Instantly the Mouser crouched himself, rudely drawing back from Frix, and then half spun around, flailing out backhanded with his left hand which had an instant earlier embraced Hisvet's maid.
It was a blow barely in time and of necessity imperfectly aimed. As the back of his left fist crashed against the lean wrist of the ocher hand holding the knife, he felt the sting of its point in his forearm. But then his right fist smashed into the Mingol's face, stirring it at least for a moment from its taut-skinned impassiveness.
As the snugly black-clad figure staggered backward under the impact, it seemed to divide in two, like some creature of slime reproducing itself, as a second dagger-armed Mingol circled from behind the first and moved toward the Mouser, who was snatching up his belt and its pendant scabbards with a curse, drawing his dirk Cat's Claw, because the pommel of that weapon came first to his hand.
Frix, who still stood dreamily in her black draperies, was saying in a husky, faraway voice, "Alarums and excursions. Enter two Mingols," while behind her Hisvet was exclaiming petulantly, "Oh, my accursed, spoilsport father! He always ruins my most aesthetic creations in the realms of delight, whether from some vile and most unfatherly jealousy, or from — "
By now the first Mingol had recovered and the two rushed warily toward the Mouser, flickering their knives ahead of their slit-eyed yellow faces as they came in. The Mouser, Cat's Claw poised a little ahead of his chest, drove them back with a sudden swishing swing of his belt held in his other hand. The weighted scabbard of his sword Scalpel took one of them in the ear, so that he winced in pain. Now would be the time to leap forward and finish them — with a single dagger-thrust apiece if he were lucky.
But the Mouser didn't. He had no way of knowing that these Mingols were the only two, or whether Hisvet and Frix might not leave off their playacting — if it had been altogether that — and leap upon him with knives of their own as he attacked his lean black assassins. Moreover, his left arm was dripping blood and he could not yet tell how bad that wound was. Finally, it was being borne in reluctantly on his proud mind that he was faced with dangers which might be a mite too much for even his great cunning, that he was blundering about in a situation he did not wholly understand, that he had even now, drunken-sensed, risked his very life against an admittedly unusual ecstasy, that he dared not depend longer on fickle luck, and that — especially in the absence of brawny Fafhrd — he badly needed wise counsel.
In two heartbeats he had turned his back on his assailants, darted past a somewhat startled-looking Frix and Hisvet, and burst out through the branchy wall of the closet-bower amidst a second and even larger explosion of white blooms.
Five heartbeats more and as he scurried north across the Plaza of Dark Delights in the light of the new-risen moon, he had buckled on his belt and withdrawn from a small pouch pendant on it a bandage which he began deftly to wrap tightly about his wound.
Five more heartbeats and he was hastening through a narrow cobbled alleyway that led in the direction of the Marsh Gate.
For he had decided that, much as he hated to admit it to himself, the time had come when he must venture across the treacherous, malodorous Great Salt Marsh and seek the advice of his sorcerous mentor, Sheelba of the Eyeless Face.
* * * *
Fafhrd spurred his tall gray mare south through the burning streets of Sarheenmar, since no road led around that city fronted by the Inner Sea and backed by desert mountains. Through those latter dry, craggy hills the only trail led east to the land-locked desert-girt Sea of Monsters, by which stood the lonely City of Ghouls, avoided by all other men.
It was smoke-clouded night and the sole light was that of the flames gushing in streamers and roaring sheets from the roofs, doors, and windows of buildings once noted for their coolness, firing their thick walls of dried-clay bricks to red heat and a beauteous, rippling porcelain-like gloss where they did not melt and topple entirely.
Though the wide street was empty, Fafhrd's bloodshot eyes were watchful in his haggard, smoke-stained, sweat-rivuleted face. He had loosened his sword in its scabbard and his short-ax in its wide sheath, strung his Mingol bow and held it ready in his left hand, and slung the quiver of its arrows high behind his right shoulder. His lightened saddlebag and half-full canteen thumped against his mount's ribs, while his flat pouch, still empty except for the ridiculous tin whistle, flapped about.
For a wonder the mare was not panicked by the fire all around. Fafhrd had heard that the Mingols, by stark-real tests, inured their horses to all manner of horrors almost as sternly as they did themselves, slaying without mercy those who still quailed on the seventh attempt of a beast or the second of a man.
Yet now Fafhrd's mount suddenly stopped dead, just short of a narrow side street, snorting her lathered nostrils and glaring her great eyes more wild and bloodshot than Fafhrd's. Heel-thuds on her ribs would not put her in again, so Fafhrd dismounted and began to drag her forward by brute force down the center of the smoke-swirled, flame-walled street.
Then there came rushing from around the burning corner ahead what looked at first glance to be a gang of exceptionally tall and skinny red-litten skeletons, each wearing a skimpy harness and brandishing in either bony hand a short tapering double-edged needle-pointed sword.
After an instant's shock, Fafhrd realized these must be Ghouls, whose flesh and inner organs, he had heard — with much skepticism, but now no longer — were transparent except where the skin became sallowly or rosily translucent on the genital organs and on the lips and small breasts of their women.
It was said also that they ate only flesh, human by preference, and that it was strange indeed to watch the raw gobbets they gulped course down and churn within the bars of their ribs, gradually turning to mush and fading from sight as their sightless blood assimilated and transformed the food — granting that a mere normal man might ever have opportunity to watch Ghouls feast without becoming a supply of gobbets himself.
Fafhrd was filled with dread, but also indignation, that he, clearly a neutral in a Ghoul-Sarheenmart-Mingol war, should be thus ambushed — for now the leading skeleton hurled his right-hand sword and Fafhrd had to weave swiftly aside as it came cartwheeling through the smoky air.
Whipping his hand over shoulder, he set arrow to bow and dropped the foremost Ghoul with a shot that transfixed his ribs just to the left of his breastbone. Somewhat to his surprise, he discovered that having a skeleton for foe and target made it easier to aim for a vital part. Now as the Ghouls approached closer, uttering horrendous war-shrieks, he noted the flame-light glinting here and there from their gassy hides and realized that even counting their flesh as solid, they were an exceptionally skinny, though rangy, folk.
He brought down two more of his charging foes, the last with a dart into a black eye socket, then dropped his bow, whirled out short-ax and sword, and made a long lunge with the latter as the four remaining Ghouls, their speed unchecked, were upon him.
Graywand took a Ghoul under the chin, jolting him to a dying stop. It was weird to see the skeleton collapse without rattle of bone. The short-ax next licked out, decapitating another enemy, whose glassy-fleshed skull went spinning off, but whose torso, louting forward, drenched the Northerner's ax-hand with invisible, warm, silky fluid.
These grisly events gave the third Ghoul time to run around his stricken comrades and get in on Fafhrd a thrust which, fortunately coming from above, glanced off his left ribs without wounding him deeply.
The long smarting sword-slice, however, turned Fafhrd's indignation wholly to fury and he smote that Ghoul so deeply in the skull that the short-ax stuck and was jerked from Fafhrd's hand. His fury became an almost blinding red rage, not lacking sexual undertones, so that when he noted that the fourth and last Ghoul carried pale breasts on her white ribs like two roses pinned there, he knocked the weapons from her hands with short disarming sword-swipes as she came darting toward him; then as she faltered stretched her full-length on the road with a left-handed punch to he
r jaw.
He stood panting, closely eyeing the scattered skeletons for sign of movement — there was none — and glaring all about for evidence of other parties of Ghouls. None also.
The horror-inured gray mare had hardly shifted an iron-shod hoof during the melee. Now she tossed her gaunt head, writhed back her black lips from her huge teeth and whinnied snickeringly.
Sheathing Graywand, Fafhrd knelt warily by the female skeleton and pressed two fingers into the invisible flesh under the hinges of her jaw. He felt a slow pulse. Without ceremony he hoisted her by the waist. She weighed a little more than he anticipated, so that her slenderness surprised him as did also the resilience and smooth texture of her invisible skin. Cold-headedly leashing his hot vengeful impulses, he dumped her over his saddlebow so that her legs dangled on one side and her trunk on the other. The mare glared back over shoulder and again lip-writhingly bared her yellowish teeth, but did no more than that.
Fafhrd bandaged his wound, rocked his hand-ax from its bony trap and sheathed it, gathered up his bow, mounted the mare and cantered on down the fire-fenced street through the wreaths of smoke and swirls of stinging sparks. He was constantly peering for more ambushes, yet glancing down once he found himself disconcerted that there should appear to be a bare white pelvic girdle on his saddlebow, just a fantastically-finned large loose bony knot to the eyes, even though hitched on either side by misty sinews and other cloudy gristle to the balance of a skeleton. After a bit he slung his strung bow over her left shoulder and rested his left hand on the slim warm invisible buttocks, to reassure himself there was a woman there.
* * * *
The rats were looting by night in Lankhmar. Everywhere in the age-old city they were pilfering, and not only food. They filched the greenish bent brass coins off a dead carter's eyes and the platinum-set nose, ear and lip jewels from the triply locked gem chest of Glipkerio's wraith-thin aunt, gnawing in the thick oak a postern door neat as a fairy tale. The wealthiest grocer lost all his husked Hrusp nuts, gray caviar from sea-sundered Ool Plerns, dried larks' hearts, strength-imparting tiger meal, sugar-dusted ghostfingers, and ambrosia wafers, while less costly dainties were untouched. Rare parchments were taken from the Great Library, including original deeds to the sewerage and tunneling rights under the most ancient parts of the city. Sweetmeats vanished from beside tables, toys from princes' nurseries, tidbits from gold-inlaid silver appetizer trays, and flinty grain from horses' feedbags. Bracelets were unhooked from the wrists of embracing lovers, the pouches and snugly-flapped pockets of crossbow-armed rat watchers were picked, and from under the noses of cats and ferrets their food was stolen.
Ominous touch, the rats gnawed nothing except where it was needful to make entries, they left no dirty, clawed tracks or fluted toothmarks, and they befouled nothing, but left their dark droppings in neat pyramids, as if taking an absent owner's care for a house they might decide to occupy permanently.
The most cunning traps were set, subtle poisons laid out invitingly, rat-holes stoppered with leaden plugs and brazen plates, candles lit in dark corners, unwinking watch kept in every likely spot. All to no avail.
Shiversomely, the rats showed a human sagacity in many of their actions. Of their few doorways discovered, some looked sawed rather than gnawed, the sawed-out part being replaced like a little door. They swung by cords of their own to dainties hung from ceilings for safety, and a few terrified witnesses claimed to have seen them hurling such cords over their hanging places like bollas, or even shooting them there attached to the darts of tiny crossbows. They seemed to practice a division of labor, some acting as lookouts, others as leaders and guards, others as skilled breakers and mechanics, still others as mere burden-bearers docile to the squeak of command.
Worst of all, the humans who heard their rare squeakings and chitterings claimed they were not mere animal noises, but the language of Lankhmar, though spoken so swiftly and pitched so high that it was generally impossible to follow.
Lankhmar's fears grew. Prophecies were recalled that a dark conqueror commanding a countless horde of cruel followers who aped the manners of civilization but were brutes _and wore dirty furs_, would some day seize the city. This had been thought to refer to the Mingols, but it could be construed as designating the rats.
* * * *
Even fat Samanda was inwardly terrorized by the depredation of the overlord's pantries and food lockers, and by a ceaseless invisible pattering. She had all the maids and pages routed from their cots two hours before dawn and in the cavernous kitchen and before the roaring fireplace, big enough to roast two beefs and heat two dozen ovens, she conducted a mass interrogation and whipping to quiet her nerves and divert her thoughts from the real culprits. Looking like slim copper statues in the orange light each shaven victim stood, bent, knelt or lay flat before Samanda, as directed, and endured her or his artistically laid-on welting, afterwards kissing the black hem of Samanda's skirt or gently patting her face and neck with a lily-white towel, chilled with ice water and wrung out, for the ogress plied her whip until the sweat trickled down from the black sphere of her hair and dripped in beads from her mustache. Slender Reetha was lashed once more, but she had a revenge by slipping a fistful of finely ground white pepper into the icy basin when she returned the towel to it; true, this resulted in a quadrupling of the next victim's punishment, but when one achieves revenge, the innocent perforce suffer.
The spectacle was watched by a select audience of white-smocked cooks and grinning barbers, of whom not a few were needed to shave the palace's army of servants. They guffawed and giggled appreciatively. It was also observed by Glipkerio from behind curtains in a gallery. The beanpole overlord was entranced and his aristocratically long nerves as much soothed as Samanda's — until he noted in the kitchen's topmost gloomy shelves the hundreds of paired pinpoints of the eyes of uninvited onlookers. He raced back to his well-guarded private chambers with his black toga flapping like a sail torn loose in a squall from a tall-masted yacht. Oh, he thought, if only Hisvin would work his master spell! But the old grain-merchant and sorcerer had told him that one planet was not quite yet in the proper configuration to reinforce his magic. Events in Lankhmar had begun to look like a race between some star and the rats. Well, if worse came to worst, Glipkerio told himself, at once giggling and panting in his swirly flight, he had an infallible way of escaping from Lankhmar and Nehwon too, and winning his way to some other world, where he would doubtless quickly be proclaimed monarch of all or at any rate an ample principality to begin with — he was a very reasonable overlord, Glipkerio felt — and thereby have some small solace for the loss of Lankhmar.
Chapter Nine
Sheelba of the Eyeless Face reached into the hut without turning his hooded head and swiftly found a small object and held it forth.
"Here is your answer to Lankhmar's Rat Plague," he said in a voice deep, hollow, rapid and grating as round stones thudding together in a moderate surf. "Solve that problem, you solve all."
Gazing from more than a yard below, the Gray Mouser saw silhouetted against the paling sky a small squat bottle pinched between the black fabric of the overlong sleeve of Sheelba, who chose never to show his fingers, if they were that. Silvery dawnlight shivered through the bottle's crystal stopper.
The Mouser was not impressed. He was bone-weary and be-mired from armpit to boots, which were now sunk ankle-deep in sucking muck and sinking deeper all the time. His coarse gray silks were be-slimed and ripped, he feared, beyond the most cunning tailor's repair. His scratched skin, where it was dry, was scaled with the Marsh's itching muddy salt. The bandaged wound in his left arm ached and burned. And now his neck had begun to ache too, from having to peer craningly upward.
All around him stretched the dismal reaches of the Great Salt Marsh, acres of knife-edged sea grass hiding treacherous creeks and deadly sink-holes and pimpled with low hummocks crowded with twisted, dwarfed thorn trees and bloated prickly cactuses. While its animal population ran a noxious gamut
from sea leeches, giant worms, poison eels and water cobras to saw-beaked, low-flapping cadaver birds and far-leaping, claw-footed salt-spiders.
Sheelba's hut was a black dome about as big as the closet-tree bower in which the Mouser had last evening endured ecstasy and attempted assassination. It stood above the Marsh on five crooked poles or legs, four spaced evenly around its rim, the fifth central. Each leg was footed with a round plate big as a cutlassman's shield, concave upward, and apparently envenomed, for ringing each was a small collection of corpses of the Marsh's deadly fauna.
The hut had a single doorway, low and top-rounded as a burrow entrance. In it now Sheelba lay, chin on bent left elbow, if either of those were those, stretching out the squat bottle and seeming to peer down at the Mouser, unmindful of the illogicality of one called the Eyeless peering. Yet despite the sky-rim now pinkening to the east, the Mouser could see no hint of face of any sort in the deep hood, only midnight dark. Wearily and for perhaps the thousandth time, the Mouser wondered if Sheelba were called the Eyeless because he was blind in the ordinary way, or had only leathery skin between nostrils and pate, or was skull-headed, or perhaps had quivering antennae where eyes should be. The speculation gave him no shiver of fear, he was too angry and fatigued — and the squat bottle still didn't impress him.
Batting aside a springing salt-spider with the back of his gauntleted hand, the Mouser called upward, "That's a mighty small jug to hold poison for all the rats of Lankhmar. Hola, you in the black bag there, aren't you going to invite me up for a drink, a bite, and a dry-out? I'll curse you otherwise with spells I've unbeknownst stolen from you!"
"I'm not your mother, mistress, or nurse, but your wizard!" Sheelba retorted in his harsh hollow sea-voice. "Cease your childish threats and stiffen your back, small gray one!"
That last seemed the ultimate and crushing infidelity to the Mouser with his stiff neck and straining spine. He thought bitterly of the sinew-punishing, skin-smarting night he'd just spent. He'd left Lankhmar by the Marsh Gate, to the frightened amazement of the guards, who had strongly advised against solo marsh sorties even by day. Then he'd followed the twisty causeway by moonlight to the lightning-blasted but still towering gray Seahawk Tree. There after long peering he'd spotted Sheelba's hut by a pulsing blue glow coming from its low doorway, and plunged boldly toward it through the swordish sea grass. Then had come nightmare. Deep creeks and thorny hummocks had appeared where he didn't expect them and he had speedily lost his usually infallible sense of direction. The small blue glow had winked out and finally reappeared far to his right, then seemed to draw near and recede bafflingly time after time. He had realized he must be walking in circles around it and guessed that Sheelba had cast a dizzying enchantment on the area, perhaps to ensure against interruption while working some particularly toilsome and heinous magic. Only after twice almost perishing in quicksands and being stalked by a long-legged marsh leopard with blue-glinting eyes which the Mouser once mistook for the hut, because the beast seemed to have a habit of winking, had he at last reached his destination as the stars were dimming.
Swords Of Lankhmar[Мечи Ланкмара] fagm-5 Page 12