SHEA'S "INFERNO"! Follow the adventures of Nifft the Lean, the master thief whose felonious appropriations and larcenous skills will lead through Stygian realms to challenge your most lurid fantasies and errant imaginings. Places where horror, harm and long eerie calms flow past the traveller in endless, unpredictable succession. Travel the man whose long, rawboned, sticky fingers and stark length of arm will lead you down to the vermiculous grottos of the demon sea, to stand beneath the subworld's lurid sky and battle monsters who seem the spiritual distillation of human evil itself! We invite to the very gates of Hell and beyond—COME IF YOU DARE!

Nifft the Lean, and his companion-at-arms, Barnar Hammer-Hand, were often lucky. Enroute to working Costard's sap mine—very dangerous, and sometimes nauseating work far below ground—they were shipwrecked. But this proved fortuitous, when they met Bunt, who had been seeking just such as they. If they would work the sap mine, but also bring back twenty gills of fluid, he would make them exceedingly wealthy.So it was settled. They would suck the sap from the servants of the monstrous insectile queen—and they would bring back some of the ichor that she alone exuded—and they would be rich. It seemed relatively easy. They wouldn't have to go to hell at all, for instance. Of course, the best laid plans sometimes do go a little astray.

PROSPEROUS HAGIA'S VAULTS BRIMMED WITH GOLD. HER WAREHOUSES BULGED WITH THE GOODS OF THE SOUTHERN SEAS. SHE HAD THE SPIDER-GOD TO THANK FOR HER PROSPERITY.But beneath Hagia's ancient bargain with the A'Rak lay the direst danger. That mercenary kingdom had mortgaged its soul in its pact with the giant arachnoid. When the note fell due, death of the most hideous kind awaited the multitudes of that affluent and bustling nation. As Hagia's debt falls due, two foreigners arrive in Big Quay, her capital: Lagademe and her team, foremost among the world's Nuncios—deliverers of anything to anywhere—and Nifft the Lean, thief and rogue extraordinaire. Nifft and Lagademe, strangers to one another at the outset, will soon be struggling side by side for their lives—and a nation's survival—against the most hideous foe in the annals of Sword and Sorcery fiction.