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SHAG MARGOLD'S Eulogy of
NIFFT THE LEAN,
His Dear Friend

NIFFT THE LEAN is no longer among us, and I have at last confessed to myself that, hereafter, he never will be. Consequently, I have tried to do for him all that remains in my power to do, little though that is. The man is gone, but here, at least, is some record of what he saw and did in the world. It is a bitter thing that each of us must finally be blown out like a candle, and have the unique ardor of his individual flame choked off, and sucked utterly away like smoke in the dark. Do we ever accept this in our hearts, any of us? The waste of knowledge! It never ceases to be . . . infuriating. In Nifft's case I find it galls me cruelly, and the documents I now present to my countrymen—records which Nifft, or Barnar the Chilite, or others of our mutual acquaintance have put in my keeping over the years—have given me great consolation for the loss of him.

In strict truth, I do not say that Nifft is dead. This cannot be known. But for all that he was dear to me, when I consider the Thing which took him from us I wish him dead. Escape he cannot. He was a man who made some deep ventures and yet always found his way back to the sunlight, but this time I do not look for my waybrother's coming home.

Nifft was an affectionate man, watchful for his friends' advantage, and hence my present possession of his records. Nifft relished making record of his exploits (simply vanity his sole motive, he insisted), and so did his friends, and from our first acquaintance he contrived to make me the guardian of all such manuscripts, alleging his unsettled life barred his keeping them. This was tactful altruism. He had other friends to leave his papers with, but to me, an historian and cartographer, they could be of unique benefit. Indeed, my latest effort, the Second Revised Global Map, owe's the kind praise it has reaped mainly to the wealth of new and detailed information which Nifft's papers put at my disposal during its drafting. From time to time I remonstrated with him, offered payment for his material, until one day he put his hand on my shoulder. (He had huge hands—they were the reason for his preeminence with all forms of dart, javelin, lance or spear.) Solemnly he said to me:

"Enough of this please, Shag. I can't take money from a man I admire as much as you. You're the most widely traveled honest man I know."

If Nifft was not entirely honest, he was entirely honorable, and it is futile to push moral assessment further than this in the case of a thief. That Nifft was one of the master thieves of his generation stands beyond dispute. The reader must note that I write in Karkmahn-Ra, jewel of the Ephesion Chain and much frequented by Nifft's guildfellows. To know his professional standing I need not travel far, and can have it from the lips of such legendary talents as Taramat Light-Touch, Nab the Trickster, and Ellen Errin the Kadrashite. These, and their peers, judge unanimously that Nifft stood in the very vanguard of his guild's greatest luminaries.

He was a limber, gaunt man, a full span taller than the average. Though he was spare, he was densely wrought—rope-veined, gnarl-muscled, and unusually strong. His face was long and droll, the big nose battered, the wide mouth wry. This face was a marvelously expressive instrument whenever Nifft chose, as he occasionally did, to entertain us with some piece of comic pantomime. He was highly accomplished in this art. At the age of thirteen he had finagled an apprenticeship in it with a traveling acrobatic troupe then visiting the town of his birth, therewith commencing the peripatetic career he was to pursue so illustriously and which, though it took him far across the face of the earth, never brought him back to his native city. By his twentieth year he was a thorough adept in all of what we may term the "carnival arts," and already a widely traveled young man. From mastery of the mountebank's larcenous skills to the study of outright felonious appropriation, and all its subsidiary sciences, proved but a short step for Nifft, who always credited his early "dramatic training" with his success as a thief, vowing it had given him a rare grasp of his trade's fundamentals: lying, imposture and nimble movement. For the latter, Nifft had a particular capacity, and was known for a certain inimitable, restive carriage of body. His way of moving—taut, flickering, balanced—made his friends liken him to a lizard—a similitude he professed to deplore, but which I believe he secretly relished.

It is hard indeed to think him gone! He was one of those men whose death one hears of frequently and always, as it proves, falsely—the kind of man who always pops up into view like a cork upon the after-turbulence of storms and shipwrecks, bobbing unharmed out of the general ruin. There was a period of about five years when I and all who knew him believed him dead. During this time I attended a number of anniversary revelries held by his guildfellows in observance of his memory—bibulous festivities which they decreed without allowing themselves to be limited by the strictly calendrical notion of an "anniversary," and of which I had attended no less than eleven when, a lustrum after his "passing," I set out on my first extended cruise of exploration in the southern oceans. I was one of a coalition of Ephesionite scholars. The vessel we had chartered for our year of reconnaissance was rigged with elaborate signal beacons on a scaffold in the foredeck, for we sought parley with every vessel we sighted at sea, and inquired into their crews' affairs—their travels, homes, and modes of life—as studiously as we logged coasts, climes, and oceanic phenomena. In our second month out, as we skirted the Glacial Maelstroms, we spied a brig of exotic design. We hailed her and, shortly, hove alongside her for our habitual trade of amenities and news.

The brig's masters were two wealthy carpet merchants from Fregor Ingens, and there was a third man with them who was in the manner of a junior partner and clerk. This man poured out the drinks for our convivial little assembly. I looked at the broad, rawboned hand that tipped the beaker to my cup, looked up along the stark length of arm, and into Nifft's black, spark-centered eyes. He had grown his hair long and wore it pulled back into a braided club on his neck, in the style of the Jarkeladd nomads, and this revealed that he now lacked his left ear, but Nifft it surely was. Our conversation on this occasion was one of covert looks only, for I quickly perceived his association with the merchants he so deferentially attended was of a type which sudden disclosure of his identity could jeopardize. I did not compromise him, though I smiled to myself to think of all I would hear from my friend the next time we sat at liquor together.

And I would not have compromised him now, as these volumes must do were Nifft ever to reenter the world of men. I would have delayed this work interminably out of reluctance to acknowledge his loss by completing this verbal monument to his life and deeds. But I am old, and my health is more than a little imperfect. No one knows his term, and I have been compelled to accomplish this labor while labor lay still within my power. From this, the great importance I attach to this work should be obvious. At the same time I must confess that during the months I have devoted to these documents, I have been no stranger to the despairing cynicism with which all men must grapple in the winter of their lives. Mockingly I have asked myself my labor's aim. Is it to set my friend's excellence before the eyes of Posterity? But "Posterity"—what a hair-raising gulf of time is masked by that word! An illimitable boneyard of Histories lies already behind us. Worlds on worlds of men have flowered, died and drifted on their time-islands into the desolation of eternity, and worlds more lie ahead of us—that, or the end of all. I have seen archaic maps which showed me the faces of earths utterly different from this, minutely rendered geographies which no man will find today in any of the five seas. Whither, on what unguessable currents, do I launch this man's fame, and what eddy will it end in, an impenetrable fragment in a tongue unknown to the wisest scholars, if it is preserved at all?

But I have set aside this cynical lassitude as a wasteful and childish mistake. Though a light burn comparatively small in the darkness, its first and consuming necessity is to broadcast all the illumination in its power. While it is foolish to deny the dark around us, it is futile to exaggerate it. And I make bold to say that I am not the only one of my countrymen who could profit from taking this admonition to heart.

I have in mind the notion that is so fashionable nowadays, namely that we live in a Dark Age where puny Science quails before many a dim Unknown on every hand. Surely this sort of facile pessimism dampens the energy of inquiry even as it leads to obscurantism—toward a despair of certainty which encourages us to embrace truth's, half-truths, and the most extravagant falsehoods with a promiscuous lack of discrimination.

What responsible person denies—to speak only of the cartographic science—that vast tracts of land and sea remain mysterious to the wisest? The great Kolodrian mountain systems are an instance. The Thaumeton Island Group, the hinterlands of the Jarkeladd tundras, are further examples. But mark in this how clearly we can define our ignorance. The fact is, our world's main outlines—coasts and climes, seas and currents—are known. It is the same in other disciplines. We have sufficient fragments of sufficient histories to know that man has been both far more powerful and far more abject than he is today. If our tools and techniques are crude compared to the fabulous resources of ages past, they are also marvels of efficacy to what our race has muddled through within yet other periods.

Granting that our knowledge be limited, what can it profit us to traffic in lurid fantasies and errant imaginings? When—certainty failing us—we must speculate, let us recognize the difference between careful enumeration of reasonable hypotheses, and the reckless multiplication of bizarre conceptions. To illustrate with a classic instance, we cannot say what demons are. If the knowledge ever existed, it is lost to us now. Consequently, we must acknowledge several theories which continue to dominate the discussions of serious students of the question. Demons, few of whom lack some human component, may have been the parent stock of Man. Or they may have been spawned by man, his degenerate progeny. Possibly, they are his invention run wild, artifacts of a potent but diseased sorcery he once possessed. And, conceivably, the sub-worlds were populated according to Undle Ninefingers' suggestion, which holds that the demons arose as a "spiritual distillate" of human evil, a "coagulation" of psychic energies into the material entities we know today. The judicious man, though he have his private leaning, must grant all of these some claim to credence. But must he entertain the idea that demons come from seeds which are rained upon the earth at each full moon? Or that each demon is the "vital shadow" of a living man, engendered below in the instant of that man's conception, and extinguished in the moment of his death?

The spirit in which I offer my prefatory notes to each of the following narratives should now be clear. I shall present as certain only those data corroborated by exhaustive research, or by my own personal investigations, as I am not untraveled for a bookish man. Wherever doubt exists, I shall unambiguously state its degree and nature, along with whatever grounds I may have for preferring one hypothesis over another. If, despite all I have said, the reader disdains such honest ambiguity, and stubbornly prefers the unequivocal assertiveness to be found in factitious travelogues penned by raffish "explorers," or in the specious "natural histories" compiled by crapulous and unprincipled hacks who have never left their squalid lofts in Scrivener's Row, then there is nothing further I can do, and I leave him, with apologies, to his deception.

Herewith, then, I dedicate these volumes to the memory of Nifft the Lean. Had there been a funerary stone marking his remains, I would have had it inscribed in accordance with the only preference he was ever heard to voice on the subject—namely, with those verses he loved above all others, written by the immortal Parple, the bard's "Salutation to the World." So let them be written here, since the stone is lacking.

Salutation To The World As Beheld At Dawn
From Atop Mount Eburon 

Long have your continents drifted and merged,
Jostled like whales on the seas,
Then cloven, and sundered, and slowly diverged,
While your mountains arose and sank to
their knees.

Long and long were your eons of ice,
Long were your ages of fire.
Long has there been
The bleeding of men
And the darkness that cancels desire.

What hosts of hosts—born, grown, and gone—
Have swarmed your million Babylons?
How many pits has Mankind dug?
How many peaks has he stood upon?

Many and long were your empires of blood,
Fewer your empires of light.
Now their wisdoms and wars
Lie remote as the stars,
Stone-cold in the blanketing night.

Now even your wisest could never restore
One tithe of the truths Man's lost,
Nor even one book of the radiant lore
That so many treasured so long, at such cost.

For it's many the pages the wind has torn
And their hoarded secrets blown—
Tumbled and chased
Through the eyeless wastes
Where the wreckage of history's thrown.

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Framed