by Fritz Leiber
The slime-puddle and its gray border had grown wider still and he was in it up to his ankles.
He clung to Reetha’s leg a moment longer with the faint and ungracious hope that since his weapons and his clothing, which touched him, had shrunk with him, she might shrink too at his touch. He would at least have a companion. Perhaps to his credit, it did not occur to him to yell, ‘Pick me up!’
The only thing that happened was that an almost inaudibly deep voice thundered down at him from Reetha’s mouth, big as a red-edged shield, ‘What are you doing? I’m scared. Start the magic!’
The Mouser jumped away from the fleshly pillar, splashing the nasty pink stuff and almost slipping in it, and whipped out his sword Scalpel. It was just a shade bigger than a needle for mending sails. While the candle, which he still held in his left hand, was the proper size to light a small room in a doll’s house.
There was loud, confused, multiple padding and claw-clicking, chittering war cries blasted his ears, and he saw the huge black rats stampeding him from three sides, kicking up the gray border in puffs as if it were a powder and then splashing the pink slime and sending ripples across it.
Reetha, terror-struck, watched her inexplicably diminished rescuer spin around, leap over a shard of rock, land in a pink splash, and brandishing his tiny sword before him, shielding his doll’s candle with his cloak, and ducking his head, rush into the rat-hole behind her and so vanish. Racing rats brushed her ankles and snapped at each other, to be first down the hole after the Mouser. Elsewhere the rat horde was swiftly disappearing down the other holes. But one rat stayed long enough to nip her foot.
Her nerve snapped. Her first footsteps spattering pink slime and gray dust, she shrieked and ran, rats dodging from under her feet, and dashed up the steps, clawed her way past several wide-eyed guardsmen into the kitchen, and sank sobbing and panting on the tiles. Samanda snapped a chain on her collar.
Fafhrd, his arms joined in a circle above and before his head to avoid skull-bump from rocky outcrops and also the unexpected brushings on face of cobwebs and wraithlike fingers and filmy wings, at last saw a jaggedly circular green glow ahead. Soon he emerged from the black tunnel into a large and many entranced cavern somewhat lit at the center of its rocky floor by a green glow which was being replenished with thin blood-red logs by two skinny, raggedy-tunicked, sharp-eyed boys, who looked like typical street urchins of Lankhmar or Ilthmar, or any other decadent city. One had a puckered scar under his left eye. On the other side of the fire from them sat on low wide stone an obscenely fat figure so well cloaked and hooded that not a speck of his face or hand were visible. He was sorting out a large pile of parchment scraps and potsherds, pinching hold of them through the dark fabric of his overlong, dangling sleeves, and scanning them close-sightedly, almost putting them inside his hood.
‘Welcome, my Gentle Son,’ he called to Fafhrd in a voice like a quavering sweet flute. ‘What happy chance brings you here?’
‘You know!’ Fafhrd said harshly, striding forward until he was glaring across the leaping green flames at the black oval defined by the forward edge of the hood. ‘How am I to save the Mouser? What’s with Lankhmar? And why, in the name of all the gods of death and destruction, is the tin whistle so important?’
‘You speak in riddles, Gentle Son,’ the fluty voice responded soothingly, as its owner went on sorting his scraps. ‘What tin whistle? What peril’s the Mouser in now?—reckless youth! And what is with Lankhmar?’
Fafhrd let loose a flood of curses, which rattled impotently among the stalactites overhead. Then he jerked free from his pouch the tiny black oblong of Sheelba’s message and held it forward between finger and thumb that shook with rage. ‘Look, Know-nothing One: I dumped a lovely girl to answer this and now—’
But the hooded figure had whistled warblingly and at that signal the black bat, which Fafhrd had forgot, launched itself from his shoulder, snatched with sharp teeth the black note from his finger-grip, and fluttered past the green flames to land on the paunchy one’s sleeve-hidden hand, or tentacle, or whatever it was. The whatever-it-was conveyed to hood-mouth the bat, who obligingly fluttered inside and vanished in the coally dark there.
There followed a squeaky, unintelligible, hood-muffled dialogue while Fafhrd sat his fists on his hips and fumed. The two skinny boys gave him sly grins and whispered together impudently, their bright eyes never leaving him. At last the fluty voice called, ‘Now it’s crystal clear to me, Oh Patient Son. Sheelba of the Eyeless Face and I have been on the outs—a bit of a wizardly bicker—and now he seeks to mend fences with this. Well, well, well, first advances by Sheelba. Ho-ho-ho!’
‘Very funny,’ Fafhrd growled. ‘Haste’s the marrow of our confab. The Sinking Land came up, shedding its waters, as I entered your caves. My swift but jaded mount crops your stingy grass outside. I must leave within the half hour if I am to cross the Sinking Land before it resubmerges. What do I do about the Mouser, Lankhmar, and the tin whistle?’
‘But, Gentle Son, I know nothing about those things,’ the other replied artlessly. ‘’Tis only Sheelba’s motives are air—clear to me. Oh, ho, to think that he—Wait, wait now, Fafhrd! Don’t rattle the stalactites again. I’ve ensorceled them against falling, but there are no spells in the universe which a big fellow can’t sometimes break through. I’ll advise you, never fear. But I must first clairvoy. Scatter on the golden dust, boys—thriftily now, don’t waste it, ’tis worth ten times its weight in diamond unpowdered.’
The two urchins each dipped into a bag beside them and threw into the feet of the green flames a glittering golden swirl. Instantly the flames darkened, though leaping high as ever and sending off no soot. Watching them in the now almost night-dark cavern, Fafhrd thought he could make out the transitory, ever-distorting shadows of twisty towers, ugly trees, tall hunchbacked men, low-shouldered beasts, beautiful wax women melting, and the like, but nothing was clear or even hinted at a story.
Then from the obese warlock’s hood came toward the darkened fire two greenish ovals, each with a vertical black streak like the jewel cat’s eye. A half yard out of the hood they paused and held steady. They were speedily joined by two more which both diverged and went farther. Then came a single one arching up over the fire until one would have thought it was in great danger of sizzling. Lastly, two which floated in opposite directions almost impossibly far around the fire and then hooked in to observe it from points near Fafhrd.
The voice fluted sagely: ‘It is always best to look at a problem from all sides.’
Fafhrd drew his shoulders together and repressed a shudder. It never failed to be disconcerting to watch Ningauble send forth his Seven Eyes on their apparently indefinitely extensible eyestalks. Especially on occasions when he’d been coy as a virgin in a bathrobe about keeping them hidden.
So much time passed that Fafhrd began to snap his fingers with impatience, softly at first, then more crackingly. He’d given up looking at the flames. They never held anything but the tantalizing, churning shadows.
At last the green eyes floated back into the hood, like a mystic fleet returning to port. The flames turned bright green again, and Ningauble said, ‘Gentle Son, I now understand your problem and its answer. In part. I have seen much, yet cannot explain all. The Gray Mouser, now. He’s exactly twenty-five feet below the deepest cellar in the palace of Glipkerio Kistomerces. But he’s not buried there, or even dead—though about twenty-four parts in twenty-five of him are dead, in the cellar I mentioned. But he is alive.’
‘But how?’ Fafhrd almost gawked, spreading his spread-fingered hands.
‘I haven’t the faintest idea. He’s surrounded by enemies but near him are two friends—of a sort. Now about Lankhmar, that’s clearer. She’s been invaded, her walls breached everywhere and desperate fighting going on in the streets, by a fierce host which outnumbers Lankhmar’s inhabitants by…my goodness…fifty to one—and equipped with all modern weapons.
‘Yet you can save the city, you c
an turn the tide of battle—this part came through very clearly—if you only hasten to the temple of the Gods of Lankhmar and climb its bell-tower and ring the chimes there, which have been silent for uncounted centuries. Presumably to rouse those gods. But that’s only my guess.’
‘I don’t like the idea of having anything to do with that dusty crew,’ Fafhrd complained. ‘From what I’ve heard of them, they’re more like walking mummies than true gods—and even more dry-spirited and unloving, being sifted through like sand with poisonous senile whims.’
Ningauble shrugged his cloaked, bulbous shoulders. ‘I thought you were a brave man, addicted to deeds of derring-do.’
Fafhrd cursed sardonically, then demanded, ‘But even if I should go clang those rusty bells, how can Lankhmar hold out until then with her walls breached and the odds fifty to one against her?’
‘I’d like to know that myself,’ Ningauble assured him.
‘And how do I get to the temple when the streets are crammed with warfare?’
Ningauble shrugged once again. ‘You’re a hero. You should know.’
‘Well then, the tin whistle?’ Fafhrd grated.
‘You know, I didn’t get a thing on the tin whistle. Sorry about that. Do you have it with you? Might I look at it?’
Grumbling, Fafhrd extracted it from his flat pouch, and brought it around the fire.
‘Have you ever blown it?’ Ningauble asked.
‘No,’ Fafhrd said with surprise, lifting it to his lips.
‘Don’t!’ Ningauble squeaked. ‘Not on any account! Never blow a strange whistle. It might summon things far worse even than savage mastiffs or the police. Here, give it to me.’
He pinched it away from Fafhrd with a double fold of animated sleeve and held it close to his hood, revolving it clockwise and counterclockwise, finally serpentinely gliding out four of his eyes and subjecting it to their massed scrutiny at thumbnail distance.
At last he withdrew his eyes, sighed, and said, ‘Well…I’m not sure. But there are thirteen characters in the inscription—I couldn’t decipher ’em, mind you, but there are thirteen. Now if you take that fact in conjunction with the slim couchant feline figure on the other side…Well, I think you blow this whistle to summon the War Cats. Mind you, that’s only a deduction, and one of several steps, each uncertain.’
‘Who are the War Cats?’ Fafhrd asked.
Ningauble writhed his fat shoulders and neck under their garments. ‘I’ve never been quite certain. But putting together various rumors and legends—oh yes, and some cave drawings north of the Cold Waste and south of Quarmall—I have arrived at the tentative conclusion that they are a military aristocracy of all the feline tribes, a bloodthirsty Inner Circle of thirteen members—in short, a dozen and one ailuric berserkers. I would assume—provisionally only, mind you—that they would appear when summoned, as perhaps by this whistle, and instantly assault whatever creature or creatures, beast or man, that seemed to threaten the feline tribes. So I would advise you not to blow it except in the presence of enemies of cats more worthy of attack than yourself, for I suppose you have slain a few tigers and leopards in your day. Here, take it.’
Fafhrd snatched and pouched it, demanding, ‘But by God’s ice-rimmed skull, when am I to blow it? How can the Mouser be two parts in fifty alive when buried eight yards deep? What vast, fifty-to-one host can have assaulted Lankhmar without months of rumors and reports of their approach? What fleets could carry—’
‘No more questions!’ Ningauble interposed shrilly. ‘Your half hour is up. If you are to beat the Sinking Land and be in time to save the city, you must gallop at once for Lankhmar. Now no more words.’
Fafhrd raved for a while longer, but Ningauble maintained a stubborn silence, so Fafhrd gave him a last thundering curse, which brought down a small stalactite that narrowly missed bashing his brains out, and departed, ignoring the urchins’ maddening grins.
Outside the caves, he mounted the Mingol mare and cantered, followed by hoof-raised dust-cloud, down the sun-yellowed, dryly rustling slope toward the mile-wide westward-leading isthmus of dark brown rock, salt-filmed and here and there sea-puddled, that was the Sinking Land. Southward gleamed the placid blue waters of the Sea of the East, northward the restless gray waters of the Inner Sea and the glinting squat towers of Ilthmar. Also northward he noted four small dust-clouds like his own coming down the Ilthmar road, which he had earlier traveled himself. Almost surely and just as he’d guessed, the four black brigands were after him at last, hot to revenge their three slain or at least woefully damaged fellow-rogues. He narrowed his eyes and nudged the gray mare to a lively lope.
11
The Mouser was hurrying against a marked moist cool draft through a vast, low-ceilinged concourse close-pillared like a mine with upended bricks and sections of pike-haft and broom-handle, and lit by caged fire-beetles and glow-worms and an occasional sputtering torch held by a rat-page in jacket and short trews lighting the way for some masked person or persons of quality. A few jewel-decked or monstrously fat rat-folk, likewise masked, traveled in litters carried by two or four squat, muscular, nearly naked rats. A limping, aged rat carrying two socks which twitched a little from the inside was removing dim, weary fire-beetles from their cages and replacing them with fresh bright ones. The Mouser hastened along on tiptoe with knees permanently bent, body hunched forward, and chin out-thrust. It made his legs in particular ache abominably, but it gave him, he hoped, the general silhouette and gait of a rat walking two-legged. His entire head was covered by a cylindrical mask cut from the bottom of his cloak, provided with eye-holes only, and which, stiffened by a wire which had previously stiffened the scabbard of Scalpel, thrust down several inches below his chin to give the impression that it covered a rat’s long snout.
He worried what would happen if someone came close enough and were sufficiently observant to note that his mask and cloak too of course were made of tiny ratskins closely stitched together. He hoped that rats were plagued by proportionately tinier rats, though he hadn’t noted any tiny rat-holes so far; after all, there was that proverb about little bugs having littler bugs, and so on; at any rate he could claim in a pinch that he came from a distant rat-city where such was the case. To keep the curious and watchful at a distance he hovered his gauntleted hands a-twitch above the pommels of Scalpel and Cat’s Claw, and chittered angrily or muttered such odd oaths as ‘All rat-catchers fry!’ or ‘By candle-fat and bacon-rind!’ in Lankhmarese, for now that he had ears small and quick enough to hear, he knew that the language was spoken underground, and especially well by the aristos of these lower levels. And what more natural than that rats, who were parasites on man’s farms and ships and cities, should copy his language along with newly other items of his habits and culture? He had already noted other solitary armed rats—bravos or berserkers, presumably—who behaved in the irritable and dangerous manner he now put on.
His escape from the cellar-rats had been achieved by his own cool-headedness and his pursuers’ blundering eagerness, which had made them fight to be first, so that the tunnel had been briefly blocked behind him. His candle had been most helpful in his descent of the first sharply down-angling, rough-hewn, then rough-digged passages, where he had made his way by sliding and leaping, checking himself on a rocky outcropping or by digging heel into dirt only when his speed became so great as to threaten a disastrous fall. The first rough-pillared concourse had also been pitch-dark, almost. There he had quickly thrown his cloak over his face to the eyes, for his candle had shown him numerous rats, most of them going naked on all fours, but a few of them hunchedly erect and wearing rough dark clothing, if only a pair of trews or a jacket or slouch hat or smock, or a belt for a short-bladed hanger. Some of these had carried pickax or shovel or pry-bar over shoulder. And there had been one rat fully clothed in black, armed with sword and dagger and wearing a silver-edged full-face vizard—at least the Mouser had assumed it was a rat.
He had taken the first passage leading do
wn—there had been regular steps now, hewn in rock or cut in gravel—and had paused at a turn in the stairs by a curious though stenchful alcove. It contained the first he had seen of the fire-beetle lamps and also a half-dozen small compartments, each closed by a door that left space below and above. After a moment’s hesitation he had darted into one which showed no black hind paws or boots below and securely hooking the door behind him, had instantly and rapidly begun to fabricate his ratskin mask. His instinctive assumption about the function of the compartments was confirmed by a large two-handled basket half full of rat droppings and a bucket of stinking urine. After his long-chinned vizard had been made and donned, he had shaken out his candle, pouched it, and then relieved himself, at last permitting himself to wonder in amazement that all his clothes and belongings had been reduced in size proportionately with his body. Ah, he told himself, that would account for the wide gray border of the pink puddle which had appeared around his boots in the cellar above. When he’d been sorcerously shrunken, the excess motes or atomies of his flesh, blood, and bones had been shed downward to make the pink pool, while those of his gray clothing and tempered iron weapons had sifted away to make up the pool’s gray border, which had been powdery rather than slimy, of course, because metal or fabric contains little or no liquid compared to flesh. It had occurred to him that there must be twenty times as much of the Mouser by weight in that poor abused pink pool overhead as there was in his present rat-small form, and for a moment he had felt a sentimental sadness.