Swords and Ice Magic fagm-6

by Fritz Leiber

  His blindly reaching hand closed on emptiness and he realized that in his furious self-upbraiding he'd reached the apex of the slope without knowing it. With belated caution he lifted his head until his eyes looked just over the edge. The sun's last dark red beams showed him a shale-scattered ledge some ten feet wide and then the mountain going up again precipitous and snowless. Opposite him in that new face was a great recess or cavern-mouth as wide as the ledge and twice that height. It was very dark inside that great door but he could make out the bright red of Mara's cloak, its hood raised, and within the hood, shadowed by it, her small face, very pale-cheeked, very dark-eyed — really, a smudge in darkness staring toward him.

  He scrambled up, peering around suspiciously, then moved toward her, softly calling her name. She did not reply with word or sign though continuing to stare. There was a warm, faintly sulfurous breeze blowing out of the mountain and it ruffled her cloak.

  Fafhrd's steps quickened and with a swift-growing anticipation of unknown horror whirled the cloak aside to reveal a small grinning skull set atop a narrow-shouldered wooden cross about four feet high.

  Fafhrd moved backwards to the ledge, breathing heavily. The sun had set and the gray sky seemed wider and more palely bright without its rays. The silence was deep. He looked along the ledge in both directions, fruitlessly, then he stared into the cave again and his jaw tightened. He took flint and iron, opened the tinder-pouch, and kindled a torch. Then holding it high in his left hand and his unbelted axe gently a-swing in his right, he walked forward into the cave and toward the mountain's heart, past the eerie diminutive scarecrow, his foot avoiding its stripped-away red cloak, along the strangely smooth-walled passageway wide and tall enough for a giant, or a winged man.

  * * *

  The Mouser hardly knew how long he'd been closely following the four godstruck females through the strangely tunnel-like cave that was leading them deeper and deeper under the glacier toward the heart of the volcanic mountain Darkfire. Long enough, at any rate, for him to have split and slivered the larger ends of the three dead branches he was carrying, so they would kindle readily. And certainly long enough to become very weary of the Mingols death-chant, or Mingol-jingle, that was now not only resounding in his mind but being spoken aloud by the four rapt women as if it were a marching, or rather scurrying song, just as Groniger's men had seemed to do. Of course in this case he didn't have to ask himself where they'd got it, for they'd all originally heard it with him night before last in the Flame Den, when Loki god had seemed to speak from the fire, but that didn't make it any easier to endure or one whit less boresome.

  At first he'd tried to reason with Cif as she hurried along with the others like a mad maenad, arguing the unwisdom of venturing so recklessly into an uncharted cavern, but she'd only pointed at Rill's torch and said, “See how it strains ahead. The god commands us,” and gone back to her chanting.

  Well, there was no denying that the flame was bending forward most unnaturally when it should have been streaming back with their rapid advance — and also lasting longer than any torch should. So the Mouser had had to go back to memorizing as well as he could their route through the rock which, chill at first, as one would expect from the ice above, was now perceptibly warmer, while the heating air carried a faint brimstone stench.

  But at all events. he told himself, he didn't have to like this sense of being the tool and sport of mysterious forces vastly more powerful than himself, forces that didn't even deign to tell him the words they spoke through him (that business of the speech he'd given but not heard one word of bothered him more and more). Ahove all he didn't have to celebrate this bondage to the inscrutable. as the women were doing, by mindlessly repeating words of death and doom.

  Also he didn't like the feeling of being in bondage to women and absorbed more and more into their affairs, such as he'd felt ever since accepting Cif's commission three months ago in Lankhmar, and which had put him in bondage, in turn, to Pshawri and Mikkidu and all his men, and to his ambitions and self-esteem.

  Above all, he didn't like being in bondage to the idea of himself being a monstrous clever fellow who could walk widdershins round all the gods and godlets, from whom everyone expected godlike performance. Why couldn't he admit to Cif at least that he'd not heard a word of his supposedly great speech? And if he could do that walk-widdershins bit, why didn't he?

  The cavernous tunnel they'd been following so long debouched into what seemed a far vaster space steaming with vapors, and then they were suddenly brought up short against a great wall that seemed to extend indefinitely upward and to either side.

  The women broke oft their doom-song and Rill cried, “Whither now, Loki?” and Hilsa echoed her tremulously. MotherGrum rumbled, “Tell us, wall,” and Cif intoned strongly, “Speak, O god.”

  And while the women were saying these things, the Mouser stole forward rapidly and laid his hand on the wall. It was so hot he almost snatched back his hand but did not, and through his palm and outspread fingers he felt a steady strong pulsation, a rhythm in the rock, exactly as if it were itself sounding the women's song.

  And then as if in answer to the women's entreaty, the Loki torch, which had burnt down to little more than a stub, flared up into a great seven-branched flame, almost intolerably bright — it was a wonder Rill could hold it showing the frighteningly vast extent of the rock face. Even as it flared, the rock seemed to heave under the Mouser's hand monstrously with each pulsation of its song and the loor began to rock with it. Then the great rock face bulged, and the heat became monstrous too, and the brimstone stench intensified so they were all set a-gagging and a-coughing even as their imaginations envisioned instant earthquake and cave-brimming floods of red-hot lava exploding from the mountain's heart.

  It says much for the Mouser's prudence that in that short period of panic and terrified wonder it occurred to him to thrust one of his frayed branches into the blinding flame. And it was well he did so, for the great god-flame now died down as swifty as it had flared up, leaving only the feeble illumination of the hurning branch of ordinary dead wood afire in his hands. Rill dropped the dead stub of her burnt-out torch with a cry of pain, as if only now feeling how it had burned her, while Hilsa whimpered and all the women groped about dazedly.

  And as if command had questionless passed to the Mouser with the torch, he now began to shepherd them back the way they had come, away from the strangling fumes, through the now-bewilderingly shadowy passageways that only he had conned and that still resounded with the dreadful rock music aping their own, a symphony of doom-song monstrously reverberated by solid stone-away toward the blessed outer light and air and sky, and fields and blessed sea.

  Nor was that the full measure of the Mouser's far-sighted prudence (so far-sighted that he sometimes couldn't tell what was its aim), for in the moment of greatest panic, when the stub of Loki-torch had fallen from Rillk hand, he had thought to snatch it up from the rocky floor and thrust it, hardly more than a hot black cinder, deep into his pouch. It burnt his fingers a little, he discovered afterwards, but luckily it was not so hot that his pouch caught fire.

  * * *

  Afreyt sat on a lichened rock outside the litter on the broad summit-pass of the Deathlands (near where Fafhrd had first encountered the Mingols, though she didn't know that) with her gray cloak huddled about her, resting. Now and again a wind from the east, whose chilliness seemed that of the violet sky, ruffled the litter's closed curtains. Its bearers had joined the other men at one of the small fires to the fore and rear, built with carried wood to heat chowder during this evening pause in their march. The gallows had been set down by Afreyt's direction and its base and beam-end wedged in rock, so that it rested like a fallen-over “L,” its angle lifting above the litter like a crooked roof, or like a rooftree with one kingpost.

  There was still enough sunset light in the west for her to wonder if that was smoke she saw moving east above the narrow crater of Mount Hellglow, while in the cold east there
was sufficient night for her to see, she was almost sure, a faint glow rising from that of Mount Darkfire. The eastwind blew again and she hunched her shoulders and drew the hood of her cloak more closely against her cheeks.

  The curtains of the litter parted for a moment and May slipped out and came and stood in front of Afreyt.

  “What's that you've got around your neck?” she asked the girl.

  “It's a noose,” the latter explained eagerly, but with a certain solemnity, “I braided it, Odin showed me how to make the knot. We're all going to belong to the Order of the Noose, which is something Odin and I invented this afternoon while Gale was taking a nap.”

  Afreyt hesitatingly reached her hand to the girl's slender throat and inspected the loop of heavy braid with uneasy fascination. There, surely enough, was the cruel hangman's knot drawn rather close, and tucked into it a nosegay of small mountain flowers, somewhat wilted, gathered this morning on the lower slopes.

  “I made one for Gale.” the girl said. “She didn't want to wear it at first hecause I'd helped invent it. She was jealous.”

  Afreyt shook her head reprovingly. though her mind wasn't on that.

  “Here,” May continued, lifting her hand which had been hanging close to her side under her cloak. “I've made one for you, a little bigger. See, it's got flowers too. Put back your hood. You wear it under your hair, of course.”

  For a long moment Afreyt looked into the girl's unblinking eyes. Then she drew back her hood, bent down her head, and helped lift her hair through. Using both hands, May drew the knot together at the base of Afreyt's throat. “There,” she said, “that's the way you wear it, snug but not tight.”

  While this was happening, Groniger had come up, carrying thrce bowls and a small covered pail of chowder. When the nooses had been explained to him, “A capital conceit!” he said with a great grin, his eyebrows lifting. “That'll show the Mingols something, let them know what they're in for. It's a grand chant the Little Captain gave us, isn't it?” Afr'eyt nodded, looking sideways a moment at Groniger. “Yes,” she said, “his wonderful words.”

  Groniger glanced back at her in similar fashion. “Yes, his wonderful words.”

  May said, “I wish I'd heard him

  Groniger handed them the bowls and swiftly poured the thick, steaming soup.

  May said, “I'll take Gale hers.”

  Groniger said gruffly to Afreyt, “Sup it while it's hot. Then get some rest. We go on at moonrise, agreed?” and when Afreyt nodded. strode off rather bumptiously, cheerily rumble-humming the chant to which they'd marched all day, the Mouser's — or Loki's, rather.

  Afreyt narrowed her brows. Normally Groniger was such a sober man, dull-spirited she'd once thought, but now he was almost like a buffoon. Was “monstrously comical” too strong an expression? She shook her head slowly. All the Rime-men were getting like that, loutish and grotesque and somehow bigger. Perhaps it was her weariness made her see things askew and magnified, she told herself.

  May came bsck and they got out their spoons and fell to. “Gale wanted to eat hers inside,” the girl volunteered after a bit. “I think she and Odin are cooking up something.” She shrugged and went back to her spooning. After another while: “I'm going to make nooses for Mara and Captain Fafhrd.” Finally she scraped her bowl, set it aside, and said, “Cousin Afreyt, do you think Groniger's a troll?”

  “What's that?” Afreyt asked.

  “A word Odin uses. He says Groniger's a troll.” Gale came excitedly out of the litter with her empty bowl, but remembering to draw the curtains behind her.

  “Odin and I have invented a marching song for us!” she announced, stacking her bowl in May's. “He says the other god's song is all right, but he should have one of his own. Listen. I'll chant it for you. It's shorter and faster than the other.” She screwed up her face. “It's like a drum,” she explained earnestly. Then, stamping with a foot: “March, march, over the Deathlands. Go, go, over the Doomlands. Doom! — kill the Mingols. Doom! — die the heroes. Doom! Doom! Glorious doom!” Her voice had grown quite loud by the time she was done.

  “Glorious doom?” Afreyt replied.

  “Yes. Come on, May, chant it with me."

  “I don't know that I want to.”

  “Oh, come on. I'm wearing your noose, aren't I? Odin says we should all chant it.”

  As the two girls repeated the chant in their shrill voices with mounting enthusiasm, Groniger and another Rime-man came up.

  “That's good,” he said, collecting the bowls. “Glorious doom is good.”

  “I like that one.” the other man agreed. “Doom! — kill the Mingols!” he repeated appreciatively.

  They went off chanting it in low voices.

  The night darkened. The wind blew. The girls grew quiet.

  May said. “lt's cold. The god'll be getting chilly. Gale, we'd better go inside. Will you be all right, cousin Afreyt?”

  “I'll be all right.”

  A while after the curtains closed behind them, May stuck her head out.

  “The god invites you to come inside with us,” she called to Afreyt.

  Afreyt caught her breath. Then she said as evenly as she could, “Thank the god, but tell him I will remain here… on guard.”

  “Very well,” May said and the curtains closed again.

  Afreyt clenched her hands under her cloak. She hadn't admitted to anyone, even Cif, that for some time now Odin had been fading. She could hardly see even a wispy outline any more. She could still hear his voice. but it had begun to grow faint, lost in wind-moaning. The god had been very real at first on that spring day when she and Cif had found him, and found that there were two gods. He'd seemed so near death then, and she'd labored so hard to save him. She'd been filled with such an adoration, as if he were some ancient hero-saint, or her own dear, dead father. And when he had caressed her fumblingly and muttered in disappointment (it sounded), “You're older than I thought,” and drifted off to sleep, her adoration had been contaminated by horror and rejection. She'd got the idea of bringing in the girls (Did that make her a monster? Well. perhaps) and after that she'd managed very well, keeping it all at a distance.

  And then there'd been the excitement of the journey to Lankhmar and the perils of Khahkht's ice-magic and the Mingols and the renewed excitement of the arrival of the Mouser and Fafhrd and the realization that Fafhrd did indeed resemblea younger Odin — was that what had made god Odin fade and grow whisper-voiced? She didn't know, but she knew it helped make everything torturesome and confusing — and she couldn't have borne to enter the litter tonight. (Yes, she was a monster.)

  She felt a sharp pain in her neck and realized that in her agitation she'd been tugging at the pendant end of the noose beneath her cloak. She loosened it and forced herself to sit quietly. It was full dark now.

  There,t~cr~ fr~nt flames flickering from ~arkf~e and Hellglow too. She heard sn~~tches of talk from the campfires and bits of the new ch~nt ~nd laughter as the story ofthat went round. It was very cold, but she did not move. The east Frew silvery-pale. the milky effulgence domed up. and at last the white moon edged into view.

  The cump stirred then and after a while the bearers came up and unwedged Odin's gallows and lifted it up and the litter too, and Afreyt arose, unkinking her stiffjoints and stamping her numbed feet, and they all marched off west across the moon-silvered rock, shouldering their grotesque weapons and the two larger burdens. Some of them limped a bit (after all, they were sailors. their feet unused to marching) but they all went on briskly to the new Odin-ch~nt, hunching their backs against the east wind. which now blew strong and steadily.

  * * *

  Fafhrd had just kindled his second torch from the emberend of the first and his surroundings had grown warmer, when the lofty passageway he was following debouched into a cavern so vast that the light he bore seemed lost in it. The sound of the cast-away torch-stub hitting rock awakened distant faint echoes and he came to a stop, peering up and around. Then he began to see
multitudinous points of light as stars, where flakes of mica in the fire-born stone reflected his torch, and in the middle distance an irregular pillar of mica-flecked rock and on its top a small pale bundle that drew his eye. Then from far above he heard the beat of great wings, a pause. then another beat — as though a greatt vulture were circling in the cavernous dark.

  He called, “Mara!” toward the pillar and the echoes came back and amongst them, shrill and faint, his own name called and the eohoes of that. Then he realized that the wing-beat had ceased and that one of the high mica-stars was getting rapidly brighter, as though it were swiftly traveling straight down toward him, and he heard a rush in the air as of a great hawk stooping.

  He jerked his whole body aside from the briFht sword darting at him and simultaneously struck with his ax just behind it. The torch was torn from his grasp, what seemed like a leather sail struck him to his knees, and then there was a great wing-beat, very close, and another, and then the shrill bellow of a man in agony that despite its extremity held a note of outrage.

  As he scrambled to his feet, he saw his torch flaring wide on the rocky floor and transfixing it the bright sword that had struck it from his grasp. Wing-beat and bellowing were going off from him now. He set his boot on the torch handle, preparatory to withdrawing the sword from it, but as he went to take hold of the latter, his fingers encountered a scaly hand, slenderer than his own, gripping it tightly, and (his groping fingers ascertained) warmly wet at the wrist, where it had been chopped off. Both hand and blood alike were invisible, so that although his fingers touched and felt, his eyes saw only the sword's hilt, the silver cross-guard, the pear-shaped silver pommel, and the black leather grip wrappcd with braided silver wire.