Read Online The Incompleat Nifft by Michael Shea - Free Book Online

from behind with my arm. Then I was just holding on as the Taker stormed through the room, hammering the floor and walls and time-frozen people with my body.
    I had such desperate work keeping my body tight against the crushing and the blows, that I had no strength to strangle it with, the best I could manage being to keep its head and jaws out of action against me. We crashed into the old woman—her abundant skirts were like cement—and careened from her to a great oaken wardrobe. The Taker rammed me into it dead on to break my hold on its throat. We smashed right through and into the wardrobe—through an inch of solid oak! Wait. Look here on the back of my shoulder where I took the blow. That's where it cut me as it broke.
    And then it was like fighting underwater, drowning and blinded in the heavy coats and cloaks. The Taker worked its head halfway around and its jaws gaped right under my face. I thought I would suffocate in its swampy breath. Meanwhile it had twisted up the length of its body and was pounding at my head with its tail. It had me pinned in the box, and could well hope to pound me senseless, given time. I was forced to keep one arm up to protect my head, and my shoulder was being beaten numb.
    Then, the next time his tail came up, I grabbed it with my blocking-hand and shoved it down the Soul-taker's own gaping throat. That freed my hands for an instant, which I used to get a double strangle-grip of its throat, locking its tail in its gullet. Its body was bent in a hoop around me, now, and I kept it pinned with my weight.
    If the Taker had a weak point, it was its hands. They were as big as a man's, but only three-fingered, and had the scaly delicacy of a reptile's. Plucking a soul off its rack of meat takes dexterity and finesse, I suppose. The Taker couldn't break my grip on its throat, and in its extremity for air, it at last lay still, conceding the match.
    I staggered back to the Guide. My opponent got up swiftly and moved to a position by the door, showing no slightest sign of fatigue or pain. He could have fought again, at this instant, I realized, and annihilated me in a moment. The Guide said to me: "It is Dalissem, the temple child of Lurkna Downs, who has called you."
    Haldar and I assented. Defalk stared at the Guide fixedly, but without shock. Surely he had guessed who had sent for him. One could not be as close to such a woman as he had been, and come away without a feeling of her power to work her will.
    "Come then, mortals," the Guide said. "We will seek her soul." He handed the leather sack to the manlizard. The servant preceded the giant out the door. The three of us followed, after slashing Defalk's ankle-bonds. The wardrobe, I saw, stood whole and undamaged. The people, it seemed, began to soften, and to stir. We stepped out the door, and into a spacious gloom. The torch-lit corridor was gone. We'd entered a vast, rawly stinking sewer.
    It was arch-vaulted, hundreds of yards across, and its only light was a kind of glow from the scummy river that filled it wall to wall. We were on a rickety wooden staircase that led down to a tiny pier. There was a raft of tarred logs moored at the pier.
    The Taker and the Guide stepped onto the raft. We forced Defalk after, and got on ourselves. The Guide said:
    "You may unbind your captive. You are within the realm of Death. If any of you leave my protection, you are forefeit unto Death, forever."
    We freed Defalk's wrists. Up at the head of the stairs the ornately carved bedroom door of Shamblord Castertaster swung shut and, with the stairs, vanished from the muddy sewer wall. Our raft was afloat, riding the hideous flood. The lizardman had taken up a pole and was pushing us out to center stream.
    Those waters teemed, Barnar. They glowed, patchily, with a rotten orange light, and in those swirls of light you could see them by the score: little bug-faced ectoplasms that lifted wet, blind eyes against the gloom, and twiddled their feelers imploringly;