Author: Racquet Network

*Chapter Seventeen*
The rats all over Lankkmar, after suffering huge losses, dove back everywhere into their holes and pulled tight shut the doors of such as had them. This happened also in the rooms of pink pools in the third floor of Hisvin’s house, where the War Cats had driven back the last of the rats who had gained their human size by drinking the white vials there and at the expense of the flesh of Hisvin’s Mingols. Now they guzzled the black vials even more eagerly, to escape back into their tunnels.
The rats also suffered total defeat in the South Barracks, where the War Cats ravaged after clawing and crashing open the doors with preternatural strength.
Their work done, the War Cats regathered at the place where Fafhrd had summoned them and there faded away even as they had earlier materialized. They were still thirteen, although they had lost one of their company, for the black kitten faded away with them, comporting himself like an apprentice member of their company. It was ever afterwards believed by most Lankhmarts, that the War Cats and the white skeletons as well had been summoned by the Gods _of_ Lankhmar, whose reputation for horrid powers and dire activities was thereby bolstered, despite some guilty recollections of their temporary defeat by the rats.
By twos and threes and sixes, the people of Lankhmar emerged from their places of hiding, learned that the Rat Plague was over, and wept, prayed, and rejoiced. Gentle Radomix Kistomerces-Null was plucked from his retreat in the slums and with his seventeen cats carried in triumph to the Rainbow Palace.
Glipkerio, his leaden craft tightly collapsed around him by weight of water, until it had become a second leaden skin molded to his form — truly a handsome coffin — continued to sink in the Lankhmar Deep, but whether to reach a solid bottom, or only a balancing place between world bubbles in the waters of infinity, who may say?
The Gray Mouser recovered Cat’s Claw from Hreest’s belt, marveling somewhat that all the rat-corpses were yet human size. Likely enough depth froze all magics.
Fafhrd noted with distaste the three pools of pink slime in front of the gold audience couch and looked for something to throw over them. Elakeria coyly clutched her coverlet around her. He dragged from a corner a colorful rug that was a duke’s ransom and made that do.
There was the noise of hooves on tiles. In the high, wide archway from which the drapes had been torn there appeared Kreeshkra, still on horseback arid leading the other two Ghoulish mounts, empty saddled. Fafhrd swung the skeleton girl down and embraced her heartily, somewhat to the Mouser’s and Elakeria’s shock, but soon said, “Dearest love, I think it best you put on again your black cloak and hood. Your naked bones are to me the acme of beauty, but here come others they may disturb.”
“Already ashamed of me, aren’t you? Oh, you dirty-minded puritanical Mud Folk!” Kreeshkra commented with a sour laugh, yet complied, while the rainbows in her eye sockets twinkled.
The others Fafhrd had referred to consisted of the councillors, soldiers, and various relatives of the late overlord, including the gentle Radomix Kistomerces-Null and his seventeen cats, each now carried and cosseted by some noble hoping to gain favor from Lankhmar’s most likely next overlord.
Not all the new arrivals were so commonplace. One heralded by more hoof-cloppings on tile, was Fafhrd’s Mingol mare, her tether bitten through. She stopped by Fafhrd and glared her bloodshot eyes at him, as if to say, “I am not so easily got rid of. Why did you cheat me of a battle?”
Kreeshkra patted the beast’s nose and observed to grim Fafhrd, “You are clearly a man who attracts deep loyalty in others. I trust you have the same quailty yourself.”
“Never doubt me, dearest,” Fafhrd answered with fond sincerity.
Also among the newcomers and returners was Reetha, looking suavely happy as a cat who has licked cream, or a panther some even more vital fluid, and naked as ever except for three broad black leather loops around her waist. She threw her arms about the Mouser “You’re big again!” she rejoiced. “And you beat them all!”
The Mouser accepted her embrace, though he purposely put on a dissatisfied face and said sourly, “You were a big help! — you and your naked army, deserting me when I most needed help. I suppose you finished off Samanda!”
“Indeed we did!” Reetha smirked like a sated leopardess. “What a sizzling she made! Look, doll, her belt of office _does_ go three times round my waist. Oh yes! we cornered her in the kitchen and brought her down. Each of us took a pin from her hair. Then — ”
“Spare me the details, darling,” the Mouser cut her short. “This night for nine hours I’ve been a rat, with all of a rat’s nasty feelings, and that’s quite long enough. Come with me, pet; there’s something we must attend to ere the crowd gets too thick.”
When they returned after a short space, the Mouser was carrying a box wrapped in his cloak, while Reetha wore a violet robe, around which was still triply looped, however, Samanda’s belt. And the crowd had thickened indeed. Radomix Kistomerces-no-longer-Null had already been informally vested with Lankhmar’s overlordship and was sitting somewhat bemused on the golden seashell audience couch along with his seventeen cats and also a smiling Elakeria, who had wrapped her coverlet like a sari around her sylphlike figure.
The Mouser drew Fafhrd aside. “That’s quite a girl you’ve got,” he remarked, rather inadequately, of Kreeshkra.
“Yes, isn’t she,” Fafhrd agreed blandly.
“You should have seen mine,” the Mouser boasted. “I don’t mean Reetha there, I mean my _weird_ one. She had — ”
“Don’t let Kreeshkra hear you use that word,” Fafhrd warned sharply through _sub voce_.
“Well, anyhow, whenever I want to see her again,” the Mouser continued conspiratorially, “I have only to swallow the contents of this black vial and — ”
“I’ll take charge of that,” Reetha announced crisply, snatching it out of his hand from behind him. She glanced at it, then expertly pitched it through a window into the Inner Sea.
The Mouser started a glare at her which turned into an infuriating smile.
Flapping her black robe to cool her, Kreeshkra came up behind Fafhrd. “Introduce me to your friends, dear,” she directed.
Meanwhile around the golden couch was an ever-thickening press of courtiers, nobles, councillors, and officers. New titles were being awarded by the dozen to all first-comers. Sentences of perpetual banishment and confiscation of property were being laid on Hisvin and all others absent, guilty or guiltless. Reports were coming in of the successful fighting of all fires in the city and the complete vanishment of rats from its streets. Plans were being laid for the complete extirpation from under the city of the entire rat-metropolis of Lankhmar Below — subtle and complex plans which did not sound to the Mouser entirely practical. It was becoming clear that under the saintly Radomix Kistomerces, Lankhmar would more than ever be ruled by foolish fantasy and shameless greed. At moments like these it was easy to understand why the Gods _of_ Lankhmar were so furiously exasperated by their city.
Various lukewarm thanks were extended to the Mouser and Fafhrd, although most of the newcomers seemed not at all clear as to what part the two heroes had placed in conquering the rats, despite Elakeria’s repeated accounts of the final fighting and of Glipkerio’s sea-plunge. Soon, clearly, seeds would be planted against the Mouser and Fafhrd in Radomix’s saintly-vague mind, and their bright heroic roles imperceptibly darkened to blackest villainy.
At the same time it became evident that the new court was disturbed by the restless tramping of the four ominous war-horses, three Ghoulish and one Mingol, and that the presence of an animated skeleton was becoming more and more disquieting, for Kreeshkra continued to wear her black robe and hood like a loose garment. Fafhrd and the Mouser looked at one another, and then at Kreeshkra and Reetha, and they realized that there was ageement between them. The Northerner mounted the Mingol mare, and the Mouser and Reetha the two leftover Ghoulish horses, and they all four made their way out of the Rainbow Palace as quietly as is possible when hooves clop on tile.
Thereafter there swiftly grew in Lankhmar a new legend of the Gray Mouser and Fafhrd: how as rat-small midget and bell-tower-tall giant they had saved Lankhmar from the rats, but at the price of being personally summoned and escorted to the Afterworld by Death himself, for the black-robed ivory skeleton, was remembered as male, which would doubtless have irked Kreeshkra greatly.
However, as next morning the four rode under the fading stars toward the paling east along the twisty causeway across the Great Salt Marsh, they were all merry enough in their own fashions. They had commandeered three donkeys and laden them with the box of jewels the Mouser had abstracted from Glipkerio’s bed-chamber and with food and drink for a long journey, though exactly where that journey would lead they had not yet agreed. Fafhrd argued for a trip to his beloved Cold Waste, with a long stopover on the way at the City of Ghouls. The Mouser was equally enthusiastic for the Eastern Lands, slyly pointing out to Reetha what an ideal place it would be for sunbathing unclad.
Yanking up her violet robe to make herself more comfortable, Reetha nodded her agreement. “Clothes are so itchy,” she said. “I can hardly bear them. I like to ride bareback — my back, not the horse’s. While hair is even itchier — I can feel mine growing. You will have to shave me every day, dear,” she added to the Mouser.
He agreed to take on that chore, but added, “However, I can’t concur with you altogether, sweet. Besides protecting from brambles and dust, clothes give one a certain dignity.”
Reetha retorted tartly, “I think there’s far more dignity in the naked body.”
“Pish, girl,” Kreeshkra told her, “what can compare with the dignity of naked bones?” But glancing toward Fafhrd’s red beard and red, curled chest, she added, “However, there is something to be said for hair.”

*Chapter Fifteen*
Glipkerio sat fidgeting on the edge of his seashell-shaped couch of gold. His light battle-ax lay forgot on the blue floor beside him. From a low table he took up a delicate silver wand of authority tipped with a bronze starfish — it was one of several dozen lying there — and sought to play with it nervously. But he was too nervous for that. Within moments it shot out of his hands and clattered musically on the blue floor-tiles a dozen feet away. He knotted his wand-long fingers together tightly, and rocked in agitation.
The Blue Audience Chamber was lit only by a few guttering, soot-runneled candles. The central curtains had been raised, but this doubling of the room’s length only added to its gloom. The stairway going up into the blue minaret was a spiral of shadows. Beyond the dark archways leading to the porch, the great gray spindle balancing atop the copper chute gleamed mysteriously in the moonlight. A narrow silver ladder led up to its manhole, which stood open.
The candles cast on the blue-tiled inner wall several monstrous shadows of a bulbous figure seeming to bear two heads, the one atop the other. It was made by Samanda, who stood watching Glipkerio with stolid intentness, as one watches a lunatic up to tricks.
Finally Glipkerio, whose own gaze never ceased to twitch about at floor level, especially at the foot of blue curtains masking arched blue doorways, began to mumble, softly at first, then louder and louder, “I can’t stand it any more. Armed rats loose in the palace. Guardsmen gone. Hairs in my throat. That horrid girl. That indecent hairy jumping jack with the Mouser’s face. No butler or maid to answer my bell. Not even a page to trim the candles. And Hisvin hasn’t come. Hisvin’s not coming! I’ve no one. All’s lost!. _I can’t stand it. I’m leaving! World, adieu! Nehwon, good-bye! I seek a happier universe!”_
And with that warning, he dashed toward the porch — a streak of black toga from which a lone last pansy petal fluttered down.
Samanda, clumping after him heavily, caught him before he could climb the silver ladder, largely because he couldn’t get his hands unknotted to grip the rungs. She gasped him round with a huge arm and led him back toward the audience couch, meanwhile straightening and unslipping his fingers for him and saying, “Now, now, no boat trips tonight, little master. It’s on dry land we stay, your own dear palace. Only think: tomorrow, when this nonsense is past, we’ll have such lovely whippings. Meanwhile to guard you, pet, you’ve me, who am worth a regiment. Stick to Samanda!”
As if taking her at her literal word, Glipkerio, who had been confusedly pulling away, suddenly threw his arms around her neck and almost managed to seat himself upon her great belly.
A blue curtain had billowed wide, but it was only Glipkerio’s niece Elakeria in a gray silk dress that threatened momently to burst at the seams. The plump and lascivious girl had grown fatter than ever the past few days from stuffing herself with sweets to assuage her grief at her mother’s broken neck and the crucifixion of her pet marmoset, and even more to still her fears for herself. But at the moment a weak anger seemed to be doing the work of honey and sugar.
“Uncle!” she cried. “You must do something at once! The guardsmen are gone. Neither my maid nor page answered my bell, and when I went to fetch them, I found that insolent Reetha — wasn’t she to be whipped? — inciting all the pages and maids to revolt against you, or do something equally violent. And in the crook of her left arm sat a living gray-clad doll waving a cruel little sword — surely it was he who crucified Kwe-Kwe! — urging further enormities. I stole away unseen.”
“Revolt, eh?” Samanda scowled, setting Glipkerio aside and unsnapping whip and truncheon from her belt. “Elakeria, look out for Uncle here. You know, boat trips,” she added in a hoarse whisper, tapping her temple significantly. “Meanwhile I’ll give those naked sluts and minions a counter-revolution they’ll not forget.”
“Don’t leave me!” Glipkerio implored, throwing himself at her neck and lap again. “Now that Hisvin’s forgot me, you’re my only protection.”
A clock struck the quarter hour. Blue drapes parted and Hisvin came in with measured steps instead of his customary scuttling. “For good or ill, I come upon my instant,” he said. He wore his black cap and toga and over the latter a belt from which hung ink-pot, quill-case, and a pouch of scrolls. Hisvet and Frix came close after him, in sober silken black robes and stoles. The blue drapes closed behind them. All three black-framed faces were grave.
Hisvin paced toward Glipkerio, who somewhat shamed into composure by the orderly behavior of the newcomers was standing beanpole tall on his own two gold-sandaled feet, had adjusted a little the disordered folds of his toga, and straightened around his golden ringlets the string of limp vegetable matter which was all that was left of his pansy wreath.
“Oh most glorious overlord,” Hisvin intoned solemnly, “I bring you the worst news” — Glipkerio paled and began again to shake — “and the best.” Glipkerio recovered somewhat. “The worst first. The star whose coming made the heavens right has winked out, like a candle puffed on by a black demon, its fires extinguished by the black swells of the ocean of the sky. In short, she’s sunk without a trace and so I cannot speak my spell against the rats. Furthermore, it is my sad duty to inform you that the rats have already, for all practical purposes, conquered Lankhmar. All your soldiery is being decimated in the South Barracks. All the temples have been invaded and the very Gods _of_ Lankhmar slain without warning in their dry, spicy beds. The rats only pause, out of a certain courtesy which I will explain, before capturing your palace over your head.”
“Then all’s lost,” Glipkerio quavered chalk-pale and turning his head added peevishly, “I _told_ you so, Samanda! Naught remains for me but the last voyage. World, adieu! Nehwon, farewell! I seek a happier — ”
But this time his lunge toward the porch was stopped at once by his plump niece and stout palace mistress, hemming him close on either side.
“Now hear the best,” Hisvin continued in livelier accents. “At great personal peril I have put myself in touch with the rats. It transpires that they have an excellent civilization, finer in many respects than man’s — in fact, they have been secretly guiding the interests and growth of man for some time — oh ’tis a cozy, sweet civilization these wise rodents enjoy and ’twill delight your sense of fitness when you know it better! At all events the rats, now loving me well — ah, what fine diplomacies I’ve worked for you, dear master! — have entrusted me with their surrender terms, which are unexpectedly generous!”
He snatched from his pouch one of the scrolls in it, and saying, “I’ll summarize,” read: “…hostilities to cease at once … by Glipkerio’s command transmitted by his agents bearing his wands of authority … Fires to be extinguished and damage to Lankhmar repaired by Lankhmarts under direction of … et cetera. Damage to ratly tunnels, arcades, pleasances, privies, and other rooms to be repaired by humans. ‘Suitably reduced in size’ should go in there. All soldiers disarmed, bound, confined … and so forth. All cats, dogs, ferrets, and other vermin … well, naturally. All ships and all Lankhmarts abroad … that’s clear enough. Ah, here’s the spot! Listen now. Thereafter each Lankhmart to go about his customary business, free in all his actions and possessions — _free_, you hear that? — subject only to the commands of his personal rat or rats, who shall crouch upon his shoulder or otherwise dispose themselves on or within his clothing, as they shall see fit, and share his bed. But _your_ rats,” he went on swiftly, pointing to Glipkerio, who had gone very pale and whose body and limbs had begun again their twitchings and his features their tics, “_your_ rats shall, out of deference to your high position, not be rats at all! — but rather my daughter Hisvet and, temporarily, her maid Frix, who shall attend you day and night, watch and watch, granting your every wish on the trifling condition that you obey their every command. What could be fairer, my dear master?”
But Glipkerio had already gone once more into his, “World, adieu! Nehwon, farewell! I seek a — ” meanwhile straining toward the porch and convulsing up and down in his efforts to be free of Samanda’s and Elakeria’s restraining arms. Of a sudden, however, he stopped still, cried, “Of course I’ll sign!” and grabbed for the parchment. Hisvin eagerly led him to his audience couch and the table, meanwhile readying his writing equipment.
But here a difficulty developed. Glipkerio was shaking so that he could hardly hold pen, let alone write. His first effort with the quill sent a comet’s tail of inkdrops across the clothing of those around him and Hisvin’s leathery face. All efforts to guide his hand, first by gentleness, then by main force, failed.
Hisvin snapped his fingers in desperate impatience, then pointed a sudden finger at his daughter. She produced a flute from her black silken robe and began to pipe a sweet yet drowsy melody. Samanda and Elakeria held Glipkerio face down on his couch, the one at his shoulders, the other at his ankles, while Frix, kneeling with one knee on the small of his back began with her fingertips to stroke his spine from skull to tail in time to Hisvet’s music, favoring her left hand with its bandaged palm.
Glipkerio continued to convulse upward at regular intervals, but gradually the violence of these earthquakes of the body decreased and Frix was able to transfer some of her rhythmic strokings to his flailing arms.
Hisvin, hard a-pace and snapping his fingers again, his shadows marching like those of giant rats moving confusedly and size-changingly against each other across the blue tiles, demanded suddenly on noting the wands of authority, “Where are your pages you promised to have here?”
Glipkerio responded dully, “In their quarters. In revolt. You stole my guards who would have controlled them. Where are your Mingols?”
Hisvin stopped dead in his pacing and frowned. His gaze went questioningly toward the unmoving blue door-drapes through which he had entered.
Fafhrd, breathing a little heavily, drew himself up into one of the belfry’s eight windows and sat on its sill and scanned the bells.
There were eight in all and all large: five of bronze, three of browned-iron, coated with the sea-pale verdigris and earth-dark rust of eons. Any ropes had rotted away, centuries ago for all he knew. Below them was dark emptiness spanned by four narrow flat-topped stone arches. He tried one of them with his foot. It held.
He set the smallest bell, a bronze one, swinging. There was no sound except for a dismal creaking.
He first peered, then felt up inside the bell. The clapper was gone, its supporting link rusted away.
All the other bells’ clappers were likewise gone, presumably fallen to the bottom of the tower.
He prepared to use his ax to beat out the alarum, but then he saw one of the fallen clappers lying on a stone arch.
He lifted it with both hands, like a somewhat ponderous club, and moving about recklessly on the arches, struck each bell in turn. Rust showered him from the iron ones.
Their massed clangor sounded louder than mountainside thunder when lightning strikes from a cloud close by. The bells were the least musical Fafhrd had ever heard. Some made swelling beats together, which periodically tortured the ear. They must have been shaped and cast by a master of discord. The brazen bells shrieked, clanged, clashed, roared, twanged, jangled, and screamingly wrangled. The iron bells groaned rusty-throated, sobbed like leviathan, throbbed as the heart of universal death, and rolled like a black swell striking a smooth rock coast. They exactly suited the Gods _of_ Lankhmar, from what Fafhrd had heard of the latter.
The metallic uproar began to fade somewhat and he realized that he was becoming deafened. Nevertheless he kept on until he had struck each bell three times. Then he peered out the window by which he had entered.
His first impression was that half the human crowd was looking straight at _him_. Then he realized it must be the noise of the bells which had turned upward those moonlit faces.
There were many more kneelers before the temple now. Other Lankhmarts were pouring up the Street of the Gods from the east, as if being driven.
The erect, black-togaed rats still stood in the same tiny line below him, auraed by grim authority despite their size, and now they were flanked by two squads of armored rats, each bearing a small weapon which puzzled Fafhrd, straining his eyes, until he recalled the tiny crossbows which had been used aboard _Squid_.
The reverberations of the bells had died away, or sunk too low for his deafened ears to note, but then he began to hear, faintly at first, murmuring and cries of hopeless horror from below.
Gazing across the crowd again, he saw black rats climbing unresisting up some of the kneeling figures, while many, of the others already had something black squatting on their right shoulders.
There came from directly below a creaking and groaning and rending. The ancient doors of the temple of the Gods _of_ Lankhmar were thrust wide open.
The white faces that had been gazing upward now stared at the porch.
The black-togaed rats and their soldiery faced around.
There strode four abreast from the wide-open doorway a company of fearfully thin brown figures, black-togaed too. Each bore a black staff. The brown was of three sorts: aged linen mummy-banding, brittle parchment-like skin stretched tight over naught but skeleton, and naked old brown bones themselves.
The crossbow-rats loosed a volley. The skeletal brown striders came on without pause. The black-togaed rats stood their ground, squeaking imperiously. Another useless volley from the tiny crossbows. Then, like so many rapiers, black staffs thrust out. Each rat they touched shriveled where he stood, nor moved again. Other rats came scurrying in from the crowd and were similarly slain. The brown company advanced at an even pace, like doom on the march.
There were screams then and the human crowd before the temple began to melt, racing down side streets and even dashing back into the temples from which they had fled. Predictably, the folk of Lankhmar were more afraid of their own gods come to their rescue than of their foes.
Himself somewhat aghast at what his ringing had roused, Fafhrd climbed down the belfry, telling himself that he must dodge the eerie battle below and seek out the Mouser in Glipkerio’s vast palace.
At the corner of the temple’s foot, the black kitten became aware of the climber high above, recognized him as the huge man he had scratched and loved, and realized that the force holding him here had something to do with that man.
The Gray Mouser loped purposefully out of the palace kitchen and up a corridor leading toward the royal dwelling quarters. Though still tiny, he was at last dressed. Beside him strode Reetha, armed with a long and needle-pointed skewer for broiling cutlets in a row. Close behind them marched a disorderly-ranked host of pages armed with cleavers and mallets, and maids with knives and toasting forks.
The Mouser had insisted that Reetha not carry him on this foray and the girl had let him have his way. And truly it made him feel more manly again to be going on his own two feet and from time to time swishing Scalpel menacingly through the air.
Still, he had to admit, he would feel a lot better were he his rightful size again, and Fafhrd at his side. Sheelba had told him the effects of the black potion would last for nine hours. He had drunk it a few minutes at most past three. So he should regain his true size a little after midnight, if Sheelba had not lied.
He glanced up at Reetha, more huge than any giantess and bearing a gleaming steel weapon tall as a catboat’s mast, and felt further reassured.
“Onward!” he squeaked to his naked army, though he tried to pitch his voice as low as possible. “Onward to save Lankhmar and her overlord from the rats!”
Fafhrd dropped the last few feet to the temple’s roof and faced around. The situation below had altered considerably.
The human folk were gone — that is, the living human folk.
The skeletal brown striders had all emerged through the door below and were marching west down the Street of the Gods — a procession of ugly ghosts, except these wraiths were opaque and their bony feet clicked harshly on the cobbles. The moonlit porch, steps, and flagstones behind them were blackly freckled with dead rats.
But the striders were moving more slowly now and were surrounded by shadows blacker than the moon could throw — a veritable sea of black rats lapping the striders and being augmented faster from all sides than the deadly staves could strike them down.
From two areas ahead, to either side of the Street of the Gods, flaming darts came arching and struck in the fore-ranks of the striders. These missiles, unlike the crossbow darts, took effect. Wherever they struck, old linen and resin-impregnated skin began to flicker and flame. The striders came to a halt, ceased slaying rats, and devoted themselves to plucking out the flaming darts sticking in them and beating out the flames on their persons.
Another wave of rats came racing down the Street of the Gods from the Marsh Gate end, and behind them on three great horses three riders leaning low in their saddles and sword-slashing at the small beasts. The horses and the cloaks and hoods of the riders were inky black. Fafhrd, who thought himself incapable of more shivers, felt another. It was as if Death itself, in three persons, had entered the scene.
The rodent fire-artillery, slewed partly around, let off at the black riders a few flaming darts which missed.
In return the black riders charged hoof-stamping and sword-slashing into the two artillery areas. Then they faced toward the brown, skeletal striders, several of whom still smoldered and flickered, and doffed their black hoods and mantles.
Fafhrd’s face broke into a grin that would have seemed most inappropriate to one knowing he feared an apparition of Death, but not knowing his experiences of the last few days.
Seated on the three black horses were three tall skeletons gleaming white in the moonlight, and with a lover’s certainty he recognized the first as being Kreeshkra’s.
She might, of course, be seeking him out to slay him for his faithlessness. Nevertheless, as almost any other lover in like circumstances — though seldom, true, near the midst of a natural-supernatural battle — he grinned a rather egotistic grin.
He lost not a moment in beginning his descent.
Meanwhile Kreeshkra, for it was indeed she, was thinking as she gazed at the Gods _of_ Lankhmar, _Well, I suppose brown bones are better than none at all. Still, they seem a poor fire risk. Ho, here come more rats! What a filthy city! And where oh where is my abominable Mud Man?_
The black kitten mewed anxiously at the temple’s foot where he awaited Fafhrd’s arrival.
Glipkerio, calm as a cushion now, completely soothed by Frix’s massage and Hisvet’s piping, was halfway through signing his name, forming the letters more ornately and surely than he ever had in his life, when the blue drapes in the largest archway were torn down and there pressed into the great chamber on silent naked feet the Mouser’s and Reetha’s forces.
Gilpkerio gave a great twitch, upsetting the ink bottle on the parchment of the surrender terms, and sending his quill winging off like an arrow.
Hisvin, Hisvit, and even Samanda backed away from him toward the porch, daunted at least momentarily by the newcomers — and indeed there was something dire about that naked, shaven youthful army be-weaponed with kitchen tools, their eyes wild, their lips a-snarl or pressed tightly together. Hisvin had been expecting his Mingols at last and so got a double shock.
Elakeria hurried after them, crying, “They’ve come to slay us all! It’s the revolution!”
Frix held her ground, smiling excitedly.
The Mouser raced across the blue-tiled floor, sprang up on Glipkerio’s couch and balanced himself on its golden back. Reetha followed rapidly and stood beside him, menacing around with her skewer.
Unmindful that Glipkerio was flinching away, pale yellow eyes peering affrightedly from a coarse fabric of criss-crossed fingers, the Mouser squeaked loudly, “Oh mighty overlord, no revolution this! Instead, we have come to save you from your enemies! That one” — he pointed at Hisvin — “is in league with the rats. Indeed, he is by blood more rat than man. Under his toga you’ll find a tail. I saw him in the tunnels below, member of the Rat Council of Thirteen, plotting your overthrow. It is he — ”
Meanwhile Samanda had been regaining her courage. Now she charged her underlings like a black rhinoceros, her globe-shaped, pin-skewered coiffure more than enough horn. Laying about with her black whip, she roared fearsomely, “Revolt, will you? On your knees, scullions and sluts! Say your prayers!”
Taken by surprise and readily falling back into an ingrained habit, their fiery hopes quenched by familiar abuse, the naked slim figures inched away from her to either side.
Reetha, however, grew pink with anger. Forgetting the Mouser and all else but her rage, envenomed by many injuries, she ran after Samanda, crying to her fellow-slaves, “Up and at her, you cowards! We’re fifty to one against her!” And with that she thrust out mightily with her skewer and jabbed Samanda from behind.
The palace mistress leaped ponderously forward, her keys and chains swinging wildly from her black leather belt. She lashed the last maids out of her way and pounded off at a thumping run toward the servants’ quarters.
Reetha cried over shoulder, “After her, all! — before she rouses the cooks and barbers to her aid!” and was off in sprinting pursuit.
The maids and pages hardly hesitated at all. Reetha had refired their hot hatreds as readily as Samanda had quenched them. To play heroes and heroines rescuing Lankhmar was moonshine. To have vengeance on their old tormentor was blazing sunlight. They all raced after Reetha.
The Mouser, still balancing on the fluted golden back of Glipkerio’s couch and mouthing his dramatic oration, realized somewhat belatedly that he had lost his army and was still only doll size. Hisvin and Hisvet, drawing long knives from under their black togas, rapidly circled between him and the doorway through which his forces had fled. Hisvin looked vicious and Hisvet unpleasantly like her father — the Mouser had never before noted the striking family resemblance. They began to close in.
To his left Elakeria snatched up a handful of the wands of office and raised them threateningly. To the Mouser, even those flimsy rods were huge as pikes.
To his right Glipkerio, still cringing away, reached down surreptitiously for his light battle-ax. Evidently the Mouser’s loyal squeaks had gone unheard, or not been believed.
The Mouser wondered which way to jump.
Behind him Frix murmured softly, though to the Mouser’s ears still somewhat boomingly, “Exit kitchen tyrant pursued by pages unclad and maids in a state of nature, leaving our hero beset by an ogre and two — or is it three? — ogresses.”
——–

*Chapter Fourteen*
Fafhrd swiftly climbed, by the low moonlight, the high Marsh Wall of Lankhmar at the point to which Sheelba had delivered him, a good bowshot south of the Marsh Gate. “At the gate you might run into your black pursuers,” Sheelba had told him. Fafhrd had doubted it. True, the black riders had been moving like a storm wind, but Sheelba’s hut had raced across the sea-grass like a low-scudding pocket hurricane; surely he had arrived ahead of them. Yet he had put up no argument. Wizards were above all else persuasive salesmen, whether they flooded you off your feet with words, like Ningauble, or manipulated you with meaningful silences, like Sheelba. For the swamp wizard had otherwise maintained his cranky quiet throughout the entire rocking, pitching, swift-skidding trip, from which Fafhrd’s stomach was still queasy.
He found plenty of good holds for hand and foot in the ancient wall. Climbing it was truly child’s play to one who had scaled in his youth Obelisk Polaris in the frosty Mountains of the Giants. He was far more concerned with what he might meet at the top of the wall, where he would be briefly helpless against a foe footed above him.
But more than all else — and increasingly so — he was puzzled by the darkness and silence with which the city was wrapped. Where was the battle-din; where were the flames? Or if Lankhmar had already been subdued, which despite Ningauble’s optimism seemed most likely from the fifty-to-one odds against her, where were the screams of the tortured, the shrieks of the raped, and all the gleeful clatter and shout of the victors?
He reached the wall’s top and suddenly drew himself up and vaulted through a wide embrasure down onto the wide parapet, ready to draw Graywand and his ax. But the parapet was empty as far as be could see in either direction.
Wall Street below was dark, and empty too as far as he could tell. Cash Street, stretching west and flooded with pale moonlight from behind him, was visibly bare of figures. While the silence was even more marked than when he’d been climbing. It seemed to fill the great, walled city, like water brimming a cup.
Fafhrd felt spooked. Had the conquerors of Lankhmar already departed? — carrying off all its treasure and inhabitants in some unimaginably huge fleet or caravan? Had they shut up themselves and their gagged victims in the silent houses for some rite of mass torture in darkness? Was it a demon, not human army which had beset the city and vanished its inhabitants? Had the very earth gaped for victor and vanquished alike and then shut again? Or was Ningauble’s whole tale wizardly flimflam? — yet even that least unlikely explanation still left unexplained the city’s ghostly desolation.
Or was there a fierce battle going on under his eyes at this very moment, and he by some spell of Ningauble or Sheelba unable to see, hear, or even scent it? — until, perchance, he had fulfilled the geas of the bells which Ningauble had laid on him.
He still did not like the idea of his bells-mission. His imagination pictured the Gods _of_ Lankhmar resting in their brown mummy-wrappings and their rotted black togas, their bright black eyes peeping from between resin-impregnated bandages and their deadly black staves of office beside them, waiting another call from the city that forgot yet feared them and which they in turn hated yet guarded. Waking with naked hand a clutch of spiders in a hole in desert rocks seemed wiser than waking such. Yet a geas was a geas and must be fulfilled.
He hurried down the nearest dark stone stairs three steps at a time and headed west on Cash Street, which paralleled Crafts Street a block to the south. He half imagined he brushed unseen figures. Crossing curvy Cheap Street, dark and untenanted as the others, he thought he heard a murmuring and chanting from the north, so faint that it must come from at least as far away as the Street of Gods. But he held to his predetermined course, which was to follow Cash Street to Nun Street, then three blocks north to the accursed bell-tower.
Whore Street, which was even more twisty than Cheap Street, looked tenantless too, but he was hardly half a block beyond it when he heard the tramp of boots and the clink of armor behind him. Ducking into the narrow shadows, he watched a double squad of guardsmen cross hurriedly through the moonlight, going south on Whore Street in the direction of the South Barracks. They were crowded close together, watched every way, and carried their weapons at the ready, despite the apparent absence of foe. This seemed to confirm Fafhrd’s notion of an army of invisibles. Feeling more spooked than ever, he continued rapidly on his way.
And now he began to note, here and there, light leaking out from around the edges of a shuttered upper window. These dim-drawn oblongs only increased his feeling of supernatural dread. Anything, he told himself, would be better than this locked-in silence, now broken only by the faint echoing tread of his own boots on the moonlit cobbles. And at the end of his trip: mummies!
Somewhere, faintly, muffled, eleven o’clock knelled. Then of a sudden, crossing narrow, black-brimming Silver Street, he heard a multitudinous pattering, like rain — save that the stars were bright overhead except for the moon’s dimming of them, and he felt no drops. He began to run.
Aboard _Squid_, the kitten, as if he had received a call which he might not disregard despite all dreads, made the long leap from the scuppers to the dock, clawed his way up onto the latter and hurried off into the dark, his black hair on end and his eyes emerald bright with fear and danger-readiness.
Glipkerio and Samanda sat in his Whip Room, reminiscing and getting a tipsy glow on, to put them in the right mood for Reetha’s thrashing. The fat palace mistress had swilled tankards of dark wine of Tovilyis until her black wool dress was soaked with sweat and salty beads stood on each hair of her ghostly black mustache. While her overlord sipped violet wine of Kiraay, which she had fetched from the upper pantry when no butler or page answered the ring of the silver and even the brazen summoning-bell. She’d said, “They’re scared to stir since your guardsmen went off. I’ll welt them properly — but only when you’ve had your special fun, little master.”
Now, for the nonce neglecting all the rare and begemmed instruments of pain around them and blessedly forgetting the rodent menace to Lankhmar, their thoughts had returned to simpler and happier days. Glipkerio, his pansy wreath awry and somewhat wilted, was saying with a tittering eagerness, “Do you recall when I brought you my first kitten to throw in the kitchen fire?”
“Do I?” Samanda retorted with affectionate scorn. “Why, little master, I remember when you brought me your first fly, to show me how neatly you could pluck off his wings and legs. You were only a toddler, but already skinny-tall.”
“Yes, but about that kitten,” Glipkerio persisted, violet wine dribbling down his chin as he took a hasty and tremble-handed swallow. “It was black with blue eyes newly unfilmed. Radomix was trying to stop me — he lived at the palace then — but you sent him away bawling.”
“I did indeed,” Samanda concurred. “The cotton-hearted brat! And I remember how the kitten screamed and frizzled, and how you cried afterwards because you hadn’t him to throw in again. To divert your mind and cheer you, I stripped and whipped an apprentice maid as skinny-tall as yourself and with long blonde braids. That was before you got your thing about hair,” — she wiped her mustache — “and had all the girls and boys shaved. I thought it was time you graduated to manlier pleasures, and sure enough you showed your excitement in no uncertain fashion!” And with a whoop of laughter she reached across and thumbed him indelicately.
Excited by this tickling and his thoughts, Lankhmar’s overlord stood up cypress-tall-and-black in his toga, though no cypress ever twitched as he did, except perhaps in an earthquake or under most potent witchcraft. “Come,” he cried. “Eleven’s struck. We’ve barely time before I must haste me to the Blue Audience Chamber to meet with Hisvin and save the city.”
“Right,” Samanda affirmed, levering herself up with her brawny forearms pulling at her knees and then pushing the pinching armchair off her large rear. “Which whips was it you’d picked now for the naughty and traitorous minx?”
“None, none,” Glipkerio cried with impatient glee. “In the end that well-oiled old black dog-whip hanging; from your belt always seems best. Hurry we, dear Samanda, hurry!”
Reetha shot up in crispy-linened bed as she heard hinges creak. Shaking nightmares from her smooth-shaven head, she fumbled frantically about for the bottle whose draining would bring her protective oblivion.
She put it to her lips, but paused a moment before upending it. The door still hadn’t opened and the creaking had been strangely tiny and shrill. Glancing over the edge of the bed, she saw that another door not quite a foot high had opened outward at floor level In the seamless-seeming wood paneling. Through it there stepped swiftly and silently, ducking his head a trifle, a well-formed and leanly muscular little man, carrying in one hand a gray bundle and in the other what seemed to be a long toy sword as naked as himself.
He closed the door behind him, so that it once more seemed not to be there, and gazed about piercingly.
“Gray Mouser!” Reetha yelled, springing from bed and throwing herself down on her knees beside him “You’ve come back to me!”
He winced, lifting his burdened tiny hands to his ears.
“Reetha,” he begged, “don’t shout like that again. It blasts my brain.” He spoke slowly and as deep-pitched as he could, but to her his voice was shrill and rapid, though intelligible.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered contritely, restraining the impulse to pick him up and cuddle him to her bosom.
“You’d better be,” he told her brusquely. “Now find something heavy and put it against this door. There’s those coming after, whom you wouldn’t want to meet. Quick about it, girl!”
She didn’t stir from her knees, but eagerly suggested, “Why not work your magic and make yourself big again?”
“I haven’t the stuff to work that magic,” he told her exasperatedly. “I had a chance at a vial of it and like any other sex-besotted fool didn’t think to swipe it. Now jump to it, Reetha!”
Suddenly realizing the strength of her bargaining position, she merely leaned closer to him and smiling archly though lovingly, asked, “With what doll-tiny bitch have you been consorting now? No, you needn’t answer that, but before I stir me to help you, you must give me six hairs from your darling head. I have good reason for my request.”
The Mouser started to argue insanely with her, then thought better of it and snicked off with Scalpel a small switch of his locks and laid then in her huge, crisscross furrowed, gleaming palm, where they were fine as baby hairs, though slightly longer and darker than most.
She stood up briskly, marched to the night table, and dropped them in Glipkerio’s night draught. Then dusting off her hands above the goblet, she looked around. The most suitable object she could see for the Mouser’s purpose was the golden casket of unset jewels. She lugged it into place against the small door, taking the Mouser’s word as to where the small door exactly was.
“That should hold them for a bit,” he said, greedily noting for future reference the rainbow gems bigger than his fists, “but ’twere best you also fetch — ”
Dropping to her knees, she asked somewhat wistfully, “Aren’t you ever going to be big again?”
“Don’t boom the floor! Yes, of course! In an hour or less, if I can trust my tricksy, treacherous wizard. Now, Reetha, while I dress me, please fetch — ”
A key chinked dulcetly and a bolt thudded softly in its channel. The Mouser felt himself whirled through the air by and with Reetha onto the soft springy white bed, and a white translucent sheet whirled over them.
He heard the big door open.
At that moment a hand on his head pressed him firmly down into a squat and as he was about to protest, Reetha whispered — it was a growl like light surf — “Don’t make a bump in the sheet. Whatever happens, hold still and hide for your dear life’s sake.”
A voice like battle trumpets blared then, making the Mouser glad of what shielding the sheet gave his ears. “The nasty girl’s crawled in my bed! Oh, the disgust of it! I feel faint. Wine! Ah! _Aaarrrggghh_ — ” There came ear-shaking chokings, spewings, and spittings, and then the battle trumpets again, somewhat muffled, as if stuffed with flannel, though even more enraged: “The filthy and demonic slut has put hairs in my drink! Oh whip her, Samanda, until she’s everywhere welted like a bamboo screen! Lash her until she licks my feet and kisses each toe for mercy!”
Then another voice, this one like a dozen huge kettle-drums, thundering through the sheet and pounding the Mouser’s tinied goldleaf-thin eardrums. “That I will, little master. Nor heed you, if you ask I desist. Come out of there, girl, or must I whip you out?”
Reetha scrambled toward the head of the bed, away from that voice. The Mouser followed crouching after her, though the mattress heaved like a white-decked ship in a storm, the sheet figuring as an almost deck-low ceiling of fog. Then suddenly that fog was whirled away, as if by a supernal wind, and there glared down the gigantic double red-and-black sun of Samanda’s face, inflamed by liquor and anger, and of her globe-dressed, pin-transfixed black hair. And the sun had a black tail — Samanda’s raised whip.
The Mouser bounded toward her across the disordered bed, brandishing Scalpel and still lugging under his other arm the gray bundle of his clothes.
The whip, which had been aimed at Reetha, changed direction and came whistling toward him. He sprang straight up with all his strength and it passed just under his naked feet like a black dragon’s tail, the whistling abruptly lowering in pitch. By good luck keeping his footing as he came down, he leaped again toward Samanda, stabbed her with Scalpel in her black-wool-draped huge kneecap, and sprang down to the parquet floor.
Like a browned-iron thunderbolt, a great ax-head bit into the wood close by him, jarring him to his teeth. Glipkerio had snatched a light battle-ax from his weapon-rack with surprising speed and wielded it with unlikely accuracy.
The Mouser darted under the bed, raced across that — to him — low-ceilinged dark wide portico, emerged on the other side and doubled swiftly back around the foot of the bed to slash at the back of Glipkerio’s ankle.
But this ham-stringing stroke failed when Glipkerio turned around. Samanda, limping just a little, came to her overlord’s side. Gigantic ax and whip were again lifted at the Mouser.
With a rather happy hysterical scream that almost ruined the Mouser’s eardrums for good, Reetha hurled her crystal wine-flagon. It passed close between Samanda’s and Glipkerio’s heads, hitting neither of them, but staying their strokes at the Mouser.
All this while, unnoticed in the racket and turmoil, the golden jewel-box had been moving away, jolt by tiny jolt, from the wall. Now the door behind it was open wide enough for a rat to get through, and Hreest emerged followed by his armed band — three masked sword-rats in all, the other two green-uniformed, and three naked-faced pike-rats in browned-iron helmets and mail.
Utterly terrified by this eruption, Glipkerio raced from the room, followed only less slowly by Samanda, whose heavy treadings shook the wooden floor like earthquake shocks.
Mad for battle and also greatly relieved to face foes his own size, the Mouser went on guard, using his clothes bundle as a sort of shield and crying out fearsomely, “Come and be killed, Hreest!”
But at that instant he felt himself snatched up with stomach-wrenching speed to Reetha’s breasts.
“Put me down! Put me down!” he yelled, still in a battle-rage, but futilely, for the drunken girl carried him reelingly out the door and slammed it behind her — once more the Mouser’s eardrums were assaulted — slammed it on a rat-pike.
Samanda and Glipkerio were running toward a distant, wide, blue curtain, but Reetha ran the other way, toward the kitchen and the servants’ quarters, and the Mouser was perforce carried with her — his gray bundle bouncing about, his pin-sword useless, and despite his shrill protests and tears of wrath.
The rats everywhere launched their grand assault on Lankhmar Above a half hour before midnight, striking chiefly by way of golden rat-holes. There were a few premature sorties, as on Silver Street, and elsewhere a few delays, as at rat-holes discovered and blocked by humans at the last moment, but on the whole the attack was simultaneous.
First to emerge from Lankhmar Below were wild troops of four-foot goers, a fierce riderless cavalry, savage rats from the stinking tunnels and warrens under the slums of Lankhmar, rodents knowing few if any civilized amenities and speaking at most a pidgin-Lankhmarese helped out with chitters and squeals. Some fought only with tooth and claw like the veriest primitives. Among them went berserkers and special-mission groups.
Then came the assassins and the incendiaries with their torches, resins, and oils — for the weapon of fire, hitherto unused, was part of the grand plan, even though the rats’ upper-level tunnels were menaced thereby. It was calculated that victory would be gained swiftly enough for the humans to be enforced to put out the blazes.
Finally came the armed and armored rats, all going biped except for those packing extra missiles and parts of light-artillery pieces to be assembled above ground.
Previous forays had been made almost entirely through rat-holes in cellars and ground floors and by way of street-drains and the like. But tonight’s grand assault was delivered whenever possible through rat-holes on upper floors and through rat-ways that emerged in attics, surprising the humans in the supposedly safe chambers in which they had shut themselves and driving them in panic into the streets.
It was turn-about from previous nights and days, when the rats had risen in black waves and streams. Now they dropped like a black indoor rain and leaked in rat-big gushes from walls thought sound, bringing turmoil and terror. Here and there, chiefly under eaves, flames began to flicker.
The rats emerged inside almost every temple and cultish hovel lining the Street of the Gods, driving out the worshipers until that wide avenue was milling with humans too terrified to dare the dark side streets or create more than a few pockets of organized resistance
In the high-windowed assembly hall of the South Barracks, Olegnya Mingolsbane loudly sputter-quavered to a weary audience which following custom had left their weapons outside — the soldiers of Lankhmar had been known to use them on irritating or merely boresome speakers. As he perorated, “You who have fought the black behemoth and leviathan, you who have stood firm against Mingol and Mirphian, you who have broken the spear-squares of King Krimaxius and routed his fortressed elephants, that _you_ should be daunted by dirty vermin — ” eight large rat-holes opened high in the back wall and from these sinister orifices a masked battery of crossbow artillery launched their whirring missiles at the aged and impassioned general. Five struck home, one down his gullet, and gargling horridly he fell from the rostrum.
Then the fire of the crossbows was turned on the startled yet lethargic audience, some of whom had been applauding Olegnya’s demise as if it had been a carnival turn. From other high rat-holes actual fire was tossed down in the forms of white phosphorus and flaming, oil-soaked, resin-hearted bundles of rags, while from various low golden rat-holes, noxious vapors brewed in the sewers were bellows-driven.
Groups of soldiers and constables broke for the doors and found them barred from the outside — one of the most striking achievements of the special-missions groups, made possible by Lankhmar having things arranged so that she could massacre her own soldiers in times of mutiny. With smuggled weapons and those of officers, a counter-fire was turned on the rat-holes, but they were difficult targets and for the most part the men of war milled about as helplessly as the worshipers in the Street of the Gods, coughing and crying out more troubled for the present by the stinking vapors and the choking fumes of little flames here and there than by the larger fire-danger.
Meanwhile the black kitten was flattening himself on top of a cask in the granaries area while a party of armed rats trooped by. The small beast shivered with fear, yet was drawn on deeper and deeper into the city by a mysterious urging which he did not understand, yet could not ignore.
Hisvin’s house had in its top floor a small room, the door and window shutters of which were all tightly barred from the inside so that a witness, if there could have been one, would have wondered how this barring had been accomplished in such fashion as to leave the room empty.
A single thick, blue-burning candle, which had somewhat fouled the air, revealed no furniture whatsoever in the room. It showed six wide, shallow basins that were part of the tiled floor. Three of these basins were filled with a thick pinkish liquid across which ever and anon a slow quivering ran. Each pink pool had a border of black dust with which it did not commingle. Along one wall were shelves of small vials, the white ones near the floor, the black ones higher.
A tiny door opened at floor level. Hisvin, Hisvet, and Frix filed silently out. Each took a white vial and walked to a pink pool and then unhesitatingly down into it. The dark dust and pinkish liquid slowed but did not stop their steps. It moved out in sluggish ripples from their knees. Soon each stood thigh-deep at a pool’s center. Then each drained his vial.
For a long instant there was no change, only the ripples intersecting and dying by the candle’s feeble gleam.
Then each figure began to grow while soon the pools were visibly diminished. In a dozen heartbeats they were empty of fluid and dust alike, while in them Hisvin, Hisvet, and Frix stood human-high, dry-shod, and clad all in black.
Hisvin unbarred a window opening on the Street of the Gods, threw wide the shutters, drew a deep breath, stooped to peer out briefly and cautiously, then turned him crouching to the girls.
“It has begun” he said somberly. “Haste we now to the Blue Audience Chamber. Time presses. I will alert our Mingols to assemble and follow us.” He scuttled past them to the door. “Come!”
Fafhrd drew himself up onto the roof of the temple of the Gods _of_ Lankhmar and paused for a backward and downward look before tackling the belfry, although so far this climb had been easier even than that of the city’s wall.
He wanted to know what all the screaming was about.
Across the street were several dark houses, first among them Hisvin’s, while beyond them rose Glipkerio’s Rainbow Palace with its moonlit, pastel-hued minarets, tallest of them the blue, like a troupe of tall slender dancing girls behind a phalanx of black-robed squat priests.
Immediately below him was the temple’s unroofed yet dark front porch and the low, wide steps leading up to it from the street. Fafhrd had not even tried the verdigrised, copper-bound, worm-eaten doors below him. He had had no mind to go stumbling around hunting for a stairs in the inner dark and dust, where his groping hands might touch mummy-wrapped, black-togaed forms which might not lie still like other dead earth, but stir with crotchety limitless anger, like ancient yet not quite senile kings who did not relish their sleep disturbed at midnight. On both counts, an outside climb had seemed healthier and likewise the awakening of the Gods _of_ Lankhmar, if they were to be wakened, better by a distant bell than by a touch on a skeletal shoulder wrapped in crumbling linen or on a bony foot.
When Fafhrd had begun his short climb, the Street of the Gods had been empty at this end, though from the open doors of its gorgeous temples — the temples of the Gods _in_ Lankhmar — had spilled yellow light and come the mournful sound of many litanies, mixed with the sharper accents of impromptu prayers and beseechings.
But now the street was churning with white-faced folk, while others were still rushing screaming from temple doorways. Fafhrd still couldn’t see what they were running from, and once more he thought of an army of invisibles — after all, he had only to imagine Ghouls with invisible bones — but then he noted that most of the shriekers and churners were looking downward toward their feet and the cobbles. He recollected the eerie pattering which had sent him running away from Silver Street. He remembered what Ningauble had asserted about the huge numbers and hidden source of the army besieging Lankhmar. And he recalled that _Clam_ had been sunk and _Squid_ captured by rats working chiefly alone. A wild suspicion swiftly bloomed in him.
Meanwhile some of the temple refugees had thrown themselves to their knees in front of the dingy fane on which he stood, and were bumping their heads on the cobbles and lower steps and uttering frenzied petitions for aid. As usual, Lankhmar was appealing to her own grim, private gods only in a moment of direst need, when all else failed. While a bold few directly below Fafhrd had mounted the dark porch and were beating on and dragging at the ancient portals.
There came a loud creaking and groaning and a sound of rending. For a moment Fafhrd thought that those below him, having broken in, were going to rush inside. But then he saw them hurrying back down the steps in attitudes of dread and prostrating themselves like the others.
The great doors had opened until there was a hand’s breadth between them. Then through that narrow gap there issued from the temple a torchlit procession of tiny figures which advanced and ranged themselves along the forward edge of the porch.
They were two score or so of large rats walking erect and wearing black togas. Four of them carried lance-tall torches flaming brightly white-blue at their tips. The others each carried something that Fafhrd, staring down eagle-eyed, could not quite discern — a little black staff? — There were three whites among them, the rest black.
A hush fell on the Street of the Gods, as if at some secret signal the humans tormenters had ceased their persecutions.
The black-togaed rats cried out shrilly in unison, so that even Fafhrd heard them clearly, “We have slain your gods, O Lankhmarts! We are your gods now, O folk of Lankhmar. Submit yourselves to our worldly brothers and you will not be harmed. Hark to their commands. Your gods are dead, O Lankhmars! We are your gods!”
The humans who had abased themselves continued to do so and to bump their heads. Others of the crowd imitated them.
Fafhrd thought for a moment of seeking something to hurl down on that dreadful little black-clad line which had cowed humanity. But the nasty notion came to him that if the Mouser had been reduced to a fraction of himself and able to live far under the deepest cellar, what could it mean but that the Mouser had been transformed into a rat by wicked magic, Hisvin’s most likely? In slaying any rat, he might slay his comrade.
He decided to stick to Ningauble’s instructions. He began to climb the belfry with great reaches and pulls of his long arms and doublings and straightenings of his still longer legs.
The black kitten, coming around a far corner of the same temple, bugged his little eyes at the horrid tableaux of black-togaed rats. He was tempted to flee, yet moved never a muscle as a soldier who knows he has a duty to perform, though has forgotten or not yet learned the nature of that duty.
——–

*Chapter Thirteen*
The Mouser, reclining on his side in his litter, the tail of one of the fore-rats swaying a respectful arm’s length from his head, noted that, without leaving the Fifth Level, they had arrived at a wide corridor stationed with pike-rats stiffly on guard and having thirteen heavily curtained doorways. The first nine curtains were of white and silver, the next of black and gold, the last three of white and gold.
Despite his weariness and grandiose feeling of security, the Mouser had been fairly watchful along the trip, suspecting though not very seriously that Skwee or Lord Null might have him followed — and then there was Hreest to be reckoned with, who might have discovered some clue at the water-privy despite the highly artistic job the Mouser felt he had done. From time to time there had been rats who might have been following his litter, but all these had eventually taken other turns in the mazy corridors. The last to engage his lazy suspicions had been two slim rats clad in black silken cloaks, hoods, masks, and gloves, but these without a glance toward him now disappeared arm-in-arm through the black-and-gold curtains, whispering together in a gossipy way.
His litter stopped at the next doorway, the third from the end. So Skwee and Siss outranked Grig, but he out-ranked Lord Null. This might be useful to know, though it merely confirmed the impression he had got at the council.
He sat, then stood up with the aid of his staff, rather exaggerating his leg cramp now, and tossed the fore-rat a corn-wreathed silver coin he had selected from Grig’s purse. He assumed that tips would be the custom of any species of being whatever, in particular rats. Then without a backward look he hobbled through the heavy curtains, noting in passing that they were woven of fine soft gold wire and braided fine white silk threads. There was a short, dim passageway similarly curtained at the other end. He pushed through the second set of curtains and found himself alone in a cozy-feeling but rather shabby square room with curtained doorways in each of the other three walls and lit by a bronze-caged fire-beetle over each doorway. There were two closed cupboards, a writing desk with stool, many scrolls in silver containers that looked suspiciously like thimbles from the human world, crossed swords and a battle-ax fixed to the dingy walls, and a fireplace in which a single giant coal glowed redly through its coat of white ash. Above the fireplace, or rather brazier-nook, emerged from the wall a bronze-ringed hemisphere about as big as the Mouser’s own rat-size head. The hemisphere was yellowish, with a large greenish-brown circle on it, and centered in this circle a black one. with a qualm of horror, the Mouser recognized it as a mummified human eye.
In the center of the room was a pillowed couch with the high back support of one who does a lot of reading lying down, and beside the couch a sizable low table with nothing on it but three bells, one copper, one silver, and one gold.
Putting his horror out of mind, for it is a singularly useless emotion, the Mouser took up the silver bell and rang it vigorously, deciding to see what taking the middle course would bring.
He had little more time than to decide that the room was that of a crusty bachelor with studious inclinations when there came backing through the curtains in the rear wall a fat old rat in spotless long white smock with a white cap on his head. This one turned and showed his silver snout and bleared eyes, and also the silver tray he was carrying, on which were steaming plates and a large steaming silver jug.
The Mouser pointed curtly at the table. The cook, for so he seemed to be, set the tray there and then came hesitantly toward the Mouser, as if to help him off with his robe. The Mouser waved him away and pointed sternly at the rear doorway. He’d be damned if he’d go to the trouble of lisping in Grig’s own home. Besides, servants might have a sharper ear than colleagues for a false voice. The cook bowed bumblingly and departed.
The Mouser settled himself gratefully on the couch, deciding against removing as yet his gloves or boots. Now that he was reclining, the latter bothered him hardly at all. However, he did remove his mask and placed it close by — it was good to get more than a squinty view of things — and set to at Grig’s dinner.
The steaming jug turned out to contain mulled wine. It was most soothing to his raw, dry throat and wearied nerves, though excessively aromatic — the single black clove bobbing in the jug was large as a lime and the cinnamon stick big as one of the parchment scrolls. Then, using Cat’s Claw and the two-tined fork provided, he began cutting up and devouring the steaming cutlets of beef — for his nose told him it was that and not, for instance, baby. From another steaming plate he sampled one of the objects that looked like small sweet potatoes. It turned out to be a single grain of boiled wheat. Likewise, one of the yellowish cubes about as big as dice proved a grain of coarse sugar, while the black balls big as the end joint of his thumb were caviar. He speared them one at a time with his fork and munched, alternating this with mouthfuls of the beef. It was very strange to eat good tender beef, the fibers of which were thick as his fingers.
Having consumed the meaty portions of Grig’s dinner and drunk all the mulled wine, the Mouser resumed his mask and settled back to plot his escape to Lankhmar Above. But the golden bell kept teasing his thoughts away from practical matters, so he reached out and rang it. Yield to curiosity without giving the mind time to get roiled, was one of his mottoes.
Hardly had the sweet _chinks_ died away when the heavy curtains of one of the side doors parted and there appeared a slim straight rat — or ratess, rather, he judged — dressed in robe, hood, mask, slippers and gloves all of fine lemon yellow silk.
This one, holding the curtains parted, looked toward him and said softly, “Lord Grig, your mistress awaits you.”
The Mouser’s first reaction was one of gratified conceit. So Grig did have a mistress, and his spur-of-the-moment answer to Skwee’s “Wife?” question at the council had been a brilliant stroke of intuition. Whether human-large or rat-small, he could outsmart anyone. He possessed Mouser-mind, unequaled in the universe.
Then the Mouser stood up and approached the slender, yellow-clad figure. There was something cursedly familiar about her. He wondered if she were the ratess in green he’d seen leading short-leashed the brace of shrews. She had a pride and poise about her.
Using the same stratagem he had with the cook, he silently pointed from her to the doorway that she should precede him. She acquiesced and he followed close behind her down a dim twisty corridor.
And cursedly attractive too, he decided, eyeing her slender silhouette and sniffing her musky perfume. Rather belatedly, he reminded himself that she was a rat and so should waken his uttermost repugnance. But was she necessarily a rat? He had been transformed in size, why not others? And if this were merely the maid, what would the mistress be? Doubtless lard-fat or hag-hairy, he told himself cynically. Still his excitement grew.
Sparing a moment’s thought to orient himself, he discovered that the side door they’d gone out by led toward the black-curtained apartments of Lord Null — presumably — rather than to those of Siss and Skwee.
At last the yellow-clad ratess parted gold-heavy black drapes, then light violet silken ones. The Mouser passed her and found himself staring about through the notched eye-holes of Grig’s mask at a large bedroom, beautifully and delicately furnished in many ways, yet the weirdest and perhaps the most frightening he had ever seen.
It was draped and carpeted and ceilinged and upholstered all in silver and violet, the latter color the exact complement of the yellow of his conductress’ gowning. It was lit indirectly from below by narrow deep tanks of slimy glow-worms big as eels, set against the walls. Against these tanks were several vanity tables, each backed by its large silver mirror, so that the Mouser saw more than one reflection of his white-robed self and his slim cicerone, who had just let the silken violet curtains waft together again. The tabletops were strewn with cosmetics and the tools of beauty, variously colored elixirs and tiny cups — all except one, near a second silver-draped door, which held nothing but two score or so black and white vials.
But between the vanity tables there hung on silver chains, close to the walls and brightly lit by the glow-worm’s up-jutting effulgence, large silver cages of scorpions, spiders, mantises, and suchlike glittering vermin, all large as puppy dogs or baby kangaroos. In one spacious cage coiled a Quarmall pocket-viper huge as a python. These clashed their fangs or hissed, according to their kind, while one scorpion angrily clattered its sting across the gleaming bars of its cage, and the viper darted its trebly forked tongue between those of its own.
One short wall, however, was bare except for two pictures tall and wide as doors, the one depicting against a dusky background a girl and crocodile amorously intertwined, the other a man and a leopardess similarly preoccupied.
Almost central in the room was a large bed covered only by a tight-drawn white linen sheet, the woven threads looking coarse as burlap, yet inviting nonetheless, and with one fat white pillow.
Lying supine and at ease on this bed, her head propped against the pillow to survey the Mouser through the eye-holes of her mask, was a figure somewhat slighter than that of his guide, yet otherwise identical and identically clad, except that the silk of her garb was finer still and violet instead of yellow.
“Well met below ground. Sweet greetings, Gray Mouser,” this one called softly in a familiar silvery voice. Then, looking beyond him, “Sweetest slave, make our guest comfortable.”
Softest footsteps approached. The Mouser turned a little and saw that his conductress had removed her yellow mask, revealing the merry yet melancholy-eyed dark face of Frix. Her black hair this time hung in two long plaits, braided with fine copper wire.
Without more ado than a smile, she began deftly to unbutton Grig’s long white robe. The Mouser lifted his arms a little and let himself be undressed as effortlessly as in a dream, and with even less attention paid the process, for he was most eagerly scanning the violet-masked figure on the bed. He knew to a certainty who it must be, beyond all contributing evidence, for the silver dart was throbbing in his temple and the hunger which had haunted him for days returned redoubled.
The situation was strange almost beyond comprehension. Although guessing that Frix and the other must have used an elixir like Sheelba’s, the Mouser could have sworn they were all three human size, except for the presence of the familiar vermin, scuttlers and slitherers, so huge.
It was a great relief to have his cramping rat-boots deftly drawn off, as he lifted first one leg, then the other. Yet although he submitted so docilely to Frix’s ministrations, he kept hold of his sword Scalpel and of the belt it hung from and also, on some cloudy impulse, of Grig’s mask. He felt the smaller scabbard empty on the belt and realized with a pang of apprehension that he had left Cat’s Claw behind in Grig’s apartment along with the latter’s ivory staff.
But these worries vanished like the last snowflake in spring when the one on the bed asked cajolingly, “Will you partake of refreshment, dearest guest?” and when he said, “I will most gladly,” lifted a violet-gloved hand and ordered, “Dear Frix, fetch sweetmeats and wine.”
While Frix busied herself at a far table, the Mouser whispered, his heart a-thump, “Ah, most delectable Hisvet — For I deem you are she?”
“As to that, you must judge for yourself,” the tinkling voice responded coquettishly.
“Then I shall call you Hisvet,” the Mouser answered boldly, “recognizing you as my queen of queens and princess of princesses. Know, delicious Demoiselle, that ever since our raptures ‘neath the closet tree were so rudely broken off by an interruption of Mingols, my mind, nay, my mania has been fixed solely on you.”
“That were some small compliment — ” the other allowed, lolling back luxuriously, “if I could believe it.”
“Believe it you must,” the Mouser asserted masterfully, stepping forward. “Know, moreover, that it is my intention that on this occasion our converse not be conducted over Frix’s shoulder, dear companion that she is, but at the closest range. I am fixedly desirous of all refreshments, omitting none.”
“You cannot think I am Hisvet!” the other countered, starting up in what the Mouser hoped was mock indignation “Else you would never dare such blasphemy!”
“I dare far more!” the Mouser declared with a soft amorous growl, stepping forward more swiftly. The vermin hanging round about moved angrily, striking against their silver bars and setting their cages a little a-swing, and clashing, clattering, and hissing more. Nevertheless the Mouser, dropping his belt and sword by the edge of the bed and setting a knee thereon, would have thrust himself directly upon Hisvet, had not Frix come bustling up at that moment and set between them on the coarse linen a great silver tray with slim decanters of sweet wine and crystal cups for its drinking and plates of sugary tidbits.
Not entirely to be balked, the Mouser darted his hand across and snatched away the vizard of violet silk from the visage it hid. Violet-gloved hands instantly snatched the mask back from him, but did not replace it, and there confronting him was indeed the slim triangular face of Hisvet, cheeks flushed, red-irised eyes glaring, but pouty lips grinning enough to show the slightly overlarge pearly upper incisors, the whole being framed by silver-blonde hair interwoven like that of Frix, but with even finer wire of silver, into two braids that reached to her waist.
“Nay,” she said laughingly, “I see you are most wickedly presumptuous and that I must protect myself.” Reaching down on her side of the bed, she procured a long slender-bladed gold-hilted dagger. Waving it playfully at the Mouser, she said, “Now refresh yourself from the cups and plates before you, but have a care of sampling other sweetmeats, dear guest.”
The Mouser complied, pouring for himself and Hisvet. He noted from a corner of his eye that Frix, moving silently in her silken robe, had rolled up Grig’s white boots and gloves in his white hood and robe and set them on a stool near the floor-to-ceiling painting of the man and the leopardess and that she had made as neat a bundle of all the rest of the Mouser’s garb — his own garb, mostly — and set them on a stool next the first. A most efficient and foresighted maid, he thought, and most devoted to her mistress — in fact altogether too devoted: he wished at this moment she would take herself off and leave him private with Hisvet.
But she showed no sign of so doing, nor Hisvet of ordering her away, so without more ado the Mouser began a mild love-play, catching at the violet-gloved fingers of Hisvet’s left hand as they dipped toward the sweetmeats or plucking at the ribbons and edges of her violet robe, in the latter case reminding her of the discrepancy in their degree of undress and suggesting that it be corrected by the subtraction of an item or two from her outfit. Hisvet in turn would deftly jab with her dagger at his snatching hand, as if to pin it to tray or bed, and he would whip it back barely in time. It was an amusing game, this dance of hand and needle-sharp dagger — or at least it seemed amusing to the Mouser, especially after he had drained a cup or two of fiery colorless wine — and so when Hisvet asked him how he had come into the rat-world, he merrily told her the story of Sheelba’s black potion and how he had first thought its effects a most damnably unfair wizardly joke, but now blessed them as the greatest good ever done him in his life — for he twisted the tale somewhat to make it appear that his sole objective all along had been to win to her side and bed.
He ended by asking, as he parted two fingers to let Hisvet’s dagger strike between them, “How ever did you and dear Frix guess that I was impersonating Grig?”
She replied, “Most simply, gracious gamesman. We went to fetch my father from the council, for there is still an important journey he, Frix, and I must make tonight. At a distance we heard you speak and I divined your true voice despite your clever lispings. Thereafter we followed you.”
“Ah, surely I may hope you love me as dearly, since you trouble to know me so well,” the Mouser warbled infatuatedly, slipping hand aside from a cunning slash. “But tell me, divine one, how comes it that you and Frix and your father are able to live and hold great power in the rat-world?”
With her dagger she pointed somewhat languidly toward the vanity table holding the black and white vials, informing him, “My family has used the same potion as Sheelba’s for countless centuries, and also the white potion, which restores us at once to human-size. During those same centuries we have interbred with the rats, resulting in divinely beautiful monsters such as I am, but also in monsters most ugly, at least by human standards. Those latter of my family stay always below ground, but the rest of us enjoy the advantages and delights of living in two worlds. The inter-breeding has also resulted in many rats with human-like hands and minds. The spreading of civilization to the rats is largely our doing, and we shall rule as chiefs and chieftesses paramount, or even goddesses and gods, when the rats rule men.”
This talk of interbreeding and monsters startled the Mouser somewhat and gave him to think, despite his ever more firmly gyved ensorcelment by Hisvet. He recalled Lukeen’s old suggestion, made aboard _Squid_, that Hisvet concealed a she-rat’s body under her maiden robes and he wondered — somewhat fearfully yet most curiously — just what form Hisvet’s slim body did take. For instance, did she have a tail? But on the whole he was certain that whatever he discovered under her violet robe would please him mightily, since now his infatuation with the grain-merchant’s daughter had grown almost beyond all bounds.
However, he outwardly showed none of this wondering, but merely asked, as if idly, “So your father is also Lord Null, and you and he and Frix regularly travel back and forth between the big and little worlds?”
“Show him, dear Frix,” Hisvet commanded lazily, lifting slim fingers to mask a yawn, as though the hand-and-dagger game had begun to bore her.
Frix moved back against the wall until her head with its natural jet-black sheath and copper-gleaming plaits, for she had thrown back her hood, was between the cages of the pocket-viper and the most enraged scorpion. Her dark eyes were a sleepwalker’s, fixed on things infinitely remote. The scorpion darted his moist white sting between the bars rat-inches from her ear, the viper’s trifid tongue vibrated angrily against her cheek, while his fangs struck the silver rounds and dripped venom that wetted oilily her yellow silken shoulder, but she seemed to take no note whatever of these matters. The fingers of her right hand, however, moved along a row of medallions decorating the glow-worm tank behind her, and without looking down, she pressed two at once.
The painting of the girl and crocodile moved swiftly upward, revealing the foot of a dark steep stairway.
“That leads without branchings to my father’s and my house,” Hisvet explained.
The painting descended. Frix pressed two other medallions and the companion painting of man and leopardess rose, revealing a like stairway.
“While that one ascends directly by way of a golden rat-hole to the private apartments of whoever is Lankhmar’s seeming overlord, now Glipkerio Kistomerces,” Hisvet told the Mouser as the second painting slid down into place. “So you see, beloved, our power goes everywhere.” And she lifted her dagger and touched it lightly to his throat. The Mouser let it rest there a space before taking its tip between fingers and thumb and moving it aside. Then he as gently caught hold of the tip of one of Hisvet’s braids, she offering no resistance, and began to unweave the fine silver wires from the finer silver-blonde hairs.
Frix still stood like a statue between fang and sting, seeming to see things beyond reality.
“Is Frix one of your breed? — combining in some fashion the finest of human and ratly qualities,” the Mouser asked quietly, keeping up with the task which, he told himself, would eventually and after an admittedly weary amount of unbraiding, allow him to arrive at his heart’s desire.
Hisvet shook her head languorously, laying aside her dagger. “Frix is my dearest slave and almost sister, but not by blood. Indeed she is the dearest slave in all Nehwon, for she is a princess and perchance by now a queen in her own world. While a-travel between worlds, she was ship-wrecked here and beset by demons, from whom my father rescued her, at the price that she serve me forever.”
At this, Frix spoke at last, though without moving else but her lips and tongue, not even her eyes to look at them. “Or until, sweetest mistress, I three times save your life at entire peril of my own. That has happened once now, aboard _Squid_, when the dragon would have gobbled you.”
“You would never leave me, dear Frix,” Hisvet said confidently.
“I love you dearly and serve you faithfully,” Frix replied. “Yet all things come to an end, blessed Demoiselle.”
“Then I shall have the Gray Mouser to protect me, and you unneeded,” Hisvet countered somewhat pettishly, lying on an elbow. “Leave us for the nonce, Frix, for I would speak privately with him.”
With merriest smile Frix came from between the deadly cages, made a curtsy toward the bed, resumed her yellow mask and swiftly went off through the second unsecret doorway, curtained with filmy silver.
Still lifted on her elbow, Hisvet turned toward the Mouser her slender form and her taper-face alight with beauty. He reached toward her eagerly, but she captured his questing hands in her cool fingers and fondling them asked, or rather stated, her eyes feeding on his, “You will love me forever, will you not, who dared the dark and fearsome tunnels of the rat-world to win me?”
“That will I surely, O Empress of Endless Delights,” the Mouser answered fervently, maddened by desire and believing his words to the ends of the universe of his feelings — almost.
“Then I think it proper to relieve you of _this_,” Hisvet said, putting the fingers of her two hands to his temple, “for it would be an offense against myself and my supreme beauty to depend on a charm when I may now wholly depend on _you_.”
And with only the tiniest tweak of pain inflicted, she deftly squeezed with her fingernails the silver dart from under the Mouser’s skin, as any woman might squeeze out a blackhead or whitehead from the visage of her lover. She showed him the dart gleaming on her palm. He for his part felt no change in his feelings whatever. He still adored her as divinity — and the fact that previously in his life he had never put any but momentary trust in any divinity whatever seemed of no importance at all, at least at this moment.
Hisvet laid a cool hand on the Mouser’s side, but her red eyes were no longer languorously misty; they were sparklingly bright. And when he would have touched her similarly she prevented him, saying in most businesslike fashion, “No, no, not quite yet! First we must plan, my sweet — for you can serve me in ways which even Frix will not. To begin, you must slay me my father, who thwarts me and confines my life unbearably, so that I may be imperatrix of all and you by most favored consort. There will be no end to our powers. Tonight, Lankhmar! Tomorrow, all Nehwon! Then … the conquest of other universes beyond the waters of space! The subjugation of the angels and demons, of heaven itself and hell! At first it may be well that you impersonate my father, as you have Grig — and done most cleverly, by my own witnessing, pet. You are of men the most like me in the world for deceptions, darling. Then — ”
She broke off at something she saw in the Mouser’s face. “You will of course obey me in all things?” she asked sharply, or rather asserted.
“Well…” the Mouser began.
The silver drape billowed to the ceiling and Frix dashed in on silent-silken slippers, her yellow robe and hood lying behind her.
“Your masks! Your masks!” she cried. “‘Ware! ‘Ware!” And she whirled over them to their necks an opaque violet coverlet, hiding Hisvet’s violet-robed form, the Mouser’s unclad body, and the tray between them. “Your father comes with armed attendants, lady!” And she knelt by the head of the bed nearest Hisvet and bowed her yellow-masked head, assuming a servile posture.
Hardly were the white and violet masks in place and the silver curtains settled to the floor than the latter were jerked rudely aside. Hisvin and Skwee appeared, both unmasked, followed by three pike-rats. Despite the presence of the huge vermin in their cages, the Mouser found it hard to banish the illusion that all the rats were actually five feet and more tall.
Hisvin’s face grew dusky red as he surveyed the scene. “Oh, most monstrous!” he cried at Hisvet. “Shameless filth! Loose with my own colleague!”
“Don’t be dramatic, Daddy,” Hisvet countered, while to the Mouser she whispered tersely, “Slay him now. I’ll clear you with Skwee and the rest.”
The Mouser, fumbling under the coverlet over the side of the bed for Scalpel, while presenting a steady white be-diamonded mask at Hisvin, said blandly, “Calm yourthelf, counthillor. If your divine daughter chootheth me above all other ratth and men, ith it my fault, Hithvin? Or herth either? Love knowth no ruleth.”
“I’ll have your head for this, Grig,” Hisvin screeched at him, advancing toward the bed.
“Daddy, you’ve become a puritanical dodderer,” Hisvet said sharply, almost primly, “to indulge in antique tantrums on this night of our great conquest. Your day is done. I must take your place on the Council. Tell him so, Skwee. Daddy darling, I think you’re just madly jealous of Grig because you’re not where he is.”
Hisvin screamed, “O dirt that was my daughter!” and snatching with youthful speed a stiletto from his waist, drove it at Hisvet’s neck betwixt violet mask and coverlet — except that Frix, lunging suddenly on her knees, swung her open left hand hard between, as one bats a ball.
The needlelike blade drove through her palm to the slim dagger’s hilt and was wrenched from Hisvin’s grasp.
Still on one knee, the bright blade transfixing her out-stretched left palm and dripping red a little, Frix turned toward Hisvin and advancing her other hand graciously, she said in clear, winning tones, “Govern your rage for all our sakes, dear my dear mistress’s father. These matters can be composed by quiet reason, surely. You must not quarrel together on this night of all nights.”
Hisvin paled and retreated a step, daunted most likely by Frix’s preternatural composure, which indeed was enough to send shivers up a man’s or even a rat’s spine.
The Mouser’s fumbling hand closed around Scalpel’s hilt. He prepared to spring out and dash back to Grig’s apartment, snatching up his bundle of clothes on the way. At some point during the last score or so heartbeats, his great undying love for Hisvet had quietly perished and was now beginning to stink in his nostrils.
But at that instant the violet drapes were torn apart and there rushed from the Mouser’s chosen escape route the rat Hreest in his gold-embellished black garb and brandishing rapier and dirk. He was followed by three gaurdsmen-rats in green uniforms, each with a like naked sword. The Mouser recognized the dirk Hreest held — it was his own Cat’s Claw.
Frix moved swiftly behind the head of the bed to the post she’d earlier taken between viper and scorpion cage, the stiletto still transfixing her left hand like a great pin. The Mouser heard her murmur rapidly, “The plot thickens. Enter armed rats at all portals. A climax nears.”
Hreest came to a sudden halt and cried ringingly at Skwee and Hisvin, “The dismembered remains of Councillor Grig have been discovered lodged against the Fifth Level sewer’s exit-grill! The human spy is impersonating him in Grig’s own clothes!”
Not at the moment, except for mask, the Mouser thought, and making one last effort cried out, “Nonthenthe! Thith ith midthummer madneth! I am Grig! It wath thome other white rat got tho foully thlain!”
Holding up Cat’s Claw and eyeing the Mouser, Hreest continued, “I discovered this dagger of human device in Grig’s apartment. The spy is clearly here.”
“Kill him in the bed,” Skwee commanded harshly, but the Mouser, anticipating a little the inevitable, had rolled out from under his sheets and now took up guard position naked, the white mask cast aside, Scalpel gleaming long and deadly in his right hand, while his left, in lieu of his dirk, held his belt and Scalpel’s limp scabbard, both doubled.
With a weird laugh Hreest lunged at him, rapier a-flicker, while Skwee drew sword and came leaping across the foot of the bed, his boot crunching glass against tray beneath the coverlet.
Hreest got a bind on Scalpel, carrying both long swords out to the side, and stepping in close stabbed with Cat’s Claw. The Mouser struck his own dirk aside with his doubled belt and drove his left shoulder into Hreest’s chest, slamming him back against two of his green uniformed sword-rats, who were thereby forced to give ground too.
At almost the same instant the Mouser parried high to the side with Scalpel, deflecting Skwee’s rapier when its point was inches from his neck. Then swiftly changing fronts, he fenced a moment with Skwee, beat the rat’s blade aside, and lunged strongly. The white-clad rat was already in retreat across the foot of the bed, from the head of which Hisvet, now unmasked, watched critically, albeit a little sulkily, but the Mouser’s point nevertheless reached Skwee’s sword-wrist and pinked it halfway through.
By this time the third green-clad rat, a giant relatively seven feet tall, who had to duck through the doorway, came lunging fiercely, though a little slowly. Meanwhile Hreest was picking himself up from the floor, while Skwee dropped his dagger and switched his rapier to his unwounded hand.
The Mouser parried the giant’s lunge, a hair’s-breadth from his naked chest, and riposted. The giant counter-parried in time, but the Mouser dropped Scalpel’s tip under the other’s blade and continuing his riposte, skewered him through the heart.
The giant’s jaw gaped, showing his great incisors. His eyes filmed. Even his fur seemed to dull. His weapons dropped from his nerveless hands and he stood dead on his feet a moment before starting to fall. In that moment the Mouser, squatting a little on his right leg, kicked out forcefully with his left. His heel took the giant in the breastbone, pushing his corpse off Scalpel and sending it careening back against Hreest and his two greenclad sword-rats.
One of the pike-rats leveled his weapon for a run at the Mouser, but at that moment Skwee commanded loudly, “No more single attacks! Form we a circle around him!”
The others were swift to obey, but in that brief pause Frix dropped open the silver-barred door that was one end of the scorpion’s cage, and despite her dagger-transfixed hand lifted the cage and heaved it sharply, sending its fearsome occupant flying to land on the foot of the bed, where it jigged about, big by comparison as a large cat, clashing its claws; rattling its chelicerae, and menacing with its sting over its head. Most of the rats directed their weapons at it. Snatching up her dagger, Hisvet crouched at the opposite corner from it, preparing to defend herself from her pet. Hisvin dodged in back of Skwee.
At the same time Frix dropped her good hand to the medallons on the glow-worm tank. The Mouser didn’t need the prompting of her wild smile and over-bright eyes. Snatching up the gray bundle of his clothes, he dashed up the dark steel stairs three at a time. Something hissed past his head and struck with a _zing_ the riser of a stone step above and clattered down. It was Hisvet’s long dagger and it had struck point-first. The stairway grew dark and he began taking its steps only two at a time, crouching low as he could and peering wide-eyed ahead. Faintly he heard Skwee’s shrill command, “After him!”
Frix with a grimace drew Hisvin’s stiletto from her palm, lightly kissed the bleeding wound, and with a curtsey presented the weapon to its owner.
The bedroom was empty save for those two and Hisvet, who was drawing her violet robe around her, and Skwee, who was knotting with spade teeth and good hand a bandage round his injured wrist.
Pierced by a dozen thrusts and oozing dark blood on the violet carpet, the scorpion still writhed on its back, its walking legs and great claws a-tremble, its sting sliding a little back and forth.
Hreest, the two green sword-rats, and the three pike-rats had gone in pursuit of the Mouser and the clatter of their boots up the steep stairs had died away.
Frowning darkly, Hisvin said to Hisvet, “I still should slay you.”
“Oh Daddy dear, you don’t understand at all what happened,” Hisvet said tremulously. “The Gray Mouser forced me at sword’s point. It was a rape. And at sword’s point under the coverlet he compelled me to say those dreadful things to you. You saw I did my best to kill him at the end.”
“Pah!” Hisvin spat, turning half aside.
“_She’s_ the one should be slain,” Skwee asserted, indicating Frix, “She worked the spy’s escape.”
“Most true, oh mighty councillor,” Frix agreed. “Else he would have killed at least half of you, and your brains are greatly needed — in fact, indispensable, are they not? — to direct tonight’s grand assault on Lankhmar Above?” She held out her red-dripping palm to Hisvet and said softly, “That’s twice, dear mistress.”
“For that you shall be rewarded,” Hisvet said, setting her lips primly. “And for helping the spy escape — and not preventing my rape! — you shall be whipped until you can no longer scream — tomorrow.”
“Right joyfully, milady — tomorrow,” Frix responded with a return of something of her merry tones. “But tonight there is work must be done. At Glipkerio’s palace in the Blue Audience Chamber. work for all three of us. And at once, I believe, milord,” she added deferentially, turning to Hisvin.
“That’s true,” Hisvin said with a start. He scowled back and forth between his daughter and her maid three times, then with a shrug, said, “Come.”
“How can you trust them?” Skwee demanded.
“I must,” Hisvin said. “They’re needful if I am properly to control Glipkerio. Meanwhile your place is that of supreme command, at the council table. Siss will be needing you. Come!” he repeated to the two girls. Frix worked the medallions. The second painting rose. They went all three up the stairs.
Skwee paced the bed-chamber alone, head bowed in angry thought, automatically overstepping the corpse of the giant sword-rat and circling the still-writhing scorpion. When he at last stopped and lifted his gaze, it was to rest it on the vanity table bearing the black and white bottles of the size-change magic. He approached that table with the gait of a sleepwalker or one who walks through water. For a space he played aimlessly with the vials, rolling them this way and that. Then he said aloud to himself, “Oh why is it that one can be wise and command a vast host and strive unceasingly and reason with diamond brilliance, and still be low as a silverfish, blind as a cutworm? The obvious is in front of our toothy muzzles and we never see it — because we rats have accepted our littleness, hypnotized ourselves with our dwarfishness, our incapacity, and our inability to burst from our cramping drain-tunnels, to leap from the shallow but deadly jail-rut, whose low walls lead us only to the stinking rubbish heap or narrow burial crypt.”
He lifted his ice-blue eyes and glared coldly at his silver-furred image in the silver mirror. “For all your greatness, Skwee,” he told himself, “you have thought small all your rat’s life. Now for once, Skwee, think big!” And with that fierce self-command, he picked up one of the white vials and pouched it, hesitated, swept all the white vials into his pouch, hesitated again, then with a shrug and a sardonic grimace swept the black vials after them and hurried from the room.
On its back on the violet carpet, the scorpion still vibrated its legs feebly.
——–

*Chapter Twelve*
Lankhmar readied herself for another night of terror as shadows lengthened toward infinity and the sunlight turned deep orange. Her inhabitants were not reassured by the lessening number of murderous rats in the streets; they smelled the electric calm before the storm and they barricaded themselves in upper stories as they had the night gone by. Soldiers and constables, according to their individual characters, grinned with relief or griped at bureaucracy’s inanities when they got the news that they were to repair to the Southern Barracks one hour before midnight to be harangued by Olegnya Mingolsbane, who was reputed to make the longest and most tedious spittle-spraying speeches of any Captain General in Nehwon’s history, and to stink with the sourness of near-senility besides that.
Aboard _Squid_, Slinoor gave orders for lights to burn all night and an all-hands watch to be kept. While the black kitten, forsaking the crow’s nest, paced the rail nearest the docks, from time to time uttering an anxious mew and eyeing the dark streets as if with mingled temptation and dread.
For a while Glipkerio soothed his nerves by observing the subtle torturing of Reetha, designed chiefly to fray her nerves rather than her flesh, and by auditing her hours-long questioning by well-trained inquisitors, who sought to hammer from her the admission that the Gray Mouser was leader of the rats — as his shrinking to rat-size seemed surely to prove — and also force her to divulge a veritable hand-book of information on the Mouser’s magical methods and sorcerous strategems. The girl truly entranced Glipkerio: she reacted to threats, evil teasings, and relatively minor pain in such a lively, unwearying way.
But after a while he nonetheless grew bored and had a light supper served him in the sunset’s red glow on his sea-porch outside the Blue Audience Chamber and beside the head of the great copper chute where balanced the great leaden spindle, which he reached out and touched from time to time for reassurance. He hadn’t lied to Hisvin, he told himself smugly; he _did_ have at least one other secret weapon, albeit it wasn’t a weapon of offense, but rather the ultimate opposite. Pray, though, he wouldn’t have to use it! Hisvin had promised that at midnight he would work his spell against the assaulting rats, and thus far Hisvin had never failed — had he not conquered the rats of the grain fleet? — while his daughter and her maid had ways of soothing Glipkerio that amazingly did not involve whippings. He had seen with his own eyes Hisvin slay rats with his spell — while on his own part he had arranged for all soldiers and police to be in the South Barracks at midnight listening to that tiresome Olegnya Mingolsbane. He had done his part, he told himself; Hisvin would do his; and at midnight his troubles and vexations would be done.
But it was such a long time until midnight! Once more boredom engulfed the black-togaed, purple-pansy coroneted, beanpole monarch, and he began to think wistfully of whips and Reetha. Beyond all other men, he mused, an overlord, burdened by administration and ceremonies, had no time for even the most homely hobbies and innocent diversions.
Reetha’s questioners, meanwhile, gave up for the day and left her in Samanda’s charge, who from time to time described gloatingly to the girl the various all-out thrashings and other torments the palace mistress would visit on her as soon as her namby-pamby inquisitors were through with her. The much-abused maid sought to comfort herself with the thought that her madcap gray rescuer might somehow regain his proper size and return to work again her escape. Surely, and despite all the nasty insinuations she had endured, the Gray Mouser was rat-size against his will. She recalled the many fairy tales she had heard of lizard- and frog-princes restored to handsomeness and proper height by a maiden’s loving kiss, and despite her miseries, her eye-browless eyes grew dreamy.
The Mouser squinted through Grig’s notched mask at the glorious Council Chamber and the other members of the Supreme Thirteen. Already the scene had become oppressively familiar to him, and he was damnably tired of lisping. Nevertheless, he gathered himself for a supreme effort, which at least was one that tickled his wits.
His coming here had been simplicity itself, and inevitability too. Upon reaching the Fifth Level after parting with Hreest and his pike-rats, rat-pages had fallen in beside him at the foot of the white marble stairs, and a rat-chamberlain had gone solemnly before him, ringing an engraved silver bell which probably once had tinkled from the ankle of a temple dancer in the Street of the Gods in the world above. Thus, footing it grandly himself with the aid of his sapphire-topped ivory staff, though still hobbling a little, he had been wordlessly conducted into the Council Chamber and to the very chair which he now occupied.
The chamber was low but vast, pillared by golden and silver candlesticks doubtless pilfered from palaces and churches overhead. Among them were a few of what looked like jeweled scepters of office and maces of command. In the background, toward the distant walls and half hid by the pillars, were grouped rat-pikemen, waiters, and other servants, litter-bearers with their vehicles, and the like.
The chamber was lit by golden and silver cages of fire-beetles and night-bees and glow-wasps large as eagles, and so many of them that the pulsing of their light was barely apparent. The Mouser had decided that if it became necessary to create a diversion, he would loose some of the glow-wasps.
Within a central circle of particularly costly pillars was set a great round table, about which sat evenly spaced the Thirteen, all masked and clad in white hoods and robes, from which white-gloved rat-hands emerged.
Opposite the Mouser and on a slightly higher chair sat Skwee, well remembered from the time he had crouched on the Mouser’s shoulder threatening to sever the artery under his ear. On Skwee’s right sat Siss, while on his left was a taciturn rat whom the rest addressed as Lord Null. Alone of the Thirteen, this lumpy Lord Null was clad in robe, hood, mask, and gloves of black. There was something hauntingly familiar about him, perhaps because the hue of his garb recalled to the Mouser Svivomilo and also Hreest.
The remaining nine rats were clearly apprentice members, promoted to fill the gaps in the Circle of Thirteen left by the white rats slain aboard _Squid_, for they never spoke and when questions were voted, only bobbingly agreed with the majority opinion among Skwee, Siss, Lord Null, and Grig — that is, the Mouser — or if that opinion were split two to two, abstained.
The entire tabletop was hidden by a circular map of what appeared to be well-tanned and buffed human skin, the most delicate and finely pored. The map itself was nothing but innumerable dots: golden, silver, red and black, and thick as fly-specks in the stall of a slum fruit-merchant. At first the Mouser had been able to think of nothing but some eerie, dense starfield. Then it had been revealed to him, by the references the others made to it, that it was nothing more or less than a map of all the rat-holes in Lankhmar!
At first this knowledge hadn’t made the map come to life for the Mouser. But then gradually he had begun to see in the apparently randomly clustered and twisty-trailed dots the outlines of at least the principal buildings and streets of Lankhmar. Of course, the whole plot of the city was reversed, because viewed from below instead of above.
The golden dots, it had turned out, stood for rat-holes unknown to humans and used by rats; the red, for holes known to humans yet still used by rats; the silver, for holes unknown to humans, but not currently employed by the dwellers undeneath; while the black dots designated the holes known to humans and avoided by the rodents of Lankhmar Below.
During the entire council session, three slim female rat-pages silently went about, changing the color of rat-holes and even dotting in new ones, according to information whispered them by rat-pages, who ceaselessly came and went on equally silent paws. For this purpose, the three females used rat-tail brushes each made of a single, stiffined horsehair frayed at the tip, which they employed most dexterously, and each had slung in a rack at the waist four ink-pots of the appropriate colors.
What the Mouser had learned during the council session had been, simply yet horribly, the all-over plan for the grand assault on Lankhmar Above, which was to take place a half-hour before this very midnight: detailed information about the disposition of pike companies, crossbow detachments, dagger groups, poison-weapon brigades, incendiaries, lone assassins, child-killers, panic-rats, stink-rats, genital-snappers and breast-biters and other berserkers, setters of man-traps such as trip-cords and needle-sharp caltrops and strangling nooses, artillery brigades which would carry up piecemeal larger weapons to be assembled above ground, until his brain could no longer hold all the data.
He had also learned that the principal attacks were to be made on the South barracks and especially on the Street of the Gods, hitherto spared.
Finally he learned that the aim of the rats was not to exterminate humans or drive them from Lankhmar, but to force an unconditional surrender from Glipkerio and enslave the overlord’s subjects by that agreement and a continuing terror so that Lankhmar would go on as always about its pleasures and business, buying and selling, birthing and dying, sending out of ships and caravans, gathering of grain — especially grain! — but ruled by the rats.
Fortunately all this briefing had been done by Skwee and Siss. Nothing had been asked of the Mouser — that is, Grig — or of Lord Null, except to supply opinions on knotty problems and lead in the voting. This had also provided the Mouser with time to devise ways and means of throwing a cat into the rats’ plans.
Finally the briefing was done and Skwee asked around the table for ideas to improve the grand assault-not as if he expected to get any.
But at this point the Mouser rose up — somewhat crippled, since Grig’s damnably ill-fitting rat-boots were still giving him the cramp — and taking up his ivory staff laid its tip unerringly on a cluster of silver dots at the west end of the Street of Gods.
“Why ith no aththault made here?” he demanded. “I thuggetht that at the height of the battle, a party of ratth clad in black togath iththue from the temple of the Godth _of_ Lankhmar. Thith will convinthe the humanth ath nothing elthe that their very godth — the godth of their thity — have turned againtht them — been tranthformed, in fact, to ratth!”
He swallowed hard down his raw, wearied throat. Why the devil had Grig had to have a lisp?
His suggestion appeared for a moment to stupefy the other members of the Council. Then Siss said, wonderingly, admiringly, enviously, and as if against his will, “I never thought of that.”
Skwee said, “The temple of the Gods _of_ Lankhmar has long been avoided by man and rat alike, as you well know, Grig. Nevertheless…”
Lord Null said peevishly, “I am against it. Why meddle with the unknown? The humans of Lankhmar fear and avoid the temple of their city’s gods. So should we.”
The Mouser glared at the black-robed rat through his mask slits. “Are we mithe or ratth?” he demanded. “Or are we even cowardly, thuperthtitiouth men? Where ith your ratly courage, Lord Null? Or thovereign, thkeptical, ratly reathon? My thratagem will cow the humanth and prove forever the thuperior bravery of ratth! Thkwee! Thith! Ith it not tho?”
The matter was put to a vote. Lord Null voted nay, Siss and the Mouser and — after a pause — Skwee voted aye, the other nine bobbed, and so Operation Black Toga, as Skwee christened it, was hastily added to the battle plans.
“We have over four hours in which to organize it,” Skwee reminded his nervous colleagues.
The Mouser grinned behind his mask. He had a feeling that the Gods _of_ Lankhmar, if ever roused, would side with the city’s human inhabitants. Or would they? — he wondered belatedly.
In any case, his business and desire now was to get out of the Council Chamber as soon as possible. A stratagem instantly suggested itself to him. He waved to a page.
“Thummon a litter,” he commanded. “Thith deliberathion hath tired me. I feel faint and am troubled by leg cramp. I will go for a thhort while to my home and wife to retht me.”
Skwee looked around at him. “Wife?” the white rat asked incredulously.
Instantly the Mouser answered, “Ith it any buthineth of yourth if it ith my whim to call my mithtreth my wife?”
Skwee still eyed him for a bit, then shrugged.
The litter arrived almost immediately, borne by two very brawny, half-naked rats. The Mouser rolled into it gratefully, laying his ivory staff beside him, commanded “To my home!” and waved a gentle good-bye to Skwee and Lord Null as he was carried joggingly off. He felt himself at the moment to be the most brilliant mind in the whole universe and thoroughly deserving of a rest, even in a rat burrow. He reminded himself he had at least four hours to go before Sheelba’s spell wore off and he became once more human size. He’d done his best for Lankhmar, now he must think of himself. He lazily wondered what the comforts of a rat home would be like. He must sample them before escaping above ground. It really had been a damnably tiring council session after all that had gone before.
Skwee tuned to Lord Null as the litter disappeared by stages beyond the pillars and said through his be-diamonded white mask, “So Grig has a mistress, the old misogynist! Perhaps it’s she who has quickened his mind to such new brilliancies as Operation Black Toga.”
“I still don’t like that one, though you outvoted me and I must go along,” chittered the other irritably from behind his black vizard. “There’s too much uncertainty tonight. The final battle about to be joined. A magically transformed human spy reported in Lankhmar Below. The change in Grig’s character. That rabid mouse running widdershins a-foam at the jaws, outside the Council Chamber, and which squeaked thrice when you slew him. The uncustomary buzzing of the night-bees in Siss’s chambers. And now this new operation adopted on the spur of the moment — ”
Skwee clapped Lord Null on the shoulder in friendly fashion. “You’re distraught tonight, comrade, and see omens in every night-bug,” he said. “Grig at all events had one most sound notion. We all could do with a little rest and refreshment. Especially you before your all-important mission. Come.”
And turning the table over to Siss, he and Lord Null went to a curtained alcove just off the Council Chamber, Skwee ordering on the way that food and drink be brought them.
When the curtains were closed behind them, Skwee seated himself in one of the two chairs beside the small table there and took off his mask. In the pulsing violet light of the three silver-caged glow-wasps illuminating the alcove, his long, white-furred, blue-eyed snout looked remarkably sinister.
“To think,” he said, “that tomorrow my people will be masters of Lankhmar Above. For millennia we rats have planned and built, tunneled and studied and striven, and now in less than six hours — it’s worth a drink! Which reminds me, comrade, isn’t it time for your medicinal draught” Lord Null hissed with consternation, prepared to lift his black mask distractedly, dipped his black-gloved right fore-member into his pouch, and came up with a tiny white vial.
“Stop!” Skwee commanded with some honor, capturing the black-gloved wrist with a sudden grab. “If you should drink _that one_ now — ”
“I _am_ nervous tonight, nervous to frustration,” the other admitted, returning the white vial to his pouch and coming up with a black one. Before draining its contents, he lifted his black mask entirely. The face behind was not a rat’s, but the seamed and beady-eyed visage, rat-small, of Hisvin the grain-merchant.
The black draught swallowed, he appeared to experience relief and easement of tension. The worry lines in his face were replaced by those of thought.
“Who is Grig’s mistress, Skwee?”‘ he speculated suddenly. “No common slut, I’ll swear, or vanity-puffed courtesan.”
Skwee shrugged his hunchy shoulders and said cynically, “The more brilliant the enchanted male, the stupider the enchanting female.”
“No!” Hisvin said impatiently. “I sense a brilliant and rapacious mind here that is not Grig’s. He was ambitious once, you know, sought your position, then his fires sank to coals glowing through wintery ash.”
“That’s true,” Skwee agreed thoughtfully. “Who has blown him alight again?” Hisvin demanded, now with anxious suspicion. “_Who_ is his mistress, Skwee?”
Fafhrd pulled up the Mingol mare before that iron-hearted beast should topple from exhaustion — and had trouble doing it, so resolute unto death was that grim creature. Yet once stopped, he felt her legs giving under her and he dropped quickly from the saddle lest she collapse from his weight. She was lathered with sweat, her head hung between her trembling forelegs, and her slatted ribs worked like a bellows as she gasped whistlingly.
He rested his hand lightly on her shaking shoulders. She never could have made Lankhmar, he knew. They were less than halfway across the Great Salt Marsh.
Low moonlight, striking from behind, washed with a faint gold the gravel of the causeway road and yellowly touched the tops of thorn tree and cactus, but could not yet slant down to the Marsh’s sea-grassed floor and black bottoms.
Save for the hum and crackle of insects and the calls of night birds, the moonlight-brushed area was silent — yet would not be so for long, Fafhrd knew with a shudder.
Ever since the preternatural emergence of the three black riders from the crash of waves over the Sinking Land and their drumming unshakable pursuit of him through the deepening night, he had been less and less able to think of them as mere vengeful Ilthmar brigands, and more and more conceived them as a supernatural black trinity of death. For miles now, besides, something huge and long-legged and lurching, though never distinctly seen, had been pur-suing him through the Marsh, keeping pace with him at the distance of a spear cast. Some giant familiar or obedient djinn of the black horsemen seemed most likely.
His fears had so worked on him that Fafhrd had finally put the mare to her extremest gallop, outdistancing the hoof-noise of the pursuit, though with no effect on the lurching shape and with the inevitable present result. He drew Graywand and faced back toward the new-risen gibbous moon.
Then very faintly he began to hear it: the muted rhythmic drumming of hooves on gravel. They were coming.
At the same moment, from the deep shadows where the giant familiar should be, he heard the Gray Mouser call hoarsely, “This way, Fafhrd! Toward the blue light. Lead your mount. Make it swift!”
Grinning even as the hairs lifted on his neck, Fafhrd looked south and saw a shaped blue glow, like a round-topped, smallish, blue-lit window in the blackness of the Marsh. He plunged down the causeway’s slanting south side toward it, pulling the mare after him, and found underfoot a low ridge of firm ground rather than mud. He moved ahead eagerly through the dark, digging in his heels and leaning forward as he dragged his spent mount. The blue window looked a little above his head now. The drumming coming up from the east was louder.
“Shake a leg, Lazybones!” he heard the Mouser call in the same rasping tones. The Gray One must have caught a cold from the Marsh’s damp or — the Fates forfend! — a fever from its miasmas.
“Tether your mount to the thorn stump,” the Mouser continued gruffly. “There’s food for her there and a water pool. Then come up. Speed, speed!”
Fafhrd obeyed without word or waste motion, for the drumming had become very loud.
As he leaped and caught hold of the blue window’s bottom and drew himself up to it, the blue glow went out. He scrambled inside onto the reed-carpeted floor of whatever it was and swiftly squirmed around so he was looking back the way he’d come.
The Mingol mare was invisible in the dark below. The causeway’s top glowed faintly in the moonlight.
Then round a cluster of thorn trees came speeding the three black riders, the drumming of the twelve hooves thunderous now. Fafhrd thought he could make out a fiendish phosphorescent glow around the nostrils and eyes of the tall black horses and he could faintly discern the black cloaks and hoods of the riders streaming in the wind of their speed. With never a pause they passed the point where he’d left the causeway and vanished behind another thorn grove to the west. He let out a long-held breath.
“Now get away from the door and brace yourself,” a voice that wasn’t the Mouser’s at all grated over his shoulder. “I’ve got to be there to pilot this rig.”
The hairs that had just lain down on Fafhrd’s neck erected themselves again. He had more than once heard the rock-harsh voice of Sheelba of the Eyeless Face, though never seen, let alone entered, his fabulous hut. He swiftly hitched himself to one side, back against wall. Something smooth and round and cool touched the back of his neck. A wall-hung skull, it almost had to be.
A black figure crawled into the space he’d just vacated. Dimly silhouetted in the doorway, its edge touched by moonlight, he saw a black cowl.
“Where’s the Mouser?” Fafhrd asked with a wheeze in his voice.
The hut gave a violent lurch. Fafhrd grabbed gropingly for and luckily found two wall posts.
“In trouble. _Deep_-down trouble,” Sheelba answered curtly. “I did his voice to make you jump lively. As soon as you’ve fulfilled whatever geas Ningauble has laid upon you — bells, isn’t it? — you must go instantly to his aid.”
The hut gave a second lurch and a third, then began to rock and pitch somewhat like a ship, but in a swift rhythm and more joltingly, as if one were in a howdah on the slant back of a drunken giant giraffe.
“Go instantly where?” Fafhrd demanded, somewhat humbly.
“How should I know and why should I tell you if I did? I am not your wizard. I’m just taking you to Lankhmar by secret ways as a favor to that paunchy, seven-eyed, billion-worded dilettante in sorcery who thinks himself my colleague and has gulled you into taking him as mentor,” the harsh voice responded from the hood. Then, relenting some-what, though growing gruffer, “Overlord’s palace, most likely. Now shut up.”
The rocking of the hut and also its speed increased. Wind pushed in, flapping the edge of Sheelba’s hood. Flashes of moon-dappled marsh shot by.
“Who were those riders after me?” Fafhrd asked, clinging to his wall posts. “Ilthmar brigands? Acolytes of the grisly, scythe-armed lord?”
No reply.
“What _is_ it all about?” Fafhrd persisted. “Grand assault by a near numberless yet nameless host on Lankhmar. Nameless black riders. The Mouser deep-buried and woefully shrunk, yet alive. A tin whistle maybe summoning War Cats who are dangerous to the blower. None of it makes sense.”
The hut gave a particularly vicious lurch. Sheelba still said not a word. Fafhrd grew seasick and devoted himself to hanging on.
Glipkerio, nerving himself, poked his pansy-wreathed, gold-ringleted head on its long neck through the kitchen door’s leather curtains and blinking his weak yellow-irised eyes at the fire’s glare, grinned an archly amiable, foolish grin.
Reetha, chained once more by the neck, sat cross-legged in front of the fire, head a-droop. Surrounded by four other maids squatting on their heels, Samanda nodded in her great chair. Yet now, though no noise had been made, her snores broke off, she opened her pig-eyes toward Glipkerio, and said familiarly, “Come in, little overlord, don’t stand there like a bashful giraffe. Have the rats got you scared too? Be off to your cots, girls.”
Three maids instantly rose. Samanda snatched a long pin from her sphere-dressed hair and lightly jabbed awake the fourth, who had been asleep on her heels.
Silently, except for a single swift-stifled squeal from the pricked one, the four maids bobbed a bow at Glipkerio, two at Samanda, and hurried out like so many wax mannequins. Reetha looked around wearily. Glipkerio wandered about, looking anywhere but at her, his chin a-twitch, his long fingers jittery, twining and untwining.
“The restless bug bite you, little overlord?” Samanda asked him. “Shall I make you a hot poppy-posset? Or would you like to see her whipped?” she asked, jerking a thick thumb toward Reetha. “The inquisitors ordered me not to, but of course if you should command me — ”
“Oh, no, no, no, of course not,” Glipkerio protested. “But speaking of whips, I’ve some new ones in my private collection I’d like to show you, dear Samanda, including one reputedly from Far Kiraay coated with rough-ground glass, if only you’d come with me. Also a handsomely embossed six-tined silver bull prod from — ”
“Oh, so it’s company you want, like all the other scared ones,” Samanda told him. “Well, I’d be willing to oblige you, little overlord, but the ‘quisitors told me I must keep an eye all night on this wicked girl, who’s in league with the rats’ leader.”
Glipkerio hemmed and hawed, finally said, “Well, you could bring her along, I suppose, if you really have to.”
“So I could,” Samanda agreed heartily, at last levering her black-dressed bulk from her chair. “We can test your new whips on her.”
“Oh, no, no, _no_,” Glipkerio once more protested. Then frowning and also writhing his narrow shoulders, he added thoughtfully, “Though there are times when to get the hang of a new instrument of pain one simply must…”
“…simply must,” Samanda agreed, unsnapping the silver chain from Reetha’s collar and snapping on a short leash. “Lead the way, little overlord.”
“Come first to my bedroom,” he told her. “I’ll go ahead to get my guardsmen out of the way.” And he made off at his longest, toga-stretching stride.
“No need to, little overlord, they know all about your habits,” Samanda called after him, then jerked Reetha to her feet. “Come, girl! — you’re being mightily honored. Be glad I’m not Glipkerio, or you’d be rubbed with cheese and shoved down-cellar for the rats to nibble.”
When they finally arrived through empty silk-hung corridors at Glipkerio’s bed-chamber, he was standing in mingled agitation and irritation before its open, jewel-studded, thick oaken door, his black toga a-rustle from his nervous jerking.
“There weren’t any guardsmen for me to warn off,” he complaced. “It seems my orders were stupidly misinterpreted, extended farther than I’d intended, and my guardsmen have all gone off with the soldiers and constables to the South Barracks.”
“What need you of guardsmen when you have _me_ to protect you, little overlord?” Samanda answered boisterously, slapping a truncheon hanging from her belt.
“That’s true,” he agreed, only a shade doubtfully, and twitched a large and complex golden key from a fold of his toga. “Now let’s lock the girl in here, Samanda, if you please, while we go to inspect my new acquisitions.”
“And decide which to use on her?” Samanda asked in her loud coarse voice.
Glipkerio shook his head as if in shocked disapproval, and looking at last at Reetha, said in grave fatherly tones, “No, of course not, it is only that I imagine the poor child would be bored at our expertise.”
Yet he couldn’t quite keep a sudden eagerness from his tones, nor a furtive gleam from his eyes.
Samanda unsnapped the leash and pushed Reetha inside.
Glipkerio warned her in last-minute apprehension, “Don’t touch my night-draught now,” pointing at a golden tray on a silver night table. Crystal flagons sat on the tray and also a long-stemmed goblet filled with pale apricot-hued wine.
“_Don’t touch one thing_, or I’ll make you beg for death,” Samanda amplified, suddenly all unhumorously brutal. “Kneel at the foot of the bed on knees and heels with head bent — servile posture three — and don’t move a muscle until we return.”
As soon as the thick door was closed and its lock softly thudded shut and the golden key chinkingly withdrawn on the other side, Reetha walked straight to the night table, worked her cheeks a bit, spat into the night-draught, and watched the bubbly scum slowly revolve. Oh if she only had some hairs to drop in it, she yearned fiercely, but there seemed to be no fur or wool in the room and she had been shaved this very morning.
She unstoppered the most tempting of the crystal flagons and carried it about with her, swigging daintily, as she examined the room, paneled with rare woods from the Eight Cities, and its ever rarer treasures, pausing longest at a heavy golden casket full of cut but unset jewels — amethysts, aquamarines, sapphires, jades, topazes, fire opals, rubies, gimpels, and ice emeralds — which glittered and gleamed like the shards of a shattered rainbow.
She also noted a rack of women’s clothes, cut for some-one very tall and thin, and — surprising beside these evidences of effeminacy — a rack of browned-iron weapons.
She glanced over several shelves of blown-glass figurines long enough to decide that the most delicate and costly-looking was, almost needless to say, that of a slim girl in boots and scanty jacket wielding a long whip. She flicked it off its shelf, so that it shattered on the polished floor and the whip went to powder.
What could they do to her that they weren’t planning to do already? — she asked herself with a tight smile.
She climbed into the bed, where she stretched and writhed luxuriously, enjoying to the full the feel of the fine linen sheets against her barbered limbs, body, and head, and now and again trickling from the crystal flagon a few nectarous drops between her playfully haughty-shaped lips. She’d be damned, she told herself, if she’d drink enough to get dead drunk before the last possible instant. Thereafter Samanda and Glipkerio might find themselves hard-put to torment a limp body and blacked-out mind with any great pleasure to themselves.
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