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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 raiments, 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 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 Arak-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:

Arak-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

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