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

and others like tattered snakes of leper's-flesh with single human eyes and lamprey mouths. And there were bigger things too, much bigger, which swam oily curves through the light-blotched soup. One of these lifted a complete human head from the waters on a neck like a polyp's stalk. It drooled and worked its mouth furiously, but could only babble at us. All these things feared the raft, but you could feel the boil and squirm of their thousands, right through your feet. The heavy logs of the raft seemed as taut and ticklish as a drumskin to the movement of the dead below.
    The Guide said: "Defalk. This is a journey you should have taken in another form, and long ago."
    "You know our companion then, Great One?" I asked. Defalk looked away from the Guide and said nothing.
    "Whose name do I not know, northron Nifft? I learn every living being's name as it is given. When the mother first speaks her infant's name, she's whispering it in my ear too. She is saying, though she does not know it, `Here, O Guide, is my Defalk, another job for you someday.' " The giant chuckled gently. There was silence for a while. The stink of the place was so entire and all-enveloping I found I could ignore it—like a waterfall's roar when you're near it long enough. It seemed to me that the current of the turgid flood was moving a bit faster.
    "But even if I had not known him early," the Guide said abruptly, "I would have learned of him later. Did I not carry down Dalissem? Oh, that stroke she gave herself meant business, mortals. No hesitation in that thrust—between the ribs and through the heart. She split it sharp and firm as a kitchen maid will cleave an apple. There was a woman! Her soul filled this whole sack! It bulged with her spirit! That's rare enough, I promise you. Most of what we take is a dwindled-down and wretched little clot of greed and complacency and fear—like this! We let such slugs worm their own way down to the floor of hell. Thus!" The Guide shook out the bag over the side of the raft. Something rat-sized clawed the air and splashed into the flood. Shortly, a whiskered snout without eyes surfaced and squeaked lugubriously at us. The Soul-taker drove the pole against it and it swam off.
    "But Dalissem," said the Guide. "Dalissem was one of those who won a place. Souls that burn hot enough, you see, stay lit in death, and win eternal being in this kingdom—being you can call being, I mean, not buglife in scum. Rage was the fire she endured by. Therefore her place of endurance is with the Raging Dead, amid the Winds of Warr."
    "Rage?" burst out Defalk. His speaking surprised us all. He looked at the Guide. "Why in a place of Rage? She died for love—for our love!" I caught in his voice both his guilt, and his more terrible secret vanity.
    "To your own shame you speak it!"—it was Haldar who said this, seizing Defalk's arm and shaking it. "But it was rage much more than love. Could you have known her so little? I knew her entirely with one glance—such is her fineness! She would have killed her enemies with her own hands, she would far rather have wreaked her rage than died! But she was powerless except against herself. So she struck there, scorning a life in chains."
    Quietly, tenderly, the guide asked, "She is beautiful, is she not, Haldar Dirkniss?"
    "She is, lord Guide."
    "You, Defalk," said the Guide, "you should have seen her journey down. You should have seen her birth from the Soul-taker's bag. Such splendor out of the foul, dark thing. True souls emerge with the shapes they had. She lay here on this deck, seven years ago, and she barely stirred when she understood where she was. Her first movement was to stretch her arm beside her, as a sleeping woman will do in the early morning, to be sure of her man in the bed by her. Dalissem found no one to her right, nor to her left. Then she sat up slowly and looked about her. I looked away to spare her shame in her disillusionment.
    "She never said anything. After a while