by Fritz Leiber
The girl exclaimed, not loudly, “Klevis!”
With his right hand the Mouser caught hold of the wrist going by him and twisted it. With his spread left hand he simultaneously rammed his attacker in the armpit.
But the Mouser’s grip, made by hurried snatch, was imperfect. Moreover, Klevis was not minded to resist and have his arm dislocated or broken in that fashion. Spinning with the Mouser’s twist, he also went into a deliberate forward somersault.
The net result was that Klevis lost his cross-gripped dagger, which clattered dully on the thick-carpeted floor, but tore loose unhurt from the Mouser and after two more somersaults came lightly to his feet, at once turning and drawing rapier.
By then the Mouser had drawn Scalpel and his dirk Cat’s Claw too, but held the latter behind him. He attacked cautiously, with probing feints. When Klevis counterattacked strongly, he retreated, parrying each fierce thrust at the last moment, so that again and again the enemy blade went whickering close by him.
Klevis lunged with especial fierceness. The Mouser parried, high this time and not retreating. In an instant they were pressed body to body, their rapiers strongly engaged near their hilts and above their heads.
By turning a little, the Mouser blocked Klevis’ knee driven at his groin. While with the dirk Klevis had overlooked, he stabbed the other from below, Cat’s Claw entering just under Klevis’ breastbone to pierce his liver, gizzard, and heart.
Letting go his dirk, the Mouser nudged the body away from him and turned.
Ivivis was facing them, with Klevis’ punching-dagger gripped ready for a thrust.
The body thudded to the floor.
“Which of us did you propose to skewer?” the Mouser asked.
“I don’t know,” the girl answered in a flat voice. “You, I suppose.”
The Mouser nodded. “Just before this interruption, you were saying, ‘The very chamber where—’ What?”“—
“Where I often met Klevis, to be with him,” she replied.
Again the Mouser nodded. “So you loved him and—”
“Shut up, you fool!” she interrupted. “Is he dead?” There were both deep concern and exasperation in her voice.
The Mouser backed along the body until he stood at the head of it. Looking down, he said, “As mutton. He was a handsome youth.”
For a long moment they eyed each other like leopards across the corpse. Then, averting her face a little, Ivivis said, “Hide the body, you imbecile. It tears my heartstrings to see it.”
Nodding, the Mouser stooped and rolled the corpse under the arras opposite the closet door. He tucked in Klevis’ rapier beside him. Then he withdrew Cat’s Claw from the body. Only a little dark blood followed. He cleaned his dirk on the arras, then let the hanging drop.
Standing up, he snatched the punching-dagger from the brooding girl and flipped it so that it too vanished under the arras.
With one hand he spread wide the slit in the arras. With the other he took hold of Ivivis’ shoulder and pressed her toward the doorway which Klevis had left open to his undoing.
She instantly shook loose from his grip but walked through the doorway. The Mouser followed. The leopard look was still in both their eyes.
A single torch lit the closet. The Mouser shut the door and barred it.
Ivivis snarled at him, summing it up: “You owe me much, Gray Stranger.”
The Mouser showed his teeth in an unhumorous grin. He did not stop to see whether his stolen trinkets had been disturbed. It did not even occur to him, then, to do so.
Fafhrd felt relief when Friska told him that the darker slit at the very end of the dark, long, straight corridor they’d just entered was the door to the Ghost Hall. It had been a hurrying, nervous trip, with many peerings around corners and dartings back into dark alcoves while someone passed, and a longer trip vertically downward than Fafhrd had anticipated. If they had now only reached the top of the Lower Levels, this Quarmall must be bottomless! Yet Friska’s spirits had improved considerably. Now at times she almost skipped along in her white chemise cut low behind. Fafhrd strode purposefully, her dress and slippers in his left hand, his ax in his right.
The Northerner’s relief in no wise diminished his wariness, so that when someone rushed from an inky tunnel-mouth they were passing, he stroked out almost negligently and he felt and heard his ax crunch halfway through a head.
He saw a comely blond youth, now most sadly dead and his comeliness rather spoiled by Fafhrd’s ax, which still stood in the great wound it had made. A fair hand opened, and the sword it had held fell from it.
“Hovis!” he heard Friska cry. “O gods! O gods that are not here. Hovis!”
Lifting a booted foot, Fafhrd stamped it sideways at the youth’s chest, at once freeing his ax and sending the corpse back into the tunneled dark from which the live man had so rashly hurtled.
After a swift look and listen all about, he turned toward Friska where she stood white-faced and staring.
“Who’s this Hovis?” he demanded, shaking her lightly by the shoulder when she did not reply.
Twice her mouth opened and shut again, while her face remained as expressionless as that of a silly fish. Then with a little gasp she said, “I lied to you, barbarian. I have met Gwaay’s page Hovis here. More than once.”
“Then why didn’t you warn me, wench!” Fafhrd demanded. “Did you think I would scold you for your morals, like some city graybeard? Or have you no regard at all for your men, Friska?”
“Oh, do not chide me,” Friska begged miserably. “Please do not chide me.”
Fafhrd patted her shoulder. “There, there,” he said. “I forget you were shortly tortured and hardly of a mind to remember everything. Come on.”
They had taken a dozen steps when Friska began to shudder and sob together in a swiftly mounting crescendo. She turned and ran back, crying, “Hovis! Hovis, forgive me!”
Fafhrd caught her before three steps. He shook her again, and when that did not stop her sobbing, he used his other hand to slap her twice, rocking her head a little.
She stared at him dumbly.
He said not fiercely but somberly, “Friska, I must tell you that Hovis is where your words and tears can never again reach him. He’s dead. Beyond recall. Also, I killed him. That’s beyond recall too. But you are still alive. You can hide from Hasjarl. Ultimately, whether you believe it or not, you can escape with me from Quarmall. Now come on with me, and no looking back.”
She blindly obeyed, with only the faintest of moanings.
The Gray Mouser stretched luxuriously on the silver-tipped bearskin he’d thrown on the floor of his closet. Then he lifted on an elbow and, finding the black pearls he’d pilfered, tried them against Ivivis’ bosom in the pale cool light of the single torch above. Just as he’d imagined, the pearls looked very well there. He started to fasten them around her neck.
“No, Mouser,” she objected lazily. “It awakens an unpleasant memory.”
He did not persist, but lying back again, said unguardedly, “Ah, but I’m a lucky man, Ivivis. I have you and I have an employer who, though somewhat boresome with his sorceries and his endless mild speaking, seems a harmless enough chap and certainly more endurable than his brother Hasjarl, if but half of what I hear of that one is true.”
The voice of Ivivis briskened. “You think Gwaay harmless?—and kinder than Hasjarl? La, that’s a quaint conceit. Why, but a week ago he summoned my late dearest friend, Divis, then his favorite concubine, and telling her it was a necklace of the same stones, hung around her neck an emerald adder, the sting of which is infallibly deadly.”
The Mouser turned his head and stared at Ivivis. “Why did Gwaay do that?” he asked. She stared back at him blankly. “Why, for nothing at all, to be sure,” she said wonderingly. “As everyone knows, that is Gwaay’s way.”
The Mouser said, “You mean that, rather than say, ‘I am wearied of you,’ he killed her?”
Ivivis nodded. “I believe Gwaay can no more
bear to hurt people’s feelings by rejecting them than he can bear to shout.”
“It is better to be slain than rejected?” the Mouser questioned ingenuously.
“No, but for Gwaay it is easier on his feelings to slay than to reject. Death is everywhere here in Quarmall.”
The Mouser had a fleeting vision of Klevis’ corpse stiffening behind the arras.Ivivis continued, “Here in the Lower Levels we are buried before we are born. We live, love, and die buried. Even when we strip, we yet wear a garment of invisible mold.”
The Mouser said, “I begin to understand why it is necessary to cultivate a certain callousness in Quarmall, to be able to enjoy at all any moments of pleasure snatched from life, or perhaps I mean from death.”
“That is most true, Gray Mouser,” Ivivis said very soberly, pressing herself against him.
Fafhrd started to brush aside the cobwebs joining the two dust-filled sides of the half open, high, nail-studded door, then checked himself and bending very low ducked under them.
“Do you stoop too,” he told Friska. “It were best we leave no signs of our entry. Later I’ll attend to our footprints in the dust, if that be needful.”
They advanced a few paces, then stood hand in hand, waiting for their eyes to grow accustomed to the darkness. Fafhrd still clutched in his other hand Friska’s dress and slippers.
“This is the Ghost Hall?” Fafhrd asked.
“Aye,” Friska whispered close to his ear, sounding fearful. “Some say that Gwaay and Hasjarl send their dead to battle here. Some say that demons owing allegiance to neither—”
“No more of that, girl,” Fafhrd ordered gruffly. “If I must battle devils or liches, leave me my hearing and my courage.”
They were silent a space then while the flame of the last torch twenty paces beyond the half shut door slowly revealed to them a vast chamber low-domed with huge, rough black blocks pale-mortared for a ceiling. It was set out with a few tatter-shrouded furnishings and showed many small closed doorways. To either side were wide rostra set a few feet above floor level, and toward the center there was, surprisingly, what looked like a dried-up fountain pool.
Friska whispered, “Some say the Ghost Hall was once the harem of the father lords of Quarmall during some centuries when they dwelt underground between Levels, ere this Quarmal’s father coaxed by his sea-wife returned to the Keep. See, they left so suddenly that the new ceiling was neither finish-polished, nor final-cemented, nor embellished with drawings, if such were purposed.”
Fafhrd nodded. He distrusted that unpillared ceiling and thought the whole place looked rather more primitive than Hasjarl’s polished and leather-hung chambers. That gave him a thought.
“Tell me, Friska,” he said. “How is it that Hasjarl can see with his eyes closed? Is it that—”
“Why, do you not know that?” she interrupted in surprise. “Do you not know even the secret of his horrible peeping? He simply—”
A dim velvet shape that chittered almost inaudibly shrill swooped past their faces, and with a little shriek Friska hid her face in Fafhrd’s chest and clung to him tightly.
In combing his fingers through her heather-scented hair to show her no flying mouse had found lodgment there and in smoothing his palms over her bare shoulders and back to demonstrate that no bat had landed there either, Fafhrd began to forget all about Hasjarl and the puzzle of his second sight—and his worries about the ceiling falling in on them too.
Following custom, Friska shrieked twice, very softly.
Gwaay languidly clapped his white, perfectly groomed hands and with a slight nod motioned for the waiting slaves to remove the platters from the low table. He leaned lazily into the deep-cushioned chair and through half-closed lids looked momentarily at his companion before he spoke. His brother across the table was not in a good humor. But then it was rare for Hasjarl to be other than in a pet, a temper, or more often merely sullen and vicious. This may have been due to the fact that Hasjarl was a very ugly man, and his nature had grown to conform to his body; or perhaps it was the other way around. Gwaay was indifferent to both theories; he merely knew that in one glance all his memory had told him of Hasjarl was verified; and he again realized the bitter magnitude of his hatred for his brother. However, Gwaay spoke gently in a low, pleasant voice:
“Well, how now, Brother, shall we play at chess, that demon game they say exists in every world? ’Twill give you a chance to lord it over me again. You always win at chess, you know, except when you resign. Shall I have the board set before us?” and then cajolingly, “I’ll give you a pawn!” and he raised one hand slightly as if to clap again in order that his suggestion might be carried out.
With the lash he carried slung to his wrist Hasjarl slashed the face of the slave nearest him, and silently pointed at the massive and ornate chessboard across the room. This was quite characteristic of Hasjarl. He was a man of action and given to few words, at least away from his home territory
Besides, Hasjarl was in a nasty humor. Flindach had torn him from his most interesting and exciting amusement: torture! And for what? thought Hasjarl: to play at chess with his priggish brother; to sit and look at his pretty brother’s face; to eat food that would surely disagree with him; to wait the answer to the casting, which he already knew—had known for years; and finally to be forced to smile into the horrible blood-whited eyes of his father, unique in Quarmall save for those of Flindach, and toast the House of Quarmall for the ensuing year. All this was most distasteful to Hasjarl and he showed it plainly.
The slave, a bloody welt swift-swelling across his face, carefully slid the chessboard between the two. Gwaay smiled as another slave arranged the chessmen precisely on their squares; he had thought of a scheme to annoy his brother. He had chosen the black as usual, and he planned a gambit which he knew his avaricious opponent couldn’t refuse; one Hasjarl would accept to his own undoing.
Hasjarl sat grimly back in his chair, arms folded. “I should have made you take white,” he complained. “I know the paltry tricks you can do with black pebbles—I’ve seen you as a girl-pale child darting them through the air to startle the slaves’ brats. How am I to know you will not cheat by fingerless shifting your pieces while I deep ponder?”
Gwaay answered gently, “My paltry powers, as you most justly appraise them, Brother, extend only to bits of basalt, trifles of obsidian and other volcanic rocks conformable to my nether level. While these chess pieces are jet, Brother, which in your great scholarship you surely know is only a kind of coal, vegetable stuff pressed black, not even in the same realm as the very few materials subject to my small magickings. Moreover, for you to miss the slightest trick with those quaint slave-surgeried eyes of yours, Brother, were matter for mighty wonder.”
Hasjarl growled. Not until all was ready did he stir; then, like an adder’s strike, he plucked a black rook’s pawn from the board and with a sputtering giggle, snarled: “Remember, Brother? It was a pawn you promised! Move!”
Gwaay motioned the waiting slave to advance his king’s pawn. In like manner Hasjarl replied. A moment’s pause and Gwaay offered his gambit: pawn to king-bishop’s fourth! Eagerly Hasjarl snatched the apparent advantage and the game began in earnest. Gwaay, his face easy-smiling in repose, seemed to be less interested in the game than in the shadow play of the flickering lamps on the figured leather upholsterings of calfskin, lambskin, snakeskin, and even slave-skin and nobler human hide; seemed to move offhand, without plan, yet confidently. Hasjarl, his lips compressed in concentration, was intent on the board, each move a planned action both mental and physical. His concentration made him for the moment oblivious of his brother, oblivious of all but the problem before him; for Hasjarl loved to win beyond all computation.
It had always been this way; even as children the contrast was apparent. Hasjarl was the elder; older by only a few months which his appearance and demeanor lengthened to years. His long, misshapen torso was ill-borne on short bandy legs. His left arm was perceptibly longer tha
n the right; and his fingers, peculiarly webbed to the first knuckle, were gnarled and stubby with brittle striated nails. It was as if Hasjarl were a poorly reconstructed puzzle put together in such fashion that all the pieces were mismated and awry.
This was particularly true of his features. He possessed his sire’s nose, though thickened and coarse-pored; but this was contradicted by the thin-lipped, tightly compressed mouth continually pursed until it had assumed a perpetual sphincterlike appearance. Hair, lank and lusterless, grew low on his forehead; and low, flattened cheekbones added yet another contradiction.
As a lad, led by some perverse whim, Hasjarl had bribed coaxed, or more probably browbeaten one of the slaves versed in surgery to perform a slight operation on his upper eyelids. It was a small enough thing in itself, yet its implications and results had affected the lives of many men unpleasantly, and never ceased to delight Hasjarl.
That merely the piercing of two small holes, centered over the pupil when the eyes were closed, could produce such qualms in other people was incredible; but it was so. Feather-weight grommets of sleekest gold, jade or—as now—ivory—kept the holes from growing shut.
When Hasjarl peered through these tiny apertures it gave the effect of an ambush and made the object of his gaze feel spied upon; but this was the least annoying of his many irritating habits.
Hasjarl did nothing easily, but he did all things well. Even in swordplay his constant practice and overly long left arm made him equal of the athletic Gwaay. His administration of the Upper Levels over which he ruled was above all things economical and smooth; for woe betide the slave who failed in the slightest detail of his duties. Hasjarl saw and punished.
Hasjarl was well nigh the equal of his teacher in the practice of the Art; and he had gathered about him a band of magicians almost the caliber of Flindach himself. But he was not happy in his prowess so hardly won, for between the absolute power which he desired and the realization of that desire stood two obstacles: the Lord of Quarmall whom he feared above all things; and his brother Gwaay whom he hated with a hatred nourished on envy and fed by his own thwarted desires.