Gildmirth sighed, and the three of us returned to our wine while the boat, under his covert direction, returned us to his manse.

I sat facing the sea through an archway in the colonnade where we sat. The Privateer, sitting behind me, touched the back of my head. A whiteness and nothingness occurred. Then again, there was the archway and the sea beyond it. I was faintly dizzy, but this passed almost at once. I looked around, and saw that a cloudiness was just clearing from Gildmirth's bloody orbs. When he spoke his jaw at first moved numbly.

"You've lived much, Nifft. You leave me quite a world to be explored once I'm alone again."

His eyes mused a moment, and he chuckled and swore. I felt my past had been as air to his present - imprisonment, and it made me glad. Barnar took his turn, and I saw that Gildmirth's touch lasted less than a minute. Again the Privateer rested, and marveled. When at last he looked at us, there was no self-consciousness in our looking-back. What would have been the point? Gildmirth smiled and said: "How tired I am of what I know of this world, my friends. How I crave to return to the learning of that more evanescent and various lore, the lore of living men."

"Listen," Barnar said, "Nifft and I have talked. We've agreed that if there's any way in which we could help you win your freedom from this place, we will put off our return until this is accomplished."

Gildmirth smiled again, and shook his head. A loud snort from Wimfort reminded us all of his presence. The Privateer had given the boy leather leggins and a byrnie of light mail from his own stores. The gear hung a bit roomily on his frame, which caused him an irritation that betrayed a habit of infallibly correct fitting-out-- something the Rod-Master's pride of place would surely have seen to.

The snort was a prelude. The boy had been developing his strategy, and was now going to expostulate with us as though we were rational beings with at least as much say in the course of events as he had. He made a reasoning gesture with both arms, a very political bit of flourish which he almost had the hang of, and which a few more years of observing his father would make him perfect in. He addressed himself to the Privateer.

"I'm convinced that you aren't seeing the true advantages of an expedition for the Elixir. You've probably been down here a while. You seem to know your way around down here, you have some powers-guide us from here to scout inland for the Elixir! You have yourself, sir, given a hint of the immeasurable value it would have, even here among demon-kind. What could it not purchase? Impressive though your establishment here might be, surely you don't have absolutely everything you wish! Surely there is something you lack that you desire. Who has everything he wants?"

The Privateer had paled. Knots of murderous intention were forming at the corners of his jaw. Then, in his eyes, I could see the dull rage give way to more self-command-to a realization that the irony of the boy's words was accidental, and that Wimfort had no conception of our protector's situation-indeed, had surprisingly scant attention to spare for it, considering that Gildmirth manifestly commanded an outpost of influence in the sea itself. The Privateer expelled the last of his wrath in a deep sigh. Looking earnestly for a moment into the boy's eyes, he ended by laughing. "Oh Junior Rod-Master, it is truly well for you that you have these men for your escorts. If anyone, on your route home, can protect you from the consequences of your fatal misapprehensions, they can. Pray for the wit to appreciate their services, and to aid them in every way you can. Gentlemen-" Here he took our hands in turn. "-I honor you for your worth, which just lately I have come to know in detail. I thank you for your generous offer to help me. May all luck go with you. I cannot hope-for your sakes-that I will see you again, though the affection I bear you makes me wish it. For the trifling service I have done you-" (Here he glanced at Wimfort.) "-I am amply repaid."

Walking away from the Privateer was as hard as disarming would have been-piling my weapons on the ground and setting forth without them. When we had scaled the salt cliffs we raised our hands to him. He was far below, but I saw him nod very slightly as he stared back up at us. Then he turned and entered the manse-I think to spare himself the spectacle of our endlessly gradual disappearance as we dwindled from view along his clifftop skyline.

XVI.

On first reaching the sea we had noted an offshore crag for a landmark, and thither we now doggedly bent our return course. We knew that by walking a diagonal path inland from the manse we could cut many weary leagues off our march, but the convenience of this was not worth the risk it entrailed. The route we knew offered dangers we had proven to be survivable, and for all we knew it was, in this, unique.

Naturally, Wimfort began gaping at the baubles down on the beaches, and immediately started demanding we stop, and go down for this or that trinket. I say "naturally" because I believe I understood him perfectly. He didn't really need to hear the answer we gave him: that such treasure-hunting would mean a dangerous re-entry of the sea's zone of influence, and that most of those riches were merely bait for man and demon alike. He didn't truly want those baubles; what he couldn't forbear to do was push at us. He was furious with us-not for anything we had done, but simply because we were the tardy, powerless drudges that we were. What he wanted was rescue by a wizard astride a golden griffon-an immediate plucking from the imprisoning waters (and not three months late, thank you) followed by a swift jaunt to pick up some of the Elixir of Sazmazm, and concluding with a prompt, painless r e t u r n h o m e , a n d the heating of Master Wimfort's bath.

And after all, how could the boy be otherwise? All he knew was to order us to do what he wanted. Reality, for him, did not run any other way than that. And here we were, telling him he was going to have to walk with us, through mire and peril, for more than a month, and that there was going to be no stop for some elixir en route.

We offered mere escape-ignominious, arse-bare escape escorted by two scoundrels of unromantic appearance. Rage and wounded pride look painful on a young face. Sixteen is a difficult age to get on with. There's much to like-the freshness, the force of conviction. But there is also a certain arrogance, an inevitable concomitant of development, perhaps, which one must always struggle to forgive. Wimfort had a great deal of freshness and - enterprise, but he also required huge amounts of forgiving. He lashed us with pejorative epithets and sneers when we denied his will and bade him march on.

Verbal rebukes were powerless to curb his hectoring. At length Barnar and I conferred aside. We took some of the rope which Gildmirth had included in our provisions and rigged a humane though not extremely comfortable cradle. In this we trussed the boy. We hung him from one of our spears and carried him between us as hunters will a bush-pig they've bagged upcountry. An hour of this convinced him of our sincerity in telling him that henceforth he would cease to vilify us, or he would make the entire journey thus. Though successful in the short range, this ploy proved a mistake. When liberated the boy did, strictly speaking, stop vilifying us, but in insult's stead be muttered endlessly varied rehearsals of our punishment and death at the hands of his father, the august Kamin, Rod-Master of Kine Gather. Whenever this paled, the boy had only to scan the beach till he found some new thing there to demand and be denied. This accomplished, he was able to resume his vengeful soliloquy with fresh gusto.

Meanwhile his surroundings, the fabulous nature of his present position, were dawning on him. At times he fell silent, and caught his eyes marveling at the sea's horizon, exulting in its shore's tangled wonders. At these moments we glimpsed an impressive strength of will in the boy-an ambition sharp and forceful as a man's hatching within a heart and mind still childish in their scope and capacity. These glimpses did not increase our peace of mind.

When at last we approached our landmark Wimfort, gathering that we were near our inland-turning, began to find the attractions of the beach ever more urgent. I could feel him winding himself tig h t f o r s o m e a b s olutely peremptory requirement that could give occasion to an outright defiance of our will. Then he saw some amphorae of burnished copper.

We were above a particularly lush stretch of beach. The cliffs here were luminously white. On the shingle footing their waxen wall, on the wave-worn stones as black as boiling tar, a flock of thralls lay in the surf. Each of the flock was two-a man and a woman, fused at the waist into a limbless, two-headed sausage-and each of these, when the surf came in, bent up in a U of revulsion, hoisting its heads out of reach of the erratic, leap- frogging foam. On all sides of this flock tide pools dappled the rocks, and these were clogged with such lurid riches as would mock the greediest imagination with its littleness. The amphorae were strewn through several such pools, and some were battered and ruptured, like storm-wrack. The plug sealing each o f t h e m b o r e a d e e p l y g r aven, S-shaped rune. Wimfort stood stock-still, then opened his mouth. Furious in advance, I forestalled him: "Can you be such a fool, Wimfort?" I shouted. "Would it be sealed in jars and stamped like a bottle in a perfumer's stall?"

"Yes!" he shrilled. "If it were some demon's booty-some Elixir successfully stolen, and jarred for storage in the demon's cellars!"

Barnar groaned. "Wimfort! Did they all lie to us when they called you well-read? That could be a snake-rune!

It could be the High-Archaic demi-sigil. I mean who even knows how 'Sazmazm' is rendered in demon callig-"

"Look!" shrieked Wimfort in horror. I blush to report that Barnar and I, green as bumpkins at a fair, whirled round as one man, and the boy sprinted for the cliff.

The bluffs were mostly sheer, but above the amphorae a deep gully split the cliff. Wimfort jumped into it and rode down it on a little avalanche of loose salt. He was halfway down before I could uproot my feet. As I ran for the cliff I called back to Barnar: "A line! And brace yourself, I want a good haul coming back!" I jumped into the gully and skied down as Wimfort had done.

The boy was nimble as a fox pup. He took some tumbles I vowed to myself had killed him, only to see him get his feet beneath him at the last instant. I couldn't match his speed, and saw the inevitability of the thing I least desired-a struggle with him on the shore, down in the reach of the surf, and whatever lived in it. He hit the cove and pelted for the amphorae. I sprang off the bluff and took the last fifteen feet by air. Wimfort was wrestling a jar from one of the pools, and I saw how suddenly the surf came in, like an extended paw, to swirl teasingly round his ankles. He dragged the jar-half his own size-onto the shingle and began frantically to pry at its stopper with a sharp stone.

I was on him, seizing his shoulders. He hugged the jar with both legs and arms. I was in urgent dread of the sea, and so I gave up trying to pry him off the jar, and dragged them both back toward the cliff. Meanwhile just offshore, the water was beginning to fold and peak in a dozen places. The peaks were sharp, and did not move with the rhythm of water, but fitfully, like things scurrying around under a sheet, all of them coming erratically but steadily nearer the beach. I looked up at the clifftop. Barnar stood and brandished a noose, beginning to move down the gully for a nearer cast. I nodded and bent down to pry at Wimfort's grip in earnest. I would have to stun his arm with a blow to the shoulder. It was not going to be an entirely disagreeable task. The boy sensed my preparatory movement and wrenched himself with unexpected violence to one side, dragging the amphora down with him to the shingle, and knocking the stopper out of it.

What poured out of it was a reeking black fluid-and far more than that. For in the fumes that instantly tangled up through the air, my mind and soul went twisting and reeling into an utterly other being. The sky over me, though it did not alter physically, became something different, became an agelessly familiar thing. The black and white shingle was the only floor my feet had ever known, except that I did not possess feet, but some giant raptor's talons. And my tongue was charged with curses in a language never heard in the world of the sun. I poured these curses from my hooked beak upon my deadly adversary.

This enemy of mine was a crablike thing, half my size. Fluid fire were his eye-knobs upon their ghastly stalks, and his pincers were likewise of flame. We joined battle, as we had done, world without end, whenever we had met in the long eons of our being. He clawed and tore at my chest and legs as I took his eye-stalks in my forepaws and lifted him, shaking him in the air.

When my mind goes back, now, to that battle, it is like stepping into a great shadowed corridor endless in either direction, a hall of memories and dark hates. For in those moments I possessed the entire past of that other being-its shape and senses, its deeds and lusts, all were mine, and I fought for them all. There was a touch, a pressure around my upper body, and then a tightening around my neck and under one of my forelegs. As this was happening, so was something else. The surf arched itself up off the stones, just like a carpet lifted by children who are playing beneath. Crouched forms with merry red sharp-cornered eyes rode mats of coiling slime out from under the shadow of the lifted water blanket. They winked at us. I knew them, and I knew what they wanted, but I was powerless to do anything other than fight my close-embraced enemy to the death.

And then something began to lift me. Haltingly, I rose up the cliff face, and my enemy, whom I could not loose, rose with me, clawing wildly at my body all the while. The sharp-eyed things swarmed onto the shingle. My heels rose just barely clear of their ropy palps, entreatingly upreached.

Somewhere in that jerky climb I began to shed somewhat the being which had engulfed my own, but the mad- ness of battle remained upon both of us. When Barnar landed us on the clifftop he had to act fast to save Wimfort's life. The lad, who had the fight of a drenched cat, was obliviously kicking my shins and clawing my face as I, singlemindedly, throttled him, while trying to grab his hands and stifle their assault. His face swelled above my fist, purple as an eggplant, but he didn't seem to care about being strangled-he wanted my life and nothing else. I began doing my lunatic all to fold him up small enough so I could pound him flat with a rock. My legs had more lumps on them than a mile of city street has cobbles, and the little beast had clawed my arms to such a tatters they looked like I'd been scrubbing them with rose-bushes. I'm not sure how my friend managed to pull us apart, but fortunately the fit waned almost immediately after we were separated.

The boy sat up groggily and set about, cautiously, trying to get some breath through his bruised windpipe. He sounded like a bellows with the nozzle rusted half-shut. I limped about until some of my blood had forsaken my many bruises and returned to my veins. I hobbled to and fro, marveling at the disastrous condition of my shins.

When Barnar saw we were at peace, he sat down to rest from his exertions. As he sat there, he started to laugh. Once he got started, he warmed right up to it. He set himself to laugh in a big, methodical way, sending a great, stately braying sound out across that festering sea. It took more and more of his strength, that laugh, and finally he had to lie on his back and give it his all. I didn't join him at first.

"Just look at you there," I snapped, "just haw-hawing away, snug as a hog in muck."

Barnar fought to breathe, to speak: "You should have . . ." (Some further struggle) " . . . You should have seen yourself!" (A gurgle, and some more braying.) "You looked like two puppets . . . whose handler was having a seizure! . . . I almost . . . dropped you!"

This last amusing thought was too much for him, and he went off again. I began to join him, half just to irritate the boy, who was taking on a pout of bitterness and injury as he came back to himself. "You rotten, swaggering bullies!" he shouted at us. It was meant as a preamble, but he stopped short, snagged on the fact that we had just pulled him out of a very deadly mistake. It didn't soften him toward us. As any spoiled child will do, he punished us for making him feel guilty by hating us more. The incident didn't really prove anything to him, since he had only half disbelieved our warnings against the amphorae in the first place. And it left intact the hateful fact of our control over him. After staring at us a moment, he said bitterly: "You just refuse to see the importance of the Elixir! It's worth any risk. Don't you see that if we brought some back, you would be rich beyond your most insanely greedy dreams?"

Barnar and I traded a look, and then stared back at him. Our humor had left us. It was more than sad, the eternal unteachabillty of youth.

"Wimfort," I said at last, "I speak this with all gravity-without malice or ill will. But may all the nameless dwellers in the Black Crack itself prevent you from ever accomplishing your desire. I swear that we will always do our utmost to thwart your efforts in that direction. And now we must march. We crave the sun, Barnar and I, and the wind and the stars. Our souls are perishing to take up the thread of our proper lives. And so would yours be too, if you were not the young idiot you are."

XVII.

The essence of nightmare lies less in the simple experience of horrors than in the unpreventable fruition of horrors foreknown. And when we turned inland from the sea, we entered our ordeal's most nightmarish phase.

We knew, in large part, what awaited us, and consequently we advanced armed with strategies-bleak- hearted, but murderously determined to dispense more damage than we endured, and to endure far less than our coming hither had caused us. In such a spirit, I say, we advanced. We advanced to encounter a perfect series of disasters-to meet each of our wisely prepared-for enemies with collision force, and come off twice as scathed as our first encounters with them had left us. The reason? The reason, in a word, was Master Wimfort, Rod-Master- apparent of the city of Kine Gather.

To evoke that train of extravagant missteps in any detail is a task from which my hand rebels. Calamity struck us with such ruthless regularity that those hours of fevered scrambling achieved-for me-the quality of Damnation itself, of entrapment beneath the Wheel of Woe where it grinds out its eternal reiterations of misery and peril.

The boy lost no time hitting his stride. The salt dunes' only predators were big-jawed beings which laired like ant-lions in plainly visible funnels whose avoidance was easy. Then we hit the first rough spot, announced by greasy black smoke which overlay and stained the dunes for miles in advance of its actual frontier. And the roaring of it outreached its smoke, for it was a place of furious conflagration. Flesh was the universal material of that jumbled terrain, knit of welded bodies both human and demonic, and all that flesh was toweringly aflame.

Crazed, veering winds raised the flame into peaks and harvested it, tearing it up by its sizzling roots of skin and blowing flesh and flame alike to rags and tatters that came driving at you like a blizzard. The living fuel sundered, body fragments wheeled before the gale till they were re-welded by impact against the first feature of that landscape that intercepted their flight, while roaring within the roaring of the fire were these victims' million voices, which rose in grieving unison, intact above their molten, broken bodies.

Our tactic here was to run shoulder to shoulder ahead of the boy, the two of us forming a kind of prow to cleave the wind, while the fire-clots splashed off our joined shields. Wimfort ran close behind in the lee we made him. The wind's shifting had us staggering and stumbling. We had to run as much as possible against the wind in order to keep our shields between us and the burning flesh. This, when it struck us, clung to us-sometimes in the most literal way when hands, claws or entire limbs of it hit us and tried to wrestle the shields from our grips, and wherever that flesh touched ours, ours came away.

We were well across this zone, and were keeping the bulk of the fiery carnage off our charge, when a few bits of flame began to get round to him on a back-draft-negligible bits, no more than we were constantly being singed with all over our bodies, but they caused Wimfort such a lively sense of discomfort that he panicked, and bolted from our cover. He began a lateral drive which he almost immediately aborted at the onslaught of a big fragment-a whole blazing torso, in fact, which spun toward him, its arms spread to wrap him in a crackling hug.

Barnar had turned and reached out his free arm to pull the boy back to cover, and when Wimfort ducked, the burning body sailed over him and smashed into my friend's embrace. The boy, mindful only of his own stinging flesh now that we no longer covered him, seized my shield and tried to wrestle it from me while I was helping Barnar peel the pyro-nomad from his chain mail, which was already cherry-red with the heat. Whole steaks of our skin came off in that grisly grappling, while the boy's wild assaults endlessly frustrated my efforts to use my sword as a prybar on Barnar's tormentor without killing my friend in the process. When pain and desperation grew too much, I knocked Wimfort senseless, and then I was able to help Barnar to a quick disentanglement. I tossed the boy across my shoulder and we fled.

The fields of fire gave place to orchard country-squat trees of leatherlike, veiny foliage studded with wrinkled blue fruit that gave off a delicious fragrance. We had no unguents, and our burns were an agony beneath our armor. With scant ceremony we told Wimfort that he was not to pluck or even touch this fruit-that we were going to make a brisk, direct march through this territory, that he was going to hold the position we assigned him throughout, and t h a t t h e r e w a s n o m o r e t o t h e a f f a ir than that.

Naturally, there proved to be a great deal more to it than that. We'd cut Wimfort a staff for the trek, and he expressed his resentment of things in general by prodding curiously with it at this fruit or that whenever our eyes were not on him. We learned he was doing this because, inevitably, one of his idle, resentful little pokes brought the fruit down. That which we had been too weary and curt to describe to him came to pass-with the first fruit, every other one on the tree dropped off. The leaves came with them, for these were the wings of those plump little monsters, all of whose bodies split open in fang-rimmed mouths as they converged in a ravenous swarm upon the three of us.

For this particular eventuality we had formulated a very clear strategy, and Barnar communicated this to Wimfort: "Run for your life!" he bellowed, and he and I set the boy an example which, at that moment, we didn't really care whether he followed or not. But in fact, he outstripped us, and nearly knocked me off my feet in so doing.

By the Crack, how that lad could run! He was, in all seriousness, an unusually gifted runner-just how gifted we had yet, to our sorrow, to learn, though we were beginning to realize it. He was long-legged and, though not quite yet at his full frame-size, already deep-lunged. In him, we saw the image of our own plight ahead of us during that long sprint beneath those trees all fat and gravid with the clustered swarms of razor-fanged hungers.

Given even the briefest contact, they clipped a bite of skin off you as big as an Astrygal twenty-gelding piece.

They taxed us sorely, though we swatted them with our shields, which grew heavier with their fig-soft, impact- flattened bodies, and dragged at our flight. When near at hand, the loathsome things smelt putrescent, and as they swooped at us they hissed feverish little curses, and derogatory personal remarks. Even when we had thinned them out till they posed no further danger, it remained a pleasure-indeed, a vindictive obsession-to smash them, and when we were at last outside the frontier of the orchard-land, we shed our gear, arranged ourselves back to back, and proceeded, methodically, to hammer every last one of the stubborn little abominations flat. We stood thus-our arms, cheeks, shins all spotted with red bites, our eyes insanely bright-and feasted on their annihilation. Wimfort, finding himself similarly beset with hangers-on, ran back to us and howled at us to kill his too, and so enthralled were we by the task, that we actually did this for him.

After that we rested, hid, and lay still for a time. It was perhaps a day or two, for our wounds had begun to scab, and the sharpest edges of their pain had dulled when we again proceeded. Just before we set out, we had an earnest talk with Wimfort. We were in a gully in a low hillside, and I pointed out to the plain before us.

"Do you see, Wimfort, yonder there, where those flatlands get so much paler?"

"I suppose so."

"Well, that's where we start running into the bog. It's a kind of swamp, teeming with men and women, you understand? With males and females. Tens of thousands of them, all of them . . . moving together." I paused, feeling that this sounded lame. "Listen Wimfort," I said, "don't be offended, but I must ask you. Do you know how babies are made?"

He gave me a look of enormous scorn. He looked up at the luminous murk that was our sky, as if to call witness to his trials at the hands of dolts. He disdained to answer.

I was relieved. He didn't know, then, or at least, knew only in a remote way. At his age the question is tricky, but I had read him as a prudish boy like many privately extravagant and ambitious types-no young tom-about- town he, fascinated by the flesh perhaps, but still feeling some compromise to his dignity in it. I handed him a cudgel I had whiffled him from a thorn root.

"Well," I said, "that's what the men and women and girls and boys and other assorted creatures in the bog are all doing-that, and variations of it. The danger is not really great, if you just remember not to be attracted into their activities. Anyone who's really trying can make his way through them, though it takes some hard struggling in the thickest places. Just remember that the fun is all on the surface there-if you let yourself be pulled deeper into the matter, you'll find yourself being swiftly destroyed. As before, momentum is everything. Don't pause, just drive forward, whacking away like a thousand devils."

It seems to me now that I hardly need to describe what ensued. When we reached it, we entered the swamp at a run, zigzagging among the mossy knolls and black, weed-slick pools where the small, outlying knots of nude - humanity mingled with miscellaneous demonry in orgiastic combination.

And our momentum held even after the orgiasts grew in number, lay ever more profusely heaped till sweaty hills of them coalesced, and the muddy earth was blanketed by their lascivious coalition. A whinnying, jabbering clamor arose from that voluptuary fen, a vast, ragged oratorio of lust, with a muffled accompaniment of something else. We reached the thick of it, and it was time to clear ourselves a path with club-work.

Coming down, we'd lacked knouts and had used our spear-butts. On either trip our swords would have been the most efficient weapons, but it was humanly impossible to use them. It was horrible enough using the clubs, even on the men, and inexpressibly so on the women. To stir the arm for such an act-not once, but countless times-was dead contrary to what every fiber of my being wanted-nay, demanded. In a certain way, that may have been the worst mauling I got on the entire journey-wading through the slippery shoals, hammering through the hot, coaxing embraces of urgent arms and pleading fingers. It was a violence to my soul. Each bruise I gave, my own nerves wore.

For the first long moments of this excruciating immersion, we kept a fair pace. Then the lad, who went - between us, started lagging. He would fall behind me until Barnar would catch up to him and thrust him on. Ever more balkily he advanced. Then I looked back and saw his eyes, even as I watched them, grow rapt, his gaze become dangerously entangled in the carnal weave. Snap! He came to a full stop, dropped his club, and dove into the squirming heap.

The succeeding frenzy, just at its fullest pitch, caused me an eerily calm moment of remembrance. I had done fisher-work on the Ahnook trawlers when I was young, and there had been one late afternoon when we made a stupendous strike. Our greedy skipper plied the nets with epileptic ardor and buried our decks with a spill-over haul, in a mad race to ship every possible ounce before it grew dark. Half of us had to stand the decks with spars in our hands and club the fish like a devil with his arse afire. They were shadfinns, big as dogs with the fight of wild pigs. In the dimming light, on the heaving, slithering decks, walloping and dancing berserkly, I had for a short eternity fore-lived what I lived now.

The boy hadn't noticed anything below the upper layers, and kicked at us furiously as he wormed himself into the endless grapple. Instantly, he had a dozen allies aiding his immersion. I felt for a horrified time the certainty that we wouldn't get him out in time. For even in our distraction, we got many glimpses of the deeper action of the fiendish congress. Several layers down you saw a kissing mouth that suddenly grinned and sank its teeth in flesh. A hand with a thumb and four bleeding stumps was seen to pound helplessly against a massive thigh. A rib broke under a powerful knee. From down there you heard the smothered undercurrent of a different oratorio, one of horror covered by the chorus of lust.

Wimfort gave us great thumping kicks of painful authority. When we could spare a blow from the rest, we parried him and struck at his legs to stun them. He sank under the first layer of stroking hands and worshipful lips, and suddenly pain stamped his face, and he howled. He began to fight like mad to become free, but now his allies had become his captors.

In desperation I drew my sword. I lopped off a man's arm, another's foot. Mercifully, this sent a shock through the massed orgy-arms recoiled and torsos writhed away. This helped Barnar as much as it did Wimfort, for several thralls had gotten arm-locks on my friend's neck, and in the last instant before he was freed I saw his left ear bitten off flush with his head.

I must say that Wimfort, when he had his feet under him again and his club restored him, began to ply this weapon with a vigor that greatly sped our passage through and exit from that region. This performance had purchased him a measure of forgiveness from our hearts by the time we had sat down in a safe place to bind Barnar's wound.

But then Wimfort,

that prodigal youth, managed to squander all he had purchased in a few brief words. He was looking at us absentmindedly when suddenly his eyes narrowed, and a look of pleased discovery dawned on his features. He laughed triumphantly, in innocent enjoyment of his enemies' defects-for I must mention that, some years prior to this time, I had had the misfortune to lose most of my own left ear.

"Your ears!" Wimfort cried, and laughed again. "Now the two of you match!"

XVIII.

We gave ourselves another, shorter period of rest, until Barnar's wound had scabbed cleanly and stopped throbbing, and then, once again, we marched. Endlessly.

Long and long we marched. Unendingly we marched. We marched, and Wimfort nagged us.

The boy was unquestionably a great natural talent, if not an outright genius, in the art of complaint-tirelessly inventive, and completely shameless in the matter of interpreting his dissatisfactions as someone else's-anyone else's-criminal failures to content him.

And so we marched, and Wimfort, marching too, also nagged us, and at length the sheer influx of his voice, - relentless as the surf's assault on the rock, began to expunge my mind, scour away any thought of my own that tried to sprout from my fast-eroding brain.

"STOP!" I bellowed. "Stop right here, sit down, shut up, and listen."

Wimfort skidded down the slick, pink knoll I had just descended, and obeyed three of my commands. Given the loathsome wetness of this spongy terrain, I didn't insist on his sitting down. I said to him, "Now. Your mouth will remain shut, and your ears open, until I'm finished; First: you are aware of the Life-Hooks in us which hind us to Charnall, who is in your father's power. Second: you were present-though you may not have been listening, since the discussion concerned persons other than yourself-when we asked Gildmirth to remove the hooks for us. He told us that, as the hook is a primitive, st rongly talisman-linked spell, we stood a two-to-one chance of having our hearts ripped out if he removed the hooks from us without using the control-ring. Now here is the new bit of information I want you to have. A while ago Barnar and I had a lengthy conversation out of your hearing in which we pondered, at length, the relative merits of abandoning you, returning to the Privateer and taking our chances on the operation, so that we could win the freedom to escape this place without the burden of yourself encumbering our efforts. We weighed the merits of this course of action for a long time, Wimfort. Do you - understand my meaning? I am in no manner joking."

We marched on. I knew my speechmaking had bought us only a morose and temporary silence from the boy. I was undefinably uneasy, aware of a peculiarly sharpened rancor toward the boy, and aware that my patience with him was dangerously frayed, while at the same time I acknowledged that, though intolerable, he had been no worse than usual lately. Moreover, I deeply disliked this zone we had recently entered, and yet so far it had been remarkably free of dangers and difficulties alike.

I couldn't discover what it was about the place that had my back up like this. It had quickly become clear that the impossibility of precisely retracing the path of our descent had resulted in the deeper penetration of an area which, evidently, we had encountered only peripherally before. And though this left the dangers of the leagues ahead an unknown factor, at least the unfamiliar territories were proving no more perilous than the remembered one had been. Here, for instance, in these wet, pillowy fields of rosy tissue, it was easy enough to fall, so ridged and seamed the stuff was, so scalloped, wrinkled and whorled-but then it was nearly impossible to suffer hurt from a fall on such moist, blubberous ground. The prospect was wide and unthreatening. Here and there from the twisted, velvety billows rose huge buttes and mesas of the whitest, smoothest stone we had ever seen. Out toward the limit of our vision the plains could be seen to grow smoother and paler, and to be thinly forested with some kind of growth.

We found that whiter zone to be sharply demarcated from the pink one. It was a wholly different material, tough and dry, and faintly resilient. And it was quite smooth, save for a system of shallow striations that printed on its surface vast, swirled patterns reminiscent of the wave lines the wind engraves on untrodden sands.

As for the treelike things that sprouted from it-quite sparsely at first-they were harmless things, but inexplicably repellent. Their substance-wet, purple twists of bundled fiber-resembled nothing so much as raw meat, thick strips of it all torqued and braided together in rubbery stalks and flaccid branchings. Pythons of translucent, silvery cord were complexly spliced throughout this tree-meat, and their network corruscated faintly, with a rhythm roughly matching that of the trees' movement. For all these growths stirred vaguely in the windless air, and faint, intricate shudders of torsion incessantly agitated their limber frames.

The ground began to rise. The trees grew ever denser and ever bigger. As the sticky forest closed in above and around us, my oppression of spirit grew almost crushing.

"Listen," Barnar said. "Do you hear something?" I shook my head angrily, and didn't answer. I had been hearing something, a slow-cadenced booming-vast, but also soft, diffuse. The grade got steeper. We wound through the carnal jungle up toward what promised to be a major ridge-crest.

When we topped that crest, I saw everything in an instant-my own stupidity first and clearest of all. The land fell away before us in a broad, shallow valley more thickly forested than the r idge, and wi th a di f ferent growth-with black hair, jungle-high. Erupting from the valley's basin at its farther end was an immense mountain. Its crest was lost in the phosphorescent gloom of the subworld's vaulted ceiling, but its smooth and tapered shape was immediately identifiable. One stark vein ran up across this mountain's face, and a swarm of aerial entities hovered near the vein at about its midway point It was the mountain we had been hearing, and whose thunder now rolled unhindered across the shaggy - lowlands-a thrumming, buzzing knell; a sound as of a million bowstrings simultaneously loosed. Wonderingly, Barnar said: "We've found-we are in-the giant Sazmazm." I nodded, still gazing. Then we jumped, our wits returning to us at the same moment. We whirled around. Wimfort was gone.

Though we failed to pick up his trail, there was at least no doubt about the direction the boy would be taking.

He would be impossible to spot until he reached the clear ground at the mountain's foot, the very threshold of his lunatic desire. Seeking him en route in the giant's snarled pectoral pelt would be futility itself, giving the young idiot plenty of time to destroy himself-and thereby us-unhindered when he reached the perimeter protected by Sazmazm's tertiary slaves.

So down we went, and threw ourselves into the arduous, oily struggle, which was hard enough to let us hope that our greater strength would enable us to reach the mountain before the boy. Our bejungled approach denied us any chance to view the situation we were nearing. When at length we stepped onto clear ground again, we were in a scorched, war-torn zone, hideously heaped with the wreckage of war, and beyond these intervening dunes of dead, the visible part of the mountain bulked huge, fearsome in its nearness.

We stood numb awhile. Some high point had to be reached from which we could overlook this cyclopaean disorder.

"The best thing seems to be to look at what we're dealing with," Barnar said bleakly. "And then try to - anticipate where he'll choose to make his rush."