The Second Book of Lankhmar

by Fritz Leiber

  The horse-galleys of the Mingols were so close that Mikkidu and his thieves had their slings ready, loaded with leaden ball, though under orders not to cast unless the Mingols started arrow fire. Across the waves a stallion screamed from its cage.

  Thought of the Maelstrom made the Mouser look in his pouch for the golden queller. He found it, all right, but somehow the charred stub of the Loki-torch had got wedged inside it. It was really no more than a black cinder. No wonder Rill had burned herself so badly, he thought, glancing at her bandaged hand—when Cif had stayed on deck, the harlots, and Mother Grum, had insisted on the same privilege and it seemed to cheer the men.

  The Mouser started to unwedge the black god-brand, but then the odd thought occurred to him that Loki, being a god (and in some sense this cinder was Loki), deserved a golden house, or carapace, so on a whim he wrapped the length of stout cord attached to it tightly round and round the weighty golden cube and knotted it, so that the two objects—queller and god-brand—were inextricably conjoined.

  Cif nudged him. Her gold-flecked green eyes were dancing, as if to say, ‘Isn’t this exciting!’

  He nodded a somewhat temperate agreement. Oh, it was exciting, all right, but it was also damnably uncertain—everything had to work out just so—why, he could still only guess at the directions god Loki had given them in the speech he had forgotten and none else had heard…

  He looked around the deck, surveying faces. It was strange, but everyone’s eyes seemed to flash with the same eager juvend excitement as was in Cif’s…it was even in Gavs’, Trenchi’s, and Gib’s (the Mingols)…even in Mother Grum’s, bright as black beads…

  In all eyes, that is, except the wrinkle-netted ones of old Ourph helping Gavs with the tiller. They seemed to express a sad and patient resignation, as though contemplating tranquilly from some distance a great and universal woe. On an impulse the Mouser took him from his task and drew him to the lee rail.

  ‘Old man,’ he said, ‘you were at the council hall the night before last when I spoke to them all and they cheered me. I take it that, like the rest, you heard not one word of what I said, or at best only a few—the directives for Groniger’s party and our sailing today?’

  For the space of perhaps two breaths the old Mingol stared at him curiously, then he slowly shook his bald dome, saying, ‘No, captain, I heard every last word you spoke (my eyes begin to fail me a little, but my ears not) and they greatly saddened me (your words) for they expressed the same philosophy as seizes upon my steppe-folk at their climacterics (and often otherwhen), the malign philosophy that caused me to part company with them in early years and make my life among the heathen.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ the Mouser demanded. ‘A favor—be brief as possible.’

  ‘Why, you spoke—most winningly indeed (even I was tempted)—of the glories of death and of what a grand thing it was to go down joyfully to destruction carrying your enemies with you (and as many as possible of your friends also), how this was the law of life and its crowning beauty and grandeur, its supreme satisfaction. And as you told them all that they soon must die and how, they all cheered you as heartily as would have my own Mingols in their climacteric and with the selfsame gleam in their eyes. I well know that gleam. And, as I say, it greatly saddened me (to find you so fervent a death-lover) but since you are my captain, I accepted it.’

  The Mouser turned his head and looked straight into the astonished eyes of Cif, who had followed close behind him and heard every word old Ourph had spoken, and looking into each other’s eyes they saw the same identical understanding.

  At that very instant the Mouser felt Flotsam beneath his feet slammed to a stop, spun sideways to her course. and sent off circling at prodigious speed just as had happened to Sprite day before yesterday, but with a greater force proportionate to her larger size. The heavens reeled, the sea went black. He and Cif were brought up against the taffrail along with a clutter of thieves, whores, witches (well, one witch), and Mingol sailors. He bid Cif cling to it for dearest life, then found his footing on the tilted deck, and raced past the rattling whipping mainsail (and past young Mikkidu embracing the mainmast with eyes tight shut in ultimate terror or perhaps in rapture) to where his own vision was unimpeded.

  Flotsam, Sea Hawk, and the whole Rime fleet were circling at dizzying velocity more than halfway down the sides of a whirlpool at least two leagues wide, whose wide-spinning upper reaches held what looked like the entire Mingol fleet, the galleys near the edge tiny as toys against the churning sky, while at the maelstrom’s still-distant center the fanged rocks protruding through the white welter there were like a field of death.

  Next below Flotsam in the vast wheel of doom spun Dwone’s fishing smack, so close he could see faces. The Rimers clutching their weird weapons and each other looked monstrously happy, like drunken and lopsided giants bound for a ball. Of course he told himself, these were the monsters whose quickening Loki had envisioned, these were the trolls or whatever. And that reminded him of what, by Ourph’s irrefutable testimony, Loki intended for them all and peradventure for Fafhrd and Afreyt also, and all the universe of seas and stars.

  He snatched the golden queller from his pouch and seeing the black cinder at its heart thought. ‘Good!—rid of two evils at one stroke.’ Aye, but he must pitch it to the whirlpool’s midst, and how to get it there, so far away? There was some simple solution, he was sure, it was on the tip of his unseen thoughts, but there were really so many distractions at the moment…

  Cif nudged him in the waist—one more distraction. As he might have expected, she had followed him close against his strictest bidding and now with a wicked grin was pointing at…of course, his sling!

  He centered the precious missile in the strap and motioning Cif to the mast to give him room, tried out his footing on the tilted deck, taking short dancing steps, and measuring out distance, speed, windage, and various imponderables with his eyes and brain. And as he did those things, whirling the queller-brand about his head, dancing out as it were the prelude to what must be his life’s longest and supremest cast, there danced up from his mind’s darkest deeps words that must have been brewing there for days, words that matched Loki’s final four evil couplets in every particular, even the rhymes (almost), but that totally reversed their meaning. And as the words came bobbing to the surface of his awareness he spoke them out, softly he thought, though in a very clear voice—until he saw that Cif was listening to him with unmistakable delight at each turn of phrase, and Mikkidu had his shut eyes open and was hearing, and the monstrous Rimers on Dwone’s smack had all their sobering faces turned his way. He somehow had the conviction that in the midst of that monstrous tumult of the elements his words were nevertheless being heard to the whirlpool’s league-distant rim—aye, and beyond that, he knew not how far. And this is what he spoke: ‘Mingols to their deaths must go? Oh, not so, not so, not so! Mingols, draw an easy breath. Leave to wanton after death. Let there be an end to strife—even Mingols relish life. Mingol madness cease to burn. Gods to proper worlds return.’

  And with that he spun dancingly across the deck, as though he were hurling the discus, the queller-brand at the end of his sling a gold-glinting circlet above his head, and loosed. The queller-brand sped up gleaming toward the whirlpool’s midst until it was too small for sight.

  And then…the vasty whirlpool was struck flat. Black water foamed white. Sea and sky churned as one. And through that hell of the winds’ howling and the waves’ crash there came a rumbling earthshaking thunder and the red flash of huge distant flames as Darkfire erupted, compounding pandemonium, adding the strokes of earth and fire to those of water and air, completing the uproar and riot of the four elements. All ships were chips in chaos, glimpsed dimly if at all, to which men clung like ants. Squalls blew from every compass-point. it seemed, warring together. Foam covered decks. mounded to mast tops.

  But before that had transpired quite in Flotsam’s case, the Mouser and some others too, gripping rail or
mast, eyes stinging with salt sea, had seen, mounting for a few brief moments to the sky, from the whirlpool’s very midst as it was smitten flat, what looked like the end of a black rainbow (or a skinny and curving black waterspout impossibly tall, some said afterwards) that left a hole behind it in the dark clouds, through which something maddening and powerful had vanished forever from their minds, their beings, and from all Nehwon.

  And then the Mouser and his crew and the women with them were all fighting to save themselves and Flotsam in the midst of an ocean that was all cross-chop and in the teeth of a gale that had reversed direction completely and now blew from the west, carrying the thick black smoke from Darkfire out toward them. Around them other ships fought the same fight in a great roiling confusion covering several square leagues that gradually sorted itself out. The Rime fishing boats and smacks (somewhat larger) with their handier rigs (and Flotsam and Sea Hawk too) were able to tack southwest against the wind and set slow courses for Salthaven. The Mingol galleys with their square sails could only run before it (the heavy seas preventing the use of oars) away from the sobering chaos of the dreadful isle whose black smoke pursued them and their dreary drenched stallions. Some of the horse-ships may have sunk, for Flotsam fished two Mingols out of the waves, but these were unclear as to whether they had been swept overboard or their ships lost, and far too miserable to seem like foes. Ourph, smiling serenely, later brought them hot chowder, while the west wind cleared the sky. (Regarding the winds, at the moment of decision the west wind had spilled south, blowing out all along the east coast of Rime Isle, and the east wind had spilled north, driving away from the whole west coast of the island, while the belt of storm between had rotated clockwise somewhat, causing wild, veering whirlwinds in the Deathlands.)

  At the same instant as the Mouser slung the queller-brand. Fafhrd was standing on the seaward turf-wall of Cold Harbor, confronting the Widder-Mingol fleet as it neared the beach and brandishing his sword. This was no mere barbarian gesture of defiance, but part of a carefully thought-out demonstration done in the hope of awing the Sea-Mingols, even though Fafhrd admitted (to himself only) that the hope was a forlorn one. Earlier, when the three Mingol advance-raiders had departed the beach, they had made no move to join with or await their fleet, although they surely must have sighted its sails, but had instead rowed steadily away south as long as eye followed. This had made Fafhrd wonder whether they had not taken some fright on the isle which they had not wanted to face again, even with the backing of their main force. In this connection he had particularly remembered the cries of woe and dread that had come from the Mingols as Groniger’s Rime Islers had topped the rise and hove into their view. Afreyt had confided to him how during the long march overland those same countrymen of hers had come to seem monstrous to her and somehow bigger, and he had had to admit that they made the same strange impression on him. And if they seemed bigger (and monstrous) to him and her, how much bigger might they not appear to Mingols?

  And so they had taken thought together, Fafhrd and Afreyt, and had made suggestions and given commands (supplemented by bullyings and blandishments as needed) and as a result Groniger’s relief-force was posted at intervals of twenty paces in a long line that began far up on the glacier and continued along the ramparts of Cold Harbor and along the rise and stretched off for almost a league south of the settlement, each Isler brandishing his pike or other weapon. While betwixt and between them all along were stationed the defenders of Cold Harbor (their country men, though lacking their aura of monstrousness) and Fafhrd’s berserks, to swell their sheer numbers and also to keep the Salthaven Islers at their posts. from which they still had a dreamy, automatonlike tendency to go marching off. Midmost on the broad ramparts of Cold Harbor, widely flanked by Groniger and another pike-waver, rested Odin’s litter with the Fallows propped over it as in the Deathlands, while around it were stationed Fafhrd, Afreyt, and the three girls, the last waving their red cloaks on long rakes like flags. (Anything for effect, Fafhrd had said, and the girls were eager to play their part in the demonstration.) Afreyt had a borrowed spear while Fafhrd alternately shook his sword and the cords of the five nooses drawn around his left hand—shook them at the massed Mingol ships nearing the harbor. Groniger and the other Islers were shouting Gale’s (or Odin’s) doom-chant: ‘Doom! Kill the Mingols! Doom! Die the heroes.’

  And then (just as, on the other side of Rime Isle, the Mouser hurled his queller-brand, as has been said) the whirlwinds betokening the reversal of gales moved across them northward, whipping the red flags, and the heavens were darkened and there came the thunder of Hellfire erupting in sympathy with Darkfire. The sea was troubled and soon pocked to the north by the ejecta of Hellglow, great rocks that fell into the waves like the shouted ‘Doom! Doom!’ of the chant in a great cannonading. And the Widder-Mingol fleet was retreating out to sea under the urging of the wind that now blew off the shore—away, away from that dreadful burning coast that appeared to be guarded by a wall of giants taller than trees and by all the powers of the four elements. And Hellfire’s smoke stretched out above them like a pall.

  But before that had all transpired (in fact, at the same instant as. a hundred leagues east, a black rainbow or waterspout shot up to the sky from the whirlpool’s center) Odin’s litter began to rock and toss on the ramparts, and the heavy gallows to twitch and strain upward like a straw or like a compass needle responding to an unknown upward magnetism. Afreyt screamed as she saw Fafhrd’s left hand turn black before her eyes. And Fafhrd bellowed with sudden agony as he felt the nooses May had braided (and decorated with flowers) tighten relentlessly about his wrist as so many steel wires, contracting deeper and deeper between arm bones and wrist bones, cutting skin and flesh, parting gristle and tendons and all tenderer stuff, while that hand was restlessly dragged upward. And then the curtains of the litter all shot up vertically and the gallows stood up on its beam end and vibrated. Suddenly something black and gleaming shot up to the sky, holing the clouds, and Fafhrd’s black severed hand and all the nooses went with it.

  Then the curtains fell back and the gallows crashed from the wall and Fafhrd stared stupidly at the blood pouring from the stump that ended his left arm. Mastering her horror, Afreyt clamped her fingers on the spouting arteries and bid May, who was nearest at hand, take knife and slash up the skirt of her white smock for bandages. The girl acted quickly, and with these folded in wads and also used as ties, Afreyt bound up Fafhrd’s great wound in its own blood and staunched the flow of that while he watched blank-faced When it was done, he muttered, ‘“A head for a head and a hand for a hand,” she said,’ and Afreyt retorted sharply, ‘Better a hand than a head—or five.’

  In Its cramping sphere Khahkht of the Black Ice smote the sharply curving walls in Its fury and tried to scratch Rime Isle off the map. It ground together the pieces representing Fafhrd and the Mouser and the rest between Its opposed horny black palms and scrabbled frantically for the pieces standing for the two intrusive gods—but those two pieces were gone. While in far Stardock, maimed Prince Faroomfar slept more easily, knowing himself avenged.

  A full two months after the events before-narrated, Afreyt had a modest fish-dinner in her low-eaved, violet-tinted house on the north edge of Salthaven, to which were invited Groniger, Skor, Pshawri, Rill, old Ourph, and of course Cif, the Gray Mouser, and Fafhrd—the largest number her table would accommodate without undue crowding. The occasion was the Mouser’s sailing on the morrow in Sea Hawk with Skor, the Mingols, Mikkidu, and three others of his original crew on a trading venture to No-Ombrulsk with goods selected (purchased and otherwise accumulated) chiefly by Cif and himself. He and Fafhrd were sorely in need of money to pay for dockage on their vessels, crew-wages, and many another expenses, while the two ladies were no better off, owing yet-to-be-finally-determined sums to the council—of which, however, they were still members, as yet. Fafhrd had to travel no distance at all to get to the feast, for he was guesting with Afreyt while he convalesced from his
maiming—just as the Mouser was staying at Cif’s place on no particular excuse at all. There had been raised eyebrows at these arrangements from the rather strait-laced Islers, which the four principals had handled by firmly overlooking them.

  During the course of the dinner, which consisted of oyster chowder, salmon baked with Island leeks and herbs, corn cakes made of costly Lankhmar grain, and light wine of Ilthmar, conversation had ranged around the recent volcanic eruptions and attendant and merely coincidental events. and their consequences, particularly the general shortage of money. Salthaven had suffered some damage from the earthquake and more from the resultant fire. The council hall had survived but the Salt Herring tavern had been burned to the ground with its Flame Den. (‘Loki was a conspicuously destructive god,’ the Mouser observed, ‘especially where his métier, fire, was involved.’ ‘It was an unsavory haunt,’ Groniger opined.) In Cold Harbor, three turf roofs had collapsed, unoccupied of course because everyone had been taking part in the defensive demonstration at the time. The Salthaven Islers had begun their homeward journey next day, the litter being used to carry Fafhrd. ‘So some mortal got some use of it besides the girls,’ Afreyt remarked. ‘It was a haunted-seeming conveyance.’ Fafhrd allowed, ‘But I was feverish.’

  But it was the short store of cash, and the contrivances adopted to increase that. which they chiefly talked about. Skor had found work for himself and the other berserks for a while helping the Islers harvest drift-timber from the Beach of Bleached Bones, but there had not been the anticipated glut of Mingol wrecks. Fafhrd talked of manning Flotsam with some of his men and bringing back from Ool Plerns a cargo of natural wood. (‘When you’re entirely recovered, yes,’ Afreyt said.) The Mouser’s men had gone to work as fishermen bossed by Pshawri, and had been able to feed both crews and sometimes have a small surplus left to sell. Strangely, or perhaps not so, the monster catches made during the great run had all spoiled, despite their salting-down, and gone stinking bad, worse than dead jellyfish, and had had to be burned. (Cif said, ‘I told you Khahkht magicked that run—and so they were phantom fish in some sense, tainted by his touch, no matter how solid-seeming.’) She and Afreyt had sold Sprite to Rill and Hilsa for a tidy sum; the two professionals’ adventure on Flotsam, amazingly, had given them a taste for the sea-life and they were now making a living as fisherwomen, though not above turning a trick at their old trade in off hours. Hilsa was out night-fishing this very evening with Mother Grum. Even the foe had fallen on hard times. Two of the three fore-raiding Sea-Mingol galleys that had rowed off south had put into Salthaven three weeks later in great distress, having been battered about by storms and then becalmed, after having fled off ill-provisioned. The crew of one had been reduced to eating their sacred bow-stallion, while that of the other had so far lost their fanatic pride along with their madness that they had sold theirs to ‘Mayor’ Bomar, who wanted to be the first Rime Isle man (or ‘foreigner’) to own a horse, but succeeded only in breaking his neck on his first attempt to ride it. (Pshawri commented ‘He was—absit omen—a somewhat overweening man. He tried to take away from me command of Sea Hawk.’)