The Incompleat Nifft (7 page)

The Taker jumped off the bed where Shamblord now lay whole and untorn, but stone dead. The manlizard now held his leather bag down near the base, trapping something in a tiny bulge, while most of the sack hung slack. The Guide of Ghosts nodded at the sack. "Observe, mortals," he said. "He hardly had a spirit at all—just that little clot of ectoplasm. He'll hardly make a ripple when he's dumped in the sewers of the world beneath."

What could one reply? I bowed. "Great Guide, what is your answer? Will you bring us down to the place of the Raging Dead and bring us, or two of us at least, back again?"

"You must fight for passage," said the Guide. His words fell with a dire resonance into his emptiness. "One of you must wrestle my Taker of Souls to a standstill."

"I am prepared to do that, great one," I answered. "I would forgo it willingly, should you decide it was not really necessary."

"It is necessary," said the Guide.

It was indeed necessary to wrestle the Soul-taker without delay, because it handed its sack to the Guide—who grasped it in the same place—threw itself at my middle, and drove me to the floor.

It was like fighting a wave. The only way to survive the assault was to roll with the surge, to twist and scramble to stay out of its holds. Forget attacking! The thing had not only a third leg in its tail, but a third hand in its jaws. They were toothless, but bone-edged, and could crush muscle. Look here at my forearm—these two marks. The Taker made them. Yes, see the breadth of his bite? To this day I don't know how I got my other arm free to throat-punch the beast, for all the rest of me was writhing across the floor, one heartbeat ahead of a chest-lock that could have staved in my ribs like a rotten cask. I flattened its gullet and just as I freed my arm we piled up against the legs of Gladda. It was like colliding with stone-planted bronze. It knocked me half silly, but I got both hands up to one of her arms and hauled myself free of the manlizard, whose head had taken more of the impact of collision.

The thing shook off its daze in a blink, but I had time to find my feet and as it came curving round the statue-woman I threw a side kick to its chest. Full force mind you, with all my leg and all my weight behind it. The thing reeled back to its three-point stance. I hit my feet again and skipped back and fired another kick to its sex.

Now my target was problematical. Lizards' privates lie under one of many identical slat-like scales on their bellies. I chose the broadest slat and hoped for the best.

With my greater experience, I can now advise against this tactic with large reptiles or quasi-reptiles. The Taker rocked with the blow and then exploded forward, as if I'd fired it with new power. For an instant I thought I'd outwitted it when I leaned aside from its dive, and threw a neck-lock on it from behind with my arm. Then I was just holding on as the Taker stormed through the room, hammering the floor and walls and time-frozen people with my body.

I had such desperate work keeping my body tight against the crushing and the blows, that I had no strength to strangle it with, the best I could manage being to keep its head and jaws out of action against me. We crashed into the old woman—her abundant skirts were like cement—and careened from her to a great oaken wardrobe. The Taker rammed me into it dead on to break my hold on its throat. We smashed right through and into the wardrobe—through an inch of solid oak! Wait. Look here on the back of my shoulder where I took the blow. That's where it cut me as it broke.

And then it was like fighting underwater, drowning and blinded in the heavy coats and cloaks. The Taker worked its head halfway around and its jaws gaped right under my face. I thought I would suffocate in its swampy breath. Meanwhile it had twisted up the length of its body and was pounding at my head with its tail. It had me pinned in the box, and could well hope to pound me senseless, given time. I was forced to keep one arm up to protect my head, and my shoulder was being beaten numb.

Then, the next time his tail came up, I grabbed it with my blocking-hand and shoved it down the Soul-taker's own gaping throat. That freed my hands for an instant, which I used to get a double strangle-grip of its throat, locking its tail in its gullet. Its body was bent in a hoop around me, now, and I kept it pinned with my weight.

If the Taker had a weak point, it was its hands. They were as big as a man's, but only three-fingered, and had the scaly delicacy of a reptile's. Plucking a soul off its rack of meat takes dexterity and finesse, I suppose. The Taker couldn't break my grip on its throat, and in its extremity for air, it at last lay still, conceding the match.

I staggered back to the Guide. My opponent got up swiftly and moved to a position by the door, showing no slightest sign of fatigue or pain. He could have fought again, at this instant, I realized, and annihilated me in a moment. The Guide said to me: "It is Dalissem, the temple child of Lurkna Downs, who has called you."

Haldar and I assented. Defalk stared at the Guide fixedly, but without shock. Surely he had guessed who had sent for him. One could not be as close to such a woman as he had been, and come away without a feeling of her power to work her will.

"Come then, mortals," the Guide said. "We will seek her soul." He handed the leather sack to the manlizard. The servant preceded the giant out the door. The three of us followed, after slashing Defalk's ankle-bonds. The wardrobe, I saw, stood whole and undamaged. The people, it seemed, began to soften, and to stir. We stepped out the door, and into a spacious gloom. The torch-lit corridor was gone. We'd entered a vast, rawly stinking sewer.

It was arch-vaulted, hundreds of yards across, and its only light was a kind of glow from the scummy river that filled it wall to wall. We were on a rickety wooden staircase that led down to a tiny pier. There was a raft of tarred logs moored at the pier.

The Taker and the Guide stepped onto the raft. We forced Defalk after, and got on ourselves. The Guide said:

"You may unbind your captive. You are within the realm of Death. If any of you leave my protection, you are forefeit unto Death, forever."

We freed Defalk's wrists. Up at the head of the stairs the ornately carved bedroom door of Shamblord Castertaster swung shut and, with the stairs, vanished from the muddy sewer wall. Our raft was afloat, riding the hideous flood. The lizardman had taken up a pole and was pushing us out to center stream.

Those waters teemed, Barnar. They glowed, patchily, with a rotten orange light, and in those swirls of light you could see them by the score: little bug-faced ectoplasms that lifted wet, blind eyes against the gloom, and twiddled their feelers imploringly; and others like tattered snakes of leper's-flesh with single human eyes and lamprey mouths. And there were bigger things too, much bigger, which swam oily curves through the light-blotched soup. One of these lifted a complete human head from the waters on a neck like a polyp's stalk. It drooled and worked its mouth furiously, but could only babble at us. All these things feared the raft, but you could
feel
the boil and squirm of their thousands, right through your feet. The heavy logs of the raft seemed as taut and ticklish as a drumskin to the movement of the dead below.

The Guide said: "Defalk. This is a journey you should have taken in another form, and long ago."

"You know our companion then, Great One?" I asked. Defalk looked away from the Guide and said nothing.

"Whose name do I not know, northron Nifft? I learn every living being's name as it is given. When the mother first speaks her infant's name, she's whispering it in my ear too. She is saying, though she does not know it, `Here, O Guide, is my Defalk, another job for you someday.' " The giant chuckled gently. There was silence for a while. The stink of the place was so entire and all-enveloping I found I could ignore it—like a waterfall's roar when you're near it long enough. It seemed to me that the current of the turgid flood was moving a bit faster.

"But even if I had not known him early," the Guide said abruptly, "I would have learned of him later. Did I not carry down Dalissem? Oh, that stroke she gave herself meant business, mortals. No hesitation in that thrust—between the ribs and through the heart. She split it sharp and firm as a kitchen maid will cleave an apple. There was a woman! Her soul filled this whole sack! It bulged with her spirit! That's rare enough, I promise you. Most of what we take is a dwindled-down and wretched little clot of greed and complacency and fear—like this! We let such slugs worm their own way down to the floor of hell. Thus!" The Guide shook out the bag over the side of the raft. Something rat-sized clawed the air and splashed into the flood. Shortly, a whiskered snout without eyes surfaced and squeaked lugubriously at us. The Soul-taker drove the pole against it and it swam off.

"But Dalissem," said the Guide. "Dalissem was one of those who won a place. Souls that burn hot enough, you see, stay lit in death, and win eternal being in this kingdom—being you can
call
being, I mean, not buglife in scum. Rage was the fire she endured by. Therefore her place of endurance is with the Raging Dead, amid the Winds of Warr."

"Rage?" burst out Defalk. His speaking surprised us all. He looked at the Guide. "Why in a place of Rage? She died for love—for our love!" I caught in his voice both his guilt, and his more terrible secret vanity.

"To your own shame you speak it!"—it was Haldar who said this, seizing Defalk's arm and shaking it. "But it was rage much more than love. Could you have known her so little? I knew her entirely with one glance—such is her fineness! She would have killed her enemies with her own hands, she would far rather have wreaked her rage than died! But she was powerless except against herself. So she struck there, scorning a life in chains."

Quietly, tenderly, the guide asked, "She is beautiful, is she not, Haldar Dirkniss?"

"She is, lord Guide."

"You, Defalk," said the Guide, "you should have seen her journey down. You should have seen her birth from the Soul-taker's bag. Such splendor out of the foul, dark thing. True souls emerge with the shapes they had. She lay here on this deck, seven years ago, and she barely stirred when she understood where she was. Her first movement was to stretch her arm beside her, as a sleeping woman will do in the early morning, to be sure of her man in the bed by her. Dalissem found no one to her right, nor to her left. Then she sat up slowly and looked about her. I looked away to spare her shame in her disillusionment.

"She never said anything. After a while she stood up and watched what passed. Through all her journey, she stood by me and watched, and her expression scarcely changed. At the very last, when we stood by the chasm of the Winds of Warr, I pointed to the staircase that led down their brim. She stepped from the chariot gravely. She turned back to me and gave me a deep reverence, dropping to one knee. She did it like a queen! Then she strode down those steps, elegant and grim. But at the bottom, on the brink of the pit, hauteur alone was not enough to express her wrath. She stopped and raised both fists above her head and shook them. Throwing back her head, she howled. Then she dove from the steps, head-first into the black hurricane."

While the giant spoke, Defalk sat down on the deck and rested his head in his hands. How much can you hate weakness? I felt sorry for him. But then the first thing he said was:

"What does she want with me now? Is she going to take my life?"

"We don't know," said Haldar. Strictly speaking, we didn't. But could there be any doubt?

After a moment Defalk, still not looking up, asked: "What has she paid you for this service?"

Haldar gave a disgusted snort. The reaction was odd—after all, we
were
working for hire, weren't we? I answered:

"She is giving us the key to the Marmion Wizard's Mansion. It is, somehow, in her possession. She showed it to us." I looked hopefully toward the Guide as I said this. He volunteered nothing about how one of the dead might obtain the Key. After a silence, barely audibly, Defalk said: "I see."

The soul-sewer branched and veered and branched. We steered through the reeking maze for an endless time. Defalk sat hunched, no doubt remembering things. Haldar stood rapt at the Guide's side, his eyes straining with an avid light at the semi-dark.

I could not share his calm rapture. It seemed to me the current had begun to quicken, and that the gloom was thinning . . . and somewhere ahead there was a sound, too faint to read, but growing. I was not at ease. It made me realize how separate our thoughts had really been in the days just past, even during our closest planning. For my friend this exploit was, from its first proposing, a feat of devotion, a chivalrous quest. He loved me well, and made a point of gloating over the prize we would win—but he did this out of concern for my feelings, lest he should seem to scorn the baseness of my motive by proclaiming the disinterest of his. Splendid Haldar! He was transparent to me. I saw then that when the moment came he would, on oath, renounce his share in the Key, and would demand that Dalissem bestow it formally on me alone. Thus did he mean to declare his love to that queenly ghost. For him, Defalk was a cur, and Dalissem nearly a divinity.

But I was in it for the Key. For me, Defalk's suffering was an ugly necessity, and Dalissem was a splendid but utterly self-willed spirit. And most important, nothing was to be taken for granted in that place. In Death's world, any covenant, no matter how mighty, can fall null—any spell, however cogent, can be abrogated. The only certain law in that place is Death itself.

Just then my uneasiness was getting a lot of encouragement. The current was unmistakably increasing, for the ectoplasmic sewage had begun to seethe with alarm and resistance. At the same time it was getting lighter—a yellowish light that thickened like mist. The ribbed vaults above us showed clearer. I discovered, with horror, that the Guide had no eyes. His sockets were wrinkled craters filled with grey smoke.

I was sure he had eyes in the death room—or had he? I can't explain why it unnerved me so—I gaped at him. He looked back at me, waiting.