OUR FORAGER sped through phalanxes of demon defenders, and torn demonmeat sprayed like wake, the flying fragments trailing entrails like comet-tails. The terrain dispread before us might be called city here and there, where domes and ragged steeples seethed with tiny-distant shapes in turmoil. Jungle it was elsewhere, where towering tracts of foliage thrashed and tremored with veiled struggles. There were walled gardens where grew rows on rows of things in glittery, bright-hued soil, things with eyes and voices, and neck-cords straining with their desperate utterance. On flagstoned highways caravans fled amid armed escorts, their multibrachiate mounts all saddlebagged with bundles that twitched and bulged. Red rivers snaked through it all, plunging here and there into caverns, and all these foaming red rapids were thronged with demonkind, whether in vessels or their own aquatic nakedness, all woven in the subworld's red-clawed trafficking. And all was grievingly, weepingly beheld by the great alien Eye in the hellroof.

Foragers cruised everywhere, smiting down domes and towers, scissoring down tall-crested jungle skylines, bursting through the great plantations' walls, devouring caravans and guards and packbeasts alike, churning into the wild red rivers and rising with broken galleons dripping in their jaws. . . .

"Harken, Harpy," I cried to our captive. "What might you fish up for us here? We favor high value and relatively light weight. Gemstones come to mind."

To hear its hissed answer we had to lean low to our Harpy's hindquarters, and smell the creature's personal scent, which was not unlike a putrefying lizard's. "Use reason, sires! Can I pilot this monster? Gemstones and their like are easily had, they're common mulch in gardens-if this Behemoth but carry us there."

We sprawled a-tumbling, barely keeping a grip on the pinioned Harpy, which might else have gone rolling off our mount. The Forager had stopped short, and violently assaulted the earth with her jaws.

This was a stretch of rolling, rocky ground all studded with stone and steel trapdoors, burrow-mouths hugely hinged and barred, squat-built turrets, and bunkers of massy iron. Our mount began to rip out the lintel and frame of a trapdoor.

There were other Foragers assailing the many-portaled groun d , a n d w e s a w o n e o f t h e m i n particular-a silhouette at some distance- rear up to encounter an attacker. Shaken as we were by our mount's convulsive tearings at the stone, this remote encounter gripped our attention, for now we could make out the silhouette of that other Forager's attacker; it was fully as large as the Behemoth, and resembled an immense 'lurk, or running-spider.

But now beneath us gaped a corridor, deeply branching and sulfurously lit and thronged by multibrachiate creatures fleeing ever deeper. Into this, our mount plunged.

Down green-litten echo-y hallways we chased hordes of scaly, hooved brutes which, as they fled, deafened us with the trumpetings of their brazen, funiculate mouths. We swerved through a turning, and thrust into a high- vaulted chamber, richly carpeted, with facing rows of splendid doors and grand statuary. Amazingly, our mount attacked the carpet, seizing up huge flaps of it. The carpet bled copious purple gore where it was torn. She pulled mightily, and the heavy, hemorrhaging fabric slithered twitching through her jaws and into her crop. And as the carpet tore, a wave of mutation rippled down the magnificent corridor walls; doors and statues and ceiling vaults all shuddered and melted from their form, revealed in their upheaval as one continuous anatomy. Statues became probing papillae, doors the wet membraneous valves of mouths, floor and wall and ceiling all one unified, sinuous, cloacal tube of carnivorous tissue. Ridges of annular muscle swept peristaltically through the glassy demonmeat, whose labyrinthine veins surged inky-black in its death-throes.

If the weight of our Forager's huge meal had slowed her, we failed to note it, and were knocked sprawling once again by the suddenness of her wheeling round and surging surfacewards.

"List! Oh, list!" the Harpy malodorously hissed, and we crouched hearkening. "Her crop's half full now.

She'll feed more, but will be soon enough returning. If you mean to use me, let us stand ready!"

We tethered the demon by the neck, and bound its legs, which, though skinny, had strength and flexibility to uncollar it once on the wing. Our mount was speeding now towards a walled orchard. "Do your gathering with your jaws," Barnar told the Harpy. "A false move and we'll break your neck. Bring us up wealth enough, and we will set you free."

Barnar and I traded a covert look here, for we had both, in the same instant, seen a further way the Harpy might be useful to us.

"Agreed!" the Harpy gasped. "Look how she makes for that plantation-your wish for jewels may well bear fruit, oh Honest Masters! I hope I may without offense, and fervently, ask you for solemn assurance of your intent to reward my earnest endeavors with the restoration of my freedom."

"We would not dream of denying you such assurance," I told the demon distractedly. Our course towards the orchard was bringing us nearer the silhouetted combat we had glimpsed just before plunging underground. But it was combat no longer. The Forager crouched paralyzed. The spider straddled it, the tip of its abdomen waggling as it bound its prey in shadowy shrouds of webbing. We shuddered at the sight, but were soon enough distracted, as the orchard wall towered swiftly near. "Down!" I bellowed. "Hold fast!"

We dropped, and gripped our harness. The wall exploded; its huge ashlars tumbled across our dreadnaught's dorsum like giant dice. We were through the wall, and speeding across a soil of purest gemstones that crunched like gravel underfoot.

True demon jewels, their colors blazed completely unaltered by the vinous hue of the subworld's light- colors for which no earthly names exist, colors like lascivious caresses, prurient osculations of the optic orbs.

From this dazzling soil of gems grew rows of taut-muscled saplings, each one rooted at the groin in the brilliant substrate. These trees were multiply headed, though every head mouthless; their branching necks strained to give utterance to a voiceless woe; their polyglot limbs futilely grappled the air.

Our Forager was not bent upon this crop itself, but toward a cluster of huge shapes in the middle distance.

Finding her steady in her course, we unbound the Harpy's wings. "We can work off her shoulder at the gap in her legs!" Barnar cried. Though her seared-off leg-stump rowed powerfully in rhythm with the other limbs, its truncation gave us a gap to play our line through. The Harpy took to the air, and we paid out some two hundred strides of line, about as much as we could easily manage the drag of.

"Don't let the line foul in its legs," I shouted to the Harpy, "or you'll be pulled in and trampled." Disdaining to reply, the demon executed an out-arcing, in-sweeping dive. It seized up jewels in the ample grip of its jaws, and we hauled in slack as it swooped up and back.

Again and again our Harpy angler dove, and with each return it streaked low in front of us and spat down a hefty spill of gemstones. While Barnar managed the Harpy's tether, I began to collect the gems in the leathern, lidded amphorae we had brought for the giants' pap. Our mount neared her quarry; the demon agriculturalists, or at least harvesters, of this infernal orchard. They were giant slugs, moving in slow formation, inching down parallel lines of the struggling trees. Their slick, mottled hide was just such flesh as we had seen being fed to the grubs in our larval chamber. Each slug glided down one line of plantings, feeding. It slid sudsing along on a tongue of slime, engulfing its slow, savoring way down its row, leaving behind black stumps where movement and struggle had been, and every so often, emitting from its anal pore a flatulent spew of fresh, bright gems.

"We're closing," rasped the Harpy, hovering near us. We allowed it to alight, till the first shock of impact was past. The foremost slug, its stalked eyes thrusting belatedly toward our Forager, was jolting ponderously to a halt, trying to reverse direction amid a great froth of agitated mucus, but our mount was upon it, shearing off half the huge molluscoid's back in one bite, exposing the wet work of its globular heart, toiling nakedly in its broken cavern of innards. The Harpy, looking behind us, was flapping furiously, and hissing.

A huge spider approached us, abdomen bobbing amid the graceful arches of its dancing legs. Above the twiddling, shaggy-sleeved horror of its fangs, its eyeknobs were mounted like a wall of merciless black gems, the biggest topmost.

"Batten down!" Barnar and I shouted at each other. We lay flat and hugged our jewels. The Harpy spread a wing to help contain the heap that was as yet unbagged. Our Forager, though a leg light on her port side, none- theless wheeled majestically to do battle.

Looking up some thirty degrees of inclination along our mount's lifted head, we saw the rearing spider loom above us, saw it strike.

And as it struck, the Forager's great fighting jaws scissored. They seized the fangs crosswise and sheared them off. The fang-stumps bled venom which smoked ruinously down on the Forager's jaws, melting great wounds in those huge, spiked mandibles.

Our Forager, unfazed, ducked and thrust more deeply under our attacker. The spider, seized at the waist where flat thorax joined bulging abdomen, was lifted off half its legs; the foremost quartet of them trod the air, all tractionless.

But hoisted thus, the spider could reach down along the Forager's ridgeline, and strike her carapace with its sheared-off, unequal fangs. Had these been undamaged, they might have punched through even our mount's adamantine exoskeleton. Even as it was, when the wounded fangs struck, the splash of poison fanned hissing and smoking across her back, and some of her armor cracked deeply with a stress-groan like a ship's hull half stove in by a rock.

We scuttled frantically back to the Forager's waist, dragging as best we could our spill of jewels. Our little world heaved as the Forager flexed her abdomen for leverage and counter-thrust. In her jaws' slow, grinding pressure, the spider's mid-joint crumpled. Still the monster 's fang-strokes fel l , their st rength and venom dwindl ing, though the relentless murder never faded from the eight black ice-moons of its eyes.

Then the arachnid broke; its legs crumpled into a crookedly twitching bouquet. It was flung down. The hairy bag of its abdomen, undefended, our Behemoth ripped wide open with her poison-scarred jaws. Thrusting her head into the bristly bag, the Forager guzzled long glutinous coils of pallid stuff which appeared to be connected to the twitching monster's spinnerettes. Apparently, our Forager feasted on that which would have mummied her, had she fallen prey.

At length, she turned from this feeding back to the sundered slug, and fed on this molluscoid until her crop could hold no more. We made a few more passes with the Harpy, but once the Forager set out on her return, her sole aim was to bear her precious booty of nourishment back to the Nest, and such was the undeviating energy of her onrush, that Barnar re-bound the Harpy, and set to helping me cut lengths of line, and weave them into a sturdy net to hold our swag, which now formed an effulgent pile of heart-stopping bigness.

"It's as if . . ." he marvelled at our dazzling hoard while we worked, " . . . as if we've snatched a piece of the sun!"

XIII.

Behold them kiss their mother's side, A-suckling of her pap.

They wash against her like a tide That at its shore doth lap.

THE RAMPART was crossed, and fell away behind us, almost unregarded, so raptly we gazed on our lucent loot. Our mount surged over the plains unopposed, like the embodiment of our henceforth triumphant fate. Three hundredweight of demon gems! I felt immortal. Wherever my desire turned its eye, obstacles toppled, while stern Impossibilities bowed obsequiously, and withdrew. We could now afford a fleet of ships, and five hundred picked mercenaries. More! A flock of Gaunts could now be hired from the Astrygals-even Stregan or Hagian gaunts could be hired, damn the cost! And with these obedient horrors on the wing for us, Pelfer's tomb could be sacked in a single day's siege. I might stand actually shod in the Buskins of Bounding Absquatulation before two months were out!

And then, with Pelfer's triad of Facilitators, how swiftly could we plant our names, Barnar's and mine, among the very greatest in the Annals of Thievery! So bright could we shine that, when we were long gone to dust, our names would be sung in admiring melodies, by tongues whose languages are yet unborn.

I lifted my jubilant eyes to that looming, lunar Eye that wept its red rivers through every corner of this piece of hell. An indecipherable passion blazed from that eye, and bathed all below as in a warm mist of blood. How could I hope to read the emotion in that awesome orb? The black gulf of its pupil was a World-leak, a hole in the shell of the Cosmos of Man, where the winds off the stars breathed through.

Yet at that moment, I did feel I could read it. I thought I saw in that Eye a glee like my own. I thought I saw glee, along with that fierce absolute hunger of a hawk's eye that is reading a far field for food: the gaze of a power both random and absolute. I saw in that Eye in the hellroof the gaze of Luck herself telling me: "Yes."

I stole looks at Barnar, afraid to confront the different dreams I knew were enkindled in him. And he seemed on his part unwilling to encounter my gaze.

The Harpy, its legs still bound and its neck short-tethered to a piton, began in its ragged whisper to entreat us for its freedom. Barnar answered it kindly.

"Regrettably, oh Demon, we find that we require your help in one small further matter. You have but to render us this bit of additional aid, and you may expect your freedom with perfect confidence, and every-"

The Harpy interrupted with a heated burst of obscenity. It hissed some personal remarks so grotesquely disparaging to Barnar and myself, that I drew Ready Jack and clipped off a punitive inch from one of the creature's elaborate mouthparts. The Harpy's pentagonal pupil contracted in pain. "You have my silence!" it humbly hissed. "I wait to do your bidding, for I must."

Barnar and I traded one quick look, and spoke no more. Why compound the mad extravagance of what we hoped for, by speaking it aloud? Yet no hope seemed utterly mad for men who had just been carried through the subworld on a Behemoth's back, and laden with jewels, and brought back out again. Already the hell-wall loomed nearer, the mountain-roots darkly mouthed with Behemoth Nests.

"In this abyss we find our apogee of Luck." I whispered this to myself, like a prayer. We gripped our harness and our bale of gems. Our Forager surged up the mountain-wall.

"The instant she branches off our blazes," was all Barnar said, and "Yes," was my only answer. The moun- tain-wall snatched us steeply upwards. We hung gripping the harness and our gems, our sinews cracking. In the Nest, the instant our mount left our marked path we must grip the Harpy's tether and jump, and let the sturdy demon slow our fall as best it could with its wings.

On the other hand, our Forager's course might lie straight back up to the apex of the Nest, perhaps even by the path it had brought us down. . . .

Here was our Nest-mouth, vomiting and swallowing giants, looming larger, larger, yawning to ingest us. . . . We were in, and cruising through the multitudes in its entryway. We jumped to our feet and dragged our gems and the Harpy over to the gap where the Forager's foremost portside leg had been. I wrenched the Harpy's neck to have its whole attention.

"If we jump, demon, wing it hard for the tunnel wall. If you let us break our legs, we'll see that you're crushed to death with us on the tunnel floor."

"Is that our blaze?" Barnar cried.

"Yes, by Key and Cauldron! And she turns!"

Silently we watched the miracle unfold. The Forager hugged our dye-blazed path at every turn. Up and up she sped, never diverging, till at length we ceased to fear she would. This Nest, this vault of Power-our Forager was its key, a key delivered into our hands.

And at length, when we did branch from our marked trail, we'd followed it so high we knew the point of our divergence must be very near our larval chamber. Why dismount now, when the Forager's goal was so sure to be our own? With jets of dye, we blazed this newest path.

The tunnel climbed more steeply, and began to yawn bigger and bigger, as gallery after gallery merged with ours from every side. The multitude of workers was even greater here than down at the Nest's entry hall, but this throng was more various in make and size, for workers of every caste were here, converging-we could not doubt it now, surely?-upon their millenial Mother.

Still we worked gently up-slope, the thousands thronging around us in rivers of opposing flow, till there ahead of us we saw the yawning portal of a chamber which dwarfed even this great concourse of confluent tunnels.

And within that colossal cavern yonder, nested in its cyanic gloom, there lay a pallid, breathing hugeness that was Awe itself.

A central current in that titan throng caught us, and snatched us through the portal. And thus were we swept into the purview of the Nest Mother's glittery eyeglobes, and into the reach of her Royal jaws.

The Queen! Living immensity, more than planetary! Her abdomen's ribbed ellipsoid, all marbled white-and- black, bulged away in the blue shadow. It was a great island at whose shores whole seas of her progeny lapped.

Her Royal head, black as a lacquered battle-casque, at first appeared a stranded thing, resembling, in its relative smallness, a different being that had been half swallowed by that abdomen's egg-laying mountain. We approached the Presence on the river of other Courtiers and Supplicants.

We learned the true hugeness of the Royal head as she received her daughters' kisses. Forager after Forager, lifting her offering, was utterly dwarfed by the Queen's receiving jaws. For an interval of awe and rapture, time vanished in our stupefaction as we drew nearer. And then our own mount lifted her filial gift up to the Royal visage. The daughter's regurgitation shook us like a silken earthquake; she cast her demon-spoil into the sky- clasping arc of the Royal mouthparts.

The Nest Mother's nearness breathed a gust of eternity on us. These jaws were the Appetite of the Nest itself, a great furnace door through which armies of demonkind marched, that Behemoth might breed and brood and build, and scour still cleaner the upper floor of hell.

Then the Royal head reared-dismissing us, summoning the next. Our mount slid aside, and cruised in a current of her sisters that coasted down along the Royal flank. We sailed past hundreds of supplicant workers, all lifting their hungry jaws to the Mother's bulging side.

And it was their jaws that helped us see something that was hard to discern at first in the densely marbled whorls of white and black that blazoned the abdominal integument. But all at once, cued by the nursing brutes, we saw them everywhere: arrays of pores across the Royal flank, pores round as a potter's jar-mouths, each delicately lipped where the chitin came up in a slight circumferential ridge.

These pores, as I say, in their harlequin mottling, played seek-me-out with our eyes, but in a short time we began to find pattern: pores of a given size lay in roughly horizontal clusters; smaller pores lay low on the abdomen, while the strata highest on the flank comprised the orifices of greatest diameter.

"See them, Barnar?" I trembled. "Each caste has its level. Is Bunt's gamble won, then?"

"See their delicacy," breathed my friend, and I shared his wonder. To drink, the Behemoths closed their man- dibles, and lay the tips of them to the pores; the closed jaws, like quills' nibs touched to ink, pulled down the fluid in their cloven points.

"What tenderness," I shuddered in my turn. The nursing giants reared up, forelegs gently resting on the Royal flank, and delicately, delicately drank, as still as statues.

"Ah, look now, Nifft. Look, old friend. Foragers every one, is it not so?"

He referred to the cluster of pores that our mount now approached. Only Foragers nursed at them, drinking perhaps an ichor exclusive to themselves; drinking giants' pap, perhaps.

We'd already lashed our netted gems to the pitons. Our mount reared high, her dorsum a steep, glossy hill now. With some scrambling, we found our footing, as she softly sank the point of her closed mandibles into a slow, stickly exudation, like white honey, that we could now see oozing from the pore.

"Now, Demon, attend!" Barnar barked-and he faltered a moment, both of us startled by the strangeness of a human shout in this measureless chthonic brood-hole of the Mountain Queen. Before Barnar's exclamation, it had not seemed to be a silence that surrounded us; the march of tarsal claws on stone, the susurrus of whickering legs, the wet whisper of feedings, the slow thrum of the Queen's majestic heart-all this had not seemed to be silence until his human voice rang so sharp and alien in this speechless smithy of giants. We harkened to his echo which still hung in that vastness-distinct, eery, melancholy. It was the echo of a phantom's voice. We were phantoms, a race undreamed of by the titans; thirsty ghosts that haunted them.

"Quick then," I muttered to the Harpy. We had already emptied the gems from our amphorae into the net. We now had these leathern jars dangling from ropes, whose ends I put in the Harpy's elaborate mouthparts. "Your legs must stay bound," I told our captive. "But with your jaws you can easily manage these ropes. Drag the jars into the outflux of the ichor; if you once sink their rims in the pap, you can scrape the jars full of the stuff. You should contrive to fill them with a couple of passes. Remember how close your freedom is! Only do this well, and liberty is yours. Up now, and away."

The Harpy cringed obediently, not yet taking wing. The creature tremored with what was perhaps outrage.

"Pitiless masters," it gasped, "I obey! I obey! But oh this is cruel! Do you not see the dangers-"

"Harpy," I answered, courteously gripping the imp by the throat, "had we wings of our own, we would brave these dangers ourselves. As it is, do now, or die at once." The Harpy took wing, its malodorous pinions seizing the air like big, sinewed hands. Up it climbed, the amphorae dangling from its jaws. When it gained some two rods' altitude, we held its tether short. It tugged and gestured beggingly for more line, but we were loathe to give it more than we could firmly manage, lest the - demon contrive to snag it, and work itself free.

It hovered, studying the pore where our mount still nursed.

"Oh no!" gasped Barnar. "We didn't dye it!"

It hit us like a blow. There hung the Harpy, wings toiling, high, wide and hideous, directly above our nursing Forager's glittery blue eyeglobes. In our shock we stood doltish, staring, like casual spectators.

And nothing happened. Still the Forager funneled down pap, unperturbed.

The Harpy winged cautiously lower, and eased the leathern jars down on the pore. Then it winged lower still, to tilt the jars' brims down into the pap; in a moment, it had sunk the brims into the cloudy lactescence.

Now came some delicate wingwork, as the Harpy tugged the lips of the jars deeper into the exudate. To manage the oblique angle needful for this work, the demon hovered even lower, hanging not quite two fathoms above the Royal abdomen, and tugging, coaxing the jarmouths into the pap.

Something moved, something huge and sudden and night-black surged up from the abdomen. A ragged piece of blackness hugged bristly limbs around the Harpy, and snatched it from the air.

Even as it dined loudly on our hapless subworld servitor, the monster-doubtless some Royal ectoparasite-- remained more than half hidden in the pattern of the Royal hide. We made out barbed fur, like a Sucking Star's, and tree-thick palps or tentacles. The Harpy lifted once more that eerie, gull-like voice it had used with its own kind before we captured it; in this melancholy demon-song, it briefly declaimed the agonies of its demise.

We slashed the lead and flung it free. Our mount, as if dismissed by our failure, instantly ceased to imbibe the pap, and backed down from the Royal flank. She wheeled, and slid out into a current of sated workers that were out-bound from the Chamber. Throughout our long withdrawal from the Queen's immensity, we scanned the terrain of Her abdomen, and though detail faded in the murk our alerted eyes discovered-now here, now there, much that lived, and moved, upon the Queen.

Somber and silent, we crouched by the gap in our mount's legs, ready to jump, feeling broody, and rebuked by Luck, whom we had thought so wholly ours. The three hundredweight that we had just failed to earn from Bunt by obtaining the pap was more than made up by the value of the jewels we had captured, but this did not comfort me. Failure had flawed our fortune's smooth ascent. I felt betrayed. I blush now at this petulance, but so it was.

We had gone not a quarter mile out of the atrium of the Royal Chamber, when an oncoming Licker bowed low in our path, and with stroking antennae, begged our mount for food. Her crop was not empty, it seemed. She stopped, and leaned down to comply. Barnar and I tossed down our bale of gems, and jumped after it.

XIV.

See how faithless Fortune bleeds!

Our lustrous Future fast recedes . . .

See how Fortune's healed again!

Our purses wax! Our dolors wane!