by Fritz Leiber
The swift something in his mind produced for his consideration a list of the beings who might hate him enough to wish him such a horrid doom and also conceivably have the magical power to effect it on him. The wizards Quarmal of Quarmall, Khahkht the Ice Wizard, Great Oomforafor, Hisvin the Rat King, his own mentor Sheelba turned against him, dear diabolic Hisvet, the gods Loki and Mog. It went on and on.
One thing stood out: any world in which a man could be twitched into his grave by the legerdemain of some mad principality or power was monstrously unfair!
10
Aboveground, Cif rose to her knees from where she’d been crouched, breaking her fingernails scrabbling at the frosty ground, and stretched her arms around the girls, who had been crowding in close and all trying to touch her, more for their own comfort and reassurance than for hers. She tried to touch them all in turn and draw them to her, hushing their clamours, though as much for her own comfort as for theirs. They felt cold.
Dumbstruck, Fafhrd turned back to ask Afreyt exactly what she’d seen when Mouser had seemed to sink into the ground impossibly. To his confusion he saw that she and Groniger were already a dozen yards away, hurrying toward Elvenhold, while Rill was sprinting after them at an angle from where she’d been at the end of the ritual line, the unlit lamp still streaming out behind her.
With a slow, puzzled headshake he turned forward again and saw, beyond the huddled backs of Cif and the girls, Pshawri convulsed in an agony, his features grimaced, his eyes squeezed half shut, his taut body rocking forward and back, and literally tearing his hair. By Kos, did the knave think it was mourning time already?
Then the tortured eyes of the Mouser’s young lieutenant fixed upon Cif. They widened, his body ceased to rock, he left off tearing his hair and he threw out both arms to her in mute appeal.
She responded immediately, pushing fully to her feet to go to him. But at that moment Fafhrd found his voice.
‘Don’t move a step!’ he called commandingly in carefully enunciated battle tones. ‘Stay where you are exactly—or we will lose the spot where Mouser disappeared into the ground.’
And he moved toward her deliberately, his sound right hand working to free his doubled-headed hand ax from the case where it hung at his side, its short helve pendant.
‘The spot where we must dig,’ he amplified, going to his knees close behind her.
She turned around, and seeing him bringing out his ax and thinking he meant to chop into the ground with it, cried in alarm, ‘Oh, don’t do that, you might hurt him.’
He shook his head reassuringly, and grasping the axe at the juncture of its head and helve, scraped with it strongly inward toward his knees, feeling with his hook through the earth he uncovered. He scraped three like swaths behind the first, baring a space about as big as a trapdoor, and then repeated the process, going an inch deeper.
Meanwhile Pshawri was approaching Cif, fumbling his pouch and babbling, ‘Sweet Lady, I am responsible for this dire mishap to my captain. I alone am guilty. Here, let me show you…’
Without ceasing his work, Fafhrd called sharply, ‘Forget that, Pshawri, and come here. I have an errand for you.’
But when that one did not seem to hear his words, only continuing to stare desperately at Cif and now groping at her arms to draw her attention, Fafhrd signed to her to draw the madman aside and hear his mouthings, meanwhile commanding, ‘You, Skullick, then! Come here!’
When his young sergeant swiftly obeyed, though not without an uneasy glance toward Pshawri, Fafhrd instructed him tersely, while keeping on with his scrapings, ‘Skullick, run like the wind back to the barracks. Find Skor and Mikkidu. Bid them haste here with one or two men apiece bringing heavy work gloves, scoops, shovels, pails, lanterns, and ropes. Don’t try to explain anything—here, take my ring. Then do you choose a man each of the Mouser’s men and mine—and a Mingol—and come on after with planks and the instruments needful for shoring a shaft, more rope, pulleys, food, fuel, water, a keg of brandy, blankets, the medicine case. Come as soon as these can be gathered. Use the dogcarts. Mannimark to remain in command at the barracks. Any questions? No? Then go!’
Skullick went. Instantly Rill took his place.
‘Fafhrd,’ she said urgently, ‘Afreyt and Groniger bid me tell you that whatever you believe we saw or think we saw, deceived perhaps by a phantom, the Mouser, at the end, raced with preternatural speed toward Elvenhold and then took cover. They go to hunt him. They urge you join them, after sending for lanterns, the dogs Racer and Gripper, and an unwashed piece of the Mouser’s intimate clothing.’
Fafhrd left off scraping out the square hole, which was five or six inches deep, to look around questioningly at those who had been listening.
‘Captain, he sank into the ground where you are digging,’ said Ourph the Mingol. ‘I saw.’
‘It’s true,’ growled Mother Grum, ‘though he grew somewhat insubstantial at the end.’
Cif broke away from the importunate Pshawri to aver with great certitude, ‘He went down there. I touched his pate and top hair before he sank away.’
Pshawri followed behind her, crying, ‘Here, Lady, I’ve found it. Here is the proof I lied to the Captain when I told him yesternight I brought up nothing from my Maelstrom dive.’
It was a skeleton cube of smooth metal big as an infant’s fist with something dark wedged inside. The metal looked like silver in the moonlight, but Cif knew that without question it was gold—the Rimish ikon that the Mouser had slung into the Great Maelstrom’s centre to quieten it after the wrecking of the Sea-Mingol armada.
‘My taking of this from the whirlpool’s maw,’ mad-eyed Pshawri proclaimed, ‘though meant to please him, has been the means of my captain’s doom. As he himself feared might hap. Gods, was ever man so cruelly self-deceived?’
‘Why did you lie to him, then?’ Fafhrd asked. ‘And why did you so desire to possess it?’
‘I may not tell you,’ Pshawri said miserably. ‘That is a private matter between myself and the Captain. Gods, what’s to do? What is to do?’
‘We keep on digging here,’ Fafhrd decided, suiting action to word. ‘Rill, tell Afreyt and Groniger of my decision.’
‘First let me make your work here easier,’ that one said, bringing the leviathan lantern from behind her and planting it on the ground next the square hole Fafhrd was digging, then snapping the fingers of her right hand thrice.
‘Burn without heat,’ she said simultaneously.
The simple magic worked.
Leviathan light white as new-fallen snow, pure history, sprang into being and illumined the surroundings like a piece of the full moon brought down to earth, so that every dirt grain inside the new-digged square seemed individually visible.
Fafhrd thanked her duly and Rill made off briskly toward Elvenhold.
Fafhrd turned back and said, ‘Pshawri, sit across the hole from me and feel through the new dirt uncovered by each of my axe scrapes. Two hands work faster than a hook. Gale! You—and Fingers here—come and kneel beside me and clear off to either side the earth my axe scrapes up. Now I’m through the frozen turf, I can take deeper swaths. Pshawri, while you are feeling for the Mouser’s head, tell us, coolly and clearly, all that your conscience will allow about your Maelstrom dive.’
‘You think he may yet survive?’ Cif asked falteringly, as though doubting her own wild hopes.
‘Madam,’ said Fafhrd, ‘I’ve known the Gray One for some time. It never does to underestimate his resourcefulness under adversity or coolth in peril.’
11
Tight-packed upright in dirt, as if he had been honoured with a Rimish pit burial, the Mouser became aware of a lump in his throat which, as he observed it, slowly grew larger and harder and began to involve or elicit twitching sensations in his cheeks and his mouth’s roof, and like painful feelings or impulses toward movement, deep in his chest. A tension grew in that whole area and there began the faintest buzzing in his ears. All these sensations continued to increase
without respite.
He recalled that his last breath had been drawn while he still saw the moon.
With a tremendous effort of will he fought down the urge to gulp in a great breath (which could fill his mouth with dust, set him coughing and gasping—not to be thought of!). He began very slowly (almost experimentally, you might say, except it had to be done—and soon!) to inhale, at first through his nostrils but swiftly switching to his barely parted lips, where his tongue could wet them and, moving from side to side, push back intrusive particles of earth, keep them at bay—somewhat like the approved technique for smoking hashish whereby one draws in thin whifflets of air on either side of the pipe to dilute the rich fumes. (Ah, mused the Mouser, the wondrous freedom of the tongue inside the mouth! No matter how the body were confined. Folk appreciated it insufficiently.)
And all the while he was drawing cold sips of precious life-giving air that had been stored between the particles of solid ground, and while letting no more dirt grains pass his lips than he could easily swallow. Why, in this fashion, he speculated, he might eventually move through the ground, taking in earth at his anterior end, perhaps—who knows?—extracting nutriment from it and then excreting it in a faecal trail.
But then the lump in his throat caught his attention again. He blew out that breath (it took an appreciable time, there was resistance) and slowly (remember, always slowly! he told himself) took in a second breath.
He decided after several repetitions of this process that if he worked at it industriously, losing no time but never letting himself be tempted to rush things, he could keep the lump in his throat (and the impulse to gasp) down to a tolerable size.
So for the present, understandably, everything not connected with breathing became of secondary importance to the Mouser—nay, tertiary!
He told himself that if he kept up the process long enough, it would become habitual, and then there would be room in his mind to think of other things, or at least of other aspects of his current predicament.
A question then would be: Would he care to do so when the time came? Would there be profit or comfort in such speculation?
As the Mouser did indeed slowly become able to attend to other matters, he noted a faint reddish glow within his eyelids. A few breaths later he told himself that could not be, it took sunlight to do that and here he had not even moon. (He would have permitted himself a small sob, except under his present circumstances the slightest breathing irregularity was not to be thought of.)
But curiosity, once roused, persisted (‘…even to the grave,’ he told himself with sententious melodrama), and after a few more breaths he parted his eyelids the narrowest slit, hedged by his lashes.
Nothing attacked him, not the tiniest grain of sand, and there was indeed yellow light.
After a bit he parted his lids still farther, while dutifully keeping up his breathing, of course, and surveyed the little scene.
Judging by the way the view was brightly yellow-rimmed, the illumination appeared to be coming from his own face. He remembered the strange dream or night-incident Cif had told him of, in which she’d seen him wearing a phosphorescent half-mask with ovals of blackness where his eyes would be. Perhaps she had indeed foreseen the future, for he now appeared to be wearing just such a mask.
What the light revealed was this: He was facing into a brown wall, so close it was blurred, but not close enough to touch in any way his bared optics.
Yet as he studied it, he seemed increasingly able to see into it, so that about a finger’s length beyond the frontal blur, individual grains of earth were sharply defined, as if some occult power of vision were mixed in with the natural sort, the former merging into and extending the latter.
By this means, whatever it might be, he saw a black pebble buried in the earth about six inches away, and beside that a dark green one big as his thumb, and next to that the ringed blank reddish face of an earthworm with small central circular mouth working, pointing almost directly at him so that its segments, seen in sharp perspective, nearly merged.
And then for the first time the element of hallucination or pure fantasy entered his vision, for it seemed to him that the worm addressed him in a high piping voice, saying, ‘O Mortal Man, what guards you? Why cannot I approach you to gnaw your eyeballs?’
Yet at the same time it so convinced the Mouser that he was beguiled into replying in soft gruff tones, ‘Ho, Fellow Prisoner—’
He got no further. His own voice, however diminished, made such a clamour in the confined space, reverberating back and forth within his skull and jaw, like wind chimes in a hurricane, that both his ears felt deep pain and he almost forgot to breathe.
The unexpectedly powerful vibrations raised by his incautious speaking also appeared to have upset the delicate equilibrium with which he hung in the sea of soil around him, for he noted that the two pebbles and the worm had begun to move upward all together, although he felt no corresponding downward pull upon his ankles. Clearly, he had prematurely attempted too much.
He carefully closed his eyes and reconcentrated all his attention on his slowly breathing in and breathing out, resolutely ignoring the deepening of his entombment.
12
Aboveground notable progress had been made in the Mouser search. It had got more organized. Both parties from the barracks had arrived and there was the reassuring presence of young men busily at work, Fafhrd’s big, lean ex-berserks, Northerners like him, and the Mouser’s reformed thieves, compact and wiry. The two dogcarts that had brought water, food, and lumber had been unloaded and the two-bearhound team of one had been unharnessed and ranged about watchfully. A small hot fire had been built and there were the heavy rich odours of mutton soup warming and gravy brewing. Mother Grum and old Ourph huddled beside the blaze.
Fafhrd’s square hole, widened by a foot on each side, had gone deep enough so that the heads of those digging it and feeling through the dirt were below ground level. Fafhrd had given over his job to his trusty lieutenant Skor, a prematurely balding redhead, while Pshawri continued at the same task, assisted now by Mara and Klute. A Northerner stood on the rim and every minute or so drew up a big pail of earth and emptied it to the side in one sweeping throw. The Mouser’s other lieutenant, Mikkidu, and another thief had started to put in the first tier of shoring from above, hammering eight-foot planks side by side with wooden mallets. Two leviathan-oil lanterns in the dark side of the hole glowed upward on their three faces. The full moon was three hours higher than when Skama had been honoured by the dance across the Great Meadow.
Fafhrd and Cif stood by the fire, sipping hot gahveh with the two oldsters. It was the first rest he’d taken. Behind him were Gale and Fingers, not drawing attention to themselves, partly for fear of being sent back to Salthaven by the next dogcart as May had been, to reassure their families all the girls were safe. Also in the fireside gahvehing group were Afreyt, Groniger, and Rill, the last having run to Elvenhold to summon the other two for conference and, as it turned out, argument.
Afreyt said to Fafhrd, without heat, ‘Dear man, I deeply admire and respect your loyalty to and regard for your old friend that makes you search for him with such stubborn single-mindedness along one trail only, a trail where your greatest success can hardly be more than the digging up of a corpse. But I question your logic. Since there are other trails—and Groniger and I both attest to that—trails promising a more useful sort of success, if any, why not expend at least half our efforts on those? Nay, why not all?’
‘That appears to me to be most closely reasoned,’ Groniger put in, seconding.
‘You think I was guided by logic and reason in what I did?’ Fafhrd asked with a shade of impatience, even contempt, shaking his hook at them. ‘I saw him sink, I tell you. So did others. Cif felt him go straight down.’
‘I too,’ from Ourph. ‘We saw one miracle, why not expect another?’
Afreyt took up, ‘Yet all of you who saw him sink have admitted, at one time or another since, that he gre
w insubstantial toward the end. And so did he to Gron and I, I freely admit, in his flight toward Elvenhold. But does not that equality argue for us giving an equal weight to both possibilities?’
Fafhrd replied, a little tiredly. ‘I’m bothered myself by those impressions of the Mouser fading. In view of them, the idea of also searching for him elsewhere on Rime Isle seems sensible, and when I sent Gib the Mingol back with the second dogcart for more lumber, you heard me tell him to fetch some rag of the Mouser’s and the two scent dogs if available.’
Cif spoke up. ‘I keep wondering if there’s not some way to use, in hunting Mou, the golden queller Pshawri brought up from the Maelstrom. It’s enwedged with the black cinder of god Loki, whom I’m convinced is responsible for Mou’s present plight. A most treacherous and madly malevolent deity, as I learned in my dealings with him.’
‘You’re right about that last,’ Mother Grum agreed darkly, but before she could say more, Skor yelled up from the hole, ‘Captain, I’ve uncovered something buried seven feet deep you’ll want to see. Will send it up.’
Fafhrd moved quickly to the rim, took something off the top of the next bucketload drawn up, shook it out and then closely inspected it.
