by Fritz Leiber
The Mouser bowed and made his way out. As he passed the statuesque maid with crisscrossed back, he whispered, “Your name?”
“Reetha,” she breathed.
Hisvet came rustling past to dip up a silver forkful of caviar, Reetha automatically dropping to her knees.
“Dark delights,” Hisvin's daughter murmured and rolled the tiny black fish eggs between her bee-stung upper lip and pink and blue tongue.
When the Mouser was gone, Glipkerio bent down to Hisvin, until his figure somewhat resembled a black gibbet. “A word in your ear,” he whispered. “The rats sometimes make even me ... well, nervous.”
“They are most fearsome beasties,” Hisvin agreed somberly, “who might daunt even the gods.”
Fafhrd spurred south along the stony sea-road that led from Klelg Nar to Sarheenmar and which was squeezed between steep, rocky mountains and the Inner Sea. The sea's dark swells peaked up blackly as they neared shore and burst with unending crashes a few yards below the road, which was dank and slippery with their spray. Overhead pressed low dark clouds which seemed less water vapor than the smoke of volcanoes or burning cities.
The Northerner was leaner—he had sweated and burned away weight—and his face was grim, his eyes red-shot and red-rimmed from dust, his hair dulled with it. He rode a tall, powerful, gaunt-ribbed gray mare with dangerous eyes, also red-shot—a beast looking as cursed as the landscape they traversed.
He had traded the bay with the Mingols for this mount, and despite its ill temper got the best of the bargain, for the bay had been redly gasping out its life from a lance thrust at the time of the trade. Approaching Klelg Nar along the forest road, he had spied three spider-thin Mingols preparing to rape slender twin sisters. He had managed to thwart this cruel and unaesthetic enterprise because he had given the Mingols no time to use their bows, only the lance, while their short narrow scimitars had been no match for Graywand. When the last of the three had gone down, sputtering curses and blood, Fafhrd had turned to the identically-clad girls, only to discover that he had rescued but one—a Mingol had mean-heartedly cut the other's throat before turning his scimitar on Fafhrd. Thereafter Fafhrd had mastered one of the tethered Mingol horses despite its fiendish biting and kicking. The surviving girl had revealed among her other shriekings that her family might still be alive among the defenders of Klelg Nar, so Fafhrd had swung her up on his saddlebow despite her frantic struggles and efforts to bite. When she quieted somewhat, he had been stirred by her slim sprawly limbs so close and her lemur-large eyes and her repeated assertion, reinforced by horrendous maidenly curses and quaint childhood slang, that all men without exception were hairy beasts, this with a sneer at Fafhrd's luxuriously furred chest. But although tempted to amorousness he had restrained himself out of consideration for her coltish youth—she seemed scarce twelve, though tall for her age—and recent bereavement. Yet when he had returned her to her not very grateful and strangely suspicious family, she had replied to his courteous promise to return in a year or two with a wrinkling of her snub nose and a sardonic flirt of her blue eyes and slim shoulders, leaving Fafhrd somewhat doubtful of his wisdom in sparing her his wooing and also saving her in the first place. Yet he had gained a fresh mount and a tough Mingol bow with its quiver of darts.
Klelg Nar was the scene of bitter house-to-house and tree-to-tree street fighting, while Mingol campfires glowed in a semicircle to the east every night. To his dismay Fafhrd had learned that for weeks there had not been a ship in Klelg Nar's harbor, of which the Mingols held half the perimeter. They had not fired the city because wood was wealth to the lean dwellers of the treeless steppes—in fact, their slaves dismantled and plucked apart houses as soon as won and the precious planks and lovely carvings were instantly carted off east, or more often dragged on travoises.
So despite the rumor that a branch of the Mingol horde had bent south, Fafhrd had set off in that direction on his vicious-tempered mount, somewhat tamed by the whip and morsels of honeycomb. And now it seemed from the smoke adrift above the sea-road that the Mingols might not have spared Sarheenmar from the torch as they had Klelg Nar. It also began to seem certain that the Mingols had taken Sarheenmar, from the evidence of the wild-eyed, desperate, ragged, dust-caked refugees who began to crowd the road in their flight north, forcing Fafhrd to toil now and again up the hillside, to save them from his new mount's savage hooves. He questioned a few of the refugees, but they were incoherent with terror, babbling as wildly as if he sought to waken them from nightmare. Fafhrd nodded to himself—he knew the Mingol penchant for torture.
But then a disordered troop of Mingol cavalry had come galloping along in the same direction as the escaping Sarheenmarts. Their horses were lathered with sweat and their shiny faces contorted by terror. They appeared not to see Fafhrd, let alone consider attacking him, while it seemed not from malice but panic that they rode down such refugees as got in their way.
Fafhrd's face grew grim and frowning as he cantered on, still against the gibbering stream, wondering what horror would daunt Mingol and Sarheenmart alike.
Black rats kept showing themselves in Lankhmar by day—not stealing or biting, squealing or scurrying, but only showing themselves. They peered from drains and new-gnawed holes, they sat in window slits, they crouched indoors as calmly and confident-eyed as cats—and as often, proportionately, in milady's boudoir as in the tenement-cells of the poor.
Whenever they were noted, there was a gasping and then shrieking, a rush of footsteps, and a hurling of black pots, begemmed bracelets, knives, rocks, chessmen, or whatever else might be handy. But often it was a time before the rats were noted, so serene and at home they seemed.
Some trotted sedately amidst the ankles and swaying black togas of the crowds on the tiled or cobbled streets, like pet dwarf dogs, causing sharp human eddies when they were recognized. Five sat like black, bright-eyed bottles on a top shelf in the store of the wealthiest grocer in Lankhmar, until they were spied for what they were and hysterically pelted with clumpy spice-roots, weighty Hrusp nuts, and even jars of caviar, whereupon they made their leisurely exit through a splinter-edged rat doorway which had not been in the back of the shelf the day before. Among the black marble sculptures lining the walls of the Temple of the Beasts, another dozen posed two-legged like carvings until the climax of the ritual, when they took up a fife-like squeaking and began a slow, sure-foot weaving through the niches. Beside the blind beggar Naph, three curled on the curb, mistaken for his soot-dirty rucksack, until a thief tried to steal it. Another reposed on the jeweled cushion of the pet black marmoset of Elakeria, niece of the overlord and a most lush devourer of lovers, until she absently reached out a plump hand to stroke the beastie and her nail-gilded fingers encountered not velvet fur, but short and bristly.
During floods and outbreaks of the dread Black Sickness, rats had in remembered times invaded the streets and dwellings of Lankhmar, but then they had raced and dodged or staggered in curves, never moved with their present impudent deliberation.
Their behavior made old folks and storytellers and thin-bearded squinting scholars fearfully recall the fables that there had once been a humped city of rats large as men where imperial Lankhmar had now stood for three-score centuries; that rats had once had a language and government of their own and a single empire stretching to the borders of the unknown world, coexistent with man's cities but more unified; and that beneath the stoutly mortared stones of Lankhmar, far below their customary burrowings and any delvings of man, there was a low-ceilinged rodent metropolis with streets and homes and glow-lights all its own and granaries stuffed with stolen grain.
Now it seemed as if the rats owned not only that legendary sub-metropolitan rodent Lankhmar, but Lankhmar above ground as well, they stood and sat and moved so arrogantly.
The sailors from Squid, prepared to awe their sea-tavern cronies and get many free drinks with their tales of the horrid rat-attack on their ship, found Lankhmar interested only in its own rat plague. They were f
illed with chagrin and fear. Some of them returned for refuge to Squid, where the starsman's light-defenses had been renewed and both Slinoor and the black kitten worriedly paced the poop.
Chapter Eight
Glipkerio Kistomerces ordered tapers lit while the sunset glow still flared in his lofty sea-footed banquet hall. Yet the beanpole monarch seemed very merry as with many a giggle and whinnying laugh he assured his grave, nervous councillors that he had a secret weapon to scotch the rats at the peak of their insolent invasion and that Lankhmar would be rid of them well before the next full moon. He scoffed at his wrinkle-faced Captain General, Olegnya Mingolsbane, who would have him summon troops from the outlying cities and towns to deal with the furry attackers. He seemed unmindful of the faint patterings that came from behind the gorgeously figured draperies whenever a lull in the conversation and clink of eating tools let it be heard, or of the occasional small, hunchbacked, four-footed shadow cast by the tapers’ light. As the long banquet went its bibulous course, he seemed to grow more merry and carefree yet—fey, some whispered in their partners’ ears. But twice his right hand shook as he lifted his tall-stemmed wine glass, while beneath the table his ropy left fingers quivered continuously, and he had doubled his long skinny legs and hooked the heels of his gilded boots over a silver rung of his chair to keep his feet off the floor.
Outdoors the rising moon, gibbous and waning, showed small, low, humped shapes moving along each roof-ridge of the city, except those on the Street of the Gods, both the many temples of the Gods in Lankhmar and the grimy cornices of the temple of the Gods of Lankhmar and its tall, square bell-tower which never issued chimes.
The Gray Mouser scuffed moodily up and down the pale sandy path that curved around the grove of perfumy closet trees. Each tree was like a huge, upended, hemispherical basket, its bottom and sides formed by the thin, resilient, closely-spaced branches which, weighted with dark green leaves and pure white blooms, curved widely out and down, so that the interior was a single bell-shaped, leaf-and-flower-walled room, most private. Fire-beetles and glow-wasps and night-bees supping at the closet flowers dimly outlined each natural tent with their pale, winking, golden and violet and pinkish lights.
From within two or three of the softly iridescent bowers already came the faint murmurings of lovers, or perhaps, the Mouser thought with a vicious stab of the mind, of thieves who had chosen one of these innocent and traditionally hallowed privacies to plot the night's maraudings. Younger or on another night, the Mouser would have eavesdropped on the second class of privacy-seekers, in order to loot their chosen victims ahead of them. But now he had other rats to roast.
High tenements to the east hid the moon, so that beyond the twinkling twilight of the closet trees, the rest of the Plaza of Dark Delights was almost gropingly black, except where some small dim sheen marked store or stand, or ghostly flames and charcoal glow showed hot food and drink available, or where some courtesan rhythmically swung her tiny scarlet lantern as she sauntered.
Those last lights mightily irked the Mouser at the moment, though there had been times when they had drawn him as the closet bloom does the night-bee and twice they had jogged redly through his dreams as he had sailed home in Squid. But several most embarrassing visits this afternoon—first to fashionable female friendlets, then to the city's most titillating brothels—had demonstrated to him that his manhood, which he had felt so ravenously a-leap in Kvarch Nar and aboard Squid, was limply dead except—he first surmised, now rather desperately hoped—where Hisvet was concerned. Every time he had embraced a girl this disastrous half-day, the slim triangular face of Hisvin's daughter had got ghostily in the way, making the visage of his companion of the moment dull and gross by comparison, while from the tiny silver dart in his temple a feeling of sick boredom and unjoyful satiety had radiated through all his flesh.
Reflected from his flesh, this feeling filled his mind. He was dully aware that the rats, despite the great losses they had suffered aboard Squid, threatened Lankhmar. Rats were deterred even less than men by numerical losses and made them up more readily. And Lankhmar was a city for which he felt some small affection, as of a man for a very large pet. Yet the rats menacing it had, whether from Hisvet's training or some deeper source, an intelligence and organization that was eerily frightening. Even now he could imagine troops of black rats footing it unseen across the lawns and along the paths of the Plaza beyond the closet trees’ glow, encircling him in a great ambush, rank on black rank.
He was aware too that he had lost whatever small trust the fickle Glipkerio had ever had in him and that Hisvin and Hisvet, after their seemingly total defeat, had turned the tables on him and must be opposed and defeated once again, just as Glipkerio's favor must be re-won.
But Hisvet, far from being an enemy to be beaten, was the girl to whom he was in thrall, the only being who could restore him to his rightful, calculating, selfish self. He touched with his fingertips the little ridge the silver dart made in his temple. It would be the work of a moment to squeeze it out point-first through its thin covering of skin. But he had a dread of what would happen then: he might not lose only his bored satiety, but the juice of all feeling, or even life itself. Besides, he didn't want to give up his silver link with Hisvet.
A tiny treading on the gravel of the path, a very faint rutching that was nevertheless more than that of one pair of footsteps, made him look up. Two slim nuns in the black robes of the Gods of Lankhmar and in the customary narrow, jutting hoods which left faces totally shadowed were approaching him, long-sleeved arm in arm.
He had known courtesans in the Plaza of Dark Delights to adopt almost any garb to inflame the senses of their customers, new or old, and capture or recapture their interest: the torn smock of a beggar girl, the hose and short jerkin and close-cropped hair of a page, the beads and bangles of a slave-girl of the Eastern Lands, the fine chain mail and visored helmet and slim sword of a fighting prince from those same areas of Nehwon, the rustling greenery of a wood nymph, the green or purplish weeds of a sea nymph, the prim dress of a schoolgirl, the embroidered garb of a priestess of any of the Gods in Lankhmar—the folk of the City of the Black Toga are rarely or never disturbed by blasphemies committed against such gods, since there are thousands of them, and easily replaced.
But there was one dress that no courtesan would dare counterfeit: the simple, straight-falling black robes and hood of a nun of the Gods of Lankhmar.
And yet...
A dozen yards short of him, the two slim black figures turned off the path toward the nearest closet tree. One parted its rustling, pendant branches, black sleeve hanging from her arm like a bat's wing. The other slipped inside. The first swiftly followed her, but not before her hood had slipped back a little, showing for an instant by a wasp's violet pulse the smiling face of Frix.
The Mouser's heart leaped. So did he.
As the Mouser arrived inside the bower amid an explosion of dislodged white blooms, as if the tree herself were throwing flowers to welcome him, the two slim black figures faced around toward him and dropped back their hoods. The same as he had last seen it aboard Squid, Frix's dark hair was confined by a silver net. The smile still curved her lips, though her gaze was distant and grave. But Hisvet's hair was itself a silver-blonde wonder, her lips pouted enticingly, as if blowing him a kiss, while her gaze danced all over his person with naughty merriment.
She moved toward him a step.
With a happy roaring shout only he could hear, blood rushed through the Mouser's arteries toward his center, reviving his limp manhood in a mere moment, as a magically summoned genie offhandedly builds a tower.
The Mouser imitated his blood, rushing blindly to Hisvet and clapping his arms around her.
But with a concerted movement like a half-circling in a swift dance, the two girls had changed places, so that it was Frix he found himself embracing, and with cheek pressed to cheek, for at the last moment she had swayed her head aside.
The Mouser would have dise
ngaged himself then, murmuring courteous and indeed almost sincere excuses, for through her robe Frix's body felt slimly enticing and most interestingly embossed, except that at that instant Hisvet leaned her head over Frix's shoulder and, tipping her elfin face sideways, planted her half-parted lips on the Mouser's mouth, which instantly began to imitate that of the industrious bee sipping nectar.
It seemed to him that he was in the Seventh Heaven, which is reserved for only the most youthful and beauteous of the gods.
When at last Hisvet removed her lips from his, keeping her face so close that the fresh scar Cat's Claw had made was a blue-edged pink ribbon from magnificent nostril to velvet-rounded slender jaw, it was instantly to murmur to him, “Rejoice, delicious Dirksman, for you have kissed with your own the actual lips of a Demoiselle of Lankhmar, which is a familiarity almost beyond imagining, and you have kissed my lips, an intimacy which passeth all understanding. And now, Dirksman, embrace Frix closely whilst I preoccupy your eyes and solace your face, which is truly the noblest area of the skin, the very soul's vizard. It is demeaning work for me, to be sure, as if a goddess should scrub and anoint with oil a common soldier's dirty boot, yet know that I do it right gladly.”
Meanwhile Frix's slim fingers were unbuckling his ratskin belt. With the faintest slither and tiniest double thunk, it slipped with Scalpel and Cat's Claw to the springy close-cropped turf bleached almost white by the closet tree's perpetual shade.
“Remember, your eyes on me only,” Hisvet whispered with the faintest yet firmest note of reproach. “I remain unjealous of Frix only so long as you disregard her utterly.”
