by Fritz Leiber
Hisvin, hard a-pace and snapping his fingers again, his shadows marching like those of giant rats moving confusedly and size-changingly against each other across the blue tiles, demanded suddenly on noting the wands of authority, ‘Where are your pages you promised to have here?’
Glipkerio responded dully, ‘In their quarters. In revolt. You stole my guards who would have controlled them. Where are your Mingols?’
Hisvin stopped dead in his pacing and frowned. His gaze went questioningly toward the unmoving blue door-drapes through which he had entered.
Fafhrd, breathing a little heavily, drew himself up into one of the belfry’s eight windows and sat on its sill and scanned the bells.
There were eight in all and all large: five of bronze, three of browned-iron, coated with the sea-pale verdigris and earth-dark rust of eons. Any ropes had rotted away, centuries ago for all he knew. Below them was dark emptiness spanned by four narrow flat-topped stone arches. He tried one of them with his foot. It held.
He set the smallest bell, a bronze one, swinging. There was no sound except for a dismal creaking.
He first peered, then felt up inside the bell. The clapper was gone, its supporting link rusted away.
All the other bells’ clappers were likewise gone, presumably fallen to the bottom of the tower.
He prepared to use his ax to beat out the alarum, but then he saw one of the fallen clappers lying on a stone arch.
He lifted it with both hands, like a somewhat ponderous club, and moving about recklessly on the arches, struck each bell in turn. Rust showered him from the iron ones.
Their massed clangor sounded louder than mountainside thunder when lightning strikes from a cloud close by. The bells were the least musical Fafhrd had ever heard. Some made swelling beats together, which periodically tortured the ear. They must have been shaped and cast by a master of discord. The brazen bells shrieked, clanged, clashed, roared, twanged, jangled, and screamingly wrangled. The iron bells groaned rusty-throated, sobbed like leviathan, throbbed as the heart of universal death, and rolled like a black swell striking a smooth rock coast. They exactly suited the Gods of Lankhmar, from what Fafhrd had heard of the latter.
The metallic uproar began to fade somewhat and he realized that he was becoming deafened. Nevertheless he kept on until he had struck each bell three times. Then he peered out the window by which he had entered.
His first impression was that half the human crowd was looking straight at him. Then he realized it must be the noise of the bells which had turned upward those moonlit faces.
There were many more kneelers before the temple now. Other Lankhmarts were pouring up the Street of the Gods from the east, as if being driven.
The erect, black-togaed rats still stood in the same tiny line below him, auraed by grim authority despite their size, and now they were flanked by two squads of armoured rats, each bearing a small weapon which puzzled Fafhrd, straining his eyes, until he recalled the tiny crossbows which had been used aboard Squid.
The reverberations of the bells had died away, or sunk too low for his deafened ears to note, but then he began to hear, faintly at first, murmuring and cries of hopeless horror from below.
Gazing across the crowd again, he saw black rats climbing unresisting up some of the kneeling figures, while many, of the others already had something black squatting on their right shoulders.
There came from directly below a creaking and groaning and rending. The ancient doors of the temple of the Gods of Lankhmar were thrust wide open.
The white faces that had been gazing upward now stared at the porch.
The black-togaed rats and their soldiery faced around.
There strode four abreast from the wide-open doorway a company of fearfully thin brown figures, black-togaed too. Each bore a black staff. The brown was of three sorts: aged linen mummy-banding, brittle parchment-like skin stretched tight over naught but skeleton, and naked old brown bones themselves.
The crossbow-rats loosed a volley. The skeletal brown striders came on without pause. The black-togaed rats stood their ground, squeaking imperiously. Another useless volley from the tiny crossbows. Then, like so many rapiers, black staffs thrust out. Each rat they touched shriveled where he stood, nor moved again. Other rats came scurrying in from the crowd and were similarly slain. The brown company advanced at an even pace, like doom on the march.
There were screams then and the human crowd before the temple began to melt, racing down side streets and even dashing back into the temples from which they had fled. Predictably, the folk of Lankhmar were more afraid of their own gods come to their rescue than of their foes.
Himself somewhat aghast at what his ringing had roused, Fafhrd climbed down the belfry, telling himself that he must dodge the eerie battle below and seek out the Mouser in Glipkerio’s vast palace.
At the corner of the temple’s foot, the black kitten became aware of the climber high above, recognized him as the huge man he had scratched and loved, and realized that the force holding him here had something to do with that man.
The Gray Mouser loped purposefully out of the palace kitchen and up a corridor leading toward the royal dwelling quarters. Though still tiny, he was at last dressed. Beside him strode Reetha, armed with a long and needle-pointed skewer for broiling cutlets in a row. Close behind them marched a disorderly-ranked host of pages armed with cleavers and mallets, and maids with knives and toasting forks.
The Mouser had insisted that Reetha not carry him on this foray and the girl had let him have his way. And truly it made him feel more manly again to be going on his own two feet and from time to time swishing Scalpel menacingly through the air.
Still, he had to admit, he would feel a lot better were he his rightful size again, and Fafhrd at his side. Sheelba had told him the effects of the black potion would last for nine hours. He had drunk it a few minutes at most past three. So he should regain his true size a little after midnight, if Sheelba had not lied.
He glanced up at Reetha, more huge than any giantess and bearing a gleaming steel weapon tall as a catboat’s mast, and felt further reassured.
‘Onward!’ he squeaked to his naked army, though he tried to pitch his voice as low as possible. ‘Onward to save Lankhmar and her overlord from the rats!’
Fafhrd dropped the last few feet to the temple’s roof and faced around. The situation below had altered considerably.
The human folk were gone—that is, the living human folk.
The skeletal brown striders had all emerged through the door below and were marching west down the Street of the Gods—a procession of ugly ghosts, except these wraiths were opaque and their bony feet clicked harshly on the cobbles. The moonlit porch, steps, and flagstones behind them were blackly freckled with dead rats.
But the striders were moving more slowly now and were surrounded by shadows blacker than the moon could throw—a veritable sea of black rats lapping the striders and being augmented faster from all sides than the deadly staves could strike them down.
From two areas ahead, to either side of the Street of the Gods, flaming darts came arching and struck in the fore-ranks of the striders. These missiles, unlike the crossbow darts, took effect. Wherever they struck, old linen and resin-impregnated skin began to flicker and flame. The striders came to a halt, ceased slaying rats, and devoted themselves to plucking out the flaming darts sticking in them and beating out the flames on their persons.
Another wave of rats came racing down the Street of the Gods from the Marsh Gate end, and behind them on three great horses three riders leaning low in their saddles and sword-slashing at the small beasts. The horses and the cloaks and hoods of the riders were inky black. Fafhrd, who thought himself incapable of more shivers, felt another. It was as if Death itself, in three persons, had entered the scene.
The rodent fire-artillery, slewed partly around, let off at the black riders a few flaming darts which missed.
In return the black riders charged hoof-stamping an
d sword-slashing into the two artillery areas. Then they faced toward the brown, skeletal striders, several of whom still smoldered and flickered, and doffed their black hoods and mantles.
Fafhrd’s face broke into a grin that would have seemed most inappropriate to one knowing he feared an apparition of Death, but not knowing his experiences of the last few days.
Seated on the three black horses were three tall skeletons gleaming white in the moonlight, and with a lover’s certainty he recognized the first as being Kreeshkra’s.
She might, of course, be seeking him out to slay him for his faithlessness. Nevertheless, as almost any other lover in like circumstances—though seldom, true, near the midst of a natural-supernatural battle—he grinned a rather egotistic grin.
He lost not a moment in beginning his descent.
Meanwhile Kreeshkra, for it was indeed she, was thinking as she gazed at the Gods of Lankhmar, Well, I suppose brown bones are better than none at all. Still, they seem a poor fire risk. Ho, here come more rats! What a filthy city! And where oh where is my abominable Mud Man?
The black kitten mewed anxiously at the temple’s foot where he awaited Fafhrd’s arrival.
Glipkerio, calm as a cushion now, completely soothed by Frix’s massage and Hisvet’s piping, was halfway through signing his name, forming the letters more ornately and surely than he ever had in his life, when the blue drapes in the largest archway were torn down and there pressed into the great chamber on silent naked feet the Mouser’s and Reetha’s forces.
Glipkerio gave a great twitch, upsetting the ink bottle on the parchment of the surrender terms, and sending his quill winging off like an arrow.
Hisvin, Hisvet, and even Samanda backed away from him toward the porch, daunted at least momentarily by the newcomers—and indeed there was something dire about that naked, shaven youthful army be-weaponed with kitchen tools, their eyes wild, their lips a-snarl or pressed tightly together. Hisvin had been expecting his Mingols at last and so got a double shock.
Elakeria hurried after them, crying, ‘They’ve come to slay us all! It’s the revolution!’
Frix held her ground, smiling excitedly.
The Mouser raced across the blue-tiled floor, sprang up on Glipkerio’s couch and balanced himself on its golden back. Reetha followed rapidly and stood beside him, menacing around with her skewer.
Unmindful that Glipkerio was flinching away, pale yellow eyes peering affrightedly from a coarse fabric of criss-crossed fingers, the Mouser squeaked loudly, ‘Oh mighty overlord, no revolution this! Instead, we have come to save you from your enemies! That one’—he pointed at Hisvin—‘is in league with the rats. Indeed, he is by blood more rat than man. Under his toga you’ll find a tail. I saw him in the tunnels below, member of the Rat Council of Thirteen, plotting your overthrow. It is he—’
Meanwhile Samanda had been regaining her courage. Now she charged her underlings like a black rhinoceros, her globe-shaped, pin-skewered coiffure more than enough horn. Laying about with her black whip, she roared fearsomely, ‘Revolt, will you? On your knees, scullions and sluts! Say your prayers!’
Taken by surprise and readily falling back into an ingrained habit, their fiery hopes quenched by familiar abuse, the naked slim figures inched away from her to either side.
Reetha, however, grew pink with anger. Forgetting the Mouser and all else but her rage, envenomed by many injuries, she ran after Samanda, crying to her fellow-slaves, ‘Up and at her, you cowards! We’re fifty to one against her!’ And with that she thrust out mightily with her skewer and jabbed Samanda from behind.
The palace mistress leaped ponderously forward, her keys and chains swinging wildly from her black leather belt. She lashed the last maids out of her way and pounded off at a thumping run toward the servants’ quarters.
Reetha cried over shoulder, ‘After her, all!—before she rouses the cooks and barbers to her aid!’ and was off in sprinting pursuit.
The maids and pages hardly hesitated at all. Reetha had re-fired their hot hatreds as readily as Samanda had quenched them. To play heroes and heroines rescuing Lankhmar was moonshine. To have vengeance on their old tormentor was blazing sunlight. They all raced after Reetha.
The Mouser, still balancing on the fluted golden back of Glipkerio’s couch and mouthing his dramatic oration, realized somewhat belatedly that he had lost his army and was still only doll size. Hisvin and Hisvet, drawing long knives from under their black togas, rapidly circled between him and the doorway through which his forces had fled. Hisvin looked vicious and Hisvet unpleasantly like her father—the Mouser had never before noted the striking family resemblance. They began to close in.
To his left Elakeria snatched up a handful of the wands of office and raised them threateningly. To the Mouser, even those flimsy rods were huge as pikes.
To his right Glipkerio, still cringing away, reached down surreptitiously for his light battle-ax. Evidently the Mouser’s loyal squeaks had gone unheard, or not been believed.
The Mouser wondered which way to jump.
Behind him Frix murmured softly, though to the Mouser’s ears still somewhat boomingly, ‘Exit kitchen tyrant pursued by pages unclad and maids in a state of nature, leaving our hero beset by an ogre and two—or is it three?—ogresses.’
16
Fafhrd, although he came down the temple’s wall fast, found the battle once more considerably changed when he reached the bottom.
The Gods of Lankhmar, though not exactly in panicky rout, were withdrawing toward the open door of their temple, thrusting their staves from time to time at the horde of rats which still beset them. Wisps of smoke still trailed from a few of them—ghostly moonlit pennons. They were coughing, or more likely cursing and it sounded like coughs. Their brown skull-faces were dire—the expression of elders defeated and trying to cloak their impotent, gibbering rage with dignity.
Fafhrd moved rapidly out of their way.
Kreeshkra and her two male Ghouls were slashing and stabbing from their saddles at another flood of rats in front of Hisvin’s house, while their black horses crunched rats under their hooves.
Fafhrd made toward them, but at that moment there was a rush of rats at him and he had to unsheathe Graywand. Using the great sword as a scythe, he cleared a space around him with three strokes, then started again toward the Ghouls.
The doors of Hisvin’s house burst open and there fled out down the short stairs a crowd of Mingol slaves. Their faces grimaced with terror, but even more striking was the fact that they were thin almost beyond emaciation. Their once-tight black liveries hung loosely on them. Their hands were skeletal. Their faces were skulls covered with yellow skin.
Three groups of skeletons: brown, ivory, and yellow—It is a prodigy of prodigies, Fafhrd thought, the beginning of a dark spectrum of bones.
Behind the Mingols and driving them, not so much to kill them as to get them out of the way, came a company of crouchy but stalwart masked men, some wearing armor, all brandishing weapons—swords and crossbows. There was something horribly familiar about their scuttling, hobble-legged gait. Then came some with pikes and helmets, but without masks. The faces, or muzzles rather, were those of rats. All the newcomers, masked or nakedly fur-faced, made for the three Ghoulish riders.
Fafhrd sprang forward, Graywand singing about his head, unmindful of the new surge of ordinary rats coming against him—and came to a skidding halt.
The man-sized and man-armed rats were still pouring from Hisvin’s house. Hero or no, he couldn’t kill that many of them.
At that instant he felt claws sink into his leg. He raised his crook-fingered big left hand to sweep away from him whatever now attacked him…and saw climbing his thigh the black kitten from Squid.
That scatterbrain mustn’t be in this dread battle, he thought…and opened his empty pouch to thrust in the kitten…and saw gleaming dully at its bottom the tin whistle…and realized that here was a metal straw to cling to.
He snatched it out and set it t
o his lips and blew it.
When one taps with idle finger a toy drum, one does not expect a peal of thunder. Fafhrd gasped and almost swallowed the whistle. Then he made to hurl it away from him. Instead he set it to his lips once more, put his hands to his ears, for some reason closed his eyes tight, and once more blew it.
Once again the horrendous noise went shuddering up toward the moon and down the shadowed streets of Lankhmar.
Imagine the scream of a leopard, the snarl of a tiger, and the roaring of a lion commingled, and one will have some faint suggestion of the sound the tin whistle produced.
Everywhere the little rats held still in their hordes. The skeletal Mingols paused in their shaking, staggering flight. The big armed rats, masked or helmeted, halted in their attack upon the Ghouls. Even the Ghouls and their horses held still. The fur on the black kitten fluffed out as it still clung to Fafhrd’s crouching thigh, and its green eyes became enormous.
Then the awesome sound had died away, a distant bell was tolling midnight, and all the battlers fell to action again.
But black shapes were forming in the moonlight around Fafhrd. Shapes that were at first no more than shadows with a sheen to them. Then darker, like translucent polished black horn. Then solid and velvet black, their pads resting on the moonlit flagstones. They had the slender, long-legged forms of cheetahs, but the mass of tigers or lions. They stood almost as high at the shoulder as horses. Their somewhat small and prick-eared heads swayed slowly, as did their long tails. Their fangs were like needles of faintly green ice. Their eyes, which were like frozen emeralds, stared all twenty-six at Fafhrd—for there were thirteen of the beasts.
Then Fafhrd realized that they were staring not at his head but at his waist.
The black kitten there gave a shrill, wailing cry that was at once a young cat’s first battle call and also a greeting.
With a screaming, snarling roar, like thirteen of the tin whistles blown at once, the War Cats bounded outward. With preternatural agility, the black kitten leaped after a group of four of them.