The Knight and Knave of Swords

by Fritz Leiber

  Buried Rimish fashion feet first,

  Bravely facing poison monsters,

  Treading serpents with her bare feet;

  Through dry earth and solid rock;

  Sinks like ghost into the granite;

  Skeldir's courage fails, she falters—

  When she spies the moon below her,

  In the heart of darkness, light!"

  This time Afreyt let twenty beats go by before giving her invocation, and the hand-linked linear company began a repetition of the three songs while they continued their curving and countercurving westward advance. A little toward the north Elvenhold loomed, a pale stout needle of rock and scrub heather to whose square top the strongest bow could not loft arrow. Two moons ago, on fateful Midsummer Day, all of them save Fingers and Ourph had picnicked there. While toward the south began a series of low rolling hills, at first mere swells in the sea of moonlit grass. And toward these hills May now began to lead their way, an overall southward veering of the dancing line.

  By the songs' second repetition islands of gorse and furze were appearing in the grassy ocean. May led between them toward a somewhat higher hill.

  "Our destination?" Fingers asked Gale, softly singing the question into the song they were on.

  "Yes," Gale replied in murmured snatches while swaying to the song. "In old times had a gallows. Then 'twas the ghost god Odin's hill when he counseled Aunt Afreyt. I was one of his handmaids."

  Fingers: What did you have to do?

  Gale: For one thing, I was his cabin-girl, you could say.

  Fingers: You were? You said he was a ghost. Was he solid enough for such things?

  Gale: Enough. He wanted all sorts of touching, both do and be done by.

  Fingers: Gods are just like men. Your aunt let you?

  Gale: It was very important information she was getting from him. Helped save Rime Isle. Also, I braided nooses for him. He made us wear them around our necks.

  Fingers: That sounds scary. Dangerous.

  Gale: It was. That's how Uncle Fafhrd lost his left hand. He was wearing them all around his left wrist in that battle I told you about. When Odin and the gallows vanished up into the sky, the nooses all tightened to nothing and shot up after—and Uncle Fafhrd's hand with them.

  Fingers: Really scary. If you'd kept them round your necks—

  Gale: Yes. Later, when Aunt Cif and Mother Grum purified the hill and cut down the bower where May and Mara and I had loved up the old god, they changed its name from Gallows to Goddess Hill, and we've been holding the summer full-moon rites on it.

  Mara: Whatever are you two whispering about? I can see Aunt Afreyt frowning at you.

  They instantly took up the song, which by now was another. "The little demons!" Afreyt whispered to Fafhrd in a not particularly angry voice.

  He turned back toward her and nodded, though even less concerned than she, just as he'd sometimes been chanting tonight and sometimes not, as the mood took him.

  The chill air was very still and fantastically clear. It occurred to Fafhrd that he had never in his life seen the full moon shine so bright, not even from Stardock. At that instant, as though some hidden cord of weakness deep in his vitals had been shrewdly plucked, he felt a spasm of unmanning faintness flurry through him, a feeling of insubstantiality, as if the world were about to fade away from him, or he from the world. It was all he could do to stand upright and not shake.

  As the weird qualm receded somewhat, he looked along the curving line of brightly lit moonlit faces to learn if it were something others had felt. Halfway up the hill the five girls moved on slowly in line, chanting raptly. Fingers, nearest of them but for Gale, looked toward him, but tranquilly, as though she'd simply sensed his gaze upon her. Next closest after the girls, Pshawri, dutifully chanting, or at least moving his lips. Finally, not five feet away, the Mouser, making not even pretense of chanting, seemingly lost in a brown study, but very much at ease, hood thrown back to bare his close-cropped head to the frosty air, while Fafhrd's covered his ears.

  Looking on his other side he saw, in orderly succession and absorbed in the ceremony: Afreyt, Groniger, Skullick, old Ourph the Mingol, Cif, fat Mother Grum the Witch, and Rill the Harlot.

  And then Fafhrd looked at Cif again (she must have started) and saw that she was now staring past him, her pale face of a sudden contorted with an expression of incredulous horror.

  He whipped around and saw, on his side, one face fewer than there'd been before. While he'd been looking in the other direction, the Mouser had gone away somewhere and his fingers dropped away unfelt from the hook that was the Northerner's left hand.

  And then he noticed that Pshawri, with an expression on his face not unlike that of Cif's, was staring at the Northerner's knees as if the Gray Mouser's young lieutenant were stupefiedly witnessing some horrifying miracle. Fafhrd looked down and saw that the Mouser had indeed dropped away! Straight down feet first into the frozen earth so he was buried upright to his waist and was no taller than a dwarf. Impossible! But there it was.

  Just then, as if some subterranean being gripping the Mouser's ankles had given another mighty yank, Fafhrd's comrade swiftly sank another half yard so he was buried to the chin like a Mingol traitor whom vengeful mates will leisurely dispatch by bowling rocks at his head and leaden-weighted skulls, though only after his concubines have been allowed (or forced) to kiss him one time each full on the lips.

  And then the Mouser looked up at Fafhrd with moonlit eyes widening, as if in full realization of his horrid plight, and gasped in piteous appeal, "Help me!" And his tall comrade could only quake and stare.

  Fafhrd heard from behind the sound of onrunning footsteps, boots ringing on frozen earth. And for a moment it seemed to him that he could see the moonlit ground through the Mouser's head, as if the little man were becoming attenuated, insubstantial. Or was that only his strange qualm returning? His own swimming eyes?

  And then, as if those subterranean hands were giving another tug, the Mouser began to move downward once again rapidly.

  From behind him Cif cast herself full length on the frozen ground, her outstretched hands snatching at the disappearing head.

  Fafhrd regained his power of movement and swiftly scanned around in case the Mouser's ghost were floating off in some other direction. The air seemed full of movement, but nothing substantial when he looked closely.

  With three exceptions everyone was staring at Cif or else hurrying toward her, who was now scrabbling through the scant frozen grass, as though frenziedly hunting for a jewel she'd dropped there. Afreyt and Groniger were looking off intently toward Elvenhold. The tall woman pointed at something and the deliberate man nodded in agreement.

  While Fingers was staring straight at Fafhrd in cool accusal, as if asking, "Why didn't you save your friend?"

  9

  From the Gray Mouser's point of view, what had happened was this:

  He'd been staring toward the moon, quite unmindful of the cold and the ceremony, lost in puzzlement as to how he could at once feel so heavy—as though wearied to death and barely able to stay erect, victim of some heatless fever—and yet at the same time so listless—light and insubstantial, as if he were thinning out to become a ghost whom the slightest breeze might blow away. The two feelings didn't agree at all, yet both were there.

  Without warning, he experienced a spasm of strange faintness, like Fafhrd's but more intense, so that he blacked out completely. It was as if the ground had been taken out from under his feet. When he came to his senses again, he was looking up at his northern comrade, who had never before seemed quite so tall.

  He must have simply keeled over, he told himself, and fallen flat. But when he tried to get up, he found he could move neither hand nor foot, bend waist or knee. Was he paralyzed? Everywhere below his neck something gripped him closely, and when he moved his fingers and thumbs against each other (both hands being imprisoned down by his sides so he couldn't spread fingers or make a fist), that something fel
t suspiciously grainy, like raw earth.

  In the most horrifying reorientation he'd ever experienced in the course of an eventful life, flat-on-my-back became buried-to-my-neck. Oh dismal! And so incredible that he couldn't really say whether it was the world, or he, that had moved to effect the dreadful exchange.

  Something terribly swift in his mind scanned almost instantaneously the pressures all over his body. Were they slightly greater around his ankles? As if he wore gyves, as if something, or someone gripped both his legs—such as the quicksand nixies Sheelba had warned him against in the Great Salt Marsh. Oh Mog, no!

  His gaze traveled up Fafhrd, who seemed tall as a pine, and he gasped out his agonized plea—and the great lout would only goggle and grimace at him, mop and mow in the moonlight, not only withholding help, but also seeming utterly unmindful of the priceless privilege he enjoyed of standing free atop the ground rather than being immured in it!

  Beyond Fafhrd he saw Cif running straight at him. If she kept on, she'd boot his face, the mad maenad! He instinctively tried to duck aside and only succeeded in wrenching his neck. And then he felt the grip on his ankles tighten and cold earth mount his chin, as his whole being was drawn downward. He clapped his lips tightly together to keep dirt out, drew one swift breath, then tried to narrow his nostrils, finally closed tight his eyes as his engulfment continued. Last thing he saw was the moon. As the gray glow of it transmitted through his eyelids vanished upward, he felt his pate scratched and his topknot sharply tweaked. Then even that was gone and there remained only a grainy coldness sliding up his cheeks. Strangely, then, it seemed to grow a little warmer and—a very little—looser, so he could puff some of the air trapped in his mouth out into his cheeks. The texture of the stuff scraping his cheeks changed from earth to wool to earth again. He realized his cowl had been dragged upward from around his neck and left buried above him. And then the rough sliding seemed to stop. One other thing he had to admit: the feeling of heaviness that had so long dogged him was completely gone. However closely confined, he seemed now rather to be floating.

  The swift something in his mind produced for his consideration a list of the beings who might hate him enough to wish him such a horrid doom and also conceivably have the magical power to effect it on him. The wizards Quarmal of Quarmall, Khahkht the Ice Wizard, Great Oomforafor, Hisvin the Rat King, his own mentor Sheelba turned against him, dear diabolic Hisvet, the gods Loki and Mog. It went on and on.

  One thing stood out: any world in which a man could be twitched into his grave by the legerdemain of some mad principality or power was monstrously unfair!

  10

  Aboveground, Cif rose to her knees from where she'd been crouched, breaking her fingernails scrabbling at the frosty ground, and stretched her arms around the girls, who had been crowding in close and all trying to touch her, more for their own comfort and reassurance than for hers. She tried to touch them all in turn and draw them to her, hushing their clamors, though as much for her own comfort as for theirs. They felt cold.

  Dumbstruck, Fafhrd turned back to ask Afreyt exactly what she'd seen when Mouser had seemed to sink into the ground impossibly. To his confusion he saw that she and Groniger were already a dozen yards away, hurrying toward Elvenhold, while Rill was sprinting after them at an angle from where she'd been at the end of the ritual line, the unlit lamp still streaming out behind her.

  With a slow, puzzled headshake he turned forward again and saw, beyond the huddled backs of Cif and the girls, Pshawri convulsed in an agony, his features grimaced, his eyes squeezed half shut, his taut body rocking forward and back, and literally tearing his hair. By Kos, did the knave think it was mourning time already?

  Then the tortured eyes of the Mouser's young lieutenant fixed upon Cif. They widened, his body ceased to rock, he left off tearing his hair and he threw out both arms to her in mute appeal.

  She responded immediately, pushing fully to her feet to go to him. But at that moment Fafhrd found his voice.

  "Don't move a step!" he called commandingly in carefully enunciated battle tones. "Stay where you are exactly—or we will lose the spot where Mouser disappeared into the ground."

  And he moved toward her deliberately, his sound right hand working to free his doubled-headed hand ax from the case where it hung at his side, its short helve pendant.

  "The spot where we must dig," he amplified, going to his knees close behind her.

  She turned around, and seeing him bringing out his ax and thinking he meant to chop into the ground with it, cried in alarm, "Oh, don't do that, you might hurt him."

  He shook his head reassuringly, and grasping the ax at the juncture of its head and helve, scraped with it strongly inward toward his knees, feeling with his hook through the earth he uncovered. He scraped three like swaths behind the first, baring a space about as big as a trapdoor, and then repeated the process, going an inch deeper.

  Meanwhile Pshawri was approaching Cif, fumbling his pouch and babbling, "Sweet Lady, I am responsible for this dire mishap to my captain. I alone am guilty. Here, let me show you."

  Without ceasing his work, Fafhrd called sharply, "Forget that, Pshawri, and come here. I have an errand for you."

  But when that one did not seem to hear his words, only continuing to stare desperately at Cif and now groping at her arms to draw her attention, Fafhrd signed to her to draw the madman aside and hear his mouthings, meanwhile commanding, "You, Skullick, then! Come here!"

  When his young sergeant swiftly obeyed, though not without an uneasy glance toward Pshawri, Fafhrd instructed him tersely, while keeping on with his scrapings, "Skullick, run like the wind back to the barracks. Find Skor and Mikkidu. Bid them haste here with one or two men apiece bringing heavy work gloves, scoops, shovels, pails, lanterns, and ropes. Don't try to explain anything—here, take my ring. Then do you choose a man each of the Mouser's men and mine—and a Mingol—and come on after with planks and the instruments needful for shoring a shaft, more rope, pulleys, food, fuel, water, a keg of brandy, blankets, the medicine case. Come as soon as these can be gathered. Use the dogcarts. Mannimark to remain in command at the barracks. Any questions? No? Then go!"

  Skullick went. Instantly Rill took his place.

  "Fafhrd," she said urgently, "Afreyt and Groniger bid me tell you that whatever you believe we saw or think we saw, deceived perhaps by a phantom, the Mouser, at the end, raced with preternatural speed toward Elvenhold and then took cover. They go to hunt him. They urge you join them, after sending for lanterns, the dogs Racer and Gripper, and an unwashed piece of the Mouser's intimate clothing."

  Fafhrd left off scraping out the square hole, which was five or six inches deep, to look around questioningly at those who had been listening.

  "Captain, he sank into the ground where you are digging," said Ourph the Mingol. "I saw."

  "It's true," growled Mother Grum, "though he grew somewhat insubstantial at the end."

  Cif broke away from the importunate Pshawri to aver with great certitude, "He went down there. I touched his pate and top hair before he sank away."

  Pshawri followed behind her, crying, "Here, Lady, I've found it. Here is the proof I lied to the Captain when I told him yesternight I brought up nothing from my Maelstrom dive."

  It was a skeleton cube of smooth metal big as an infant's fist with something dark wedged inside. The metal looked like silver in the moonlight, but Cif knew that without question it was gold—the Rimish ikon that the Mouser had slung into the Great Maelstrom's center to quieten it after the wrecking of the Sea-Mingol armada.

  "My taking of this from the whirlpool's maw," mad-eyed Pshawri proclaimed, "though meant to please him, has been the means of my captain's doom. As he himself feared might hap. Gods, was ever man so cruelly self-deceived?"

  "Why did you lie to him, then?" Fafhrd asked. "And why did you so desire to possess it?"

  "I may not tell you," Pshawri said miserably. "That is a private matter between myself and the Captain. Gods, what's to do
? What is to do?"

  "We keep on digging here," Fafhrd decided, suiting action to word. "Rill, tell Afreyt and Groniger of my decision."

  "First let me make your work here easier," that one said, bringing the leviathan lantern from behind her and planting it on the ground next the square hole Fafhrd was digging, then snapping the fingers of her right hand thrice.

  "Burn without heat," she said simultaneously.

  The simple magic worked.

  Leviathan light white as new-fallen snow, pure history, sprang into being and illumined the surroundings like a piece of the full moon brought down to earth, so that every dirt grain inside the new-digged square seemed individually visible.

  Fafhrd thanked her duly and Rill made off briskly toward Elvenhold.

  Fafhrd turned back and said, "Pshawri, sit across the hole from me and feel through the new dirt uncovered by each of my ax scrapes. Two hands work faster than a hook. Gale! You—and Fingers here—come and kneel beside me and clear off to either side the earth my ax scrapes up. Now I'm through the frozen turf, I can take deeper swaths. Pshawri, while you are feeling for the Mouser's head, tell us, coolly and clearly, all that your conscience will allow about your Maelstrom dive."

  "You think he may yet survive?" Cif asked falteringly, as though doubting her own wild hopes.

  "Madam," said Fafhrd, "I've known the Gray One for some time. It never does to underestimate his resourcefulness under adversity or coolth in peril."

  11

  Tight-packed upright in dirt, as if he had been honored with a Rimish pit burial, the Mouser became aware of a lump in his throat which, as he observed it, slowly grew larger and harder and began to involve or elicit twitching sensations in his cheeks and his mouth's roof, and like painful feelings or impulses toward movement, deep in his chest. A tension grew in that whole area and there began the faintest buzzing in his ears. All these sensations continued to increase without respite.

  He recalled that his last breath had been drawn while he still saw the moon.