Nifft The Lean by Michael Shea

Author:Michael Shea [Shea, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy
Publisher: Daw Books, Incorporated
Published: 1982-12-27T00:00:00+00:00

III

Near its inland border, the city rose toward a central eminence, a great table-topped monolith crowned with its most august edifices. These surrounded a vast, colonnade-bordered plaza, in which Minor's landau discharged its three passengers. Minor turned to guide the other two toward a huge, blunt-terraced building, the acropolis' second-largest structure. Nifft, however, set out rather dreamily in the opposite direction, walking a ways out toward the center of the square, and stopping at the tip of a jagged blade of shadow that lay upon the flagstones. This was the greatest salience of a vast wedge of shadow which the noonday sun printed upon the plaza, darkening more than half of its upland side. Minor lifted his arm and began to call some remonstration, when he and Kandros saw the gaunt Karkmahnite lift his gaze from the shadow's tip toward the megalith that cast it. The Sexton's arm fell, and for a moment the three stood looking silently up at the hammer of ill fate that overhung the prosperous city.

The half-destroyed—and potentially all-destroying—mountain was so like its grotesque fellows that its condition endowed them all with added menace. They would not have lacked this quality in any case. The noon sunlight blazoned forth the dynamic of their making, showing well over half their material to be disparate metallic veins, wildly torqued and twisted together, as if the varied metals had once been molten in one cauldron together, and stirred there by some cosmic ladle. This structure was the source of the mountains' tormented and skeletal shapes, for it had been gnawed into prominence by millennia of "peeling"—spiral quarrying of various individual veins, as well as of the rock between the veins. This latter material was not so variegated as the metals which it interleaved. Most of it was a dense, fine-textured stone of brownish black—the fecal coal, in fact, which Minor had mentioned. This had been as heavily quarried as any of the metals were.

The damaged peak resembled many others in having been so deeply scored that the intact veins supporting the mass of its higher parts were clearly discernible. At a place perhaps four-fifths up the mountain, just about where its "neck" might be said to be, a large landslide had exposed the scrawny spinal veins holding up the massive, gnarled summit. The three twisted shafts of metal ore that did this looked surprisingly slight for the task, and indeed, had buckled under it—had bent to an angle halfway between the vertical and the horizontal, bowing titanically in the city's direction. Raggedly surrounding the point of breakage, a system of wood-and-steel buttresses had been built—colossal enough on the human scale, but pathetically inadequate to sustain the mass they encircled.

Nifft turned and rejoined his companions. As Minor led them toward the temple, Nifft murmured: "Those supports. They must have been undertaken more as a psychological palliative than a seriously-believed-in preventive measure?"

Minor nodded sourly. Nifft went on: "How big is it, in terms of the city? I mean, if it hit

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