by Fritz Leiber
Finishing his business, he had prepared to continue his downward course when there had come the descending clatter of paw- and boot-steps, quickly followed by a banging on the door of his compartment.
Without hesitation he had unhooked the door and opened it with a jerk. Facing him close there had been the black-clad, black-and-silver-masked rat he had seen on the level above, and behind him three bare-faced rats with drawn daggers that looked and probably were sharper than gross human fingers could ever hone.
After the first glance, the Mouser had looked lower than his pursuers’ faces, for fear the color and shape and especially the placing of his eyes might give him away.
The vizarded one had said swiftly and clearly in excellent Lankhmarese, ‘Have you seen or heard anyone come down the stairs?—in particular an armed human magically reduced to decent and normal size?’
Again without hesitation the Mouser had chittered most angrily, and roughly shouldering his questioner and the others aside, had spat out, ‘Idiots! Opium-chewers! Nibblers of hemp! Out of my way!’
On the stairs he had paused to look back briefly, snarl loudly and contemptuously, ‘No, of course not!’ and then gone down the stairs with dignity, though taking them two at a time.
The next level had shown no rats in sight and been redolent of grain. He had noted bins of wheat, barley, millet, kombo, and wild rice from the River Tilth. A good place to hide—perhaps. But what could he gain by hiding?
The next level—the third down—had been full of military clatter and rank with rat-stink. He had noted rat pikemen drilling in bronze cuirasses and helmets and another squad being instructed in the crossbow, while still others crowded around a table where routes on a great map were being pointed out. He had lingered even a shorter time there.
Midway down each stairs had been a compartmented nook like the first he’d used. He had docketed away in his mind his information.
Refreshingly clean, moist air had poured out of the fourth level, it had been more brightly lit, and most of the rats strolling in it had been richly dressed and masked. He had turned into it at once, walking against the moist breeze, since that might well come from the outer world and mark a route of escape, and he had continued with angry chitters and curses to play his impulsively assumed role of crotchety, half-mad rat-bravo or rogue-rat.
In fact, he found himself trying so hard to be a convincing rat that without volition his eyes now followed with leering interest a small mincing she-rat in pink silk and pearls—mask as well as dress—who led on a leash what he took at first to be a baby rat and then realized was a dwarfish, well-groomed, fear-eyed mouse, and also an imperiously tall ratess in dark green silk sewn over with ruby chips and holding in one hand a whip and in the other the short leashes of two fierce-eyed, quick-breathing shrews that looked as big as mastiffs and were doubtless even more bloodthirsty.
Still looking lustfully at this striking proud creature as she passed him with green, be-rubied mask tilted high, he ran into a slow-gaited, portly rat robed and masked in ermine, which looked extremely coarse-haired now, and wearing about his neck a long gold chain and about his alder-manic waist a gold-studded belt, from which hung a heavy bag that chinked dulcetly at the Mouser’s jolting impact.
Snapping a ‘Your pardon, merchant!’ at the wheezingly chittering fellow, the Mouser strode on without backward glance. He grinned conceitedly under his mask. These rats were easy to befool!—and perhaps reduction in size had sharpened finer his own sharp wits.
He was tempted for an instant to turn back and lure off and rob the fat fellow, but realized at once that in the human world the chinking goldpieces would be smaller than sequins.
This thought set his mind on a problem which had been obscurely terrifying him ever since he had plunged into the rat-world. Sheelba had said the effects of the potion would last for nine hours. Then presumably the Mouser would resume his normal size as swiftly as he had lost it. To have that happen in a burrow or even in the foot-and-a-half-high, pillar-studded concourse would be disastrous—it made him wince to think of it.
Now, the Mouser had no intention of staying anything like nine hours in the rat-world. On the other hand, he didn’t exactly want to escape at once. Dodging around in Lankhmar like a nimbly animate gray doll for half a night didn’t appeal to him—it would be shame-making even if, or perhaps especially if while doll-size he had to report his important intelligences about the rat-world to Glipkerio and Olegnya Mingolsbane—with Hisvet watching perhaps. Besides, his mind was already afire with schemes to assassinate the rats’ king, if they had one, or foil their obvious project of conquest in some even more spectacular fashion on their home ground. He felt a peculiarly great self-confidence and had not realized yet that it was because he was fully as tall as the taller rats around, as tall as Fafhrd, relatively, and no longer the smallish man he had been all his life.
However, there was always the possibility that by some unforeseeable ill fortune he might be unmasked, captured, and imprisoned in a tiny cell. A panicking thought.
But even more unnerving was the basic problem of time. Did it move faster for the rats, or slower. He had the impression that life and all its processes moved at a quicker tempo down here. But was that true? Did he now clearly hear the rat-Lankhmarese, which had previously sounded like squeaks, because his ears were quicker, or merely smaller, or because most of a rat’s voice was pitched too high for human ears to hear, or even because rats spoke Lankhmarese only in their burrows? He surreptitiously felt his pulse. It seemed the same as always. But mightn’t it be greatly speeded up and his senses and mind speeded up equally, so that he noted no difference? Sheelba had said something about a day being a tenth of a million pulsebeats. Was that rat or human-pulse? Were rat-hours so short that nine of them might pass in a hundred or so human minutes? Almost he was tempted to rush up the first stairs he saw. No, wait…if the timing was by pulse and his pulse seemed normal, then wouldn’t he have one normal Mouser-sleep to work in town here? It was truly most confusing. ‘Out upon it all, by cat-gut sausages and roasted dog’s eyes!’ he heard himself curse with sincerity.
Several things at any rate were clear. Before he dared idle or nap, let alone sleep, he must discover some way of measuring down here the passage of time in the above-ground world. Also, to get at the truth about rat-night and day, he must swiftly learn about rodent sleeping habits. For some reason his mind jumped back to the tall ratess with the brace of straining shrews. But that was ridiculous, he told himself. There was sleeping and sleeping, and that one had very little if anything to do with the other.
He came out of his thought-trance to realize fully what his senses had for some time been telling him: that the strollers had become fewer, the breeze more damp and cool and fresh, and sea-odorous too, and the pillars ahead natural rock, while through the doorways chiseled between them shone a yellowish light, not bright yet twinkling and quite unlike that of the fire-beetles, glow-wasps, and tiny torches.
He passed a marble doorway and noted white marble steps going down from it. Then he stepped between two of the rocky pillars and halted on the rim of a wonder-place.
It was a roughly circular natural rock cave many rats high and many more long and wide, and filled with faintly rippling seawater which transmitted a mild flood of yellowish light that came through a great wide hole, underwater by about the length of a rat’s-pike, in the other end of the glitter-ceilinged cavern. All around this sea lake, about two rat-pikes above the water, went the rather narrow rock road, looking in part natural, in part chiseled and pickaxed, on which he now stood. At its distant end, in the shadows above the great underwater hole, he could dimly make out the forms and gleaming weapons of a half-dozen or so motionless rats, evidently on guard duty.
As the Mouser watched, the yellow light became yellower still, and he realized it must be the light of later afternoon, surely the afternoon of the day in which he had entered the rat-world. Since sunset was at six o’clock and he had entered the rat-world after thr
ee, he had spent fewer than three of his nine hours. Most important he had linked the passage of time in the rat-world with that in the big world—and was somewhat startled at the relief he felt.
He recalled too the ‘dead’ rats which had seemed to swim away from the cage dropped from the palace window into the Inner Sea after Hisvin’s demonstration of his death-spell. They might very well have swum underwater into this very cavern, or another like it.
It also came to him that he had discovered the secret of the damp breeze. He knew the tide was rising now, an hour or so short of full, and in rising it drove the cave-trapped air through the concourse. At low tide the great hole would be in part above water, allowing the cavern air to be refreshed from outside. A rather clever if intermittent ventilation system. Perhaps some of these rats were a bit more ingenious than he had given them credit for.
At that instant there came a light, inhuman touch on his right shoulder. Turning around, he saw stepping back from him with naked rapier held a little to one side the black-masked black-clad rat who had disturbed him in the privy.
‘What’s the meaning of this?’ he chitteringly blustered. ‘By God’s hairless tail, why am I catted and ferreted?—you black dog!’
In far less ratlike Lankhmarese than the Mouser’s, the other asked quietly, ‘What are you doing in a restricted area? I must ask you to unmask, sir.’
‘Unmask? I’ll see the color of your liver first, mousling!’ the Mouser ranted wildly. It would never do, he knew, to change character now.
‘Must I call in my underlings to unmask you by force?’ the other inquired in the same soft, deadly voice. ‘But it is not necessary. Your reluctance to unmask is final confirmation of my deduction that you are indeed the magically shrunken human come as a spy into Lankhmar Below.’
‘That opium specter again?’ the Mouser raved, dropping his hand to Scalpel’s hilt. ‘Begone, mad mouse dipped in ink, before I cut you to collops!’
‘Your threats and brags are alike useless, sir,’ the other answered with a low and humorous laugh. ‘You wonder how I became certain of your identity? I suppose you think you were very clever. Actually you gave yourself away more than once. First, by relieving yourself in that jakes where I first encountered you. Your dung was of a different shape, color, consistency, and odor than that of my compatriots. You should have sought out a water-privy. Second, although you did try to shadow your eyes, the eye-holes in your mask are too squintingly close together, as are all human eyes. Third, your boots are clearly made to fit human rather than rodent feet, though you have the small sense to walk on your toes to ape our legs and gait.’
The Mouser noted that the other’s black boots had far tinier soles than his own and were of soft leather both below and above the big ankle-bend.
The other continued, ‘And from the very first I knew you must be an utter stranger, else you would never have dared shoulder aside and insult the many times proven greatest duellist and fastest sword in all Lankhmar Below.’
With black-gloved left paw the other whipped off his silver-trimmed mask, revealing upstanding oval ears and long furry black face and huge, protuberant, wide-spaced black eyes. Baring his great white incisors in a lordly smirk and bringing his mask across his chest in a curt, sardonic bow, he finished, ‘Svivomilo, at your service.’
At least now the Mouser understood the vast vanity—great almost as his own!—which had led his pursuer to leave his underlings behind in the concourse while he came on alone to make the arrest. Whipping out simultaneously Scalpel and Cat’s Claw, purposely not pausing to unmask, the Mouser made his most rapid advance, ending in a tremendous lunge at the neck. It seemed to him that he had never before in his life moved as swiftly—small size certainly had its points.
There was a flash and a clash and Scalpel was deflected—by Svivomilo’s dagger drawn with lightning speed. And then Svivomilo’s rapier was on the offensive and the Mouser barely avoiding it by rapid parries with both his weapons and by backing off perilously along the water’s brink. Now his involuntary thought was that his opponent had had a much longer time than he of being small and practicing the swiftness it allowed, while his mask interfered with his vision and if it slipped a little would blind him altogether. Yet Svivomilo’s incessant attacks gave him no time to whip it off. With sudden desperation he lunged forward himself, managing to get a bind with Scalpel on the rapier that momentarily took both weapons out of the fight, and an instant later lashed out with Cat’s Claw at Svivomilo’s dagger-stabbing wrist, and by accurate eye and good fortune cut its inner tendons.
Then as Svivomilo hesitated and sprang back, the Mouser disengaged Scalpel and launched it in another sinew-straining, long lunge, thrice dipping his point just under Svivomilo’s double and then circle parries, and finally drove its point on in a slicing thrust that went through the rat’s neck and ended grating against the vertebra there.
Scarlet blood pouring over the black lace at Svivomilo’s throat and down his chest, and with only one short, bubbling, suffocated gasp, for the Mouser’s thrust had severed wind-pipe as well as arteries, the rightly boastful but foolishly reckless duellist pitched forward on his face and lay writhing.
The Mouser made the mistake of trying to sheathe his bloodied sword, forgetting that Scalpel’s scabbard was no longer wire-stiffened, which made the action difficult. He cursed the scabbard, limp as Svivomilo’s now nerveless tail.
Four cuirassed and helmeted rats with pikes at the ready appeared at two of the rocky doorways. Brandishing his red-dripping sword and gleaming dirk, the Mouser raced through an untenanted doorway and with a chittering scream to clear the way ahead of him, sprinted across the concourse to the marble doorway he’d noted earlier, and plunged down the white stairway.
The usual nook in the turn of the stairs held only three compartments, each with a silver-fitted door of ivory. Into the central one there was going a white-booted rat wearing a voluminous white cloak and hood and bearing in his white-gloved right hand an ivory staff with a large sapphire set in its top.
Without an instant’s pause the Mouser ended his plunging descent with a dash into the nook. He hurled ahead of him the white-cloaked rat and slammed and hooked fast behind them the ivory door.
Recovering himself, the Mouser’s victim turned and with outraged dignity and brandished staff demanded through his white mask set with diamonds, ‘Who dareth dithturb with rude thcufflingth Counthillor Grig of the Inner Thircle of Thirteen? Mithcreant!’
While a part of the Mouser’s brain was realizing that this was the lisping white rat he had seen aboard Squid sitting on Hisvin’s shoulder, his eyes were informing him that this compartment held not a box for droppings, but a raised silver toilet seat, up through which came the sound and odor of rushing seawater. It must be one of the water-privies Svivomilo had mentioned.
Dropping Scalpel, the Mouser threw back Grig’s hood, dragged off his mask over his head, tripped the sputtering councillor and forced his head down against the far side of the privy’s silver rim, and then with Cat’s Claw cut Grig’s furry white throat almost from ratty ear to ear, so that his blood gushed down into the rushing water below. As soon as his victim’s writhings stilled, the Mouser drew off Grig’s white cloak and hood, taking great care that no blood got on them.
At that moment he heard the booted footsteps of several persons coming down the stairs. Operating with demonic speed, the Mouser placed Scalpel, the ivory staff, and the white mask and hood and cloak behind the seat of the privy, then hoisted the dead body so that it sat on the same, and himself stood crouching on the silver rim, facing the hooked door and holding the limp trunk erect. Then he silently prayed with great sincerity to Issek of the Jug, the first god he could think of, the one whom Fafhrd had once served.
Wavy and hooked browned-iron pike-blades gleamed above the doorways. The two to either side were slammed open. Then after a pause, during which he hoped someone had peered under the central door just enough to note the white boots, there c
ame a light rapping, and then a respectful voice inquiring, ‘Your pardon, Nobility, but have you recently seen anything of a person in gray with cloak and mask of finest gray fur, and armed with rapier and dagger?’
The Mouser answered in a voice which he tried to make calm and dignifiedly benign, ‘I have theen nothing, thir. About thirty breathth ago I heard thomeone clattering at thpeed down the thtairth.’
‘Our humblest thanks, Nobility;’ the questioner responded, and the booted footsteps continued rapidly down toward the fifth level.
The Mouser let off a long soft sigh and chopped short his prayer. Then he set swiftly to work, for he knew he had a considerable task ahead of him, some of it most grisly. He wiped off and scabbarded Scalpel and Cat’s Claw. Then he examined his victim’s cloak, hood, and mask, discovering almost no blood on them, and set them aside. He noted that the cloak could be fastened down the front with ivory buttons. Then he dragged off Grig’s tall boots of whitest suede and tried them on his own legs. Though their softness helped, they fitted abominably, the sole covering little more than the area under his toes. Still, this would keep him reminded to maintain a rat’s gait at all times. He also tried on Grig’s long white gloves, which fitted worse, if that were possible. Still, he could wear them. His own boots and gauntlets he tucked securely over his gray belt.
Next he undressed Grig and dropped his garments one by one into the water, retaining only a razor-sharp ivory-and-gold-fitted dagger, a number of small parchment scrolls, Grig’s undershirt, and a double-ended purse filled with gold coins struck with a rat’s head on one side, circled by a wreath of wheat, and on the other a complex maze (tunnels?) and a numeral followed by the initials S. F L. B ‘Since the Founding of Lankhmar Below?’ he hazarded brilliantly. He hung the purse over his belt, fixed the dagger to it by a gold hook on its ivory sheath, and thrust the scrolls unscanned into his own pouch.
Then with a grunt of distaste he rolled up his sleeves and using the ivory-handled dagger, proceeded to dismember the furry corpse into pieces small enough to force through the silver rim so that they splashed into the water and were carried away.
