by Fritz Leiber
“So passed the day — I utterly lost in him, unaware of all else, save what struck his fancy moment by moment. He was a wondrously apt scholar. I named objects both in our Rime tongue and Low Lankhmarese, thinking it'd be useful to him as he got his vision for lands beyond the Isle.
“Evening drew in. I helped the god to his feet. The wan light washing over him seemed to dissolve a little his pale flesh.
“I indicated Salthaven, that we should walk there. He assented eagerly (I think he was attracted by its evening smokes, being drawn to fire, his trumps) and we set out, he leaning on me lightly.
“And now the mystery of Afreyt was made clear. She would by no means go with us! And then I saw, though only very dimly, the figure she had been succoring, tending and teaching all day long, as I had Loki — the figure of a frail old man (god, rather), bearded and one-eyed, who'd been lying close alongside Loki at the first, and I empowered to see only the one and she the other!”
“A most marvelous circumstance indeed,” the Mouser commented. “Perhaps like drew to like and so revealed itself. Say, did the other god by any chance resemble Fafhrd? — but for being one-eyed, of course.”
She nodded eagerly. “An older Fafhrd, as ‘twere his father. Afreyt marked it. Oh, you must know something of this mystery?”
The Mouser shook his head, “Just guessing,” and asked, “What was his name — the older god's?”
(She told him.)
“Well, what happened next?”
“We parted company. I walked the god Loki to Salthaven, he leaning on my arm. He was still most delicate. It seems one worshipper is barely enough at best to keep a god alive and visible, no matter how active his mind — for by now he was pointing out things to me (and indicating actions and states) and naming them in Rimic, Low Lankhmarese — and High as well! — before I named them, sure indication of his god's intellect.
“At the same time he was, despite his weakness, beginning to give me indications of a growing interest in me (I mean, my person) and I was fast losing all doubts as to how I'd be expected to entertain him when I got him home. Now, I was very happy to have got, hopefully, a new god for Rime Isle. And I must needs adore him, if only to keep him alive. But as for making him free of my bed, I had a certain reluctance, no matter how ghostly-insubstantial his flesh turned out to be in closest contact (and if it stayed that way)!
“Oh, I suppose I'd have submitted if it had come to that; still, there's something about sleeping with a god — a great honor, to be sure, but (to name only one thing) one surely couldn't expect faithfulness (if one wanted that) — certainly not from the whimsical, merry and mischievous god this Loki was showing himself to be! Besides, I wanted to be able to weigh clearheadedly the predictions and warnings for Rime Isle I hoped to get from him — not with a mind dreamy with lovemaking and swayed by all the little fancies and fears that come with full infatuation.
“As things fell out, I never had to make the decision. Passing this tavern, he was attracted by a flickering red glow and slipped inside without attracting notice (he was still invisible to all but me). I followed (that got me a look or two, I being a respectable councilwoman) and pressed on after him as he followed the pulsing fire-glow into this inner room, where a great bawdy party was going on and the hearth was ablaze. Before my eyes he melted into the flames and joined with them!
“The revelers were somewhat taken aback by my intrusion, but after looking them over with a smile I merely turned and went out, waving my hand at them and saying, ‘Enjoy!'—that was for Loki too. I'd guessed he'd got where he wanted to be.”
And she waved now at the dancing flames, then turned back to the Mouser with a smile. He smiled back, shaking his head in wonder.
She continued, “So I went home, well content, but not before I'd reserved the Flame Den (as I then learned this place is called) for the following night.
“Next day I hired two harlots for the evening (so there'd be entertainment for Loki) and Mother Grum to be our doorwoman and ensure our privacy.
“That night went as I'd guessed it would. Loki had indeed taken up permanent residence in the fire here and after a while I was able to talk with him and get some answers to questions, though nothing of profit to Rime Isle as yet. I made arrangements with the Ilthmart for the Flame Den to be reserved one night each week, and like bargains with Hilsa and Rill to come on those nights and entertain the god and keep him happy. Hilsa, has the god been with you tonight?” she called to the woman feeding the fire, the one with red stockings.
“Twice,” that one replied matter-of-factly in a husky voice. “Slipped from the fire invisibly and back again. He's content.”
“Your pardon, Lady Cif,” the Mouser interposed, “but how do these professional women find such close commerce with an invisible god to be? What's it like? I'm curious.”
Cif looked toward them where they sat by the fire.
“Like having a mouse up your skirt,” Hilsa replied with a short chuckle, swinging a red leg.
“Or a toad,” her companion amended. “Although he dwells in the flames, his person is cold.” Rill had laid aside her cat's cradle and joined her hands, fingers interweaving, to make shadow-faces on the wall, of prick-eared gigantic werewolves, great sea serpents, dragons, and long-nosed, long-chinned witches. “He likes these hobgoblins,” she commented.
The Mouser nodded thoughtfully, watching them for a while, and then back to the fire.
Cif continued, “Soon the god, I could tell, was beginning to get the feel of Nehwon, fitting his mind to her, stretching it out to her farthest bounds, and his oracles became more to the point. Meantime Afreyt, with whom I conferred daily, was caring for old Odin out on the moor in much the same way (though using girls to comfort and appease him instead of full-grown women, he being an older god), eliciting prophecies of import.
“Loki it was who first warned us that the Mingols were on the move, mustering horse-ships against Rime Isle, mounting under Khahkht's urgings toward a grand climacteric of madness and rapine. Afreyt put independent question to Odin and he confirmed it — they were together in the tale at every point.
“When asked what we must do, they both advised — again independently — that we seek out two certain heroes in Lankhmar and have them bring their bands to the Isle's defence. They were most circumstantial, giving your names and haunts, saying you were their men, whether or not you knew it in this life, and they did not change their stories under repeated questioning. Tell me, Gray Mouser, have you not known the god Loki before? Speak true.”
“Upon my word, I haven't, Lady Cif,” he averred, “and am no more able than you to explain the mystery of our resemblance. Though there is a certain weird familiarity about the name, and Odin's too, as if I'd heard them in dreams or nightmares. But however I rack my brains, it comes no clearer.”
“Well,” she resumed after a pause, “the two gods kept up their urgings that we seek you out and so half a year ago Afreyt and I took ship for Lankhmar on Hlal — with what results you know.”
“Tell me, Lady Cif,” the Mouser intejected, rousing himself from his fire-peerings, “how did you and tall Afreyt get back to Rime Isle after Khahkht's wizardrous blizzard snatched you out of the Silver Eel?”
“It transpired as swiftly as our journey there was long,” she said. “One moment we were in his cold clutch, battered and blinded by wind-driven ice, our ears assaulted by a booming laughter. The next we had been taken in charge by two feminine flying creatures who whirled us at dizzying speed through darkness to a warm cave where they left us breathless. They said they were a mountain king's two daughters.”
“Hirriwi and Keyaira, I'll be bound!” the Mouser exclaimed. “They must be on our side.”
“Who are those?” Cif inquired.
“Mountain princesses Fafhrd and I have known in our day. Invisibles like our revered fire-dweller here.” He nodded toward the flames. “Their father rules in lofty Stardock.”
“I've heard of that peak an
d dread Oomforafor, its king, whom some say is with his son Faroomfar an ally of Khahkht. Daughters against father and brother — that would be natural. Well, Afreyt and I after we'd recovered our breath made our way to the cavern's mouth — and found ourselves looking down on Rime Isle and Salthaven from a point midway up Darkfire. With some little difficulty we made our way home across rock and glacier.”
“The volcano,” the Mouser mused. “Again Loki's link with fire.” His attention had been drawn back to the hypnotic flames.
Cif nodded. “Thereafter Loki and Odin kept us informed of the Mingols’ progress toward Rime Isle — and your own. Then four days ago Loki began a running account of your encounters with Khahkht's frost monstreme. He made it most vivid — sometimes you'd have sworn he was piloting one of the ships himself. I managed to reserve the Flame Den the succeeding nights (and have it now for the next three days and nights also), so we were able to follow the details of the long flight or long pursuit — which, truth to tell, became a bit monotonous.”
“You should have been there,” the Mouser murmured.
“Loki made me feel I was.”
“Incidentally,” the Mouser said casually, “I'd think you'd have rented the Flame Den every night once you'd got your god here.”
“I'm not made of gold,” she informed him without rancor. “Besides, Loki likes variety. The brawls that others hold here amuse him — were what attracted him in the first place. Furthermore, it would have made the council even more suspicious of my activities.”
The Mouser nodded. “I thought I recognized a crony of Groniger's playing chess out there.”
“Hush,” she counseled him. “I must now consult the god.” Her voice had grown a little singsong in the later stages of her narrative and it became more so as, without transition, she invoked, “And now, O Loki god, tell us about our enemies across the seas and in the realms of ice. Tell us of cruel, cold Khahkht, of Edumir of the Widdershin Mingols and Gonov of the Sunwise. Hilsa and Rill, sing with me to the god.” And her voice became a somnolent two-toned, wordless chant in which the other women joined: Hilsa's husky voice, Rill's slightly shrill one, and a soft growling that after a bit the Mouser realized came from Mother Grum — all tuned to the fire and its flame-voice.
The Mouser lost himself in this strange medley of notes and all at once the crackling flame-voice, as if by some dream magic, became fully articulate, murmuring rapidly in Low Lankhmarese with occasional words slipped in that were as hauntingly strange as the god's own name:
“Storm clouds thicken round Rime Isle. Nature brews her blackest bile. Monsters quicken, nightmares foal, niss and nicor, drow and troll.” (Those last four nouns were all strange ones to the Mouser, specially the bell-toll sound of “troll.") “Sound alarms and strike the drum — in three days the Mingols come, Sunwise Mingols from the east, horsehead ship and human beast. Trick them all most cunningly — lead them to the spinning sea, to down-swirling dizzy bowl. Trust the whirlpool, ‘ware the troll! Mingols to their deaths must go, down to weedy hell below, never draw an easy breath, suffer an unending death, everlasting pain and strife, everlasting death in life. Mingol madness ever burn! Never peace again return!”
And the flame-voice broke off in a flurry of explosive crackles that shattered the dream-magic and brought the Mouser to his feet with a great start, his sleepy mood all gone. He stared at the fire, walked rapidly around it, peered at it closely from the other side, then swiftly scanned the entire room. Nothing! He glared at Hilsa and Rill. They eyed him blandly and said in unison, “The god has spoken,” but the sense of a presence was gone from the fire and the room as well, leaving behind not even a black hole into which it might have retired — unless perchance (it occurred to the Mouser) it had retired into him, accounting for the feeling of restless energy and flaming thought which now possessed him, while the litany of Mingol doom kept repeating itself over and over in his memory. “Can such things be?” he asked himself and answered himself with an instant and resounding “Yes!”
He paced back to Cif, who had risen likewise. “We have three days,” she said.
“So it appears,” he said. Then, “Know you aught of trolls? What are they?”
“I was about to ask you that,” she replied. “The word's as strange to me as it appears to be to you.”
“Whirlpools, then,” he queried, his thoughts racing. “Any of them about the isle? Any sailors’ tales?”
“Oh, yes — the Great Maelstrom off the isle's rock-fanged east coast with its treacherous swift currents and tricky tides, the Great Maelstrom from whence the island gets what wood it owns, after it's cast up on the Beach of Bleached Bones. It forms regularly each day. Our sailors know it well and avoid it like no other peril.”
“Good! I must put to sea and seek it out and learn its every trick and how it comes and goes. I'll need a small sailing craft for that while Flotsam's laid up for repairs — there's little time. Aye, and I'll need more money too — shore silver for my men.”
“Wherefore to sea?” her breath catching, she asked. “Wherefore must you dash yourself at such a maw of danger?" — but in her widening eyes he thought he could see the dawning of the answer to that.
“Why, to put down your foes,” he said ringingly. “Heard you not Loki's prophecy? We'll expedite it. We'll drown at least one branch of the Mingols e'er ever they set foot on Rimeland! And if, with Odin's aid, Fafhrd and Afreyt can scupper the Widder-Mingols half as handily, our task is done!”
The triumphant look flared up in her eyes to match that in his own.
* * *
The waning moon rode high in the southwest and the brightest stars still shone, but in the east the sky had begun to pale with the dawn, as Fafhrd led his twelve berserks north out of Salthaven. Each was warmly clad against the ice ahead and bore longbow, quiver, extra arrow-pack, belted ax, and bag of provender. Skor brought up the rear, keen to enforce Fafhrd's rule of utter silence while they traversed the town, so that this breach of port regulations might go unnoticed. And for a wonder they had not been challenged. Perhaps the Rimelanders slept extra sound because so many of them had been up to all hours salting down the monster fish-catch, the last boatloads of which had come in after nightfall.
With the berserks tripped along the girls May and Mara in their soft boots and hooded cloaks, the former with a jar of fresh-drawn milk for the god Odin, the latter to be the expedition's guide across central Rime Isle to Cold Harbor, at Afreyt's insistence—"for she was born on a Cold Harbor farm and knows the way — and can keep up with any man.”
Fafhrd had nodded dubiously on hearing that. He had not liked accepting responsibility for a girl with his childhood sweetheart's name. Nor had he liked leaving the management of everything in Salthaven to the Mouser and the two women, now that there was so much to do, and besides all else the new task of investigating the Grand Maelstrom and spying out its ways, which would occupy the Mouser for a day at least, and which more befitted Fafhrd as the more experienced ship-conner. But the four of them had conferred together at midnight in Flotsam's cabin behind shrouded portholes, pooling their knowledge and counsels and the two gods’ prophecies, and it had been so decided.
The Mouser would take Ourph with him, for his ancient sea-wisdom, and Mikkidu, to discipline him, using a small fishing craft belonging to the women.
Meanwhile, Pshawri would be left in sole charge of the repairs on Flotsam and Sea Hawk (subject to the advisements of the three remaining Mingols), trying to keep up the illusion that Fafhrd's berserks were still aboard the latter. Cif and Afreyt would take turns in standing by at the docks to head off inquiries by Groniger and deal with any other matters that might arise unexpectedly.
Well, it should work, Fafhrd told himself, the Rime Islers being such blunt, unsubtle types, hardy and simple. Certainly the Mouser had seemed confident enough — restless and driving, eyes flashing, humming a tune under his breath.
On-winging dawn pinkened the low sky to the east as Fafhrd tramped ah
ead through the heather, lengthening his stride, an ear attuned to the low voices of the men behind and the lighter ones of the girls. A glance overshoulder told him they were keeping close order, with Mara and May immediately behind him.
As Gallows Hill showed up to the left, he heard the men mark it with grim exclamations. A couple spat to ward off ill omen.
“Bear the god my greeting, May,” he heard Mara say.
“If he wakes enough to attend to aught but drink his milk and sleep again.” May replied as she branched off from the expedition and headed for the hill with her jar through the dissipating shadows of night.
Some of the men exclaimed gloomily at that, too, and Skor called for silence.
Mara said softly to Fafhrd, “We bear left here a little, so as to miss Darkfire's icefall, which we skirt through the Isle's center until it joins the glacier of Mount Hellglow."
Fafhrd thought, what cheerful names they favor, and scanned ahead. Heather and gorse were becoming scantier and stretches of lichened, shaly rock beginning to show.
“What do they call this part of Rime Isle?” he asked her.
“The Deathlands,” she answered.
More of the same, he thought. Well, at any rate the name fits the mad, death-bent Mingols and this gallows-favoring Odin god too.
* * *
The Mouser was tallest of the four short, wiry men waiting at the edge of the public dock. Pshawri close beside him looked resolute and attentive, though still somewhat pale. A neat bandage went across his forehead. Ourph and Mikkidu rather resembled two monkeys, the one wizened and wise, the other young and somewhat woebegone.
The salt cliff to the east barely hid the rising sun, which glittered along its crystalline summit and poured light on the farther half of the harbor and on the fishing fleet putting out to sea. The Mouser gazed speculatively after the small vessels — you'd have thought the Islanders would have been satisfied with yesterday's monster catch, but no, they seemed even more in a hurry today, as if they were fishing for all Nehwon or as if some impatient chant were beating in their heads, driving them on, such as was beating in the Mouser's now: Mingols to their deaths must go, down to weedy hell below—yes, to hell they must go indeed! and time was wasting and where was Cif?
