Swords and Ice Magic fagm-6

by Fritz Leiber

  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 the 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 equatoriaql sun disk, and intoned in voice like grinding ice flowes, “Heed me, smallest atomies, that in rime seas seethe and freeze. Hear me, spirits of the cold, then do straigtway 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 w
hipped 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! Take 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.”

  Aboard Flotsam, the Mouser was giving like directions to Ourph. He was cheered by sight of Fafhrd's flares matching his own. though he did not need their testimony. Now he longed for talk with Fafhrd. Which would be soon. The gap of black water between ships was narrowing rapidly. He wasted a moment musing whether mere chance or else some goddess had steered his comrade's arrow aside from his heart. He thought of Cif.

  Aboard both ships, almost in unison, Pshawri and Mannimark cried out fearfully, “Ship close astern!”

  Out of the torn and darkening fog bank, driving with preternatural rapidity into the teeth of the gale on a course to smash them both, there had silently come a craft monstrous in size and aspect. It might well have remained unseen until collision, save that the weird rays of the rising black sun striking its loadside engendered there a horrid, pale reflection, not natural white light at all, but a loathly, colorless luminescence — a white to make the flesh crawl, a cave-toad, fish-belly white. And if the substance making the reflection had any texture at all, it was that of ridged and crinkled gray horn — dead men's fingernails.

  The leprous Hel-glow showed the demonic craft to have thrice the freeboard of any natural ship. Its towering prow and sides were craggy and jagged, as if it were cast entire of ice in a titanic rough mold left over from the Age of Chaos, or else hacked by jinn into crude ship-likeness from a giant berg broken off from glacier vast. And it was driven by banks of oars long and twitchy as insect legs or limbs of myriapod, yet big as jointed yards or masts, as they sent it scuttling monstrously across black ocean vast. And from its lofty deck, as if hurled by demon ballistas, catapults, and mangonels, there now came hurtling down around Flotsam and Sea Hawk great blocks of ice which sent up black, watery volcanoes. While from the jagged top of its foremast — pale, big, and twisted as a thunder-blasted pine long dead — there shot out two thin beams of blackest black, like rays of anti-sun but more intense, which smote the Gray Mouser and Fafhrd each in the chest with deepstriking chill and sick, spreading dizziness and weakening of will.

  Nevertheless they each managed to give rapid, stinging commands, and the two ships turned away in time's nick from each other and the oared deathberg striking between them. Flotsam had had only to turn further into the wind and so come round smoothly and swiftly. But Sea Hawk perforce must jibe. Its sail shivered a space, then filled abruptly on the other side with noise like thunder crack, but the stout Ool Krut canvas did not split. Both ships scudded north before the gale.

  Behind them the eldritch bergship slowed and turned with supernatural celerity, spider-walked by its strange oars, and came in monstrous pursuit, gigantically oared on. And although no word was voiced or sign given by the pursued — almost as if by taking no notice of it, the menacing tangle of ghostly white evil astern could be made not to be — a collective shudder nevertheless went through the crews and captains of the sailing galley and the long-yarded two-master.

  With that began a time of trial and tension, a Reign of Terror, an Eternal Night, such as no one amongst them had ever known before. First, there was the darkness, which grew greater the higher the anti-sun climbed in the black heavens. Even candle flames below and the cook fires sheltered from the blast grew blue and dim. While the pustulant white glow hunting them had this quality: that its light illumined nothing it fell on, but rather darkened it, as if it carried the essence of the anti-light along with it, as if it existed solely to make visible the terror of the bergship. Although the bergship was real as death and ever inching nearer, that eerie light sometimes seemed to Fafhrd and the Mouser most akin to the glows seen crawling on the inside of closed eyelids in darkness absolute.

  Second, there was the cold that was a part of the anti-sunlight and struck deep with it, that penetrated every cranny of Sea Hawk and Flotsam, that had to be fought with both protective huddlings and violent movement, and also with drink and food warmed very slowly and with difficulty over the enfeebled flames — a cold that could paralyze both mind and body, and then kill.

  Third, there was the potent silence that came with the unnatural dark and cold, the silence that made almost inaudible the constant creakings of rigging and wood, that muffled all foot-stampings and side-flailings against the cold, that turned all speech to whispers and changed the pandemonium of the great gale itself driving them north to the soft roaring of a seashell held forever to the ear.

  And then there was that great gale itself, no whit weaker that it had no great noise — the gale that blew icy spume over the stern, the murderous gale that had always to be struggled against and kept watch on (gripping with fingers and thumbs like gyves to hopefully firm handholds when a man was anywhere on deck or above), the gale near hurricane force that was driving them ever north at an unprecedented pace. None of them had ever before sailed before such a wind, even in the Mouser's and Fafhrd's and Ourph's first passage of the Outer Sea. Any of them would have long since hove to with bare masts and likely sea anchor, save for the menace of the bergship behind.

  Last, there was that monstrous craft itself, deathberg or bergship, ever gaining on them, its leggy oars ever more strongly plied. Rarely, a jagged ice block crashed in black sea beside them. Rarely, a black ray teased at hero's heart. But those were but cackling reminders. The monster craft's main menace: it did nothing (save close the distance to its fleeing foes). The monster-craft's intent: grapple and board! (or so it seemed).

  Each on his ship, Fafhrd and Mouser fought weariness and chill; insane desire to sleep; strange, fleeting dreads. Once Faf
hrd fancied unseen fliers battling overhead, as if in fabulous aerial extension of the sea war of his and Mouser's craft ‘gainst iceship huge. Once Mouser seemed to see black sails of two great fleets. Both masters cheered their men, kept them alive.

  Sometimes Sea Hawk and Flotsam were far apart in their parallel flight north, quite out of sight and hail. Sometimes they came together enough to see glints of each other. And once so close their captains could trade words.

  Fafhrd hailed in bursts (they were whispers in Mouser's ears), “Ho, Small One! Heard you Stardock's fliers? Our mountain princesses… fighting with Faroomfar?”

  The Mouser shouted back, “My ears are frostbit. Have you sighted… other foe ships… besides monstreme?”

  Fafhrd: Monstreme? What's that?

  Mouser: That ill astern. My word's analogous… to bireme… quadrireme. Monstreme! — rowed by monsters.

  Fafhrd: A monstreme in full gale. An awful thought! (He looked astern at it.)

  Mouser: Monstreme in monsoon… would be awfuler.

  Fafhrd: Let's not waste breath. When will we raise Rime Isle?

  Mouser: I had forgot we had a destination. What time think you?

  Fafhrd: First bell in second dogwatch. Sunset season.

  Mouser: It should get lighter… when this black sun sets.

  Fafhrd: It ought to. Damn the double dark!

  Mouser: Damn the dimidiate halved white astern! What's its game?

  Fafhrd: Freeze fast to us, I wot. Then kill by cold, else board us.