by Fritz Leiber
The Mouser persisted, ‘But what if your Vlana should appear, blue-faced and unloving? Or my Ivrian in like state, for that matter?’
That dire image did it. Fafhrd sprang up, grabbing for the low fence. But—lo and behold—there was no fence at hand. In all directions stretched out the damp, dark green turf of the Shadowland, while the soft drizzle had thickened again, hiding Astorian. There was no way to tell directions.
The Mouser searched in his ratskin pouch and drew out a blue bone needle. He pricked himself finding it, and cursed. It was wickedly sharp at one end, round and pierced at the other.
‘We need a pool or puddle,’ he said.
‘Where did you get that toy?’ Fafhrd quizzed. ‘Magic, eh?’
‘From Nattick Nimblefingers the Tailor in vasty Lankhmar,’ the Mouser responded. ‘Magic, nay! Hast heard of compass needles, oh wise one?’
Not far off they found a shallow puddle atop the turf. The Mouser carefully floated his needle on the small mirror of clear, placid water. It spun about slowly and eventually settled itself.
‘We go that way,’ Fafhrd said, pointing out from the pierced end of the needle ‘South.’ For he realized the pricking end must point toward the heart of the Shadowland—Nehwon’s Death Pole, one might call it. For an instant he wondered if there were another such pole at the antipodes—perhaps a Life Pole.
‘And we’ll still need the needle,’ the Mouser added, pricking himself again and cursing as he pouched it, ‘for future guidance.’
‘Hah! Wah-wah-wah-wah!’ yelled three berserks, emerging like fleet statues from the mist. They had been long marooned in the skirts of the Shadowland, reluctant either to advance to the Castle of Death and find their Hell or Valhalla, or to seek escape, but always ready for a fight. They rushed at Fafhrd and the Mouser, bare-skinned and naked-bladed.
It took the Twain ten heartbeats of clashing sword-fight to kill them, though killing in the domain of Death must be at least a misdemeanor, it occurred to the Mouser—like poaching. Fafhrd got a shallow slash wound across his biceps, which the Mouser carefully bound up.
‘Wow!’ said Fafhrd. ‘Where did the needle point? I’ve got turned around.’
They located the same or another puddle-mirror, floated the needle, again found South, and then took up their trek.
They twice tried to escape from the Shadowland by changing course, once east, once west. It was no use. Whatever way they went, they found only soft-turfed earth and the misted sky. So they kept on south, trusting Nattick’s needle.
For food they cut out black lambs from the black flocks they encountered, slew, bled, skinned, dressed, and roasted the tender meat over fires from wood of the squat black trees and bushes here and there. The young flesh was succulent. They drank dew.
Death in his low-walled keep continued to grin from time to time at his map, as the dark tongue of his territory kept magically extending southwest, the dimmed spark of his doomed victims in its margin.
He noted that the Ghoulish cavalry originally pursuing the Twain had halted at the boundary of his marchland.
But now there was the faintest trace of anxiety in Death’s smile. And now and again a tiny vertical frown creased his opalescent, unwrinkled forehead, as he exerted his faculties to keep his geographical sorcery going.
The black tongue kept on down the map, past Sarheenmar and thievish Ilthmar to the Sinking Land. Both cities on the shore of the Inner Sea were scared unto death by the dark invasion of damp turf and misty sky, and they thanked their degenerate gods that it narrowly bypassed them.
And now the black tongue crossed the Sinking Land, moving due west. The little frown in Death’s forehead had become quite deep. At the Swamp Gate of Lankhmar the Mouser and Fafhrd found their magical mentors waiting, Sheelba of the Eyeless Face and Ningauble of the Seven Eyes.
‘What have you been up to?’ Sheelba sternly asked the Mouser.
‘And what have you been doing?’ Ningauble demanded of Fafhrd.
The Mouser and Fafhrd were still in the Shadowland, and the two wizards outside it, with the boundary midway between. So their conversation was like that of two pairs of people on opposite sides of a narrow street, on the one side of which it is raining cats and dogs, the other side dry and sunny, though in this instance stinking with the smog of Lankhmar.
‘Seeking Reetha,’ the Mouser replied, honestly for once.
‘Seeking Kreeshkra,’ Fafhrd said boldly, ‘but a mounted Ghoul troop harried us back.’
From his hood Ningauble writhed out six of his seven eyes and regarded Fafhrd searchingly. He said severely, ‘Kreeshkra, tired of your untameable waywardness, has gone back to the Ghouls for good, taking Reetha with her. I would advise you instead to seek Frix,’ naming a remarkable female who had played no small part in the adventure of the rat-hordes, the same affair in which Kreeshkra the Ghoul girl had been involved.
‘Frix is a brave, handsome, remarkably cool woman,’ Fafhrd temporized, ‘but how to reach her? She’s in another world, a world of air.’
‘While I counsel that you seek Hisvet,’ Sheelba of the Eyeless Face told the Mouser grimly. The unfeatured blackness in his hood grew yet blacker (with concentration) if that were possible. He was referring to yet another female involved in the rat adventure, in which Reetha also had been a leading character.
‘A great idea, Father,’ responded the Mouser, who made no bones about preferring Hisvet to all other girls, particularly since he had never once enjoyed her favours, though on the verge of doing so several times. ‘But she is likely deep in the earth and in her rat-size persona. How would I do it? How, how?’
If Sheel and Ning could have smiled, they would have.
However, Sheelba said only, ‘It is bothersome to see you both bemisted, like heroes in smoke.’
He and Ning, without conference, collaborated in working a small but very difficult magic. After resisting most tenaciously, the Shadowland and its drizzle retreated east, leaving the Twain in the same sunshine as their mentors. Though two invisible patches of dark mist remained, entering into the flesh of the Mouser and Fafhrd and closing forever around their hearts.
Far eastaways, Death permitted himself a small curse which would have scandalized the high gods, had they heard it. He looked daggers at his map and its shortening black tongue. For Death, he was in a most bitter temper. Foiled again!
Ning and Sheel worked another diminutive wizardry.
Without warning, Fafhrd shot upwards in the air, growing tinier and tinier, until at last he was lost to sight.
Without moving from where he stood, the Mouser also grew tiny, until he was somewhat less than a foot high, of a size to cope with Hisvet, in or out of bed. He dove into the nearest rathole.
Neither feat was as remarkable as it sounds, since Nehwon is only a bubble rising through the waters of infinity.
The two heroes each spent a delightful weekend with his lady of the week.
‘I don’t know why I do things like this,’ Hisvet said, lisping faintly and touching the Mouser intimately as they lay side by side supine on silken sheets. ‘It must be because I loathe you.’
‘A pleasant and even worthy encounter,’ Frix confessed to Fafhrd in similar situation. ‘It is my hang-up to enjoy playing, now and then, with the lower animals. Which some would say is a weakness in a queen of the air.’
Their weekend done, Fafhrd and the Mouser were automatically magicked back to Lankhmar, encountering one another in Cheap Street near Nattick Nimblefinger’s narrow and dirty-looking dwelling. The Mouser was his right size again.
‘You look sunburned,’ he observed to his comrade.
‘Space-burned, it is,’ Fafhrd corrected. ‘Frix lives in a remarkably distant land. But you, old friend, look paler than your wont.’
‘Shows what three days underground will do to a man’s complexion,’ the Mouser responded. ‘Come, let’s have a drink at the Silver Eel.’
Ningauble in his cave near Ilthmar and Sheelba in his mobile h
ut in the Great Salt Marsh each smiled, though lacking the equipment for that facial expression. They knew they had laid one more obligation on their protégés.
IV
The Bait
Fafhrd the Northerner was dreaming of a great mound of gold.
The Gray Mouser the Southerner, ever cleverer in his forever competitive fashion, was dreaming of a heap of diamonds. He hadn’t tossed out all of the yellowish ones yet, but he guessed that already his glistening pile must be worth more than Fafhrd’s glowing one.
How he knew in his dream what Fafhrd was dreaming was a mystery to all beings in Nehwon, except perhaps Sheelba of the Eyeless Face and Ningauble of the Seven Eyes, respectively the Mouser’s and Fafhrd’s sorcerer-mentors. Maybe, a vast, black basement mind shared by the two was involved.
Simultaneously they awoke, Fafhrd a shade more slowly, and sat up in bed.
Standing midway between the feet of their cots was an object that fixed their attention. It weighed about eighty pounds, was about four feet eight inches tall, had long straight black hair pendant from head, had ivory-white skin, and was as exquisitely formed as a slim chesspiece of the King of Kings carved from a single moonstone. It looked thirteen, but the lips smiled a cool self-infatuated seventeen, while the gleaming deep eye-pools were first blue melt of the Ice Age. Naturally, she was naked.
‘She is mine!’ the Gray Mouser said, always quick from the scabbard.
‘No, she’s mine!’ Fafhrd said almost simultaneously, but conceding by that initial ‘No’ that the Mouser had been first, or at least he had expected the Mouser to be first.
‘I belong to myself and to no one else, save two or three virile demidevils,’ the small naked girl said, though giving them each in turn a most nymphish lascivious look.
‘I’ll fight you for her,’ the Mouser proposed.
‘And I you,’ Fafhrd confirmed, slowly drawing Graywand from its sheath beside his cot.
The Mouser likewise slipped Scalpel from its ratskin container.
The two heroes rose from their cots.
At this moment, two personages appeared a little behind the girl—from thin air, to all appearances. Both were at least nine feet tall. They had to bend, not to bump the ceiling. Cobwebs tickled their pointed ears. The one on the Mouser’s side was black as wrought iron. He swiftly drew a sword that looked forged from the same material.
At the same time, the other newcomer—bone-white, this one—produced a silver-seeming sword, likely steel plated with tin.
The nine-footer opposing the Mouser aimed a skull-splitting blow at the top of his head. The Mouser parried in prime and his opponent’s weapon shrieked off to the left. Whereupon, smartly swinging his rapier widdershins, the Mouser slashed off the black fiend’s head, which struck the floor with a horrid clank.
The white afreet opposing Fafhrd trusted to a downward thrust. But the Northerner, catching his blade in a counter-clockwise bind, thrust him through, the silvery sword missing Fafhrd’s right temple by the thinness of a hair.
With a petulant stamp of her naked heel, the nymphet vanished into thin air, or perhaps Limbo.
The Mouser made to wipe off his blade on the cot-clothes, but discovered there was no need. He shrugged. ‘What a misfortune for you, comrade,’ he said in a voice of mocking woe. ‘Now you will not be able to enjoy the delicious chit as she disports herself on your heap of gold.’
Fafhrd moved to cleanse Graywand on his sheets, only to note that it too was altogether unbloodied. He frowned. ‘Too bad for you, best of friends,’ he sympathized. ‘Now you won’t be able to possess her as she writhes with girlish abandon on your couch of diamonds, their glitter striking opalescent tones from her pale flesh.’
‘Mauger that effeminate artistic garbage, how did you know that I was dreaming diamonds?’ the Mouser demanded.
‘How did I?’ Fafhrd asked himself wonderingly. At last he begged the question with, ‘The same way, I suppose, that you knew I was dreaming of gold.’
The two excessively long corpses chose that moment to vanish, and the severed head with them.
Fafhrd said sagely, ‘Mouser, I begin to believe that supernatural forces were involved in this morning’s haps.’
‘Or else hallucinations, oh great philosopher,’ the Mouser countered somewhat peevishly.
‘Not so,’ Fafhrd corrected, ‘for see, they’ve left their weapons behind.’
‘True enough,’ the Mouser conceded, rapaciously eyeing the wrought-iron and tin-plated blades on the floor. ‘Those will fetch a fancy price on Curio Court.’
The Great Gong of Lankhmar, sounding distantly through the walls, boomed out the twelve funereal strokes of noon, when burial parties plunge spade into earth.
‘An after-omen,’ Fafhrd pronounced. ‘Now we know the source of the supernal force. The Shadowland, terminus of all funerals.’
‘Yes,’ the Mouser agreed. ‘Prince Death, that eager boy, has had another go at us.’
Fafhrd splashed cool water onto his face from a great bowl set against the wall. ‘Ah well,’ he spoke through the splashes, ‘’Twas a pretty bait at least. Truly, there’s nothing like a nubile girl, enjoyed or merely glimpsed naked, to give one an appetite for breakfast.’
‘Indeed yes,’ the Mouser replied, as he tightly shut his eyes and briskly rubbed his face with a palm full of white brandy. ‘She was just the sort of immature dish to kindle your satyrish taste for maids newly budded.’
In the silence that came as the splashing stopped, Fafhrd inquired innocently, ‘Whose satyrish taste?’
V
Under the Thumbs of the Gods
Drinking strong drink one night at the Silver Eel, the Gray Mouser and Fafhrd became complacently, even luxuriously, nostalgic about their past loves and amorous exploits. They even boasted a little to each other about their most recent erotic solacings (although it is always very unwise to boast of such matters, especially out loud; one never knows who may be listening).
‘Despite her vast talent for evil,’ the Mouser said, ‘Hisvet remains always a child. Why should that surprise me?—evil comes naturally to children, it is a game to them, they feel no shame. Her breasts are no bigger than walnuts, or limes, or at most small tangerines topped by hazelnuts—all eight of them.’
Fafhrd said, ‘Frix is the very soul of the dramatic. You should have seen her poised on the battlement later that night, her eyes raptly agleam, seeking the stars. Naked save for some ornaments of copper fresh as rosy dawn. She looked as if she were about to fly—which she can do, as you know.’
In the Land of the Gods, in short in Godsland and near Nehwon’s Life Pole there, which lies in the southern hemisphere at the antipodes from the Shadowland (abode of Death), three gods sitting together cross-legged in a circle picked out Fafhrd’s and the Mouser’s voices from the general mutter of their worshippers, both loyal and lapsed, which resounds eternally in any god’s ear, as if he held a seashell to it.
One of the three gods was Issek, whom Fafhrd had once faithfully served as acolyte for three months. Issek had the appearance of a delicate youth with wrists and ankles broken, or rather permanently bent at right angles. During his Passion he had been severely racked. Another was Kos, whom Fafhrd had revered during his childhood in the Cold Waste, rather a squat, brawny god bundled up in furs, with a grim, not to say surly, heavily bearded visage.
The third God was Mog, who resembled a four-limbed spider with a quite handsome, though not entirely human face. Once the girl Ivrian, the Mouser’s first love, had taken a fancy to a jet statuette of Mog he had stolen for her and decided, perhaps roguishly, that Mog and the Mouser looked alike.
Now the Gray Mouser is generally believed to be and have always been complete atheist, but this is not true. Partly to humor Ivrian, whom he spoiled fantastically, but partly because it tickled his vanity that a god should choose to look like him, he made a game for several weeks of firmly believing in Mog.
So the Mouser and Fafhrd were clearly worshippers
, though lapsed, and the three gods singled out their voices because of that and because they were the most noteworthy worshippers these three gods had ever had and because they were boasting. For the gods have very sharp ears for boasts, or for declarations of happiness and self-satisfaction, or for assertions of a firm intention to do this or that, or for statements that this or that must surely happen, or any other words hinting that a man is in the slightest control of his own destiny. And the gods are jealous, easily angered, perverse, and swift to thwart.
‘It’s them, all right—the haughty bastards!’ Kos grunted, sweating under his furs—for Godsland is paradisial.
‘They haven’t called on me for years—the ingrates!’ Issek said with a toss of his delicate chin. ‘We’d be dead for all they care, except we’ve our other worshippers. But they don’t know that—they’re heartless.’
‘They have not even taken our names in vain,’ said Mog. ‘I believe, gentlemen, it is time they suffered the divine displeasure. Agreed?’
In the meanwhile, by speaking privily of Frix and Hisvet, the Mouser and Fafhrd had aroused certain immediate desires in themselves without seriously disturbing their mood of complacent nostalgia.
‘What say you, Mouser,’ Fafhrd mused lazily, ‘should we now seek excitement? The night is young.’
His comrade replied grandly, ‘We have but to stir a little, to signify our interest, and excitement will seek us. We’ve loved and been forever adored by so many girls that we’re bound to run into a pair of ’em. Or even two pair. They’ll catch our present thoughts on the wing and come running. We will hunt girls—ourselves the bait!’
‘So let’s be on our way,’ said Fafhrd, drinking up and rising with a lurch.
‘Ach, the lewd dogs!’ Kos growled, shaking sweat from his brow, for Godsland is balmy (and quite crowded). ‘But how to punish ’em?’