by Fritz Leiber
He set out again. At once the pattering was resumed, only now there was more of it, as if the storm were about to break. He quickened his stride a little, and then all of a sudden they were upon him: two ragged lines of small low silvered shapes rushing out of the shadows to his right and from behind the trash-heaps and out of the drain-slits to his left and a few even squeezing under the scoop-thresholded doors.
He began to run skippingly and much faster than his foes, Scalpel striking out like a silver toad's tongue to pink one after another of them in a vital part, as if he were some fantastic trash collector and the rats animate small rubbish. They continued to close on him from ahead, but most he outran and the rest he skewered. The wine he'd bibbed giving him complete confidence, it became almost a dance—a dance of death with the rats figuring as humanity and he their grisly gray overlord, armed with rapier instead of scythe.
Shadows and silvered wall switched sides as the street curved. A larger rat got past Scalpel and sprang for his waist, but he deftly flicked it past him on Cat's Claw's point while his sword thrust through two more. Never in his life, he told himself gleefully, had he been so truly and literally the Gray Mouser, decimating a mouser's natural prey.
Then something whirred past his nose like an angry wasp, and everything changed. He recalled in a vivid flash the supremely strange night of decision aboard Squid, which had become almost a fantasy-memory to him, and the crossbow rats and Skwee with sword at his jugular, and he realized fully for the first time in Lankhmar that he was not dealing with ordinary or even extraordinary rats, but with an alien and hostile culture of intelligent beings, small to be sure, but perhaps more clever and surely more prolific and murder-bent than even men.
Leaving off skipping, he ran as fast as he could, slashing out repeatedly with Scalpel, but thrusting his dirk in his belt and grabbing in his pouch for Sheelba's black bottle.
It wasn't there. With sinking heart and a self-curse, he remembered that, wine-bemused, he'd left it under his pillow at Nattick's.
He shot past the black Street of the Thinkers with its taller buildings shutting out the moon. More rats poured out. His boot squished down on one and he almost slipped. Two more steel wasps buzzed past his face and—he'd never have believed it from another's lips—a small blue-flaming arrow. He raced past the lightless long wall of the building housing the Thieves’ Guild, thinking chiefly of making more speed and hardly at all of rat-slashing.
Then almost at once, Cheap Street curving more sharply, there were bright lights ahead of him and many people, and a few strides later he was among them and the rats all gone.
He bought from a street vendor a small tankard of charcoal-heated ale to occupy the time while his dread and gasping faded. When his dry throat had been warmly and bitterly wetted, he gazed east two squares down the Street of the Gods to the Marsh Gate and then west more glittering blocks than he could clearly see.
It seemed to him that all Lankhmar was gathered here tonight by light of flaring torch and lamp and horn-shielded candle—and pole-lofted flare—praying and strolling, moaning and drinking, munching, and whispering fearful gossip. He wondered why the rats had spared this street only. Were they even more afraid of men's gods than men were?
At the Marsh Gate end of the Street of the Gods were only the hutments of the newest, poorest, and most slum-suited Gods in Lankhmar. Indeed most of the congregations here were mere curbside gatherings about some scrawny hermit or leather-skinned death-skinny priest come from the deserts of the Eastern Lands.
The Mouser turned the other way and began a slow and twisty stroll through the hush-voiced mob, here greeting an old acquaintance, there purchasing a cup of wine or a noggin of spirits from a street seller, for the Lankhmarts believe that religion and minds half-fuddled, or at least drink-soothed, go nicely together.
Despite momentary temptation, he successfully got by the intersection with Whore Street, tapping the dart in his temple to remind himself that erotic experience would end in futility. Although Whore Street itself was dark, the girls young and old were out in force tonight, doing their business in the shadowed porticos, workmanlike providing man's third most potent banishment of fears after prayers and wine.
The farther he got from the Marsh Gate, the wealthier and more richly served became the Gods in Lankhmar whose establishments he passed—churches and temples now, some even with silver-chased pillars and priests with golden chains and gold-worked vestments. From the open doors came rich yellow light and heady incense and the drone of chanted curses and prayers—all against the rats, so far as the Mouser could make them out.
Yet the rats were not altogether absent from the Street of the Gods, he began to note. Tiny black heads peered down from the roofs now and again, while more than once he saw close-set amber-red eyes behind the grill of a drain in the curb.
But by now he had taken aboard enough wine and spirits not to be troubled by such trifles, despite his recent fright, and his memory wandered off to the strange season, years ago, when Fafhrd had been the penniless, shaven acolyte of Bwadres, sole priest of Issek of the Jug, and he himself had been lieutenant to the racketeer Pulg, who preyed on all priests and prayerful folk.
He returned to his complete senses near the Hlal end of the Street of the Gods, where the temples are all golden-doored and their spires shoot sky-high and the priests’ robes are rainbow expanses of jewels. Around him was a throng of folk almost as richly clad, and now through a break in it he suddenly perceived, under green velvet hood and high-piled, silver-woven black hair, the merry-melancholy face of Frix with dark eyes upon him. Something pale brown and small and irregularly shaped dropped noiselessly from her hand to the pavement, here of ceramic bricks mortised with brass. Then she turned and was gone. He rushed after her, snatching up the small square of ball-crumpled parchment she'd dropped, but two aristos and their courtesans and a merchant in cloth of gold got shoulderingly in his way, and when he had broken free of them, resolutely curbing his wine-fired temper to avoid a duel, and got out of the press, no hooded green velvet robe was to be seen, or any woman in any guise looking remotely like Frix.
He smoothed the crumpled parchment and read it by the light of a low-swinging, horn-paned oil street lamp.
Be of hero-like patience and courage.
Your dearest desire will be fulfilled
beyond your daringest expectations,
and all enchantments lifted.
Hisvet
He looked up and discovered he was past the last luxuriously gleaming, soaring temple of the Gods in Lankhmar and facing the lightless low square fane with its silent square bell-tower of the Gods of Lankhmar, those brown-boned, black-togaed ancestor-deities, whom the Lankhmarts never gather to worship, yet fear and revere in their inmost sleeping minds beyond the sum of all the other gods and devils in Nehwon.
The excitement engendered in him by Hisvet's note momentarily extinguished by that sight, the Mouser moved forward from the last street lamp until he stood in the lightless street facing the lightless low temple. There crowded into his liquored compassless mind all he had ever heard of the head Gods of Lankhmar: They cared not for priests, or wealth, or even worshipers. They were content with their dingy temple so long as they were not disturbed. And in a world where practically all other gods, including all the Gods in Lankhmar, seemed to desire naught but more worshipers, more wealth, more news of themselves to be dissipated to the ends of the world, this was most unusual and even sinister. They emerged only when Lankhmar was in direct peril—and even then not always—they rescued and then they chastised—not Lankhmar's foes but her folk—and after that they retired as swiftly as possible to their dismal fane and rotting beds.
There were no rat-shapes on the roof of that temple, or in the shadows crowding thick around it.
With a shudder the Mouser turned his back on it, and there across the street, shouldered by the great dim cylinders of the granaries and backgrounded by Glipkerio's palace with its rainbow minarets pastel
in the moonlight, was the narrow, dark-stoned house of Hisvin the grain-merchant. Only one window in the top floor showed light.
The wild desires roused in the Mouser by Hisvet's note flared up again and he was mightily tempted to climb that window, however smooth and holdless looked the unadorned sooty stone wall, but common sense got the better of wild desire in him despite the fire of wine. After all, Hisvet had writ “patience” before “courage.”
With a sigh and a shrug he turned back toward the brightly lit section of the Street of the Gods, gave most of the coins in his pouch to a mincing, bejeweled slave-girl for a small crystal flask of rare white brandy from the walled tray hung from her shoulders just below her naked breasts, took one swig of the icily fiery stuff, and was by that swig emboldened to cut down pitch-black Nun Street, intending to go a square beyond the Street of the Thinkers and by way of Crafts Street, weave home to Cheap Street and Nattick's.
Aboard Squid, curled up in the crow's nest, the black kitten writhed and whimpered in his sleep as though racked by the nightmares of a full-grown cat, or even a tiger.
Chapter Ten
Fafhrd stole a lamb at dawn and broke into a cornfield north of Ilthmar to provide breakfast for himself and his mount. The thick chops, broiled or at least well-scorched on a thick green twig over a small fire, were delicious, but the mare as she chomped grimly eyed her new master with what seemed to him qualified approval, as if to say, “I'll eat this corn, though it is soft, milky, and effeminate truck compared to the flinty Mingol grain on which they raised me and grew my stern courage, which comes of grinding the teeth.”
They finished their repast, but made off hurriedly when outraged shepherds and farmers came hooting at them through the tall green field. A stone slung by a shepherd who'd probably brained a few dozen wolves in his day whizzed close above Fafhrd's ducked head. He attempted no reprisal, but galloped out of range, then reined in to an amble to give himself time to think before passing through Ilthmar, around which no roads led, and the squatty towers of which were already visible ahead, glinting deceptively golden in the new-minted rays of the fresh sun.
Ilthmar, fronting the Inner Sea somewhat north of the Sinking Land which led west to Lankhmar, was an ill, treacherous, money-minded city. Though nearest Lankhmar, it stood at the crossroads of the known world, roughly equidistant from the desert-guarded Eastern Lands, the forested Land of the Eight Cities, and the steppes, where traveled about the great tent-city of the merciless Mingols. And being so situated, it forever sought by guile or secret force to levy toll on all travelers. Its land-pirates and sea-brigands, who split their take with its unruly governing barons, were widely feared, yet the great powers could never permit one of themselves to dominate such a strategic point, so Ilthmar maintained the independence of a middleman, albeit a most thievish and untrustworthy one.
Central location, where the gossip of all Nehwon crossed tracks along with the world's travelers, was surely also the reason why Ningauble of the Seven Eyes had located himself in a mazy, enchantment-guarded cave at the foot of the little mountains south of Ilthmar.
Fafhrd saw no signs of Mingol raiding, which did not entirely please him. An alarmed Ilthmar would be easier to slip through than an Ilthmar pretending to doze in the sun, but with pig-eyes ever a-watch for booty. He wished now he'd brought Kreeshkra with him, as he'd earlier planned. Her terrifying bones would have been a surer guarantee of safe transit than a passport from the King of the East stamped in gold-sifted wax with his famed Behemoth Seal. What a fool, either to dote or to flee, a man was about a woman new-bedded! He wished also that he had not given her his bow, or rather that he'd had two bows.
However, he was three-quarters of the way through the trash-paved city with its bedbug inns and smiling little taverns of resinous wine, more often than not laced with opium for the uneasy, before trouble pounced. A great gaudy caravan rousing itself for its homeward journey to the Eastern Lands doubtless attracted attention from him. The only decor of the mean buildings around him was the emblem of Ilthmar's rat-god, endlessly repeated.
The trouble came two blocks beyond the caravan and consisted of seven scarred and pockmarked rogues, all clad in black boots, tight black trousers and jerkins and black cloaks with hoods thrown back to show close-fitting black skullcaps. One moment the street seemed clear, the next all seven were around him, menacing with their wickedly saw-toothed swords and other weapons, and demanding he dismount.
One made to seize the mare's bridle near the bit. That was definitely a mistake. She reared and put an iron-shod hoof past his guard and into his skull as neatly as a duelist. Fafhrd drew Graywand and at the end of the drawing stroke slashed through the throat of the nearest black brigand. Coming down on her forehooves the mare lashed out a hind one and ruined the guts of an unchivalrous fellow preparing to launch a short javelin at Fafhrd's back. Then horse and rider were galloping away at a pace that at the southern outskirts of the city took them past Ilthmar's baronial guard before those slightly more respectable, iron-clad brigands could get set to stop them.
A half league beyond, Fafhrd looked back. There was no sign as yet of pursuit, but he was hardly reassured. He knew his Ilthmar brigands. They were stickers. Fired now by revenge-lust as well as loot-hunger, the four remaining black rogues would doubtless soon be on his trail. And this time they'd have arrows or at least more javelins, and use them at a respectful distance. He began to scan the slopes ahead for the tricky, almost unmarked path leading to Ningauble's underground dwelling.
Glipkerio Kistomerces found the meeting of the Council of Emergency almost more than he could bear. It was nothing more than the Inner Council plus the War Council, which overlapped in membership, these two being augmented by a few additional notables, including Hisvin, who had said nothing, so far, though his small black-irised eyes were watchful. But all the others, waving their toga-winged arms for emphasis, did nothing but talk, talk, talk about the rats, rats, rats!
The beanpole overlord, who did not look tall when seated, since all his height was in his legs, had long since dropped his hands below the tabletop to hide the jittery way they were weaving like a nest of nervous white snakes, but perhaps because of this he had now developed a violent facial tic which jolted his wreath of daffodils down over his eyes every thirteenth breath he drew—he had been counting and found the number decidedly ominous.
Besides this, he had lunched only hurriedly and meagerly and—worse—not watched a page or maid being whipped or even slapped since before breakfast, so that his long nerves, finer drawn than those of other men by reason of his superior aristocracy and great length of limb, were in a most wretched state. It was all of yesterday, he recalled, that he had sent that one mincing maid to Samanda for punishment and still had got no word from his overbearing palace mistress. Glipkerio knew well enough the torment of punishment deferred, but in this case it seemed to have turned into a torment of pleasure deferred—for himself. The beastly fat woman should have more imagination! Why, oh why, he asked himself, was it only that watching a whipping could soothe him? He was a man greatly abused by destiny.
Now some black-togaed idiot was listing out nine arguments for feeing the entire priesthood of Ilthmar's rat-god to come to Lankhmar and make propitiating prayers. Glipkerio had grown so nervously impatient that he was exasperated even by the fulsome compliments to himself with which each speaker lengthily prefaced his speech, and whenever a speaker paused more than a moment for breath or effect, he had taken to quickly saying “Yes,” or “No,” at random, hoping this would speed things up, but it appeared to be working out the other way. Olegnya Mingolsbane had still to speak and he was the most boring, lengthiest, and self-infatuated talker of them all.
A page approached him and kneeled, holding respectfully out a scrap of dirty parchment twice folded and sealed with candle grease. He snatched it, glancing at Samanda's unmistakably large and thick-whorled thumbprint in the sooty grease, and tore it open and read the black scrawl.
; She shall be lashed with white-hot wires
on the stroke of three. Do not be tardy, little
overlord, for I shall not wait for you.
Glipkerio sprang up, his thoughts for the moment concerned only with whether it was the half-hour or three-quarter hour after two o'clock he had last heard strike.
Waving the refolded note at his council—or perhaps it was only that his hand was wildly a-twitch—he said in one breath, glaring defiantly as he did so, “Important news of my secret weapon! I must closet me at once with its sender,” and without waiting for reactions, but with a final tic so violent it jolted his daffodil wreath forward to rest on his nose, Lankhmar's overlord dashed through a silver-chased purple-wood arch out of the Council Chamber.
Hisvin slid out of his chair with a curt, thin-lipped bow to the council and went scuttling after him as fast as if he had wheels under his toga rather than feet. He caught up with Glipkerio in the corridor, laid firm hand on the skinny elbow high as his black-capped skull and after a quick glance ahead and back for eavesdroppers, called up softly but stirringly, “Rejoice, oh mighty mind that is Lankhmar's very brain, for the lagging planet has at last arrived at his proper station, made rendezvous with his starry fleet, and tonight I speak my spell that shall save your city from the rats!”
“What's that? Oh yes. Good, oh good,” the other responded, seeking chiefly to break loose from Hisvin's grasp, though meanwhile pushing back his yellow wreath so it was once more atop his blond-ringleted narrow skull. “But now I must rush me to—”