by Fritz Leiber
Pshawri's spent legs were wobbly yet he managed to stand. He saw that the first of the five fish-shaped clouds hid the sun. It had veered north, as though curious about the Maelstrom and determined to inspect it, and the other four had followed it in line. A strong breeze from the southwest explained this and chilled Pshawri, so he was glad for the large rough towel Skullick tossed his way.
"A goodly tickle you gave him in the nose, my boyo," that one congratulated. "He'll sneeze longer than you bleed where he scraped you, never you fear. But, by Kos, Pshawri, how they all came after you! You'd no sooner raised sand than they were up and streaking in from far and near. Like lean black watchdogs!" He appealed incredulously, "Think you they felt your stone-abetted impact through the sand so far? By Kos, they must have!"
"There was more than one?" Pshawri asked, shivering as he spoke for the first time since his dive.
"More? I counted full five blacks at the end, besides two tiger rays. I told you it was more dangerous than you dreamed, and now events have proved me sevenfold right. You're lucky to have got out with your life, lucky you found no treasure to delay you. A few moments more and you'd not have been facing one shark, but three or four!"
Pshawri had been about to display his golden find for his comrade's admiration when Skullick's words not only told him the latter hadn't seen him make it, but also reawakened the strange pang of guilt and foreboding he'd felt below.
While hurrying into his clothes, a process in which he was speeded by the quickening breeze and absence of sun, he managed to switch the slimy cube from the uneasy revealment of the net bag to the revealing concealment of his moleskin belt pouch, while Skullick scanned the sky.
"See how the weather shifts," that one called. "What witch has whistled up this frigid wind? Cold from the south, at any rate southwest—unnatural. Mark how that line of clouds that hides the sun veers widdershins. Lucky you did not find the whirlpool-queller, or else we'd have the spinning of that element to deal with. As it is, I fear our presence irks the Maelstrom. Up anchor, cully, hoist sail and away! We'll find your captain's gift another day!"
Pshawri was happy to spring to with a will. Relentless action left less time for feeling strange guilts and thinking crazy thoughts about clouds. And the calm waters, though wind-ruffled, showed no other signs of movement.
3
In jam-packed Godsland, which lies lofty and mountaingirt near Nehwon's south pole, a handsome young god, who had been drawing crowds in the stranger's pavilion by sleeping entranced for seventeen months, woke with an enraged shout that seemed loud enough to reach the Shadowland at Godsland's antipodes, and that momentarily deafened half the divinities and all the demi-divinities in his heavenly audience.
Among the latter were Fafhrd's and the Gray Mouser's three particular godlings—brutal Kos, spiderish Mog, and the limp-wristed Issek—who had been teased to come witness the feat of supernal hibernation not only out of sheer curiosity, but also from intimations that the handsome young sleeping stranger and his record-breaking trance were somehow involved with their two most illustrious (though often backsliding) worshippers. The three reacted variously to the ear-splitting cry. Issek covered his while Kos dug a little finger into one.
And now it became apparent that Loki's piercing shout had indeed reached the Shadowland, for the slender, seemingly youthful, opalescent-fleshed figure of Death, or its simulacrum, appeared at the foot of the silken bier on which the angry young god crouched, and the two were seen by the deafened divinities to hold converse together, Loki fiercely commanding, Death raising objections, placating, temporizing, though nodding repeatedly and smiling winningly at the same time.
Yet despite the latter's amiable behavior there were shrinkings back among the members of the motley heavenly host, for even in Godsland Death is not a popular figure nor widely trusted.
Fafhrd's and Mouser's three oddly matched godlings, who had earlier wormed their way quite close to the red-draped bier, regained their audition in time to hear Loki's last summary command:
"So be it then, sirrah! So soon as all the essential formalities of your paltry world are satisfied and necessary niggling conditions met—so soon and not one instant later!—I want the impious mortal who consigned me to deep watery oblivion to be sent a like distance underground. It is commanded!"
With a final bow and strange obsequious look, Nehwon's Death (or its simulacrum) said softly, "Hearkening in obedience," and vanished.
"I like that!" quick-witted Mog remarked in an indignant ironic undertone to his two cronies. "Out of sheer spite toward the Gray Mouser for his dunking, this vagabond Loki proposes to rob us of one of our chief worshippers."
After a face-saving haughty glare around (for Death's departure had been snubbingly abrupt), Loki slid off the bier to confer in urgent whispers with another stranger god, dignified but elderly to the point of doddering, who responded with rather senile-seeming nods and shrugs.
"Yes," Issek replied venomously to Mog. "And now, see, he's trying to persuade his comrade, old Odin, to demand of Death a like doom for Fafhrd."
"No, I doubt that," Kos protested. "The dodderer has already revenged himself on Fafhrd by taking his left hand. And he's had no indignities visited on him to reawaken his ire. He's hung on here while his comrade slept because he has nowhere better to go."
"I'd not count on that," Mog said morosely. "Meanwhile, what's to do about the clear threat to the Mouser? Protest to Death this wanton raid by a foreign god on our dwindling congregation?"
"I'd want to think twice before going that far," Issek responded dubiously. "Appeals to him have been known to backfire on their makers."
"I don't like dealing with him myself, and that's a fact," Kos seconded. "He gives me the cold shivers. Truth to tell, I don't think you can trust the Powers any further than you can trust foreign gods!"
"He didn't seem too happy about Loki's arrogance toward him," Issek put in hopefully. "Perhaps things will work out well without our meddling." He smiled a somewhat sickish smile.
Mog frowned but spoke no more.
Back in one of the long corridors of his mist-robed mazy low castle under the sunless moist gray skies of the Shadowland, Death thought coolly with half his mind (the other half was busy as always with his eternal work everywhere in Nehwon) of what a stridently impudent god this young stranger Loki was and what a pleasure it would be to break the rules, spit in the face of the other Powers, and carry him off before his last worshipper died.
But as always good taste and sportsmanship prevailed.
A Power must obey the most whimsical and unreasonable command of the least god, insofar as it could be reconciled with conflicting orders from other gods and provided the proprieties were satisfied—that was one of the things that kept Necessity working.
And so although the Gray Mouser was a good tool he would have liked to decide when to discard, Death began with half his mind to plan the doom and demise of that one. Let's see, a day and a half would be a reasonable period for preparation, consultations, and warnings. And while he was at it, why not strengthen the Gray One for his coming ordeal? There were no rules against that. It would help him if he were heavier, massier in body and mind. Where get the heaviness? Why, from his comrade Fafhrd, of course, nearest at hand. It would leave Fafhrd light-headed and -bodied for a while, but that couldn't be helped. And then there were the proper and required warnings to think about...
While half Death's mind was busy with these matters, he saw his Sister Pain slinking toward him from the corridor's end on bare silent feet, her avid red eyes fixed on his pale slate cool-gray ones. She was slender as he and like-complected, except that here and there her opalescence was streaked with blue—and to his great distaste she padded about, as was her wont, in steamy nakedness, rather than decently robed and slippered like himself.
He prepared to stride past her with never a word.
She smiled at him knowingly and said with languorous hisses in her voice, "You've a choice mor
sel for me, haven't you?"
4
While these ominous Nehwonal and supernal events were transpiring that so concerned them, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser were relaxedly and unsuspectingly sipping dark brandy by the cool white light, which Rime Islers call history, of a leviathan-oil lamp in the root-and-wine cellar of Cif's snug Salthaven abode while that lady and Afreyt were briefly gone to the lunar temple at the arctic port-town's inland outskirts on some business involving the girl acolytes of the Moon Goddess, whose priestesses Cif and Afreyt were, and the girl acolytes their nieces.
Since their slaying of their would-be killers and the lifting of the old-age curse, the two captains had been enjoying to the full their considerable relief, leaving the overseeing of their men to their lieutenants, visiting their barracks but once a day (and taking turns even at that—or even having their lieutenants make report to them, a practice to which they'd sunk once or twice lately), spending most of their time at their ladies' cozier and more comfortable abodes and pleasuring themselves with the sportive activities (including picnicking) which such companionship made possible and to which their recent stints as grumpy and unjoyous old men also inclined them, abetted by the balmy weather of Thunder and Satyrs Moon.
Indeed, today the last had got a bit too much for them. Hence their retreat to the deep, cool, flagstoned cellar, where they were assuaging the melancholy that unbridled self-indulgence is strangely apt to induce in heroes by rehearsing to each other anecdotes of ghosts and horrors.
"Hast ever heard," the tall Northerner intoned, "of those sinuous earth-hued tropical Kleshite ghouls with hands like spades that burrow beneath cemeteries and their environs, silently emerge behind you, then seize you and drag you down before you can gather your wits to oppose it, digging more swiftly than the armadillo? One such, it's said, subterraneously pursued a man whose house lay by a lich-field and took him in his own cellar, which doubtless had a feature much like that." And he directed his comrade's attention to an unflagged area, just behind the bench on which they sat, that showed dark sandy loam and was large enough to have taken the passage of a broad-shouldered man.
"Afreyt tells me," he explained, "it's been left that way to let the cellar breathe—a most necessary ventilation in this clime."
The Mouser regarded the gap in the flagging with considerable distaste, arching his brows and wrinkling his nostrils, then recovered his mug from the stout central table before them and took a gut-shivering slug. He shrugged. "Well, tropic ghouls are unlikely here in polar clime. But now I'm reminded—hast ever heard tell?—of that Ool Hrusp prince who so feared his grave, abhorring earth, that he lived his whole life (what there was of it) in the topmost room of a lofty tower twice the height of the mightiest trees of the Great Forest where Ool Hrusp is situated?"
"What happened to him in the end?" Fafhrd duly inquired.
"Why, although he dwelt secure two thousand leagues from the edge of the desert southeast of the Inner Sea and with all that water between to distance him, a monstrously dense sandstorm born on a typhoon wind sought him out, turned the green canopy of the forest umber, sifted his stone eyrie full, and suffocated him."
From upstairs came a smothered cry.
"My story must have carried," the Mouser observed. "The girls seem to have returned."
He and Fafhrd looked at each other with widening eyes.
"We promised we'd watch the roast," the latter said.
"And when we came down here," the other continued, "we told ourselves we'd go up and check and baste it after a space."
Then both together, chiming darkly, "But you forgot."
There was a swift patter of footsteps—more than one pair—on the cellar stairs. Somehow five slender girls came down into the cool historic glow without tripping or colliding. The first four wore sandals of white bearhide, near identical knee-length tunics of fine white linen and yashmacks of the same material, hiding most of their hair and all of their faces below their eyes, whose merry flashing nevertheless showed they were all grinning.
The fifth, who was the slenderest, went barefoot in a shorter white-belted white tunic of coarser weave and wore a yashmack of reversed white unshorn lamb's hide and, despite the weather, gloves of the same material. Her gaze seemed grave.
All but she tore off their yashmacks together, showing them to be Afreyt's flaxen-haired nieces May, Mara, and Gale, and Cif's niece Klute, who was raven-tressed.
But Fafhrd and Mouser knew that already. The two had risen. May danced toward them excitedly. "Uncle Fafhrd! We've had an adventure!"
Following at her heels, Mara cut in, "We were almost kidnapped aboard an Ilthmar trader that was a secret slaver!"
"Anything could have happened to us!" Gale exulted, taking her turn. "Imagine! They say Eastern princes will pay fortunes for twelve-year-old blond virgins!"
"Only, our new friend escaped from the trader and warned Aunts Cif and Afreyt," black-haired Klute topped her triumphantly, looking back toward the fifth girl, who hadn't come forward or unyashmacked. "She'd been kidnapped herself at Tovilyis and been a prisoner on Weasel all Satyrs Moon!"
Gale grabbed back the news-telling with, "But she's a novice of Skama just like us. Tovilyis coven. Her mother was a priestess of the moon."
"And she's a princess herself too!" May topped them all. "A really-truly princess of south Lankhmar land!"
"You can tell she's a princess," Mara fairly shrieked, "because she always wears gloves!"
"Don't squeal like a piglet, Mara," May reproved, seeing a surer way to hog attention, and for a longer time. "Girls, we have omitted to introduce our new friend and rescuer." And when that one still hung back, dropping her eyes demurely, May placed herself beside her and gently impelled her forward.
"Uncle Fafhrd," she said gravely, "may I introduce you to my new friend and rescuer of all of us, the princess Fingers of Tovilyis? And, dear Princess, my friend, may I tender your hand to our most honored guest Captain Fafhrd, a great hero of Rime Isle, my Aunt Afreyt's lover, and my own dearest uncle?"
The strangely yashmacked girl dropped her eyes still farther and seemed to shiver slightly all over, yet let her left hand be drawn forward.
Fafhrd took it and, bowing ceremoniously low and looking straight into the hooded and half-averted face, said, "Any friend of May's is a friend of mine, most honored Princess Fingers, while as the rescuer of her and all my other friends here, I owe you eternal gratitude. My sword is yours." And he kissed the lamb's hide for three heartbeats. Her head tipped up a trifle and her eyelashes fluttered.
All the other girls ooh'ed and aah'ed, though there was a hard expression on Klute's face, while the Mouser's gaze grew somewhat sardonic.
May repossessed herself of the gloved hand and swung it toward the Mouser.
"Dear Uncle Mouser," she intoned, her voice speeding up just a little because of the repetition, despite her efforts to vary her speech, "could I introduce you to my new friend and benefactress of all us girls, the princess Fingers of south Lankhmar land? Princess dear, my friend, could I entrust your precious hand to our honored guest Captain Mouser, Klute's Aunt Cif's lover and my own good, beloved, honorary uncle—and hero of Rime Isle second only to Fafhrd?"
The Mouser's eyebrows lifted formidably. "Her left hand? No, you may not," he dismissed May harshly, setting his fists upon his hips and standing as tall as possible, which involved leaning back a little. Then, looking sneeringly down his nose at the scrawny figure cowered before him, he made a fearsome face and barked commandingly, "Manners, child!—for it is a child you are, an ill-bred and conceited snit of a girl-child, whatever else you may be."
The other girls gasped in consternation at this turn of talk, while Fafhrd gave his comrade an unfriendly glare, but the one addressed swiftly drew off her gloves and unyashmacked, revealing a piquant face blushing almost the same hue as her close-cropped hair as she tucked the three lambskin items inside her belt.
Lifting her eyes to the Mouser, she said in a low clear voic
e, "You rebuke me well, sir. I most humbly apologize." She spoke (though with a strange lisping accent) the same Low Lankhmarese the others all had used, which was the common trade language of most of Nehwon. Then she extended up toward him palm down a slender pale right hand.
He took it without gripping, resting it on his spread fingers as he observed it thoughtfully. "Fingers," he said slowly, as though savoring the word. "Now that's an odd name for a princess."
"I am no princess, sir," she responded instantly. "That's but something I told the priestesses when I came off Weasel, to be sure my warning would be listened to."
The other girls stared at her as though betrayed, but the Gray Mouser only nodded ruminatively, hefting her hand as though appraising it. "That fits better with what I find here," he said, "much as your speech says Ilthmar to my ear and not Tovilyis. Observe," he continued, as if lecturing, "though narrow, this is a strong and efficient working hand, has done much gripping and squeezing, rubbing and slapping, twisting and prodding, tapping and stroking, finger dancing, et cetera." He turned it over, so her palm lay upward, and rubbed that testingly with his thumb in a circle. "And yet despite the work it's done, it's moist and most pleasingly soft. That's from the oil in the lambswool of the gloves. I doubt not that her uncommon yashmack equally benefits her cheeks, lips, and winsome chin, making them all luxuriously smooth." He sighed thoughtfully. Then, "May, approach us! Hold out your hand." The blond girl obeyed wonderingly. He dropped the hand he'd been supporting into it and turned toward Klute, who was grinning wickedly.
"How does my favorite niece?"
The other girls appeared to be hunting furiously for something to say. Fafhrd swung toward the Mouser, Fingers looked tranquil, when all of a sudden Afreyt called briskly from the top of the stairs, "That's enough games in the cellar and skulking in the forecastle! On deck all of you and earn your dinners!"
Klute and the Mouser led the way, gossiping airily, he making much of her, Mara and Gale followed somewhat glumly. Fafhrd deftly caught up May and Fingers where the Mouser had left them standing bemusedly hand in hand and, holding them comfortably in either arm, brought up the rear.