dwindling to a glimmer in the blue-black deeps, and vanishing. 

XXVI 

Oh, let me and my fortune ride the sea, 

On Ocean's bosom know-at last!-repose! 

There nor flame nor thief need dreaded be, 

And lapping swells lull weary lids to close. . . . 

KAIRNGATE HARBOR will forever wear the friendly luster of a safe haven to
my eyes, for the way it looked at that day's end. The water wore the
setting sun, and the little bay was a single coin of gold. At a shipyard,
whose master we caught just locking his gate to leave, we found a yare
little caravel he'd just refitted, with a stout four-oar skiff aboard her.
We let him wangle a fiveweight for her in our craving for the peace it
would give us to have our treasure shipped and safe offshore at last. 

Klaskat and Klopp we sent off with two hundred lictors each. We might not
have spared so much, but in our impatience to be loaded we let them help
us lay our bales aboard, and they, as they worked, allowed their looks to
display their doubt that what we shipped was truly larval scrapings. They
handled the bundles roughly enough to make them chink metallically. Hence
the handsomeness of our stipend. Even so they drove off laggingly, with
wistful backward gazes.4 

We named our caravel Bounty, and by the rising of the gibbous moon, we had
sailed her out and anchored her in an untrafficked reach of the harbor.
She rode in plain sight of the balconied dockside refectory where we
proposed to sup. With our Unguent strapped to our middles beneath our
jerkins, and our beloved Bounty never out of our gaze, we could be aboard
her in mere seconds at the first sign of threat. 

We rowed ashore in silence, in silence took our table on the crowded
balcony, bespoke our meal, awaited it and ate it in silence. Our treasure
was won, and was shipped. Now came the having, the spending. Now, whenever
Barnar and I faced each other, we faced the gulf that yawned between us.
And so we avoided one another's eyes. 

Down in our little Bounty there, sitting on moonlit water as still as
hammered pewter, lay a cargo of wonders. And contained within that wealth,
as the progeny lies in the womb, were deeds to make our names ring down
through the ages in the annals of thievery. 

And these yet unborn marvels tormented me. I saw my hands, in Pelfer's
gantlets, touch the iron gates of Mhurdaal's Manse (all hung with corpses
of unsuccessful thieves, still fresh and bleeding though long centuries
slain); I heard the gates groan, and gape asunder. I saw Mhurdaal's
Library, labyrinth of lore, saw plague-touched cities full of folk
a-sweating out pure gold. . . . 

And here sat Barnar, also gazing on the Bounty, and seeing forests of
skorse, stubbornly dreaming of stands of timber, himself as thick and
rooted as a tree in his infuriating willfulness. It did not matter what
our halves of this fortune might do. Entire, our fortune was a bridge to
glory, to immortal exploit. Half a bridge leads but to an abyss. Barnar
had sworn to the exploit, and I could not, would not let it go. So we sat
there, the silence between us like a spectral Third at the table. 

Until Barnar said, "That woman at the railing . . . do we know her?" 

"Is that not Niasynth?" 

"Yes, I think it is!" The young-ancient woman looked travel-ready in a
shortcape, tunic, boots and shortsword. She sat gazing at the moon and
sea. A rapture, a zone of privacy long centuries deep, enveloped her, and
we made no move to rupture it. We watched her, and our own memories of the
subworld's eternity seemed to enfold us, so that we jumped when a woman's
voice greeted us from close at hand. 

"This is well-met, good thieves!" Sha'Urley stood at our table. "Let's
have a hug and a kiss, oh thou miserly, greedy, tight-bungholed Nifft!" I
embraced her, though I could have wished her ebullience more
seemly-spoken. She sat, and took wine with us. Her accoutrement was like
Niasynth's, towards whom her smiling eyes continually slanted as she spoke
with us. 

"What a delight to meet you like this!" I told her. "Perhaps we can settle
that fiftyweight of gold still owed us here and now. Then we need make no
stop in Dolmen Harbor." 

"Alas, there you must stop, I'm afraid, and deal with Ha'Awley. I've ceded
to my brother all my interest in his enterprise of the giants' pap. He is
the repository of any and all revenues it may have drawn. The only coin I
bear is needed for our travels, Niasynth's and mine." 

"Travelling?" I asked, but we understood, I think, even before she
explained. 

"She has a new world to learn," Sha'Urley said. "And as I tried to tell
her about this world, I discovered how little I knew it myself. I found
that I have the same world to learn as she does. The pair of you too had a
part in rousing me. The places you will go on a venture! You are both no
less than inspirational!" 

"There's no finer thing than setting out to see what you can see!" I told
her. I was envying her a bit for some reason, as if I weren't as footloose
as she. "We congratulate you. But, dearest Sha'Urley, forgive our closer
inquiry into your brother's affairs. He does indeed have our fiftyweight
of specie, does he not?" 

Sha'Urley laughed. "Whatever his other difficulties, lack of specie is not
one of them. Bunt Hivery remains one of the foremost in the Angalheim
chain." 

"I beg your leave to press a bit," Barnar told her. "How does his
enterprise with the ichor fare?" 

"To be honest, good Barnar, that is precisely what I am studiously trying
not to know. This is as far south as we came with him, and we have not
seen him for near a month. We have toured southern Kairnheim while
Niasynth regained her strength. We are here only to set sail with the
morning tide for the Minuskulons. I have avoided even news of Dolmen, lest
it ensnare me. 'Who means to fly, takes wing at once.'" 

"Dearest Sha'Urley," I put in. "Believe me, I appreciate the perilous
poise of spirit you have come to, and we do not wish to jar you, but-" 

Smiling, she raised a preventing palm. "Peace, sweet thief. I know why you
have grounds for fear. Costard's doings, and his fate, have reached us
here." 

"Even his final attainment of the sea?" 

"No. We knew he crawled coastward, no more." 

When she had heard from us the details of Costard's recent plunge into the
deep, which we strove to render vividly, she covered her face a moment,
concealing some emotion which caused a slight tremor of her shoulders. 

"Well," she said at length, with a solemn face, "I can tell you only that
poor Costard's . . . abandon is not a flaw my brother shares. If profit
can be had from this ichor outside its ordained sphere, Ha'Awley will
extract it, both methodically and cautiously." A shadow touched her eyes
here. "It has been impossible not to gather that some kind of unrest lies
on Dolmen in recent days. And looking across the channel this morning, I
noticed in the oblique light of sunrise some shadowy suggestion of
airborne turmoil above my homeland's heights. More I cannot say, and will
not know. Indeed, we're going to board our ship within the hour, and lie
safe from hearing further news before we sail." 

I could not help but sigh. "Well, it is a nuisance to have to put in at a
troubled port! Still, a fiftyweight of specie is no trifling sum." 

"Forgive me if I smile," Sha'Urley said. "Forgive me if I'm wrong in
thinking you have ten thousand times that value even now in hand, perhaps
down in that caravel anchored there, that your eyes seldom leave for
long." 

"Even as yours seldom leave Niasynth for long?" 

She grinned at this. "Yes. Even so. And I hope your obsession will make
your hearts soar as high as mine does, every time I look at my dear
Niasynth. But just consider, friends: why don't you let that fiftyweight
go? Not for my brother's sake, but in a spirit of libation, of a little
thanks-offering to Luck? The way you've been squeezing and grabbing pelf
down in the underworlds, madly fanatic as demons yourselves . . . I'm
saying you need to unclench, to ease out of avarice's frenzy. Forget the
fifty as a purely moral exercise." 

Plainly, Sha'Urley's heart being light, her reason too had slipped its
tether. I forgave this grotesque suggestion as the mere ebullition of a
fevered fancy. 

We lingered drinking with her a while, and then parted with great
affection-and before Niasynth had yet come away from her revery at the
railing. She seemed to sit in a space still too far from this world for
our voices to reach her. Surely a speech that was more than words was all
her mind could really hear as yet, a speech such as Sha'Urley must use
with her. 

XXVII 

Come golden sweetness! Overbrim each cell 

Of Fortune's labyrinthine honeycomb. 

Swell! Gather to one shining drop, and fall, 

Delicious sphere, upon my tongue, thy tomb! 

THE SUMMER NORTHERLIES were done. A southwest breeze with a nip of autumn
in it arose some hours before dawn, and we hoisted sail and tacked for
Dolmen. Sunrise found us scudding smartly, keel kicking spray from the
chop. Our little Bounty's friskiness seemed to coax me to sail straight
out for the open sea. Forget Dolmen, forget further complication. Drive
straight to the open Agon; make landfall in the Minuskulons in a
twenty-night, make Pardash and Karkmahn-Ra in the same again. Perhaps the
morning wind whispered the same to Barnar. 

But then I asked myself: What sane man could leave a fiftyweight of gold
lying by when he might have it for three or four steps out of his path?
Was it not blind foolishness not to take one's own? And no doubt Barnar
asked himself the same. 

The wind dropped as Dolmen's peaks loomed bigger, but the channel current
pulled us steadily along. Dolmen was mantled in some thin cloud and haze,
and we had drawn quite near when the noon sun thawed the sky and raised
the winds again, and blew the island jewel clear. There was indeed a
fretful turmoil in the air above the highlands; bursts of smoke roiled up
into the winds, and were snatched to tatters. There was a scent, too, on
the breeze, a taunting whiff that was and yet was not like burning flesh.
. . . And was there not a fierce music as well, that came to us fitfully
on the wind? A humming, buzzing ground-note, and the shrill voices of men,
as at war? 

"Smoke. What next?" I said bitterly. "Will we never have done with
obstacles and complications?" 

"Look how the harbor swarms!" 

Taking in canvas, we slipped round the harbor's northern spur. We peered a
long tense moment at the bustle of ships, the throngs on the quays, the
laden wagons jostling on the upland highways, before determining, with
relief, that this was a swarming more of business than disaster. 

Nonetheless we anchored our Bounty well outside the thick of the traffic,
then lowered our skiff and oared in toward the docks. "Shall we make for
that wine shop?" Barnar suggested. "The outside tables should give a good
view of her." 

All the moored ships loomed big above us, and not a few of them were Bunt
Hivery's freighters, big but graceful vessels, castled fore and aft, with
Bunt's escutcheon on the foresail, and more of these appeared to be
offloading than taking cargo on. Teamsters held their dray wagons steady
to take on packets of heavy lumber, kegs of pitch and bales of torches,
stacks of hinged, folded timbers that might be collapsible derricks or
siege weapons, and packets I could not at first identify, but which proved
with closer looking to be bundled darts for a large ballista, each missile
near big as a man. 

"Seems we have a distinctly military kind of commerce here," Barnar mused.
"And at the same time not a few of the locals look to be taking up
travelling." For mixed with the freighters were not a few other craft
taking on passengers, while everywhere on the docks the dray wagons were
interspersed with little knots of folk waiting to take ship, most of them
caped for open sea breezes and hovering protectively round their little
cargoes of baggage. 

"Yes. Things are definitely a-boil," I answered. "Bounty's well anchored
outside this mess. If Bunt's in a pickle I'd best have the coin straight
out of him, in case he's a-sinking. I'll try his manse first." 

Barnar climbed up to the quay and took an outside table at the wineshop,
beginning his watch on Bounty. With his Unguent strapped to his middle
beneath his jerkin, he would not need the skiff, which I rowed
cross-harbor, weaving easily amid the larger craft, and making better time
than I would afoot through the crowds on the quay. 

I tried to read Dolmen's situation as I oared my way. Whatever was going
on up in the highlands, there was much of war and siege about it. An
unbroken snake of traffic rippled up the switchbacks of both the main
upland highways. The downcoming wagons were mostly empty, and those
climbing bore baled torches and barrels of pitch and the like. 

"Ho, lanky Karkmahnite! Sweet Nifft! Withstay thy sinewy arm a moment from
thy toils, my lizardly darling!" This merry salutation, brazen as
trumpets, blared down upon me. Looking up, I saw perched in the forecastle
of one of Bunt's freighters, lissom Higaia-in arms, and looking quite
dazzling so. She wore a snug pectoral plate of brass, molded to the ripe
economy of her breasts, which it enshrined in lovely sculptures of
themselves. She had a stout gaffing hook for cargo handling which she
gripped two-handed, its shaft across the back of her neck-the way a
resting trooper will wear his javelin like a yoke-but in the next instant
her vessel's creaking cargo boom caught her attention. She whirled and
brandished the gaff like a baton of office then: "Ease it there! Slow on
that windlass! Easy down, Hoofa! Easy down!" Her freighter was one of the
few taking on rather than discharging goods. 

I tied up to the ladder she dropped me, and climbed it. We hugged each
other with a will, Higaia and I, while over the crown of her raven-black
head I saw a big flat packet of canvas lowered into her freighter's hold. 

And her freighter it was, or half hers. She was cargomaster-boss of the
freight and its handling, coequal, in Bunt's commercial fleet, to the
vessel's captain. This was Radula, a nervous, friendly man with an
unusually fair skin that ran heavily to freckles and sunburn, unfortunate
skin for a sea-captain. He greeted me very civilly and then told Higaia,
an odd quaver to his voice, "I'd like to be standing well away within the
hour, my dear. Can you manage it?" 

"With ease, Raddy, with ease. I'm going down now to see the comb secured.
Come on, Nifft. Are you heading south? We're bound for the Minuskulons." 

"As are we, and beyond them to the Ephesions. There rides our little
carrack Bounty, yonder. We're just putting in to collect a fiftyweight
Ha'Awley owes us." 

Higaia paused at the hatchway, looked at Bounty, and then looked at me
rather sharply, before she led me down the ladder into the hold. Its gloom
was fragrant; aromas of brine and sweetness warred. Her voice echoed below
me, "A fiftyweight's no trifle, I suppose . . . but you'll have to go up
to the meadows for it." 

"Do you imply that this is difficult, or dangerous?" 

"Let me show you something." 

Leading me over to the canvas balke that had just been laid upon a dozen
like it-and the whole hold was stowed full of the same-she plucked from
her belt a dagger honed sharp as a razor, and, crosswise down one corner
of the packet, she slashed out a narrow flap perhaps a cubit long. Within
it was honeycomb, half a cubit thick. Each cell could have coffered the
head of a man. In the shadowy hold, the sheen of the wax dimly glimmered,
and the liquid gold within it looked dark as amber. It made the scalp
prickle with that flush of danger riches give you. 

"It was for harvesting this," Higaia told me, "that I got my promotion
from the bath-house. For you see, when they were producing comb on this
scale, though huge, the bees could still fly, at least for short
stretches, and they had begun attacking men and women. Bunt suddenly
needed men-at-arms. For thrice the pay of the baths you may be sure I made
my skills known to him." 

"I knew you were a dancer. I don't wonder you're mistress of the dance of
arms," I answered, distracted. I was picturing this monstrosity that had
come to pass in Bunt's flower fields. "These giant bees," I prompted,
"defended their comb, then, from the harvesting?" 

"No. Their attacking seemed spontaneous, a kind of hunting. They had a
week before devoured the last of the flowers right down to the roots-all
the meadows are bald dirt now. The bees were evidently trying to eat their
victims, but naturally their mouthparts were wrong for the work. It is of
course as fatal to suffer an attempted eating, by an insect of that size,
as it is to be eaten." 

"You distinguished yourself, plainly, to be given this command." 

"I did indeed, my dear. I'm quite an adept of both axe and cudgel, and
though this was shield-and-torch work, I distinguished myself in many a
battle. It has been Bunt's salvation that, with a bit of pitch flung on
them, these monstrosities will burn so readily. When the pressure of
battle declined, he was quick to redeploy us for shipping the harvest
out-he needs to recoup the hemorrhage of gold he has suffered from this
nightmarish metamorphosis." 

"The battle has slackened off, then?" 

"Not exactly. Rather, the defense needs somewhat fewer troops, for when
the newer, bigger generation emerged from the hives-which are now great
dug caverns in the earth, under where the hive houses stood before-when
this flightless generation emerged from the earth, we found they could be
barricaded; dammed up in their sluggish, lurching onslaught, and burnt by
the score. Still, they come out of the earth in numbers that our
decimations barely match." 

"To what dimensions have they now attained?" I asked, a touch of frost
upon my spine. 

"Big as titanoplods, or near. Their legs do them little good anymore, but
they have a slow, blundering power, lurching like grubs. At favorable
points of terrain, our troops have grown adept at throwing up collapsible
barricades across the bees' line of progress, and while the brutes are
baffled, pitch and torch them." 

"Do you tell me, then, that Bunt holds disaster at bay?" 

"Seemingly. There are some grounds for anxiety. As I've said, the hives
expanded, and the bees dug them underground as they grew. I have been down
here this last two days but people have been telling me the earth in the
uplands is unquiet. And more than one person has also said that the ground
around the hives is swelling, rising, doming up, as at huge movement
underneath. My dear-may I presume a bit?" Here Higaia reached up and
affectionately touched my cheek. She had an air of soothing me as she
spoke, as if I suffered from some fever. "You have a nice little carrack,
sweet Nifft, and your moneybelt feels quite hefty when I hug you. Let go
of this fiftyweight. For one thing, Bunt must be nigh paupered. His bees
devoured all the flower fields, including those of the other Dolmen
hiveries, and Bunt stands liable to enormous indemnities. And for another
thing, I feel to my bones that the worst hasn't happened yet, and I'm glad
to be gone from here myself inside the half hour. Quit this place when I
do, Nifft! Run with us down across the Agon, and in a fortnight we'll be
having some fine mulled tartle together at an inn I know in Quincipolis!" 

Leave fiftyweight lying, and walk away? What was this madness that seemed
to run like plague among my woman friends? There was something almost
ominous about it, and I frankly gaped at her. There was a commotion of
voices topside. Higaia sprang up the ladder, and I followed her. 

A shouted conversation was in progress between a group of cargo handlers
at the port rail, and some mercenaries on the dock below. These
men-at-arms-the loudest their seeming captain, a gnarled man with a
scarred face-seemed to be demanding something the handlers denied. Higaia
came to the rail, silencing her crew, and greeted the captain, "Good
morrow, Hob. What are you after?" 

"We need half a dozen of your longshoremen, Higaia. We're short troops
round the South Dandinnia." 

"Come up and talk to me, Hob." 

As the gnarled veteran came up the gangplank, Higaia explained, "The South
Dandinnia is one of Bunt's hives. It's the one lying nearest the highway,
just beyond that crest up there." 

We led Hob to the forecastle for privacy after Higaia set her crew back to
shipping the last bundles of giant comb. "Is it Bunt sends you?" she asked
Hob. "When last he was down here he was most urgent this cargo should be
shipped and away-he needs the capital." 

"He needs a hundred more men round South Dandinnia, Higaia, whatever else
he thinks he needs. I haven't seen him and there was no time to go asking.
The ground is shaking and around the hive it's swollen into a hill! If a
wave of even bigger bees comes out we'll need a big wall ready for them
and torchmen enough to man it! Bunt's over in the central fields, on the
barricades round the oldest hives. I'd be longer getting there and back
than coming down here." 

"Well, take them, if they'll go, though if any want to set sail with me I
won't deny them passage." She and Hob locked eyes here a moment. The
veteran's flinty gaze conceded something. "I might go with you myself," he
said, "but I don't like leaving conflicts unresolved." 

I had been listening with a sinking heart, as it grew plainer that Bunt,
encircled by disaster, would probably be powerless to pay us our
fiftyweight out of pocket. But then I was inspired with a solution. "Good
Hob, might I follow you back up to the highlands, and be directed thence
to where Bunt is?" 

"How not? But let's make haste." 

"One minute more I beg! Dear Higaia, if I came back with a fiftyweight
draft signed by Bunt, could I not draw it in shares from the sale of your
comb?" 

"With a properly drawn instrument, my dear, greedy Nifft, how not?" 

Hob took some little further time to recruit more men from another of
Bunt's ships, and Higaia's freighter was already getting under way as we
trotted single file up the first few switchbacks of the highway. As our
line threaded its way up between wagons heaped with bales of torches and
kegs of pitch, I could see tiny Higaia standing with Radula on the
foredeck, conferring over something, their little features so plain in the
limpid air I could make out the bright red of Radula's sunburned nose.
Another ship-not one of Bunt's-was standing out across the harbor at about
the same time. A knot of emigrants crowded amidships at the port rail,
their heads turned in troubled unison toward the home they were leaving,
some of them gazing upwards past us at the heights, whence ragged scarves
and banners of smoke still blew, and the gusted noise of strenuous
multitudes at work, or war, or both. 

Hob had a good threescore men in tow. I'd noted at once that, however
mixed their gear, these men had heavy leathers in common-jerkins or
doublets above, trousers or chaps below. Each, moreover, had some kind of
stout headpiece about his person, be it a half-casque, or just a skullcap
with metal plates sewn on, and that all this varied head gear had in
common a heavy leathern back flap to protect the neck-clearly standard
issue provided by Bunt for hirelings he had drawn from varied sources over
the recent weeks of his accelerating disaster. 

At first I hung back in the line to hear scuttlebutt, though most of these
fellows were short-spoken, seeming winded by the climb; between working on
the "lines" up top, and as cargo handlers down on the docks, most of them
had already pulled long shifts over the last few days. Only a
worried-looking youth made me much answer to my sociable probings. "Master
Bunt must be quick with a lictor to get such work from you fellows, eh?" I
asked him. 

"Why, I should think so! If it wasn't for payout every second sunset, and
regular gold in my belt, I'd have shipped out a week ago! I mean didn't I
see Tark get his head pulled off? See it with my own eyes. Tell me If I
didn't see it, Weppel! Eh?" This last was addressed to the man jogging
ahead of him, and punctuated with a poke of a finger. 

Weppel shrugged off the touch, and snapped without turning, "So you saw
it! We all did! Have done! That risk's past in any case. The monsters
can't get airborne any more and pounce on us like that. Have done!" 

"All I mean is," the youth nagged, "was having his head pulled off worth
five lictors a shift and kip-and-commons? You think poor Tark thought it
was worth it as that damned bee tugged his head off so . . . so clumsily?"

"Get off the road, then, you nanny's brat, if you don't like the wage!" 

This riposte came not from Weppel but a teamster we jogged past, sweating
his team up through a turn, his wagon overloaded with pyramided casks of
pitch. 

"Stow the jabber!" Hob barked from above. I would learn most from him in
the end, so I worked my way toward the head of the line. We were now a
quarter mile up the heights, and the swarming harbor looked small below.
The perspective allowed me to notice anew how deep the little bay was,
with a brief, grey ring of shallows round the dockside rim, then plunging
steeply to blue-black, thousand-fathom depths. There was little Bounty
riding on the deep water's edge. 

"I gather then, Captain Hob," I ventured cheerily, coming up with him,
"that Bunt keeps ample specie on hand, and pays his troops every two
days." 

He gave me little more than his dour, scarred profile in answering. "True.
But how much he has left, and how much he'll pay you, are other
questions." 

"No doubt. His draft-in-hand will do if cash be short. What do you make of
his chances of saving his enterprise-speaking soldier to soldier you
understand, just between us." 

I got Hob's whole face for a moment at that, and a glare of surprise. "You
look a man of the world, sir," he growled, facing crestward again and
redoubling his pace. "What do you think?" We were near the top now, and
with the gusts of smoke, the scents of pitch and strange meat burning came
wafting down more thickly, and the hubbub of men's voices had a shrill and
desperate note. 

And here, in further answer, came an empty wagon clattering down from the
crest, the driver wild-eyed, flogging his team and bellowing. He came at
once in collision with an up-bound wain of field-rations, pulled by heavy
plods among which his team entangled themselves. 

Hob, with a roar, led us pelting up the highway. He grabbed the panicked
teamster from his seat before the man's wild shouts had grown coherent
and, masking the movement skilfully, clubbed him senseless as he brought
him to the ground. Hob then smartly set his men to disengaging the tangled
teams, and bringing the vehicle out of the highway, and once the way was
clear he roared them to press on double-time up to the crest. Traffic,
after a ripple of hesitation, flowed smoothly again. A pulse of panic had
been masterfully damped out by the canny old veteran captain. Now we
topped the first tier of the heights, and a broad reach of the
bee-pastures stretched before us. 

I was the more appalled by what I saw because my last view of this
prospect, some months earlier in Ha'Awley Bunt's phaeton, had so smitten
me with its polychromatic glory. A rainbow blaze of blossoms, like the
wing of some impossible, gigantic blutterfly, had lain draped across the
hills. These rolling meadows had glowed crimson, saffron, sapphire, rose
and violet, all drenched in wind-cleansed sunlight purely gold as honey!
Now stenchful smokes tumbled across torn, naked dirt, and wherever the
wind briefly jerked aside the black and smutty curtains, it was to display
the litter and wreckage of war: Huge, charred carcasses smouldered amidst
the wreckage of barricades; smudged, scorched troops limped to or from new
battlements which scores of wagons served with casks of pitch and torches.
At one place the smoke parted and, for an instant, framed a huge ballista
which launched a blazing dart, before the fumes re-engulfed it from my
view. 

Into this confusion Hob plunged with his men at a gallop, and I must needs
follow, or lose his directions to Ha'Awley Bunt. But at the crest of a
hilltop I paused, instinctively, for a last view down upon the harbor, and
saw something that froze me where I stood. 

Out in the open channel, just a bowshot outside the mouth of the harbor, a
huge pallid shape slid up from the blue-black deeps. It was Costard. 

In the brief interval since we'd parted he had grown in bulk, and in
deformity. His limbs, sunk in his sleek obesity, had shortened, broadened.
His jaw jutted hugely, and if humanity remained in his contorted eyes, it
was the fleeting, fitful consciousness of the lunatic that flickered
there. And then I saw that he was pursued. Huge black haggards, a whole
hunting pack of them, dogged his suety flanks, and one nipped a little red
bite from his buttock. Costard's blood clouded the water and inflamed the
pack with hunger. 

But the wound galvanized the bloated metamorph as well; he blew a wrathful
geyser of spray, and wheeled in the water, and plied his haggletooth jaws,
biting the haggards in twain. Their blood in the water woke him to a
hunger that eclipsed his initial wrath, and he fell to devouring his
fragmented attackers. 

The whole spectacle transpired in moments. Costard searched fretfully for
further victuals, and then seemed to grow aware of the harbor before him
and its swarm of ships. 

It was at this precise juncture that a mighty cry went up from the fields
behind me, and a great, dense wall of smoke whelmed against my back,
engulfed me, swallowed breath and sight at once, even as the earth shook
under me, and I heard, above a thousand frightened cries, an earthquake
noise, the sodden groan of a hillside breaking open. 

Thus benighted, I experienced the tearing of an inner veil from my
greed-ensorcelled understanding. We should not be in this place, convulsed
with dangers as it was. We should never have brought our precious Bounty
within a league of it! 

I plunged, blind and choking, back the way I had come, praying to feel the
highway underfoot, finding it, and pelting down it. 

I dodged between the wagons. The draybeasts screamed as the teamsters
fought to turn them. I vaulted the backs of beast and man, overleapt
tilting vehicles caught up and toppling in the turmoil of retreat. Below
me, the pale leviathan that had been Costard-red gobbets of haggard
eddying about him-nosed zig and zag, tentatively into the harbor-mouth,
the traffic of ships still unaware of him, most eyes bent dockwards,
though I thought in the tiny multitudes I saw faces turning up towards me,
tiny arms pointing. Above and behind me the hilltop thundered with a
heaving hugeness whose tremors I felt through my footsoles. Though I
fought my way down, down through the switchbacks, still these concussions
drew closer, while screaming voices came avalanching down behind me,
fleeing troops in whose shrill outcry recurred the word queen like a
refrain. 

Will my folly be believed? Can such utter abdication of my faculties be
credited? I, veteran of a thousand near collisions with calamity, to prove
so fuddled with the jostle and uproar. I leapt most acrobatically-twice,
straight down across the switchback at a leap, landing once most catlike
on the hub of a toppled wagon's wheel after a vault of full two rods and
more! My eye danced bayward, gauging monstrous Costard's quickening
advance into the harbor, then shot crestward, seeing a great wall of smoke
billow out from the meadow, as if the approach of something huge were
thrusting the fumes ahead of it. I actually tried to judge the distance I
might run before either impending disaster fell, and if I would be in
earshot of Barnar (who surely must be looking crestwards soon, as the tiny
multitude were beginning to do) in time for him to anoint his hands and
feet, fly out to Bounty, cut her hawsers and drag her out to open sea . .
. 

And then, of course, it smote me-what I should have done the instant I
knew of Doom's advance. I thrust my hand within my jerkin, and anointed my
own hands and feet, and leapt into the air! 

And as I did so, the smoke bulged again from the crest, and the wind
plucked it away in streamers, and a Queen Bee rolled out onto the very
brink of the highlands. 

By the Crack, and by all that crawls out of it! Ten times as big as a
Forager she was! Though of a tiny race, it seemed Her Royalty had taken
disproportionate impetus from an ichor brewed by a not wholly alien
species. 

But Her Royalty was defaced in her deformity. The amber fur that ermined
her black, armored head and thorax, blazed glorious gold in the sun, it is
true, but her stumplike wings and spindly legs were nigh powerless to move
her swollen hugeness. On her abdomen's ballooned distension the
black-and-gold armor that sheathed it had separated, the sclerae stretched
apart, like polished warshields on a white wall. Her inexorable advance
was achieved by a convulsive larval wriggle. I could not turn my face away
from her poised immensity. I swam backwards down the air, as one who
tilted back and fell. Thus my bellow was aimed at the sky: 

"Barnar! Cast off the Bounty, Barnaaaar!" 

I was still too high to be heard in any case, yet there he was when I
craned back to see, swimming through the lower air from the dockside
toward our Bounty, and there was the crowd in two waves rolling back along
the docks and quays, recoiling from the path of the Queen, should she
fall. 

She towered and teetered there, as the shifting winds scoured her bright
in the blaze of noon, as the sun struck a royal largesse of gold from her
fur, and painted splashes of rainbow across her great faceted eyes. 

I heard it an instant before my eye could tell: "Here she comes!" someone
bellowed above me. But already I swam furiously down toward the bay.
Tilting immensely forward, the Queen Bee fell, tumbling across the sun,
flinging down shadow where I flew. 

I plunged toward the Bounty, where even now Barnar, Old Biter high, swept
at the hawser of her stern anchor. The Queen tumbled majestically through
the brilliant air, her stunted wings buzzing futilely, flashing like a
thousand swords. Halfway down she smote the mountain flank, thundering,
vaulting out again adown the air. 

I swooped down to Barnar as he cut the hawser with one mighty
axe-stroke-and as Costard's dripping hugeness surged up from the water at
Bounty's stern. 

The hapless leviathan meant, I think, a greeting, a familial embrace.
Costard's huge, addled eye noting Barnar aloft at his axe work, and
recognizing him. But so close he came up that Barnar leapt aloft, and I
with him, recoiling wildly, as Costard's eye saw something else above him,
and blinked with awe, and Barnar and I swam wildly upwards as darkness
leapt down at us and struck the sea. 

Our terror put us well aloft, and we looked down from high on that awful
sinking. In a towering explosion of foam the Queen snatched under a dozen
vessels, our dear, doomed little Bounty dead smack in their midst. She
snatched them down brusquely, in the way a gambler's hand might sweep his
take off of the board. In a great cloudy fist of bubbles those ships, and
Costard with them, were snatched below, sliding down the steep flank of
the drowned peak, a seething whiteness dwindling, dwindling, dwindling in
the blue-black deeps, then swallowed by the thousand-fathom dark. 

We hung there seeing that descent long after it had ceased to be visible.
We imagined her down there, the Queen, furrowing the steep mud slope like
a great ploughshare, and planting in that furrow our poor beloved Bounty.
All of our immense treasure was dwindled to a little golden seed entombed
where sunlight would never touch it in a million years. 

XXVIII 

Where wild winds shepherd their cloudy kine, 

Where lightnings unborn sleep sheathed in 

the blue, 

That's the bright country that I would call mine, 

And there would I do what the winged ones do! 

ALL BUNT'S QUEENS had imbibed his fateful potation. Their eruption from
the earth, almost simultaneously throughout the fields, was a final frenzy
heralding death, much as with Costard's cattle. The drowned Queen's demise
preceeded her sisters' by less than an hour. 

Dolmen's highlands now lay utterly desolate of apian life, a vast scab of
scorched dirt. Dazed-looking troops came down, and helped at harborside,
where dazed Dolmen Harbor worked to mend the hole torn through its body. 

A big section of dockside, and an inn or two, had been snatched down to
the deeps by the sinking Queen. Her hesitation up on the precipice had
been just long enough to warn the multitudes below. The Royal Death had
plucked but a few score human lives down with it. Barnar and I joined the
general reconstruction. From barges and wherries we gaffed in debris from
the harbor, retrieved the dead (where we could), set new pilings and
planking, looked after the bereaved and the ruined. 

To Ha'Awley Bunt's credit, he came down and worked with the rest, perhaps
more dazed than anyone, save Barnar and myself. A curious zone of respect
enveloped the hive-master in the midst of his townfellows, that little
bubble of silence and averted eyes that surrounds the sacrifice,
Disaster's Chosen One. 

I do not think his precise agency in this disaster was widely understood,
but this was not from any secrecy of his own in the matter, at least not
now that all was destroyed. On that first eve of the tragedy we found
ourselves sitting at table with him in the same mead hall where we had
met. Scores of men did as we did that night, sat numbly drinking, till we
laid our heads upon our arms and slept thus through the night. 

How vividly I see Bunt still as he was that evening, his tired head
drooping as low as his flagon, his faint, far-off voice marvelling, as if
he spoke his protests to some invisible tribunal in the air beyond us: "I
put so little in their little jaws! I wet a pinhead in the pap, and
touched lightly! Lightly I touched it to their tiny mouths! That one time
only! Weeks ago! I still have practically the whole jar of the
treacherous, insidious ichor!" 

"Perhaps in itself, in its own sphere," I dully chided, "it is neither
insidious nor treacherous, but needs active cupidity to make it so." 

He looked at me, his eyes bleak beyond riposte. Still, his amazement was
strongest in him. "So little, Nifft! As if but the scent of Behemoth's
Queen breathed on them, as if she but whispered to then, and on that hint,
that rumor only, they grew gigantic and devoured me whole! Such potency!
At least, with the pap, I shall recoup some capital. No power so dangerous
that someone will not crave it." 

Even numbed Barnar shuddered at that. "Where will you sell it then, oh
honest merchant? We would know where to stand clear of." 

"As yet I do not know. Do you reproach me, gentlemen? I am a man of
business-what would you have? You may be sure that when my fortune is but
part-repaired, I'll pay indemnities aplenty here, and mend what can be
mended of what's marred. . . ." 

I did not doubt him then, and do not now. I did not care. All light had
left my life, all hope my heart. I stolidly drank my head heavy enough to
sink, and sink, and sink until I slept. 

We rose in the early morning. I have never felt graver or grimmer, and yet
at the same time I felt unaccountably refreshed, freed of some chronic
weariness I had not known I suffered. We had already determined how we
would proceed. At a ship chandler's we bought two of the votive wreaths
which sailors cast out in open-ocean burials. 

We set out walking along the southern rim of the harbor. On the south it
narrowed to a sharp little spit of rock with the sea on both sides of it;
we had come round this spit on foot when we first arrived here, still wet
from the maw of the glabrous, and we remembered the solitude of the place.
When we reached it we found that the wind of the open channel there erased
the noise of the distant docks, still swarming with repair. 

We stripped down to bathe in the sea. As I laid my arms on the rock, and
then my gear and my garb, I greeted each article as a part of myself,
comprising, in the aggregate, my All, my Fortune. Videlicet: old,
battered, handy Ready Jack with his chipped pommel-stone, and the
ghul-skin sheath I bought in Cuneate Bay; my stout jerkin that keeps me so
warm in keen mountain winds and is tough enough to turn a knife blade too,
with a little luck; my old moneybelt here, provisioned heftily enough now
(save when I thought what had been lost!); my buskins stout and supple;
tough, trusty leg armor that yet lets me sprint, withal; and my leathern
amphora of the Unguent of Flight. 

I laid it all out on the rocks, and dove into the sea. We swam a furlong
or two. I realized I had not until this very moment really emerged from
the underworlds-that one never can until he has taken a plunge in the sea,
snorted the brine. This alone can cleanse the last whiffs of subworld air
from the nostrils! The morning sun touched our skins through the water's
chilly velvet, and we were home again under the sky. 

At length we swam back and re-dressed, and performed the simple, homely
ceremony we had conceived. The pair of us stood ourselves side by side,
facing out over the harbor deeps, our little Bounty's drowning place.
Barnar, in his beautiful, surprising baritone, sang Passarolle's Hymn to
Having Had: 

How you gleamed! How you dazzled me, 

shone in my arms 

When I hugged you, and held you, 

and had you for mine! 

But all things that live must at length come 

to harm, 

If it's only the harm of their ceasing to shine. 

You blazed when we loved! 

You were both flame and wick. 

How meltingly glowed you your body away! 

And all our sweet nearness, we lived it up quick! 

Now, somewhere, the still-fleeing light of our days 

Wings shining along with the lie we still love, 

Though long have our hands and our hearts 

ceased to move. 

We cast out the wreaths, and watched them till they grew sodden, and sank.
Only at that moment, I think, did my soul finally and fully let go of my
lost fortune. It seemed to me that a transparent empire of phantom wonders
flickered in the sky above me, and melted away forever-castles and
splendors, steeples and towers of Exploit standing tall on history's
horizons . . . all of it a thousand fathoms down now. Dark. 

And in that moment the wreaths went down, something heavy seemed to sink
out of my heart as well. How much less I had now than before! But I seemed
to know myself again. 

"A good fortyweight each of specie in our moneybelts," said Barnar. "Our
weapons, our gear . . . And tenweight each of the Unguent of Flight . . ."

How good it was that our eyes could meet again, Barnar and I, and we could
laugh! 

"Well, old Ox-back," I suggested, "let's fly on down to the Minuskulons." 

"What a splendid idea!" 

We anointed our hands and our feet with the Unguent of Flight, and we
climbed into the air. 

Back down in the subworld, when we had followed the New Queen's ravening
army for some days, but had not yet grown greatly laden with our plunder,
Barnar and I found ourselves almost directly under the polestar and murky
sun of that region: the red-weeping Eye of Heliomphalodon Incarnadine. 

And the whim took us to fly up near that monstrous orb and see what could
be seen within it. 

The demon's pupil yawned above us, a sawtoothed wheel of black. Its simple
hugeness made us hang in terror, halted still some quarter mile below it,
and from even this remove its dark sentience sucked with a whirlpool's
force at us, irresistibly pulling our buoyancy up into itself. 

And we saw that red shadows thronged that abyss at every depth, they
bloomed and melted, making those deeps as populous as a night sky is with
stars. And I believe-though it stirs the hairs along my nape even to think
it now-I believe the Demon noted us, and knew us for humankind. Knew us
for possessors of the sun he craved, the sun he had destroyed himself to
reach, his blazing Grail of exploit. 

And I will always think that I saw more, that I saw the sun 'Omphalodon
dreamed of, saw it there in the gulf of his gaze: a furious contorted coal
of ruby light, poisonously hot and murky, but burning colossally, a titan
in its sea of blood-red worlds. I directly beheld 'Omphalodon's dream, and
I pitied him. This blood-hued, scalding pustule of a sun, its rage all
heat and little light-thus high was all the demon's imagining could
achieve, origined as he was so deep in hell. 

Now Barnar and I, from the south lip of half-ruined Dolmen Harbor, took to
the air, and climbed straight up toward the sun itself. Its inexhaustible
gold bathed us in the ultimate, the only wealth-sweet Light! Where is the
joy of anything else without it? 

Now in this cloudless windy noon, this scoured blue sky, we flew. And
despite all the leagues we had swum the vaulted skies of the subworld, we
flew now for the first time, except, perhaps for those first moments of
wild discovery flying up the wall of 'Omphalodon's buried flesh. 

We felt snug and free as fish in the wind's liquidity; we soared, grabbing
handfuls of the atmosphere. Dolmen's blackened crown, still leaking smoke
from smouldering carcasses, dropped away beneath us. 

We spurned them, and climbed higher, and the island dwindled to let us see
others of the Angalheims, strung out to the south, a great flotilla of
islands cruising in to dock at Kairnheim's shore, the green scrub on their
flanks all polished and glossy like new armor scoured by the wind's
whetstone. Here and there other, more peaceful flower fields showed,
shards of rainbow in the uplands. 

We gaped astonished on the earth, on one another. We had life, and flight,
and some time left under the sun of this wide mad wealth, this World of
Light. 

"We're rich!" I howled. 

"Away!" Barnar bellowed, and we pulled up into a sharp climb toward the
zenith.