*Chapter Eleven*
The Mouser was hurrying against a marked moist cool draft through a vast, low-ceilinged concourse close-pillared like a mine with upended bricks and sections of pike-haft and broom-handle, and lit by caged fire-beetles and glow-worms and an occasional sputtering torch held by a rat-page in jacket and short trews lighting the way for some masked person or persons of quality. A few jewel-decked or monstrously fat rat-folk, likewise masked, traveled in litters carried by two or four squat, muscular, nearly naked rats. A limping, aged rat carrying two socks which twitched a little from the inside was removing dim, weary fire-beetles from their cages and replacing them with fresh bright ones. The Mouser hastened along on tiptoe with knees permanently bent, body hunched forward, and chin out-thrust. It made his legs in particular ache abominably, but it gave him, he hoped, the general silhouette and gait of a rat walking two-legged. His entire head was covered by a cylindrical mask cut from the bottom of his cloak, provided with eye-holes only, and which, stiffened by a wire which had previously stiffened the scabbard of Scalpel, thrust down several inches below his chin to give the impression that it covered a rat’s long snout.
He worried what would happen if someone came close enough and were sufficiently observant to note that his mask and cloak too of course were made of tiny ratskins closely stitched together. He hoped that rats were plagued by proportionately tinier rats, though he hadn’t noted any tiny rat-holes so far; after all, there was that proverb about little bugs having littler bugs, and so on; at any rate he could claim in a pinch that he came from a distant rat-city where such was the case. To keep the curious and watchful at a distance he hovered his gauntleted hands a-twitch above the pommels of Scalpel and Cat’s Claw, and chittered angrily or muttered such odd oaths as “All rat-catchers fry!” or “By candle-fat and bacon-rind!” in Lankhmarese, for now that he had ears small and quick enough to hear, he knew that the language was spoken underground, and especially well by the aristos of these lower levels. And what more natural than that rats, who were parasites on man’s farms and ships and cities, should copy his language along with newly other items of his habits and culture? He had already noted other solitary armed rats — bravos or berserkers, presumably — who behaved in the irritable and dangerous manner he now put on.
His escape from the cellar-rats had been achieved by his own cool-headedness and his pursuers’ blundering eagerness, which had made them fight to be first, so that the tunnel had been briefly blocked behind him. His candle had been most helpful in his descent of the first sharply down-angling, rough-hewn, then rough-digged passages, where he had made his way by sliding and leaping, checking himself on a rocky outcropping or by digging heel into dirt only when his speed became so great as to threaten a disastrous fall. The first rough-pillared concourse had also been pitch-dark, almost. There he had quickly thrown his cloak over his face to the eyes, for his candle had shown him numerous rats, most of them going naked on all fours, but a few of them hunchedly erect and wearing rough dark clothing, if only a pair of trews or a jacket or slouch hat or smock, or a belt for a short-bladed hanger. Some of these had carried pickax or shovel or pry-bar over shoulder. And there had been one rat fully clothed in black, armed with sword and dagger and wearing a silver-edged full-face vizard — at least the Mouser had assumed it was a rat.
He had taken the first passage leading down — there had been regular steps now, hewn in rock or cut in gravel — and had paused at a turn in the stairs by a curious though stenchful alcove. It contained the first he had seen of the fire-beetle lamps and also a half-dozen small compartments, each closed by a door that left space below and above. After a moment’s hesitation he had darted into one which showed no black hind paws or boots below and securely hooking the door behind him, had instantly and rapidly begun to fabricate his ratskin mask. His instinctive assumption about the function of the compartments was confirmed by a large two-handled basket half full of rat droppings and a bucket of stinking urine. After his long-chinned vizard had been made and donned, he had shaken out his candle, pouched it, and then relieved himself, at last permitting himself to wonder in amazement that all his clothes and belongings had been reduced in size proportionately with his body. Ah, he told himself, that would account for the wide gray border of the pink puddle which had appeared around his boots in the cellar above. When he’d been sorcerously shrunken, the excess motes or atomies of his flesh, blood, and bones had been shed downward to make the pink pool, while those of his gray clothing and tempered iron weapons had sifted away to make up the pool’s gray border, which had been powdery rather than slimy, of course, because metal or fabric contains little or no liquid compared to flesh. It had occurred to him that there must be twenty times as much of the Mouser by weight in that poor abused pink pool overhead as there was in his present rat-small form, and for a moment he had felt a sentimental sadness.
Finishing his business, he had prepared to continue his downward course when there had come the descending clatter of paw- and boot-steps, quickly followed by a banging on the door of his compartment.
Without hesitation he had unhooked the door and opened it with a jerk. Facing him close there had been the black-clad, black-and-silver-masked rat he had seen on the level above, and behind him three bare-faced rats with drawn daggers that looked and probably were sharper than gross human fingers could ever hone.
After the first glance, the Mouser had looked lower than his pursuers’ faces, for fear the color and shape and especially the placing of his eyes might give him away.
The vizarded one had said swiftly and clearly in excellent Lankhmarese, “Have you seen or heard anyone come down the stairs? — in particular an armed human magically reduced to decent and normal size?”
Again without hesitation the Mouser had chittered most angrily, and roughly shouldering his questioner and the others aside, had spat out, “Idiots! Opium-chewers! Nibblers of hemp! Out of my way!”
On the stairs he had paused to look back briefly, snarl loudly and contemptuously, “No, of course not!” and then gone down the stairs with dignity, though taking them two at a time.
The next level had shown no rats in sight and been redolent of grain. He had noted bins of wheat, barley, millet, kombo, and wild rice from the River Tilth. A good place to hide — perhaps. But what could he gain by hiding?
The next level — the third down — had been full of military clatter and rank with rat-stink. He had noted rat pikemen drilling in bronze cuirasses and helmets and another squad being instructed in the crossbow, while still others crowded around a table where routes on a great map were being pointed out. He had lingered even a shorter time there.
Midway down each stairs had been a compartmented nook like the first he’d used. He had docketed away in his mind his information.
Refreshingly clean, moist air had poured out of the fourth level,it had been more brightly lit, and most of the rats strolling in it had been richly dressed and masked. He had turned into it at once, walking against the moist breeze, since that might well come from the outer world and mark a route of escape, and he had continued with angry chitters and curses to play his impulsively assumed role of crotchety, half-mad rat-bravo or rogue-rat.
In fact, he found himself trying so hard to be a convincing rat that without volition his eyes now followed with leering interest a small mincing she-rat in pink silk and pearls — mask as well as dress — who led on a leash what he took at first to be a baby rat and then realized was a dwarfish, well-groomed, fear-eyed mouse, and also an imperiously tall ratess in dark green silk sewn over with ruby chips and holding in one hand a whip and in the other the short leashes of two fierce-eyed, quick-breathing shrews that looked as big as mastiffs and were doubtless even more bloodthirsty.
Still looking lustfully at this striking proud creature as she passed him with green, be-rubied mask tilted high, he ran into a slow-gaited, portly rat robed and masked in ermine, which looked extremely coarse-haired now, and wearing about his neck a long gold chain and about his alder-manic waist a gold-studded belt, from which hung a heavy bag that chinked dulcetly at the Mouser’s jolting impact.
Snapping a “Your pardon, merchant!” at the wheezingly chittering fellow, the Mouser strode on without backward glance. He grinned conceitedly under his mask. These rats were easy to befool! — and perhaps reduction in size had sharpened finer his own sharp wits.
He was tempted for an instant to turn back and lure off and rob the fat fellow, but realized at once that in the human world the chinking goldpieces would be smaller than sequins.
This thought set his mind on a problem which had been obscurely terrifying him ever since he had plunged into the rat-world. Sheelba had said the effects of the potion would last for nine hours. Then presumably the Mouser would resume his normal size as swiftly as he had lost it. To have that happen in a burrow or even in the foot-and-a-half-high, pillar-studded concourse would be disastrous — it made him wince to think of it.
Now, the Mouser had no intention of staying anything like nine hours in the rat-world. On the other hand, he didn’t exactly want to escape at once. Dodging around in Lankhmar like a nimbly animate gray doll for half a night didn’t appeal to him — it would be shame-making even if, or perhaps especially if while doll-size he had to report his important intelligences about the rat-world to Glipkerio and Olegnya Mingolsbane — with Hisvet watching perhaps. Besides, his mind was already afire with schemes to assassinate the rats’ king, if they had one, or foil their obvious project of conquest in some even more spectacular fashion on their home ground. He felt a peculiarly great self-confidence and had not realized yet that it was because he was fully as tall as the taller rats around, as tall as Fafhrd, relatively, and no longer the smallish man he had been all his life.
However, there was always the possibility that by some unforeseeable ill fortune he might be unmasked, captured, and imprisoned in a tiny cell. A panicking thought.
But even more unnerving was the basic problem of time. Did it move faster for the rats, or slower. He had the impression that life and all its processes moved at a quicker tempo down here. But was that true? Did he now clearly hear the rat-Lankhmarese, which had previously sounded like squeaks, because his ears were quicker, or merely smaller, or because most of a rat’s voice was pitched too high for human ears to hear, or even because rats spoke Lankhmarese only in their burrows? He surreptitiously felt his pulse. It seemed the same as always. But mightn’t it be greatly speeded up and his senses and mind speeded up equally, so that he noted no difference? Sheelba had said something about a day being a tenth of a million pulsebeats. Was that rat or human-pulse? Were rat-hours so short that nine of them might pass in a hundred or so human minutes? Almost he was tempted to rush up the first stairs he saw. No, wait … if the timing was by pulse and his pulse seemed normal, then wouldn’t he have one normal Mouser-sleep to work in town here? It was truly most confusing. “Out upon it all, by cat-gut sausages and roasted dog’s eyes!” he heard himself curse with sincerity.
Several things at any rate were clear. Before he dared idle or nap, let alone sleep, he must discover some way of measuring down here the passage of time in the above-ground world. Also, to get at the truth about rat-night and day, he must swiftly learn about rodent sleeping habits. For some reason his mind jumped back to the tall ratess with the brace of straining shrews. But that was ridiculous, he told himself. There was sleeping and sleeping, and that one had very little if anything to do with the other.
He came out of his thought-trance to realize fully what his senses had for some time been telling him: that the strollers had become fewer, the breeze more damp and cool and fresh, and sea-odorous too, and the pillars ahead natural rock, while through the doorways chiseled between them shone a yellowish light, not bright yet twinkling and quite unlike that of the fire-beetles, glow-wasps, and tiny torches.
He passed a marble doorway and noted white marble steps going down from it. Then he stepped between two of the rocky pillars and halted on the rim of a wonder-place.
It was a roughly circular natural rock cave many rats high and many more long and wide, and filled with faintly rippling seawater which transmitted a mild flood of yellowish light that came through a great wide hole, underwater by about the length of a rat’s-pike, in the other end of the glitter-ceilinged cavern. All around this sea lake, about two rat-pikes above the water, went the rather narrow rock road, looking in part natural, in part chiseled and pickaxed, on which he now stood. At its distant end, in the shadows above the great underwater hole, he could dimly make out the forms and gleaming weapons of a half-dozen or so motionless rats, evidently on guard duty.
As the Mouser watched, the yellow light became yellower still, and he realized it must be the light of later afternoon, surely the afternoon of the day in which he had entered the rat-world. Since sunset was at six o’clock and he had entered the rat-world after three, he had spent fewer than three of his nine hours. Most important he had linked the passage of time in the rat-world with that in the big world — and was somewhat startled at the relief he felt.
He recalled too the “dead” rats which had seemed to swim away from the cage dropped from the palace window into the Inner Sea after Hisvin’s demonstration of his death-spell. They might very well have swum underwater into this very cavern, or another like it.
It also came to him that he had discovered the secret of the damp breeze. He knew the tide was rising now, an hour or so short of full, and in rising it drove the cave-trapped air through the concourse. At low tide the great hole would be in part above water, allowing the cavern air to be refreshed from outside. A rather clever if intermittent ventilation system. Perhaps some of these rats were a bit more ingenious than he had given them credit for.
At that instant there came a light, inhuman touch on his right shoulder. Turning around, he saw stepping back from him with naked rapier held a little to one side the black-masked black-clad rat who had disturbed him in the privy.
“What’s the meaning of this?” he chitteringly blustered. “By God’s hairless tail, why am I catted and ferreted? — you black dog!”
In far less ratlike Lankhmarese than the Mouser’s, the other asked quietly, “What are you doing in a restricted area? I must ask you to unmask, sir.”
“Unmask? I’ll see the color of your liver first, mouseling!” the Mouser ranted wildly. It would never do, he knew, to change character now.
“Must I call in my underlings to unmask you by force?” the other inquired in the same soft, deadly voice. “But it is not necessary. Your reluctance to unmask is final confirmation of my deduction that you are indeed the magically shrunken human come as a spy into Lankhmar Below.”
“That opium specter again?” the Mouser raved, dropping his hand to Scalpel’s hilt. “Begone, mad mouse dipped in ink, before I cut you to collops!”
“Your threats and brags are alike useless, sir,” the other answered with a low and humorous laugh. “You wonder how I became certain of your identity? I suppose you think you were very clever. Actually you gave yourself away more than once. First, by relieving yourself in that jakes where I first encountered you. Your dung was of a different shape, color, consistency, and odor than that of my compatriots. You should have sought out a water-privy. Second, although you did try to shadow your eyes, the eye-holes in your mask are too squintingly close together, as are all human eyes. Third, your boots are clearly made to fit human rather than rodent feet, though you have the small sense to walk on your toes to ape our legs and gait.”
The Mouser noted that the other’s black boots had far tinier soles than his own and were of soft leather both below and above the big ankle-bend.
The other continued, “And from the very first I knew you must be an utter stranger, else you would never have dared shoulder aside and insult the many times proven greatest duelist and fastest sword in all Lankhmar Below.”
With black-gloved left paw the other whipped off his silver-trimmed mask, revealing upstanding oval ears and long furry black face and huge, protuberant, wide-spaced black eyes. Baring his great white incisors in a lordly smirk and bringing his mask across his chest in a curt, sardonic bow, he finished, “Svivomilo, at your service.”
At least now the Mouser understood the vast vanity — great almost as his own! — which had led his pursuer to leave his underlings behind in the concourse while he came on alone to make the arrest. Whipping out simultaneously Scalpel and Cat’s Claw, purposely not pausing to unmask, the Mouser made his most rapid advance, ending in a tremendous lunge at the neck. It seemed to him that he had never before in his life moved as swiftly — small size certainly had its points.
There was a flash and a clash and Scalpel was deflected — by Svivomilo’s dagger drawn with lightning speed. And then Svivomilo’s rapier was on the offensive and the Mouser barely avoiding it by rapid parries with both his weapons and by backing off perilously along the water’s brink. Now his involuntary thought was that his opponent had had a much longer time than he of being small and practicing the swiftness it allowed, while his mask interfered with his vision and if it slipped a little would blind him altogether. Yet Svivomilo’s incessant attacks gave him no time to whip it off. With sudden desperation he lunged forward himself, managing to get a bind with Scalpel on the rapier that momentarily took both weapons out of the fight, and an instant later lashed out with Cat’s Claw at Svivomilo’s dagger-stabbing wrist, and by accurate eye and good fortune cut its inner tendons.
Then as Svivomilo hesitated and sprang back, the Mouser disengaged Scalpel and launched it in another sinew-straining, long lunge, thrice dipping his point just under Svivomilo’s double and then circle parries, and finally drove its point on in a slicing thrust that went through the rat’s neck and ended grating against the vertebra there.
Scarlet blood pouring over the black lace at Svivomilo’s throat and down his chest, and with only one short, bubbling, suffocated gasp, for the Mouser’s thrust had severed wind-pipe as well as arteries, the rightly boastful but foolishly reckless duelist pitched forward on his face and lay writhing.
The Mouser made the mistake of trying to sheathe his bloodied sword, forgetting that Scalpel’s scabbard was no longer wire-stiffened, which made the action difficult. He cursed the scabbard, limp as Svivomilo’s now nerveless tail.
Four cuirassed and helmeted rats with pikes at the ready appeared at two of the rocky doorways. Brandishing his red-dripping sword and gleaming dirk, the Mouser raced through an untenanted doorway and with a chittering scream to clear the way ahead of him, sprinted across the concourse to the marble doorway he’d noted earlier, and plunged down the white stairway.
The usual nook in the turn of the stairs held only three compartments, each with a silver-fitted door of ivory. Into the central one there was going a white-booted rat wearing a voluminous white cloak and hood and bearing in his white-gloved right hand an ivory staff with a large sapphire set in its top.
Without an instant’s pause the Mouser ended his plunging descent with a dash into the nook. He hurled ahead of him the white-cloaked rat and slammed and hooked fast behind them the ivory door.
Recovering himself, the Mouser’s victim turned and with outraged dignity and brandished staff demanded through his white mask set with diamonds, “Who dareth dithturb with rude thcufflingth Counthillor Grig of the Inner Thircle of Thirteen? Mithcreant!”
While a part of the Mouser’s brain was realizing that this was the lisping white rat he had seen aboard _Squid_ sitting on Hisvin’s shoulder, his eyes were informing him that this compartment held not a box for droppings, but a raised silver toilet seat, up through which came the sound and odor of rushing seawater. It must be one of the water-privies Svivomilo had mentioned.
Dropping Scalpel, the Mouser threw back Grig’s hood, dragged off his mask over his head, tripped the sputtering councillor and forced his head down against the far side of the privy’s silver rim, and then with Cat’s Claw cut Grig’s furry white throat almost from ratty ear to ear, so that his blood gushed down into the rushing water below. As soon as his victim’s writhings stilled, the Mouser drew off Grig’s white cloak and hood, taking great care that no blood got on them.
At that moment he heard the booted footsteps of several persons coming down the stairs. Operating with demonic speed, the Mouser placed Scalpel, the ivory staff, and the white mask and hood and cloak behind the seat of the privy, then hoisted the dead body so that it sat on the same, and himself stood crouching on the silver rim, facing the hooked door and holding the limp trunk erect. Then he silently prayed with great sincerity to Issek of the Jug, the first god he could think of, the one whom Fafhrd had once served.
Wavy and hooked browned-iron pike-blades gleamed above the doorways. The two to either side were slammed open. Then after a pause, during which he hoped someone had peered under the central door just enough to note the white boots, there came a light rapping, and then a respectful voice inquiring, “Your pardon, Nobility, but have you recently seen anything of a person in gray with cloak and mask of finest gray fur, and armed with rapier and dagger?”
The Mouser answered in a voice which he tried to make calm and dignifiedly benign, “I have theen nothing, thir. About thirty breathth ago I heard thomeone clattering at thpeed down the thtairth.”
“Our humblest thanks, Nobility;” the questioner responded, and the booted footsteps continued rapidly down toward the fifth level.
The Mouser let off a long soft sigh and chopped short his prayer. Then he set swiftly to work, for he knew he had a considerable task ahead of him, some of it most grisly. He wiped off and scabbarded Scalpel and Cat’s Claw. Then he examined his victim’s cloak, hood, and mask, discovering almost no blood on them, and set them aside. He noted that the cloak could be fastened down the front with ivory buttons. Then he dragged off Grig’s tall boots of whitest suede and tried them on his own legs. Though their softness helped, they fitted abominably, the sole covering little more than the area under his toes. Still, this would keep him reminded to maintain a rat’s gait at all times. He also tried on Grig’s long white gloves, which fitted worse, if that were possible. Still, he could wear them. His own boots and gauntlets he tucked securely over his gray belt.
Next he undressed Grig and dropped his garments one by one into the water, retaining only a razor-sharp ivory-and-gold-fitted dagger, a number of small parchment scrolls, Grig’s undershirt, and a double-ended purse filled with gold coins struck with a rat’s head on one side, circled by a wreath of wheat, and on the other a complex maze (tunnels?) and a numeral followed by the initials _S. F L. B_ “Since the Founding of Lankhmar Below?” he hazarded brilliantly. He hung the purse over his belt, fixed the dagger to it by a gold hook on its ivory sheath, and thrust the scrolls unscanned into his own pouch.
Then with a grunt of distaste he rolled up his sleeves and using the ivory-handled dagger, proceeded to dismember the furry corpse into pieces small enough to force through the silver rim so that they splashed into the water and were carried away.
This horrid task at last accomplished, he made a careful search for blood splatters, wiped them up with Grig’s under-shirt, used it to polish the silver rim, then dropped it after the other stuff.
Still not giving himself a pause, he pulled on again the white suede boots, donned the white cloak, which was of finest wool, and buttoned it all the way down the front, thrusting his arms through the slits in the cloak to either side.
Then he put on the mask, discovered that he had to use the dagger to extend narrowly the eye-slits at their inner ends to be able to see at all with his own close-set human eyes. After that he tied on the hood, throwing it as far forward as practicable to hide the mask’s mutilations and his lack of be-furred rat ears. Finally he drew on the long, ill-fitting white gloves.
It was well that he had worked as speedily as he had, allowing himself no time for rest, for now there came booted footsteps up the stairs and the nastily hooked pike-blades a-wave again, while below the door of his compartment there appeared typically crooked rat-boots of fine black leather embossed with golden scroll-work.
There was a sharper knocking and a grating voice, polite yet peremptory, said, “Your pardon, Councillor. This is Hreest. As Lieutenant Warden of the Fifth Level, I must ask you to open the door. You have been closeted a long while in there, and I must assure myself that the spy we seek is not holding a knife at your throat.”
The Mouser coughed, took up the sapphire-headed ivory staff, drew wide the door and majestically strode forth with a slight hobble. Resuming with tired legs the aching, tip-toe rat-gait had given him a sudden torturing cramp in his left calf.
The pike-rats knelt. The fancy-booted rat whose black clothes, mask, gauntlets and rapier-scabbard were also covered with fine-lined golden arabesques, dropped back two steps.
Directing only a brief gaze at him, the Mouser said coolly, “You dare dithturb and hathten Counthillor Grig at hith eliminathionth? Well, perhapth your reathonth are good enough. Perhapth.”
Hreest swept off his wide-brimmed hat plumed with the breast-feathers of black canaries. “I am certain they are, Nobility. There is loose in Lankhmar Below a human spy, magically changed to our size. He has already murdered that skillful if unruly and conceited swordsman Svivomilo.”
“Thorry newth indeed!” the Mouser lisped. “Thearch out thith thpy at onthe! Thpare no ecthpenthe in men or effort. I will inform the Counthil, Hreetht, if you have not.”
And while Hreest’s voice followed him with ratly apologies, thanks, and reassurances, the Mouser stepped regally down the white marble stairs, his limp hardly noticeable due to the grateful support afforded by his ivory staff. The sapphire in its top twinkled like the blue star Ashsha. He felt like a king.
Fafhrd rode west through the gathering twilight, the iron-shod hooves of the Mingol mare striking sparks from the flinty substance of the Sinking Land. The sparks were becoming faintly visible, just as were a few of the largest stars. The road, mere hoof dints, was becoming hard to discern. To north and south, the Inner Sea and the Sea of the East were sullen gray expanses, the former wave-flecked. And now finally, against the last dirty pink ribbon of sunset fringing the west, he made out the wavery black line of squat trees and towering cactuses that marked the beginning of the great Salt Marsh.
It was a welcome sight, yet Fafhrd was frowning deeply — two vertical furrows springing up from the inside end of either eyebrow.
The left furrow, you might say, was for what followed him. Taking an unhurried look over shoulder, he saw that the four riders whom he had first glimpsed coming down the Sarheenmar road were now only a bowshot and a half behind him. Their horses were black and they wore great black cloaks and hoods. He knew now to a certainty they were his four black Ilthmar brigands. And Ilthmar land-pirates hungry only for loot, let alone vengeance, had been known to pursue their prey to the very Marsh Gate of Lankhmar.
The right furrow, which was deepest, was for an almost imperceptible tilt, south lifting above north, in the ragged black horizon ahead. That this was actually a slight tilting of the Sinking Land in the opposite direction was proven when the Mingol mare took a lurch to the left. Fafhrd harshly kicked his mount into a gallop. It would be a near thing whether he reached the Marsh causeway before he was engulfed.
Lankhmar philosophers believe that the Sinking Land is a vast long shield, concave underneath, of hard-topped rock so porous below that it is exactly the same weight as water. Volcanic gases from the roots of the Ilthmar Mountains and also mephitic vapors from the incredibly deep-rooted and yeasty Great Salt Marsh gradually fill the concavity and lift the huge shield above the surface of the seas. But then an instability develops, due to the greater density of the shield’s topping. The shield begins to rock. The supporting gases and vapors escape in great alternate belches through the waters to north and south. Then the shield sinks somewhat below the waves and the whole slow, rhythmic process begins again.
So it was that the tilting told Fafhrd that the Sinking Land was once more about to submerge. And now the tilt had increased so much that he had to pull a little on the mare’s right bridle to keep her to the road. Looking back over right shoulder, he saw that the four black horsemen were also coming on faster, in fact somewhat faster than he.
As his gaze returned to his goal of safety, the Marsh, he saw the near waters of the Inner Sea shoot upward in a line of gray, foam geysers — the first escape of vapors — while the waters of the Sea of the East drew suddenly closer.
Then very slowly the rock beneath him began to tilt in the opposite direction, until at last he was pulling on the mare’s left bridle to keep her to the road. He was very glad she was a Mingol beast, trained to ignore any and all unnaturalness, even earthquake.
And now it was the still waters of the Sea of the East that exploded upward in a long, dirty, bubbling fence of escaping gas, while the waters of the Inner Sea came foaming almost to the road.
Yet the Marsh was very close. He could make out individual thorn trees and cactuses and thickets of giant sea-grass outlined against the now utterly bled west. And then he saw straight ahead a gap that — pray Issek! — would be the causeway.
Sparks sped whitely from under the mare’s iron shoes. The beast’s breath rasped.
But now there was a new disquieting change in the landscape, though a very slight one. Almost imperceptibly, the whole Great Salt Marsh was beginning to rise.
The Sinking Land was beginning its periodic submergence.
From either side, from north and south, gray walls were converging on him — the foam-fronted raging waters of the Inner Sea and the Sea of the East rushing to sink the great stone shield now its gaseous support was gone.
A black barrier a yard high loomed just ahead. Fafhrd leaned low in the saddle, nudging the mare’s flanks with his heels, and with a great long leap the mare lifted them the needed yard and found them firm footing again, and with never a pause galloped on unchangingly, except that now instead of clashing sharply against rock, the iron shoes struck mutedly on the tight-packed gravel of the causeway.
From behind them came a mounting, rumbling, snarling roar that suddenly rose to a crashing climax. Fafhrd looked back and saw a great starburst of waters — not gray now, but ghostly white in the remaining light from the west — where the waves of the Inner Sea had met the rollers of the Sea of the East exactly at the road.
He was about to look forward again and slow his mount, when out of that pale, churny explosion there appeared a black horse and rider, then another, then a third. But no more — the fourth had evidently been engulfed. The hair lifted on his back at the thought of the leaps the three other beasts had made with their black riders, and he cursed the Mingol mare to make more speed, knowing that kind words went unheard by her.
——–

*Chapter Ten*
Fafhrd stole a lamb at dawn and broke into a cornfield north of Ilthmar to provide breakfast for himself and his mount. The thick chops, broiled or at least well-scorched on a thick green twig over a small fire, were delicious, but the mare as she chomped grimly eyed her new master with what seemed to him qualified approval, as if to say, “I’ll eat this corn, though it is soft, milky, and effeminate truck compared to the flinty Mingol grain on which they raised me and grew my stern courage, which comes of grinding the teeth.”
They finished their repast, but made off hurriedly when outraged shepherds and farmers came hooting at them through the tall green field. A stone slung by a shepherd who’d probably brained a few dozen wolves in his day whizzed close above Fafhrd’s ducked head. He attempted no reprisal, but galloped out of range, then reined in to an amble to give himself time to think before passing through Ilthmar, around which no roads led, and the squatty towers of which were already visible ahead, glinting deceptively golden in the new-minted rays of the fresh sun.
Ilthmar, fronting the Inner Sea somewhat north of the Sinking Land which led west to Lankhmar, was an ill, treacherous, money-minded city. Though nearest Lankhmar, it stood at the crossroads of the known world, roughly equidistant from the desert-guarded Eastern Lands, the forested Land of the Eight Cities, and the steppes, where traveled about the great tent-city of the merciless Mingols. And being so situated, it forever sought by guile or secret force to levy toll on all travelers. Its land-pirates and sea-brigands, who split their take with its unruly governing barons, were widely feared, yet the great powers could never permit one of themselves to dominate such a strategic point, so Ilthmar maintained the independence of a middleman, albeit a most thievish and untrustworthy one.
Central location, where the gossip of all Nehwon crossed tracks along with the world’s travelers, was surely also the reason why Ningauble of the Seven Eyes had located himself in a mazy, enchantment-guarded cave at the foot of the little mountains south of Ilthmar.
Fafhrd saw no signs of Mingol raiding, which did not entirely please him. An alarmed Ilthmar would be easier to slip through than an Ilthmar pretending to doze in the sun, but with pig-eyes ever a-watch for booty. He wished now he’d brought Kreeshkra with him, as he’d earlier planned. Her terrifying bones would have been a surer guarantee of safe transit than a passport from the King of the East stamped in gold-sifted wax with his famed Behemoth Seal. What a fool, either to dote or to flee, a man was about a woman new-bedded! He wished also that he had not given her his bow, or rather that he’d had two bows.
However, he was three-quarters of the way through the trash-paved city with its bedbug inns and smiling little taverns of resinous wine, more often than not laced with opium for the uneasy, before trouble pounced. A great gaudy caravan rousing itself for its homeward journey to the Eastern Lands doubtless attracted attention from him. The only decor of the mean buildings around him was the emblem of Ilthmar’s rat-god, endlessly repeated.
The trouble came two blocks beyond the caravan and consisted of seven scarred and pockmarked rogues, all clad in black boots, tight black trousers and jerkins and black cloaks with hoods thrown back to show close-fitting black skullcaps. One moment the street seemed clear, the next all seven were around him, menacing with their wickedly saw-toothed swords and other weapons, and demanding he dismount.
One made to seize the mare’s bridle near the bit. That was definitely a mistake. She reared and put an iron-shod hoof past his guard and into his skull as neatly as a duelist. Fafhrd drew Graywand and at the end of the drawing stroke slashed through the throat of the nearest black brigand. Coming down on her forehooves the mare lashed out a hind one and ruined the guts of an unchivalrous fellow preparing to launch a short javelin at Fafhrd’s back. Then horse and rider were galloping away at a pace that at the southern outskirts of the city took them past Ilthmar’s baronial guard before those slightly more respectable, iron-clad brigands could get set to stop them.
A half league beyond, Fafhrd looked back. There was no sign as yet of pursuit, but he was hardly reassured. He knew his Ilthmar brigands. They were stickers. Fired now by revenge-lust as well as loot-hunger, the four remaining black rogues would doubtless soon be on his trail. And this time they’d have arrows or at least more javelins, and use them at a respectful distance. He began to scan the slopes ahead for the tricky, almost unmarked path leading to Ningauble’s underground dwelling.
* * * *
Glipkerio Kistomerces found the meeting of the Council of Emergency almost more than he could bear. It was nothing more than the Inner Council plus the War Council, which overlapped in membership, these two being augmented by a few additional notables, including Hisvin, who had said nothing, so far, though his small black-irised eyes were watchful. But all the others, waving their toga-winged arms for emphasis, did nothing but talk, talk, talk about the rats, rats, rats!
The beanpole overlord, who did not look tall when seated, since all his height was in his legs, had long since dropped his hands below the tabletop to hide the jittery way they were weaving like a nest of nervous white snakes, but perhaps because of this he had now developed a violent facial tic which jolted his wreath of daffodils down over his eyes every thirteenth breath he drew — he had been counting and found the number decidedly ominous.
Besides this, he had lunched only hurriedly and meagerly and — worse — not watched a page or maid being whipped or even slapped since before breakfast, so that his long nerves, finer drawn than those of other men by reason of his superior aristocracy and great length of limb, were in a most wretched state. It was all of yesterday, he recalled, that he had sent that one mincing maid to Samanda for punishment and still had got no word from his overbearing palace mistress. Glipkerio knew well enough the torment of punishment deferred, but in this case it seemed to have turned into a torment of pleasure deferred — for himself. The beastly fat woman should have more imagination! Why, oh why, he asked himself, was it only that watching a whipping could soothe him? He was a man greatly abused by destiny.
Now some black-togaed idiot was listing out nine arguments for feeing the entire priesthood of Ilthmar’s rat-god to come to Lankhmar and make propitiating prayers. Glipkerio had grown so nervously impatient that he was exasperated even by the fulsome compliments to himself with which each speaker lengthily prefaced his speech, and whenever a speaker paused more than a moment for breath or effect, he had taken to quickly saying “Yes,” or “No,” at random, hoping this would speed things up, but it appeared to be working out the other way. Olegnya Mingolsbane had still to speak and he was the most boring, lengthiest, and self-infatuated talker of them all.
A page approached him and kneeled, holding respectfully out a scrap of dirty parchment twice folded and sealed with candle grease. He snatched it, glancing at Samanda’s unmistakably large and thick-whorled thumbprint in the sooty grease, and tore it open and read the black scrawl.
_She shall be lashed with white-hot wires _
_on the stroke of three. Do not be tardy, little _
_overlord, for I shall not wait for you. _
Glipkerio sprang up, his thoughts for the moment concerned only with whether it was the half-hour or three-quarter hour after two o’clock he had last heard strike.
Waving the refolded note at his council — or perhaps it was only that his hand was wildly a-twitch — he said in one breath, glaring defiantly as he did so, “Important news of my secret weapon! I must closet me at once with its sender,” and without waiting for reactions, but with a final tic so violent it jolted his daffodil wreath forward to rest on his nose, Lankhmar’s overlord dashed through a silver-chased purple-wood arch out of the Council Chamber.
Hisvin slid out of his chair with a curt, thin-lipped bow to the council and went scuttling after him as fast as if he had wheels under his toga rather than feet. He caught up with Glipkerio in the corridor, laid firm hand on the skinny elbow high as his black-capped skull and after a quick glance ahead and back for eavesdroppers, called up softly but stirringly, “Rejoice, oh mighty mind that is Lankhmar’s very brain, for the lagging planet has at last arrived at his proper station, made rendezvous with his starry fleet, and tonight I speak my spell that shall save your city from the rats!”
“What’s that? Oh yes. Good, oh good,” the other responded, seeking chiefly to break loose from Hisvin’s grasp, though meanwhile pushing back his yellow wreath so it was once more atop his blond-ringleted narrow skull. “But now I must rush me to — ”
“She will stand and wait for her thrashing,” Hisvin hissed with naked contempt. “I said that tonight at the stroke of twelve I speak my spell that shall save Lankhmar from the rats, and save your overlord’s throne too, which you must certainly lose before dawn if we beat not the rats tonight.”
“But that’s just the point, she _won’t_ wait,” Glipkerio responded with agonizing agitation. “It’s _twelve_, you say? But that can’t be. It’s not yet three! — surely?”
“Oh wisest and most patient one, master of time and the waters of space,” Hisvin howled obsequiously, a-tiptoe. Then he dug his nails into Glipkerio’s arm and said slowly, marking each word, “I said that tonight’s the night. My demonic intelligencers assure me the rats plan to hold off this evening, to lull the city’s wariness, then make a grand assault at midnight. To make sure they’re all in the streets and stay there while I recite my noxious spell from this palace’s tallest minaret, you must an hour beforehand order all soldiers to the South Barracks and your constables too. Tell Captain General Olegnya you wish him to deliver them a morale-building address — the old fool won’t be able to resist that bait. Do … you … understand … me … my … overlord?”
“Yes, yes, oh yes!” Glipkerio babbled eagerly, grimacing at the pain of Hisvin’s grip, yet not angered but thinking only of getting loose. “Eleven o’clock tonight … all soldiers and constables off streets … oration by Olegnya. And now, please, Hisvin, I must rush me to — ”
” — to see a maid thrashed,” Hisvin finished for him flatly. Again the fingernails dug. “Expect me infallibly at a quarter to midnight in your Blue Audience Chamber, whence I shall climb the Blue Minaret to speak my spell. You yourself must be there — and with a corps of your pages to carry a message of reassurance to your people. See that they are provided with wands of authority. I will bring my daughter and her maid to mollify you — and also a company of my Mingol slaves to supplement your pages if need be. There’d best be wands for them too. Also — ”
“Yes, yes, dear Hisvin,” Glipkerio cut in, his babbling growing desperate. “I’m very grateful … Frix and Hisvet, they’re good ones … I’ll remember all … quarter to midnight … Blue Chamber … pages … wands … wands for Mingols. And now I must rush me — ”
“_Also_,” Hisvin continued implacably, his fingernails like a spiked trap. “_Beware of the Gray Mouser!_ Set your guards on the watch for him! And now … be off to your flagellatory pastimes,” he added brightly, loosing his horny nails from Glipkerio’s arm.
Massaging the dents they’d made, hardly yet realizing he was free, Glipkerio babbled on, “Ah yes, the Mouser — bad, bad! But the rest … good, good! Enormous thanks, Hisvin! And now I must rush me — ” And he turned away with a lunging, improbably long step.
” — to see a maid — ” Hisvin couldn’t resist repeating.
As if the words stung him between the shoulders, Glipkerio turned back at that and interrupted with some spirit. “To attend to business of highest importance! I have other secret weapons than yours, old man — and other sorcerors too!” And then he was swift-striding off again, black toga at extremest stretch.
Cupping bony hand to wrinkled lips, Hisvin cried after him sweetly, “I hope your business writhes prettily and screams most soothingly, brave overlord!”
The Gray Mouser showed his courier’s ring to the guards at the opal-tiled land entry of the palace. He half expected it not to work. Hisvin had had two days to poison silly Glip’s mind against him, and indeed there were sidewise glances and a wait long enough for the Mouser to feel the full strength of his hangover and to swear he’d never drink so much, so mixed again. And to marvel too at his stupidity and good luck in venturing last night into the dark, rat-infested streets and getting back silly-drunk to Nattick’s through some of the darkest of them without staggering into a second rat-ambush. Ah well, at least he’d found Sheelba’s black vial safe at Nattick’s, resisted the impulse to drink it while tipsy, and he’d got that heartening, titillating note from Hisvet. As soon as his business was finished here, he must hie himself straight to Hisvin’s house and —
A guard returned from somewhere and nodded sourly. He was passed inside.
From the sneer-lipped third butler, who was an old gossip friend of the Mouser, he learned that Lankhmar’s overlord was with his Emergency Council, which now included Hisvin. He resisted the grandiose impulse to show off his Sheelban rat-magic before the notables of Lankhmar and in the presence of his chief sorcerous rival, though he did confidently pat the black vial in his pouch. After all, he needed a spot where rats were foregathered for the thing to work and he needed Glipkerio alone best to work on him. So he strolled into the dim mazy lower corridors of the palace to waste an hour and eavesdrop or chat as opportunity afforded.
As generally happened when he killed time, the Mouser soon found himself headed for the kitchen. Though he dearly detested Samanda, he made a point of slyly courting her, because he knew her power in the palace and liked her stuffed mushrooms and mulled wine.
The plain-tiled yet spotless corridors he now traversed were empty. It was the slack half hour when dinner has been washed up and supper mostly not begun, and every weary servitor who can flops on a cot or the floor. Also, the menace of the rats doubtless discouraged wanderings of servant and master alike. Once he thought he heard a faint boot-tramp behind him, but it faded when he looked back, and no one appeared. By the time he had begun to smell foods and fire and pots and soap and dishwater and floorwater, the silence had became almost eerie. Then somewhere a bell harshly knelled three times and from ahead, “Get out!” was suddenly roared in Samanda’s harsh voice. The Mouser shrank back despite himself. A leather curtain bellied a score of paces ahead of him and three kitchen boys and a maid came hurrying silently into the corridor, their bare feet making no sound on the tiles. In the light filtering down from the tiny, high windows they looked like waxen mannikins as they fled swiftly past him. Though they avoided him, they seemed not to see him. Or perhaps that was only some whip-ingrained “eyes front!” discipline.
As silently as they — who couldn’t even make the noise of a hair dropping, since this morning’s barbering had left them none — the Mouser hurried forward and put his eye to the slit in the leather curtains.
The four other doorways to the kitchen, even the one in the gallery, also had their curtains drawn. The great hot room had only two occupants. Fat Samanda, perspiring in her black wool dress and under the prickly plum pudding of her piled black hair, was heating in the whitely blazing fireplace the seven wire lashes of a long-handled whip. She drew it forth a little. The strands glowed dull red. She thrust it back. Her sparse, sweat-beaded black mustache lengthened and shed its salt rain in a smile as her tiny, fat-pillowed eyes fed on Reetha, who stood with arms straight down her sides and chin high, almost in the room’s center, half faced away from the blaze. The serving maid wore only her black leather collar. The diamond-stripe patterns of her last whippings still showed faintly down her back.
“Stand straighter, my pet,” Samanda cooed like a cow. “Or would it be easier if your wrists were roped to a beam and your ankles to the ring-bolt in the cellar door?”
Now the dry stink of dirty floorwater was strongest in the Mouser’s nostrils. Glancing down and to one side through his slit, he noted a large wooden pail filled almost to the brim with a mop’s huge soggy head, lapped around by gray, soap-foamy water.
Samanda inspected the seven wires again. They glowed bright red. “Now,” she said. “Brace yourself, my poppet.”
Slipping through the curtain and snatching up the mop by its thick, splintery handle, the Mouser raced at Samanda, holding the mop’s huge, dripping Medusa-head between their faces in hopes that she would not be able to identify her assailant. As the fiery wires hissed faintly through the air, he took her square in the face with a big smack and a gray splash, so that she was driven back a yard before she tripped on a long grilling-fork and fell backwards on her hinder fat-cushions.
Leaving the mop lying on her face with its handle neatly down her front, the Mouser whirled around, noting as he did a watery yellow eye in the nearest curtain slit and also the last red winking out of the wires lying midway between the fireplace and Reetha, still stiffly erect and with eyes squeezed shut and muscles taut against the red-hot blow.
He grabbed her arm at its pit, she screamed with amazement and pent tension, but he ignored this and hurried her toward the doorway by which he had entered, then stopped short at the tramp of many boots just beyond it. He rushed the girl in turn toward the two other leather-curtained doorways that hadn’t an eye in their slits. More boots tramping. He sped back to the room’s center, still firmly gripping Reetha.
Samanda, still on her back, had pushed the mop away with her pudgy fingers and was frantically wiping her eyes and squealing from soap-smart and rage.
The watery yellow eye was joined by its partner as Glipkerio strode in, daffodil wreath awry, black toga a-flap, and to either side of him a guardsman presenting toward the Mouser the gleaming brown-steel blade of a pike, while close behind came more guardsmen. Still others, pikes ready, filled the other three doorways and even appeared in the gallery.
Waving long white fingers at the Mouser, Glipkerio hissed, “Oh most false Gray Mouser! Hisvin has hinted you work against me and now I catch you at it!”
The Mouser squatted suddenly on his hams and heaved muscle-crackingly with both hands on a big recessed iron ring-bolt. A thick square trapdoor made of heavy wood topped with tile came up on its hinges. “Down!” he commanded Reetha, who obeyed with commendably cool-headed alacrity. The Mouser followed hunched at her heels, and let drop the trapdoor. It slammed down just in time to catch the blades of two pikes thrust at him, and presumably lever them with a jerk from their wielders’ hands. Admirable wedges those tapering browned-iron blades would make to keep the trapdoor shut, the Mouser told himself.
Now he was in absolute darkness, but an earlier glance had shown him the shape and length of the stone stairs and an empty flagstoned area below abutting a niter-stained wall. Once again grasping Reetha’s upper arm, he guided her down the stairs and across the gritty floor to within a couple of yards of the unseen wall. Then he let go the girl and felt in his pouch for flint, steel, his tinderbox, and a short thick-wicked candle.
From above came a muffled crack. Doubtless a pike-pole breaking as someone sought to rock out the trapped blade. Then someone commanded a muffled, “Heave!” The Mouser grinned in the dark, thinking how that would wedge the browned-iron wedges tighter.
Tiny sparks showered, a ghostly flame rose from a corner of the tinderbox, a tiny round flame like a golden pillbug with a sapphire center appeared at the tip of the candle’s wick and began to swell. The Mouser snapped shut the tinderbox and held up the candle beside his head. Its flame suddenly flared big and bright. The next instant Reetha’s arms were clamped around his neck and she was gasping in dry-mouthed terror against his ear.
Surrounding them on three sides and backing them against the ancient stone wall with its pale crystalline splotches, were a dozen ranks of silent rats formed in a semicircle about a spear-length away — hundreds, nay thousands of blackest long-tails, and more pouring out to join them from a score of rat-holes in the base of the walls in the long cellar, which was piled here and there with barrels, casks, and grain-sacks.
The Mouser suddenly grinned, thrust tinderbox, steel, and flint back in his pouch and felt there for something else.
Meanwhile he noted a tall, narrow rat-hole just by them, newly gnawed — or perhaps chiseled and pickaxed, to judge from the fragments of mortar and tiny shards of stone scattered in front of it. No rats came from it, but he kept a wary eye on it.
The Mouser found Sheelba’s squat black bottle, pried the bandage off it, and withdrew its crystal stopper.
The dull-brained louts in the kitchen overhead were pounding on the trapdoor now — another useless assault!
The rats still poured from the holes and in such numbers that they threatened to become a humpy black carpet covering the whole floor of the cellar except for the tiny area where Reetha clung to the Mouser.
His grin widened. He set the bottle to his lips, took an experimental sip, thoughtfully rolled it on his tongue, then upended the vial and let its faintly bitter contents gurgle into his mouth and down his throat.
Reetha, unlinking her arms, said a little reproachfully, “I could use some wine too.”
The Mouser raised his eyebrows happily at her and explained, “Not wine. Magic!” Had not her own eyebrows been shaven, they would have risen in puzzlement. He gave her a wink, tossed the bottle aside, and confidently awaited the emergence of his anti-rat powers, whatever they might be.
From above came the groan of metal and the slow cracking of tough wood. Now they were going about it the right way, with pry-bars. Likely the trap would open just in time for Glipkerio to witness the Mouser vanquishing the rat army. Everything was timing itself perfectly.
The black sea of hitherto silent rats began to toss and wave and from it came an angry chittering and a clashing of tiny teeth. Better and better! — this warlike show would put some rife into their defeat.
He idly noted that he was standing in the center of a large, gray-bordered splotch of pinkish slime he must have overlooked before in his haste and excitement. He had never seen a cellar-mold quite like it.
His eyeballs seemed to him to swell and burn a little and suddenly he felt in himself the powers of a god. He looked up at Reetha to warn her not to be frightened at anything that might happen — say his flesh glowing with a golden light or two bright scarlet beams flashing from his eyes to shrivel rats or heat them to popping.
Then he was asking himself, “_Up_ at Reetha?”
The pinkish splotch had become a large puddle lapping slimily over the soles of his boots.
There was a splintering. Light spilled down from the kitchen on the crowded rats.
The Mouser gawked at them horror-struck. They were as big as cats! No, black wolves! No, furry black men on all fours! He clutched at Reetha … and found himself vainly seeking to encircle with his arms a smooth white calf thick as a temple pillar. He gazed up at Reetha’s amazed and fear-struck giant face two stories above. There echoed evilly in his ears Sheelba’s carelessly spoken, fiendishly ambiguous: “…put you on the right footing to cope with the situation…” Oh yes indeed!
The slime-puddle and its gray border had grown wider still and he was in it up to his ankles.
He clung to Reetha’s leg a moment longer with the faint and ungracious hope that since his weapons and his clothing, which touched him, had shrunk with him, she might shrink too at his touch. He would at least have a companion. Perhaps to his credit, it did not occur to him to yell, “Pick me up!”
The only thing that happened was that an almost inaudibly deep voice thundered down at him from Reetha’s mouth, big as a red-edged shield, “What are you doing? I’m scared. Start the magic!”
The Mouser jumped away from the fleshly pillar, splashing the nasty pink stuff and almost slipping in it, and whipped out his sword Scalpel. It was just a shade bigger than a needle for mending sails. While the candle, which he still held in his left hand, was the proper size to light a small room in a doll’s house.
There was loud, confused, multiple padding and claw-clicking, chittering war cries blasted his ears, and he saw the huge black rats stampeding him from three sides, kicking up the gray border in puffs as if it were a powder and then splashing the pink slime and sending ripples across it.
Reetha, terror-struck, watched her inexplicably diminished rescuer spin around, leap over a shard of rock, land in a pink splash, and brandishing his tiny sword before him, shielding his doll’s candle with his cloak, and ducking his head, rush into the rat-hole behind her and so vanish. Racing rats brushed her ankles and snapped at each other, to be first down the hole after the Mouser. Elsewhere the rat horde was swiftly disappearing down the other holes. But one rat stayed long enough to nip her foot.
Her nerve snapped. Her first footsteps spattering pink slime and gray dust, she shrieked and ran, rats dodging from under her feet, and dashed up the steps, clawed her way past several wide-eyed guardsmen into the kitchen, and sank sobbing and panting on the tiles. Samanda snapped a chain on her collar.
Fafhrd, his arms joined in a circle above and before his head to avoid skull-bump from rocky outcrops and also the unexpected brushings on face of cobwebs and wraithlike fingers and filmy wings, at last saw a jaggedly circular green glow ahead. Soon he emerged from the black tunnel into a large and many entranced cavern somewhat lit at the center of its rocky floor by a green glow which was being replenished with thin blood-red logs by two skinny, raggedy-tunicked, sharp-eyed boys, who looked like typical street urchins of Lankhmar or Ilthmar, or any other decadent city. One had a puckered scar under his left eye. On the other side of the fire from them sat on low wide stone an obscenely fat figure so well cloaked and hooded that not a speck of his face or hand were visible. He was sorting out a large pile of parchment scraps and potsherds, pinching hold of them through the dark fabric of his overlong, dangling sleeves, and scanning them close-sightedly, almost putting them inside his hood.
“Welcome, my Gentle Son,” he called to Fafhrd in a voice like a quavering sweet flute. “What happy chance brings you here?”
“_You_ know!” Fafhrd said harshly, striding forward until he was glaring across the leaping green flames at the black oval defined by the forward edge of the hood. “How am I to save the Mouser? What’s with Lankhmar? And why, in the name of all the gods of death and destruction, is the tin whistle so important?”
“You speak in riddles, Gentle Son,” the fluty voice responded soothingly, as its owner went on sorting his scraps. “What tin whistle? What peril’s the Mouser in now? — reckless youth! And what _is_ with Lankhmar?”
Fafhrd let loose a flood of curses, which rattled impotently among the stalactites overhead. Then he jerked free from his pouch the tiny black oblong of Sheelba’s message and held it forward between finger and thumb that shook with rage. “Look, Know-nothing One: I dumped a lovely girl to answer this and now — ”
But the hooded figure had whistled warblingly and at that signal the black bat, which Fafhrd had forgot, launched itself from his shoulder, snatched with sharp teeth the black note from his finger-grip, and fluttered past the green flames to land on the paunchy one’s sleeve-hidden hand, or tentacle, or whatever it was. The whatever-it-was conveyed to hood-mouth the bat, who obligingly fluttered inside and vanished in the coally dark there.
There followed a squeaky, unintelligible, hood-muffled dialogue while Fafhrd sat his fists on his hips and fumed. The two skinny boys gave him sly grins and whispered together impudently, their bright eyes never leaving him. At last the fluty voice called, “Now it’s crystal clear to me, Oh Patient Son. Sheelba of the Eyeless Face and I have been on the outs — a bit of a wizardly bicker — and now he seeks to mend fences with this. Well, well, well, first advances by Sheelba. Ho-ho-ho!”
“Very funny,” Fafhrd growled. “Haste’s the marrow of our confab. The Sinking Land came up, shedding its waters, as I entered your caves. My swift but jaded mount crops your stingy grass outside. I must leave within the half hour if I am to cross the Sinking Land before it resubmerges. _What do I do about the Mouser, Lankhmar, and the tin whistle?_”
“But, Gentle Son, I know nothing about those things,” the other replied artlessly. “‘Tis only Sheelba’s motives are air — clear to me. Oh, ho, to think that he — Wait, wait now, Fafhrd! Don’t rattle the stalactites again. I’ve ensorceled them against falling, but there are no spells in the universe which a big fellow can’t sometimes break through. I’ll advise you, never fear. But I must first clairvoy. Scatter on the golden dust, boys — thriftily now, don’t waste it, ’tis worth ten times its weight in diamond unpowdered.”
The two urchins each dipped into a bag beside them and threw into the feet of the green flames a glittering golden swirl. Instantly the flames darkened, though leaping high as ever and sending off no soot. Watching them in the now almost night-dark cavern, Fafhrd thought he could make out the transitory, ever-distorting shadows of twisty towers, ugly trees, tall hunchbacked men, low-shouldered beasts, beautiful wax women melting, and the like, but nothing was clear or even hinted at a story.
Then from the obese warlock’s hood came toward the darkened fire two greenish ovals, each with a vertical black streak like the jewel cat’s eye. A half yard out of the hood they paused and held steady. They were speedily joined by two more which both diverged and went farther. Then came a single one arching up over the fire until one would have thought it was in great danger of sizzling. Lastly, two which floated in opposite directions almost impossibly far around the fire and then hooked in to observe it from points near Fafhrd.
The voice fluted sagely: “It is always best to look at a problem from all sides.”
Fafhrd drew his shoulders together and repressed a shudder. It never failed to be disconcerting to watch Ningauble send forth his Seven Eyes on their apparently indefinitely extensible eyestalks. Especially on occasions when he’d been coy as a virgin in a bathrobe about keeping them hidden.
So much time passed that Fafhrd began to snap his fingers with impatience, softly at first, then more crackingly. He’d given up looking at the flames. They never held anything but the tantalizing, churning shadows.
At last the green eyes floated back into the hood, like a mystic fleet returning to port. The flames turned bright green again, and Ningauble said, “Gentle Son, I now understand your problem and its answer. In part. I have seen much, yet cannot explain all. The Gray Mouser, now. He’s exactly twenty-five feet below the deepest cellar in the palace of Glipkerio Kistomerces. But he’s not buried there, or even dead — though about twenty-four parts in twenty-five of him _are_ dead, in the cellar I mentioned. But he _is_ alive.”
“But _how_?” Fafhrd almost gawked, spreading his spread-fingered hands.
“I haven’t the faintest idea. He’s surrounded by enemies but near him are two friends — of a sort. Now about Lankhmar, that’s clearer. She’s been invaded, her walls breached everywhere and desperate fighting going on in the streets, by a fierce host which outnumbers Lankhmar’s inhabitants by … my goodness … fifty to one — and equipped with all modern weapons.
“Yet you can save the city, you can turn the tide of battle — this part came through very clearly — if you only hasten to the temple of the Gods _of_ Lankhmar and climb its bell-tower and ring the chimes there, which have been silent for uncounted centuries. Presumably to rouse those gods. But that’s only my guess.”
“I don’t like the idea of having anything to do with that dusty crew,” Fafhrd complained. “From what I’ve heard of them, they’re more like walking mummies than true gods — and even more dry-spirited and unloving, being sifted through like sand with poisonous senile whims.”
Ningauble shrugged his cloaked, bulbous shoulders. “I thought you were a brave man, addicted to deeds of derring-do.”
Fafhrd cursed sardonically, then demanded, “But even if I should go clang those rusty bells, how can Lankhmar hold out until then with her walls breached and the odds fifty to one against her?”
“I’d like to know that myself,” Ningauble assured him.
“And how do I get to the temple when the streets are crammed with warfare?”
Ningauble shrugged once again. “You’re a hero. You should know.”
“Well then, the tin whistle?” Fafhrd grated.
“You know, I didn’t get a thing on the tin whistle. Sorry about that. Do you have it with you? Might I look at it?”
Grumbling, Fafhrd extracted it from his flat pouch, and brought it around the fire.
“Have you ever blown it?” Ningauble asked.
“No,” Fafhrd said with surprise, lifting it to his lips.
“Don’t!” Ningauble squeaked. “Not on any account! Never blow a strange whistle. It might summon things far worse even than savage mastiffs or the police. Here, give it to me.”
He pinched it away from Fafhrd with a double fold of animated sleeve and held it close to his hood, revolving it clockwise and counterclockwise, finally serpentinely gliding out four of his eyes and subjecting it to their massed scrutiny at thumbnail distance.
At last he withdrew his eyes, sighed, and said, “Well … I’m not sure. But there are thirteen characters in the inscription — I couldn’t decipher ’em, mind you, but there _are_ thirteen. Now if you take that fact in conjunction with the slim couchant feline figure on the other side … Well, I think you blow this whistle to summon the War Cats. Mind you, that’s only a deduction, and one of several steps, each uncertain.”
“Who are the War Cats?” Fafhrd asked.
Ningauble writhed his fat shoulders and neck under their garments. “I’ve never been quite certain. But putting together various rumors and legends — oh yes, and some cave drawings north of the Cold Waste and south of Quarmall — I have arrived at the tentative conclusion that they are a military aristocracy of all the feline tribes, a bloodthirsty Inner Circle of thirteen members — in short, a dozen and one ailuric berserkers. I would assume — provisionally only, mind you — that they would appear when summoned, as perhaps by this whistle, and instantly assault whatever creature or creatures, beast or man, that seemed to threaten the feline tribes. So I would advise you not to blow it except in the presence of enemies of cats more worthy of attack than yourself, for I suppose you have slain a few tigers and leopards in your day. Here, take it.”
Fafhrd snatched and pouched it, demanding, “But by God’s ice-rimmed skull, when _am_ I to blow it? How can the Mouser be two parts in fifty alive when buried eight yards deep? What vast, fifty-to-one host can have assaulted Lankhmar without months of rumors and reports of their approach? What fleets could carry — ”
“No more questions!” Ningauble interposed shrilly. “Your half hour is up. If you are to beat the Sinking Land and be in time to save the city, you must gallop at once for Lankhmar. Now no more words.”
Fafhrd raved for a while longer, but Ningauble maintained a stubborn silence, so Fafhrd gave him a last thundering curse, which brought down a small stalactite that narrowly missed bashing his brains out, and departed, ignoring the urchins’ maddening grins.
Outside the caves, he mounted the Mingol mare and cantered, followed by hoof-raised dust-cloud, down the sun-yellowed, dryly rustling slope toward the mile-wide westward-leading isthmus of dark brown rock, salt-filmed and here and there sea-puddled, that was the Sinking Land. Southward gleamed the placid blue waters of the Sea of the East, northward the restless gray waters of the Inner Sea and the glinting squat towers of Ilthmar. Also northward he noted four small dust-clouds like his own coming down the Ilthmar road, which he had earlier traveled himself. Almost surely and just as he’d guessed, the four black brigands were after him at last, hot to revenge their three slain or at least woefully damaged fellow-rogues. He narrowed his eyes and nudged the gray mare to a lively lope.

*Chapter Nine*
Sheelba of the Eyeless Face reached into the hut without turning his hooded head and swiftly found a small object and held it forth.
“Here is your answer to Lankhmar’s Rat Plague,” he said in a voice deep, hollow, rapid and grating as round stones thudding together in a moderate surf. “Solve that problem, you solve all.”
Gazing from more than a yard below, the Gray Mouser saw silhouetted against the paling sky a small squat bottle pinched between the black fabric of the overlong sleeve of Sheelba, who chose never to show his fingers, if they were that. Silvery dawnlight shivered through the bottle’s crystal stopper.
The Mouser was not impressed. He was bone-weary and be-mired from armpit to boots, which were now sunk ankle-deep in sucking muck and sinking deeper all the time. His coarse gray silks were be-slimed and ripped, he feared, beyond the most cunning tailor’s repair. His scratched skin, where it was dry, was scaled with the Marsh’s itching muddy salt. The bandaged wound in his left arm ached and burned. And now his neck had begun to ache too, from having to peer craningly upward.
All around him stretched the dismal reaches of the Great Salt Marsh, acres of knife-edged sea grass hiding treacherous creeks and deadly sink-holes and pimpled with low hummocks crowded with twisted, dwarfed thorn trees and bloated prickly cactuses. While its animal population ran a noxious gamut from sea leeches, giant worms, poison eels and water cobras to saw-beaked, low-flapping cadaver birds and far-leaping, claw-footed salt-spiders.
Sheelba’s hut was a black dome about as big as the closet-tree bower in which the Mouser had last evening endured ecstasy and attempted assassination. It stood above the Marsh on five crooked poles or legs, four spaced evenly around its rim, the fifth central. Each leg was footed with a round plate big as a cutlassman’s shield, concave upward, and apparently envenomed, for ringing each was a small collection of corpses of the Marsh’s deadly fauna.
The hut had a single doorway, low and top-rounded as a burrow entrance. In it now Sheelba lay, chin on bent left elbow, if either of those were those, stretching out the squat bottle and seeming to peer down at the Mouser, unmindful of the illogicality of one called the Eyeless peering. Yet despite the sky-rim now pinkening to the east, the Mouser could see no hint of face of any sort in the deep hood, only midnight dark. Wearily and for perhaps the thousandth time, the Mouser wondered if Sheelba were called the Eyeless because he was blind in the ordinary way, or had only leathery skin between nostrils and pate, or was skull-headed, or perhaps had quivering antennae where eyes should be. The speculation gave him no shiver of fear, he was too angry and fatigued — and the squat bottle still didn’t impress him.
Batting aside a springing salt-spider with the back of his gauntleted hand, the Mouser called upward, “That’s a mighty small jug to hold poison for all the rats of Lankhmar. Hola, you in the black bag there, aren’t you going to invite me up for a drink, a bite, and a dry-out? I’ll curse you otherwise with spells I’ve unbeknownst stolen from you!”
“I’m not your mother, mistress, or nurse, but your wizard!” Sheelba retorted in his harsh hollow sea-voice. “Cease your childish threats and stiffen your back, small gray one!”
That last seemed the ultimate and crushing infidelity to the Mouser with his stiff neck and straining spine. He thought bitterly of the sinew-punishing, skin-smarting night he’d just spent. He’d left Lankhmar by the Marsh Gate, to the frightened amazement of the guards, who had strongly advised against solo marsh sorties even by day. Then he’d followed the twisty causeway by moonlight to the lightning-blasted but still towering gray Seahawk Tree. There after long peering he’d spotted Sheelba’s hut by a pulsing blue glow coming from its low doorway, and plunged boldly toward it through the swordish sea grass. Then had come nightmare. Deep creeks and thorny hummocks had appeared where he didn’t expect them and he had speedily lost his usually infallible sense of direction. The small blue glow had winked out and finally reappeared far to his right, then seemed to draw near and recede bafflingly time after time. He had realized he must be walking in circles around it and guessed that Sheelba had cast a dizzying enchantment on the area, perhaps to ensure against interruption while working some particularly toilsome and heinous magic. Only after twice almost perishing in quicksands and being stalked by a long-legged marsh leopard with blue-glinting eyes which the Mouser once mistook for the hut, because the beast seemed to have a habit of winking, had he at last reached his destination as the stars were dimming.
Thereafter he had poured out, or rather up, to Sheelba all his recent vexations, suggesting suitable solutions for each problem: a love potion for Hisvet, friendship potions for Frix and Hisvin, a patron potion for Glipkerio, a Mingol-repellent ointment, a black albatross to seek out Fafhrd and tell him to hurry home, and perhaps something to use against the rats, too. Now he was being offered only the last.
He rotated his head writhingly to unkink his neck, flicked a sea cobra away with Scalpel’s scabbard-tip, then gazed up sourly at the little bottle.
“How am I supposed to administer it?” he demanded. “A drop down each rat-hole? Or do I spoon it into selected rats and release them? I warn you that if it contains seeds of the Black Sickness, I will send all Lankhmar to extirpate you from the Marsh.”
“None of those,” Sheelba grated contemptuously. “You find a spot where rats are foregathered. Then you drink it yourself.”
The Mouser’s eyebrows lifted. After a bit he asked, “What will that do? Give me an evil eye for rats, so my glance strikes them dead? Make me clairvoyant, so I can spy out their chief nests through solid earth and rock? Or wondrously increase my cunning and mental powers?” he added, though truth to tell, he somewhat doubted if the last were possible to any great degree.
“Something like all those,” Sheelba retorted carelessly, nodding his hood. “It will put you on the right footing to cope with the situation. It will give you a power to deal with rats and deal death to them too, which no complete man has ever possessed on earth before. Here.” He let go the bottle. The Mouser caught it. Sheelba added instantly, “The effects of the potion last but nine hours, to the exact pulse-beat, which I reckon at a tenth of a million to the day, so see that all your work be finished in three-eighths that time. Do not fail to report to me at once thereafter all the circumstances of your adventure. And now farewell. Do not follow me.”
Sheelba withdrew inside his hut, which instantly bent its legs and by ones and twos lifted its shield-like feet with sucking _plops_ and walked away — somewhat ponderously at first, but then more swiftly, footing it like a great black beetle or water bug, its platters fairly skidding on the mashed-down sea grass.
The Mouser gazed after it with fury and amazement. Now he understood why the hut had been so elusive, and what had _not_ gone wrong with his sense of direction, and why the tall Seahawk Tree was no longer anywhere in sight. The wizard had led him a long chase last night, and doubtless a merry one from Sheelba’s viewpoint.
And when it occurred to the bone-tired, be-mired Mouser that Sheelba could readily now have transported him to the vicinity of the Marsh Gate in his traveling hut, he was minded to peg at the departing vehicular dwelling the lousy little bottle he’d got.
Instead he knotted a length of bandage tightly around the small black container, top to bottom, to make sure the stopper didn’t come out, put the bottle in the midst of his pouch, and carefully retightened and tied the pouch’s thong. He promised himself that if the potion did not solve his problems, he would make Sheelba feel that the whole city of Lankhmar had lifted up on myriad stout legs and come trampling across the Great Salt Marsh to pash the wizard in his hut. Then with a great effort he pulled his feet one after the other out of the muck into which he’d sunk almost knee-deep, pried a couple of pulsing sea slugs off his left boot with Cat’s Claw, used the same dagger to slay by slashing a giant worm tightening around his right ankle, drank the last stinging sup of wine in his wine-flask, tossed that away, and set out toward the tiny towers of Lankhmar, now dimly visible in the smoky west, directly under the sinking, fading gibbous moon.
* * * *
The rats were harming in Lankhmar, inflicting pain and wounds. Dogs came howling to their masters to have needle-like darts taken out of their faces. Cats crawled into hiding to wait it out while rat-bites festered and healed. Ferrets were found squealing in rat-traps that bruised flesh and broke bones. Elakeria’s black marmoset almost drowned in the oiled and perfumed water of his mistress’ deep, slippery-sided silver bathtub, into which the spidery-armed pet had somehow been driven, befouling the water in his fear.
Rat-nips on the face brought sleepers screamingly awake, sometimes to see a small black form scuttling across the blanket and leaping from the bed. Beautiful or merely terrified women took to wearing while they slept full masks of silver filigree or tough leather. Most households, highest to humblest, slept by candlelight and in shifts, so that there were always watchers. A shortage of candles developed, while lamps and lanterns were priced almost out of sight. Strollers had their ankles bitten; most streets showed only a few hurrying figures, while alleys were deserted. Only the Street of the Gods, which stretched from the Marsh Gate to the granaries on the Hlal, was free of rats, in consequence of which it and its temples were crammed with worshipers rich and poor, credulous and hitherto atheist, praying for relief from the Rat Plague to the ten hundred and one Gods _in_ Lankhmar and even to the dire and aloof Gods _of_ Lankhmar, whose bell-towered, ever-locked temple stood at the granaries-end of the street, opposite the narrow house of Hisvin the grain-merchant.
In frantic reprisal rat-holes were flooded, sometimes with poisoned water. Fumes of burning phosphorus and sulfur were pumped down them with bellows. By order of the Supreme Council and with the oddly ambivalent approval of Glipkerio, who kept chattering about his secret weapons, professional rat-catchers were summoned en masse from the grainfields to the south and from those to the west, across the river Hlal. By command of Olegnya Mingolsbane, acting without consultation with his overlord, regiments of black-clad soldiers were rushed at the double from Tovilyis, Kartishla, even Land’s End, and issued on the way weapons and items of uniform which puzzled them mightily and made them sneer more than ever at their quartermasters and at the effete and fantasy-minded Lankhmar military bureaucracy: long-handled three-tined forks, throwing balls pierced with many double-ended slim spikes, lead-weighted throwing nets, sickles, heavy leather gauntlets and bag-masks of the same material.
Where _Squid_ was docked at the towering granaries near the end of the Street of the Gods, waiting fresh cargo, Slinoor paced the deck nervously and ordered smooth copper disks more than a yard across set midway up each mooring cable, to baffle any rat creeping up them. The black kitten stayed mostly at the mast-top, worriedly a-peer at the city and descending only to scavenge meals. No wharf-cats came sniffing aboard _Squid_ or were to be seen prowling the docks.
In a green-tiled room in the Rainbow Palace of Glipkerio Kistomerces, and in the midst of a circle of fork-armed pages and guardsmen officers with bared dirks and small one-hand crossbows at the cock, Hisvin sought to cope with the hysteria of Lankhmar’s beanpole monarch, whom a half-dozen slim naked serving maids were simultaneously brow-stroking, finger-fondling, toe-kissing, plying with wine and black opium pills tiny as poppy seeds, and otherwise hopefully soothing.
Twisting away from his delightful ministrants, who moderated but did not cease their attentions, Glipkerio bleated petulantly, “Hisvin, Hisvin, you must hurry things. My people mutter at me. My Council and Captain General take measures over my head. There are even slavering mad-dog whispers of supplanting me on my seashell throne, as by my idiot cousin Radomix Kistomerces-Null. Hisvin, you’ve got your rats in the streets by day and night now, all set to be blasted by your incantations. When, oh when, is that planet of yours going to reach its proper spot on the starry stage so you can recite and finger-weave your rat-deadly magic? What’s delaying it, Hisvin? I command that planet to move faster! Else I will send a naval expedition across the unknown Outer Sea to sink it!”
The skinny, round-shouldered grain-merchant sorrowfully sucked in his cheeks beneath the flaps of his black leather cap, raised his beady eyes ceilingward, and in general made a most pious face.
“Alas, my brave overlord,” he said, “that star’s course may not yet be predicted with absolute certainty. It will soon arrive at its spot, never fear, but exactly how soon the most learned astrologer cannot foretell. Benign waves urge it forward, then a malign sky-swell drives it back. It is in the eye of a celestial storm. As an iceberg-huge jewel floating in the blue waters of the heavens, it is subject to their currents and ragings. Recall also what I’ve told you of your traitorous courier, the Gray Mouser, who it now appears is in league with powerful witch doctors and fetish-men working against us.”
Nervously plucking at his black toga and slapping away with his long, flappy fingers the pink hand of a maid who sought to rearrange the garment, Glipkerio spat out peevishly, “Now the Mouser. Now the stars. What sort of impotent sorcerer are you? Methinks the rats rule the stars as well as the streets and corridors of Lankhmar.”
Reetha, who was the rebuffed maid, uttered a soundless philosophic sigh and softly as a mouse inserted her slapped hand under her overlord’s toga and began most gently to scratch his stomach, meanwhile occupying her mind with a vision of herself girdled in three leather loops with Samanda’s keys, thongs, chains, and whips, while the blubbery palace mistress knelt naked and quaking before her.
Hisvin intoned, “Against that pernicious thought, I present you with a most powerful palindrome: Rats live on no evil star. Recite it with lips and mind when your warlike eagerness to come to final grips with your furry foes makes you melancholy, oh most courageous commander-in-chief.”
“You give me words; I ask for action,” Glipkerio complained.
“I will send my daughter Hisvet to attend you. She has now disciplined into instructive erotic capers a new dozen of silver-caged white rats.”
“Rats, rats, rats! Do you seek to drive me mad?” Glipkerio squeaked angrily.
“I will at once order her to destroy her harmless pets, good scholars though they be,” Hisvin answered smoothly, bowing very low so that he could make a nasty face unseen. “Then, your overlordship wishing, she shall come to soothe your battle-stung brazen nerves with mystic rhythms learned in the Eastern Lands. While her maid Frix is skilled in subtle massages known only to her and to certain practitioners in Quarmall, Kokgnab, and Klesh.”
Glipkerio lifted his shoulders, pouted his lips, and uttered a little grunt midway between indifference and unwilling satisfaction.
At that instant, a half-dozen of the officers and pages crouched together and directed their gazes and weapons at a doorway in which had appeared a little low shadow.
At the same moment, her mind overly absorbed and excited by the imagined squeals and groans of Samanda forced to crawl about the kitchen floor by jerks of her globe-dressed black hair and by jabs of the long pins taken from it, Reetha inadvertently tweaked a tuft of body hair which her gently scratching fingers had encountered.
Her monarch writhed as if stabbed and uttered a thin, piercing shriek.
A dwarf white cat had trotted nervously into the doorway, looking back over shoulder with nervous pink eyes, and now when Glipkerio screamed, disappeared as if batted by an unseen broom.
Glipkerio gasped, then shook a pointing finger under Reetha’s nose. It was all she could do not to snap with her teeth at the soft, perfumed object, which looked as long and loathsome to her as the white caterpillar of a giant moon moth.
“Report yourself to Samanda!” he commanded. “Describe to her in full detail your offense. Tell her to inform me beforehand of your hour of punishment.”
Against his own rule, Hisvin permitted himself a small, veiled expression of his contempt for his overlord’s wits. In his solemn professional voice he said, “For best effect, recite my palindrome backwards, letter by letter.”
* * * *
The Mouser snored peacefully on a thick mattress in a small bedroom above the shop of Nattick Nimblefingers the tailor, who was furiously at work below cleaning and mending the Mouser’s clothing and accouterments. One full and one half-empty wine-jug rested on the floor by the mattress, while under the Mouser’s pillow, clenched in his left fist for greater security, was the small black bottle he’d got from Sheelba.
It had been high noon when he had finally climbed out of the Great Salt Marsh and trudged through the Marsh Gate, utterly spent. Nattick had provided him with a bath, wine and a bed — and what sense of security the Mouser could get from harboring with an old slum friend.
Now he slept the sleep of exhaustion, his mind just beginning to be tickled by dreams of the glory that would be his when, under the eyes of Glipkerio, he would prove himself Hisvin’s superior at blasting rats. His dreams did not take account of the fact that Hisvin could hardly be counted a blaster of rats, but rather their ally — unless the wily grain-merchant had decided it was time to change sides.
* * * *
Fafhrd, stretched out in a grassy hilltop hollow lit by moonlight and campfire, was conversing with a long-limbed recumbent skeleton named Kreeshkra, but whom he now mostly addressed by the pet name Bonny Bones. It was a moderately strange sight, yet one to touch the hearts of imaginative lovers and enemies of racial discrimination in all the many universes.
The somewhat oddly matched pair regarded each other tenderly. Fafhrd’s curly, rather abundant body hair against his pale skin, where his loosened jerkin revealed it, was charmingly counterpointed by the curving glints of camp-fire reflected here and there from Kreeshkra’s skin against the background of her ivory bones. Like two scarlet minnows joined head and tail, her mobile lips played or lay quivering side by side, alternately revealing and hiding her pearly front teeth. Her breasts mounted on her rib cage were like the stem halves of pears, shading from palest pink to scarlet.
Fafhrd thoughtfully gazed back and forth between these colorful adornments.
“Why?” he asked finally.
Her laughter rippled like glass chimes. “Dear stupid Mud Man!” she said in her outlandishly accented Lankhmarese. “Girls who are not Ghouls — all your previous women, I suppose, may they be chopped to still-sentient raw bits in Hell! — draw attention to their points of attraction by concealing them with rich fabric or precious metals. We, who are transparent-fleshed and scorn all raiment, must go about it another way, employing cosmetics.”
Fafhrd chuckled lazily in answer. He was now looking back and forth between his dear white-ribbed companion and the moon seen through the smooth, pale gray branches of the dead thorn tree on the rim of the hollow, and finding a wondrous content in _that_ counterpoint. He thought how strange it was, though really not so much, that his feelings toward Kreeshkra had changed so swiftly. Last night, when she had revived from her knockout a mile or so beyond burning Sarheenmar, he had been ready to ravage and slay her, but she had comported herself with such courage and later proven herself such a spirited and sympathetic companion, and possessed of a ready wit, though somewhat dry, as befitted a skeleton, that when the pink rim of dawn had added itself to and then drunk the city’s flames, it had seemed the natural thing that she should ride pillion behind him as he resumed his journey south. Indeed, he’d thought, such a comrade might daunt without fight the brigands who swanned around Ilthmar and thought Ghouls a myth. He had offered her bread, which she refused, and wine, which she drank sparingly. Toward evening his arrow had brought down a desert antelope and they had feasted well, she devouring her portion raw. It was true what they said about Ghoulish digestion. Fafhrd had at first been bothered because she seemed to hold no grudge on behalf of her slain fellows and he suspected that she might be employing her extreme amiability to put him off guard and then slay him, but he had later decided that life or its loss was likely accounted no great matter by Ghouls, who looked so much like skeletons to begin with.
The gray Mingol mare, tethered to the thorn tree on the hollow’s rim, threw up her head and nickered.
A mile or more overhead in the windy dark, a bat slipped from the back of a strongly winging black albatross and fluttered earthward like an animate large black leaf.
Fafhrd reached out an arm and ran his fingers through Kreeshkra’s invisible shoulder-length hair. “Bonny Bones,” he asked, “why do you call me Mud Man?”
She answered tranquilly, “All your kind seem mud to us, whose flesh is as sparkling clear as running water in a brook untroubled by man or rains. Bones are beautiful. They are made to be seen.” She reached out skeleton-seeming soft-touching hand and played with the hair on his chest, then went on seriously, staring toward the stars. “We Ghouls have such an aesthetic distaste for mud-flesh that we consider it a sacred duty to transform it to crystal-flesh by devouring it. Not yours, at least not tonight, Mud Man,” she added, sharply tweaking a copper ringlet.
He lightly captured her wrist. “So your love for me is most unnatural, at least by Ghoulish standards,” he said with a touch of argumentativeness.
“If you say so, master,” she answered with a sardonic, mock-submissive note.
“I stand, or rather lie, corrected,” Fafhrd murmured. “I’m the lucky one, whatever your motives and whatever name we give them.” His voice became clearer again. “Tell me, Bonny Bones, how in the world did you ever come to learn Lankhmarese?”
“Stupid, _stupid_ Mud Man,” she replied indulgently. “Why, ’tis our native tongue” — and here her voice grew dreamy — “deriving from those ages a millennium and more ago when Lankhmar’s empire stretched from Quarmall to the Trollstep Mountains and from Earth’s End to the Sea of Monsters, when Kvarch Nar was Hwarshmar and we lonely Ghouls alley-and-graveyard thieves only. We had another language, but Lankhmarese was easier.”
He returned her hand to her side, to plant his own beyond her and stare down into her black eye sockets. She whimpered faintly and ran her fingers lightly down his sides. Fighting impulse for the moment, he said, “Tell me, Bonny Bones, how do you manage to _see_ anything when light goes right through you? Do you see with the inside of the back of your skull?”
“Questions, questions, questions,” she complained moaningly.
“I only want to become less stupid,” he explained humbly.
“But I _like_ you to be stupid,” she answered with a sigh. Then raising up on her elbow so that she faced the still-blazing campfire — the thorn tree’s dense wood burnt slowly and fiercely — she said, “Look closely into my eyes. No, without getting between them and the fire. Can you see a small rainbow in each? That’s where light is refracted to the seeing part of my brain, and a very thin real image formed there.”
Fafhrd agreed he could see twin rainbows, then went on eagerly, “Don’t stop looking at the fire yet; I want to show you something.” He made a cylinder of one hand and held an end of the cylinder to her nearest eye, then clapped his fingers, held tightly together, against the other end. “There!” he said. “You can see the fire glow through the edges of my fingers, can’t you? So I’m part transparent. I’m part crystal, at least,”
“I can, I can,” she assured him with singsong weariness. She looked away from his hands and the fire at his face and hairy chest. “But I _like_ you to be mud,” she said. She put her hands on his shoulders. “Come, darling, be dirtiest mud.”
He gazed down at the moonlit pearl-toothed skull and blackest eye sockets in each of which a faint opalescent moonbow showed, and he remembered how a wisewoman of the North had once told him and the Mouser that they were both in love with Death. Well, she’d been right, at least about himself, Fafhrd had to confess now, as Kreeshkra’s arms began to tug at him.
At that instant there sounded a thin whistle, so high as to be almost inaudible, yet piercing the ear like a needle finer than a hair. Fafhrd jerked around, Kreeshkra swiftly lifted her head, and they noted that they were being watched not only by the Mingol mare, but also with upside-down eyes by a black bat which hung from a high gray twig of the thorn tree.
Filled with premonition, Fafhrd pointed a forefinger at the dangling black flier, which instantly fluttered down to the fleshly perch presented. Fafhrd drew off its leg a tiny black roll of parchment springy as thinnest tempered iron, waved the flutterer back to its first perch, and unrolling the black parchment and holding it close to the firelight and his eyes close to it, read the following missive writ in a white script:
_Mouser in direst danger. Also Lankhmar. Consult Ningauble of the Seven Eyes. Speed of the essence. Don’t lose the tin whistle. _
The signature was a tiny unfeatured oval, which Fafhrd knew to be one of the sigils of Sheelba of the Eyeless Face.
White jaw resting on folded white knuckles, Kreeshkra watched the Northerner from her inscrutable black eye pits as he buckled on his sword.
“You’re leaving me,” she asserted in a flat voice.
“Yes, Bonny Bones, I must ride south like the wind,” Fafhrd admitted hurriedly. “A lifelong comrade’s in immense peril.”
“A man, of course,” she divined with the same tonelessness. “Even Ghoulish men save their greatest love for their male swordmates.”
“It’s a different sort of love,” Fafhrd started to argue as he untied the mare from the thorn tree, feeling at the flat pouch hanging from the saddlebow, to make sure it still held the thin tin cylinder. Then, more practically, “There’s still half the antelope to give you strength for your trudge home — and it’s uncooked too.”
“So you assume my people are eaters of carrion, and that half a dead antelope is a proper measure of what I mean to you?”
“Well, I’d always heard that Ghouls … and no, of course, I’m not trying to _pay_ you….Look here, Bonny Bones — I won’t argue with you, you’re much too good at it. Suffice it that I must course like the lonely thunderbolt to Lankhmar, pausing only to consult my master sorcerer. I couldn’t take you — or anyone! — on that journey.”
Kreeshkra looked around curiously. “Who asked to go? The bat?”
Fafhrd bit his lip, then said, “Here, take my hunting knife,” and when she made no reply, laid it by her hand. “Can you shoot an arrow?”
The skeleton girl observed to some invisible listener, “Next the Mud Man will be asking if I can slice a liver. Oh well, I should doubtless have tired of him in another night and on pretext of kissing his neck, bit through the great artery under his ear, and drunk his blood and devoured his carrion mud-flesh, leaving only his stupid brain, for fear of contaminating and making imbecilic my own.”
Abstaining from speech, Fafhrd laid the Mingol bow and its quiver of arrows beside the hunting knife. Then he knelt for a farewell kiss, but at the last instant the Ghoul turned her head so that his lips found only her cold cheek.
As he stood up, he said, “Believe it or not, I’ll come back and find you.”
“You won’t do either,” she assured him, “and I shan’t be anywhere.”
“Nevertheless I will hunt you down,” he said. He had untethered the mare and stood beside it. “For you have given me the weirdest and most wondrous ecstasy of any woman in the world.”
Looking out into the night, the Ghoulish girl said, “Congratulations, Kreeshkra. Your gift to humanity: freakish thrills. Make like a thunderbolt, Mud Man. I dote on thrills too.”
Fafhrd shut his lips, gazed at her a moment longer. Then as he whirled about him his cloak, the bat fluttered to it and hung there.
Kreeshkra nodded her head, “I said the bat.” Fafhrd mounted the mare and cantered down the hillside.
Kreeshkra sprang up, snatched the bow and arrow, ran to the rim of the grassy saucer and drew a bead on Fafhrd’s back, held it for three heartbeats, then turned abruptly and winged the arrow at the thorn tree. It lodged quivering in the center of the gray trunk.
Fafhrd glanced quickly around at the _snap, whir, tchunk!_ A skeleton arm was waving him good-bye and continued to do so until he reached the road at the foot of the slope, where he urged the mare into a long-striding lope.
On the hilltop Kreeshkra stood in thought for two breaths. Then from her belt she detached something invisible, which she dropped in the center of the dying campfire.
There was a sputtering and a shower of sparks, when a bright blue flame shot straight up a dozen yards and burnt for as many heartbeats before it died. Kreeshkra’s bones looked like blued iron, her glinting glassy flesh like scraps of tropic night-sky, but there was none to see this beauty.
Fafhrd watched the needlelike flare over shoulder as he sped rockingly along and he frowned into the wind.
The rats were murdering in Lankhmar that night. Cats died by swiftly sped crossbow darts that punctured slit-pupiled eye to lodge in brain. Poison set out for rats was cunningly secreted in gobbets of dogs’ dinners. Elakeria’s marmoset died crucified to the head of the sandalwood bed of that plump wanton, just opposite her ceiling-tall mirror of daily-polished silver. Babies were bitten to death in their cradles. A few big folk were stung by deep-burrowing darts smeared with a black stuff and died in convulsions after hours of agony. Many drank to still their fears, but the unwatched dead-drunk bled to death from neat cuts that tapped arteries. Glipkerio’s aunt, who was also Elakeria’s mother, strangled in a noose hung over a dark steep stairs made slippery by spilled oil. A venturesome harlot was overrun in the Plaza of Dark Delights and eaten alive while no one heeded her screams.
So tricky were some of the traps the rats set and by circumstantial evidence so deft their wielding of their weapons, that many folk began to insist that some of them, especially the rare and elusive albinos, had on their forelegs tiny clawed hands rather than paws, while there were many reports of rats running on their hind legs.
Ferrets were driven in droves down rat-holes. None returned. Eerily bag-headed, brown-uniformed soldiers rushed about in squads, searching in vain for targets for their new and much-touted weapons. The deepest wells in the city were deliberately poisoned, on the assumption that the city of rats went as deep and tapped those wells for its water supply. Burning brimstone was recklessly poured into rat-holes and soldiers had to be detached from their primary duty to fight the resultant fires.
An exodus begun by day continued by night from the city, by yacht, barge, rowboat, and raft, also south by cart, carriage, or afoot through the Grain Gate and even east through the Marsh Gate, until bloodily checked by command of Glipkerio, advised by Hisvin and by the city’s stiff-necked and ancient Captain General, Olegnya Mingolsbane. Lukeen’s war galley was one of the several which rounded up the fleeing civilian vessels and returned them to their docks — that is, all but the most gold-heavy, bribe-capable yachts. Shortly afterwards, rumor spread fast as news of a new sin, that there was a conspiracy to assassinate Glipkerio and set on his throne his widely-admired and studious pauper cousin, Radomix Kistomerces-Null, who was known to keep seventeen pet cats. A striking force of plain-clothes constables and Lankhmarines was sent from the Rainbow Palace through the torchlit dark to seize Radomix, but he was warned in time and lost himself and his cats in the slums, where he and they had many friends, both human and feline.
As the night of terror grew older at snail’s pace, the streets emptied of civilian human traffic and grew peculiarly silent and dark, since all cellars and many ground floors had been abandoned and locked, barred, and barricaded from above. Only the Street of the Gods was still crowded, where the rats still had made no assault and where comfort of a sort was to be had against fears. Elsewhere the only sounds were the quick, nervous tramp of squads of constables and soldiers on night guard and patterings and chitterings that grew ever more bold and numerous.
Reetha lay stretched before the great kitchen fire, trying to ignore Samanda sitting in her huge palace mistress’ chair and inspecting her whips, rods, paddles, and other instruments of correction, sometimes suddenly whisking one through the air. A very long thin chain confined Reetha by her neck collar to a large, recessed, iron ring-bolt in the kitchen’s tiled floor near the center of the room. Occasionally Samanda would eye her thoughtfully, and whenever the bell tolled the half hour, she’d order the girl to stand to attention and perhaps perform some trifling chore, such as filling Samanda’s wine-tankard. Yet still she never struck the girl, nor so far as Reetha knew, had sent message to Glipkerio apprising him of the time of his maid’s correction.
Reetha realized that she was being deliberately subjected to the torment of punishment deferred and tried to lose her mind in sleep and fantasies. But sleep, the few times she achieved it, brought nightmares and made more shockful the half-hourly wakenings, while fantasies of lording it cruelly over Samanda rang too hollow in her present situation. She tried to romance, but the material she had to work with was thin. Among other scraps, there was the smallish, gray-clad swordsman who had asked her her name the day she had been whipped for being scared by rats into dropping her tray. He at least had been courteous and had seemed to regard her as more than an animated serving tray, but surely he had long since forgotten her.
Without warning, the thought flashed across her mind that if she could lure Samanda close, she might if she were swift enough be able to strangle her with the slack of her chain — but this thought only set her trembling. In the end she was driven to a count of her blessings, such as that at least she had no hair to be pulled or set afire.
The Gray Mouser woke an hour past midnight feeling fit and ready for action. His bandaged wound didn’t bother him, though his left forearm was still somewhat stiff. But since he could not favorably contact Glipkerio before daylight, and having no mind to work Sheelba’s anti-rat magic except in the overlord’s admiring presence, he decided to put himself to sleep again with the remaining wine.
Operating silently, so as not to disturb Nattick Nimblefingers, whom he heard snoring tiredly on a pallet near him, he rather rapidly finished off the half-jug and then began more meditatively to suck on the full one. Yet drowsiness, let alone sleep, perversely refused to come. Instead the more that he drank, the more tinglingly alive he became, until at last with a shrug and a smile he took up Scalpel and Cat’s Claw with never a clink and stole downstairs.
There a horn-shielded lamp burning low showed his clothes and accouterments all orderly lying on Nattick’s clean worktable. His boots and other leather had been brushed and scrubbed and then re-suppled with neat’s-foot oil, and his gray silk tunic and cloak washed, dried, and neatly mended, each new seam and patch interlocked and double-stitched. With a little wave of thanks at the ceiling, he rapidly dressed himself, lifted one of the two large oil-filmed identical keys from their secret hook, unlocked the door, drew it open on its well-greased hinges, slipped into the night and locked the door behind him.
He stood in deep shadow. Moonlight impartially silvered the age-worn walls opposite and their stains and the tight-shuttered little windows and the low, shut doors above the footstep-hollowed stone thresholds and the worn-down cobbles and the bronze-edged drain-slits and the scattered garbage and trash. The street was silent and empty either way to where it curved out of sight. So, he thought, must look the city of Ghouls by night, except that there, there were supposed to be skeletons slipping about on narrow ridgy ivory feet with somehow never a _clack_ or _click._
Moving like a great cat, he stepped out of the shadows. The swollen but deformed moon peered down at him almost blindingly over Nattick’s scalloped roof-ridge. Then he was himself part of the silvered world, padding at a swift, long-striding walk on his spongy-soled boots along Cheap Street’s center toward its curve-hidden intersections with the Street of the Thinkers and the Street of the Gods. Whore Street paralleled Cheap Street to the left and Carter Street and Wall Street to the right, all four following the curving Marsh Wall beyond Wall Street.
At first the silence was unbroken. When the Mouser moved like a cat, he made no more noise. Then he began to hear it — a tiny pattering, almost like a first flurry of small raindrops, or the first breath of a storm through a small-leafed tree. He paused and looked around. The pattering stopped. His eyes searched the shadows and discerned nothing except two close-set glints in the trash that might have been water-drops or rubies — or something.
He set out again. At once the pattering was resumed, only now there was more of it, as if the storm were about to break. He quickened his stride a little, and then all of a sudden they were upon him: two ragged lines of small low silvered shapes rushing out of the shadows to his right and from behind the trash-heaps and out of the drain-slits to his left and a few even squeezing under the scoop-thresholded doors.
He began to run skippingly and much faster than his foes, Scalpel striking out like a silver toad’s tongue to pink one after another of them in a vital part, as if he were some fantastic trash collector and the rats animate small rubbish. They continued to close on him from ahead, but most he outran and the rest he skewered. The wine he’d bibbed giving him complete confidence, it became almost a dance — a dance of death with the rats figuring as humanity and he their grisly gray overlord, armed with rapier instead of scythe.
Shadows and silvered wall switched sides as the street curved. A larger rat got past Scalpel and sprang for his waist, but he deftly flicked it past him on Cat’s Claw’s point while his sword thrust through two more. Never in his life, he told himself gleefully, had he been so truly and literally the Gray Mouser, decimating a mouser’s natural prey.
Then something whirred past his nose like an angry wasp, and everything changed. He recalled in a vivid flash the supremely strange night of decision aboard _Squid_, which had become almost a fantasy-memory to him, and the crossbow rats and Skwee with sword at his jugular, and he realized fully for the first time in Lankhmar that he was not dealing with ordinary or even extraordinary rats, but with an alien and hostile culture of intelligent beings, small to be sure, but perhaps more clever and surely more prolific and murder-bent than even men.
Leaving off skipping, he ran as fast as he could, slashing out repeatedly with Scalpel, but thrusting his dirk in his belt and grabbing in his pouch for Sheelba’s black bottle.
It wasn’t there. With sinking heart and a self-curse, he remembered that, wine-bemused, he’d left it under his pillow at Nattick’s.
He shot past the black Street of the Thinkers with its taller buildings shutting out the moon. More rats poured out. His boot squished down on one and he almost slipped. Two more steel wasps buzzed past his face and — he’d never have believed it from another’s lips — a small blue-flaming arrow. He raced past the lightless long wall of the building housing the Thieves’ Guild, thinking chiefly of making more speed and hardly at all of rat-slashing.
Then almost at once, Cheap Street curving more sharply, there were bright lights ahead of him and many people, and a few strides later he was among them and the rats all gone.
He bought from a street vendor a small tankard of charcoal-heated ale to occupy the time while his dread and gasping faded. When his dry throat had been warmly and bitterly wetted, he gazed east two squares down the Street of the Gods to the Marsh Gate and then west more glittering blocks than he could clearly see.
It seemed to him that all Lankhmar was gathered here tonight by light of flaring torch and lamp and horn-shielded candle — and pole-lofted flare — praying and strolling, moaning and drinking, munching, and whispering fearful gossip. He wondered why the rats had spared this street only. Were they even more afraid of men’s gods than men were?
At the Marsh Gate end of the Street of the Gods were only the hutments of the newest, poorest, and most slum-suited Gods _in_ Lankhmar. Indeed most of the congregations here were mere curbside gatherings about some scrawny hermit or leather-skinned death-skinny priest come from the deserts of the Eastern Lands.
The Mouser turned the other way and began a slow and twisty stroll through the hush-voiced mob, here greeting an old acquaintance, there purchasing a cup of wine or a noggin of spirits from a street seller, for the Lankhmarts believe that religion and minds half-fuddled, or at least drink-soothed, go nicely together.
Despite momentary temptation, he successfully got by the intersection with Whore Street, tapping the dart in his temple to remind himself that erotic experience would end in futility. Although Whore Street itself was dark, the girls young and old were out in force tonight, doing their business in the shadowed porticos, workmanlike providing man’s third most potent banishment of fears after prayers and wine.
The farther he got from the Marsh Gate, the wealthier and more richly served became the Gods _in_ Lankhmar whose establishments he passed — churches and temples now, some even with silver-chased pillars and priests with golden chains and gold-worked vestments. From the open doors came rich yellow light and heady incense and the drone of chanted curses and prayers — all against the rats, so far as the Mouser could make them out.
Yet the rats were not altogether absent from the Street of the Gods, he began to note. Tiny black heads peered down from the roofs now and again, while more than once he saw close-set amber-red eyes behind the grill of a drain in the curb.
But by now he had taken aboard enough wine and spirits not to be troubled by such trifles, despite his recent fright, and his memory wandered off to the strange season, years ago, when Fafhrd had been the penniless, shaven acolyte of Bwadres, sole priest of Issek of the Jug, and he himself had been lieutenant to the racketeer Pulg, who preyed on all priests and prayerful folk.
He returned to his complete senses near the Hlal end of the Street of the Gods, where the temples are all golden-doored and their spires shoot sky-high and the priests’ robes are rainbow expanses of jewels. Around him was a throng of folk almost as richly clad, and now through a break in it he suddenly perceived, under green velvet hood and high-piled, silver-woven black hair, the merry-melancholy face of Frix with dark eyes upon him. Something pale brown and small and irregularly shaped dropped noiselessly from her hand to the pavement, here of ceramic bricks mortised with brass. Then she turned and was gone. He rushed after her, snatching up the small square of ball-crumpled parchment she’d dropped, but two aristos and their courtesans and a merchant in cloth of gold got shoulderingly in his way, and when he had broken free of them, resolutely curbing his wine-fired temper to avoid a duel, and got out of the press, no hooded green velvet robe was to be seen, or any woman in any guise looking remotely like Frix.
He smoothed the crumpled parchment and read it by the light of a low-swinging, horn-paned oil street lamp.
_Be of hero-like patience and courage. _
_Your dearest desire will be fulfilled _
_beyond your daringest expectations,_
_and all enchantments lifted._
_Hisvet _
He looked up and discovered he was past the last luxuriously gleaming, soaring temple of the Gods _in_ Lankhmar and facing the lightless low square fane with its silent square bell-tower of the Gods _of_ Lankhmar, those brown-boned, black-togaed ancestor-deities, whom the Lankhmarts never gather to worship, yet fear and revere in their inmost sleeping minds beyond the sum of all the other gods and devils in Nehwon.
The excitement engendered in him by Hisvet’s note momentarily extinguished by that sight, the Mouser moved forward from the last street lamp until he stood in the lightless street facing the lightless low temple. There crowded into his liquored compassless mind all he had ever heard of the head Gods _of_ Lankhmar: They cared not for priests, or wealth, or even worshipers. They were content with their dingy temple _so long as they were not disturbed_. And in a world where practically all other gods, including all the Gods _in_ Lankhmar, seemed to desire naught but more worshipers, more wealth, more news of themselves to be dissipated to the ends of the world, this was most unusual and even sinister. They emerged only when Lankhmar was in direct peril — and even then not always — they rescued and then they chastised — not Lankhmar’s foes but her folk — and after that they retired as swiftly as possible to their dismal fane and rotting beds.
There were no rat-shapes on the roof of _that_ temple, or in the shadows crowding thick around it.
With a shudder the Mouser turned his back on it, and there across the street, shouldered by the great dim cylinders of the granaries and backgrounded by Glipkerio’s palace with its rainbow minarets pastel in the moonlight, was the narrow, dark-stoned house of Hisvin the grain-merchant. Only one window in the top floor showed light.
The wild desires roused in the Mouser by Hisvet’s note flared up again and he was mightily tempted to climb that window, however smooth and holdless looked the unadorned sooty stone wall, but common sense got the better of wild desire in him despite the fire of wine. After all, Hisvet had writ “patience” before “courage.”
With a sigh and a shrug he turned back toward the brightly lit section of the Street of the Gods, gave most of the coins in his pouch to a mincing, bejeweled slave-girl for a small crystal flask of rare white brandy from the walled tray hung from her shoulders just below her naked breasts, took one swig of the icily fiery stuff, and was by that swig emboldened to cut down pitch-black Nun Street, intending to go a square beyond the Street of the Thinkers and by way of Crafts Street, weave home to Cheap Street and Nattick’s.
Aboard _Squid_, curled up in the crow’s nest, the black kitten writhed and whimpered in his sleep as though racked by the nightmares of a full-grown cat, or even a tiger.

*Chapter Seven*
Fafhrd awoke consumed by thirst and amorous yearning, and with a certainty that it was late afternoon. He knew where he was and, in a general way, what had been happening, but his memory for the past half day or so was at the moment foggy. His situation was that of a man who stands on a patch of ground with mountains sharp-etched all around, but the middle distance hidden by a white sea of ground-mist.
He was in leafy Kvarch Nar, chief of the Eight so-called Cities — truly, none of them could compare with Lankhmar, the only city worth the name on the Inner Sea. And he was in his room in the straggling, low, unwalled, yet shapely wooden palace of Movarl. Four days ago the Mouser had sailed for Lankhmar aboard _Squid_ with a cargo of lumber which the thrifty Slinoor had shipped, to report to Glipkerio the safe delivery of four-fifths of the grain, the eerie treacheries of Hisvin and Hisvet, and the whole mad adventure. Fafhrd, however, had chosen to remain a while in Kvarch Nar, for to him it was a fun place, not just because he had found a fun-loving, handsome girl there, one Hrenlet.
More particularly, Fafhrd was snug abed but feeling somewhat constricted — clearly he had not taken off his boots or any other of his clothing or even unbelted his short-ax, the blade of which, fortunately covered by its thick leather sheath, stuck into his side. Yet he was also filled with a sense of glorious achievement — why, he wasn’t yet sure, but it was a grand feeling.
Without opening his eyes or moving any part of him the thickness of a Lankhmar penny a century old, he oriented himself. To his left, within easy arm-reach on a stout night table would be a large pewter flagon of light wine. Even now he could sense, he thought, its coolth. Good.
To his right, within even easier reach, Hrenlet. He could feel her radiant warmth and hear her snoring — very loudly, in fact.
Or was it Hrenlet for certain? — or at any rate _only_ Hrenlet? She had been very merry last night before he went to the gaming table, playfully threatening to introduce him intimately to a red-haired and hot-blooded female cousin of hers from Ool Hrusp, where they had great wealth in cattle. Could it be that…? At any rate, good too, or even better.
While under his downy thick pillows — Ah, there was the explanation for his ever-mounting sense of glory! Late last night he had cleaned them all out of every golden Lankhmarian rilk, every golden Kvarch Nar gront, every golden coin from the Eastern Lands, Quarmall, or elsewhere! Yes, he remembered it well now: he had taken them all — and at the simple game of sixes and sevens, where the banker wins if he matches the number of coins the player holds in his fist; those Eight-City fools didn’t realize they tried to make their fists big when they held six golden coins and tightened them when they held seven. Yes, he had turned all their pockets and pouches inside out — and at the end he had crazily matched a quarter of his winnings against an oddly engraved slim tin whistle supposed to have magical properties … and won that too! And then saluted them all and reeled off happily, well-ballasted by gold like a treasure galleon, to bed and Hrenlet. Had he had Hrenlet? He wasn’t sure.
Fafhrd permitted himself a dry-throated, raspy yawn. Was ever man so fortunate? At his left hand, wine. At his right a beauteous girl, or more likely two, since there was a sweet strong farm-smell coming to him under the sheets; and what is juicier than a farmer’s (or cattleman’s) redhead daughter? While under his pillows — he twisted his head and neck luxuriously; he couldn’t quite feel the tight-bulging bag of golden coins — the pillows were many and thick — but he could imagine it.
He tried to recall why he had made that last hare-brained successful wager. The curly-bearded braggart had claimed he had the slim tin whistle of a wise woman and that it summoned thirteen helpful beasts of some sort — and this had recalled to Fafhrd the wise woman who had told him in his youth that each sort of animal has its governing thirteen — and so his sentimentality had been awakened — and he had wanted to get the whistle as a present for the Gray Mouser, who doted on the little props of magic — yes, that was it!
Eyes still shut, Fafhrd plotted his course of action. He suddenly stretched out his left arm blind and without any groping fastened it on the pewter flagon — it was even be-dewed! — and drained half of it — nectar! — and set it back.
Then with his right hand he stroked the girl — Hrenlet, or her cousin? — from shoulder to haunch.
She was covered with short bristly fur and, at his amorous touch, she mooed!
Fafhrd wide-popped his eyes and jackknifed up in the bed, so that sunlight, striking low through the small unglazed window, drenched him yellowly and made a myriad wonder of the hand-polished woods paneling the room, their grains an infinitely varied arabesque. Beside him, pillowed as thickly as he was — and possibly drugged — was a large, long-eared, pink-nostriled auburn calf. Suddenly he could feel her hooves through his boots, and drew the latter abruptly back. Beyond her was no girl — or even other calf — at all.
He dove his right hand under his pillows. His fingers touched the familiar double-stitched leather of his pouch, but instead of being ridgy and taut with gold pieces, it was, except for one thin cylinder — that tin-whistle — flat as an unleavened Sarheenmar pancake.
He flung back the bedclothes so that they bellied high and wild in the air, like a sail torn loose in a squall. Thrusting the burgled purse under his belt, he vaulted out of bed, snatched up his long-sword by its furry scabbard — he intended it for spanking purposes — and dashed through the heavy double drapes out the door, pausing only to dump down his throat the last of the wine.
Despite his fury at Hrenlet, he had to admit, as he hurriedly quaffed, that she had dealt honestly with him up to a point: his bed-comrade was female, red-haired, indubitably from the farm and — for a calf — beauteous, while her now-alarmed mooing had nevertheless a throaty amorous quality.
The common-room was another wonder of polished wood — Movarl’s kingdom was so young that its forests were still its chief wealth. Most of the windows showed green leaves close beyond. From walls and ceiling jutted fantastic demons and winged warrior-maidens all wood-carved. Here and there against the wall leaned beautifully polished bows and spears. A wide doorway led out to a narrow courtyard where a bay stallion moved restlessly under an irregular green roof. The city of Kvarch Nar had twenty times as many mighty trees as homes.
About the common-room lounged a dozen men clad in green and brown, drinking wine, playing at board-games, and conversing. They were dark-bearded brawny fellows, a little shorter — though not much — than Fafhrd.
Fafhrd instantly noted that they were the identical fellows whom he had stripped of their gold-pieces at last night’s play. And this tempted him — hot with rage and fired by gulped wine — into a near-fatal indiscretion.
“Where is that thieving, misbegotten Hrenlet?” he roared, shaking his scabbarded sword above his head. “She’s stolen from under my pillows all my winnings!”
Instantly the twelve sprang to their feet, hands gripping sword hilts. The burliest took a step toward Fafhrd, saying icily, “You dare suggest that a noble maiden of Kvarch Nar shared your bed, barbarian?”
Fafhrd realized his mistake. His liaison with Hrenlet, though obvious to all, had never before been remarked on, because the women of the Eight Cities are revered by their men and may do what they wish, no matter how licentious. But woe betide the outlander who puts this into words.
Yet Fafhrd’s rage still drove him beyond reason. “Noble?” he cried. “She’s a liar and a whore! Her arms are two white snakes, a-crawl ‘neath the blankets — for gold, not man-flesh! Despite which, she’s also a shepherd of lusts and pastures her flock between my sheets!”
A dozen swords came screeching out of their scabbards at that and there was a rush. Fafhrd grew logical, almost too late. There seemed only one chance of survival left. He sprinted straight for the big door, parrying with his still-scabbarded sword the hasty blows of Movarl’s henchmen, raced across the courtyard, vaulted into the saddle of the bay, and kicked him into a gallop.
He risked one backward look as the bay’s iron-shod hooves began to strike sparks from the flinty narrow forest road. He was rewarded by a vivid glimpse of his yellow-haired Hrenlet leaning bare-armed in her shift from an upper window and laughing heartily.
A half-dozen arrows whirred viciously around him and he devoted himself to getting more speed from the bay. He was three leagues along the winding road to Klelg Nar, which runs east through the thick forest close to the coast of the Inner Sea, when he decided that the whole business had been a trick, worked by last night’s losers in league with Hrenlet, to regain their gold — and perhaps one of them his girl — and that the arrows had been deliberately winged to miss.
He drew up the bay and listened. He could hear no pursuit. That pretty well confirmed it.
Yet there was no turning back now. Even Movarl could hardly protect him after he had spoken the words he had of an Eight-Cities lady.
There were no ports between Kvarch Nar and Klelg Nar. He would have to ride at least that far around the Inner Sea, somehow evading the Mingols besieging Klelg Nar, if he were to get back to Lankhmar and his share of Glipkerio’s reward for bringing all the grain ships save _Clam_ safe to port. It was most irksome.
Yet he still could not really hate Hrenlet. This horse was a stout one and there was a big saddlebag of food balancing a large canteen of wine. Besides, its reddish hue delightfully echoed that of the calf, a rough joke, but a good one.
Also, he couldn’t deny that Hrenlet had been magnificent between the sheets — a superior sort of slim unfurred cow, and witty too.
He dipped in his pancake-flat pouch and examined the tin whistle, which aside from memories was now his sole spoil from Kvarch Nar. It had down one side of it a string of undecipherable characters and down the other the figure of a slim feline beast couchant. He grinned widely, shaking his head. What a fool was a drunken gambler! He made to toss it away, then remembered the Mouser and returned it to his pouch.
He touched the bay with his heels and cantered on toward Klelg Nar, whistling an eerie but quickening Mingol march.
Nehwon — a vast bubble leaping up forever through the waters of eternity. Like airy champagne … or, to certain moralists, like a globe of stinking gas from the slimiest, most worm-infested marsh.
Lankhmar — a continent firm-seated on the solid watery inside of the bubble called Nehwon. With mountains, hills, towns, plains, a crooked coastline, deserts, lakes, marshes too, and grainfields — especially grainfields, source of the continent’s wealth, to either side of the Hlal, greatest of rivers.
And on the continent’s northern tip, on the east bank of the Hlal, mistress of the grainfields and their wealth, the City of Lankhmar, oldest in the world. Lankhmar, thick-walled against barbarians and beasts, thick-floored against creepers and crawlers and gnawers.
At the south of the City of Lankhmar, the Grain Gate, its twenty-foot thickness and thirty-foot width often echoing with the creak of ox-drawn wagons bringing in Lankhmar’s tawny, dry, edible treasure. Also the Grand Gate, larger still and more glorious, and the smaller End Gate. Then the South Barracks with its black-clad soldiery, the Rich Men’s Quarter, the Park of Pleasure and the Plaza of Dark Delights. Next Whore Street and the streets of other crafts. Beyond those, crossing the city from the Marsh Gate to the docks, the Street of the Gods, with its many flamboyantly soaring fanes of the Gods _in_ Lankhmar and its single squat black temple of the Gods _of_ Lankhmar — more like an ancient tomb except for its tall, square, eternally silent bell-tower. Then the slums and the windowless homes of the nobles; the great grain-towers, like a giant’s forest of house-thick tree-trunks chopped off evenly. Finally, facing the Inner Sea to the north and the Hlal to the west, the North Barracks, and on a hill of solid, sea-sculptured rock, the Citadel and the Rainbow Palace of Glipkerio Kistomerces.
An adolescent serving maid balancing on her close-shaven head with aid of a silver coronet-ring a large tray of sweet-meats and brimming silver goblets, strode like a tightrope walker into a green-tiled antechamber of the Blue Audience Chamber of that palace. She wore black leather collars around her neck, wrists, and slender waist. Light silver chains a little shorter than her forearms tied her wrist-collars to her waist-collar — it was Glipkerio’s whim that no maid’s finger should touch his food or even its tray and that every maid’s balance be perfect. Aside from her collars she was unclothed, while aside from her short-clipped eyelashes, she was entirely shaven — another of the fantastic monarch’s dainty whims, that no hair should drop in his soup. She looked like a doll before it is dressed, its wig affixed, and its eyebrows painted on.
The sea-hued tiles lining the chamber were hexagonal and big as the palm of a large hand. Most were plain, but here and there were ones figured with sea creatures: a mollusk, a cod, an octopus, a sea horse.
The maid was almost halfway to the narrow, curtained archway leading to the Blue Audience Chamber when her gaze became fixed on a tile in the floor a long stride from the archway ahead but somewhat to the left. It was figured with a sea lion. It lifted the breadth of a thumb, like a little trapdoor, and eyes with a jetty gleam a finger-joint apart peered out at her.
She shook from toes to head, but her tight-bitten lips uttered no sound. The goblets chinked faintly, the tray began to slide, but she got her head under its center again with a swift sidewise ducking movement, and then began to go with long fearful steps around the horrid tile as far as she could to the right, so that the edge of the tray was hardly a finger’s-breadth from the wall.
Just under the edge of the tray, as if that were a porch-roof, a plain green tile in the wall opened like a door and a rat’s black face thrust out with spade-teeth bared.
The maid leaped convulsively away, still in utter silence. The tray left her head. She tried to get under it. The floor-tile clattered open wide and a long-bodied black rat came undulating out. The tray struck the dodging maid’s shoulder, she strained toward it futilely with her short-chained hands, then it struck the floor with a nerve-shattering clangor and all the spilled goblets rang.
As the silver reverberations died, there was else only the rapid soft _thump_ of her bare feet running back the way she had come. One goblet rolled a last turn. Then there was desert stillness in the green antechamber.
Two hundred heartbeats later, it was broken by another muted thudding of bare feet, this time those of a party returning the way the maid had run. There entered first, watchful-eyed, two shaven-headed, white-smocked, browny cooks, each armed with a cleaver in one hand and a long toasting-fork in the other. Second, two naked and shaven kitchen boys, bearing many wet and dry rags and a broom of black feathers. After them, the maid, her silver chains gathered in her hands, so that they would not chink from her trembling. Behind her, a monstrously fat woman in a dress of thick black wool that went to her redoubled chins and plump knuckles and hid her surely monstrous feet and ankles. Her black hair was dressed in a great round beehive stuck through and through with long black-headed pins, so that it was as if she bore a prickly planet on her head. This appeared to be the case, for her puffed face was weighted with a world of sullenness and hate. Her black eyes peered stern and all-distrustful from between folds of fat, while a sparse black mustache, like the ghost of a black centipede, crossed her upper lip. Around her vast belly she wore a broad leather belt from which hung at intervals keys, thongs, chains, and whips. The kitchen boys believed she had deliberately grown mountain-fat to keep them from clinking together and so warn them when she came a-spying.
Now the fat kitchen-queen and palace mistress stared shrewdly around the antechamber, then spread her humpy palms, glaring at the maid. Not one green tile was displaced.
In like dumb-show, the maid nodded vehemently, pointing from her waist at the tile figured with a sea lion, then threaded tremblingly forward between the spilled stuff and touched it with her toe.
One of the cooks quickly knelt and gently thumped it and the surrounding tiles with a knuckle. Each time the faint sound was equally solid. He tried to get the tines of his fork under the sea lion tile from every side and failed.
The maid ran to the wall where the other glazed door had opened and searched the bare tiles frantically, her slim hands tugging uselessly. The other cook thumped the tiles she indicated without getting a hollow sound.
The glare of the palace mistress changed from suspicion to certainty. She advanced on the maid like a storm cloud, her eyes its lightning, and suddenly thrusting out her two ham-like arms, snapped a thong to a silver ring in the maid’s collar. That snap was the loudest sound yet.
The maid shook her head wildly three times. Her trembling increased, then suddenly stopped altogether. As the palace mistress led her back the way they had come, she drooped her head and shoulders, and at the first vindictive downward jerk dropped to her hands and knees and padded rapidly, dog-fashion.
Under the watchful eyes of one of the cooks, the kitchen boys began swiftly to clean up the mess, wrapping each goblet in a rag ere they laid it on the platter, lest it chink. Their gazes kept darting fearfully about at the myriad tiles.
The Gray Mouser, standing on _Squid_’s gently-dipping prow, sighted the soaring Citadel of Lankhmar through the dispersing fog. Beyond it to the east there soon came into view the square-topped minarets of the Overlord’s palace, each finished in stone of different hue, and to the south the dun granaries like vast smokestacks. He hailed the first sea-wherry he saw to _Squid_’s side. With the black kitten spitting at him reproachfully, and against Slinoor’s command but before Slinoor could decide to have him forcibly restrained — he slid down the long boathook with which the prow wherryman had caught hold of _Squid_’s rail. Landing lightly in the wherry, he gave an approving shoulder-pat to the astonished hook-holder, then commanded, promising a fat fee, that he be rowed with all speed to the palace dock. The hook was shipped, the Mouser wove his way to the slender craft’s stern, the three wherrymen out-oared and the craft raced east over the silty water, brown with mud from the Hlal.
The Mouser called consolingly back to Slinoor, “Never fear, I will make a marvelous report to Glipkerio, praising you to the skies — and even Lukeen to the height of a low raincloud!”
Then he faced forward, faintly smiling and frowning at once in thought. He was somewhat sorry he had had to desert Fafhrd, who had been immersed in an apparently endless drinking and dicing bout with Movarl’s toughest henchmen when _Squid_ had sailed from Kvarch Nar — the great oafs died of wine and their losses each dawn, but were reborn in the late afternoon with thirst restored and money-pouches miraculously refilled.
But he was even more pleased that now he alone would bear Glipkerio Movarl’s thanks for the four shiploads of grain and be able all by himself to tell the wondrous tale of the dragon, the rats, and their human masters — or colleagues. By the time Fafhrd got back from Kvarch Nar, broken-pursed and likely broken-pated too, the Mouser would be occupying a fine apartment in Glipkerio’s palace and be able subtly to irk his large comrade by offering him hospitalities and favors.
He wondered idly where Hisvin and Hisvet and their small entourage were now. Perhaps in Sarheenmar, or more likely Ilthmar, or already lurching by camel-train from that city to some retreat in the Eastern Lands, to be well away from Glipkerio’s and Movarl’s vengeance. Unwilled, his left hand rose to his temple, gently fingering the tiny straight ridge there. Truly, at this already dreamy distance, he could not hate Hisvet or the brave proxy-creature Frix. Surely Hisvet’s vicious threats had been in part a kind of love-play. He did not doubt that some part of her yearned for him. Besides, he had marked her far worse than she had marked him. Well, perhaps he would meet her again some year in some far corner of the world.
These foolishly forgiving and forgetting thoughts of the Mouser were in part due, he knew himself, to his present taut yearning for any acceptable girl. Kvarch Nar under Movarl had proved a strait-laced city, by the Mouser’s standards, and during his brief stay the one erring girl encountered — one Hrenlet — had chosen to err with Fafhrd. Well, Hrenlet had been something of a giantess, albeit slender, and now he was in Lankhmar, where he knew a dozen-score spots to ease his tautness.
The silty-brown water gave way abruptly to deep green. The sea-wherry passed beyond the outflow of the Hlal and was darting along atop the Lankhmar Deep, which dove down sheer-walled and bottomless at the very foot of the wave-pitted great rock on which stood the citadel and the palace. And now the wherrymen had to row out around a strange obstruction: a copper chute wide as a man is tall that, braced by great brazen beams, angled down from a porch of the palace almost to the surface of the sea. The Mouser wondered if the whimmy Glipkerio had taken up aquatic sports during his absence. Or perhaps this was a new way of disposing of unsatisfactory servants and slaves — sliding them suitably weighted into the sea. Then he noted a spindle-shaped vehicle (if it was that) thrice as long as a man and made of some dull gray metal poised at the top of the chute. A puzzle.
The Mouser dearly loved puzzles, if only to elaborate on them rather than solve them, but he had no time for this one. The wherry had drawn up at the royal wharf, and he was haughtily exhibiting to the clamoring eunuchs and guards his starfish-emblemed courier’s ring from Glipkerio and his parchment sealed with the cross-sworded seal of Movarl.
The latter seemed to impress the palace-fry most. He was swiftly bowed across the dock, mounted a dizzily tall, gaily-painted wooden stair, and found himself in Glipkerio’s audience chamber — a glorious sea-fronting blue-tiled room, each large triangular tile bearing a fishy emblem in bas-relief.
The room was huge despite the blue curtains dividing it now into two halves. A pair of naked and shaven pages bowed to the Mouser and parted the curtains for him. Their sinuous silent movements against that blue background made him think of mermen. He stepped through the narrow triangular opening — to be greeted by a rather distant but imperious “Hush!”
Since the hissing command came from the puckered lips of Glipkerio himself and since one of the beanpole monarch’s hand-long skinny fingers now rose and crossed those lips, the Mouser stopped dead. With a fainter hiss the blue curtains fell together behind him.
It was a strange and most startling scene that presented itself. The Mouser’s heart missed a beat — mostly in self-outrage that his imagination had completely missed the weird possibility that was now staged before him.
Three broad archways led out onto a porch on which rested the pointy-ended gray vehicle he had noted balanced at the top of the chute. Now he could see a hinged manhole toward its out-jutting bow.
At the near end of the room was a large, thick-bottomed, close-barred cage containing at least a score of black rats, which chittered and wove around each other ceaselessly and sometimes clattered the bars menacingly.
At the far end of the sea-blue room, near the circular stair leading up into the palace’s tallest minaret, Glipkerio had risen in excitement from his golden audience couch shaped like a seashell. The fantastic overlord stood a head higher than Fafhrd, but was thin as a starved Mingol. His black toga made him look like a funeral cypress. Perhaps to offset this dismal effect, he wore a wreath of small violet flowers around his blond head, the hair of which clustered in golden ringlets.
Close beside him, scarce half his height, hanging weightlessly on his arm like an elf and dressed in a loose robe of pale blonde silk, was Hisvet. The Mouser’s dagger-cut, stretching from her left nostril to her jaw, was still a pink line and would have given her a sardonic expression, except that now as her gaze swung to the Mouser she smiled most prettily.
Standing almost midway between the audience couch and the caged rats was Hisvet’s father Hisvin. His skinny frame was wrapped in a black toga, but he still wore his tight black leather cap with its long cheek-flaps. His gaze was fixed fiercely on the caged rats and he was weaving his bony fingers at them hypnotically.
“Gnawers dark from deep below…” he began to incant in a voice that whistled with age yet was authoritatively strident.
At that instant a naked young serving maid appeared through a narrow archway near the audience couch, bearing on her shaven head a great silver tray laden with goblets and temptingly mounded silver plates. Her wrists were chained to her waist, while a fine silver chain between her narrow black anklets prevented her from taking steps more than twice as long as her narrow pink-toed feet.
Without a “Hush!” this time, Glipkerio raised a narrow long palm to her and once again put a long, skinny finger to his lips. The slim maid’s movements ceased imperceptibly and she stood silent as a birch tree on a windless day.
The Mouser was about to say, “Puissant Overlord, this is evilest enchantment. You are consorting with your dearest enemies!” — but at that instant Hisvet smiled at him again and he felt a frighteningly delicious tingling run down his cheek and gums from the silver dart in his left temple to his tongue, inhibiting speech.
Hisvin recommenced in his commanding Lankhmarese that bore the faintest trace of an Ilthmar lisp and reminded the Mouser of the lisping rat Grig:
“Gnawers dark from deep below,
To ratty grave you now must go!
Blear each eye and drag each tail!
Fur fall off and heartbeat fail!”
All the black rats crowded to the farthest side of their cage from Hisvin, chittering and squeaking as if in maddest terror. Most of them were on their hind feet, clawing toward the bars like a panicky human crowd.
The old man, now swiftly weaving his fingers in a most complex, mysterious pattern, continued relentlessly:
“Blur your eyesight, stop your breath! —
By corrupting spell of Death!
Your brains are cheese, your life is fled!
Spin once around and drop down dead!”
_And the black rats did just that_ — spinning like amateur actors both to ease and dramatize their falls, yet falling most convincingly all the same with varying _plops_ onto the cage floor or each other and lying stiff and still with furry eyelids a-droop and hairless tails slack and sharp-nailed feet thrust stiffly up.
There was a curious slow-paced slappy clapping as Glipkerio applauded with his narrow hands which were long as human feet. Then the beanpole monarch hurried to the cage with strides so lengthy that the lower two-thirds of his toga looked like the silhouette of a tent. Hisvet skipped merrily at his side, while Hisvin came circling swiftly.
“Didst see that wonder, Gray Mouser?” Glipkerio demanded in piping voice, waving his courier closer. “There is a plague of rats in Lankhmar. You, who might from your name be expected to protect us, have returned somewhat tardily. But — bless the Black-Boned Gods! — my redoubtable servant Hisvin and his incomparable sorcerer-apprentice daughter Hisvet, having conquered the rats which menaced the grain fleet, hastened back in good time to take measures against our local rat-plague — magical measures which will surely be successful, as has now been fully demonstrated.”
At this point the fantastical overlord reached a long thin naked arm from under his toga and chucked the Mouser under the chin, much to the latter’s distaste, though he concealed it. “Hisvin and Hisvet even tell me,” Glipkerio remarked with a fluty chuckle, “that they suspected _you_ for a while of being in league with the rats — as who would not from your gray garb and small crouchy figure? — and kept you tied. But all’s well that ends well and I forgive you.”
The Mouser began a most polemical refutation and accusation — but only in his mind, for he heard himself saying, “Here, Milord, is an urgent missive from the King of the Eight Cities. By the by, there was a dragon — ”
“Oh, that two-headed dragon!” Glipkerio interrupted with another piping chuckle and a roguish finger-wave. He thrust the parchment into the breast of his toga without even glancing at the seal. “Movarl has informed me by albatross post of the strange mass delusion in my fleet. Hisvin and Hisvet, master psychologists both, confirm this. Sailors are a woefully superstitious lot, Gray Mouser, and ’tis evident their fancies are more furiously contagious than I suspected — for even you were infected! I would have expected it of your barbarian mate — Favner? Fafrah? — or even of Slinoor and Lukeen — for what are captains but jumped-up sailors? — but you, who are at least sleazily civilized … However, I forgive you that too! Oh, what a mercy that wise Hisvin here thought to keep watch on the fleet in his cutter!”
The Mouser realized he was nodding — and that Hisvet and, in his wrinkle-lipped fashion, Hisvin were smiling archly. He looked down at the piled stiff rats in their theatrical death-throes. Issek take ’em, but their droopy-lidded eyes even looked whitely glazed!
“Their fur hasn’t fallen off,” he criticized mildly.
“You are too literal,” Glipkerio told him with a laugh. “You don’t comprehend poetic license.”
“Or the devices of humano-animal suggestion,” Hisvin added solemnly.
The Mouser trod hard — and, he thought, surreptitiously — on a long tail that drooped from the cage bottom to the tiled floor. There was no atom of response.
But Hisvin noted and lightly clicked a fingernail. The Mouser fancied there was a slight stirring deep in the rat-pile. Suddenly a nauseous stink sprang from the cage. Glipkerio gulped. Hisvet delicately pinched her pale nostrils between thumb and ring-finger.
“You had some question about the efficacy of my spell?” Hisvin asked the Mouser most civilly.
“Aren’t the rats corrupting rather fast?” the Mouser asked. It occurred to him that there might have been a tight-sealed sliding door in the floor of the cage and a dozen long-dead rats or merely a well-rotted steak in the thick bottom beneath.
“Hisvin kills ’em doubly dead,” Glipkerio asserted somewhat feebly, pressing his long hand to his narrow stomach. “All processes of decay are accelerated!”
Hisvin waved hurriedly and pointed toward an open window beyond the archways to the porch. A brawny yellow Mingol in black loincloth sprang from where he squatted in a corner, heaved up the cage, and ran with it to dump it in the sea. The Mouser followed him. Elbowing the Mingol aside with a shrewd dig at the short ribs and leaning far out, supporting himself with his other hand reaching up and gripping the tiled window-side, the Mouser saw the cage tumbling down the sheer wall and sea-eaten rock, the stiff rats tumbling about in it, and fall with a white splash into the blue waters.
At the same instant he felt Hisvet, who had rapidly followed him, press closely with her silken side against his from armpit to ankle bone.
The Mouser thought he made out small dark shapes leaving the cage and swimming strongly underwater toward the rock as the iron rat-prison sank down and down.
Hisvet breathed in his ear, “Tonight when the evening star goes to bed. The Plaza of Dark Delight. The grove of closet trees.”
Turning swiftly back, Hisvin’s delicate daughter commanded the black-collared, silver-chained maid, “Light wine of Ilthmar for his Majesty! Then serve us others.”
Glipkerio gulped down a goblet of sparkling colorless ferment and turned a shade less green. The Mouser selected a goblet of darker, more potent stuff and also a black-edged tender beef cutlet from the great silver tray as the maid dropped gracefully to both knees while keeping her slender upper body perfectly erect.
As she rose with an effortless-seeming undulation and moved mincingly toward Hisvin, the short steps enforced by her silver ankles-chain, the Mouser noted that although her front had been innocent of both raiment and ornamentation, her naked back was crisscrossed diamond-wise by a design of evenly-spaced pink lines from nape to heels.
Then he realized that these were not narrow strokes painted on, but the weals of a whiplashing. So stout Samanda was maintaining her artistic disciplines! The unspoken torment-conspiracy between the lath-thin effeminate Glipkerio and the bladder-fat palace mistress was both psychologically instructive and disgusting. The Mouser wondered what the maid’s offense had been. He also pictured Samanda sputtering through her singing black woolen garb in a huge white-hot oven — or sliding with a leaden weight on her knee-thick ankles down the copper chute outside the porch.
Glipkerio was saying to Hisvin, “So it is only needful to lure out all the rats into the streets and speak your spell at them?”
“Most true, O sapient Majesty,” Hisvin assured him, “though we must delay a little, until the stars have sailed to their most potent stations in the ocean of the sky. Only then will my magic slay rats at a distance. I’ll speak my spell from the blue minaret and slay them all.”
“I hope those stars will set all canvas and make best speed,” Glipkerio said, worry momentarily clouding the childish delight in his long, low-browed face. “My people have begun to fret at me to do something to disperse the rats or fight ’em back into their holes. Which will interfere with luring them forth, don’t you think?”
“Don’t trouble your mighty brain with that worry,” Hisvin reassured him. “The rats are not easily scared. Take measures against them insofar as you’re urged to. Meanwhile, tell your council you have an all-powerful weapon in reserve.”
The Mouser suggested, “Why not have a thousand pages memorize Hisvin’s deadly incantation and shout it down the rat-holes? The rats, being underground, won’t be able to tell that the stars are in the wrong place.”
Glipkerio objected, “Ah, but it is necessary that the tiny beasts also see Hisvin’s finger-weaving. You do not understand these refinements, Mouser. You have delivered Movarl’s missive. Leave us.
“But mark this,” he added, fluttering his black toga, his yellow-irised eyes like angry gold coins in his narrow head. “I have forgiven you once your delays, Small Gray Man, and your dragon-delusions and your doubts of Hisvin’s magical might. But I shall not forgive a second time. Never mention such matters again.”
The Mouser bowed and made his way out. As he passed the statuesque maid with crisscrossed back, he whispered, “Your name?”
“Reetha,” she breathed.
Hisvet came rustling past to dip up a silver forkful of caviar, Reetha automatically dropping to her knees.
“Dark delights,” Hisvin’s daughter murmured and rolled the tiny black fish eggs between her bee-stung upper lip and pink and blue tongue.
When the Mouser was gone, Glipkerio bent down to Hisvin, until his figure somewhat resembled a black gibbet. “A word in your ear,” he whispered. “The rats sometimes make even me … well, nervous.”
“They are most fearsome beasties,” Hisvin agreed somberly, “who might daunt even the gods.”
Fafhrd spurred south along the stony sea-road that led from Klelg Nar to Sarheenmar and which was squeezed between steep, rocky mountains and the Inner Sea. The sea’s dark swells peaked up blackly as they neared shore and burst with unending crashes a few yards below the road, which was dank and slippery with their spray. Overhead pressed low dark clouds which seemed less water vapor than the smoke of volcanoes or burning cities.
The Northerner was leaner — he had sweated and burned away weight — and his face was grim, his eyes red-shot and red-rimmed from dust, his hair dulled with it. He rode a tall, powerful, gaunt-ribbed gray mare with dangerous eyes, also red-shot — a beast looking as cursed as the landscape they traversed.
He had traded the bay with the Mingols for this mount, and despite its ill temper got the best of the bargain, for the bay had been redly gasping out its life from a lance thrust at the time of the trade. Approaching Klelg Nar along the forest road, he had spied three spider-thin Mingols preparing to rape slender twin sisters. He had managed to thwart this cruel and unaesthetic enterprise because he had given the Mingols no time to use their bows, only the lance, while their short narrow scimitars had been no match for Graywand. When the last of the three had gone down, sputtering curses and blood, Fafhrd had turned to the identically-clad girls, only to discover that he had rescued but one — a Mingol had mean-heartedly cut the other’s throat before turning his scimitar on Fafhrd. Thereafter Fafhrd had mastered one of the tethered Mingol horses despite its fiendish biting and kicking. The surviving girl had revealed among her other shriekings that her family might still be alive among the defenders of Klelg Nar, so Fafhrd had swung her up on his saddlebow despite her frantic struggles and efforts to bite. When she quieted somewhat, he had been stirred by her slim sprawly limbs so close and her lemur-large eyes and her repeated assertion, reinforced by horrendous maidenly curses and quaint childhood slang, that all men without exception were hairy beasts, this with a sneer at Fafhrd’s luxuriously furred chest. But although tempted to amorousness he had restrained himself out of consideration for her coltish youth — she seemed scarce twelve, though tall for her age — and recent bereavement. Yet when he had returned her to her not very grateful and strangely suspicious family, she had replied to his courteous promise to return in a year or two with a wrinkling of her snub nose and a sardonic flirt of her blue eyes and slim shoulders, leaving Fafhrd somewhat doubtful of his wisdom in sparing her his wooing and also saving her in the first place. Yet he had gained a fresh mount and a tough Mingol bow with its quiver of darts.
Klelg Nar was the scene of bitter house-to-house and tree-to-tree street fighting, while Mingol campfires glowed in a semicircle to the east every night. To his dismay Fafhrd had learned that for weeks there had not been a ship in Klelg Nar’s harbor, of which the Mingols held half the perimeter. They had not fired the city because wood was wealth to the lean dwellers of the treeless steppes — in fact, their slaves dismantled and plucked apart houses as soon as won and the precious planks and lovely carvings were instantly carted off east, or more often dragged on travoises.
So despite the rumor that a branch of the Mingol horde had bent south, Fafhrd had set off in that direction on his vicious-tempered mount, somewhat tamed by the whip and morsels of honeycomb. And now it seemed from the smoke adrift above the sea-road that the Mingols might not have spared Sarheenmar from the torch as they had Klelg Nar. It also began to seem certain that the Mingols had taken Sarheenmar, from the evidence of the wild-eyed, desperate, ragged, dust-caked refugees who began to crowd the road in their flight north, forcing Fafhrd to toil now and again up the hillside, to save them from his new mount’s savage hooves. He questioned a few of the refugees, but they were incoherent with terror, babbling as wildly as if he sought to waken them from nightmare. Fafhrd nodded to himself — he knew the Mingol penchant for torture.
But then a disordered troop of Mingol cavalry had come galloping along in the same direction as the escaping Sarheenmarts. Their horses were lathered with sweat and their shiny faces contorted by terror. They appeared not to see Fafhrd, let alone consider attacking him, while it seemed not from malice but panic that they rode down such refugees as got in their way.
Fafhrd’s face grew grim and frowning as he cantered on, still against the gibbering stream, wondering what horror would daunt Mingol and Sarheenmart alike.
* * * *
Black rats kept showing themselves in Lankhmar by day — not stealing or biting, squealing or scurrying, but only showing themselves. They peered from drains and new-gnawed holes, they sat in window slits, they crouched indoors as calmly and confident-eyed as cats — and as often, proportionately, in milady’s boudoir as in the tenement-cells of the poor.
Whenever they were noted, there was a gasping and then shrieking, a rush of footsteps, and a hurling of black pots, begemmed bracelets, knives, rocks, chessmen, or whatever else might be handy. But often it was a time before the rats were noted, so serene and at home they seemed.
Some trotted sedately amidst the ankles and swaying black togas of the crowds on the tiled or cobbled streets, like pet dwarf dogs, causing sharp human eddies when they were recognized. Five sat like black, bright-eyed bottles on a top shelf in the store of the wealthiest grocer in Lankhmar, until they were spied for what they were and hysterically pelted with clumpy spice-roots, weighty Hrusp nuts, and even jars of caviar, whereupon they made their leisurely exit through a splinter-edged rat doorway which had not been in the back of the shelf the day before. Among the black marble sculptures lining the walls of the Temple of the Beasts, another dozen posed two-legged like carvings until the climax of the ritual, when they took up a fife-like squeaking and began a slow, sure-foot weaving through the niches. Beside the blind beggar Naph, three curled on the curb, mistaken for his soot-dirty rucksack, until a thief tried to steal it. Another reposed on the jeweled cushion of the pet black marmoset of Elakeria, niece of the overlord and a most lush devourer of lovers, until she absently reached out a plump hand to stroke the beastie and her nail-gilded fingers encountered not velvet fur, but short and bristly.
During floods and outbreaks of the dread Black Sickness, rats had in remembered times invaded the streets and dwellings of Lankhmar, but then they had raced and dodged or staggered in curves, never moved with their present impudent deliberation.
Their behavior made old folks and storytellers and thin-bearded squinting scholars fearfully recall the fables that there had once been a humped city of rats large as men where imperial Lankhmar had now stood for three-score centuries; that rats had once had a language and government of their own and a single empire stretching to the borders of the unknown world, coexistent with man’s cities but more unified; and that beneath the stoutly mortared stones of Lankhmar, far below their customary burrowings and any delvings of man, there was a low-ceilinged rodent metropolis with streets and homes and glow-lights all its own and granaries stuffed with stolen grain.
Now it seemed as if the rats owned not only that legendary sub-metropolitan rodent Lankhmar, but Lankhmar above ground as well, they stood and sat and moved so arrogantly.
The sailors from _Squid_, prepared to awe their sea-tavern cronies and get many free drinks with their tales of the horrid rat-attack on their ship, found Lankhmar interested only in its own rat plague. They were filled with chagrin and fear. Some of them returned for refuge to _Squid_, where the starsman’s light-defenses had been renewed and both Slinoor and the black kitten worriedly paced the poop.
——–

*Chapter Six*
After Frix and the rats had gone, Hisvet gazed at the Mouser for the space of a score of heartbeats, frowning just a little, studying him deeply with her red-irised eyes.
Finally she said with a sigh, “I wish I could be certain.”
“Certain of what, White Princessship?” the Mouser asked.
“Certain that you love me truly,” she answered softly yet downrightly, as if he surely knew. “Many men — aye and women too and demons and beasts — have told me they loved me truly, but truly I think none of them loved me for myself (save Frix, whose happiness is in being a shadow) but only because I was young or beautiful or a Demoiselle of Lankhmar or dreadfully clever or had a rich father or was dowered with power, being blood-related to the rats, which is a certain sign of power in more worlds than Nehwon. Do you truly love me for myself, Gray Mouser?”
“I love you most truly indeed, Shadow Princess,” the Mouser said with hardly an instant’s hesitation. “Truly I love you for yourself alone, Hisvet. I love you more dearly than aught else in Nehwon — aye, and in all other worlds too and heaven and hell besides.”
Just then Fafhrd, cruelly clawed or bit by the kitten, let off a most piteous groan indeed with a dreadful high note in it, and the Mouser said impulsively, “Dear Princess, first chase me that were-cat from my large friend, for I fear it will be his blinding and death’s bane, and then we shall discourse of our great loves to the end of eternity.”
“_That_ is what I mean,” Hisvet said softly and reproachfully. “If you loved me truly for myself, Gray Mouser, you would not care a feather if your closest friend or your wife or mother or child were tortured and done to death before your eyes, so long as my eyes were upon you and I touched you with my fingertips. With my kisses on your lips and my slim hands playing about you, my whole person accepting and welcoming you, you could watch your large friend there scratched to blindness and death by a cat — or mayhap eaten alive by rats — and be utterly content. I have touched few things in this world, Gray Mouser. I have touched no man, or male demon or larger male beast, save by the proxy of Frix. Remember that, Gray Mouser.”
“To be sure, Dear Light of my Life!” the Mouser replied most spiritedly, certain now of the sort of self-adoring madness with which he had to deal, since he had a touch of the same mania and so was well-acquainted with it. “Let the barbarian bleed to death by pinpricks! Let the cat have his eyes! Let the rats banquet on him to his bones! What skills it while we trade sweet words and caresses, discoursing to each other with our entire bodies and our whole souls!”
Meanwhile, however, he had started to saw again most fiercely with his now-dulled coin, unmindful of Hisvet’s eyes upon him. It joyed him to feel Cat’s Claw lying against his ribs.
“That’s spoken like my own true Mouser,” Hisvet said with most melting tenderness, brushing her fingers so close to his cheek that he could feel the tiny chill zephyr of their passage. Then, turning, she called, “Holla, Frix! Send to me Skwee and the White Company. Each may bring with him two black comrades of his own choice. I have somewhat of a reward for them, somewhat of a special treat. Skwee! Skwee-skwee-skwee!”
What would have happened then, both instantly and ultimately, is impossible to say, for at that moment Frix hailed, “Ahoy!” into the fog and called happily down, “A black sail, oh Blessed Demoiselle, it is your father!”
Out of the pearly fog to starboard came the shark’s-fin triangle of the upper portion of a black sail, running alongside _Squid_ aft of the dragging brown mainsail. Two boathooks, a small ship’s length apart, came up and clamped down on the starboard middeck rail while the black sail flapped. Frix came running lightly forward and secured to the rail midway between the boathooks the top of a rope ladder next heaved up from the black cutter (for surely this must be that dire craft, the Mouser thought).
Then up the ladder and over the rail came nimbly an old man of Lankhmar dressed all in black leather and on his left shoulder a white rat clinging with right forepaw to a cheek-flap of his black leather cap. He was followed swiftly by two lean bald Mingols with faces yellow-brown as old lemons, each shoulder-bearing a large black rat that steadied itself by a yellow ear.
At that moment, most coincidentally, Fafhrd groaned again, more loudly, and opened his eyes and cried out in the faraway moan of an opium-dreamer. “Millions of black monkeys! Take him off, I say! ‘Tis a black fiend of hell torments me! Take him off!”
At that the black kitten raised up, stretched out its small evil face, and bit Fafhrd on the nose. Disregarding this interruption, Hisvet threw up her hand at the newcomers and cried clearly, “Greetings, oh Co-commander my Father! Greetings, peerless rat-captain Grig! _Clam_ is conquered by you, now _Squid_ by me, and this very night, after small business of my own attended to, shall see the perdition of all this final fleet. Then it’s Movarl estranged, the Mingols across the Sinking Land, Glipkerio hurled down, and the rats ruling Lankhmar under my overlordship and yours!”
The Mouser, sawing ceaselessly at the third loop, glanced to note Skwee’s muzzle at that moment. The small white captain had come down from the afterdeck at Hisvet’s summoning along with eight white comrades, two bandaged, and now he shot Hisvet a silent look that seemed to say there might be doubts about the last item of her boast, once the rats ruled Lankhmar.
Hisvet’s father Hisvin had a long-nosed, much-wrinkled face patched by a week of white, old-man’s beard, and he seemed permanently stooped far over, yet he moved most briskly for all that, taking very rapid little shuffling steps.
Now he answered his daughter’s bragging speech with a petulant sideways flirt of his black glove close to his chest and a little impatient “Tsk-tsk!” of disapproval, then went circling the deck at his odd scuttling gait while the Mingols waited by the ladder-top. Hisvin circled by Fafhrd and his black tormentor (“Tsk-tsk!”) and by the Mouser (another “Tsk!”) and stopping in front of Hisvet said rapid and fumingly, still crouched over, jogging a bit from foot to foot, “Here’s confusion indeed tonight! You catsing and romancing with bound men! I know, I know! The moon coming through too much! (I’ll have my astrologer’s liver!) _Shark_ oaring like a mad cuttlefish through the foggy white! A black balloon with little lights scudding above the waves! And but now ere we found you, a vast sea monster swimming about in circles with a gibbering demon on his head — it came sniffing at us as if we were dinner, but we evaded it!
“Daughter, you and your maid and your little people must into the cutter at once with us, pausing only to slay these two and leave a suicide squad of gnawers to sink _Squid_!”
“Yeth, think _Thquid_!” the Mouser could have sworn he heard the rat on Hisvin’s shoulder lisp shrilly in Lankhmarese.
“Sink _Squid_?” Hisvet questioned. “The plan was to slip her to Ilthmar with a Mingol skeleton crew and there sell her cargo.”
“Plans change!” Hisvin snapped. “Daughter, if we’re not off this ship in forty breaths, _Shark_ will ram us by pure excess of blundering energy or the monster with the clown-clad mad mahout will eat us up as we drift here helpless. Give orders to Skwee! Then out with your knife and cut me those two fools’ throats! Quick, quick!”
“But, Daddy,” Hisvet objected, “I had something quite different in mind for them. Not death, at least not altogether. Something far more artistic, even loving — ”
“I give you thirty breaths each to torture ere you slay them!” Hisvin conceded. “Thirty breaths and not one more, mind you! I know your somethings!”
“Dad, don’t be crude! Among new friends! _Why_ must you always give people a wrong impression of me? I won’t endure it longer!”
“Chat-chat-chat! You pother and pose more than your rat-mother.”
“But I tell you I won’t endure it. This time we’re going to do things my way for a change!”
“Hist-hist!” her father commanded, stooping still lower and cupping hand to left ear, while his white rat Grig imitated his gesture on the other side.
Faintly through the fog came a gibbering. “_Gotterdammter Nebel! Freunde, wo sind Sie?” (“Goddam fog! Friends, where are you?” Evidently Karl Treuherz’s Lankhmarese dictionary was unavailable to him at the moment.) _
“‘Tis the gibberer!” Hisvin cried under his breath. “The monster will be upon us! Quick, daughter, out with your knife and slay, or I’ll have my Mingols dispatch them!”
Hisvet lifted her hand against that villainous possibility. Her proudly plumed head literally bent to the inevitable.
“I’ll do it,” she said. “Skwee, give me your crossbow. Load with silver.”
The white rat-captain folded his forelegs across his chest and chittered at her with a note of demand.
“No, you can’t have him,” she said sharply. “You can’t have either of them. They’re mine now.”
Another curt chitter from Skwee.
“Very well, your people may have the small black one. Now quick with your crossbow; or I’ll curse you! Remember, only a smooth silver dart.”
Hisvin had scuttled to his Mingols and now he went around in a little circle, almost spitting. Frix, smiling, glided to him and touched his arm but he shook away from her with an angry flirt.
Skwee was fumbling into his canister rat-frantically. His eight comrades were fanning out across the deck toward Fafhrd and the black kitten, which leaped down now in front of Fafhrd, snarling defiance.
Fafhrd himself was looking about, bloody-faced but at last lucid-eyed, drinking in the desperate situation, poppy-langour banished by nose-bite.
Just then there came another gibber through the fog, _”Gotterdammter Nirgendswelt!_” _(“Goddam Nowhere-World!”)_
Fafhrd’s bloodshot eyes widened and brightened with a great inspiration. Bracing himself against his bonds, he inflated his mighty chest.
“_Hoongk!_” he bellowed. “_Hoongk!_”
Out of the fog came eager answer, growing each time louder: _”Hoongk! Hoongk! Hoongk!” _
Seven of the eight white rats that had crossed the deck now returned carrying stretched between them the still-snarling black kitten, spread-eagled on its back, one to each paw and ear while the seventh tried to master but was shaken from side to side by the whipping tail. The eighth came hobbling behind on three legs, shoulder paralyzed by a deep-stabbing cat-bite.
From cabin and forecastle and all corners of the deck, the black rats scurried in to watch gloatingly their traditional enemy mastered and delivered to torment, until the middeck was thick with their bloaty dark forms.
Hisvin cracked a command at his Mingols. Each drew a wavy-edged knife. One headed for Fafhrd, the other for the Mouser. Black rats hid their feet.
Skwee dumped his tiny darts on the deck. His paw closed on a palely gleaming one and he slapped it in his crossbow, which he hurriedly handed up toward his mistress. She lifted it in her right hand toward Fafhrd, but just then the Mingol moving toward the Mouser crossed in front of her, his kreese point-first before him. She shifted crossbow to left hand, whipped out her dagger and darted ahead of the Mingol.
Meanwhile the Mouser had snapped the three cut loops with one surge. The others still confined him loosely at ankles and throat, but he reached across his body, drew Cat’s Claw and slashed out at the Mingol as Hisvet shouldered the yellow man aside.
The dirk sliced her pale cheek from jaw to nose.
The other Mingol, advancing his kreese toward Fafhrd’s throat, abruptly dropped to the deck and began to roll back across it, the black rats squeaking and snapping at him in surprise.
“_Hoongk_!”
A great green dragon’s head had loomed from the moon-mist over the larboard rail just at the spot where Fafhrd was tied. Strings of slaver trailed on the Northerner from the dagger-toothed jaws.
Like a ponderous jack-in-the-box, the red-mawed head dipped and drove forward, lower jaw rasping the oaken deck and sweeping up from it a swath of black rats three rats wide. The jaws crunched together on their great squealing mouthful inches from the rolling Mingol’s head. Then the green head swayed aloft and a horrid swelling traveled down the greenish-yellow neck.
But even as it poised there for a second strike, it shrank in size by comparison with what now appeared out of the mist after it — a second green dragon’s head fourfold larger and fantastically crested in red, orange and purple (for at first sight the rider seemed to be part of the monster). This head now drove forward as if it were that of the father of all dragons, sweeping up a black-rat swath twice as wide as had the first and topping off its monster gobble with the two white rats behind the rat-carried black kitten.
It ended its first strike so suddenly (perhaps to avoid eating the kitten) that its parti-colored rider, who’d been waving his pike futilely, was hurled forward off its green head. The rider sailed low past the mainmast, knocking aside the Mingol striking at the Mouser, and skidded across the deck into the starboard rail.
The white rats let go of the kitten, which raced for the mainmast.
Then the two green heads, famished by their two days of small fishy pickings since their last real meal at the Rat Rocks, began methodically to sweep _Squid_’s deck clean of rats, avoiding humans for the most part, though not very carefully. And the rats, huddled in their mobs, did little to evade this dreadful mowing. Perhaps in their straining toward world-dominion they had grown just human and civilized enough to experience imaginative, unhelpful, freezing panic and to have acquired something of humanity’s talent for inviting and enduring destruction. Perhaps they looked on the dragons’ heads as the twin red maws of war and hell, into which they must throw themselves willy-nilly. At all events they were swept up by dozens and scores. All but three of the white rats were among those engulfed.
Meanwhile the larger people aboard _Squid_ faced up variously to the drastically altered situation.
Old Hisvin shook his fist and spat in the larger dragon’s face when after its first gargantuan swallow it came questing toward him, as if trying to decide whether this bent black thing were (ugh!) a very queer man or (yum!) a very large rat. But when the stinking apparition kept coming on, Hisvin rolled deftly over the rail as if into bed and swiftly climbed down the rope ladder, fairly chittering in consternation, while Grig clung for dear life to the back of the black leather collar.
Hisvin’s two Mingols picked themselves up, and followed him, vowing to get back to their cozy cold steppes as soon as Mingolly possible.
Fafhrd and Karl Treuherz watched the melee from opposite sides of the middeck, the one bound by ropes, the other by out-wearied astonishment.
Skwee and a white rat named Siss ran over the heads of their packed apathetic black fellows and hopped on the starboard rail. There they looked back. Siss blinked in horror. But Skwee, his black-plumed helmet pushed down over his left eye, menaced with his little sword and chittered defiance.
Frix ran to Hisvet and urged her to the starboard rail. As they neared the head of the rope ladder, Skwee went down it to make way for his empress, dragging Siss with him. Just then Hisvet turned like someone in a dream. The smaller dragon’s head drove toward her viciously. Frix sprang in the way, arms wide, smiling, a little like a ballet dancer taking a curtain call. Perhaps it was the suddenness or seeming aggressiveness of her move that made the dragon sheer off, fangs clashing. The two girls climbed the rail.
Hisvet turned again, Cat’s Claw’s cut a bold red line across her face, and sighted her crossbow at the Mouser. There was the faintest silvery flash. Hisvet tossed the crossbow in the black sea and followed Frix down the ladder. The boathooks let go, the flapping black sail filled, and the black cutter faded into the mist.
The Mouser felt a little sting in his left temple, but he forgot it while whirling the last loops from his shoulders and ankles. Then he ran across the deck, disregarding the green heads lazily searching for last rat morsels, and cut Fafhrd’s bonds.
All the rest of that night the two adventurers conversed with Karl Treuherz, telling each other fabulous things about each other’s worlds, while Scylla’s sated daughter slowly circled _Squid_, first one head sleeping and then the other. Talking was slow and uncertain work, even with the aid of the little Lankhmarese-German German-Lankhmarese Dictionary for Space-Time and Inter-Cosmic Travelers, and neither party really believed a great deal of the other’s tales, yet pretended to for friendship’s sake.
“Do all men dress as grandly as you do in Tomorrow?” Fafhrd once asked, admiring the German’s purple and orange garb.
“No, Hagenbeck just has his employees do it, to spread his time zoo’s fame,” Karl Treuherz explained.
The last of the mist vanished just before dawn and they saw, silhouetted against the sea silvered by the sinking gibbous moon, the black ship of Karl Treuherz, hovering not a bowshot west of _Squid_, its little lights twinkling softly.
The German shouted for joy, summoned his sleepy monster by thwacking his pike against the rail, swung astride the larger head, and swam off calling after him, “_Auf Wiedersehen_!”
Fafhrd had learned just enough Gibberish during the night to know this meant, “Until we meet again.”
When the monster and the German had swum below it, the space-time engine descended, somehow engulfing them. Then a little later the black ship vanished.
“It dove into the infinite waters toward Karl’s Tomorrow bubble,” the Gray Mouser affirmed confidently. “By Ning and by Sheel, the German’s a master magician!”
Fafhrd blinked, frowned, and then simply shrugged.
The black kitten rubbed his ankle. Fafhrd lifted it gently to eye level, saying, “I wonder, kitten, if you’re one of the Cats’ Thirteen or else their small agent, sent to wake me when waking was needful?” The kitten smiled solemnly into Fafhrd’s cruelly scratched and bitten face and purred.
Clear gray dawn spread across the waters of the Inner Sea, showing them first _Squid_’s two boats crowded with men and Slinoor sitting dejected in the stern of the nearer but standing with uplifted hand as he recognized the figures of the Mouser and Fafhrd; next Lukeen’s war galley _Shark_ and the three other grain ships _Tunny, Carp_ and _Grouper_; lastly, small on the northern horizon the green sails of two dragon-ships of Movarl.
The Mouser, running his left hand back through his hair, felt a short, straight, rounded ridge in his temple under the skin. He knew it was Hisvet’s smooth silver dart, there to stay.
——–