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Swords Against Wizardry
by Fritz Leiber
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Copyright (c)1968 by Fritz Leiber


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       Other works by Fritz Leiber also available in e-reads editions
       THE GREEN MILLENIUM
       GATHER, DARKNESS!
       SWORDS AND DEVILTY
       SWORDS AGAINST DEATH
       SWORDS IN THE MIST
       SWORDS AGAINST WIZARDY
       THE SWORDS OF LANKHMAR
       SWORDS AND ICE MAGIC
       THE KNIGHT AND KNAVE OF SWORDS
       THE WANDERER
--------
         *I. In the Witch's Tent*
       The hag bent over the brazier. Its upward-seeking gray fumes interwove
with strands of her downward-dangling, tangled black hair. Its glow showed her
face to be as dark, jagged-featured, and dirty as the new-dug root-clump of a
blackapple tree. A half century of brazier heat and smoke had cured it as
black, crinkly, and hard as Mingol bacon.
       Through her splayed nostrils and slack mouth, which showed a few brown
teeth like old tree stumps irregularly fencing the gray field of her tongue,
she garglingly inhaled and bubblingly expelled the fumes.
       Such of them as escaped her greedy lungs tortuously found their way to
the tent's saggy roof, resting on seven ribs down-curving from the central
pole, and deposited on the ancient rawhide their tiny dole of resin and soot.
It is said that such a tent, boiled out after decades or preferably centuries
of use, yields a nauseous liquid which gives a man strange and dangerous
visions.
       Outside the tent's drooping walls radiated the dark, twisty alleys of
Illik-Ving, an overgrown and rudely boisterous town, which is the eighth and
smallest metropolis of the Land of the Eight Cities.
       While overhead there shivered in the chill wind the strange stars of
the World of Nehwon, which is so like and unlike our own world.
       Inside the tent, two barbarian-clad men watched the crouching witch
across the brazier. The big man, who had red-blond hair, stared somber-eyed
and intently. The little man, who was dressed all in gray, drooped his
eyelids, stifled a yawn, and wrinkled his nose.
       "I don't know which stinks worse, she or the brazier," he murmured. "Or
maybe it's the whole tent, or this alley muck we must sit in. Or perchance her
familiar is a skunk. Look, Fafhrd, if we must consult a sorcerous personage,
we should have sought out Sheelba or Ningauble before ever we sailed north
from Lankhmar across the Inner Sea."
       "They weren't available," the big man answered in a clipped whisper.
"Shh, Gray Mouser, I think she's gone into trance."
       "Asleep, you mean," the little man retorted irreverently.
       The hag's gargling breath began to sound more like a death rattle. Her
eyelids fluttered, showing two white lines. Wind stirred the tent's dark wall
-- or it might be unseen presences fumbling and fingering.
       The little man was unimpressed. He said, "I don't see why we have to
consult anyone. It isn't as if we were going outside Nehwon altogether, as we
did in our last adventure. We've got the papers -- the scrap of ramskin
parchment, I mean -- and we know where we're going. Or at least you say you
do."
       "Shh!" the big man commanded, then added hoarsely, "Before embarking on
any great enterprise, it's customary to consult a warlock or witch."
       The little man, now whispering likewise, countered with, "Then why
couldn't we have consulted a civilized one? -- any member in good standing
of the Lankhmar Sorcerers Guild. He'd at least have had a comely naked girl or
two around, to rest your eyes on when they began to water from scanning his
crabbed hieroglyphs and horoscopes."
       "A good earthy witch is more honest than some city rogue tricked out in
black cone-hat and robe of stars," the big man argued. "Besides, this one is
nearer our icy goal and its influences. You and your townsman's lust for
luxuries! You'd turn a wizard's workroom into a brothel."
       "Why not?" the little man wanted to know. "Both species of glamour at
once!" Then, jerking his thumb at the hag, "Earthy, you said? Dungy describes
her better."
       "Shh, Mouser, you'll break her trance."
       "Trance?" The little man reinspected the hag. Her mouth had shut and
she was breathing wheezingly through her beaky nose alone, the fume-sooty tip
of which sought to meet her jutting chin. There was a faint high wailing, as
of distant wolves, or nearby ghosts, or perhaps just an odd overtone of the
hag's wheezes.
       The little man sneered his upper lip and shook his head.
       His hands shook a little too, but he hid that. "No, she's only stoned
out of her skull, I'd say," he commented judiciously. "You shouldn't have
given her so much poppy gum."
       "But that's the entire intent of trance," the big man protested. "To
lash, stone, and otherwise drive the spirit out of the skull and whip it up
mystic mountains, so that from their peaks it can spy out the lands of past
and future, and mayhaps other-world."
       "I wish the mountains ahead of us were merely mystic," the little man
muttered. "Look, Fafhrd, I'm willing to squat here all night -- at any rate
for fifty more stinking breaths or two hundred bored heartbeats -- to
pleasure your whim. But has it occurred to you that we're in danger in this
tent? And I don't mean solely from spirits. There are other rogues than
ourselves in Illik-Ving, some perhaps on the same quest as ours, who'd dearly
love to scupper us. And here in this blind leather hut we're deer on a skyline
-- or sitting ducks."
       Just then the wind came back with its fumblings and fingerings, and in
addition a scrabbling that might be that of wind-swayed branch tips or of dead
men's long fingernails a-scratch. There were faint growlings and wailings too,
and with them stealthy footfalls. Both men thought of the Mouser's last
warning. Fafhrd and he looked toward the tent's night-slitted skin door and
loosened their swords in their scabbards.
       At that instant the hag's noisy breathing stopped and with it all other
sound. Her eyes opened, showing only whites -- milky ovals infinitely eerie
in the dark root-tangle of her sharp features and stringy hair. The gray tip
of her tongue traveled like a large maggot around her lips.
       The Mouser made to comment, but the out-thrust palm-side of Fafhrd's
spread-fingered hand was more compelling than any shh.
       In a voice low but remarkably clear, almost a girl's voice, the hag
intoned:
"For reasons sorcerous and dim
You travel toward the world's frost rim...."
       _"Dim" is the key word there,_ the Mouser thought. _Typical witchy say-
nothing. She clearly knows naught about us except that we're headed north,
which she could get from any gossipy mouth_.
"You north, north, north, and north must go
Through dagger-ice and powder-snow...."
       _More of the same,_ was the Mouser's inward comment. _But must she rub
it in, even the snow? Brr!_
"And many a rival, envy-eyed,
Will dog your steps until you've died...."
       Aha, the inevitable fright-thrust, without which no fortune-tale is
complete!
"But after peril's cleansing fire
You'll meet at last your hearts' desire...."
       _And now pat the happy ending! Gods, but the stupidest palm-reading
prostitute of Ilthmar could -- _
       Something silvery gray flashed across the Mouser's eyes, so close its
form was blurred. Without a thought he ducked back and drew Scalpel.
       The razor-sharp spear-blade, driven through the tent's side as if it
were paper, stopped inches from Fafhrd's head and was dragged back.
       A javelin hurtled out of the hide wall. This the Mouser struck aside
with his sword.
       Now a storm of cries rose outside. The burden of some was, "Death to
the strangers!" Of others, "Come out, dogs, and be killed!"
       The Mouser faced the skin door, his gaze darting.
       Fafhrd, almost as quick to react as the Mouser, hit on a somewhat
irregular solution to their knotty tactical problem: that of men besieged in a
fortress whose walls neither protect them nor permit outward viewing. At first
step, he leaped to the tent's central pole and with a great heave drew it from
the earth.
       The witch, likewise reacting with good solid sense, threw herself flat
on the dirt.
       "We decamp!" Fafhrd cried. "Mouser, guard our front and guide me!"
       And with that he charged toward the door, carrying the whole tent with
him. There was a rapid series of little explosions as the somewhat brittle old
thongs that tied its rawhide sides to its pegs snapped. The brazier tumbled
over, scattering coals. The hag was overpassed. The Mouser, running ahead of
Fafhrd, threw wide the door-slit. He had to use Scalpel at once, to parry a
sword thrust out of the dark, but with his other hand he kept the door spread.
       The opposing swordsman was bowled over, perhaps a bit startled at being
attacked by the tent. The Mouser trod on him. He thought he heard ribs snap as
Fafhrd did the same, which seemed a nice if brutal touch. Then he was crying
out, "Veer left now, Fafhrd! Now to the right a little! There's an alley
coming up on our left. Be ready to turn sharp into it when I give the word.
Now!" And grasping the door's hide edges, the Mouser helped swing the tent as
Fafhrd pivoted.
       From behind came cries of rage and wonder, also a screeching that
sounded like the hag, enraged at the theft of her home.
       The alley was so narrow that the tent's sides dragged against buildings
and fences. At the first sign of a soft spot in the dirt underfoot, Fafhrd
drove the tent-pole into it, and they both dashed out of the tent, leaving it
blocking the alley.
       The cries behind them grew suddenly louder as their pursuers turned
into the alley, but Fafhrd and the Mouser did not run off over-swiftly. It
seemed certain their attackers would spend considerable time scouting and
assaulting the empty tent.
       They loped together through the outskirts of the sleeping city toward
their own well-hidden camp outside it. Their nostrils sucked in the chill,
bracing air funneling down from the best pass through the Trollstep Mountains,
a craggy chain which walled off the Land of the Eight Cities from the vast
plateau of the Cold Waste to the north.
       Fafhrd remarked, "It's unfortunate the old lady was interrupted just
when she was about to tell us something important."
       The Mouser snorted. "She'd already sung her song, the sum of which was
zero."
       "I wonder who those rude fellows were and what were their motives!"
Fafhrd asked. "I thought I recognized the voice of that ale-swiller Gnarfi,
who has an aversion to bear-meat."
       "Scoundrels behaving as stupidly as we were," the Mouser answered.
"Motives? -- as soon impute 'em to sheep! Ten dolts following an idiot
leader."
       "Still, it appears that someone doesn't like us," Fafhrd opined.
       "Was that ever news!" the Gray Mouser retorted.
--------
         *II: Stardock*
       Early one evening, weeks later, the sky's gray cloud-armor blew away
south, smashed and dissolving as if by blows of an acid-dipped mace. The same
mighty northeast wind contemptuously puffed down the hitherto impregnable
cloud wall to the east, revealing a grimly majestic mountain range running
north to south and springing abruptly from the plateau, two leagues high, of
the Cold Waste -- like a dragon fifty leagues long heaving up its spike-
crested spine from icy entombment.
       Fafhrd, no stranger to the Cold Waste, born at the foot of these same
mountains and childhood climber of their lower slopes, named them off to the
Gray Mouser as the two men stood together on the crunchy hoarfrosted eastern
rim of the hollow that held their camp. The sun, set for the camp, still shone
from behind their backs onto the western faces of the major peaks as he named
them -- but it shone not with any romanticizing rosy glow, but rather with a
clear, cold, detail-pinning light fitting the peaks' dire aloofness.
       "Travel your eye to the first great northerly upthrust," he told the
Mouser, "that phalanx of heaven-menacing ice-spears shafted with dark rock and
gleaming green -- that's the Ripsaw. Then, dwarfing them, a single ivory-icy
tooth, unscalable by any sane appraisal -- the Tusk, he's called. Another
unscalable then, still higher and with south wall a sheer precipice shooting
up a league and curving outward toward the needletop: he is White Fang, where
my father died -- the canine of the Mountains of the Giants.
       "Now begin again with the first snow dome at the south of the chain,"
continued the tall fur-cloaked man, copper-bearded and copper-maned, his head
otherwise bare to the frigid air, which was as quiet at ground level as sea-
deep beneath storm. "The Hint, she's named, or the Come On. Little enough she
looks, yet men have frozen nighting on her slopes and been whirled to death by
her whimsical queenly avalanches. Then a far vaster snow dome, true queen to
the Hint's princess, a hemisphere of purest white, grand enough to roof the
council hall of all the gods that ever were or will be -- she is Gran Hanack,
whom my father was first of men to mount and master. Our town of tents was
pitched _there_ near her base. No mark of it now, I'll guess, not even a
midden.
       "After Gran Hanack and nearest to us of them all, a huge flat-topped
pillar, a pedestal for the sky almost, looking to be of green-shot snow but in
truth all snow-pale granite scoured by the storms: Obelisk Polaris.
       "Lastly," Fafhrd continued, sinking his voice and gripping his smaller
comrade's shoulder, "let your gaze travel up the snow-tressed, dark-rocked,
snowcapped peak between the Obelisk and White Fang, her glittering skirt
somewhat masked by the former, but taller than they as they are taller than
the Waste. Even now she hides behind her the mounting moon. She is Stardock,
our quest's goal."
       "A pretty enough, tall, slender wart on this frostbit patch of Nehwon's
face," the Gray Mouser conceded, writhing his shoulder from Fafhrd's grip.
"And now at last tell me, friend, why you never climbed this Stardock in your
youth and seized the treasure there, but must wait until we get a clue to it
in a dusty, hot, scorpion-patrolled desert tower a quarter world away -- and
waste half a year getting here."
       Fafhrd's voice grew a shade unsure as he answered, "My father never
climbed her; how should I? Also, there were no legends of a treasure on
Stardock's top in my father's clan ... though there was a storm of other
legends about Stardock, each forbidding her ascent. They called my father the
Legend Breaker and shrugged wisely when he died on White Fang.... Truly, my
memory's not so good for those days, Mouser -- I got many a mind-shattering
knock on my head before I learned to deal all knocks first ... and then I was
hardly a boy when the clan left the Cold Waste -- though the rough hard walls
of Obelisk Polaris had been my upended playground...."
       The Mouser nodded doubtfully. In the stillness they heard their
tethered ponies munching the ice-crisped grass of the hollow, then a faint
unangry growl from Hrissa the ice-cat, curled between the tiny fire and the
piled baggage -- likely one of the ponies had come cropping too close. On the
great icy plain around them, nothing moved -- or almost nothing.
       The Mouser dipped gray lambskin-gloved fingers into the bottom of his
pouch and from the pocket there withdrew a tiny oblong of parchment and read
from it, more by memory than sight:
"Who mounts white Stardock, the Moon Tree,
"Past worm and gnome and unseen bars,
"Will win the key to luxury:
"The Heart of Light, a pouch of stars."
       Fafhrd said dreamily, "They say the gods once dwelt and had their
smithies on Stardock and from thence, amid jetting fire and showering sparks,
launched all the stars; hence her name. They say diamonds, rubies, smaragds --
all great gems -- are the tiny pilot models the gods made of the stars ... and
then threw carelessly away across the world when their great work was done."
       "You never told me that before," the Mouser said, looking at him
sharply.
       Fafhrd blinked his eyes and frowned puzzledly. "I am beginning to
remember childhood things."
       The Mouser smiled thinly before returning the parchment to its deep
pocket. "The guess that a pouch of stars might be a bag of gems," he listed,
"the story that Nehwon's biggest diamond is called the Heart of Light, a few
words on a ramskin scrap in the topmost room of a desert tower locked and
sealed for centuries -- small hints, those, to draw two men across this
murdering, monotonous Cold Waste. Tell me, Old Horse, were you just homesick
for the miserable white meadows of your birth to pretend to believe 'em?"
       "Those small hints," Fafhrd said, gazing now toward White Fang, "drew
other men north across Nehwon. There must have been other ramskin scraps,
though why they should be discovered at the same time, I cannot guess."
       "We left all such fellows behind at Illik-Ving, or Lankhmar even,
before we ever mounted the Trollsteps," the Mouser asserted with complete
confidence. "Weak sisters, they were, smelling loot but quailing at hardship."
       Fafhrd gave a small headshake and pointed. Between them and White Fang
rose the tiniest thread of black smoke.
       "Did Gnarfi and Kranarch seem weak sisters? -- to name but two of the
other seekers," he asked when the Mouser finally saw and nodded.
       "It could be," the Mouser agreed gloomily. "Though aren't there any
ordinary travelers of this Waste? Not that we've seen a man-shaped soul since
the Mingol."
       Fafhrd said thoughtfully, "It might be an encampment of the ice gnomes
... though they seldom leave their caves except at High Summer, now a month
gone...." He broke off, frowning puzzledly. "Now how did I know that?"
       "Another childhood memory bobbing to the top of the black pot?" the
Mouser hazarded. Fafhrd shrugged doubtfully.
       "So, for choice, Kranarch and Gnarfi," the Mouser concluded. "Two
strong brothers, I'll concede. Perhaps we should have picked a fight with 'em
at Illik-Ving," he suggested. "Or perhaps even now ... a swift march by night
... a sudden swoop -- "
       Fafhrd shook his head. "Now we're climbers, not killers," he said. "A
man must be all climber to dare Stardock." He directed the Mouser's gaze back
toward the tallest mountain. "Let's rather study her west wall while the light
holds.
       "Begin first at her feet," he said. "That glimmering skirt falling from
her snowy hips, which are almost as high as the Obelisk -- that's the White
Waterfall, where no man may live.
       "Now to her head again. From her flat tilted snowcap hang two great
swelling braids of snow, streaming almost perpetually with avalanches, as if
she combed 'em day and night -- the Tresses, those are called. Between them's
a wide ladder of dark rock, marked at three points by ledges. The topmost of
the three ledge-banks is the Face -- d'you note the darker ledges marking eyes
and lips? The midmost of the three is called the Roosts; the lowermost --
level with Obelisk's wide summit -- the Lairs."
       "What lairs and roosts there?" the Mouser wanted to know.
       "None may say, for none have climbed the Ladder," Fafhrd replied. "Now
as to our route up her -- it's most simple. We scale Obelisk Polaris -- a
trustworthy mountain if there ever was one -- then cross by a dippling snow-
saddle (there's the danger-stretch of our ascent!) to Stardock and climb the
Ladder to her top."
       "How do we climb the Ladder in the long blank stretches between the
ledges?" the Mouser asked with childlike innocence, almost. "That is, if the
Lairers and Roosters will honor our passports and permit us to try."
       Fafhrd shrugged. "There'll be a way, rock being rock."
       "Why's there no snow on the Ladder?"
       "Too steep."
       "And supposing we climb it to the top," the Mouser finally asked, "how
do we lift our black-and-blue skeletonized bodies over the brim of Stardock's
snowy hat, which seems to outcurve and downcurve most stylishly?"
       "There's a triangular hole in it somewhere called the Needle's Eye,"
Fafhrd answered negligently. "Or so I've heard. But never you fret, Mouser,
we'll find it."
       "Of course we will," the Mouser agreed with an airy certainty that
almost sounded sincere, "we who hop-skip across shaking snow bridges and dance
the fantastic up vertical walls without ever touching hand to granite. Remind
me to bring a longish knife to carve our initials on the sky when we celebrate
the end of our little upward sortie."
       His gaze wandered slightly northward. In another voice he continued,
"The dark north wall of Stardock now -- that looks steep enough, to be sure,
but free of snow to the very top. Why isn't that our route -- rock, as you say
with such unanswerable profundity, being rock."
       Fafhrd laughed unmockingly. "Mouser," he said, "do you mark against the
darkening sky that long white streamer waving south from Stardock's top? Yes,
and below it a lesser streamer -- can you distinguish that? That second one
comes through the Needle's Eye! Well, those streamers from Stardock's hat are
called the Grand and Petty Pennons. They're powdered snow blasted off Stardock
by the northeast gale, which blows at least seven days out of eight, never
predictably. That gale would pluck the stoutest climber off the north wall as
easily as you or I might puff dandelion down from its darkening stem.
Stardock's self shields the Ladder from the gale."
       "Does the gale never shift around to strike the Ladder?" the Mouser
inquired lightly.
       "Only occasionally," Fafhrd reassured him.
       "Oh, that's great," the Mouser responded with quite overpowering
sincerity and would have returned to the fire, except just then the darkness
began swiftly to climb the Mountains of the Giants, as the sun took his final
dive far to the west, and the gray-clad man stayed to watch the grand
spectacle.
       It was like a black blanket being pulled up. First the glittering skirt
of the White Waterfall was hidden, then the Lairs on the Ladder and then the
Roosts. Now all the other peaks were gone, even the Tusk's and White Fang's
gleaming cruel tips, even the greenish-white roof of Obelisk Polaris. Now only
Stardock's snow hat was left and below it the Face between the silvery
Tresses. For a moment the ledges called the Eyes gleamed, or seemed to. Then
all was night.
       Yet there was a pale afterglow about. It was profoundly silent and the
air utterly unmoving. Around them, the Cold Waste seemed to stretch north,
west, and south to infinity.
       And in that space of silence something went whisper-gliding through the
still air, with the faint rushy sound of a great sail in a moderate breeze.
Fafhrd and the Mouser both stared all around wildly. Nothing. Beyond the
little fire, Hrissa the ice-cat sprang up hissing. Still nothing. Then the
sound, whatever had made it, died away.
       Very softly, Fafhrd began, "There is a legend...." A long pause. Then
with a sudden headshake, in a more natural voice: "The memory slips away,
Mouser. All my mind-fingers couldn't clutch it. Let's patrol once around the
camp and so to bed."
         ****
       From first sleep the Mouser woke so softly that even Hrissa, back
pressed against him from his knees to his chest on the side toward the fire,
did not rouse.
       Emerging from behind Stardock, her light glittering on the southern
Tress, hung the swelling moon, truly a proper fruit of the Moon Tree. Strange,
the Mouser thought, how small the moon was and how big Stardock, silhouetted
against the moon-pale sky.
       Then, just below the flat top of Stardock's hat, he saw a bright, pale
blue twinkling. He recalled that Ashsha, pale blue and brightest of Nehwon's
stars, was near the moon tonight, and he wondered if he were seeing her by
rare chance through the Needle's Eye, proving the latter's existence. He
wondered too what great sapphire or blue diamond -- perhaps the Heart of
Light? -- had been the gods' pilot model for Ashsha, smiling drowsily the
while at himself for entertaining such a silly, lovely myth. And then,
embracing the myth entirely, he asked himself whether the gods had left any of
their full-scale stars, unlaunched, on Stardock. Then Ashsha, if it were she,
winked out.
       The Mouser felt cozy in his cloak lined with sheep's-wool and now
thong-laced into a bag by the horn hooks around its hem. He stared long and
dreamily at Stardock until the moon broke loose from her and a blue jewel
twinkled on top of her hat and broke loose too -- now Ashsha surely. He
wondered unfearfully about the windy rushing he and Fafhrd had heard in the
still air -- perhaps only a long tongue of a storm licking down briefly. If
the storm lasted, they would climb up into it.
       Hrissa stretched in her sleep. Fafhrd grumbled low in a dream, wrapped
in his own great thong-laced cloak stuffed with eiderdown.
       The Mouser dropped his gaze to the ghostly flames of the dying fire,
seeking sleep himself. The flames made girl-bodies, then girl-faces. Next a
ghostly pale green girl-face -- perhaps an afterimage, he thought at first --
appeared beyond the fire, staring at him through close-slitted eyes across the
flame tops. It grew more distinct as he gazed at it, but there was no trace of
hair or body about it -- it hung against the dark like a mask.
       Yet it was weirdly beautiful: narrow chin, high-arched cheeks, wine-
dark short lips slightly pouted, straight nose that went up without a dip into
the broad, somewhat low forehead -- and then the mystery of those fully lidded
eyes seeming to peer at him through wine-dark lashes. And all, save lashes and
lips, of palest green, like jade.
       The Mouser did not speak or stir a muscle, simply because the face was
very beautiful to him -- just as any man might hope for the moment never to
end when his naked mistress unconsciously or by secret design assumes a
particularly charming attitude.
       Also, in the dismal Cold Waste, any man treasures illusions, though
knowing them almost certainly to be such.
       Suddenly the eyes parted wide, showing only the darkness behind, as if
the face were a mask indeed. The Mouser did start then, but still not enough
to wake Hrissa.
       Then the eyes closed, the lips puckered with taunting invitation; then
the face began swiftly to dissolve as if it were being literally wiped away.
First the right side went, then the left, then the center, last of all the
dark lips and the eyes. For a moment the Mouser fancied he caught a winy odor;
then all was gone.
       He contemplated waking Fafhrd and almost laughed at the thought of his
comrade's surly reactions. He wondered if the face had been a sign from the
gods, or a sending from some black magician castled on Stardock, or Stardock's
very soul perhaps -- though then where had she left her glittering tresses and
hat and her Ashsha eye? -- or only a random creation of his own most clever
brain, stimulated by sexual privation and tonight by beauteous if devilishly
dangerous mountains. Rather quickly he decided on the last explanation and he
slumbered.
         ****
       Two evenings later, at the same hour, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stood
scarcely a knife cast from the west wall of Obelisk Polaris, building a cairn
from pale greenish rock-shards fallen over the millennia. Among this scanty
scree were some bones, many broken, of sheep or goats.
       As before, the air was still though very cold, the Waste empty, the set
sun bright on the mountain faces.
       From this closest vantage point the Obelisk was foreshortened into a
pyramid that seemed to taper up forever, vertically. Encouragingly, his rock
felt diamond-hard while the lowest reaches of the wall at any rate were thick
with bumpy handholds and footholds, like pebbled leather.
       To the south, Gran Hanack and the Hint were hidden.
       To the north White Fang towered monstrously, yellowish white in the
sunlight, as if ready to rip a hole in the graying sky. Bane of Fafhrd's
father, the Mouser recalled.
       Of Stardock, there could be seen the dark beginning of the wind-blasted
north wall and the north end of the deadly White Waterfall. All else of
Stardock the Obelisk hid.
       Save for one touch: almost straight overhead, seeming now to come from
Obelisk Polaris, the ghostly Grand Pennon streamed southwest.
       From behind Fafhrd and the Mouser as they worked came the tantalizing
odor of two snow hares roasting by the fire, while before it Hrissa tore flesh
slowly and savoringly from the carcass of a third she'd coursed down. The ice-
cat was about the size and shape of a cheetah, though with long tufty white
hair. The Mouser had bought her from a far-ranging Mingol trapper just north
of the Trollsteps.
       Beyond the fire the ponies eagerly chomped the last of the grain,
strengthening stuff they'd not tasted for a week.
       Fafhrd wrapped his sheathed longsword Graywand in oiled silk and laid
it in the cairn, then held out a big hand to the Mouser.
       "Scalpel?"
       "I'm taking my sword with me," the Mouser stated, then added
justifyingly, "it's but a feather to yours."
       "Tomorrow you'll find what a feather weighs," Fafhrd foretold. The big
man shrugged and placed by Graywand his helmet, a bear's hide, a folded tent,
shovel and pickax, gold bracelets from his wrists and arms, quills, ink,
papyrus, a large copper pot, and some books and scrolls. The Mouser added
various empty and near-empty bags, two hunting spears, skis, an unstrung bow
with a quiver of arrows, tiny jars of oily paint and squares of parchment, and
all the harness of the ponies, many of the items wrapped against damp like
Graywand.
       Then, their appetites quickening from the roast-fumes, the two comrades
swiftly built two top courses, roofing the cairn.
       Just as they turned toward supper, facing the raggedly gilt-edged flat
western horizon, they heard in the silence the rushy sail-like noise again,
fainter this time but twice: once in the air to the north and, almost
simultaneously, to the south.
       Again they stared around swiftly but searchingly, yet there was nothing
anywhere to be seen except -- again Fafhrd saw it first -- a thread of black
smoke very near White Fang, rising from a point on the glacier between that
mountain and Stardock.
       "Gnarfi and Kranarch, if it be they, have chosen the rocky north wall
for their ascent," the Mouser observed.
       "And it will be their bane," Fafhrd predicted, up-jerking his thumb at
the Pennon.
       The Mouser nodded with less certainty, then demanded, "Fafhrd, what was
that sound? You've lived here."
       Fafhrd's brow crinkled and his eyes almost shut. "Some legend of great
birds..." he muttered questioningly, "...or of great fish -- no, that couldn't
be right."
       "Memory pot still seething all black?" the Mouser asked. Fafhrd nodded.
       Before he left the cairn, the Northerner laid beside it a slab of salt.
"That," he said, "along with the ice-filmed pool and herbage we just passed,
should hold the ponies here for a week. If we don't return, well, at least we
showed 'em the way between here and Illik-Ving."
       Hrissa smiled up from her bloody tidbit, as if to say, "No need to
worry about me or my rations."
         ****
       Again the Mouser woke as soon as sleep had gripped him tight, this time
with a surge of pleasure, as one who remembers a rendezvous. And again, this
time without any preliminary star-staring or flame-gazing, the living mask
faced him across the sinking fire: every same expression-quirk and feature --
short lips, nose and forehead one straight line -- except that tonight it was
ivory pale with greenish lips and lids and lashes.
       The Mouser was considerably startled, for last night he had stayed
awake, waiting for the phantom girl-face -- and even trying to make it come
again -- until the swelling moon had risen three handbreadths above Stardock
... without any success whatever. His mind had known that the face had been an
hallucination on the first occasion, but his feelings had insisted otherwise -
- to his considerable disgust and the loss of a quarter night's sleep.
       And by day he had secretly consulted the last of the four short stanzas
on the parchment scrap in his pouch's deepest pocket:
Who scales the Snow King's citadel
Shall father his two daughters' sons;
Though he must face foes fierce and fell,
His seed shall live while time still runs.
       Yesterday that had seemed rather promising -- at least the fathering
and daughters part -- though today, after his lost sleep, the merest mockery.
       But now the living mask was there again and going through all the same
teasing antics, including the shuddersome yet somehow thrilling trick of
opening wide its lids to show not eyes but a dark backing like the rest of the
night. The Mouser was enchanted in a shivery way, but unlike the first night
he was full-mindedly alert, and he tested for illusions by blinking and
squinting his own eyes and silently shifting his head about in his hood --
with no effect whatever on the living mask. Then he quietly unlaced the thong
from the top hooks of his cloak -- Hrissa was sleeping against Fafhrd tonight
-- and slowly reached out his hand and picked up a pebble and flicked it
across the pale flames at a point somewhat below the mask.
       Although he knew there wasn't anything beyond the fire but scattered
scree and ringingly hard earth, there wasn't the faintest sound of the pebble
striking anywhere. He might have thrown it off Nehwon.
       At almost the same instant, the mask smiled tauntingly.
       The Mouser was very swiftly out of his cloak and on his feet.
       But even more swiftly the mask dissolved away -- this time in one swift
stroke from forehead to chin.
       He quickly stepped, almost lunged, around the fire to the spot where
the mask had seemed to hang, and there he stared around searchingly. Nothing -
- except a fleeting breath of wine or spirits of wine. He stirred the fire and
stared around again. Still nothing. Except that Hrissa woke beside Fafhrd and
bristled her moustache and gazed solemnly, perhaps scornfully, at the Mouser,
who was beginning to feel rather like a fool. He wondered if his mind and his
desires were playing a silly game against each other.
       Then he trod on something. His pebble, he thought, but when he picked
it up, he saw it was a tiny jar. It could have been one of his own pigment
jars, but it was too small, hardly bigger than a joint of his thumb, and made
not of hollowed stone but some kind of ivory or other tooth.
       He knelt by the fire and peered into it, then dipped in his little
finger and gingerly rubbed the tip against the rather hard grease inside. It
came out ivory-hued. The grease had an oily, not winy odor.
       The Mouser pondered by the fire for some time. Then with a glance at
Hrissa, who had closed her eyes and laid back her moustache again, and at
Fafhrd, who was snoring softly, he returned to his cloak and to sleep.
       He had not told Fafhrd a word about his earlier vision of the living
mask. His surface reason was that Fafhrd would laugh at such calf-brained
nonsense of smoke-faces; his deeper reason the one which keeps any man from
mentioning a pretty new girl even to his dearest friend.
       So perhaps it was the same reason which next morning kept Fafhrd from
telling his dearest friend what happened to him late that same night. Fafhrd
dreamed he was feeling out the exact shape of a girl's face in absolute
darkness while her slender hands caressed his body. She had a rounded
forehead, very long-lashed eyes, in-dipping nose bridge, apple cheeks, an
impudent snub nose -- _it felt_ impudent! -- and long lips whose grin his big
gentle fingers could trace clearly.
       He woke to the moon glaring down at him aslant from the south. It
silvered the Obelisk's interminable wall, turning rock-knobs to black shadow
bars. He also woke to acute disappointment that a dream had been only a dream.
Then he would have sworn that he felt fingertips briefly brush his face and
that he heard a faint silvery chuckle which receded swiftly. He sat up like a
mummy in his laced cloak and stared around. The fire had sunk to a few red
ember-eyes, but the moonlight was bright, and by it he could see nothing at
all.
       Hrissa growled at him reproachfully for a silly sleep-breaker. He
damned himself for mistaking the afterimage of a dream for reality. He damned
the whole girl-less, girl-vision-breeding Cold Waste. A bit of the night's
growing chill spilled down his neck. He told himself he should be fast asleep
like the wise Mouser over there, gathering strength for tomorrow's great
effort. He lay back, and after some time he slumbered.
         ****
       Next morning the Mouser and Fafhrd woke at the first gray of dawn, the
moon still bright as a snowball in the west, and quickly breakfasted and
readied themselves and stood facing Obelisk Polaris in the stinging cold, all
girls forgotten, their manhood directed solely at the mountain.
       Fafhrd stood in high-laced boots with newly-sharpened thick hobnails.
He wore a wolfskin tunic, fur turned in but open now from neck to belly. His
lower arms and legs were bare. Short-wristed rawhide gloves covered his hands.
A rather small pack, wrapped in his cloak, rode high on his back. Clipped to
it was a large coil of black hempen rope. On his stout unstudded belt, his
sheathed ax on his right side balanced on the other a knife, a small
waterskin, and a bag of iron spikes headed by rings.
       The Mouser wore his ramskin hood, pulled close around his face now by
its drawstring, and on his body a tunic of gray silk, triple layered. His
gloves were longer than Fafhrd's and fur-lined. So were his slender boots,
which were footed with crinkly behemoth hide. On his belt, his dagger Cat's
Claw and his waterskin balanced his sword Scalpel, its scabbard thonged
loosely to his thigh. While to this cloak-wrapped pack was secured a curiously
thick, short, black bamboo rod headed with a spike at one end and at the other
a spike and large hook, somewhat like that of a shepherd's crook.
       Both men were deeply tanned and leanly muscular, in best trim for
climbing, hardened by the Trollsteps and the Cold Waste, their chests a shade
larger than ordinary from weeks of subsisting on the latter's thin air.
       No need to search about for the best-looking ascent -- Fafhrd had done
that yesterday as they'd approached the Obelisk.
       The ponies were cropping again, and one had found the salt and was
licking it with his thick tongue. The Mouser looked around for Hrissa to cuff
her cheek in farewell, but the ice-cat was sniffing out a spoor beyond the
campsite, her ears a-prick.
       "She makes a cat-parting," Fafhrd said. "Good."
       A faint shade of rose touched the heavens and the glacier by White
Fang. Scanning toward the latter, the Mouser drew in his breath and squinted
hard, while Fafhrd gazed narrowly from under the roof of his palm.
       "Brownish figures," the Mouser said at last. "Kranarch and Gnarfi
always dressed in brown leather, I recall. But I make them more than two."
       "I make them four," Fafhrd said. "Two strangely shaggy -- clad in brown
fur suits, I guess. And all four mounting from the glacier up the rock wall."
       "Where the gale will -- " the Mouser began, then looked up. So did
Fafhrd.
       The Grand Pennon was gone.
       "You said that sometimes -- " the Mouser started.
       "Forget the gale and those two and their rough-edged reinforcements,"
Fafhrd said curtly. He faced around again at Obelisk Polaris. So did the
Mouser.
       Squinting up the greenish-white slope, head bent sharply back, the
Mouser said, "This morning he seems somewhat steeper than even that north wall
and rather extensive upward."
       "Pah!" Fafhrd retorted. "As a child I would climb him before breakfast.
Often." He raised his clenched right rawhide glove as if it held a baton, and
cried, "We go!"
       With that he strode forward and without a break began to walk up the
knobby face -- or so it seemed, for although he used handholds he kept his
body far out from the rock, as a good climber should.
       The Mouser followed in Fafhrd's steps and holds, stretching his legs
farther and keeping somewhat closer to the cliff.
       Midmorning and they were still climbing without a break. The Mouser
ached or stung in every part. His pack was like a fat man on his back, Scalpel
a sizable boy clinging to his belt. And his ears had popped five times.
       Just above, Fafhrd's boots clashed rock-knobs and into rock-holes with
an unhesitating mechanistic rhythm the Mouser had begun to hate. Yet he kept
his eyes resolutely fixed on them. Once he had looked down between his own
legs and decided not to do that again.
       It is not good to see the blue of distance, or even the gray-blue of
middle distance, below one.
       So he was taken by surprise when a small white bearded face, bloodily
encumbered, came bobbing up alongside and past him.
       Hrissa halted on a ledgelet by Fafhrd and took great whistling breaths,
her tufted belly-skin pressing up against her spine with each exhalation. She
breathed only through her pinkish nostrils because her jaws were full of two
snow hares, packed side by side, with dead heads and hindquarters a-dangle.
       Fafhrd took them from her and dropped them in his pouch and laced it
shut.
       Then he said, just a shade grandiloquently, "She has proved her
endurance and skill, and she has paid her way. She is one of us."
       It had not occurred to the Mouser to doubt any of that. It seemed to
him simply that there were three comrades now climbing Obelisk Polaris.
Besides, he was most grateful to Hrissa for the halt she had brought. Partly
to prolong it, he carefully pressed a handful of water from his bag and
stretched it to her to lap: Then he and Fafhrd drank a little too.
         ****
       All the long summer day they climbed the west wall of the cruel but
reliable Obelisk. Fafhrd seemed tireless. The Mouser got his second wind, lost
it, and never quite got his third. His whole body was one great leaden ache,
beginning deep in his bones and filtering outward, like refined poison,
through his flesh. His vision became a bobbing welter of real and remembered
rock-knobs, while the necessity of never missing one single grip or foot-
placement seemed the ruling of an insane schoolmaster god. He silently cursed
the whole maniacal Stardock project, cackling in his brain at the idea that
the luring stanzas on the parchment could mean anything but pipe dreams. Yet
he would not cry quits or seek again to prolong the brief breathers they took.
       He marveled dully at Hrissa's leaping and hunching up beside them. But
by midafternoon he noted she was limping, and once he saw a light blood-print
of two pads where she'd set a paw.
       They made camp at last almost two hours before sunset, because they'd
found a rather wide ledge -- and because a very light snowfall had begun, the
tiny flakes sifting silently down like meal.
       They made a fire of resin-pellets in the tiny claw-footed brazier
Fafhrd packed, and they heated over it water for herb tea in their single
narrow high pot. The water was a long time getting even lukewarm. With Cat's
Claw the Mouser stirred two dollops of honey into it.
       The ledge was as long as three men stretched out and as deep as one. On
the sheer face of Obelisk Polaris that much space seemed an acre, at least.
       Hrissa stretched slackly behind the tiny fire. Fafhrd and the Mouser
huddled to either side of it, their cloaks drawn around them, too tired to
look around, talk, or even think.
       The snowfall grew a little thicker, enough to hide the Cold Waste far
below.
       After his second swallow of sweetened tea, Fafhrd asserted they'd come
at least two-thirds of the way up the Obelisk.
       The Mouser couldn't understand how Fafhrd could pretend to know that,
any more than a man could tell by looking at the shoreless waters of the Outer
Sea how far he'd sailed across it. To the Mouser they were simply in the exact
center of a dizzily tip-tilted plain of pale granite, green-tinged and now
snow-sprinkled. He was still too weary to outline this concept to Fafhrd, but
he managed to make himself say, "As a child you would climb up and down the
Obelisk before breakfast?"
       "We had rather late breakfasts then," Fafhrd explained gruffly.
       "Doubtless on the afternoon of the fifth day," the Mouser concluded.
       After the tea was drunk, they heated more water and left the hacked and
disjointed bits of one of the snow hares in the fluid until they turned gray,
then slowly chewed them and drank the dull soup. At about the same time Hrissa
became a little interested in the flayed carcass of the other hare set before
her nose -- by the brazier to keep it from freezing.
       Enough interested to begin to haggle it with her fangs and slowly chew
and swallow.
       The Mouser very gently examined the pads of the ice-cat's paws. They
were worn silk-thin, there were two or three cuts in them, and the white fur
between them was stained deep pink. Using a feather touch, the Mouser rubbed
salve into them, shaking his head the while. Then he nodded once and took from
his pouch a large needle, a spool of thin thong, and a small rolled hide of
thin, tough leather.
       From the last he cut with Cat's Claw a shape rather like a very fat
pear and stitched from it a boot for Hrissa.
       When he tried it on the ice-cat's hind paw, she let it be for a little,
then began to bite at it rather gently, looking up queerly at the Mouser. He
thought, then very carefully bored holes in it for the ice-cat's non-
retracting claws, then drew the boot up the leg snugly until the claws
protruded fully and tied it there with the drawstring he'd run through slits
at the top.
       Hrissa no longer bothered the boot. The Mouser made others, and Fafhrd
joined in and cut and stitched one too.
       When Hrissa was fully shod in her four clawed paw-mittens, she smelled
each, then stood up and paced back and forth the length of the ledge a few
times, and finally settled herself by the still-warm brazier and the Mouser,
chin on his ankle.
       The tiny grains of snow were still falling ruler-straight, frosting the
ledge and Fafhrd's coppery hair. He and the Mouser began to pull up their
hoods and lace their cloaks about them for the night. The sun still shone
through the snowfall, but its light was filtered white and brought not an atom
of warmth.
       Obelisk Polaris was not a noisy mountain, as many are -- a-drip with
glacial water, rattling with rock slides, and even with rock strata a-creak
from uneven loss or gain of heat. The silence was profound.
       The Mouser felt an impulse to tell Fafhrd about the living girl-mask or
illusion he'd seen by night, while simultaneously Fafhrd considered recounting
to the Mouser his own erotic dream.
       At that moment there came again, without prelude, the rushing in the
silent air and they saw, clearly outlined by the falling snow, a great flat
undulating shape.
       It came swooping past them, rather slowly, about two spear-lengths out
from the ledge.
       There was nothing at all to be seen except the flat, flakeless space
the thing made in the airborne snow and the eddies it raised; it in no way
obscured the snow beyond. Yet they felt the gust of its passage.
       The shape of this invisible thing was most like that of a giant skate
or stingray four yards long and three wide; there was even the suggestion of a
vertical fin and a long, lashing tail.
       "Great invisible fish!" the Mouser hissed, thrusting his hand down in
his half-laced cloak and managing to draw Scalpel in a single sweep. "Your
mind was most right, Fafhrd, when you thought it wrong!"
       As the snow-sketched apparition glided out of sight around the buttress
ending the ledge to the south, there came from it a mocking rippling laughter
in two voices, one alto, one soprano.
       "A sightless fish that laughs like girls -- most monstrous!" Fafhrd
commented shakenly, hefting his ax, which he'd got out swiftly too, though it
was still attached to his belt by a long thong.
       They crouched there then for a while, scrambled out of their cloaks,
and with weapons ready, awaited the invisible monster's return, Hrissa
standing between them with fur bristling. But after a while they began to
shake from the cold and so they perforce got back into their cloaks and laced
them, though still gripping their weapons and prepared to throw off the upper
lacings in a flash. Then they briefly discussed the weirdness just witnessed,
insofar as they could, each now confessing his earlier visions or dreams of
girls.
       Finally the Mouser said, "The girls might have been riding the
invisible thing, lying along its back -- and invisible too! Yet, what was the
thing?"
       This touched a small spot in Fafhrd's memory. Rather unwillingly he
said, "I remember waking once as a child in the night and hearing my father
say to my mother, '...like great thick quivering sails, but the ones you can't
see are the worst.' They stopped speaking then, I think because they heard me
stir."
       The Mouser asked, "Did your father ever speak of seeing girls in the
high mountains -- flesh, apparition, or witch, which is a mixture of the two;
visible or invisible?"
       "He wouldn't have mentioned 'em if he had," Fafhrd replied. "My mother
was a very jealous woman and a devil with a chopper."
       The whiteness they'd been scanning turned swiftly to darkest gray. The
sun had set. They could no longer see the falling snow. They pulled up their
hoods and laced their cloaks tight and huddled together at the back of the
ledge with Hrissa close between them.
         ****
       Trouble came early the next day. They roused with first light, feeling
battered and nightmare-ridden, and uncramped themselves with difficulty while
the morning ration of strong herb tea and powdered meat and snow were stewed
in the same pot to a barely uncold aromatic gruel. Hrissa gnawed her rewarmed
hare's bones and accepted a little bear's fat and water from the Mouser.
       The snow had stopped during the night, but the Obelisk was powdered
with it on every step and hold, while under the snow was ice -- the first-
fallen snow melted by yesterday afternoon's meager warmth on the rock and
quickly refrozen.
       So Fafhrd and the Mouser roped together, and the Mouser swiftly
fashioned a harness for Hrissa by cutting two holes in the long side of an
oblong of leather. Hrissa protested somewhat when her forelegs were thrust
through the holes and the ends of the oblong double-stitched together snugly
over her shoulders. But when an end of Fafhrd's black hempen rope was tied
around her harness where the stitching was, she simply lay down flat on the
ledge, on the warm spot where the brazier had stood, as if to say, "This
debasing tether I will not accept, though humans may."
       But when Fafhrd slowly started up the wall and the Mouser followed and
the rope tightened on Hrissa, and when she had looked up and seen them still
roped like herself, she followed sulkily after. A little later she slipped off
a bulge -- her boots, snug as they were, must have been clumsy to her after
naked pads -- and swung scrabbling back and forth several long moments before
she was supporting her own weight again. Fortunately the Mouser had a firm
stance at the time.
       After that, Hrissa came on more cheerily, sometimes even climbing to
the side ahead of the Mouser and smiling back at him -- rather sardonically,
the Mouser fancied.
       The climbing was a shade steeper than yesterday with an even greater
insistence that each hand- and foothold be perfect. Gloved fingers must grip
stone, not ice; spikes must clash through the brittle stuff to rock. Fafhrd
roped his ax to his right wrist and used its hammer to tap away treacherous
thin platelets and curves of the glassy frozen water.
       And the climbing was more wearing because it was harder to avoid
tenseness. Even looking sideways at the steepness of the wall tightened the
Mouser's groin with fear. He wondered _what if the wind should blow?_ -- and
fought the impulse to cling flat to the cliff. Yet at the same time sweat
began to trickle down his face and chest, so that he had to throw back his
hood and loosen his tunic to his belly to keep his clothes from sogging.
       But there was worse to come. It had looked as though the slope above
were gentling, but now, drawing nearer, they perceived a bulge jutting out a
full two yards some seven yards above them. The under-slope was pocked here
and there -- fine handholds, except that they opened down. The bulge extended
as far as they could see to either side, at most points looking worse.
       They found themselves the best and highest holds they could, close
together, and stared up at their problem. Even Hrissa, a-cling by the Mouser,
seemed subdued.
       Fafhrd said softly, "I mind me now they used to say there was an out-
jutting around the Obelisk's top. His Crown, I think my father called it. I
wonder..."
       "Don't you know?" the Mouser demanded, a shade harshly. Standing rigid
on his holds, his arms and legs were aching worse than ever.
       "O Mouser," Fafhrd confessed, "in my youth I never climbed Obelisk
Polaris farther than halfway to last night's camp. I only boasted to raise our
spirits."
       There being nothing to say to that, the Mouser shut his lips, though
somewhat thinly. Fafhrd began to whistle a tuneless tune and carefully fished
a small grapnel with five dagger-sharp flukes from his pouch and tied it
securely to the long end of their black rope still coiled on his back. Then
stretching his right arm as far out as he might from the cliff, he whirled the
grapnel in a smallish circle, faster and faster, and finally hurled it upward.
They heard it clash against rock somewhere above the bulge, but it did not
catch on any crack or hump and instantly came sliding and then dropping down,
missing the Mouser by hardly a handbreadth, it seemed to him.
       Fafhrd drew up the grapnel -- with some delays, since it tended to
catch on every crack or hump below them -- and whirled and hurled it again.
And again and again and again, each time without success. Once it stayed up,
but Fafhrd's first careful tug on the rope brought it down.
       Fafhrd's sixth cast was his first really bad one. The grapnel never
went out of sight at all. As it reached the top of the throw, it glinted for
an instant.
       "Sunlight!" Fafhrd hissed happily. "We're almost to the summit!"
       "That 'almost' is a whopper, though," the Mouser commented, but even he
couldn't keep a cheerful note out of his voice.
       By the time Fafhrd had failed on seven more casts, all cheerfulness was
gone from the Mouser again. His aches were horrible, his hands and feet were
numbing in the cold, and his brain was numbing too, so that the next time
Fafhrd cast and missed, he was so unwise as to follow the grapnel with his
gaze as it fell.
       For the first time today he really looked out and down.
       The Cold Waste was a pale blue expanse almost like the sky -- and
seeming even more distant -- all its copses and mounds and tiny tarns having
long since become pinpoints and vanished. Many leagues to the west, almost at
the horizon, a jagged pale gold band showed where the shadows of the mountains
ended. Midway in the band was a blue gap -- Stardock's shadow continuing over
the edge of the world.
       Giddily the Mouser snatched his gaze back to Obelisk Polaris ... and
although he could still see the granite, it didn't seem to count anymore --
only four insecure holds on a kind of pale green nothingness, with Fafhrd and
Hrissa somehow suspended beside him. His mind could no longer accept the
Obelisk's steepness.
       As the urge to hurl himself down swelled in him, he somehow transformed
it into a sardonic snort, and he heard himself say with daggerish contempt,
"Leave off your foolish fishing, Fafhrd! I'll show you now how Lankhmarian
mountain science deals with a trifling problem such as this which has baffled
all your barbarian whirling and casting!"
       And with that he unclipped from his pack with reckless speed the thick
black bamboo pike or crook and began cursingly with numb fingers to draw out
and let snap into place its telescoping sections until it was four times its
original length.
       This tool of technical climbing, which indeed the Mouser had brought
all the way from Lankhmar, had been a matter of dispute between them the whole
trip, Fafhrd asserting it was a tricksy toy not worth the packing.
       Now, however, Fafhrd made no comment, but merely coiled up his grapnel
and thrust his hands into his wolfskin jerkin against his sides to warm them
and, mild-eyed, watched the Mouser's furious activity. Hrissa shifted to a
perch closer to Fafhrd and crouched stoically.
       But when the Mouser shakily thrust the narrower end of his black tool
toward the bulge above, Fafhrd reached out a hand to help him steady it, yet
could not refrain from saying, "If you think to get a good enough hold with
the crook on the rim to shinny up that stick -- "
       "Quiet, you loutish kibitzer!" the Mouser snarled and with Fafhrd's
help thrust pike-end into a pock in the rock hardly a finger's length from the
rim. Then he seated the spiked foot of the pole in a small, deep hollow just
above his head. Next he snapped out two short recessed lever-arms from the
base of the pole and began to rotate them. It soon became clear that they
controlled a great screw hidden in the pole, for the latter lengthened until
it stood firmly between the two pocks in the rock, while the stiff black shaft
itself bent a little.
       At that instant a sliver of rock, being pressed by the pole, broke off
from the rim. The pole thrummed as it straightened and the Mouser, screaming a
curse, slipped off his holds and fell.
         ****
       It was good then that the rope between the two comrades was short and
that the spikes of Fafhrd's boots were seated firmly, like so many demon-
forged dagger-points, in the rock of his footholds -- for as the strain came
suddenly on Fafhrd's belt and on his rope-gripping left hand, he took it
without plummeting after the Mouser, only bending his knees a little and
grunting softly, while his right hand snatched hold of the vibrating pole and
saved it.
       The Mouser had not even fallen far enough to drag Hrissa from her
perch, though the rope almost straightened between them. The ice-cat, her
tufted neck bent sharply between foreleg and chest, peered down with great
curiosity at the dangling man.
       His face was ashen. Fafhrd made no mark of that, but simply handed him
the black pole, saying, "It's a good tool. I've screwed it back short. Seat it
in another pock and try again."
       Soon the pole stood firm between the hollow by the Mouser's head and a
pock a hand's width from the rim. The bowlike bend in the pole faced downward.
Then they put the Mouser first on the rope, and he went climbing up and out
along the pole, hanging from it back downward, his boot-edges finding tiny
holds on the pole's section-shoulders -- out into and over the vast, pale
blue-gray space which had so lately dizzied him.
       The pole began to bend a little more with the Mouser's weight, the
pike-end slipping a finger's span in the upper pock with a horrible tiny
grating sound, but Fafhrd gave the screw another turn, and the pole held firm.
       Fafhrd and Hrissa watched the Mouser reach its end, where he paused
briefly. Then they saw him reach up his left arm until it was out of sight to
the elbow above the rim, meanwhile gripping with his right hand the crook and
twining his legs around the shaft. He appeared to feel about with his left
hand and find something. Then he moved out and up still further and very
slowly his head and after it, in a sudden swift sweep, his right arm went out
of sight above the rim.
       For several long moments they saw only the bottom half of the bent
Mouser, his dark crinkly-soled boots twined securely to the end of the pole.
Then, rather slowly, like a gray snail, and with a final push of one boot
against the top of the crook, he went entirely out of sight.
       Fafhrd slowly paid out rope after him.
       After some time the Mouser's voice, quite ghostly yet clear, came down
to them: "Hola! I've got the rope anchored around a boss big as a tree stump.
Send up Hrissa."
       So Fafhrd put Hrissa on the rope ahead of him, knotting it to her
harness with a sheepshank.
       Hrissa fought desperately for a moment against being swung into space,
but as soon as it was done hung deathly still. Then as she was drawn slowly
up, Fafhrd's knot began to slip. The ice-cat swiftly snatched at the rope with
her teeth and gripped it far back between her jaws. The moment she came near
the rim, her clawed mittens were ready, and she scrabbled and was dragged out
of sight.
       Soon word came down from the Mouser that Hrissa was safe and Fafhrd
might follow. He frowningly tightened the screw another half turn, though the
pole creaked ominously, and then very gently climbed out along it. The Mouser
now kept the rope taut from above, but for the first stretch it could hardly
take more than a few pounds of Fafhrd's weight off the pole.
       The upper spike once again grated horribly a bit in its pock, but it
still held firm. Helped more by the rope now, Fafhrd got his hands and head
over the rim.
       What he saw was a smooth, gentle rock slope, which could be climbed by
friction, and at the top of it the Mouser and Hrissa standing backgrounded by
blue sky and gilded by sunlight.
       Soon he stood beside them.
       The Mouser said, "Fafhrd, when we get back to Lankhmar remind me to
give Glinthi the Artificer thirteen diamonds from the pouch of them we'll find
on Stardock's hat: one for each section and joint of my climbing pole, one
each for the spikes at the ends and two for each screw."
       "Are there two screws?" Fafhrd asked respectfully.
       "Yes, one at each end," the Mouser told him and then made Fafhrd brace
the rope for him so that he could climb down the slope and, bending all his
upper body down over the rim, shorten the pole by rotating its upper screw
until he was able to drag it triumphantly back over the top with him.
       As the Mouser telescoped its sections together again, Fafhrd said to
him seriously, "You must thong it to your belt as I do my ax. We must not
chance losing Glinthi's help on the rest of this journey."
         ****
       Throwing back their hoods and opening their tunics wide to the hot sun,
Fafhrd and the Mouser looked around, while Hrissa luxuriously stretched and
worked her slim limbs and neck and body, the white fur of which hid her
bruises. Both men were somewhat exalted by the thin air and filled brain-high
with the ease of mind and spirit that comes with a great danger skillfully
conquered.
       Rather to their amazement, the southward swinging sun had climbed
barely halfway to noon. Perils which had seemed demihours long had lasted
minutes only.
       The summit of Obelisk Polaris was a great rolling field of pale rock
too big to measure by Lankhmar acres. They had arrived near the southwest
corner, and the gray-tinted stone meadow seemed to stretch east and north
almost indefinitely. Here and there were hummocks and hollows, but they
swelled and dipped most gently. There were a few scattered large boulders, not
many, while off to the east were darker indistinct shapes which might be
bushes and small trees footed in cracks filled with blown dirt.
       "What lies east of the mountain chain?" the Mouser asked. "More Cold
Waste?"
       "Our clan never journeyed there," Fafhrd answered. He frowned. "Some
taboo on the whole area, I think. Mist always masked the east on my father's
great climbs, or so he told us."
       "We could have a look now," the Mouser suggested.
       Fafhrd shook his head. "Our course lies there," he said, pointing
northeast, where Stardock rose like a giantess standing tall but asleep, or
feigning sleep, looking seven times as big and high at least as she had before
the Obelisk hid her top two days ago.
       The Mouser said, a shade dolefully, "All our brave work scaling the
Obelisk has only made Stardock higher. Are you sure there's not another peak,
perhaps invisible, on top of her?"
       Fafhrd nodded without taking his eyes off her, who was empress without
consort of the Mountains of the Giants. Her Tresses had grown to great
swelling rivers of snow, and now the two adventurers could see faint stirrings
in them -- avalanches slipping and tumbling.
       The Southern Tress came down in a great dipping double curve toward the
northwest corner of the mighty rock summit on which they stood.
       At the top, Stardock's corniced snow hat, its upper rim glittering with
sunlight as if it were edged around with diamonds, seemed to nod toward them a
trifle more than it ever had before, and the demurely-eyed Face with it, like
a great lady hinting at possible favors.
       But the gauzy, long pale veils of the Grand and Petty Pennons no longer
streamed from her Hat. The air atop Stardock must be as still at the moment as
it was where they stood upon the Obelisk.
       "What devil's luck that Kranarch and Gnarfi should tackle the north
wall the one day in eight the gale fails!" Fafhrd cursed. "But 'twill be their
destruction yet -- yes, and of their two shaggy-clad henchmen too. This calm
can't hold."
       "I recall now," the Mouser remarked, "that when we caroused with 'em in
Illik-Ving, Gnarfi, drunken, claimed he could whistle up winds -- had learned
the trick from his grandmother -- and could whistle 'em down too, which is
more to the point."
       "The more reason for us to hasten!" Fafhrd cried, upping his pack and
slipping his big arms through the wide shoulder straps. "On, Mouser! Up,
Hrissa! We'll have a bite and sup before the snow ridge."
       "You mean we must tackle that freezing, treacherous problem today?"
demurred the Mouser, who would dearly have loved to strip and bake in the sun.
       "Before noon!" Fafhrd decreed. And with that he set them a stiff
walking pace straight north, keeping close to the summit's west edge, as if to
countermand from the start any curiosity the Mouser might have about a peek to
the east. The latter followed with only minor further protests; Hrissa came on
limpingly, lagging at first far behind, but catching up as her limp went and
her cat-zest for newness grew.
       And so they marched across the great, strange rolling granite plain of
Obelisk's top, patched here and there with limestone stretches white as
marble. Its sun-drenched silence and uniformity became eerie after a bit. The
shallowness of its hollows was deceptive: Fafhrd noted several in which
battalions of armed men might have hidden a-crouch, unseen until one came
within a spear's cast.
       The longer they strode along, the more closely Fafhrd studied the rock
his hobnails clashed. Finally he paused to point out a strangely rippled
stretch.
       "I'd swear that once was seabottom," he said softly.
       The Mouser's eyes narrowed. Thinking of the great invisible fishlike
flier they had seen last evening, its raylike form undulating through the
snowfall, he felt gooseflesh crawling on him.
       Hrissa slunk past them, head a-weave.
       Soon they passed the last boulder, a huge one, and saw, scarcely a
bowshot ahead, the glitter of snow.
       The Mouser said, "The worst thing about mountain climbing is that the
easy parts go so quickly."
       "Hist!" warned Fafhrd, sprawling down suddenly like a great four-legged
water beetle and putting his cheek to the rock. "Do you hear it, Mouser!"
       Hrissa snarled, staring about, and her white fur bristled.
       The Mouser started to stoop, but realized he wouldn't have to, so fast
the sound was coming on: a general high-pitched drumming, as of five hundred
fiends rippling their giant thick fingernails on a great stone drumhead.
       Then, without pause, there came surging straight toward them over the
nearest rock swelling to the southeast, a great wide-fronted stampede of
goats, so packed together and their fur so glossy white that they seemed for a
flash like an onrushing of living snow. Even the great curving horns of their
leaders were ivory-hued. The Mouser noted that a stretch of the sunny air just
above their center shimmered and wavered as it will above a fire. Then he and
Fafhrd were racing back toward the last boulder with Hrissa bounding ahead.
       Behind them the devil's tattoo of the stampede grew louder and louder.
       They reached the boulder and vaulted atop it, where Hrissa already
crouched, hardly a pounding heartbeat before the white horde. And well it was
that Fafhrd had his ax out the instant they won there, for the midmost of the
great billies sprang high, forelegs tucked up and head bowed to present his
creamy horns -- so close Fafhrd could see their splintered tips. But in that
same instant Fafhrd got him in his snowy shoulder with a great swashing deep-
cleaving blow so heavy that the beast was carried past them to the side and
crashed on the short slope leading down to the rim of the west wall.
       Then the white stampede was splitting around the great boulder, the
animals so near and packed that there was no longer room for leaping, and the
din of their hooves and the gasping and now the frightened bleating was
horrendous, and the caprid stench was stifling, while the boulder rocked with
their passage.
       In the worst of the bruit there was a momentary downrushing of air,
briefly dispelling the stench, as something passed close above their heads,
rippling the sky like a long flapping blanket of fluid glass, while through
the clangor could be heard for a moment a harsh, hateful laughter.
       The lesser tongue of the stampede passed between the boulder and the
rim, and of these goats many went tumbling over the edge with bleats like
screams of the damned, carrying with them the body of the great billy Fafhrd
had maimed.
       Then as sudden in its departure as a snow squall that dismasts a ship
in the Frozen Sea, the stampede was past them and pounding south, swinging
east somewhat from the deadly rim, with the last few of the goats, chiefly
nannies and kids, bounding madly after.
       Pointing his arm toward the sun as if for a sword-thrust, the Mouser
cried furiously, "See there, where the beams twist all askew above the herd!
It's the same flier as just now overpassed us and last night we saw in the
snowfall -- the flier who raised the stampede and whose riders guided it
against us! Oh, damn the two deceitful ghostly bitches, luring us on to a
goaty destruction stinking worse than a temple orgy in the City of Ghouls!"
       "I thought this laughter was far deeper," Fafhrd objected. "It was not
the girls."
       "So they have a deep-throated pimp -- does that improve them in your
eyes? Or your great flapping love-struck ears?" the Mouser demanded angrily.
       The drumming of the stampede had died away even swifter than it had
come, and in the new-fallen silence they heard now a happy half-obstructed
growling. Hrissa, springing off the boulder at stampede-end, had struck down a
fat kid and was tearing at its bloodied white neck.
       "Ah, I can smell it broiling now!" the Mouser cried with a great smile,
his preoccupations altering in less than an instant. "Good Hrissa! Fafhrd, if
those be treelets and bushes and grass to the east -- and they must be that,
for what else feeds these goats? -- there's sure to be dead wood -- why, there
may even be mint! -- and we can..."
       "You'll eat the flesh raw for lunch or not at all!" Fafhrd decreed
fiercely. "Are we to risk the stampede again? Or give the sniggering flier a
chance to marshal against us some snow lions? -- which are sure to be here
too, to prey on the goats. And are we to present Kranarch and Gnarfi the
summit of Stardock on a diamond-studded silver platter? -- if this devil's
lull holds tomorrow too and they be industrious strong climbers, not nice-
bellied sluggards like one I could name!"
       So, with only a gripe or two more from the Mouser, the kid was swiftly
bled, gutted and skinned, and some of its spine-meat and haunches wrapped and
packed for supper. Hrissa drank some more blood and ate half the liver and
then followed the Mouser and Fafhrd as they set off north toward the snow
ridge. The two men were chewing thin-sliced peppered collops of raw kid, but
striding swiftly and keeping a wary eye behind for another stampede.
       The Mouser expected now at last to get a view of the eastern depths, by
peering east along the north wall of Obelisk Polaris, but here again he was
foiled by the first great swell of the snow-saddle.
       However, the northern view was fearsomely majestic. A full half league
below them now and seen almost vertically on, the White Waterfall went
showering down mysteriously, twinkling even in the shadow.
       The ridge by which they must travel first curved up a score of yards,
then dipped smoothly down to a long snow-saddle another score of yards below
them, then slowly curved up into the South Tress, down which they could now
plainly see avalanches trickling and tumbling.
       It was easy to see how the northeast gale, blowing almost continually
but missing the Ladder, would greatly pile up snow between the taller mountain
and the Obelisk -- but whether the rocky connection between the two mountains
underlay the snow by only a few yards or by as much as a quarter league was
impossible to know.
       "We must rope again," Fafhrd decreed. "I'll go first and cut steps for
us across the west slope."
       "What need we steps in this calm!" the Mouser demanded. "Or to go by
the west slope? You just don't want me to see the east, do you? The top of the
ridge is broad enough to drive two carts across abreast."
       "The ridge-top in the wind's path almost certainly over-hangs emptiness
to the east and would break away," Fafhrd explained. "Look you, Mouser; do I
know more about snow and ice or do you?"
       "I once crossed the Bones of the Old Ones with you," the Mouser
retorted, shrugging. "There was snow there, I recall."
       "Pooh, the mere spillings of a lady's powderbox compared to this. No,
Mouser, on this stretch my word is law."
       "Very well," the Mouser agreed.
       So they roped up rather close -- in order, Fafhrd, Mouser, and Hrissa -
- and without more ado Fafhrd donned his gloves and thonged his ax to his
wrist and began cutting steps for them around the shoulder of the snow swell.
       It was rather slow work, for under a dusting of powder snow the stuff
was hard, and for each step Fafhrd must make at least two cuts -- first an in-
chopping backhand one to make the step, then a down-chop to clear it. And as
the slope grew steeper, he must make the steps somewhat closer together. The
steps he made were rather small, at least for his great boots, but they were
sure.
       Soon the ridge and the Obelisk cut off the sun. It grew very chill. The
Mouser closed his tunic and drew his hood around his face, while Hrissa,
between her short leaps from step to step, performed a kind of tiny cat-jig on
them, to keep her gloved paws from freezing. The Mouser reminded himself to
stuff them a bit with lamb's wool when he renewed the salve. He had his pike
out now, telescoped short and thonged to his wrist.
       They passed the shoulder of the swell and came opposite the beginning
of the snow-saddle, but Fafhrd did not cut steps up toward it. Rather, the
steps he now was cutting descended at a sharper angle than the saddle dipped,
though the slope they were crossing was becoming quite steep.
       "Fafhrd," the Mouser protested quietly, "we're heading for Stardock's
top, not the White Waterfall."
       "You said, 'Very well,'" Fafhrd retorted between chops. "Besides, who
does the work?" His ax rang as it bit into ice.
       "Look, Fafhrd," the Mouser said, "there are two goats crossing to
Stardock along the saddletop. No, three."
       "We should trust goats? Ask yourself why they've been sent." Again
Fafhrd's ax rang.
       The sun swung into view as it coursed southward, sending their three
shadows ranging far ahead of them. The pale gray of the snow turned glittery
white. The Mouser unhooded to the yellow rays. For a while the enjoyment of
their warmth on the back of his head helped him keep his mouth shut, but then
the slope grew steeper yet, as Fafhrd continued remorselessly to cut steps
downward.
       "I seem to recall that our purpose was to _climb_ Stardock, but my
memory must be disordered," the Mouser observed. "Fafhrd, I'll take your word
we must keep away from the top of the ridge, but do we have to keep away so
_far_? And the three goats have all skipped across."
       Still, "'Very well,' you said," was all Fafhrd would answer, and this
time there was a snarl in his voice.
       The Mouser shrugged. Now he was bracing himself with his pike
continuously, while Hrissa would pause studyingly before each leap.
       Their shadows went less than a spear's cast ahead of them now, while
the hot sun had begun to melt the surface snow, sending down trickles of ice
water to wet their gloves and make their footing unsure.
       Yet still Fafhrd kept cutting steps downward. And now of a sudden he
began to cut them downward more steeply still, adding with taps of his ax a
tiny handhold above each step -- and these handholds were needed!
       "Fafhrd," the Mouser said dreamily, "perhaps an ice-sprite has
whispered to you the secret of levitation, so that from this fine takeoff you
can dive, level out, and then go spring to Stardock's top. In that case I wish
you'd teach myself and Hrissa how to grow wings in an instant."
       "Hist!" Fafhrd spoke softly yet sharply at that instant. "I have a
feeling. Something comes. Brace yourself and watch behind us."
       The Mouser drove his pike in deep and rotated his head. As he did,
Hrissa leaped from the last step behind to the one on which the Mouser stood,
landing half on his boot and clinging to his knee -- yet this done so
dexterously the Mouser was not dislodged.
       "I see nothing," the Mouser reported, staring almost sunward. Then,
words suddenly clipped: "Again the beams twist like a spinning lantern! The
glints on the ice ripple and wave. 'Tis the flier come again! Cling!"
       There came the rushing sound, louder than ever before and swiftly
mounting, then a great sea-wave of air, as of a great body passing swiftly
only spans away; it whipped their clothes and Hrissa's fur and forced them to
cling fiercely to their holds, though Fafhrd made a full-armed swipe with his
ax. Hrissa snarled. Fafhrd almost louted forward off his holds with the
momentum of his blow.
       "I'll swear I scored on him, Mouser," he snarled, recovering. "My ax
touched something besides air."
       "You harebrained fool!" the Mouser cried. "Your scratches will anger
him and bring him back." He let go of the chopped ice-hold with his hand and,
steadying himself by his pike, he searched the sun-bright air ahead and around
for ripples.
       "More like I've scared him off," Fafhrd asserted, doing the same. The
rushy sound faded and did not return; the air became quiet, and the steep
slope grew very still; even the water-drip faded.
       Turning back to the wall with a grunt of relief, the Mouser touched
emptiness. He grew still as death himself. Turning his eyes only he saw that
upward from a point level with his knees the whole snow ridge had vanished --
the whole saddle and a section of the swell to either side of it -- as if some
great god had reached down while the Mouser's back was turned and removed that
block of reality.
       Giddily he clung to his pike. He was standing atop a newly created
snow-saddle now. Beyond and below its raw, fresh-fractured white eastern
slope, the silently departed great snow-cornice was falling faster and faster,
still in one hill-size chunk.
       Behind them the steps Fafhrd had cut mounted to the new snow rim, then
vanished.
       "See, I chopped us down far enough only in the nick," Fafhrd grumbled.
"My judgment was faulty."
       The falling cornice was snatched downward out of sight so that the
Mouser and Fafhrd at last could see what lay east of the Mountains of the
Giants: a rolling expanse of dark green that might be treetops except that
from here even giant trees would be tinier than grass blades -- an expanse
even farther below them than the Cold Waste at their backs. Beyond the green-
carpeted depression, another mountain range loomed like the ghost of one.
       "I have heard legends of the Great Rift Valley," Fafhrd murmured. "A
mountainsided cup for sunlight, its warm floor a league below the Waste."
       Their eyes searched.
       "Look," the Mouser said, "how trees climb the eastern face of Obelisk
almost to his top. Now the goats don't seem so strange."
       They could see nothing, however, of the east face of Stardock.
       "Come on!" Fafhrd commanded. "If we linger, the invisible growl-
laughtered flier may gather courage to return despite my ax-nick."
       And without further word he began resolutely to cut steps onward ...
and still a little down.
       Hrissa continued to peer over the rim, her bearded chin almost resting
on it, her nostrils a-twitch as if she faintly scented gossamer threads of
meat-odor mounting from the leagues' distant dark green, but when the rope
tightened on her harness, she followed.
       Perils came thick now. They reached the dark rock of the Ladder only by
chopping their way along a nearly vertical ice wall in the twinkly gloom under
a close-arching waterfall of snow that shot out from an icy boss above them --
perhaps a miniature version of the White Waterfall that was Stardock's skirt.
       When they stepped at last, numb with cold and hardly daring to believe
they'd made it, onto a wide dark ledge, they saw a jumble of bloody goat
tracks in the snow around.
       Without more warning than that, a long snowbank between that step and
the next above reared up its nearest white end a dozen feet and hissed
fearsomely, showing it to be a huge serpent with head a big as an elk's, all
covered with shaggy snow-white fur. Its great violet eyes glared like those of
a mad horse and its jaw gaped to show slashing-teeth like a shark's and two
great fangs jetting a mist of pale ichor.
       The furred serpent hesitated for two sways between the nearer, taller
man with flashing ax and the farther, smaller one with thick black stick. In
that pause Hrissa, with snarling hisses of her own, sprang forward past the
Mouser on the downslope side and the furred serpent struck at this newest and
most active foe.
       Fafhrd got a blast of its hot acrid breath, and the vapor trail from
its nearer fang bathed his left elbow.
       The Mouser's attention was fixed on a fur-wisped violet eye as big as a
girl's fist.
       Hrissa looked down the monster's gaping dark red gullet rimmed by
slaver-swimming ivory knives and the two ichor-jetting fangs.
       Then the jaws clashed shut, but in the intervening instant Hrissa had
leaped back more swiftly even than she'd advanced.
       The Mouser plunged the pike-end of his climbing pole into the glaring
violet eye.
       Swinging his ax two-handed, Fafhrd slashed at the furry neck just back
of the horselike skull, and there gushed out red blood which steamed as it
struck the snow.
       Then the three climbers were scrambling upward, while the monster
writhed in convulsions which shook the rock and spattered with red alike the
snow and its snow-white fur.
       At what they hoped was a safe distance above it, the climbers watched
it dying, though not without frequent glances about for creatures like it or
other perilous beasts.
       Fafhrd said, "A hot-blooded serpent, a snake with fur -- it goes
against experience. My father never spoke of such; I doubt he ever met 'em."
       The Mouser answered, "I'll wager they find their prey on the east slope
of Stardock and come here only to lair or breed. Perhaps the invisible flier
drove the three goats over the snow-saddle to lure this one." His voice grew
dreamy. "Or perhaps there's a secret world inside Stardock."
       Fafhrd shook his head, as if to clear it of such imagination-snaring
visions. "Our way lies upward," he said. "We'd best be well above the Lairs
before nightfall. Give me a dollop of honey when I drink," he added, loosening
his water bag as he turned and scanned up the Ladder.
       From its base the Ladder was a dark narrow triangle climbing to the
blue sky between the snowy, ever-tumbling Tresses. First there were the ledges
on which they stood, easy at first, but swiftly growing steeper and narrower.
Next an almost blank stretch, etched here and there with shadows and ripplings
hinting at part-way climbing routes, but none of them connected. Then another
band of ledges, the Roosts. Then a stretch still blanker than the first.
Finally another ledge-band, narrower and shorter -- the Face -- and atop all
what seemed a tiny pen-stroke of white ink: the brim of Stardock's pennonless
snowy hat.
       All the Mouser's aches and weariness came back as he squinted up the
Ladder while feeling in his pouch for the honey jar. Never, he was sure, had
he seen so much distance compressed into so little space by vertical
foreshortening. It was as if the gods had built a ladder to reach the sky, and
after using it had kicked most of the steps away. But he clenched his teeth
and prepared to follow Fafhrd.
         ****
       All their previous climbing began to seem book-simple compared to what
they now straggled through, step by straining step, all the long summer
afternoon. Where Obelisk Polaris had been a stern schoolmaster, Stardock was a
mad queen, tireless in preparing her shocks and surprises, unpredictable in
her wild caprices.
       The ledges of the Lairs were built of rock that sometimes broke away at
a touch, and they were piled with loose gravel. Also, the climbers made
acquaintance with Stardock's rocky avalanches, which brought stones whizzing
and spattering down around them without warning, so that they had to press
close to the walls and Fafhrd regretted leaving his helmet in the cairn.
Hrissa first snarled at each pelting pebble which hit near her, but when at
last struck in the side by a small one, showed fear and slunk close to the
Mouser, trying until rebuked to push between the wall and his legs.
       And once they saw a cousin of the white worm they had slain rear up
man-high and glare at them from a distant ledge, but it did not attack.
       They had to work their way to the northernmost point of the topmost
ledge before they found, at the very edge of the Northern Tress, almost
underlying its streaming snow, a scree-choked gully which narrowed upward to a
wide vertical groove -- or chimney, as Fafhrd called it.
       And when the treacherous scree was at last surmounted, the Mouser
discovered that the next stretch of the ascent was indeed very like climbing
up the inside of a rectangular chimney of varying width and with one of the
four walls missing -- that facing outward to the air. Its rock was sounder
than that of the Lairs, but that was all that could be said for it.
       Here all tricks of climbing were required and the utmost of main
strength into the bargain. Sometimes they hoisted themselves by cracks wide
enough for finger- and toeholds; if a crack they needed was too narrow, Fafhrd
would tap into it one of his spikes to make a hold, and this spike must, if
possible, be unwedged after use and recovered. Sometimes the chimney narrowed
so that they could walk up it laboriously with shoulders to one wall and boot
soles to the other. Twice it widened and became so smooth-walled that the
Mouser's extensible climbing-pike had to be braced between wall and wall to
give them a necessary step.
       And five times the chimney was blocked by a huge rock or chockstone
which in falling had wedged itself fast, and these fearsome obstructions had
to be climbed around on the outside, generally with the aid of one or more of
Fafhrd's spikes driven between chockstone and wall, or his grapnel tossed over
it.
       "Stardock has wept millstones in her day," the Mouser said of these
gigantic barriers, jerking his body aside from a whizzing rock for a period to
his sentence.
       This climbing was generally beyond Hrissa, and she often had to be
carried on the Mouser's back, or left on a chockstone or one of the rare paw-
wide ledges and hoisted up when opportunity offered. They were strongly
tempted, especially after they grew death-weary, to abandon her but could not
forget how her brave feint had saved them from the white worm's first stroke.
       All this, particularly the passing of the chockstones, must be done
under the pelting of Stardock's rocky avalanches -- so that each new
chockstone above them was welcomed as a roof, until it had to be surmounted.
Also, snow sometimes gushed into the chimney, overspilling from one of the
snowy avalanches forever whispering down the North Tress -- one more danger to
guard against. Ice water runneled too from time to time down the chimney,
drenching boots and gloves and making all holds unsure.
       In addition, there was less nourishment in the air, so that they had
more often to halt and gasp deeply until their lungs were satisfied. And
Fafhrd's left arm began to swell where the venomous mist from the worm's fang
had blown around it, until he could hardly bend its swollen fingers to grip
crack or rope. Besides, it itched and stung. He plunged it again and again
into snow to no avail.
       Their only allies on this most punishing ascent were the hot sun,
heartening them by its glow and offsetting the growing frigidity of the thin
still air, and the very difficulty and variety of the climb itself, which at
least kept their minds off the emptiness around and beneath them -- the latter
a farther drop than they'd ever stood over on the Obelisk. The Cold Waste
seemed like another world, poised separate from Stardock in space.
       Once they forced themselves to eat a bite and several times sipped
water. And once the Mouser was seized with mountain sickness, ending only when
he had retched himself weary.
       The only incident of the climb unrelated to Stardock's mad self
occurred when they were climbing out around the fifth chockstone, slowly, like
two large slugs, the Mouser first this time and bearing Hrissa, with Fafhrd
close behind. At this point the North Tress narrowed so that a hump of the
North Wall was visible across the snow stream.
       There was a whirring unlike that of any rock. Another whirring then,
closer and ending in a _thunk_. When Fafhrd scrambled atop the chockstone and
into the shelter of the walls, he had a cruelly barbed arrow through his pack.
       At cost of a third arrow whirring close by his head, the Mouser peeped
out north with Fafhrd clinging to his heels and swiftly dragging him back.
       "'Twas Kranarch all right; I saw him twang his bow," the Mouser
reported. "No sight of Gnarfi, but one of their new comrades clad in brown fur
crouched behind Kranarch, braced on the same boss. I couldn't see his face,
but 'tis a most burly fellow, short of leg."
       "They keep apace of us," Fafhrd grunted.
       "Also, they scruple not to mix climbing with killing," the Mouser
observed as he broke off the tail of the arrow piercing Fafhrd's pack and
yanked out the shaft. "Oh, comrade, I fear your sleeping cloak is sixteen
times holed. And that little bladder of pine liniment -- it got holed too. Ah,
what fragrance!"
       "I'm beginning to think those two men of Illik-Ving aren't sportsmen,"
Fafhrd asserted. "So ... up and on!"
       They were all dog-weary, even cat-Hrissa, and the sun was barely ten
fingerbreadths (at the end of an outstretched arm) above the flat horizon of
the Waste; and something in the air had turned Sol white as silver -- he no
longer sent warmth to combat the cold. But the ledges of the Roosts were close
above now, and it was possible to hope they would offer a better campsite than
the chimney.
       So although every man and cat muscle protested against it, they obeyed
Fafhrd's command.
       Halfway to the Roosts it began to snow, powdery grains falling arrow-
straight like last night, but thicker.
       This silent snowfall gave a sense of serenity and security which was
most false, since it masked the rockfalls which still came firing down the
chimney like the artillery of the God of Chance.
       Five yards from the top a fist-size chunk struck Fafhrd glancingly on
the right shoulder, so that his good arm went numb and hung useless, but the
little climbing that remained was so easy he could make it with boots and
puffed-up, barely-usable left hand.
       He peeped cautiously out of the chimney's top, but the Tress here had
thickened up again, so that there was no sight of the North Wall. Also the
first ledge was blessedly wide and so overhung with rock that not even snow
had fallen on its inner half, let alone stones. He scrambled up eagerly,
followed by the Mouser and Hrissa.
       But even as they cast themselves down to rest at the back of the ledge,
the Mouser wriggling out of his heavy pack and unthonging his climbing-pike
from his wrist -- for even _that_ had become a torturesome burden -- they
heard a now-familiar rushing in the air, and there came a great flat shape
swooping slowly through the sun-silvered snow which outlined it. Straight at
the ledge it came, and this time it did not go past, but halted and hung
there, like a giant devil fish nuzzling the sea's rim, while ten narrow marks,
each of suckers in line, appeared in the snow on the ledge's edge, as of ten
short tentacles gripping there.
       From the center of this monstrous invisibility rose a smaller snow-
outlined invisibility of the height and thickness of a man. Midway up this
shape was one visible thing: a slim sword of dark gray blade and silvery hilt,
pointed straight at the Mouser's breast.
       Suddenly the sword shot forward, almost as fast as if hurled, but not
quite, and after it, as swiftly, the man-size pillar, which now laughed
harshly from its top.
       The Mouser snatched up one-handed his unthonged climbing pike and
thrust at the snow-sketched figure behind the sword.
       The gray sword snaked around the pike and with a sudden sharp twist
swept it from the Mouser's fatigue-slack fingers.
       The black tool, on which Glinthi the Artificer had expended all the
evenings of the Month of the Weasel three years past, vanished into the
silvery snowfall and space.
       Hrissa backed against the wall frothing and snarling, a-tremble in
every limb.
       Fafhrd fumbled frantically for his ax, but his swollen fingers could
not even unsnap the sheath binding its head to his belt.
       The Mouser, enraged at the loss of his precious pike to the point where
he cared not a whit whether his foe was invisible or not, drew Scalpel from
its sheath and fiercely parried the gray sword as it came streaking in again.
       A dozen parries he had to make and was pinked twice in the arm and
pressed back against the wall almost like Hrissa, before he could take the
measure of his foe, now out of the snowfall and wholly invisible, and go
himself on the attack.
       Then, glaring at a point a foot above the gray sword -- a point where
he judged his foe's eyes to be (if his foe carried his eyes in his head) -- he
went stamping forward, beating at the gray blade, slipping Scalpel around it
with the tiniest disengages, seeking to bind it with his own sword, and ever
thrusting impetuously at invisible arm and trunk.
       Three times he felt his blade strike flesh, and once it bent briefly
against invisible bone.
       His foe leaped back onto the invisible flier, making narrow footprints
in the slush gathered there. The flier rocked.
       In his fighting rage the Mouser almost followed his foe onto that
invisible, living, pulsating platform, yet prudently stopped at the brink.
       And well it was he did so, for the flier dropped away like a skate in
flight from a shark, shaking its slush into the snowfall. There came a last
burst of laughter more like a wail, fading off and down in the silvery murk.
       The Mouser began to laugh himself, a shade hysterically, and retreated
to the wall. There he wiped off his blade and felt the stickiness of invisible
blood, and laughed a wild high laugh again.
       Hrissa's fur was still on end -- and was a long time flattening.
       Fafhrd quit trying to fumble out his ax and said seriously, "The girls
couldn't have been with him -- we'd have seen their forms or footprints on the
slush-backed flier. I think he's jealous of us and works against 'em."
       The Mouser laughed -- only foolishly now -- for a third time.
       The murk turned dark gray. They set about firing the brazier and making
ready for night. Despite their hurts and supreme weariness, the shock and
fright of the last encounter had excited new energy from them and raised their
spirits and given them appetites. They feasted well on thin collops of kid
frizzled in the resin-flames or cooked pale gray in water that, strangely,
could be sipped without hurt almost while it boiled.
       "Must be nearing the realm of the Gods," Fafhrd muttered. "It's said
they joyously drink boiling wine -- and walk hurtlessly through flames."
       "Fire is just as hot here, though," the Mouser said dully.
       "Yet the air seems to have less nourishment. On what do you suppose the
Gods subsist?"
       "They are ethereal and require neither air nor food," Fafhrd suggested
after a long frown of thinking.
       "Yet you just now said they drink wine."
       "Everybody drinks wine," Fafhrd asserted with a yawn, killing the
discussion and also the Mouser's dim, unspoken speculation as to whether the
feebler air, pressing less strongly on heating liquid, let its bubbles escape
more easily.
       Power of movement began to return to Fafhrd's right arm and his left
was swelling no more. The Mouser salved and bandaged his own small wounds,
then remembered to salve Hrissa's pads and tuck into her boots a little pine-
scented eiderdown tweaked from the arrow-holes in Fafhrd's cloak.
       When they were half laced up in their cloaks, Hrissa snuggled between
them -- and a few more precious resin-pellets dropped in the brazier as a
bedtime luxury -- Fafhrd got out a tiny jar of strong wine of Ilthmar, and
they each took a sip of it, imagining those sunny vineyards and that hot, rich
soil so far south.
       A momentary flare from the brazier showed them the snow falling yet. A
few rocks crashed nearby and a snowy avalanche hissed, then Stardock grew
still in the frigid grip of night. The climbers' aerie seemed most strange to
them, set above every other peak in the Mountains of the Giants -- and likely
all Nehwon -- yet walled with darkness like a tiny room.
       The Mouser said softly, "Now we know what roosts in the Roosts. Do you
suppose there are dozens of those invisible mantas carpeting around us on
ledges like this, or a-hang from them? Why don't they freeze? Or does someone
stable them? And the invisible folk, what of them? No more can you call 'em
mirage -- you saw the sword, and I fought the man-thing at the other end of
it. Yet invisible! How's that possible?"
       Fafhrd shrugged and then winced because it hurt both shoulders cruelly.
"Made of some stuff like water or glass," he hazarded. "Yet pliant and
twisting the light less -- and with no surface shimmer. You've seen sand and
ashes made transparent by firing. Perhaps there's some heatless way of firing
monsters and men until they are invisible."
       "But how light enough to fly?" the Mouser asked.
       "Thin beasts to match thin air," Fafhrd guessed sleepily.
       The Mouser said, "And then those deadly worms -- and the Fiend knows
what perils above." He paused. "And yet we must still climb Stardock to the
top, mustn't we? Why?"
       Fafhrd nodded. "To beat out Kranarch and Gnarfi..." he muttered. "To
beat out my father ... the mystery of it ... the girls ... O Mouser, could you
stop here any more than you could stop after touching half of a woman?"
       "You don't mention diamonds anymore," the Mouser noted. "Don't you
think we'll find them?"
       Fafhrd started another shrug and mumbled a curse that turned into a
yawn.
       The Mouser dug in his pouch to the bottom pocket and brought out the
parchment and blowing on the brazier read it all by the resin's last flaming:
Who mounts white Stardock, the Moon Tree,
Past worm and gnome and unseen bars,
Will win the key to luxury:
The Heart of Light, a pouch of stars.
The gods who once ruled all the world
Have made that peak their citadel,
From whence the stars were one time hurled
And paths lead on to Heav'n and Hell.
Come, heroes, past the Trollstep rocks.
Come, best of men, across the Waste.
For you, glory each door unlocks.
Delay not, up, and come in haste.
Who scales the Snow King's citadel
Shall father his two daughters' sons;
Though he must face foes fierce and fell,
His seed shall live while time still runs.
       The resin burnt out. The Mouser said, "Well, we've met a worm and one
unseen fellow who sought to bar our way -- and two sightless witches who might
be Snow King's daughters for all I know. Gnomes now -- they would be a change,
wouldn't they? You said something about ice gnomes, Fafhrd. What was it?"
       He waited with an unnatural anxiety for Fafhrd's answer. After a bit he
began to hear it: soft regular snores.
       The Mouser snarled soundlessly, his demon of restlessness now become a
fury despite all his aches. He shouldn't have thought of girls -- or rather of
one girl who was nothing but a taunting mask with pouting lips and eyes of
black mystery seen across a fire.
       Suddenly he felt stifled. He quickly unhooked his cloak and despite
Hrissa's questioning mew felt his way south along the ledge. Soon snow,
sifting like ice needles on his flushed face, told him he was beyond the
overhang. Then the snow stopped. Another overhang, he thought -- but he had
not moved. He strained his eyes upward, and there was the black expanse of
Stardock's topmost quarter silhouetted against a band of sky pale with the
hidden moon and specked by a few faint stars. Behind him to the west, the
snowstorm still obscured the sky.
       He blinked his eyes and then he swore softly, for now the black cliff
they must climb tomorrow was a-glow with soft scattered lights of violet and
rose and palest green and amber. The nearest, which were still far above,
looked tinily rectangular, like gleam-spilling windows seen from below.
       It was as if Stardock were a great hostelry.
       Then freezing flakes pinked his face again, and the band of sky
narrowed to nothing. The snowfall had moved back against Stardock once more,
hiding all stars and other lights.
       The Mouser's fury drained from him. Suddenly he felt very small and
foolhardy and very, very cold. The mysterious vision of the lights remained in
his mind, but muted, as if part of a dream. Most cautiously he crept back the
way he had come, feeling the radiant warmth of Fafhrd and Hrissa and the
burnt-out brazier just before he touched his cloak. He laced it around him and
lay for a long time doubled up like a baby, his mind empty of everything
except frigid blackness. At last he slumbered.
         ****
       Next day started gloomy. The two men chafed and wrestled each other as
they lay, to get the stiffness a little out of them and enough warmth in them
to rise. Hrissa withdrew from between them limping and sullen.
       At any rate, Fafhrd's arms were recovered from their swelling and
numbing, while the Mouser was hardly aware of his own arm's little wounds.
       They breakfasted on herb tea and honey and began climbing the Roosts in
a light snowfall. This last pest stayed with them all morning except when
gusty breezes blew it back from Stardock. On these occasions they could see
the great smooth cliff separating the Roosts from the ultimate ledges of the
Face. By the glimpses they got, the cliff looked to be without any climbing
routes whatever, or any marks at all -- so that Fafhrd laughed at the Mouser
for a dreamer with his tale of windows spilling colored light -- but finally
as they neared the cliff's base they began to distinguish what seemed to be a
narrow crack -- a hairline to vision -- mounting its center.
       They met none of the invisible flat fliers, either a-wing or a-perch,
though whenever gusts blew strange gaps into the snowfall, the two adventurers
would firm themselves on their perches and grip for their weapons, and Hrissa
would snarl.
       The wind slowed them little though chilling them much, for the rock of
the Roosts was true.
       And they still had to watch out for stony peltings, though these were
fewer than yesterday, perhaps because so much of Stardock now lay below them.
       They reached the base of the great cliff at the point where the crack
began, which was a good thing since the snowfall had grown so heavy that a
hunt for it would have been difficult.
       To their joy, the crack proved to be another chimney, scarcely a yard
across and not much more deep, and as knobbly inside with footholds as the
cliff outside was smooth. Unlike yesterday's chimney, it appeared to extend
upward indefinitely without change of width, and as far as they could see
there were no chockstones. In many ways it was like a rock ladder half
sheltered from the snow. Even Hrissa could climb here, as on Obelisk Polaris.
       They lunched on food warmed against their skins. They were afire with
eagerness, yet forced themselves to take time to chew and sip. As they entered
the chimney, Fafhrd going first, there came three faint growling booms --
thunder perhaps and certainly ominous, yet the Mouser laughed.
       With never-failing footholds and opposite wall for back-brace, the
climbing was easy, except for the drain on main strength, which required
rather frequent halts to gulp down fresh stores of the thin air. Only twice
did the chimney narrow so that Fafhrd had to climb for a short stretch with
his body outside it; the Mouser, slighter framed, could stay inside.
       It was an intoxicating experience, almost. Even as the day grew darker
from the thickening snowfall and as the crackling booms returned sharper and
stronger -- thunder now for sure, since they were heralded by brief palings up
and down the chimney -- snow-muted lightning flashes -- the Mouser and Fafhrd
felt as merry as children mounting a mysterious twisty stairway in a haunted
castle. They even wasted a little breath in joking calls which went echoing
faintly up and down the rugged shaft as it paled and gloomed with the
lightning.
       But then the shaft grew by degrees almost as smooth as the outer cliff
and at the same time it began gradually to widen, first a handbreadth, then
another, then a finger more, so that they had to mount more perilously,
bracing shoulders against one wall and boots against the other and so
"walking" up with pushes and heaves. The Mouser drew up Hrissa, and the ice-
cat crouched on his pitching, rocking chest -- no inconsiderable burden. Yet
both men still felt quite jolly -- so that the Mouser began to wonder if there
might not be some actual intoxicant in air near Heaven.
       Being a head or two taller than the Mouser, Fafhrd was better equipped
for this sort of climbing and was still able to go on at the moment when the
Mouser realized that his body was stretched almost straight between shoulders
and boot soles -- with Hrissa a-crouch on him like a traveler on a little
bridge. He could mount no farther -- and was hazy about how he had managed to
come this far.
       Fafhrd came down like a great spider at the Mouser's call and seemed
not much impressed by the latter's plight -- in fact, a lightning flash showed
his great bearded face all a-grin.
       "Abide you here a bit," he said. "'Tis not so far to the top. I think I
glimpsed it the last flash but one. I'll mount and draw you up, putting all
the rope between you and me. There's a crack by your head -- I'll knock in a
spike for safety's sake. Meanwhile, rest."
       Whereupon Fafhrd did all of these things so swiftly and was on his
upward way again so soon that the Mouser forebore to utter any of the sardonic
remarks churning inside his rigid belly.
       Successive lightning flashes showed the Northerner's long-limbed form
growing smaller at a gratifyingly rapid rate until he looked hardly bigger
than a trap spider at the end of his tube. Another flash and he was gone, but
whether because he had reached the top or passed a bend in the chimney the
Mouser couldn't be sure.
       The rope kept paying upward, however, until there was only a small loop
below the Mouser. He was aching abominably now and was also very cold, but
gritted his teeth against the pain. Hrissa chose this moment to prowl up and
down her small human bridge, restlessly. There was a blinding lightning flash
and a crash of thunder that shook Stardock. Hrissa cringed.
       The rope grew taut, tugging at the belt of the Mouser, who started to
put his weight on it, holding Hrissa to his chest, but then decided to wait
for Fafhrd's call. This was a good decision on his part, for just then the
rope went slack and began to fall on the Mouser's belly like a stream of black
water. Hrissa crouched away from it on his face. It came pelting endlessly,
but finally its upper end hit the Mouser under the breastbone with a snap. The
only good thing was that Fafhrd didn't come hurtling down with it. Another
blinding mountain-shaking crash showed the upper chimney utterly empty.
       "Fafhrd!" the Mouser called. "_Fafhrd_!" There came back only the echo.
       The Mouser thought for a bit, then reached up and felt by his ear for
the spike Fafhrd had struck in with a single offhand slap of his ax-hammer.
Whatever had happened to Fafhrd, nothing seemed to remain to do but tie rope
to spike and descend by it to where the chimney was easier.
       The spike came out at the first touch and went clattering shrilly down
the chimney until a new thunderblast drowned the small sound.
       The Mouser decided to "walk" down the chimney. After all, he'd come up
that way the last few score of yards.
       The first attempt to move a leg told him his muscles were knotted by
cramp. He'd never be able to bend his leg and straighten it again without
losing his purchase and falling.
       The Mouser thought of Glinthi's pike, lost in white space, and he slew
that thought.
       Hrissa crouched on his chest and gazed down into his face with an
expression the next levin-glare showed to be sad yet critical, as if to ask,
"Where is this vaunted human ingenuity?"
         ****
       Fafhrd had barely eased himself out of the chimney onto the wide, deep
rock-roofed ledge at its top, when a door two yards high, a yard wide, and two
spans thick had silently opened in the rock at the back of the ledge.
       The contrast was most remarkable between the roughness of that rock and
the ruler-flat smoothness of the dark stone forming the thick sides of the
door and the lintel, jambs, and threshold of the doorway.
       Soft pink light spilled out and with it a perfume whose heavy fumes
were cargoed with dreams of pleasure barges afloat in a rippling sunset sea.
       Those musky narcotic fumes, along with the alcoholic headiness of the
thin air, almost made Fafhrd forget his purpose, but touching the black rope
was like touching Hrissa and the Mouser at its other end. He unknotted it from
his belt and prepared to secure it around a stout rock pillar beside the open
door. To get enough rope to make a good knot he had to draw it up quite tight.
       But the dream-freighted fumes grew thicker, and he no longer felt the
Mouser and Hrissa in the rope. Indeed, he began to forget his two comrades
altogether.
       And then a silvery voice -- a voice he knew well from having heard it
laugh once and once chuckle -- called, "Come in, barbarian. Come in to me."
       The end of the black rope slipped from his fingers unnoticed and hissed
softly across the rock and down the chimney.
       Stooping a little, he went through the doorway which silently closed
behind him just in time to shut out the Mouser's desperate call.
       He was in a room lit by pink globes hanging at the level of his head.
Their soft warm radiance colored the hangings and rugs of the room, but
especially the pale spread of the great bed that was its only furniture.
       Beside the bed stood a slim woman whose black silk robe concealed all
of her except her face, yet did not disguise her body's sleek curves. A black
lace mask hid the rest of her.
       She looked at Fafhrd for seven thudding heartbeats, then sat down on
the bed. A slender arm and hand clothed all in black lace came from under her
robe and patted the spread beside her and rested there. Her mask never wavered
from Fafhrd's face.
       He shouldered out of his pack and unbuckled his ax belt.
         ****
       The Mouser finished pounding all the thin blade of his dagger into the
crack by his ear, using the firestone from his pouch for hammer, so that
sparks showered from every cramped stroke of stone against pommel -- small
lightning flashes to match the greater flares still chasing up and down the
chimney, while their thunder crashed an obbligato to the Mouser's taps. Hrissa
crouched on his ankles, and from time to time the Mouser glared at her, as if
to say, "Well, cat?"
       A gust of snow-freighted wind roaring up the chimney momentarily lifted
the lean shaggy beast a span above him and almost blew the Mouser loose, but
he tightened his pushing muscles still more and the bridge, arching upward a
trifle, held firm.
       He had just finished knotting an end of the black rope around the
dagger's crossguard and grip -- and his fingers and forearms were almost
useless with fatigue -- when a window two feet high and five wide silently
opened in the back of the chimney, its thick rock shutter sliding aside, not a
span away from the Mouser's inward shoulder.
       A red glow sprang from the window and somewhat illuminated four faces
with piggy black eyes and with low hairless domes above.
       The Mouser considered them. They were all four of extreme ugliness, he
decided dispassionately. Only their wide white teeth, showing between their
grinning lips which almost joined ear to swinish ear, had any claim to beauty.
       Hrissa sprang at once through the red window and disappeared. The two
faces between which she jumped did not flicker a black button-eye.
       Then eight short brawny arms came out and easily pried the Mouser out
and lifted him inside. He screamed faintly from a sudden increase in the agony
of his cramps. He was aware of thick dwarfish bodies clad in hairy black
jerkins and breeks -- and one in a black hairy skirt -- but all with thick-
nailed splay-feet bare. Then he fainted.
       When he came to, it was because he was being punishingly massaged on a
hard table, his body naked and slick with warm oil. He was in a low, ill-lit
chamber and still closely surrounded by the four dwarves, as he could tell
from the eight horny hands squeezing and thumping his muscles before he ever
opened his eyes.
       The dwarf kneading his right shoulder and banging the top of his spine
crinkled his warty eyelids and bared his beautiful white teeth bigger than a
giant's in what might be intended for a friendly grin. Then he said in an
atrocious Mingol patois, "I am Bonecracker. This is my wife Gibberfat.
Cosseting your body on the larboard side are my brothers Legcruncher and
Breakskull. Now drink this wine and follow me."
       The wine stung, yet dispelled the Mouser's dizziness, and it was
certainly a blessing to be free of the murderous massage -- and also
apparently of the cramp-lumps in his muscles.
       Bonecracker and Gibberfat helped him off the slab while Legcruncher and
Breakskull rubbed him quickly down with rough towels. The warm low-ceilinged
room rocked dizzily for a moment; then he felt wondrous fine.
       Bonecracker waddled off into the dimness beyond the smoky torches. With
never a question the Mouser followed the dwarf. Or were these Fafhrd's ice
gnomes? he wondered.
       Bonecracker pulled aside heavy drapes in the dark. Amber light fanned
out. The Mouser stepped from rock-roughness onto down-softness. The drapes
swished to behind him.
       He was alone in a chamber mellowly lit by hanging globes like great
topazes -- yet he guessed they would bounce aside like puffballs if touched.
There was a large wide couch and beyond it a low table against the arras-hung
wall with an ivory stool set before it. Above the table was a great silver
mirror, while on it were fantastic small bottles and many tiny ivory jars.
       No, the room was not altogether empty. Hrissa, sleekly groomed, lay
curled in a far corner. She was not watching the Mouser, however, but a point
above the stool.
       The Mouser felt a shiver creeping on him, yet not altogether one of
fear.
       A dab of palest green leaped from one of the jars to the point Hrissa
was watching and vanished there. But then he saw a streak of reflected green
appear in the mirror. The riddlesome maneuver was repeated, and soon in the
mirror's silver there hung a green mask, somewhat clouded by the silver's
dullness.
       Then the mask vanished from the mirror and simultaneously reappeared
unblurred hanging in the air above the ivory stool. It was the mask the Mouser
knew achingly well -- narrow chin, high-arched cheeks, straight nose and
forehead.
       The pouty wine-dark lips opened a little and a soft throaty voice
asked, "Does my visage displease you, man of Lankhmar?"
       "You jest cruelly, O Princess," the Mouser replied, drawing on all his
aplomb and sketching a courtier's bow, "for you are Beauty's self."
       Slim fingers, half outlined now in pale green, dipped into the unguent
jar and took up a more generous dab.
       The soft throaty voice, that so well matched half the laughter he had
once heard in a snowfall, now said, "You shall judge all of me."
         ****
       Fafhrd woke in the dark and touched the girl beside him. As soon as he
knew she was awake too, he grasped her by the hips. When he felt her body
stiffen, he lifted her into the air and held her above him as he lay flat on
his back.
       She was wondrous light, as if made of pastry or eiderdown, yet when he
laid her beside him again, her flesh felt as firm as any, though smoother than
most.
       "Let us have a light, Hirriwi, I beg you," he said.
       "That were unwise, Faffy," she answered in a voice like a curtain of
tiny silver bells lightly brushed. "Have you forgotten that now I am wholly
invisible? -- which might tickle some men, yet you, I think..."
       "You're right, you're right, I like you real," he answered, gripping
her fiercely by the shoulders to emphasize his feelings, then guiltily jerking
away his hands as he thought of how delicate she must be.
       The silver bells clashed in full laughter, as if the curtain of them
had been struck a great swipe. "Have no fears," she told him. "My airy bones
are grown of matter stronger than steel. It is a riddle beyond your
philosophers and relates to the invisibility of my race and of the animals
from which it sprang. Think how strong tempered glass can be, yet light goes
through it. My cursed brother Faroomfar has the strength of a bear for all his
slimness while my father Oomforafor is a very lion despite his centuries. Your
friend's encounter with Faroomfar was no final test -- but oh how it made him
howl -- Father raged at him -- and then there are the cousins. Soon as this
night be ended -- which is not soon, my dear; the moon still climbs -- you
must return down Stardock. Promise me that. My heart grows cold at the thought
of the dangers you've already faced -- and was like ice I know not how many
times this last three-day."
       "Yet you never warned us," he mused. "You lured me on."
       "Can you doubt why?" she asked. He was feeling her snub nose then and
her apple cheeks, and so he felt her smile too. "Or perhaps you resent it that
I let you risk your life a little to win here to this bed?"
       He implanted a fervent kiss on her wide lips to show her how little
true that was, but she thrust him back after a moment.
       "Wait, Faffy dear," she said. "No, wait, I say! I know you're greedy
and impetuous, but you can at least wait while the moon creeps the width of a
star. I asked you to promise me you would descend Stardock at dawn."
       There was a rather long silence in the dark.
       "Well?" she prompted. "What shuts your mouth?" she queried impatiently.
"You've shown no such indecision in certain other matters. Time wastes, the
moon sails."
       "Hirriwi," Fafhrd said softly, "I must climb Stardock."
       "Why?" she demanded ringingly. "The poem has been fulfilled. You have
your reward. Go on, and only frigid fruitless perils await you. Return, and
I'll guard you from the air -- yes, and your companion too -- to the very
Waste." Her sweet voice faltered a little. "O Faffy, am I not enough to make
you forego the conquest of a cruel mountain? In addition to all else, I love
you -- if I understand rightly how mortals use that word."
       "No," he answered her solemnly in the dark. "You are wondrous, more
wondrous than any wench I've known -- and I love you, which is not a word I
bandy -- yet you only make me hotter to conquer Stardock. Can you understand
that?"
       Now there was silence for a while in the other direction.
       "Well," she said at length, "you are masterful and will do what you
will do. And I have warned you. I could tell you more, show you reasons
counter, argue further, but in the end I know I would not break your
stubbornness -- and time gallops. We must mount our own steeds and catch up
with the moon. Kiss me again. Slowly. So."
         ****
       The Mouser lay across the foot of the bed under the amber globes and
contemplated Keyaira, who lay lengthwise with her slender apple-green
shoulders and tranquil sleeping face propped by many pillows.
       He took up the corner of a sheet and moistened it with wine from a cup
set against his knee and with it rubbed Keyaira's slim right ankle so gently
that there was no change in her narrow bosom's slow-paced rise and fall.
Presently he had cleared away all the greenish unguent from a patch as big as
half his palm. He peered down at his handiwork. This time he expected surely
to see flesh, or at least the green cosmetic on the underside of her ankle,
but no, he saw through the irregular little rectangle he'd wiped only the
bed's tufted coverlet reflecting the amber light from above. It was a most
fascinating and somewhat unnerving mystery.
       He glanced questioningly over at Hrissa who now lay on an end of the
low table, the thin-glassed, fantastic perfume bottles standing around her,
while she contemplated the occupants of the bed, her white tufted chin set on
her folded paws. It seemed to the Mouser that she was looking at him with
disapproval, so he hastily smoothed back unguent from other parts of Keyaira's
leg until the peephole was once more greenly covered.
       There was a low laugh. Keyaira, propped on her elbows now, was gazing
at him through slitted heavy-lashed eyelids.
       "We invisibles," she said in a humorous voice truly or feignedly heavy
with sleep, "show only the outward side of any cosmetic or raiment on us. It
is a mystery beyond our seers."
       "You are Mystery's queenly self a-walk through the stars," the Mouser
pronounced, lightly caressing her green toes. "And I the most fortunate of
men. I fear it's a dream and I'll wake on Stardock's frigid ledges. How is it
I am here?"
       "Our race is dying out," she said. "Our men have become sterile.
Hirriwi and I are the only princesses left. Our brother Faroomfar hotly wished
to be our consort -- he still boasts his virility -- 'twas he you dueled with
-- but our father Oomforafor said, 'It must be new blood -- the blood of
heroes.' So the cousins and Faroomfar, he much against his will, must fly
hither and yon and leave those little rhymed lures written on ramskin in
perilous, lonely spots apt to tempt heroes."
       "But how can visibles and invisibles mate?" he asked.
       She laughed with delight. "Is your memory _that_ short, Mouse?"
       "I mean, have progeny," he corrected himself, a little irked, but not
much, that she had hit on his boyhood nickname. "Besides, wouldn't such
offspring be cloudy, a mix of seen and unseen?"
       Keyaira's green mask swung a little from side to side.
       "My father thinks such mating will be fertile and that the children
will breed true to invisibility -- that being dominant over visibility -- yet
profit greatly in other ways from the admixture of hot, heroic blood."
       "Then your father commanded you to mate with me?" the Mouser asked, a
little disappointed.
       "By no means, Mouse," she assured him. "He would be furious if he
dreamt you were here, and Faroomfar would go mad. No, I took a fancy to you,
as Hirriwi did to your comrade, when first I spied on you on the Waste -- very
fortunate that was for you, since my father would have got your seed, if you
had won to Stardock's top, in quite a different fashion. Which reminds me,
Mouse, you must promise me to descend Stardock at dawn."
       "That is not so easy a promise to give," the Mouser said. "Fafhrd will
be stubborn, I know. And then there's that other matter of a bag of diamonds,
if that's what a pouch of stars means -- oh, it's but a trifle, I know,
compared to the embraces of a glorious girl ... still..."
       "But if I say I love you? -- which is only truth..."
       "Oh Princess," the Mouser sighed, gliding his hand to her knee. "How
can I leave you at dawn? Only one night..."
       "Why, Mouse," Keyaira broke in, smiling roguishly and twisting her
green form a little, "do you not know that every night is an eternity? Has not
any girl taught you that yet, Mouse? I am astonished. Think, we have half an
eternity left us yet -- which is also an eternity, as your geometer, whether
white-bearded or dainty-breasted, should have taught you."
       "But if I am to sire many children -- " the Mouser began.
       "Hirriwi and I are somewhat like queen bees," Keyaira explained, "but
think not of that. We have eternity tonight, 'tis true, but only if we make it
so. Come closer."
       A little later, plagiarizing himself somewhat, the Mouser said softly,
"The sole fault of mountain climbing is that the best parts go so swiftly."
       "They can last an eternity," Keyaira breathed in his ear. "Make them
last, Mouse."
         ****
       Fafhrd woke shaking with cold. The pink globes were gray and tossing in
icy gusts from the open door. Snow had blown in on his clothes and gear
scattered across the floor and was piled inches deep on the threshold, across
which came also the only illumination -- leaden daylight.
       A great joy in him fought all these grim gray sights and conquered
them.
       Nevertheless he was naked and shivering. He sprang up and beat his
clothes against the bed and thrust his limbs into their icy stiffness.
       As he was buckling his ax belt, he remembered the Mouser down in the
chimney, helpless. Somehow all night, even when he'd spoken to Hirriwi of the
Mouser, he'd never thought of that.
       He snatched up his pack and sprang out on the ledge.
       From the corner of his eye he caught something moving behind him. It
was the massive door closing.
       A titan gust of snow-fisted wind struck him. He grabbed the rough rock
pillar to which he'd last night planned to tie the rope and hugged it tight.
The gods help the Mouser below! Someone came sliding and blowing along the
ledge in the wind and snow and hugged the pillar lower down.
       The gust passed. Fafhrd looked for the door. There was no sign of it.
All the piled snow was redrifted. Keeping close hold of pillar and pack with
one hand, he felt over the rough wall with the other. Fingernails no more than
eyes could discover the slightest crack.
       "So you got tossed out too?" a familiar voice said gaily. "_I_ was
tossed out by ice gnomes, I'll have you know.
       "Mouser!" Fafhrd cried. "Then you weren't -- ? I thought -- "
       "You never thought of me once all night, if I know you," the Mouser
said. "Keyaira assured me you were safe and somewhat more than that. Hirriwi
would have told you the same of me if you'd asked her. But of course you
didn't."
       "Then you too -- ?" Fafhrd demanded, grinning with delight.
       "Yes, Prince Brother-in-Law," the Mouser answered him, grinning back.
       They pommeled each other around the pillar a bit -- to battle chill,
but in sheer high spirits too.
       "Hrissa?" Fafhrd asked.
       "Warm inside, the wise one. They don't put out the cat here, only the
man. I wonder, though.... Do you suppose Hrissa was Keyaira's to begin with
and that she foresaw and planned..." His voice trailed off.
       No more gusts had come. The snowfall was so light they could see almost
a league -- up to the Hat above the snow-streaked ledges of the Face and down
to where the Ladder faded out.
       Once again their minds were filled, almost overpowered by the vastness
of Stardock and by their own Predicament: two half-frozen mites precariously
poised on a frozen vertical world only distantly linked with Nehwon.
       To the south there was a pale silver disk in the sky -- the sun. They'd
been abed till noon.
       "Easier to fashion an eternity out of an eighteen-hour night," the
Mouser observed.
       "We galloped the moon deep under the sea," Fafhrd mused.
       "Your girl promise to make you go down?" the Mouser asked suddenly.
       Fafhrd nodded his head. "She tried."
       "Mine too. And not a bad idea. The summit smells, by her account. But
the chimney looks stuffed with snow. Hold my ankles while I peer over. Yes,
packed solid all the way down. So -- ?"
       "Mouser," Fafhrd said, almost gloomily, "whether there's a way down or
no, I must climb Stardock."
       "You know," the Mouser answered, "I am beginning to find something in
that madness myself. Besides, the east wall of Stardock may hold an easy route
to that lush-looking Rift Valley. So let's do what we can with the bare seven
hours of light left us. Daytime's no stuff to fashion eternities."
         ****
       Mounting the ledges of the Face was both the easiest and hardest
climbing they'd had yet to do. The ledges were wide, but some of them sloped
outward and were footed with rotten shale that went skidding away into space
at a touch, and now and again there were brief traverses which had to be done
by narrow cracks and main strength, sometimes swinging by their hands alone.
       And weariness and chill and even dizzying faintness came far quicker at
this height. They had to halt often to drink air and chafe themselves. While
in the back of one deep ledge -- Stardock's right eye, they judged -- they
were forced to spend time firing the brazier with all the remaining resin-
pellets, partly to warm food and drink, but chiefly to warm themselves.
       Last night's exertions had weakened them too, they sometimes thought,
but then the memories of those exertions would return to strengthen them.
       And then there were the sudden treacherous wind gusts and the constant
yet variable snowfall, which sometimes hid the summit and sometimes let them
see it clear against the silvery sky, with the great white out-curving brim of
the Hat now poised threateningly above them -- a cornice like that of the
snow-saddle, only now they were on the wrong side.
       The illusion grew stronger that Stardock was a separate world from
Nehwon in snow-filled space.
       Finally the sky turned blue, and they felt the sun on their backs --
they had climbed above the snowfall at last -- and Fafhrd pointed at a tiny
nick of blue deep in the brim of the Hat -- a nick just visible above the next
snow-streaked rock bulge -- and he cried, "The apex of the Needle's Eye!"
       At that, something dropped into a snowbank beside them, and there was a
muffled clash of metal on rock, while from snow a notched and feathered arrow-
end stuck straight up.
       They dodged under the protective roof of a bigger bulge as a second
arrow and a third clashed against the naked rock on which they'd stood.
       "Gnarfi and Kranarch have beaten us, curse 'em," Fafhrd hissed, "and
set an ambush for us at the Eye, the obvious spot. We must go roundabout and
get above 'em."
       "Won't they expect that?"
       "They were fools to spring their ambush too soon. Besides, we have no
other tactic."
       So they began to climb south, though still upward, always keeping rock
or snow between them and where they judged the Needle's Eye to be. At last,
when the sun was dropping swiftly toward the western horizon, they came
swinging back north again and still upward, stamping out steps now in the
steepening bank of snow that reversed its curve above them to make the brim of
the Hat that now roofed them ominously, covering two-thirds of the sky. They
sweated and shook by turns and fought off almost continuous bouts of giddy
faintness, yet still strove to move as silently and warily as they might.
       At last they rounded one more snow bulge and found themselves looking
down a slope at the great bare stretch of rock normally swept by the gale that
came through the Needle's Eye to make the Petty Pennon.
       On the outward lip of the exposed rock were two men, both clad in suits
of brown leather, much scuffed and here and there ripped, showing the inward-
turned fur. Lank, black-bearded, elk-faced Kranarch stood whipping his arms
against his chest for warmth. Beside him lay his strung bow and some arrows.
Stocky boar-faced Gnarfi knelt peeping over the rim. Fafhrd wondered where
their two brown-clad bulky servitors were.
       The Mouser dug into his pouch. At the same moment Kranarch saw them and
snatched up his weapon though rather more slowly than he would have in thicker
air. With a similar slowness the Mouser drew out the fist-size rock he had
picked up several ledges below for just such a moment as this.
       Kranarch's arrow whistled between his and Fafhrd's heads. A moment
later the Mouser's rock struck Kranarch full on his bow-shoulder. The weapon
fell from his hand, and that arm dangled. Then Fafhrd and the Mouser charged
recklessly down the snow slope, the former brandishing his unthonged ax, the
latter drawing Scalpel.
       Kranarch and Gnarfi received them with their own swords, and Gnarfi
with a dagger in his left hand as well. The battle that followed had the same
dreamlike slowness as the exchange of missiles. First Fafhrd's and the
Mouser's rush gave them the advantage. Then Kranarch's and Gnarfi's great
strength -- or restedness, rather -- told, and they almost drove their enemy
off the rim. Fafhrd took a slash in the ribs which bit through his tough
wolfskin tunic, slicing flesh and jarring bone.
       But then skill told, as it generally will, and the two brown-clad men
received wounds and suddenly turned and ran through the great white pointy-
topped triangular archway of the Needle's Eye. As he ran Gnarfi screeched,
"Graah! Kruk!"
       "Doubtless calling for their shaggy-clad servants or bearers," the
Mouser gasped in surmise, resting sword arm on knee, almost spent. "Farmerish
fat country fellows those looked, hardly trained to weapons. We need not fear
'em greatly, I think, even if they come to Gnarfi's call." Fafhrd nodded,
gasping himself. "Yet they climbed Stardock," he added dubiously.
       Just then there came galloping through the snowy archway on their hind
legs with their nails clashing the windswept rock and their fang-edged
slavering red mouths open wide and their great-clawed arms widespread -- two
huge brown bears.
       With a speed which their human opponents had been unable to sting from
them, the Mouser snatched up Kranarch's bow and sent two arrows speeding,
while Fafhrd swung his ax in a gleaming circle and cast it. Then the two
comrades sprang swiftly to either side, the Mouser wielding Scalpel and Fafhrd
drawing his knife.
       But there was no need for further fighting. The Mouser's first arrow
took the leading bear in the neck, his second straight in its red mouth-roof
and brain, while Fafhrd's ax sank to its helve between two ribs on the
trailing bear's left side. The great animals pitched forward in their blood
and death throes and rolled twice over and went tumbling ponderously off the
rim.
       "Doubtless both shes," the Mouser remarked as he watched them fall. "Oh
those bestial men of Illik-Ving! Still, to charm or train such beasts to carry
packs and climb and even give up their poor lives..."
       "Kranarch and Gnarfi are no sportsmen, that's for certain now," Fafhrd
pronounced. "Don't praise their tricks." As he stuffed a rag into his tunic
over his wound, he grimaced and swore so angrily that the Mouser didn't speak
his quip: _Well, bears are only shortened bearers. I'm always right._
       Then the two comrades trudged slowly under the high tentlike arch of
snow to survey the domain, highest on all Nehwon, of which they had made
themselves masters -- refusing from light-headed weariness to think, in that
moment of triumph, of the invisible beings who were Stardock's lords. They
went warily, yet not too much so, because Gnarfi and Kranarch had run scared
and were wounded not trivially -- and the latter had lost his bow.
       Stardock's top behind the great toppling snow wave of the Hat was
almost as extensive north to south as that of Obelisk Polaris, yet the east
rim looked little more than a long bowshot away. Snow with a thick crust
beneath a softer layer covered it all except for the north end and stretches
of the east rim, where bare dark rock showed.
       The surface, both snow and rock, was flatter even than that of the
Obelisk and sloped somewhat from north to south. There were no structures or
beings visible, nor signs of hollows where either might hide. Truth to tell,
neither the Mouser nor Fafhrd could recall ever having seen a lonelier or
barer place.
       The only oddity they noticed at first were three holes in the snow a
little to the south, each about as big as a hogshead but having the form of an
equilateral triangle and apparently going down through the snow to the rock.
The three were arranged as the apex of another equilateral triangle.
       The Mouser squinted around closely, then shrugged. "But a pouch of
stars could be a rather small thing, I suppose," he said. "While a heart of
light -- no guessing its size."
       The whole summit was in bluish shadow except for the northernmost end
and for a great pathway of golden light from the setting sun leading from the
Needle's Eye all the way across the wind-leveled snow to the east rim.
       Down the center of this sunroad went Kranarch's and Gnarfi's running
footsteps, the snow flecked here and there with blood. Otherwise the snow
ahead was printless. Fafhrd and the Mouser followed those tracks, walking east
up their long shadows.
       "No sign of 'em ahead," the Mouser said. "Looks like there is some
route down the east wall, and they've taken it -- at least far enough to set
another ambush."
       As they neared the east rim, Fafhrd said, "I see other prints making
north -- a spear's cast that way. Perhaps they turned."
       "But where to?" the Mouser asked.
       A few steps more and the mystery was solved horribly. They reached the
end of the snow, and there on the dark bloodied rock, hidden until now by the
wind-piled margin of the snow, sprawled the carcasses of Gnarfi and Kranarch,
their middle clothes ripped away, their bodies obscenely mutilated.
       Even as the Mouser's gorge rose, he remembered Keyaira's lightly-spoken
words: "If you had won to Stardock's top, my father would have got your seed
in quite a different fashion."
       Shaking his head and glaring fiercely, Fafhrd walked around the bodies
to the east rim and peered down.
       He recoiled a step, then knelt and once more peered.
       The Mouser's hopeful theory was prodigiously disproved. Never in his
life had Fafhrd looked straight down half such a distance.
       A few yards below, the east wall vanished inward. No telling how far
the east rim jutted out from Stardock's heart-rock.
       From this point the fall was straight to the greenish gloom of the
Great Rift Valley -- five Lankhmar leagues, at least. Perhaps more.
       He heard the Mouser say over his shoulder, "A path for birds or
suicides. Naught else."
       Suddenly the green below grew bright, though without showing the
slightest feature except for a silvery hair, which might be a great river,
running down its center. Looking up again, they saw that the sky had gone all
golden with a mighty afterglow. They faced around and gasped in wonder.
       The last sunrays coming through the Needle's Eye, swinging southward
and a little up, glancingly illuminated a transparent, solid symmetric shape
big as the biggest oak tree and resting exactly over the three triangular
holes in the snow. It might only be described as a sharp-edged solid star of
about eighteen points, resting by three of those on Stardock and built of
purest diamond or some like substance.
       Both had the same thought: that this must be a star the gods had failed
to launch. The sunlight had touched the fire in its heart and made it shine,
but for a moment only and feebly, not incandescently and forever, as it would
have in the sky.
       A piercingly shrill, silvery trumpet call broke the silence of the
summit.
       They swung their gaze north. Outlined by the same deep golden sunlight,
ghostlier than the star, yet still clearly to be seen in some of its parts
against the yellow sky, a tall slender castle lifted transparent walls and
towers from the stony end of the summit. Its topmost spires seemed to go out
of sight upward rather than end.
       Another sound then -- a wailing snarl. A pale animal bounded toward
them across the snow from the northwest. Leaping aside with another snarl from
the sprawled bodies, Hrissa rushed past them south with a third snarl tossed
at them.
       Almost too late they saw the peril against which she had tried to warn
them.
       Advancing toward them from west and north across the unmarked snow were
a score of sets of footprints. There were no feet in those prints, nor bodies
above them, yet they came on -- right print, left print, appearing in
succession -- and ever more rapidly. And now they saw what they had missed at
first because viewed end-on above each paired set of prints -- a narrow-
shafted, narrow-bladed spear, pointed straight toward them, coming on as
swiftly as the prints.
       They ran south with Hrissa, Fafhrd in the lead. After a half dozen
sprinting steps the Northerner heard a cry behind him. He stopped and then
swiftly spun around.
       The Mouser had slipped in the blood of their late foes and fallen. When
he got to his feet, the gray spear points were around him on all sides save
the rim. He made two wild defensive slashes with Scalpel, but the gray spear
points came in relentlessly. Now they were in a close semicircle around him
and hardly a span apart, and he was standing on the rim. They advanced another
thrust, and the Mouser perforce sprang back from them -- and down he fell.
       There was a rushing sound, and chill air sluiced Fafhrd from behind,
and something sleekly hairy brushed his calves. As he braced himself to rush
forward with his knife and slay an invisible or two for his friend, slender
unseen arms clasped him from behind and he heard Hirriwi's silvery voice say
in his ear, "Trust us," and a coppery-golden sister voice say, "We'll after
him," and then he found himself pulled down onto a great invisible pulsing
shaggy bed three spans above the snow, and they told him "Cling!" and he clung
to the long thick unseen hair, and then suddenly the living bed shot forward
across the snow and off the rim and there tilted vertically so his feet
pointed at the sky and his face at the Great Rift Valley -- and then the bed
plunged straight down.
       The thin air roared past, and his beard and mane were whipped back by
the speed of that plunge, but he tightened his grip on the handfuls of
invisible hair, and a slender arm pressed him down from either side, so that
he felt through the fur the throbbing heartbeat of the great invisible
carpetlike creature they rode. And he became aware that somehow Hrissa had got
under his arm, for there was the small feline face beside his, with slitted
eyes and with beard-tuft and ears blown back. And he felt the two invisible
girls' bodies alongside his.
       He realized that mortal eyes, could such have watched, would have seen
only a large man clasping a large white cat and falling headfirst through
empty space -- but he would be falling much faster than any man should fall,
even from such a vast height.
       Beside him Hirriwi laughed, as if she had caught his thought, but then
that laughter broke off suddenly and the roaring of the wind died almost to
utter silence. He guessed it was because the swiftly thickening air had
deafened him.
       The great dark cliffs flashing upward a dozen yards away were a blur.
Yet below him the Great Rift Valley was still featureless green -- no, the
larger details were beginning to show now: forests and glades and curling
hair-thin streams and little lakes like dewdrops.
       Between him and the green below he saw a dark speck. It grew in size.
It was the Mouser! -- rather characteristically falling headfirst, straight as
an arrow, with hands locked ahead of him and legs pressed together behind,
probably in the faint hope that he might hit deep water.
       The creature they rode matched the Mouser's speed and then gradually
swung its plunge toward him, flattening out more and more from the vertical,
so that the Mouser was pressed against them. Arms visible and invisible
clasped him then, pulling him closer, so that all five of the plungers were
crowded together on that one great sentient bed.
       The creature's dive flattened still more then, halting its fall --
there was a long moment while they were all pressed stomach-surgingly tight
against the hairy back, while the trees still rushed up at them -- and then
they were coasting above those same treetops and spiraling down into a large
glade.
       What happened next to Fafhrd and the Mouser went all in a great
tumbling rush, much too swiftly: the feel of springy turf under their feet and
balmy air sluicing their bodies, quick kisses exchanged, laughing, shouted
congratulations that still sounded all muffled like ghost voices, something
hard and irregular yet soft-covered pressed into the Mouser's hands, a last
kiss -- and then Hirriwi and Keyaira had broken away and a great burst of air
flattened the grass and the great invisible flier was gone and the girls with
it.
       They could watch its upward spiraling flight for a little, however,
because Hrissa had gone away on it too. The ice-cat seemed to be peering down
at them in farewell. Then she too vanished as the golden afterglow swiftly
died in the darkening sky overhead.
       They stood leaning together for support in the twilight. Then they
straightened themselves, yawning prodigiously, and their hearing came back.
They heard the gurgling of a brook and the twittering of birds and a small,
faint rustle of dry leaves going away from them and the tiny buzz of a
spiraling gnat.
       The Mouser opened the invisible pouch in his hands.
       "The gems seem to be invisible too," he said, "though I can feel 'em
well enough. We'll have a hard time selling them -- unless we can find a blind
jeweler."
       The darkness deepened. Tiny cold fires began to glow in his palms:
ruby, emerald, sapphire, amethyst, and pure white.
       "No, by Issek!" the Gray Mouser said. "We'll only need to sell them by
night -- which is unquestionably the best time for trade in gems."
       The new-risen moon, herself invisible beyond the lesser mountains
walling the Rift Valley to the east, painted palely now the upper half of the
great slender column of Stardock's east wall.
       Gazing up at that queenly sight, Fafhrd said, "Gallant ladies, all
four."
--------
         *III: The Two Best Thieves in Lankhmar*
       Through the Mazy avenues and alleys of the great city of Lankhmar,
Night was a-slink, though not yet grown tall enough to whirl her black star-
studded cloak across the sky, which still showed pale, towering wraiths of
sunset.
       The hawkers of drugs and strong drinks forbidden by day had not yet
taken up their bell-tinklings and thin, enticing cries. The pleasure girls had
not lit their red lanterns and sauntered insolently forth. Bravos,
desperadoes, procurers, spies, pimps, conmen, and other malfeasors yawned and
rubbed drowsy sleep from eyes yet thick-lidded. In fact, most of the Night
People were still at breakfast, while most of the Day People were at supper.
Which made for an emptiness and hush in the streets, suitable to Night's
slippered tread. And which created a large bare stretch of dark, thick,
unpierced wall at the intersection of Silver Street with the Street of the
Gods, a crossing-point where there habitually foregathered the junior
executives and star operatives of the Thieves Guild; also meeting there were
the few freelance thieves bold and resourceful enough to defy the Guild and
the few thieves of aristocratic birth, sometimes most brilliant amateurs, whom
the Guild tolerated and even toadied to, on account of their noble ancestry,
which dignified a very old but most disreputable profession.
       Midway along the bare stretch of wall, where none might conceivably
overhear, a very tall and a somewhat short thief drifted together. After a
while they began to converse in prison-yard whispers.
       A distance had grown between Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser during their
long and uneventful trek south from the Great Rift Valley. It was due simply
to too much of each other and to an ever more bickering disagreement as to how
the invisible jewels, gift of Hirriwi and Keyaira, might most advantageously
be disposed of -- a dispute which had finally grown so acrimonious that they
had divided the jewels, each carrying his share. When they finally reached
Lankhmar, they had lodged apart and each made his own contact with jeweler,
fence or private buyer. This separation had made their relationship quite
scratchy, but in no way diminished their absolute trust in each other.
       "Greetings, Little Man," Fafhrd prison-growled. "So you've come to sell
your share to Ogo the Blind, or at least give him a viewing? -- if such
expression may be used of a sightless man."
       "How did you know that?" the Mouser whispered sharply.
       "It was the obvious thing to do," Fafhrd answered somewhat
condescendingly. "Sell the jewels to a dealer who could note neither their
night-glow nor daytime invisibility. A dealer who must judge them by weight,
feel, and what they can scratch or be scratched by. Besides, we stand just
across from the door to Ogo's den. It's very well guarded, by the by -- at
fewest, ten Mingol swordsmen."
       "At least give me credit for such trifles of common knowledge," the
Mouser answered sardonically. "Well, you guessed right; it appears that by
long association with me you've gained some knowledge of how my wit works,
though I doubt that it's sharpened your own a whit. Yes, I've already had one
conference with Ogo, and tonight we conclude the deal."
       Fafhrd asked equably, "Is it true that Ogo conducts all his interviews
in pitchy dark?"
       "Ho! So there are some few things you admit not knowing! Yes, it's
quite true, which makes any interview with Ogo risky work. By insisting on
absolute darkness, Ogo the Blind cancels at a stroke the interviewer's
advantage -- indeed, the advantage passes to Ogo, since he is used by a
lifetime of it to utter darkness -- a long lifetime, since he's an ancient
one, to judge by his speech. Nay, Ogo knows not what darkness is, since it's
all he's ever known. However, I've a device to trick him there if need be. In
my thick, tightly drawstringed pouch I carry fragments of brightest glow-wood,
and can spill them out in a trice."
       Fafhrd nodded admiringly and then asked, "And what's in that flat case
you carry so tightly under your elbow? An elaborate false history of each of
the jewels embossed in ancient parchment for Ogo's fingers to read?"
       "There your guess fails! No, it's the jewels themselves, guarded in
clever wise so that they cannot be filched. Here, take a peek." And after
glancing quickly to either side and overhead, the Mouser opened the case a
handbreadth on its hinges.
       Fafhrd saw the rainbow-twinkling jewels firmly affixed in artistic
pattern to a bed of black velvet, but all closely covered by an inner top
consisting of a mesh of stout iron wire.
       The Mouser clapped the case shut. "On our first meeting, I took two of
the smallest of the jewels from their spots in the box and let Ogo feel and
otherwise test them. He may dream of filching them all, but my box and the
mesh thwart that."
       "Unless he steals from you the box itself," Fafhrd agreed. "As for
myself, I keep my share of the jewels chained to me."
       And after such precautionary glances as the Mouser had made, he thrust
back his loose left sleeve, showing a stout browned-iron bracelet snapped
around his wrist. From the bracelet hung a short chain which both supported
and kept tightly shut a small, bulging pouch. The leather of the pouch was
everywhere sewed across with fine brown wire. He unclicked the bracelet, which
opened on a hinge, then clicked it fast again.
       "The browned-iron wire's to foil any cutpurse," Fafhrd explained
offhandedly, pulling down his sleeve.
       The Mouser's eyebrows rose. Then his gaze followed them as it went from
Fafhrd's wrist to his face, while the small man's expression changed from mild
approval to bland inquiry. He asked, "And you trust such devices to guard your
half of the gems from Nemia of the Dusk?"
       "How did you know my dealings were with Nemia?" Fafhrd asked in tones
just the slightest surprised.
       "Because she's Lankhmar's only woman fence, of course. All know you
favor women when possible, in business as well as erotic matters. Which is one
of your greatest failings, if I may say so. Also, Nemia's door lies next to
Ogo's, though that's a trivial clue. You know, I presume, that seven Kleshite
stranglers protect her somewhat overripe person? Well, at least then you know
the sort of trap you're rushing into. Deal with a woman! -- surest route to
disaster. By the by, you mentioned 'dealings.' Does that plural mean this is
not your first interview with her?"
       Fafhrd nodded. "As you with Ogo.... Incidentally, am I to understand
that you trust men simply because they're men? That were a greater failing
than the one you impute to me. Anyhow, as you with Ogo, I go to Nemia of the
Dusk a second time, to complete our deal. The first time I showed her the gems
in a twilit chamber, where they appeared to greatest advantage, twinkling just
enough to seem utterly real. Did you know, in passing, that she always works
in twilight or soft gloom? -- which accounts for the second half of her
name. At all events, as soon as she glimpsed them, Nemia greatly desired the
gems -- her breath actually caught in her throat -- and she agreed at once
to my price, which is not low, as basis for further bargaining. However, it
happens that she invariably follows the rule -- which I myself consider a
sound one -- of never completing a transaction of any sort with a member of
the opposite sex without first testing them in amorous commerce. Hence this
second meeting. If the member be old or otherwise ugly, Nemia deputes the task
to one of her maids, but in my case, of course..." Fafhrd coughed modestly.
"One more point I'd like to make: 'overripe' is the wrong expression. 'Full-
bloomed' or 'the acme of maturity' is what you're looking for."
       "Believe me, I'm sure Nemia is in fullest bloom -- a late August
flower. Such women always prefer twilight for the display of their 'perfectly
matured' charms," the Mouser answered somewhat stifledly. He had for some time
been hard put to restrain laughter, and now it appeared in quiet little bursts
as he said, "Oh, you great fool! And you've actually agreed to go to bed with
her? And expect not to be parted from your jewels (including family jewels?),
let alone not strangled, while at that disadvantage? Oh, this is worse than I
thought."
       "I'm not always at such a disadvantage in bed as some people may
think," Fafhrd answered with quiet modesty. "With me, amorous play sharpens
instead of dulls the senses. I trust you have as much luck with a man in ebon
darkness as I with a woman in soft gloom. Incidentally, why must you have two
conferences with Ogo? Not Nemia's reason, surely?"
       The Mouser's grin faded and he lightly bit his lip. With elaborate
casualness he said, "Oh, the jewels must be inspected by the Eyes of Ogo --
_his_ invariable rule. But whatever test is tried, I'm prepared to out-trick
it."
       Fafhrd pondered, then asked, "And what, or who are, or is, the Eyes of
Ogo? Does he keep a pair of them in his pouch?"
       "Is," the Mouser said. Then with even more elaborate casualness, "Oh,
some chit of a girl, I believe. Supposed to have an intuitive faculty where
gems are concerned. Interesting, isn't it, that a man as clever as Ogo should
believe such superstitious nonsense? Or depend on the soft sex in any fashion.
Truly, a mere formality."
       "'Chit of a girl,'" Fafhrd mused, nodding his head again and yet again
and yet again. "That describes to a red dot on each of her immature nipples
the sort of female you've come to favor in recent years. But of course the
amorous is not at all involved in this deal of yours, I'm sure," he added,
rather too solemnly.
       "In no way whatever," the Mouser replied, rather too sharply. Looking
around, he remarked, "We're getting a bit of company, despite the early hour.
There's Dickon of the Thieves Guild, that old pen-pusher and drawer of the
floor plans of houses to be robbed -- I don't believe he's actually worked
on a job since the Year of the Snake. And there's fat Grom, their
subtreasurer, another armchair thief. Who comes so dramatically a-slither? --
by the Black Bones, it's Snarve, our overlord Glipkerio's nephew! Who's that
he speaks to? -- oh, only Tork the Cutpurse."
       "And there now appears," Fafhrd took up, "Vlek, said to be the Guild's
star operative these days. Note his smirk and hear how his shoes creak
faintly. And there's that gray-eyed, black-haired amateur, Alyx the Picklock
-- well, at least her boots don't squeak, and I rather admire her courage in
adventuring here, where the Guild's animosity toward freelance females is as
ill a byword as that of the Pimps Guild. And, just now turning from the Street
of the Gods, who have we but Countess Kronia of the Seventy-seven Secret
Pockets, who steals by madness, not method. There's one bone-bag I'd never
trust, despite her emaciated charms and the weakness you lay to me."
       Nodding, the Mouser pronounced, "And such as these are called the
aristocracy of thiefdom! In all honesty I must say that notwithstanding your
weaknesses -- which I'm glad you admit -- one of the two best thieves in
Lankhmar now stands beside me. While the other, needless to say, occupies my
ratskin boots."
       Fafhrd nodded back, though carefully crossing two fingers.
       Stilling a yawn, the Mouser said, "By the by, have you yet any thought
about what you'll be doing after those gems are stolen from your wrist, or --
though unlikely -- sold and paid for? I've been approached about -- or at
any rate been considering a wander toward -- in the general direction of the
Eastern Lands."
       "Where it's hotter even than in this sultry Lankhmar? Such a stroll
hardly appeals to me," Fafhrd replied, then casually added, "In any case, I've
been thinking of taking ship -- er -- northward."
       "Toward that abominable Cold Waste once more? No, thank you!" the
Mouser answered. Then, glancing south along Silver Street, where a pale star
shone close to the horizon, he went on still more briskly, "Well, it's time
for my interview with Ogo -- and his silly girl Eyes. Take your sword to bed
with you, I advise, and look to it that neither Graywand nor your more vital
blade are filched from you in Nemia's dusk."
       "Oh, so first twinkle of the Whale Star is the time set for your
appointment too?" Fafhrd remarked, himself stirring from the wall. "Tell me,
is the true appearance of Ogo known to anyone? Somehow the name makes me think
of a fat, old, and overlarge spider."
       "Curb your imagination, if you please," the Mouser answered sharply.
"Or keep it for your own business, where I'll remind you that the only
dangerous spider is the female. No, Ogo's true appearance is unknown. But
perhaps tonight I'll discover it!"
       "I'd like you to ponder that your besetting fault is overcuriosity,"
said Fafhrd, "and that you can't trust even the stupidest girl to be always
silly."
       The Mouser turned impulsively and said, "However tonight's interviews
fall out, let's rendezvous after. The Silver Eel?"
       Fafhrd nodded, and they gripped hands together. Then each rogue
sauntered toward his fateful door.
         ****
       The Mouser crouched a little, every sense a-quiver, in space utterly
dark. On a surface before him -- a table, he had felt it out to be -- lay
his jewel box, closed. His left hand touched the box. His right gripped Cat's
Claw and with that weapon nervously threatened the inky darkness all around.
       A voice which was at once dry and thick croaked from behind him, "Open
the box!"
       The Mouser's skin crawled at the horror of that voice. Nevertheless, he
complied with the direction. The rainbow light of the meshed jewels spilled
upward, dimly showing the room to be low-ceilinged and rather large. It
appeared to be empty except for the table and, indistinct in the far left
corner behind him, a dark low shape which the Mouser did not like. It might be
a hassock or a fat, round, black pillow. Or it might be ... The Mouser wished
Fafhrd hadn't made his last suggestion.
       From ahead of him a rippling, silvery voice quite unlike the first
called, "Your jewels, like no others I have ever seen, gleam in the absence of
all light."
       Scanning piercingly across the table and box, the Mouser could see no
sign of the second caller. Evening out his own voice, so it was not breathy
with apprehension, but bland with confidence, he said, to the emptiness, "My
gems are like no others in the world. In fact, they come not from the world,
being of the same substance as the stars. Yet you know by your test that one
of them is harder than diamond."
       "They are truly unearthly and most beautiful jewels," the sourless
silvery voice answered. "My mind pierces them through and through, and they
are what you say they are. I shall advise Ogo to pay your asking price."
       At that instant the Mouser heard behind him a little cough and a dry,
rapid scuttling. He whirled around, dirk poised to strike. There was nothing
to be seen or sensed, except for the hassock or whatever, which had not moved.
The scuttling was no longer to be heard.
       He swiftly turned back, and there across the table from him, her front
illumined by the twinkling jewels, stood a slim naked girl with pale straight
hair, somewhat darker skin, and overlarge eyes staring entrancedly from a
child's tiny-chinned, pouty-lipped face.
       Satisfying himself by a rapid glance that the jewels were in their
proper pattern under their mesh and none missing, he swiftly advanced Cat's
Claw so that its needle point touched the taut skin between the small yet
jutting breasts. "Do not seek to startle me so again!" he hissed. "Men --
aye, and girls -- have died for less."
       The girl did not stir by so much as the breadth of a fine hair; neither
did her expression nor her dreamy yet concentrated gaze change, except that
her short lips smiled, then parted to say honey-voiced, "So you are the Gray
Mouser. I had expected a crouchy, sear-faced rogue, and I find ... a prince."
The very jewels seemed to twinkle more wildly because of her sweet voice and
sweeter presence, striking opalescent glimmers from her pale irises.
       "Neither seek to flatter me!" the Mouser commanded, catching up his box
and holding it open against his side. "I am inured, I'll have you know, to the
ensorcelments of all the world's minxes and nymphs."
       "I speak truth only, as I did of your jewels," she answered
guilelessly. Her lips had stayed parted a little, and she spoke without moving
them.
       "Are you the Eyes of Ogo?" the Mouser demanded harshly, yet drawing
Cat's Claw back from her bosom. It bothered him a little, yet only a little,
that the tiniest stream of blood, like a black thread, led down for a few
inches from the prick his dirk had made.
       Utterly unmindful of the tiny wound, the girl nodded. "And I can see
through you, as through your jewels, and I discover naught in you but what is
noble and fine, save for certain small subtle impulses of violence and
cruelty, which a girl like myself might find delightful."
       "There your all-piercing eyes err wholly, for I am a great villain,"
the Mouser answered scornfully, though he felt a pulse of fond satisfaction
within him.
       The girl's eyes widened as she looked over his shoulder somewhat
apprehensively, and from behind the Mouser the dry and thick voice croaked
once more, "Keep to business! Yes, I will pay you in gold your offering price,
a sum it will take me some hours to assemble. Return at the same time tomorrow
night and we will close the deal. Now shut the box."
       The Mouser had turned around, still clutching his box, when Ogo began
to speak. Again he could not distinguish the source of the voice, though he
scanned minutely. It seemed to come from the whole wall.
       Now he turned back. Somewhat to his disappointment, the naked girl had
vanished. He peered under the table, but there was nothing there. Doubtless
some trapdoor or hypnotic device...
       Still suspicious as a snake, he returned the way he had come. On close
approach, the black hassock appeared to be only that. Then as the door to the
outside slid open noiselessly, he swiftly obeyed Ogo's last injunction,
snapping shut the box, and departed.
         ****
       Fafhrd gazed tenderly at Nemia lying beside him in perfumed twilight,
while keeping the edge of his vision on his brawny wrist and the pouch pendant
from it, both of which his companion was now idly fondling.
       To do Nemia justice, even at the risk of imputing a certain cattiness
to the Mouser, her charms were neither overblown, nor even ample, but only ...
sufficient.
       From just behind Fafhrd's shoulder came a spitting hiss. He quickly
turned his head and found himself looking into the crossed blue eyes of a
white cat standing on the small bedside table beside a bowl of bronze
chrysanthemums.
       "Ixy!" Nemia called remonstratingly yet languorously.
       Despite her voice, Fafhrd heard behind him, in rapid succession, the
click of a bracelet opening and the slightly louder click of one closing.
       He turned back instantly, to discover only that Nemia had meanwhile
clasped on his wrist, beside the browned-iron bracelet, a golden one around
which sapphires and rubies marched alternately in single file.
       Gazing at him from betwixt the strands of her long dark hair, she said
huskily, "It is only a small token which I give to those who please me ...
greatly."
       Fafhrd drew his wrist closer to his eyes to admire his prize, but
mostly to palpate his pouch with the fingers of his other hand, to assure
himself that it bulged as tightly as ever.
       It did, and in a burst of generous feeling he said, "Let me give you
one of my gems in precisely the same spirit," and made to undo his pouch.
       Nemia's long-fingered hand glided out to prevent. "No," she breathed.
"Let never the gems of business be mixed with the jewels of pleasure. Now if
you should choose to bring me some small gift tomorrow night, when at the same
hour we exchange your jewels for my gold and my letters of credit on
Glipkerio, underwritten by Hisvin the Grain Merchant..."
       "Right," Fafhrd said briefly, concealing the relief he felt. He'd been
an idiot to think of giving Nemia one of the gems -- and with it a day's
opportunity to discover its abnormalities.
       "Until tomorrow," Nemia said, opening her arms to him.
       "Until tomorrow, then," Fafhrd agreed, embracing her fervently, yet
keeping his pouch clutched in the hand to which it was chained -- and
already eager to be gone.
         ****
       The Silver Eel was far less than half filled, its candles few, its
cupbearers torpid, as Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser entered simultaneously by
different doors and made for one of the many empty booths.
       The only eye to watch them at all closely was a gray one above a narrow
section of pale cheek bordered by dark hair, peering past the curtain of the
backmost booth.
       When their thick table-candles had been lit and cups set before them
and a jug of fortified wine, and fresh charcoal tumbled into the red-seeded
brazier at table's end, the Mouser placed his flat box on the table and,
grinning, said, "All's set. The jewels passed the test of the Eyes -- a
toothsome wenchlet; more of her later. I get the cash tomorrow night -- all
my offering price! But you, friend, I hardly thought to see you back alive.
Drink we up! I take it you escaped from Nemia's divan whole and sound in
organs and limbs -- as far as you yet know. But the jewels?"
       "They came through too," Fafhrd answered, swinging the pouch lightly
out of his sleeve and then back in again. "And I get my money tomorrow night
... the full amount of my asking price, just like you."
       As he named those coincidences, his eyes went thoughtful.
       They stayed that way while he took two large swallows of wine. The
Mouser watched him curiously.
       "At one point," Fafhrd finally mused, "I thought she was trying the old
trick of substituting for mine an identical but worthlessly filled pouch.
Since she'd seen the pouch at our first meeting, she could have had a similar
one made up, complete with chain and bracelet."
       "But was she -- ?" the Mouser asked.
       "Oh no, it turned out to be something entirely different," Fafhrd said
lightly, though some thought kept two slight vertical furrows in his forehead.
"That's odd," the Mouser remarked. "At one point -- just one, mind you --
the Eyes of Ogo, if she'd been extremely swift, deft, and silent, might have
been able to switch boxes on me."
       Fafhrd lifted his eyebrows.
       The Mouser went on rapidly, "That is, if my box had been closed. But it
was open, in darkness, and there'd have been no way to reproduce the
varicolored twinkling of the gems. Phosphorus or glow-wood? Too dim. Hot
coals? No, I'd have felt the heat. Besides, how get that way a diamond's pure
white glow? Quite impossible."
       Fafhrd nodded agreement but continued to gaze over the Mouser's
shoulder.
       The Mouser started to reach toward his box, but instead with a small
self-contemptuous chuckle picked up the jug and began to pour himself another
drink in a careful small stream.
       Fafhrd shrugged at last, used the back of his forefingers to push over
his own pewter cup for a refill, and yawned mightily, leaning back a little
and at the same time pushing his spread-fingered hands to either side across
the table, as if pushing away from him all small doubts and wonderings.
       The fingers of his left hand touched the Mouser's box.
       His face went blank. He looked down his arm at the box.
       Then to the great puzzlement of the Mouser, who had just begun to fill
Fafhrd's cup, the Northerner leaned forward and placed his head ear-down on
the box.
       "Mouser," he said in a small voice, "your box is buzzing."
       Fafhrd's cup was full, but the Mouser kept on pouring.
       Heavily fragrant wine puddled and began to run toward the glowing
brazier.
       "When I touched the box, I felt vibration," Fafhrd went on bemusedly.
"It's buzzing. It's still buzzing."
       With a low snarl, the Mouser slammed down the jug and snatched the box
from under Fafhrd's ear. The wine reached the brazier's hot bottom and hissed.
He tore the box open, opened also its mesh top, and he and Fafhrd peered in.
       The candlelight dimmed, but by no means extinguished the yellow,
violet, reddish, and white twinkling glows rising from various points on the
black velvet bottom.
       But the candlelight was quite bright enough also to show, at each such
point, matching the colors listed, a firebeetle, glowwasp, nightbee, or
diamondfly, each insect alive but delicately affixed to the floor of the box
with fine silver wire. From time to time the wings or wingcases of some
buzzed.
       Without hesitation, Fafhrd unclasped the browned-iron bracelet from his
wrist, unchained the pouch, and dumped it on the table.
       Jewels of various sizes, all beautifully cut, made a fair heap.
       But they were all dead black.
       Fafhrd picked up a big one, tried it with his fingernail, then whipped
out his hunting knife and with its edge easily scored the gem.
       He carefully dropped it in the brazier's glowing center. After a bit it
flamed up yellow and blue.
       "Coal," Fafhrd said.
       The Mouser clawed his hands over his faintly twinkling box, as if about
to pick it up and hurl it through the wall and across the Inner Sea.
       Instead he unclawed his hands and hung them decorously at his sides.
       "I am going away," he announced quietly, but very clearly, and did so.
       Fafhrd did not look up. He was dropping a second black gem in the
brazier.
       He did take off the bracelet Nemia had given him; he brought it close
to his eyes, said, "Brass ... glass," and spread his fingers to let it drop in
the spilled wine. After the Mouser was gone, Fafhrd drained his brimming cup,
drained the Mouser's and filled it again, then went on supping from it as he
continued to drop the black jewels one by one in the brazier.
         ****
       Nemia and the Eyes of Ogo sat cozily side by side on a luxurious divan.
They had put on negligees. A few candles made a yellowish dusk.
       On a low, gleaming table were set delicate flagons of wines and
liqueurs, slim-stemmed crystal goblets, golden plates of sweetmeats and
savories, and in the center two equal heaps of rainbow-glowing gems.
       "What a quaint bore barbarians are," Nemia remarked, delicately
stifling a yawn, "though good for one's sensuous self, once in a great while.
This one had a little more brains than most. I think he might have caught on,
except that I made the two clicks come so exactly together when I snapped back
on his wrist the bracelet with the false pouch and at the same time my brass
keepsake. It's amazing how barbarians are hypnotized by brass along with any
odd bits of glass colored like rubies and sapphires -- I think the three
primary colors paralyze their primitive brains."
       "Clever, _clever_ Nemia," the Eyes of Ogo cooed with a tender caress.
"My little fellow almost caught on too when I made the switch, but then he got
interested in threatening me with his knife. Actually jabbed me between the
breasts. I think he has a dirty mind."
       "Let me kiss the blood away, darling Eyes," Nemia suggested. "Oh,
dreadful ... dreadful."
       While shivering under her treatment -- Nemia had a slightly bristly
tongue -- Eyes said, "For some reason he was quite nervous about Ogo." She
made her face blank, her pouty mouth hanging slightly open.
       The richly draped wall opposite her made a scuttling sound and then
croaked in a dry, thick voice, "Open your box, Gray Mouser. Now close it.
Girls, girls! Cease your lascivious play!"
       Nemia and Eyes clung to each other laughing. Eyes said in her natural
voice, if she had one, "And he went away still thinking there was a real Ogo.
I'm quite certain of that. My, they both must be in a froth by now."
       Sitting back, Nemia said, "I suppose we'll have to take some special
precautions against their raiding us to get their jewels back."
       Eyes shrugged. "I have my five Mingol swordsmen."
       Nemia said. "And I have my three and a half Kleshite stranglers."
       "Half?" Eyes asked.
       "I was counting Ixy. No, but seriously."
       Eyes frowned for half a heartbeat, then shook her head decisively. "I
don't think we need worry about Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser raiding us back.
Because we're girls, their pride will be hurt, and they'll sulk a while and
then run away to the ends of the earth on one of those adventures of theirs."
       "Adventures!" said Nemia, as one who says, "Cesspools and privies!"
       "You see, they're really weaklings," Eyes went on, warming to her
topic. "They have no drive whatever, no ambition, no true passion for money.
For instance, if they did -- and if they didn't spend so much time in dismal
spots away from Lankhmar -- they'd have known that the King of Ilthmar has
developed a mania for gems that are invisible by day, but glow by night, and
has offered half his kingdom for a sack of star-jewels. And then they'd never
have had even to consider such an idiotic thing as coming to us."
       "What do you suppose he'll do with them? The King, I mean."
       Eyes shrugged. "I don't know. Build a planetarium. Or eat them." She
thought a moment. "All things considered, it might be as well if we got away
from here for a few weeks. We deserve a vacation."
       Nemia nodded, closing her eyes. "It should be absolutely the opposite
sort of place to the one in which the Mouser and Fafhrd will have their next
-- ugh! -- adventure."
       Eyes nodded too and said dreamily, "Blue skies and rippling water,
spotless beach, a tepid wind, flowers and slim slavegirls everywhere..."
       Nemia said, "I've always wished for a place that has no weather, only
perfection. Do you know which half of Ilthmar's kingdom has the least
weather?"
       "Precious Nemia," Eyes murmured, "you're so civilized. And so very,
very clever. Next to one other, you're certainly the best thief in Lankhmar."
       "Who's the other?" Nemia was eager to know.
       "Myself, of course," Eyes answered modestly.
       Nemia reached up and tweaked her companion's ear -- not too
painfully, but enough.
       "If there were the least money depending on that," she said quietly but
firmly, "I'd teach you differently. But since it's only conversation..."
       "Dearest Nemia."
       "Sweetest Eyes."
       The two girls gently embraced and kissed each other fondly.
         ****
       The Mouser glared thin-lipped across a table in a curtained booth in
the Golden Lamprey, a tavern not unlike the Silver Eel.
       He rapped the teak before him with his fingertip, and the perfumed
stale air with his voice, saying, "Double those twenty gold pieces and I'll
make the trip and hear Prince Gwaay's proposal."
       The very pale man opposite him, who squinted as if even the candlelight
were a glare, answered softly, "Twenty-five -- and you serve him for one day
after arrival."
       "What sort of ass do you take me for?" the Mouser demanded dangerously.
"I might be able to settle all his troubles in one day -- I usually can --
and what then? No, no preagreed service; I hear his proposal only. And ...
thirty-five gold pieces in advance."
       "Very well, thirty gold pieces -- twenty to be refunded if you refuse
to serve my master, which would be a risky step, I warn you."
       "Risk is my bedmate," the Mouser snapped. "Ten only to be refunded."
       The other nodded and began slowly to count rilks onto the teak. "Ten
_now_," he said. "Ten when you join our caravan tomorrow morning at the Grain
Gate. And ten when we reach Quarmall."
       "When we first glimpse the spires of Quarmall," the Mouser insisted.
       The other nodded.
       The Mouser moodily snatched the golden coins and stood up. They felt
very few in his fist. For a moment he thought of returning to Fafhrd and with
him devising plans against Ogo and Nemia.
       No, never! He realized he couldn't in his misery and self-rage bear the
thought of even looking at Fafhrd.
       Besides, the Northerner would certainly be drunk.
       And two, or at most three, rilks would buy him certain tolerable and
even interesting pleasures to fill the hours before dawn brought him release
from this hateful city.
         ****
       Fafhrd was indeed drunk, being on his third jug. He had burnt up all
the black jewels and was now with the greatest delicacy and most careful use
of the needle point of his knife, releasing unharmed each of the silver-wired
firebeetles, glowwasps, nightbees, and diamondflies. They buzzed about
erratically.
       Two cupbearers and the chucker-out had come to protest, and now Slevyas
himself joined them, rubbing the back of his thick neck. He had been stung and
a customer too. Fafhrd had himself been stung twice, but hadn't seemed to
notice. Nor did he now pay the slightest attention to the four haranguing him.
       The last nightbee was released. It careened off noisily past Slevyas'
neck, who dodged his head with a curse. Fafhrd sat back, suddenly looking very
wretched. With varying shrugs the master of the Silver Eel and his three
servitors made off, one cupbearer making swipes at the air.
       Fafhrd tossed up his knife. It came down almost point first, but didn't
quite stick in the teak. He laboriously scabbarded it, then forced himself to
take a small sip of wine.
       As if someone were about to emerge from the backmost booth, there was a
stirring of its heavy curtains, which like all the others had stitched to them
heavy chain and squares of metal, so that one guest couldn't stab another
through them, except with luck and the slimmest stilettos.
       But at that moment a very pale man, who held up his cloak to shield his
eyes from the candlelight, entered by the side door and made to Fafhrd's
table.
       "I've come for my answer, Northerner," he said in a voice soft yet
sinister. He glanced at the toppled jugs and spilled wine. "That is, if you
remember my proposition."
       "Sit down," Fafhrd said. "Have a drink. Watch out for the glowwasps --
they're vicious." Then, scornfully, "Remember! Prince Hasjarl of Marquall --
Quarmall. Passage by ship. A mountain of gold rilks. Remember!"
       Keeping on his feet, the other amended, "Twenty-five rilks. Provided
you take ship with me at once and promise to render a day's service to my
prince. Thereafter by what further agreement you and he arrive at."
       He placed on the table a small golden tower of precounted coins.
       "Munificent!" Fafhrd said, grabbing it up and reeling to his feet. He
placed five of the coins on the table and shoved the rest in his pouch, except
for three more, which scattered dulcetly across the floor. He corked and
pouched the third wine jug. Coming out from behind the table, he said, "Lead
the way, comrade," gave the squinty-eyed man a mighty shove toward the side
door, and went weaving after him.
       In the backmost booth, Alyx the Picklock pursed her lips and shook her
head disapprovingly.
--------
         IV: *The Lords of Quarmall*
       The room was dim, almost maddeningly dim to one who loved sharp detail
and the burning sun. The few wall-set torches that provided the sole
illumination flamed palely and thinly, more like will-o'-the-wisps than true
fire, although they released a pleasant incense. One got the feeling that the
dwellers of this region resented light and only tolerated a thin mist of it
for the benefit of strangers.
       Despite its vast size, the room was carved all in somber solid rock --
smooth floor, polished curving walls, and domed ceiling -- either a natural
cave finished by man or else chipped out and burnished entirely by human
effort, although the thought of that latter amount of work was nearly
intolerable. From numerous deep niches between the torches, metal statuettes
and masks and jeweled objects gleamed darkly.
       Through the room, bending the feeble bluish flames, came a perpetual
cool draft bringing acid odors of damp ground and moist rock which the sweet
spicy scent of the torches never quite masked.
       The only sounds were the occasional rutch of rock on wood from the
other end of the long table, where a game was being played with black and
white stone counters -- that and, from beyond the room, the ponderous sighing
of the great fans that sucked down the fresh air on its last stage of passage
from the distant world above and drove it through this region ... and the
perpetual soft thudding of the naked feet of the slaves on the heavy leather
tread-belts that drove those great wooden fans ... and the very faint mechanic
gasping of those slaves.
       After one had been in this region for a few days, or only a few hours,
the sighing of the fans and the soft thudding of the feet and the faint
gaspings of the tortured lungs seemed to drone out only the name of this
region, over and over.
       "Quarmall..." they seemed to chant. "Quarmall ... Quarmall is all..."
       The Gray Mouser, upon whose senses and through whose mind these
sensations and fancies had been flooding and flitting, was a small man
strongly muscled. Clad in gray silks irregularly woven, with tiny thread-tufts
here and there, he looked restless as a lynx and as dangerous.
       From a great tray of strangely hued and shaped mushrooms set before him
like sweetmeats, the Mouser disdainfully selected and nibbled cautiously at
the most normal looking, a gray one. Its perfumy savor masking bitterness
offended him, and he spat it surreptitiously into his palm and dropped that
hand under the table and flicked the wet chewed fragments to the floor. Then,
while he sucked his cheek sourly, the fingers of both his hands began to play
as slowly and nervously with the hilts of his sword Scalpel and his dagger
Cat's Claw as his mind played with his boredoms and murky wonderings.
       Along each side of the long narrow table, in great high-backed chairs
widely spaced, sat six scrawny old men, bald or shaven of dome and chin, and
chicken-fluted of jowl, and each clad only in a neat white loincloth. Eleven
of these stared intently at nothing and perpetually tensed their meager
muscles until even their ears seemed to stiffen, as though concentrating
mightily in realms unseen. The twelfth had his chair half turned and was
playing across a far corner of the table the board-game that made the
occasional tiny rutching noises. He was playing it with the Mouser's employer
Gwaay, ruler of the Lower Levels of Quarmall and younger son to Quarmal, Lord
of Quarmall.
       Although the Mouser had been three days in Quarmall's depths he had
come no closer to Gwaay than he was now, so that he knew him only as a pallid,
handsome, soft-spoken youth, no realer to the Mouser, because of the eternal
dimness and the invariable distance between them, than a ghost.
       The game was one the Mouser had never seen before and quite tricky in
several respects.
       The board looked green, though it was impossible to be certain of
colors in the unending twilight of the torches, and it had no perceptible
squares or tracks on it, except for a phosphorescent line midway between the
opponents, dividing the board into two equal fields.
       Each contestant started the game with twelve flat circular counters set
along his edge of the board. Gwaay's counters were obsidian-black, his ancient
opponent's marble-white, so the Mouser was able to distinguish them despite
the dimness.
       The object of the game seemed to be to move the pieces randomly forward
over uneven distances and get at least seven of them into your opponent's
field first.
       Here the trickiness was that one moved the pieces not with the fingers
but only by looking at them intently. Apparently, if one gazed only at a
single piece, one could move it quite swiftly. If one gazed at several, one
could move them all together in a line or cluster, but more sluggishly.
       The Mouser was not yet wholly convinced that he was witnessing a
display of thought-power. He still suspected threads, soundless air-puffings,
surreptitious joggings of the board from below, powerful beetles under the
counters, and hidden magnets -- for Gwaay's pieces at least could by their
color be some sort of lodestone.
       At the present moment Gwaay's black counters and the ancient's white
ones were massed at the central line, shifting only a little now and then as
the push-of-war went first a nail's breadth one way, then the other. Suddenly
Gwaay's rearmost counter circled swiftly back and darted toward an open space
at the board's edge. Two of the ancient's counters formed a wedge and thrust
across the midline through the weak point thus created. As the ancient's two
detached counters returned to oppose them, Gwaay's end-running counter sped
across. The game was over -- Gwaay gave no sign of this, but the ancient began
fumblingly to return the pieces to their starting positions with his fingers.
       "Ho, Gwaay, that was easily won!" the Mouser called out cockily. "Why
not take on two of them together? The oldster must be a sorcerer of the Second
Rank to play so weakly -- or even a doddering apprentice of the Third."
       The ancient shot the Mouser a venomous gaze. "We are, all twelve of us,
sorcerers of the First Rank and have been from our youth," he proclaimed
portentously. "As you should swiftly learn were one of us to point but a
little finger against you."
       "You have heard what he says," Gwaay called softly to the Mouser
without looking at him.
       The Mouser, daunted no whit, at least outwardly, called back, "I still
think you could beat two of them together, or seven -- or the whole decrepit
dozen! If they are of First Rank, you must be of Zero or Negative Magnitude."
       The ancient's lips worked speechlessly and bubbled with froth at that
affront, but Gwaay only called pleasantly, "Were but three of my faithful magi
to cease their sorcerous concentrations, my brother Hasjarl's sendings would
burst through from the Upper Levels and I would be stricken with all the
diseases in the evil compendium, and a few others that exist in Hasjarl's
putrescent imagination alone -- or perchance I should be erased entirely from
this life."
       "If nine out of twelve must be forever a-guarding you, they can't get
much sleep," the Mouser observed, calling back.
       "Times are not always so troublous," Gwaay replied tranquilly.
"Sometimes custom or my father enjoins a truce. Sometimes the dark inward sea
quiets. But today I know by certain signs that a major assault is being made
on the liver and lights and blood and bones and rest of me. Dear Hasjarl has a
double coven of sorcerers hardly inferior to my own -- Second Rank, but High
Second -- and he whips them on. And I am as distasteful to Hasjarl, oh Gray
Mouser, as the simple fruits of our manure beds are to your lips. Tonight,
furthermore, my father Quarmal casts his horoscope in the tower of the Keep,
high above Hasjarl's Upper Levels, so it befits I keep all rat-holes closely
watched."
       "If it's magical helpings you lack," the Mouser retorted boldly, "I
have a spell or two that would frizzle your elder brother's witches and
warlocks!" And truth to tell the Mouser had parchment-crackling in his pouch
one spell -- though one spell only -- which he dearly wanted to test. It had
been given him by his own wizardly mentor and master Sheelba of the Eyeless
Face.
       Gwaay replied, more softly than ever, so that the Mouser felt that if
there had been a yard more between them he would not have heard, "It is your
work to ward from my physical body Hasjarl's sword-sendings, in particular
those of this great champion he is reputed to have hired. My sorcerers of the
First Rank will shield off Hasjarl's sorcerous _billets-doux_. Each to his
proper occupation." He lightly clapped his hands together. A slim slavegirl
appeared noiselessly in the dark archway beyond him. Without looking once at
her, Gwaay softly commanded, "Strong wine for our warrior." She vanished.
       The ancient had at last laboriously shuffled the black-and-white
counters into their starting positions, and Gwaay regarded his thoughtfully.
But before making a move, he called to the Mouser, "If time still hangs heavy
on your hands, devote some of it to selecting the reward you will take when
your work is done. And in your search overlook not the maiden who brings you
the wine. Her name is Ivivis."
       At that the Mouser shut up. He had already chosen more than a dozen
expensive be-charming objects from Gwaay's drawers and niches and locked them
in a disused closet he had discovered two levels down. If this should be
discovered, he would explain that he was merely making an innocent
preselection pending final choice, but Gwaay might not view it that way and
Gwaay was sharp, judging from the way he'd noted the rejected mushroom and
other things.
       It had not occurred to the Mouser to preempt a girl or two by locking
her in the closet also, though it was admittedly an attractive idea.
       The ancient cleared his throat and said chucklingly across the board,
"Lord Gwaay, let this ambitious sworder try his sorcerous tricks. Let him try
them on me!"
       The Mouser's spirits rose, but Gwaay only raised palm and shook his
head slightly and pointed a finger at the board; the ancient began obediently
to think a piece forward.
       The Mouser's spirits fell. He was beginning to feel very much alone in
this dim underworld where all spoke and moved in whispers. True, when Gwaay's
emissary had approached him in Lankhmar, the Mouser had been happy to take on
this solo job. It would teach his loud-voiced sword-mate Fafhrd a lesson if
his small gray comrade (and brain!) should disappear one night without a word
... and then return perchance a year later with a brimful treasure chest and a
mocking smile.
       The Mouser had even been happy all the long caravan trip from Lankhmar
south to Quarmall, along the Hlal River and past the Lakes of Pleea and
through the Mountains of Hunger. It had been a positive pleasure to loll on a
swaying camel beyond reach of Fafhrd's hugeness and disputatious talk and
boisterous ways, while the nights grew ever bluer and warmer and strange
jewel-fiery stars came peering over the southern horizon.
       But now he had been three nights in Quarmall since his secret coming to
the Lower Levels -- three nights and days, or rather one hundred and forty-
four interminable demi-hours of buried twilight -- and he was already
beginning in his secretest mind to wish that Fafhrd were here, instead of half
a continent away in Lankhmar -- or even farther than that if he'd carried out
his misty plans to revisit his northern homeland. Someone to drink with, at
any rate -- and even a roaring quarrel would be positively refreshing after
seventy-two hours of nothing but silent servitors, tranced sorcerers, stewed
mushrooms, and Gwaay's unbreakable soft-tongued equanimity.
       Besides, it appeared that all Gwaay wanted was a mighty sworder to
nullify the threat of this champion Hasjarl was supposed to have hired as
secretly as Gwaay had smuggled in the Mouser. If Fafhrd were here, he could be
Gwaay's sworder, while the Mouser would have better opportunity to peddle
Gwaay his magical talents. The one spell he had in his pouch -- he had got it
from Sheelba in return for the tale of the Perversions of Clutho -- would
forever establish his reputation as an archimage of deadly might, he was sure.
       The Mouser came out of his musings to realize that the slavegirl Ivivis
was kneeling before him -- for how long she had been there he could not say --
and proffering an ebony tray on which stood a squat stone jug and a copper
cup.
       She knelt with one leg doubled, the other thrust behind her as in a
fencing lunge, stretching the short skirt of her green tunic, while her arms
reached the tray forward.
       Her slim body was most supple -- she held the difficult pose
effortlessly. Her fine straight hair was pale as her skin -- both a sort of
ghost color. It occurred to the Mouser that she would look very well in his
closet, perhaps cherishing against her bosom the necklace of large black
pearls he had discovered piled behind a pewter statuette in one of Gwaay's
niches.
       However, she was kneeling as far away from him as she could and still
stretch him the tray, and her eyes were most modestly downcast, nor would she
even flicker up their lids to his gracious murmurings -- which were all the
approach he thought suitable at this moment.
       He seized the jug and cup. Ivivis drooped her head still lower in
acknowledgment, then flirted silently away.
       The Mouser poured a finger of blood-red, blood-thick wine and sipped.
Its flavor was darkly sweet, but with a bitter undertaste. He wondered if it
were fermented from scarlet toadstools.
       The black-and-white counters skittered rutchingly in obedience to
Gwaay's and the ancient's peerings. The pale torch flames bent to the
unceasing cool breeze, while the fan-slaves and their splayed bare feet on the
leather belts and the great unseen fans themselves on their ponderous axles
muttered unendingly, "Quarmall ... Quarmall is downward tall ... Quarmall ...
Quarmall is all..."
       In an equally vast room many levels higher yet still underground -- a
windowless room where torches flared redder and brighter, but their brightness
nullified by an acrid haze of incense smoke, so that here too the final effect
was exasperating dimness -- Fafhrd sat at the table's foot.
       Fafhrd was ordinarily a monstrously calm man, but now he was restlessly
drumming fist on thumb-root, on the verge of admitting to himself that he
wished the Gray Mouser were here, instead of back in Lankhmar or perchance off
on some ramble in the desert-patched Eastern Lands.
       The Mouser, Fafhrd thought, might have more patience to unriddle the
mystifications and crooked behavior-ways of these burrowing Quarmallians. The
Mouser might find it easier to endure Hasjarl's loathsome taste for torture,
and at least the little gray fool would be someone human to drink with!
       Fafhrd had been very glad to be parted from the Mouser and from his
vanities and tricksiness and chatter when Hasjarl's agent had contacted him in
Lankhmar, promising large pay in return for Fafhrd's instant, secret, and
solitary coming. Fafhrd had even dropped a hint to the small fellow that he
might take ship with some of his Northerner countrymen who had sailed down
across the Inner Sea.
       What he had not explained to the Mouser was that, as soon as Fafhrd was
aboard her, the longship had sailed not north but south, coasting through the
vast Outer Sea along Lankhmar's western seaboard.
       It had been an idyllic journey, that -- pirating a little now and then,
despite the sour objections of Hasjarl's agent, battling great storms and also
the giant cuttlefish, rays, and serpents which swarmed ever thicker in the
Outer Sea as one sailed south. At the recollection Fafhrd's fist slowed its
drumming and his lips almost formed a long smile.
       But now this Quarmall! This endless stinking sorcery! This torture-
besotted Hasjarl! Fafhrd's fist drummed fiercely again.
       _Rules!_ -- he mustn't explore downward, for that led to the Lower
Levels and the enemy. Nor must he explore upward -- that way was to Father
Quarmal's apartments, sacrosanct. None must know of Fafhrd's presence. He must
satisfy himself with such drink and inferior wenches as were available in
Hasjarl's limited Upper Levels. (They called these dim labyrinths and crypts
_upper_!)
       _Delays!_ -- they mustn't muster their forces and march down and smash
brother-enemy Gwaay; that was unthinkable rashness. They mustn't even shut off
the huge treadmill-driven fans whose perpetual creaking troubled Fafhrd's ears
and which sent the life-giving air on the first stages of its journey to
Gwaay's underworld, and through other rock-driven wells sucked out the stale -
- no, those fans must never be stopped, for Father Quarmal would frown on any
battle-tactic which suffocated valuable slaves; and from anything Father
Quarmal frowned on, his sons shrank shuddering.
       Instead, Hasjarl's war-council must plot years-long campaigns weaponed
chiefly with sorcery and envisioning the conquest of Gwaay's Lower Levels a
quarter tunnel -- or a quarter mushroom field -- at a time.
       _Mystifications!_ -- mushrooms must be served at all meals but never
eaten or so much as tasted. Roast rat, on the other hand, was a delicacy to be
crowed over. Tonight Father Quarmal would cast his own horoscope and for some
reason that superstitious starsighting and scribbling would be of incalculable
cryptic consequence. All maids must scream loudly twice when familiarities
were suggested to them, no matter what their subsequent behavior. Fafhrd must
never get closer to Hasjarl than a long dagger's cast -- a rule which gave
Fafhrd no chance to discover how Hasjarl managed never to miss a detail of
what went on around him while keeping his eyes fully closed almost all the
time.
       Perhaps Hasjarl had a sort of short-range second sight, or perhaps the
slave nearest him ceaselessly whispered an account of all that transpired, or
perhaps -- well, Fafhrd had no way of knowing.
       But somehow Hasjarl could see things with his eyes shut.
       This paltry trick of Hasjarl's evidently saved his eyes from the
irritation of the incense smoke, which kept those of Hasjarl's sorcerers and
of Fafhrd himself red and watering. However, since Hasjarl was otherwise a
most energetic and restless prince -- his bandy-legged misshapen body and
mismated arms forever a-twitch, his ugly face always grimacing -- the detail
of eyes tranquilly shut was peculiarly jarring and shiversome.
       All in all, Fafhrd was heartily sick of the Upper Levels of Quarmall
though scarcely a week in them. He had even toyed with the notion of double-
crossing Hasjarl and hiring out to his brother or turning informer for his
father -- although they might, as employers, be no improvement whatever.
       But mostly he simply wanted to meet in combat this champion of Gwaay's
he kept hearing so much of -- meet him and slay him and then shoulder his
reward (preferably a shapely maiden with a bag of gold in her either hand) and
turn his back forever on the accursed dim-tunneled whisper-haunted hill of
Quarmall!
       In an excess of exasperation he clapped his hand to the hilt of his
longsword Graywand.
       Hasjarl saw that, although Hasjarl's eyes were closed, for he quickly
pointed his gnarly face down the long table at Fafhrd, between the ranks of
the twenty-four heavily-robed, thickly-bearded sorcerers crowded shoulder to
shoulder. Then, his eyelids still shut, Hasjarl commenced to twitch his mouth
as a preamble to speech and with a twitter-tremble as overture called, "Ha,
hot for battle, eh, Fafhrd boy? Keep him in the sheath! Yet tell me, what
manner of man do you think this warrior -- the one you protect me against --
Gwaay's grim man-slayer? He is said to be mightier than an elephant in
strength, and more guileful than the very Zobolds." With a final spasm Hasjarl
managed, still without opening his eyes, to look expectantly at Fafhrd.
       Fafhrd had heard all this sort of worrying time and time again during
the past week, so he merely answered with a snort:
       "Zutt! They all say that about anybody. I know. But unless you get me
some action and keep these old flea-bitten beards out of my sight -- "
       Catching himself up short, Fafhrd tossed off his wine and beat with his
pewter mug on the table for more. For although Hasjarl might have the demeanor
of an idiot and the disposition of a ocelot, he served excellent ferment of
grape ripened on the hot brown southern slopes of Quarmall hill ... and there
was no profit in goading him.
       Nor did Hasjarl appear to take offense -- or if he did, he took it out
on his bearded sorcerers, for he instantly began to instruct one to enunciate
his runes more clearly, questioned another as to whether his herbs were
sufficiently pounded, reminded a third that it was time to tinkle a certain
silver bell thrice, and in general treated the whole two dozen as if they were
a roomful of schoolboys and he their eagle-eyed pedagogue -- though Fafhrd had
been given to understand that they were all magi of the First Rank.
       The double coven of sorcerers in turn began to bustle more nervously,
each with his particular spell -- touching off more stinks, jiggling black
drops out of more dirty vials, waving more wands, pin-stabbing more figurines,
finger-tracing eldritch symbols more swiftly in the air, mounding up each in
front of him from his bag more noisome fetishes, and so on.
       From his hours of sitting at the foot of the table, Fafhrd had learned
that most of the spells were designed to inflict a noisome disease upon Gwaay:
the Black Plague, the Red Plague, the Boneless Death, the Hairless Decline,
the Slow Rot, the Fast Rot, the Green Rot, the Bloody Cough, the Belly Melts,
the Ague, the Runs, and even the footling Nose Drip. Gwaay's own sorcerers, he
gathered, kept warding off these malefic spells with counter-charms, but the
idea was to keep on sending them in hopes that the opposition would some day
drop their guard, if only for a few moments.
       Fafhrd rather wished Gwaay's gang were able to reflect back the
disease-spells on their dark-robed senders. He had become weary even of the
abstruse astrologic signs stitched in gold and silver on those robes, and of
the ribbons and precious wires knotted cabalistically in their heavy beards.
       Hasjarl, his magicians disciplined into a state of furious busyness,
opened wide his eyes for a change and with only a preliminary lip-writhe
called to Fafhrd, "So you want action, eh, Fafhrd boy?"
       Fafhrd, mightily irked at the last epithet, planted an elbow on the
table and wagged that hand at Hasjarl and called back, "I do. My muscles cry
to bulge. You've strong-looking arms, Lord Hasjarl. What say you we play the
wrist game?"
       Hasjarl tittered evilly and cried, "I go but now to play another sort
of wrist game with a maid suspected of commerce with one of Gwaay's pages. She
never screamed even once ... then. Wouldst accompany me and watch the action,
Fafhrd?" And he suddenly shut his eyes again with the effect of putting on two
tiny masks of skin -- yet shut them so firmly there could be no question of
his peering through the lashes.
       Fafhrd shrank back in his chair, flushing a little. Hasjarl had divined
Fafhrd's distaste for torture on the Northerner's first night in Quarmall's
Upper Levels and since then had never missed an opportunity to play on what
Hasjarl must view as Fafhrd's weakness.
       To cover his embarrassment, Fafhrd drew from under his tunic a tiny
book of stitched parchment pages. The Northerner would have sworn that
Hasjarl's eyelids had not flickered once since closing, yet now the villain
cried, "The sigil on the cover of that packet tells me it is something of
Ningauble of the Seven Eyes. What is it, Fafhrd?"
       "Private matters," the latter retorted firmly. Truth to tell, he was
somewhat alarmed. The contents of the packet were such as he dared not permit
Hasjarl see. And just as the villain somehow knew, there was indeed on the top
parchment the bold black figure of a seven-fingered hand, each finger bearing
an eye for a nail -- one of the many signs of Fafhrd's wizardly patron.
       Hasjarl coughed hackingly. "No servant of Hasjarl has private matters,"
he pronounced. "However, we will speak of that at another time. Duty calls
me." He bounded up from his chair and fiercely eyeing his sorcerers cried at
them barkingly, "If I find one of you dozing over his spells when I return, it
were better for him -- aye, and for his mother too had he been born with
slave's chains on his ankles!"
       He paused, turning to go, and pointing his face at Fafhrd again, called
rapidly yet cajolingly, "The girl is named Friska. She's but seventeen. I
doubt not she will play the wrist game most adroitly and with many a charming
exclamation. I will converse with her, at length. I will question her, as I
twist the crank, very slowly. And she will answer, she will comment, she will
describe her feelings, in sounds if not in words. Sure you won't come?" And
trailing an evil titter behind him, Hasjarl strode rapidly from the room, red
torches in the archway outlining his monstrous bandy-legged form in blood.
       Fafhrd ground his teeth. There was nothing he could do at the moment.
Hasjarl's torture chamber was also his guard barrack. Yet the Northerner
chalked up in his mind an intention, or perhaps an obligation.
       To keep his mind from nasty unmanning imaginings, he began carefully to
reread the tiny parchment book which Ningauble had given him as a sort of
reward for past services, or an assurance for future ones, on the night of the
Northerner's departure from Lankhmar.
       Fafhrd did not worry about Hasjarl's sorcerers overlooking what he
read. After their master's last threat, they were all as furiously and elbow-
jostlingly busy with their spells as so many bearded black ants.
       Quarmall was first brought to my attention (_Fafhrd read in Ningauble's
little handwritten, or tentacle-writ book_) by the report that certain
passageways beneath it ran deep under the Sea and extended to certain caverns
wherein might dwell some remnant of the Elder Ones. Naturally I dispatched
agents to probe the truth of the report: two well-trained and valuable spies
were sent (also two others to watch them) to find the facts and accumulate
gossip. Neither pair returned, nor did they send messages or tokens in
explanation, or indeed word of any sort. I was interested; but being unable at
that time to spare valuable material on so uncertain and dangerous a quest, I
bided my time until information should be placed at my disposal (as it usually
is).
       After twenty years my discretion was rewarded. (_So went the crabbed
script as Fafhrd continued to read_.) An old man, horribly scarred and
peculiarly pallid, was fetched to me. His name was Tamorg, and his tale
interesting in spite of the teller's incoherence. He claimed to have been
captured from a passing caravan when yet a small lad and carried into
captivity within Quarmall. There he served as a slave on the Lower Levels, far
below the ground. Here there was no natural light, and the only air was sucked
down into the mazy caverns by means of large fans, treadmill-driven; hence his
pallor and otherwise unusual appearance.
       Tamorg was quite bitter about these fans, for he had been chained at
one of those endless belts for a longer time than he cared to think about. (He
really did not know exactly how long, since there was, by his own statement,
no measure of time in the Lower Levels.) Finally he was released from his
onerous walking, as nearly as I could glean from his garbled tale, by the
invention or breeding of a specialized type of slave who better served the
purpose.
       From this I postulate that the Masters of Quarmall are sufficiently
interested in the economics of their holdings to improve them: a rarity among
overlords. Moreover, if these specialized slaves were bred, the life-span of
these overlords must perforce be longer than ordinary; or else the cooperation
between father and son is more perfect than any filial relationship I have yet
noted.
       Tamorg further related that he was put to more work digging, along with
eight other slaves likewise taken from the treadmills. They were forced to
enlarge and extend certain passages and chambers; so for another space of time
he mined and buttressed. This time must have been long, for by close cross-
questioning I found that Tamorg digged and walled, single-handed, a passage a
thousand and twenty paces long. These slaves were not chained, unless
maniacal, nor was it necessary to bind them so; for these Lower Levels seem to
be a maze within a maze, and an unlucky slave once strayed from familiar paths
stood small chance of retracing his steps. However, rumor has it, Tamorg said,
that the Lords of Quarmall keep certain slaves who have memorized each a
portion of the ever-extending labyrinth. By this means they are able to
traverse with safety and communicate one level to the other.
       Tamorg finally escaped by the simple expedient of accidentally breaking
through the wall whereat he dug. He enlarged the opening with his mattock and
stooped to peer. At that moment a fellow workman pushed against him, and
Tamorg was thrust head-foremost into the opening he had made. Fortunately it
led into a chasm at the bottom of which ran a swift but deep underground
stream, into which Tamorg fell. As swimming is an art not easily forgotten, he
managed to keep afloat until he reached the outer world. For several days he
was blinded by the sun's rays and felt comfortable only by dim torchlight.
       I questioned him in detail about the many interesting phenomena which
must have been before him constantly, but he was very unsatisfactory, being
ignorant of all observational methods. However I placed him as gatekeeper in
the palace of D -- whose coming and going I desired to check upon. So much for
that source of information.
       My interest in Quarmall was aroused (_Ningauble's book went on_) and my
appetite whetted by this scanty meal of facts, so I applied myself toward
getting more information. Through my connection with Sheelba I made contact
with Eeack, the Overlord of Rats; by holding out the lure of secret passages
to the granaries of Lankhmar, he was persuaded to visit me. His visit proved
both barren and embarrassing. Barren because it turned out that rats are eaten
as a delicacy in Quarmall and hunted for culinary purposes by well-trained
weasels. Naturally, under such circumstances, any rat within the walls of
Quarmall stood little chance of doing liaison work except from the uncertain
vantage of a pot. Eeack's personal cohort of countless rats, evil-smelling and
famished, consumed all edibles within reach of their sharp teeth; and out of
pity for the plight in which I was left Eeack favored me by cajoling Scraa to
wake and speak with me.
       Scraa (_Ningauble's notes continued_) is one of those eon-old roaches
who existed contemporaneously with those monstrous reptiles which once ruled
the world, and whose racial memories go back into the mistiness of time before
the Elder Ones retreated from the surface. Scraa presented me the following
short history of Quarmall neatly inscribed on a peculiar parchment composed of
cleverly welded wingcases flattened and smoothed most subtly. I append his
document and apologize for his somewhat dry and prosy style.
       "The city-state of Quarmall houses a civilization almost unheard of in
the sphere of anthropoid organization. Perhaps the closest analogy which might
be made is to that of the slave-making ants. The domain of Quarmall is at the
present day limited to the small mountain, or large hill, on which it stands;
but like a radish the main portion of it lies buried beneath the surface. This
was not always so.
       "Once the Lords of Quarmall ruled over broad meadows and vast seas;
their ships swam between all known ports, and their caravans marched the
routes from sea to sea. Slowly from the fertile valleys and barren cliffs,
from the desert spots and the open sea the grip of Quarmall loosened; not
willingly but ever forced did the Lords of Quarmall retreat. Inexorably they
were driven, year by year, generation by generation, from all their
possessions and rights; until finally they were confined to that last and
staunchest stronghold, the impregnable castle of Quarmall. The cause of this
driving is lost in the dimness of fable; but it was probably due to those most
gruesome practices which even to this day persuade the surrounding countryside
that Quarmall is unclean and cursed.
       "As the Lords of Quarmall were pushed back, driven in spite of their
sorceries and valor, they burrowed under that last, vast stronghold ever
deeper and ever broader. Each succeeding Lord dug more deeply into the bowels
of the small mount on which sat the Keep of Quarmall. Eventually the memory of
past glories faded and was forgotten and the Lords of Quarmall concentrated on
their mazy tunneling to the exclusion of the outer world. They would have
forgotten the outer world entirely but for their constant and ever-increasing
need of slaves and of sustenance for those slaves.
       "The Lords of Quarmall are magicians of great repute and adepts in the
practice of the Art. It is said that by their skill they can charm men into
bondage both of body and of soul."
       So much did Scraa write. All in all it is a very unsatisfactory bit of
gossip: hardly a word about those intriguing passageways which first aroused
my interest; nothing about the conformation of the Land or its inhabitants;
not even a map! But then poor ancient Scraa lives almost entirely in the past
-- the present will not become important to him for another eon or so.
       However, I believe I know two fellows who might be persuaded to
undertake a mission there.... (_Here Ningauble's notes ended, much to Fafhrd's
irritation and suspicious puzzlement -- and carking shamed discomfort too, for
now he must think again of the unknown girl Hasjarl was torturing_.)
       Outside the mount of Quarmall the sun was past meridian, and shadows
had begun to grow. The great white oxen threw their weight against the yoke.
It was not the first time nor would it be the last, they knew. Each month as
they approached this mucky stretch of road the master whipped and slashed them
frantically, attempting to goad them into a speed which they, by nature, were
unable to attain. Straining until the harness creaked, they obliged as best
they could: for they knew that when this spot was pulled the master would
reward them with a bit of salt, a rough caress, and a brief respite from work.
It was unfortunate that this particular piece of road stayed mucky long after
the rains had ceased; almost from one season to the next. Unfortunate that it
took a longer time to pass.
       Their master had reason to lash them so. This spot was accounted
accursed among his people. From this curved eminence the towers of Quarmall
could be spied on; and more important these towers looked down upon the road,
even as one looking up could see them. It was not healthy to look on the
towers of Quarmall, or to be looked upon by them. There was sufficient reason
for this feeling. The master of the oxen spat surreptitiously, made an obvious
gesture with his fingers, and glanced fearfully over his shoulder at the
skythrusting lacy-topped towers as the last mudhole was traversed. Even in
this fleeting glance he caught the glimpse of a flash, a brilliant
scintillation, from the tallest keep. Shuddering, he leaped into the welcome
covert of the trees and thanked the gods he worshipped for his escape.
       Tonight he would have much to speak of in the tavern. Men would buy him
bowls of wine to swill, and bitter beer of herbs. He could lord it for an
evening. Ah! but for his quickness he might even now be plodding soulless to
the mighty gates of Quarmall; there to serve until his body was no more and
even after. For tales were told of such charmings, and of other things, among
the elders of the village: tales that bore no moral but which all men did
heed. Was it not only last Serpent Eve that young Twelm went from the ken of
men? Had he not jeered at these very tales and, drunken, braved the terraces
of Quarmall? Sure, and this was so! And it was also true that his less brave
companion had seen him swagger with bravado to the last, the highest terrace,
almost to the moat; then when Twelm, alarmed at some unknown cause, turned to
run, his twisted-arched body was pulled willy-nilly back into the darkness.
Not even a scream was heard to mark the passing of Twelm from this earth and
the ken of his fellowmen. Juln, that less brave or less foolhardy companion of
Twelm, had spent his time thenceforth in a continual drunken stupor. Nor would
he stir from under roofs at night.
       All the way to the village the master of the oxen pondered. He tried to
formulate in his dim peasant intellect a method by which he might present
himself as a hero. But even as he painfully constructed a simple, self-
aggrandizing tale, he bethought himself of the fate of that one who had dared
to brag of robbing Quarmall's vineyards; the one whose name was spoken only in
a hushed whisper, secretly. So the driver decided to confine himself to facts,
simple as they were, and trust to the atmosphere of horror that he knew any
manifestation of activity in Quarmall would arouse.
       While the driver was still whipping his oxen, and the Mouser watching
two shadow-men play a thought-game, and Fafhrd swilling wine to drown the
thought of an unknown girl in pain -- at that same time Quarmal, Lord of
Quarmall, was casting his own horoscope for the coming year. In the highest
tower of the Keep he labored, putting in order the huge astrolabe and the
other massive instruments necessary for his accurate observations.
       Through curtains of broidery the afternoon sun beat hotly into the
small chamber; beams glanced from the polished surfaces and scintillated into
rainbow hues as they reflected askew. It was warm, even for an old man lightly
gowned, and Quarmal stepped to the windows opposite the sun and drew the
broidery aside, letting the cool moor-breeze blow through his observatory.
       He glanced idly out the deep-cut embrasures. In the distance down past
the terraced slopes he could see the little, curved brown thread of road which
led eventually to the village.
       Like ants the small figures on it appeared: ants struggling through
some sticky trap; and like ants, even as Quarmal watched, they persisted and
finally disappeared. Quarmal sighed as he turned away from the windows. Sighed
in a slight disappointment because he regretted not having looked a moment
sooner. Slaves were always needed. Besides, it would have been an opportunity
for trying out a recently invented instrument or two.
       Yet it was never Quarmal's way to regret the past, so with a shrug he
turned away.
       For an old man Quarmal was not particularly hideous until his eyes were
noticed. They were peculiar in their shape, and the ball was a rich ruby-red.
The dead-white iris had that nauseous sheen of pearly iridescence found only
in the sea dwellers among living creatures; this character he inherited from
his mother, a mer-woman. The pupils, like specks of black crystal, sparkled
with incredible malevolent intelligence. His baldness was accentuated by the
long tufts of coarse black hair which grew symmetrically over each ear. Pale,
pitted skin hung loosely on his jowls, but was tightly drawn over the high
cheekbones. Thin as a sharpened blade, his long jutting nose gave him the
appearance of an old hawk or kestrel.
       If Quarmal's eyes were the most arresting feature in his countenance,
his mouth was the most beautiful. The lips were full and ruddy, remarkable in
so aged a man, and they had that peculiar mobility found in some elocutionists
and orators and actors. Had it been possible for Quarmal to have known vanity,
he might have been vain about the beauty of his mouth; as it was this
perfectly molded mouth served only to accentuate the horror of his eyes.
       He looked up veiledly now through the iron rondures of the astrolabe at
the twin of his own face pushing forth from a windowless square of the
opposite wall: it was his own waxen life-mask, taken within the year and most
realistically tinted and blackly hair-tufted by his finest artist, save that
the white-irised eyes were of necessity closed -- though the mask still gave a
feeling of peering. The mask was the last in several rows of such, each a
little more age-darkened than the succeeding one. Though some were ugly and
many were elderly-handsome, there was a strong family resemblance between the
shut-eyed faces, for there had been few if any intrusions into the male
lineage of Quarmall.
       There were perhaps fewer masks than might have been expected, for most
Lords of Quarmall lived very long and had sons late. Yet there were also a
considerable many, since Quarmall was such an ancient rulership. The oldest
masks were of a brown almost black and not wax at all but the cured and
mummified face skins of those primeval autocrats. The arts of flaying and
tanning had early been brought to an exquisite degree of perfection in
Quarmall and were still practiced with jealously prideful skill.
       Quarmal dropped his gaze from the mask to his lightly-robed body. He
was a lean man, and his hips and shoulders still gave evidence that once he
had hawked, hunted, and fenced with the best. His feet were high-arched, and
his step was still light. Long and spatulate were his knob-knuckled fingers,
while fleshy muscular palms gave witness to their dexterity and nimbleness, a
necessary advantage to one of his calling. For Quarmal was a sorcerer, as were
all the Lords of Quarmall from the eon-mighty past. From childhood up through
manhood each male was trained into his calling, like some vines are coaxed to
twist and thread a difficult terrace.
       As Quarmal returned from the window to attend his duties he pondered on
his training. It was unfortunate for the House of Quarmall that he possessed
two instead of the usual single heir. Each of his sons was a creditable
necromancer and well skilled in other sciences pertaining to the Art; both
were exceedingly ambitious and filled with hatred. Hatred not only for one
another but for Quarmal their father.
       Quarmal pictured in his mind Hasjarl in his Upper Levels below the Keep
and Gwaay below Hasjarl in his Lower Levels ... Hasjarl cultivating his
passions as if in some fiery circle of Hell, making energy and movement and
logic carried to the ultimate the greatest goods, constantly threatening with
whips and tortures and carrying through those threats, and now hiring a great
brawling beast of a man to be his sworder ... Gwaay nourishing restraint as if
in Hell's frigidest circle, trying to reduce all life to art and intuitive
thought, seeking by meditation to compel lifeless rock to do his bidding and
constrain Death by the power of his will, and now hiring a small gray man like
Death's younger brother to be his knifer....Quarmal thought of Hasjarl and
Gwaay, and for a moment a strange smile of fatherly pride bent his lips, and
then he shook his head, and his smile became stranger still, and he shuddered
very faintly.
       It was well, thought Quarmal, that he was an old man, far past his
prime, even as magicians counted years, for it would be unpleasant to cease
living in the prime of life, or even in the twilight of life's day. And he
knew that sooner or later, in spite of all protecting charms and precautions,
Death would creep silently on him or spring suddenly from some unguarded
moment. This very night his horoscope might signal Death's instant escapeless
approach; and though men lived by lies, treating truth's very self as lie to
be exploited, the stars remained the stars.
       Each day Quarmal's sons, he knew, grew more clever and more subtle in
their usage of the Art which he had taught them. Nor could Quarmal protect
himself by slaying them. Brother might murder brother, or the son his sire,
but it was forbidden from ancient times for the father to slay his son. There
were no very good reasons for this custom, nor were any needed. Custom in the
House of Quarmall stood unchallenged, and it was not lightly defied.
       Quarmal bethought him of the babe sprouting in the womb of Kewissa, the
childlike favorite concubine of his age. So far as his precautions and
watchfulness might have enforced, that babe was surely his own -- and Quarmal
was the most watchful and cynically realistic of men. If that babe lived and
proved a boy -- as omens foretold it would be -- and if Quarmal were given but
twelve more years to train him, and if Hasjarl and Gwaay should be taken by
the fates or each other...
       Quarmal clipped off in his mind this line of speculation. To expect to
live a dozen more years with Hasjarl and Gwaay growing daily more clever-
subtle in their sorceries -- or to hope for the dual extinguishment of two
such cautious sprigs of his own flesh -- were vanity and irrealism indeed!
       He looked around him. The preliminaries for the casting were completed,
the instruments prepared and aligned; now only the final observations and
their interpretation were required. Lifting a small leaden hammer Quarmal
lightly struck a brazen gong. Hardly had the resonance faded when the tall,
richly appareled figure of a man appeared in the arched doorway.
       Flindach was Master of the Magicians. His duties were many but not
easily apparent. His power carefully concealed was second only to that of
Quarmal. A wearied cruelty sat upon his dark visage, giving him an air of
boredom which ill matched the consuming interest he took in the affairs of
others. Flindach was not a comely man: a purple wine mark covered his left
cheek, three large warts made an isosceles triangle on his right, while his
nose and chin jutted like those of an old witch. Startlingly, with an effect
of mocking irreverence, his eyes were ruby-whited and pearly-irised like those
of his lord; he was a younger offspring of the same mer-woman who had birthed
Quarmal -- after Quarmal's father had done with her and, following one of
Quarmal's bizarre customs, had given her to his Master of the Magicians.
       Now those eyes of Flindach, large and hypnotically staring, shifted
uneasily as Quarmal spoke: "Gwaay and Hasjarl, my sons, work today on their
respective Levels. It would be well if they were called into the council room
this night. For it is the night on which my doom is to be foretold. And I
sense premonitorily that this casting will bear no good. Bid them dine
together and permit them to amuse one another by plotting at my death -- or by
attempting each other's."
       He shut his lips precisely as he finished and looked more evil than a
man expecting Death should look. Flindach, used to terrors in the line of
business, could scarcely repress a shudder at the glance bestowed on him; but
remembering his position he made the sign of obeisance, and without a word or
backward look departed.
       The Gray Mouser did not once remove his gaze from Flindach as the
latter strode across the domed dim sorcery chamber of the Lower Levels until
he reached Gwaay's side. The Mouser was mightily intrigued by the warts and
wine mark on the cheeks of the richly-robed witch-faced man and by his eerie
red-whited eyes, and he instantly gave this charming visage a place of honor
in the large catalog of freak-faces he stored in his memory vaults.
       Although he strained his ears, he could not hear what Flindach said to
Gwaay or what Gwaay answered.
       Gwaay finished the telekinetic game he was playing by sending all his
black counters across the midline in a great rutching surge that knocked half
his opponent's white counters tumbling into his loinclothed lap. Then he rose
smoothly from his stool.
       "I sup tonight with my beloved brother in my all-revered father's
apartments," he pronounced mellowly to all. "While I am there and in the
escort of great Flindach here, no sorcerous spells may harm me. So you may
rest for a space from your protective concentrations, oh my gracious magi of
the First Rank." He turned to go.
       The Mouser, inwardly leaping at the chance to glimpse the sky again, if
only by chilly night, rose springily too from his chair and called out, "Ho,
Prince Gwaay! Though safe from spells, will you not want the warding of my
blades at this dinner party? There's many a great prince never made king
'cause he was served cold iron 'twixt the ribs between the soup and the fish.
I also juggle most prettily and do conjuring tricks."
       Gwaay half turned back. "Nor may steel harm me while my sire's hand is
stretched above," he called so softly that the Mouser felt the words were
being lobbed like feather balls barely as far as his ear. "Stay here, Gray
Mouser."
       His tone was unmistakably rebuffing, nevertheless the Mouser, dreading
a dull evening, persisted, "There is also the matter of that serious spell of
mine of which I told you, Prince -- a spell most effective against magi of the
Second Rank and lower, such as a certain noxious brother employs. Now were a
good time -- "
       "Let there be no sorcery tonight!" Gwaay cut him off sternly, though
speaking hardly louder than before. "'Twere an insult to my sire and to his
great servant Flindach here, a Master of Magicians, even to think of such!
Bide quietly, swordsman, keep peace, and speak no more." His voice took on a
pious note. "There will be time enough for sorcery and swords, if slaying
there must be."
       Flindach nodded solemnly at that, and they silently departed. The
Mouser sat down. Rather to his surprise, he noted that the twelve aged
sorcerers were already curled up like pillbugs on their sides on their great
chairs and snoring away. He could not even while away time by challenging one
of them to the thought-game, hoping to learn by playing, or to a bout at
conventional chess. This promised to be a most glum evening indeed.
       Then a thought brightened the Mouser's swarthy visage. He lifted his
hands, cupping the palms, and clapped them lightly together as he had seen
Gwaay do.
       The slim slavegirl Ivivis instantly appeared in the far archway. When
she saw that Gwaay was gone and his sorcerers slumbering, her eyes became
bright as a kitten's. She scampered to the Mouser, her slender legs flashing,
seated herself with a last bound on his lap, and clapped her lissome arms
around him.
       Fafhrd silently faded back into a dark side passage as Hasjarl came
hurrying along the torchlit corridor beside a richly robed official with
hideously warted and mottled face and red eyeballs, on whose other side strode
a pallid comely youth with strangely ancient eyes. Fafhrd had never before met
Flindach or, of course, Gwaay.
       Hasjarl was clearly in a pet, for he was grimacing insanely and
twisting his hands together furiously as though pitting one in murderous
battle against the other. His eyes, however, were tightly shut. As he stamped
swiftly part, Fafhrd thought he glimpsed a bit of tattooing on the nearest
upper eyelid.
       Fafhrd heard the red-eyeballed one say, "No need to run to your sire's
banquet-board, Lord Hasjarl. We're in good time." Hasjarl answered only a
snarl, but the pale youth said sweetly, "My brother is ever a baroque pearl of
dutifulness."
       Fafhrd moved forward, watched the three out of sight, then turned the
other way and followed the scent of hot iron straight to Hasjarl's torture
chamber.
       It was a wide, low-vaulted room and the brightest Fafhrd had yet
encountered in these murky, misnamed Upper Levels.
       To the right was a low table around which crouched five squat brawny
men more bandy-legged than Hasjarl and masked each to the upper lip. They were
noisily gnawing bones snatched from a huge platter of them, and swilling ale
from leather jacks. Four of the masks were black, one red.
       Beyond them was a fire of coals in a circular brick tower half as high
as a man. The iron grill above it glowed redly. The coals brightened almost to
white, then grew more deeply red again, as a twisted half-bald hag in tatters
slowly worked a bellows.
       Along the walls to either side, there thickly stood or hung various
metal and leather instruments which showed their foul purpose by their ghostly
hand-and-glove resemblance to various outer surfaces and inward orifices of
the human body: boots, collars, masks, iron maidens, funnels, and the like.
       To the left a fair-haired pleasingly plump girl in white under tunic
lay bound to a rack. Her right hand in an iron half-glove stretched out tautly
toward a machine with a crank. Although her face was tear-streaked, she did
not seem to be in present pain.
       Fafhrd strode toward her, hurriedly slipping out of his pouch and onto
the middle finger of his right hand the massy ring Hasjarl's emissary had
given him in Lankhmar as token from his master. It was of silver, holding a
large black seal on which was Hasjarl's sign: a clenched fist.
       The girl's eyes widened with new fears as she saw Fafhrd coming.
       Hardly looking at her as he paused by the rack, Fafhrd turned toward
the table of masked messy feasters, who were staring at him gape-mouthed by
now. Stretching out toward them the back of his right hand, he called harshly
yet carelessly, "By authority of this sigil, release to me the girl Friska!"
From mouth-corner he muttered to the girl, "Courage!"
       The black-masked creature who came hurrying toward him like a terrier
appeared either not to recognize at once Hasjarl's sign or else not to reason
out its import, for he said only, wagging a greasy finger, "Begone, barbarian.
This dainty morsel is not for you. Think not to quench your rough lusts here.
Our Master -- "
       Fafhrd cried out, "If you will not accept the authority of the Clenched
Fist one way, then you must take it the other."
       Doubling up the hand with the ring on it, he smashed it against the
torturer's suet-shining jaw so that he stretched himself out on the dark
flags, skidded a foot, and lay quietly.
       Fafhrd turned at once toward the half-risen feasters and slapping
Graywand's hilt but not drawing it, he planted his knuckles on his hips and,
addressing himself to the red mask he barked out rather like Hasjarl, "Our
Master of the Fist had an afterthought and ordered me to fetch the girl Friska
so that he might continue her entertainment at dinner for the amusement of
those he goes to dine with. Would you have a new servant like myself report to
Hasjarl your derelictions and delays? Loose her quickly and I'll say nothing."
He stabbed a finger at the hag by the bellows, "You! -- fetch her outer
dress."
       The masked ones sprang to obey quickly enough at that, their tucked-up
masks falling over their mouths and chins. There were mumblings of apology,
which he ignored. Even the one he had slugged got groggily to his feet and
tried to help.
       The girl had been released from her wrist-twisting device, Fafhrd
supervising, and she was sitting up on the side of the rack when the hag came
with a dress and two slippers, the toe of one stuffed with oddments of
ornament and such. The girl reached for them, but Fafhrd grabbed them instead
and, seizing her by the left arm, dragged her roughly to her feet.
       "No time for that now," he commanded. "We will let Hasjarl decide how
he wants you trigged out for the sport," and without more ado he strode from
the torture chamber, dragging her beside him, though again muttering from
mouth-side, "Courage."
       When they were around the first bend in the corridor and had reached a
dark branching, he stopped and looked at her frowningly. Her eyes grew wide
with fright; she shrank from him, but then firming her features she said
fearful-boldly, "If you rape me, by the way, I'll tell Hasjarl."
       "I don't mean to rape but rescue you, Friska," Fafhrd assured her
rapidly. "That talk of Hasjarl sending to fetch you was but my trick. Where's
a secret place I can hide you for a few days? -- until we flee these musty
crypts forever! I'll bring you food and drink."
       At that Friska looked far more frightened. "You mean Hasjarl didn't
order this? And that you dream of escaping from Quarmall? Oh stranger, Hasjarl
would only have twisted my wrist a little longer, perhaps not maimed me much,
only heaped a few more indignities, certainly spared my life. But if he so
much as suspected that I had sought to escape from Quarmall ... Take me back
to the torture chamber!"
       "That I will not," Fafhrd said irkedly, his gaze darting up and down
the empty corridor. "Take heart, girl. Quarmall's not the wide world.
Quarmall's not the stars and the sea. Where's a secret room?"
       "Oh, it's hopeless," she faltered. "We could never escape. The stars
are a myth. Take me back."
       "And make myself out a fool? No," Fafhrd retorted harshly. "We're
rescuing you from Hasjarl and from Quarmall too. Make up your mind to it,
Friska, for I won't be budged. If you try to scream I'll stop your mouth.
_Where's a secret room?"_ In his exasperation he almost twisted her wrist, but
remembered in time and only brought his face close to hers and rasped,
_"Think!"_ She had a scent like heather underlying the odor of sweat and
tears.
       Her eyes went distant then, and she said in a small voice, almost
dreamlike, "Between the Upper and the Lower Levels there is a great hall with
many small rooms adjoining. Once it was a busy and teeming part of Quarmall,
they say, but now debated ground between Hasjarl and Gwaay. Both claim it,
neither will maintain it, not even sweep its dust. It is called the Ghost
Hall." Her voice went smaller still. "Gwaay's page once begged me meet him a
little this side of there, but I did not dare."
       "Ha, that's the very place," Fafhrd said with a grin. "Lead us to it."
       "But I don't remember the way," Friska protested. "Gwaay's page told
me, but I tried to forget..."
       Fafhrd had spotted a spiral stair in the dark branchway.
       Now he strode instantly toward it, drawing Friska along beside him.
       "We know we have to start by going down," he said with rough cheer.
"Your memory will improve with motion, Friska."
       The Gray Mouser and Ivivis had solaced themselves with such kisses and
caresses as seemed prudent in Gwaay's Hall of Sorcery, or rather now of
Sleeping Sorcerers. Then, at first coaxed chiefly by Ivivis, it is true, they
had visited a nearby kitchen, where the Mouse had readily wheedled from the
lumpish cook three large thin slices of medium-rare unmistakable rib-beef,
which he had devoured with great satisfaction.
       At least one of his appetites mollified, the Mouser had consented that
they continue their little ramble and even pause to view a mushroom field.
Most strange it had been to see, betwixt the rough-finished pillars of rock,
the rows of white button-fungi grow dim, narrow, and converge toward infinity
in the ammonia-scented darkness.
       At this point they had become teasing in their talk, he taxing Ivivis
with having many lovers drawn by her pert beauty, she stoutly denying it, but
finally admitting that there was a certain Klevis, page to Gwaay, for whom her
heart had once or twice beat faster.
       "And best, Gray Guest, you keep an eye open for him," she had warned,
wagging a slim finger, "for certain he is the fiercest and most skillful of
Gwaay's swordsmen."
       Then to change this topic and to reward the Mouser for his patience in
viewing the mushroom field, she had drawn him, they going hand in hand now, to
a wine cellar. There she had prettily begged the aged and cranky butler for a
great tankard of amber fluid for her companion. It had proved to the Mouser's
delight to be purest and most potent essence of grape with no bitter admixture
whatever.
       Two of his appetites now satisfied, the third returned to the Mouser
more hotly. Hand-holding became suddenly merely tantalizing and Ivivis' pale
green tunic no more an object for admiration and for compliments to her, but
only a barrier to be got rid of as swiftly as possible and with the smallest
necessary modicum of decorousness.
       Himself taking the lead, he drew her as directly as he could recall the
route, and with little speech, toward the closet he had preempted for his
loot, two levels below Gwaay's Hall of Sorcery. At last he found the corridor
he sought, one hung to either side with thick purple arras and lit by
infrequent copper chandeliers which hung each from the rock ceiling on three
copper chains and held three thick black candles.
       This far Ivivis followed him with only the fewest flirtatious balkings
and a minimum of wondering, innocent-eyed questions as to what he intended and
why such haste was needful. But now her hesitations became convincing, her
eyes began to show a genuine uneasiness, or even fearfulness, and when he
stopped by the arras-slit before the door to his closet and with the
courtliest of lecherous smirks he could manage indicated to her that they had
reached their destination, she drew sharply back, stifling an exclamation with
the flat of her hand.
       "Gray Mouser," she whispered rapidly, her eyes at once frightened and
beseeching, "there is a confession I should have made earlier and now must
make at once. By one of those malign and mocking coincidences which haunt all
Quarmall, you have chosen for your hidey hole the very chamber where -- "
       Well it was for the Gray Mouser then that he took seriously Ivivis'
look and tone, that he was by nature sense-aware and distrustful, and in
particular that his ankles now took note of a slight yet unaccustomed draft
from under the arras. For without other warning a fist pointed with a dark
dagger punched through the arras-slit at his throat.
       With the edge of his left hand, which had been raised to indicate to
Ivivis their bedding-place, the Mouser struck aside the black-sleeved arm.
       The girl exclaimed, not loudly, "Klevis!"
       With his right hand the Mouser caught hold of the wrist going by him
and twisted it. With his spread left hand he simultaneously rammed his
attacker in the armpit.
       But the Mouser's grip, made by hurried snatch, was imperfect. Moreover,
Klevis was not minded to resist and have his arm dislocated or broken in that
fashion. Spinning with the Mouser's twist, he also went into a deliberate
forward somersault.
       The net result was that Klevis lost his cross-gripped dagger, which
clattered dully on the thick-carpeted floor, but tore loose unhurt from the
Mouser and after two more somersaults came lightly to his feet, at once
turning and drawing rapier.
       By then the Mouser had drawn Scalpel and his dirk Cat's Claw too, but
held the latter behind him. He attacked cautiously, with probing feints. When
Klevis counterattacked strongly, he retreated, parrying each fierce thrust at
the last moment, so that again and again the enemy blade went whickering close
by him.
       Klevis lunged with especial fierceness. The Mouser parried, high this
time and not retreating. In an instant they were pressed body to body, their
rapiers strongly engaged near their hilts and above their heads.
       By turning a little, the Mouser blocked Klevis' knee driven at his
groin. While with the dirk Klevis had overlooked, he stabbed the other from
below, Cat's Claw entering just under Klevis' breastbone to pierce his liver,
gizzard, and heart.
       Letting go his dirk, the Mouser nudged the body away from him and
turned.
       Ivivis was facing them, with Klevis' punching-dagger gripped ready for
a thrust.
       The body thudded to the floor.
       "Which of us did you propose to skewer?" the Mouser asked.
       "I don't know," the girl answered in a flat voice. "You, I suppose."
       The Mouser nodded. "Just before this interruption, you were saying,
'The very chamber where -- ' What?"
       " -- where I often met Klevis, to be with him," she replied.
       Again the Mouser nodded. "So you loved him and -- "
       "Shut up, you fool!" she interrupted. _"Is he dead?"_ There were both
deep concern and exasperation in her voice.
       The Mouser backed along the body until he stood at the head of it.
Looking down, he said, "As mutton. He was a handsome youth."
       For a long moment they eyed each other like leopards across the corpse.
Then, averting her face a little, Ivivis said, "Hide the body, you imbecile.
It tears my heartstrings to see it."
       Nodding, the Mouser stooped and rolled the corpse under the arras
opposite the closet door. He tucked in Klevis' rapier beside him. Then he
withdrew Cat's Claw from the body. Only a little dark blood followed. He
cleaned his dirk on the arras, then let the hanging drop.
       Standing up, he snatched the punching-dagger from the brooding girl and
flipped it so that it too vanished under the arras.
       With one hand he spread wide the slit in the arras. With the other he
took hold of Ivivis' shoulder and pressed her toward the doorway which Klevis
had left open to his undoing.
       She instantly shook loose from his grip but walked through the doorway.
The Mouser followed. The leopard look was still in both their eyes.
       A single torch lit the closet. The Mouser shut the door and barred it.
       Ivivis snarled at him, summing it up: "You owe me much, Gray Stranger."
       The Mouser showed his teeth in an unhumorous grin. He did not stop to
see whether his stolen trinkets had been disturbed. It did not even occur to
him, then, to do so.
       Fafhrd felt relief when Friska told him that the darker slit at the
very end of the dark, long, straight corridor they'd just entered was the door
to the Ghost Hall. It had been a hurrying, nervous trip, with many peerings
around corners and dartings back into dark alcoves while someone passed, and a
longer trip vertically downward than Fafhrd had anticipated. If they had now
only reached the top of the Lower Levels, this Quarmall must be bottomless!
Yet Friska's spirits had improved considerably. Now at times she almost
skipped along in her white chemise cut low behind. Fafhrd strode purposefully,
her dress and slippers in his left hand, his ax in his right.
       The Northerner's relief in no wise diminished his wariness, so that
when someone rushed from an inky tunnel-mouth they were passing, he stroked
out almost negligently and he felt and heard his ax crunch halfway through a
head.
       He saw a comely blond youth, now most sadly dead and his comeliness
rather spoiled by Fafhrd's ax, which still stood in the great wound it had
made. A fair hand opened, and the sword it had held fell from it.
       "Hovis!" he heard Friska cry. "O gods! O gods that are not here.
Hovis!"
       Lifting a booted foot, Fafhrd stamped it sideways at the youth's chest,
at once freeing his ax and sending the corpse back into the tunneled dark from
which the live man had so rashly hurtled.
       After a swift look and listen all about, he turned toward Friska where
she stood white-faced and staring.
       "Who's this Hovis?" he demanded, shaking her lightly by the shoulder
when she did not reply.
       Twice her mouth opened and shut again, while her face remained as
expressionless as that of a silly fish. Then with a little gasp she said, "I
lied to you, barbarian. I have met Gwaay's page Hovis here. More than once."
       "Then why didn't you warn me, wench!" Fafhrd demanded. "Did you think I
would scold you for your morals, like some city graybeard? Or have you no
regard at all for your men, Friska?"
       "Oh, do not chide me," Friska begged miserably. "Please do not chide
me."
       Fafhrd patted her shoulder. "There, there," he said. "I forget you were
shortly tortured and hardly of a mind to remember everything. Come on."
       They had taken a dozen steps when Friska began to shudder and sob
together in a swiftly mounting crescendo. She turned and ran back, crying,
"Hovis! Hovis, forgive me!"
       Fafhrd caught her before three steps. He shook her again, and when that
did not stop her sobbing, he used his other hand to slap her twice, rocking
her head a little.
       She stared at him dumbly.
       He said not fiercely but somberly, "Friska, I must tell you that Hovis
is where your words and tears can never again reach him. He's dead. Beyond
recall. Also, I killed him. That's beyond recall too. But you are still alive.
You can hide from Hasjarl. Ultimately, whether you believe it or not, you can
escape with me from Quarmall. Now come on with me, and no looking back."
       She blindly obeyed, with only the faintest of moanings.
       The Gray Mouser stretched luxuriously on the silver-tipped bearskin
he'd thrown on the floor of his closet. Then he lifted on an elbow and,
finding the black pearls he'd pilfered, tried them against Ivivis' bosom in
the pale cool light of the single torch above. Just as he'd imagined, the
pearls looked very well there. He started to fasten them around her neck.
       "No, Mouser," she objected lazily. "It awakens an unpleasant memory."
       He did not persist, but lying back again, said unguardedly, "Ah, but
I'm a lucky man, Ivivis. I have you and I have an employer who, though
somewhat boresome with his sorceries and his endless mild speaking, seems a
harmless enough chap and certainly more endurable than his brother Hasjarl, if
but half of what I hear of that one is true."
       The voice of Ivivis briskened. "You think Gwaay harmless? -- and kinder
than Hasjarl? La, that's a quaint conceit. Why, but a week ago he summoned my
late dearest friend, Divis, then his favorite concubine, and telling her it
was a necklace of the same stones, hung around her neck an emerald adder, the
sting of which is infallibly deadly."
       The Mouser turned his head and stared at Ivivis. "Why did Gwaay do
that?" he asked.
       She stared back at him blankly. "Why, for nothing at all, to be sure,"
she said wonderingly. "As everyone knows, that is Gwaay's way."
       The Mouser said, "You mean that, rather than say, 'I am wearied of
you,' he killed her?"
       Ivivis nodded. "I believe Gwaay can no more bear to hurt people's
feelings by rejecting them than he can bear to shout."
       "It is better to be slain than rejected?" the Mouser questioned
ingenuously.
       "No, but for Gwaay it is easier on his feelings to slay than to reject.
Death is everywhere here in Quarmall."
       The Mouser had a fleeting vision of Klevis' corpse stiffening behind
the arras.
       Ivivis continued, "Here in the Lower Levels we are buried before we are
born. We live, love, and die buried. Even when we strip, we yet wear a garment
of invisible mold."
       The Mouser said, "I begin to understand why it is necessary to
cultivate a certain callousness in Quarmall, to be able to enjoy at all any
moments of pleasure snatched from life, or perhaps I mean from death."
       "That is most true, Gray Mouser," Ivivis said very soberly, pressing
herself against him.
       Fafhrd started to brush aside the cobwebs joining the two dust-filled
sides of the half open, high, nail-studded door, then checked himself and
bending very low ducked under them.
       "Do you stoop too," he told Friska. "It were best we leave no signs of
our entry. Later I'll attend to our footprints in the dust, if that be
needful."
       They advanced a few paces, then stood hand in hand, waiting for their
eyes to grow accustomed to the darkness. Fafhrd still clutched in his other
hand Friska's dress and slippers.
       "This is the Ghost Hall?" Fafhrd asked. "Aye," Friska whispered close
to his ear, sounding fearful. "Some say that Gwaay and Hasjarl send their dead
to battle here. Some say that demons owing allegiance to neither -- "
       "No more of that, girl," Fafhrd ordered gruffly. "If I must battle
devils or liches, leave me my hearing and my courage."
       They were silent a space then while the flame of the last torch twenty
paces beyond the half shut door slowly revealed to them a vast chamber low-
domed with huge, rough black blocks pale-mortared for a ceiling. It was set
out with a few tatter-shrouded furnishings and showed many small closed
doorways. To either side were wide rostra set a few feet above floor level,
and toward the center there was, surprisingly, what looked like a dried-up
fountain pool.
       Friska whispered, "Some say the Ghost Hall was once the harem of the
father lords of Quarmall during some centuries when they dwelt underground
between Levels, ere this Quarmal's father coaxed by his sea-wife returned to
the Keep. See, they left so suddenly that the new ceiling was neither finish-
polished, nor final-cemented, nor embellished with drawings, if such were
purposed."
       Fafhrd nodded. He distrusted that unpillared ceiling and thought the
whole place looked rather more primitive than Hasjarl's polished and leather-
hung chambers. That gave him a thought.
       "Tell me, Friska," he said. "How is it that Hasjarl can see with his
eyes closed? Is it that -- "
       "Why, do you not know that?" she interrupted in surprise. "Do you not
know even the secret of his horrible peeping? He simply -- "
       A dim velvet shape that chittered almost inaudibly shrill swooped past
their faces, and with a little shriek Friska hid her face in Fafhrd's chest
and clung to him tightly.
       In combing his fingers through her heather-scented hair to show her no
flying mouse had found lodgment there and in smoothing his palms over her bare
shoulders and back to demonstrate that no bat had landed there either, Fafhrd
began to forget all about Hasjarl and the puzzle of his second sight -- and
his worries about the ceiling falling in on them too.
       Following custom, Friska shrieked twice, very softly.
       Gwaay languidly clapped his white, perfectly groomed hands and with a
slight nod motioned for the waiting slaves to remove the platters from the low
table. He leaned lazily into the deep-cushioned chair and through half-closed
lids looked momentarily at his companion before he spoke. His brother across
the table was not in a good humor. But then it was rare for Hasjarl to be
other than in a pet, a temper, or more often merely sullen and vicious. This
may have been due to the fact that Hasjarl was a very ugly man, and his nature
had grown to conform to his body; or perhaps it was the other way around.
Gwaay was indifferent to both theories; he merely knew that in one glance all
his memory had told him of Hasjarl was verified; and he again realized the
bitter magnitude of his hatred for his brother. However, Gwaay spoke gently in
a low, pleasant voice:
       "Well, how now, Brother, shall we play at chess, that demon game they
say exists in every world? 'Twill give you a chance to lord it over me again.
You always win at chess, you know, except when you resign. Shall I have the
board set before us?" and then cajolingly, "I'll give you a pawn!" and he
raised one hand slightly as if to clap again in order that his suggestion
might be carried out.
       With the lash he carried slung to his wrist Hasjarl slashed the face of
the slave nearest him, and silently pointed at the massive and ornate
chessboard across the room. This was quite characteristic of Hasjarl. He was a
man of action and given to few words, at least away from his home territory.
       Besides, Hasjarl was in a nasty humor. Flindach had torn him from his
most interesting and exciting amusement: torture! And for what? thought
Hasjarl: to play at chess with his priggish brother; to sit and look at his
pretty brother's face; to eat food that would surely disagree with him; to
wait the answer to the casting, which he already knew -- had known for years;
and finally to be forced to smile into the horrible blood-whited eyes of his
father, unique in Quarmall save for those of Flindach, and toast the House of
Quarmall for the ensuing year. All this was most distasteful to Hasjarl and he
showed it plainly.
       The slave, a bloody welt swift-swelling across his face, carefully slid
the chessboard between the two. Gwaay smiled as another slave arranged the
chessmen precisely on their squares; he had thought of a scheme to annoy his
brother. He had chosen the black as usual, and he planned a gambit which he
knew his avaricious opponent couldn't refuse; one Hasjarl would accept to his
own undoing.
       Hasjarl sat grimly back in his chair, arms folded. "I should have made
you take white," he complained. "I know the paltry tricks you can do with
black pebbles -- I've seen you as a girl-pale child darting them through the
air to startle the slaves' brats. How am I to know you will not cheat by
fingerless shifting your pieces while I deep ponder?"
       Gwaay answered gently, "My paltry powers, as you most justly appraise
them, Brother, extend only to bits of basalt, trifles of obsidian and other
volcanic rocks conformable to my nether level. While these chess pieces are
jet, Brother, which in your great scholarship you surely know is only a kind
of coal, vegetable stuff pressed black, not even in the same realm as the very
few materials subject to my small magickings. Moreover, for you to miss the
slightest trick with those quaint slave-surgeried eyes of yours, Brother, were
matter for mighty wonder."
       Hasjarl growled. Not until all was ready did he stir; then, like an
adder's strike, he plucked a black rook's pawn from the board and with a
sputtering giggle, snarled: "Remember, Brother? It was a pawn you promised!
Move!"
       Gwaay motioned the waiting slave to advance his king's pawn. In like
manner Hasjarl replied. A moment's pause and Gwaay offered his gambit: pawn to
king-bishop's fourth! Eagerly Hasjarl snatched the apparent advantage and the
game began in earnest. Gwaay, his face easy-smiling in repose, seemed to be
less interested in the game than in the shadow play of the flickering lamps on
the figured leather upholsterings of calfskin, lambskin, snakeskin, and even
slave-skin and nobler human hide; seemed to move offhand, without plan, yet
confidently. Hasjarl, his lips compressed in concentration, was intent on the
board, each move a planned action both mental and physical. His concentration
made him for the moment oblivious of his brother, oblivious of all but the
problem before him; for Hasjarl loved to win beyond all computation.
       It had always been this way; even as children the contrast was
apparent. Hasjarl was the elder; older by only a few months which his
appearance and demeanor lengthened to years. His long, misshapen torso was
ill-borne on short bandy legs. His left arm was perceptibly longer than the
right; and his fingers, peculiarly webbed to the first knuckle, were gnarled
and stubby with brittle striated nails. It was as if Hasjarl were a poorly
reconstructed puzzle put together in such fashion that all the pieces were
mismated and awry.
       This was particularly true of his features. He possessed his sire's
nose, though thickened and coarse-pored; but this was contradicted by the
thin-lipped, tightly compressed mouth continually pursed until it had assumed
a perpetual sphincterlike appearance. Hair, lank and lusterless, grew low on
his forehead; and low, flattened cheekbones added yet another contradiction.
       As a lad, led by some perverse whim, Hasjarl had bribed coaxed, or more
probably browbeaten one of the slaves versed in surgery to perform a slight
operation on his upper eyelids. It was a small enough thing in itself, yet its
implications and results had affected the lives of many men unpleasantly, and
never ceased to delight Hasjarl.
       That merely the piercing of two small holes, centered over the pupil
when the eyes were closed, could produce such qualms in other people was
incredible; but it was so. Feather-weight grommets of sleekest gold, jade or -
- as now -- ivory -- kept the holes from growing shut.
       When Hasjarl peered through these tiny apertures it gave the effect of
an ambush and made the object of his gaze feel spied upon; but this was the
least annoying of his many irritating habits.
       Hasjarl did nothing easily, but he did all things well. Even in
swordplay his constant practice and overly long left arm made him the equal of
the athletic Gwaay. His administration of the Upper Levels over which he ruled
was above all things economical and smooth; for woe betide the slave who
failed in the slightest detail of his duties. Hasjarl saw and punished.
       Hasjarl was well nigh the equal of his teacher in the practice of the
Art; and he had gathered about him a band of magicians almost the caliber of
Flindach himself. But he was not happy in his prowess so hardly won, for
between the absolute power which he desired and the realization of that desire
stood two obstacles: the Lord of Quarmall whom he feared above all things; and
his brother Gwaay whom he hated with a hatred nourished on envy and fed by his
own thwarted desires.
       Gwaay, antithetically, was supple of limb, well-formed and good to look
upon. His eyes, wide-set and pale, were deceptively gentle and kindly; for
they masked a will as strong and capable of action as coiled spring-steel. His
continual residence in the Lower Levels over which he ruled gave to his pallid
smooth skin a peculiar waxy luster.
       Gwaay possessed that enviable ability to do all things well, with
little exertion and less practice. In a way he was much worse than his
brother: for while Hasjarl slew with tortures and slow pain and an obvious
personal satisfaction, he at least attached some importance to life because he
was so meticulous in its taking; whereas Gwaay smiling gently would slay,
without reason, as if jesting. Even the group of sorcerers which he had
gathered about him for protection and amusement was not safe from his fatal
and swift humors.
       Some thought that Gwaay was a stranger to fear, but this was not so. He
feared the Lord of Quarmall and he feared his brother; or rather he feared
that he would be slain by his brother before he could slay him. Yet so well
were his fear and hatred concealed that he could sit relaxed, not two yards
from Hasjarl, and smile amusedly, enjoying every moment of the evening. Gwaay
flattered himself on his perfect control over all emotion.
       The chess game had developed beyond the opening stage, the moves coming
slower, and now Hasjarl rapped down a rook on the seventh rank.
       Gwaay observed gently, "Your turreted warrior rushes deep into my
territory, Brother. Rumor has it you've hired a brawny champion out of the
north. With what purpose, I wonder, in our peace-wrapped cavern world? Could
he be a sort of living rook?" He poised, hand unmoving, over one of his
knights.
       Hasjarl giggled. "And if his purpose is to slash pretty throats, what's
that to you? I know naught of this rook-warrior, but 'tis said -- slaves'
chat, no doubt -- that you yourself have had fetched a skilled sworder from
Lankhmar. Should I call him a knight?"
       "Aye, two can play at a game," Gwaay remarked with prosy philosophy and
lifting his knight, softly but firmly planted it at his king's sixth.
       "I'll not be drawn," Hasjarl snarled. "You shall not win by making my
mind wander." And arching his head over the board, he cloaked himself again
with his all-consuming calculations.
       In the background slaves moved silently, tending the lamps and
replenishing the founts with oil. Many lamps were needed to light the council
room, for it was low-celled and massively beamed, and the arras-hung walls
reflected little of the yellow rays and the mosaic floor was worn to a dull
richness by countless footsteps in the past. From the living rock this room
had been carved; long-forgotten hands had set the huge cypress beams and
inlaid the floor so cunningly.
       Those gay, time-faded tapestries had been hung by the slaves of some
ancient Lord of Quarmall, who had pilfered them from a passing caravan, and so
with all the rich adornments. The chessmen and the chairs, the chased lamp
sconces and the oil which fed the wicks, and the slaves which tended them: all
was loot. Loot from generations back when the Lords of Quarmall plundered far
and wide and took their toll from every passing caravan.
       High above that warm, luxuriously furnished chamber where Gwaay and
Hasjarl played at chess, the Lord of Quarmall finished the final calculations
which would complete his horoscope. Heavy leather hangings shut out the stars
that had but now twinkled down their benisons and dooms. The only light in
that instrument-filled room was the tiny flare of a single taper. By such
scant illumination did custom bid the final casting be read, and Quarmal
strained even his keen vision to see the Signs and Houses rightly.
       As he rechecked the final results his supple lips writhed in a sneer, a
grimace of displeasure. _Tonight or tomorrow_, he thought with an inward
chill. _At most, late on the morrow._ Truly, he had little time.
       Then, as if pleased by some subtle jest, he smiled and nodded, making
his skinny shadow perform monstrous gyrations on the curtains and brasured
wall.
       Finally Quarmal laid aside his crayon and taking the single candle
lighted by its flame seven larger tapers. With the aid of this better light he
read once more the horoscope. This time he made no sign of pleasure or any
other emotion. Slowly he rolled the intricately diagrammed and inscribed
parchment into a slender tube, which he thrust in his belt; then rubbing
together his lean hands he smiled again. At a nearby table were the
ingredients which he needed for his scheme's success: powders, oils, tiny
knives, and other materials and instruments.
       The time was short. Swiftly he worked, his spatulate fingers performing
miracles of dexterity. Once he went on an errand to the wall. The Lord of
Quarmall made no mistakes, nor could he afford them.
       It was not long before the task was completed to his satisfaction.
After extinguishing the last-lit candles, Quarmal, Lord of Quarmall, relaxed
into his chair and by the dim light of a single taper summoned Flindach, in
order that his horoscope might be announced to those below.
       As was his wont, Flindach appeared almost at once. He presented himself
confronting his master with arms folded across his chest, and head bowed
submissively. Flindach never presumed. His figure was illuminated only to the
waist; above that shadow concealed whatever expression of interest or boredom
his warted and wine-marked face might show.
       In like manner the pitted yet sleeker countenance of Quarmal was
obscured; only his pale irises gleamed phosphorescent from the shadows like
two minute moons in a dark bloody sky.
       As if he were measuring Flindach, or as if he saw him for the first
time, Quarmal slowly raised his glance from foot to forehead of the figure
before him, and looking direct into the shaded eyes of Flindach so like his
own, he spoke. "O Master of Magicians, it is within your power to grant me a
boon this night."
       He raised a hand as Flindach would have spoken and swiftly continued:
"I have watched you grow from boy to youth and from youth to man; I have
nurtured your knowledge of the Art until it is only second to my own. The same
mother carried us, though I her firstborn and you the child of her last
fertile year -- that kinship helped. Your influence within Quarmall is almost
equal to mine. So I feel that some reward is due your diligence and
faithfulness."
       Again Flindach would have spoken, but was dissuaded by a gesture.
Quarmal spoke more slowly now and accompanied his words with staccato taps on
the parchment roll. "We both well know, from hearsay and direct knowledge,
that my sons plot my death. And it is also true that in some manner they must
be thwarted, for neither of the twain is fit to become the Lord of Quarmall;
nor does it seem probable that either will ever reach such wisdom. Under their
warring, Quarmall would die of inanition and neglect, as has died the Ghost
Hall. Furthermore, each of them, to buttress his sorceries, has secretly hired
a sworded champion from afar -- you've seen Gwaay's -- and this is the
beginning of the bringing of free mercenaries into Quarmall and the sure doom
of our power." He stretched a hand toward the dark close-crowded rows of
mummied and waxen masks and he asked rhetorically, "Did the Lords of Quarmall
guard and preserve our hidden realm that its councils might be entered,
crowded, and at last be captured by foreign captains?
       "Now a far more secret matter," he continued, his voice sinking. "The
concubine Kewissa carries my seed: male -- growing, by all omens and oracles -
- though this is known only to Kewissa and myself, and now to you, Flindach.
Should this unborn sprout reach but boyhood brotherless, I might die content,
leaving to you his tutelage in all confidence and trust."
       Quarmal paused and sat impassive as an effigy. "Yet to forestall
Hasjarl and Gwaay becomes more difficult each day, for they increase in power
and in scope. Their own innate wickedness gives them access to regions and
demons heretofore but imagined by their predecessors. Even I, well versed in
necromancy, am often appalled." He paused and quizzically looked at Flindach.
       For the first time since he had entered, Flindach spoke. His voice was
that of one trained in the recitation of incantations, deep and resonant.
"Master, what you speak is true. Yet how will you encompass their plots? You
know, as well as I, the custom that forbids what is perhaps the only means of
thwarting them."
       Flindach paused as if he would say more, but Quarmal quickly
intervened. "I have concocted a scheme, which may or may not succeed. The
success of it depends almost entirely upon your cooperation." He lowered his
voice almost to a whisper, beckoning for Flindach to step closer. "The very
stones may carry tales, O Flindach, and I would that this plan were kept
entirely secret." Quarmal beckoned again, and Flindach stepped still nearer
until he was within arm's reach of his master. Half stooping, he placed
himself in such a position that his ear was close to Quarmal's mouth. This was
closer than ever he remembered approaching Quarmal, and strange qualms filled
his mind, recrudescences of childish old wives' tales. This ancient ageless
man with eyes pearl-irised as his own seemed to Flindach not like half brother
at all, but like some strange, merciless half father. His burgeoning terror
was intensified when he felt the sinewy fingers of Quarmal close on his wrist
and gently urge him closer, almost to his knees, beside the chair.
       Quarmal's lips moved swiftly, and Flindach controlled his urge to rise
and flee as the plan was unfolded to him. With a sibilant phrase, the final
phrase, Quarmal finished, and Flindach realized the full enormity of that
plan. Even as he comprehended it, the single taper guttered and was
extinguished. There was darkness absolute.
       The chess game progressed swiftly; the only sounds, except the
ceaseless shuffle of naked feet and the hiss of lamp wicks, were the dull
click of the chessmen and the staccato cough of Hasjarl. The low table off
which the twain had eaten was placed opposite the broad arched door which was
the only apparent entrance to the council chamber.
       There was another entrance. It led to the Keep of Quarmall; and it was
toward this arras-concealed door that Gwaay glanced most often. He was
positive that the news of the casting would be as usual, but a certain
curiosity whelmed him this evening; he felt a faint foreshadowing of some
untoward event, even as wind blows gusty before a storm.
       An omen had been vouchsafed Gwaay by the gods today; an omen that
neither his necromancers nor his own skill could interpret to his complete
satisfaction. So he felt that it would be wise to await the development of
events prepared and expectant.
       Even as he watched the tapestry behind which he knew was the door
whence would step Flindach to announce the consequences of the casting, that
hanging bellied and trembled as if some breeze blew on it, or some hand pushed
against it lightly.
       Hasjarl abruptly threw himself back in his chair and cried in his high-
pitched voice, "Check with my rook to your king, and mate in three!" He
dropped one eyelid evilly and peered triumphantly at Gwaay.
       Gwaay, without removing his eyes from the still-swaying tapestry, said
in precise, mellow words, "The knight interposes, Brother, discovering check.
I mate in two. You are wrong again, my comrade."
       But even as Hasjarl swept the men with a crash to the floor, the arras
was more violently disturbed. It was parted by two slaves and the harsh gong-
note, announcing the entrance of some high official, sounded.
       Silently from betwixt the hanging stepped the tall lean form of
Flindach. His shadowed face, despite the disfiguring wine mark and the treble
mole, had a great and solemn dignity. And in its somber expressionlessness --
an expressionlessness curiously mocked by a knowing glitter deep in the black
pupils of the pearl-irised crimson-balled eyes -- it seemed to forebode some
evil tiding.
       All motion ceased in that long low hall as Flindach, standing in the
archway framed in rich tapestries, raised one arm in a gesticulation demanding
silence. The attendant well-trained slaves stood at their posts, heads bowed
submissively; Gwaay remained as he was, looking directly at Flindach; and
Hasjarl, who had half-turned at the gong note, likewise awaited the
announcement. In a moment, they knew, Quarmal their father would step from
behind Flindach and smiling evilly would announce his horoscope. Always this
had been the procedure; and always, since each could remember, Gwaay and
Hasjarl had at this moment wished for Quarmal's death.
       Flindach, arm lifted in dramatic gesture, began to speak.
       "The casting of the horoscope has been completed and the finding has
been made. Even as the Heavens foretell is the fate of man fulfilled. I bring
this news to Hasjarl and Gwaay, the sons of Quarmal."
       With a swift motion Flindach plucked a slender parchment tube from his
belt and, breaking it with his hands, dropped it crumpled at his feet. In
almost the same gesture he reached behind his left shoulder and stepping from
the shadow of the arch drew a peaked cowl over his head.
       Throwing wide both arms, Flindach spoke, his voice seeming to come from
afar:
       "Quarmal, Lord of Quarmall, rules no more. The casting is fulfilled.
Let all within the walls of Quarmall mourn. For three days the place of the
Lord of Quarmall will be vacant. So custom demands and so shall it be. On the
morrow, when the sun enters his courtyard, that which remains of what was once
a great and puissant lord will be given to the flames. Now I go to mourn my
Master and oversee the obsequies and prepare myself with fasting and with
prayer for his passing. Do you likewise."
       Flindach slowly turned and disappeared into the darkness from which he
had come.
       For the space of ten full heartbeats Gwaay and Hasjarl sat motionless.
The announcement came as a thunderclap to both. Gwaay for a second felt an
impulse to giggle and smirk like a child who has unexpectedly escaped
punishment and is instead rewarded; but in the back of his mind he was half-
convinced that he had known all along the outcome of the casting. However, he
controlled his childish glee and sat silent, staring.
       On the other hand Hasjarl reacted as might be expected of him. He went
through a series of outlandish grimaces and ended with an obscene half-
smothered titter. Then he frowned, and turning said to Gwaay, "Heard you not
what said Flindach? I must go and prepare myself!" and he lurched to his feet
and paced silently across the room, out the broad-arched door.
       Gwaay remained sitting for another few moments, frowning eyes narrowed
in concentration, as if he were puzzling over some abstruse problem which
required all his powers to solve. Suddenly he snapped his fingers and,
motioning for his slaves to precede him, made ready for his return to the
Lower Levels, whence he had come.Fafhrd had barely left the Ghost Hall when he
heard the faint rattle and clink of armed men moving cautiously. His
bemusement with Friska's charms vanished as if he had been doused with ice
water. He shrank into the deeper darkness and eavesdropped long enough to
learn that these were pickets of Hasjarl, guarding against an invasion from
Gwaay's Lower Levels -- and not tracking down Friska and himself as he'd first
feared. Then he made off swiftly for Hasjarl's Hall of Sorcery, grimly pleased
that his memory for landmarks and turnings seemed to work as well for mazy
tunnels as for forest trails and steep zigzag mountain escalades.
       The bizarre sight that greeted him when he reached his goal stopped him
on the stony threshold. Standing shin-deep and stark naked in a steaming
marble tub shaped like a ridgy seashell, Hasjarl was berating and haranguing
the great roomful around him. And every man jack of them -- sorcerers,
officers, overseers, pages bearing great fringy towels and dark red robes and
other apparel -- was standing quakingly still with cringing eyes, except for
the three slaves soaping and laving their Lord with tremulous dexterity.
       Fafhrd had to admit that Hasjarl naked was somehow more consistent --
ugly everywhere -- a kobold birthed from a hot-spring. And although his
grotesque child-pink torso and mismated arms were a-writhe and a-twitch in a
frenzy of apprehension, he had dignity of a sort.
       He was snarling, "Speak, all of you, is there a precaution I have
forgotten, a rite omitted, a rat-hole overlooked that Gwaay might creep
through? Oh, that on this night when demons lurk and I must mind a thousand
things and dress me for my father's obsequies, I should be served by wittols!
Are you all deaf and dumb? Where's my great champion, who should ward me now?
Where are my scarlet grommets? Less soap there, you -- take that! You, Essem,
are we guarded well above? -- I don't trust Flindach. And Yissim, have we
guards enough below? -- Gwaay is a snake who'll strike through any gap. Dark
Gods, defend me! Go to the barracks, Yissim, get more men, and reinforce our
downward guards -- and while you're there, I mind me now, bid them continue
Friska's torture. Wring the truth from her! She's in Gwaay's plots -- this
night has made me certain. Gwaay knew my father's death was imminent and laid
invasion plans long weeks agone. Any of you may be his purchased spies! Oh
where's my champion? _Where are my scarlet grommets?"_
       Fafhrd, who'd been striding forward, quickened his pace at mention of
Friska. A simple inquiry at the torture chamber would reveal her escape and
his part in it. He must create diversions. So he halted close in front of pink
wet steaming Hasjarl and said boldly, "Here is your champion, Lord. And he
counsels not sluggy defense, but some swift stroke at Gwaay! Surely your
mighty mind has fashioned many a shrewd attacking stratagem. Launch you a
thunderbolt!"
       It was all Fafhrd could do to keep speaking forcefully to the end and
not let his voice trail off as his attention became engrossed in the strange
operation now going on. While Hasjarl crouched stock-still with head a-twist,
an ashen-faced bath-slave had drawn out Hasjarl's left upper eyelid by its
lashes and was inserting into the hole in it a tiny flanged scarlet ring or
grommet no bigger than a lentil. The grommet was carried on the tip of an
ivory wand as thin as a straw, and the whole deed was being done by the slave
with the anxiety of a man refilling the poison pouches of an untethered
rattlesnake -- if such an action might be imagined for purposes of comparison.
       However, the operation was quickly completed, and then on the right eye
too -- and evidently with perfect satisfaction, since Hasjarl did not slash
the slave with the soapy wet lash still dangling from his wrist -- and when
Hasjarl straightened up he was grinning broadly at Fafhrd.
       "You counsel me well, champion," he cried. "These other fools could do
nothing but shake. There _is_ a stroke long-planned that I'll try now, one
that won't violate the obsequies. Essem, take slaves and fetch the dust -- you
know the stuff I mean -- and meet me at the vents! Girls, sluice these suds
off with tepid water. Boy, give me my slippers and my toweling robe! -- those
other clothes can wait. Follow me, Fafhrd!
       But just then his red-grommeted gaze lit on his four-and-twenty bearded
and hooded sorcerers standing apprehensive by their chairs.
       "Back to your charms at once, you ignoramuses!" he roared at them. "I
did not tell you to stop because I bathed! Back to your charms and send your
plagues at Gwaay -- red, black and green, nose drip and bloody rot -- or I
will burn your beards off to the eyelashes as prelude to more dire torturings!
Haste, Essem! Come, Fafhrd!"
       The Gray Mouser at that same moment was returning from his closet with
Ivivis when Gwaay, velvet-shod and followed by barefoot slaves, came around a
turn in the dim corridor so swiftly there was no evading him.
       The young Lord of the Lower Levels seemed preternaturally calm and
controlled, yet with the impression that under the calm was naught but
quivering excitement and darting thought -- so much so that it would hardly
have surprised the Mouser if there had shone forth from Gwaay an aura of Blue
Essence of Thunderbolt. Indeed, the Mouser felt his skin begin to prickle and
sting as if just such an influence were invisibly streaming from his employer.
       Gwaay scanned the Mouser and the pretty slavegirl in a flicker and
spoke, his voice dancing rapid and gaysome.
       "Well, Mouser, I can see you've sampled your reward ahead of time. Ah,
youth and dim retreats and pillowed dreams and amorous hostessings -- what
else gilds life or makes it worth the guttering sooty candle? Was the girl
skillful? Good! Ivivis, dear, I must reward your zeal. I gave Divis a necklace
-- would you one? Or I've a brooch shaped like a scorpion, ruby-eyed -- "
       The Mouser felt the girl's hand quiver and chill in his and he cut in
quickly with, "My demon speaks to me, Lord Gwaay, and tells me it's a night
when the Fates walk."
       Gwaay laughed. "Your demon has been listening behind the arras. He's
heard tales of my father's swift departure." As he spoke a drop formed at the
end of his nose, between his nostrils. Fascinated, the Mouser watched it grow.
Gwaay started to lift the back of his hand to it, then shook it off instead.
For an instant he frowned, then laughed again.
       "Aye, the Fates trod on Quarmall Keep tonight," Gwaay said, only now
his gay rapid voice was a shade hoarse.
       "My demon whispers me further that there are dangerous powers abroad
this night," the Mouser continued.
       "Aye, brother love and such," Gwaay quipped in reply, but now his voice
was a croak. A look of great startlement widened his eyes. He shivered as with
a chill, and drops pattered from his nose. Three hairs came loose from his
scalp and fell across his eyes. His slaves shrank back from him.
       "My demon warns me we'd best use my Great Spell quickly against those
powers," the Mouser went on, his mind returning as always to Sheelba's
untested rune. "It destroys only sorcerers of the Second Rank and lower.
Yours, being of the First Rank, will be untouched. But Hasjarl's will perish."
       Gwaay opened his mouth to reply, but no words came forth, only a
moaning nightmarish groan like that of a mute. Hectic spots shone forth high
on his cheeks, and now it seemed to the Mouser that a reddish blotch was
crawling up the right side of his chin, while on the left black spots were
forming. A hideous stench became apparent. Gwaay staggered and his eyes
brimmed with a greenish ichor. He lifted his hand to them, and its back was
yellowish crusted and red-cracked. His slaves ran.
       "Hasjarl's sendings!" the Mouser hissed. "Gwaay's sorcerers still
sleep! I'll rouse 'em! Support him, Ivivis!" And turning he sped like the wind
down corridor and up ramp until he reached Gwaay's Hall of Sorcery. He entered
it, clapping and whistling harshly between his teeth, for true enough the
twelve scrawny loinclothed magi were still curled snoring on their wide high-
backed chairs. The Mouser darted to each in turn, righting and shaking him
with no gentle hands and shouting in his ear, "To your work! Anti-venom! Guard
Gwaay!"
       Eleven of the sorcerers roused quickly enough and were soon staring
wide-eyed at nothingness, though with their bodies rocking and their heads
bobbing for a while from the Mouser's shaking -- like eleven small ships just
overpassed by a squall.
       He was having a little more trouble with the twelfth, though this one
was coming awake, soon would be doing his share, when Gwaay appeared of a
sudden in the archway with Ivivis at his side, though not supporting him. The
young Lord's face gleamed as silvery clear in the dimness as the massy silver
mask of him that hung in the niche above the arch.
       "Stand aside, Gray Mouser, I'll jog the sluggard," he cried in a
rippingly bright voice and snatching up a small obsidian jar tossed it toward
the drowsy sorcerer.
       It should have fallen no more than halfway between them. Did he mean to
wake the ancient by its shattering? the Mouser wondered. But then Gwaay stared
at it in the air and it quickened its speed fearfully. It was as if he had
tossed up a ball, then batted it. Shooting forward like a bolt fired point-
blank from a sinewy catapult it shattered the ancient's skull and spattered
the chair and the Mouser with his brains.
       Gwaay laughed, a shade high-pitched, and cried lightly, "I must curb my
excitement! I must! I must! Sudden recovery from two dozen deaths -- or
twenty-three and the Nose Drip -- is no reason for a philosopher to lose
control. Oh, I'm a giddy fellow!"
       Ivivis cried suddenly, "The room swims! I see silver fish!"
       The Mouser felt dizzy himself then and saw a phosphorescent green hand
reach through the archway toward Gwaay -- reach out on a thin arm that
lengthened to yards. He blinked hard and the hand was gone -- but now there
were swimmings of purple vapor.
       He looked at Gwaay and that one, frowny-eyed now, was sniffling hard
and then sniffling again, though no new drop could be seen to have formed on
his nose-end.
       Fafhrd stood three paces behind Hasjarl, who looked in his bunched and
high-collared robe of earth-brown toweling rather like an ape.
       Beyond Hasjarl on the right there trotted on a thick wide roller-riding
leather belt three slaves of monstrous aspect: great splayed feet, legs like
an elephant's, huge furnace-bellows chests, dwarfy arms, pinheads with wide
toothy mouths and with nostrils bigger than their eyes or ears -- creatures
bred to run ponderously and nothing else. The moving belt disappeared with a
half twist into a vertical cylinder of masonry five yards across and reemerged
just below itself, but moving in the opposite direction, to pass under the
rollers and complete its loop. From within the cylinder came the groaning of
the great wooden fan which the belt whirled and which drove life-sustaining
air downward to the Lower Levels.
       Beyond Hasjarl on the left was a small door as high as Fafhrd's head in
the cylinder. To it there mounted one by one, up four narrow masonry steps, a
line of dusky, great-headed dwarves. Each bore on his shoulder a dark bag
which when he reached the window he untied and emptied into the clamorous
shaft, shaking it out most thoroughly while he held it inside, then folding it
and leaping down to give place to the next bag-bearer.
       Hasjarl leered over his shoulder at Fafhrd. "A nosegay for Gwaay!" he
cried. "'Tis a king's ransom I strew on the downward gale: powder of poppy,
dust of lotus and mandragora, crumble of hemp. A million lewdly pleasant
dreams, and all for Gwaay! Three ways this conquers him: he'll sleep a day and
miss my father's funeral, then Quarmall's mine by right of sole appearance yet
with no bloodshed, which would mar the rites; his sorcerers will sleep and my
infectious spells burst through and strike him down in stinking jellied death;
his realm will sleep, each slave and cursed page, so we conquer all merely by
marching down after the business of the funeral. Ho, swifter there!" And
seizing a long whip from an overseer, he began to crack it over the squat
cones of the tread-slaves' heads and sting their broad backs with it. Their
trot changed to a ponderous gallop, the moan of the fan rose in pitch, and
Fafhrd waited to hear it shatter crackingly, or see the belt snap, or the
rollers break on their axles.
       The dwarf at the shaft-window took advantage of Hasjarl's attention
being elsewhere to snatch a pinch of powder from his bag and bring it to his
nostrils and sniff it down, leering ecstatically. But Hasjarl saw and whipped
him about the legs most cruelly. The dwarf dutifully emptied his bag and shook
it out while making little hops of agony. However he did not seem much
chastened or troubled by his whipping, for as he left the chamber Fafhrd saw
him pull his empty bag over his head and waddle off breathing deeply through
it.
       Hasjarl went on whip-cracking and calling, "Swifter, I say! For Gwaay a
drugged hurricane!"
       The officer Yissim raced into the room and darted to his master.
       "The girl Friska's escaped!" he cried. "Your torturers say your
champion came with your seal, telling them you had ordered her release -- and
snatched her off! All this occurred a quarter day ago."
       "Guards!" Hasjarl squealed. "Seize the Northerner! Disarm and bind the
traitor!"
       But Fafhrd was gone.
       The Mouser, in company with Ivivis, Gwaay and a colorful rabble of
drug-induced hallucinations, reeled into a chamber similar to the one from
which Fafhrd had just disappeared. Here the great cylindrical shaft ended in a
half turn. The fan that sucked down the air and blew it out to refresh the
Lower Levels was set vertically in the mouth of the shaft and was visible as
it whirled.
       By the shaft-mouth hung a large cage of white birds, all lying on its
floor with their feet in the air. Besides these tell-tales, there was
stretched on the floor of the chamber its overseer, also overcome by the drugs
whirlwinding from Hasjarl.
       By contrast, the three pillar-legged slaves ponderously trotting their
belt seemed not affected at all. Presumably their tiny brains and monstrous
bodies were beyond the reach of any drug, short of its lethal dose.
       Gwaay staggered up to them, slapped each in turn, and commanded,
"Stop!" Then he himself dropped to the floor.
       The groaning of the fan died away, its seven wooden vanes became
clearly visible as it stopped (though for the Mouser they were interwoven with
scaly hallucinations), and the only real sound was the slow gasping of the
tread-slaves.
       Gwaay smiled weirdly at them from where he sprawled, and he raised an
arm drunkenly and cried, "Reverse! About face!" Slowly the tread-slaves
turned, taking a dozen tiny steps to do it, until they all three faced the
opposite direction on the belt.
       "Trot!" Gwaay commanded them quickly. Slowly they obeyed and slowly the
fan took up again its groaning, but now it was blowing air up the shaft
against Hasjarl's downward fanning.
       Gwaay and Ivivis rested on the floor for a space, until their brains
began to clear and the last hallucinations were chased from view. To the
Mouser they seemed to be sucked up the shaft through the fan blades: a filmy
horde of blue-and-purple wraiths armed with transparent saw-toothed spears and
cutlasses.
       Then Gwaay, smiling in highest excitement with his eyes, said softly
and still a bit breathlessly, "My sorcerers ... were not overcome ... I think.
Else I'd be dying ... Hasjarl's two dozen deaths. Another moment ... and I'll
send across the level ... to reverse the exhaust fan. We'll get fresh air
through it. And put more slaves on this belt here -- perchance I'll blow my
brother's nightmares back to him. Then lave and robe me for my father's fiery
funeral and mount to give Hasjarl a nasty shock. Ivivis, as soon as you can
walk, rouse my bath girls. Bid them make all ready."
       He reached across the floor and grasped the Mouser strongly at the
elbow. "You, Gray One," he whispered, "prepare to work this mighty tune of
yours which will smite down Hasjarl's warlocks. Gather your simples, pray your
demonic prayers -- consulting first with my twelve arch-magi ... if you can
rouse the twelfth from his dark hell. As soon as Quarmal's lich is in the
flames, I'll send you word to speak your deadly spell." He paused, and his
eyes gleamed with a witchy glare in the dimness. "The time has come for
sorcery and swords!"
       There was a tiny scrabbling as one of the white birds staggered to its
feet on the cage-bottom. It gave a chirrup that was rather like a hiccup, yet
still had a note of challenge in it.
       All that night through, all Quarmall was awake. Into the Ordering Room
of the Keep, a magician came crying, "Lord Flindach! The mind-casters have
incontrovertible advertisements that the two brothers war against each other.
Hasjarl sends sleepy resins down the shafts, while Gwaay blows them back."
       The warty and purple-blotched face of the Master of Magicians looked up
from where he sat busy at a table surrounded by a small host awaiting orders.
       "Have they shed blood?" he asked.
       "Not yet."
       "It is well. Keep enchanted eyes on them."
       Then, gazing sternly in turn from under his hood at those whom he
addressed, the Master of Magicians gave his other orders:
       To two magicians robed as his deputies: "Go on the instant to Hasjarl
and Gwaay. Remind them of the obsequies and stay with them until they and
their companies reach the funeral courtyard."
       To a eunuch: "Hasten to your master Brilla. Learn if he requires
further materials or assistance building the funeral pyre. Help will be
furnished him at once and without stint."
       To a captain of slingers: "Double the guard on the walls. Yourself make
the rounds. Quarmall must be entirely secure from outward assaults and escapes
from within on this coming morn."
       To a richly-clad woman of middle years: "To Quarmal's harem. See that
his concubines are perfectly groomed and clad, as if their Lord himself meant
to visit them at dawn. Quiet their apprehensions. Send to me the Ilthmarix
Kewissa."
       In Hasjarl's Hall of Sorcery, that Lord let his slaves robe him for the
obsequies, while not neglecting to direct the search for his traitorous
champion Fafhrd, to instruct the shaft-watchers in the precautions they must
take against Gwaay's attempts to return the poppy dust, perchance with
interest, and to tutor his sorcerers in the exact spells they must use against
Gwaay once Quarmal's body was devoured by the flame.
       In the Ghost Hall, Fafhrd munched and drank with Friska a small feast
he'd brought. He told her how he'd fallen into disfavor with Hasjarl, and he
mulled plans for his escape with her from the realm of Quarmall.
       In Gwaay's Hall of Sorcery, the Gray Mouser conferred in turn with the
eleven skinny wizards in their white loincloths, telling them nothing of
Sheelba's spell, but securing from each the firm assurance that he was a magus
of the First Rank.
       In the steam room of Gwaay's bath, that Lord recuperated his flesh and
faculties shaken by disease spells and drugs. His girls, supervised by Ivivis,
brought him fragrant oils and elixirs, and scrubbed and laved him as he
directed languidly yet precisely. The slender forms, blurred and silvered by
the clouds of steam, moved and posed as in a languorous ballet.
       The huge pyre was finally completed, and Brilla heaved a sigh of relief
and contentment with the knowledge of work well done. He relaxed his fat,
massive frame onto a bench against the wall and spoke to one of his companions
in a high-pitched feminine voice:
       "Such short notice, and at such a time, but the gods are not to be
denied, and no man can cheat his stars. It is shameful though, to think that
Quarmal will go so poorly attended: only a half dozen Lankhmarts, an
Ilthmarix, and three Mingols -- and one of those blemished. I always told him
he should keep a better harem. However the male slaves are in fine fettle and
will perhaps make up for the rest. Ah! but it's a fine flame the Lord will
have to light his way!" Brilla wagged his head dolefully and, snuffling,
blinked a tear from his piggy eye; he was one of the few who really regretted
the passing of Quarmal.
       As High Eunuch to the Lord, Brilla's position was a sinecure and,
besides, he had always been fond of Quarmal since he could remember. Once when
a small chubby boy Brilla had been rescued from the torments of a group of
larger, more virile slaves who had freed him at the mere passing-by of
Quarmal. It was this small incident, unwotted or long forgotten by Quarmal,
which had provoked a lifelong devotion in Brilla.
       Now only the gods knew what the future held. Today the body of Quarmal
would be burned, and what would happen after that was better left unpondered,
even in the innermost thoughts of a man. Brilla looked once more at his
handiwork, the funeral pyre. Achieving it in six short hours, even with hosts
of slaves at his command, had taxed his powers. It towered in the center of
the courtyard, even higher than the arch of the great gate thrice the stature
of a tall man. It was built in the form of a square pyramid, truncated midway;
and the inflammable woods that composed it were completely hidden by somber-
hued drapes.
       A runway was built from the ground across the vast courtyard to the
topmost tier on each of the four sides; and at the top was a sizable square
platform. It was here that the litter containing the body of Quarmal would be
placed, and here the sacrificial victims be immolated. Only those slaves of
proper age and talents were permitted to accompany their Lord on his long
journey beyond the stars.
       Brilla approved of what he saw and, rubbing his hands, looked about
curiously. It was only on such occasions as this that one realized the
immensity of Quarmall, and these occasions were rare; perhaps once in his life
a man would see such an event. As far as Brilla could see small bands of
slaves were lined, rank on rank, against the walls of the courtyard, even as
was his own band of eunuchs and carpenters. There were the craftsmen from the
Upper Levels, skilled workmen all in metal and in wood; there were the workers
from the fields and vineyards all brown and gnarled from their labors; there
were the slaves from the Lower Levels, blinking in the unaccustomed daylight,
pallid and curiously deformed; and all the rest who served in the bowels of
Quarmall, a representative group from each level.
       The size of the turnout seemed to contradict the dawn's frightening
rumors of secret war last night between the Levels, and Brilla felt reassured.
       Most important and best placed were the two bands of henchmen of
Hasjarl and Gwaay, one group on each side of the pyre. Only the sorcerers of
the twain were absent, Brilla noted with a pang of unease, though refusing to
speculate why.
       High above all this mass of mixed humanity, atop the towering walls,
were the ever-silent, ever-alert guards; standing quietly at their posts,
slings dangling ready to hand. Never yet had the walls of Quarmall been
stormed, and never had a slave once within those close-watched walls passed
into the outer world alive.
       Brilla was admirably placed to observe all that occurred. To his right,
projecting from the wall of the courtyard, was the balcony from which Hasjarl
and Gwaay would watch the consuming of their father's body; to his left,
likewise projecting, was the platform from which Flindach would direct the
rituals. Brilla sat almost next to the door whence the prepared and purified
body of Quarmal would be borne for its final fiery cleansing. He wiped the
sweat from his flabby jowls with the hem of his under tunic and wondered how
much longer it would be before things started. The sun could not be far from
the top of the wall now, and with its first beams the rites began.
       Even as he wondered there came the tremendous, muffled vibration of the
huge gong. There was a craning of necks and a rustling as many bodies shifted;
then silence. On the left balcony the figure of Flindach appeared.
       Flindach was cowled with the Cowl of Death and his garments were of
heavy woven brocades, somber and dull. At his waist glittered the circular
fan-bladed Golden Symbol of Power, which while the Chair of Quarmall was
vacant, Flindach as High Steward must keep inviolate.
       He lifted his arms toward the place where the sun would in a moment
appear and intoned the Hymn of Greeting; even as he chanted, the first tawny
rays struck into the eyes of those across the courtyard. Again that muffled
vibration, which shook the very bones of those closest to it, and opposite
Flindach, on the other balcony, appeared Gwaay and Hasjarl. Both were garbed
alike but for their diadems and scepters. Hasjarl wore a sapphire-jeweled
silver band on his forehead, and in his hand was the scepter of the Upper
Levels, crested with a clenched fist; Gwaay wore a diadem inlaid with rubies,
and in his hand was his scepter surmounted by a worm, dagger-transfixed.
Otherwise the twain were dressed identically in ceremonial robes of darkest
red, belted with broad leather girdles of black; they wore no weapons nor were
any other ornaments permissible.
       As they seated themselves upon the high stools provided, Flindach
turned toward the gate nearest Brilla and began to chant. His sonorous voice
was answered by a hidden chorus and reechoed by certain of the bands in the
courtyard. For the third time the monstrous gong was sounded, and as the last
echoes faded the body of Quarmal, litter-borne, appeared. It was carried by
the six Lankhmar slavegirls and followed by the Mingols; this small band was
all that remained of the many who had slept in the bed of Quarmal.
       But where, Brilla asked himself with a heart-bounding start, was
Kewissa the Ilthmarix, the old Lord's favorite? Brilla had ordered the
marshaling of the girls himself. She could not --
       Slowly through a lane of prostrate bodies the litter progressed toward
the pyre. The carcass of Quarmal was propped in a sitting posture, and it
swayed in a manner horribly suggestive of life as the slavewomen staggered
under their unaccustomed load. He was garbed in robes of purple silk, and his
brow bore the golden bands of Quarmall's Lord.
       Those lean hands, once so active in the practice of necromancy and
incantations, were folded stiffly over the Grammarie which had been his bible
during life. On his wrist, hooded and chained, was a great gyrfalcon, and at
the feet of its dead master lay his favorite coursing leopard, quiet in the
quietness of death. Even as was the falcon hooded, so with waxlike lids were
the once awesome eyes of Quarmal covered; those eyes which had seen so much of
death were now forever dead.
       Although Brilla's mind was still agitated about Kewissa, he spoke a
word of encouragement to the other girls as they passed, and one of them flung
him a wistful smile; they all knew it was an honor to accompany their master
into the future, but none of them desired it particularly; however there was
little they could do about it except follow directions. Brilla felt sorry for
them all; they were so young, had such luscious bodies and were capable of
giving so much pleasure to a man, for he had trained them well. But custom
must be fulfilled. Yet how then had Kewissa -- ? Brilla shut off that
speculation.
       The litter moved on up the ramp. The chanting grew in volume and tempo
as the top of the pyre was reached, and the rays of the sun, now shining full
onto the dead countenance of Quarmal, as the litter turned toward it,
reflected from the bright hair and white skin of the Lankhmar slavegirls, who
had with their companions thrown themselves at the feet of Quarmal.
       Suddenly Flindach dropped his arms and there was silence, a complete
and total silence startling in its contrast to the measured chant and clashing
gongs.
       Gwaay and Hasjarl sat motionless, staring intently at the figure that
had once been the Lord of Quarmall.
       Flindach again raised his arms and from the gate opposite to that from
whence had come the body of Quarmal, there leaped eight men. Each bore a
flambeau and was naked but for a purple cowl which obscured his face. To the
accompaniment of harsh gong notes they ran swiftly to the pyre, two on each
side and, thrusting their torches into the prepared wood, cast themselves over
the flames they created and clambering up the pyramid embraced the slavegirls
wantonly.
       Almost at once the flames ate into the resinous and oil-impregnated
wood. For a moment through the thick smoke the interlocking writhing forms of
the slaves could be perceived, and the lean figure of dead Quarmal staring
through closed lids directly into the face of the sun. Then, incensed by the
heat and acrid fumes, the great falcon screamed in vicious anger and wing-
flapping rose from the wrist of its master. The chains held fast; but all
could see the arm of Quarmal lifted high in a gesture of sublime dismissal
before the smoke obscured. The chanting reached crescendo and abruptly ended
as Flindach gave the sign that the rites were finished.
       As the eager flames swiftly consumed the pyre and the burden it bore,
Hasjarl broke the silence which custom had enjoined. He turned toward Gwaay
and fingering the knuckly knob of his scepter and with an evil grin he spoke.
       "Ha! Gwaay, it would have been a merry thing to have seen you leching
in the flames. Almost as merry as to see our sire gesticulating after death.
Go quickly, Brother! There's yet a chance to immolate yourself and so win fame
and immortality." And he giggled, slobbering.
       Gwaay had just made an unapparent sign to a page nearby, and the lad
was hurrying away. The young Lord of the Lower Levels was in no manner amused
by his brother's ill-timed jesting, but with a smile and shrug he replied
sarcastically, "I choose to seek death in less painful paths. Yet the idea is
a good one; I'll treasure it." Then suddenly in a deeper voice: "It had been
better that we were both stillborn than to fritter our lives away in futile
hatreds. I'll overlook your dream-dust and your poppy hurricanes, and e'en
your noisome sorceries, and make a pact with you, O Hasjarl! By the somber
gods who rule under Quarmall's Hill and by the Worm which is my sign I swear
that from my hand your life is sacrosanct; with neither spells nor steel nor
venoms will I slay thee!" Gwaay rose to his feet as he finished and looked
directly at Hasjarl.
       Taken unaware, Hasjarl for a second sat in silence; a puzzled
expression crossed his face; then a sneer distorted his thin lips and he spat
at Gwaay:
       "So! You fear me more even than I thought. Aye! And rightly so! Yet the
blood of yon old cinder runs in both our bodies, and there is a tender spot
within me for my brother. Yes, I'll pact with thee, Gwaay! By the Elder Ones
who swim in lightless deeps and by the Fist that is my token, I'll swear your
life is sacrosanct -- until I crush it out!" And with a final evil titter
Hasjarl, like a malformed stoat, slid from stool and out of sight.
       Gwaay stood quietly listening, gazing at the space where Hasjarl had
sat; then, sure his brother was well gone, he slapped his thighs mightily and,
convulsed with silent laughter, gasped to no one in particular, "Even the
wiliest hares are caught in simple snares," and still smiling he turned to
watch the dancing flames.
       Slowly the variegated groups were herded into the passageways whence
they had come and the courtyard was cleared once again, except for those
slaves and priests whose duties kept them there.
       Gwaay remained watching for a time, then he too slipped off the balcony
into the inner rooms. And a faint smile yet clung to his mouth corners as if
some jest were lingering in his mind pleasantly.
       "...And by the blood of that one whom it is death to look upon..."
       So sonorously invoked the Mouser, as with eyes closed and arms
outstretched he cast the rune given him by Sheelba of the Eyeless Face which
would destroy all sorcerers of less than First Rank of an undetermined
distance around the casting point -- surely for a few miles, one might hope,
so smiting Hasjarl's warlocks to dust.
       Whether his Great Spell worked or not -- and in his inmost heart he
strongly mistrusted that it would -- the Mouser was very pleased with the
performance he was giving. He doubted Sheelba himself could have done better.
What magnificent deep chest tones -- even Fafhrd had never heard him declaim
so.
       He wished he could open his eyes for just a moment to note the effect
his performance was having on Gwaay's magicians -- they'd be staring open-
mouthed for all their supercilious boasting, he was sure -- but on this point
Sheelba's instructions had been adamant: eyes tightly shut while the last
sentences of the rune were being recited and the great forbidden words spoken;
even the tiniest blink would nullify the Great Spell. Evidently magicians were
supposed to be without vanity or curiosity -- what a bore!
       Of a sudden in the dark of his head, he felt contact with another and a
larger darkness, a malefic and puissant darkness, of which light itself is
only the absence. He shivered. His hair stirred. Cold sweat prickled his face.
He almost stuttered midway through the word "slewerisophnak." But
concentrating his will, he finished without flaw.
       When the last echoing notes of his voice had ceased to rebound between
the domed ceiling and floor, the Mouser slit open one eye and glanced
surreptitiously around him.
       One glance and the other eye flew open to fullness. He was too
surprised to speak.
       And whom he would have spoken to, had he not been too surprised, was
also a question.
       The long table at the foot of which he stood was empty of occupants.
Where but moments before had sat eleven of the very greatest magicians of
Quarmall -- sorcerers of the First Rank, each had sworn on his black Grammarie
-- was only space.
       The Mouser called softly. It was possible that these provincial fellows
had been frightened at the majesty of his dark Lankhmarian delivery and had
crawled under the table.
       But there was no answer.
       He spoke louder. Only the ceaseless groan of the fans could be sensed,
though hardly more noticeable after four days hearing them than the coursing
of his blood. With a shrug the Mouser relaxed into his chair. He murmured to
himself, "If those slick-faced old fools run off, what next? Suppose all
Gwaay's henchmen flee?"
       As he began to plan out in his mind what strategy of airy nothing to
adopt if that should come to pass, he glanced somberly at the wide high-backed
chair nearest his place, where had sat the boldest-seeming of Gwaay's arch-
magi. There was only a loosely crumpled white loincloth -- but in it was what
gave the Mouser pause. A small pile of flocculent gray dust was all.
       The Mouser whistled softly between his teeth and raised himself the
better to see the rest of the seats. On each of them was the same: a clean
loincloth, somewhat crumpled as if it had been worn for a little while, and
within the cloth that small heap of grayish powder.
       At the other end of the long table, one of the black counters, which
had been standing on its edge, slowly rolled off the board of the thought-game
and struck the floor with a tiny tick. It sounded to the Mouser rather like
the last noise in the world.
       Very quietly he stood up and silently walked in his ratskin moccasins
to the nearest archway, across which he had drawn thick curtains for the Great
Spell. He was wondering just what the range of the spell had been, _where_ it
had stopped, if it had stopped at all. Suppose, for instance, that Sheelba had
underestimated its power and it disintegrated not only sorcerers, but...
       He paused in front of the curtain and gave one last over-the-shoulder
glance. Then he shrugged, adjusted his swordbelt, and, grinning far more
bravely than he felt, said to no one in particular, "But they assured me that
they were the very greatest sorcerers."
       As he reached toward the curtain, heavy with embroidery, it wavered and
shook. He froze, his heart leaping wildly. Then the curtains parted a little
and there was thrust in the saucy face of Ivivis, wide-eyed with excited
curiosity.
       "Did your Great Spell work, Mouser?" she asked him breathlessly.
       He let out his own breath in a sigh of relief. "You survived it, at all
events," he said and reaching out pulled her against him. Her slim body
pressing his felt very good. True, the presence of almost any living being
would have been welcome to the Mouser at this moment, but that it should be
Ivivis was a bonus he could not help but appreciate.
       "Dearest," he said sincerely, "I was feeling that I was perchance the
last man on Earth. But now -- "
       "And acting as if I were the last girl, lost a year," she retorted
tartly. "This is neither the place nor the time for amorous consolations and
intimate pleasantries," she continued, half mistaking his motives and pushing
back from him.
       "Did you slay Hasjarl's wizards?" she demanded, gazing up with some awe
into his eyes.
       "I slew some sorcerers," the Mouser admitted judiciously. "Just how
many is a moot question."
       "Where are Gwaay's?" she asked, looking past the Mouser at the empty
chairs. "Did he take them all with him?"
       "Isn't Gwaay back from his father's funeral yet?" the Mouser countered,
evading her question, but as she continued to look into his eyes, he added
lightly, "His sorcerers are in some congenial spot -- I hope."
       Ivivis looked at him queerly, pushed past, hurried to the long table,
and gazed up and down the chair seats.
       "Oh, _Mouser_!" she said reprovingly, but there was real awe in the
gaze she shot him.
       He shrugged. "They swore to me they were of First Rank," he defended
himself.
       "Not even a fingerbone or skullshard left," Ivivis said solemnly,
peering closely at the nearest tiny gray dust pile and shaking her head.
       "Not even a gallstone," the Mouser echoed harshly. "My rune was dire."
       "Not even a tooth," Ivivis reechoed, rubbing curiously if somewhat
callously through the pile. "Nothing to send their mothers."
       "Their mothers can have their diapers to fold away with their baby
ones," the Mouser said irascibly though somewhat uncomfortably. "Oh, Ivivis,
sorcerers don't have mothers!"
       "But what happens to our Lord Gwaay now that his protectors are gone?"
Ivivis demanded more practically. "You saw how Hasjarl's sendings struck him
last night when they but dozed. And if anything happens to Gwaay, then what
happens to us?"
       Again the Mouser shrugged. "If my rune reached Hasjarl's twenty-four
wizards and blasted them too, then no harm's been done -- except to sorcerers,
and they all take their chances, sign their death warrants when they speak
their first spells -- 'tis a dangerous trade.
       "In fact," he went on with argumentative enthusiasm, "we've gained.
Twenty-four enemies slain at cost of but a dozen -- no, eleven total
casualties on our side -- why, that's a bargain any warlord would jump at!
Then with the sorcerers all out of the way -- except for the Brothers
themselves, and Flindach -- that warty blotchy one is someone to be reckoned
with! -- I'll meet and slay this champion of Hasjarl's and we'll carry all
before us. And if..."
       His voice trailed off. It had occurred to him to wonder why he himself
hadn't been blasted by his own spell. He had never suspected, until now, that
he might be a sorcerer of the First Rank -- having despite a youthful training
in country-sorceries only dabbled in magic since. Perhaps some metaphysical
trick or logical fallacy was involved.... If a sorcerer casts a rune that
midway of the casting blasts _all_ sorcerers, _provided the casting be
finished_, then does he blast himself or...? Or perhaps indeed, the Mouser
began to think boastfully, he was unknown to himself a magus of the First
Rank, or even higher, or --
       In the silence of his thinking, he and Ivivis became aware of
approaching footsteps, first a multitudinous patter but swiftly a tumult. The
gray-clad man and the slavegirl had hardly time to exchange a questioning
apprehensive look when there burst through the draperies, tearing them down,
eight or nine of Gwaay's chiefest henchmen, their faces death-pale, their eyes
staring like madmen's. They raced across the chamber and out the opposite
archway almost before the Mouser could recover from where he'd dodged out of
their way.
       But that was not the end of the footsteps. There was a last pair coming
down the black corridor and at a strange unequal gallop, like a cripple
sprinting, and with a squushy slap at each tread. The Mouser crossed quickly
to Ivivis and put an arm around her. He did not want to be standing alone at
this moment, either.
       Ivivis said, "If your Great Spell missed Hasjarl's sorcerers, and their
disease-spells struck through to Gwaay, now undefended..."
       Her whisper trailed off fearfully as a monstrous figure clad in dark
scarlet robes lurched by swift convulsive stages into view. At first the
Mouser thought it must be Hasjarl of the Mismated Arms, from what he'd heard
of that one. Then he saw that its neck was collared by gray fungus, its right
cheek crimson, its left black, its eyes dripping green ichor and its nose
spattering clear drops. As the loathy creature took a last great stride into
the chamber, its left leg went boneless like a pillar of jelly and its right
leg, striking down stiffly though with a heel splash, broke in midshin and the
jagged bones thrust through the flesh. Its yellow-crusted, red-cracked scurfy
hands snatched futilely at the air for support, and its right arm brushing its
head carried away half the hair on that side.
       Ivivis began to mewl and yelp faintly with horror and she clung to the
Mouser, who himself felt as if a nightmare were lifting its hooves to trample
him.
       In such manner did Prince Gwaay, Lord of the Lower Levels of Quarmall,
come home from his father's funeral, falling in a stenchful, scabrous,
ichorous heap upon the torn-down richly embroidered curtains immediately
beneath the pristine-handsome silver bust of himself in the niche above the
arch.
       The funeral pyre smoldered for a long time, but of all the inhabitants
in that huge and ramified castle-kingdom Brilla the High Eunuch was the only
one who watched it out. Then he collected a few representative pinches of
ashes to preserve; he kept them with some dim idea that they might perhaps act
as some protection, now that the living protector was forever gone.
       Yet the fluffy-gritty gray tokens did not much cheer Brilla as he
wandered desolately into the inner rooms. He was troubled and eunuchlike be-
twittered by thoughts of the war between brothers that must now ensue before
Quarmall had again a single master. Oh, what a tragedy that Lord Quarmal
should have been snatched so suddenly by the Fates with no chance to make
arrangement for the succession! -- though what that arrangement might have
been, considering custom's strictures in Quarmall, Brilla could not say.
Still, Quarmal had always seemed able to achieve the impossible.
       Brilla was troubled too, and rather more acutely, by his guilty
knowledge that Quarmal's concubine Kewissa had evaded the flames. He might be
blamed for that, though he could not see where he had omitted any customary
precaution. And burning would have been small pain indeed to what the poor
girl must suffer now for her transgression. He rather hoped she had slain
herself by knife or poison, though that would doom her spirit to eternal
wandering in the winds between the stars that make them twinkle.
       Brilla realized his steps were taking him to the harem, and he halted
a-quake. He might well find Kewissa there and he did not want to be the one to
turn her in.
       Yet if he stayed in this central section of the Keep, he would
momentarily run into Flindach and he knew he would hold back nothing when
gimleted by that arch-sorcerer's stern witchy gaze. He would have to remind
him of Kewissa's defection.
       So Brilla bethought him of an errand that would take him to the
nethermost sections of the Keep, just above Hasjarl's realm. There was a
storeroom there, his responsibility, which he had not inventoried for a month.
Brilla did not like the Dark Levels of Quarmall -- it was his pride that he
was one of the elite who worked in or at least near sunlight -- but now, by
reason of his anxieties, the Dark Levels began to seem attractive.
       This decision made, Brilla felt slightly cheered. He set off at once,
moving quite swiftly, with a eunuch's peculiar energy, despite his elephantine
bulk.
       He reached the storeroom without incident. When he had kindled a torch
there, the first thing he saw was a small girl-like woman cowering among the
bales of drapery. She wore a lustrous loose yellow robe and had the winsome
triangular face, moss-green hair, and bright blue eyes of an Ilthmarix.
       "Kewissa," he whispered shudderingly yet with motherly warmth. "Sweet
chick..."
       She ran to him. "Oh Brilla, I'm so frightened," she cried softly as she
pressed against his paunch and hid herself in his great-sleeved arms.
       "I know, I know," he murmured, making little clucking noises as he
smoothed her hair and petted her. "You were always frightened of flames, I
remember now. Never mind, Quarmal will forgive when you meet beyond the stars.
Look you, little duck, it's a great risk I run, but because you were the old
Lord's favorite I cherish you dearly. I carry a painless poison ... only a few
drops on the tongue, then darkness and the windy gulfs....A long leap, true,
but better far than what Flindach must order when he discovers -- "
       She pushed back from him. "It was Flindach who commanded me not to
follow My Lord to his last hearth!" she revealed wide-eyed and reproachful.
"He told me the stars directed otherwise and also that this was Quarmal's
dying wish. I doubted and feared Flindach -- he with face so hideous and eyes
so horridly like My Dear Lord's -- yet could not but obey ... with some small
thankfulness, I must confess, dear Brilla."
       "But what reason earthly or unearthly...?" Brilla stammered, his mind
a-whirl.
       Kewissa looked to either side. Then, "I bear Quarmal's quickening
seed," she whispered.
       For a bit this only increased Brilla's confusion. How could Quarmal
have hoped to get a concubine's child accepted as Lord of All when there were
two grown legitimate heirs? Or cared so little for the land's security as to
leave alive even an unborn bastard? Then it occurred to him -- and his heart
shook at the thought -- that Flindach might be seeking to seize supreme power,
using Kewissa's babe and an invented death wish of Quarmal as his pretext
along with those Quarmal-eyes of his. Palace revolutions were not entirely
unknown in Quarmall. Indeed, there was a legend that the present line had
generations ago clambered dagger-fisted to power by that route, though it was
death to repeat the legend.
       Kewissa continued, "I stayed hidden in the harem. Flindach said I'd be
safe. But then Hasjarl's henchmen came searching in Flindach's absence and in
defiance of all customs and decencies. I fled here."
       This continued to make a dreadful sort of sense, Brilla thought. If
Hasjarl suspected Flindach's impious snatch at power, he would instinctively
strike at him, turning the fraternal strife into a three-sided one involving
even -- woe of woes! -- the sunlit apex of Quarmall, which until this moment
had seemed so safe from war's alarums....
       At that very instant, as if Brilla's fears had conjured up their
fruition, the door of the storeroom opened wide and there loomed in it an
uncouth man who seemed the very embodiment of battle's barbarous horrors. He
was so tall his head brushed the lintel; his face was handsome yet stern and
searching-eyed; his red-gold hair hung tangledly to his shoulders; his garment
was a bronze-studded wolfskin tunic; longsword and massy short-handled ax
swung from his belt, and on the longest finger of his right hand Brilla's gaze
-- trained to miss no detail of decor and now fear-sharpened -- noted a ring
with Hasjarl's clenched-fist sigil.
       The eunuch and the girl huddled against each other, quivering.
       Having assured himself that these two were all he faced, the newcomer's
countenance broke into a smile that might have been reassuring on a smaller
man or one less fiercely accoutered. Then Fafhrd said, "Greetings,
Grandfather. I require only that you and your chick help me find the sunlight
and the stables of this benighted realm. Come, we'll plot it out so you may
satisfy me with least danger to yourselves." And he swiftly stepped toward
them, silently for all his size, his gaze returning with interest to Kewissa
as he noted she was not child but woman.
       Kewissa felt that and although her heart was a-flutter, piped up
bravely, "You dare not rape me! I'm with child by a dead man!"
       Fafhrd's smile soured somewhat. Perhaps, he told himself, he should
feel complimented that girls started thinking about rape the instant they saw
him; still he was a little irked. Did they deem him incapable of civilized
seduction because he wore furs and was no dwarf? Oh well, they quickly
learned. But what a horrid way to try to daunt him!
       Meanwhile tubby-fat Grandfather, who Fafhrd now realized was hardly
equipped to be that or father either, said fearful-mincing, "She speaks only
the truth, oh Captain. But I will be o'erjoyed to aid you in any -- "
       There were rapid steps in the passage and the harsh slither of steel
against stone. Fafhrd turned like a tiger. Two guards in the dark-linked
hauberks of Hasjarl's guards were pressing into the room. The fresh-drawn
sword of one had scraped the door-side, while a third behind them cried
sharply now. "Take the Northern turncoat! Slay him if he shows fight. I'll
secure old Quarmal's concubine."
       The two guards started to run at Fafhrd, but he, counterfeiting even
more the tiger, sprang at them twice as suddenly. Graywand coming out of his
scabbard swept sideways up, fending off the sword of the foremost even as
Fafhrd's foot came crushing down on that one's instep. Then Graywand's hilt
crashed backhand into his jaw, so that he lurched against his fellow.
Meanwhile Fafhrd's ax had come into his left hand, and at close quarters he
stroked it into their brains, then shouldering them off as they fell, he drew
back the ax and cast it at the third, so that it lodged in his forehead
between the eyes as he turned to see what was amiss, and he dropped down dead.
       But the footsteps of a fourth and perhaps a fifth could be heard racing
away. Fafhrd sprang toward the door with a growl, stopped with a foot-stamp
and returned as swiftly, stabbing a bloody finger at Kewissa cowering into the
great hulk of blanching Brilla.
       "Old Quarmal's girl? With child by him?" he rapped out and when she
nodded rapidly, swallowing hard, he continued, "Then you come with me. Now!
The castrado too."
       He sheathed Graywand, wrenched his ax from the sergeant's skull,
grabbed Kewissa by the upper arm and strode toward the door with a devilish
snarling head-wave to Brilla to follow.
       Kewissa cried, "Oh mercy, sir! You'll make me lose the child."
       Brilla obeyed, yet twittered as he did, "Kind Captain, we'll be no use
to you, only encumber you in your -- "
       Fafhrd, turning suddenly again, spared him one rapid speech, shaking
the bloody ax for emphasis: "If you think I don't understand the bargaining
value or hostage-worth of even an unborn claimant to a throne, then your skull
is as empty of brains as your loins are of seed -- and I doubt that's the
case. As for you, girl," he added harshly to Kewissa, "if there's anything but
bleat under your green ringlets, you know you're safer with a stranger then
with Hasjarl's hellions and that better your child miscarry than fall into
their hands. Come, I'll carry you." He swept her up. "Follow, eunuch; work
those great thighs of yours if you love living."
       And he made off down the corridor, Brilla trotting ponderously after
and wisely taking great gasping breaths in anticipation of exertions to come.
Kewissa laid her arms around Fafhrd's neck and glanced up at him with
qualified admiration. He himself now gave vent to two remarks which he'd
evidently been saving for an unoccupied moment.
       The first, bitterly sarcastic: "...if he shows fight!"
       The second, self-angry: "Those cursed fans must be deafening me, that I
didn't hear 'em coming!"
       Forty loping paces down the corridor he passed a ramp leading upward
and turned toward a narrower darker corridor.
       From just behind, Brilla called softly yet rapidly, penurious of
breath. "That ramp led to the stables. Where are you taking us, My Captain?"
       "Down!" Fafhrd retorted without pausing in his lope. "Don't panic, I've
a hidey hole for the two of you -- and even a girl-mate for little Prince-
mother Greenilocks here." Then to Kewissa, gruffly, "You're not the only girl
in Quarmall who wants rescuing, nor yet the dearest."
       The Mouser, steeling himself for it, knelt and surveyed the noisome
heap that was Prince Gwaay. The stench was abominably strong despite the
perfumes the Mouser had sprinkled and the incense he had burned but an hour
ago.
       The Mouser had covered with silken sheets and fur robes all the
loathsomeness of Gwaay except for his plagues-stricken pillowed-up face. The
sole feature of this face that had escaped obvious extreme contagion was the
narrow handsome nose, from the end of which there dripped clear fluid, drop by
slow drop, like the ticking of a water clock, while from below the nose
proceeded a continual small nasty retching which was the only reasonably sure
sign that Gwaay was not wholly moribund. For a while Gwaay had made faint
straining moanings like the whispers of a mute, but now even those had ceased.
       The Mouser reflected that it was very difficult indeed to serve a
master who could neither speak, write, nor gesticulate -- particularly when
fighting enemies who now began to seem neither dull nor contemptible. By all
counts Gwaay should have died hours since. Presumably only his steely
sorcerous will and consuming hatred of Hasjarl kept his spirit from fleeing
the horrid torment that housed it.
       The Mouser rose and turned with a questioning shrug toward Ivivis, who
sat now at the long table hemming up two hooded black voluminous sorcerer's
robes, which she had cut down at the Mouser's direction to fit him and
herself. The Mouser had thought that since he now seemed to be Gwaay's sole
remaining sorcerer as well as champion, he should be prepared to appear
dressed as the former and to boast at least one acolyte.
       In answer to the shrug, Ivivis merely wrinkled her nostrils, pinched
them with two dainty fingertips, and shrugged back. True, the Mouser thought,
the stench was growing stronger despite all his attempts to mask it. He
stepped to the table and poured himself a half cup of the thick blood-red
wine, which he'd begun unwillingly to relish a little, although he'd learned
it was indeed fermented from scarlet toadstools. He took a small swallow and
summed up:
       "Here's a pretty witch's kettle of problems. Gwaay's sorcerers blasted
-- all right, yes, by me, I admit it. His henchmen and soldiery fled -- to the
lowest loathy dank dim tunnels, I think, or else gone over to Hasjarl. His
girls vanished save for you. Even his doctors fearful to come nigh him -- the
one I dragged here fainting dead away. His slaves useless with dread -- only
the tread-beasts at the fans keep their heads, and they because they haven't
any! No answer to our message to Flindach suggesting that we league against
Hasjarl. No page to send another message by -- and not even a single picket to
warn us if Hasjarl assaults."
       "You could go over to Hasjarl yourself," Ivivis pointed out.
       The Mouser considered that. "No," he decided, "there's something too
fascinating about a forlorn hope like this. I've always wanted to command one.
And it's only fun to betray the wealthy and victorious. Yet what strategy can
I employ without even a skeleton army?"
       Ivivis frowned. "Gwaay used to say that just as sword-war is but
another means of carrying out diplomacy, so sorcery is but another means of
carrying out sword-war. Spell-war. So you could try your Great Spell again,"
she concluded without vast conviction.
       "Not I!" the Mouser repudiated. "It never touched Hasjarl's twenty-four
or it would have stopped their disease spells against Gwaay. Either they are
of First Rank or else I'm doing the spell backwards -- in which case the
tunnels would probably collapse on me if I tried it again."
       "Then use a different spell," Ivivis suggested brightly. "Raise an army
of veritable skeletons. Drive Hasjarl mad, or put a hex on him so he stubs his
toe at every step. Or turn his soldiers' swords to cheese. Or vanish their
bones. Or transmew all his maids to cats and set their tails afire. Or -- "
       "I'm sorry, Ivivis," the Mouser interposed hurriedly to her mounting
enthusiasm. "I would not confess this to another, but ... that was my only
spell. We must depend on wit and weapons alone. Again I ask you, Ivivis, what
strategy does a general employ when his left is o'erwhelmed, his right takes
flight, and his center is ten times decimated?"
       A slight sweet sound like a silver bell chinked once, or a silver
string plucked high in the harp, interrupted him. Although so faint, it seemed
for a moment to fill the chamber with auditory light. The Mouser and Ivivis
gazed around wonderingly and then at the same moment looked up at the silver
mask of Gwaay in the niche above the arch before which Gwaay's mortal remains
festered silken-wrapped.
       The shimmering metal lips of the statua smiled and parted -- so far as
one might tell in the gloom -- and faintly there came Gwaay's brightest voice,
saying: "Your answer: he attacks!"
       The Mouser blinked. Ivivis dropped her needle. The statua continued,
its eyes seeming to twinkle, "Greetings, hostless captain mine! Greetings,
dear girl. I'm sorry my stink offends you -- yes, yes, Ivivis, I've observed
you pinching your nose at my poor carcass this last hour through -- but then
the world teems with loathiness. Is that not a black death-adder gliding now
through the black robe you stitch?"
       With a gasp of horror Ivivis sprang cat-swift up and aside from the
material and brushed frantically at her legs. The statua gave a naturally
silver laugh, than quickly said, "Your pardon, gentle girl -- I did but jest.
My spirits are too high, too high -- perchance because my body is so low.
Plotting will curb my feyness. Hist now, hist!"
       In Hasjarl's Hall of Sorcery his four-and-twenty wizards stared
desperately at a huge magic screen set up parallel to their long table, trying
with all their might to make the picture on it come clear. Hasjarl himself,
dire in his dark red funeral robes, gazing alternately with open eyes and
through the grommeted holes in his upper lids, as if that perchance might make
the picture sharper, stutteringly berated them for their clumsiness and at
intervals conferred staccato with his military.
       The screen was dark gray, the picture appearing on it in pale green
witch-light. It stood twelve feet high and eighteen feet long. Each wizard was
responsible for a particular square yard of it, projecting on it his share of
the clairvoyant picture.
       This picture was of Gwaay's Hall of Sorcery, but the best effect
achieved so far was a generally blurred image showing the table, the empty
chairs, a low mound on the floor, a high point of silver light, and two
figures moving about -- these last mere salamanderlike blobs with arms and
legs attached, so that not even the sex could be determined, if indeed they
were human at all or even male or female.
       Sometimes a yard of the picture would come clear as a flowerbed on a
bright day, but it would always be a yard with neither of the figures in it or
anything of more interest than an empty chair. Then Hasjarl would bark sudden
for the other wizards to do likewise, or for the successful wizard to trade
squares with someone whose square had a figure in it, and the picture would
invariably get worse and Hasjarl would screech and spray spittle, and then the
picture would go completely bad, swimming everywhere or with squares all
jumbled and overlapping like an unsolved puzzle, and the twenty-four sorcerers
would have to count off squares and start over again while Hasjarl disciplined
them with fearful threats.
       Interpretations of the picture by Hasjarl and his aides differed
considerably. The absence of Gwaay's sorcerers seemed to be a good thing,
until someone suggested they might have been sent to infiltrate Hasjarl's
Upper Levels for a close-range thaumaturgic attack. One lieutenant got
fearfully tongue-lashed for suggesting the two blob-figures might be demons
seen unblurred in their true guise -- though even after Hasjarl had discharged
his anger, he seemed a little frightened by the idea. The hopeful notion that
all Gwaay's sorcerers had been wiped out was rejected when it was ascertained
that no sorcerous spells had been directed at them recently by Hasjarl or any
of his wizards.
       One of the blob-figures now left the picture entirely, and the point of
silvery light faded. This touched off further speculation, which was
interrupted by the entry of several of Hasjarl's torturers looking rather
battered and a dozen of his guards. The guards were surrounding -- with naked
swords aimed at his chest and back -- the figure of an unarmed man in a
wolfskin tunic with arms bound tight behind him. He was masked with a red silk
eye-holed sack pulled down over his head and hair, and a black robe trailed
behind him.
       "We've taken the Northerner, Lord Hasjarl!" the leader of the dozen
guards reported joyously. "We cornered him in your torture room. He disguised
himself as one of those and tried to lie his way through our lines, bumped and
going on his knees, but his height still betrayed him."
       "Good, Yissim -- I'll reward you," Hasjarl approved. "But what of my
father's treacherous concubine and the great castrado who were with him when
he slew three of your fellows?"
       "They were still with him when we glimpsed him near Gwaay's realm and
gave chase. We lost 'em when he doubled back to the torture room, but the hunt
goes on."
       "Find 'em, you were best," Hasjarl ordered grimly, "or the sweets of my
reward will be soured entire by the pains of my displeasure." Then to Fafhrd,
"So, traitor! Now I will play with you the wrist game -- aye, and a hundred
others too, until you are wearied of sport."
       Fafhrd answered loudly and clearly through his red mask, "I'm no
traitor, Hasjarl. I was only tired of your twitching and of your torturing of
girls."
       There came a sibilant cry from the sorcerers. Turning, Hasjarl saw that
one of them had made the low mound on the floor come clear, so that it was
clearly seen as a stricken man covered to his pillowed head.
       "Closer!" Hasjarl cried -- all eagerness, no threat -- and perhaps
because they were neither startled nor threatened, each wizard did his work
perfectly, so that there came green-pale onto the screen Gwaay's face, wide as
an oxcart and team, the plagues visible by the huge pustules and crustings and
fungoid growths if not by their colors, the eyes like great vats stewing with
ichor, the mouth a quaking bog-hole, while each drop that fell from the nose-
tip looked a gallon.
       Hasjarl cried thickly, like a man choking with strong drink, "Joy, oh
joy! My heart will break!"
       The screen went black, the room dead silent, and into it from the
further archway there came gliding noiselessly through the air a tiny bone-
gray shape. It soared on unflapping wings like a hawk searching its prey, high
above the swords that struck at it. Then turning in a smooth silent curve, it
swooped straight at Hasjarl and, evading his hands that snatched at it too
late, tapped him on the breast and fell to the floor at his feet.
       It was a dart folded from parchment on which lines of characters showed
at angles. Nothing more deadly than that.
       Hasjarl snatched it up, pulled it crackingly open, and read aloud:
       "Dear Brother. Let us meet on the instant in the Ghost Hall to settle
the succession. Bring your four-and-twenty sorcerers. I'll bring one. Bring
your champion. I'll bring mine. Bring your henchmen and guards. Bring
yourself. I'll be brought. Or perhaps you'd prefer to spend the evening
torturing girls. Signed (by direction) Gwaay."
       Hasjarl crumpled the parchment in his fist and peering over it
thoughtful-evil, rapped out staccato: "We'll go! He means to play on my
brotherly pity -- that would be sweet. Or else to trap us, but I'll out-trick
him!"
       Fafhrd called boldly, "You may be able to best your death-rotten
brother, oh Hasjarl, but what of his champion? -- cunninger than Zobold, more
battle-fierce than a rogue elephant! Such a one can cut through your cheesy
guards as easy as I bested 'em one-to-five in the Keep, and be at your noisy
throat! You'll need me!"
       Hasjarl thought for a heartbeat, then turning toward Fafhrd said, "I'm
not mind-proud. I'll take advice from a dead dog. Bring him with us. Keep him
bound, but bring his weapons."
       Along a wide low tunnel that trended slowly upward and was lit by wall-
set torches flaming no bluer-bright than marsh gas and as distant-seeming each
from the next as coastal beacons, the Mouser striding swiftly yet most warily
led a strange short cortege.
       He wore a black robe with peaked black hood that thrown forward would
hide his face entirely. Under it he carried at his belt his sword and dagger
and also a skin of the blood-red toadstool wine, but in his fingers he bore a
thin black wand tipped with a silver star, to remind him that his primary
current role was Sorcerer Extraordinary to Gwaay.
       Behind him trotted two-abreast four of the great-legged tiny-headed
tread-slaves, looking almost like dark walking cones, especially when
silhouetted by a torch just passed.
       They bore between them, each clutching a pole-end in both dwarfish
hands, a litter of bloodwood and ebony ornately carved, whereon rested
mattressed and covered by furs and silks and richly embroidered fabrics the
stenchful, helpless flesh and dauntless spirit of the young Lord of the Lower
Levels.
       Close behind Gwaay's litter followed what seemed a slightly smaller
version of the Mouser. It was Ivivis, masquerading as his acolyte. She held a
fold of her hood as a sort of windbreak in front of her mouth and nose, and
frequently she sniffed a handkerchief steeped in spirits of camphor and
ammonia. Under her arm she carried a silver gong in a woolen sack and a
strange thin wooden mask in another.
       The splayed callused feet of the tread-slaves struck the stony floor
with a faint _hrush_, over which came at long regular intervals Gwaay's gargly
retching. Other sound there was none.
       The walls and low ceiling teemed with pictures, mostly in yellow ocher,
of demons, strange beasts, bat-winged girls, and other infernal beauties.
Their slow looming and fading was nightmarish, yet gently so. All in all, it
was one of the pleasantest journeys the Mouser could recall, equal of a trip
he had once made by moonlight across the roofs of Lankhmar to hang a wilting
wreath on a forgotten tower-top statue of the God of Thieves, and light a
small blue fire of brandy to him.
       "Attack!" he murmured humorously and wholly to himself. "Forward, my
big-foot phalanx! Forward, my terror-striking war-car! Forward, my dainty
rearguard! Forward, my Host!"
       Brilla and Kewissa and Friska sat quiet as mice in the Ghost Hall
beside the dried-up fountain pool yet near the open door of the chamber that
was their appointed hiding place. The girls were whispering together, head
leaned to head, yet that was no noisier than the squeaking of mice, nor was
the occasional high sigh Brilla let slip.
       Beyond the fountain was the great half open door through which the sole
faint light came questing and through which Fafhrd had brought them before
doubling back to draw off the pursuit. Some of the cobwebs stretching across
it had been torn away by Brilla's ponderous passage.
       Taking that door and the one to their hiding place as two opposite
corners of the room, the two remaining opposite corners were occupied by a
wide black archway and a narrow one, each opening on a large section of stony
floor raised three steps above the still larger floor section around the
dried-up pool. Elsewhere in the wall were many small doors, all shut,
doubtless leading to onetime bed chambers. Over all hung the pale mortared
great black slabs of the shallowly domed ceiling. So much their eyes, long
accustomed to the darkness, could readily distinguish.
       Brilla, who recognized that this place had once housed a harem, was
musing melancholically that now it had become a kind of tiniest harem again,
with eunuch -- himself -- and pregnant girl -- Kewissa -- gossiping with
restless high-spirited girl -- Friska -- who was fretting for the safety of
her tall barbarian lover. Old times! He had wanted to sweep up a bit and find
some draperies, even if rotten ones, to hang and spread, but Friska had
pointed out that they mustn't leave clues to their presence.
       There came a faint sound through the great door. The girls quit their
whispering and Brilla his sighs and musings, and they listened with all their
beings. Then more noises came -- footsteps and the knock of a sheathed sword
against the wall of a tunnel -- and they sprang silently up and scurried back
into their hiding chamber and silently shut the door behind them, and the
Ghost Hall was briefly alone with its ghosts once more.
       A helmeted guard in the hauberk of Hasjarl's guards appeared in the
great door and stood peering about with arrow nocked to the taut string of a
short bow he held crosswise. Then he motioned with his shoulder and came
sneaking in followed by three of his fellows and by four slaves holding aloft
yellowly flaming torches, which cast the monstrous shadows of the guardsmen
across the dusty floor and the shadows of their heads against the curving far
wall, as they spied about for signs of trap or ambush.
       Some bats swooped about and fled the torchlight through the archways.
       The first guardsman whistled then down the corridor behind him and
waved an arm and there came two parties of slaves, who applied themselves each
to a side of the great door, so that it groaned and creaked loudly at its
hinges, and they pushed it open wide, though one of them leaped convulsively
as a spider fell on him from the disturbed cobwebs, or he thought it did.
       Then more guards came, each with a torch-slave, and moved about calling
softly back and forth, and tried all the shut doors and peered long and
suspiciously into the black spaces beyond the narrow archway and the wide one,
but all returned quite swiftly to form a protective semicircle around the
great door and enclosed most of the floor space of the central section of the
Ghost Hall.
       Then into that shielded space Hasjarl came striding, surrounded by his
henchmen and followed at heel by his two dozen sorcerers closely ranked. With
Hasjarl too came Fafhrd, still arm-bound and wearing his red bag-mask and
menaced by the drawn swords of his guards. More torch-slaves came too, so that
the Ghost Hall was flaringly lit around the great door, though elsewhere a
mixture of glare and black shadow.
       Since Hasjarl wasn't speaking, no one else was. Not that the Lord of
the Upper Levels was altogether silent -- he was coughing constantly, a
hacking bark, and spitting gobbets of phlegm into a finely embroidered
kerchief. After each small convulsion he would glare suspiciously around him,
drooping evilly one pierced eyelid to emphasize his wariness.
       Then there was a tiny scurrying and one called, "A rat!" Another loosed
an arrow into the shadows around the pool where it rasped stone, and Hasjarl
demanded loudly why his ferrets had been forgotten -- and his great hounds
too, for that matter, and his owls to protect him against poison-toothed bats
Gwaay might launch at him -- and swore to flay the right hands of the
neglectful ones.
       It came again, that swift-traveling rattle of tiny claws on smooth
stone, and more arrows were loosed futilely to skitter across the floor, and
guards shifted position nervously, and in the midst of all that Fafhrd cried,
"Up shields, some of you, and make walls to either side of Hasjarl! Have you
not thought that a dart, and not a paper one this time, might silently wing
from either archway and drive through your dear Lord's throat and stop his
precious coughing forever?"
       Several leaped guiltily to obey that order and Hasjarl did not wave
them away and Fafhrd laughed and remarked, "Masking a champion makes him more
dreadsome, oh Hasjarl, but tying his hands behind him is not so apt to impress
the enemy -- and has other drawbacks. If there should now come suddenly a-rush
that one wilier than Zobold, weightier than a mad elephant to tumble and hurl
aside your panicky guards -- "
       "Cut his bonds!" Hasjarl barked, and someone began to saw with a dagger
behind Fafhrd's back. "But don't give him his sword or ax! Yet hold them ready
for him!"
       Fafhrd writhed his shoulders and flexed his great forearms and began to
massage them and laughed again through his mask.
       Hasjarl fumed and then ordered all the shut doors tried once more.
Fafhrd readied himself for action as they came to the one behind which Friska
and the two others were hidden, for he knew it had no bolt or bar. But it held
firm against all shoving. Fafhrd could imagine Brilla's great back braced
against it, with the girls perhaps pushing at his stomach, and he smiled under
the red silk.
       Hasjarl fumed a while longer and cursed his brother for his delay and
swore he had intended mercy to his brother's minions and girls, but now no
longer. Then one of Hasjarl's henchmen suggested Gwaay's dart-message might
have been a ruse to get them out of the way while an attack was launched from
below through other tunnels or even by way of the air-shafts, and Hasjarl
seized that henchman by the throat and shook him and demanded why, if he had
expected that, he hadn't spoken earlier.
       At that moment a gong sounded, high and silver-sweet, and Hasjarl
loosed his henchmen and looked around wonderingly. Again the silvery gong-
note, then through the wider black archway there slowly stepped two monstrous
figures each bearing a forward pole of an ornately carved black and red
litter.
       All of those in the Ghost Hall were familiar with the tread-slaves, but
to see them anywhere except on their belts was almost as great and grotesque a
wonder as to see them for the first time. It seemed to portend unsettlements
of custom and dire upheavals, and so there was much murmuring and some
shrinking.
       The tread-slaves continued to step ponderously forward, and their mates
came into view behind them. The four advanced almost to the edge of the raised
section of floor and set the litter down and folded their dwarfed arms as well
as they could, hooking fingers to fingers across their gigantic chests, and
stood motionless.
       Then through the same archway there swiftly paced the figure of a
rather small sorcerer in black robe and hood that hid his features, and close
behind him like his shadow a slightly smaller figure identically clad.
       The Black Sorcerer took his stand to one side of the litter and a
little ahead of it, his acolyte behind him to his right, and he lifted
alongside his cowl a wand tipped with glittering silver and said loudly and
impressively, "I speak for Gwaay, Master of Demons and Lord of All Quarmall! -
- as we will prove!"
       The Mouser was using his deepest thaumaturgic voice, which none but
himself had ever heard, except for the occasion on which he had blasted
Gwaay's sorcerers -- and come to think of it, that had ended with no one else
having heard either. He was enjoying himself hugely, marveling greatly at his
own audacity.
       He paused just long enough, then slowly pointed his wand at the low
mound on the litter, threw up his other arm in an imperious gesture, palm
forward, and commanded, "On your knees, vermin, all of you, and do obeisance
to your sole rightful ruler, Lord Gwaay, at whose name demons blench!"
       A few of the foremost fools actually obeyed him -- evidently Hasjarl
had cowed them all too well -- while most of the others in the front rank
goggled apprehensively at the muffled figure in the litter -- truly, it was an
advantage having Gwaay motionless and supine, looking like Death's horridest
self: it made him a more mysterious threat.
       Searching over their heads from the cavern of his cowl, the Mouser
spotted one he guessed to be Hasjarl's champion -- gods, he was a whopper, big
as Fafhrd! -- and knowledgeable in psychology if that red silk bag-mask were
his own idea. The Mouser didn't relish the idea of battling such a one, but
with luck it wouldn't come to that.
       Then there burst through the ranks of the awed guards, whipping them
aside with a short lash, a hunch-shouldered figure in dark scarlet robes --
Hasjarl at last! and coming to the fore just as the plot demanded.
       Hasjarl's ugliness and frenzy surpassed the Mouser's expectations. The
Lord of the Upper Levels drew himself up facing the litter and for a
suspenseful moment did naught but twitch, stutter, and spray spittle like the
veriest idiot. Then suddenly he got his voice and barked most impressively and
surely louder than any of his great hounds:
       "By right of death -- suffered lately or soon -- lately by my father,
star-smitten and burned to ash -- soon by my impious brother, stricken by my
sorceries -- and who dare not speak for himself, but must fee charlatans -- I,
Hasjarl, do proclaim myself sole Lord of Quarmall -- and of all within it --
demon or man!"
       Then Hasjarl started to turn, most likely to order forward some of his
guards to seize Gwaay's party, or perhaps to wave an order to his sorcerers to
strike them down magically, but in that instant the Mouser clapped his hands
together loudly. At that signal, Ivivis, who'd stepped between him and the
litter, threw back her cowl and opened her robe and let them fall behind her
almost in one continuous gesture -- and the sight revealed held everyone
spellbound, even Hasjarl, as the Mouser had known it would.
       Ivivis was dressed in a transparent black silk tunic -- the merest
blackly opal gleaming over her pale flesh and slimly youthful figure -- but on
her face she wore the white mask of a hag, female yet with mouth a-grin
showing fangs and with fiercely staring eyes red-balled and white-irised, as
the Mouser had swiftly repainted them at the direction of Gwaay, speaking from
his silver statua. Long green hair mixed with white fell from the mask behind
Ivivis and some thin strands of it before her shoulders. Upright before her in
her right hand she held ritualistically a large pruning knife.
       The Mouser pointed straight at Hasjarl, on whom the eyes of the mask
were already fixed, and he commanded in his deepest voice, "Bring that one
here to me, oh Witch-Mother!" and Ivivis stepped swiftly forward.
       Hasjarl took a backward step and stared horror-enchanted at his
approaching nemesis, all motherly-cannibalistic above, all elfin-maidenly
below, with his father's eyes to daunt him and with the cruel knife to suggest
judgment upon himself for the girls he had lustingly done to death or lifelong
crippledness.
       The Mouser knew he had success within his grasp and there remained only
the closing of the fingers.
       At that instant there sounded from the other end of the chamber a great
muffled gong-note deep as Gwaay's had been silvery-high, shuddering the bones
by its vibrancy. Then from either side of the narrow black archway at the
opposite end of the hall from Gwaay's litter, there rose to the ceiling with a
hollow roar twin pillars of white fire, commanding all eyes and shattering the
Mouser's spell.
       The Mouser's most instant reaction was inwardly to curse such superior
stage-management.
       Smoke billowed out against the great black squares of the ceiling, the
pillars sank to white jets, man-high, and there strode forward between them
the figure of Flindach in his heavily embroidered robes and with the Golden
Symbol of Power at his waist, but with the Cowl of Death thrown back to show
his blotched warty face and his eyes like those in Ivivis' mask. The High
Steward threw wide his arms in a proud imploring gesture and in his deep and
resonant voice that filled the Ghost Hall recited thus:
       "Oh Gwaay! Oh Hasjarl! In the name of your father burned and beyond the
stars, and in the name of your grandmother whose eyes I too bear, think of
Quarmall! Think of the security of this your kingdom and of how your wars
ravage her. Forego your enmities, abjure your brotherly hates, and cast your
lots now to settle the succession -- the winner to be Lord Paramount here, the
loser instantly to depart with great escort and coffers of treasure, and
journey across the Mountains of Hunger and the desert and the Sea of the East
and live out his life in the Eastern Lands in all comfort and high dignity. Or
if not by customary lot, then let your champions battle to the death to decide
it -- all else to follow the same. Oh Hasjarl, oh Gwaay, I have spoken." And
he folded his arms and stood there between the two pale flame pillars still
burning high as he.
       Fafhrd had taken advantage of the shocks to seize his sword and ax from
the ones holding them nervelessly, and to push forward by Hasjarl as if
properly to ward him standing alone and unshielded in front of his men. Now
Fafhrd lightly nudged Hasjarl and whispered through his bag-mask, "Take him up
on it, you were best. I'll win your stuffy loathy catacomb kingdom for you --
aye, and once rewarded depart from it swifter ever than Gwaay!"
       Hasjarl grimaced angrily at him and turning toward Flindach shouted, --
"_I_ am Lord Paramount here, and no need of lots to determine it! Yes, and I
have my arch-magi to strike down any who sorcerously challenge me! -- and my
great champion to smite to mincemeat any who challenge me with swords!"
       Fafhrd threw out his chest and glared about through red-ringed eyeholes
to back him up.
       The silence that followed Hasjarl's boast was cut as if by keenest
knife when a voice came piercingly dulcet from the unstirring low mound on the
litter, cornered by its four impassive tread-slaves, or from a point just
above it.
       "I, Gwaay of the Lower Levels, am Lord Paramount of Quarmall, and not
my poor brother there, for whose damned soul I grieve. And I have sorceries
which have saved my life from the evilest of his sorceries and I have a
champion who will smite his champion to chaff!"
       All were somewhat daunted at that seemingly magical speaking except
Hasjarl, who giggled sputteringly, twitching a-main, and then as if he and his
brother were children alone in a playroom, cried out, "Liar and squeaker of
lies! Effeminate boaster! Puny charlatan! Where is this great champion of
yours? Call him forth! Bid him appear! Oh confess it now, he's but a figment
of your dying thoughts! Oh, ho, ho, ho!"
       All began to look around wonderingly at that, some thoughtful, some
apprehensive. But as no figure appeared, certainly not a warlike one, some of
Hasjarl's men began to snigger with him. Others of them took it up.
       The Gray Mouser had no wish to risk his skin -- not with Hasjarl's
champion looking a meaner foe every moment, side armed with ax like Fafhrd and
now apparently even acting as counselor to his lord -- perhaps a sort of
captain-general behind the curtain, as he was behind Gwaay's -- yet the Mouser
was almost irresistibly tempted by this opportunity to cap all surprises with
a master surprise.
       And in that instant there sounded forth again Gwaay's eerie bell-voice,
coming not from his vocal cords, for they were rotted away, but created by the
force of his deathless will marshaling the unseen atomies of the air:
       "From the blackest depths, unseen by all, in very center of the Hall --
Appear, my champion!"
       That was too much for the Mouser. Ivivis had reassumed her hooded black
robe while Flindach had been speaking, knowing that the terror of her hag-mask
and maiden-form was a fleeting thing, and she again stood beside the Mouser as
his acolyte. He handed her his wand in one stiff gesture, not looking at her,
and lifting his hands to the throat of his robe, he threw it and his hood back
and dropped them behind him, and drawing Scalpel whistling from her sheath
leaped forward with a heel-stamp to the top of the three steps and crouched
glaring with sword raised above head, looking in his gray silks and silver a
figure of menace, albeit a rather small one and carrying at his belt a
wineskin as well as a dagger.
       Meanwhile Fafhrd, who had been facing Hasjarl to have a last word with
him, now ripped off his red bag-mask, whipped Graywand screaming from his
sheath, and leaped forward likewise with an intimidating stamp.
       Then they saw and recognized each other.
       The pause that ensued was to the spectators more testimony to the
fearsomeness of each -- the one so dreadful-tall, the other metamorphosed from
sorcerer. Evidently they daunted each other greatly.
       Fafhrd was the first to react, perhaps because there had been something
hauntingly familiar to him all along about the manner and speech of the Black
Sorcerer. He started a gargantuan laugh and managed to change it in the nick
into a screaming snarl of, "Trickster! Chatterer! Player at magic! Sniffer
after spells. Wart! _Little Toad_!"
       The Mouser, mayhap the more amazed because he had noted and discounted
the resemblance of the masked champion to Fafhrd, now took his comrade's cue -
- and just in time, for he was about to laugh too -- and boomed back,
       "Boaster! Bumptious brawler! Bumbling fumbler after girls! Oaf! Lout!
Big Feet!"
       The taut spectators thought these taunts a shade mild, but the
spiritedness of their delivery more than made up for that.
       Fafhrd advanced another stamp, crying, "Oh, I have dreamed of this
moment. I will mince you from your thickening toenails to your cheesy brain!"
       The Mouser bounced for his stamp, so as not to lose height going down
the steps, and skirled out the while, "All my rages find happy vent. I will
gut you of each lie, especially those about your northern travels!"
       Then Fafhrd cried, "Remember Ool Hrusp!" and the Mouser responded,
"Remember Lithquil!" and they were at it.
       Now for all most of the Quarmallians knew, Lithquil and Ool Hrusp might
be and doubtless were places where the two heroes had earlier met in fight, or
battlefields where they had warred on opposing sides, or even girls they had
fought over. But in actuality Lithquil was the Mad Duke of the city of Ool
Hrusp, to humor whom Fafhrd and the Mouser had once staged a most realistic
and carefully rehearsed duel lasting a full half hour. So those Quarmallians
who anticipated a long and spectacular battle were in no wise disappointed.
       First Fafhrd aimed three mighty slashing blows, any one enough to
cleave the Mouser in twain, but the Mouser deflected each at the last moment
strongly and cunningly with Scalpel, so that they whished an inch above his
head, singing the harsh chromatic song of steel on steel.
       Next the Mouser thrust thrice at Fafhrd, leaping skimmingly like a
flying fish and disengaging his sword each time from Graywand's parry. But
Fafhrd always managed to slip his body aside, with nearly incredible swiftness
for one so big, and the thin blade would go hurtlessly by him.
       This interchange of slash and thrust was but the merest prologue to the
duel, which now carried into the area of the dried-up fountain pool and became
very wild-seeming indeed, forcing the spectators back more than once, while
the Mouser improvised by gushing out some of his thick blood-red toadstool
wine when they were momentarily pressed body-to-body in a fierce exchange, so
that they both appeared sorely wounded.
       There were three in the Ghost Hall who took no interest in this seeming
masterpiece of duels and hardly watched it. Ivivis was not one of them -- she
soon threw back her hood, tore off her hag-mask, and came following the fight
close, cheering on the Mouser. Nor were they Brilla, Kewissa and Friska -- for
at the sound of swords the two girls had insisted on opening their door a
crack despite the eunuch's solicitous apprehensions and now they were all
peering through, head above head, Friska in the midst agonizing at Fafhrd's
perils.
       Gwaay's eyes were clotted and the lids glued with ichor, and the
tendons were dissolved whereby he might have lifted his head. Nor did he seek
to explore with his sorcerous senses in the direction of the fight. He clung
to existence solely by the thread of his great hatred for his brother, all
else of life was to him less than a shadow-show; yet his hate held for him all
of life's wonder and sweetness and high excitement -- it was enough.
       The mirror image of that hate in Hasjarl was at this moment strong
enough too to dominate wholly his healthy body's instincts and hungers and all
the plots and images in his crackling thoughts. He saw the first stroke of the
fight, he saw Gwaay's litter unguarded, and then as if he had seen entire a
winning combination of chess and been hypnotized by it, he made his move
without another cogitation.
       Widely circling the fight and moving swiftly in the shadows like a
weasel, he mounted the three steps by the wall and headed straight for the
litter.
       There were no ideas in his mind at all, but there were some shadowy
images distortedly seen as from a great distances -- one of himself as a tiny
child toddling by night along a wall to Gwaay's crib, to scratch him with a
pin.
       He did not spare a glance for the tread-slaves, and it is doubtful if
they even saw, or at least took note of him, so rudimentary were their minds.
       He leaned eagerly between two of them and curiously surveyed his
brother. His nostrils drew in at the stench, and his mouth contracted to its
tightest sphincter yet still smiled.
       He plucked a wide dagger of blued steel from a sheath at his belt and
poised it above his brother's face, which by its plagues was almost
unrecognizable as such. The honed edges of the dagger were tiny hooks directed
back from the point.
       The sword-clashing below reached one of its climaxes, but Hasjarl did
not mark it.
       He said softly, "Open your eyes, Brother. I want you to speak once
before I slay you."
       There was no reply from Gwaay -- not a motion, not a whisper, not a
bubble of retching.
       "Very well," Hasjarl said harshly, "then die a prim shut-mouth," and he
drove down the dagger.
       It stopped violently a hairbreadth above Gwaay's upper cheek, and the
muscles of Hasjarl's arm driving it were stabbingly numbed by the jolt they
got.
       Gwaay did open his eyes then, which was not very pleasant to behold
since there was nothing in them but green ichor.
       Hasjarl instantly closed his own eyes, but continued to peer down
through the holes in his upper lids.
       Then he heard Gwaay's voice like a silver mosquito by his ear saying,
"You have made a slight oversight, dear brother. You have chosen the wrong
weapon. After our father's burning you swore to me my life was sacrosanct --
until you killed me by crushing. 'Until I crush it out,' you said. The gods
hear only our words, Brother, not our intentions. Had you come lugging a
boulder, like the curious gnome you are, you might have accomplished your
aim."
       "Then I'll have you crushed!" Hasjarl retorted angrily, leaning his
face closer and almost shouting. "Aye, and I'll sit by and listen to your
bones crunch -- what bones you have left! You're as great a fool as I, Gwaay,
for you too after our father's funeral promised not to slay me. Aye, and
you're a greater fool, for now you've spilled to me your little secret of how
you may be slain."
       "I swore not to slay you with spells or steel or venom or with my
hand," the bright insect voice of Gwaay replied. "Unlike you, I said nothing
at all of crushing." Hasjarl felt a strange tingling in his flesh while in his
nostrils there was an acrid odor like that of lightning mingling with the
stink of corruption.
       Suddenly Gwaay's hands thrust up to the palms out of his overly rich
bedclothes. The flesh was shredding from the finger bones which pointed
straight up, invokingly.
       Hasjarl almost started back, but caught himself. He'd die, he told
himself, before he'd cringe from his brother. He was aware of strong forces
all about him.
       There was a muffled grating noise and then an odd faintly pattering
snowfall on the coverlet and on Hasjarl's neck ... a thin snowfall of pale
gritty stuff ... grains of mortar....
       "Yes, you will crush me, dear brother," Gwaay admitted tranquilly. "But
if you would know how you will crush me, recall my small special powers ... or
else _look up_!"
       Hasjarl turned his head, and there was the great black basalt slab big
as the litter rushing down, and the one moment of life left Hasjarl was
consumed in hearing Gwaay say, "You are wrong again, my comrade."
       Fafhrd stopped a sword-slash in midcourse when he heard the crash and
the Mouser almost nicked him with his rehearsed parry. They lowered their
blades and looked, as did all others in the central section of the Ghost Hall.
       Where the litter had been was now only the thick basalt slab mortar-
streaked with the litter-poles sticking out from under, and above in the
ceiling the rectangular white hole whence the slab had been dislodged. The
Mouser thought, _That's a larger thing to move by thinking than a checker or
jar, yet the same black substance._
       Fafhrd thought, _Why didn't the whole roof fall? -- there's the
strangeness._
       Perhaps the greatest wonder of the moment was the four tread-slaves
still standing at the four corners, eyes forward, fingers locked across their
chests, although the slab had missed them only by inches in its falling.
       Then some of Hasjarl's henchmen and sorcerers who had seen their Lord
sneak to the litter now hurried up to it but fell back when they beheld how
closely the slab approached the floor and marked the tiny rivulet of blood
that ran from under it. Their minds quailed at the thought of those brothers
who had hated each other so dearly, and now their bodies locked in an obscene
interpenetrating and commingling embrace.
       Meanwhile Ivivis came running to the Mouser and Friska to Fafhrd to
bind up their wounds, and were astonished and mayhap a shade irked to be told
there were none. Kewissa and Brilla came too and Fafhrd with one arm around
Friska reached out the wine-bloody hand of the other and softly closed it
around Kewissa's wrist, smiling at her friendlily.
       Then the great muffled gong-note sounded again and the twin pillars of
white flame briefly roared to the ceiling to either side of Flindach. They
showed by their glare that many men had entered by the narrow archway behind
Flindach and now stood around him: stout guardsmen from the companies of the
Keep with weapons at the ready, and several of his own sorcerers.
       As the flame-pillars swiftly shrank, Flindach imperiously raised hand
and resonantly spoke:
       "The stars which may not be cheated foretold the doom of the Lord of
Quarmall. All of you heard those two" -- he pointed toward the shattered
litter -- "proclaim themselves Lord of Quarmall. So the stars are twice
satisfied. And the gods, who hear our words to each tiniest whisper, and order
our fates by them, are content. It remains that I reveal to you the next Lord
of Quarmall."
       He pointed at Kewissa and intoned, "_The next Lord of Quarmall but one_
sleeps and waxes in the womb of her, wife of the Quarmal so lately honored
with burnings and immolations and ceremonious rites."
       Kewissa shrank, and her blue eyes went wide. Then she began to beam.
       Flindach continued, "It still remains that I reveal to you _the next
Lord of Quarmall_, who shall tutor Queen Kewissa's babe until he arrives at
manhood a perfect king and all-wise sorcerer, under whom our buried realm will
enjoy perpetual inward peace and outward-raiding prosperity."
       Then Flindach reached behind his left shoulder. All thought he purposed
to draw forward the Cowl of Death over his head and brows and hideous warty
winy cheeks for some still more solemn speaking. But instead he grasped his
neck by the short hairs of the nape and drew it upward and forward and his
scalp and all his hair with it, and then the skin of his face came off with
his scalp as he drew his hand down and to the side, and there was revealed,
sweat-gleaming a little, the unblemished face and jutting nose and full mobile
smiling lips of Quarmal, while his terrible blood-red white-irised eyes gazed
at them all mildly.
       "I was forced to visit Limbo for a space," he explained with a solemn
yet genial fatherly familiarity, "while others were Lords of Quarmall in my
stead and the stars sent down their spears. It was best so, though I lost two
sons by it. Only so might our land be saved from ravenous self-war."
       He held up for all to see the limp mask with empty lash-fringed
eyeholes and purple-blotched left cheek and wart-triangled right. He said,
"And now I bid you all honor great and puissant Flindach, the loyalest Master
of Magicians a king ever had, who lent me his face for a necessary deception
and his body to be burned for mine with waxen mask of mine to cover his poor
head-front, which had sacrificed all. In solemnly supervising my own high
flaming obsequies, I honored only Flindach. For him my women burned. This his
face, well preserved by my own skills as flayer and swift tanner, will hang
forever in place of honor in our halls, while the spirit of Flindach holds my
chair for me in the Dark World beyond the stars, a Lord Paramount there until
I come, and eternally a Hero of Quarmall."
       Before any cheering or hailing could be started -- which would have
taken a little while, since all were much bemused -- Fafhrd cried out, "Oh
cunningest king, I honor you and your babe so highly and the Queen who carries
him in her womb that I will guard her moment by moment, not moving a pace from
her, until I and my small comrade here are well outside Quarmall -- say a mile
-- together with horses for our conveyance and with the treasures promised us
by those two late kings." And he gestured as Quarmal had toward the crushed
litter.
       The Mouser had been about to launch at Quarmal some subtly intimidating
remark about his own skills as a sorcerer in blasting Gwaay's eleven. But now
he decided that Fafhrd's words were sufficient and well-spoken, save for the
slighting reference to himself, and he held his peace.
       Kewissa started to withdraw her hand from Fafhrd's, but he tightened
his grip just a little, and she looked at him with understanding. In fact, she
called brightly to Quarmal, "Oh, Lord Husband, this man saved my life and your
son's from Hasjarl's fiends in a storeroom of the Keep. I trust him," while
Brilla, dabbing tears of joy from his eyes with his undersleeve, seconded her
with, "My very dear Lord, she speaks only nakedest truth, bare as a newborn
babe or new-wed wife."
       Quarmal raised his hand a little, reprovingly, as if such speaking were
unnecessary and somewhat out of place, and smiling thinly at Fafhrd and the
Mouser said, "It shall be as you have spoken. I am neither ungenerous nor
unperceptive. Know that it was not altogether by chance that my late sons
unbeknown to each other hired you two friends -- also mutually unknowing -- to
be their champions. Furthermore know that I am not altogether unaware of the
curiosities of Ningauble of the Seven Eyes or of the Spells of Sheelba of the
Eyeless Face. We grandmaster sorcerers have a -- But to speak more were only
to kindle the curiosity of the gods and alert the trolls and attract the
attention of the restless hungry Fates. Enough is enough."
       Looking at Quarmal's slitted eyes, the Mouser was glad he had not
boasted, and even Fafhrd shivered a little.
       Fafhrd cracked whip above the four-horse team to set them pulling the
high-piled wagon more briskly through this black sticky stretch of road deeply
marked with cart tracks and the hoofprints of oxen, a mile from Quarmall.
Friska and Ivivis were turned around on the seat beside him to wave as long a
farewell as they might to Kewissa and the eunuch Brilla, standing at the
roadside with four impassive guardsmen of Quarmall, to whom they had but now
been released.
       The Gray Mouser, sprawled on his stomach atop the load, waved too, but
only with his left hand -- in his right he held a cocked crossbow while his
eyes searched the trees about for sign of ambush.
       Yet the Mouser was not truly apprehensive. He thought that Quarmal
would hardly be apt to try any tricks against such a proven warrior and
sorcerer as himself -- or Fafhrd too, of course. The old Lord had shown
himself a most gracious host during the last few hours, plying them with rare
wines and loading them with rich gifts beyond what they'd asked or what the
Mouser had purloined in advance, and even offering them other girls in
addition to Ivivis and Friska -- a benison which they'd rejected, with some
inward regrets, after noting the glares in the eyes of those two. Twice or
thrice Quarmal had smiled in too tiger-friendly a fashion, but at such times
Fafhrd had stood a little closer to Kewissa and emphasized his light but
inflexible grip on her, to remind the old Lord that she and the prince she
carried were hostages for his and the Mouser's safety.
       As the mucky road curved up a little, the towers of Quarmall came into
view above the treetops. The Mouser's gaze drifted to them, and he studied the
lacy pinnacles thoughtfully, wondering whether he'd ever see them again.
Suddenly the whim seized him to return to Quarmall straightway -- yes, to slip
off the back of the load and run there. What did the outer world hold half so
fine as the wonders of that subterranean kingdom? -- its mazy mural-pictured
tunnelings a man might spend his life tracing ... its buried delights ... even
its evils beautiful ... its delicious infinitely varied blacks ... its hidden
fan-driven air....Yes, suppose he dropped down soundlessly this very moment...
       There was a flash, a brilliant scintillation from the tallest keep. It
pricked the Mouser like a goad and he loosed his hold and let himself slide
backward off the load. But just at that instant the road turned and grew firm
and the trees moved higher, masking the towers, and the Mouser came to himself
and grabbed hold again before his feet touched the road and he hung there
while the wheels creaked merrily and cold sweat drenched him.
       Then the wagon stopped and the Mouser dropped down and took three deep
breaths and then hastened forward to where Fafhrd had descended too and was
busy with the harness of the horses and their traces.
       "Up again, Fafhrd, and whip up," he cried. "This Quarmal is a cunninger
witch than I guessed. If we waste time by the way, I fear for our freedom and
our souls!"
       "You're telling me!" Fafhrd retorted. "This road winds and there'll be
more sticky stretches. Trust a wagon's speed? -- pah! We'll uncouple the four
horses and taking only simplest victuals and the smallest and most precious of
the treasure, gallop across the moor away from Quarmall straight as the crow
flies. That way we _should_ dodge ambush and outrun ranging pursuit. Friska,
Ivivis! Spring to it, all!"

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