by Fritz Leiber
What the wide-peering fishy eyes saw evidently did not please the mermaids, for they made faces and with powerful flirts of their long finny tails retreated away from the crystal wall through the greenish water, whose cloudiness was increased by their rapid movements, until they could no longer be seen.
Turning to the Mouser, Fafhrd inquired, eyebrows alift, “You mentioned other fish in the sea?”
With a quick frown the Mouser strode on. Trailing him, Fafhrd mused puzzledly, “You said this might be a secret temple, friend. But if so, where are its porters, priests, and patrons other than ourselves?”
“More like a museum — scenes of distant life. And a piscesium, or piscatorium,” his comrade answered curtly over shoulder.
“I've also been thinking,” Fafhrd continued, quickening his steps, “there's too much space here we've been walking through for the lot behind the Silver Eel to hold. What has been builded here? — or there?”
The Mouser went through the far door. Fafhrd was close behind.
* * *
In Godsland Kos snarled, “The rogues are taking it too easily. Oh, for a thunderbolt!”
Mog told him rapidly, “Never you fear, my friend, we have them on the run. They're only putting up appearances. We'll wear them down by slow degrees until they pray to us for mercy, groveling on their knees. That way our pleasure's greater.”
“Quiet, you two,” Issek shrilled, waving his bent wrists, “I'm getting another girl pair!”
It was clear from these and other quick gesticulations and injunctions — and from their rapt yet tense expressions — that the three gods in close inward-facing circle were busy with something interesting. From all around other divinities large and small, baroque and classical, noisome and beautiful, came drifting up to comment and observe. Godsland is overcrowded, a veritable slum, all because of man's perverse thirst for variety. There are rumors among the packed gods there of other and (perish the thought!) superior gods, perhaps invisible, who enjoy roomier quarters on another and (oh woe!) higher level and who (abysmal deviltry!) even hear thoughts, but nothing certain.
Issek cried out in ecstasy, “There, there, the stage is set! Now to search out the next teasing pair. Kos and Mog, help me. Do your rightful share.”
* * *
The Gray Mouser and Fafhrd felt they'd been transported to the mysterious realm of Quarmall, where they'd had one of their most fantastic adventures. For the next chamber seemed a cave in solid rock, given room-shape by laborious chipping. And behind a table piled with parchments and scrolls, inkwells and quills, sat the two saucy, seductive slavegirls they'd rescued from the cavern-world's monotonies and tortures: slender Ivivis, supple as a snake, and pleasantly plump Friska, light of foot. The two men felt relief and joy that they'd come home to the familiar and beloved.
Then they saw the room had windows, with sunlight suddenly striking in (as if a cloud had lifted), and was not solid rock but morticed stone, and that the girls wore not the scanty garb of slaves but rich and sober robes, while their faces were grave and self-reliant.
Ivivis looked up at the Mouser with inquiry but instant disapproval. “What dost here, figment of my servile past? ‘Tis true, you rescued me from Quarmall foul. For which I paid you with my body's love. Which ended at Tovilysis when we split. We're quits, dear Mouser, yes by Mog, we are!” (She wondered why she used that particular oath.)
Likewise Friska looked at Fafhrd and said, “That goes for you too, bold barbarian. You also killed my lover Hovis, you'll recall — as Mouser did Ivivis’ Klevis. We are no longer simple-minded slaves, playthings of men, but subtile secretary and present treasurer of the Guild of Free Women at Tovilysis. We'll never love again unless I choose — which I do not today! And so, by Kos and Issek, now begone!” (She wondered likewise why she invoked those particular deities, for whom she had no respect whatever.)
These rebuffs hurt the two heroes sorely, so that they had not the spirit to respond with denials, jests, or patient gallantries. Their tongues clove to their hard palates, their hearts and privates grew chilly, they almost cringed — and they rather swiftly stole from that chamber by the open door ahead… into a large room shaped of bluish ice, or rock of the same hue and translucence and as cold, so that the flames dancing in the large fireplace were welcome. Before this was spread a rug looking wondrously thick and soft, about which were set scatteredly jars of unguents, small bottles of perfume (which made themselves known by their ranging scents), and other cosmetic containers and tools. Furthermore, the invitingly textured rug showed indentations as if made by two recumbent human forms, while about a cubit above it floated two living masks as thin as silk or paper or more thin, holding the form of wickedly pretty, pert girl faces, the one rosy mauvette, the other turquoise green.
Others would have deemed it a prodigy, but the Mouser and Fafhrd at once recognized Keyaira and Hirriwi, the invisible frost princesses with whom they'd once been separately paired for one long, long night in Stardock, tallest of Nehwon's northron peaks, and knew that the two gaysome girls were reclining unclad in front of the fire and had been playfully anointing each other's faces with pigmented salves.
Then the turquoise mask leapt up betwixt Fafhrd and the fire, so that dancing orange flames only shone through its staring eye holes and between its now cruel and amused lips as it spoke to him, saying, “In what frowsty bed are you now dead asleep, gross one-time lover, that your squeaking soul can be blown halfway across the world to gape at me? Some day again climb Stardock and in your solid form importune me, I might hark. But now, phantom, depart!”
The mallow mask likewise spoke scornfully to the Mouser, saying in tones as stinging and impelling as the flames seen through its facial orifices, “And you remove too, wraith most pitiful. By Khahkht of the Black Ice and Gara of the Blue — and e'en Kos of the Green — I enjoin it! Blow winds! and out lights all!” Fafhrd and the Mouser were hurt even more sorely by these new rebuffs. Their very souls were shriveled by the feeling that they were indeed the phantoms, and the speaking masks the solid reality.
Nevertheless, they might have summoned the courage to attempt to answer the challenge (though ‘tis doubtful), except that at Keyaira's last commands they were plunged into darkness absolute and manhandled by great winds and then dumped in a lighted area. A wind-slammed door crashed shut behind them.
They saw with considerable relief that they were not confronting yet another pair of girls (that would have been unendurable) but were in another stretch of corridor lit by clear-flaming torches held in brazen wall brackets in the form of gripping bird-talons, coiling squid-tentacles, and pinching crab-claws. Grateful for the respite, they took deep breaths.
Then Fafhrd frowned deeply and said, “Mark me, Mouser, there's magic somewhere in all this. Or else the hand of a god.”
The Mouser commented bitterly, “If it's a god, he's a thumb-fingered one, the way he sets us up to be turned down.”
Fafhrd's thoughts took a new tack, as shown by the changing furrows in his forehead. “Mouser, I never squeaked,” he protested. “Hirriwi said I squeaked.”
“Manner of speaking only, I suppose,” his comrade consoled. “But gods! what misery I felt myself, as if I were no longer man at all, and this no more than broomstick.” He indicated his sword Scalpel at his side and gazed with a shake of his head at Fafhrd's scabbarded Graywand.
“Perchance we dream—” Fafhrd began doubtfully.
“Well, if we're dreaming, let's get on with it,” the Mouser said and, clapping his friend around the shoulders, started them down the corridor. Yet despite these cheerful words and actions, both men felt they were getting more and more into the toils of nightmare, drawing them on will-lessly.
They rounded a turn. For some yards the right-hand wall became a row of slender dark pillars, irregularly spaced, and between them they could see more random dusky slim shafts and at middle distance a long altar on which light showered softly down, revealing a tall, naked woman stretched on it, and by h
er a priestess in purple robes with dagger bared in one hand and large silver chalice in the other, who was intoning a litany.
Fafhrd whispered, “Mouser! the sacrifice is the courtesan Lessnya, with whom I had some dealings when I was acolyte of Issek, years ago.”
“While the other is Ilala, priestess of the like-named goddess, with whom I had some commerce when I was lieutenant to Pulg the extortioner,” the Mouser whispered back.
Fafhrd protested, “But we can't have already come all the way to the temple of Ilala, though this looks like it. It's halfway across Lankhmar from the Eel,” while the Mouser recalled tales he'd heard of secret passages in Lankhmar that connected points by distances shorter than the shortest distance between.
Ilala turned toward them in her purple robes and said with eyebrows raised, “Quiet back there! You are committing sacrilege, trespassing on most holy ritual of the great goddess of all shes. Impious intruders, depart!” While Lessnya lifted on an elbow and looked at them haughtily. Then she lay back again and regarded the ceiling while Ilala plunged her dagger deep into her chalice and then with it flicked sprinkles of wine (or whatever other fluid the chalice held) on Lessnya's naked shape, wielding the blade as if it were an aspergillum. She aspersed her thrice — on bosom, loins, and knees — and then resumed her muttered litany, while Lessnya echoed her (or else snored) and the Mouser and Fafhrd stole on along the torchlit corridor.
But they had little time to ponder on the strange geometries and stranger religiosities of their nightmare progress, for now the left-hand wall gave way for a space to a fabulously decorated, large, dim chamber, which they recognized as the official residence room of the Grandmaster of the Thieves’ Guild in Thieves’ House, half Lankhmar City back again from Ilala's fane. The foreground was filled with figures kneeling away from them in devout supplication toward a thick-topped ebony table, behind which there stood queenly tall a handsome red-haired woman dressed in jewels and behind her a trim second female in maid's black tunic collared and cuffed with white.
“'Tis Ivlis in her beauty from the past, for whom I stole Ohmphals’ erubescent fingertips,” the Mouser whispered in stupefaction. “And now she's got herself a peck more gems.”
“And that is Freg, her maid, looking no older,” Fafhrd whispered back hoarsely in dream-drugged wonderment.
“But what's she doing here in Thieves’ House?” the Mouser pressed, his whisper feverish, “where women are forbidden and contemned. As if she were grandmaster of the Guild… grand-mistress… goddess… worshipped…. Is Thieves’ Guild upside down?…all Nehwon turvy-topsy…?”
Ivlis looked up at them across the heads of her kneeling followers. Her green eyes narrowed. She casually lifted her fingers to her lips, then flicked them sideways twice, indicating to the Mouser that he should silently keep going in that direction and not return.
With a slow unloving smile, Freg made exactly the same gesture to Fafhrd, but even more idly seeming, as if humming a chorus. The two men obeyed, but with their gazes trailing behind them, so that it was with complete surprise, almost with starts of fear, that they found they had walked blindly into a room of rare woods embellished with intricate carvings, with a door before them and doors to either side, and in the one of the latter nearest the Mouser a freshly nubile girl with wicked eyes, in a green robe of shaggy toweling cloth, her black hair moist, and in the one nearest Fafhrd two slim blondes a-smile with dubious merriment and wearing loosely the black hoods and robes of nuns of Lankhmar. In nightmare's fullest grip they realized that this was the very same garden house of Duke Danius, haunted by their earliest deepest loves, impiously reconstituted from the ashes to which the sorcerer Sheelba had burned it and profanely refurbished with all the trinkets wizard Ningauble had magicked from it and scattered to the four winds; and that these three night-fillies were Ivmiss Ovartamortes, niece of Karstak like-named, Lankhmar's then overlord, and Fralek and Fro, mirror-twin daughters of the death-crazed duke, the three she-colts of the dark to whom they'd madly turned after losing even the ghosts of their true loves in Shadowland. Fafhrd was wildly thinking in unvoiced sound, “Fralek and Fro, and Freg, Friska and Frix — what is this Fr'-charm on me?” while through the Mouser's mind was skipping likewise, “Ivlis, Ivmiss, Ivivis (three Iv's — and there's e'en an Iv in Hisvet) — who are these girl-lets of the Iv?” (Near the Life Pole, the gods Mog, Issek, and Kos were working at the top of their bent, crying out to each other new girl-discoveries with which to torment their lapsed worshippers. The crowd of spectator gods around them was now large.)
And then the Mouser bethought him with a shiver that he had not listed amongst his girl-lings of the Iv the archgirl of them all, fair Ivrian, forever lost in Death's demesne. And Fafhrd likewise shook. And the night-fillies flanking them pouted and made moues at them, and they were fairly catapulted into the midst of a pavilion of wine-dark silk, beyond whose unstirring folds showed the flat black horizons of the Shadowland.
Beauteous, slate-visaged Vlana spat full in Fafhrd's face, saying, “I told you I'd do that if you came back,” but fair Ivrian only eyed the Mouser with never a sign or word.
And then they were back in the betorched corridor, more hurried along it than hurrying, and the Mouser envied Fafhrd death's spittle inching down his cheek. And girls were flashing by like ghosts, unheedingly — Mara of Fafhrd's youth, Atya who worshipped Tyaa, bovine-eyed Hrenlet, Ahura of Seleucia, and many many more — until they were feeling the utter despair that comes with being rejected not by one or a few loves, but by all. The unfairness of it alone was enough to make a man die.
Then in the rush one scene lingered awhile: Alyx the Picklock garbed in the scarlet robes and golden tiara a-swarm with rubies of the archpriest of an eastern faith, and kneeling before her costumed as clerk Lilyblack, the Mouser's girlish leman from his criminous days, intoning, “Papa, the heathen rage, the civilized decay,” and the transvestite archpriestess pronouncing, “All men are enemies…”
Almost Fafhrd and the Mouser dropped to their knees and prayed to whatever gods may be for surcease from their torment. But somehow they didn't, and of a sudden they found themselves on Cheap Street near where it crosses Crafts and turning in at a drab doorway after two females, whose backs were teasingly familiar, and following them up a narrow flight of stairs that stretched up so far in one flight that its crazy warpage was magnified.
In Godsland Mog threw himself back, blowing out his breath and saying, “There! that gets them all,” while Issek likewise stretched himself out (so far as his permanently bent ankles and wrists would permit), observing, “Lord, people don't appreciate how we gods work, what toil in sparrow-watching!” and the spectator gods began to disperse.
But Kos, still frowningly immersed in his task to such a degree that he wasn't aware of the pain in his short burly thighs from sitting cross-legged so long, cried out, “Hold on! Here's another pair: to wit, one Nemia of the Dusk, one Eyes of Ogo, women of lax morals and, to boot, receivers of stolen property, oh, that's vile!”
Issek laughed wearily and said, “Wait now, dear Kos. I crossed those two off at the very start. They're our men's dearest enemies, swindled them out of a precious loot of jewels, as almost any god around could tell you. Sooner than seek them out (to be rebuffed in any case, of course) our boys would rot in hell,” while Mog yawned and added, “Don't you ever know, dear Kos, when the game's done?”
So the befurred short god shrugged and gave over, cursing as he tried to straighten his legs.
Meanwhile, the Eyes of Ogo and Nemia of the Dusk reached the summit of the endless stairs and tiredly entered their pad, eyeing it with disfavor. (It was an impoverished, dingy, even noisome place — the two best thieves in Lankhmar had fallen on hard times, as even the best of thieves and receivers will in the course of long careers.)
Nemia turned round and said, “Look what the cat dragged in.” Hardship had drastically straightened her lush curves. Her comrade Ogo-Eyes still looked somewhat like a child, but a very old a
nd ill-used one. “Wow,” she said wearily, “you two look miserable, as if you'd just escaped death and sorry you had. Do yourselves a favor — fall down the stairs, breaking your necks.”
When Fafhrd and the Mouser didn't move, or change their woebegone expressions, she laughed shortly, dropped into a broken-seated chair, poked out a leg at the Mouser, and said, “Well, if you're not leaving, make yourself useful. Remove my sandals, wash my feet,” while Nemia sat down before a rickety dressing table and, while surveying herself in the broken mirror, held out a broken-toothed instrument in Fafhrd's direction, saying, “Comb my hair, barbarian. Watch out for snarls and knots.”
Fafhrd and the Mouser (the latter preparing and fetching warm water) began solemn-faced to do those very things most carefully.
After quite a long time (and several other menial services rendered or servile penances done) the two women could no longer keep from smiling. Misery, after it's comforted, loves company.
“That's enough for now,” Ogo-Eyes told the Mouser. “Come, make yourself comfortable.” Nemia spoke likewise to Fafhrd, adding, “Later you men can make the dinner and go out for wine.”
After a while the Mouser said, “By Mog, this is more like it.” Fafhrd agreed, “By Issek, yes. Kos damn all spooked adventures.”
The three gods, hearing their names taken in vain as they rested in paradise from their toils, were content.
