"The greatest powers in the sea are concentrated near the Rifft, my friends, and yet it may even be safer there than elsewhere, given their absorption in the frontier. You'll see much activity at the chasm's brink. One league of very mighty demons has even succeeded in hauling something up from the Rifft. The entire sea is alive with the rumor and fear of it. But do not be distracted. 'Shads keep their flocks in the seams and gullies of these islands' footslopes, and we will not be far from the doings at the chasm's edge, but concentrate on scanning for the boy's face. You will see many faces to scan."

Gildmirth set down the sword, stripped off his clothes, and leapt overboard. The waters began to roil where he had sunk, and huge, silvery limbs sprouted beneath the masking effervescence. We pulled on our helmets, and doffed all our weapons save a harpoon each. A huge saurian head thrust from the water and laid its jaw upon our prow. The beast reached a webbed-and-taloned paw into the boat and took up the sword, whose scale at last was appropriate to its wielder's size, for the water-lizard was almost thirty feet long. When Gildmirth spoke to us it was with a huge red tongue that labored between sawlike teeth, steel-bright as before though savagely reshaped.

His words came out as whispery, half-crushed things which the tongue's unwieldiness had maimed: "Cleave to my belt, good thievesss. Carry those lances couched. Hassste! Let's be down and doing!"

We leapt in. It was hard to swim up to the giant, for all our knowing who it was. Hard also to grasp the swordbelt that girt its middle and feel its scales, rough as stone, against my knuckles. But hardest of all was holding while it did a whipping dive and hauled us underwater with the terrible speed of falling through empty air. And then another world yawned under us, and as I was snatched down into the limitless swarm of it, I became eyes, and awe, and nothing more.

XIII.

Sometimes, when I am in Karkmahn-Ra, I will climb at nightfall into the hills that stand behind the city.

Wolves haunt them, and an occasional stalking vampire, but the sight's worth the risk. A great city sprawled in the night-it wakes up the heart in you, stirs your ambition, reminds you of the glory that can be man's and your own, for toil and daring can produce accomplishments that shine back at the stars like those million lamps and torches do.

But now I have seen-deep in a place itself deep under this world-a dazzling sprawl that's vaster than a thousand cities. Its drowned lights dot and streak the flanks of the sunken mountains and crawl like fire-ants over reefs and knolls and gullies out to the brink of an utter blackness that is fenced with flames.

The titanic blaze banners and flaps and buckles, as earth-flame does, but slower, as if weighted down by the tons of ocean on it. It rims the gulf of the Black Rifft, and masks its depths with the volumes of slow, black smoke it vomits up, like the ink of an immense squid. Meanwhile those flames dispense a poisonous luminosity for miles across the ocean floor, a ruddy fog that roils across the multicolored phosphorescences of the deep- dwelling hosts.

All the most formidable encampments of those hosts are concentrated near the fiery wall, their fortressed bivouacs often encompassing some huge machinery for siege or assault. Misshapen crews drive ensorcelled battering rams against the unyielding palisades of fire, or swing great booms from derricks to reach across the flame crests. One such encampment dwarfs all the others-or it did, at any rate, when I went down. There is reason to think its aspect might have changed since that time. But then it was such that I could make out its form from afar while many nearer works, though huge, were still vague to me: lying quite near the brink-fire were two stupendous ovoids; these had been netted over with scaffolding, and were flanked by mammoth cranes.

Gildmirth pulled us down to search the intermediate terrain. In the manner of a hawk working a range of foothills, we swooped along the sea floor, rolling with its roll, at a fixed distance above it. At first our cruising itself was as horrible as the things it manifested to us. The saurian's speed was astonishing, absolutely unslowed by the water's crushing weight, but in eery contrast to this my spirit felt all the heaviness of nightmare, where a dreadful pressure murders the will, makes it an unheeded voice exhorting a body that is infinitely slow to move.

Our leveling off brought us first above a field of waxen cells, like a giant honeycomb laid flat. Blurred within the cells were men and women folded tight, eyes and mouths gaping. The workers on these fields were like great, slender wasps. They moved with a dancing, finicking daintiness, stopping here and there to dip their stingers into a cell and, with a shudder, squirt a black polyhedron into it. I began to notice, here and there, the fat, black, joint- legged things sharing the cells with their human occupants, tunneling gradually into their bodies, burgeoning as those bodies writhed and dwindled.

Glowing rivulets of lava bordered this infernal nursery, molten leakage that threaded downslope in all - directions from a volcanic cone that pierced the surface up to our left toward the island peaks. Within this magmatic mazeway a second zone of demon enterprise began. Here lurking monsters of the breed our guide had so lately grappled with plied trowels to mold the lava into smoking walls. These demons were of the class whose use of man is artistic rather than anthropophagous, for these steaming ramparts were the matrix for human bas-reliefs, wherein the living material, variously amputated, were cemented to compose a writhing mural. The innards of these sufferers were grafted to a system of blood-pipes set in the scalding masonry so that, once troweled and tamped into place, they lived rooted, sustained by that vascular network of boiling blood. At least our guide's plunging speed, indifferent to any sight irrelevant to our goal, abbreviated our witnessing of these things.

Yet he surprised us shortly after our leaving this last zone by making a sharp detour. We had just made out what we thought must be a Bonshad not far ahead, when Gildmirth swept down into a dive upon a huge polypous growth directly beneath us. It lifted huge menacing pseudopods, each fully half as thick as the great lizard himself, to meet the latter's plunge. The Privateer brought his blade-all asmoke with bubbles from the murderous energy of the stroke-athwart the nearest pair of these scabby extrusions, and sheared them cleanly through. One of the sundered members flew, heaving and shuddering past me, giving my shoulder a glancing blow that was like being jostled by a warhorse at full gallop. Two more strokes and Gildmirth had barbered the monster clean of its last protectors. Amid their bleeding stumps were the creature's massive, five-lobed jaws- made of purest gold and crusted over with rubies as big as apples. Those hideous beaks mouthed impotent appetite as Gildmirth plunged his sword into its throat. The jaws gaped and froze. The lizard sheathed his blade, reached down, and ripped the jaws apart.

The rubies he ate greedily, crushing them like sugar-candies swiftly in its jaws. The gold he relished more, with a humiliating hunger that could not mask its own trembling. His steel fangs tore the honeybright metal, and his big, scaly gullet throbbed with the meal. When he had done he drew his sword again, planted his hind legs against the sand, and surged up toward the 'shad that hovered over a coral knoll just beyond us.

It was huge, hanging there over its flock of naked humans. Their veins and nerve-wires all sprouted from their backs and ran up like puppet-wires to join in a ball of fibers which the shaggy, hook-bellied thing was applying to its abdominal mouthparts.

The flock was grazing-after a manner-for the 'shad had them all sprawling and crawling over a system of reefs which were forested with giant anemones that bristled with man-large tongues and antennae. The waxen-fleshed, horror-eyed folk wriggled through those rippling, squeezing pastures of outrage while the Bonshad floated over them, nursing on the anguish coursing through their nerves.

It was a flock of about thirty. We had studied the miniature of Wimfort until our eyes rebelled at the sight, and we quickly made sure that he was not one of that lewdly palpated, trembling little herd. Gildmirth turned me his right eye and Barnar his left. We shook our heads. His great paws clawed us back up to our cruising speed and we plunged on, breasting out over another falling-away of the seafloor, and curving toward the right, where lay a larger stretch of anemone-carpeted terrain. Over this hung numerous 'shads, all territorially spaced, hideous, hairy little balloons in the distance, sucking each on its tether of nerve.

Our course brought us closer to the Black Rifft's brink and as we swept toward the 'shad-meadows we coasted past a clearer view than previous of some of the siegeworks there, particularly of a thicket of derricks which thrust great lateral arms through the gapped crest of the flame-wall. From these wrought-steel arms huge hooks were lowered on the ends of massive chains. Enormous windlasses drove the movement of the booms themselves as well as paying out the fishing chain off its immense spools. Stumbling human gangs, vast in numbers, provided the power that turned those windlasses. Similar gangs powered the vehicles of the demon-bosses who oversaw the work. These were brawny toads as big as houses. They lolled in the sodden hulks of galleons-storm-taken ships all bearded and furred with bottom-life, some of their hulls half stove in. Each of these had hundreds of slave haulers dragging its keel over the ocean floor. Their eyes had been taken, their hair was longer than the ever-springing hair in graves. Their skin floated up from their arms in brine-fat tatters. Their tread was sottish, their feet hidden in clouds of sand.

But we quickly ceased attending to anything except that greatest of the works which bordered the Rifft farther down its perimeter. Though still more than a mile distant, it was now revealed to us in greater detail. Each of the ovoids-of a pale rose tint, and minutely faceted-was as big as a mountain. Near them, small hills of iron bar were being forged, amid geysering sparks, into an irregular construction that looked like the beginnings of a cage-a cage big enough to hold a mountain. Meanwhile, beneath the web of scaffolding that had been thrown over the nearer of the two titanic shapes, a large hole had been broken in its substance, which appeared to be little more than a relatively thin shell. And we had drawn just near enough to find that something was visible within that hole, a small part of what the shell contained. It was a three-taloned foot as big as a city. Gildmirth pulled us away from the Rifft, working in an upslope path that would skirt the 'shad-meadows.

We found the boy in the fourth flock we surveyed. Almost in the first instant of my scanning, the victim my eye had lit on wrenched his head around in some access of suffering, and the face of Wimfort was flashed at me. I tugged Gildmirth's belt and pointed. He looked at Barnar, who confirmed our quarry. The Privateer bucked and heaved and plunged straight for the water's ceiling.

I felt each instant of that swift climb as a distinct and individual joy. We surfaced to find the boat awaiting us at a spot halfway around the island-cluster from our starting point. We were not far from the crest of the volcano we had seen. The cone's steaming rim, which barely over-topped the waves, swarmed with activity. Gildmirth laid his jaw on the boat's stern and we climbed aboard along his body, joyfully shucking our helmets, eager more for the act of breathing than the air itself, such that it felt sweet to draw in even that tomblike atmosphere.

"Practisss the ssskiff!" the lizard enjoined me. Its squamous head glittered and ducked under. The waters bulged with the force of his dive.

Taking both harpoons, I stepped into the little bone coracle. I willed it twenty yards to starboard of the boat. I sped so swiftly thither I was toppled, and clung aboard only with undignified difficulty. Barnar's braying followed me as I thought the skiff through several other maneuvers, standing better braced now, more fluid at the hips.

"You might well laugh," I shouted to my friend as I zigzagged ever more skillfully over the swell. "See how far we've come! Impossibly far. We've found the young idiot-actually reached him and ferreted out his - squirming-place in this infernal stew!"

Barnar merely whooped and waved his arms for a reply, and I myself felt giddy and nonsensical enough with our continuing good luck. I made a quick excursion toward the crater-top to view the siege in progress there.

Rafts of batrachian demons, reminiscent of the larger breed I had seen being charioted below by human gangs, were beached on the crater's flanks and mining at it furiously, using battering-irons or huge hammers and steel wedges. Their assault was countered by fire-elementals within the magmatic cauldron they sought to inundate and conquer. These shapeless, smoldering beings catapulted avalanches of lava on their besiegers, driving them by the score to quench their sizzling skin in the sea. Meanwhile with this same mater ial the elementals ceaselessly caulked and re-knit the breaches broken by their enemies' tools.

I heard Barnar shout, and sped back toward the boat. Not far from it there was a milky spot in the water, like a cataract in an old dog's eye. I swung near just in time to be drenched by the explosion of Gildmirth in battle with the Bonshad.

I should actually say "Gildmirth hanging onto the Bonshad," for he gripped its back with all four paws and his locked jaws, and by wrestling mightily steered his opponent to some degree, but all the rest of the motive power of that struggle came from the 'shad. Its hook-rimmed mouth-hole gaped from its underside, which the lizard's grip on its in-hooking legs exposed uncharacteristically to view. Such a wad of muscle was its lumpish body that you could clearly see the freeing of just one of its pinioned legs would enable it to compact itself with a power that must surely break the reptile's desperate grip. The speed with which it would then be able to sink its mouthparts into the Privateer's flank was amply attested to now by the monster's volcanic convulsions, which sent the pair of them cartwheeling insanely over the waves.

I began gathering speed with a series of quick swings into their zone of combat and then sharply out again, after each such approach pulling immediately round to make a new and more driving interception. My nearest glimpses of the Privateer told me that he was bone-tired-his paws showed their tendons stark as an oak's roots against rocky ground. His snakish neck bulged so full with strain that its scales jutted out, like wind-lifted shingles in a storm. I swung out to my widest retreat thus far, then pulled in, driving for a peak speed from which to make my cast.

The saurian made a mighty effort, and so far controlled the 'shad's tumble as to keep it belly-out in my direction. I balanced the harpoon by my ear, taking the skiff's buffets with loose knees, for now we sheared, half- flying, straight through the crests of the chop. I saw, some moments ahead of me, the spot and instant of my cast, which I would make at the apex of the skiff's turn, so that the cast would have a sling's momentum behind it, augmenting the strength of my arm. I saw too just where that haggle-rim mouth-hole would be, and my spirit welled up in me with that prescient certainty that precedes many of the greatest feats of weaponry.

I drew back to full cock for the throw, then hit my turn. Obediently, the mouth-hole tumbled precisely to its foreseen spot and I pumped that shaft dead into it, not even grazing the hooks that twisted so furiously round its border. The shaft sprouted full half its length out of the demon's back, and grazed Gildmirth's flank, for he was not quick enough in letting go. The 'shad flopped and churned across the swell for a full minute of storm-wild, crazy force before it realized it was dead, and settled, and sank.

We had to dive again with the P r i v a t e e r , a n d b e q u i c k in pulling on our gear for it.

The abandoned flock below was a f r e e c o n f e c t i o n f o r any drifting entities that scented it. Being pulled under again felt like a burial-alive- n o part of me desired it, and I scarcely kept my grip.

We swooped upon the meadow in time to drive off a many-mouthed, ray-shaped demon, which for all its mouths had no stomach to face the lizard's sword. The nerve-ball still hung above the little herd it tethered, just where its savorer had hung, and the flock remained as powerless as if the demon still hovered over them.

The saurian took the wadded skein of tissue and began to bounce and jiggle it in his paws, the way you have to do to untangle snarled rope. The fibers began to open out. We helped, teasing strands apart. Toward the end it became a gossamer-light labor. We had to swim more than fifty feet above the pasture to make room for the endless unraveling, which we accomplished with gentle upward sweeps of our arms. Our work caused the flock to lurch and spasm in the lubricious embrace of their pasture.

But suddenly, just when the ball was entirely combed apart, the slick web of innards snapped simultaneously back down to its flock of donors and vanished inside their spines, which sealed up like sprung traps. Then the truly terrible dances began, as they awakened to their freedom in that grisly place. We came down quick on Wimfort. Gildmirth began plunging his sword into the things that held the boy-cloven tongues and shattered antennae recoiled from their prey. Barnar and I plucked him up, and I helped my friend get him tucked securely under his left arm. We cleaved to the Privateer and he sprang skyward with us all.

When we were settled with our unconscious charge in the boat, the Privateer took time to bind the wound which crossed half the left side of his ribs, a more considerable wound in his human stature than it bad appeared on the lizard's huge bulk. Smiling with a sudden, strange cordiality, Gildmirth told me: "That was a remarkable cast, Nifft."

In temperate language I replied, as candor compelled me to do , t h a t i t h a d indeed been one of the finest feats of spear-work that it had ever been my fortune to witness.

XIV.

For much of our voyage back the lad l a y i n t h e b o w , his glazed eyes aimed at the clouds, or stirring mindlessly at sudden lurc h e s o f t h e c r a f t . W e h a d e m p t i e d t h e p r o vision sack to make him a blanket, and had fallen to sharing the wine this had brought to light. Gildmirth, after musing o n t h e boy's face awhile, said, "He's a handsome lad. What are his c h a nces of growing to a good man?"

Barnar sighed, and spat gently into the sea. I looked cheerlessly at the boy. My friend and I had had much time to reflect that all our toil was for a resurrection which, while it might not turn out to do the w o r l d g r eat harm, wasn't likely to do it any good either. Wimfort's features had t h e fine symmetry that adolescence c an show right up to the brink of adulthood's emergent emphases and distortions. A certain heaviness of cheek and jaw was already just beginning to suggest the sire.

"I'm afraid, good Privateer, that the signs are discouraging," I answered. "He's here, of course, strictly through his own ambitious carelessness."

"Prime flaws of youth, of course-but a l s o i t s s t r e n g ths, this carelessness and ambition."

I nodded. "He has imagination and boldness. You wouldn't expect him to temper a rich boy's arrogance with much thought of others. He's the Rod-Master's son, as I've told you. But maybe with this-" I gestured at the sea "-and all he'll have to endure going back, he might get that needed awakening to the world around him."

"If you get him back it will be your business to hope he has been wakened. Ambitious dabblers in sorcery add much to the hell that is on earth. In my origins of course I am just such a go-to-market meddler in the arts as I speak of. But at least for every spell I purchased I bought the best tutors in its use and meaning, and I sought no new spell until I had faithfully learned all lore foundational to the last I had bought, or anywise tangent to it. Nor have I ever, to get to the essence of it, brought accidental doom upon my fellows through the casual practice of arts for which my wits were premature."

I did not want him to fall silent on this topic. "It is indeed a part of your legend, Privateer, that many of your . . . sharp practices were aimed at financing your thaumaturgic studies."

Gildmirth regarded us blandly for some moments. "Is that indeed a part of my legend? I am touched that my swindles are remembered at all. Toss. Thank you. It was an expensive education; I was never, before now, a glutton for mere gold itself. All my major larcenies were devoted to scholarly ends, in fact."

"I understand," Barnar said, "that just before your coming here you worked an extremely lucrative deception on your native city."

Gildmirth let a bitter eye roll across the cloud-vaults before allowing himself to sink into the obvious pleasure of boastful reminiscence. He drank, and handed me the jack with a pleased sigh. "That one bought me this boat and sail. It was a good piece of work. Sordon-Head was gearing up for yet another trade war. A major competitor of hers, the Klostermain League of Cities, had just lost half its navy in a storm, while we were just nearing completion of an admirable new navy. Our High Council suddenly recalled a gross defamation of one of our outlying shrines by a drunken Klostermain sailor. It had happened several months before that storm so disastrous for the League, if I recall rightly. We began applying diplomatic pressure on the League for trade concessions, while hinting ever more strongly of war. Our High Council was ripe for anything that might create assurance enough for us to go the last inch to candid armed aggression for profit.

"I came to them with the proposal of constructing a spearhead fleet of superlative fighting frigates, and demonstrated how such a tactical weapon could penetrate harbors and destroy ships in the docks, sparing us many chancier engagements on the high seas. I was an object of guarded civic pride for my exploits abroad, and I had always kept my in-town dealings well masked. They heaped my lap with gold. Their dreams of empire, of Klostermain plunder made them practically force on me the sum of Eleven million gold lictors."

Wimfort screeched, gull-voiced. He twisted, as if ants covered him, and under the sack we'd covered him with we could see his hands moving to rub some nameless memory off his skin. Barnar pressed a huge hand onto the boy's forehead. The boy's eyes closed again, as if that slight pressure crushed down the ugly dream behind them.

"Conceive the sum," the Privateer said after a moment, "Still it astonishes me, though I have often seen that sum quadrupled on a few hectares of the ocean's floor. Of course, it was spent a fortnight from my getting it-on this craft. It was a purchase I had studied and planned for more than a decade.

"You should have seen my shipyards in Sordon-Head. Giant, covered buildings, windowless-the danger of Klostermain spies stealing some forewarning of their fate, you see-we couldn't risk it. And in those great empty warehouses a fleet was in d e e d a - b u i l d i n g . A brace of towering frigates, made of leather, paper, and feather-wood. While my crews tolled on these, I had a n o t her crew working, a crew of musicians. Their instruments were mallets, saws , augers, rusty winches. Their oratorio was woven of shouted curses, and gusty dockworker's cries: 'Lower away there, easy n o w !

D o w n w i t h it-a bit more, another arse-hair-hold! Maul here, and quarter-inch spikes, prompt now!' Whenever the great men of the council passed my yards they drank in these melodies and passed on smiling.

"There was a grand harbor-side assembly to witness the launching of our raiding-frigates, as they had come to be called. The docks on all sides were crowned with walls of expectant citizens. The day was a glory-a steel- blue sky and a sweet, steady offshore wind. The council had a tiered platform at the tip of our major pier. When my flotilla came past them they would set afire a huge, wooden mock-up of the city's seal. "I was in the shipyard. All the craft had been blocked on ramps and set to slide down by themselves to a launching in fair order. There were six of them, and I was in this boat, ramped to slide out in their midst, and so be masked by them at first. I pulled the block-pins. The great doors opened and our convoy skidded like so many fat swans onto the water.

"And they were light as swans too, at first. They were very proud ladies, my paper frigates, in the first moments of their promenading out onto the sea. They drew gasps from the crowd. But almost at once you could hear everyone saying 'Eh?' 'What?' Because the six of them wandered out giddily, like so many drunks reeling through the town square on their way to dance at the carnival. They bumped each other, some turned stern-first, and rocked till their masts looked like metronomes. The council buzzed. The seal was already proudly blazing, but the town orchestra was already faltering in mid-bar. The breeze jumbled the boats out to the center of the harbor. And then they began soaking up water in earnest. Here and there a sodden hull caved in like pastry left in the rain. Now a great noise arose from the multitude. The first of my ladies drank the limit. She went down so straight her masts looked like a weed being yanked under by a gopher.

"I was lying just here, in the stern. I would be unveiled on center-stage, so to speak, when the last frigate sank.

Now this was the riskiest part of my venture, because for the whole five minutes it took all of them to go under, I was fighting for my life with an attack of laughter that almost killed me. That's how I was revealed to my fellow- citizens, despite my best attempts at self-command. But when the populace gave a . . . what shall I call it? A surge of comprehension, I struggled to the mast and pulled myself onto my feet. The rest of the fleet had at last begun to weigh anchor, and undertake my capture. Gasping and clinging to the mast, I shouted: "Citizens!"

That set me laughing again-the thought of them all. "Citizens!" I croaked again. "I can' t understand it! I'm . . . appalled! I used . . . the best . . . paper!" Getting that said nearly finished me. The fleet's lead ship was less than a hundred yards off now, and archers were forming up on its quarterdeck. I unfurled the sail. I'd researched the demon currents and they're quite strong near Sordon-Head. I departed then from the bay of my native city, and as I left I noted with satisfaction how the hard-taxed multitudes were swarming off the docks and onto the main pier, and how the entire council-at pier's end-had risen to its feet in what looked like alarm.

"It took some ingenuity to stay slow enough for the fleet to follow me. It was a point of pride, I suppose, but perhaps something less personal than that as well. At any rate I wanted my destination known, my descent witnessed. One doesn't want to leave the world of one's kind without some moment of farewell, some acknowledgment by your fellows of your kinship and your departure. I came down by the Taarg Vortex, which is a maelstrom in the Yellow Reefs. I did not think that any would come down with me, but the captain of the flagship was a zealous man and did not pull up and bring a line in time. He was pulled down after me. Those I could manage, in that raging hurricane of water, I killed with arrows, but many were taken instantly by demons, and I could do nothing for them. Wheeling in anguish, they went where I did, through the Dark Rapids, down where the whirlpool's root feeds into a subworld river which none have given a name, and which empties in the sea some thousand leagues in that direction."

At some point Gildmirth's voice must have entered Wimfort's dream-webbed brain, because when the Privateer stopped, the boy snapped open his eyes. They were large and dark, not piggy like his father's, and they now registered the clouds they stared at. With Barnar's help, he sat up. He looked at us, the boat, and us again.

Seeing such astonishment as his, I couldn't think of what to tell him. It was Barnar who gave him the necessaries: "We are men, Wimfort, not demons. This man has helped us fish you out, rescue you. Your father sent Nifft and me for you. We're taking you back up to the world of mankind."

My friend's summation struck me at first as the report of some other men ' s actions. I looked at my hands. They are quite presentable hands, but nothing out of the ordinary. I marveled at what Barnar and I had done thus far, even leav- ing aside that which the Privateer had made possible for us.

As for Wimfort's reaction to these words, it was like watching Barnar speaking sentences into a tunnel. After a long lag, answering lights of comprehension flickered from the darkness of the boy's eyes. His breathing grew stronger. More fear showed on his face, and he brought his hands up to touch it. Then, with a tremor, he thawed out. Tears bulged from the corners of his eyes-slow in emerging, then falling with that surprising quickness that tears have. Barnar patted his shoulder.

"We have a hard trek home, Wimfort," he said, "but we have an excellent chance of making it."

The boy looked at him and me, beginning to breathe more slowly. He looked at Gildmirth, whose plum-red orbs were like two terrible sunsets in the grinning ruins of his face.

"Your freedom's real, son," the Privateer said. "To talk to you of odds, of numbers, would never make clear to you the magnitude of your good fortune. So many like yourself are here forever."

"You two," Wimfort said. It was a croak, a voice almost erased. He cleared his throat. "You two. My father sent you?" Seeing someone is half of meeting him, and hearing his voice the other half. I liked the voice-still a treble, with a gravelly shade of manhood to come. An un-selfconscious voice that said exactly what it thought. He probably had an ungentle tongue toward servants, but perhaps also a sense of humor, and imagination. He looked wonderingly about the sky and sea.

"How long have I been here?" he asked.

Barnar shrugged. "We cannot say how long we've been atraveling. Perhaps you have been here two or three months."

"Three months!" Wimfort said it hushedly. It was poignant, for we knew that he was reviewing what had filled those months for him. He shuddered, and then shuddered again more powerfully. He looked at us with what might have been panic drawing in his face.

"You two walked that long to reach me?"

"No," I said. "The trek was probably something more than a month, and you had been down here for a similar period before your father was able to . . . obtain our services."

"My father sent you . . ." echoed the boy. I was getting alarmed-his stare was so wide. "Three months here!"

he groaned. "Three months. And my father sent you. He waited two months, and then sent a pair of baboons on foot who took another two months to get here!" His voice was rising to a howl as uncontrolled as his arithmetic was getting. "A good wizard could have had me out in a day! That dung-heap! That greedy, stingy dung-heap!

THREE MONTHS!!".

XV.

Wimfort recovered swiftly. My God, the resilience of the young! Within an hour to step back into your own mind and character after months of the Bonshad's intricate violation of your inmost thoughts. But that is the essence of youth-to believe soundly and fixedly in its own destruction. Soon we found, full-blown before us, the lad Charnall had described, with the same ambitions-intact, invigorated even by their grim miscarriage.

We cut the sack into a tunic for his temporary comfort. He dressed very surlily after I had told him he was a young idiot and that he was not to call us baboons. I tried not to be harsh about it, remembering he was convalescent. As he dressed, by way of setting things at ease, Gildmirth explained to him the erroneous tradition that made so many people summon Bonshads, and assured him that the Elixir of Sazmazm was nowhere near the sea, nor could any marine power hope to possess it, though such would treasure it as much as any primary demon would.

Wimfort had squatted on a rower's bench, with his back very straight and his face half-averted from us. When the Privateer finished the lad scowled and shook his head pityingly at the waters, then looked round to deliver this answer: "I'm really an idiot, eh? As that one says? Do you think I'm so stupid I don't know the situation of the Elixir?

Of course it isn't in the sea. It is obtained from somewhere outside it by the Bonshad, which as everyone knows lives in the sea."

"You just know that better than most by now," I put in, disgusted with the boy's impenetrability. He disdained to notice me and continued setting the Privateer straight: "Just for your information, grandfather, I've read all that's known of the matter. The Elixir of Sazmazm is - obtained in the prime subworld where the Giant Sazmazm, of the tertiary subworld, lies captive." Wimfort had adopted that bored off-handedness with which smart students reel off authoritative texts which they have memorized entirely and-in their opinion-mastered completely. "If you are curious as to the manner of the giant's captivity, it's relatively simple. Sazmazm sought ascension to the prime subworld where he meant to enjoy empire, and unholy feasts upon the lesser demons. He bargained with the great warlock, Wanet-ka, the greatest in all the Red Millennium, and generally held unscrupulous enough to wreak any harm for the right price, even that of bringing a tertiary power within one level of the world of men. Wanet-ka accepted the giant's advance, a stupendous sum, and then swindled Sazmazm. Using a loophole in the re-assembly clause of his pact, he transported the demon two levels up, as agreed, but everted him in so doing, and reconstituted him with fantastic whimsy and disorder. Sazmazm endures, a vast, impotent disjointment, his lifeblood pulsing through him in veins nakedly accessible to those who would brave the giant's tertiary vassals, who attend him, and laboriously transport his essence back down to his native world, fraction by fraction-a millennial labor."

Something tickled my memory. The boy's words evoked some image, too ephemeral for me to resolve, which spidered uneasily across my mind. The Privateer laughed. "Excellent. Two-thirds Ha-dadd-almost word for word-and the other third a loose rephrasing of Spinny the Elder. Both standard sources even in my day.

Moreover, everything you have recited is true." "For this feat-" Wimfort spoke with the outraged emphasis of a lecturer who has been crassly interrupted.

"-the Grey League granted Wanet-ka the honorary epithet of 'the Benevolent,' and included his biography in their Archive of Optimates."

"Just for your information, grandchild, in the Benevolent Wanet-ka, you have chosen from the past the worst possible hero on whom to model your ambitions. A great man and warlock he surely was. But such a one as only greybeards like myself, who understand how to distinguish his triumphs from his lunacies, can intelligently honor. Wanet-ka! For the reasons you admire him, you might as well choose some great demon chief from these deeps to idolatrize."

"I don't idolatrize," the boy said hotly, "and you can just keep your jaw locked from now on."

The Privateer's jaw did indeed tighten shut. He reached forth his hand toward the boy. He was back in the stern, and so the boy didn't move, thinking the gesture a senseless one-until the Privateer's arm elongated impossibly, and a huge webbed claw half-engulfed the lad's head. Wimfort's horror was plain. Gildmirth said, "Your father didn't send me after you, boy. I live here, and may do so forever. For a false copper I'd take you back down and hand you to another Bonshad. Don't yank on my old grey beard, boy. I hurt all over in ways you'll never learn enough to understand. I'm in a nasty mood, grandson, and you watch your tongue most careful ly wi th me, at al l times."

Gildmirth's pique was surely forgivable. To hear such a squall as the boy had made raised over a three-month term in hell, for one who has stoically borne a sentence of three centuries, must be unimaginably irritating-- especially when the short-term wailer makes his complaint en route to his freedom. Perhaps he regretted his anger, however, for he brought his arm back to its proper form, and went on in a gentler tone: "You must grasp, my boy, that I'm not disparaging your ambition. I admire your spirit. And when I force unwelcome information on you, I'm just trying to amplify your understanding, give you vital data on whose basis you can proceed to fulfill your dreams of sorcerous power. Do you think that I or my friends here are jealous of the greatness you propose for yourself? Why should we care one way or the other? We have our own pressing concerns. Since I happen to know something of the matter-a circumstance I regard as purely an accident of time and experience, and of which I am no-wise vain-I'm simply telling you that no serious wizard, save for some hard to imagine and highly specific aim, would meddle with the Elixir of Sazmazm. Its power is far too unwieldy-too great for accurate mastery and utilization-while its immense attractiveness to all the demons of this world makes the mere transport of it highly dangerous, assuming that it could be wrested from Sazmazm's vassals in the first place. I am told that you bear a spell of incorporation for the Elixir. Can you believe that making your body a jar for this substance could be anything but the rankest suicide down here? The first demon that caught you would make a f i r e a n d r e n d e r t he Elixir from you as casually as if you were a chunk of whale fat.

"You must understand. This Elixir is a powerful drug to the denizens of this world. It enhances their sensual and cerebral universe to a pitch of paradisiacal ecstasy. From even the most vanishingly small potations of it, they taste an amplification of spirit to which the intoxications of human prey are but the feeblest premonition.

"But leave all this aside. Suppose you brought the Elixir safely back to the surface-world? Your plans for its use might be unexceptionable-temperate, benign, creative-still the smell of it would be on you, so to speak.

Within the first day of your homecoming, all the most powerful wizards on earth would know you had it-know who you were, and how to find you. Consider that phrase, please: 'all the most powerful wizards on earth.' In my day, that was a crew that contained some great and remorseless predators. Whether or not many of those men still live-and many might-their like have surely been appearing throughout the intervening centuries. I'll say no more than to remind you of the chunk of whale fat."

The boy said nothing, but clearly it was only the demonstration that his preceptor was no mean magus that stilled his tongue. He squirmed and twitched with unspoken rebuttal throughout the Privateer's remarks.