by Fritz Leiber
He swallowed hard down his raw, wearied throat. Why the devil had Grig had to have a lisp?
His suggestion appeared for a moment to stupefy the other members of the Council. Then Siss said, wonderingly, admiringly, enviously, and as if against his will, ‘I never thought of that.’
Skwee said, ‘The temple of the Gods of Lankhmar has long been avoided by man and rat alike, as you well know, Grig. Nevertheless…’
Lord Null said peevishly, ‘I am against it. Why meddle with the unknown? The humans of Lankhmar fear and avoid the temple of their city’s gods. So should we.’
The Mouser glared at the black-robed rat through his mask slits. ‘Are we mithe or ratth?’ he demanded. ‘Or are we even cowardly, thuperthtitiouth men? Where ith your ratly courage, Lord Null? Or thovereign, thkeptical, ratly reathon? My thratagem will cow the humanth and prove forever the thuperior bravery of ratth! Thkwee! Thith! Ith it not tho?’
The matter was put to a vote. Lord Null voted nay, Siss and the Mouser and—after a pause—Skwee voted aye, the other nine bobbed, and so Operation Black Toga, as Skwee christened it, was hastily added to the battle plans.
‘We have over four hours in which to organize it,’ Skwee reminded his nervous colleagues.
The Mouser grinned behind his mask. He had a feeling that the Gods of Lankhmar, if ever roused, would side with the city’s human inhabitants. Or would they?—he wondered belatedly.
In any case, his business and desire now was to get out of the Council Chamber as soon as possible. A stratagem instantly suggested itself to him. He waved to a page.
‘Thummon a litter,’ he commanded. ‘Thith deliberathion hath tired me. I feel faint and am troubled by leg cramp. I will go for a thort while to my home and wife to retht me.’
Skwee looked around at him. ‘Wife?’ the white rat asked incredulously.
Instantly the Mouser answered, ‘Ith it any buthineth of yourth if it ith my whim to call my mithtreth my wife?’
Skwee still eyed him for a bit, then shrugged.
The litter arrived almost immediately, borne by two very brawny, half-naked rats. The Mouser rolled into it gratefully, laying his ivory staff beside him, commanded ‘To my home!’ and waved a gentle good-bye to Skwee and Lord Null as he was carried joggingly off. He felt himself at the moment to be the most brilliant mind in the whole universe and thoroughly deserving of a rest, even in a rat burrow. He reminded himself he had at least four hours to go before Sheelba’s spell wore off and he became once more human size. He’d done his best for Lankhmar, now he must think of himself. He lazily wondered what the comforts of a rat home would be like. He must sample them before escaping above ground. It really had been a damnably tiring council session after all that had gone before.
Skwee tuned to Lord Null as the litter disappeared by stages beyond the pillars and said through his be-diamonded white mask, ‘So Grig has a mistress, the old misogynist! Perhaps it’s she who has quickened his mind to such new brilliancies as Operation Black Toga.’
‘I still don’t like that one, though you outvoted me and I must go along,’ chittered the other irritably from behind his black vizard. ‘There’s too much uncertainty tonight. The final battle about to be joined. A magically transformed human spy reported in Lankhmar Below. The change in Grig’s character. That rabid mouse running widdershins a-foam at the jaws, outside the Council Chamber, and which squeaked thrice when you slew him. The uncustomary buzzing of the night-bees in Siss’ chambers. And now this new operation adopted on the spur of the moment—’
Skwee clapped Lord Null on the shoulder in friendly fashion. ‘You’re distraught tonight, comrade, and see omens in every night-bug,’ he said. ‘Grig at all events had one most sound notion. We all could do with a little rest and refreshment. Especially you before your all-important mission. Come.’
And turning the table over to Siss, he and Lord Null went to a curtained alcove just off the Council Chamber, Skwee ordering on the way that food and drink be brought them.
When the curtains were closed behind them, Skwee seated himself in one of the two chairs beside the small table there and took off his mask. In the pulsing violet light of the three silver-caged glow-wasps illuminating the alcove, his long, white-furred, blue-eyed snout looked remarkably sinister.
‘To think,’ he said, ‘that tomorrow my people will be masters of Lankhmar Above. For millennia we rats have planned and built, tunneled and studied and striven, and now in less than six hours—it’s worth a drink! Which reminds me, comrade, isn’t it time for your medicinal draught?’
Lord Null hissed with consternation, prepared to lift his black mask distractedly, dipped his black-gloved right fore-member into his pouch, and came up with a tiny white vial.
‘Stop!’ Skwee commanded with some horror, capturing the black-gloved wrist with a sudden grab. ‘If you should drink that one now—’
‘I am nervous tonight, nervous to frustration,’ the other admitted, returning the white vial to his pouch and coming up with a black one. Before draining its contents, he lifted his black mask entirely. The face behind was not a rat’s, but the seamed and beady-eyed visage, rat-small, of Hisvin the grain-merchant.
The black draught swallowed, he appeared to experience relief and easement of tension. The worry lines in his face were replaced by those of thought.
‘Who is Grig’s mistress, Skwee?’ he speculated suddenly. ‘No common slut, I’ll swear, or vanity-puffed courtesan.’
Skwee shrugged his hunchy shoulders and said cynically, ‘The more brilliant the enchanted male, the stupider the enchanting female.’
‘No!’ Hisvin said impatiently. ‘I sense a brilliant and rapacious mind here that is not Grig’s. He was ambitious once, you know, sought your position, then his fires sank to coals glowing through wintery ash.’
‘That’s true,’ Skwee agreed thoughtfully.
‘Who has blown him alight again?’ Hisvin demanded, now with anxious suspicion. ‘Who is his mistress, Skwee?’
Fafhrd pulled up the Mingol mare before that iron-hearted beast should topple from exhaustion—and had trouble doing it, so resolute unto death was that grim creature. Yet once stopped, he felt her legs giving under her and he dropped quickly from the saddle lest she collapse from his weight. She was lathered with sweat, her head hung between her trembling forelegs, and her slatted ribs worked like a bellows as she gasped whistlingly.
He rested his hand lightly on her shaking shoulders. She never could have made Lankhmar, he knew. They were less than halfway across the Great Salt Marsh.
Low moonlight, striking from behind, washed with a faint gold the gravel of the causeway road and yellowly touched the tops of thorn tree and cactus, but could not yet slant down to the Marsh’s sea-grassed floor and black bottoms.
Save for the hum and crackle of insects and the calls of night birds, the moonlight-brushed area was silent—yet would not be so for long, Fafhrd knew with a shudder.
Ever since the preternatural emergence of the three black riders from the crash of waves over the Sinking Land and their drumming unshakable pursuit of him through the deepening night, he had been less and less able to think of them as mere vengeful Ilthmar brigands, and more and more conceived them as a supernatural black trinity of death. For miles now, besides, something huge and long-legged and lurching, though never distinctly seen, had been pursuing him through the Marsh, keeping pace with him at the distance of a spear cast. Some giant familiar or obedient djinn of the black horsemen seemed most likely.
His fears had so worked on him that Fafhrd had finally put the mare to her extremest gallop, outdistancing the hoof-noise of the pursuit, though with no effect on the lurching shape and with the inevitable present result. He drew Graywand and faced back toward the new-risen gibbous moon.
Then very faintly he began to hear it: the muted rhythmic drumming of hooves on gravel. They were coming.
At the same moment, from the deep shadows where the giant familiar should be, he heard the G
ray Mouser call hoarsely, ‘This way, Fafhrd! Toward the blue light. Lead your mount. Make it swift!’
Grinning even as the hairs lifted on his neck, Fafhrd looked south and saw a shaped blue glow, like a round-topped, smallish, blue-lit window in the blackness of the Marsh. He plunged down the causeway’s slanting south side toward it, pulling the mare after him, and found underfoot a low ridge of firm ground rather than mud. He moved ahead eagerly through the dark, digging in his heels and leaning forward as he dragged his spent mount. The blue window looked a little above his head now. The drumming coming up from the east was louder.
‘Shake a leg, Lazybones!’ he heard the Mouser call in the same rasping tones. The Gray One must have caught a cold from the Marsh’s damp or—the Fates forfend!—a fever from its miasmas.
‘Tether your mount to the thorn stump,’ the Mouser continued gruffly. ‘There’s food for her there and a water pool. Then come up. Speed, speed!’
Fafhrd obeyed without word or waste motion, for the drumming had become very loud.
As he leaped and caught hold of the blue window’s bottom and drew himself up to it, the blue glow went out. He scrambled inside onto the reed-carpeted floor of whatever it was and swiftly squirmed around so he was looking back the way he’d come.
The Mingol mare was invisible in the dark below. The causeway’s top glowed faintly in the moonlight.
Then round a cluster of thorn trees came speeding the three black riders, the drumming of the twelve hooves thunderous now. Fafhrd thought he could make out a fiendish phosphorescent glow around the nostrils and eyes of the tall black horses and he could faintly discern the black cloaks and hoods of the riders streaming in the wind of their speed. With never a pause they passed the point where he’d left the causeway and vanished behind another thorn grove to the west. He let out a long-held breath.
‘Now get away from the door and brace yourself,’ a voice that wasn’t the Mouser’s at all grated over his shoulder. ‘I’ve got to be there to pilot this rig.’
The hairs that had just lain down on Fafhrd’s neck erected themselves again. He had more than once heard the rock-harsh voice of Sheelba of the Eyeless Face, though never seen, let alone entered, his fabulous hut. He swiftly hitched himself to one side, back against wall. Something smooth and round and cool touched the back of his neck. A wall-hung skull, it almost had to be.
A black figure crawled into the space he’d just vacated. Dimly silhouetted in the doorway, its edge touched by moonlight, he saw a black cowl.
‘Where’s the Mouser?’ Fafhrd asked with a wheeze in his voice.
The hut gave a violent lurch. Fafhrd grabbed gropingly for and luckily found two wall posts.
‘In trouble. Deep-down trouble,’ Sheelba answered curtly. ‘I did his voice to make you jump lively. As soon as you’ve fulfilled whatever geas Ningauble has laid upon you—bells, isn’t it?—you must go instantly to his aid.’
The hut gave a second lurch and a third, then began to rock and pitch somewhat like a ship, but in a swift rhythm and more joltingly, as if one were in a howdah on the slant back of a drunken giant giraffe.
‘Go instantly where?’ Fafhrd demanded, somewhat humbly.
‘How should I know and why should I tell you if I did? I am not your wizard. I’m just taking you to Lankhmar by secret ways as a favor to that paunchy, seven-eyed, billion-worded dilettante in sorcery who thinks himself my colleague and has gulled you into taking him as mentor,’ the harsh voice responded from the hood. Then, relenting some-what, though growing gruffer, ‘Overlord’s palace, most likely. Now shut up.’
The rocking of the hut and also its speed increased. Wind pushed in, flapping the edge of Sheelba’s hood. Flashes of moon-dappled marsh shot by.
‘Who were those riders after me?’ Fafhrd asked, clinging to his wall posts. ‘Ilthmar brigands? Acolytes of the grisly, scythe-armed lord?’
No reply.
‘What is it all about?’ Fafhrd persisted. ‘Grand assault by a near numberless yet nameless host on Lankhmar. Nameless black riders. The Mouser deep-buried and woefully shrunk, yet alive. A tin whistle maybe summoning War Cats who are dangerous to the blower. None of it makes sense.’
The hut gave a particularly vicious lurch. Sheelba still said not a word. Fafhrd grew seasick and devoted himself to hanging on.
Glipkerio, nerving himself, poked his pansy-wreathed, gold-ringleted head on its long neck through the kitchen door’s leather curtains and blinking his weak yellow-irised eyes at the fire’s glare, grinned an archly amiable, foolish grin.
Reetha, chained once more by the neck, sat cross-legged in front of the fire, head a-droop. Surrounded by four other maids squatting on their heels, Samanda nodded in her great chair. Yet now, though no noise had been made, her snores broke off, she opened her pig-eyes toward Glipkerio, and said familiarly, ‘Come in, little overlord, don’t stand there like a bashful giraffe. Have the rats got you scared too? Be off to your cots, girls.’
Three maids instantly rose. Samanda snatched a long pin from her sphere-dressed hair and lightly jabbed awake the fourth, who had been asleep on her heels.
Silently, except for a single swift-stifled squeal from the pricked one, the four maids bobbed a bow at Glipkerio, two at Samanda, and hurried out like so many wax mannequins. Reetha looked around wearily. Glipkerio wandered about, looking anywhere but at her, his chin a-twitch, his long fingers jittery, twining and untwining.
‘The restless bug bite you, little overlord?’ Samanda asked him. ‘Shall I make you a hot poppy-posset? Or would you like to see her whipped?’ she asked, jerking a thick thumb toward Reetha. ‘The inquisitors ordered me not to, but of course if you should command me—’
‘Oh, no, no, no, of course not,’ Glipkerio protested. ‘But speaking of whips, I’ve some new ones in my private collection I’d like to show you, dear Samanda, including one reputedly from Far Kiraay coated with rough-ground glass, if only you’d come with me. Also a handsomely embossed six-tined silver bull prod from—’
‘Oh, so it’s company you want, like all the other scared ones,’ Samanda told him. ‘Well, I’d be willing to oblige you, little overlord, but the ’quisitors told me I must keep an eye all night on this wicked girl, who’s in league with the rats’ leader.’
Glipkerio hemmed and hawed, finally said, ‘Well, you could bring her along, I suppose, if you really have to.’
‘So I could,’ Samanda agreed heartily, at last levering her black-dressed bulk from her chair. ‘We can test your new whips on her.’
‘Oh, no, no, no,’ Glipkerio once more protested. Then frowning and also writhing his narrow shoulders, he added thoughtfully, ‘Though there are times when to get the hang of a new instrument of pain one simply must…’
‘…simply must,’ Samanda agreed, unsnapping the silver chain from Reetha’s collar and snapping on a short leash. ‘Lead the way, little overlord.’
‘Come first to my bedroom,’ he told her. ‘I’ll go ahead to get my guardsmen out of the way.’ And he made off at his longest, toga-stretching stride.
‘No need to, little overlord, they know all about your habits,’ Samanda called after him, then jerked Reetha to her feet. ‘Come, girl!—you’re being mightily honored. Be glad I’m not Glipkerio, or you’d be rubbed with cheese and shoved down-cellar for the rats to nibble.’
When they finally arrived through empty silk-hung corridors at Glipkerio’s bed-chamber, he was standing in mingled agitation and irritation before its open, jewel-studded, thick oaken door, his black toga a-rustle from his nervous jerking.
‘There weren’t any guardsmen for me to warn off,’ he complained. ‘It seems my orders were stupidly misinterpreted, extended farther than I’d intended, and my guardsmen have all gone off with the soldiers and constables to the South Barracks.’
‘What need you of guardsmen when you have me to protect you, little overlord?’ Samanda answered boisterously, slapping a truncheon hanging from her belt.
‘That’s true
,’ he agreed, only a shade doubtfully, and twitched a large and complex golden key from a fold of his toga. ‘Now let’s lock the girl in here, Samanda, if you please, while we go to inspect my new acquisitions.’
‘And decide which to use on her?’ Samanda asked in her loud coarse voice.
Glipkerio shook his head as if in shocked disapproval, and looking at last at Reetha, said in grave fatherly tones, ‘No, of course not, it is only that I imagine the poor child would be bored at our expertise.’
Yet he couldn’t quite keep a sudden eagerness from his tones, nor a furtive gleam from his eyes.
Samanda unsnapped the leash and pushed Reetha inside.
Glipkerio warned her in last-minute apprehension, ‘Don’t touch my night-draught now,’ pointing at a golden tray on a silver night table. Crystal flagons sat on the tray and also a long-stemmed goblet filled with pale apricot-hued wine.
‘Don’t touch one thing, or I’ll make you beg for death,’ Samanda amplified, suddenly all unhumorously brutal. ‘Kneel at the foot of the bed on knees and heels with head bent—servile posture three—and don’t move a muscle until we return.’
As soon as the thick door was closed and its lock softly thudded shut and the golden key chinkingly withdrawn on the other side, Reetha walked straight to the night table, worked her cheeks a bit, spat into the night-draught, and watched the bubbly scum slowly revolve. Oh if she only had some hairs to drop in it, she yearned fiercely, but there seemed to be no fur or wool in the room and she had been shaved this very morning.
She unstoppered the most tempting of the crystal flagons and carried it about with her, swigging daintily, as she examined the room, paneled with rare woods from the Eight Cities, and its ever rarer treasures, pausing longest at a heavy golden casket full of cut but unset jewels—amethysts, aquamarines, sapphires, jades, topazes, fire opals, rubies, gimpels, and ice emeralds—which glittered and gleamed like the shards of a shattered rainbow.
She also noted a rack of women’s clothes, cut for some-one very tall and thin, and—surprising beside these evidences of effeminacy—a rack of browned-iron weapons.
