Swords in the Mist

by Fritz Leiber

  The Mouser was inclined to take on faith the reality of anything Fafhrd got mixed up with, certainly anything that Fafhrd got physically into—the near-seven-foot Northerner was much too huge a hulk of solid matter to be picturable as strolling arm-in-arm with illusions.

  The events leading up to the reality-footing facts of the rope, the smoke, and Fafhrd down the air-well had been quite simple. At dawn the sloop had begun to drift mysteriously among the water dimples, there being no perceptible wind or current. Shortly afterward it had bumped over the lip of the large saucer-shaped depression and slid to its present position with a little rush and then frozen there, as though the sloop’s bowsprit and the hole were mutually desirous magnetic poles coupling together. Thereafter, while the Mouser had watched with eyes goggling and teeth a-chatter, Fafhrd had sighted down the hole, grunted with stolid satisfaction, slung the knotted rope down it, and then proceeded to array himself, seemingly with both war and love in mind—pomading his bushy hair and beard, perfuming his hairy chest and armpits, putting on a blue silk tunic under the gleaming one of otterskin and all his silver-plated necklaces, armbands, brooches and rings as well, but also strapping longsword and ax to his sides and lacing on his spiked boots. Then he had lit a long thin torch of resinous pine in the galley firebox, and when it was flaming bravely he had, despite the Mouser’s solicitous cries and tugging protests, gone out on the bowsprit and lowered himself into the hole, using thumb and forefinger of his right hand to grip the torch and the other three fingers of that hand, along with his left hand, to grip the rope. Only then had he spoken, calling on the Mouser to make ready and follow him if the Mouser were more hot-blooded man than cold-blooded lizard.

  The Mouser had made ready to the extent of stripping off most of his clothing—it had occurred to him it would be necessary to dive for Fafhrd when the hole became aware of its own impossibility and collapsed—and he had fetched to the foredeck his own sword Scalpel and dagger Cat’s Claw in their case of oiled sealskin with the notion they might be needed against sharks. Thereafter he had simply poised on the bowsprit, as we have seen, observing Fafhrd’s slow descent and letting the fascination of it all take hold of him.

  At last he dipped his head and called softly down the hole, “Fafhrd, have you reached bottom yet?” frowning at the ring-shaped ripples even this gentle calling sent traveling down the hole and up again by reflection.

  “What did you say?”

  Fafhrd’s answering bellow, concentrated by the tube and coming out of it like a solid projectile, almost blasted the Mouser off the bowsprit. Far more terrifying, the ring-ripples accompanying the bellow were so huge they almost seemed to close off the tube—narrowing it from four to two or three feet at any rate and dashing a spray of drops up into the Mouser’s face as they reached the surface, lifting the rim upward as if the water were elastic, and then were reflected down the tube again.

  The Mouser closed his eyes in a wince of horror, but when he opened them the hole was still there, and the giant ring-ripples were beginning to abate.

  Only a shade more loudly than the first time, but much more poignantly, the Mouser called down, “Fafhrd, don’t do that again!”

  “What?”

  This time the Mouser was prepared for it—just the same it was most horrid to watch those huge rings traveling up and down the tube in an arrow-swift green peristalsis. He firmly resolved to do no more calling, but just then Fafhrd started to speak up the tube in a voice of more rational volume—the rings produced were hardly thicker than a man’s wrist.

  “Come on, Mouser! It’s Easy! You only have to drop the last six feet!”

  “Don’t drop it, Fafhrd!” the Mouser instantly replied. “Climb back up!”

  “I already have! Dropped, I mean. I’m on the bottom! Oh, Mouser!”

  The last part of Fafhrd’s call was in a voice so infused with a mingled awe and excitement that the Mouser immediately asked back down, “What? ‘Oh Mouser’—what?”

  “It’s wonderful, it’s amazing, it’s fantastic!” the reply came back from below—but this time very faintly all of a sudden, as if Fafhrd had somehow gone around an impossible bend or two in the tube.

  “What is, Fafhrd?” the Mouser demanded—and this time his own voice raised moderate rings. “Don’t go away, Fafhrd. But what is down there?”

  “Everything!” the answer came back, not quite so faint this time.

  “Are there girls?” the Mouser queried.

  “A whole world!”

  The Mouser sighed. The moment had come, he knew, as it always did, when outward circumstances and inner urges commanded an act, when curiosity and fascination tipped the scale of caution, when the lure of a vision and an adventure became so great and deep-hooking that he must respond to it or have his inmost self-respect eaten away.

  Besides, he knew from long experience that the only way to extricate Fafhrd from the predicaments into which he got himself was to go fetch the perfumed and be-sworded lout!

  So the Mouser sprang up lightly, clipped to his underbelt his sealskin-cased weapons, hung beside them in loops a short length of knotted line with a slip-noose tied in one end, made sure that the sloop’s hatches were securely covered and even that the galley fire was tightly boxed, rattled off a short scornful prayer to the gods of Lankhmar, and lowered himself off the bowsprit and down into the green hole.

  The hole was chilly, and it smelled of fish, smoke, and Fafhrd’s pomade. The Mouser’s main concern as soon as he got in it, he discovered to his surprise, was not to touch its glassy sides. He had the feeling that if he so much as lightly brushed it, the water’s miraculous “skin” would rupture, and he would be engulfed—rather as an oiled needle floating on a bowl of water in its tiny hammock of “water skin” is engulfed and sinks when one pinks it. He descended rapidly knot by knot, supporting himself by his hands, barely touching his toes to the rope below, praying there would be no sway and that he would be able to check it if it started. It occurred to him he should have told Fafhrd to guy the rope at the bottom if he possibly could and above all have warned him not to shout up the tube while the Mouser descended—the thought of being squeezed by those dread water-rings was almost too much to bear. Too late now—any word now would only too surely bring a bellow from the Northerner in reply.

  First fears having been thus inspected, though by no means banished, the Mouser began to take some note of his surroundings. The luminous green world was not just one emerald blank as it had seemed at first. There was life in it, though not in the greatest abundance: thin strands of scalloped maroon seaweed, near-invisible jellyfish trailing their opalescent fringes, tiny dark skates hovering like bats, small silvery backboned fish gliding and darting—some of them, a blue-and-yellow-ringed and black-spotted school, even contesting lazily over the Black Treasurer’s morning garbage, which the Mouser recognized by a large pallid beef bone Fafhrd had gnawed briefly before tossing overside.

  Looking up, he was hard put not to gasp in horror. The hull of the sloop, pressing down darkly, though pearled with bubbles, looked seven times higher above him than the distance he had descended by his count of the knots. Looking straight up the tube, however, he saw that the circle of deep blue sky had not shrunk correspondingly, while the bowsprit bisecting it was still reassuringly thick. The curve of the tube had shrunk the sloop as it had the shark. The illusion was most weird and foreboding, nonetheless.

  And now as the Mouser continued his swift descent, the circle overhead did grow smaller and more deeply blue, becoming a cobalt platter, a peacock saucer, and finally no more than a strange ultramarine coin that was the converging point of the tube and rope and in which the Mouser thought he saw a star flash. The Gray One puffed a few rapid kisses toward it, thinking how like they were to a drowning man’s last bubbles. The light dimmed. The colors around him faded, the maroon seaweed turned gray, the fish lost their yellow rings, and the Mouser’s own hands became blue as those of a corpse. And now he began to make out dimly the
sea bottom, at the same extravagant distance below as the sloop was above, though immediately under him the bottom was oddly veiled or blanketed and only far off could he make out rocks and ridged stretches of sand.

  His arms and shoulders ached. His palms burned. A monstrously fat grouper swam up to the tube and followed him down it, circling. The Mouser glared at it menacingly, and it turned on its side and opened an impossibly large moon crescent of mouth. The Mouser saw the razor teeth and realized it was the shark he’d seen or another like it, tinied by the lens of the tube. The teeth clashed, some of them inside the tube, only inches from his side. The water’s “skin” did not rupture disastrously, although the Mouser got the eerie impression that the “bite” was bleeding a little water into the tube. The shark swam off to continue its circling at a moderate distance, and the Mouser refrained from any more menacing looks.

  Meanwhile the fishy smell had grown stronger, and the smoke must have been getting thicker too, for now the Mouser coughed in spite of himself, setting the water rings shooting up and down. He fought to suppress an anguished curse—and at that moment his toes no longer touched rope. He unloosed the extra coil from his belt, went down three more knots, tightened the slip-noose above the second knot from the bottom, and continued on his way.

  Five handholds later his feet found a footing in cold muck. He gratefully unclenched his hands, working his cramped fingers, at the same time calling “Fafhrd!” softly but angrily. Then he looked around.

  He was standing in the center of a large low tent of air, which was floored by the velvety sea-muck in which he had sunk to his ankles and roofed by the leadenly gleaming undersurface of the water—not evenly though, but in swells and hollows with ominous downward bulges here and there. The air-tent was about ten feet high at the foot of the tube. Its diameter seemed at least twenty times that, though exactly how far the edges extended it was impossible to judge for several reasons: the great irregularity of the tent’s roof, the difficulty of even guessing at the extent of some outer areas where the distance between water-roof and muck-floor was measurable in inches, the fact that the gray light transmitted from above hardly permitted decent vision for more than two dozen yards, and finally the circumstance that there was considerable torch-smoke in the way here and there, writhing in thick coils along the ceiling, collecting in topsy-turvy pockets, though eventually gliding sluggishly up the tube.

  What fabulous invisible “tent-poles” propped up the ocean’s heavy roof the Mouser could no more conceive than the force that kept the tube open.

  Writhing his nostrils distastefully, both at the smoke and the augmented fishy smell, the Mouser squinted fiercely around the tent’s full circumference. Eventually he saw a dull red glow in the black smudge where it was thickest, and a little later Fafhrd emerged. The reeking flame of the pine torch, which was still no more than half consumed, showed the Northerner bemired with sea-muck to his thighs and hugging gently to his side with his bent left arm a dripping mess of variously gleaming objects. He was stooped over somewhat, for the roof bulged down where he stood.

  “Blubber brain!” the Mouser greeted him. “Put out that torch before we smother! We can see better without it. Oh, oaf, to blind yourself with smoke for the sake of light!”

  To the Mouser there was obviously only one sane way to extinguish the torch—jab it in the wet muck underfoot—but Fafhrd, though evidently most agreeable to the Mouser ’s suggestion in a vacantly smiling way, had another idea. Despite the Mouser’s anguished cry of warning, he casually thrust the flaming stick into the watery roof.

  There was a loud hissing and a large downward puff of steam and for a moment the Mouser thought his worst dreads had been realized, for an angry squirt of water from the quenching point struck Fafhrd in the neck. But when the steam cleared it became evident that the rest of the sea was not going to follow the squirt, at least not at once, though now there was an ominous lump, like a rounded tumor, in the roof where Fafhrd had thrust the torch, and from it water ran steadily in a stream thick as a quill, digging a tiny crater where it struck the muck below.

  “Don’t do that!” the Mouser commanded in unwise fury.

  “This?” Fafhrd asked gently, poking a finger through the ceiling next to the dripping bulge. Again came the angry squirt, diminishing at once to a trickle, and now there were two bulges closely side by side, quite like breasts.

  “Yes, that—not again,” the Mouser managed to reply, his voice distant and high because of the self-control it took him not to rage at Fafhrd and so perhaps provoke even more reckless probings.

  “Very well, I won’t,” the Northerner assured him. “Though,” he added, gazing thoughtfully at the twin streams, “it would take those dribblings years to fill up this cavity.”

  “Who speaks of years down here?” the Mouser snarled at him. “Dolt! Iron Skull! What made you lie to me? ‘Everything’ was down here, you said—‘a whole world.’ And what do I find? Nothing! A miserable little cramp-roofed field of stinking mud!” And the Mouser stamped a foot in rage, which only splashed him foully, while a puffed, phosphorescent-whiskered fish expiring on the mire looked up at him reproachfully.

  “That rude treading,” Fafhrd said softly, “may have burst the silver-filigreed skull of a princess. ‘Nothing,’ say you? Look you then, Mouser, what treasure I have digged from your stinking field.”

  And as he came toward the Mouser, his big feet gliding gently through the top of the muck for all the spikes on his boots, he gently rocked the gleaming things cradled in his left arm and let the fingers of his right hand drift gently among them.

  “Aye,” he said, “jewels and gauds undreamed by those who sail above, yet all teased by me from the ooze while I sought another thing.”

  “What other thing, Gristle Dome?” the Mouser demanded harshly, though eyeing the gleaming things hungrily.

  “The path,” Fafhrd said a little querulously, as if the Mouser must know what he meant. “The path that leads from some corner or fold of this tent of air to the sea-king’s girls. These things are a sure promise of it. Look you, here, Mouser.” And he opened his bent left arm a little and lifted out most delicately with thumb and fingertips a life-size metallic mask.

  Impossible to tell in that drained gray light whether the metal were gold or silver or tin or even bronze and whether the wide wavy streaks down it, like the tracks of blue-green sweat and tears, were verdigris or slime. Yet it was clear that it was female, patrician, all-knowing yet alluring, loving yet cruel, hauntingly beautiful. The Mouser snatched it eagerly yet angrily and the whole lower face crumpled in his hand, leaving only the proud forehead and the eyeholes staring at him more tragically than eyes.

  The Mouser flinched back, expecting Fafhrd to strike him, but in the same instant he saw the Northerner turning away and lifting his straight right arm, index finger a-point, like a slow semaphore.

  “You were right, oh Mouser!” Fafhrd cried joyously. “Not only my torch’s smoke but its very light blinded me. See! See the path!”

  The Mouser’s gaze followed Fafhrd’s pointing. Now that the smoke was somewhat abated and the torch-flame no longer shot out its orange rays, the patchy phosphorescence of the muck and of the dying sea-things scattered about had become clearly visible despite the muted light filtering from above.

  The phosphorescence was not altogether patchy, however. Beginning at the hole from which the knotted rope hung, a path of unbroken greenish-yellow witch-fire a long stride in width led across the muck toward an unpromising-looking corner of the tent of air where it seemed to disappear.

  “Don’t follow it, Fafhrd,” the Mouser automatically enjoined, but the Northerner was already moving past him, taking frightening long dreamlike strides. By degrees his cradling arm unbent, and one by one his ooze-won treasures began to slip from it into the muck. He reached the path and started along it, placing his spike-soled feet in the very center.

  “Don’t follow it, Fafhrd,” the Mouser repeated—a little hopeless
ly, almost whiningly, it must be admitted. “Don’t follow it, I say. It leads only to squidgy death. We can still go back up the rope, aye, and take your loot with us.”

  But meanwhile he himself was following Fafhrd and snatching up, though more cautiously than he had the mask, the objects his comrade let slip. It was not worth the effort, the Mouser told himself as he continued to do it: though they gleamed enticingly, the various necklaces, tiaras, filigreed breast-cups and great-pinned brooches weighed no more and were no thicker than plaitings of dead ferns. He could not equal Fafhrd’s delicacy, and they fell apart at his touch.

  Fafhrd turned back to him a face radiant as one who dreams sleeping of ultimate ecstasies. As the last ghost-gaud slipped from his arm, he said, “They are nothing—no more than the mask—mere sea-gnawed wraiths of treasure. But oh, the promise of them, Mouser! Oh, the promise!”

  And with that he turned forward again and stooped under a large downward bulge in the low leaden-hued roof.

  The Mouser took one look back along the glowing path to the small circular patch of sky-light with the knotted rope falling in the center of it. The twin streams of water coming from the two “wounds” in the ceiling seemed to be coming more strongly—where they hit, the muck was splashing. Then he followed Fafhrd.