by Fritz Leiber
And so it was that Pulgh Arthonax, penurious and perverse overlord of Lankhmar, who hated heroes of all description—but especially fair-complected big ones like Fafhrd—and Hamomel, thrifty and ruthless grand master of the Thieves Guild there, who detested the Mouser generally as a freelance competitor and particularly as one who had lured twelve promising apprentices away from the Guild to be his henchmen—these two took counsel together and commissioned the Assassins’ Order, an elite within the Slayers’ Brotherhood, to dispatch the Twain in Rime Isle before they should point toe toward Lankhmar. And because Arth-Pulgh and Hamomel were both most miserly magnates and insatiably greedy withal, they beat down the Order’s price as far as they could and made it a condition of the commission that three-fourths of any portable booty found on or near the doomed Twain be returned to them as their lawful share.
So the Order drew up death warrants, chose by lot two of its currently unoccupied fellows, and in solemn secret ceremony attended only by the Master and the Recorder, divested these of their identities and rechristened them the Death of Fafhrd and the Death of the Gray Mouser, by which names only they should henceforth be known to each other and within the profession until the death warrants were served and their commissions fulfilled.
6
Next day repairs to Sea Hawk continued, the low tide repeating, Witches Moon being only one day old. During a late morning break Fafhrd moved apart from his men a little and scanned the high bright sky toward north and east, his gaze ranging. Skor ventured to follow him across the wet sand and copy his peerings. He saw nothing in the gray-blue heavens, but experience had taught him his captain had exceptionally keen eyesight.
‘Sea eagles?’ he asked softly.
Fafhrd looked at him thoughtfully, then smiled, shaking his head, and confided, ‘I was imagining which stars would be there, were it now night.’
Skor’s forehead wrinkled puzzledly. ‘Stars by day?’
Fafhrd nodded. ‘Yes. Where think you the stars are by day?’
‘Gone,’ Skor answered, his forehead clearing. ‘They go away at dawn and return at evening. Their lights are extinguished—like winter campfires! for surely it must be cold where the stars are, higher than mountaintops. Until the sun comes out to warm up things, of course.’
Fafhrd shook his head. ‘The stars march west across the sky each night in the same formations which we recognize year after year, dozen years after dozen, and I would guess gross after gross. They do not skitter for the horizon when day breaks or seek out lairs and earth holes, but go on marching with the sun’s glare hiding their lights—under cover of day, one might express it.’
‘Stars shining by day?’ Skor questioned, doing a fair job of hiding his surprise and bafflement. Then he caught Fafhrd’s drift, or thought he did, and a certain wonder appeared in his eyes. He knew his captain was a good general who made a fetish of keeping track of the enemy’s position, especially in terrain affording concealment, as forest on land or fog at sea. So by his very nature his captain had applied the same rule to the stars and studied ’em as closely as he’d traced the movements of the Mingol scouts fleeing across Rime Isle.
Though it was strange thinking of the stars as enemies. His captain was a deep one! Perhaps he did have foes among the stars. Skor had heard rumour that he’d bedded a queen of the air.
7
That night as the Gray Mouser and Cif leisurely prepared for bed in her low-eaved house tinted a sooty red on the northwestern edge of Salthaven City, and whilst that lady busied herself at her mirrored dressing table, the Mouser himself sitting on bed’s edge set his pouch upon a low bedside table and withdrew from it a curious lot of commonplace objects—curious in part because they were so commonplace—and arranged them in a line on the table’s dark surface.
Cif, made curious by the slow regularity of his movements she saw reflected cloudily in the sheets of silver she faced, took up a small flat black box and came over and sat herself beside him.
The objects included a toothed small wooden wheel as big almost as a Sarheenmar dollar with two of the teeth missing, a finch’s feather, three lookalike gray round pebbles, a scrap of blue wool cloth stiff with dirt, a bent wrought-iron nail, a hazelnut, and a dinted small black round that might have been a Lankhmar tik or Eastern halfpenny.
Cif ran her eye along them, then looked at him questioningly.
He said, ‘Coming here from the barracks at first eve, a strange mood seized me. Low in the sunset glow the new moon’s faintest and daintiest silver crescent had just materialized like the ghost of a young girl—and just in the direction of this house, at that, as though to signal your presence here—but somehow I had eyes only for the gutter and the pathside. Which is where I found those. And a remarkable lot they are for a small northern seaport. You’d think Ilthmar at least…’ He shook his head.
‘But why collect ’em?’ she queried. Like an old ragpicker, she thought.
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I think I thought I might find a use for them,’ he added doubtfully.
She said, ‘They do look like oddments that might be involved in casting a spell.’
He shrugged again, but added, ‘They’re not all what they seem. That, for instance—’ he pointed at one of three gray spherelets. ‘—is not a pebble like the other two, but a lead slingshot, perhaps one of my own.’
Struck by his thrusting finger, that rolled off the table and hit the terrazzo floor with a little dull yet dinky thud, as if to prove his observation.
As he recovered it, he paused with his eyes close to the floor to study first the crushed black marble of the terrazzo flecked with dark red and gold, and second Cif’s near foot, which he then drew up onto his lap and studied still more minutely.
‘A strangely symmetric pentapod coral outcrop from sea’s bottom,’ he observed, and planted a slow kiss upon the base of her big toe, insinuated the tip of his tongue between it and the next.
‘There’s an eel nosed around in my reef,’ she murmured.
Laying his cheek upon her ankle, he sighted up her leg. She was wearing a singlet of fine brown linen that tied between her legs. He said, ‘Your hair has exactly the same tints as are in the flooring.’
She said, ‘You think I didn’t select the marble for crushing with that in mind? Or add in the gold flakes? Here’s a present of sorts for you.’ And she pushed the small flat black box down her leg toward him from her groin to her knee.
He sat up to inspect it, though keeping her foot in his lap.
On the black fabric lining it, there lay like a delicate mist cloud the slender translucent bladder of a fish.
Cif said, ‘I am minded to experience your love fully tonight. Yet not as fully, mind you, as to wish that we fashion a daughter together.’
The Mouser said, ‘I’ve seen the like of this made of thinnest leather well oiled.’
She said, ‘Not as effectual, I believe.’
He said, ‘To be sure, here, it would be something from a fish, this being Rime Isle. Tell me, did harbor master Groniger fashion this, as thrifty with the Isle’s sperm as with its coins?’ Then he nodded.
He reached over and drew her other foot up on his lap also. After saluting it similarly, he rested the side of his face on both her ankles and sighted up the narrow trough between her legs. ‘I am minded,’ he said dreamily but with a little growl in his voice, ‘to embark on another slow and intensely watchful journey, mindful of every step, such as that by which I arrived at this house this eve.’
She nodded, wondering idly if the growl were Gusorio’s, but it seemed too faint for that.
8
In the bow of a laden grainship sailing north from Lankhmar across the Inner Sea to the land of the Eight Cities, the Death of Fafhrd, who was tall and lank, dire as a steel scarecrow, said to his fellow passenger, ‘This incarnation likes me and likes me not. ’Tis a balmy journey now but it’ll be long and by all accounts cold as witchcunt at the end, albeit summer. Arth-Pulgh’s a mean employer, an
d unlucky. Hand me a medlar from the sack.’
The Death of the Gray Mouser, lithe as a weasel and forever smiling, replied, ‘No meaner nor no curster than Hamomel. Working for whom, however, is the pits. I’ve not yet shaken down to this persona, know not its likings. Reach your own apples.’
9
A week later, the evening being unseasonably balmy and Witches Moon at first quarter near the top of the sky, a hemispherical silver goblet brimful of stars and scattering them dimmed by moonwine all over the sky as it descended toward the lips of the west, drawn down by the same goddess who had lifted it, Afreyt and Fafhrd after supping alone at her violet-tinted pale house on Salthaven’s northern edge were minded to wander across the great meadow in the direction of Elvenhold, a northward slanting slim rock spire two bowshots high, chimneyed and narrowly terraced, that thrust from the rolling fields almost a league away to the west.
‘See how her tilt,’ Fafhrd observed of that slender mountainlet, ‘directs her at the dark boss of the Targe—’ (naming the northernmost constellation in the Lankhmar heavens) ‘—as if she were granite arrow aimed at skytop by the gods of the underworld.’
‘Tonight the earth is full of the heat of these gods’ forges, pressing summer scents from spring flowers and grasses. Let’s rest awhile,’ Afreyt answered, and truly although it was not yet May Eve, the heavy air was more like Midsummer’s. She touched his shoulder and sank to the herby sward.
After a stare around the horizon for any sky wanderer on verge of rise or set, Fafhrd seated himself by her right side. A low lurhorn sounded faintly from the town behind them or the sea beyond that.
‘Night fishers summoning the finny ones,’ he hazarded.
‘I dreamed last night,’ she said, ‘that a beast thing came out of the sea and followed me dripping salt drops as I wandered through a dark wood. I could see its silver scales between the dark boles in the gloom. But I was not afeared, and it in turn seemed to respond to this cue, for the longer it followed me the less it became like a beast and the more like a sea-person, and come not to work a hurt on me but to warn me.’
‘Of what?’ and when she was silent, ‘Its sex?’
‘Why, female—’ she answered at once, but then becoming doubtful, ‘—I think. Had it sex? I wonder why I did not wait for it to catch up, or perhaps turn sudden and walk toward it? I think I felt, did I so, and although I feared it not, it would turn to a beast again, a deep-voiced beast.’
‘I too dreamed strangely last night, and my dream strangely chimed with yours, or was it by day I dreamed? For I have begun to do that,’ Fafhrd announced, dropping himself back at full length on the springy sward, the better to observe the seven spiralled stars of the Targe. ‘I dreamt I was pent in the greatest of castles with a million dark rooms in it, and that I searched for Gusorio (for that old legend between the Mouser and me is sometimes more than a joke) because I’d been solemnly told, perchance in a dream within the dream, that he had a message for me.’
She turned and leaned over him, her eyes staring deep into his as she listened. Her palely golden hair fell forward in two sweeping smooth cascades over her shoulders. He readjusted his position slightly so that five of the stars of Targe rose in a semicircle from her forehead (his eyes straying now and again toward her shadowed throat and the silver cord lacing together the sides of her violet bodice) and he continued, ‘In the twelve times twelve times twelfth room there stood at the far door a figure clad all in silver-scale mail (there’s our dreams chiming) but its back was toward me and the longer I looked at it, the taller and skinnier it seemed than Gusorio should be. Nevertheless I cried out to it aloud and in the very instant of my calling knew that I’d made an irreparable mistake and that my voice would work a hideous change in it and to my harm. See, our dreams clink again? But then, as it started to turn, I awoke. Dearest princess, did you know that the Targe crowns you?’ And his right hand moved toward the silver bow drooping below her throat as she bent down to kiss him.
But as he enjoyed those pleasures and their continuations and proliferations while the moon sank, which pleasures were greatly enhanced by their starry background, the far ecstasies complementing the near, he marvelled how these nights he seemed to be walking at once toward brightest life and darkest death, while through it all Elvenhold loomed in the low distance.
10
‘No question on it, Captain Mouser’s changed,’ Pshawri said with certainty, yet also amazedly and apprehensively, to his fellow lieutenant Mikkidu as they tippled together two evenings later in a small booth of the Sea Wrack. ‘Here’s yet another example if’t be needed. You know the care he has for our grub, to see that cookie doesn’t poison us. Normally he’ll taste a spoon of stew, say what it lacks or not, even order it dumped (that happened once, remember?) and go dancing off. Yet this very afternoon I spied him standing before the roiling soup kettle and staring into it for as long as it takes to stow Flotsam’s mainsail and then rig it again, watching it bubble and seethe with greatest interest, the beans and fish flakes bobbing and the turnips and carrots turning over, as though he were reading there auguries and prognostics on the fate of the world!’
Mikkidu nodded. ‘Or else he’s trotting about bent over like Mother Grum, seeing things even an ant ignores. He had me stooping about after him over a route that could have been the plan of a maze, pointing out in turn a tangle of hair combings, a penny, a pebble, a parchment scrap scribbled with runic, mouse droppings, and a dead cockroach.’
‘Did he make you eat it?’ asked Pshawri.
Mikkidu shook his head wonderingly. ‘No chewings…and no chewings out either. He only said at the end, when my legs had started to cramp, “I want you to keep these matters in mind in the future.”’
‘And meantime Captain Fafhrd—’
The two semi-rehabilitated thieves looked up. Skor from the next booth had thrust over his balding head, worry-wrinkled, which now loomed above them ‘—is so busy keeping watch on the stars by night—and by day too, somehow—that it’s a wonder he can navigate Salthaven without breaking his neck. Think you some evil wight has put a spell on both?’
Normally the Mouser’s and Fafhrd’s men were mutually rivalrous, suspicious, and disparaging of each other. It was a measure of their present concern for their captains that they pooled their knowledge and took frank counsel together.
Pshawri shrugged as hugely as one so small was able. ‘Who knows? ’Tis such footling matters, and yet…’
‘Chill ills abound here,’ Mikkidu intoned. ‘Khahkht the Wizard of Ice, Stardock’s ghost fliers, sunken Simorgya…’
11
At the same moment Cif and Afreyt, in the former’s sauna, chatted together with even greater but more playful freedom. Afreyt confided with mock grandeur, ‘I’ll have you know that Fafhrd compared my niplets to stars.’
Cif chortled midst the steam and answered coarsely with mock pride, ‘The Mouser likened my arse hole to one. And to the stem dimple of a pome. And his own intrusive member to a stiletto! Whate’er ails them doesn’t show in bed.’
‘Or does it?’ Afreyt questioned laughingly. ‘In my case, stars. In yours, fruits and cutlery too.’
12
As the Deaths of Fafhrd and the Mouser jounced on donkeyback at the tail of a small merchant troop to which they’d attached themselves travelling through the forested land of the Eight Cities from Kvarch Nar to Illik Ving, Witches Moon being full, the former observed, ‘The trouble with these long incarnations as the death of another is that one begins to forget one’s own proper persona and best interests, especially if one be a dedicated actor.’
‘Not so, necessarily,’ the other responded. ‘Rather, it gives one a clear head (what head clearer than Death’s?) to observe oneself dispassionately and examine without bias the terms of the contract under which one operates.’
‘That’s true enough,’ Fafhrd’s Death said, stroking his lean jaw while his donkey stepped along evenly for a change. ‘Why think you this one talks s
o much of booty we may find?’
‘Why else but that Arth-Pulgh and Hamomel expect there will be treasure on our intendeds or about them? There’s a thought to warm the cold nights coming!’
‘Yes, and raises a nice question in our order’s law, whether we’re being hired principally as assassins or robbers.’
‘No matter that,’ Death of the Mouser summed up. ‘We know at least we must not hit the Twain until they’ve shown us where their treasure is.’
‘Or treasures are, more like,’ the other amended, ‘if they distrust each other, as all sane men do.’
13
Coming in opposite directions around a corner behind Salthaven’s council hall after a sharp rain shower, the Mouser and Fafhrd bumped into each other because the one was bending down to inspect a new puddle while the other studied the clouds retreating from arrows of sunshine. After grappling together briefly with sharp growls that turned to sudden laughter, Fafhrd was shaken enough from his current preoccupations by this small surprise to note the look of puzzled and wondrous brooding that instantly replaced the sharp friendly grin on the Mouser’s face—a look that was undersurfaced by a pervasive sadness.
His heart was touched and he asked, ‘Where’ve you been keeping yourself, comrade? I never seem to see you to talk to these past days.’
‘’Tis true,’ the Mouser replied with a sharp grimace, ‘we do seem to be operating on different levels, you and I, in our movings around Salthaven this last moon-wax.’
