by Fritz Leiber
‘But what’s she doing here in Thieves’ House?’ the Mouser pressed, his whisper feverish, ‘where women are forbidden and contemned. As if she were grandmaster of the Guild…grand-mistress…goddess…worshipped…Is Thieves’ Guild upside down?…all Nehwon turvy-topsy…?’
Ivlis looked up at them across the heads of her kneeling followers. Her green eyes narrowed. She casually lifted her fingers to her lips, then flicked them sideways twice, indicating to the Mouser that he should silently keep going in that direction and not return.
With a slow unloving smile, Freg made exactly the same gesture to Fafhrd, but even more idly seeming, as if humming a chorus. The two men obeyed, but with their gazes trailing behind them, so that it was with complete surprise, almost with starts of fear, that they found they had walked blindly into a room of rare woods embellished with intricate carvings, with a door before them and doors to either side, and in the one of the latter nearest the Mouser a freshly nubile girl with wicked eyes, in a green robe of shaggy toweling cloth, her black hair moist, and in the one nearest Fafhrd two slim blondes a-smile with dubious merriment and wearing loosely the black hoods and robes of nuns of Lankhmar. In nightmare’s fullest grip they realized that this was the very same garden house of Duke Danius, haunted by their earliest deepest loves, impiously reconstituted from the ashes to which the sorcerer Sheelba had burned it and profanely refurbished with all the trinkets wizard Ningauble had magicked from it and scattered to the four winds; and that these three night-fillies were Ivmiss Ovartamortes, niece of Karstak like-named, Lankhmar’s then overlord, and Fralek and Fro, mirror-twin daughters of the death-crazed duke, the three she-colts of the dark to whom they’d madly turned after losing even the ghosts of their true loves in Shadowland. Fafhrd was wildly thinking in unvoiced sound, ‘Fafhrd and Fro, and Freg, Friska and Frix—what is this Fr’-charm on me?’ while through the Mouser’s mind was skipping likewise, ‘Ivlis, Ivmiss, Ivivis (three Iv’s—and there’s e’en an Iv in Hisvet)—who are these girl-lets of the Iv…?’
(Near the Life Pole, the gods Mog, Issek, and Kos were working at the top of their bent, crying out to each other new girl-discoveries with which to torment their lapsed worshippers. The crowd of spectator gods around them was now large.)
And then the Mouser bethought him with a shiver that he had not listed amongst his girl-lings of the Iv the archgirl of them all, fair Ivrian, forever lost in Death’s demesne. And Fafhrd likewise shook. And the night-fillies flanking them pouted and made moues at them, and they were fairly catapulted into the midst of a pavilion of wine-dark silk, beyond whose unstirring folds showed the flat black horizons of the Shadowland.
Beauteous, slate-visaged Vlana spat full in Fafhrd’s face, saying, ‘I told you I’d do that if you came back,’ but fair Ivrian only eyed the Mouser with never a sign or word.
And then they were back in the betorched corridor, more hurried along it than hurrying, and the Mouser envied Fafhrd death’s spittle inching down his cheek. And girls were flashing by like ghosts, unheedingly—Mara of Fafhrd’s youth, Atya who worshipped Tyaa, bovine-eyed Hrenlet, Ahura of Seleucia, and many many more—until they were feeling the utter despair that comes with being rejected not by one or a few loves, but by all. The unfairness of it alone was enough to make a man die.
Then in the rush one scene lingered awhile: Alyx the Picklock garbed in the scarlet robes and golden tiara a-swarm with rubies of the archpriest of an eastern faith, and kneeling before her costumed as clerk Lilyblack, the Mouser’s girlish leman from his criminous days, intoning, ‘Papa, the heathen rage, the civilized decay,’ and the transvestite archpriestess pronouncing, ‘All men are enemies…’
Almost Fafhrd and the Mouser dropped to their knees and prayed to whatever gods may be for surcease from their torment. But somehow they didn’t, and of a sudden they found themselves on Cheap Street near where it crosses Crafts and turning in at a drab doorway after two females, whose backs were teasingly familiar, and following them up a narrow flight of stairs that stretched up so far in one flight that its crazy warpage was magnified.
In Godsland Mog threw himself back, blowing out his breath and saying, ‘There! that gets them all,’ while Issek likewise stretched himself out (so far as his permanently bent ankles and wrists would permit), observing, ‘Lord, people don’t appreciate how we gods work, what toil in sparrow-watching!’ and the spectator gods began to disperse.
But Kos, still frowningly immersed in his task to such a degree that he wasn’t aware of the pain in his short burly thighs from sitting cross-legged so long, cried out, ‘Hold on! Here’s another pair: to wit, one Nemia of the Dusk, one Eyes of Ogo, women of lax morals and, to boot, receivers of stolen property, oh, that’s vile!’
Issek laughed wearily and said, ‘Wait now, dear Kos. I crossed those two off at the very start. They’re our men’s dearest enemies, swindled them out of a precious loot of jewels, as almost any god around could tell you. Sooner than seek them out (to be rebuffed in any case, of course) our boys would rot in hell,’ while Mog yawned and added, ‘Don’t you ever know, dear Kos, when the game’s done?’
So the befurred short god shrugged and gave over, cursing as he tried to straighten his legs.
Meanwhile, the Eyes of Ogo and Nemia of the Dusk reached the summit of the endless stairs and tiredly entered their pad, eyeing it with disfavor. (It was an impoverished, dingy, even noisome place—the two best thieves in Lankhmar had fallen on hard times, as even the best of thieves and receivers will in the course of long careers.)
Nemia turned round and said, ‘Look what the cat dragged in.’ Hardship had drastically straightened her lush curves. Her comrade Ogo-Eyes still looked somewhat like a child, but a very old and ill-used one. ‘Wow,’ she said wearily, ‘you two look miserable, as if you’d just escaped death and sorry you had. Do yourselves a favor—fall down the stairs, breaking your necks.’
When Fafhrd and the Mouser didn’t move, or change their woebegone expressions, she laughed shortly, dropped into a broken-seated chair, poked out a leg at the Mouser, and said, ‘Well, if you’re not leaving, make yourself useful. Remove my sandals, wash my feet,’ while Nemia sat down before a rickety dressing table and, while surveying herself in the broken mirror, held out a broken-toothed instrument in Fafhrd’s direction, saying, ‘Comb my hair, barbarian. Watch out for snarls and knots.’
Fafhrd and the Mouser (the latter preparing and fetching warm water) began solemn-faced to do those very things most carefully.
After quite a long time (and several other menial services rendered or servile penances done) the two women could no longer keep from smiling. Misery, after it’s comforted, loves company. ‘That’s enough for now,’ Ogo-Eyes told the Mouser. ‘Come, make yourself comfortable.’ Nemia spoke likewise to Fafhrd, adding, ‘Later you men can make the dinner and go out for wine.’
After a while the Mouser said, ‘By Mog, this is more like it.’ Fafhrd agreed, ‘By Issek, yes. Kos damn all spooked adventures.’
The three gods, hearing their names taken in vain as they rested in paradise from their toils, were content.
VI
Trapped In the Sea of Stars
Fafhrd the educated barbarian and his constant comrade the Gray (Grey?) Mouser, city-born but wizard-tutored in the wilds, had in their leopard-boat Black Racer sailed farther south in the Outer Sea along the Quarmallian or west coast of Lankhmar continent than they had ever ventured before, or any other honest mariner they knew.
They were lured on by a pair of shimmer-sprights, as they are called, a breed of will-o’-the-wisps which men deem infallible guides to lodgements of precious metals, if only one have a master hunter’s patience and craft to track them down, by reason of which they are also called treasure-flies, silver-moths, and gold-bugs. This pair had a coppery pink seeming by day and a silvery black gleam by night, promising by those hues a trove of elektrum and still dearer, because massier, white gold. They most resembled restlessly flowing, small bedsheets of go
ssamer. They fluttered ceaselessly about the single mast, darting ahead, drifting behind. Sometimes they were almost invisible, faintest heat-blurs in the pelting fire of the near-vertical sun, ghostliest shimmers in the dark of night and easily mistaken for reflections of the White Huntress’ light on sea and sail, the moon now being near full. Sometimes they moved as sprightly as their name, sometimes they drooped and lagged, but ever moved on. At such times they seemed sad (or melancholy, Fafhrd said, one of his favorite moods). On other occasions they became (if ears could be trusted) vocal with joy, filling the air about the leopard-boat with faint sweet jargonings, whispers ’twixt wind and speech, and long ecstatic purrs.
By the Gray Mouser’s and Fafhrd’s calculations, Black Racer had now left behind Lankhmar continent to loadside, and the hypothetical Western continent far, far to steerside, and struck out due south into the Great Equatorial Ocean (sometimes called—but why?—the Sea of Stars) that girdles Nehwon and is deemed wholly dire and quite uncrossable by Lankhmarts and Easterners alike, who in their sailings hug the southern coasts of the northern continents, so that one would have thought the doughtiest sailors would have ere this turned back.
But there was, you see, another reason besides the hope of vast riches—and not chiefly their great courage either, by any means—that Fafhrd and the Mouser kept sailing on in the face of unknown perils and horrid legendary of monsters that crunched ships, and currents swifter than the hurricane, and craterous maelstroms that swallowed vastest vessels in one gulp and even sucked down venturesome islands. It was a reason they spoke of seldom to each other and then only most guardedly, in low tones after long silence in the long silent watches of the night. It was this: that on the edge of darkest sleep, or sluggishly rousing from sail-shadowed nap by day, they briefly saw the shimmer-sprights as beautiful, slim, translucent girls, mirror-image twins, with loving faces and great, glimmering wings. Girls with fine hair like gold or silver clouds and distant eyes that yet brimmed with thought and witchery, girls slim almost beyond belief yet not too slim for the act of love, if only they might wax sufficiently substantial, which was something their smiles and gazes seemed to promise might come to pass. And the two adventurers felt a yearning for these shimmer-girls such as they had never felt for mortal woman, so that they could no more turn back than men wholly ensorcelled or stark lockjawed mad.
That morning as their treasure-sprights led them on, looking like rays of rainbow in the sun, the Mouser and Fafhrd were each lost in his secret thoughts of girls and gold, so that neither noted the subtle changes in the ocean surface ahead, from ripply to half smooth with odd little long lines of foam racing east. Suddenly the gold-bugs darted east and the next instant something seized the leopard-boat’s keel so that she veered strongly east with a bound like that of the lithe beast for which her class of craft was named. The tall mast was almost snapped and the two heroes were nearly thrown to the deck, and by the time they had recovered from their surprise the Black Racer was speeding east, the twin shimmer-sprights winging ahead exultantly, and the two heroes knew that they were in the grip of the Great Eastward Equatorial Current and that it was no fable.
Momentarily forgetting their aerial maybe-girls, they moved to steer north out of it, Fafhrd leaning on the tiller while the Mouser saw to the large single sail, but at that moment a northwest wind struck from astern with gale force, almost driving the Black Racer under as it drove her deeper and deeper south into the current. This wind was no mere gust but steadily mounted to storm force, so that it would infallibly have torn their sail away ere they could furl it save that the current below was carrying them east almost as fast as the wind harried them on above.
Then a league to the south they saw three waterspouts travelling east together, gray pillars stretching halfway from earth to sky, at thrice Black Racer’s speed at least, indicating that the current was still swifter there. As the two still-astonished sailormen perforce accepted their plight—helpless in the twin grasp of furiously speeding water and air as if their craft were frozen to the sea—the Gray Mouser cried out, ‘O Fafhrd, now I can well believe that metaphysical fancy that the whole universe is water and our world but one wind-haunted bubble in it.’
From where white-knuckled he gripped the tiller, Fafhrd replied, ‘I’ll grant, what with those ’spouts and all this flying foam, it seems right now there’s water everywhere. Yet still I can’t believe that philosopher’s dream of Nehwon-world a bubble, when any fool can see the sun and moon are massy orbs like Nehwon thousands of leagues distant in the high air, which must be very thin out there, by the by.
‘But man, this is no time for sophistries. I’ll tie the tiller, and while this weird calm lasts (born of near equal speeds of current and wind, and as if the air were cut away before and closing in behind) let’s triple-reef the sail and make all snug.’
As they worked, the three waterspouts vanished in the distance ahead, to be replaced by a group of five more coming up fast from astern—somewhat nearer this time, for all the while Black Racer was being driven gradually but relentlessly south. From almost overhead the midday sun beat down fiercely, for the storm wind blowing near hurricane force had brought no clouds or opaque air with it—in itself a prodigy unparalleled in the recollection of the Mouser or even Fafhrd, a widely sailed man. After several futile efforts to steer north out of the mighty current (which resulted only in the following storm wind shifting perversely north a point or two, driving them deeper south) the two men gave over, thereby admitting their complete inability at present to influence their leopard boat’s course.
‘At this rate,’ Fafhrd opined, ‘we’ll cross the Great Equatorial Ocean in a matter of month or two. Lucky we’re well provisioned.’
The Mouser replied dolefully, ‘If Racer holds together a day amidst those ’spouts and speeds, I’ll be surprised.’
‘She’s a stout craft,’ Fafhrd said lightly. ‘Just think, Small Gloomy One, the southern continents, unknown to man! We’ll be the first to visit ’em!’
‘If there are any such. And our planks don’t split. Continents?—I’d give my soul for one small isle.’
‘The first to reach Nehwon’s south pole!’ Fafhrd daydreamed on. ‘The first to climb the southern Stardocks! The first to loot the treasures of the south! The first to find what land lies at antipodes from Shadowland, realm of Death! The first—’
The Mouser quietly removed himself to the other side of the shortened sail from Fafhrd and cautiously made his way to the prow, where he wearily threw himself down in a narrow angle of shadow. He was dazed by wind, spray, exertion, the needling sun, and sheer velocity. He dully watched the coppery pinkish shimmer-sprights, which were holding position with remarkable steadiness for them at mast height a ship’s length ahead.
After a while he slept and dreamed that one of them detached itself from the other, and came down and hovered above him like a long rosy spectrum and then became a fond- and narrow-visaged green-eyed girl in his arms, who loosened his clothing with slim fingers cool as milk kept in a well, so that looking down closely he saw the nipples of her dainty breasts pressing like fresh-scoured copper thimbles into the curly dark hair on his chest. And she was saying softly and sweetly, head bent forward like his, lips and tongue brushing his ear, ‘Press on, press on. This is the only way to Life and immortality and paradise.’ And he replied, ‘My dearest love, I will.’
He woke to Fafhrd’s shout and to a fugitive but clear, though almost blinding, vision of a female face that was narrow and beautiful, but otherwise totally unlike that of the douce girl of his dream. A sharp, imperious face, wildly alive, made all of red-gold light, the irises of her wide eyes vermilion.
He lifted up sluggishly. His jerkin was unlaced to his waist and pushed back off his shoulders.
‘Mouser,’ Fafhrd said urgently, ‘when I first glimpsed you but now, you were all bathed in fire!’
Gazing stupidly down, the Mouser saw twin threads of smoke rising from his matted chest where the nipples o
f his dream had pressed into it. And as he stared at the gray threads, they died. He smelled the stink of burning hair.
He shook his head, blinked, and pushed himself to his feet. ‘What a strange fancy,’ he said to Fafhrd. ‘The sun must have got in your eye. Say, look there!’
The five waterspouts had drawn far ahead and had been replaced by two groups (of three and four respectively) swiftly overtaking Black Racer from astern, the four rather distant, the three appallingly close, so that they could see clearly the structure of each: pillars of wild gray water almost a ship’s length thick and towering up to thrice mast height, where each broke off abruptly.
And in the farther distance they could now see still more groups of speeding spouts, and most distant-dim yet speediest of all a gigantic single one that looked leagues thick. A-prow the twin shimmer-sprights led on.
‘’Tis passing strange,’ Fafhrd averred.
‘Does one speak of a covey of waterspouts?’ the Mouser wanted to know. ‘Or a pride? A congeries? A fountain? Or—yes!—a tower! A tower of waterspouts!’
The day passed and half the night, and their weird situation of eastward speeding held—and Black Racer held together. The sea was slick and moving in long low swells across which blew thin, long, pale lines of foam. The wind was hurricane force at very least, but the velocity of the Great Equatorial Current had increased to match it.
Overhead, nearly at mast-top, the full moon shone down, scantily scattered about with stars. Her White Huntress light showed the smooth surface of the racing sea to be outdinted near and far by towers of waterspouts racing by in majestical array and yet with fantastical celerity, as if they somehow profited far more from the speed of the current than did Black Racer. At mast height and ship’s length ahead, the twin shimmer-sprights flew on like flags of silver lace against the dark. All almost silently.
‘Fafhrd,’ the Gray Mouser spoke very softly, as if reluctant to break the silver moonlight’s spectral spell, ‘Tonight I clearly see that Nehwon is a vast bubble rising through waters of eternity, with continents and isles afloat inside.’