The Knight and Knave of Swords

by Fritz Leiber

  A flurry of wind stung their faces with ice needles as they entered the night pale with the chill glow of the barely gibbous moon and a faint deep melancholy note resounded from the wind chimes the other side of Salthaven. Afreyt set a fast pace for the barracks. No others were abroad. At irregular intervals the wind chimes repeated their profound reverberation, like a god muttering in his sleep.

  At the barracks were lights and labor and a loaded dogcart ready to leave. Afreyt commandeered it for herself and the girls, pulling rank on Mannimark, which drew from Gale a look of further disillusion with "grown-ups" as she clambered reluctantly aboard. Fingers took it more naturally, copying the older woman's queenly mien and manner.

  "Any message for the diggings?" that one asked the mustached man as she took the long whip from its socket. "I'll make your excuses, Sergeant. I'm sure the other cart will be back for you soon."

  "No mind, Lady," he answered. "We'll walk."

  "Very well, Sergeant." And with a whip crack and jingle of bells the cart was off, making a sharp turn that headed them into the cutting wind and away from the risen low-moon. The girls ducked their faces into their hoods but Afreyt lifted hers high. The occasional boom of the chimes grew less faint as they approached the Moon Temple, and then there was added to it a still deeper clanking as a heavier beam was struck and boomed its note.

  "The north blast quickens," she commented. "It will be bitter crossing the Meadow."

  Soon the fire facing the shelter tent became their beacon and promise of warmth. Afreyt signaled their approach with a flurry of whip cracks.

  "Where's Lady Cif?" she asked the knot of soup drinkers.

  "At the face, Lady," Skullick replied.

  "Unload," she directed, and springing down, followed by the girls, made for the pit, whence rose a short pale column of white light.

  Beside it the pile of dug dirt was higher and wider and Fren walked a strange short sentry-go, stepping on the forward edge of the big forge-bellows next the pit edge, mounting its slant in three short steps (which made it sink), giving its top handle an upward yank after stepping off it (which helped an interior spring expand it again), drawing in air, and so back to the pit edge and repeat the mini-march.

  Peering down the shaft from the opposite edge of the hole, the three females saw how the first furry snow-white serpent's hide emerged from the bellow's front and curved downward, its crested head clamping its jaws on the tail of the second, and so on downward until the fifth entered the cross corridor at the shaft's bottom, where two leviathan lamps provided illumination.

  They could see the furry tube slacken and swell as each successive giant's breath of fresh air traveled down.

  Afreyt explained to the girls, "Each tail tip is clipped off short and thrust inside the jaws of the preceding snow serpent, a clear glue making the juncture airtight. Spirits of wine dissolve this, so the hides may be parted, cleaned, and restored (the tail tips are kept) to something like their original value afterward. Else all would be monstrously unthrifty." And with a sign to the windlass man and a "You next" to the girls, she stepped into the empty pail and traveled down beside the slowly pulsating, furry white tube, stepped out at the bottom and waited until it returned with Fingers and Gale.

  The horizontal passage was a dimly lit, stone-floored, narrow, unlofty rectangle, so that Afreyt must stoop as she led the way, although the girls were able to walk upright as they followed.

  "I expected it to be warmer underground," Gale observed.

  "The dragon's breath we're blowing down is chill," the older woman reminded her. "Look, there's a fortune in wood around us," she told the girls.

  "A hero's life is worth any expenditure," Fingers assured her somewhat loftily.

  "So it behooves those who may have to ransom or rescue them to lay up cash," Afreyt responded. "Luckily the lumber's all salvageable, like the hides."

  Just ahead appeared to be solid rock, and seemingly from it, but actually from around it, there materialized a short man carrying a full pail before him and another behind. It was the Mouser's other lieutenant, Mikkidu. They managed to squeeze past him and then along a short section of corridor where the left wall was stone, the right wood, until it had jogged past the obstruction into bright light, which showed their journey's end eight yards ahead.

  From the ceiling's last short crossboard hung a large leviathan lamp, while beneath the as yet unroofed yard of tunnel, Cif knelt away from them and worked at the naked face with wooden trowel and gloved left hand, scraping and brushing away the stuff that was of a consistency between flaky sandstone and packed sand. While supported by an upslanted peg in the right-hand wall, the last snow-serpent puffed chill gusts that stirred the falling dust and fine debris.

  So great was the small woman's concentration on her exacting task that she was unaware of their presence until Afreyt touched her shoulder.

  She turned on them a blank stare, swiftly rising to her feet. Then her eyes wavered and she lurched forward into her friend's arms.

  "You're out on your feet," Afreyt protested. "You should have been relieved at the face hours ago! Here, take a swallow of this," she added, withdrawing a silver flask from her pouch and uncorking it with her teeth while continuing to support Cif with her other arm.

  The outwearied woman grasped it and gulped the watered brandy greedily.

  "Have you had any rest at all since coming out this noon?" Afreyt demanded.

  "I lay in the tent awhile, but it made me nervous."

  "So you're coming up at once with me. There's a new matter we must discuss alone. Gale! Take over here at the face. Fingers can help you—it's a sort of work her deft hands should be good at."

  "Oh good!" said Gale.

  Fingers: "You honor me."

  Cif made no demur, accepting support but asking, "What new matter?"

  "All in good time."

  Just past the jog they encountered Mikkidu returning with empty pails. Afreyt addressed him, "I'm taking the lady Cif home for long-needed rest. You're in charge now. Gale and our new friend Fingers are working the face. See that they aren't kept at it too long and are both sent to Cif's house by midnight."

  When he shot Cif a look of inquiry, she nodded and then remembered to give him Fafhrd's ring.

  Aboveground the dogcart had been unloaded and Skullick was greeting Mannimark and Faf's berserk Gort as they came loping in.

  Afreyt poured Cif a mouthful of hot soup and directed, "Hitch up fresh dogs. I'm driving the lady Cif home. She needs rest badly. No other load. Here Mikkidu has the ring."

  "Mara and May were due to go this trip," Skullick pointed out. The blond girls waved from where they huddled in the shelter tent.

  "I'll take them, of course," Afreyt said. "Girls, climb aboard! And take a blanket with you. And another for Lady Cif."

  Returning to Salthaven, they all had the wind at their backs, which was some improvement. None was inclined to talk. Midway Cif asked suspiciously, "Was there poppy dust in the watered brandy you fed me? It has a sickly, bitter aftertaste."

  "Only enough to induce tranquillity and encourage sleep, but not enforce it."

  Afreyt drove straight to Cif's and had the girls return the cart to the barracks before wending to their own homes. She warmed a solid meal while Cif got comfortable, saw it consumed, then poured them both brandy and handed Cif the letter Pshawri had entrusted to her, saying, "I've read it, of course. Matter of import for you, certainly."

  Cif studied the broken green seal and the violet-inked address as she unfolded it. "This sheet was in the Captain's last mail bag from Lankhmar," she averred, "before he distributed the letters to his men."

  Then she was silent while she read to herself the following:

  Dear Son Pshawri,

  I hope this finds you alive and continuing to prosper on your northern adventure in service of that notable rogue the Gray Mouser.

  I am to tell you he has more reason to make you his lieutenant than even he weens.

 
When you were young I pointed him out to you among other noteworthy Lankhmarts. But I did not see fit to tell you (or him) that he was your father. Such tactics seldom work out, to my knowledge and experience, and I would scorn to curry favor in such a way.

  It happened in my salad days, before I became a professional woman, and while I was body maid to the dancer Ivrian and we were all caught up in a supernal intrigue involving the Thieves Guild, some of its jeweled relics, and the Mouser's uncouth barbarian comrade Fafhrd.

  They vied with each other to seduce me. Fafhrd loved me the more, but the Mouser was tricksier and measured his drinks more carefully—and mine. The best of what I know of the uses of evil and falsity was taught me by that devil.

  But now you find yourself by chance in service of the very same man, you may find the knowledge of advantage to you. Use it as you see fit. Luckily the relationship is supported by evidence. Triads of equidistant moles run in his family.

  Thanks for the silver ring and seven rilks.

  Prosper,

  your loving mother Freg

  Cif lifted her eyes to Afreyt's. "That letter rings true to me," she said, nodding soberly.

  "You think so too?" the other replied.

  "By Skama's scales, what else! It is man's nature to plant his seed where'er the soil looks good."

  "A hero's doubly so..." Afreyt chimed, "whence else his deeds of daring?"

  Cif mused, "When we told Mou and Faf of our courting of the stranger gods Odin and Loki in Rime Isle's service and even setting sexual lures and ties for them, I recall they hinted of their own conquests among female divinities—the viewless Stardock princesses, some nixies of the sea, the rat queen Hisvet, and some princess of the air who served her as a maid."

  Afreyt pointed out, "This woman claiming Pshawri as her son would seem to have no noble blood at all, let alone divine. How would you feel should he claim son-right of Captain Mouser?"

  Cif looked up sharply. "Pshawri has served Mou faithfully and may do more than that in this now quest! I favor Pshawri's claim. The resemblances between them run deep—Mou bears upon his hip a triad of dark moles."

  "Another question," Afreyt went on. "Has your Gray lover ever professed to you any out-of-way sexual tastes?"

  "Has your red-haired barbarian?" Cif countered.

  "I don't know if you could rightly call it out-of-way," the other said with a wry laugh, "but once when we were playing somewhat listlessly abed, he suggested inviting Rill to join us. I told him I'd strangle him first and indeed tried to. In the excitement of the delirium this led to, the original proposal was forgotten at the time and just how playful or serious it had been at the time of it being made."

  Cif laughed, then grew thoughtful in turn. "I once recall the Mouser pestering me as to whether I'd ever felt an attraction to the same sex as my own. At the time I put him in his place, of course, telling I had no truck with any such filthy practices, but since I have wondered once or twice about his curiosity."

  Afreyt looked at her quizzically. "Oh," she said, "so you didn't tell him about our..." She left her words hanging.

  "But we were barely more than girls when that happened," Cif protested.

  "True indeed," Afreyt said. "Barely fourteen, as I recall. But you are drowsing off, I plainly see. And so, to tell the truth, am I."

  25

  Next time the Gray Mouser came first to consciousness, he had forgotten not only who but what he was.

  He wondered why a darkness-dwelling creature that was no more than a limp fleshy pocket not moist enough for its own comfort and occupied by two hard, smooth, pointy semicircular ridges that fit together neatly and by a sort of blind sessile snail busy exploring itself and its container endlessly and scavenging life-giving air from the dry grainy outside, should be equipped with a mighty mind capable of mastering whole worlds of life and experience.

  The sentient pocket with in-dwelling restless mollusk knew of its mind's might from the variety and rapid sequence of its inscrutable mysterious thoughts and memories which threatened momently to burst into clarity and stain the omnipresent dark with flaring colors. It knew its dry, grainy, closely packed immediate surroundings by a dull yellow glow so dim as hardly to deserve the name of light at all. It was a sort of dim seeing locked in solidity.

  Without preamble or warning there blazed up for this buried mind the moving picture of a brilliantly lamp-lit room, lined with a great map of Nehwon-world and shelves of ancient books, wherein a venerable, kingly, seated biped beast silently discoursed to a considerably smaller version of itself standing attentively before it.

  Memory told the sentient pocket that the beast was man, and then in a flash of insight it realized that behind the handsome full red mobile lips known as mouth lay such a moist pocket as itself with pale pointy smooth ridges called teeth and an indwelling anchor named tongue, and that as a consequence of all this there must be attached to it a body such as that of the beast under view and itself be man also, however cabined and confined in grainy earth.

  Instantly his mind began to get a host of little messages from this attached body, which turned out to be in fetal position with both hands tenderly cupping its genitals, rag-limp after their torture by stangury-style orgasm in the skeletal embrace of blue-pied Sister Pain.

  Memory of that terrible triggering made him wonder for a moment if he were not simply gazing into another room in the apartments of Hisvet in Lankhmar Below, perhaps that of her sorcerer-father Hisvin, with Foursie due to burst in naked the next moment chattering out her demon alarm—and the dread blue lady once again centipede-walk her bone hand round his waist from behind as he lay trapped and confined by dirt.

  But, no! The very earth that clasped him so intimately had changed profoundly in texture and in reek. The rocks from which nature had ground it had been igneous and metamorphic rather than sedimentary, he could tell. The moisture in it was not Salt Marsh and Hlal-mouth brackish, but had the icy bite of the mineralized streams rivuleting from the mountains of Hunger, a thousand Lankhmar leagues to the south of that metropolis. The commingled effluvia were not those of polyglot Lankhmar but of some more intense and secret community with a pervading mushroom odor. Toadstool wine!

  A second contemplation of the new buried room and its occupants made much clear. However had he for a moment confused schoolmasterish, peevish Hisvin with this imperious figure discoursing to the crafty-looking lad who stood before him—the beaky nose, the wattled cheeks, the proud hawklike visage, but above all the ruby-red eyeballs with white irises and glittering jet pupils—those last alone should have told him (but for lingerings of his torture-wrought amnesia) that this could be none other than Quarmal, Lord of Quarmall, on numerous counts his and friend Fafhrd's dearest enemy.

  As soon as this realization struck him he noted other clues to the scene's identity and locale, such as a curtain of dangling cords bellowing inward at the room's far end, and behind that, dimly glimpsed, a thick-thighed, short-armed human monster walking without moving forward—one of the almost mindless slaves specially bred to work the treadmills that spun the great wooden fans that sucked down air into the many ramp-joined levels of the buried city and its low-ceilinged mushroom fields.

  Unquestionably he was half again as far from Rime Isle as he'd been when overtaken by Sister Pain while spying on Hisvet's remedy for boredom on tedious afternoons in Lankhmar Below, the distance demi-doubled—a prodigious feat of subterranean transversing, one must admit. Unless, of course, both experiences were incidents in a lengthy nightmare dreamed while shallowly buried on Gallows Hill—which more and more seemed the explanation of choice for all this underground hugger-mugger, provided he were eventually rescued from it, to be sure.

  Coming out of this reverie, the Mouser checked that his shallow breathing of earth-trapped air was still unlabored and then scanned anew the long room lined with books and charts and philosophic instruments. How characteristic of most of his life, he told himself, was his present situation! To be on the
outside in drenching rain or blasting snow or (like now) worse and looking in at a cozy abode of culture, comfort, companionship, and couth—what man wouldn't turn to thieving and burglary when faced at every turn with such a fate?

  But back to the business at hand, he told himself, resuming his scanning of the spacious room with its two-and-one-half occupants (the half being for the monstrous treadslave, laboring behind the wavy curtain of cords at the far end).

  The soundlessly lecturing Lord Quarmal perched on a high stool beside a narrow table, and the attentive lad (whose dutiful answers or replies were likewise inaudible) were like a study in old and young skinniness ... and wariness, to judge by their expressions. He also noted a family resemblance in their features although the lad's eyes had no sign of the old man's ruby-red balls and white irises, while the latter's long-hair tufts between his shriveled ears and bald pate had no greenish cast such as that shown by the other's short-cropped locks.

  What were they being cagey about? he asked himself. Damn it, why was this talk blocked off? Recalling he'd had the same trouble hearing Hisvet and Company at first, he focused his attention, (or, rather, the occult auditory) in one effort to make it come through to him as clearly as the visual did.

  Failing to achieve any results, he decided shortly he must be pressing. He relaxed his concentration and let his mind drift. A gesture of Quarmal with the long thin stiff wand or rod he carried turned his attention to the big Nehwon map, the handsome craft of which tempted the Mouser to scan it almost idly for a while. The colors were mostly naturalistic, with blues representing seas and lakes, yellow for deserts, white for snow and ice, and so forth. Close to the west edge, near the dark blue of the Outer Sea, Quarmall stood out in royal purple as clearly as if there'd been a sign reading "You are here."

  Just north of it were several small white ovals—the peaks of the Mountains of Hunger. Then a great space of pale brown with the blue thread of the Hlal winding through it—the grainfields. Then Hlal-mouth with the city of Lankhmar on its east bank, and above those the paler blue expanse of the Inner Sea.