by Fritz Leiber
An adolescent serving maid balancing on her close-shaven head with aid of a silver coronet-ring a large tray of sweet-meats and brimming silver goblets, strode like a tightrope walker into a green-tiled antechamber of the Blue Audience Chamber of that palace. She wore black leather collars around her neck, wrists, and slender waist. Light silver chains a little shorter than her forearms tied her wrist-collars to her waist-collar—it was Glipkerio’s whim that no maid’s finger should touch his food or even its tray and that every maid’s balance be perfect. Aside from her collars she was unclothed, while aside from her short-clipped eyelashes, she was entirely shaven—another of the fantastic monarch’s dainty whims, that no hair should drop in his soup. She looked like a doll before it is dressed, its wig affixed, and its eyebrows painted on.
The sea-hued tiles lining the chamber were hexagonal and big as the palm of a large hand. Most were plain, but here and there were ones figured with sea creatures: a mollusk, a cod, an octopus, a sea-horse.
The maid was almost halfway to the narrow, curtained archway leading to the Blue Audience Chamber when her gaze became fixed on a tile in the floor a long stride from the archway ahead but somewhat to the left. It was figured with a sea lion. It lifted the breadth of a thumb, like a little trapdoor, and eyes with a jetty gleam a finger-joint apart peered out at her.
She shook from toes to head, but her tight-bitten lips uttered no sound. The goblets chinked faintly, the tray began to slide, but she got her head under its center again with a swift sidewise ducking movement, and then began to go with long fearful steps around the horrid tile as far as she could to the right, so that the edge of the tray was hardly a finger’s-breadth from the wall.
Just under the edge of the tray, as if that were a porch-roof, a plain green tile in the wall opened like a door and a rat’s black face thrust out with spade-teeth bared.
The maid leaped convulsively away, still in utter silence. The tray left her head. She tried to get under it. The floor-tile clattered open wide and a long-bodied black rat came undulating out. The tray struck the dodging maid’s shoulder, she strained toward it futilely with her short-chained hands, then it struck the floor with a nerve-shattering clangor and all the spilled goblets rang.
As the silver reverberations died, there was else only the rapid soft thump of her bare feet running back the way she had come. One goblet rolled a last turn. Then there was desert stillness in the green antechamber.
Two hundred heartbeats later, it was broken by another muted thudding of bare feet, this time those of a party returning the way the maid had run. There entered first, watchful-eyed, two shaven-headed, white-smocked, browny cooks, each armed with a cleaver in one hand and a long toasting-fork in the other. Second, two naked and shaven kitchen boys, bearing many wet and dry rags and a broom of black feathers. After them, the maid, her silver chains gathered in her hands, so that they would not chink from her trembling. Behind her, a monstrously fat woman in a dress of thick black wool that went to her redoubled chins and plump knuckles and hid her surely monstrous feet and ankles. Her black hair was dressed in a great round beehive stuck through and through with long black-headed pins, so that it was as if she bore a prickly planet on her head. This appeared to be the case, for her puffed face was weighted with a world of sullenness and hate. Her black eyes peered stern and all-distrustful from between folds of fat, while a sparse black moustache, like the ghost of a black centipede, crossed her upper lip. Around her vast belly she wore a broad leather belt from which hung at intervals keys, thongs, chains, and whips. The kitchen boys believed she had deliberately grown mountain-fat to keep them from clinking together and so warn them when she came a-spying.
Now the fat kitchen-queen and palace mistress stared shrewdly around the antechamber, then spread her humpy palms, glaring at the maid. Not one green tile was displaced.
In like dumb-show, the maid nodded vehemently, pointing from her waist at the tile figured with a sea lion, then threaded tremblingly forward between the spilled stuff and touched it with her toe.
One of the cooks quickly knelt and gently thumped it and the surrounding tiles with a knuckle. Each time the faint sound was equally solid. He tried to get the tines of his fork under the sea lion tile from every side and failed.
The maid ran to the wall where the other glazed door had opened and searched the bare tiles frantically, her slim hands tugging uselessly. The other cook thumped the tiles she indicated without getting a hollow sound.
The glare of the palace mistress changed from suspicion to certainty. She advanced on the maid like a storm cloud, her eyes its lightning, and suddenly thrusting out her two ham-like arms, snapped a thong to a silver ring in the maid’s collar. That snap was the loudest sound yet.
The maid shook her head wildly three times. Her trembling increased, then suddenly stopped altogether. As the palace mistress led her back the way they had come, she drooped her head and shoulders, and at the first vindictive downward jerk dropped to her hands and knees and padded rapidly, dog-fashion.
Under the watchful eyes of one of the cooks, the kitchen boys began swiftly to clean up the mess, wrapping each goblet in a rag ere they laid it on the platter, lest it chink. Their gazes kept darting fearfully about at the myriad tiles.
The Gray Mouser, standing on Squid’s gently-dipping prow, sighted the soaring Citadel of Lankhmar through the dispersing fog. Beyond it to the east there soon came into view the square-topped minarets of the Overlord’s palace, each finished in stone of different hue, and to the south the dun granaries like vast smokestacks. He hailed the first sea-wherry he saw to Squid’s side. With the black kitten spitting at him reproachfully, and against Slinoor’s command but before Slinoor could decide to have him forcibly restrained—he slid down the long boathook with which the prow wherryman had caught hold of Squid’s rail. Landing lightly in the wherry, he gave an approving shoulder-pat to the astonished hook-holder, then commanded, promising a fat fee, that he be rowed with all speed to the palace dock. The hook was shipped, the Mouser wove his way to the slender craft’s stern, the three wherrymen out-oared and the craft raced east over the silty water, brown with mud from the Hlal.
The Mouser called consolingly back to Slinoor, ‘Never fear, I will make a marvelous report to Glipkerio, praising you to the skies—and even Lukeen to the height of a low raincloud!’
Then he faced forward, faintly smiling and frowning at once in thought. He was somewhat sorry he had had to desert Fafhrd, who had been immersed in an apparently endless drinking and dicing bout with Movarl’s toughest henchmen when Squid had sailed from Kvarch Nar—the great oafs died of wine and their losses each dawn, but were reborn in the late afternoon with thirst restored and money-pouches miraculously refilled.
But he was even more pleased that now he alone would bear Glipkerio Movarl’s thanks for the four shiploads of grain and be able all by himself to tell the wondrous tale of the dragon, the rats, and their human masters—or colleagues. By the time Fafhrd got back from Kvarch Nar, broken-pursed and likely broken-pated too, the Mouser would be occupying a fine apartment in Glipkerio’s palace and be able subtly to irk his large comrade by offering him hospitalities and favors.
He wondered idly where Hisvin and Hisvet and their small entourage were now. Perhaps in Sarheenmar, or more likely Ilthmar, or already lurching by camel-train from that city to some retreat in the Eastern Lands, to be well away from Glipkerio’s and Movarl’s vengeance. Unwilled, his left hand rose to his temple, gently fingering the tiny straight ridge there. Truly, at this already dreamy distance, he could not hate Hisvet or the brave proxy-creature Frix. Surely Hisvet’s vicious threats had been in part a kind of love-play. He did not doubt that some part of her yearned for him. Besides, he had marked her far worse than she had marked him. Well, perhaps he would meet her again some year in some far corner of the world.
These foolishly forgiving and forgetting thoughts of the Mouser were in part due, he knew himself, to his present taut yearning for any
acceptable girl. Kvarch Nar under Movarl had proved a strait-laced city, by the Mouser’s standards, and during his brief stay the one erring girl encountered—one Hrenlet—had chosen to err with Fafhrd. Well, Hrenlet had been something of a giantess, albeit slender, and now he was in Lankhmar, where he knew a dozen-score spots to ease his tautness.
The silty-brown water gave way abruptly to deep green. The sea-wherry passed beyond the outflow of the Hlal and was darting along atop the Lankhmar Deep, which dove down sheer-walled and bottomless at the very foot of the wave-pitted great rock on which stood the citadel and the palace. And now the wherrymen had to row out around a strange obstruction: a copper chute wide as a man is tall that, braced by great brazen beams, angled down from a porch of the palace almost to the surface of the sea. The Mouser wondered if the whimmy Glipkerio had taken up aquatic sports during his absence. Or perhaps this was a new way of disposing of unsatisfactory servants and slaves—sliding them suitably weighted into the sea. Then he noted a spindle-shaped vehicle (if it was that) thrice as long as a man and made of some dull gray metal poised at the top of the chute. A puzzle.
The Mouser dearly loved puzzles, if only to elaborate on them rather than solve them, but he had no time for this one. The wherry had drawn up at the royal wharf, and he was haughtily exhibiting to the clamoring eunuchs and guards his starfish-emblemed courier’s ring from Glipkerio and his parchment sealed with the cross-sworded seal of Movarl.
The latter seemed to impress the palace-fry most. He was swiftly bowed across the dock, mounted a dizzily tall, gaily-painted wooden stair, and found himself in Glipkerio’s audience chamber—a glorious sea-fronting blue-tiled room, each large triangular tile bearing a fishy emblem in bas-relief.
The room was huge despite the blue curtains dividing it now into two halves. A pair of naked and shaven pages bowed to the Mouser and parted the curtains for him. Their sinuous silent movements against that blue background made him think of mermen. He stepped through the narrow triangular opening—to be greeted by a rather distant but imperious ‘Hush!’
Since the hissing command came from the puckered lips of Glipkerio himself and since one of the beanpole monarch’s hand-long skinny fingers now rose and crossed those lips, the Mouser stopped dead. With a fainter hiss the blue curtains fell together behind him.
It was a strange and most startling scene that presented itself. The Mouser’s heart missed a beat—mostly in self-outrage that his imagination had completely missed the weird possibility that was now staged before him.
Three broad archways led out onto a porch on which rested the pointy-ended gray vehicle he had noted balanced at the top of the chute. Now he could see a hinged manhole toward its out-jutting bow.
At the near end of the room was a large, thick-bottomed, close-barred cage containing at least a score of black rats, which chittered and wove around each other ceaselessly and sometimes clattered the bars menacingly.
At the far end of the sea-blue room, near the circular stair leading up into the palace’s tallest minaret, Glipkerio had risen in excitement from his golden audience couch shaped like a seashell. The fantastic overlord stood a head higher than Fafhrd, but was thin as a starved Mingol. His black toga made him look like a funeral cypress. Perhaps to offset this dismal effect, he wore a wreath of small violet flowers around his blond head, the hair of which clustered in golden ringlets.
Close beside him, scarce half his height, hanging weightlessly on his arm like an elf and dressed in a loose robe of pale blonde silk, was Hisvet. The Mouser’s dagger-cut, stretching from her left nostril to her jaw, was still a pink line and would have given her a sardonic expression, except that now as her gaze swung to the Mouser she smiled most prettily.
Standing almost midway between the audience couch and the caged rats was Hisvet’s father Hisvin. His skinny frame was wrapped in a black toga, but he still wore his tight black leather cap with its long cheek-flaps. His gaze was fixed fiercely on the caged rats and he was weaving his bony fingers at them hypnotically.
‘Gnawers dark from deep below…’ he began to incant in a voice that whistled with age yet was authoritatively strident.
At that instant a naked young serving maid appeared through a narrow archway near the audience couch, bearing on her shaven head a great silver tray laden with goblets and temptingly mounded silver plates. Her wrists were chained to her waist, while a fine silver chain between her narrow black anklets prevented her from taking steps more than twice as long as her narrow pink-toed feet.
Without a ‘Hush!’ this time, Glipkerio raised a narrow long palm to her and once again put a long, skinny finger to his lips. The slim maid’s movements ceased imperceptibly and she stood silent as a birch tree on a windless day.
The Mouser was about to say, ‘Puissant Overlord, this is evilest enchantment. You are consorting with your dearest enemies!’—but at that instant Hisvet smiled at him again and he felt a frighteningly delicious tingling run down his cheek and gums from the silver dart in his left temple to his tongue, inhibiting speech.
Hisvin recommenced in his commanding Lankhmarese that bore the faintest trace of an Ilthmar lisp and reminded the Mouser of the lisping rat Grig:
‘Gnawers dark from deep below,
To ratty grave you now must go!
Blear each eye and drag each tail!
Fur fall off and heartbeat fail!’
All the black rats crowded to the farthest side of their cage from Hisvin, chittering and squeaking as if in maddest terror. Most of them were on their hind feet, clawing toward the bars like a panicky human crowd.
The old man, now swiftly weaving his fingers in a most complex, mysterious pattern, continued relentlessly:
‘Blur your eyesight, stop your breath!—
By corrupting spell of Death!
Your brains are cheese, your life is fled!
Spin once around and drop down dead!’
And the black rats did just that—spinning like amateur actors both to ease and dramatize their falls, yet falling most convincingly all the same with varying plops onto the cage floor or each other and lying stiff and still with furry eyelids a-droop and hairless tails slack and sharp-nailed feet thrust stiffly up.
There was a curious slow-paced slappy clapping as Glipkerio applauded with his narrow hands which were long as human feet. Then the beanpole monarch hurried to the cage with strides so lengthy that the lower two-thirds of his toga looked like the silhouette of a tent. Hisvet skipped merrily at his side, while Hisvin came circling swiftly.
‘Didst see that wonder, Gray Mouser?’ Glipkerio demanded in piping voice, waving his courier closer. ‘There is a plague of rats in Lankhmar. You, who might from your name be expected to protect us, have returned somewhat tardily. But—bless the Black-Boned Gods!—my redoubtable servant Hisvin and his incomparable sorcerer-apprentice daughter Hisvet, having conquered the rats which menaced the grain fleet, hastened back in good time to take measures against our local rat-plague—magical measures which will surely be successful, as has now been fully demonstrated.’
At this point the fantastical overlord reached a long thin naked arm from under his toga and chucked the Mouser under the chin, much to the latter’s distaste, though he concealed it. ‘Hisvin and Hisvet even tell me,’ Glipkerio remarked with a fluty chuckle, ‘that they suspected you for a while of being in league with the rats—as who would not from your gray garb and small crouchy figure?—and kept you tied. But all’s well that ends well and I forgive you.’
The Mouser began a most polemical refutation and accusation—but only in his mind, for he heard himself saying, ‘Here, Milord, is an urgent missive from the King of the Eight Cities. By the by, there was a dragon—’
‘Oh, that two-headed dragon!’ Glipkerio interrupted with another piping chuckle and a roguish finger-wave. He thrust the parchment into the breast of his toga without even glancing at the seal. ‘Movarl has informed me by albatross post of the strange mass delusion in my fleet. Hisvin and Hi
svet, master psychologists both, confirm this. Sailors are a woefully superstitious lot, Gray Mouser, and ’tis evident their fancies are more furiously contagious than I suspected—for even you were infected! I would have expected it of your barbarian mate—Favner? Fafrah?—or even of Slinoor and Lukeen—for what are captains but jumped-up sailors?—but you, who are at least sleazily civilized…However, I forgive you that too! Oh, what a mercy that wise Hisvin here thought to keep watch on the fleet in his cutter!’
The Mouser realized he was nodding—and that Hisvet and, in his wrinkle-lipped fashion, Hisvin were smiling archly. He looked down at the piled stiff rats in their theatrical death-throes. Issek take ’em, but their droopy-lidded eyes even looked whitely glazed!
‘Their fur hasn’t fallen off,’ he criticized mildly.
‘You are too literal,’ Glipkerio told him with a laugh. ‘You don’t comprehend poetic license.’
‘Or the devices of humano-animal suggestion,’ Hisvin added solemnly.
The Mouser trod hard—and, he thought, surreptitiously—on a long tail that drooped from the cage bottom to the tiled floor. There was no atom of response.
But Hisvin noted and lightly clicked a fingernail. The Mouser fancied there was a slight stirring deep in the rat-pile. Suddenly a nauseous stink sprang from the cage. Glipkerio gulped. Hisvet delicately pinched her pale nostrils between thumb and ring-finger.
‘You had some question about the efficacy of my spell?’ Hisvin asked the Mouser most civilly.
‘Aren’t the rats corrupting rather fast?’ the Mouser asked. It occurred to him that there might have been a tight-sealed sliding door in the floor of the cage and a dozen long-dead rats or merely a well-rotted steak in the thick bottom beneath.