More precisely, we confronted what filled the portal-filled it utterly, and bulged forth from it.

This Tolltaker, or at least that portion of one here presented to our view, was like nothing so much as a giant bud, whose tight-clenched petals were of a viscid, purplish meat that smelled like sun-cooked carrion. It lay as still as carrion too, until Ostrogall, startling me, gave utterance to a shrill ululation, apparently a greeting in some demon-speech.

At this, the bud delicately shivered. One of its petals stirred, and extruded from the rest like a great, reeking tongue. Embedded within was a ratlike demon-more like a captive than an anatomical feature, for it was netted to the tongue by purple veins that pierced and pinioned it. It opened a whiskered, edentulous maw and emitted an unearthly warble that answered Ostrogall's in pitch and cadence.

With an instant impulse of distrust, I slipped the carrying bag over Ostrogall's head, crying, "Silence, stump!

We are the seekers here! Make known to us, oh Tolltaker, what we must do to partake of the Unguent of Flight."

Assuming that this demon was tongued for human speech, as Ostrogall was, I was unprepared for the Secondary's readiness to meet all comers. The entire petal retracted, re-entombing the embedded demon, and another petal thrust forth.

Beside me, Sha'Urley gasped. Perhaps we all did. A beautiful young woman lay half sunk in this demon tongue, likewise netted in a piercing mesh of veins. The pallor of her face, her lovely breasts, had a womb-licked wetness, a natal sheen. I think the most piercing horror of this epiphany was her eyes, all dark and lustrous, knowing us, a living mind behind them, yet long centuries vacant of all hope. Her voice was an echo in an empty habitation: "Each seeker's toll," she hollowly pronounced, "is one of his limbs. You are five, and might alternatively render one of your number entire, to pay for the other four." Now another of the Secondary's petals protruded- this one the lowest of the cluster. It split open, presenting us a steamy, fanged mouth that drizzled caustic drool.

Evidently it was to this esurient orifice the owed limbs were to be tendered.

The proposition took us several stunned heartbeats to digest. I answered her. "You err, oh fair and luckless captive! We are six. And this demon here, though he lack a limb or two, is all entire of mind and wit. The life of him, the nasty devious will of him, the gist of him is quite intact. What if we render him? Surely he would pay for all of us? Or pay for my partner and me, at least?"

"His wholeness of mind is of slight import to my master," she intoned. "He is a head, no more. He would pay for one."

I had expected little more; meanwhile my offer outraged our companions, and woke a bag-muffled wail from Ostrogall. "Peace, all of you!" I cried. "One must test one's ground!"

Barnar leaned near me. What he murmured in my ear was purest inspiration. I beamed. I gripped his hand.

Again I addressed our tragic interpreter, while Barnar whispered to our companions, taking something from each of them.

"Unhappy young woman!" I said. "I herewith make it known to your possessor that its hellish inflexibility awakes my wrath. I have determined to slay your master, and pay no toll at all!"

"My master hears you with indifference," she emptily reported.

"Well, we shall see," I huffed, unlimbering the quiver of throwing-steel I'd brought. This comprised four in- close javelins, heavy-butted for thrusting weight, and four spears, three-quarter hafted for carrying, with the plume-shaped head I like for penetration and the short bronze neck for resilience on impact that lets a rightly- thrown stick snake its way deeper into tough spots. I hoisted and hefted a javelin, making a great show of adjusting my throwing stance. Meanwhile Barnar and Ha'Awley inconspicuously retired to where they could climb the defile's opposite walls and, unseen, re-approach the Tolltaker along higher ground. There they would deploy a weapon of their own.

"By all the powers, beautiful one!" It was Sha'Urley, just behind me-and by her tender tone I knew she did not speak merely to assist our distraction of the Tolltaker, but rather spoke outright from her heart. "Who are you? Ah my poor sister! How came you to this vile durance?"

This in some measure seemed to stun the beauteous thrall of the puppeteering demon. Her startled eyes seemed to stare into wastes of time we could not know, as if, in melancholy horror, she only now remembered she had had a name, a native home, a soul. . . .

"I was Niasynth . . ." she said, wonderingly. "I was born in Saradown of world-wide fame for ships, and sailing folk. . . ."

"Alas, poor fair one," Sha'Urley breathed. Were those tears in her eyes? "It is a name unknown to me."

"I came to the infamous port of Bawd, renowned for decadence. . . . I lay with a handsome stranger, who drugged me and sold me to a demon-broker . . ."

"Fair sufferer!" I cried, "your liberation is at hand!" I knew as I spoke that I lied, unless her likely death were liberation. I pitched the javelin mightily. It slipped through the tiny aperture of the bud where the petalpoints met, vanishing utterly, waking scarce a tremor from that mountainous demonmeat.

"My master bids me mock the paltriness of your power to do it harm," Niasynth emptily intoned. "Indeed!" I raged, hefting now a spear. Now Barnar and Ha'Awley had crept into view above, and at opposite sides of, the defile. "Make known to that heap of reeking meat," I raged, "that I herewith repay its callous tyran- nies!" I gave my spear-cast a goodly wind-up dance, to allow my friends to coincide their assault precisely with what slight distraction my weapon's impact might afford, lest the Tolltaker detect their weapon's approach.

I sank my shaft near all its length straight down the throat of the jaws the demon had thrust out to take our toll. The jaws engulfed the shaft without a tremor, but simultaneously my colleagues squeezed out the whole contents of four full flasks of brood-scent on the demon's dorsal surface.

I waited through several heartbeats, strung tight , expect ing the demon's surge of panic at the whelm of - Behemoth-scent, and sudden withdrawal. Surely so powerful a gust of spoor, coming from above and behind, must throw the demon into an upheaval of escape. It did not even stir. Though it were a secondary demon, how could it be indifferent to Behemoth's scent?

Here came Bunt and Barnar tumbling pell-mell back into the ravine. At a loss, I began deploying a third cast, with further declamations of wrath and resolution. But I had scarce cocked to throw when I sensed a fleet - approaching tremor in the ground. I flung my spear to work what last diversion it could, and dove to hug the ground. From overhead, huge jaws thrust down into the defile, and seized the demon just where its blubberous mass sprouted from the stone.

In the instant of seizure the Forager's aim had merely been to lift and bear away what she had taken for a misplaced infant. But the furious power of the demon's reaction quickly galvanized her to an answering rage. - Undoubtedly some taste of demonmeat-for the Tolltaker wounded itself with its struggles-counteracted the - delusion of the brood-scent. The hungry Forager pulled mightily, her clawed feet shrieking on the stone. Three rods of writhing demon was hauled twisting from its shaft. Incredibly, such seemed its subworld strength, it balked at further extraction, despite the Forager's mightiest pullings.

And then a second Forager came pistoning up the draw, and added its jaws to the demon's uprooting. More heaving, bucking demon-thew came out.

A third Forager loomed above. We fled the ravine and found more distant cover, while vast jaws tore, demon-blood sprayed, and the vermiform Tolltaker writhed and thrashed and hammered the stone with its ever-diminishing bulk. Did luck not love us? How we had blundered to success!

Soon, crops full, our huge a s s i s t a n t s sped away. Returning up the ravine, we found it sprayed with purple gore and littered with torn flesh-and found the tunnelmouth open and unguarded.

"Look there!" Sha'Urley cried. "Niasynth lives!"

If live she did, it could not be for long. Poor demon-thrall, poor human puppet! Though the slab of hellmeat she was bound to had indeed fallen clear of the Foragers' feast, it had bled out a purple pond already, and it seemed that she, too, dwindled with the bleeding. Sha'Urley, kneeling by her, began with her sword's edge to shave the demon tissue from Niasynth, though still that beauteous thrall bled her own blood from the stubs of sundered demon veins that pierced her everywhere. Her voice came dreamy with her waning strength: "Thanks, dear sister, but I die apace. Hear me, earthfellows. Each of you may scrape off of 'Omphalodon's uncovered flesh no more Unguent than will fill one of the bowls you will find within the shaft. Should any one take more, it will be known. The Secondaries' spells enmesh the Talons. Huge convulsions, and your deaths, will follow any act of greedy excess by any one of you. One bowl each, no more. With all my heart I thank you for this death's sweet . . . sweet . . . deliverance."

"We too rejoice for you. Away then!" I cried.

"First help me!" Sha'Urley urged. "I think she may be saved!"

"Alas, fond hope!" I cried. Already my whole spirit was below, in a rapture of near-achieved delight. The four of us plunged into the shaft-mouth, while still Sha'Urley knelt by bleeding Niasynth, plying her swordblade with surgical tenderness.

An antechamber received us, where the light of torches socketed in the wall mixed with dim, vinous light - leaking down from the subworld above. Here where his eyes might help, and his treacheries could no longer hinder, I unhooded Ostrogall. "Please, gentlemen!" he cried, "Take her admonition firm to heart! For the least excess in harvest of the Unguent will be known. And such is the savage rigor of the Secondaries' spirit that they have provided for these tunnels' ruin, sooner than bear pilferage past what they prescribe!"

Half-hearkening, we scanned an inscription chiselled in the wall, above a heap of carven stone bowls. These lines of High Archaic were known to us. Their best-known description is found in Finnik of Minuskulon's Iambical Ditties:

Heliomphaladon Incarnadine Sunken in his Dark did long repine, And craved to clutch the splendor of the sun Whose glow and grandeur, legended in lore, The mighty demon ne'er laid eye upon, Mured as he was in his Third Subworld lair.

Crouched where fang-tormented myriad moan And Universe is but a rumored light, The demon gnawed Forever like a bone Whilst solar phantoms scorched his murky sight,

Till was more real this storied star to him Than were his world's inexorable walls.

His molten hands did through the world-bone swim. . . .

Now behold where all disjoint he sprawls!

On sunless hell his eye forever shines, Heliomphalodon Incarnadine.

I hefted one of the bowls. It was capacious enough, perhaps, if one but knew the concentration of the Unguent's power. I could not repress the thought, however, that it would not hold half the capacity of one of the leathern jars that we had brought to bear our harvest away in. Perhaps Ostrogall sensed my disappointment, for he elaborated: "The Secondaries, oh Luminous Masters, have involved the Talons in trigger spells. Take but an iota of excess and the Talons are fractionally released from the detaining sorcery ensnaring them. They surge upward.

All this tunnelwork meets grinding annihilation in one claw-twitch. Believe me, none in all this time, not even the grimmest of my own compatriots, has ever dared to flout this iron limit. Should even one of us let greed over- rule him here, we all shall die together."

The four of us nodded solemnly at one another. "Well, then," Barnar said, scanning the several tunnels that branched from this chamber, "Nifft and I will take this way, you two that one, and the first to find our quarry can halloo the others."

As Costard's and Bunt's torches dwindled down the central shaft, we took the leftward one. We began going at a jog-trot, the pair of us moved by a wordless accord-Barnar, I am sure, mutely assessing distances and times, as I was.

Cut by demon art, the shaft walls had a melted smoothness, and were amply diametered to allow much larger beings than ourselves an easy passage. Our going down, though somewhat steep, was neither difficult, nor long.

The cavernous gallery we shortly came to was vaulted so high that our torchlight could not show us its upper reaches. And one entire wall of it was a glittery expanse of ophidian scales.

Barnar and I had once stood before the naked hugeness of everted Sazmazm. It may be that this stone-bound 'Omphalodon was a being less immense, but in the wholeness, the intact design of this grasping limb of his, there was an equal awe. Above, at the ragged limit of our torchlight, we discerned a seam in the scaly fabric, just such a fold as one's palm shows where it articulates. Fossiled in its sunward reach, this grasping extremity was the brute embodiment of the great demon's will; the very shape of his ambition loomed above us. Terror and exaltation filled us equally, as did simultaneous inspiration. "Let's try it out!" we cried, almost together.

"What must we do?" I asked Ostrogall.

"Besmear your hands and bootsoles. And please remember that this application must be deducted from your alloted bowl-ful."

Perhaps we feared the giant would feel, and move in answer to, our touch, for almost cringingly did we stroke our palms adown the waxy sheen that lacquered all its scales. But these scales were dense and hard as stone; ourselves it was who shuddered at the contact.

In our reaching downward to besmear our bootsoles, the Unguent's power was revealed to us, for the downthrust of our hands lifted us half a fathom off the ground.

"Without exertion of your conscious will to move earthward," Ostrogall told us, "your almost every move- ment spurns the ground beneath, and lifts you."

Our feet anointed, yelping and laughing with discovery like boys, arms and legs dogpaddling, we climbed into the torchlit gloom of the cavern. What fierce, rare joy it was! We quickly learned a swimming motion that drove us with increasing accuracy wherever we listed. "Let's try the tunnel, for speed," I cried. Were we preparing for what followed? I cannot think so-it did not seem so. We found we could swim up the tunnel we had come down much faster than either of us could run it. Lust to possess this power in quantity soon turned our flight back down toward the cavern. The trick of swim- ming groundwards we brought off with some few bruises, discovering that we must will the specific rate of descent as well as the mere direction. Now, bowls ready, facing the scaly wall . . . we paused.

"You know, Barnar," I said, "what would be simpler for the Secondaries than to post a rumor of dire conse- quences? What could be easier than, by mere rumor, to minimize the taking of all seekers here, and thus prolong the cannibal profit of those same Secondaries' enterprise?"

"The very notion gnaws my thoughts as well!" my friend exclaimed.

Ostrogall's sharp bleat of protest was muffled when I sheathed him in his bag. "I'll be completely frank with you, Barnar," I went on. "I feel a powerful, unshakeable conviction that we are safe to fill our jars completely with this glorious ointment. How unlikely it is, after all, that the Secondaries would actually annihilate this huge source of profit, in punishment of pilferage!"

Barnar nodded vigorously, eyes shining. "You speak my very mind and heart, old friend! I will say more. I will tell you that in this inexplicable yet all-compelling conviction that I share with you, in this I recognize one of those moments of truth given to all men, one of those life-altering gambles that the soul must make to lift itself to greater destiny than was at first ordained it!"

Ostrogall grew shrill in his pouch, and I cried him, "Peace, thou hellish fragment! You have yourself allowed that none have dared to try this vaunted limit! It is a threat, no more, a bugbear whose sole potency lies in that none have ventured to assay it! Now be mute, or die herewith!"

Perhaps some half conscious vestige of caution led Barnar and me to trade a look, then swiftly act in tandem, abbreviating as fully as might be the act of harvesting the Unguent. With shaving sweeps of our swords' edges, we scraped off bladefuls of the waxen goo, and these in turn we scraped off into our jars. Twice, thrice . . . four sweeps, and we had filled and stoppered these containers, sheathed our blades, snatched up our torches, and swum into the air towards the tunnel we'd come down by.

This spontaneous haste of our departure proved fortunate. Almost at once, the vaulted stone entombing us groaned, and cracked, and hugely shuddered. A ripple of movement passed along the scaly wall of demonskin.

Madly we swam the air up-tunnel, bellowing, "Bunt! Costard! Make for the surface!" These shouts evinced more fellow-feeling than common sense, for the shriek of splintering stone, and the clamor of flying shards through which we flew, must render needless such verbal warnings.

Our tunnel collapsed behind us as we flew into the antechamber, and the gust of air it squeezed out after us set us tumbling, our torches blown out like candles. Here came Bunt and Costard sprawling out of their own tunnel, likewise collapsing behind them, as even now the antechamber shuddered and heaved and spilled out towering fragments from its riven walls in colossal slow collapse around us. We swooped towards the fallen pair. Their dropped bowls of Unguent skittered away across the convulsing floor as we seized them one-handed by their belts-I Costard, Barnar Bunt-and swam one-handed with them for the entryway.

Our flight proved only slightly hampered by the burden of our companions. We arrowed still quicker than a man might sprint on firm ground, which was far faster than any man might actually run across that heaving, buckling stone.

Yet the "O" of the entryway was still far, too far to reach. Then the gallery's roof and walls and floor heaved violently together like a clenching fist. Again a surge of squeezed-out air accelerated us-shot us wheeling out the collapsing entry, as a dart is powered from a blowpipe's muzzle.

Ahead, across the dancing subworld floor, Sha'Urley had got clear a hundred strides or so, though she labored with the slack and blood-bright shape of Niasynth across her shoulder.

"Get a grip on them as we swoop near!" I shouted at Bunt and Costard. With both their hands free, they got a firm though awkward hold on the struggling women, and we had all four of them aloft. We swam one-handed through the ruddy air, and dared to glance back. We saw the accursed hill of stone erupt, spraying wheeling boulders through the subworld sky.

Four black, titanic Talons sprouted from the subworld floor. Shedding stone, they thrust up, and up, and up- reached near a third the distance to the stony sky. There, though rooted at the wrist, they stirred and swayed, free, after an eon's burial, to move once more.

And it seemed the great star-pupiled eye, bloody sun to this fiendish domain, beheld with grieving joy this fragment of its former self, resurgent in its captive sight.

XVIII.

Reach up thy claw!

To rise one world is given. Live still in woe, Still one stone sky from heaven.

"THUS," SHA'URLEY TOLD US. "Pluck them sharp like roots . . . see how her flesh heals whole and scarless where I've pulled them out?"

We had laid Niasynth in a recess of the ravine wall, having retreated some few miles from the Talons. These Talons of 'Omphalodon filled half our sky, sluggishly clawing the air, as if still disbelievingly testing their disinterment. The Unguent of Flight, for any others who might now come seeking it, must be a prize obtained more through a mountain climber's than a spelunker's skills.

The sundered network of demon veins that pierced Niasynth's body dribbled her own bright human blood until we plucked them out. We all worked intently at this, while Sha'Urley, with her poignard's edge, tenderly shaved off the last slabs of demonmeat from the young captive's limbs. As the Secondary's putrid substance fell away, Niasynth's skin, though still drawn and pale, resumed a youthful luster, a glow it must have worn long centuries gone when she was taken. Thus she resumed a beauty destined to be dust in ages past, but for the nefandous immortality that had engulfed it here, time out of mind. At length, her groanings done, her brow unknotted, clean and whole, she slept.

We moved away from her, as present business brought the five of us all eye to eye. Bunt had evidently prepared some grave remonstration, but Costard, forestalling him, bleated out, "Uncle Barnar, by the Crack, how could you?"-his very voice cracking on the question.

Barnar and I did trade-I do confess-one quick look that weighed denial. But we chose in the end a manly frankness. I showed Costard a condolent smile, and thwacked his shoulder. "We took a gamble, and lost."

"You took a gamble, and we lost our Unguent of Flight!" The petulant young dolt seemed really to be losing his voice, so badly was it breaking, his little ferret's eyes fairly popping under his low-slung brows. "You two came flying out! You can h a r d l y k e e p o n t h e ground right now!"

"It's hard getting the knack of willing oneself down, Nephew," Barnar explained to him. "With our extremities anointed, most casual movements act to thrust us aloft. We are just now learning to think ourselves steadily aground without being wholly occupied with the thinking."

"Let's just come to the point," urged Sha'Urley, managing a fairly friendly smile. "It's pretty plain you've come out packing a gluttonous excess of the Unguent-whence else the catastrophe? Whence that?"

She swept her hand towards the towering Talons. And just then, as we looked, three Foragers swarmed up one of 'Omphalodon's digits. We saw the flash of their comparatively tiny jaws, saw little bright rills of the demon's blood-and then saw what we might have expected, but were stunned to view: the Foragers swam, legs flailing, into the air.

Airborne, a madness seized them-nothing in their nature prepared them for this. Their legs pumped wildly and they careened away into the ruby gloom, their frenzy for the solid ground lofting them ever higher. Yet even as we watched, a dozen more Foragers converged on the Talons, drawn perhaps by the smell of 'Omphalodon's blood. Of these, some two or three-treading where the demon flesh was torn or washed with gore-maintained their footing, and fed. Meanwhile, we saw in the widespread flux of Behemoths-formerly converging toward the distant fortress-a rippling directional change towards a new cynosure: the Talons of 'Omphalodon.

Awesome though this spectacle was, narrow questions of property very soon re-engrossed our companions.

"The only real question here, then," resumed Sha'Urley, "is will you, or will you not, give the three of us some Unguent, we whose shares of it your greed foreclosed?"

"Can we properly speak of 'shares,' " I asked, "of something whose having lies wholly in the chance of the taking? You, for instance, were detained not by us, but by-most creditably, to be sure!-young Niasynth in her extremity. Meanwhile, the esteemed Ha'Awley, and young Costard here, were prevented of their so-called shares by their failure to keep their footing, and their Unguent, when the ground became unsteady. As you will readily grant, we did everything we could to aid you during that upheaval, but to put it bluntly, it is the first rule of adventuring that each man must look to his own take."

Costard had more squawking to do, and the Bunts, both of them, had further casuistries to propound. We remained firm, though it grew increasingly difficult to remain civil at the same time. Scanning about me for some relief, I saw the Talons' lower portions now all befurred with Foragers, while the upper joints were beclouded with more Foragers in scrambling flight. The immense digits flexed furiously, and flexed again, and we could hear the faint splintery report of crushed Behemoths, whose minuscule debris fell from the workings of those giant joints. But still the flood of Foragers converged. I looked skywards.

Did 'Omphalodon's blood-weeping Eye up there, moon of this lower place-did his Eye move slightly? Scan more particularly this long-hid, new-born part of himself? And weep the more to see it freed but partly, still one sky lower than the sun-burnished heaven that was his ancient aim?

"Enough, Costard," Sha'Urley cried-for only he still harangued us now. "You deafen us all to no good! Is it not plain that our friends here would sooner leap naked into flames than surrender the least tittle of their takings?" She turned to me. "Do you know, Nifft, looking at you now, I almost have to smile, even to laugh. . . ."

And indeed, first she smiled, and then she laughed-quite genuinely, it seemed. "You must forgive my saying it," she added when she could, "but I see you there, such an intense, crouched, piggish, greedy apparition at this moment, all tightened up right down to your bunghole at the bare notion of letting one tenth-pennyweight of your possession go!"

"I'm a little saddened," was my moderate response, "that you deem this crass turn of tongue to be warranted with me. I can only declare the simple truth, that Barnar and I have acted at every step with the best intentions toward yourselves. And we stand ready even now-that is, if we fail not of your standards of transportation-to carry you all back to the Nest's comparative safety. There awaits, after all, that first endeavor we stand contracted for, and from which, I believe, you projected the only profit that we engaged to bring you? For now, indeed, we plainly have power to earn that further payment you stand sworn to, Ha'Awley? Eh? While we stand dithering, the milking of the Royal Mother remains to do."