Michael Shea - The A'rak

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The A’rak

by Michael Shea

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or

incidents is purely coincidental.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN: 0-671-31947-7

Cover art by Gary Ruddell

First printing, October 2000

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Typeset by Brilliant Press

Printed in the United States of America

To my dearly beloved

Linda, Della, and Jake

BAEN BOOKS by Michael Shea

The Incompleat Nifft

SHAG MARGOLD’S

PREFACE TO

THE A’RAK

One densely foggy morning not many months before the events here recorded, the witch Gnarl-Bone

the Bearded walked along the rocky shore of her native Strega. She was attended by two of her

myrmidames who were, shortly, to assist in her conveyance, for Gnarl-Bone purposed to go seeking

something which her researches—researches prosecuted over several decades—had at last persuaded her

lay not far off.

Strega is the westernmost isle of the Astrygal Island Chain, and while witches in their varied collegia,

cloisters, bibliotroves and incunabularia have dominated most of the islands time out of mind, it is on

Strega in particular that the sisterhood’s greatest archivists have founded their fastnesses. Strega is the

Lore-hoard of the Astrygals, and is, in consequence, home to the Lore’s most potent adepts. And among

these gathered prodigies, Gnarl-Bone is, by any reckoning, among the two or three Preeminents.

Indeed, this search towards whose conclusion she now bestrode the surf-scoured shingle (with a

visage—always fierce—contorted by hope to a near demon-ferocity)—this search had been stimulated by

clues which, to any other eyes than hers, would have been mere fragments of enigma: a couplet from an

obscure Angrian epode seven thousand lines in length; a half dozen words of digression in Skatagary’s

mad, visionary Geophobion; a never previously noticed inconsistency in Punktil’s Digitary of Dead Stars.

These had individually (let alone the connection between them) eluded the greatest scholars; in greater

Gnarl-Bone, they had sparked the hope of a priceless acquisition, and on this misty, moisty Stregan

morning she marched, in a rage of suspenseful eagerness, either to embrace her prize, or to know herself

deluded these long years.

“Here!” she boomed, midway across a surf-lashed cove of shingle. She faced the sea, and her

myrmidames crouched ready at her either side. She and they marched into the breakers’ foamy onslaught,

trudging stolidly out until, waist-deep, Gnarl-Bone made a peremptory gesture at the next incoming wave.

The obedient billow surged up to a great height, and, just as it neared the trio, arched over their heads and

back around them, enveloping them in a great bubble. Now they strode offshore within this air-globe, the

myrmidames dropping to all fours to trundle it forward along the seafloor at their mistress’ direction. As

their sphere sank under the surface, the sorceress with a second gesture filled it with light, which spilled

out far beyond their vehicle in all directions, and draped in brilliance the seafloor’s weedy, undulous

terrain.

Gnarl-Bone stood on air, thoughtfully stroking her tattered beard, directing her dog-trotting minions

now here, now there. These two dames, with not four centuries of age between them, were mere pups

beside their venerable mistress, but still they found it toilsome negotiating the history-strewn slopes and

ravines of the circum-Stregan sea-bottom. The Astrygals have fought off more than one invasion (many of

these from the air) and the seafloors round those isles are crowded with the hulks and bones of beaten

Ambition.

Their search was long, but at length came a moment when Gnarl-Bone’s eyes narrowed, and the harsh

crags of her visage slowly softened with an emotion she had nearly forgotten in her long years of dark

endeavor and recondite inquiry: awe.

Their radiant globe trundled toward what, in its weedy raiment, could only be a giant, crook-legged

skeleton of unearthly anatomy. They circled it, spilling light across a long body like jointed armor, and the

jagged jut of broken, blade-like wings. Within the ruin of the central body, whose form might be likened

to a stove-in hull (though no Kolodrian war-galley, nor even ten such, matched its size) a much smaller,

compact shape lay nested. At sight of this the sorceress’ cragged and gullied countenance contorted in a

ghastly ecstasy. Witchcraft’s intricate speculations, and anfractuous inductions, are so often inconclusive,

that confirmation savors sweet indeed.

From Gnarl-Bone’s discovery flowed all the momentous events herein related. The narrative is

presented by two of its chief actors: my dear friend Nifft the Lean, the Ephesionite thief, and Lagademe

the Nuncio, a woman of irreproachable courage and character—as, indeed, any Nuncio of her reputation is

likely to be. I have inter-leaved their accounts, regularly alternating between their testimonies. This, I

believe, allows the reader a readier grasp of developments on several fronts.

While I have reproduced Nuncio Lagademe’s testimony very nearly in its entirety, I have had to trim

Nifft’s account, for my friend was familiar with the Nuncio’s account, and included in his own many

remarks upon hers. As these were largely in the nature of self-justifications or retorts to some of the

Nuncio’s observations, I have pruned them off of the plausible thief’s narrative. Such deletions can be

assumed to have been made on every other page of Nifft’s chapters. Where I have excised a particularly

lengthy one of Nifft’s divagations, I indicate the lacuna with the following typographical mark: ( . . . )

Hagia—our grim drama’s setting—is the third largest of the nine Astrygals, but the thaumaturgic

sorority have for unknown reasons never settled in the island’s northern half. North Hagia, all hills and

river-valleys, has anciently been home to a pastoral nation. In recent centuries, of course, its metropolis,

Big Quay, on the Haagsford River, is a mighty entrepot of warehousing and banking concerns, one of the

great hubs of trade and speculation dominating the commerce that swarms across the southern Sea of

Agon. While the city’s situation, midway between the bustling economies of the Ingens Cluster, the

Ephesion Chain, and the Great Shallows’ southern rim, has always suited it for this role, its era of

commercial hegemony only began, of course, with the coming of the A’Rak, whose temples came to stand

among the proudest of the rising nation’s majestic financial edifices.

It ill behooves the historiographer to pass judgement on a nation’s choice of gods, nor do I wish to

anticipate further that which Nifft and Lagademe provide in detail hereafter. Whatever one’s private

estimation of the North Hagians’ bargain, their Covenant with the A’Rak, no person of any humanity will

deny that its final cost, recorded in these pages, was such as to still the tongue of Reprobation, and fill

Reproof’s stern eye with Pity’s tears.

Targvad’s A’Rak-on-Epos, as rendered from the High Archaic by Roddish the Minusk, provides

perhaps the best brief evocation of that monstrous deity’s aura of menace, as it has been attested to by

generations of foreign observers and commentators:

A’Rak-on-Epos

Through a crack A’Rak crawled in the sky of his world

Out to oceans of space where the great star-wheels whirled;

He tiptoed across this white pavement of stars,

and up through the floor of his new world—ours.

The first world he’d feasted on festered and bled,

A charnel house heaped with his harvests of dead,

till his undying hunger was driven to flee

by the scourge of a Foe more immortal than he.

Now lowly he lurks here, a tenant discreet,

And sparingly, modestly sups at his meat—

Sends his spawn out a-hunting and hides ’neath the soil,

then devours his sons and possesses their spoils.

But once he ran rampant, and will never forget

the untrammelled slaughter that fevers him yet

in dreams when he rears up his gore-crusted jaws,

and feeds at his will without limits or laws.

Now pious he crouches in churches and whispers

of riches his vassals may reap from their Vespers,

and devours them in nibbles, by alms and by tithes,

though worlds were once fields that his fangs swept like scythes.

As he once in abundance of butchery bathed

when from his greed escaped nothing that breathed,

Howso pious and sparing he shepherd and shear thee,

Forget not! His lust is to slaughter and tear thee!

—Shag Margold

LAGADEME I

We made a delivery to some herb-haags in the Carnalin Mountains, not far upcoast from Lebanoi on the

eastern shore of the Great Shallows, and it was from them that we obtained the commission for our Hagian

delivery.

We delivered to the haags—with no small trouble up the crooked roads to their steep-perched little

hamlet—a gryf-gryf, for the haags use these monsters’ urine to catalyze many of their most efficacious

infusions. When the delivery was accomplished, the senior haag had me in to her study—a plank table in

the midst of one of their overwhelmingly odorous potting sheds.

“Gryf’s got a biter broke,” she observed sullenly, referring to a severe crack in one of our delivery’s

tusks.

“Yes,” I said shortly, my mouth still puckered by the exceeding sour wine she had poured me. “Brute

got his claws through the bars, broke that spoke on the clanker’s wheel there.” (We use the two-axle

clanker for heavy deliveries, rather than the two-wheel quickshaw we much prefer.) “Two of my men—

Raschle and Olombo there, had to club it near senseless to save the vehicle. That’s how his biter got

cracked.”

This senior haag, Radax, had canines so outgrown they weren’t unlike little tusks themselves. “Hard

cargo,” she conceded. She hefted a poke of Kolodrian lictors, our honorarium, in her soil-blackened paw,

gimleting me with a sullen look that was meant, I thought, to convey a grave doubt of some kind—

perhaps about proposing what she then, after paying me, proposed:

“Happen a near gossip of a dear clansister half removed of mine hath need on a crew o’ Nuncers

yourselfs-like, good Dame. Needs them down to North Hagia. Thrice pay to this here is proposed, as the

wayfaring’s to be done down in the spidergod’s webby wolds an’ what-all.”

That the stipend was princely was not my first thought on hearing this proposed commission. Nor did I

first note that the isle was a part of the world I had not yet seen, though this is a consideration that weighs

with me, as a rule. What struck me at once, rather, was the geography of the proposition. With Hagia lying

south-southeast of this coast, and our course hence a diagonal down the length of the Great Shallows, we

must, if we took this commission, pass hard by the raft cities of the Hydrobani Archipelago, in whose

great hive of brothels and gaming dens my sole and precious son Persander had perversely apprenticed

himself to acquire the most reverend arts of Gaming, to wit: shilling, sharping, dealing, duping, dicing,

finessing and fleecing.

My beloved Persander, my precious but willful son whom I, in my helpless outrage, had denounced and

forever banished from my sight! There was a poignant humor in this banishing of course, for since

Persander grew to his young manhood, I scarcely saw him once in a year. But the break itself, and my own

harsh, denouncing words to him—this was a galling pain in my heart, as it would be in any mother’s. I can

run mountain trail all day and night long with the toughest, but a woman in her full maturity knows that

the years must be counted like precious coin, and that a broken love long unmended can quick enough turn

to a broken love forever unmended.

How I had grieved in the two years since for my rash absoluteness! No day passed that I did not in my

heart unspeak my spiteful petulance a dozen ways. Two years lost between us already! With every life

uncertain enough but a Nuncio’s doubly unsure . . . it had begun to seem possible that we would never

meet again, my precious son and I.

And here now offered itself this irreproachably fortuitous turning of my professional fortunes, that

would allow me to seek out Persander at last—to tell him without deceit that chance had brought me near

him, and that my grieving heart had taken me the final steps, and here I was to unsay my hard words, and

embrace my precious child again.

“Well, who might this client be precisely,” I inquired blandly, “and what would she have conveyed, and

whither?”

“Seemly a dame lately widowed and wanting her mate’s remainders took acrosst country to be tombed

in that particular one of the spidergod’s temples as he was whelped and raised nigh. Seemly he was pious

in the A’Rakishite warshup and rittles an such-lot, while this widow dame, to hear my clan-sister tell it, is

quite the agnosticator and unbeliever—as indeed ’tis noised that most Hagish folk are, beyond the

formalities.”

“The husband is already deceased?” I asked carefully.

“Yes indeed.”

“And . . . embalmed, or the like?”

“Boxed and ’balmed. Him in his coffin just need wheeling cross-country and tucking in one of them

temple nooches.”

“She’s . . . sent word rather far abroad, hasn’t she, and will have been waiting quite some time before

we could possibly arrive to—”

“Well she trusts this gossip of hers that’s clan-sister of mine, now doesn’t she? And on our side, as she

trusts a clan-sister, we want her to have a first-water Nuncio, don’t we, as the A’Rakish wolds don’t lack

in danger now and again, do they?”

Though it seemed an odd sort of commission, I accepted it pending my crew’s approval, which I

straightway received. My crew—Shinn and Bantril (our pullers on the quickshaw, and our plod drovers on

this clanker) and Olombo and Raschle (our men-at-arms)—were as much taken with the stipend as I, and,

as crack nuncials tend to be, were unwilling to acknowledge any uneasiness about a risky destination, so

they promptly ratified my acceptance. Radax at once presented us with ship money to Hagia, and half the

stipend, of which Pompilla—the widow commissioning us—would pay us the rest on our arrival at Big

Quay.

I could not help reflecting that Radax had just laid out a very substantial sum from her own pocket, on

this distant widow’s behalf. For how could this Pompilla have forwarded her own funds to Radax at this

stage of her inquiries? I let the thought go. I had mainly my son on my mind, and this commission created

the pretext for seeing him again.

We went down to Lebanoi on the coast, and among that great milltown’s thronging wharves, found a

caravel cargoed with casks and tuns of pickled polyp and marinaded bi-valves, bound to Hagia by way of

the Hydrobani Archipelago, at whose raft towns stopovers by out-bound bottoms are common.

Shipmasters have found that a hard go at drinking and gambling settles a crew down for long hauls, the

more if they have been picked clean and put doubly in need of their pay. We made Glamara, grandest of

all the Hydrobani’s floating shearing pens, by nightfall, when its colored lights dapple the soft swells it

rides, and its timbers reverb like a vast complex drum with the clamors and capers of fevered fools vying

to be fleeced. Glamara, when last I’d heard, was where my Persander had ’prenticed himself.

Our shipmaster, Plectt, who struck me as rather a cynic and dandy—though polished enough—

suggested the glyfrig and runeriddle parlors. “A young blade carving a niche, Nuncio—if I may express it

so?—if he is bold and sharp-witted, works the glyfs or the runes, where they’ll give him a pit of his own

and a cut of the table to lure in the talent.”

I was supping some wine, a practice I’m little given to, but I intended it as a precaution to maintain

affability. To betray my contempt for this place would be to assure my inquiries met only rebuff, and the

mere sight of those gaudy-lanterned laneways where the raucous toppers reeled tipsily from den to den,

made me grit my teeth in scorn. My crew seemed annoyingly inclined to hang about me, meanwhile,

making mellowness hard to maintain.

“Won’t you all go and . . . game or whatever?” I burst out at them. “Leave me to concentrate! If you

spot him, come and tell me—I’ll be working straight west down yon largest promenade, the glyfrabble

and runewreckers lairs first. What do you need that for, Raschle?!” I noticed that Raschle had wrapped a

cubit of log-chain round his forearm and covered it with his sleeve. I’d just previously seen Olombo tuck

an ironwood short-knout in his breech-waist, and a brass knuckle-frame in his pocket. The two of them

traded a quick, hooded glance, and shrugged. My wiry pullers, Bantril and Shinn, glum, short-spoken men

of the tundra stock, turned away when I looked at them. Had Bantril there strapped something to his ribs

beneath his doublet? “Will you all leave me to collect myself, please?” I cried. “To concentrate?”

I watched them go. They seemed to confer before diverging in pairs to either side of the boulevard, and

leaving my view.

I quaffed one more goblet of wine. I sighed. Unclenched my hands. I practiced some affable smiles,

which I hoped would facilitate my inquiries in this city of scoundrels. Then I set forth.

The boulevard was an endless procession of lounges and parlors and lairs all tiaraed and spangled in

lamps—their mere monikers galled me: The Gilded Palm, Odds Bodikins, Pelf’s Paradise, The Portly

Poke, The Deck and Die. Smiling affably, I asked passers-by which were the glyf-trick and rune-swindle

dens, and was answered with japes and affronts.

Stepping in this place and that, I amiably conferred with various greeters and doorkeepers: with

pomaded panders, mustachioed shills, rouged catamites in kohl and ringlets, powdered ponces, and leering

ganymedes—for whose facetious impertinences I thanked them, smiling affably.

At length I learned to descry—through street windows—the red felt tables for rune play, and the racked

arrays of glass statuettes that were glyfs. Now, speaking less, I hunted through the dens themselves,

overstepping here the vomitus of a gamester overtaken by surfeit, sidestepping there the blind assault of a

gamester in fury, or ducking under the wild, begging embrace of a gamester just ruined.

Until, wonderfully, there he was, my son, at a rune table, suavely directing the coins his ring of bettors

vied to place. My dear, grave Persander, look at him: coolth itself amid chaos he was, his shoulders at last

their full breadth now (my father’s shoulder’s, as I had foreseen, not his father’s)—his brows’ brooding jut

in place too now, giving his eyes the shadowed private look I’d long seen they’d grow to. And his ears!

The last of that dear, boyish blatancy was gone now. They hugged his head sleekly, a man’s, my precious

little boy’s no more!

He saw me, stood staring, then signalled a colleague to stand in for him, and came over to me. His face

stayed impassive (already a gambler’s) but he walked straight to me and hugged me without hesitation.

I hugged him hard. “My precious son! I’ve intruded! No! I’ve inexcusably thrust in, interrupted,

embarrassed you. . . .”

“Mother! I rejoice to see you. I’m completely delighted!”

And then I could see that I had embarrassed him, though he was covering very smoothly. How could

this not embarrass him? I asked myself, but even so it stung me. He mustn’t be pawed by his mother here

where he worked his profession! Oh heavens forbid! I stood a bit away and smiled as if he were a dear

friend. It felt false and I felt miserable, but also a mite irritated now. “We are commissioned to North

Hagia, our carrack put in here. I had to see you and to . . . show you my affection.”

“North Hagia? Big Quay?” He seemed to disapprove. It irked me, seemed mere contrariety. Belatedly I

saw it was the A’Rak, the danger he minded. It made me glad. I was starting to reassure him when a big,

ruddy fop in wide fleecy muttonchops and a toga of silver fur placed a proprietary palm on my son’s

shoulder. “Riddler! I have coin here, Sirrah, riding on your felt! I’m engaged and I’m not having riddlers

switched on me, do you think me an infant? That I don’t know it’s bad luck? If you are indeed employed

here, come get thee back to work!”

“Sir,” said Persander coolly, gracefully lifting the man’s hand from his shoulder with one twist of his

wrist, “you are incorrect, and impo—”

“Impolite,” he was undoubtedly going to say. I afterwards recalled in perfect detail that moment when I

interrupted, and did the unforgivable for a mother—stepped in to defend my son, as if he couldn’t do it

himself! I tried to stand still, stay silent, and almost managed, but when my son addressed this flatulent

money-sack as “Sir,” my outrage wouldn’t stay down.

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摘要：

TheA’rakbyMichaelSheaThisisaworkoffiction.Allthecharactersandeventsportrayedinthisbookarefictional,andanyresemblancetorealpeopleorincidentsispurelycoincidental.Copyright©2000byMichaelSheaAllrightsreserved,includingtherighttoreproducethisbookorportionsthereofinanyform.ABaenBooksOriginalBaenPublishing...

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