Michael Shea’s (1946–2014) first published novel, A Quest for Simbilis (1974), was an authorized sequel to Jack Vance’s two Dying Earth books. (When Vance’s Cugel’s Saga appeared in 1983, it took the series in a new direction and Shea’s novel was no longer considered part of the canon.) Shea’s Nifft the Lean (1982)—four connected novellas—was influenced by Vance, Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Leiber, and H. P. Lovecraft. Considered by some to be one of the more important works of modern sword and sorcery, it won the World Fantasy Award for best novel in 1983. Nifft later appeared in The Mines of Behemoth (1997) and in The A’rak (2000). Shea also authored three other non-Nifft novels and over thirty shorter works. “Epistle from Lebanoi,” the final Nifft story, was published in 2012.
Long hast thou lain in dreams of war—
Lift from the dark your eyeless gaze!
Stand beneath the sky once more,
Where seas of suns spill all ablaze!
—Gothol’s invocation of his long-drowned father, Zan-Kirk
From Lebanoi
Nifft the Lean, traveler and entrepreneur at large,
Salutes Shag Margold, Scholar
I am to ship out to the Ingens Cluster, but it seems the craft I’ve passage on is finding the refitting of a gale-damaged mast slow work. Writing—even to you, old friend—is tedious toil, but since the alternative is the restless fidgets, write I will. And in truth, what’s passed here merits some memorial.
Well then—I disembarked here at Lebanoi from a Lulumean carrack a fortnight ago. I know you are aware that for all the lumber towns along this forested coast, and all the flumes you’ll find in them, Lebanoi’s Great Flume is justly preeminent. Standing at dockside, staring up its mighty sweep to the peaks, I gave this fabled structure its due of honest awe.
Then, bent on some ale, I repaired to a tavern, where I found out right quick about the native fiber of some of these lumbering folk! They can thump a bar, and bray and scowl with the best, these logger-lads! No dainty daisies these, be sure of that, when they come down the mountain for their spree!
I sat with a pint in the Peavey Inn—an under-Flume inn, one of countless grog-dens built high up within the massy piers which prop that mighty channel of water-borne timber. In many of these inns and taverns—clumped up right against the Flume’s underbelly and reached by zigzags of staircases—you can hear just above you, through the ceiling, the soft rumble of rivering timber as you sit imbibing.
And thus sat I, assaying the domestic stout, till a bit of supper should restore my land-legs for the long ascent to Upflume—Lebanoi’s smaller sister city on the higher slopes halfway up the Flume’s length.
But here came trouble, a come-to-blows brewing. For behold, a bare-armed lout, all sinewed and tattooed—axes and buck-saws inked upon his arms—stood next to me at the bar, and he began booming gibes at me which he thinly guised as jests.
“Your braid’s divine!” he cried. “Do they not call that style a ‘plod’s-tail,’ honest traveler?”
My hair was clubbed in the style of the Jarkeladd nomads. I keep it long to unbind in polite surroundings to mask the stump that’s all that remains of my left ear—lost, as you know Shag, down among the Dead.
Soon, I knew, after initial insults, the lout would mock my ear, for his eye already dwelt on it. I decided that this slur, when it came, would trigger my clouting him.
Beaming in his face, I cried, “Why thank you! Your own dense curls, Sir, merit equal praise! Sawdust and shavings besprinkle your coiffure! How stylish to resemble—as you do—a broom that’s used to scour a saw-mill’s floor!”
He sneered and plucked a phial out of his vest, tapped dust into his cup, and drank it off. Even swamp-despising woodsmen buy swamp spices—this one “whiff,” unless I missed my guess, productive of raw energy, no more.
“Another thing, fine foreigner,” brayed my lout, “that I adore your doublet, and your hose! Garments so gay they would not shame a damsel!”
This bellicose buffoon would blanch to face such men as wear the Ephesian mode I wore. I grant, the costume does not shun display. The snake-scale appliqué upon my hose, the embroidered dragon coiled upon my codpiece, my doublet harlequinned with beadwork—all my clothes artfully entertained the cultivated eye with rich invention.
Of course, I would straightway don self-effacing garb once I should find an inn, and stroll the town to learn its modes. The seasoned traveler travels to behold, not be beheld. But, until I did so, a bustling port like Lebanoi might sanely be expected to extend sophisticated sufferance to the modes of the far-flung cultures whom her trade invites!
“No doubt,” I said, “your celibate sojourns in the woods make even stumps and knotholes seem to sport a womanly allure. No doubt even alley curs arouse your lust, so be that they have tails to wag, and furry arses.”
Oddly, though his mates looked to be loggers like himself, they seemed in the main unmoved by our exchange, and unconcerned by gibes from me that mocked their trade. Their cool interest set my nerves on edge.
“Where did you hear,” brayed Lout, “we lacked for lasses? You were mis-told, or likelier mis-heard! Yes, half-heard with your half-a-brace of ears! ’Tis very meet that you should mention arses—that puckered hole you sport athwart your head resembles one!”
All knew my blow was coming, yet showed no concern beyond any man’s casual interest in a developing brawl . . .
Well, I clouted him, and brought him down, then backed away a bit, and let my hand hover in the general direction of my sword-hilt. An older, gnarlier woodsman, giving a sardonic eye to my stunned adversary on the floor, addressed me.
“Think nothing of it, stranger! Here now my lads—someone prop him at a table and pour him another flagon.”
“Please!” I interjected. “Permit me to buy his drink—by way of amends!”
This was generally well received. The older man, Kronk, stood me a flagon. “Wabble’s not a bad sort, but he’s dim, and in his cups. He took you for a spice magnate, merely by your costly gear. Too dim to see that your style—no offense—is much too lively even for an Up-flume entrepreneur.”
We talked. I learned that tree-jacks dabbled in spice trade even as Up-flumers did, in the long years since the Witches’ War had damaged Rainbowl Crater, and reduced the output of Lebanoi’s mills.
I took a thankful leave of him, keen to have some daylight left to learn the city a bit more, and to dress myself less noticeably.
Stairs and catwalks threaded the maze of under-Flume construction. I made my way a good half mile farther inland from the dockside, or farther “up-flume” as the saying is here. I mounted a level rooftop, scooted well back into the Flume’s shadow, and disrobed. I stowed my gaudier gear, and donned a leather jerkin and woolen hose. Bound up my hair, and hid it in a Phrygian cap.
I rested and enjoyed the view, the golden sinking of the day. Above me hummed the Flume’s boxed flood, the softly knocking bones of trees that colossal conduit carried down to the wharf-side mills. I looked upwards along its mighty sweep, ascending on its titan legs the skorse-clad mountains . . .
All Lebanoi was bathed in rosy westering light. Her mills and yards and manses and great halls glowed every mellow hue of varnished wood. Her houses thronged the gentler coastal hills. And they were so etched by the slanting sunbeams that I could trace the carven vines and leaves that filigreed the gables of even the more distant buildings.
The rumble of the rivering logs above me, the shriek of saws from the mills, the creak of tackle, the shouts and thumps of cargo from the shipyards—all blended in a pleasing song of energy and enterprise. Despite her wounds from the Witches’ War, the city still prospered.
But I’d just tasted the tensions at work here. Where factions are at odds, outsiders best go lightly. Best to head inland to the town of Up-flume, obtain my spice, and ship out tomorrow. It meant harvesting at night, but by all reports spice-gathering went on in the swamp at all hours.
And so, I mounted from the Flume’s underside to its top. This, of course, forms a wide wooden highway which streams with traffic up-Flume and down, and in the late sun its whole great sweep showed clear. Far up I saw where the Flume’s high terminus lay shattered, just below great Rainbowl Crater’s fractured wall—Lebanoi’s two great wounds, suffered in the Witches’ War . . .
My own goal lay but half as far—just four miles up, where Lebanoi’s smaller sister-city filled a shallow valley under the Flume’s crossing: Up-Flume, where the spice swamp lay.
I flagged a dwarf-plod shay. “Are spicers ready-found at night?” I asked my teamster, a white-haired woman, as she sped us up-flume. She slant-eyed me, wryly marking an innocent abroad. “Readily found, at double rate, and like to take you roundabout if you don’t watch ’em close.”
I tipped her for the warning.
As we reached Up-Flume, the full moon was just rising as the red sun sank to sea. At Up-flume, one took ramps that zigzagged down through a three- and four-tiered city of dwellings densely built amid the Flume’s pilings, and jutting out an eighth mile to either side on tiered platforms. Down amid the swampwaters themselves could be seen here and there the bow and stern-lights of spicers’ boats out harvesting amid the darkening bogs.
Descending, I was accosted on the stairs by more than a few would-be guides, and courteously deflected all of them. It might behoove me to try them later, but first I meant to try my hand alone.
On the swampside docks, a punt-and-pole was readily rented for a high fee and a hefty deposit, and in this narrow vessel I set off cautiously along the swamp’s meandering shoreline, where my pole—with careful probing—found mucky purchase.
No accident my being here at the full moon’s rising. A full moon is prescribed, both for one’s searching and for the spices’ potency, which is held to peak when bathed in lunar light.
But the density of vegetation here—big shaggy trees all spliced with scaly vines, overarching a boskage of glossy shrubs and dense thickets—provided an eerie matrix for all the furtive movement everywhere about me. The swamp teemed with spicers all hunting discreetly, taut, intent, and sly. On all sides the feculent waters chuckled and tremored with their stealthy investigations. Foliage flustered or twitched or whispered here and there, and you glimpsed the sheen of swift hulls crossing moonlit patches of black water and then ducking quick back into the darkness again.
But soon I knew I could not move so discreetly, however deftly I poled through the shadowy margins. My punt was rented, and the sight of it drew defter boatmen gliding to my gunnels.
“What spice, what spice, Sir? Five lictors in my pocket brings you to it!”
At my outset, I firmly declined their insistence. Before my coming to Lebanoi, costly consultations with two different spice connoisseurs had provided me with sketches of the herbs I sought. These drawings had looked detailed enough on receipt, but proved useless compared to the intricate, moonlit weeds and worts I scanned.
So at length, I named to these solicitors the growths I sought. “Sleight Sap, Spiny Vagary, and Obfusc Root.”
The spice-hustlers showed me knowing smiles at this, and their price rose to twenty or even thirty lictors. What I sought were inducers of trance, confused logic, and ready belief. All these herbal attributes inescapably pointed to thievery as their seeker’s aim.
I resolved to search on solo, and stoutly forbade myself to be discouraged. The full moon neared zenith, which made my sketches easy to scan, but did nothing to improve their correspondence to the jungled growths around me
And then, a new difficulty. I became aware of a furtive follower—that sensation one gets of cautious, incremental movements at one’s back. Now astern of me, now to my right or my left, it seemed that something in the middle distance always moved in concert with me. Thrice I diverged, at ever sharper angles, and each time, soon sensed him once more astern.
At the moon-drenched middle of a large pool, I drove my pole in the muck and, thus anchored, turned my face towards his approach, and waited. At length, he edged out into view. “He” surely, so hugely thewed his arms and shoulders showed, his cask-like torso. Shy though, he seemed—pausing, then gingerly poling forward again, as though doubting his welcome.
But at length he came to rest, his raft rim almost touching my gunnel. His massy shoulders were torqued out of line, his huge arms hung a bit askew, and his gnarled body seemed constantly straining to straighten itself. So thick was his neck his whole head seemed a stump, his ears a ragged lichen, his brows a shaggy shelf. Yet for all the brute strength in the shape of him, his eyes were meek and blinking.
“Friend, you are in danger here.” His voice, an abyssal echo, came eerily distinct from his great chest.
I felt a strange conviction from his calm utterance, which I resisted. “Does this danger come from you yourself, Sir, or from some other quarter?”
“Another quarter. It comes from Gothol, who is, in a manner of speaking, my half-brother.”
Again his deep resonance somehow invited my trust against my will. But indeed his words were full of somber implications which, as I sorted them out, prickled along my spine.
“If it comes from Gothol, it also comes, then, from . . . ”—my throat, for a moment, would not give passage to the name. The deformed giant courteously waited, despite an air of growing unease. “Ahem . . . Comes also, then, from Zan-Kirk, who begot Gothol on the demon Heka-Tong.”
“Just so, my friend. That great mage indeed did sire Gothol thus, down in the sub-World.”
“So . . . if you speak of him as your half-brother,” I ventured to continue, “then might you not, Sir, be born of Zan-Kirk’s consort, Hylanais . . . ?” I stood in some suspense, fearing that perhaps my mouth had outrun my wit. I had asked, in effect, if he had not been born of the witch’s defiant coupling with a nameless vagabond abroad in the wilderness, done in vengeance for her mighty consort’s sub-World dalliance with the demon Heka-Tong . . .
“Born of Hylanais, yes, and named by her Yanîn—but truly, hark me, Sir—”
“Delighted. My name is Nifft, called the Lean, of Karkmahn-Ra.”
“I greet you, Nifft, but in all truth we stand in danger even now. For Gothol is at hand. And Zan-Kirk—even now quite near to us—will himself follow hard upon Gothol’s coming!
“In fact, good Nifft, we have no time to flee. If you’ll permit me, I will take the liberty of hiding you. We truly have no time—see there?”
His gnarled arm swept up-flume. Up at the fractured Rainbowl Crater—up from behind the low rampart that repaired the lowest fraction of its gaping wound—a golden star had risen . . .
Or comet? It moved at a steady, easy pace down . . . down towards us, sinking smoothly through the night sky in an arc that arched along the Flume’s great lanterned length. This gliding, golden star looked likely to alight quite near us. Urgently, the deformed brute asked me: “To preserve your safety, Sir, would you permit me a rather brusque liberty with your person?”
The comet sank nearer and nearer—now there was no doubt it would alight near where we stood. “Well,” I said, “I suppose if you think it—”
“Thank you Sir!” His huge arm plucked me from my punt and hurled me into the air, hurled me high into the branches of the great tree shadowing us.
I was plunged into the black cloud of its leaves, where I bruisingly impacted with its boughs, which I desperately embraced. My launcher’s voice rose after me, soft but distinct:
“I’ll be at hand my friend, but we must not be seen. A dire work which we cannot prevent is to be done here, and witnesses will surround us who must not see you. You must lie still, and watch, and harken. On our lives, don’t betray our presence here!”
II
But my dear Shag, let us leave me—I assure you I don’t mind—leave me up in those boughs for a moment, up in the tree where Yanîn has just tossed me. Because it occurs to me that just now you might be wondering, “Hylanais? Zan-Kirk? And who might these be?”
They were long faithful lovers, these two mages. In the use of their powers they were beneficent, and their thaumaturgies were often helpful to the cities of that coast, for their powers were wielded in controversion of all mishap or malevolence that might befall Kolodria.
Their concord was Lebanoi’s blessing, as was their discord nearly Lebanoi’s undoing.
They were faithful to one another, these two, until Zan-Kirk’s ambition urged him to an exploit that could truly test his power. And thus it was, in a moment fatal to Lebanoi’s peace, that Zan-Kirk resolved to descend to the Sub-World, and there to couple with the Demoness Heka-Tong. This would be an eroto-chthonic feat unequaled in thaumaturgy’s annals, and it may actually be the case that the sorcerer fatuously expected his mate’s approval of this exploit for its daring.
Instead, her wrath and reproach are well chronicled in Shallows ballads. In one, the sorceress most movingly expostulates:
Ah Zan-Kirk, had we not a vow
That all-encircled us as now
This sky, these green-clad mountains do?
Thour’t all to me—not I to you?
Go then—rut as suits thy will!
But know, therewith our vow dost kill.
Thereafter, from unplighted troth,
I fly bird-free, and nothing loath
To try the love of any man
That please mine eye, where-ere it scan.
And should I choose conceive, I shall,
And so, of all we’ve shared, ends all!
Thus a Chilite lay reports her rage. Zan-Kirk answered this with equal rage. This was to be an exploit, in no way erotic. It was a Feat, to which he, as a hero, had a right. At her threatened infidelity, he thundered,
Shouldst thou do me adultery
What spawn thou hast in bastardy
Shall choke its life out in my grip,
And I thy bitch’s bowels shall rip!
—spoke thus, and wheeled his dragon-mount up and away through the dawn-lit sky, south to Magor Ingens, the hell-vent through which he descended to his infernal exploit upon the vast, fuliginous body of the Narn Heka-Tong. This was a coupling that required seven years for its accomplishment, and at the end of that term Gothol—who at present bestrides the sky above us—was born full-grown in all his power.
In these years of betrayal Hylanais embraced a nomad’s path. Cloaked or cowled, she appears here and there in the popular record of song and penny-sheet poetry, from which it seems she wandered up and down through the length of Kolodria, and even across the Narrows into Lulume, and in the course of these peregrinations she committed a retaliatory infidelity with a hulking rural simpleton chance-met on a country lane.
However impregnated, she bore a man-child some few years before Zan-Kirk accomplished his swiving of the Narn Heka-Tong. The warlock must perforce abide with the Narn as she lay in brood, but Zan-Kirk’s rage at Hylanais caused him to leave the Narn-son, Gothol, too abruptly, before that potent nursling had been molded to the mage’s will.
Rumors winged with terror flocked ahead of Zan-Kirk’s return to Lebanoi, for he came to destroy his “faithless” mate. He raised a demon army and led it up from the Sub-World through the Taarg Vortex. The march of this subworld army through our world—through Sordon Head, and thence across Kolodria’s southern tip—left a wake of slaughter and nightmare still traceable seven generations later. Perhaps to still the panic his advent might spread, he sent ahead nuncios to Lebanoi to proclaim that it was Rainbowl Crater he came to “protect,” and the city itself had naught to fear from him if it offered him no opposition.
Hylanais was amply forewarned. She scorned to draw her forces from the sub-Worlds. Those she recruited were warriors who had proven their greatness in their dying. She went to the Cidril Steppes and raised the Orange Brotherhood from the plains where they’d fallen, holding off the K’ouri Hordes. These she called up from the blanketing earth where they’d lain three hundred years. In Lulume she raised the Seven Thousand from their tombs in Halasspa, which they saved from the Siege of Giants by their valiant but fatal sortie from that city’s walls.
She rushed her forces overland. Her dead army’s march still echoes eerily in the mountain folks’ traditions, but of physical scars they left none. All passions were quelled in them but the soul-fire of warriors. They advanced without hungers, or hurtfulness.
Hylanais arrived just before her wrathful mate. Her forces took the high ground just beneath the crater’s wall. Rainbowl is closely flanked by neighboring peaks, but sea-ward the crater presents an almost sculpted rim, like an immense chalice of glossy stone. Beautifully carven by nature, it had spillways cut from its base to feed the Flume, which like a titanic wooden nursling suckled from the crater’s mother waters.
Shortly after the witch had deployed, the warlock drew his forces up below her. Her lich army’s shadowy sockets stared down into the Subworld legion’s sulfurous orbs.
Rainbowl Crater’s catastrophe is almost universally ascribed to Zan-Kirk’s ungoverned fury, for it seems he was one of those men who thinks fidelity their mate’s sacred duty, not his own. Raging upslope he came, in his fury conjuring a lightning-storm so ill-controlled as to wildly overleap his hated consort, and strike great Rainbowl’s wall instead.
Thus, battle was never joined. A thunderous din of broken stone deafened half the world, and the crater’s towering rim fragmented. Colossal shards of stone hung in the air, then thundered down the slope, just ahead of the down-rushing waters unpent by the blast.
The avalanching rubble entombed those martial legions of the dead. The great wave swept the demons down, and drowned Upflume Valley and half its population in a demon-clogged flood.
Though no direct witness is recorded, the Elder Fiske’s lines are surely close to the truth as best we can reconstruct it:
Now Rainbowl, a chalice with moon-silvered rim
Gigantically balanced above the mad din
Of up-swarming demons and down-swarming dead—
Now Rainbowl is ambushed by black thunder-heads.
White tridents of lightning lash Rainbowl’s curved wall,
And the stone is all fractures, is starting to fall . . .
The wall is all fragments hung loose in the sky
Thrust out by a water-wall half a mile high.
On the dead who so long in their first tombs have lain
The stone crashes down and entombs them again,
And the following wave smites the demon array
And washes them wheeling and wailing away.
And thus it came to be that under the landslide of Rainbowl’s broken wall, the witch’s army of the Raised Dead lay once more entombed, and that downslope a great swamp was created in Upflume Valley, and buried in the muck of that swamp, a host of demons lay ensorcelled. The subsequently famed “swamp-spice” which flourished in that fen—the herbs and weeds and worts of various and subtle potencies—sprang from the sub-World nimbus that corona’d those drowned demons.
III
I hope you will not have forgotten, Shag, that we left me hugging the high branches of a tree in that same swamp, on a torchlit night with the full moon at zenith, nor have forgotten the slow-sinking golden comet that was descending, arching down towards us.
I hugged the boughs and peered up through the foliage. The comet slowed and slowed still more as it sank, sank nearer . . . until it paused midair perhaps two hundred feet above the swamp, about of a height with the top of the Flume.
And, coming to rest in the air, it was a comet no more, but an airborne raft of carven logs with cressets blazing all around its rim. Amidships stood a man of more than human stature, half again a tall man’s height, heroically muscled, and clad in a golden corselet and brazen greaves.
So regal seemed his ownership of the very air he stood on! Already he’d conjured a rapt multitude, for atop the Flume a torch-bearing crowd gazed up at him, while all the rooftops and stairways of the under-Flume city had sprouted hundreds more folk, all clutching lights and lanterns.
A sorcery breathed from this giant. Though he hung so high above us, his face blazed eerily visible. His carven features, the leonine curlings of his golden mane, and his eyes! His eyes beamed down a radiant tenderness upon our upturned faces.
He seemed to behold his enraptured worshipers with a rapture of his own. His voice filled the sky in tones of tenderness—it plucked our spines like lute-strings, and woke plangent melodies within our minds, even though, for me at least, what he uttered was the most brazen inversion of historical truth that it would be possible to speak.
“Beloved Lebanites! Dear friends! My sisters and my brothers! When Rainbowl burst two hundred years ago, a dire vandalism was done against you! Zan-Kirk—my Sire, and still beloved by me—was cut down by his traitorous consort Hylanais, as he was in the very act of bringing back to Lebanoi her greatness and her ancient grandeur!
“Oh Hylanais! Thou misguided witch! You were self-ensorceled by your spite against my father, who was your loving mate! Just when our city was to taste of greatness, you struck the chalice from her hand—you or your bastard spawn! You shattered Rainbowl and our hope, and sealed Zan-Kirk within this boggy tomb where he now lies with his doomed army . . .
“But hear me now, O Lebanites! Even this, the Rainbowl’s breakage, was not the true loss of your greatness, not the whole loss. After all, your mills perhaps produce less wealth, but still you have sufficiency of trade!
“No! Lebanoi lost her true greatness far longer ago than the shattering of Rainbowl! Lebanoi’s true greatness fled with the Rainbowl’s creation! Lebanoi lost her strength and glory half a millennium ago! Her greatness fled when the Sojourners in their fiery vessel departed. For it was the flame of their star-seeking craft that melted great Rainbowl from the mountain’s living stone! That created Rainbowl for our lasting benefit! But that boon, though great, was too little recompense for the loss of the Sojourners themselves—our loss of them amidst the distant stars!”
Ah Shag, even I—crouched like a lemur in my tree—was moved by the vision he conjured, for I had heard of the Sojourners, those grand Ancients, those bold travelers who in their daring had leapt off the earth itself and out into the vastness of the star-fields . . . The Narn-son spoke on:
“But note well, my friends! The Sojourners left us with the means to our reunion with them! The Rainbowl is a beacon, my people! It is a bell! When it is sounded, it will call the Sojourners back to us! And—oh hear me, my countrymen—the art of its sounding is now known to us.
“For my great Sire, Zan-Kirk, descended to the subworld because only in those sulfurous deeps could the lore be found to send a summons that might reach the stars, and call our mighty forebears home. Call them home to share with us their harvest of star-spanning lore, of trans-galactic discovery!”
The Narn-son was eloquent, I can’t deny it. His tones were pure and plangent. My heart cried assent: A beacon! A bell! Yes, kindle it, sound it! Bring those starry navigators back home to us!
At the same time, I sensed there was a reason that he was using the sorcery of his voice up here, in the swamp, instead of down in Lebanoi proper, where he could have swayed far more folk just as powerfully. I began to realize there was something in the swamp itself he wanted. Uneasiness began to crawl up my back on tiny ants’ feet.
And now the Narn-son gazed down upon the swamp below. He spread his hands towards the waters, and apostrophized the murky pools in their beds of black growth:
“My father, I have come for you!”
He brought his torch-rimmed raft down now, gently descending towards the swamp itself, until it hung hovering just above the largest pond—a small black lake in truth, that opened out beside the tree I crouched in. And as Gothol sank towards this tarn, he reached out his fist and opened it palm-down. A white spark drifted down from his hand, and when it touched the water, a dim, pale light overspread the pool, and seemed—so faintly!—to thin the utter blackness of the deep.
The Narn-son’s raft settled onto the surface. He was below me now, and I could see that at the raft’s center sat a low golden chair, like a squat throne. Under the raft’s weight the water flexed like crawling skin, and chuckled and muttered in the mucky marges of the fen.
Gothol solemnly addressed the tarn, speaking as if to the water itself, or to someone in it. His voice was mellow and tender, but by its sheer size it made the swamp seem smaller:
Father who art sunk in sleep,
Who art shepherd of the drowned—
Bestir thy flock to quit the deep!
Come sound the Bell thou sought’st to sound.
Ascend the lofty shrine of stone
Whence giants of our race adjourned!
What seas of stars have they o’erflown?
What whirling worlds of wonders learned?
Their ark sailed incandescent floods
Past archipelagos of flame!
Unto what power have these, our blood,
In all their wanderings attained?
Unto what wisdom have they grown
That left with wisdoms we have lost?
What rescues might to them be known
Whom vast galactic gales have tossed?
Long hast thou lain in dreams of war—
Lift from the dark your eyeless gaze!
Stand beneath the sky once more
Where seas of suns spill all ablaze!
And call, with me, those sailors home
Whose ships those seas of suns have roamed!
The waters’ blackness relented further. Moonlight in spiderweb filaments lay like glowing nets on bulky shapes upon the silty bottom.
Gothol cast a torch into the water. Its flame—undimmed—shrank to a blood-rose of light as it sank. Deep in the smoky muck it settled by one of those shapes, beside its head, the red glow revealing an eyeless face of leather and stark teeth.
The Narn-son spoke a syllable. That blind face stirred. The gaunt jaw moved.
Gothol gestured at the water. A circle of foam began to spin, and a vortex sank from this, sharp-tipped—a whirling foam-fang that struck and somehow seized the sodden lich.
A gangly stick-figure was plucked up to the surface, to lie spinning on a slow wheel of foam. It was the black, shriveled form of a man in loose-hung armor. Gothol, with a slight lift of his head and his right hand, made it rise dripping from the wheeling foam, and hang in the air before him. He reached out his arms, and embraced it.
It lay, a crooked black swamp-rotted root, against the giant’s burnished corselet. He carried it to the low golden chair, and enthroned it. The dripping mummy lay slack against the carven gold.
“Father,” the Narn-son said.
Torchlit, he was a dreadful object, this bony remnant of a big-framed man, though dwarfed by him who’d called him Father. The trellis of his ribs showed through his rusted mail. His crusted sword hung from his caved-in loins. His knob-kneed legs rose from his rotted boots like dead saplings from old pots. He wore a helmet with the beaver up, swamp-weed dangling from its rusted hinges.
The giant leaned near. “Father, greet your bereaved son, un-orphaned now by your return.” He touched the mailed chest—which expanded—and the eye-sockets, in which two orange sparks kindled.
The shrunk ribs heaved. With crackly, whistly labor, Zan-Kirk leaned forward and began to cough—slow, endless coughs that sounded like hammerblows fracturing ice. He wrenched his mummied jaws apart, and spat a black clot into the black waters.
Then slowly, slowly the wizard raised his hand before his face, and higher yet, till he could fan his stark-boned fingers out against the zenithed moon, and thus he held them back-lit, gazing at them for many moments.
He turned at last the glow of his empty orbits to his son’s eyes. His voice emerged in rusty gasps: “Plucked . . . like a root . . . from my sleep . . . How dare you . . . puppet me . . . like this?”
“I wake you, Sire, to serve your own great Work, suspended by my step-dam’s sorcery. I wake you to enthrone you at my side, that we together might recall the Sojourners to their primeval home. That we together might embrace the gods that they have certainly become.”
“Enthrone me!” hissed the lich. “Use me, rather . . . You want my army . . . What of Hylanais? . . . Does she live?” His long-drowned voice was all whispers and gasps, but when he spoke the name of Hylanais, it came out crackling like a blaze.
I think I did not fully credit that this charnel thing had life, until I heard him speak the witch’s name, and heard his words come scorched from him, as in the furnace of that warlock’s wrath.
The golden giant smiled sadly. “Father, I do not know. I only rejoice at your new life, and the work we shall do together.”
“Life . . . These cold sparks . . . gnawing my dead bones? . . . Life?” And yet Zan-Kirk rose, and with a noise of wet wood crackling, strode stiffly left and right across the raft. Found—with a groan—enough strength in his arm-bones to wrench his rusted blade from its scabbard, and slice the air with it: stroke, and counter-stroke . . .
When he spoke again, there was a bit more timbre, and more purpose in his voice, though still a hissing voice it was. “For my allegiance . . . two conditions . . . First . . . If we win . . . you and I . . . stand forth as equals . . . before the Sojourners . . . for their bounty . . .
“Second . . . the demon-bitch . . . Hylanais, if she . . . walks the earth . . . I shall be free . . . be helped at need . . . to work her death . . . in agony . . . Do you accept . . . these terms?”
“Great Sire,” the giant boomed, “your demands are branded on my heart-of-hearts, so inward to my purpose are they now.”
Zan-Kirk nodded. The phosphorescence of his sockets flared. He walked to the raft’s rim and raised his sword. He flourished it, and its blade glowed red, as from a forge. Two-handed, he propelled it point-first down into the waters.
The sword came ablaze as it dove, and burned a red track through the murk. It transfixed the muddy bottom and burned there still, revealing heaped on every side a bulky litter of uncanny forms, trunked and limbed and skulled in every bestial shape: his demon army, so long drowned.
Now the entire swamp-floor came a-boil with movement. Clawed paws and spiny tentacles thrust upward amid smoky blooms of silt, while a smutty lambency of green and orange stole like fever-glow across the whole drowned grave.
The raft rocked as the first shape erupted from the water: a huge one, its wide, black bat-wings drizzling mud as their labor held it poised upon the air. Submissively it offered Zan-Kirk back his sword, hilt first. Zan-Kirk seized the sword, and mounted the brute’s shoulders.
Gothol swept his raft aloft again. The torch-bearing crowds on the Flume and on the rooftops of the town beneath it were crying aloud, all astir with movement that knew not yet where to flow. The Narn-son hovered high, the demon-borne wizard beside him, and suddenly my leafy perch began to tremor. There were deep movements of the muck my tree was rooted in. The whole swamp-floor began to quake.
A noise of torn water and of muddy suction rose. Brute shapes erupted and lurched from the fen. They were demon-shapes in lumbering cavalcade that seemed to take form as they climbed, shedding the muck that blurred their vile bodies as they moved upslope.
Gothol, aloft, sent his mellow voice down upon the terrified throngs on the Flume and the rooftops. “Look, beloved Lebanites! Behold, and fear not! See how submissive these monsters move! Hark! They go silent! See! They go docile! They are my father’s slaves and mine! They go to work a wonder for you all! They go up to Rainbowl, and there will abide, to heal her wound, and work your city’s weal! They go but to repair the Rainbowl’s wound!”
Beloved Lebanites indeed! What could the citizens, those torch-clutching thousands do, after all? What but stand, and tremble where they stood?
The dripping, malformed army trudged endlessly up from the fen. The swamp’s floor convulsed, as my tree tilted near to toppling, while other trees around me crashed into the water.
Those mud-slick shapes moved in strange unison, their ascending column seemed cohesive as a fluid. From high on his broad-winged brute, Zan-Kirk bent down on them the eyeless fire of his gaze, while Gothol, like a captain who waves forth his troop, swept summit-ward his moon-bright blade . . .
You know how much I’ve seen of the sub-Worlds, Shag. Demons are dire in the snarling seethe of their dissension. To see their eerie concord here, as they climbed dripping from the swamp, oh, worse than demonlike it was, this homicidal unison! Against such a tide, what could stand?
I watched the very last of them lurch dripping from the fen, their line so long now: half a mile of greasy thew and burnished carapace, of drooling maw and spiky mandible, they toiled and rippled peak-ward past the Flume’s huge legs.
Then, far up in the rubble-slope beneath the Rainbowl’s wound, something moved. A sharp noise echoed down of shifted stone. And there once more—the moonlight betrayed that something moved in that high rubble.
Those stones were big as battle-chariots, as drayers’ vans, and suddenly one of them sprang hammering down half a furlong before it came again to rest.
Yet . . . what was it which thrust that boulder free? It was something too small to see at first. Too small until it writhed up from the rubble and stood swaying in the moonlight, and was visible then only by its blackness amid the pallid boulders: it was a little human figure, gaunt and dark as some long-withered root.
Such a paltry apparition! So slight a thing to rise, and stand, and face downslope as if to challenge the demon legion climbing up to meet it.
Below my high perch in the branches, Yanîn emerged from his leafy covert. He pointed at the small far shape of darkness, and in a tone of awe and joy he said, “You see her there, Nifft? Hylanais, my most precious mother! Two hundred years of burial she’s endured! Alas! I could not choose but leave her lie! I was not yet grown strong enough to face the war of the Dead with the Demons!”
Then that far, high, moon-bleached landslide moved again, and three more boulders tipped from their lodgements. Two came soon to rest, the third went banging farther down, and three—then four, five, six more lean dark forms stood up with Hylanais.
One of these shapes pulled what looked to be an ancient pike out of the rubble. The others heaved against more stones which, though they seemed propelled by such slight force, all lurched like mighty hammers down, in their turn displacing further stones.
Now scores of these black, crooked shapes stood toiling in the rubble of great Rainbowl’s wall, all of them shifting other boulders, till the crack and bang of tumbled stone rose to an unremitting roar, rose like a noise of war, like the clang and clash of gathered shields colliding, while the gaunt shapes standing up from the rubble suddenly numbered in the hundreds.
I watched these meager figures sprouting like weeds from that lofty rock-slide—all looking so frail amidst the mighty stones they moved—and then I regarded the demon horde already half a mile upslope of us, a single viscous mass it seemed of sinew, scale and talon, of fang, beak, spike and claw . . .
I asked Yanîn, “Do you think the witch’s risen dead—those troops twice killed already—can stand against this demon mass? Or against Gothol and Zan-Kirk, who marshal them?”
He aimed his eyes up at me—as nearly as his wrenched frame could manage this. “Stand against these demons? Stand against Zan-Kirk and his Narn-son? Why certainly! But they will not do so! Our dead allies have more urgent work to do!”
“What work’s more urgent than killing those demons?”
“Why, the Rainbowl’s repair of course!”
“Repair? How repair?”
“By restoring the broken stone to the cleft.”
“But first things first! These demons!”
“Who repairs the Bell can sound it—no one else!”
I gazed up disbelieving at the gigantic rubble of those stones, and chose to ask a more urgent question. “But who then will oppose these demons, and the two great mages that command them?”
“Who? Why, you and I!”
“You and I?”
“We’ll have some help, of course.”
“ . . . I rejoice to hear it.”
“Now I must take the liberty of asking you to come down and, ah, sit astride my shoulders.”
“Hmm. It would seem in that case that I am to be the one taking the liberty . . . ”
Yet before I descended, I could not help but pause, an awe-struck witness. For already the dark, shrunken dead, so slight and frail on their far height, were in fact hoisting those great stones—in pairs and threes—and bringing them up to the great cleft. This mere work of portage, like the labor of ants, had the impact of a witnessed wonder.
But even more miraculous was the laying of each stone in contact with the ruptured wall. As each boulder touched the stone it had been part of, it flowed like a liquid into that substance and extended it. Already the ashlar patch was half masked by restored native granite. The antlike dead touched boulder after boulder to the base of the patch, and reborn rock rose like poured fluid in a conic cup.
“My friend!” called Yanîn from below me. “Look where the Narn-son and Zan-Kirk fly to the witch to work her harm! Make haste!”
And there indeed were Gothol on his blazing raft, and the wizard on his wide-winged brute, sweeping up in advance of their monstrous troops. They were less than two miles below the witch and her lichfield of gaunt laborers. The moonlight glinted on the Narn-son’s blade, while the warlock’s brightest feature were the blazing coals that were his eyes . . .
I swung down from my tree. Yanîn crouched before me and I mounted his shoulders. “All I can do in aid is yours—forgive the liberty,” I said.
“You’re light as a leaf. Grip the collar of my jerkin.”
I did so. “And, ahem, exactly how are we to—”
“Aerially,” he said. And leapt straight into the sky.
IV
“Leapt,” while accurate, is too weak a term. Such was the speed of our ascent my frame seemed to contract to half its volume, my ribcage too compressed to allow the intake of a breath.
At our apex, and the start of our descent, I could breathe again, had breath and awe to spare for what stretched out below us: the dark might of the demon army toiling upslope. An army they truly seemed; despite their multiplicity of shape, the mute unison of their movement was sinister in the extreme.
Within the wind-rush of our plunge (whose angle I anxiously gauged, fearing we might not come down far enough in advance of that dire vanguard) Yanîn’s rumbled words rose plain to me:
“You may doubt that we’ll have help. Be comforted! I have many friends in this forest.”
I rejoiced to hear it, but scanning the wooded slopes, could see no sign of any allies amid those trees. Here came the treetops, and hard earth beneath.
“Hold tight,” Yanîn gritted.
Twigs whipped my head and shoulders, and the arse-and-spine-numbing impact was reduced by a second, lesser leap skyward, one that just cleared the crests of several trees, and plunged us again to the mountainside some furlongs higher upslope.
And as soon as I had dismounted his shoulders, and shaken the numbness from my legs and arse, I could feel through my footsoles the tramp of the ascending demon columns climbing towards us.
Yanîn seized my right shoulder in his huge hand, and an icy rill went through my bone and sinew—the pulse of sorcery.
“Thus I endow your touch with power. We must run zig and zag across the front of their advance! Strike every trunk with the flat of your hand and say: Root and branch! Arise! Advance!”
This will not seem much to do—the pair of us running crosswise to the slope, striking tree after tree and crying the words aloud. And indeed, I was awed to wake so much power so quickly. Each skorse, as we struck and invoked it, shuddered and shook its great crest like a brandished lance. Tore out its roots from the soil and rock and stood upon them.
Every skorse sinks a tripod of taproots. Each one we woke writhed and wrenched them free, and with a gigantic, staggery strength surged down toward the demon-horde.
In truth they were titans, but lurching and lumbering ones. To strike, they must make a stand on their roots, and make great lateral strokes with their lower and largest boughs. The demons they connected with, they bashed to bloody tatters, but such was their weighty momentum, recovery from each stroke was slow. Meanwhile demons, of course, are agile as lizards or rats. Demons are limber as maggots in meat.
The head of their up-rushing column was compacted at first, and thus at the outset, the slaughter those timber titans wrought was grand and glorious: neighboring trees, with opposing strokes of their branches, scissored whole streams of demon-meat between them . . .
It could not last. Zan-Kirk—though flown far peak-wards to engage his hated spouse—wheeled back astride his winged brute, and with a gesture caused his demons to disperse in a hundred branching paths upslope.
Now, they were flooding upwards in a swath a quarter-mile broad, and from a column, had become a rising inundation.
“We must defend the crater—hold tight!” I mounted his shoulders again and once more Yanîn leapt into the sky. Our arc was flatter, would bring us down on the rubble-slope where Hylanais toiled. The witch’s work was stunningly advanced. She was airborne on wings she’d conjured, transparent and invisible in their vibration as a dragonfly’s. Her dead were an ant-swarm, dwarfed by the boulders that they hoisted, up from the diminishing rubble-slope and onto the steep pitch of the crater wall—twin streams of these great stones, balanced on their bone-lean shoulders, they carried up the rupture’s either side.
Their progress gave us hope. The crude repair of ashlar that had stood so long impounding its meager reservoir was swallowed up and twice overtopped. Two hundred feet of the wound was seamlessly closed in the glittery gray rock they lofted, shard by shard. For to touch one of these boulders to the patch at any point was to see it snatched into the reborn wall like water into a sponge—to see the fragment meld with the broken rim, and the whole mend incrementally rise.
And in their toil, it seemed the dead soldiers grew brighter, for the stone they wrestled scoured the rusted greaves and corselets they wore, such that their armor began to flash brazen and silver in the blaze of moonlight, and their long-empty sockets seemed to gleam with it too.
Those twice-dead warriors—tireless—ant-swarmed the boulders upslope either side of the breach, like a V-shaped bucket brigade, but of course the upper third of the crater’s great wound yawned widest of all. Those skeletal conscripts twice resurrected by the witch—two hundred years ago, and now—toiled like the heroes they were, but we already saw that once arrived at the crater, the best we could do against the ascending demons would be too little. If they reached the breach in their thousands, they would usurp the crater’s repair . . . We apexed, and now we were plunging again
Even as we dove, we saw Hylanais overwhelmed. She was zigging and zagging on her blur of wings, and retreating ever higher from her army, because Gothol on his raft, and Zan-Kirk on his demon, flanked her left and right, and flung bolt after bolt of raw thaumaturgic energy at her, while her fierce dodges and deflections plainly cost her all the strength she had. Even as we plunged to the crater’s rubble-slope, we saw we’d land with but scant lead on the up-rushing hellspawn.
Yanîn’s great torqued mass—like a spring—somehow diminished our impact with Rainbowl. Here was the rubble-slope much shrunk by the energy of the dead heroes, yet it seemed a work that could not be accomplished before the demons swarmed up from the trees.
Yanîn said, “Take arms against them when they come, my friend. I must give myself to one task alone. Good luck.”
He lifted the boulder next to the one he stood on—it was as big as a mail-coach!—and thrust it into the air. Astonished, I watched it arc high, high up the cone, strike the patch, and melt into it.
A hellish din! Now five thousand demons erupted from the treeline not many furlongs downslope from us, while bolts of crackling energy split the sky between the three combatant wizards high above us. Yanîn, in swift series, hurled three huge stones arcing a quarter-mile through the air to merge with—and incrementally augment—the stony poultice on great Rainbowl’s wound.
The demons poured from the trees, crossed the open slopes, muscling and lurching and scrabbling through moonlight, clawing and seething, gaunt-limbed and rasp-tongued and thorn-furred and fungus-eyed they came, their unearthly stench—an almost solid thing—welling forth from them like a kind of miasmic vanguard.
It was time to turn to. I had a good sword, though I sorely disliked lacking a shield . . .
Here they came closing, closing—I had just time for another glance behind me at Yanîn. There seemed to be two of him, so incessant and swift were his workings. I saw no less than three huge boulders strung through the air along the same trajectory, and he launched yet a fourth along that same parabola just before the first of the series impacted with the patch, and swelled it . . .
And here were the demons now. As I set my blade sweeping through that thorny surf of claws and jaws, I saw with great relief hundreds of the dead army leave off their relay of rocks, draw their blades, and turn with us to hew this demon-flux.
Dead allies! I can see them still, sharp-etched in moonlight! Though their gaunt jaws seemed to gnaw the air, though leather their flesh and their limbs scarce more than bones—though they had mere moonlight for eyes in their sockets—the smell that came off those twice-dead warriors was not of the grave, not at all! Not of the tomb, though they’d lain twice entombed. The smell that came off these dead warriors was of ice and stone and midnight wind, all laced with the lovely bitter smell of steel . . .
We lifted our blades and on came the demons. A beetle-backed one with triple barbed bug-jaws had at me, and I blessed this chance for a shield. I sheared off his up-reaching jaws with a cross-stroke, sliced five of his legs out from under, and as he buckled down before me, hacked out a great square of his leathery carapace, and ripped it free of his back—a shield!
But no, Shag—I’ll spare you the details of my own small doings, and show you the grand tides in flux here, the whole sea of war in its surgings.
Full half of the twice-raised dead had come down off the crater and—raising a skullish hiss, a windy war-cry from their leathery lungs—swept down in a scything line that bagged the demon onslaught in a vast net of bony, tireless limbs and whistling swordblades.
Up on the crater their twice-dead brethren in two chain-lines passed wall-wrack back up to the wall. Aloft, Hylanais was blasted, scorched and thunderbolted from two sides by her risen mate and his subworld scion. Though scathed with blazing energies, the witch remained impossibly aloft, her wings a blur, though her wearied sorcery was all shield-work now, all incandescent hemispheres she deployed left and right of her to contain and cancel her husband’s and the Narn-son’s bolts and blazes.
While through it all Yanîn’s brute energy launched huge stones moonward that plunged, plunged, plunged into the great wound, the healed rock rising in the gap like pale wine in a goblet.
When you are sunk in combat on a grand scale, you can feel a touch of the eternal. When did this all-engulfing turmoil start? How could it ever end?
But end it did! It ended with the hurling of a single stone. Just as my eye chanced to be turned that way, Yanîn launched a mighty boulder, and I saw—astonished—that it was the final fragment of Rainbowl’s collapse.
It arced up, up through the moonlight—big as a three-storey manse it was!—and as it soared, dead silence fell upon that whole infernal battlefield, for it soared up to an almost perfectly completed crater, and fell into the one little notch of vacancy that remained, high up upon the crater’s crown.
It seemed that Hylanais had never doubted this would come to pass, for she had shot aloft, and already she hung there, centered high above the bowl, as that last fragment found its niche.
And then quite leisurely—for an odd paralysis seemed to befall both Zan-Kirk and his son—she stretched out her hand, and dropped a tiny clot of light down into the high, gigantic basin.
What an audience we were in that moment! A true and single audience, united by our sudden stillness and our rapt attention. Furiously though the demon army and its generals had fought to reach the crater and to kindle there the summons to the Sojourners, we had beaten them.
And now every one of us—human, demon, dead and living—raptly awaited what would answer the summons. A dire and various audience we were, to be sure: claws, clubs, blades, and fangs all cocked to rend and slay, but all our eyes, human and hellish, were in unison now fixed aloft; a host of living warriors, hilts gripped, lifted axes taking the moonlight; a host of dead warriors in a killing frenzy, to whom this moment was the more apocalyptic for their having lain so long in death before waking to possess it . . . But all of these awaiting the outcome, all now realizing that whatever would spring from the witch’s spark, it would befall every one of us.
None in all that host but the airborne—none but the witch, and the warlock, and the Narn-son—could see what that little clot of radiance illuminated as it dropped inside the crater. But every one of us reckoned—from the speed of its plunge—the rate of its unseen journey to the imagined crater floor.
And such a concord was there in that monstrous throng’s silent reckonings, that a single shudder moved across the whole grim host of us upon the mountainside—every corpse, and demon, and every living soul of us shuddered just one heartbeat before the crater erupted.
It was the eruption, huge and silent, of a perfect inverted cone of rose-red light up to the stars.
The full moon had somewhat declined from zenith, and the rubescent beam, spreading as it rose, just nicked the lunar rim, painting there a red ellipse like a bloody thumbprint . . .
Still that impossible stillness held us all. Rapt, our eyes or empty sockets scanned aloft as that great chalice of light beamed up at the stars . . . and as something began to fill that chalice.
Indistinct it was at first, a kind of granulation within the rosy cup of radiance . . . until these contents began to seem more like the substance of the cup itself.
Faces! Tier upon tier of them spiraling upwards and outwards, these were the vast chalice’s substance! They were a towering tribunal—rank on widening rank of faces rising toward the stars, every one of them preternaturally distinct within their dizzying distances, and every one of them gazing down on Lebanoi, upon her war-torn slopes, her sprawling butchery of man and demon.
It froze us even stiller than before—every one of us it froze. Something in the unearthly concord of those sky-borne gazes unutterably diminished us, annihilated us with the sad austerity of their ageless, alien regard.
Within their great cyclone of sentience they grieved, that sad tribunal of the Sojourners. It was grief with a shudder in it they showed us, as they gazed down on the wide, bleeding wreckage we’d spread for their welcome.
That witnessing host roofed our world, and their somber regard showed us starkly the inferno that our bodies blazed in. My flesh felt thin as a shadow sheathing my bones, while the eyes of the Sojourners seemed to gaze down into a pit centuries deep, upon some holocaust of remote antiquity.
Beheld by that tribunal, we felt ourselves to be the briefest of echoes from some distant past, a rumor roaming the reverberant corridors through which had thronged a great host long ago . . .
That high tribunal of skyborn faces! The gravity of them had turned us to stone in mid-slaughter. Stunned we stood, sword-arms hanging slack. It was among the strangest moments of my life, Shag! To stand arms-length from demons and to think no more of them than that they were residents like me on this strange earth! But in truth, no more than that they seemed when this host—eyes immutable as constellations—paved the night sky . . .
The somber knowledge of that multitude! Knowing our future as well as our past . . . It seemed they had gathered to witness our metamorphosis. To witness this strange crescendo our old world—once theirs—was rising towards.
I felt it through my legs: whatever was to come of this, would not be long in coming.
A true thought, that one. Yanîn leapt prodigiously aloft, and stood astride the Flume just below its shattered terminus. Looking back down upon the mingled army of demons just emerged from the trees, and of dead still climbing from their fen, he bellowed, “Come up! Climb up! Come see and be seen!”
Those demons in their homicidal fever required no prompting to come up. That wry-framed giant with his equine eyes—had he sided with the warlock? It was the witch had my allegiance from the first. But did Hylanais’s son embrace the subworld?
I looked up at the witch’s army on the crater wall—those twice-dead veterans of sorcerous war. My allegiance went to them completely, such that it made the hair stir on my neck to see that demon column—shields and axes high—come foaming up the mountainside at them.
“Let them come to you!” Hylanais from astride her winged demon called down: “Wrack and dark ruin upon you both!” and she gestured obscenely, first at Gothol on his raft, then at Zan-Kirk astride his monster.
Come they did, and hurtling up the steep terrain those subworld soldiers—so variously limbed and bodied—looked agile as insects swarming up a wall. They looked every bit as swift as the dead that were avalanching to meet them, and deploying to fill the whole slope below Rainbowl.
You must keep in mind, Shag, how moon-drenched it was, how stark white-and-black; the twice-killed soldiers, bare bone showing everywhere, plunging down against the muck-dark demons baying their hunger as they climbed . . .
But the collision of their ranks astonished every combatant—living, dead and demon alike. For as those warfronts, those harrows of hammering steel, collided high on the slope, the astonishment of it filled every eye for sixty leagues around, and half a dozen other cities saw it.
For colors bloomed as blazing rich as any tropic jungle at full noon—this in the night, mind you, in moonlight only!
The battle lines seemed to merge and swell as impossible night-blazing colors erupted everywhere from the hillside. From our post just below Rainbowl’s wall we saw what caused this profusion. For as every demon with one of the dead collided, the both of them exploded into a branching, blossoming skeleton, its every bone a limb that flowered, blossomed purple, saffron, blood-red and cerulean . . .
Branching and budding and blooming, a rainbow growth overspread that battlefield, and climbed the Flume’s mighty legs. A forestation of hues that blazed even in darkness, knit from every shape of branch, leaf, tendril, limb and frond.
So like an earthquake was this efflorescence to my astonished mind, that it was almost detachedly I watched as Gothol’s raft—the Narn-son’s wrath proclaimed in his raised fist—and Zan-Kirk’s hairy-winged mount both plummeted to the earth. As he plunged, Gothol stood mute. The warlock barked one hoarse curse at his mate: “Forever the dark then, witch!”
On impact came their writhe of metamorphosis . . . and both those grim, dire men were . . . flower trees!—their legs gnarled roots, and their arms all blossoms scooping up the moonlight and the air . . .
And as these two, so the hosts they led also rippled with mountain-wide metamorphosis, and their forest of lifted blades and brandished lances were trunks and boughs and branches multifoliate, and the screams and butchering grunts of war sank to the wide whisper of foliage rattling, muttering and whispering in the night wind off the sea . . .
The Sojourners, that watching host which filled the sky—all those faces softened with something like assent, and then grew vague, grew smoky, and dispersed, and left just moon-drenched night behind.
I stood still staring, straining still to see that host of unsuspected witnesses, straining still to feel their cosmic fellowship—undreamed of, and then so briefly known.
“Would you not like to see where they have gone?” Though softly spoken, the depth of Yanîn’s voice at my ear caused me a tremor.
I weighed my answer. “I would like to, but only if I could certainly return here from there. For this strange world is marvel enough for me.”
We two looked about us. Shaggy with blossom the whole upper Flume had grown. The crater wall and its under-slope, that had been so starkly stony for so long, was growing even as we watched, growing ever more richly encrusted with color and form. Judging by the vernal riot of blossoming, foliate and fronded forms emerging everywhere, there was just no telling what might spring up next . . .