by Fritz Leiber
“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 forever?"
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 odors, 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 center 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 color 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 favors, as it were.
But as to her own secret person, it still remained a mystery to the Mouser, whether under the robes, wraps, and armor 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-pommeled 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 permeable 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."
They appeared to relax their attention — a little, at any rate.
She tapped three fingers against the ruby rondure of her lips as she yawned prettily. “My, that was a most lengthy and boring lecture,” she commented. “Yet you endured it most commendably, dear Threesie,” she addressed the dark-haired maid. “And you too, Foursie,” she told the fair-haired one. She picked up from beside her a long emerald-headed pin and flourished it playfully. “There was not once the need for me to make use of this upon either of you,” she said, laughing, “to recall to attention the willful wandering mind and wake the lazy dreamer."
Both girls shaped their lips to appreciative smiles, while giving the pin most sour looks.
Hisvet handed it to Foursie, who bore it somewhat gingerly across the room to a drawered chest topped with cosmetics and mirrors, and inserted it into a spherical black cushion that held jewel-headed others such, compassing all the hues of the rainbow.
Meanwhile Hisvet addressed Threesie, whose eyes widened as she listened. “During my talk I twice got the distinct impression that we were being spied on by an evil intelligence, one of the criminous sort my father deals with, or one of our own enemies or a cast-off lover perchance.” She searched her gaze around the walls, lingering somewhat overlong, the Mouser felt, in his direction.
“I will meditate on it,” she continued. “Dear Threesie, fetch me my silver-inlaid black opal figure of the world of Nehwon which I call the Opener of the Way."
Threesie nodded dutifully and went to the same chest Foursie had just visited, passing her midway.
“Dear Foursie,” Hisvet greeted the blonde, “fetch me a beaker of white wine. My throat has grown quite dry with all that stupid talking."
Foursie bowed her fair-thatched head and came to the low table set against the wall behind which the Mouser was embedded in earth invisible to him. He studied her appreciatively as she unstoppered the carafe he'd so disastrously snatched at and neatly filled a shining glass so tall and narrow it looked like a measuring tube. Her white uniform tunic was secured down the front with large circular jet buttons.
Returning to her mistress, she went down on her knees without bending her slender body in any other way and proffered the refreshment.
“Taste it first,” Hisvet instructed.
Getting this instruction, not uncommonly given servants by aristocrats, Foursie threw back her head and poured a short gush of the fluid between her parted lips without touching them to the glass, which she next held out to show its level was perceptibly decreased.
Hisvet accepted it, saying, “That was well executed, Foursie. Next time don't wait for instruction. And you might lick your lips and smile to show that you enjoyed."
Foursie bobbed her head.
“Dear demoiselle,” Threesie called from where she knelt at the chest of drawers, “I cannot find the Opener."
“Have you searched carefully for it?” Hisvet called back, her voice becoming slightly thin. “It is an oblate sphere big as two thumbs, inset with silver bounding the continents and flat diamonds for the cities and a larger amethyst and turquoise making the death and life poles."
“Dear demoiselle, I know the Opener,” Threesie called respectfully.
Hisvet, who was looking at Foursie again, shrugged her shoulders, then set the narrow glass to her lips and downed its contents in three swallows. “That was refreshing.” Again the lip pats.
A rutching sound turned her attention back to Threesie. “No, do not open the other drawers,” she directed. “It would not be there. Just search the top one thoroughly and find it. Set out the contents one by one on top of the chest if necessary."
“Yes, demoiselle."
Hisvet caught Foursie's eye again, rolled hers toward busy Threesie, sketched another shrug, and commented confidingly, “This could become a tiresome annoyance, you know, a true weariness. No, girl, don't bob your head. That's all right on Threesie, but it's not your style. Incline it once, demurely."
“Yes, mistress.” Her single nod was shy as a virgin princess's.
“How are you doing, Threesie?"
The brunette turned to face them. Her reply was barely loud enough to cross the room. “Demoiselle, I must confess myself defeated."
After a rather long pause, Hisvet said reflectively, “That could be quite bothersome for you, Threesie, you know. As senior maid present, you would be wholly responsible for any deficiencies, disappearances, or thefts. Think about it."
After another pause, she sighed and said, holding out the empty glass, “Foursie, fetch me the springy implement of correction."
The blonde inclined her head, took the glass, and walking somewhat more slowly, returned to the low table, set down the glass, refilled it, and reached across to seize the magically suspended white whip, which she lifted with a little twist and bore off with the glass, thereby solving a minor mystery for the Mouser. The whip had simply been hanging on a hook on the wall. But
since the wall had been and was again invisible to him, so was the hook protruding from it.
He felt a stirring of interest in the scene he spied on from his confining point of vantage, and was duly grateful to have his mind taken a little off his own troubles. He knew something of Hisvet's ways and could guess the next developments, or at least speculate rewardingly. Dark-haired Threesie seemed well cast as the villain or culprit of this triangular piece. Leaning back against the chest of drawers and scowling, she looked a bird of ill omen in her uniform black tunic, though the large circular alabaster buttons going down the front added a comic note. Foursie did her kneeling trick a second time. Hisvet accepted the whip and replenished drink, saying graciously, “Thank you, my dear. I feel much better with these both by me. Well, Threesie?"
“I am thinking, demoiselle,” that one said, “and it comes to me that when I entered this room Foursie was crouched where I stand now with the drawer open I have just searched thoroughly, and she was rummaging around in it. She pushed it shut at once, but may well have taken somewhat from it, I realize now, and hid about her person."
“Demoiselle, that's not true!” Foursie protested, turning pale. “The drawer was never open, nor I at it."
“She is a vicious little liar, dear mistress,” Threesie shot back. “Mark how she blanches!"
“Hush, girls,” Hisvet reproved. “I have thought of a simple way to settle this most unseemly dispute. Threesie dear, had Foursie opportunity to hide the Opener elsewhere in the room after she took it, if she did? As I recall, I entered shortly after you did."
“No, mistress, she had not."
“Well, then.” Hisvet said, smiling. “Threesie, come here. Foursie dear, strip off your tunic, so she may search you thoroughly."
“Demoiselle!” the blonde uttered reproachfully. “You would not shame me so."
“No shame at all,” Hisvet assured her ingenuously, lifting her silver eyebrows. “Why, child, suppose I were entertaining a lover, I might very well — probably would — have you and Threesie disrobe, so as not to embarrass him, or at all events make us both feel conspicuous. Or we might have the whim to ask one of you or both to join in our play under direction. Frix understood these things, as I hope Threesie does. Frix was incomparable. Not even Twosie comes close to matching her. But as you know, Frix managed to work out her term of service, discharge the geas my father set upon her. There's never been another Onesie, and that's why."