The Incompleat Nifft (3 page)

Nifft waved his hand vaguely and didn't answer, gazing at the swamp with more complacency than his friend. Barnar poked the fire discontentedly. Talk was what he needed; he was in too glum a mood for silent musing. He cast about for a subject. He found one which he would have shunned as indiscreet in a less gloomy mood—for one did not ask even one's esteemed partner about his past; among thieves such information must be volunteered.

"You used to know a man from these regions, didn't you? A guidefellow who'd won a high name—Halder it was, wasn't it?"

"Haldar Dirkniss." Nifft answered him with a look of benign humor. This prodding was sufficiently unlike Barnar's style to make Nifft aware of its cause, and after a moment he sat up a little straighter and spoke more expansively. "He was my partner for six years, Barnar. You would have loved him. He had a marvelous imagination, and withal he was so solemn. You should have seen him at work laying the groundwork for some exploit—grave, intense. . . . he was so
studious
!
And he loved the form as much as the dross, loved an inspired trick as much as the gold it
won. We would have made the Black Crack's own trio!"

"Where is he now?"

"In the land of the dead." Nifft said this with an odd intensity, looking at Barnar with a watchfulness the Chilite didn't understand. Nifft's metaphorical turn of speech also seemed out of place.

"My regrets," Barnar said uncertainly. "It's where we'll all go sure enough and all too soon."

"But never in the same way, Barnar—never as Haldar—and I—went there. We went down alive!"

If Nifft had said this gravely Barnar would have known he jested. But he said it with the evil smile he reserved for true and terrible matters, a taunting smile that dared his hearer's disbelief. Barnar knew his friend's humor: a scoffing reply now, and Nifft would laugh, as if in acknowledgment of fraud, and say no further word. Barnar had seen him do as much amid colleagues at more than one tavern where the men of the guild drank and gossiped. He'd seen skeptical laughter lose men the hearing of several adventures which perhaps he would have mocked himself, had he not experienced them at Nifft's side.

Still Nifft grinned at him, his last words hanging like a challenge that must be taken up if he was to proceed. So at last the Chilite rumbled grudgingly:

"Well, if such a thing can be done, you're as likely a man for the job as any I know, though in truth it's a hard matter to swallow. Does the Guide of Ghosts pass traffic thru his gates, then?"

This was enough—Nifft sat up, warming to speech. "Now that it's said, I find it easy to tell. All the time I've known you I've hesitated to try. I was afraid you'd mock the notion and anger me and bad blood would be made between us. I've been remembering that exploit ever since we entered the swamps.

"You see, Barnar, there is no
gate
to that place. You enter it through an instant of time. You must stand near someone when his death comes, and in the instant before he goes there is a spell you must speak which lets you into the dying man's moment. And then, you see, you are present when the Guide of Ghosts, and the Soul-taker, come for him.

"And though there may be other living men around the deathbed, they will be to you as statues. For them, the man's passing is a single blink of time. You who have entered his moment through the spell move within the Time beneath time—the Time where the dead endure."

Barnar opened his mouth to ask a question, but closed it again on seeing his friend's self-absorbed stare. Nifft would give the whole tale now, and would not like interruptions. The Chilite settled himself a bit more comfortably. Leaving an ear open to the noises of the swamp, he gave the rest of his mind to Nifft's words, smiling slightly to himself.

"But it goes further—much further than this, Barnar. For if you meet the Guide's minion in combat—if you grapple with the Soul-taker, and pin him—then the Guide will bring you with him on his journey below. He will bring you to any soul you seek, wherever it lies in death's domain. And he'll bring you out again too if you're lucky. . . ."

We were crossing the great steppes when the night caught us short, Haldar and me—just as it's done us tonight. In case you don't know it, that's wolf country, and I'm not talking about your carrion-eating skulkers of the foothills, but big, red-jawed man-eaters as high at the shoulder as a two-year colt.

Our mounts were bone-tired with staying ahead of them all day long. We'd drawn no steady pursuit, but the price of that was holding a pace that would kill our horses if we kept it up the next day. Even so, we rode long past sunset, encouraged by the full moon that rose at dusk. It bought us nothing—there are no safe camps on those plains—and we finally had to take what offered. We wound our way into a boulderfall on the flank of a ridge. We settled into a narrow clearing well-overhung by the big moon-pale rocks, and we hobbled the mounts at its mouth. The rocks were polished granite, and were something to set your back against if it came to swordwork against wolves. But they had none of the friendly feel of something that gives you shelter. The very gravel we crouched on had a nastiness to it—a kind of sick smell. You know such spots; a fear inhabits them over and above any fear you may be feeling for this reason or that. We made a small fire, broke out a loaf and cheese. We didn't talk.

The mean little prairie towns we'd just come through, and the ill luck we'd had in them had left us bruised and black of spirit. All our tricks had been small and mean, our purses were flat, our bellies vacant and our skins unwashed. Lurkna Downs, on the shore of the Great Cleft Lake, was little more than a day distant—a city large and rich and old. Assuming we survived the night, we had an even or better chance of reaching it. But we took no consolation in this. Our gloom had gotten to the philosophical stage, you see. Or rather Haldar's had first, and I'd caught it from him, as usual. The upshot was we felt so leaden that it was damned unlikely we ever
would
reach Lurkna. We sat chewing slowly and glaring resentfully at the plains that fell away below the ridge.

The land itself there is wolfish. The boulders, pale and smooth, were like earth's bones jutting from her starved soil. Out on the prairie the moon-silvered grass grew lank and patchy, like a great mangy hide. And if you want to stretch the comparison, the wolves themselves were the lice moving through the patches of silver, or merging with the moon-shadows. We saw more than a few such, too, though at the time no comic view of them suggested itself.

At length, Haldar sighed bitterly and threw down the crust he'd been gnawing. He glared at me, then at the fire.

"You know, we're not a jot different from those wolves," he snarled. "We walk on our hind paws, and pull leggin's on over our arses, but that's all."

To one who'd shared Haldar's thoughts for years, this said much in little. I must tell you my friend was terribly idealistic. I loved him as a brother, and tried to cure him of it, but I never did. And when I say
terribly,
I mean it. You want an instance? We once turned a trick in Bagág Marsh. It was a fine and nimble-witted piece of work, I promise you. We galloped out of town on the night of our take with near a hundredweight each of wrought gold. We were galloping out of sheer exuberance, you understand. Our canniness had guaranteed a delayed pursuit.

Well, we came to a bridge crossing a very fast-moving river to the north of the city. Suddenly Haldar reined up at mid-bridge, and stood in his stirrups. He was a light man—wiry like me, but middling short. He had a hatchet face—his nose and chin formed a ridge-line which his black eyes and black beard crowded up to. It was a fierce little face, hawkish, and as he stood there in his stirrups he thrust it up greedily against the starlight. He seemed to want to breathe the whole night into himself, and you almost believed he could fit it all in, so intent and still he was. Suddenly he dismounted, pulled his saddlebag off the pommel, and dumped his hundredweight of gold into the river. I died a little at that moment, Barnar. No! I died a great deal! Thanks be to the Crack, I was professional enough to hold my tongue about what a partner does with his own share of a take. But I nearly had to bite it through to hold it.

Yet even in my shock, I understood. The only fitting celebration of his pride in his work was to show that beside it, the gold was nothing. Oh, he was a craftsman too, every bit as fine as we are, Barnar, and I honored him truly for the passion of his gesture. But couldn't he have made some poetic statement, such as: "Beside the wealth of my art, this gold is but dross to me!"—and then squandered it on lowly things—flesh and feasts—to show his contempt for it?

Well of course the point is that for Haldar, there was no substitute for the absolute. If he got pessimistic, as he did not seldom, he might not just talk about it. He was capable of jumping up and striding out onto the plain and fraternizing with the wolves, just to express his sarcasm and disgust with a thief's way of living.

The cold and sickly feeling of our camp hadn't left it. The lure of Haldar's furious despair was strong.

"Roast you!" I growled. "Will you eat? Blast and damn you Haldar, you've got no right to go sour. If you sink I'm almost surely gone.
I'm
not a wolf! If I were, I'm sure I'd like my life that way just as much as I like the one I've got, and I mean to keep the one I've got."

Sadly, easily, he waved away my words. "You're fooling yourself, Nifft. The great tricks are gone now, don't you see? Those feats of deep cunning and brave flair—we're all alloted a few of them, and we get no more, no matter what our longing is. And you know, you're lucky if you even recognize when you're
having
your best moments. Half the time your soul is looking the other way when they come. And you never grow wise enough to know what they were until you have passed the hope of having more. Then, the rest of life is this—" he waved at the moonlit plain "—greedy four-legged scavenging through a desolation."

Well normally I can turn a sharp retort to such elegiac horse-flop, and so too, surely, could Haldar himself at another time. But just then I hadn't the spit for it. I felt such a freezing, putrid sadness! And all at once I understood that it was—still—the place we were camped. For the feeling was seeping
into
me. These boulders and this gravel were giving it off the way ice gives off cold. There was something here, and its presence was getting stronger moment by moment.

Haldar, it was clear, was reacting to it without realizing its source. He sat jabbing a stick into the fire, as if trying to stab it to death. I tried to speak but my throat caught, and it seemed for a moment I couldn't find even the simplest words. My friend threw down his stick, rubbed his forehead, and then jumped up and shook his fist at the sky.

"By the Crack," he shouted, "I'd give my life to work just one great feat more—one greater than any I've yet accomplished. My life! I swear it by the Wizard's Key!"

Well his words shocked me. Even though my dread of this place hung heavier and heavier from my heart, like a poison fruit that would fall and break and cause something foul and dark to be born—I still had the wit to be both alarmed and startled. I was alarmed because Haldar wasn't a man to bandy oaths, and if he spoke one he was dead serious about it. And I was startled by the oddity of the oath itself. Have you ever heard anyone but some Kairnish outlander swear by the Wizard's Key? It certainly wasn't Haldar's custom. We stared at each other and he looked as surprised as I was. And then I got a feeling.

"There's something here," I said. "Do you feel it? Not far.
Under
us maybe . . . but approaching."

Halder looked around, nodding grimly, scowling at the shadows. "Mark me!" he cried aloud, "who- or whatever you are that stand near us now. You have put a thought in my mind, and a word in my mouth. But I defy you! I claim my oath as my own. I stand by it as mine. So stand forth now, if you mean to offer what I ask!"

That was the man all over, Barnar. No one spoke straighter to the point. Let nameless things skulk, if he heard them in the woodwork he'd call them out to state their business.

We waited in silence. The ugly weight still dragged on my heart. I was so absorbed I didn't realize my hand was on my swordhilt until I had the blade half out of the sheath. I remember hearing, as I listened, a sound of toenails on stone, and thinking to myself,
No, that's only a wolf.
 

So in a way I wasn't surprised when Haldar's mount screamed and we turned to see its legs buckling as two huge wolves dragged it down by the throat. Two more swarmed onto it while my mount rose and stove in the skull of a fifth with its forehoof. I was already launched toward it when I saw the wolf above and behind us on the rock overhanging our fire. I shouted to Haldar and as I completed my spring, I had a last sight of the wolf leaping down on him: a giant silver dog that hung above him on the firelit air.

Then there was only the work at hand. After that cold, festering dread, the bloody uproar was like fresh air. I brought down a two-handed stroke on one of the beasts, and no more than half clove its neck, though I had my broad-blade then, and a full swing. That's how big those brutes were. Its spine held my blade almost too long as a new wolf plunged in from the dark, but I got my point up to its throat and its own leap killed it, though both my shoulders were nearly unsocketed. I slashed my mount's hobble and it stood its ground unhindered. Halder's already had four beasts sunk to their shoulders in its opened belly, while it still screamed. My friend shouted.

That leaping wolf had taken his blade in its open jaws, but the thing was so big that its heart wasn't cleft till its jaws had reached the hilt, and Haldar had had to drop the sword or lose his hand. The animal lay twitching now, the sword-pommel between its teeth, and Haldar had only a brand from the fire in one hand, and a knife in the other, with which to face a new attacker up on the rock. I swear, this wolf was two-thirds as big as a horse. It had shoulders like a northron bear. Its ribs showed as distinctly as so many peals of a deathknell—ours. Its eyes were as yellow as honey and insane with hunger and from the dark behind it, in the intervals between the horse's screams, came the sound of other paws scrabbling on stone.