A flux of larval feeding was just then tapering off-an after-ripple, no doubt, of a wave of Foragers returning to the Nest with their plunder. Everywhere the larvae's jaws worked furiously with a wet noise of mastication.

This meaty murmur was embellished by demon utterance, muttered or shrill, as tough subworld entities surrendered fragment by fragment to larval greed. What had caught Barnar's eye was a huge chunk of torso, a blackish meat marbled with veins of incandescent green, which still writhed in the jaws of the Nurse that staggered under its mass. The size of the creature it had been bitten from must have been immense.

"The Foragers are surely dire indeed," I murmured, "to have slain whatever that was part of." We had been told, of course, that members of the Forager caste were made on a scale that dwarfed all other workers.

"You there! Hu-u-umans! Help me!"

Barnar and I spun around. Another Nurse was just then passing behind us, and for a dizzying instant it seemed that this giantess had hailed us with this reedy outcry. But after an instant's stupefaction, we saw that the voice proceeded from the wad of mangled demonmeat which she bore in her jaws.

From a hash of several demons chewed into one pulpy ball, there thrust out the head, shoulders, and one writhing limb of a still-living demon whose body had been mangled in with the others. It was this creature whose warbly voice accosted us. His head was encrusted with an opulent jewelry of eyes, whose glint pierced the fungal gloom as he was borne past us. "Stalwart tappers! L-u-uminous Heroes! Save me, and I will make you rich past the wildest dreams of avarice!" Barnar and I exchanged a look. Did I appear as startled, as nakedly greedy, as he did? We both hastily assumed suitably grave and skeptical countenances. "What else would it say, after all?" I noted.

"Of course!"

"Still," I prevaricated, "As the old saw has it: 'Who knows the bournes of demon pelf?' "

" . . . 'Neither Man nor demon self.' " Barnar finished, nodding. So we trotted after the Nurse, reassuring each other we would merely indulge our curiosity by inquiring of the demon precisely what he was offering.

"We should keep firmly in mind," I urged, "that we already have a wildly lucrative enterprise in hand. We must not be seduced by desperate promises. Because almost surely, whatever this demon has to offer, the payment will lie in the subworld and will somehow involve our carrying him thither."

"Precisely," Barnar nodded. "On the other hand . . . what can be lost by interrogating this demon? His kind are studious of Behemoth lore. Demons know their conquerors in detail. We may learn a bit, if nothing else."

"Let's hurry, then," I said. "It looks like it'll have two grubs on it."

The Nurse had bestowed her burden between two larvae, which mouthed up to it on either side. The eye-- jewelled demon writhed on the crest of this food-lump, his broken hindquarters inextricably anchored in the mass. His limb (a tentacle with a three-clawed tip) desperately signaled us. His mouth was a membranous vent in his throat, whence once more came his ululant voice. "Quick! Oh quickly, Exalted Ones! Wealth past telling I promise you! Oh, hurry! If they eat my head, I'll be blind!"

"That sounds highly probable," I told the demon. The Nurse had left-we had a clear field of action. "But I'm afraid we must require you to define precisely what you mean by 'wealth past telling.' And you'd best be quick about it, I think."

The demon gaped a moment. His eyes were a wild mix, each distinctly charactered, and a little multitude of individually evil minds looked out from these mixed eyes. His mouth-vent moaned, and then renewed his reedy plea: "The Unguent of Flight! I can put in your possession the Unguent of Flight! If I prove to lie, feed me back to these brutes!"

Who would not have called us credulous, in acting as we then did? But what is great luck, if not highly - unlikely? We advanced on the food-clump, sword and axe drawn. "Oh yes!" the demon cried. "Cut me free at the ribs! Oh, hurry!"

I reached the demon my left arm, which he powerfully gripped. The sucking larval jaws now scissored quite close to him from either side. I pulled him outward, and Barnar chopped through his chest's mangled axis with one shearing stroke of Old Biter.

We took our demonic fragment to a little recess in the chamber wall and laid him on the stone. The bleeding stump of his amputation scabbed over almost as we spoke, and in moments his stump was sheathed in a tough, dry bark. Head and shoulders, one limb-he lay there and glittered up at us his eyes of a hundred different beings, a hundred alien hungers. His mouth-vent, moist and urgent, pleaded, "Plant me! Just plant me, anywhere in subworld soil. I'll root! The Unguent of Flight, in return, is easy to be had, and not deep in the subworld at all, by a safe path I know." Barnar and I shared a knowing look here. The demon grew more urgent. "Bear me for your guide, oh Radiant Ones, and I will give you power to swim the air! I am your humblest, most abject servant, your doting Ostrogall by name!"

Well, sure enough, here was the proposition we'd foreseen: a quick little journey down to the nest-mouth, and out into the subworld. And for what prize now? The Unguent of Flight, a priceless treasure in itself, and a ready means to further wealth! The sheer, mad unlikeliness of the prospect perversely made me feel it might be genuine.

"We can promise no more than to think it over," I answered our truncated interlocutor, this abbreviated Ostrogall. "You will have to abide our leisure to consider your proposition, and in the interim you must vow to cause no mischief."

Ostrogall fervently agreed. He then set to slathering us with effusive flattery, and though he was silent at our command, his vigilant presence, riding in a loop of my loosened weapons belt, still compromised our sense of privacy. Thus, when we returned to our operations nook, I popped Ostrogall (with his effusive assurances that he would be "quite comfortable") into a stout leather supply bag, and hung this from a peg on the wall.

IX.

Through years and years a young lad flees And whips his team that breasts the seas.

WE SAGGED into our hammocks, and into the silence that had grown our habit at this hour. But tonight we could almost hear each other's minds racing. "How chances multiply, sometimes," I ventured, "and set us branching off from our first intent!"

"Aye. Though surely we must stay on the branching that leads to the Royal Brood Chamber, and the giants'

pap, for there our least doubtful fortune lies?"

"Of course! But in this pattern of constantly emergent opportunity . . . I feel something here I scarcely dare put into words, Barnar. I feel Our Time is coming!"

"By Crack, Key and Cauldron, Nifft, you speak my very mind!" We both sat upright in our hammocks now.

Barnar's eyes revealed to mine a glint of cautious glee. "We've both been feeling it, haven't we?" he went on.

"Here and now has come to us that truly golden moment in our professional lives. When we came down through that gangway-nay, when we first contracted to help my feckless nephew, with that first inauspicious step-we passed through that Door that is only once opened to a craftsman in all his life. Luck herself invited us down here under the earth, and down here, Luck means to do us well beyond our power to imagine!"

"I have felt the same, old friend," I solemnly answered. "The very same."

One must not speak too much aloud of Luck, most especially when She hovers nearest, but when we'd lain back again, Barnar could not forbear giving his suppressed excitement some vent in speech. "Suppose we get even a little luckier than what we now contemplate? Say we made just one or two hundredweight more than six hundred? With eight hundredweight, we could forest the heights and the barrens as well as my clan's holdings, just as you said, Nifft. Then, if the Ham-Hadryan, and the Magnass-Dryan clans should, through some accord, unite their endeavors, our mills would reap such wealth from Shallows' shipyards, (See Shag Margold's Inter- jection) that your venture to the Tomb of Pelfer could be undertaken within a twelvemonth's time."

I was stung to find him still so placidly putting in second place the glorious exploit that I burned to undertake.

"We would be prudent, I think," I sneered gently, "to bank nothing on the desperate promises of a demon. Lucky we may feel, but we might not prove so, stumping down to the subworld with that polyocular abomination tucked under one arm."

"I mean only," Barnar said patiently (but I could tell he was stung in turn), "that opportunities seem to be opening to us at every turn, and among them may well come something which makes us richer yet."

I was not of a mind to answer. After a moment, Barnar said, "Let me tell you a story, Nifft, about a man we both know-a man who is dear as a brother to my heart. This man is called Nifft the Karkmanhite, but though Karkmahn-Ra, Jewel of Pardash, herself the Queen of the Ephesion Chain, is his chosen home, he was in fact born at the little harbor of Ladrona Bay on Samadrios, a lesser Ephesion and the southernmost isle of the Chain."

"Spare me," I complained, though I knew he must have his turn.

"Winds from the glacial maelstroms frost Samadrios' southern shores," Barnar resumed, "but little Ladrona with her cosy bay on the isle's northern coast had a brisk but temperate clime, and bustled with trade. Ladrona's dire fate in the end was conversely the making of Nifft. To know the man, you must know the boy who saw that city's death.

"His family ran a harborside hostel, and it was Nifft's fortune on the morning of his city's death to have driven his father's wagon up into the hills on the weekly trip to the brewery. The lad had taken on the casks of ale and small beer he had been sent for, and had just started along the ridge road back down to the harbor, when he felt the earth jolt under him. The whole island did several sharp dance steps on the ocean floor, and the wide sea around it convulsed like flesh that shudders.

"The lad stood amazed, fighting the reins of his rearing team. And then he saw the ocean rise into a single mountain of infinite width, and march toward his world.

"Now he lashed his team on again, plunging down harborwards, while his unbelieving mind still hung behind him, hawklike on the sky, beholding the sea's vast, glittery onslaught. In his blind haste it insanely seemed to him that if he just reached home before the wave smote it-if he could just burst into the hostel and cry, 'Father!

Mother! The Ocean is coming!'-if he could just reach them with a warning, then the disaster would be halted.

"He was still high in the hills when the great maw of foam thunderously swallowed Ladrona Bay at a gulp.

Still Nifft lashed his mad team downward, as if moved by the same unstoppable fury as moved the sea. As the road crossed a little upland valley, the leaping sea came avalanching up over the ridge and snatched him, wagon and all, up into a boiling cauldron of weedy brine.

"For long, unbelievable moments his team crested the boil and dragged his wagon through it, he wielding his whip like Benthodagon in his sea-chariot of Aristoz legend. It was the wave's highest reach; it receded, leaving in the valley a salt lake where, nostrils flaring, eyes glaring, the team at length drowned and dragged the wagon down, and Nifft, a lifetime older than he had been seconds earlier, swam dazedly to higher ground.

"Ladrona was scoured from the shore. Not even the foundations of his family's hostel remained. Not long - after this, Nifft apprenticed himself to a travelling acrobatic troupe, and he has never once returned to the isle of his birth. But perhaps it is equally true to say that he has never left that foaming lake in the hills above drowned Ladrona-has never ceased lashing his team through the waves, to stay ahead of drowning.

"For when has Nifft ceased from wandering? When has he ceased to push restlessly from exploit to exploit?

Whatever he has, he seeks always a further prize. And it is with just this in mind that his good friend, Barnar Ham-Hadryan, urges him: at some point even the greatest craftsmen must say of someplace: Here I will abide- this place I will cherish as my own. For what will Pelfer's Buskins and all the rest bring, but further wandering, further seeking? Whereas on Chilia, in my natal mountains, we have a paradise to resurrect, and then, inhabit!"

I had to endure in patience a ploy I'd used myself, but I was hard put to hold my tongue. When I answered, I struggled to hide my irritation. "Isn't it enough, Barnar, that we first vowed to seek Pelfer's Tomb, and that my vow of the Witches' Seed came second? Can we not lay this painful controversy to rest on this simple principle of priority?"

"Come to that, Nifft, why should not the more recent undertaking be the more binding?"

Discussion was useless. Silence fell again on us. Out in the nursery chamber echoed the whicker and whisper of huge chitinous legs most delicately a-dancing, and the sounds of grubs wetly mouthing, and of demons faintly crooning their annihilation. The murmur of the Nest's mighty life gradually, gently rubbed my thoughts away, and I sank into sleep.

But some time later, from the deeps of that sleep, a little noise tickled me awake. I lay for a moment listening to it. When I stealthily arose, I found that Ostrogall had got his whole limb thrust out of the mouth of his bag; his industrious little claws had almost untied the bag's binding.

I roused Barnar and we held judgement over the fractional demon. His gush of verbose apology was silenced by Barnar's gesturings with his axe.

"Already you have abused our trust," I told Ostrogall. "You now swear you will suffer any punishment to reinstate our tentative agreement. Very well. We must insist on precaution. You must be quit of that remaining limb of yours if we are to keep you here in our quarters. If this is unacceptable to you, we will be glad to return you to those grubs."

Ostrogall scarcely paused. "Agreed! Agreed, if it must be! I need only my neck, and just a bit of chest to be planted by, but that's quite enough, as long as you will plant me. I humbly accept the precaution. Just give me a fair hearing on the matter of the Unguent when you are so inclined. Question me, and I swear you will be persuaded. And once you are aloft-once, Oh Effulgent Ones, you have the Unguent, and are soaring at will high up among the winds, you will bless the day our paths crossed down here. You will see, my Benefactors!"

So he extended his limb, and Barnar lopped it off. We returned him to his bag, bound this double tight, hung it high, and went back to our hammocks, and our interrupted sleep.

X.

Who goeth to the Mother's breast Of greater Life to sup, Oh, tread ye nimbly through the Nest!

Oh, firmly grip thy cup!

EARLY ON OUR FOURTH DAY in the chamber, I teetered atop a half-deflated grub, waiting to free the valve and ease the line back up to the ceiling. As the grub gently, steadily sank under me, I gazed over the larval shoals. Barnar, returning from signalling for suction on this our third larva of the day, came climbing up to keep me company.

"It's more than a momentary flux," I told him. "I'll swear it! The place is . . . seething! Look where one comes for the empty already." A Nurse, just a spearcast off, loomed down to devour the plundered bag of our second larva of the morning. The whole chamber bustled with activity; feeding was going on everywhere. Nurses and Lickers sped in every direction. We'd found things in this state on our awaking, and for hours now the spate had not slackened.

Barnar agreed. "It's all the pupae that impress me most. It has to mean a . . . population surge, does it not?"

We stood thoughtful as the grub deflated. What else could it mean? On our first days here we only occa- sionally saw the pupae carried out by Nurses. Pupae were constantly forming; matured, full-fed grubs grew quiet and developed a thick sheen of exudate which, in a day or so, hardened into the pupal husk. These pupae were carried off by Nurses to the eclosia (so we had been told), where the callows would hatch and be nursed up to adult size. But now, any time and anywhere we looked, we saw more pupae being carried out. Correspondingly, new larvae were being incessantly brought in from the Incubaria. Barnar hesitated, before adding, "Our friend in the bag is most urgent for an audience with our effulgent selves. While I was signalling just now he was wheedling me through the leather, telling me there is a very 'significant stir' in the Nest."

This awareness in the demon-nub, bagged as he was, reminded us that demonkind possessed valuable insights into Behemoth's ways. "Well," I suggested, "let's go back and chat with him." We untethered the suck-line from the empty we stood on, and went back to the nook.

Hanging blind in his bag, still Ostorgall was a w a r e o f us, though we approached quietly to test him. "O Effulgent Ones! Dare I address you? Dare I share with you my humble concern for your safety?"

What could we lose by hearing his gambits? Unbagged and propped on a ledge, Ostrogall looked as healthy as ever. His recent amputation was smoothly and toughly scabbed over. An oily light of alien solicitude sparkled in his hundred eyes.

"Gentlemen, only my fears for your safety make me thus importunate, for is not your salvation also my own?

As my liberation is your enrichment? I urge only this: if you mean at all to travel through the Nest, then undertake it boldly and at once, for past all doubt, I sense some great business is astir in this Nest. A yeasty ferment is at work, their numbers grow-I feel it! And at such times, sirs, the corridors thunder with traffic, and grow ever more perilous for travellers of our slight size!"

"You seem to imply," I answered, "that our carrying you down to the subworld is a settled thing, but I, for one, am far f rom decided. Tel l me this, Ostrogall: Do the Younger Umbral's verses, describing the Fl ight of Forkbeard, - accurately represent the Unguent as being obtained by squeezing certain tubers grubbed up from the garden of a giant swamp-waddle?"

"Forgive me," meekly fluted the demon-nub, "but I really cannot say."

"You really can't say?" Barnar raised his brows. "What of Cogiter's dactyls? Do these rightly report the Unguent as being the product of a hirsute, odoriferous fruit that grows on the walls of caverns in the floor of the primary subworld, as expressed in the couplet: 'Deep grottoes papilla-ed with bulbulous swellings-fruits better for squeezing and draining than smelling'?"

"I must, with inexpressible regret," Ostrogall faintly piped, "profess myself powerless to respond to your query."

"Well, what can you tell us then?" I urged. I seized him up by the neck stump and we went out into the open chamber with him. "I so far find no reason not to tuck you back into the larval jaws from which we so impru- dently plucked you! What think you, Barnar? Which one looks hungriest to you?"

"Gentle saviors! Sagacious paladins!" Ostrogall bleated. "I can do no other than cling to my sole poor means of purchasing your aid. Men of your bold make would dare the place without my guidance if you knew where and how to look."

"That grub over there," Barnar suggested, "looks extremely hungry. See how she works her jaws? We want the demon's end to be quick as possible of course-we're not cruel men. Let's pop him in there."

"If you are bent on doing so, Masters, I must suffer it," the demon cried. "The grub's loathsome gut will - reduce me to a mash of quaternary spores, which will escape in its fecal matter. By little and little, some of these spores of mine will be tracked out in the tunnels, and thence to the subworld floor. It will take perhaps a century before I seed, and root, and bloom, and see again, but I will bear this long blindness if I must!"

In the end we rebagged him. Why not hang him up blind for a while, and see if his attitude evolved?

Moreover, in the last analysis, we did not feel his desperate reticence was wholly out of character for one who had a true treasure to protect.

At the same time, Ostrogall had succeeded in persuading us, though not to the quest he craved. He had convinced us of the danger of this rising pulse in the Nest-life, this fermentation. If we were to explore at large, it must be done now before this tempo grew any quicker. Costard must rest content with the sap we'd sent him. We must be off on our own greater mission, for two jarsful of juice worth three hundredweight of gold.

Our equipage was soon assembled: our arms, oiled and sharpened, strapped to our backs; two bandoliers each, these hung with some provisions, but primarily laden with dozens of the little skin bladders of orange dye that all tappers carry on their belts for touch-ups of their invisibility. We brought a large surplus of these, for splashes of the dye on the walls of the Nest tunnels could also serve us as path markers. In addition we had two hundred ells of tough, limber climbing-line each, and, most to the point, two leathern amphorae, stoutly lidded, discreetly provided us by Bunt for filling with the giants' pap.

When all was ready, Barnar sent the "pause-for-rest" code on the signal cord. No simple acknowledgement came back, but rather an impatient clatter of inquiry. We disdained to answer, but we did grow mindful of the gold in our lockless provisions chests, should bumptious Costard be moved to come down if we were long on our errand. So we staggered a half mile or so along the chamber wall with our wealth, till we found a safe nook to bury it in.

And so we stepped for the first time out into a Nest tunnel. We stepped out cringing, recoiling in advance from monstrosities which . . . did not materialize. We stood in high-vaulted emptiness, scanning a cerulean gloom that yawned away in both directions.

"Well," said Barnar, "let's be off. What is the slope, would you say? It looks dead level here." We were concerned in our explorations always to move up-slope, following the principle that Behemoth's most protected chambers lie highest in the mountains. By this reasoning, the Royal Brood Chamber must lie at the Nest's apex, above even these lofty strata of the larval chambers.

"Doesn't this way seem just fractionally . . . ?"

"Yes, I suppose so. Let's cover ground while it's clear like this." We were off at a jog-trot, squirting arcs of dye every few rods against the gallery walls. The emptiness of the tunnel grew ominous, almost unbearable.

Then . . . was that a tremoring underfoot? "Barnar, do you feel-"

"By Crack, Key and Cauldron!"

"Dive into this crevice!"

Thus began our introduction to the larger worker castes. That first one-for we came to recognize their features with some repetition-was a Digger, with huge, blunt, earth-breaking jaws. Its body had half again the bulk of a Nurse's. In moments, the unnatural void that had greeted our entry was obliterated by the thunder of repeated passings. Diggers, Sweepers, Carriers (whose immense crops made them provision-vessels to other castes), the colossal size of all these workers was only half their impact. Their speed was the other half-their speed and their reckless elan. Two workers running abreast might charge headlong at three others oppositely bound, and none would hesitate a jot. All of them would thunderously merge, and sunder, with not a bristle's width to spare, their glossy flanks whickering with glancing frictions, their giant, sharp-kneed legs pumping miraculously free of entanglement. Incessantly though these thunderous mergings occurred, they did not fail to awe us every time.

Equal to the awe of their onrush was the awe of their stopping. It seemed impossible such hugeness could come to such precise and absolute a halt as these giants could when confronted with a fellow worker's begging.

We learned that an individual of any caste could detain any other by bowing, as it were, and, in a crouched posture, twiddle her antennae in a ritualized gesture of supplication. The accosted one then either shared with the beggar food she carried in her jaws, or regurgitated into the beggar's mouth the macerated nourishment she carried in her crop. By such exchange, of course, does a subworld harvest reach every hungry one of a Nest's million mouths.

These sudden pauses in the flux threatened our rhythm, and we learned not to slow down for anything-to run hard when we were in the clear, to read tremors through our footsoles, and to dive sharp or shin quick up a veining in the wal l at the very f i rst vibrat ion of oncomers. We learned to guess the numbers and course of these oncomers, and move decisively before the danger was in view, for by then it might well be too late.