The Incompleat Nifft by Michael Shea

ear."
    "No!" shrieked a sister behind her. "A right ear. We want a right ear, you scabby sack of tombslime!"
    "A left ear," insisted the first. She snatched some rusty shears from her waist. The blades were furred with mold where the blood was crusted, but I took the tool almost gratefully. It was only an ear, you understand, and the hole would still be there for hearing. Look. Here's my work—I spared myself a bit, you see, but I had to give them all the lobe, for that's where the blood is, and they'd have noticed a cheat there. Seeing through a bright red haze, I tossed them the shears, and then the morsel. Instantly they were a screeching heap, fighting for the prize. Hair was rent, and strips of flesh torn from lean flanks. They fought like famished gulls, while I remounted, and the Guide lashed the dogs. Haldar bound my head with a strip from my sleeve as we whirled across the bridge. It seemed endlessly long. The gulf beneath was a dreadful one. A groaning of deep waters filled its darkness.
    Even before my brain had swum clear of nausea and pain, I discovered I was hearing things most deep and hidden and distant—hearing, impossibly clear, the secretest sounds of this world. The smallest whispers from the gulf floor entered my brain as if little rat-mouths were murmuring directly through the ruined gate in the side of my head. Pleadings in a mindless speech of moans; torturing giggles and chuckles from dry throats of bone; babbles of devil-confession; the liquid noise of strange stews; the scuff of hooves, claws clicking—even the silken sweep of deep fins. That gulf and all the canyons beyond said much to me as we pounded through them, and hinted countless things I did not wish to know.

VII
     
    I think that Haldar caught my cue of pity. For after a while, he said, "I will pay next, Lord Guide."
    "Then you will pay soon," said the Guide.
    We had run for some time through a deep canyon whose walls overhung and whose course was branched and mazy. The light on the river and the wide banks was dim and shadow-crossed. The hounds raged forward, tireless, like a destroying wave that comes pushing through miles of ocean. But the grey chasm mocked our speed by seeming endlessly the same.
    We watched for changes at the Guide's hint, but at first saw only familiar things. There were huts with door-curtains of strung teeth still chattering from the denizens' quick hiding. (I alone heard also their rank breathing within, and the groans of their tightly muffled victims.) There were ghoulish smithies too, where toad-bodied giants hammered smoking limbs onto struggling souls stretched on anvils, and other shops as well where similar giants with pipes blew screaming dwarves into being from cauldrons of molten flesh. There were rat-men struggling in thickets of tarantula weed, and there were groves of dung-bearing trees with twisted trunks translucent like gut. Soulcreeps such as Shamblor inhabited these groves, grazing endlessly. Their drear whining said it was not by choice.
    I was the first to sense the new thing ahead. I began to hear the guzzlings and growls of ten thousand carrion-eating throats. It was the noise of a great host, tearing and gulping.
    My companions were alerted shortly after by the sooty cloud of birds swooping and wheeling beyond the next bend in the river. We flew through the curve. Before us a mammoth dyke stretched to the river from either wall of the canyon. It was a little mountain range of the freshly killed—fifty feet high and a hundred wide, they were piled. Jackals tugged and shouldered and fought all along the fringes of that wall, while its upper slopes were glittery black with birds. Necrophage insects hung thick as coal dust in the air, and I heard with intolerable distinctness the wet working of their mandibles.
    On our bank there was a gateway through the heap. It was overlooked by a guard-tower made of bones. As we neared, something big could be seen moving in the tower. We could also see