*Chapter Five*
Two hours later the Demoiselle Hisvet offered to the Mouser, “A golden rilk for your thoughts, Dirksman.”
She was on the swung-down sea-bed once more, half reclining. The long table, now laden with tempting viands and tall silver wine cups, had been placed against the bed. Fafhrd sat across from Hisvet, the empty silver cages behind him, while the Mouser was at the stern end of the table. Frix served them all from the door forward, where she took the trays from the cook’s boys without giving them so much as a peep inside. She had a small brazier there for keeping hot such items as required it and she tasted each dish and set it aside for a while before serving it. Thick dark-pink candles in silver sconces shed a pale light.
The white rats crouched in rather disorderly fashion around a little table of their own set on the floor near the wall between the sea-bed and the door, just aft of one of the trapdoors opening down into the grain-redolent hold. They wore little black jackets open at the front and little black belts around their middles. They seemed more to play with than eat the bits of food Frix set before them on their three or four little silver plates and they did not lift their small bowls to drink their wine-tinted water but rather lapped at them and that not very industriously. One or two would always be scampering up onto the bed to be with Hisvet, which made them most difficult to count, even for Fafhrd, who had the best view. Sometimes he got eleven, sometimes ten. At intervals one of them would stand up on the pink coverlet by Hisvet’s knees and chitter at her in cadences so like those of human speech that Fafhrd and the Mouser would have to chuckle.
“Dreamy Dirksman, two rilks for your thoughts!” Hisvet repeated, upping her offer. “And most immodestly I’ll wager a third rilk they are of me.”
The Mouser smiled and lifted his eyebrows. He was feeling very light-headed and a bit uneasy, chiefly because contrary to his intentions he had been drinking much more than Fafhrd. Frix had just served them the main dish, a masterly yellow curry heavy with dark-tasting spices and originally appearing with “Victor” pricked on it with black capers. Fafhrd was devouring it manfully, though not voraciously, the Mouser was going at it more slowly, while Hisvet all evening had merely toyed with her food.
“I’ll take your two rilks, White Princess,” the Mouser replied airily, “for I’ll need one to pay the wager you’ve just won and the other to fee you for telling me _what_ I was thinking of you.”
“You’ll not keep my second rilk long, Dirksman,” Hisvet said merrily, “for as you thought of me you were looking not at my face, but most impudently somewhat lower. You were thinking of those somewhat nasty suspicions Lukeen voiced this day about my secretest person. Confess it now, you were!”
The Mouser could only hang his head a little and shrug helplessly, for she had most truly divined his thoughts. Hisvet laughed and frowned at him in mock anger, saying, “Oh, you are most indelicate minded, Dirksman. Yet at least you can see that Frix, though indubitably mammalian, is not fronted like a she-rat.”
This statement was undeniably true, for Hisvet’s maid was all dark smooth skin except where black silk scarves narrowly circled her slim body at breasts and hips. Silver net tightly confined her black hair and there were many plain silver bracelets on each wrist. Yet although garbed like a slave, Frix did not seem one tonight, but rather a lady-companion who expertly played at being slave, serving them all with perfect yet laughing, wholly unservile obedience.
Hisvet, by contrast, was wearing another of her long smocks, this of black silk edged with black lace, with a lace-edged hood half thrown back. Her silvery white hair was dressed high on her head in great smooth swelling sweeps. Regarding her across the table, Fafhrd said, “I am certain that the Demoiselle would be no less than completely beautiful to us in whatever shape she chose to present herself to the world — wholly human or somewhat otherwise.”
“Now that was most gallantly spoken, Swordsman,” Hisvet said with a somewhat breathless laugh. “I must reward you for it. Come to me, Frix.” As the slim maid bent close to her, Hisvet yet twined her white hands round the dark waist and imprinted a sweet slow kiss on Frix’s lips. Then she looked up, and gave a little tap on the shoulder to Frix, who moved smiling around the table and, half kneeling by Fafhrd, kissed him as she had been kissed. He received the token graciously, without unmannerly excitement, yet when Frix would have drawn back, prolonged the kiss, explaining a bit thickly when he released her: “Somewhat extra to return to the sender, perchance.” She grinned at him saucily and went to her serving table by the door, saying, “I must first chop the rats their meat, naughty barbarian,” while Hisvet discoursed, “Don’t seek too much, Bold Swordsman. That was in any case but a small proxy reward for a small gallant speech. A reward with the mouth for words spoken with the mouth. To reward you for drubbing Lukeen and vindicating my honor were a more serious matter altogether, not to be entered on lightly. I’ll think of it.”
At this point the Mouser, who just had to be saying something but whose fuddled brain was momentarily empty of suitably venturesome yet courteous wit, called out to Frix, “Why chop you the rats their mutton, dusky minx? ‘Twould be rare sport to see them slice it for themselves.” Frix only wrinkled her nose at him, but Hisvet expounded gravely, “Only Skwee carves with any great skill. The others might hurt themselves, particularly with the meat shifting about in the slippery curry. Frix, reserve a single chunk for Skwee to display us his ability. Chop the rest fine. Skwee!” she called, setting her voice high. “Skwee-skwee-skwee!”
A tall rat sprang onto the bed and stood dutifully before her with forelegs folded across his chest. Hisvet instructed him, then took from a silver box behind her a most tiny carving set of knife, steel and fork in joined treble scabbard and tied it carefully to his belt. Then Skwee bowed low to her and sprang nimbly down to the rats’ table.
The Mouser watched the little scene with clouded and heavy-lidded wonder, feeling that he was falling under some sort of spell. At times thick shadows crossed the cabin; at times Skwee grew tall as Hisvet or perhaps it was Hisvet tiny as Skwee. And then the Mouser grew small as Skwee, too, and ran under the bed and fell into a chute that darkly swiftly slid him, not into a dark hold of sacked or loose delicious grain, but into the dark, spacious, low-ceilinged pleasance of a subterranean rat-metropolis, lit by phosphorus, where robed and long-skirted rats whose hoods hid their long faces moved about mysteriously, where rat-swords clashed behind the next pillar and rat-money chinked, where lewd female rats danced in their fur for a fee, where masked rat-spies and rat-informers lurked, where everyone — every-furry-one — was cringingly conscious of the omniscient overlordship of a supernally powerful Council of Thirteen, and where a rat-Mouser sought everywhere a slim rat-princess named Hisvet-sur-Hisvin.
The Mouser woke from his dinnerdream with a jerk. Somehow he’d surely drunk even more cups than he’d counted, he told himself haltingly. Skwee, he saw, had returned to the rats’ table and was standing before the yellow chunk Frix had set on the silver platter at Skwee’s end. With the other rats watching him, Skwee drew forth knife and steel with a flourish. The Mouser roused himself more fully with another jerk and shake and was inspired to say, “Ah, were I but a rat, White Princess, so that I might come as close to you, serving you!”
The Demoiselle Hisvet cried, “A tribute indeed!” and laughed with delight showing — it appeared to the Mouser — a slim pink tongue half splotched with blue and an inner mouth similarly pied. Then she said rather soberly, “Have a care what you wish, for some wishes have been granted,” but at once continued gaily, “nevertheless, ’twas most gallantly said, Dirksman. I must reward you. Frix, sit at my right side here.”
The Mouser could not see what passed between them, for Hisvet’s loosely smocked form hid Frix from him, but the merry eyes of the maid peered steadily at him over Hisvet’s shoulder, twinkling like the black silk. Hisvet seemed to be whispering into Frix’s ear while nuzzling it playfully.
Meanwhile there commenced the faintest of high _skirrings_ as Skwee rapidly clashed steel and knife together, sharpening the latter. The Mouser could barely see the rat’s head and shoulders and the tiny glimmer of clashing metal over the larger table intervening. He felt the urge to stand and move closer to observe the prodigy — and perchance glimpse something of the interesting activities of Hisvet and Frix — but he was held fast by a great lethargy, whether of wine or sensuous anticipation or pure magic he could not tell.
He had one great worry — that Fafhrd would out with a cleverer compliment than his own, one so much cleverer that it might even divert Frix’s mission to him. But then he noted that Fafhrd’s chin had fallen to his chest, and there came to his ears along with the silvery _klirring_ the barbarian’s gently rumbling snores.
The Mouser’s first reaction was pure wicked relief. He remembered gloatingly past times he’d gamboled with generous, gay girls while his comrade snored sodden. Fafhrd must after all have been sneaking many extra swigs or whole drinks!
Frix jerked and giggled immoderately. Hisvet continued to whisper in her ear while Frix giggled and cooed again from time to time, continuing to watch the Mouser impishly.
Skwee scabbarded the steel with a tiny _clash_, drew the fork with a flourish, plunged it into the yellow-coated meat-chunk, big as a roast for him, and began to carve most dexterously.
Frix rose at last, received her tap from Hisvet, and headed around the table, smiling the while at the Mouser.
Skwee up with a paper-thin tiny slice of mutton on his fork and flapped it this way and that for all to see, then brought it close to his muzzle for a sniff and a taste.
The Mouser in his dreamy slump felt a sudden twinge of apprehension. It had occurred to him that Fafhrd simply couldn’t have sneaked _that_ much extra wine. Why, the Northerner hadn’t been out of his sight the past two hours. Of course blows on the head sometimes had a delayed effect.
All the same his first reaction was pure angry jealousy when Frix paused beside Fafhrd and leaned over his shoulder and looked in his forward-tipped face.
Just then there came a great squeak of outrage and alarm from Skwee and the white rat sprang up onto the bed, still holding carving knife and fork with the mutton slice dangling from it.
From under eyelids that persisted in drooping lower and lower, the Mouser watched Skwee gesticulate with his tiny implements, as he chittered dramatically to Hisvet in most man-like cadences, and finally lift the petal of mutton to her lips with an accusing squeak.
Then, coming faintly through the chittering, the Mouser heard a host of stealthy footsteps crossing the middeck, converging on the cabin. He tried to call Hisvet’s attention to it, but found his lips and tongue numb and unobedient to his will.
Frix suddenly grasped the hair of Fafhrd’s forehead and jerked his head up and back. The Northerner’s jaw hung slackly, his eyes fell open, showing only whites.
There was a gentle rapping at the door, exactly the same as the cook’s boys had made delivering the earlier courses.
A look passed between Hisvet and Frix. The latter dropped Fafhrd’s head, darted to the door, slammed the bar across it and locked the bar with the chain (the grille already being shut) just as something (a man’s shoulder, it sounded) thudded heavily against the thick panels.
That thudding continued and a few heartbeats later became much more sharply ponderous, as if a spare mast-section were being swung like a battering ram against the door, which yielded visibly at each blow.
The Mouser realized at last, much against his will, that something was happening that he ought to do something about. He made a great effort to shake off his lethargy and spring up.
He found he could not even twitch a finger. In fact it was all he could do to keep his eyes from closing altogether and watch through lash-blurred slits as Hisvet, Frix and the rats spun into a whirlwind of silent activity.
Frix jammed her serving table against the jolting door and began to pile other furniture against it.
Hisvet dragged out from behind the sea-bed various dark long boxes and began to unlock them. As fast as she threw them open the white rats helped themselves to the small blued-iron weapons they contained: swords, spears, even most wicked-looking blued-iron crossbows with belted canisters of darts. They took more weapons than they could effectively use themselves. Skwee hurriedly put on a black-plumed helmet that fitted down over his furry cheeks. The number of rats busy around the boxes was ten — that much the Mouser noted clearly.
A split appeared in the middle of the open door. Nevertheless Frix sprang away from there to the starboard trap-door leading to the hold and heaved it up. Hisvet threw herself on the floor toward it and thrust her head down into the dark square hole.
There was something terribly animal-like about the movements of the two women. It may have been only the cramped quarters and the low ceiling, but it seemed to the Mouser that they moved by preference on all fours.
All the while Fafhrd’s chest-sunk head kept lifting very slowly and then falling with a jerk as he went on snoring.
Hisvet sprang up and waved on the ten white rats. Led by Skwee, they trooped down through the hatch, their blued-iron weapons flashing and once or twice clashing, and were gone in a twinkling. Frix grabbed dark garments out of a curtained niche. Hisvet caught her by the wrist and thrust the maid ahead of her down the trap and then descended herself. Before pulling the hatch down above her, she took a last look around the cabin. As her red eyes gazed briefly at the Mouser, it seemed to him that her forehead and cheeks were grown over with silky white hair, but that may well have been a combination of eyelash-blur and her own disordered hair streaming and streaking down across her face.
The cabin door split and a man’s length of thick mast boomed through, overturning the bolstering table and scattering the furniture set on and against it. After the mast-end came piling in three apprehensive sailors followed by Slinoor, holding a cutlass low, and Slinoor’s starsman (navigation officer) with a crossbow at the cock.
Slinoor pressed ahead a little and surveyed the scene swiftly yet intently, then said, “Our poppy-dust curry has taken Glipkerio’s two lust-besotted rogues, but Hisvet’s hid with her nymphy slave-girl. The rats are out of their cages. Search, sailors! Starsman, cover us!”
Gingerly at first, but soon in a rush, the sailors searched the cabin, tumbling the empty boxes and jerking the quilts and mattress off the sea-bed and swinging it up to see beneath, heaving chests away from walls and flinging open the unlocked ones, sweeping Hisvet’s wardrobe in great silken armfuls out of the curtained niches in which it had been hanging.
The Mouser again made a mighty effort to speak or move, with no more success than to widen his blurred eye-slits a little. A sailor louted into him and he helplessly collapsed sideways against an arm of his chair without quite falling out of it. Fafhrd got a shove behind and slumped face-down on the table in a dish of stewed plums, his great arms outsweeping unconsciously, upsetting cups and scattering plates.
The starsman kept crossbow trained on each new space uncovered. Slinoor watched with eagle eye, flipping aside silken fripperies with his cutlass point and using it to overset the rats’ table, peering the while narrowly.
“There’s where the vermin feasted like men,” he observed disgustedly. “The curry was set before them. Would they had gorged themselves senseless on it.”
“Likely they were the ones to note the drug even through the masking spices of the curry, and warn the women,” the starsman put in. “Rats are prodigiously wise to poisons.”
As it became apparent neither girls nor rats were in the cabin, Slinoor cried with angry anxiety, “They can’t have escaped to the deck — there’s the sky-trap locked below besides our guard above. The mate’s party bars the after hold. Perchance the stern-lights — ”
But just then the Mouser heard one of the horn windows behind him being opened and _Squid_’s arms-master call from there, “Naught came this way. Where are they, captain?”
“Ask someone wittier than I,” Slinoor tossed him sourly. “Certain, they’re not here.”
“Would that these two could speak,” the starsman wished, indicating the Mouser and Fafhrd.
“No,” Slinoor said dourly. “They’d just lie. Cover the larboard trap to the hold. I’ll have it up and speak to the mate.”
Just then footsteps came hurrying across the middeck and _Squid_’s mate with blood-streaked face entered by the broken door, half dragging and half supporting a sailor who seemed to be holding a thin stick to his own bloody cheek.
“Why have you left the hold?” Slinoor demanded of the first. “You should be with your party below.”
“Rats ambushed us on our way to the after hold,” the mate gasped. “There were dozens of blacks led by a white, some armed like men. The sword of a beam-hanger almost cut my eye across. Two foamy-mouthed springers dashed out our lamp. ‘Twere pure folly to have gone on in the dark. There’s scarce a man of my party not bitten, slashed or jabbed. I left them guarding the foreway to the hold. They say their wounds are poisoned and talk of nailing down the hatch.”
“Oh monstrous cowardice!” Slinoor cried. “You’ve spoiled my trap that would have scotched them at the start. Now all’s to do and difficult. Oh scarelings! Daunted by rats!”
“I tell you they were armed!” the mate protested and then, swinging the sailor forward, “Here’s my proof with a spearlet in his cheek.”
“Don’t drag her out, captain, sir,” the sailor begged as Slinoor moved to examine his face. “‘Tis poisoned too, I wot.”
“Hold still, boy,” Slinoor commanded. “And take your hands away — I’ve got it firm. The point’s near the skin. I’ll drive it out forward so the barbs don’t catch. Pinion his arms, mate. Don’t move your face, boy, or you’ll be hurt worse. If it’s poisoned, it must come out the faster. There!”
The sailor squeaked. Fresh blood rilled down his cheek.
“‘Tis a nasty needle indeed,” Slinoor commended, inspecting the bloody point. “Doesn’t look poisoned. Mate, gently cut off the shaft aft of the wound, draw out the rest forward.”
“Here’s further proof, most wicked,” said the starsman, who’d been picking about in the litter. He handed Slinoor a tiny crossbow.
Slinoor held it up before him. In the pale candlelight it gleamed bluely, while the skipper’s dark-circled eyes were like agates.
“Here’s evil’s soul,” he cried. “Perchance ’twas well you were ambushed in the hold. ‘Twill teach each mariner to hate and fear all rats again, like a good grain-sailor should. And now by a swift certain killing of all rats on _Squid_ wipe out today’s traitorous foolery, when you clapped for rats and let rats lead your cheers, seduced by a scarlet girl and bribed by that most misnamed Mouser.”
The Mouser, still paralyzed and perforce watching Slinoor aslant as Slinoor pointed at him, had to admit it was a well-turned reference to himself.
“First off,” Slinoor said, “drag those two rogues on deck. Truss them to mast or rail. I’ll not have them waking to botch my victory.”
“Shall I up with a trap and loose a dart in the after hold?” the starsman asked eagerly.
“You should know better,” was all Slinoor answered.
“Shall I gong for the galley and run up a red lamp?” the mate suggested.
Slinoor was silent two heartbeats, then said, “No. This is _Squid_’s fight to wipe out today’s shame. Besides, Lukeen’s a hothead botcher. Forget I said that, gentlemen, but it is so.”
“Yet we’d be safer with the galley standing by,” the mate ventured to continue. “Even now the rats may be gnawing holes in us.”
“That’s unlikely with the Rat-Queen below,” Slinoor retorted. “Speed’s what will save us and not standby ships. Now hearken close. Guard well all ways to the hold. Keep traps and hatches shut. Rouse off the watch. Arm every man. Gather on middeck all we can spare from sailing. Move!”
The Mouser wished Slinoor hadn’t said “Move!” quite so vehemently, for the two sailors instantly grabbed his ankles and dragged him most enthusiastically out of the littered cabin and across the middeck, his head bumping a bit. True, he couldn’t feel the bumps, only hear them.
To the west the sky was a quarter globe of stars, to the east a mass of fog below and thinner mist above, with the gibbous moon shining through the latter like a pale misshapen silver ghost-lamp. The wind had slackened. _Squid_ sailed smoothly.
One sailor held the Mouser against the mainmast, facing aft, while the other looped rope around him. As the sailors bound him with his arms flat to his sides, the Mouser felt a tickle in his throat and life returning to his tongue, but he decided not to try to speak just yet. Slinoor in his present mood might order him gagged.
The Mouser’s next divertissement was watching Fafhrd dragged out by four sailors and bound lengthwise, facing inboard with head aft and higher than feet, to the larboard rail. It was quite a comic performance, but the Northerner snored through it.
Sailors began to gather then on middeck, some palely silent but most quipping in low voices. Pikes and cutlasses gave them courage. Some carried nets and long sharp-tined forks. Even the cook came with a great cleaver, which he hefted playfully at the Mouser.
“Struck dumb with admiration of my sleepy curry, eh?”
Meanwhile the Mouser found he could move his fingers. No one had bothered to disarm him, but Cat’s Claw was unfortunately fixed far too high on his left side for either hand to touch, let alone get out of its scabbard. He felt the hem of his tunic until he touched, through the cloth, a rather small flat round object thinner along one edge than the other. Gripping it by the thick edge through the cloth, he began to scrape with the thin edge at the fabric confining it.
The sailors crowded aft as Slinoor emerged from the cabin with his officers and began to issue low-voiced orders. The Mouser caught, “Slay Hisvet or her maid on sight. They’re not women but were-rats or worse,” and then the last of Slinoor’s orders: “Poise your parties below the hatch or trap by which you enter. When you hear the bosun’s whistle, move!”
The effect of this “Move!” was rather spoiled by a tiny _twing_ and the arms-master clapping his hand to his eye and screaming. There was a flurry of movement among the sailors. Cutlasses struck at a pale form that scurried along the deck. For an instant a rat with a crossbow in his fore-paws was silhouetted on the starboard rail against the moon-pale mist. Then the starsman’s crossbow twanged and the dart winging with exceptional accuracy or luck knocked the rat off the rail into the sea.
“That was a whitey, lads!” Slinoor cried. “A good omen!” Thereafter there was some confusion, but it was quickly settled, especially when it was discovered that the arms-master had not been stuck in the eye but only near it, and the beweaponed parties moved off, one into the cabin, two forward past the mainmast, leaving on deck a skeleton crew of four.
The fabric the Mouser had been scraping parted and he most carefully eased out of the shredded hem an iron tik (the Lankhmar coin of least value) with half its edge honed to razor sharpness and began to slice with it in tiny strokes at the nearest loop of the line binding him. He looked hopefully toward Fafhrd, but the latter’s head still hung at a senseless angle.
A whistle sounded faintly, followed some ten breaths later by a louder one from another part of the hold, it seemed. Then muffled shouts began to come in flurries, there were two screams, something thumped the deck from below, and a sailor swinging a rat squeaking in a net dashed past the Mouser.
The Mouser’s fingers told him he was almost through the first loop. Leaving it joined by a few threads, he began to slice at the next loop, bending his wrist acutely to do it.
An explosion shook the deck, stinging the Mouser’s feet. He could not conjecture its nature and sawed furiously with his sharpened coin. The skeleton crew cried out and one of the helmsmen fled forward but the other stuck by the tiller. Somehow the gong clanged once, though no one was by it.
Then _Squid_’s sailors began to pour up out of the hold, half of them without weapons and frantic with fear. They milled about. The Mouser could hear sailors dragging _Squid_’s boats, which were forward of the mainmast, to the ship’s side. The Mouser gathered that the sailors had fared most evilly below, assaulted by battalions of black rats, confused by false whistles, slashed and jabbed from dark corners, stung by darts, two struck in the eye and blinded. What had completed their rout was that, coming to a hold of unsacked grain, they’d found the air above it choked with grain dust from the recent churnings and scatterings of a horde of rats, and Frix had thrown in fire from beyond, exploding the stuff and knocking them off their feet though not setting fire to the ship.
At the same time as the panic-stricken sailors, there also came on deck another group, noted only by the Mouser; a most quiet and orderly file of black rats that went climbing around him up the mainmast. The Mouser weighed crying an alarm, although he wouldn’t have wagered a tik on his chances of survival with hysterical be-cutlassed sailors rat-slashing all around him.
In any case his decision was made for him in the negative by Skwee, who climbed on his left shoulder just then. Holding on by a lock of the Mouser’s hair, Skwee leaned out in front of him, staring into the Mouser’s left eye with his own two wally blue ones under his black-plumed silver helmet. Skwee touched pale paw to his buck-toothed lips, enjoining silence, then patted the little sword at his side and jerked his rat-thumb across his rat-throat to indicate the penalty for silence broken. Thereafter he retired into the shadows by the Mouser’s ear, presumably to watch the routed sailors and wave on and command his own company — and keep close to the Mouser’s jugular vein. The Mouser kept sawing with his coin.
The starsman came aft followed by three sailors with two white lanterns apiece. Skwee crowded back closer between the Mouser and the mast, but touched the cold flat of his sword to the Mouser’s neck, just under the ear, as a reminder. The Mouser remembered Hisvet’s kiss. With a frown at the Mouser the starsman avoided the mainmast and had the sailors hang their lanterns to the aftermast and the crane fittings and the forward range of the afterdeck, fussing about the exact positions. He asserted in a high babble that light was the perfect military defense and counter-weapon, and talked wildly of light-entrenchments and light palisades, and was just about to set the sailors hunting more lamps, when Slinoor limped out of the cabin bloody-foreheaded and looked around.
“Courage, lads,” Slinoor shouted hoarsely. “On deck we’re still masters. Let down the boats orderly, lads, we’ll need ’em to fetch the marines. Run up the red lamp! You there, gong the alarm!”
Someone responded, “The gong’s gone overboard. The ropes that hung it — gnawed!”
At the same time thickening waves of fog came out of the east, shrouding _Squid_ in deadly moonlit silver. A sailor moaned. It was a strange fog that seemed to increase rather than diminish the amount of light cast by the moon and the starsman’s lantern. Colors stood out, yet soon there were only white walls beyond the _Squid_’s rails.
Slinoor ordered, “Get up the spare gong! Cook, let’s have your biggest kettles, lids and pots — anything to beat an alarm!”
There were two splashing thumps as _Squid_’s boats hit the water.
Someone screamed agonizingly in the cabin.
Then two things happened together. The mainsail parted from the mast, falling to starboard like a cathedral ceiling in a gale, its lines and ties to the mast gnawed loose or sawed by tiny swords. It floated darkly on the water, dragging the boom wide. _Squid_ lurched to starboard.
At the same time a horde of black rats spewed out of the cabin door and came pouring over the taffrail, the latter presumably by way of the stern lights. They rushed at the humans in waves, springing with equal force and resolution whether they landed on pike points or tooth-clinging to noses and throats.
The sailors broke and made for the rafts, rats landing on their backs and nipping at their heels. The officers fled too. Slinoor was carried along, crying for a last stand. Skwee out with his sword on the Mouser’s shoulder and bravely waved on his suicidal soldiery, chittering high, then leaped down to follow in their rear. Four white rats armed with crossbows knelt on the crane fittings and began to crank, load and fire with great efficiency.
Splashings began, first two and three, then what sounded like a half dozen together, mixed with screams. The Mouser twisted his head around and from the corner of his eye saw the last two of _Squid_’s sailors leap over the side. Straining a little further around yet, he saw Slinoor clutch to his chest two rats that worried him, and follow the sailors. The four white-furred arbalesters leaped down from the crane fittings and raced toward a new firing position on the prow. Hoarse human cries came up from the water and faded off. Silence fell on _Squid_ like the fog, broken only by the inevitable chitterings — and those few now.
When the Mouser turned his head aft again, Hisvet was standing before him. She was dressed in close-fitting black leather from neck to elbows and knees, looking most like a slim boy, and she wore a black leather helmet fitting down over her temples and cheeks like Skwee’s silver one, her white hair streaming down in a tail behind making her plume. A slim dagger was scabbarded on her left hip.
“Dear, dear Dirksman,” she said softly, smiling with her little mouth, “you at least do not desert me,” and she reached out and almost brushed his cheek with her fingers. Then, “Bound!” she said, seeming to see the rope for the first time and drawing back her hand “We must remedy that, Dirksman.”
“I would be most grateful, White Princess,” the Mouser said humbly. Nevertheless, he did not let go his sharpened coin, which although somewhat dulled had now sliced almost halfway through a third loop.
“We must remedy that,” Hisvet repeated a little absently, her gaze straying beyond the Mouser. “But my fingers are too soft and unskilled to deal with such mighty knots as I see. Frix will release you. Now I must hear Skwee’s report on the afterdeck. Skwee-skwee-skwee!”
As she turned and walked aft the Mouser saw that her hair all went through a silver-ringed hole in the back top of her black helmet. Skwee came running past the Mouser and when he had almost caught up with Hisvet he took position to her right and three rat-paces behind her, strutting with forepaw on sword-hilt and head held high, like a captain-general behind his empress.
As the Mouser resumed his weary sawing of the third loop, he looked at Fafhrd bound to the rail and saw that the black kitten was crouched fur-on-end on Fafhrd’s neck and slowly raking his cheek with the spread claws of a fore-paw while the Northerner still snored garglingly. Then the kitten dipped its head and bit Fafhrd’s ear. Fafhrd groaned piteously, but then came another of the gargling snores. The kitten resumed its cheek-raking. Two rats, one white, one black, walked by and the kitten wailed at them softly yet direly. The rats stopped and stared, then scurried straight toward the afterdeck, presumably to report the unwholesome condition to Skwee or Hisvet.
The Mouser decided to burst loose without more ado, but just then the four white arbalesters came back dragging a brass cage of frightened cheeping wrens the Mouser remembered seeing hanging by a sailor’s bunk in the forecastle. They stopped by the crane fittings again and started a wrenshoot. They’d release one of the tiny terrified mutterers, then as it whisked off bring it down with a well-aimed dart — at distances up to five and six yards, never missing. Once or twice one of them would glance at the Mouser narrowly and touch the dart’s point.
Frix stepped down the ladder from the afterdeck. She was now dressed like her mistress, except she had no helmet, only the tight silver hairnet, though the silver rings were gone from her wrists.
“Lady Frix!” the Mouser called in a light voice, almost gaily. It was hard to say how one should speak on a ship manned by rats, but a high voice seemed indicated.
She came toward him smiling, but, “Frix will do better,” she said. “Lady is such a corset title.”
“Frix then,” the Mouser called. “on your way would you scare that black witch cat from our poppy-sodden friend? He’ll rake out my comrade’s eye.”
Frix looked sideways to see what the Mouser meant, but still kept stepping toward him.
“I never interfere with another person’s pleasures or pains, since it’s hard to be certain which are which,” she informed him, coming close. “I only carry out my mistress’ directives. Now she bids me tell you be patient and of good cheer. Your trials will soon be over. And this withal she sends you as a remembrancer.” Lifting her mouth, she kissed the Mouser softly on each upper eyelid.
The Mouser said, “That’s the kiss with which the unseen priestess of Djil seals the eyes of those departing this world.”
“Is it?” Frix asked softly.
“Aye, ’tis,” the Mouser said with a little shudder, continuing briskly, “So now undo me these knots, Frix, which is something your mistress has directed. And then perchance give me a livelier smack — after I’ve looked to Fafhrd.”
“I only carry out the directives of my mistress’ own mouth,” Frix said, shaking her head a little sadly. “She said nothing to me about untying knots. But doubtless she will direct me to loose you shortly.”
“Doubtless,” the Mouser agreed, a little glumly, forbearing to saw with his coin at the third loop while Frix watched him. If he could but sever at once three loops, he told himself, he might be able to shake off the remaining ones in a not impossibly large number of heartbeats.
As if on cue, Hisvet stepped lightly down from the afterdeck and hastened to them.
“Dear mistress, do you bid me undo the Dirksman his knots?” Frix asked at once, almost as if she wanted to be told to.
“I will attend to matters here,” Hisvet replied hurriedly. “Go you to the afterdeck, Frix, and hearken and watch for my father. He delays overlong this night.” She also ordered the white crossbow-rats, who’d winged their last wren, to retire to the afterdeck.
——–

*Chapter Four*
Despite Slinoor’s urging, the sun was dropping down the western sky before _Squid_’s gongsman beat the rapid brassy tattoo that signalized the imminence of combat. The sky was clear to the west and overhead, but the sinister fog-bank still rested a Lankhmar league (twenty bowshots) to the east, paralleling the northward course of the fleet and looking almost as solid and dazzling as a glacier wall in the sun’s crosswise rays. Most mysteriously neither hot sun nor west wind dissipated it.
Black-suited, brown-mailed and brown-helmeted marines facing aft made a wall across _Squid_ to either side of the mainmast. They held their spears horizontal and crosswise at arm’s-length down, making an additional low fence. Black-tunicked sailors peered between their shoulders and boots, or sat with their own brown legs a-dangle on the larboard side of the foredeck, where the great sail did not cut off their view. A few perched in the rigging.
The damaged rail had been stripped away from the break in the afterdeck and there around the bare aftermast sat the three judges: Slinoor, the Mouser, and Lukeen’s sergeant. Around them, mostly to larboard of the two helmsmen, were grouped _Squid_’s officers and certain officers of the other ship on whose presence the Mouser had stubbornly insisted, though it had meant time-consuming ferrying by ship’s boat.
Hisvet and Frix were in the cabin with the door shut. The Demoiselle had wanted to watch the duel through the open door or even from the afterdeck, but Lukeen had protested that this would make it easier for her to work an evil spell on him, and the judges had ruled for Lukeen. However the grille was open and now and again the sun’s rays twinkled on a peering eye or silvered fingernail.
Between the dark spear-wall of marines and the afterdeck stretched a great square of white oaken deck, empty save for the crane-fittings and like fixed gear and level except for the main hatch, which made a central square of deck a hand’s span above the rest. Each corner of the larger square was marked off by a black-chalked quarter circle. Either contestant stepping inside a quarter circle after the duel began (or springing on the rail or grasping the rigging or falling over the side) would at once forfeit the match.
In the forward larboard quarter circle stood Lukeen in black shirt and hose, still wearing his gold-banded starfish emblem. By him was his second, his own hawkfaced lieutenant. With his right hand Lukeen gripped his quarter-staff, a heavy wand of close-grained oak as tall as himself and thick as Hisvet’s wrist. Raising it above his head he twirled it till it hummed. He smiled fiendishly.
In the after starboard quarter circle, next to the cabin door, were Fafhrd and his second, the mate of _Carp_, a grossly fat man with a touch of the Mingol in his sallow features. The Mouser could not be judge and second both, and he and Fafhrd had diced more than once with _Carp_’s mate in the old days at Lankhmar — losing money to him, too, which at least indicated that he might be resourceful.
Fafhrd took from him now his own quarterstaff, gripping it cross-handed near one end. He made a few slow practice passes with it through the air, then handed it back to _Carp_’s mate and stripped off his jerkin.
Lukeen’s marines sniggered to each other at the Northerner handling a quarterstaff as if it were a two-handed broadsword, but when Fafhrd bared his hairy chest _Squid_’s sailors set up a rousing cheer and when Lukeen commented loudly to his second, “What did I tell you? A great hairy-pelted ape, beyond question,” and spun his staff again, the sailors booed him lustily.
“Strange,” Slinoor commented in a low voice. “I had thought Lukeen to be popular among the sailors.”
Lukeen’s sergeant looked around incredulously at that re-mark. The Mouser only shrugged. Slinoor continued to him, “If the sailors knew your comrade fought on the side of rats, they’d not cheer him.” The Mouser only smiled.
The gong sounded again.
Slinoor rose and spoke loudly: “A bout at quarterstaves with no breathing spells! Commander Lukeen seeks to prove on the overlord’s mercenary Fafhrd certain allegations against a Demoiselle of Lankhmar. First man struck senseless or at mercy of his foe loses. Prepare!”
The ship’s boys went skipping across the middeck, scattering handfuls of white sand.
Sitting, Slinoor remarked to the Mouser, “A pox of this footling duel! It delays our action against Hisvet and the rats. Lukeen was a fool to bridle at the barbarian. Still, when he’s drubbed him, there’ll be time enough.”
The Mouser lifted an eyebrow. Slinoor said lightly, “Oh didn’t you know? Lukeen will win; that’s certain,” while the sergeant, nodding soberly, confirmed, “The Commander’s a master of staves. “‘Tis no game for barbarians.”
The gong sounded a third time.
Lukeen sprang nimbly across the chalk and onto the hatch, crying, “Ho, hairy ape! Art ready to double-kiss the oak? First my staff, then the deck?”
Fafhrd came shambling out, gripping his wand most awkwardly and responding, “Your spit has poisoned my left eye, Lukeen, but I see some civilized target with my right.”
Lukeen dashed at him joyously then, feinting at elbow and head, then rapidly striking with the other end of his staff at Fafhrd’s knee to tumble or lame him.
Fafhrd, abruptly switching to conventional stance and grip, parried the blow and swung a lightning riposte at Lukeen’s jaw.
Lukeen got his staff up in time so that the blow hit only his cheek glancingly, but he was unsettled by it and thereafter Fafhrd was upon him, driving him back in a hail of barely parried blows while the sailors cheered.
Slinoor and the sergeant gaped wide-eyed, but the Mouser only knotted his fingers, muttering, “Not so fast, Fafhrd.”
Then, as Fafhrd prepared to end it all, he stumbled, stepping off the hatch, which changed his swift blow to the head into a slow blow at the ankles. Lukeen leaped up so that Fafhrd’s staff passed under his feet, and while he was still in the air rapped Fafhrd on the head.
The sailors groaned. The marines cheered once, growlingly.
The unfooted blow was not of the heaviest, nonetheless it three-quarters stunned Fafhrd and now it was his turn to be driven back under a pelting shower of swipes. For several moments there was no sound but the rutch of soft-soled boots on sanded oak and the rapid dry musical _bong_ of staff meeting staff.
When Fafhrd came suddenly to his full senses he was falling away from a wicked swing. A glimpse of black by his heel told him that his next inevitable backward step would carry him inside his own quarter circle.
Swift as thought he thrust far behind him with his staff. Its end struck deck, then stopped against the cabin wall, and Fafhrd heaved himself forward with it, away from the chalk line, ducking and lunging to the side to escape Lukeen’s blows while his staff could not protect him.
The sailors screamed with excitement. The judges and officers on the afterdeck kneeled like dice-players, peering over the edge.
Fafhrd had to lift his left arm to guard his head. He took a blow on the elbow and his left arm dropped limp to his side. Thereafter he had to handle his staff like a broad-sword indeed, swinging it one-handed in whistling parries and strokes.
Lukeen hung back, playing more cautiously now, knowing Fafhrd’s one wrist must tire sooner than his two. He’d aim a few rapid blows at Fafhrd, then prance back.
Barely parrying the third of these attacks, Fafhrd riposted recklessly, not with a proper swinging blow, but simply gripping the end of his staff and lunging. The combined length of Fafhrd and his staff overtook Lukeen’s retreat and the tip of Fafhrd’s staff poked him low in the chest, just on the nerve spot.
Lukeen’s jaw dropped, his mouth stayed open wide, and he wavered. Fafhrd smartly rapped his staff out of his fingers and as it clattered down, toppled Lukeen to the deck with a second almost casual prod.
The sailors cheered themselves hoarse. The marines growled surlily and one cried, “Foul!” Lukeen’s second knelt by him, glaring at Fafhrd. _Carp_’s mate danced a ponderous jig up to Fafhrd and wafted the wand out of his hands. On the afterdeck _Squid_’s officers were glum, though those of the other grain ships seemed strangely jubilant. The Mouser gripped Slinoor’s elbow, urging, “Cry Fafhrd victor,” while the sergeant frowned prodigiously, hand to temple, saying, “Well, there’s nothing I know of in the _rules_…”
At that moment the cabin door opened and Hisvet stepped out, wearing a long scarlet, scarlet-hooded silk robe.
The Mouser, sensing climax, sprang to starboard, where _Squid_’s gong hung, snatched the striker from the gongsman and clanged it wildly.
_Squid_ grew silent. Then there were pointings and questioning cries as Hisvet was seen. She put a silver recorder to her lips and began to dance dreamily toward Fafhrd, softly whistling with her recorder a high haunting tune of seven notes in a minor key. From somewhere tiny tuned bells accompanied it tinklingly. Then Hisvet swung to one side, facing Fafhrd as she moved around him, and the questioning cries changed to ones of wonder and astonishment and the sailors came crowding as far aft as they could and swinging through the rigging, as the procession became visible that Hisvet headed.
It consisted of eleven white rats walking in single file on their hind legs and wearing little scarlet robes and caps. The first four carried in each forepaw clusters of tiny silver bells which they shook rhythmically. The next five bore on their shoulders, hanging down between them a little, a double length of looped gleaming silver chain — they were very like five sailors lugging an anchor chain. The last two each bore slantwise a slim silver wand as tall as himself as he walked erect, tail curving high.
The first four halted side by side in rank facing Fafhrd and tinkling their bells to Hisvet’s piping.
The next five marched on steadily to Fafhrd’s right foot. There their leader paused, looked up at Fafhrd’s face with upraised paw, and squeaked three times. Then, gripping his end of the chain in one paw, he used his other three to climb Fafhrd’s boot. Imitated by his four fellows, he then carefully climbed Fafhrd’s trousers and hairy chest.
Fafhrd stared down at the mounting chain and scarlet-robed rats without moving a muscle, except to frown faintly as tiny paws unavoidably tweaked clumps of his chest-hair.
The first rat mounted to Fafhrd’s right shoulder and moved behind his back to his left shoulder, the four other rats following in order and never letting slip the chain.
When all five rats were standing on Fafhrd’s shoulders, they lifted one strand of the silver chain and brought it forward over his head, most dextrously. Meanwhile he was looking straight ahead at Hisvet, who had completely circled him and now stood piping behind the bell-tinklers.
The five rats dropped the strand so that the chain hung in a gleaming oval down Fafhrd’s chest. At the same instant each rat lifted his scarlet cap high above his head as his foreleg would reach.
Someone cried, “Victor!”
The five rats swung down their caps and again lifted them high, and as if from one throat all the sailors and most of the marines and officers cried in a great shout: “_Victor!_”
The five rats led two more cheers for Fafhrd, the men aboard _Squid_ obeying as if hypnotized — though whether by some magic power or simply by the wonder and appropriateness of the rats’ behavior, it was hard to tell.
Hisvet finished her piping with a merry flourish and the two rats with silver wands scurried up onto the afterdeck and standing at the foot of the aftermast where all might see, began to drub away at each other in most authentic quarterstaff style, their wands flashing in the sunlight and chiming sweetly when they clashed. The silence broke in rounds of exclamation and laughter. The five rats scampered down Fafhrd and returned with the bell-tinklers to cluster around the hem of Hisvet’s skirt. Mouser and several officers were leaping down from the afterdeck to wring Fafhrd’s good hand or clap his back. The marines had much ado to hold back the sailors, who were offering each other bets on which rat would be the winner in this new bout.
Fafhrd, fingering his chain, remarked to the Mouser, “Strange that the sailors were with me from the start,” and under cover of the hubbub the Mouser smilingly explained, “I gave them money to bet on you against the marines. Likewise I dropped some hints and made some loans for the same purpose to the officers of the other ships — a fighter can’t have too big a claque. Also I started the story going round that the whiteys are anti-rat rats, trained exterminators of their own kind, sample of Glipkerio’s latest device for the safety of the grain fleets — sailors eat up such tosh.”
“Did you first cry victor?” Fafhrd asked.
The Mouser grinned. “A judge take sides? In _civilized_ combat? Oh, I was prepared to, but ’twasn’t needful.”
At that moment Fafhrd felt a small tug at his trousers and looking down saw that the black kitten had bravely approached through the forest of legs and was now climbing him purposefully. Touched at this further display of animal homage, Fafhrd rumbled gently as the kitten reached his belt, “Decided to heal our quarrel, eh, small black one?” At that the kitten sprang up his chest, sunk his little claws in Fafhrd’s bare shoulder and, glaring like a black hangman, raked Fafhrd bloodily across the jaw, then sprang by way of a couple of startled heads to the mainsail and rapidly climbed its concave taut brown curve. Someone threw a belaying pin at the small black blot, but it was negligently aimed and the kitten safely reached the mast-top.
“I forswear all cats!” Fafhrd cried angrily, dabbling at his chin. “Henceforth rats are my favored beasties.”
“Most properly spoken, Swordsman!” Hisvet called gaily from her own circle of admirers, continuing, “I will be pleased by your company and the Dirksman’s at dinner in my cabin an hour past sunset. We’ll conform to the very letter of Slinoor’s stricture that I be closely watched and the White Shadows too.” She whistled a little call on her silver recorder and swept back into her cabin with the nine rats close at her heels. The quarterstaving scarlet-robed pair on the afterdeck broke off their drubbing with neither victorious and scampered after her, the crowd parting to make way for them admiringly.
Slinoor, hurrying forward, paused to watch. _Squid_’s skipper was a man deeply bemused. Somewhere in the last half hour the white rats had been transformed from eerie poison-toothed monsters threatening the fleet into popular, clever, harmless animal-mountebanks, whom _Squid_’s sailors appeared to regard as a band of white mascots. Slinoor seemed to be seeking unsuccessfully but unceasingly to decipher how and why.
Lukeen, still looking very pale, followed the last of his disgruntled marines (their purses lighter by many a silver smerduk, for they had been coaxed into offering odds) over the side into _Shark_’s long dinghy, brushing off Slinoor when _Squid_’s skipper would have conferred with him.
Slinoor vented his chagrin by harshly commanding his sailors to leave off their disorderly milling and frisking, but they obeyed him right cheerily, skipping to their proper stations with the happiest of sailor smirks. Those passing the Mouser winked at him and surreptitiously touched their forelocks. _Squid_ bowled smartly northward a half bowshot astern of _Tunny_, as she’d been doing throughout the duel, only now she began to cleave the blue water a little more swiftly yet as the west wind freshened and her after sail was broken out. In fact, the fleet began to sail so swiftly now that _Shark_’s dinghy couldn’t make the head of the line, although Lukeen could be noted bullying his marine-oarsmen into back-cracking efforts, and the dinghy had finally come to signal _Shark_ herself to come back and pick her up — which the war galley achieved only with difficulty, rolling dangerously in the mounting seas and taking until sunset, oars helping sails, to return to the head of the line.
“_He_’ll not be eager to come to _Squid_’s help tonight, or much able to either,” Fafhrd commented to the Mouser where they stood by the larboard middeck rail. There had been no open break between them and Slinoor, but they were inclined to leave him the afterdeck, where he stood beyond the helmsmen in bent-head converse with his three officers, who had all lost money on Lukeen and had been sticking close to their skipper ever since.
“Not still expecting _that_ sort of peril tonight are you, Fafhrd?” the Mouser asked with a soft laugh. “We’re far past the Rat Rocks.”
Fafhrd shrugged and said frowningly, “Perhaps we’ve gone just a shade too far in endorsing the rats.”
“Perhaps,” the Mouser agreed. “But then their charming mistress is worth a fib and false stamp or two, aye and more than that, eh, Fafhrd?”
“She’s a brave sweet lass,” Fafhrd said carefully.
“Aye, and her maid too,” the Mouser said brightly. “I noted Frix peering at you adoringly from the cabin entryway after your victory. A most voluptuous wench. Some men might well prefer the maid to the mistress in this instance. Fafhrd?”
Without looking around at the Mouser, the Northerner shook his head.
The Mouser studied Fafhrd, wondering if it were politic to make a certain proposal he had in mind. He was not quite certain of the full nature of Fafhrd’s feelings toward Hisvet. He knew the Northerner was a goatish man enough and had yesterday seemed quite obsessed with the love-making they’d missed in Lankhmar, yet he also knew that his comrade had a variable romantic streak that was sometimes thin as a thread yet sometimes grew into a silken ribbon leagues wide in which armies might stumble and be lost.
On the afterdeck Slinoor was now conferring most earnestly with the cook, presumably (the Mouser decided) about Hisvet’s (and his own and Fafhrd’s) dinner. The thought of Slinoor having to go to so much trouble about the pleasures of three persons who today had thoroughly thwarted him made the Mouser grin and somehow also nerved him to take the uncertain step he’d been contemplating.
“Fafhrd,” he whispered, “I’ll dice you for Hisvet’s favors.”
“Why, Hisvet’s but a girl — ” Fafhrd began in accents of rebuke, then cut off abruptly and closed his eyes in thought. When he opened them, they were regarding the Mouser with a large smile.
“No,” Fafhrd said softly, “for truly I think this Hisvet is so balky and fantastic a miss it will take both our most heartfelt and cunning efforts to persuade her to aught. And, after that, who knows? Dicing for such a girl’s favors were like betting when a Lankhmar night-lily will open and whether to north or south.”
The Mouser chuckled and lovingly dug Fafhrd in the ribs, saying, “There’s my shrewd true comrade!”
Fafhrd looked at the Mouser with sudden dark suspicions. “Now don’t go trying to get me drunk tonight,” he warned, “or sifting opium in my drink.”
“Hah, you know me better than that, Fafhrd,” the Mouser said with laughing reproach.
“I certainly do,” Fafhrd agreed sardonically.
Again the sun went under with a green flash, indicating crystal clear all to the west, though the strange fogbank, now an ominous dark wall, still paralleled their course a league or so to the east.
The cook, crying, “My mutton!” went racing forward past them toward the galley, whence a deliciously spicy aroma was wafting.
“We’ve an hour to kill,” the Mouser said. “Come on, Fafhrd. On our way to board _Squid_ I bought a little jar of wine of Quarmall at the Silver Eel. It’s still sealed.”
From just overhead in the rat-lines, the black kitten hissed down at them in angry menace or perhaps warning.

*Chapter Three*
Out of the fog to larboard came a green serpent’s head big as a horse’s, with white dagger teeth fencing red mouth horrendously agape. With dreadful swiftness it lunged low past Fafhrd on its endless yellow neck, its lower jaw loudly scraping the deck, and the white daggers clashed on the black kitten.
Or rather, on where the kitten had just been. For the latter seemed not so much to leap as to lift itself, by its tail perhaps, onto the starboard rail and thence vanished into the fog at the top of the aftermast in at most three more bounds.
The helmsmen raced each other forward. Slinoor and the Mouser threw themselves against the starboard taffrail, the unmanned tiller swinging slowly above them affording some sense of protection against the monster, which now lifted its nightmare head and swayed it this way and that, each time avoiding Fafhrd by inches. Apparently it was searching for the black kitten or more like it.
Fafhrd stood frozen, at first by sheer shock, then by the thought that whatever part of him moved first would get snapped off.
Nevertheless he was about to jump for it — besides all else the monster’s mere stench was horrible — when a second green dragon’s head, four times as big as the first with teeth like scimitars, came looming out of the fog. Sitting commandingly atop this second head was a man dressed in orange and purple, like a herald of the Eastern Lands, with red boots, cape and helmet, the last with a blue window in it, seemingly of opaque glass.
There is a point of grotesquerie beyond which horror cannot go, but slips into delirium. Fafhrd had reached that point. He began to feel as if he were in an opium dream. Everything was unquestionably real, yet it had lost its power to horrify him acutely.
He noticed as the merest of quaint details that the two greenish yellow necks forked from a common trunk.
Besides, the gaudily garbed man or demon riding the larger head seemed very sure of himself, which might or might not be a good thing. Just now he was belaboring the smaller head, seemingly in rebuke, with a blunt-pointed, blunt-hooked pike he carried, and roaring out, either under or through his blue-red helmet, a gibberish that might be rendered as:
“_Gotterdammer Ungeheuer!”_^ _(“Goddam monster!” German is a language completely unknown in Nehwon_.)
The smaller head cringed away, whimpering like seventeen puppies. The man-demon whipped out a small book of pages and after consulting it twice (apparently he could see out through his blue window) called down in broken outlandishly accented Lankhmarese, “What world is this, friend?”
Fafhrd had never before in his life heard that question asked, even by an awakening brandy guzzler. Nevertheless in his opium-dream mood he answered easily enough, “The world of Nehwon, oh sorcerer!”
“_Gott sei dank!_”(^ _”Thank God!”)_ the man-demon gibbered.
Fafhrd asked, “What world do _you_ hail from?”
The question seemed to confound the man-demon. Hurriedly consulting his book, he replied, “Do you know about other worlds? Don’t you believe the stars are only huge jewels?”
Fafhrd responded, “Any fool can see that the lights in the sky are jewels, but we are not simpletons, we know of other worlds. The Lankhmarts think they’re bubbles in infinite waters. _I_ believe we live in the jewel-ceilinged skull of a dead god. But doubtless there are other such skulls, the universe of universes being a great frosty battlefield.”
The tiller, swinging as _Squid_ wallowed with sail a-flap, bumped the lesser head, which twisted around and snapped at it, then shook splinters from its teeth.
“Tell the sorcerer to keep it off!” Slinoor shouted, cringing.
After more hurried page-flipping the man-demon called down, “Don’t worry, the monster seems to eat only rats. I captured it by a small rocky island where many rats live. It mistook your small black ship’s cat for a rat.”
Still in his mood of opium-lucidity, Fafhrd called up, “Oh sorcerer, do you plan to conjure the monster to your own skull-world, or world-bubble?”
This question seemed doubly to confound and excite the man-demon. He appeared to think Fafhrd must be a mind reader. With much frantic book-consulting, he explained that he came from a world called simply Tomorrow and that he was visiting many worlds to collect monsters for some sort of museum or zoo, which he called in his gibberish _Hagenbecks Zeitgarten.( Literally, in German, “_Hagenbecks_ Time garden,” apparently derived from _Tiergarten_, which means animal-garden, or zoo. _
On this particular expedition he had been seeking a monster that would be a reasonable facsimile of a wholly mythical six-headed sea-monster that devoured men off the decks of ships and was called Scylla by an ancient fantasy writer named Homer.
“There never was a Lankhmar poet named Homer,” muttered Slinoor.
“Doubtless he was a minor scribe of Quarmall or the Eastern Lands,” the Mouser told Slinoor reassuringly. Then, grown less fearful of the two heads and somewhat jealous of Fafhrd holding the center of the stage, the Mouser leapt atop the taffrail and cried, “Oh, sorcerer, with what spells will you conjure your Little Scylla back to, or perhaps I should say ahead to your Tomorrow bubble? I myself know somewhat of witchcraft. Desist, vermin!” This last remark was directed with a gesture of lordly contempt toward the lesser head, which came questing curiously toward the Mouser. Slinoor gripped the Mouser’s ankle.
The man-demon reacted to the Mouser’s question by slapping himself on the side of his red helmet, as though he’d forgotten something most important. He hurriedly began to explain that he traveled between worlds in a ship (or space-time engine, whatever that might mean) that tended to float just above the water — “a black ship with little lights and masts” — and that the ship had floated away from him in another fog a day ago while he’d been absorbed in taming the newly captured sea-monster. Since then the man-demon, mounted on his now-docile monster, had been fruitlessly searching for his lost vehicle.
The description awakened a memory in Slinoor, who managed to nerve himself to explain audibly that last sunset _Squid_’s crow’s nest had sighted just such a ship floating or flying to the northeast.
The man-demon was voluble in his thanks and after questioning Slinoor closely announced (rather to everyone’s relief) that he was now ready to turn his search eastward with new hope.
“Probably I will never have the opportunity to repay your courtesies,” he said in parting. “But as you drift through the waters of eternity at least carry with you my name: Karl Treuherz of _Hagenbecks_.”
Hisvet, who had been listening from the middeck, chose that moment to climb the short ladder that led up to the afterdeck. She was wearing an ermine smock and hood against the chilly fog.
As her silvery hair and pale lovely features rose above the level of the afterdeck the smaller dragon’s head, which had been withdrawing decorously, darted at her with the speed of a serpent striking. Hisvet dropped. Woodwork rended loudly.
Backing out into the fog atop the larger and rather benign-eyed head, Karl Treuherz gibbered as never before and belabored the lesser head mercilessly as it withdrew.
Then the two-headed monster with its orange-and-purple mahout could be dimly seen moving around _Squid_’s stern eastward into thicker fog, the man-demon gibbering gentlier what might have been an excuse and farewell: _”Es tut mir sehr leid! Aber danke schoen, danke schoen!” (^ It was: “I am so very sorry! But thank you, thank you so nicely!”)_
With a last gentle _”Hoongk!”_ the man-demon dragon-dragon assemblage faded into the fog.
Fafhrd and the Mouser raced a tie to Hisvet’s side, vaulting down over the splintered rail, only to have her scornfully reject their solicitude as she lifted herself from the oaken middeck, delicately rubbing her hip and limping for a step or two.
“Come not near me, Spoonmen,” she said bitterly. “Shame it is when a Demoiselle must save herself from toothy perdition only by falling helter-skelter on that part of her which I would almost shame to show you on Frix. You are no gentle knights, else dragons’ heads had littered the after-deck. Fie, fie!”
Meanwhile patches of clear sky and water began to show to the west and the wind to freshen from the same quarter. Slinoor dashed forward, bawling for his bosun to chase the monster-scared sailors up from the forecastle before _Squid_ did herself an injury. Although there was yet little real danger of that, the Mouser stood by the tiller, Fafhrd looked to the mainsheet. Then Slinoor, hurrying back aft followed by a few pale sailors, sprang to the taffrail with a cry.
The fogbank was slowly rolling eastward. Clear water stretched to the western horizon. Two bowshots north of _Squid_, four other ships were emerging in a disordered cluster from the white wall: the war galley _Shark_ and the grain ships _Tunny, Carp_ and _Grouper_. The galley, moving rapidly under oars, was headed toward _Squid_.
But Slinoor was staring south. There, a scant bowshot away, were two ships, the one standing clear of the fog-bank, the other half hid in it.
The one in the clear was _Clam_, about to sink by the head, its gunwales awash. Its mainsail, somehow carried away, trailed brownly in the water. The empty deck was weirdly arched upward.
The fog-shrouded ship appeared to be a black cutter with a black sail.
Between the two ships, from _Clam_ toward the cutter, moved a multitude of tiny, dark-headed ripples.
Fafhrd joined Slinoor. Without looking away, the latter said simply, “Rats!” Fafhrd’s eyebrows rose.
The Mouser joined them, saying, “_Clam_’s holed. The water swells the grain, which mightily forces up the deck.”
Slinoor nodded and pointed toward the cutter. It was possible dimly to see tiny dark forms — rats surely! — climbing over its side from out of the water. “There’s what gnawed holes in _Clam_,” Slinoor said.
Then Slinoor pointed between the ships, near the cutter. Among the last of the ripple-army was a white-headed one. A second later a small white form could be seen swiftly mounting the cutter’s side. Slinoor said, “There’s what commanded the hole-gnawers.”
With a dull splintering rumble the arched deck of _Clam_ burst upward, spewing brown.
“The grain!” Slinoor cried hollowly.
“Now you know what tears ships,” the Mouser said.
The black cutter grew ghostlier, moving west now into the retreating fog.
The galley _Shark_ went boiling past _Squid_’s stern, its oars moving like the legs of a leaping centipede. Lukeen shouted up, “Here’s foul trickery! _Clam_ was lured off in the night!”
The black cutter, winning its race with the eastward-rolling fog, vanished in whiteness.
The split-decked _Clam_ nosed under with hardly a ripple and angled down into the black and salty depths, dragged by its leaden keel.
With war trumpet skirling, _Shark_ drove into the white wall after the cutter.
_Clam_’s masthead, cutting a little furrow in the swell, went under. All that was to be seen now on the waters south of _Squid_ was a great spreading stain of tawny grain.
Slinoor turned grim-faced to his mate. “Enter the Demoiselle Hisvet’s cabin, by force if need be,” he commanded. “Count her white rats!”
Fafhrd and the Mouser looked at each other.
* * * *
Three hours later the same four persons were assembled in Hisvet’s cabin with the Demoiselle, Frix and Lukeen.
The cabin, low-ceilinged enough so that Fafhrd, Lukeen and the mate must move bent and tended to sit hunch-shouldered, was spacious for a grain ship, yet crowded by this company together with the caged rats and Hisvet’s perfumed, silver-bound baggage piled on Slinoor’s dark furniture and locked sea chests.
Three horn windows to the stern and louver slits to starboard and larboard let in a muted light.
Slinoor and Lukeen sat against the horn windows, behind a narrow table. Fafhrd occupied a cleared sea chest, the Mouser an upended cask. Between them were racked the four rat-cages, whose white-furred occupants seemed as quietly intent on the proceedings as any of the men. The Mouser amused himself by imagining what it would be like if the white rats were trying the men instead of the other way round. A row of blue-eyed white rats would make most formidable judges, already robed in ermine. He pictured them staring down mercilessly from very high seats at a tiny cringing Lukeen and Slinoor, round whom scuttled mouse pages and mouse clerks and behind whom stood rat pikemen in half armor holding fantastically barbed and curvy-bladed weapons.
The mate stood stooping by the open grille of the closed door, in part to see that no other sailors eavesdropped.
The Demoiselle Hisvet sat cross-legged on the swung-down sea-bed, her ermine smock decorously tucked under her knees, managing to look most distant and courtly even in this attitude. Now and again her right hand played with the dark wavy hair of Frix, who crouched on the deck at her knees.
Timbers creaked as _Squid_ bowled north. Now and then the bare feet of the helmsmen could be heard faintly slithering on the afterdeck overhead. Around the small trapdoor-like hatches leading below and through the very crevices of the planking came the astringent, toastlike, all-pervasive odor of the grain.
Lukeen spoke. He was a lean, slant-shouldered, cordily muscled man almost as big as Fafhrd. His short coat of browned-iron mail over his simple black tunic was of the finest links. A golden band confined his dark hair and bound to his forehead the browned-iron five-pointed curvy-edged starfish emblem of Lankhmar.
“How do I know _Clam_ was lured away? Two hours before dawn I twice thought I heard _Shark_’s own gong-note in the distance, although I stood then beside _Shark_’s muffled gong. Three of my crew heard it too. ‘Twas most eerie. Gentlemen, I know the gong-notes of Lankhmar war galleys and merchantmen better than I know my children’s voices. This that we heard was so like _Shark_’s I never dreamed it might be that of another ship — I deemed it some ominous ghost-echo or trick of our minds and I thought no more about it as a matter for action. If I had only had the faintest suspicion….”
Lukeen scowled bitterly, shaking his head, and continued, “Now I know the black cutter must carry a gong shaped to duplicate _Shark_’s note precisely. They used it, likely with someone mimicking my voice, to draw _Clam_ out of line in the fog and get her far enough off so that the rat-horde, officered by the white one, could work its will on her without the crew’s screams being heard. They must have gnawed twenty holes in her bottom for _Clam_ to take on water so fast and the grain to swell so. Oh, they’re far shrewder and more persevering than men, the little spade-toothed fiends!”
“Midsea madness!” Fafhrd snorted in interruption. “Rats make men scream? And do away with them? Rats seize a ship and sink it? Rats officered and accepting discipline? Why this is the strangest superstition!”
“You’re a fine one to talk of superstition and the impossible, Fafhrd,” Slinoor shot at him, “when only this morning you talked with a masked and gibbering demon who rode a two-headed dragon.”
Lukeen lifted his eyebrows at Slinoor. This was the first he’d heard of the Hagenbeck episode.
Fafhrd said, “That was travel between worlds. Another matter altogether. No superstition in it.”
Slinoor responded skeptically, “I suppose there was no superstition in it either when you told me what you’d heard from the Wise Woman about the Thirteen?”
Fafhrd laughed. “Why, I never believed one word the Wise Woman ever told me. She was a witchy old fool. I recounted her nonsense merely as a curiosity.”
Slinoor eyed Fafhrd with slit-eyed incredulity, then said to Lukeen, “Continue.”
“There’s little more to tell,” the latter said. “I saw the rat-battalions swimming from _Clam_ to the black cutter. I saw, as you did, their white officer.” This with a glare at Fafhrd. “Thereafter I fruitlessly hunted the black cutter two hours in the fog until cramp took my rowers. If I’d found her, I’d’ve not boarded her but thrown fire into her! Aye, and stood off the rats with burning oil on the waters if they tried again to change ships! Aye, and laughed as the furred murderers fried!”
“Just so,” Slinoor said with finality. “And what, in your judgment, Commander Lukeen, should we do now?”
“Sink the white archfiends in their cages,” Lukeen answered instantly, “before they order the rape of more ships, or our sailors go mad with fear.”
This brought an instant icy retort from Hisvet. “You’ll have to sink me first, silver-weighted, oh Commander!”
Lukeen’s gaze moved past her to a scatter of big-eared silver unguent jars and several looped heavy silver chains on a shelf by the bed. “That too is not impossible, Demoiselle,” he said, smiling hardly.
“There’s not one shred of proof against her!” Fafhrd exploded. “Little Mistress, the man is mad.”
“No proof?” Lukeen roared. “There were twelve white rats yesterday. Now there are eleven.” He waved a hand at the stacked cages and their blue-eyed haughty occupants. “You’ve all counted them. Who else but this devilish Demoiselle sent the white officer to direct the sharp-toothed gnawers and killers that destroyed _Clam_? What more proof do you want?”
“Yes, indeed!” the Mouser interjected in a high vibrant voice that commanded attention. “There is proof aplenty…_if_ there were twelve rats in the four cages yesterday.” Then he added casually but very clearly, “It is my recollection that there were eleven.”
Slinoor stared at the Mouser as though he couldn’t believe his ears. “You lie!” he said. “What’s more, you lie senselessly. Why, you and Fafhrd and I all spoke of there being twelve white rats!”
The Mouser shook his head. “Fafhrd and I said no word about the exact number of rats. _You_ said there were a dozen,” he informed Slinoor. “Not twelve, but … a dozen. I assumed you were using the expression as a round number, an approximation.” The Mouser snapped his fingers. “Now I remember that when you said a dozen I became idly curious and counted the rats. And got eleven. But it seemed to me too trifling a matter to dispute.”
“No, there were twelve rats yesterday,” Slinoor asserted solemnly and with great conviction. “You’re mistaken, Gray Mouser.”
“I’ll believe my friend Slinoor before a dozen of you,” Lukeen put in.
“True, friends should stick together,” the Mouser said with an approving smile. “Yesterday I counted Glipkerio’s gift-rats and got eleven. Ship’s Master Slinoor, any man may be mistaken in his recollections from time to time. Let’s analyze this. Twelve white rats divided by four silver cages equals three to a cage. Now let me see … I have it! There was a time yesterday when between us, we surely counted the rats — when we carried them down to this cabin. How many were in the cage you carried, Slinoor?”
“Three,” the latter said instantly.
“And three in mine,” the Mouser said.
“And three in each of the other two,” Lukeen put in impatiently. “We waste time!”
“We certainly do,” Slinoor agreed strongly, nodding.
“Wait!” said the Mouser, lifting a point-fingered hand. “There was a moment when all of us must have noticed how many rats there were in one of the cages Fafhrd carried — when he first lifted it up, speaking the while to Hisvet. Visualize it. He lifted it like this.” The Mouser touched his thumb to his third finger. “How many rats were in that cage, Slinoor?”
Slinoor frowned deeply. “Two,” he said, adding instantly, “and four in the other.”
“You said three in each just now,” the Mouser reminded him.
“I did not!” Slinoor denied. “Lukeen said that, not I.”
“Yes, but you nodded, agreeing with him,” the Mouser said, his raised eyebrows the very emblem of innocent truth-seeking.
“I agreed with him only that we wasted time,” Slinoor said. “And we do.” Just the same a little of the frown lingered between his eyes and his voice had lost its edge of utter certainty.
“I see,” the Mouser said doubtfully. By stages he had begun to play the part of an attorney elucidating a case in court, striding about and frowning most professionally. Now he shot a sudden question: “Fafhrd, how many rats did you carry?”
“Five,” boldly answered the Northerner, whose mathematics were not of the sharpest, but who’d had plenty time to count surreptitiously on his fingers and to think about what the Mouser was up to. “Two in one cage, three in the other.”
“A feeble falsehood!” Lukeen scoffed. “The base barbarian would swear to anything to win a smile from the Demoiselle, who has him fawning.”
“That’s a foul lie!” Fafhrd roared, springing up and fetching his head such a great hollow thump on a deck beam that he clapped both hands to it and crouched in dizzy agony.
“Sit down, Fafhrd, before I ask you to apologize to the deck!” the Mouser commanded with heartless harshness. “This is solemn civilized court, no barbarous brawling session! Let’s see — three and three and five make … eleven. Demoiselle Hisvet!” He pointed an accusing finger straight between her red-irised eyes and demanded most sternly, “How many white rats did you bring aboard _Squid_? The truth now and nothing but the truth!”
“Eleven,” she answered demurely. “La, but I’m joyed someone at last had the wit to ask me.”
“That I know’s not true!” Slinoor said abruptly, his brow once more clear. “Why didn’t I think of it before? — ‘twould have saved us all this bother of questions and counting. I have in this very cabin Glipkerio’s letter of commission to me. In it he speaks verbatim of entrusting to me the Demoiselle Hisvet, daughter of Hisvin, and twelve witty white rats. Wait, I’ll get it out and prove it to your faces!”
“No need, Ship’s Master,” Hisvet interposed. “I saw the letter writ and can testify to the perfect truth of your quotations. But most sadly, between the sending of the letter and my boarding of _Squid_, poor Tchy was gobbled up by Glippy’s giant boarhound Bimbat.” She touched a slim finger to the corner of her eye and sniffed. “Poor Tchy, he was the most winsome of the twelve. ‘Twas why I kept to my cabin the first two days.” Each time she spoke the name Tchy, the eleven caged rats chittered mournfully.
“Is it Glippy you call our overlord?” Slinoor ejaculated, genuinely shocked. “Oh shameless one!”
“Aye, watch your language, Demoiselle,” the Mouser warned severely, maintaining to the hilt his new role of austere inquisitor. “Any familiar relationship between you and our overlord the arch-noble Glipkerio Kistomerces does not come within the province of this court.”
“She lies like a shrewd subtle witch!” Lukeen asserted angrily. “Thumbscrew or rack, or perchance just a pale arm twisted high behind her back would get the truth from her fast enough!”
Hisvet turned and looked at him proudly. “I accept your challenge, Commander,” she said evenly, laying her right hand on her maid’s dark head. “Frix, reach out your naked hand, or whatever other part of you the brave gentleman wishes to torture.” The dark maid straightened her back. Her face was impassive, lips firmly pressed together, though her eyes searched around wildly. Hisvet continued to Slinoor and Lukeen, “If you know any Lankhmar law at all, you know that a virgin of the rank of Demoiselle is tortured only in the person of her maid, who proves by her steadfastness under extreme pain the innocence of her mistress.”
“What did I tell you about her?” Lukeen demanded of them all. “Subtle is too gross a term for her spiderwebby sleights!” He glared at Hisvet and said scornfully, his mouth a-twist, “Virgin!”
Hisvet smiled with cold long-suffering. Fafhrd flushed and although still holding his battered head, barely refrained from leaping up again. Lukeen looked at him with amusement, secure in his knowledge that he could bait Fafhrd at will and that the barbarian lacked the civilized wit to insult him deeply in return.
Fafhrd stared thoughtfully at Lukeen from under his capping hands. Then he said, “Yes, you’re brave enough in armor, with your threats against girls and your hot imaginings of torture, but if you were without armor and had to prove your manhood with just one brave girl alone, you’d fall like a worm!”
Lukeen shot up enraged and got himself such a clout from a deck beam that he squeaked shudderingly and swayed. Nevertheless he gripped blindly for his sword at his side. Slinoor grasped that wrist and pulled him down into his seat.
“Govern yourself, Commander,” Slinoor implored sternly, seeming to grow in resolution as the rest quarreled and quibbled. “Fafhrd, no more dagger words. Gray Mouser, this is not your court but mine and we are not met to split the hairs of high law but to meet a present peril. Here and now this grain fleet is in grave danger. Our very lives are risked. Much more than that, Lankhmar’s in danger if Movarl gets not his gift-grain at this third sending. Last night _Clam_ was foully murdered. Tonight it may be _Grouper_ or _Squid, Shark_ even, or no less than all our ships. The first two fleets went warned and well guarded, yet suffered only total perdition.”
He paused to let that sink in. Then, “Mouser, you’ve roused some small doubts in my mind by your eleven-twelving. But small doubts are nothing where home lives and home cities are in peril. For the safety of the fleet and of Lankhmar we’ll sink the white rats forthwith and keep close watch on the Demoiselle Hisvet to the very docks of Kvarch Nar.”
“Right!” the Mouser cried approvingly, getting in ahead of Hisvet. But then he instantly added, with the air of sudden brilliant inspiration, “_Or_…better yet … appoint Fafhrd and myself to keep unending watch not only on Hisvet but also on the eleven white rats. That way we don’t spoil Glipkerio’s gift and risk offending Movarl.”
“I’d trust no one’s mere watching of the rats. They’re too tricksy,” Slinoor informed him. “The Demoiselle I intend to put on _Shark_, where she’ll be more closely guarded. The grain is what Movarl wants, not the rats. He doesn’t know about them, so can’t be angered at not getting them.”
“But he does know about them,” Hisvet interjected. “Glipkerio and Movarl exchange weekly letters by albatross-post. La, but Nehwon grows smaller each year, Ship’s Master — ships are snails compared to the great winging mail-birds. Glipkerio wrote of the rats to Movarl, who expressed great delight at the prospective gift and intense anticipation of watching the White Shadows perform. Along with myself,” she added, demurely bending her head.
“Also,” the Mouser put in rapidly, “I must firmly oppose — most regretfully, Slinoor — the transfer of Hisvet to another ship. Fafhrd’s and my commission from Glipkerio, which I can produce at any time, states in clearest words that we are to attend the Demoiselle at all times outside her private quarters. He makes us wholly responsible for her safety — and also for that of the White Shadows, which creatures our overlord states, again in clearest writing, that he prizes beyond their weight in jewels.”
“You can attend her in _Shark_,” Slinoor told the Mouser curtly.
“I’ll not have the barbarian on my ship!” Lukeen rasped, still squinting from the pain of his clout.
“I’d scorn to board such a tricked-out rowboat or oar-worm,” Fafhrd shot back at him, voicing the common barbarian contempt for galleys.
“_Also_,” the Mouser cut in again, loudly, with an admonitory gesture at Fafhrd, “it is my duty as a friend to warn you, Slinoor, that in your reckless threats against the White Shadows and the Demoiselle herself, you risk incurring the heaviest displeasure not only of our overlord but also of the most powerful grain-merchant in Lankhmar.”
Slinoor answered most simply, “I think only of the City and the grain fleet. You know that,” but Lukeen, fuming, spat out a “Hah!” and said scornfully, “The Gray Fool has not grasped that it is Hisvet’s very father Hisvin who is behind the rat-sinkings, since he thereby grows rich with the extra nation’s-ransoms of grain he sells Glipkerio!”
“Quiet, Lukeen!” Slinoor commanded apprehensively. “This dubious guesswork of yours has no place here.”
“Guesswork? Mine?” Lukeen exploded. “It was _your_ suggestion, Slinoor — Yes, and that Hisvin plots Glipkerio’s overthrow — Aye, and even that he’s in league with the Mingols! Let’s speak truth for once!”
“Then speak it for yourself alone, Commander,” Slinoor said most sober-sharply. “I fear the blow’s disordered your brain. Gray Mouser, you’re a man of sense,” he appealed. “Can you not understand my one overriding concern? We’re alone with mass murder on the high seas. We must take measures against it. Oh, will none of you show some simple wit?”
“La, and I will, Ship’s Master, since you ask it,” Hisvet said brightly, rising to her knees on the sea-bed as she turned toward Slinoor. Sunlight striking through a louver shimmered on her silver hair and gleamed from the silver ring confining it. “I’m but a girl, unused to problems of war and rapine, yet I have an all-explaining simple thought that I have waited in vain to hear voiced by one of you gentlemen, wise in the ways of violence.
“Last night a ship was slain. You hang the crime on rats — small beasties which would leave a sinking ship in any case, which often have a few whites among them, and which only by the wildest stretch of imagination are picturable as killing an entire crew and vanishing their bodies. To fill the great gaps in this weird theory you make me a sinister rat-queen, who can work black miracles, and now even, it seems, create my poor doting daddy an all-powerful rat-emperor.
“Yet this morning you met a ship’s murderer if there ever was one and let him go honking off unchallenged. La, but the man-demon even confessed he’d been seeking a multi-headed monster that would snatch living men from a ship’s deck and devour them. Surely he lied when he said his this-world foundling ate small fry only, for it struck at me to devour me — and might earlier have snapped up any of you, except it was sated!
“For what is more likely than that the two-head long-neck dragon ate all _Clam_’s sailors off her deck, snaking them out of the forecastle and hold, if they fled there, like sweetmeats from a compartmented comfit-box, and then scratched holes in _Clam_’s planking? Or perhaps more likely still, that _Clam_ tore out her bottom on the Dragon Rocks in the fog and at the same time met the sea-dragon? These are sober possibilities, gentlemen, apparent even to a soft girl and asking no mind-stretch at all.”
This startling speech brought forth an excited medley of reactions. Simultaneously the Mouser applauded, “A gem of princess-wit, Demoiselle; oh you’d make a rare strategist.” Fafhrd said stoutly, “Most lucid, Little Mistress, yet Karl Treuherz seemed to me an honest demon.” Frix told them proudly, “My mistress outthinks you all.” The mate at the door goggled at Hisvet and made the sign of the starfish. Lukeen snarled, “She conveniently forgets the black cutter,” while Slinoor cried them all down with, “Rat-queen you say jestingly? Rat-queen you are!”
As the others grew silent at that dire accusation, Slinoor gazing grimly fearful at Hisvet, continued rapidly, “The Demoiselle has recalled to me by her speech the worst point against her. Karl Treuherz said his dragon, living by the Rat Rocks, ate only rats. It made no move to gobble us several men, though it had every chance, yet when Hisvet appeared it struck at her at once. It knew her true race.”
Slinoor’s voice went shudderingly low. “Thirteen rats with the minds of men rule the whole rat race. That’s ancient wisdom from Lankhmar’s wisest seers. Eleven are these silver-furred silent sharpies, hearing our every word. The twelfth celebrates in the black cutter his conquest of _Clam_. The thirteenth” — and he pointed finger — “is the silver-haired, red-eyed Demoiselle herself!”
Lukeen slithered to his feet at that, crying, “Oh most shrewdly reasoned, Slinoor! And why does she wear such modest shrouding garb except to hide further evidence of the dread kinship? Let me but strip off that cloaking ermine smock and I’ll show you a white-furred body and ten small black dugs instead of proper maiden breasts!”
As he came snaking around the table toward Hisvet, Fafhrd sprang up, also cautiously, and pinned Lukeen’s arms to his sides in a bear-hug, calling, “Nay, and you touch her, you die!”
Meantime Frix cried, “The dragon was sated with _Clam_’s crew, as my mistress told you. It wanted no more coarse-fibered men, but eagerly seized at my dainty-fleshed darling for a dessert mouthful!”
Lukeen wrenched around until his black eyes glared into Fafhrd’s green ones inches away. “Oh most foul barbarian!” he grated. “I forego rank and dignity and challenge you this instant to a bout of quarterstaves on middeck. I’ll prove Hisvet’s taint on you by trial of battle. That is, if you dare face civilized combat, you great stinking ape!” And he spat full in Fafhrd’s taunting face.
Fafhrd’s only reaction was to smile a great smile through the spittle running gummily down his cheek, while maintaining his grip of Lukeen and wary lookout for a bite at his own nose.
Thereafter, challenge having been given and accepted, there was naught for even the head-shaking, heaven-glancing Slinoor to do but hurry preparation for the combat or duel, so that it might be fought before sunset and leave some daylight for taking sober measures for the fleet’s safety in the approaching dark of night.
As Slinoor, the Mouser and mate came around them, Fafhrd released Lukeen, who scornfully averting his gaze instantly went on deck to summon a squad of his marines from _Shark_ to second him and see fair play. Slinoor conferred with his mate and other officers. The Mouser, after a word with Fafhrd, slipped forward and could be seen gossiping industriously with _Squid’_s bosun and the common members of her crew down to cook and cabin boy. Occasionally something might have passed rapidly from the Mouser’s hand to that of the sailor with whom he spoke.
——–

*Chapter Two*
With the motherly-generous west wind filling their brown triangular sails, the slim war galley and the five broad-beamed grain ships, two nights out of Lankhmar, coursed north in line ahead across the Inner Sea of the ancient world of Nehwon.
It was late afternoon of one of those mild blue days when sea and sky are the same hue, providing irrefutable evidence for the hypothesis currently favored by Lankhmar philosophers: that Nehwon is a giant bubble rising through the waters of eternity with continents, islands, and the great jewels that at night are the stars all orderly afloat on the bubble’s inner surface.
On the afterdeck of the last grain ship, which was also the largest, the Gray Mouser spat a plum skin to leeward and boasted luxuriously, “Fat times in Lankhmar! Not one day returned to the City of the Black Toga after months away adventuring and we get this cushy job from the Overlord himself — and with an advance on pay too.”
“I have an old distrust of cushy jobs,” Fafhrd replied, yawning and pulling his fur-trimmed jerkin open wider so that the mild wind might trickle more fully through the tangled hair-field of his chest. “And we were rushed out of Lankhmar so quickly that we had not even time to pay our respects to the ladies. Nevertheless I must confess that we might have done worse. A full purse is the best ballast for any man-ship, especially one bearing letters of marque against ladies.”
Ship’s Master Slinoor looked back with hooded appraising eyes at the small lithe gray-clad man and his tall, more gaudily accoutered barbarian comrade. The master of _Squid_ was a sleek black-robed man of middle years. He stood beside the two stocky black-tunicked bare-legged sailors who held steady the great high-arching tiller that guided _Squid_.
“How much do you two rogues really know of your cushy job?” Slinoor asked softly. “Or rather, how much did the arch-noble Glipkerio choose to tell you of the purpose and dark antecedents of this voyaging?” Two days of fortunate sailing seemed at last to have put the closed-mouthed ship’s master in a mood to exchange confidences, or at least trade queries and lies.
From a bag of netted cord that hung by the taffrail, the Mouser speared a night-purple plum with the dirk he called Cat’s Claw. Then he answered lightly, “This fleet bears a gift of grain from Overlord Glipkerio to Movarl of the Eight Cities in gratitude for Movarl’s sweeping the Mingol pirates from the Inner Sea and mayhap diverting the steppe-dwelling Mingols from assaulting Lankhmar across the Sinking Land. Movarl needs grain for his hunter-farmers turned cityman-soldiers and especially to supply his army relieving his border city of Klelg Nar, which the Mingols besiege. Fafhrd and I are, you might say, a small but mighty rear-guard for the grain and for certain more delicate items of Glipkerio’s gift.”
“You mean those?” Slinoor bent a thumb toward the larboard rail.
_Those_ were twelve large white rats distributed among four silver-barred cages. With their silky coats, pale-rimmed blue eyes and especially their short, arched upper lips and two huge upper incisors, they looked like a clique of haughty, bored, inbred aristocrats, and it was in a bored aristocratic fashion that they were staring at a scrawny black kitten which was perched with dug-in claws on the starboard rail, as if to get as far away from the rats as possible, and staring back at them most worriedly.
Fafhrd reached out and ran a finger down the black kitten’s back. The kitten arched its spine, losing itself for a moment in sensuous delight, but then edged away and resumed its worried rat-peering — an activity shared by the two black-tunicked helmsmen, who seemed both resentful and fearful of the silver-caged afterdeck passengers.
The Mouser sucked plum juice from his fingers and flicked out his tongue-tip to neatly capture a drop that threatened to run down his chin. Then, “No, I mean not chiefly those high-bred gift-rats,” he replied to Slinoor and kneeling lightly and unexpectedly and touching two fingers significantly to the scrubbed oak deck, he said, “I mean chiefly _she_ who is below, who ousts you from your master’s cabin, and who now insists that the gift-rats require sunlit and fresh air — which strikes me as a strange way of cosseting burrow- and shadow-dwelling vermin.”
Slinoor’s cropped eyebrows rose. He came close and whispered, “You think the Demoiselle Hisvet may not be merely the conductress of the rat-gift, but also herself part of Glipkerio’s gift to Morvarl? Why, she’s the daughter of the greatest grain-merchant in Lankhmar, who’s grown rich selling tawny corn to Glipkerio.”
The Mouser smiled cryptically but said nothing.
Slinoor frowned, then whispered ever lower, “True, I’ve heard the story that Hisvet has already been her father Hisvin’s gift to Glipkerio to buy his patronage.”
Fafhrd, who’d been trying to stroke the kitten again with no more success than to chase it up the aftermast, turned around at that. “Why, Hisvet’s but a child,” he said almost reprovingly. “A most prim and proper miss. I know not of Glipkerio, he seems decadent” — the word was not an insult in Lankhmar — “but surely Movarl, a Northerner albeit a forest man, likes only strong-beamed, ripe, complete women.”
“Your own tastes, no doubt?” the Mouser remarked, gazing at Fafhrd with half-closed eyes. “No traffic with child-like women?”
Fafhrd blinked as if the Mouser had dug fingers in his side. Then he shrugged and said loudly, “What’s so special about these rats? Do they do tricks?”
“Aye,” Slinoor said distastefully. “They play at being men. They’ve been trained by Hisvet to dance to music, to drink from cups, hold tiny spears and swords, even fence. I’ve not seen it — nor would care to.”
The picture struck the Mouser’s fancy. He envisioned himself small as a rat, dueling with rats who wore lace at their throats and wrists, slipping through the mazy tunnels of their underground cities, becoming a great connoisseur of cheese and smoked meats, perchance wooing a slim rat-queen and being surprised by her rat-king husband and having to dagger-fight him in the dark. Then he noted one of the white rats looking at him intently through the silver bars with a cold inhuman blue eye and suddenly his idea didn’t seem amusing at all. He shivered in the sunlight.
Slinoor was saying, “It is not good for animals to try to be men.” _Squid_’s skipper gazed somberly at the silent white aristos. “Have you ever heard tell of the legend of — ” he began, hesitated, then broke off, shaking his head as if deciding he had been about to say too much.
“A sail!” The call winged down thinly from the crow’s nest. “A black sail to windward!”
“What manner of ship?” Slinoor shouted up.
“I know not, master. I see only sail top.”
“Keep her under view, boy,” Slinoor commanded.
“Under view it is, master.”
Slinoor paced to the starboard rail and back.
“Movarl’s sails are green,” Fafhrd said thoughtfully.
Slinoor nodded. “Lankhmar’s are white. The pirates’ were red, mostly. Lankhmar’s sails once were black, but now that color’s only for funeral barges and they never venture out of sight of land. At least I’ve never known…”
The Mouser broke in with, “You spoke of dark antecedents of this voyaging. Why dark?”
Slinoor drew them back against the taffrail, away from the stocky helmsmen. Fafhrd ducked a little, passing under the arching tiller. They looked all three into the twisting wake, their heads bent together.
Slinoor said, “You’ve been out of Lankhmar. Did you know this is not the first gift-fleet of grain to Movarl?”
The Mouser nodded. “We’d been told there was another. Somehow lost. In a storm, I think. Glipkerio glossed over it.”
“There were two,” Slinoor said tersely. “Both lost. Without a living trace. There was no storm.”
“What then?” Fafhrd asked, looking around as the rats chittered a little. “Pirates?”
“Movarl had already whipped the pirates east. Each of the two fleets was galley-guarded like ours. And each sailed off into fair weather with a good west wind.” Slinoor smiled thinly. “Doubtless Glipkerio did not tell you of these matters for fear you might beg off. We sailors and the Lankhmarines obey for duty and the honor of the City, but of late Glipkerio’s had trouble hiring the sort of special agents he likes to use for second bowstrings. He has brains of a sort, our overlord has, though he employs them mostly to dream of visiting other world bubbles in a great diving-bell or sealed metallic diving-ship, while he sits with trained girls watching trained rats and buys off Lankhmar’s enemies with gold and repays Lankhmar’s ever-more-greedy friends with grain, not soldiers.” Slinoor grunted. “Movarl grows most impatient, you know. He threatens, if the grain comes not, to recall his pirate-patrol, league with the land-Mingols and set them at Lankhmar.”
“Northerners, even though not snow-dwelling, league with Mingols?” Fafhrd objected. “Impossible!”
Slinoor looked at him. “I’ll say just this, ice-eating Northerner. If I did not believe such a league both possible and likely — and Lankhmar thereby in dire danger — I would never have sailed with this fleet, honor and duty or no. Same’s true of Lukeen, who commands the galley. Nor do I think Glipkerio would otherwise be sending to Movarl at Kvarch Nar his noblest performing rats and dainty Hisvet.”
Fafhrd growled a little. “You say both fleets were lost without a trace?” he asked incredulously.
Slinoor shook his head. “The first was. Of the second, some wreckage was sighted by an Ilthmar trader Lankhmar-bound. The deck of only one grain ship. It had been ripped off its hull, splinteringly — how or by what, the Ilthmart dared not guess. Tied to a fractured stretch of railing was the ship’s master, only hours dead. His face had been nibbled, his body gnawed.”
“Fish?” the Mouser asked.
“Seabirds?” Fafhrd inquired.
“Dragons?” a third voice suggested, high, breathless, and as merry as a schoolgirl’s. The three men turned around, Slinoor with guilty swiftness.
The Demoiselle Hisvet stood as tall as the Mouser, but judging by her face, wrists, and ankles was considerably slenderer. Her face was delicate and taper-chinned with small mouth and pouty upper lip that lifted just enough to show a double dash of pearly tooth. Her complexion was creamy pale except for two spots of color high on her cheeks. Her straight fine hair, which grew low on her forehead, was pure white touched with silver and all drawn back through a silver ring behind her neck, whence it hung unbraided like a unicorn’s tail. Her eyes had china whites but darkly pink irises around the large black pupils. Her body was enveloped and hidden by a loose robe of violet silk except when the wind briefly molded a flat curve of her girlish anatomy. There was a violet hood, half thrown back. The sleeves were puffed but snug at the wrists. She was bare-foot, her skin showing as creamy there as on her face, except for a tinge of pink about the toes.
She looked them all three one after another quickly in the eye. “You were whispering of the fleets that failed,” she said accusingly. “Fie, Master Slinoor. We must all have courage.”
“Aye,” Fafhrd agreed, finding that a cue to his liking. “Even dragons need not daunt a brave man. I’ve often watched the sea monsters, crested, horned, and some two-headed, playing in the waves of outer ocean as they broke around the rocks sailors call the Claws. They were not to be feared, if a man remembered always to fix them with a commanding eye. They sported lustily together, the man dragons pursuing the woman dragons and going — ” Here Fafhrd took a tremendous breath and then roared out so loudly and wailingly that the two helmsmen jumped — “_Hoongk! Hoongk!_”
“Fie, Swordsman Fafhrd,” Hisvet said primly, a blush mantling her cheeks and forehead. “You are most indelicate. The sex of dragons — ”
But Slinoor had whirled on Fafhrd, gripping his wrist and now crying, “Quiet, you monster-fool! Know you not we sail tonight by moonlight past the Dragon Rocks? You’ll call them down on us!”
“There are no dragons in the Inner Sea,” Fafhrd laughingly assured him.
“There’s something that tears ships,” Slinoor asserted stubbornly.
The Mouser took advantage of this brief interchange to move in on Hisvet, rapidly bowing thrice as he approached.
“We have missed the great pleasure of your company on deck, Demoiselle,” he said suavely.
“Alas, sir, the sun mislikes me,” she answered prettily. “Now his rays are mellowed as he prepared to submerge. Then too,” she added with an equally pretty shudder, “these rough sailors — ” She broke off as she saw that Fafhrd and the master of _Squid_ had stopped their argument and returned to her. “Oh, I meant not you, dear Master Slinoor,” she assured him, reaching out and almost touching his black robe.
“Would the Demoiselle fancy a sun-warmed, wind-cooled black plum of Sarheenmar?” the Mouser suggested, delicately sketching in the air with Cat’s Claw.
“I know not,” Hisvet said, eyeing the dirk’s needle-like point. “I must be thinking of getting the White Shadows below before the evening’s chill is upon us.”
“True,” Fafhrd agreed with a flattering laugh, realizing she must mean the white rats. “But ’twas most wise of you, Little Mistress, to let them spend the day on deck, where they surely cannot hanker so much to sport with the Black Shadows — I mean, of course, their black free commoner brothers, and slim delightful sisters, to be sure, hiding here and there in the hold.”
“There are no rats on my ship, sportive or otherwise,” Slinoor asserted instantly, his voice loud and angry. “Think you I run a rat-brothel? Your pardon, Demoiselle,” he added quickly to Hisvet. “I mean, there are no common rats aboard _Squid_.”
“Then yours is surely the first grain ship so blessed,” Fafhrd told him with indulgent reasonableness.
The sun’s vermilion disk touched the sea to the west and flattened like a tangerine. Hisvet leaned back against the taffrail under the arching tiller. Fafhrd was to her right, the Mouser to her left with the plums hanging just beyond him, near the silver cages. Slinoor had moved haughtily forward to speak to the helmsmen, or pretend to.
“I’ll take that plum now, Dirksman Mouser,” Hisvet said softly.
As the Mouser turned away in happy obedience and with many a graceful gesture, delicately palpating the net bag to find the most tender fruit, Hisvet stretched her right arm out sideways and without looking once at Fafhrd slowly ran her spread-fingered hand through the hair on his chest, paused when she reached the other side to grasp a fistful and tweak it sharply, then trailed her fingers rightly back across the hair she had ruffled.
Her hand came back to her just as the Mouser turned around. She kissed the palm lingeringly, then reached it across her body to take the black fruit from the point of the Mouser’s dirk. She sucked delicately at the prick Cat’s Claw had made and shivered.
“Fie, sir,” she pouted. “You told me ‘twould be sun-warmed and ’tis not. Already all things grow chilly with evening.” She looked around her thoughtfully. “Why, Swordsman Fafhrd is all gooseflesh,” she announced, then blushed and tapped her lips reprovingly. “Close your jerkin, sir. ‘Twill save you from catarrh and perchance from further embarrassment a girl who is unused to any sight of man-flesh save in slaves.”
“Here is a tastier plum,” the Mouser called from beside the bag. Hisvet smiled at him and lightly tossed him back-handed the plum she’d sampled. He dropped that overboard and tossed her the second plum. She caught it deftly, lightly squeezed it, touched it to her lips, shook her head sadly though still smiling, and tossed back the plum. The Mouser, smiling gently too, caught it, dropped it overboard and tossed her a third. They played that way for some time. A shark following in the wake of the _Squid_ got a stomachache.
The black kitten came single-footing back along the starboard rail with a sharp eye to larboard. Fafhrd seized it instantly as any good general does opportunity in the heat of battle.
“Have you seen the ship’s catling, Little Mistress?” he called, crossing to Hisvet, the kitten almost hidden in his big hands. “Or perhaps we should call the _Squid_ the catling’s ship, for she adopted it, skipping by herself aboard just as we sailed. Here, Little Mistress. It feels sun-toasted now, warmer than any plum,” and he reached the kitten out sitting on the palm of his right hand.
But Fafhrd had been forgetting the kitten’s point of view. Its fur stood on end as it saw itself being carried toward the rats and now, as Hisvet stretched out her hand toward it, showing her upper teeth in a tiny smile and saying, “Poor little waif,” the kitten hissed fiercely and raked out stiff-armed with spread claws.
Hisvet drew back her hand with a gasp. Before Fafhrd could drop the kitten or bat it aside, it sprang to the top of his head and from there onto the highest point of the tiller.
The Mouser darted to Hisvet, crying meanwhile at Fafhrd, “Dolt! Lout! You knew the beast was half wild!” Then, to Hisvet, “Demoiselle! Are you hurt?”
Fafhrd struck angrily at the kitten and one of the helmsmen came back to bat at it too, perhaps because he thought it improper for kittens to walk on the tiller. The kitten made a long leap to the starboard rail, slipped over it, and dangled by two claws above the curving water.
Hisvet was holding her hand away from the Mouser and he was saying, “Better let me examine it, Demoiselle. Even the slightest scratch from a filthy ship’s cat can be dangerous,” and she was saying, almost playfully, “No, Dirksman, I tell you it’s nothing.”
Fafhrd strode to the starboard rail, fully intending to flick the kitten overboard, but somehow when he came to do it he found he had instead cupped the kitten’s rear in his hand and lifted it back on the rail. The kitten instantly sank its teeth deeply in the root of his thumb and fled up the aftermast. Fafhrd with difficulty suppressed a great yowl. Slinoor laughed.
“Nevertheless, I will examine it,” the Mouser said masterfully and took Hisvet’s hand by force. She let him hold it for a moment, then snatched it back and drawing herself up said frostily, “Dirksman, you forget yourself. Not even her own physician touches a Demoiselle of Lankhmar, he touches only the body of her maid, on which the Demoiselle points out her pains and symptoms. Leave me, Dirksman.”
The Mouser stood huffily back against the taffrail. Fafhrd sucked the root of his thumb. Hisvet went and stood beside the Mouser. Without looking at him, she said softly, “You should have asked me to call my maid. She’s quite pretty.”
Only a fingernail clipping of red sun was left on the horizon. Slinoor addressed the crow’s nest: “What of the black sail, boy?”
“She holds her distance, master,” the cry came back. “She courses on abreast of us.”
The sun went under with a faint green flash. Hisvet bent her head sideways and kissed the Mouser on the neck, just under the ear. Her tongue tickled.
“Now I lose her, master,” the crow’s nest called. “There’s mist to the northwest. And to the northeast … a small black cloud … like a black ship specked with light … that moves through the air. And now that fades too. All gone, master.”
Hisvet straightened her head. Slinoor came toward them muttering, “The crow’s nest sees too much.” Hisvet shivered and said, “The White Shadows will take a chill. They’re delicate, Dirksman.” The Mouser breathed, “You are Ecstasy’s White Shadow, Demoiselle,” then strolled toward the silver cages, saying loudly for Slinoor’s benefit, “Might we not be privileged to have a show of them, Demoiselle, tomorrow here on the afterdeck? ‘Twould be wondrous instructive to watch you control them.” He caressed the air over the cages and said, lying mightily, “My, they’re fine handsome fellows.” Actually he was peering apprehensively for any of the little spears and swords Slinoor had mentioned. The twelve rats looked up at him incuriously. One even seemed to yawn.
Slinoor said curtly, “I would advise against it, Demoiselle. The sailors have a mad fear and hatred of all rats. ‘Twere best not to arouse it.”
“But these are aristos,” the Mouser objected, while Hisvet only repeated, “They’ll take a chill.”
Fafhrd, hearing this, took his hand out of his mouth and came hurrying to Hisvet, saying, “Little Mistress, may I carry them below? I’ll be gentle as a Kleshite nurse.” He lifted between thumb and third finger a cage with two rats in it. Hisvet rewarded him with a smile, saying, “I wish you would, gallant Swordsman. The common sailors handle them too roughly. But two cages are all you may safely carry. You’ll need proper help.” She gazed at the Mouser and Slinoor.
So Slinoor and the Mouser, the latter much to his distaste and apprehension, must each gingerly take up a silver cage, and Fafhrd two, and follow Hisvet to her cabin below the afterdeck. The Mouser could not forbear whispering privily to Fafhrd, “Oaf! To make rat-grooms of us! May you get rat-bites to match your cat-bite!” At the cabin door Hisvet’s dark maid Frix received the cages, Hisvet thanked her three gallants most briefly and distantly and Frix closed the door against them. There was the muffled thud of a bar dropping across it and the jangle of a chain locking down the bar.
* * * *
Darkness grew on the waters. A yellow lantern was lit and hoisted to the crow’s nest. The black war galley _Shark_, its brown sail temporarily furled, came rowing back to fuss at _Clam_, next ahead of _Squid_ in line, for being slow in getting up its masthead light, then dropped back by _Squid_ while Lukeen and Slinoor exchanged shouts about a black sail and mist and ship-shaped small black clouds and the Dragon Rocks. Finally the galley went bustling ahead again with its Lankhmarines in browned-iron chain mail to take up its sailing station at the head of the column. The first stars twinkled, proof that the sun had not deserted through the waters of eternity to some other world bubble, but was swimming as he should back to the east under the ocean of the sky, errant rays from him lighting the floating star-jewels in his passage.
After moonrise that night Fafhrd and the Mouser each found private occasion to go rapping at Hisvet’s door, but neither profited greatly thereby. At Fafhrd’s knock Hisvet herself opened the small grille set in the larger door, said swiftly, “Fie, for shame, Swordsman! Can’t you see I’m undressing?” and closed it instantly. While when the Mouser asked softly for a moment with “Ecstasy’s White Shadow,” the merry face of the dark maid Frix appeared at the grille, saying, “My mistress bid me kiss my hand good night to you.” Which she did and closed the grille.
Fafhrd, who had been spying, greeted the crestfallen Mouser with a sardonic, “Ecstasy’s White Shadow!”
“Little Mistress!” the Mouser retorted scathingly.
“Black Plum of Sarheenmar!”
“Kleshite Nurse!”
Neither hero slept restfully that night and two-thirds through it the _Squid_’s gong began to sound at intervals, with the other ships’ gongs replying or calling faintly. When at dawn’s first blink the two came on deck, _Squid_ was creeping through fog that hid the sail top. The two helmsmen were peering about jumpily, as if they expected to see ghosts. The sails were barely filled. Slinoor, his eyes dark-circled by fatigue and big with anxiety, explained tersely that the fog had not only slowed but disordered the grain fleet.
“That’s _Tunny_ next ahead of us. I can tell by her gong note. And beyond _Tunny, Carp_. Where’s _Clam_? What’s _Shark_ about? And still not certainly past the Dragon Rocks! Not that I want to see ’em!”
“Do not some captains call them the Rat Rocks?” Fafhrd interposed. “From a rat-colony started there from a wreck?”
“Aye,” Slinoor allowed and then grinning sourly at the Mouser, observed, “Not the best day for a rat-show on the afterdeck, is it? Which is some good from this fog. I can’t abide the lolling white brutes. Though but a dozen in number they remind me too much of the Thirteen. Have you ever heard tell of the legend of the Thirteen?”
“I have,” Fafhrd said somberly. “A wise woman of the Cold Waste once told me that for each animal kind — wolves, bats, whales, it holds for all and each — there are always thirteen individuals having almost manlike (or demonlike!) wisdom and skill. Can you but find and master this inner circle, the Wise Woman said, then through them you can control all animals of that kind.”
Slinoor looked narrowly at Fafhrd and said, “She was not an altogether stupid woman.”
The Mouser wondered if for men also there was an inner circle of Thirteen.
The black kitten came ghosting along the deck out of the fog forward. It made toward Fafhrd with an eager mew, then hesitated, studying him dubiously.
“Take for example, cats,” Fafhrd said with a grin. “Somewhere in Nehwon today, mayhap scattered but more likely banded together, are thirteen cats of superfeline sagacity, somehow sensing and controlling the destiny of all catkind.”
“What’s this one sensing now?” Slinoor demanded softly.
The black kitten was staring to larboard, sniffing. Suddenly its scrawny body stiffened, the hair rising along its back and its skimpy tail a-bush.
“_Hoongk!_”
Slinoor turned to Fafhrd with a curse, only to see the Northerner staring about shut-mouthed and startled. Clearly _he_ had not bellowed.
——–