The Incompleat Nifft.

MICHAEL SHEA.

SNAFU!.

The sea erupted, and the beast was alongside us, and was seizing our hull in his huge, dripping crab-legs, while his long, eel-slick body bowed and bowed and bowed at the loins with his fierce, lecherous thrustings. The brute was in rut-the worst kind of glabrous to meet; sure death. Amidships and aft a dozen men were instantly crushed by his legs. His sinewy tail scourged the sea behind him in his lust, driving us forward even as he embraced us. The steep, stony shore of Dolmen loomed towards us at incredible speed.

The impenetrability of our hull timbers quickly drove the ardent giant to a fury. He flung our ship clean out of the water, toppling Barnar and me back onto the deck just as we had mounted the gunwale to abandon ship. The carrack sailed creakily through twenty fathoms of thin air, and crashed down at Dolmen's very shore, and even as it did so, the glabrous surged up behind the vessel-a benthic fetor welling from its mossy, gaping jaws-and swallowed it whole.

The glabroous did this with the blind, uncalculating rage his breed is so well known for.

Barnar and I, tumbled to the prow by the bow's impact with the shore, saw the darkness of the brute's maw loom over us, and saw his huge teeth bite off the sky.

BAEN BOOKS by Michael Shea.

The Incompleat Nifft.

(Nifft the Lean & The Mines of Behemoth).

The A'rak (forthcoming) Running Away With the Circus.

an introduction to Michael Shea's Nifft the Lean.

ACCORDING TO JOAN DIDION, both Truffaut and Fellini have talked about the "circus aspect" of filmmaking. I take that to mean generating more wildness and color for its own fevered sake than the material actually requires and I've remembered Didion's remark because that's the kind of entertainment that seizes me, and stays with me after it's done. Often the advice one wants to give to a cautious would-be writer is, "From this point on-from this page on-just go crazy."

But of course that's not quite right. If we want extravagant spectacle, then we don't want frenzied stream-of-- consciousness from the writer-any more than we want haphazardly splashed paint from a painter, or inept camera work and incomprehensible editing from a movie director. On the contrary, we want the artist to be the - proverbial clear pane of unrippled glass, so that we can easily see the gilded towers and the gladiators and the dancing girls and the monsters beyond. That's where we want to see the thundering industry of the grotesque.

And we do want it to be wild. Goya wouldn't have been right for illustrating Nifft the Lean-we don't need the subtle expressions, the political commentary, the restraint. For Michael Shea's masterwork, I'd like to see what Dore could have done, or Bosch; vast, deep crowd scenes against stone-carved mountains and Piranesi - architecture, with end-of-the-world chiaroscuro.

The handicap that challenges fantasy-especially fantasy prose-is that the events in it are not only impossible today, like the events in hard science fiction, but are just plain impossible ever; the reader must be fooled into forgetting this.

What's required is a suspension of flat-out incredulity. To elicit this foolhardy investment on the reader's part, a writer has to make the fantasy world absolutely tangible. We readers need to be able to vividly-lividly!-see and hear and smell what's going on. Nifft the Lean does this at every turn with effortless-seeming power. When Nifft and Barnar are stringing up the corpse of the lurk, in the rafters above the guarded chamber of the doomed Year-King, the dimensions and acoustics are as clear as if we're standing right beside our heroes; when Dalissem appears so hideously out of the desert rock, we see and hear and feel the distressing spectacle; when Barnar and Nifft ride their modified ore-wagon down the precipitous mine-shaft into the underworld, we experience what Algis Budrys has in conversation called "The best entry into Hell in all of literature."

Behind and below the spotlit figure on the high wire, a circus is ropes and pegs and grommetted canvas, and in addition to the costumed performers there are drivers and accountants and somebody to sweep up all the peanut shells and elephant manure; and even outside the tent you can smel l cot ton candy on the night ai r . That 's how you can tell you're in a real event, and not just dreaming.

Now, a circus would probably be just as affecting without these peripheral details, because it's actually there.

Magic urgently needs the weathered scaffolding and worn ropes and scratched bolt-heads, because the reader knows, if given a moment to think, that it isn't really there at all.

And Michael Shea's magic is as unarguable as an overheated car engine. Before going down into the Underworld, Nifft assesses his weapons, and assesses too the physical symptoms of the Wayfarer's Blessing, the Charm of Brisk Blood, and the Life Hook, all as palpable as a hangover or caffeine jitters; the demons he encounters are, though insane and extravagant, zoological specimens on the hoof; and when Lybis leads her mercenary army to find the petrophagic flock, her progress is slowed because her distance from the Goddess is weakening her reception of the telepathic signal. And Shag Margold's prefaces provide us with a fellow member of the - audience-a shrewd, erudite, humorous fellow, at that-who obviously believes that the show is real.

Altogether, Shea has snuck in and conquered our credulity before we could muster the forces of our skepticism.

And having conquered it, he is a merciless carpetbagger-by the time he has led us to the strangely populated plains and weirdly utilitarian architecture of Anvil Pastures, we can only hang on and gape at the towering wonders around us.

There's nothing wrong with insights into "the human heart in conflict with itself," nor with "holding up a mirror" to a community, nor with having valuable things to say about the ills of humanity- But sometimes we just want a big, loud damn circus.

Tim Powers Santa Ana, CA.

1994.

NIFFT THE LEAN.

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, owes 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 inst rument whenever Ni f f t 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 . Whi le it is foolish to deny the dark around us, it is fut i le to exaggerate i t . 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. Conse- quently, 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 subworlds 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.

Part 1.

SHAG MARGOLD'S Preface to Come Then, Mortal- We Will Seek Her Soul.

THE MANUSCRIPT OF this account is in a professional scribe's hand, but it is unmistakably of Nifft's own composition. This is not automatically the case, even though a given history be recounted as if in Nifft's voice, for two of his dearest friends, in repeating tales he told them but did not himself record, enjoyed adopting his persona and reproducing-or so they conceived-his narrative manner. (See, for example, the chapter concerning his encounter with the vampire Queen Vulvula.) In the present instance, however, I am convinced we have our information direct from the master-thief himself.

The Great Cleft Lake lies in Lulume, near the center of that continent's northern limb, and Lurkna Downs is the only really large city on its extensive perimeter, occupying The Jut, a sharp salience of the southern shoreline which extends to within half a mile of the northern shore, almost bisecting the vast body of water. Numerous small fishing hamlets rim the lake, for its waters teem with many delectable or otherwise valuable species, the most notable being speckled ramhead, skad, grapple, deepwater lumulus and pygmy hull-breaker. But as the great size of most of these creatures might suggest, fishing those waters on a commercial scale requires large vessels and elaborate equipment, and northern Lulume as a whole is too poor and thinly populated to mount such enterprise. Lurkna Downs owes its beginning to the wealth of Kolodria, whence entrepreneurs from the Great Shallows came some two centuries ago and endowed the then-minor settlement with its first large fishing fleet.

And, having seeded the Great Cleft Lake with ships, it is Kolodrian merchants who today bear its finny harvest back across the Sea of Agon in their argosies, and market it throughout the Shallows.

These economic matters are not entirely remote from the love of Dalissem for Defalk, and its dreadful issue. - Everything Nifft tells us of that volcano-hearted temple child marks her as a classic specimen of northern Lulume's self-styled First Folk, a people who, though not truly aboriginal, migrated from the Jarkeladd tundras in the north of the Kolodrian continent more than a millennium ago. They came across the Icebridge Island Chain, and brought into Lulume a nomad stoicism and uncouth but potent sorcery with which, where it survives today, the fiercest Jarkeladd shaman would still feel an instantaneous kinship and empathy.

But indeed, this tundra-born culture is now half-eclipsed in the Cleft Lake region. The habit of wealth and property which the Kolodrian merchants brought to Lurkna Downs, the urbanity and cosmopolitan conceits which two centuries of trade with Kolodria have since fostered there, have deprived the First Folk values-their ferocious passions and proud austerities-of the general reverence they once enjoyed. And Defalk belonged to this latter-day Lurkna Downs just as surely as Dalissem did to the First Folk. That she was a temple child in itself argues this. This cult-to which Dalissem would have been born, and not admitted through any voluntary candidacy-is one of the few still-vigorous First Folk institutions that is allowed a conspicuous existence in Lurkna Downs. The cult's name is never uttered by its initiates in the hearing of the uninitiated, and its tenets remain obscure. But the learned Quall of Hursh-Himin is probably correct in saying that it centers on a rigorous votive asceticism-virginity paramount among the self-abnegations required-and that its annual mysteries involve further physical rigors. These trance-inducing group ordeals' aim is a visionary ecstasy (one sees again the tundra influence) wherein is revealed-to herself and her sisters at once-the identity of the worshipper to be honored as that year's sacramental suicide. Dalissem's actions-though rebelliously secular in their frame of expression-undeniably tend to corroborate this report.

Though this is the extent of our reliable information about the cult, I feel I must go out of my way to point out that we have no reason to credit the usually trustworthy Arsgrave's preposterous assertion that the cultists' - alleged virginity masks the most unvirginal practice-the cult's "chief end" he calls it!-of mass orgiastic - copulation with water demons in the lake's deeps. No serious student of the Aquademoniad can be unaware that - fresh-water demons have been extinct for at least three millennia. My own opinion is that Arsgrave's sexual pride-which he seems incapable of suppressing, even in contexts utterly remote from that issue-renders him powerless to believe that the pleasures of "normal" copulation can be forgone by any but those devoted to wholly grotesque passions.

Finally, as to the world of the dead, I will neither misrepresent my faith-which is absolute-in Nifft's - veracity by expressin g doubt of its existence, nor compromise my editorial impartiality by expressing conviction thereof. It is, however, perhaps relevant to note that both Undle Ninefingers and the great Pandector- drawing on wholly independent sources and writing without knowledge of one another-affirm its existence; and that Pandector's account in particular describes a mode whereby the living may enter that realm which in every - essential feature agrees with Nifft's description.

-Shag Margold.

Come Then, Mortal- We Will Seek Her Soul.

I.

NIFFT THE LEAN and Barnar the Chilite had agreed not to sleep that night. Darkness had overtaken them in the swamp. They might rest their bodies, but not their vigilance-not here.

They climbed up in the groin of one of the massive, wide-spreading swamp trees. Here there was room to recline, and to build a small fire which seemed scarcely to affect the tough, reptilian bark of the giant supporting them. They did not risk a fire big enough to warm them against the numbing, clammy air. At the spare little flame they dried their boots and kept the blood in their hands and feet, but came no closer than this to comfort.

The two friends talked quietly, pausing often to read-brows intent-the wide, wet noise of the swamp, and to listen for the silken progress of a treelurk down one of the branches they sat on. Both were men inured to hard and various terrain, and in the manner of such men they seemed able to achieve a subtle bodily harmony with whatever surroundings they had to endure. Nifft sat with his arms folded across his knees. His gauntness, his loose, jut-limbed repose, called to mind the big carrion-eating birds they had seen so many of during their day's march across the fens. Barnar was more suggestive of the water-bulls of the region. He sat foursquare, thick and still as a boulder, yet following everything with flick of eye and nostril.

There came a long pause in their talk. Barnar squinted at the wet darkness around them for a long time, and shrugged, as if to throw off ugly thoughts. "Study it how you wi l l , i t 's a foul piece of the world and not meant for men, not sane ones."

Nifft waved his hand vaguely and didn't answer, gazing at the swamp with more complacency than his friend.

Barnar poked the fire discontentedly. Talk was what he needed; he was in too glum a mood for silent musing. He cast about for a subject. He found one which he would have shunned as indiscreet in a less gloomy mood-for one did not ask even one's esteemed partner about his past; among thieves such information must be volunteered.

"You used to know a man from these regions, didn't you? A guidefellow who'd won a high name-Halder it was, wasn't it?"

"Haldar Dirkniss." Nifft answered him with a look of benign humor. This prodding was sufficiently unlike Barnar's style to make Nifft aware of its cause, and after a moment he sat up a little straighter and spoke more expansively. "He was my partner for six years, Barnar. You would have loved him. He had a marvelous imagination, and withal he was so solemn. You should have seen him at work laying the groundwork for some exploit-grave, intense. . . . he was so studious! And he loved the form as much as the dross, loved an inspired trick as much as the gold it won. We would have made the Black Crack's own trio!"