by Fritz Leiber
‘How did you know?’ Gale’s eyes grew larger still. ‘Well, I was going to build up to it, but since you ask right off: Uncle Fafhrd has swum up into the sky to board a cloud ship of Arilia or flag a flier from Stardock. I think he’s looking for help in finding Uncle Mouser.’
‘Stop talking nonsense,’ Cif burst out.
‘Fafhrd can’t swim through air,’ Afreyt pointed out.
‘Sea tunnels of Simorgya! Cloud ships of Arilia!’ Groniger protested. ‘That’s too much nonsense for a cold summer morning.’
‘But it’s what happened,’ the girl insisted. ‘Why, Aunt Afreyt, you yourself saw Fafhrd and Mara flying high through air when the invisible princess Hirriwi of Stardock rescued them from Hellfire on her invisible fish of air. Fingers saw more than I did. She’ll tell you.’
The Ilthmar cabingirl said, ‘Aboard Weasel the sailors all assured me that the strangest sorts of vessels dock at Rime Isle, including the cloud galleons of the Queendom of the Air. And I did see Captain Fafhrd swimming strongly atop the fog toward a cloud that could have been such a vessel.’
‘Arilia is a fable, child,’ Groniger assured her gently. ‘Sailors tell all sorts of lies. Actually Rime Isle’s the least fantastic place in all of Nehwon.’
‘But Uncle Fafhrd did mount up the sky,’ Gale reaffirmed stubbornly. ‘I don’t know how. Maybe Princess Hirriwi taught him to fly and he never told us about it. He’s awfully modest. But he did it. We both saw him.’
‘All right, all right,’ Cif told her. ‘I think you’d best just tell us the whole story from the beginning.’
Afreyt said, ‘But first you need a cup of wine to calm you down and also warm you. You’ve been long out on a chilly morning that may go down in legend.’ She opened her hamper, took out a jug of fortified sweet wine and two small silver mugs, filled them halfway, and made both children drink them down. This led to serving wine to all the others.
Gale said, ‘Fingers should start it. At the beginning I was asleep.’
Fingers told them, ‘Captain Fafhrd came back from the diggings just after the rest of you all went off. He drank some gahveh and brandy and began to pace up and down, frowning and rubbing his wrist against his forehead as if he were trying to think out some problem. He got very nervous and fey. Finally he took up a jug, hung a lamp on his hook, and went off after you. I waked Gale and told her I thought he needed watching.’
‘That’s right,’ Gale took over. ‘So we jumped out of bed and ran to the fire and got dressed.’
‘That explains it,’ Afreyt interjected.
‘What?’ Pshawri asked.
‘Why Udall kept watching Fafhrd so long. Go on, dear.’
Gale continued, ‘It was easy to follow Uncle Fafhrd because of his lamp. The darkness was fading anyway, the stars going out. At first we didn’t try to catch up with him or let him know we were behind him.’
‘You were afraid he’d send you back,’ Cif guessed.
‘That’s right. At first he seemed to be following you, but where you turned south he kept straight on east. It was getting quite light now, but the sun was still in hiding. Every so often he’d stop and look ahead at the fog and the rooftops and the wind-chime arch sticking up out of it and lift his head to scan the sky above it—that’s when I saw the little fleet of clouds—and raise his hand before his face to invoke the gods and ask their help.’
‘That was the hand that had the jug in it?’ Afreyt asked.
‘It must have been,’ the girl replied, ‘for I don’t recall the lamp going up and down.
‘And then Uncle Fafhrd began to run in the strangest slow way, he seemed to float and almost stop between each step. Of course, we started to run too. We were all into the fog by now, which seemed to slow him and support him at the same time, so his steps were longer.
‘The fog got over our heads and hid him from us. We got to the Moon Arch and Fingers started to climb it before I could tell her that was frowned on. She got above the fog and called down…’
Gale stretched a hand toward Fingers, who continued, ‘Truly, gentles, I saw Captain Fafhrd swimming strongly through the top of the fog, up its long white slope, while a good distance beyond him, the goal of his mighty self-sailing, there was—I know the eyes can be fooled and my mind was full of the sailors’ tales, nevertheless, my word as a novice witch—there was a dense cloud that looked very much like a white ship with a high stern-castle. Sunlight flashed from its silver brightwork.
‘Then that same sun got into my eyes and I stopped seeing anything clearly. I’d called some of it down to Gale and I climbed down and told her the rest.’
Gale took up again. ‘We ran through Salthaven to the eastern headland. The fog was breaking up and burning off, but we couldn’t see anything clearly. When we got there, the Maelstrom was seething and mists rising from it. But overhead it was clear and I could see Uncle Fafhrd, very high now, beside the white cloud-ship, showing only its keel. There were five gulls around him. Then the mists from below came between us. I thought you should know, Aunt Afreyt. But since it was on the way to the diggings, we decided to tell Aunt Cif first.’
Fingers added, ‘I saw what she saw, gentles. But Captain Fafhrd was very far off then. It could have been a very large marine bird—a sea mandragon escorted by five sea hawks.’
The listeners looked at each other.
‘This rings true,’ Afreyt said quite softly. ‘I feared that Fafhrd was fey when he was last down the shaft.’
‘You believe what these girls tell us?’ Groniger asked only somewhat incredulously.
‘To be sure she does,’ Mother Grum answered.
‘But why would he go to air folk,’ Skullick wanted to know, ‘to get advice on someone lost underground?’
‘You can’t guess the designs of a fey one,’ Rill told him.
‘But what of the Gray Mouser now?’ Cif addressed Afreyt. ‘As Fafhrd’s spokeswoman, what say you to sending Pshawri to Darkfire?’
‘Let him go, of course, and luck with him. Luck and quietus to Loki,’ that lady responded without hesitation. ‘Here’s provisions for you, Lieutenant.’ From her hamper she gave him a small loaf and a hard sausage and the near empty sweet-wine jug, which would do to carry cool water he’d get at Last Spring on the way.
After a quick glance to assure himself the others were otherwise occupied, Pshawri said to Afreyt in a low voice, ‘Lady, would you add to your kindnesses one further favour?’ and when she nodded, handed her a folded paper indited in violet ink with broken green seals. ‘Keep this for me. Should I not return (such things happen), give it to Captain Fafhrd, if he’s back. Otherwise read it yourself—and show it to Lady Cif at your decision.’
‘I’ll do that,’ she said softly, and then resuming her normal voice, called, ‘Cif dear, you’ll take over for Fafhrd and me at the digging. I’ll give you Fafhrd’s ring.’
‘Can you doubt it?’ Cif replied, turning back from Mother Grum, with whom she’d been conferring.
Afreyt went on, ‘For it’s now my turn to do some thinking about a lost one—and to see that these two outwearied girls do some sound sleeping. I’ll take them to your place, Cif, and see to all there. Skama, shield me from feyness, except it be your inspiration.’
So without more ceremony the three parties separated: Pshawri north toward distant, smoke-trailing Darkfire; Cif, Skullick, and Rill back to the diggings; Afreyt, Groniger, and the weary old and young pairs to Salthaven.
Trudging with the last party, and suddenly looking every bit as tired as Afreyt had described her, Fingers recited as by someone already asleep and dreaming,
‘After the dog has eaten out his heart,
The cat his liver, and his secret parts
Uprooted and devoured by the hog,
He shall sleep sounder then than any log,
A shadow prince enrobed by moonlit fog.’
‘Was that your brother, Princess?’ Gale asked, wrinkling her nose. ‘You know the nicest poems, I must say.’
After a moment Afreyt inquired thoughtfully, ‘But what kind of a poem was it, dear Fingers? Where did it come from?’
Still somewhat in a sleepy singsong, the weary child responded, ‘It is the augmented third stanza of a Quarmallian death spell effective only in its entirety.’ She shook her head and blinked her eyes and came more awake. ‘Now how did I know that?’ she asked. ‘My mother was born in Quarmall, that is true, but that was another of the things we weren’t supposed to tell most people.’
‘Yet she taught you this Quarmall death spell,’ Afreyt stated.
Fingers shook her head decidedly. ‘My mother never dealt in death spells, nor taught me any. She is a white witch, truly.’ She looked puzzledly at Gale and then up at Afreyt and asked, ‘Why does a memory wink off whenever you try to watch it closely? Is it because we cannot live for ever?’
19
As consciousness next glimmered, glowed, and then shone noontide bright in the Gray Mouser’s skull, he would have been certain he was dreaming, for in his nostrils was the smell of Lankhmar earth, richly redolent of the grainfields, the Great Salt Marsh, the river Hlal, the ashes of innumerable fires, and the decay of myriad entities, a unique melange of odours, and he was ensconced in one of the secretmost rooms of all Lankhmar City, one he knew well although he had visited it only once. How could his underground journeying possibly have carried him so far, two thousand leagues or more, one tenth the way at least around all Nehwon world?—except that he had never in his life had a dream in which the furniture and actors were so clearly distinct and open to scrutiny in all their details.
But as we know, it was the Mouser’s custom on waking anywhere not to move more than an eye muscle or make the least sound, even that of a deeper breath, until he had taken in and thoroughly mastered the nature of his surroundings and his own circumstances amongst them.
He was comfortably seated cross-legged about a Lankhmar cubit (a forearm’s length) behind a narrow low table beside the foot of the wide bed, sheeted in white silk curiously coarse of weave, in the combined underground bedroom and boudoir of the rat princess Hisvet, his most tormenting one-time paramour, daughter of the wealthy grain merchant Hisvin, in the buried city of Lankhmar Below. He knew it was that room and no other by its pale violet hangings, silver fittings, and a half hundred more apposite details, chiefest perhaps two painted panels in the far wall depicting an unclad maiden and crocodile erotically intertwined and a youth and leopardess similarly entangled. As had been the case some five years ago, the room was lit by narrow tanks of glow worms at the foot of the walls, but now also by silver cages hanging cornice-high and imprisoning flashing firebeetles, glow wasps, nightbees, and diamond-flies big as robins or starlings. While on the low table before him rested a silver waterclock with visible pool, upon the centre of which a large drop fell every third breath or dozenth heartbeat, making circular ripples, and a cut crystal carafe of pale golden wine, reminding him he was abominably thirsty.
So much for the furniture of his dream, vision, or true sighting. The actors included slim Hisvet herself wearing a violet wrap whose colour matched the hangings and her lips. She was seated on the bed’s foot, looking as merry and schoolgirl innocent (and devilishly attractive) as always, her fine silver-blond hair drawn through a small ring of that metal behind her head, while standing at dutiful attention close before her were two barefoot maids with hair cropped short and wearing identical closely fitting hip-length black and white tunics. Hisvet was lecturing them, laying out rules of some sort, apparently, and they were listening most earnestly, although they showed it in different ways, the brunette nodding her head, smiling her understandings, and darting her gaze with sharp intelligence, while the blonde maintained a sober and distant, yet wide-eyed expression, as though memorizing Hisvet’s every word, inscribing each one in a compartment of her brain reserved for that purpose alone.
But although Hisvet worked her violet lips and the tip of her mottled blue and pink tongue continuously in the movements of speech and lifted an admonitory right forefinger from time to time and once touched it successively on the tips of the outspread fingertips of her supine left hand to emphasize points one, two, three, and four, not a single word could the Gray Mouser hear. Nor did any one of the three ever look once in his direction, even the saucy dark-haired wench whose gaze went everywhere else.
Since both maids in their very short tunics were quite as attractive as their ravishing mistress, their disregard of him began to wound the Mouser’s vanity not a little.
Since there seemed nothing for the moment to do but watch them, the Mouser soon developed a hankering to see their naked shapes. So far as the maids were concerned, he might get his wish simply by waiting. Hisvet had a remarkable instinct for such matters and was perfectly willing to let other women entertain for her—distribute her favours, as it were.
But as to her own secret person, it still remained a mystery to the Mouser, whether under the robes, wraps, and armour she affected there was a normal maiden form or a slender rat tail and eight tits, which his imagination pictured as converging pairs of large-nippled and large-aureoled bud-breasts, the third pair to either side of her umbilicus and the fourth close together upon her pubis.
It also was a mystery to him whether the three females and he were all now of rat size or human size—ten inches or five feet high. Certainly he’d had none of the shape-changing elixir that was used in moving between Lankhmar Above and the rat city of Lankhmar Below.
His hankerings continued. Surely he deserved some reward for all the underground perils he’d braved. Women could do men so much good so easily.
There remained the problem of the three women’s perfect inaudibility.
Either, he guessed, they were engaged in an elaborate pantomime (plotted by Hisvet to tease him?), or it was a dream despite its realism, or else there was some hermetic barrier (most likely magical) between his ears and them.
Supporting this last possibility was the point that while he could see the giant luminescent insects move about in their cages, striking the silver bars with wing and limb while making their bright shinings and flashes, no angry buzzings or sounds of any sort came down from them; while (most telling of all in its way) only silence accompanied the infrequent but regular plashes of the singular crystalline drops into the shimmering pool of the waterclock so close at hand.
One final circumstance suggestive of magic at work and matching the strange quiet of the scene otherwise so real: miraculously suspended in the air above the near edge of the low table, in a vertical attitude with ring-pommelled small silver grip uppermost, was a tapering whip of white snow-serpent hide scarcely a cubit long, so close at hand he could perceive its finely rugose surface, yet spy no thread or other explanation of its quiet suspension.
Well, that was the scene, he told himself. Now to decide on how to enter it, assert himself as one of the actors. He would lean suddenly forward, he told himself, reach out his right hand, seize with his three bottom fingers the neck of the carafe, unstopper it with forefinger and thumb preparatory to putting it to his parched lips, saying meanwhile something to the effect of, ‘Greetings, dearest delightful Demoiselle, do me the kindness of interrupting this charade to give an old friend notice. Don’t be alarmed, girls,’ that last being for the two maids, of course.
No sooner thought than done!
But, from the start, things went most grievously agley. On his first move he felt himself gripped by a general paralysis that struck like lightning. His whole front was bruised, his right hand and arm scraped, from every side dark brown grainy walls rushed in upon him, his ‘Greetings’ became on the first syllable a strangled growl that stabbed his ears, pained his whole skull, and changed to a fit of coughing that left him with what seemed a mouthful of raw dirt.
He was still in the same horrid buried predicament he’d been in ever since he’d slipped down out of the full-moon ceremony on Gallows Hill into the cold cruel ground that was at once so strangely perm
eable to his involuntary passage through it and so adamantly resistant to his attempts to escape it. This time he’d been fooled by the perfection of the occult vision, which let him see through solid earth for a distance around him, into thinking he was free, disregarding the evidence of all his other avenues of awareness. Evidently he had somehow been brought to Lankhmar’s underenvirons, and nothing now remained to do but begin anew the slow game of regularizing his breathing, calming his pounding heart, and freeing his mouth grain by grain of the dirt that had entered it during his spasm, carefully working his tongue to best advantage, in order to assure bare survival. For after the pain in his skull subsided he became aware of a general weakness and a wavering of consciousness that told him he was very near the edge between being and not being and must work most cunningly to draw back from it.
During this endeavor he was assisted by the fact that he never quite altogether lost sight of a larger white and violet visual reality around him. There were patchy flashes and glimpses of it alternating with the grainy dark dirt, and he was also helped by the faint yellow glow continuing to emanate from his upper face.
When the Mouser finally re-won all the territory he’d lost by his incautious sally, he was surprised to see fair Hisvet still going through all the motions of talking, and the winsome maids through those of attending her every word, as animatedly as before. Whatever was she saying?
While carefully maintaining all underground breathing routines, he concentrated his attention on other channels of sensation than the visual, seeking to widen and deepen, and bringing to bear all his inner powers, and after a time his efforts were rewarded.
The next heavy drop fell into the pool of the waterclock with an audible dulcet plash! He almost, but not quite, gave a start.
Almost immediately a glow wasp buzzed and a diamond-fly whirred its transparent wings against the wire-thin pale bars.
Hisvet leaned back on her elbows and said in silver tones, ‘At ease, girls.’