by Fritz Leiber
A brighter white blink momentarily lightened the fog ahead. Without pausing an instant for thought, the Mouser shouted his commands. ‘Loadside sweeps! Pull water! Yarely! Steerside, push hard!’ And unmindful of the Mingol manning it, he threw himself at the tiller and drove it steerside so that Flotsam’s rudder would strengthen the turning power of the loadside sweeps.
It was well he acted as swiftly as he did. From out the fog ahead thrust a low, thick, sharp-tipped, glittering shaft that would otherwise have rammed Flotsam’s bow and split her in twain. As it was, the ram grazed Flotsam’s side with shuddering rasp as the small ship veered abruptly loadside in response to the desperate sweeping of its soldier-thieves.
And now, following its ram, the white, sharp prow of Fafhrd’s ship parted the gleam-shot fog. Almost incredibly lofty that prow was, high as a house and betokening ship as huge, so that Flotsam’s men had to crane necks up at it and even the Mouser gasped in fear and wonder. Fortunately it was yards to steerward as Flotsam continued to veer loadward, or else the smaller ship had been battered in.
Out of the fog dead ahead there appeared a flatness travelling sideways. A yard above the deck, it struck the mast, which might have snapped except that the flatness broke off first and there dropped with a clash at the Mouser’s feet something which further widened his eyes: the great ice-crusted blade and some of the loom of an oar twice the size of Flotsam’s sweeps, and looking for all the world like a dead giant’s fingernail.
The next huge oar missed the mast, but struck Pshawri a glancing blow and sent him sprawling. The rest missed Flotsam by widening margins. From the vast and towering, white, glittering bulk already vanishing in the fog there came a mighty cry: ‘Oh coward! To turn aside from battle challenge! Oh, crafty coward! But go on guard again! I’ll get you yet, small one, howe’er you dodge!’
Those huge, mad words were followed by an equally insane laughter. It was the sort of laughter the Mouser had heard before from Fafhrd in perilous battle plights, now madder than ever, fiendish even, but it was loud as if there were a dozen Fafhrds voicing it in unison. Had he trained his berserks to echo him?
A clawlike hand gripped the Mouser’s elbow hard. Then Ourph was pointing at the big, broken oar end on the deck. ‘It’s nought but ice.’ The old Mingol’s voice resonated with superstitious awe. ‘Ice forged in Khahkht’s chill smithy.’ He let go Mouser and, swiftly stooping, raised the thing in black-mitted hands widely spaced, as one might a wounded deadly serpent, and of a sudden hurled it overboard.
Beyond him, Mikkidu had lifted Pshawri’s shoulders and bloodied head from the deck. But now he was peering up at his captain over his still, senseless comrade. In his wild eyes was a desperate questioning.
The Mouser hardened his face. ‘Sweep on, you sluggards,’ he commanded measuredly. ‘Push strongly. Mikkidu, let crewmen see to Pshawri, you chink gong for the sweeps. Swiftest beat! Ourph, arm your crew. Send down for arrows and your bows of horn—and for my soldiers their slings and ammunition. Leaden ball, not rock. Gavs, keep close watch astern, Trenchi at prow. Yarely all!’
The Gray One looked grimly dangerous and was thinking thoughts he hated. A thousand years ago in the Silver Eel, Fafhrd had announced he’d hire twelve berserkers, madmen in battle. But had his dear friend, now demon-possessed, guessed then just how mad his dozen dements would be, and that their craziness would be catching? and infect himself?
Above the ice fog, the stars glittered like frost candles, dimmed only by the competing light of the gibbous moon low in the southwest, where in the distance the front of an approaching gale was rolling up the thick carpet of ice crystals floating in air.
Not far above the pearly white surface, which stretched to all horizons save the southwest, the messenger hawk the Mouser had released was winging east. As far as eye could see, no other living thing shared its vast-arched loneliness, yet the bird suddenly veered as if attacked, then frantically beat its wings and came to a twisting stop in mid-air, as if it had been seized and held helpless. Only there was nothing to be seen sharing the clear air with the thrashing bird.
The scrap of parchment around its leg unrolled like magic, lay flat in the air for a space, then rolled itself around the scaly leg again. The white hawk shot off desperately to the east, zigzagging as if to dodge pursuit and flying very close to the white floor, as if ready at any moment to dive into it.
A voice came out of the empty air at the point where the bird had been released, soliloquizing, ‘There’s profit enow and more in this leaguer of Oomforafor of Stardock and the Khahkht of the Black Ice, if my ruse works—and it will! Dear devilish sisters, weep!—your lovers who defiled you are dead men already, though they still breathe and walk awhile. Delayed revenge long savored and denied is sweeter than swift. And sweetest of all when the ones you hate love, but are forced to kill, each other. For if my notes effect not that mebliss, my name’s not Faroomfar! And now, wing sound-swift! my fleet steed of air, my viewless magic rug.’
The strange, low fog stayed thick and bitter cold, but Fafhrd’s garb of reversed snow-fawn fur was snug. Gauntleted hand on the low figurehead—a hissing snow serpent—he gazed back with satisfaction from Sea Hawk’s prow at his oarsmen, still rowing as strongly as when he’d first commanded them on sighting Mouser’s red flare from the masthead. They were staunch lads, when kept busy and battered as needed. Nine of them tall as he, and three taller—his corporals Skullick and Mannimark and sergeant Skor, the last two hid by the fog where Skor clinked time at the stern. Each petty officer immediately commanded a squad of three men.
And Sea Hawk was a staunch sailing galley!—a little longer and narrower of beam and with much taller mast, rigged fore and aft, than the Gray Mouser’s ship (though Fafhrd could not know that, never having seen Flotsam).
Yet he frowned slightly. Pelly should be back by now, provided Mouser had sent a return message, and the little gray man never lost chance to talk, whether by tongue or pen. It was time he visited the top anyhow—the Mouser might burn another flare, and Skullick wake-dream on watch. But as he neared the mast, a seven-foot ghost loomed up—a ghost in turned gray otter’s fur.
‘How now, Skullick?’ Fafhrd rasped, looking up their half span’s difference in height. ‘Why have you left your station? Speak swiftly, scum!’ And without other warning or preparation, he struck his corporal major a short-traveling jolt in the midriff that jarred him back a step and (rather illogically) robbed him of most of the breath he had to speak with.
‘It’s cold…as witch’s womb…up there,’ Skullick gasped with pain and difficulty. ‘And my relief’s…o’erdue.’
‘From now on you’ll wait on station for your relief until Hell freezes over, and haply you too. But you’re relieved.’ And Fafhrd struck him again in the same crucial spot. ‘Now water the rowers, four measures of water to one of usquebaugh—and if you take more than two gulps of the last, I’ll surely know!’
He turned away abruptly, reached the mast in two strides, and climbed it rhythmically by the pins of its bronze collars, past the mainyard, to which the big sail was snugly furled, past the peak, until his gloved hands gripped the short horizontal bar of the crow’s-perch. As he drew himself up by them, it was a wonder how the fog gave way without gradation to star-ceilinged air, as though a fine film, impalpable yet tough, confined the ice motes, held them down. When he stood on the bar and straightened himself, he was waist-deep in fog so thick he could barely see his feet. He and the mast top were scudding through a pearly sea, strongly propelled by the invisible rowers below. The stars told him Sea Hawk was still headed due west. His sense of direction had worked truly in the fog below. Good!
Also, the feckless Skullick had spoken true. It was cold indeed as a she-demon’s privies, yet wonderfully bracing. He noted the new wind sweeping up the fog in the southwest, and north of that the spot where he’d picked up the Mouser’s flare on the horizon’s brim. The deformed fat moon was there now, almost touching it, yet still most bright. If t
he Mouser burned another flare, it ought to be higher, because Fafhrd’s rowing should be bringing the ships together. He searched the west closely to make sure another red spark wasn’t being drowned by Nehwon’s strong moonlight.
He saw a black speck against the lopsided, bright pearl orb. As he watched, it rapidly increased in size, grew wings, and with a white beat of them landed with jolting twin-talon grip on Fafhrd’s gauntleted wrist.
‘You’re ruffled, Pelly. Who has troubled you?’ he asked as he snapped threads and unrolled from leg the parchment scrap. He recognized the start of his own note, flipped it over, and by the flat moonlight read the Mouser’s.
Madman Most Welcome!—I’ll burn them one each bell. I do not agree. My crew is trained already.
M.
No feigned attack, you cur once my friend, but earnest deadly. I want no less than your destruction, dog. To the death!
Fafhrd read the salutation and first sentence with great relief and joy. The next two sentences made him frown in puzzlement. But with the dire postscript, his face fell, and his expression became one of deep dread and utter dolefulness. He hurriedly rescanned the script to see how the letters and words were formed. They were the Mouser’s unquestionably, the postscript slightly scrawled ’cause writ more swift. Something he’d missed nagged briefly at his mind, then was forgot. He crumpled the parchment and thrust it deep in his pouch.
He said to himself in the naked, low tones of a man plunged into nightmare, ‘I can’t believe and yet cannot deny. I know when Mouser jests and when speaks true. There must be swift-striking madness in these polar seas, perhaps loosed by that warlock Afreyt named…Ice Wizard…It…Khahkht. And yet…and yet I must ready Sea Hawk for total war, howe’er it grieve me. A man must be prepared for all events, no matter how they chill and tear his heart.’
He gave the west a final glance. The front of the southwest gale was close now, sweeping up the ice crystals ahead of it. It was a chord that cut off a whole sector of the circular white fog-sea, replacing it with naked black ocean. From that came a fleeting white glow that made Fafhrd mutter, ‘Ice blink.’
Then closer still, hardly a half-score bowshots away, still in the fog yet near its wind-smitten edge, a redness flared bright, then died.
Fafhrd sank swiftly into the fog, going down the mast in swift hand-over-hand drops, his boots hardly touching the bronze collar pins.
Inside the dark-mapped globular vacuity, It ceased Its dartings, held Itself rigidly erect, facing away from the water-walled equatorial sun disk, and intoned in voice like grinding ice floes, ‘Heed me, smallest atomies, that in rime seas seethe and freeze. Hear me, spirits of the cold, then do straightway what you’re told. Ships are meeting, heroes greeting; gift to each, from each, of death. Monstreme lurk, in icy murk, picket of the Mingol work ’gainst each city, hearth, and kirk. If they ’scape the Viewless’s ruse, make yourself of direst use. Vessels shatter! Man-bones scatter! Bloody flesh, bones darkness splatter!—every splinter, every tatter! Deeds of darkness, darkness merit—so, till’s done, put out the sun!’
And with reptilian swiftness It whipped around and clapped a blacked-iron lid over the softly flaring, walled solar disk, which plunged the spherical cavity into an absolute blackness, wherein It whispered grindingly and chucklesome, ‘…and the Ghouls conjured the sun out of Heaven, quotha! Ghouls, indeed!—ever o’er-boastful. Khahkht never boasts, but does!’
At the foot of Flotsam’s mainmast the Gray Mouser gripped Pshawri by the throat, but forbore to shake him. Beneath bloody head-circling bandage, his corporal major’s white-circled pupils stared at him defiantly from bloodless face.
‘Was one light battle-tap enough to make a crack for all your brains to leak out?’ the Mouser demanded. ‘Why did you fire that flare, and so reveal us to our enemy?’
Pshawri winced but continued to oppose his gaze to the captain’s glare. ‘You ordered it—and did not countermand,’ he stated stubbornly.
The Mouser sputtered, but had to allow the truth of that. The fool had been obedient, even if utterly lacking in judgment. Soldiers and their blind devotion to duty! especially spoken order! Most odd to think that this faithful idiot was yesterday a burglar-thief, child of treachery and lies and blinkered selfishness. The Mouser had also guiltily to admit he could have countermanded his command, paying lip service to logic and making allowance for stupidity, and particularly have noted what the fool was up to when he mounted the mast a second time. Pshawri was clearly still shaken from his head blow, poor devil, and at least he had been quick enough in casting boathook and flare into the sea when the Mouser’d roared at him from below.
‘Very well,’ he said gruffly, releasing his grip. ‘Next time think too—if there’s time—and there was!—as well as act. Ask Ourph for a noggin of white brandy. Then be forward lookout with Gavs—I’m doubling them bow and stern.’
And with that, the Mouser himself took up the general work of trying to pierce the stilly fog with eyes and ears, wondering the while unhappy and uneasy about the nature of Fafhrd’s madness and of the vast, fell vessel he’d built, bought, commandeered, or perchance got from Ningauble or other sorcerer. Or sorcerers!—it had surely been big and weird enough to be the chattel of several archimages! Conceivably a refitted prison hulk from rimy No-Ombrulsk. Or, illest thought of all (stemming from Ourph’s fears ’bout the vanished oar shard), was the sorcerer Khahkht?—and some link ’twixt that warlock and mad Fafhrd?
Flotsam ghosted on, the sweepsmen pushing only enough to keep her under way. Mouser had early ordered slowest beat to conserve their strength.
‘Three bells,’ Ourph softly called.
Dawn nighs, the Mouser thought.
Pshawri could not have been long at the bow when his cry came back, ‘Clear sea ahead! And wind!’
The fog thinned to wisps torn and tossed aft by the eddying, frosty air. The gibbous moon was firmly bedded on the western horizon, yet still sent an eerie white glare, while south of her a few lonely stars hung in the sky. That was uncanny, the Mouser thought, for the imminent dawn should already have extinguished them. He faced east—and almost gasped. Above the low, moonlit fog bank, the heavens were darker than ever, the night was starless, while due east on the fog bank there rested a sliver of blackness blacker than any night could be, as if a black sun were rising that shot out beams of a darkness powerful and active as light—not light’s absence, but its enemy-opposite. And from that same thickening sliver, along with the potent darkness, there seemed to come a cold more intense and differing in kind from that of the bitter southwest wind striking behind his right ear.
‘Ship on our loadside beam!’ Pshawri cried shrilly.
At once the Mouser dropped his gaze and sighted the stranger vessel, about three bowshots distant, just emerged from the fog bank and equally illumined by the moon glare, and headed straight at Flotsam. At first he took it for Fafhrd’s icy leviathan come again, then saw it was small as his own ship, maybe narrower of beam. His thoughts zigzagged wildly—did mad Fafhrd command a fleet? was it a Sea Mingol warcraft? or still other pirate? or from Rime Isle? He forced himself to think more to the purpose.
His heart pulsed twice. Then, ‘Make sail, my Mingols all!’ he commanded. ‘Odd-numbered sweepsmen! rack your long tools, then arm! Pshawri! command ’em!’ And he grasped the tiller as the steersman let it go.
Aboard Sea Hawk, Fafhrd saw Flotsam’s low hull and short masts and long, slantwise main and mizzen yards blackly silhouetted against the spectrally white, misshapen moon awash in the west. In the same instant he at last realized what it was that had nagged his mind at the mast top. He whipped the gauntlet from his right hand, plunged the latter into his pouch, plucked out the parchment scrap, and this time reread his own note—and saw below it the damning postscript he knew he’d never written. Clearly both postscripts, penned in deceptive scrawls, were cunning forgeries, however done o’erhead in birds’ realm.
So even as he felt the wind and commanded, ‘Skor! T
ake your squad. Prepare to make sail!’ he drew a favorite arrow from the quiver ready beside him on the deck, threaded the note around it in studied haste, swiftly uncased and strung his great bow, and with a curt prayer to Kos bent it to its muscle-cracking extreme and sent the pet arrow winging high into the black sky toward the moon and the black two-master.
Aboard Flotsam, the Mouser felt a shiver of super-added apprehension which mounted while he watched his Mingols purposefully struggling with frozen lines and ties in the freshening chilly wind, until it culminated in the chunk of an arrow almost vertically into the deck scarce a cubit from his foot. So the small, moonlit sailing galley (for he had meanwhile identified it as such a craft) was signaling attack! Yet the range was still so great that he knew of only one bowman in Nehwon who could have made that miraculous shot. Not letting go the tiller, he stooped and severed the threads of the pale parchment wrapped tightly just behind the arrow’s half-buried head, and read (or rather mostly reread) the two notes, his with the devilish postscript he’d never seen before. Even as he finished, the characters became unreadable from the black beams of anti-sun fighting down the moon rays and beginning to darken that orb. Yet he made the same deduction as had Fafhrd, and hot tears of joy were squeezed from his chilled eye sockets as he realized that whatever impossible-seeming sleights of ink and voice had been worked this night, his friend was sane and true.
There was a protracted, sharp crackling as the last ties of the sails were loosed and wind filled them, breaking their frozen folds and festoons. The Mouser bore on the tiller, heading Flotsam into what was now a strengthening gale. But at the same time he sharply commanded, ‘Mikkidu! burn three flares, two red, one white!’
Aboard Sea Hawk, Fafhrd saw the blessed treble sign flare up in gathering unnatural murk, even as his reefed sails filled and he turned his own craft into the wind. He ordered, ‘Mannimark! answer those flares with like. Skullick, you dolt! slack your squad’s bows. Those to the west are friends!’ Then he said to Skor beside him, ‘Take the helm. My friend’s ship is on close-hauled southron course like ours. Work over to her. Lay us alongside.’