by Fritz Leiber
Fafhrd waved that he understood and returned to his digging.
The second reading showed the same results. Pshawri and Cif moved out four yards and began their first methodical circling of the hole, dowsing every few steps. One by one their small company of observers returned to the fire, wearied by sameness. A full bucket came up from the hole.
And after a while, another.
Slowly the white-glowing lantern with which Cif had provided herself grew more distant from the hole. Slowly the pile of dug earth beside it grew. Fingers and Gale slept in each other’s arms. While the full moon inched down the western sky.
Time passed.
15
The yellowing moon was no more than two fists above the western horizon of Rime Isle’s central hills when Fafhrd’s probing spade encountered stone. They’d deepened the hole by about a woman’s height below the second tier of shoring. At first Fafhrd thought the obstruction a small boulder and tried to dig around it. Afreyt warned him against overspeed but he persisted. The boulder grew larger and larger. Soon the whole bottom of the shaft was a flat floor of solid rock.
He lifted his eyes to Afreyt’s. ‘What’s to do now?’
She shook her head.
A spear’s cast southeast of the hole the two dowsers began to get results.
The twine-and-cube pendulum suspended from Pshawri’s left hand instead of hanging straight down dead, as it had done over a hundred successive times by count, slowly began to swing forth and back, away from the hole and toward it. They both stared down at it wonderingly, suspiciously.
‘Are you making it do that, Pshawri?’ she whispered.
‘I don’t think so,’ he answered doubtfully.
And then the wonder happened. The swings of the cube toward the hole began to get shorter and shorter, and those away longer and longer, until they stopped altogether and the cube hung straining away from the hole, perceptibly out of the vertical.
‘How are you doing that, Pshawri?’ Her voice was small, respectful.
‘I don’t know,’ he replied shakily. ‘It pulls. And I’m getting a vibration.’
She touched his hand with her forefinger, as before. Almost immediately she nodded, looking at him with awe.
‘I’ll call Afreyt and Fafhrd. Don’t you move.’
She rummaged a metal whistle from her pouch and blew it. The note was shrill and piercing in the cold still air.
Down in the hole they heard it. ‘Cif’s signal,’ Afreyt said, but Fafhrd had already chinned himself on the lowest peg and was hauling himself up the rest hand over hook. She hung one of the lanterns on one arm and followed him up, using both hands and feet.
Fafhrd scanned around and saw a small white glow out in the frozen meadow across the hole from where he stood. It moved back and forth to call attention to itself. He looked down the wood-lined shaft and spotted at its foot the yellow ochre mark he’d made to show the direction Cat’s Claw had pointed when it was found. It was in line with the distant lamp. He sucked in his breath, took from Afreyt the lit lamp she’d brought up with her, held it aloft, and moved it twice from side to side in answering signal. The one out in the meadow was immediately lowered.
‘That tears it,’ he told Afreyt, lowering the lamp. ‘The dagger and the dowsing agree. The shaft must now be dug in that direction, footed upon the rock we’ve just uncovered and lined and roofed with wood to shield it from collapse.’
She nodded and said swiftly, ‘Skullick suggested earlier that was the message the horizontal attitude and pointing of Cat’s Claw were intended by the Gray Mouser to convey.’
Idlers crowded around them to hear what new was up. The Northerner at the pulley gazed at Fafhrd intently.
He continued raptly, ‘The side passage should be narrow and low to conserve wood. The shoring planks can be sawed in three to make its walls. We should be able to dig faster sideways, yet great care must still be exercised in breaking earth.’
Afreyt broke in, ‘There’ll be a power of digging, nevertheless, just to take the side passage out below the point where Cif and Skullick are now standing.’
‘That’s true,’ he answered, ‘and also true that Captain Mouser may have been drawn away we know not how far, judging by the swiftness and ease with which he first sank. He may be anywhere out there. And yet I feel it’s vital we continue on digging from that spot, abiding by the one solid clue we have that we know is from him: his pointing knife! That’s a more material clue than any hints and suggestions to be got from dowsing. No, the digging that we’ve started must go on, else we lose all drive and organization. That we’re not doing it right now carks me. But I myself have grown too frantic for the nonce to do the work properly with all due precautions.’ He appealed to Afreyt, ‘You yourself, dear, warned me that I was overspeeding, and I was.’
He turned to the stalwart at the pulley and commanded, ‘Udall, fetch Skor! Wake him if he’s asleep. Ask him—with courtesy—to come to me here. Tell him he’s needed.’ Udall went. Fafhrd turned back to Afreyt, explaining, ‘Skor has the patience for the task that I lack, at least at this moment.’ His voice changed. ‘And would you, my dear, not only continue with the sifting for now, but also take on for me the direction of the whole task in my absence? Here, take my signet. Wear it on your fist.’ He held out his right hand to her, fingers spread. She drew the ring from off the little one. ‘I want to go apart (I don’t think well in company) and brood upon this matter, on ways of recovering the Gray One besides digging and dowsing. I think he will return here eventually, exit the underworld same place he entered it—that’s why we must keep digging at this spot—yet that’s at best the likeliest end. There are a thousand other possibilities to be considered. My mind’s afire. The Gray One and I have been in a hundred predicaments and plights as bad as this one.
‘Would you do that for me, dear?’ he finished. ‘The sifting you can assign to Rill or two of the girls, or even at a pinch to Mother Grum.’
‘Leave it all to me, Captain,’ she said, rubbing along his jaw the clenched knuckles of her right hand, which now wore his silver crossed-swords signet upon the middle finger.
Her action was playful, affectionate, but her violet eyes were anxious and her voice sober as death.
Snowtreader had responded as swiftly as Fafhrd to Cif’s whistle, bounding out across the frosty meadow. He stopped before Cif, who was still signaling with her high-held lamp. Then his eyes went to bent-over Pshawri and the object hanging oddly from the lieutenant’s rock-steady hand. He sniffed at it gingerly and suspiciously, gave a whine of recognition, and hurried on across the meadow a dozen more yards with his nose close to the ground, then paused to look back and bark twice.
Cif lowered her lamp at Fafhrd’s answering signal from the shaft head. Pshawri appealed to her, ‘Would you mark this spot here, Lady? I think we should follow Snowtreader’s lead and hurry on while the scent is hot, dowsing at intervals.’
Using her dagger pommel for a hammer, she drove into the ground over which Pshawri had been hovering one of the small stakes they’d brought and tied to it a short length of gray ribbon from her pouch. She said, ‘I think you’re right. Though while I was signaling, I had the thought that the cinder we’re dowsing with is Loki’s. It might he guiding us toward him rather than Mouser, and I know from experience what wild goose hunts, what weird will-o’-the-wisp chases that god might lead us on.’
‘No, Lady,’ Pshawri assured her, ‘it’s the Captain’s signals I’m getting. I know his vibes. And Snowtreader would never confuse him with that tricksy stranger god. What’s more, the dog didn’t howl this time, as he did so dolefully when the moon was high, but only whined—a sign he’s scenting a live thing, no carrion corpse.’
Cif observed, ‘You’re awfully fond of the Captain, aren’t you? I pray Skama you’re right. Lead on, then. The others will catch up.’
She was referring to the five dark forms between her and the cookfire and the other lights around the shaft head: Rill, Skullic
k, Groniger, Ourph, and Mother Grum, all grown curious. Beyond them and the little lights round the shaft head, the setting moon was just touching the horizon, as though going to earth amongst Rime Isle’s central hills.
Back at the now-lonely cookfire Fafhrd poured himself a half mug of simmering gahveh, tempered it with brandy, drank half of that off in one big hot swallow, and set himself to think shrewdly and systematically of the Gray Mouser’s plight, as he’d told Afreyt he would.
He discovered almost at once that his whirling, plunging thoughts and fancies were not to be tamed that way.
Nor did the rest of the mug’s contents, taken at a gulp, enforce tranquillity and logic upon stormy disorder.
He paced around in a circle, breaking off when he found himself beginning to twist, jerk, and stamp in a frenzy of control-seeking.
He shook his fingers in front of his face, as if trying to conjure things from empty air.
In a sudden frantic reversal of attitude he asked himself whether he really wanted to rescue the Mouser at all. Let the Gray One escape by his own devices. He’d managed it often enough in the past, by Kos!
He’d have liked to measure his wilder imaginings against Rill’s practicality, Groniger’s sturdy reason, Mother Grum’s dogmatic witch-reasonings, or Ourph’s Mingol fatalism. But they’d all traipsed off after the dowsers. He’d told Afreyt he wanted solitude, but now he asked himself how was a man to think without talking? He felt confused, light-headed, light in other ways, as if a puff of wind might knock him down.
He looked at the things around him: the fire, the soup, the piled lumber, the girls’ clothes warming, the shelter tent, its cots.
He didn’t need to talk to children, he told himself. Let them sleep. He wished he could.
But his strange nervousness grew. Finally, to discharge it in action, he seized a fresh brandy jug with his right hand, hooked up a lamp with his other upper extremity, set out across the meadow after the dowsers.
He walked unevenly, veering and correcting himself. He wasn’t sure he wanted to catch up with the dowsers. But he had to be moving, or else explode.
16
In the cozy nest from which she’d been watching Fafhrd’s every action, Fingers roused Gale by yanking the pale tuft of her fine maiden hair. ‘That hurt, you fiend,’ the Rimish girl protested, rubbing her eyes. ‘No one else ever summoned me from slumber so.’
‘It hurts most where you love most,’ the cabingirl recited as by rote, continuing in livelier tones, ‘I knew you’d want to be wide awake, dear demon, to hear the latest news of your hero uncle with the growly name.’
‘Fafhrd?’ Gale was all attention.
‘The same. He’s just come out of the hole, cavorted around the fire, and now taken a lamp and a jar and gone off after your dark-haired aunt who’s dowsing for your other uncle. I think he’s fey and wants watching over.’
‘Where are our clothes?’ Gale asked at once, squirming half out of the nest.
‘The lady with the scarred hand set them to warm close by the fire before they all went off ahead of Fafhrd. Come on, I’ll race you.’
‘Someone will see us.’ Gale clapped her slender forearm across her barely budded breasts.
‘Not if we rush, Miss Prim and Proper.’
The two girls streaked to the fire through the frigid air and, looking around and giggling the while, hurried into their toasty clothes as swiftly as if they’d both been sailors. Then they moved out hand in hand, following Fafhrd’s lamp, while the last sliver of full moon hid itself behind Rime Isle’s central hills and the sky paled with the first hint of dawn.
17
The Mouser struggled awake from darkest depths. The process seemed to involve toilsome stages of marginal consciousness, but when he finally—and quite suddenly—felt himself fully master of his mind, he found his body sprawled at full length with his bent head pillowed on the crook of his left elbow and the bracing reek of salt sea filling his nostrils.
For a blessed moment he supposed himself to be abed in his trim room in the Salthaven barracks built last year by his men and Fafhrd’s, and with the window open to the cool, damp morning breeze.
His first attempted movement shattered that illusion. He was in the same dreadful plight he’d been when his awareness had last ebbed away to chthonic darkness while he was most effortfully fleeing Death’s skinny sister Pain.
Except his plight had worsened—he’d lost the strange power of movement he’d had then, of laborious crabwise retreat. That seemed to depend, for its generation, upon extremes of terror.
And the sea stink was new. That must he coming from the grainy earth that gripped him vicelike. And that earth was now perceptibly damp. Which must in turn mean that his flight had led him to the Rime Isle coast, to the sea’s fringes. Perhaps he was already under the cold, tumultuous, merciless waters of the boundless Outer Sea.
And he was no longer buried upright but lying flat. Truly it was astonishing what a difference that made. Upright, though as closely confined as a statue by its mould, one felt somehow free and on guard. Whereas lying flat, whether supine or prone, was the posture of submission. It made one feel utterly helpless. It was the very worst—
No, he interrupted himself, don’t exaggerate. Worse than flat would be buried upside down, heels above head. Best leave off imagining confinements lest he think of one that was still worse.
He set himself to do the same routine things he’d done after his earlier underground lapse of consciousness—regularize and maximize his furtive breathing, assure himself of the continuing glow about his eyes and of his seeming occult power to see, albeit somewhat dimly, for some yards all around him.
The way his head was bent, he found he was looking down his body, along his legs and past his feet. He wished he had a wider range of vision, yet at least there was no blue and chalky female form pursuing him sharklike from that direction.
It was really unnerving, though, how defenceless his flat attitude made him feel, all ready to be trampled, or spat upon, or skewered with pitchfork.
He’d had previous strayings into the realm of Death without his nerve failing, he reminded himself, straining for reassurance and to keep panic at bay. There’d been that time in Lankhmar when he’d entered the magic shop of the Devourers and laid down fearlessly in a black-pillowed coffin and also walked quite eagerly into a mirror that was a vertical pool of liquid mercury held upright by mighty sorceries.
But he’d been drunk and girlstruck then, he reminded himself, though at the time the mercury had felt cool and refreshing (not grainy and suffocating like this stuff!), and he’d afterward nursed the private conviction that he’d been about to discover a secret heroes’ heaven high above the one reserved for the gods when Fafhrd had jerked him out of the silver fluid.
No matter. His present friends and lovers, he told himself, must be working like beavers right now to effect his recovery, either by digging (there were enough of them surely) or by working some magic or supernal deal. Perhaps right at this moment dear Cif was manipulating the Golden Ikons of the Isle as she had last year when his mind had been trapped in the brain of a sounding whale.
Or Fafhrd might have figured out some trick to get him back. Though the great oaf had hardly looked capable of such when Mouser had last seen him, goggling down bewilderedly at his disappearing comrade.
Yet how would any of them know where to dig for him, the way he’d moved around? Or be able to dig for him at all, if he were already beneath the Outer Sea?
Which reminded him in turn that according to the most ancient legends, Simorgya had invaded Rime Isle in prehistoric times by way of long, long tunnels leading under the wild waves. That was before the more southern isle sank beneath the billows and its cruel inhabitants grew gills and fins.
A fantasy, no doubt, old witches’ tales. Yet if such tunnels ever had existed, he was surely in the right place to find them now, Rime Isle’s south coast. Or find at least one—surely that was not hoping too much. An
d so as he industriously sipped air through barely parted lips from the dank earth enfolding him, exhaling in little puffs more forcibly than he inhaled, to drive back intrusive moist granules, he became aware of a pale green undulation parallel to his body some three yards out from him, as though something were moving back and forth out there, up and down a narrow corridor, while it closely regarded him. After a time it resolved itself into the dainty form of the Simorgyan demoness Ississi, not more than a quarter—nay, hardly an eighth!—of the way through her girl-fish shape-change: there was the barest hint of a crest along her spine, and the merest suggestion of webs joining the roots of her slender fingers, and only the slightest green tinge to her glorious complexion, she of the large yellow-green eyes and lisping seductive speech, who’d been so amenable to harshest discipline, at least for quite a while. And she seemed to be wearing a filmy rainbow robe composed of the tatters and rags of the costly, colourful, fine fabric destroyed during his final submarine bout with her when Sea Hawk had sunk for a space.
For a moment his dissolving skepticism reasserted itself as he asked himself how he could be so certain it was indeed Ississi in this hazy realm where any fish (or girl, for that matter) looked very much like the next (and both like phantoms woven of greenish smoke). But even as he posed that question, the vision became more real, each winsome feature more clearly defined. What’s more, he realized he was in no way frightened of her despite the circumstances of their encounter. In fact, as his eyes moved slowly back and forth as they followed her to and fro, he found himself growing drowsy, the regular movement was so restful. He even found himself developing the illusion (surely it must be one?) that his entire body, not just his eyes, was moving slowly forward and back in unison with hers, as if it had unbeknownst to himself escaped into a corridor or tunnel parallel with hers and was afloat in the unresistant air!
Just at that moment he received a shock which caused him sharply to revise any opinion he may have entertained about one young female being very much like the next—or one fish, for that matter. Although he had not seen Ississi’s half-smiling lips close up or pucker in any way, he heard a trilling, soft, seductive whistle.