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NIFFT I

I am sure you are familiar with the tradition, Dear Shag, that Grandfather A'rak, and all his issue, great and small, instantly know thieves for what they are—can smell them, is the common expression, which I for one find offensive. Who knows by what arcane sensitivity these alien beings identify the members of my guild?

But that they in fact do so is disputed by no one. When the Hagian octaloon began circulating, minted from the A'rak's mines (in which the budding human elite he was grooming always owned shares, to be sure) it quickly became the preferred coinage throughout the southern Agon, and its allure brought the best builders from abroad to assist in the new city's birth. But outgoing gold makes no nation rich. When foreign wealth learned it had no safer haven than the vaults of the A'rak's monastia, only then began Big Quay's real greatness.

Where else were hoards of coin more direly guarded than here, where thieves encountered instantaneous apprehension? Big Quay, midway between the Ephesions and the Ingens Cluster, is perfectly sited as an entrepot, and as speculation in her warehoused cargoes thrived, the speculators lodged their capital in the monastia, whose letters of draught and notes of deposit quickly became as good as gold half the world over.

The monastia, monkish cloisters on the face of them, were an instance of the spidergod's ever-canny cloaking of his fiscal webwork in the pious garb of his cult; the cloisters were fortressed vaults, in fact, and their comfortably maintained inhabitants functioned as the clerks and directors of any banking house function.

That the monastia should be my chief interest in Big Quay perhaps scarcely needs saying. What induced me to attempt them—or even to come near them with an attempt in mind—is best grasped through this narrative's unfolding. A monastial vault was in any case a long-odds prize at the best, and in the short term I aimed at a more modest profit, while maintaining a wait-and-see view towards the greater.

The great question, of course, was the how of the A'rak-spawn's spotting of thieves. Needless to say, the spiderkind don't traffic openly about. Discretion is the keynote of their dominion in Hagia. Save for the yearly Choosing on Shortest Night (as will shortly appear) they confine their feeding to the countryside well away from the metropolis. It seemed certain a thief could go safe enough amid Big Quay's throngs. The presence there, indeed, of great merchants and financiers, trafficking freely, absolutely assured this.

The difficulty was, the first little profit I aimed at involved selling to Grandfather A'rak himself a certain article I'd acquired by chance. Clearly, I was in double need of a proxy—not merely to avoid being devoured on the spot, before my proposition was even out of my mouth, but to gain audience with the Great Sire himself in the first instance.

The flagship shrine, so to speak, among the A'rak's temples was the Big Quay Fane, and its Ecclesiarch was the Primate among all A'rak's priests. Plainly, this prelate was my only possible intermediary. A new man had but lately succeeded to the Ecclesiarchal Chair, one Paanja Pandagon. The gossip reported him somewhat young for the post; he would in any case be unseasoned to it. The circumstance seemed more auspicious than otherwise, given the unprecedented nature of what I had come a-peddling.

It was the Ecclesiarch, then, whom the Nuncio Lagademe spied me a-spying on. I had debarked the same morning as she, and had gone straight to work. As I had sat in the pews, much nearer the dais than she, I was close when that faltering moment came upon the Ecclesiarch. I could just see his brow (well tanned) break a sweat, and his hands tremble, before he clenched and stilled them. And I wondered the less at these things, because I also perceived an unearthly, outwelling energy invisibly fountaining up from the dais he stood on. Others in pews as near as mine felt it too—they glanced at, and then hid their eyes from each other, and shrank down in their seats.

It was no sooner felt than it ended, this eerie efflux, but I knew in that instant it was aimed, was addressed to the priest in particular, and I didn't wonder that he trembled.

Still shaken afterwards, he was the easier to follow unseen (I too was shaken, I think, to miss the Nuncio watching us both!)—down a corridor through an annex of sacerdotal chambers. He turned into a doorless ward-room that was antechamber to his own quarters. The look in his eyes was remote. He transferred his diademed chaplet from his head to a perruquier's block affixed to the wall, and draped his shawl on a tailor's mold next to it. Now I stood unconcealed in the doorway, but he turned toward his chamber, still unseeing.

"Honored Ecclesiarch," I said gently, "may I speak with you?"

He turned—a lean, handsome man in his early middle years, startlement sparking anger in his eye, but his breeding apparent in his swift self-repossession. "I know I intrude inexcusably," I bowed, "but as you are the A'rak's chief minister, and I have learned of some danger to the god, I have risked rudeness to do you the sooner a great service."

"You have learned of a danger to the god . . . ?" He echoed me, his grey eyes amazed . . . and something more than amazed? Did I detect even then a fore-tremor of . . . hope? None he could admit to himself at this point, surely. On balance, alarm seemed to dominate. He ushered me into his chamber and bolted his door. From a carafe on his desk he unlimbered two goblets of light morning wine. We sat and we sipped. He studied me, politely but gravely.

"Let me," I offered, "bluntly encounter your doubts, and set forth my business. I am Nifft the Ephesionite, but of transient life many long years now, a soldier for hire, in the main; I have known rigors, and, now and again, sordid circumstances, but I am honest in my dealings, and in letters, more learned than most.

"So. What I bring you, I hope to be paid for, though what sum, if anything, I leave in your hands to determine, as my news, for aught I know, is known to you, or is plain fraud to your better-schooled eyes, or is worthless for some other cause I know not of."

Here I drew forth the worn and smudged parchment I had carried so far, displaying but not tendering it yet. "I bring you this torn penny ballad sheet I found in a jumble-shop on Yonder Meerbog, one of the western Minuskulons. As you will see if you buy it of me, it is fragmentary. There are four quatrains, but only the first line of a fifth. And given the common size of a ballad sheet, I think we are probably several verses short of the whole here. By its style of scribework I judge it of Kolodrian origin, but make no claim to know.

"You must understand, though, that this sheet by itself might never have brought me here. But some two or three months after I acquired this, in the course of my crossing the Shallows—an unhurried, wandering sort of crossing, you understand—I winded a most persistent rumor abroad, concerning your nation. The gist of it was, that before much more time has passed, the vault-doors of North Hagia will hang open and unguarded."

"You heard this from more than one source, you say?" Courtesy vied with impatience in Paanja Pandagon's eyes as he asked this. Rumors.

"In Lulume I overheard two old stevedores trading it. In a Lebanoi tavern a polyp factor at the table next mine murmured it to his sister, a harlot. On a charter barque bearing gamesters to Glamara, I eavesdropped on some thieves in their cups, and heard one tell another the same. Rumors, Ecclesiarch, provided one knows how to sift them aright, are History happening."

"You are right, of course. `The vault doors of North Hagia will hang open and unguarded. . . .' It is . . . ominous, to be sure. Well, shall I, then . . . ?" He gestured for the verses.

The verses on the vellum sheet I gave him were these:

Let the A'rak's web be woven,
the ghost-web he's been wont to weave
of souls torn from bodies cloven
by his fangs that all things cleave.

Let him slay and slay and tear them,
souls alive from bodies slain,
let him weave those ghosts and wear them—
for one doth come to work him pain!

Heap the smoking meat thou'st plundered,
weave the soul-stuff, weave it strong!
for such soul-stuff can't be sundered
and thoul't need its shield ere long!

When thour't clothed in slaughter's garment
thou not be bravely clad?
Staunch the fabric spun from torment,
and bright the dyes by victims bled!

But 'ware that thou be not the garment

Gravely, Pandagon read and re-read these lines, and at length gave that little lift of the shoulders that shrugs off a faint qualm of unease. "In the main, its meaning is dark to me, but the sneer in it, the mocking and threat . . . it is most disturbing."

"It is dark to me too, Ecclesiarch. Struggling for its meaning, I find almost nothing. A word—Pam'Pel—which I do not know if it is animal, vegetable, or mineral, or perhaps it is a name . . . thence, a word which I not only do not have any connexion, I do not even know if it has anything to do really with this matter. An echo, perhaps, in those lines from Targvad: ". . . till his undying hunger was driven to flee/By the scourge of a foe more immortal than he. . . ."

"Yes. . . . Do you know, honest Nifft, that I was invested with this priestly dignity only last autumn?"

"I did hear your appointment was recent."

"The fact is that in the normal cycle of affairs, even the holder of my post—that is to say, the chief prelate of our national faith—even the Ecclesiarch of this our primary fane. . . . But forgive me. I hope that if I speak in a personal vein, I will not be imposing on your patience? You have perhaps some business which—"

"I am honored, Ecclesiarch, to share your thoughts, and keenly interested besides, I assure you."

"Well then, direct intercourse with the A'rak is far from frequent, even for the holder of my post. At the Choosing on Shortest Night—but two days off, of course—I anticipated my first such moment of direct communion with my great patron, for he addresses the whole assembly on that solemn occasion; however, a communication particularly directed to myself, even at the Choosing, is by no means certain. But now I truly know myself Ecclesiarch past doubting—I find, you see, that I had not fully grasped, even with all my misgivings, the responsibility I have assumed. This very hour, at morning Eulogy, the god directly addressed me from the altar's deeps. He commanded me to attend him tonight, alone, up in the Arena. The annals of our faith record no previous summons of this kind."

I showed him I felt the awe of it, but I didn't speak, sensing he would say more in my silence, because it was his own thoughts he was trying to discover. "The moment I felt the god's presence retire, I experienced the oddest rush of memories—so long unrecalled that their clarity quite stunned me. I remembered a seashore outing when I was quite small, something big and dark tiptoing out of the surf, all dripping with foam, and myself beginning to call the others to look, and being snatched up double quick, and hustled inside our circle round the fire, and told to look at the flames and nowhere else; then I recalled myself as an older boy, at a cousin's funeral party, the deceased not to be viewed as he had been god-taken, but myself sneaking back to the room where his family's senior women were winding him, and glimpsing before I was hustled away just one of his hands stiffly protruding from the shroud, the hand a knot of stark bone and tendon in skin like black leather; later, when I was a youth in a country ride with my friends, when one of us outriding went into a coppice, we heard his mount shrilling and he screaming, and the lot of us stunned, shamefaced, mouthed the god's name one to another in whispers, and turned home sadly to tell his parents . . ."

The silence he came to seemed haunted, so I gently prompted him, "I don't understand this of the seashore."

"A'rak and his spawn, though not expert swimmers, can hunt seafloor and riverfloor. They take care not to lay the burden of their appetites on any single species, you see."

I longed then to ask what most foreigners do—the size of the spider-kin's annual harvest of human lives. But had the sense not to. Well-watered Hagia's fat, fruitful countryside teems with folk. In any land comparably populous, thousands will vanish—in this way and that way—each year.

But even unspoken that question—the cost in human meat of Hagia's Covenant—hung in the room with us. Now that Pandagon really felt the weight of his post, I guessed that his thoughts at some point contained the reflection that, in a nation of shepherds, the Ecclesiarch here was himself the arch-shepherd of the Spider-god's human flocks.

By whatever vague intuitions, I sensed that here was a man whose attitude toward his public post was far from predictable. He was, I recalled hearing, from some genteely declined branch of a House still great in the Big Quay oligarchy of Old Money, and his appointment was the by-blow of political jockeying among that set. Paandagon was a political nobody whose choice sleighted no important faction, and so he had been named by the City's Docksmeister, who mayored the town and always needed Old Money majorities behind him to keep his post.

As I've noted, Paanja Pandagon had that amiable, untargeted manner of those raised in comfortable circumstances amidst that absence of urgencies that money brings. Yet an ardor lurked in him too, an ambition, but an ambition, I sensed, of the cultivated kind, for honor, for heroic service. Now, having wandered vaguely to this pass in his life's genteel aimlessness, he found that what proved to be a frightening power had been offhandedly placed in his hands. Here he was the spidergod's First Officer among all the god's human congregation. He was stunned, of course, at heart, struggling to grasp it—but how steadily he bore it! How courteous he was with me, despite the profound ambiguity that undoubtedly shrouded my true motives from his eyes! I found I was starting to like this Paanja Pandagon.

"I will frankly declare a thought," I told him, "which I hope you will take as kindly meant even though, as I fear, it might strike you as offensive. I hope it is not indelicate to wonder, but wonder I must: this rumored peril of the god's, these ballads circulating . . . and this apparently extraordinary summonsing of the Ecclesiarch to a private colloquy. In short: is something stirring?"

"I have only thanks for your candor. I thought it myself, and now feel less foolish to have thought it. You have clearly been much abroad, Nifft. Your views of us from . . . outside, I much relish. Look you now, what of this: come for a swim! What do you say? Come swimming with Minor and me—it is wonderfully refreshing, I swear it! And I would like you to talk with us. I would like Minor to hear at once what you've brought. And as for your remuneration, well, will a twenty weight of gold octals suffice as your fee for this vital intelligence?"

I beamed—who would not? "What a princely sum!" I cried. "Thank you! A swim sounds like a splendid idea!"

* * *

He left me in his study to breakfast on fruit and morning wine. Returning presently, he conducted me through the Fane's sacerdotal annex to an alley that backed it.

"This," he told me by way of introduction, "is Fane Censer Minim, my dear old friend." The man sat the box of a low-slung high-wheeled dasher with a team of three skinnies, a fleet looking little vehicle indeed. I had noticed him officiating at the service, holding a shalice-shaped censer. He turned to give me his hand without dismounting, the reins still gripped in his free hand—a short, dense-bodied man, swarthy, with black hair like short fur. He was polite, and unmistakably disinclined to like me. When I saw him shoot Paanja Pandagon a monitory glance, I knew the man at once. Honest and gloomily inward, his loyalty to his more dashing friend was absolute. He was his friend's watchdog, a practical-minded man who probably felt his friend's only fault was a carelessly generous, undescriminating spirit that trusted others unwisely.

In consequence, though this Minim, Arch Censer (the post of second power behind the Ecclesiarch's, in fact) looked gloomy enough as I got in, and plainly felt a good day's swim had been spoiled (I had to smile, imagining what his reaction had been when Paanja had blithely recounted the twenty-weight he'd paid me)—in spite or because of the poor solemn fellow's brooding, I found myself rather liking him as well. What is finer, after all, than the unselfishness of loyalty?

Broody he might be, but Fursten Minim well knew how to drive a fine costly dasher like this one. We skimmed and we flew, the team ran their skittery claws up more than one alleyway wall when he lashed us through high, fast corner-turns. Monumental Big Quay, full of structures in pompous scale, was full of back-alleys serving these edifices' hindsides for their mundane deliveries and dispatchings of services. Minim, with many a veer and a vectoring, ferreted us through a chain of these near-empty alleys, our wheelrims skating off sparks from the cobbles and flags as often as not, and brought us in a thoroughly exhilarated mood to the downstream corner of Big Quay. Here the sheer crags that backed the city closely approached the riverbank, tapering the city's southern edge almost to a point. Downstream of this point, there was just enough negotiable river margin to support the South Path, a twisting gravelled road suitable only for light conveyances. Here Minim slowed to a walk, and I joined him and Paanja in quietly savoring the vista of the river so closely flanking us, past a thin marge of boulders and trees.

"How often we sneaked into Chancel a half hour late," exclaimed the Ecclesiarch, "Nimmy and I, young scoundrels in the Academy together—how often we sneaked in wet-eared and late, from stealing down here to swim after sevenses? Not truth?"

"Truth," Minim said seriously. They spoke of the "Academy," where, as in most such incubaria of wealth, rank prevailed. Minim was mighty in family rank, but was ugly and utterly without presence. Young Pandagon's flair, contrariwise, won only jeers, because of the genteel poverty of his family connections. Both were social outcasts, then, as it happened, but their bond was not sealed until, one day when Paanja happened to be off on a ramble, he came across two larval oligarchs thrashing young Minim. Unhesitant, he pounced, and pummeled them bloody and senseless, and from this generous act, two half-brothers were born, so to speak.

My private thought was that in that encounter the ardent Paanja had found his moment, his self—here was dangerous, disinterested Good to be done! It was hard not to like the pair of them, in sum, and it grieved me to reflect that perhaps these two excellent fellows, in the course of what might be coming, would stand in grave danger indeed.

We left the path for a cluster of boulders, where there were smooth surfaces and pockets of sunwarmed sand. When we had stripped, it appeared how muscled and honed Pandagon kept himself, and I knew I had read him aright, for his body declared his ambition. Minim looked askance at my advancing to the water still wearing my back-rigged baby broadsword.

"Is the weapon wise?"

"Oh, no harm, thank you. Sheath's packed with brazzwax and skanx oil."

"I mean, it will cumber you."

"Not at all, thanks. Discomfort will be slight, beside the comfort of having it handy."

"I assure you, where we swim it's wide and deep, and there's nothing dangerous. Out in the estuary are concentrated the only dangerous flora or fauna in our—"

"Forgive me, Minim. Bluntly, I am obligated by a private vow to myself, never to find myself swordless where a need might arise. I don't intend any insult to your river. Allow an anxious traveller his odd charms and rites."

"Nimmy lay off our friend!" cried Pandagon. "Manners! Let's hit the water, lads! In!"

How like a schoolboy he still was, this head priest of all North Hagia! Yet the river was indeed glorious. Its wide flux was all hammered pewter, sunpricked with sapphire and silver, and diving into the broad, smooth surge of its flowing coolth felt like having ten years of age skinned off me in a single slash. We porpoised up new-fleshed into the morning light.

"We ride downstream just a ways," called Paanja Pandagon, "then we steady-stoke against the current, then when we're breathed and limbered, we swim back upstream."

Slice it however, I disliked swimming naked in dark water in the spidergod's country. I was a while forgetting the tickle of nasty possibilities against my footsoles.

But at length, forget I did. Hagia, heaped green and bosomy to either side of the wide, silver waterway—she was fair for all her failings! Never again do I expect to see such lush beauty made the theater of such an ugly Death as was soon to hold sway here.

This sustained, methodical swimming against the current was an inspired means of turning brute exercise into recreation. We were all working away, well spread, each privately savoring his task, when Minim surprised me by declaiming quite impressively, spacing their rhythm to his labor's, a quatrain of the pennysheet verses I'd just sold to Paanja.

"Let the A'rak's . . . web be woven . . . that ghost web he . . . was wont to weave . . . of souls torn frorm . . . bodies cloven . . . by his fangs that . . . all things cleave!"

"Did you know it already . . . that ballad, good Minim?"

"I'm just a quick study. . . . but what could it mean?. . . . Does it mean anything? . . . No offense."

"None taken!. . . . Of course you doubt! . . . I approached you . . . for profit! . . . But I didn't write it! . . . I don't know what it means . . . It sounds very much . . . like a threat though . . ."

We swam then in silence. Never could I have believed I could find such physical pleasure in the waters of a land so deeply wormholed and blighted with horror beneath its fair surfaces! When we climbed out at last, we were laughing like youths at inane jollities, merely glad at our strength and refreshment and the glory of the sun on the green hills around us. We each found a big, comfy, sunwarmed boulder to lie on. The sun lavished light on us like a largess of gold coin. I felt the happy moment was, distinctly, an omen. If I survived, my enterprise here was meant to bathe me in gold.

But at length our silence grew tenser with unspoken thoughts of the problems at hand, until at last Paanja said, "Speak it out for us, Nimmy. Let us hear the lines again."

And Minim recited them without preamble. Just at the first, it seemed he wanted to put a burlesque solemnity in his rendering, to parody the lines, but his voice soon turned grave:

Let the A'rak's web be woven
that ghostweb he was wont to weave
of souls torn from bodies cloven
by his fangs that all things cleave!

Let him stab and slay and tear them,
souls alive from bodies slain.
Let him weave those ghosts and wear them—
for one doth come to work him pain.

Heap the smoking meat thou'st plundered!
Weave, oh A'Rak! Weave it strong!
for such web can scarce be sundered,

And thou'lt need its shield ere long!

When thour't clothed in Slaughter's garment.
Wilt thou not be bravely clad?
Staunch the fabric spun from torment,
And bright the dyes by victims bled!

But 'ware that thou be not the garment. . . ."

Our after-silence rang with one question: The garment of whom? The poetic fragment was as obscure to me as to them, whatever gleanings of legend and vague conjectures I might bring to bear upon the lines.

"It would be madness," Minim flatly declared, "to share these verses with the deity tonight—to associate yourself in any way with verses which embody an unmistakable threat to him."

"I won't pretend, Nimmy, that I yet know what I am going to do, Nimmy. It all hangs upon what he's called me up to the Stadium for. It has occured to me that if rumors are abroad, and the god has winded them, then it might be dangerous to conceal these verses from him. I must weigh this a while."

No doubt he must. For me, it was time to arrange my lodging and begin finding my way about. I rose, and shrugged into my doublet. "You have shown me such hospitality," I told them. "This swim has been pure delight, and it seems ill bred to take short leave. But you two must take counsel, and I have planned a tourist's amble about your lovely countryside. May I come see you in two or three days, and perhaps learn what you have learned of the, ah, deity's communications—barring impropriety, of course?"

"You will be welcome, and warmly, Nifft," beamed Paanja Pandagon. Fursten Minim bowed graciously, though his look was much more reserved. The Ecclesiarch produced a vellum chit. "Convey this card of mine . . . to the Weskitt and Fobb, an elegant hostelry near 'Change Row. You will be entertained as my guest."

Minim's handclasp was politely firm. His eyes were still distrusting, though they perhaps looked less sure of what they doubted in me.

In sum, I set out feeling content with my new acquaintance, and in general, well launched. It was already midday. Now I would bathe and dine at the Weskitt and Fobb. Early on the morrow would be soon enough to commence my reconnaissance of the nearby Monastia, whose renowned architecture I was keen to contemplate.

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Framed