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Part 2

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SHAG MARGOLD'S Preface to
The Pearls of the
Vampire Queen

THIS ACCOUNT IS the work of Ellen Errin (known perhaps equally well as Greymalkin Mary)—something I flatter myself I would know even were the manuscript not written in her unmistakable script, which is both exceedingly minuscule and almost preternaturally legible. For just as distinctive to me as her hand, is her subtle, incessant parody of Nifft's voice. That the two were lovers for many years need not be concealed. Ellen herself certainly regards the fact with outspoken pride, and Nifft always did likewise. It is probably best understood, then, as a lover's liberty that she takes when she invariably, in adopting Nifft's voice, makes him sound twice the boaster that he ever really was. It is never his tone she distorts, but only the measure of his bragging. In the present instance she was sharing the jest with Taramat Lighttouch, who did indeed receive it as a missive from Chilia, where Ellen had been staying with Nifft and Barnar for more than six months before she relayed his adventure to their mutual friend in Karkhman-Ra. In sum, I find I must confess that these gentle parodies of hers always make me smile, for truly, Nifft was never over modest.

Fregor Ingens, where this chapter of Nifft's career has its setting, is still referred to by certain intransigent members of the cartographic guild as the "fourth continent." It is scarcely a sixth the size of Lúlumë, and it is clearly part of an island system, namely the Ingens Cluster, which lies halfway between Kolodria's southern tip and the Glacial Maelstroms of the southern Pole. But because it is the largest island known, it seems there will always be some contentious souls ambitious to promote it to continental status. In my view these commentators could toil more fruitfully on other ground, such as the amplification of our extremely sparse information on the geography and inhabitants of Fregor's central highlands, which are spectacularly mountainous—thought indeed to contain several of the earth's highest peaks—and shrouded in perpetual clouds.

The lowlands of Fregor's northern coast are at least rather better known and it is here, some hundred leagues inland of Cuneate Bay, that the swamplands of the vampire Queen lie. Indeed, the bay's cities owe their modestly active shipping trade largely to the proximity of Queen Vulvula's pearl-rich domains, which are productive of little else and in consequence draw heavily on the resources of the teeming Kolodrian continent. The swamp pearls—like a ceaseless, glittering black rivulet—trickle northward overland in heavily armed caravans: the Kolodrian merchant argosies river southward from the Great Shallows; the two streams meet in the ports of Cuneate Bay, mingle turbulently in clearing houses and brokerage halls, and resume their flow, the pearls northward overseas, the goods southward overland to the royal vampire's hungry fens and tarns.

But to speak of hunger is to raise the issue that must be foremost in the mind of anyone who has perused this record of Nifft's Fregorian exploit: can a vampire's rule be a just rule? I confess that the question is still so "alive" for me—that is to say, unconcluded—that more than eleven years of diligent inquiry have left me as destitute of any certain answer as I was when Taramat first showed me the manuscript. Perhaps as close as I have come to any such thing is in considering the case of a realm near Vulvula's which is just as trade-dependent as her own, that of Gelidor Ingens. Gelidor is the second-largest (it is the size of Chilia) and southernmost island of the Ingens Chain. During the season of the sirikons it is only five days' sail from Samádrios, the western-most isle of my native Ephesion Chain. Whether Samádrios' need nourished an infant industry in Gelidor, or Gelidor's natural abundance of the resource in question nurtured Samádrios' inclination to rely on it must rank as one of the most venerable controversies in Ephesion academic tradition. (That it has been so since the Aboriginal Trade Wars suggests—to me at least—that the answer lies either beyond the reach of formal inquiry, or beneath its notice.) But past any dispute is Gelidor's preeminence as a nursery of arms, especially since the decline of Anvil Pastures (elsewhere detailed), and Samádrios' centuries-long dependence on those arms for the prosecution of her interminable bid for empire in the islands of the Kolodrian Tail. And Samádrios is far from being Gelidor's only customer. Her mercenaries are the highest paid in the world. The skill and bellicosity of her army and navy have not only made her mistress of half the islands of the dense and disparate Ingens cluster, they have also caused war to become her prime export. The Hipparch of Gelidor subjects his teeming island to a painful diminution of prosperity—always swiftly and vigorously deplored by the populace—whenever he fails to dispense at least two-thirds of his annual crop of academy-trained officers among the globe's annual crop of red and rampant battlefields. And so we might fairly ask: Who drinks more blood—the Hipparch, or Queen Vulvula?

Shag Margold

The Pearls of the
Vampire Queen

I

To Taramet Light-touch

Sow-and-Farrow Inn

Karkhman-Ra

WARMEST SALUTATIONS, O Prince of Scoundrels! Dear deft-fingered felon, Paragon of Pilferers, Nabob of Knaves—good morrow, good day or good night, whichever suits the hour this finds you! Do you guess who I am that greets you thus? Eh? Of course you do. Who else but your own nimble, narrow-built, never-baffled Nifft—inimitable Nifft of the knife-keen wits!

Has it been two years since we've been out of touch? That much and more, by the Black Crack! I'm sure you thought me dead or something like it, and I promise you, Taramat, I came close to it, for the haul that Barnar and I made in Fregor Ingens has taken us all of twenty-six months of breakneck squandering to dissipate, and if it had been just a jot richer, we would certainly have died of our vices before we'd wasted it all.

Haul? In Fregor? But of course—you don't know about it yet! Stupid of me . . . suppose I write you a nice long letter telling you all about it? It's raining here in Chilia where we're visiting Barnar's family. I've got lots of time on my hands, and we won't be getting back down your way till late this Spring. So it's agreed then, and I assure you it's no trouble at all, for I love to reminisce about exploits, especially remarkable ones. Just be sure to share this with Ellen if you see her—you know how she dotes on me and relishes keeping abreast of what I'm doing.

Well, it was swamp pearls, Taramat—five hundred apiece. Yes. You may well gape (as I know you're doing). You know their value, I'm sure, but have you ever seen one? Black as obsidian, twelve-faceted (the runts have six) and big as your thumb. They are dazzling to behold—nothing less—and we never doubted that obtaining some was worth risking the vampire queen's wrath.

Now we knew that Queen Vulvula's divers go down after them in threes—one pearl-picker and two stranglers. But this is because they are anxious not to kill the pearl-bearing polyps. With a pair of heavies, the thing's palps can be pinned and the picker left free to take its pearls. They attack the polyp's strangling-node only as a last resort, to free one of their team from a lethal grip of one of the palps. But a diver can get sufficient diversion from just one strangler if the man is strong enough and goes straight for the strangling node and squeezes to kill. You try to be quick and not leave the thing dead, as their corpses make a good trail for the archer-boats, but to get by with one strangler, he can't be shy about damaging the things. You know Barnar's strength. I was content to risk the picking with him strangling solo, and he was willing to try it if I was. So we signed up as men-at-arms on a Chilite skirmisher to get passage to Cuneate Bay, and spent three days there in Draar Harbor getting provisions. Then we headed south.

With good mounts the swamps are about ten days' journey inland. It's bad country, but our luck was good right up through the eighth day. Then, on the eighth night, it went bad. We were in the salt marshes near the mountains that flank the swamps when three huge salt beetles attacked us. Luckily, though wood is scarce there, we'd kept enough of a fire going to give us a little light to fight by. We killed them all, but not before they'd killed our mounts. Worse, their caustic blood destroyed both our spear shafts. We still had our bows and blades, but we would rather have lost these than the spears, which would be the only really useful weapons in the swamps. When you're swimming you can't use a bow, so it's no help against lurks, and it's scant help against ghuls because they're so tough-bodied in all but a few places. And swords bring you far closer than you ever want to be, either to a lurk or a ghul.

The swamps begin to the south of the Salt Tooth Mountains. As soon as we reached the upper passes of this range, we were looking across a plain of clouds that seemed to have no end. The range forms a wall the clouds can't pass, and the plains below have been a sump of rains for thousands of years.

Descending the range's swamp side, we were deep in cottony fog most of the way down, but just as we neared the plain we entered a zone of clear air between the clouds and the swamp. In the cold grey light between the cloud ceiling and the watery floor, we could see for miles across the pools and thickly grown mudbars that concealed our illicit fortune-to-be. The bars and ridges of silt are mazelike, turning the waters, which look jet black from a distance, into a puzzle of crazy-shaped lagoons. But the growth on these bars, though thick, is not as lush as you'd expect. It's mainly shrubs and flowers; big trees are rare. The question of cover would be tricky as a result. The place offered many avenues of vision down which a man standing on a flatboat could overlook a dozen lagoons at a glance.

But when we stood on the bog's very rim, pausing before we entered the waters, Barnar snuffed softly, and said to me: "It's got that smell, Nifft. There could be a great prize waiting for us here." He was right, too. It had that peculiar stink of threat about it. You looked at that low-riding cloudcover, looking torn and dirty as a stable-floor, and then at those endless unclean waters, and you knew that obscene riches lay ripening out there, riches so encumbered with danger that their guards had ceased to believe that they could ever be stolen, not in any big way.

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Framed