Nifft the Lean by Michael Shea

Author:Michael Shea [Shea, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy
ISBN: 9780586064993
Publisher: Grafton Books
Published: 1990-01-14T16:00:00+00:00

XI

We had to row the boat across to the manse. ‘Our sail,’ Gildmirth explained, ‘is one of the things we must pick up from my quarters. You’ll forgive my resting now when you understand the labor I have undertaken for you.’

‘We are delighted to help,’ I grunted. ‘And so? Please go on. What can you tell us about Wimfort?’

‘Wimfort?’

‘The boy we’re after.’

‘Oh. Little more than why he made his mistake about bonshads. You see, Balder Xolot’s Thaumaturge’s Pocket Pandect has a mistake in it. And in the hundred and twelve years since he published it, it’s been disastrous to all that class of people who study not at all, and yet buy serious spells by the lot. For all such go-to-market magi are quite correctly informed that of all abridgers and condensers of Power Lore, Xolot is unquestionably the best. Alas, he was human. In his transcription of the Paleo-Archaic texts concerning Sazmazm, he misread the word parn-shtadha. This is a rare variant of the more usual sh’t-parndha, which one need have no Paleo-Archaic to recognize as meaning no one, so close is it to High Archaic’s hesha’t pa-harnda. But Xolot decided it was a scribal error for parnsht’ada, which is to say, bonshad. What a crop of ruin from so small a seed! One little sentence. “And no one” — it says — “hath power to bring it” — meaning the Elixir — “from where it lieth up into the sun.” Give one more pull please, gentlemen, and ship your oars.’

We obeyed. The boat’s momentum carried it across the terrace and through the flooded doorway.

Till now we had only glimpsed the pain of the Privateer’s imprisonment. But here, inside his manse, the ruin of his spirit was starkly visible in the ruin he inhabited. You could see that formerly, this great chamber had been the throne room of his pride, both the showroom of his past achievements and the workroom where he shaped new projects. At present it was an indoor lagoon which the low swell filled with echoes, and everything in it was the sea’s. Even the canvases arrayed along the walls to either side of us, though only the bottoms of their ornate frames hung in the water, had all been invaded and colonized by sea growth. The bright imagery was spotted with leprous mosses; shell life scabbed and sea-grass whiskered it. Gildmirth figured in all these pictures and in them it seemed he had recorded — with great artistry — key events in his history here. Now you saw his face everywhere — crusted, bearded, or grotesquely blurred, like a drowned corpse.

Much more in there was literally drowned, of course. The ceiling was hung with luminous globes whose light sifted down to the sunken floor, and we could see that this — which we crossed so smoothly now — had been a crowded place to weave your way across before the waters had possessed it. Low platforms and daises stood everywhere. Many of them supported taxidermic

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