Swords and Ice Magic fagm-6

by Fritz Leiber

  The two heroes each spent a delightful weekend with his lady of the week.

  “I don't know why I do things like this,” Hisvet said, lisping faintly and touching the Mouser intimately as they lay side by side supine on silken sheets. “It must be because I loathe you.”

  “A pleasant and even worthy encounter,” Frix confessed to Fafhrd in similar situation. “It is my hang-up to enjoy playing, now and then, with the lower animals. Which some would say is a weakness in a queen of the air.”

  Their weekend done, Fafhrd and the Mouser were automatically magicked back to Lankhmar, encountering one another in Cheap Street near Nattick Nimblefinger's narrow and dirty-looking dwelling. The Mouser was his right size again.

  “You look sunburned,” he observed to his comrade.

  “Space-burned, it is,” Fafhrd corrected. “Frix lives in a remarkably distant land. But you, old friend, look paler than your wont.”

  “Shows what three days underground will do to a man's complexion,” the Mouser responded. “Come, let's have a drink at the Silver Eel.”

  Ningauble in his cave near Ilthmar and Sheelba in his mobile hut in the Great Salt Marsh each smiled, though lacking the equipment for that facial expression. They knew they had laid one more obligation on their protégés.

  IV: The Bait

  Fafhrd the Northerner was dreaming of a great mound of gold.

  The Gray Mouser the Southerner, ever cleverer in his forever competitive fashion, was dreaming of a heap of diamonds. He hadn't tossed out all of the yellowish ones yet, but he guessed that already his glistening pile must be worth more than Fafhrd's glowing one.

  How he knew in his dream what Fafhrd was dreaming was a mystery to all beings in Nehwon, except perhaps Sheelba of the Eyeless Face and Ningauble of the Seven Eyes, respectively the Mouser's and Fafhrd's sorcerer-mentors. Maybe, a vast, black basement mind shared by the two was involved.

  Simultaneously they awoke, Fafhrd a shade more slowly, and sat up in bed.

  Standing midway between the feet of their cots was an object that fixed their attention. It weighed about eighty pounds, was about four feet eight inches tall, had long straight black hair pendant from head, had ivory-white skin, and was as exquisitely formed as a slim chesspiece of the King of Kings carved from a single moonstone. It looked thirteen, but the lips smiled a cool self-infatuated seventeen, while the gleaming deep eye-pools were first blue melt of the Ice Age. Naturally, she was naked.

  “She is mine!” the Gray Mouser said, always quick from the scabbard.

  “No, she's mine!” Fafhrd said almost simultaneously, but conceding by that initial “No” that the Mouser had been first, or at least he had expected the Mouser to be first.

  “I belong to myself and to no one else, save two or three virile demidevils,” the small naked girl said, though giving them each in turn a most nymphish lascivious look.

  “I'll fight you for her,” the Mouser proposed.

  “And I you,” Fafhrd confirmed, slowly drawing Graywand from its sheath beside his cot.

  The Mouser likewise slipped Scalpel from its ratskin container.

  The two heroes rose from their cots.

  At this moment, two personages appeared a little behind the girl — from thin air, to all appearances. Both were at least nine feet tall. They had to bend, not to bump the ceiling. Cobwebs tickled their pointed ears. The one on the Mouser's side was black as wrought iron. He swiftly drew a sword that looked forged from the same material.

  At the same time, the other newcomer — bone-white, this one — produced a silver-seeming sword, likely steel plated with tin.

  The nine-footer opposing the Mouser aimed a skull-splitting blow at the top of his head. The Mouser parried in prime and his opponent's weapon shrieked off to the left. Whereupon, smartly swinging his rapier widdershins, the Mouser slashed off the black fiend's head, which struck the floor with a horrid clank.

  The white afreet opposing Fafhrd trusted to a downward thrust. But the Northerner, catching his blade in a counterclockwise bind, thrust him through, the silvery sword missing Fafhrd's right temple by the thinness of a hair.

  With a petulant stamp of her naked heel, the nymphet vanished into thin air, or perhaps Limbo.

  The Mouser made to wipe off his blade on the cot-clothes, but discovered there was no need. He shrugged. “What a misfortune for you, comrade,” he said in a voice of mocking woe. “Now you will not be able to enjoy the delicious chit as she disports herself on your heap of gold.”

  Fafhrd moved to cleanse Graywand on his sheets, only to note that it too was altogether unbloodied. He frowned. “Too bad for you, best of friends,” he sympathized. “Now you won't be able to possess her as she writhes with girlish abandon on your couch of diamonds, their glitter striking opalescent tones from her pale flesh.”

  “Mauger that effeminate artistic garbage, how did you know that I was dreaming diamonds?” the Mouser demanded.

  “How did I?” Fafhrd asked himself wonderingly. At last he begged the question with, “The same way, I suppose, that you knew I was dreaming of gold.”

  The two excessively long corpses chose that moment to vanish, and the severed head with them.

  Fafhrd said sagely, “Mouser, I begin to believe that supernatural forces were involved in this morning's haps.”

  “Or else hallucinations, oh great philosopher,” the Mouser countered somewhat peevishly.

  “Not so,” Fafhrd corrected, “for see, they've left their weapons behind.”

  “True enough,” the Mouser conceded, rapaciously eyeing the wrought-iron and tin-plated blades on the floor. “Those will fetch a fancy price on Curio Court.”

  The Great Gong of Lankhmar, sounding distantly through the walls, boomed out the twelve funereal strokes of noon, when burial parties plunge spade into earth.

  “An after-omen,” Fafhrd pronounced. “Now we know the source of the supernal force. The Shadowland, terminus of all funerals.”

  “Yes,” the Mouser agreed. “Prince Death, that eager boy, has had another go at us.”

  Fafhrd splashed cool water onto his face from a great bowl set against the wall. “Ah well,” he spoke through the splashes, “'Twas a pretty bait at least. Truly, there's nothing like a nubile girl, enjoyed or merely glimpsed naked, to give one an appetite for breakfast.”

  “Indeed yes,” the Mouser replied, as he tightly shut his eyes and briskly rubbed his face with a palm full of white brandy. “She was just the sort of immature dish to kindle your satyrish taste for maids newly budded.”

  In the silence that came as the splashing stopped, Fafhrd inquired innocently, “Whose satyrish taste?”

  V: Under the Thumbs of the Gods

  Drinking strong drink one night at the Silver Eel, the Gray Mouser and Fafhrd became complacently, even luxuriously, nostalgic about their past loves and amorous exploits. They even boasted a little to each other about their most recent erotic solacings (although it is always very unwise to boast of such matters, especially out loud; one never knows who may be listening).

  “Despite her vast talent for evil,” the Mouser said, “Hisvet remains always a child. Why should that surprise me? — evil comes naturally to children, it is a game to them, they feel no shame. Her breasts are no bigger than walnuts, or limes, or at most small tangerines topped by hazelnuts — all eight of them.”

  Fafhrd said, “Frix is the very soul of the dramatic. You should have seen her poised on the battlement later that night, her eyes raptly agleam, seeking the stars. Naked save for some ornaments of copper fresh as rosy dawn. She looked as if she were about to fly — which she can do, as you know."

  In the Land of the Gods, in short in Godsland and near Nehwon's Life Pole there, which lies in the southron hemisphere at the antipodes from the Shadowland (abode of Death), three gods sitting together cross-legged in a circle picked out Fafhrd's and the Mouser's voices from the general mutter of their worshippers, both loyal and lapsed, which resounds eternally in any god's ear,
as if he held a seashell to it.

  One of the three gods was Issek, whom Fafhrd had once faithfully served as acolyte for three months. Issek had the appearance of a delicate youth with wrists and ankles broken, or rather permanently bent at right angles. During his Passion he had been severely racked. Another was Kos, whom Fafhrd had revered during his childhood in the Cold Waste, rather a squat, brawny god bundled up in furs, with a grim, not to say surly, heavily bearded visage.

  The third God was Mog, who resembled a four-limbed spider with a quite handsome, though not entirely human face. Once the girl Ivrian, the Mouser's first love, had taken a fancy to a jet statuette of Mog he had stolen for her and decided, perhaps roguishly, that Mog and the Mouser looked alike.

  Now the Gray Mouser is generally believed to be and have always been complete atheist, but this is not true. Partly to humor Ivrian, whom he spoiled fantastically, but partly because it tickled his vanity that a god should choose to look like him, he made a game for several weeks of firmly believing in Mog.

  So the Mouser and Fafhrd were clearly worshippers, though lapsed, and the three gods singled out their voices because of that and because they were the most noteworthy worshippers these three gods had ever had and because they were boasting. For the gods have very sharp ears for boasts, or for declarations of happiness and self-satisfaction, or for assertions of a firm intention to do this or that, or for statements that this or that must surely happen, or any other words hinting that a man is in the slightest control of his own destiny. And the gods are jealous, easily angered, perverse, and swift to thwart.

  “It's them, all right — the haughty bastards!” Kos grunted, sweating under his furs — for Godsland is paradisial.

  “They haven't called on me for years — the ingrates!” Issek said with a toss of his delicate chin. “We'd be dead for all they care, except we've our other worshippers. But they don't know that — they're heartless.”

  “They have not even taken our names in vain,” said Mog. “I believe, gentlemen, it is time they suffered the divine displeasure. Agreed?”

  * * *

  In the meanwhile, by speaking privily of Frix and Hisvet, the Mouser and Fafhrd had aroused certain immediate desires in themselves without seriously disturbing their mood of complacent nostalgia.

  “What say you, Mouser,” Fafhrd mused lazily, “should we now seek excitement? The night is young.”

  His comrade replied grandly, “We have but to stir a little, to signify our interest, and excitement will seek us. We've loved and been forever adored by so many girls that we're bound to run into a pair of ‘em. Or even two pair. They'll catch our present thoughts on the wing and come running. We will hunt girls — ourselves the bait!”

  “So let's be on our way,” said Fafhrd, drinking up and rising with a lurch.

  “Ach, the lewd dogs!” Kos growled, shaking sweat from his brow, for Godsland is balmy (and quite crowded). “But how to punish ‘em?”

  Mog said, smiling lopsidedly because of his partially arachnid jaw structure, “They seem to have chosen their punishment.”

  “The torture of hope!” Issek chimed eagerly, catching on. “We grant them their wishes—”

  “—and then leave the rest to the girls,” Mog finished.

  “You can't trust women,” Kos asserted darkly.

  “On the contrary, my dear fellow,” Mog said, “when a god's in good form, he can safely trust his worshippers, female and male alike, to do all the work. And now, gentlemen, on with our thinking caps!”

  Kos scratched his thickly matted head vigorously, dislodging a louse or two.

  * * *

  Whimsically, and perhaps to put a few obstacles between themselves and the girls presumably now rushing toward them, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser chose to leave the Silver Eel by its kitchen door, something they'd never done once before in all their years of patronage.

  The door was low and heavily bolted, and when those were shot still wouldn't budge. And the new cook, who was deaf and dumb, left off his stuffing of a calf's stomach and came over to make gobbling noises and flap his arms in gestures of protest or warning. But the Mouser pressed two bronze agols into his greasy palm while Fafhrd kicked the door open. They prepared to stride out into the dismal lot covered by the eroded ashes of the tenement where the Mouser had dwelt with Ivrian (and she and Fafhrd's equally dear Vlana had burned) and also the ashes of the wooden garden house of mad Duke Danius, which they'd once stolen and occupied for a space — the dismal and ill-omened lot which they'd never heard of anyone building on since.

  But when they'd ducked their heads and gone through the doorway, they discovered that construction of a sort had been going on (or else that they'd always seriously underestimated the depth of the Silver Eel) for instead of on empty ground open to sky, they found themselves in a corridor lit by torches held in brazen hands along each wall.

  Undaunted, they strode forward past two closed doors.

  “That's Lankhmar City for you,” the Mouser observed. “You turn your back and they've put up a new secret temple.”

  “Good ventilation, though,” Fafhrd commented on the absence of smoke.

  They followed the corridor around a sharp turn… and stopped dead. The split-level chamber facing them had surprising features. The sunken half was close-ceilinged and otherwise gave the impression of being far underground, as if its floor were not eight finger-joints deeper than the raised section but eighty yards. Its furniture was a bed with a coverlet of violet silk. A thick yellow silk cord hung through a hole in the low ceiling.

  The chamber's raised half seemed the balcony or battlement of a tower thrust high above Lankhmar's smog, for stars were visible in the black upper background and ceiling.

  On the bed, silver-blonde head to its foot, slim Hisvet lay prone but upthrust on her straightened arms. Her robe of fine silk, yellow as desert sunlight, was out-dented by her pair of small high breasts, but depended freely from the nipples of those, leaving unanswered the question of whether there were three more pairs arranged symmetrically below.

  While against starry night (or its counterfeit), her dark hair braided with scrubbed copper wire, Frix stood magnificently tall and light-footed (though motionless) in her silken robe violet as a desert's twilight before dawn.

  Fafhrd was about to say, “You know, we were just talking about you,” and the Mouser was about to tread on his instep for being so guileless, when Hisvet called to the latter, “You again! — intemperate dirksman. I told you never even to think of another rendezvous with me for two years’ space.”

  Frix said to Fafhrd, “Beast! I told you I played with a member of the lower orders only on rare occasions.”

  Hisvet tugged sharply on the silken cord. A heavy door dropped down in the men's faces from above and struck its sill with a great and conclusive jar.

  Fafhrd lifted a finger to his nose, explaining ruefully, “I thought the door had taken off the tip. Not exactly a loving reception.”

  The Mouser said bravely, “I'm glad they turned us off. Truly, it would have been too soon, and so a bore. On with our girl hunt!”

  They returned past the mute flames held in bronze hands to the second of the two closed doors. It opened at a touch to reveal another dual chamber and in it their loves Reetha and Kreeshkra, whom only short months ago they'd been seeking near the Sea of Monsters, until they were trapped in the Shadowland and barely escaped back to Lankhmar. To the left, in muted sunlight on a couch of exquisitely smoothed dark wood, Reetha reclined quite naked. Indeed, extremely naked, for as the Mouser noted, she'd kept up her habit, inculcated when she'd been slave of a finicky overlord, of regularly shaving all of herself, even her eyebrows. Her totally bare head, held at a pert angle, was perfectly shaped and the Mouser felt a surge of sweet desire. She was cuddling to her tender bosom a very emaciated-seeming but tranquil animal, which the Mouser suddenly realized was a cat, hairless save for its score of whiskers bristling from its mask.

  To the right, in d
ark night a-dance with the light of campfire and on a smooth shale shore of what Fafhrd recognized to be, by the large white-bearded serpents sporting in it, the Sea of Monsters, sat his beloved Kreeshkra, more naked even than Reetha. She might have been a disquieting sight to some (naught but an aristocratically handsome skeleton), except that the flames near which she sat struck dark blue gleams from the sweetly curved surfaces of her transparent flesh casing her distinguished bones.

  “Mouser, why have you come?” Reetha cried out somewhat reproachfully. “I'm happy here in Eevamarensee, where all men are as hairless by nature (our household animals too) as I am by my daily industry. I love you dearly still, but we can't live together and must not meet again. This is my proper place.”

  Likewise, bold Kreeshkra challenged Fafhrd with “Mud Man, avaunt! I loved you once. Now I'm a Ghoul again. Perhaps in future time… But now, begone!"

  It was well neither Fafhrd nor Mouser had stepped across the threshold, for at those words this door slammed in their faces too, and this time stuck fast. Fafhrd forbore to kick it.

  “You know, Mouser,” he said thoughtfully. “We've been enamored of some strange ones in our time. But always most intensely interesting,” he hastened to add.

  “Come on, come on,” the Mouser enjoined gruffly. “There are other fish in the sea.”

  The remaining door opened easily too, though Fafhrd pushed it somewhat gingerly. Nothing startling, however, came into view this time, only a long dark room, empty of persons and furniture, with a second door at the other end. Its only novel feature was that the right-hand wall glowed green. They walked in with returning confidence. After a few steps they became aware that the glowing wall was thick crystal enclosing pale green, faintly clouded water. As they watched, continuing to stroll, there swam into view with lazy undulations two beautiful mermaids, the one with long golden hair trailing behind her and a sheathlike garb of wide-meshed golden fishnet, the other with short dark hair parted by a ridgy and serrated silver crest. They came close enough for one to see the slowly pulsing gills scoring their necks where they merged into their sloping, faintly scaled shoulders, and farther down their bodies those discreet organs which contradict the contention, subject of many a crude jest, that a man is unable fully to enjoy an unbifurcated woman (though any pair of snakes in love tell us otherwise). They swam closer still, their dreamy eyes now wide and peering, and the Mouser and Fafhrd recognized the two queens of the sea they had embraced some years past while deep diving from their sloop Black Treasurer.