A murmur of concern swept along the wall. Someone down the line reported seeing one of the hummocks containing the dormant carnivorous hatchlings stir, and tremble where it lay. For an indeterminate, unbreathing time, everyone watched the plain. The hillocks marking the self-inhumed monsters seemed universally unmoving. The thunderous impacts of the flock against the wall, never having ceased, returned to the general awareness. Missiles and hot oil resumed their rain-all but ineffectual except in a temporary way-upon the assailants. Pozzle and Smalling returned their gaze to the route the landau must be following to reach them, and when it came into view they found it to be remarkably far advanced toward them.

"Why such haste?" muttered Pozzle. "Some new catastrophe?"

"Here he is."

Breathless, Sexton Minor pitched from the landau and floundered up the causeway to the gate-side battlements. His manner, once he appeared, was of extravagantly elaborate discretion, and this drew all eyes upon him as he ushered the waiting pair over to a corner.

"A dreadful catastrophe has befallen us," he moaned. "Dame Lybis, in her excitement, didn't find the whole - passage. I had a feeling about it. I w e n t i n t o the Archives . . . and I found t h e r e s t o f i t , r i g h t n e a r where she had stopped looking when she discovered the first page. Look. Read."

Smalling seized the document. He held it so that he and Pozzle could read it together. When they had done so, both went to the posted copy of what Lybis had discovered in the archives the night before. They reread this, and then reread what Minor had just handed them. Taken from the beginning, the entire passage ran:

By foes disarmed, in death unhanded, Though all disjoint, still Pastur clutches The staff that he, in life, commanded, And still with moveless fingers touches That which shall make all harm be ended.

(Here the published fragment ended, and the Sexton's supplement began.)

For once each bone to each attaches Thereby is his death rescinded- Thus both his mind and might are mended, And 'ware ye then, lest down he reaches- What he pursues, great Pastur catches.

When they had finished their perusal, the two Aristarchs looked dazedly at Minor. The crowd of their fellows was now curiously following their actions.

"Where's Lybis?" Pozzle asked in a small and distant voice, his shock as yet embryonic, not fully born in his mind. "She must be shown-"

"Listen!" Smalling said. So closely did the pair have their fellows attending to them that his command was obeyed by the entire company of Aristarchs. Their heads rose, ears tilting inquisitively. From all along the wall a blurred roar of consternation welled. And nothing crosscut the sound. It was distinct from the most distant points of the wall-because the flock's crashing assault had ceased utterly. The Aristarchs surged to the battlements, whence the rest of the city already gaped upon the universally quiescent behemoths below. Even the dogged parties of thieves engaged in stripping the gold from the wall paused, astonished, in their shelters where they melted down their peelings. Somewhere a cry arose, and here and there it was taken up in accents of hoarse terror: "Out on the field! Look out on the field!"

The hillocks holding the self-encoffined carnivores were trembling and heaving. Loose soil drizzled from shining sarcophagi of black plates which were beginning to split open even as they wrenched themselves from their shallow socketings in the earth. The one most advanced in its struggles lay also among the nearest to the trench. The sun was just down-there were no more shadows on the earth, and the light was red-gold. Clearly the populace saw the encasement split lengthwise, and clearly too saw what dragged itself forth and gigantically unfolded itself, beginning to winnow dry its wide, membranous wings as it stood fully revealed before them. It was a Flockwarden, and relatively small though the secondary egg had been, it stood a third as large as the Goddess herself, whose pavillioned corpse, lying not far off, had carried for so long the undying seed from which it had sprung.

XIII.

By the time the light had faded, a legion of her kind had risen from the plain-and by that time, they had stood long enough, and their restive wings had so gained in dry resilience and eye-eluding speed of oscillation, that nothing appeared to hinder them from taking flight. But grounded they stood, vibrating with readiness, while their flock, separated from them by the chewn-down trench, shared their paralysis.

Once it was grasped that a heaven-sent hiatus (some obscure feature of these breeds' biological cycles, no doubt) was to be granted the beleaguered city, the multitude turned and bent its gaze on the acropolis, where the repair of Pastur's ancient amputation was being prosecuted energetically.

It was a dramatic vision that greeted the throng, and wrung a hopeful cry from it, a shout of excited - discussion-for the crane erected for the hand's assembly, working from a platform built on the edge of the giant's pelvic bone, was at that moment but one step from finishing its task-raising what appeared to be the last joint of the last finger, and dangling it some few yards from its point of juncture with the condyle of the next-to- last phalanx. Though the light was fast dimming, the sketch of lanterns and torches in which the scaf folding ensheathed the skeleton starkly displayed i ts form. I t was more anthropoid than not, but with certain striking exag- gerations or diminutions of the human scale in some of its features.

Its arms and hands were almost simianly massive and elongate, but withal the fingers were extremely - prehensile-looking, the fingers being four-knuckled, and the thumb connected by an exceptionally mobile- seeming joint to the metacarpal. The rib cage bespoke a stupendous chest of topheavy outline, with most of its mass displaced in an upward bulge. This was an arrangement that doubtless gave the arms a basis for the exertion of truly enormous leverage. Waistwards, the giant slimmed and his legs, though strong and shapely, were com- paratively small. As to the skull, while in sum it was more bulky than human make, it had its excess of bulk exclusively in the cranial bulge, whose ampleness seemed divisible into four distinct lobes of bone. Toward the tiny, delicate jaw the lower skull shrank radically. The giant's face must have been eerily, gnomishly small under the swelling of its brainpan. As for the delicate tapering design that marked every aspect of Pastur's hugeness, it was evidenced even in this final phalanx now being lowered to its assembly-crowning lodgment. For the bone was scarce four feet long, spare and graceful, completing a digit identical to its fellows in its limber strength of design.

But just then, perversely, the movement of the crane suffered a hitch, then paused abruptly. The bone, light though it was, had been faultily wrapped with the cable, and its sudden slippage in its noose brought the crane up short. The phalanx was swung back again to the platform and lowered to be reslung. On the wall the people groaned, and shuffled like a herd growing nervous to the verge of stampede.

Alone among the crowd a group of three men standing near the gate showed a doubtful, retrograde cant of body in their gazing up at the skeleton. The million leaned toward it, as if from a distance to impart their own strength to the effort of the crane-crew upon that culminatory bone. But Smalling, Pozzle, and Minor, through each moment that they regarded it, cringed anew from what they saw, or from something they were thinking of as they watched.

The crane rose again, and swung the now perfectly balanced fraction of the giant across the cerulean, torch-lit sky. The crowd yearned, in a movement as multiple and unanimous as phototropism in a variegated garden, toward that elevated spectacle. The phalanx drifted across and down. Two workmen were poised on catwalks to either side of the near-finished finger. They received it in the air and guided it downward, applying its condyle with delicacy-almost tenderness-in its proper orientation to that of the penultimate bone. The piece rocked into place, making a gentle, solid crack of impact, belatedly but crisply audible across the deserted city. A much vaster noise succeeded this one.

First there was visible a slight, sharp tugging-together of the skeleton, a magnetically simultaneous tightening that rippled through the whole immense fossil. This was followed, an instant later, by the noise: like that made by a vast, well-drilled army performing a turning movement, it resembled the oiled rattle of a hundred thousand shields, spears, and swordbelts. This washed down to the stunned multitu d e . A n d then the orbits of the recumbent skull filled with saffron pools of light, and s e n t t w o t o w ering, powerful beams of illumin a t i o n into the sky. The right hand g e n t l y c l o s e d u pon t h e w o r k m e n perched on it.

A new cry was arising, overtopping even the uproar this had kindled. For the legion of new Flockwardens was taking wing. In the next instant the herd had renewed its assault on the walls, and the staggering force of their impacts was such as made their prior efforts seem a curiously restrained performance. In the anarchy of mind that engulfed everyone for the next few moments, the approach to the north gate by a large aerial form went unnoticed. And then this apparition swept down and hovered just above the Aristarchs, to add to their already multifaceted astonishment. Astride the back of the creature-it was a new-hatched Flockwarden-sat Dame Lybis and, behind her, Nifft the Karkhmanite. The Shrine-mistress cried out: "Aristarchs! Townsfellows! Hark you, all my venal devotees, my greedy congregation-harken all ye dear, doubting, ducat-minded delvers into Pastur's rightful wealth and realm! I bring you the last sacral Pronouncement of my priesthood, indeed, of my cult itself. First, behold, if you will, Great Pastur!"

The injunction was ironic. All saw the giant sit up, saw it, with a curiously delicate gesture both deft and dismissive, reach down from the plateau to liberate the workmen he had captured amid the empty buildings below. They saw him, with quick, finicking movements of his fingers, brush from himself like cobwebs the scaffolding encumbering him. The weighty shards rang as they rained on the rooftops of the buildings below the acropolis, and the queer, delayed musicality of this was, in the crowd's stupor, as enrapturing as any of the more prodigious things they witnessed. For then, the giant stepped down from the plateau, spread his hands upon the plaza where he had just lain, and leaned there, his eye beams playing, as if musingly, upon his recent bed.

"And then, if you will-" Lybis let her voice echo and create a listening silence, then repeated herself, voice resonant: "And then, if you will, behold Pastur's Anvil, whereon he will work again as he once worked, and this time he will fashion, not the star-vessels of others, but his own, for he has wearied of our world, my erstwhile - parishioners! Exceedingly and abundantly is he weary of it. The Wardens will now marshall his flock, to whom gold is no real obstacle, to the swift and-if you choose it-peaceable dismantling of the city's walls. A squad of the goddesses now guards the harbor, and others patrol the other walls. You will work for Pastur, and you will work surpassing hard, and long though your toil will be, you'll suffer no harm from him if you obey him, and serve his forges. And now I bid you a farewell that is not untinctured by a sour satisfaction with your fate. Since I was sixteen, I have served an unthanked shrine where you regularly came scavenging whenever the Goddess chose to throw you the lucrative offal you craved. I have known the proverbial aloneness of the dedicated artist. I will grant that my solitary tenure was not unleavened by laughter, and I have had the further incomparable compensation that the flock, and the Goddess' unfettered will, were resurgent during my humble term of service.

Of these circumstances I have taken unflinching advantage, and am grateful that the honor of doing so has fallen to me, out of so many thousands who have served here. And now, Sexton Minor, you are to accompany me. Step forth!"

The Aristarchs recoiled from the Warden's smooth approach, which accompanied these words. Minor began to retire in equal confusion.

"What?" boomed the priestess. "Do you think you would survive residence in this vast slave camp, now that your complicity with me is thus widely published? Climb aboard or die here, it's as simple as that. Pastur has greater work in hand than the guarding of one miserable life."

The Sexton's passionate denials died in his throat. Gaping, he climbed up via one of the Warden's spiny legs.

The Goddess bore them upward, and Lybis shouted: "Now, farewell. Your new master will be setting to work now, and he will need his tools. You near the gate would do well to clear the wall when he comes for his hammer!"

Pastur swept his hands across his anviltop. This one brief gesture cleared it of all that crowned it. The Aristarkion mingled with the temple in the general wreckage he sent cascading down. Then, setting his feet with titanic delicacy upon the broadest open places amid the buildings, very few of which he crushed in his progress, he walked down to the harbor. He reached over the sea for his staff. His hand slipped into the same waters from which it had so recently been raised, and with a great tearing and sucking noise the rod came uprooted from the harbor-floor and towered in the starlight, shedding in fragments the dockworks that encrusted it. Its upper end, immemorially masked by the waters, was arched like a shepherd's crosier. A dozen of the Flock-wardens swarmed upward and perched atop the crook of the staff. The giant turned the beacons of his eyes upon the north wall of the city, and gestured toward it. The Wardens sped thither, and commenced clearing it of the astonished Anvilians, while Pastur advanced to take up his hammer, so long laid down.

"And so none of them had ever read that ancient variant of their city's name? Nor of Pastur himself? How very curious."

"Hm! I'll tell you, Shag, it's always been an exceedingly curious thing to me, just how incurious most people are about all save their own little island of time and place in the world."

"Yes. If the cult was guilty of systematically obscuring its own origins and traditions, it was at least not hiding anything that anyone was inquiring into very energetically. Indeed, the scholarly community at large has been none too vigorous in recording that temple's history. . . . Well! You've come well out of it at least. You understand of course that there's absolutely no question of my accepting a gift of that size." The scholar sternly indicated a little stack of gold bullion on the floor in one corner of the study. "The way you spend money, you're going to need that yourself before long."

"Well, if you're going to be stonefaced about it, you're just going to have to get rid of it yourself. Those bricks are heavy. I recommend that you only carry them out of here one at a time, and at long intervals. And anyway, what about this new treatise-has the Academy gotten richer, or aren't you going to have to help subsidize the printing of this excellent work, wherein my own humble name appears repeatedly, in ample footnotes?"

Margold glowered mulishly at his square, rather battered-looking hands. After a while, glancing up at Nifft's eyes and finding them both sarcastic and resolute, the historian sighed.

"And so. Where is Dame Lybis now?"

"Somewhere in the Aristoz Chain."

The scholar nodded, impressed. "I see. She sounds like one who will go far with that caliber of thaumaturgic - training."

Nifft's assent to this was accompanied by marked restiveness. He got up and went to the window as he - answered. "Absolutely my own opinion. It's caused me some worries, too, I'll confess to you. I love Dame Lybis dearly-I have the highest admiration for her person, her pluck and her artistry. But then too, she doesn't lack cynicism. Power she'll surely gain. She has the love of achievement, and the will to drive herself. If she will remain benign as she grows in power, that's the question I can't confidently answer."

Margold guffawed. His thick grey hair was wispy in a flame-like way, and for a moment his sea-weathered face seemed to corruscate with his enjoyment of Nifft's remark. "Remain benign, you say? By the Crack and all that crawls out of it-by Anvil Staff and Hammer! I like that! I truly do. Remain benign. When I tell that to my colleagues, I'll have to get it just right, the earnest way you said that!" The cartographer sat chuckling. Nifft arched a brow at his nails. Presently he chuckled a bit himself.

"I don't deny it was a grim game. Though they didn't suffer the death they marketed abroad so blithely, some of them at least might have learned what it was like to wish they would." The pair enjoyed this sally equally, and at some length.

"You know," Margold said at last, "your description of the giant, his bones' lightness . . . it is an odd thought, but perhaps those bones of his never did have flesh on them. Perhaps he was himself . . . the product of a forge, some distant foundry far vaster even than his own?"

"You mean, that he was some kind of vast . . . automaton?"

The historian nodded. "Remember, if we may trust the tradition, how he was destroyed. It is said that the landslide created by his ambushers did not . . . kill him-that he'd worked both hand and staff clear of the rubble, and would have used that formidable weapon to free himself in a short time more, had not their amputation of his hand broken his bodily integrity, and therewith his life. Care was taken to remove the hand far from the body, and cast it in the sea. A man who loses a hand does not necessarily die of it. But a clock with even one spring removed ceases to work, and will start up again should the spring be restored to the rest of the mechanism."

Nifft looked dreamily from the window. "So that all his work was for yet greater masters on a greater world?

Why not? A slave himself? But a terrible and beautiful creation all the same, Shag. I recall the last look I had of him-like some of those engravings you showed me of scenes from Parple's Pan-Demonion-whose were they again?"

"You mean Rotto Starv's woodcuts."

"Starv's. The same. Anyway, a day before we set sail, Kandros and I took Minor and Krekkit up on a Flockwarden just after sunset, to take a sort of good-bye look at the city, I suppose-as much for ourselves as for the old man and Minor, both of whom we'd come to like. At any rate, we flew up over the peaks to the south of town, and hung there looking at it as the light faded. It was something to fill you with awe, Shag, the armies of them, their desperate unison.

"The townspeople, I mean. They thronged the streets, and moved in that steady, always-changing-yet-the- same way a stream has. They served the same forges and foundries the town has always served-but they all served them. The flocks were off working a distant mountain, quite near Ossuaridon, in fact. Half the Flockwardens were with the flock, and the other half were patrolling the streets and the perimeter where the rubble of the walls was heaped. They were scarcely needed. Pastur's sole presence commanded every man and woman of them. He was resting from his labors. His anvil still hummed with the recent blows of his hammer, and glowing crumbs of metal were strewn atop it. He sat back on the hillside, his huge arms draped over his knees, the hammer held casually in his right hand. He was watching the city as a sightseer might watch a view. The chimneys smoked and the firestacks flamed as I, nor anyone else, had never seen them do before. His eyebeams played across the rooftops and the crowded streets, and from time to time, he raised them toward the stars."

After a silence, Margold murmured: "He had the flock working where he was buried with their ancestors? - Perhaps even then he was beginning his preparations to return home."

"Yes. One wonders what he will find there, after so long an absence. He seemed to be wondering too."

The Mines of Behemoth

For Linda, sweet Beloved!

For Della and Jake, so dear to us.

Shag Margold's Introduction to The Mines of Behemoth

MY OLD FRIEND, NIFFT, with a perhaps unintentional candor, has displayed a personal flaw or two in this narrative. I honor his memory none the less for it. The good of Nifft always overbalanced the ill, and just so here where, whatever slight moral shortcomings may appear in our narrator, he gives us in his tale the most vivid and enlightening natural history of the Behemoth's life-cycle yet put on record.

Hadaska Broode, a Minusk historian, has penned the following tetrameters in homage to Behemoth. While I cannot pretend the lines are accomplished poetry, they are at least heartfelt:

What dread Being dares to farm where every breed of demon swarms?

Who dares till there? Who shall go and scythe the harvest row on row?

Who in that sunless gulf of harms could drive the plow? Would dare to sow?

Behemoth's jaws alone the share to carve the flinty furrow there.

Behemoth's strength the reaper's blade, her bowels the barn where harvest's laid.

To hers, what husbandry compares, that has half demonkind unmade?

Broode's ardor for Behemoth is understandable in one of his nation. His native Minuskulons, though the smallest of the major island chains, loom large in the Behemoth sap trade, for they are the only landfall the Sea of Agon affords between southern Kairnheim, where sap is mined, and the sap's two greatest overseas markets: the Ephesion Chain to the south, and the Great Shallows to the east. The sap in its cake form is of course excellent fodder for kine and draybeasts the world over. In the Ephesions-on my native Pardash, for example- it is also used in its fluid state; a dilution is sprayed on our fields to enrich our somewhat lean soils. Meanwhile the Great Shallows' many sea-dwelling races use sap cake to mulch their mariculture and nourish their polyp patches, whelk beds, crab pastures, bivalve grottoes, and every kind of raft garden. The Minusk mariners who have flourished in this sap trade all know Broode's little poem by heart.

Given Behemoth's incredible utility to men-both in the havoc she wreaks on the demon race, and in the boon of her stolen sap-it is not surprising she inspires such paeans. The work of Kai rnish scholars ( thei rs another race especially in her debt) abounds with similar encomiums. Both these schools of Behemoth's most ardent admirers share a further accord. On the question of Behemoth's origins, Minusk and Kairnish authorities alike aver that the Mountain Mother was born of some now forgotten human sorcery.

I will perhaps be forgiven a smile at this. If Behemoth be the scion of some thaumaturgic science man once wielded, then how much less at fault we must feel to play the vampire in her nests, even as she scours the subworld of our demon foes? For if the Mountain Mother be the fruit of philanthropic wizardry, where's the flaw in getting double good of her? Is it denied a man to use his own wagon or draybeast to his profit? Kairnish folk might have the most need of this balm to guilt; in the northern reaches of their continent (as I have noted in my preface to The Fishing of the Demon-Sea) the subworld preys upon the overworld all too vigorously, and men there fall in great numbers to demonic predation. Meanwhile in southern Kairnheim, where Behemoth nests under the Broken Axle Mountains, the demon nation still reels under a millenial defeat at the jaws of the Mountain Mother's legions, even while the southern Kairns most vigorously steal her sap from her nests.

Yet those of the opposing mind, who argue that Behemoth was born naturally of the Earth, point to her form which, in all but the scale of it, is so common through the natural world. Many scholars of unimpeachable erudition take this side of the controversy. Etiolatus the Praiseworthy notes, "How can those who go open minded on the earth, feeling the heart of the planet murmuring against their footsoles, ever think that Queen Earth in her Robe of Stars could fail to breed of herself the cure for any ill that blights her? Demons infested her; she gave birth to Behemoth."

For my part, though I have profound respect for the Earth's powers of invention, I think the answer is unknowable. My awe and love for the beasts, in any case, is great. I find cause for rejoicing in the fact that the sinking of a new sap-mine is the difficult and costly task that it is. The lithivorous ferrecks used to dowse for larval chambers, and then used to sink the first shafts down to those larval chambers, are creatures akin to certain brood parasites within Behemoth nests, and are both fierce and highly dangerous to manage. In consequence, these ferrecks have been almost entirely preempted by the sorcerous sisterhoods of the Astrygals, who have the means to command the beasts' angry energies. The ferrecks then being hard and costly to procure from the witches, the proliferation of new sap-mines throughout the Broken Axle Mountains has slowed almost to the rate of replacement for old mines fallen defunct through the phenomenon of "nest wander." Perhaps the sorcerers of the Astrygals intentionally sustain this equilibrium. In any case, our rapacity is shackled, and we plunder Behemoth less gravely than we might.

All that lives is flux, and a question Nifft raises disturbs me: might Demonkind grow to engulf Behemoth?

The black yeast of demon vitality cooks unsleeping in its planetary cloaca; its vapors of infection float up fine as finest soot, soundlessly, steadily blackening, blackening what they blanket. Its patient twisting tendrils imperceptibly find purchase. . . . The reader will perhaps-when the fate of Heliomphalodon Incarnadine is learned, and Nifft's fears thereat-share my own unease.

Having touched on the question of human rapacity, I cannot close without confessing that it is with some misgiving I make public Nifft's account of the so-called "giants' pap" produced by Behemoth Queens, and of its apparent powers. Two considerations have persuaded me it is safe to expose this powerful substance to the greedy attention of entrepreneurs. In the first place, Nifft's narrative must tend to discourage exploitation. In the second, who but Nifft and Barnar, endowed as they were with rarest luck, could contrive to milk a Queen?

While I naturally shrink from burdening my dear friend's narrative (and the present manuscript is unmis- takably of Nifft's own composition) with an excess of commentary or exegesis, I cannot leave certain lacunae unglossed. But since a prefatory voice must fade from memory as the history unfolds, the best procedure seems to be to deploy a brief Interjection or two within the narrative. Thus commentary can lie nearer what it touches.

I.

We were still wet from Mayhem's maw When first those golden glades we saw

MY FIRST STEPS along the path that led me to the greatest fortune I have ever won, or could sanely hope to equal in the future, were inauspicious enough. That twisted and darkling journey commenced, for Barnar Hammer-hand and me, with an indignity, and then led straight to a disaster.

The indignity was that we were contracted to a stint of hard, dirty toil in a sap mine. The disaster fell when we were two weeks at sea en route to this uncouth endeavor. For just as we hove almost in sight of our inglorious goal, our vessel was swallowed by a bull glabrous.

One often hears this sort of thing about "inauspicious beginnings" from people relating strokes of great good fortune. It is my belief that Luck schools those she is about to bless by dealing them a preliminary box or two about the ears. Thus, with a draught of bile, she reminds their palates of the taste of woe, that Fortune's sweetness might ravish them the more.

Barnar's nephew Costard owned the sap mine we were bound for. Our dreary underground labor there would be in the way of a family favor, for young Costard had written that the mine was in difficulties. Our route lay northwards along the Angalheim Island chain, and the northerlies that scou r t h e s e isles all summer long had set o u r s a i ls a-spanking, and chased us smartly along. Now the Isle of Hadron dropped astern, and we were drawing close to Dolmen, the northernmost isle. Beyond Dolmen, we already had in view the rim of the Kairnish continent. There, in the Broken Axle Mountains, our destination lay.

Our vessel was the carrack of a Minusk cloth-and-oils merchant. She was a yare but smallish craft, scarcely six rods from stem to stern. She skipped from crest to crest, outrunning the swell, frolicsome as a shimfin when it runs breaching from sheer exuberance. The vessel's surge, the sunstruck sea around us and the gem-blue sky, were almost enough to cheer us out of the gloom that our coming toils had sunk us in.