Early morning is a graveyard kind of hour in the swamps-there's no clear air under the clouds then, because the mist is rising from the waters. It moves in slow, torn columns across the quays, and if you're standing at the waterside, you can't even see the pyramid. I found Barnar at the dock. We carried the bundled lurk across the ter race, and into the palace.

Inside there was some activity-here and there a tavern door opened, and you could see the tapster inside kindling the public-room fire. We went as quickly as we could without running, and feared no questions. Since the Audience Chamber would be closed now until the god-making, bountymen arriving with a catch would be - expected to wrap it up and take it to an inn for the duration.

But at the highest levels there were nei ther inns nor taverns, and outlanders ascending here with a large burden would draw scrutiny from any guardsman. Here we went even quicker, prepared to kill, counting on the hour to spare us the necessity. We met no one, and gained the outside staircase leading up to the second level from the top.

From the head of these stairs I crept to the door. Inside there was a guard strolling down the corridor, at the end of which was the staircase to the King's level. He passed the door and turned the corner. He was followed by another walking the same way about twenty seconds later. So it went-I watched five more minutes, but there was no gap in their circuit long enough for us to get to that staircase unseen. We would have to kill one.

I conferred with Barnar, then memorized the face of the next guard who passed. We took the one who followed. Barnar seized him from behind as he turned the corner and broke his neck. We hauled him back out to the staircase. We were going to tie his body to its underside but I found a flask on him so we chose a less mystery-creating plan. We drenched his beard and doublet with the liquor, replaced the flask in his belt, and Barnar lifted him high overhead. There was a gardened terrace about six levels down-invisible now, but I remembered its location and directed my friend. He heaved, grunting softly. The guard arched outward, seeming to hang sprawled in the fog, staring upward open-mouthed, and then was swallowed in the whiteness. After a moment there was a soft crash of broken shrubbery. Barnar, as a last touch, wrenched the staircase's heavy bannister loose and lef t i t hanging. When the guard whose face I had memorized passed, we entered and dashed down the hal l wi th our load.

I got into the rafters and Barnar threw up the lurk so that it landed across a beam. He came up and we pulled our line after us. The level below would be sealed off by a full guard at mid-morning, to begin the King's two- day pre-ritual isolation, and just after the breakfast hour there would be a last-minute rush of gawkers. We rested, - saving our work for that noisy hour .

When the folk began arriving, we carried the lurk within fifty yards of the King's door, and unwrapped it. I inserted crossed sticks into its body through the slit in its abdomen and this swelled it out perfectly. Barnar prepared three thirty-foot lengths of bowstring and hooked one end of each into the body-one to the rear part, and one to ei ther side of the f lat , head par t , amid the base joints of the legs. Then, with as little lef t to do as possible, we carried it to just above the King's cell. We stretched it lengthwise atop a beam, tying its forelegs and rear body to two daggers pushed into the wood. It would have a whole day to lose the last of its creases. We laid the coiled bowstr ings on top of it, and got out of there.

I have the trick of sleeping to kill time, and Barnar had been up all night. We found perches two full corridors away, in case we made sleep-noises.

When we woke my time sense told me we had an hour or so to wait until our chosen time, the pit of night.

The guards were under oaths of silence during this part of the vigil, but they ignored them. We listened to the small shapeless sounds that were all that was left of their conversation by the time it reached us. Their talk wavered feebly, like the flame of an ill-made candle in a gusty room. You could read their oppression of spirit in the way their voices blurred, ceased, and then, doggedly, started again. Barnar and I traded our thoughts with a look: they would be jumpy all right.

It was a man like themselves they guarded, and he lay at the threshold of a grisly journey. When humankind make covenants with the more-than-human, or the less-than-human, you may buttress them with traditions and rites as you will, but there remains an unacknowledged horror that is never quieted in men's hearts. At last we moved, and as we came closer, our movements got as deft and still as the creeping of rats, minus even their tiny noise of nails. We entered the perilous silence above the King's door, and looked down upon the two polished domes of the guards' helmets. Their talk had stopped again. You could almost feel their gloom. They were ripe for our game.

We undid the lurk from the daggers-it had straightened nicely. Barn a r t ook the coils of bowstring and t u c k e d t h e m under his arms, then picked up the lurk by the three lines, holding them near the hooks. I crouched on one side of the gap in the beams and fastened a line to a rafter. Barnar stood on the other side of the gap, one foot on the catwalk and the other on the beam, and poised the lurk over the opening.

Remember the weight of the thing, my friends! He looked to me and I nodded that I was ready. He began to pay out line through his fingers, letting the legs drop foremost and bringing the whole thing almost flush with the wall, so that it looked like it was crawling down it. It looked real enough to stir your hair, its black legs flung out in their six-foot spread, its jointed barrel of a body taut and poised behind. If I had been standing twelve hours in the empty half-dark gnawed at by unhealthy thoughts, and had turned to see such a thing a foot above my - shoulder, I would have done just what the guards did.

This is not to detract from Barnar's masterful handling. When he had the thing positioned, he let it drop a good four feet and scuff the wall as it did so. This brought their faces up at just the right instant to see the monster lurch to a murderous, poised halt an arm's length above them. They peeled themselves from the doorway and spilled across the corridor, one man losing his spear as he sprawled. Barnar was already hauling the lurk back upwards wi th a marvelous smooth speed that made it seem to be scuttling in reverse motion up the wall.

Holding the lurk straight-armed before him, he danced along the beam and catwalk to the next large gap in the rafters, and cast it down through. The throw was perfect. The skeleton struck with a rattling splash right next to the men, who were just struggling to their feet. He was playing dangerously near them, for the bowstrings were far from invisible, but his speed and timing were such that they kept the maximum panic alive in the men. The second throw sent them stumbling round the corner. I had dropped my line, slid down and entered the King's cell before I heard the sound of Barnar's third cast down the next hallway. Things couldn't be better-they had only one spear and so they wouldn't risk a cast with it, and Barnar could play them several moments more while they gathered their wits and the puppet's reality was put to a test. I moved as quick as a dodging, darting fly. I had cup, salve, and poniard out, and the King by the ankle in an instant. I cut him under the bump of the ankle, where you'll get a good half-cup of blood and the bleeding will then peter out. I pocketed the goblet, wiped the wound clean, and sealed it with the salve. I scarcely spared a glance for the King's face-he was staring at me with strange sad intensity, as if he knew me and I had somehow disappointed him. Then I was shutting the door, shinning up the rope, and drawing it after me.

I rushed along the catwalk past the corner and signaled through the beams. Barnar was just drawing up the lurk. He unhooked the lines and set the great spider-thing on a beam so that its forelegs hung down into the guards' range of vision. Then Barnar was with me and we were dancing through those beams almost as fast as a man can jog on level ground, going the opposite way round the square of halls from the point where the reinforcements would be entering. Our two guards had been shouting for them for some time-for it was death for them to leave their post on this floor-and we heard boots thundering on the stairs already.

We had left our plans vague at this point, counting on turmoil, but unable to foresee its precise form. We had included the possibility of revealing ourselves as practical jokers, since there would be enough guards there who were jealous of our two victims' special post to raise a laugh and some sympathy for our game. But this being the eve of the god-making, and the swampfolks' prime night of revel out of the whole year, when the pyramid was alive with drinkers and singers from top to bottom, we'd seen at least a good chance for a cleaner escape. This we got. The downstairs guard flooded up into the hall where their colleagues were, and after a brief interval a stampede of more miscellaneous footfalls came pounding up the stairs. We got down from rafters in time to be in the hall as the red-faced citizenry rushed in. They eddied at the head of the stairs, prevented from entering the hall where the action was by the crowd of guards there. We jumped from round the corner and waved excitedly.

"This way! We can get through over here!" I shouted. Threescore of men and women cried out and pounded after us. We let the crowd overtake and surround us, falling back into it as we all rushed round the other way. As they rounded the last corner before the King's cell we dropped out of the rear of the rout and ran back to the stairs.

VII.

On the next night we stood by the dais in the center of the Audience Chamber. It had cost us our runt pearl from the ghul to buy this place from one of the chamber guards. Those near us had paid as much. The whole vast hall was packed with folk, hot and close, from wall to wall. We had taken our place hours early, and heard the tale of the "puppet-show upstairs" passed among the folk around us, variously distorted. People enjoyed it hugely. A new jocose tradition might have gotten started, had we not spoiled the humor of the idea for the Queen a short time later.

She appeared in the great doorway at midnight. Lines of guards held clear a broad aisle from the doorway to the dais, where the altar stood, and she remained in the doorway at the end of this aisle, not moving for a long time. She wore a coarse white robe that covered her entire body. Her long black hair was unbound, and her face had a terrible beauty, meaning both those words. It was a northron face-nose large and strong, eyes set both shadowy deep and wide apart, a marvellous wide mouth with lips of infinite expression.

There was a weight and power in the way she stood, a realness that made that whole human multitude seem a shadowy and passing thing. She stood in her straightness and silence and six hundred years of life-for she was ancient when she came to this place-and all of our thousands surrounding her seemed brief, fugitive, whispering-like a host of dead leaves. Truly my friends, aren't our lives as quick in their passing as a thief's shadow across a wall?

Queen Vulvula's hand moved to her throat, and her robe fell from her nakedness. She moved forth down the aisle.

She had a body to stir and stiffen you: big guava breasts, hanging-ripe; thighs round and strong; hips like a bulging vase for milk or scented oil. But as she drew near the dais, we saw it was an autumnal body. The breasts were frost-nipped, beginning to dwindle from within as apples will. Her thighs moved with a chilled slowness, and the veins were beginning to map themselves out on the backs of her hands. And as she mounted toward the altar we saw that at the corners of her plump and flexible mouth dark nets of wintery erosion were spreading out across her jaw.

As she stood on the dais I felt her presence fully, like a gust from the icy gulf of her heart. She looked over us as a harvester looks over a great stubborn field which he has made to yield him fruit. She knew her alienness in her people's minds; their unspoken horror and the danger she lived in because of it. And she relished it. The risk and care of empire gratified her centuries-deep mind. She smiled very slightly. Looking at her mouth, you knew that it would have a small, frosty atmosphere all its own around it, and that its kiss would suck your soul out in the fire. She moved to the head of the altar. Literally its head, for the altar was a big statue of a man in a wrestler's bridge, that is, supporting himself on his feet and hands but face upwards, so that his thighs, stomach and chest formed a long level surface. The Queen spoke some words in a language I have never heard. Her voice was mellower than you expected, soft at the edges. Effortlessly it filled the whole hall. As she spoke she pointed overhead, then to the altar, and then floorward, meaning the catacombs below, no doubt. Then she spoke for our understanding:

"Your sons have fattened in my rule.

Your rafts go laden with peaceful trade.

There's no man's wife need fear the ghul.

Your pearls are spared the poacher's raid- They're farmed by laws that spread their worth, And keep ensheathed war's wasteful blade.

You've had what Good men get on earth- Now grant your Queen does nothing cruel Who, dead with craving, ends her dearth.

Her year-long lord, with year-long Heaven paid, Comes now to her to see her thirst allayed."

The King appeared in the doorway, borne on a litter by two bearers. He slouched, still strengthless, in the seat, but the set of his head showed his wits more awake than before. He wore a sacrificial fillet of graven bronze round his brow, and as they carried him forward, you could see his eyes moving restlessly under its line.

The bearers set the litter before the altar. They were powerful men, of Barnar's type. One grasped the King's wrists and the other his ankles. The Queen spoke again, and there was a tenderness in her voice:

"Rise to me now, my love, a king, And descend from me as a God.

You will sit in Eternity with your line, And rule the ever-after-living hosts.

You will wield the scepter of the shadow-kind, You will be judge and shepherd of the ghosts.

Rise to me, now, my love, a king, And descend from me as a God."

When she had said this they lifted the King onto the altar. He looked to this side and that as they pressed his legs against the stone legs, his back against the stone chest, his arms and shoulders against the arms and shoulders of stone. And as he looked here and there, I thought for a moment that he looked at me, and smiled, ever so faintly. I don't insist on this-I half think it was a dream myself-the air was so charged, and the silence crawled all over the skin of the multitude like a swarm of ants. But do you suppose he understood what had been done, and took some last small comfort, some revenge in the thought?

She knelt beside him, and her face was taut, refined by a tension of icy love, made younger before our eyes by her passionate anticipation. She lowered her face-worshipfully, kissing-to the muscled juncture of his neck and shoulder. And then there was a crisp, liquid sound of horrible distinctness, her hands clutched his shoulders, and the King's body rose and convulsed upon the stone with the raw, coiling power of a speared eel.

The two giants holding him grunted with strain, and the Queen's head rode with the youth's surging body as if it were a part of it. He hammered the rock like a beached dolphin pounds the wet sand, slowing with suffocation, and as he stilled, the Queen clutched and nuzzled with a weasel's self-forgetting lust. Her shoulders worked like pumps as she sucked and her hands kneaded his torso as if it were a great udder of blood. She almost drowned herself in her hunger, and had to tear her face up from its feeding to breathe with all the desperate speed of a diver breaking the surface. She reared her crazed, glass-eyed face before the crowd-her lips smeared, her chin drizzling red. Her breasts were actually fuller now-they jutted youthfully, and I saw a thin thread of blood- red leakage from both her nipples. She leaned and drank again. The King barely moved. His skin tightened over the muscles, while the muscles themselves seemed to be slowly dissolving.

She grew calmer, methodical. She drank from both his wrists next, and then from inside of both his thighs, to empty him efficiently. She licked her mouth clean, then cupped and lifted her breasts and licked her nipples clean. A priestess ascended the dais with a silver laver in which she washed herself a second time, and then drank off the water. Another priestess brought her a robe of scarlet. She put it on and, flanked by the priestesses, stepped down. It was done.

When she had exited the littermen laid the King's husk on the litter and bore it from the hall. The Queen would spend the night above, in the King's cell where the priestesses would install for her a large mirror framed in gold. The King would go to the catacombs, where other priestesses waited with the sacred taxidermy tools.

VIII.

The next morning, on the western quay, we waited for the expected to befall. We had hired a taxiraft, and had it standing by. Then the commotion came boiling out of the palace, born by scores of hurrying folk. The Queen had been heard to waken, rise and, a moment later, scream.

We boarded at once. An hour later we had reached a certain great mudbar near the fringe of the swamp-one so large it amounted to an island. Here we waited, sending the pilot back well paid and at double speed with a small scroll for the Queen. We'd chosen a shrewd man who would have the savvy to get himself into the Queen's hearing in an uproar like the one you would expect in the pyramid. The scroll's marking would help. We had written on the outside; "Concerning the Year King's Missing Blood." A glance at this added vigor to his plying of the stern oar, and he was soon out of sight.

This was the most ticklish step of all. Having two thousand prime swamp pearls put into our hands was going to be a simple matter now. But remaining alive for even an instant after the King's blood was back in the Queen's control-this was going to strain both wit and nerve to accomplish.

Barnar's interview with the swamp witch was made with this difficulty in mind. If you're going to guarantee your safety with sorcerers-and the Vampire Queen was a very great one-you've got to get them to protect you with their own thaumaturgy. The trick is to make them give you magic which they cannot themselves afterward over-pass. You've got to ask for the best thing in their repertory.

The swamp witch was no Vulvula. But it was worthwhile having her professional opinion as to what is the fastest thing that wizardry can call to the aid of man. I would have guessed, all by myself and without paying a pearl, the answer that she gave my friend. Still, it was something to have a confirmation. She told Barnar that the fastest being, in the upper world and the subworlds alike, is a basiliscus. I see you nodding wisely, Taramat.

Read on a bit.

So we demanded, along with the pearls, a ring charmed to command the service of a basiliscus. Then we sat down, had a bit of jerky and wine, and waited.

The priestess of the Queen came almost impossibly soon. When we saw she had two archers on the raft with her, I quickly waded into the water. The King's blood had dried into a greyish biscuit, full of little holes like lava-rock. I held it up and called out: "Throw your bows in the water-double quick! Otherwise the Queen is going to have to drink this whole swamp to save her youth!"

The bows went overboard. The men kept their spears but this was fair, as we had one, and we couldn't expect them to risk our robbing them. The raft came up to the islet. We gestured the soldiers back. The priestess stepped ashore with two leathern bags, and stood staring at us, rage in her eyes, her mouth impassive. I stayed in the water, as the soldiers were so near. Barnar said: "Time is short, woman. Give us the ring. We'll make the exchange when we're on the creature's back." She nodded wordlessly, and tossed him a small silver ring. Barnar put it on his smallest finger and raised his hands.

The spell the witch had taught him was brief. He intoned it with great verve and authority. First there was a long silence.

Then the earth began to wrinkle and crack, like pottery glaze, along a thirty-foot seam that crossed the width of the islet. The cracks darkened and grew, the fragmented clay began to buckle, and even I, standing in the water, felt a giant mass jerking and slithering underfoot. A lizard-foot that could have held me like a doll reached out of the tormented mire. A second followed, as a polished, scaly snout appeared. The seam bulged and gaped and the vast reptile heaved clear, hurling blocks of clay to all sides, and raising waves from which I was barely quick enough to save the blood-cake. With imperial self-absorption the basiliscus hauled itself into the water on the other side of the islet, and unfolded its wings to bathe them. They were no bigger, fanned out, than the raft the soldiers stood on-curiously stunted-looking given the body's bulk. In its own good time it crawled back into the islet and aimed its obsidian eye, big as a target-shield, attentively at Barnar.

The basiliscus isn't a true demon because it can barely use speech at all, but it falls under the compulsions of the Great Age of Thaumaturgy, and is part of our inheritance of power from our forebears. You tell it where you want to go. It takes you there and you feed it the ring in payment, allowing it to return to the subworlds. And you'd better feed it the ring, and ask for no further trips. Magic compels it just so far, and then its nature asserts itself. Into its ragged pit of an earhole, Barnar whispered the name of our destination, then mounted its back. I jumped from the water and vaulted on behind him, keeping the blood-cake poised for a throw at the lagoon.

The priestess approached and opened the mouths of both bags for our inspection. I don't know which felt more unreal, to be sitting on the back of that lizard or to be looking at the oily lustre of two thousand perfect swamp pearls. The priestess stepped nearer, the bags in one hand, the other extended for the blood. I made the exchange with pickpocket deftness, hugged the bags to me, and Barnar shouted: "Away!"

A slow gale of breath entered the cavelike chest under us. For a moment nothing happened, and fleetingly it bothered me that in that time, neither the priestess nor the soldiers stirred. They didn't make a move, and yet had time enough, if they were good, so spear us both from our mount. Then we were fifty yards away.

The basiliscus's scales were big as flagstones and smooth as wax. Luckily there was room in their interstices for you to sink half your hand in, because its back was far too broad to grip with your legs. It took exactly three running leaps, crossing lakelets like puddles and using big mudbars as stepping-stones. Its wings hammered once, twice, and then suddenly they were winnowing cottony fog, and there was no swamp to be seen.

We swam thundering up through clouds and mist for several moments, knuckles cracking with the strain of our climbing speed, and then we were in clear sky, with the clouds a level white broth below, hemmed in a bowl- like rim of ragged peaks. Beyond the hills, where we were headed, the salt steppes lay parching under the hot blue emptiness. Then, through the rush of wind and the creaking, leathery toil of the vast wings, we heard a whine far to our rear.

We looked back, and learned in one glance that there is something faster than a basiliscus. Whatever its name is-for that we never learned-there was one of them bursting from the cloud-broth just where we had exited. It had one human rider. Even at that moment I marveled that any man should venture to sit astride the spiny neck of such a thing.

I have seen its kind in little-stiltlegged bugs with long bodies and two forelegs it uses as arms, barbed along their insides for piercing what they snatch. Their flat, triangular heads have two globelike eyes and dainty greedy mouths, whose hunger the barbed arms must constantly serve. This one's head was big enough for a man to dance on, and it was dead white all over. Only the furious power of its wings-two shining blurs at its sides-set off its form against the white background of clouds. The thing was big enough to kill our basiliscus, though it probably wouldn't be able to eat more than two thirds of him. Of course it would start with us.

There was no hurrying our mount, which sped its maximum as a matter of course. Meanwhile, the Queen's rider guided the huge, pale insect into a long, sloping climb which would intersect our course, for we had leveled off. I remembered seeing the lightning deftness of the little cousins of this thing-they can snatch a spider out of its web without leaving a tremor among the silk threads. This thing would have a fifteen-foot reach if an inch, and to cap the mess, I could only defend our rear with one hand; it was imperative for both of us to keep one hand dug into the lizard's scales, or the wind or our passage would sweep us off.

We were over the steppes now. Hopelessly I chose a stabbing-grip on our spear with my free hand. The look of the hell-bug as it rose behind us was all fragility and grace. Its two lower pairs of legs hung trailing in dainty curves under its long body, which looked as smooth and balanced as the war-canoes of the southeastern savages.

It was getting so near you could make out the faceting of its eyeglobes, a taunting reminder of the pearls in our bags. I could even see the face of the soldier guiding the thing.

It's strange to see a man's face through the screaming wind of that speed, with the whole sky around you and the whole world beneath, a barren floor, and still to get as clear a feel for his past and his character as if the two of you were sitting at mugs in a cozy tavern. But I did feel I knew the man in that glance-plain sense said that it would be a tough and tried soldier, for an important mission like this. The face said that and more-the scars above and below the steady bright eyes, squinted against the wind, the mouth shut and thoughtful. It added up to a sturdy, cool professional who thinks ahead and then kills you without slip-ups when it's his job to do so and he has the edge.

Good soldiers stay alive by being unsentimental and having a quick eye for the main chance. There was no time to chew it over. That quirky peek into the man's nature showed me our only longshot hope, and without a pause for thought I did the hardest thing I've ever done. I grabbed a bag by the bottom, and with a snap of the arm that forced open its drawstrings, I flung its whole contents into the air behind us. I groaned as I did it, looking back. The pearls sped earthward in a glistering black clot, scattering slowly, seeming to swarm as they fell like bees do before hive-making. Our speed and theirs made the jewels flee the faster from sight, and I still see them sometimes in memory, a thousand black stars, tumbling down through the wide blaze of noon.

If betrayal of his Queen was on the soldier's mind before, I do not know. Perhaps if he'd caught us and had the whole two thousand, the habit of loyalty would have stayed firm and he would have smoothly completed his mission. But seeing the pearls there, stark and dazzling in the sky, and knowing that they could be his or they could be who knew whose-it shocked him into realizing the wealth he was pursuing. If he did not follow them down, and finished the chase, they would be leagues behind, and he might never find them. Almost without hesitation, he reined his mount into a dive.

It had to be a whole thousand, you see, for some would be lost, and there must be enough even so to purchase swift escape and a new life. The Queen would eventually work a spell of recall on the mount he rode, and in the meantime he could use it to his advantage. Luck go with the man, I bear him no grudge! Still, as I say I see them tumbling, tumbling, those thousand dazzling, jetblack pearls, sometimes in memory.

Ah well! Having a share of a full thousand would simply have meant more squandering to do. The soldier was a career man, a maker of plans and investments, and is probably cherishing his coffers right now, and dreading thieves. For me, it was work enough to rid myself of the five hundred I came away with. Think-I did it in two years! Surely, that's a feat as great as any involved in the winning of those black beauties!

Part 3.

SHAG MARGOLD'S Preface to The Fishing of the Demon-Sea.

KAIRNHEIM, WHENCE NIFFT'S and Barnar's ill luck led them down to the primary subworld, is as remarkable for its ethnic homogeneity as the other two continents are for their diversity. It does not lack all racial variety. The perimeter of Shormuth-the huge bay in its eastern coast-is host to a miscellany of folk. But the bulk of the continent is inhabited by Kairns, a cattle-raising people originating from the southern limb of Lulume, across the Sea of Catastor.

The Kairns came to Kairnheim in two major waves of migration separated by an interval of about four hundred years. It was the southeast half of the continent that received both influxes, for east of the Ikon Mountains luxuriant grasslands stretch practically unbroken for three hundred leagues to the coast. This gently rolling land, thickly braided with rivers, is the realm called Prior Kairnlaw. It is superlative grazing land. The Kairns who held it first were loath to share it with their late-coming cousins, and indeed, did not do so, for their cousins-more numerous and hungrier than they-drove them out of it, and into the northwestern plateaus, the colder, rockier, more arid half of the continent known today as Latter Kairnlaw.

Kine Gather lies in Latter Kairnlaw not far from the Bone Axe Mountains, a northern branching of the Ikons.

Like its sister-cities of this area-White Lick, Crossgulch, Bailey's Yards-it grew from a cattle market on a river, a rough-and-ready sort of place where stock could be auctioned and shipped by enterprising men unwilling to endure tedious inquiries into their herds' provenance or prior ownership. And, again like their neighbors, Kine Gather's citizens retain even in the moderate prosperity they currently enjoy all the predilections of their city's founders: raiding, cattle-rustling, passionate quarrels over boundaries, and blood-feuds.

Most Latter-Kairns share these traits, and this is understandable. Their sparse-grown, harsh-wintered terrain compels their herdsmen to arduous seasonal pilgrimages to keep their animals in pasture. Only the hostility of that land to any other economy-combined with what might be called a very stubborn cultural spirit-keeps them at their historic trade. And yet, for all their pains, they can expect to raise only maculate hornbow and dwarf-ox with any success, while in Prior Kairnlaw both these breeds thrive and four others besides: palomino hornbow, crucicorn, plodd and jabobo (of which last, more presently). If scarcity alone had not made cattle thieves of the Latter-Kairns, their enduringly bitter sense of dispossession would have done it. Inevitably they have robbed one another, but they have always preferred the richer plunder and the prestige among their fellows to be won by raiding their homeland's usurpers.

One aspect of this historic conflict-the jabobo question-has proven particularly fateful for both kairnish nations by leading them, indirectly, to a dangerously frequent contact with the demon realms. Wimfort's folly and consequent abduction-which compelled Nifft and Barnar to their dire expedition-are perfectly symptomatic of this trend, and so its cause deserves some amplification.

Jabobos flourish in Prior Kairnlaw as they do nowhere else on earth. The beasts are big quasi-bipeds, about twice the size of a man. They are cleanly (they wash themselves in the manner of cats), short-muzzled, small- eared and, except for their thick, stubbish tails and huge thighs, have a rather anthropoid aspect. They are valued for their milk, not their flesh, and no more males than are needed for breeding are ever raised. The females have remarkably pronounced mammary developments which are, if I may so phrase it, directly and immediately exploitable by men. The herdsman's feeling of communion with such a breed is-imaginably-great. Not to put too fine a point on it, jabobo cults-originating in various fertility-promoting rituals informally practiced by herdsmen-now abound in Prior Kairnlaw. Sacred herds are designated and the rituals centered on them are reported-probably reliably-to have both dionysiac and priapic features. (The herds are often called, by local cynics, "sacred seraglios.") Whether the ancestors of the Latter Kairns, when they possessed that bovine Eden, ran to similar extremes is a moot question. A primitive purity of both rite and tenet is hotly alleged by them today, and it may have been so. Certainly they too in their day had sacred herds, and their doctrine holds the descendants of these beasts to be sacred still, and still their own religious proper ty. Hence Prior Kairnlaw cul t act ivi t ies are felt by Latter Kairns as an intolerably flagrant profanation of their lactescent icons, a heinous sacrilege daily renewed. On this question the Latter Kairns focus all the rage and anguish of their dispossession. And it was during the First Jabobo Wars that they-athirst for a vengeance beyond the scope of torch and sword-began buying sorcery in the cities of Shormuth. The Prior Kairns armed themselves in haste from the same dubious arsenal, and three centuries of necromantic skirmishing, not yet abated, were begun.

More than one observer has remarked on the great number of subworld portals to be found in Kairnheim.

Some-like Stalwart's Quarry-resemble Darkvent in having been opened by human inadvertence, but far more have appeared with ominous spontaneity, unlocked by earthquake, erosion, and even lightning. The speculation that a zone of extraordinary demon vitality underlies the continent, while doubtless correct, misses the heart of the matter. For surely, centuries of haphazard and indiscriminate invocations of demonic power by the Kairns have had the effect of concentrating the ever-alert malevolence of the subworlds beneath their land. The Kairns lack any coherent thaumaturgical tradition, oral or written. Impetuous and ill-informed, they offer a ready market for the services of third-rate mages and unscrupulous spell-brokers, such as are now to be found in great numbers in the Shormuth region. Such "wizardlets" command powers sufficient to tap demonic forces, but inadequate to ensure the mastery of them. In essence, the true demon highways to man's world lie through man's spirit; to yearn for destructive power is to open a gate to the subworlds, and from this we must conclude that the very foundation stone of Kairnheim is by now vermiculate with the hellish traffic that her people have kept so steadily aflowing.

The manuscript of this narrative is in Nifft's own hand. He himself told me he felt a particular responsibility to undertake the labor of writing it, as an act of homage to Gildmirth, for whom he conceived an abiding affection and regard. The Privateer surely merits some particular comment. His birthplace-Sordon Head, on Kolodr ia's southern coast-is as r ich and empi re- incl ined a ci ty now as i t was when he swindled it three hundred years ago to finance his journey to the Demon Sea. Indeed, Gildmirth's ploy proves him a native son, both in his cunning and his venturesome greed, for Sordonite policy has always leaned as heavily on deception to gain its ends as on the strength of its navy. Many writers have held its people's ruthless duplicity to be a shade more (or less) than human, and subscribed to the legend that there is demon blood in the population. There is little more than the city's proximity to Taarg Vortex-the subworld marine portal down which Gildmirth escaped his enraged fellow citizens-to support this tradition. More probable is the rumor that many Sordonite families have close ties with the formidable wizards of the Astrygal Chain southwest of the Great Shallows. Gildmirth, at least, almost certainly enjoyed such connections, for it is unlikely he could have obtained his shape-shifting powers in any other place.

-Shag Margold The Fishing of the Demon-Sea I.

JUST AFTER DAWN, they buckled us into the strappadoes. The mechanism is fairly simple. Your wrists and ankles are pulled toward the four corners of the upright frame, and you're splayed in the center like a moth in a web. Each machine has three executioners. Two work the winches until all the joints in your body are pulled apart. The third has a long-handled pruning scissors for starting the cuts around your separated joints. Then the winchmen go to work again, to tear you apart at the cuts. They alternate. It's considered good winch-and-scissors work when your trunk falls all at once out of the splayed rack of your limbs. They don't like thieves in Kine Gather.