by Fritz Leiber
In the center of the room was a bare round-table of ebony and ivory squares. About it were set seven straight-backed but well-padded chairs, the one facing the map and away from the Mouser and Fafhrd being higher backed and wider armed than the others—a chief’s chair, likely that of Krovas.
The Mouser tiptoed forward, irresistibly drawn, but Fafhrd’s left hand clamped down on his shoulder like the iron mitten of a Mingol cataphract and drew him irresistibly back.
Scowling his disapproval, the Northerner brushed down the black rag over the Mouser’s eyes again, and with his crutch-hand thumbed ahead; then set off in that direction in most carefully calculated, silent hops. With a shrug of disappointment the Mouser followed.
As soon as they had turned away from the doorway, but before they were out of sight, a neatly black-bearded, crop-haired head came like a serpent’s around the side of the highest-backed chair and gazed after them from deep-sunken yet glinting eyes. Next a snake-supple, long hand followed the head out, crossed thin lips with ophidian forefinger for silence, and then finger-beckoned the two pairs of dark-tunicked men who were standing to either side of the doorway, their backs to the corridor wall, each of the four gripping a curvy knife in one hand and a dark leather, lead-weighted bludgeon in the other.
When Fafhrd was halfway to the seventh doorway, from which the monotonous yet sinister recitation continued to well, there shot out through it a slender, whey-faced youth, his narrow hands clapped over his mouth, under terror-wide eyes, as if to shut in screams or vomit, and with a broom clamped in an armpit, so that he seemed a bit like a young warlock about to take to the air. He dashed past Fafhrd and the Mouser and away, his racing footsteps sounding rapid-dull on the carpeting and hollow-sharp on the stairs before dying away.
Fafhrd gazed back at the Mouser with a grimace and shrug, then squatting one-legged until the knee of his bound-up leg touched the floor, advanced half his face past the doorjamb. After a bit, without otherwise changing position, he beckoned the Mouser to approach. The latter slowly thrust half his face past the jamb, just above Fafhrd’s.
What they saw was a room somewhat smaller than that of the great map and lit by central lamps that burned blue-white instead of customary yellow. The floor was marble, darkly colorful and complexly whorled. The dark walls were hung with astrological and anthropomantic charts and instruments of magic and shelved with cryptically labeled porcelain jars and also with vitreous flasks and glass pipes of the oddest shapes, some filled with colored fluids, but many gleamingly empty. At the foot of the walls, where the shadows were thickest, broken and discarded stuff was irregularly heaped, as if swept out of the way and forgot, and here and there opened a large rathole.
In the center of the room and brightly illuminated by contrast was a long table with thick top and many stout legs. The Mouser thought fleetingly of a centipede and then of the bar at the Eel, for the tabletop was densely stained and scarred by many a spilled elixir and many a deep black burn by fire or acid or both.
In the midst of the table an alembic was working. The lamp’s flame—deep blue, this one—kept a-boil in the large crystal cucurbit a dark, viscid fluid with here and there diamond glints. From out of the thick, seething stuff, strands of a darker vapor streamed upward to crowd through the cucurbit’s narrow mouth and stain—oddly, with bright scarlet—the transparent head and then, dead black now, flow down the narrow pipe from the head into a spherical crystal receiver, larger even than the cucurbit, and there curl and weave about like so many coils of living black cord—an endless, skinny, ebon serpent.
Behind the left end of the table stood a tall, yet hunchbacked man in black robe and hood which shadowed more than hid a face of which the most prominent features were a long, thick, pointed nose with out-jutting, almost chinless mouth just below. His complexion was sallow-gray like clay and a short-haired bristly, gray beard grew high on his wide cheeks. From under a receding forehead and bushy gray brows, wide-set eyes looked intently down at an age-browned scroll, which his disgustingly small clubhands, knuckles big, short backs gray-bristled, ceaselessly unrolled and rolled up again. The only move his eyes ever made, besides the short side-to-side one as he read the lines he was rapidly intoning, was an occasional farther sidewise glance at the alembic.
On the other end of the table, beady eyes darting from the sorcerer to the alembic and back again, crouched a small black beast, the first glimpse of which made Fafhrd dig fingers painfully into the Mouser’s shoulder and the latter almost gasp, not from the pain. It was most like a rat, yet it had a higher forehead and closer-set eyes than either had ever seen in a rat, while its forepaws, which it constantly rubbed together in what seemed restless glee, looked like tiny copies of the sorcerer’s clubhands.
Simultaneously yet independently, Fafhrd and the Mouser each became certain it was the beast which had gutter-escorted Slivikin and his mate, then fled, and each recalled what Ivrian had said about a witch’s familiar and Vlana about the likelihood of Krovas employing a warlock.
What with the ugliness of the clubhanded man and beast and between them the ropy black vapor coiling and twisting in the great receiver and head, like a black umbilical cord, it was a most horrid sight. And the similarities, save for size, between the two creatures were even more disquieting in their implications.
The tempo of the incantation quickened, the blue-white flames brightened and hissed audibly, the fluid in the cucurbit grew thick as lava, great bubbles formed and loudly broke, the black rope in the receiver writhed like a nest of snakes; there was an increasing sense of invisible presences, the supernatural tension grew almost unendurable, and Fafhrd and the Mouser were hard put to keep silent the open-mouthed gasps by which they now breathed, and each feared his heartbeat could be heard cubits away.
Abruptly the incantation peaked and broke off, like a drum struck very hard, then instantly silenced by palm and fingers outspread against the head. With a bright flash and dull explosion, cracks innumerable appeared in the cucurbit; its crystal became white and opaque, yet it did not shatter or drip. The head lifted a span, hung there, fell back. While two black nooses appeared among the coils in the receiver and suddenly narrowed until they were only two big black knots.
The sorcerer grinned, rolling up the end of the parchment with a snap, and shifted his gaze from the receiver to his familiar, while the latter chittered shrilly and bounded up and down in rapture.
‘Silence, Slivikin! Comes now your time to race and strain and sweat,’ the sorcerer cried, speaking pidgin Lankhmarese now, but so rapidly and in so squeakingly high-pitched a voice that Fafhrd and the Mouser could barely follow him. They did, however, both realize they had been completely mistaken as to the identity of Slivikin. In moment of disaster, the fat thief had called to the witch-beast for help rather than to his human comrade.
‘Yes, master,’ Slivikin squeaked back no less clearly, in an instant revising the Mouser’s opinions about talking animals. He continued in the same fifelike, fawning tones, ‘Harkening in obedience, Hristomilo.’
Now they knew the sorcerer’s name too.
Hristomilo ordered in whiplash pipings, ‘To your appointed work! See to it you summon an ample sufficiency of feasters! I want the bodies stripped to skeletons, so the bruises of the enchanted smog and all evidence of death by suffocation will be vanished utterly. But forget not the loot! On your mission, now—depart!’
Slivikin, who at every command had bobbed his head in manner reminiscent of his bouncing, now squealed, ‘I’ll see it done!’ and gray-lightninglike leaped a long leap to the floor and down an inky rathole.
Hristomilo, rubbing together his disgusting clubhands much as Slivikin had his, cried chucklingly, ‘What Slevyas lost, my magic has rewon!’
Fafhrd and the Mouser drew back out of the doorway, partly with the thought that since neither his incantation and his alembic, nor his familiar now required his unblinking attention, Hristomilo would surely look up and spot them; partly in revulsion from what t
hey had seen and heard; and in poignant if useless pity for Slevyas, whoever he might be, and for the other unknown victims of the rat-like and conceivably rat-related sorcerer’s death spells, poor strangers already dead and due to have their flesh eaten from their bones.
Fafhrd wrested the green bottle from the Mouser and, though almost gagging on the rotten-flowery reek, gulped a large, stinging mouthful. The Mouser couldn’t quite bring himself to do the same, but was comforted by the spirits of wine he inhaled during this byplay.
Then he saw, beyond Fafhrd, standing before the doorway to the map room, a richly clad man with gold-hilted knife jewel-scabbarded at his side. His sunken-eyed face was prematurely wrinkled by responsibility, overwork, and authority, framed by neatly cropped black hair and beard. Smiling, he silently beckoned them.
The Mouser and Fafhrd obeyed, the latter returning the green bottle to the former, who recapped it and thrust it under his left elbow with well-concealed irritation.
Each guessed their summoner was Krovas, the Guild’s Grandmaster. Once again Fafhrd marveled, as he hobble-dehoyed along, reeling and belching, how Kos or the Fates were guiding him to his target tonight. The Mouser, more alert and more apprehensive too, was reminding himself that they had been directed by the niche-guards to report to Krovas, so that the situation, if not developing quite in accord with his own misty plans, was still not deviating disastrously.
Yet not even his alertness, nor Fafhrd’s primeval instincts, gave him forewarning as they followed Krovas into the map room.
Two steps inside, each of them was shoulder-grabbed and bludgeon-menaced by a pair of ruffians further armed with knives tucked in their belts.
They judged it wise to make no resistance, on this one occasion at least bearing out the Mouser’s mouthings about the supreme caution of drunken men.
‘All secure, Grandmaster,’ one of the ruffians rapped out.
Krovas swung the highest-backed chair around and sat down, eyeing them coolly yet searchingly.
‘What brings two stinking, drunken beggar-Guildsmen into the top-restricted precincts of the masters?’ he asked quietly.
The Mouser felt the sweat of relief bead his forehead. The disguises he had brilliantly conceived were still working, taking in even the head man, though he had spotted Fafhrd’s tipsiness. Resuming his blind-man manner, he quavered, ‘We were directed by the guard above the Cheap Street door to report to you in person, great Krovas, the Night Beggarmaster being on furlough for reasons of sexual hygiene. Tonight we’ve made good haul!’ And fumbling in his purse, ignoring as far as possible the tightened grip on his shoulders, he brought out the golden coin given him by the sentimental courtesan and displayed it tremble-handed.
‘Spare me your inexpert acting,’ Krovas said sharply. ‘I’m not one of your marks. And take that rag off your eyes.’
The Mouser obeyed and stood to attention again insofar as his pinioning would permit, and smiling the more seeming carefree because of his reawakening uncertainties. Conceivably he wasn’t doing quite as brilliantly as he’d thought.
Krovas leaned forward and said placidly yet piercingly, ‘Granted you were so ordered—and most improperly so; that door-guard will suffer for his stupidity!—why were you spying into a room beyond this one when I spotted you?’
‘We saw brave thieves flee from that room,’ the Mouser answered pat. ‘Fearing that some danger threatened the Guild, my comrade and I investigated, ready to scotch it.’
‘But what we saw and heard only perplexed us, great sir,’ Fafhrd appended quite smoothly.
‘I didn’t ask you, sot. Speak when you’re spoken to,’ Krovas snapped at him. Then, to the Mouser, ‘You’re an overweening rogue, most presumptuous for your rank.’
In a flash the Mouser decided that further insolence, rather than fawning, was what the situation required. ‘That I am, sir,’ he said smugly. ‘For example, I have a master plan whereby you and the Guild might gain more wealth and power in three months than your predecessors have in three millennia.’
Krovas’ face darkened. ‘Boy!’ he called. Through the curtains of an inner doorway, a youth with dark complexion of a Kleshite and clad only in a black loincloth sprang to kneel before Krovas, who ordered, ‘Summon first my sorcerer, next the thieves Slevyas and Fissif,’ whereupon the dark youth dashed into the corridor.
Then Krovas, his face its normal pale again, leaned back in his great chair, lightly rested his sinewy arms on its great padded ones, and smilingly directed at the Mouser, ‘Speak your piece. Reveal to us this master plan.’
Forcing his mind not to work on the surprising news that Slevyas was not victim but thief and not sorcery-slain but alive and available—why did Krovas want him now?—the Mouser threw back his head and, shaping his lips in a faint sneer, began, ‘You may laugh merrily at me, Grandmaster, but I’ll warrant that in less than a score of heartbeats you’ll be straining sober-faced to hear my least word. Like lightning, wit can strike anywhere, and the best of you in Lankhmar have age-honored blind spots for things obvious to us of outland birth. My master plan is but this: let Thieves’ Guild under your iron autocracy seize supreme power in Lankhmar City, then in Lankhmar Land, next over all Nehwon, after which who knows what realms undreamt will know your suzerainty!’
The Mouser had spoken true in one respect: Krovas was no longer smiling. He was leaning forward a little and his face was darkening again, but whether from interest or anger it was too soon to say.
The Mouser continued, ‘For centuries the Guild’s had more than the force and intelligence needed to make a coup d’état a nine-finger certainty; today there’s not one hair’s chance in a bushy head of failure. It is the proper state of things that thieves rule other men. All Nature cries out for it. No need slay old Karstak Ovartamortes, merely overmaster, control, and so rule through him. You’ve already fee’d informers in every noble or wealthy house. Your post’s better than the King of Kings’. You’ve a mercenary striking force permanently mobilized, should you have need of it, in the Slayers’ Brotherhood. We Guild-beggars are your foragers. O great Krovas, the multitudes know that thievery rules Nehwon, nay, the universe, nay, more, the highest gods’ abode! And the multitudes accept this, they balk only at the hypocrisy of the present arrangement, at the pretense that things are otherwise. Oh, give them their decent desire, great Krovas! Make it all open, honest and aboveboard, with thieves ruling in name as well as fact.’
The Mouser spoke with passion, for the moment believing all he said, even the contradictions. The four ruffians gaped at him with wonder and not a little awe. They slackened their holds on him and on Fafhrd too.
But leaning back in his great chair again and smiling thinly and ominously, Krovas said coolly, ‘In our Guild intoxication is no excuse for folly, rather grounds for the extremest penalty. But I’m well aware your organized beggars operate under a laxer discipline. So I’ll deign to explain to you, you wee drunken dreamer, that we thieves know well that, behind the scenes, we already rule Lankhmar, Nehwon, all life in sooth—for what is life but greed in action? But to make this an open thing would not only force us to take on ten thousand sorts of weary work others now do for us, it would also go against another of life’s deep laws: illusion. Does the sweetmeats hawker show you his kitchen? Does a whore let average client watch her enamel-over her wrinkles and hoist her sagging breasts in cunning gauzy slings? Does a conjurer turn out for you his hidden pockets? Nature works by subtle, secret means—man’s invisible seed, spider bite, the viewless spores of madness and of death, rocks that are born in earth’s unknown bowels, the silent stars a-creep across the sky—and we thieves copy her.’
‘That’s good enough poetry, sir,’ Fafhrd responded with undertone of angry derision, for he had himself been considerably impressed by the Mouser’s master plan and was irked that Krovas should do insult to his new friend by disposing of it so lightly. ‘Closet kingship may work well enough in easy times. But’—he paused histrionically—‘will it serve when T
hieves’ Guild is faced with an enemy determined to obliterate it forever, a plot to wipe it entirely from the earth?’
‘What drunken babble’s this?’ Krovas demanded, sitting up straight. ‘What plot?’
‘’Tis a most secret one,’ Fafhrd responded grinning, delighted to pay this haughty man in his own coin and thinking it quite just that the thief-king sweat a little before his head was removed for conveyance to Vlana. ‘I know naught of it, except that many a master thief is marked down for the knife—and your head doomed to fall!’
Fafhrd merely sneered his face and folded his arms, the still slack grip of his captors readily permitting it, his (sword) crutch hanging against his body from his lightly gripping hand. Then he scowled as there came a sudden shooting pain in his numbed, bound-up left leg, which he had forgotten for a space.
Krovas raised a clenched fist and himself half out of his chair, in prelude to some fearsome command—likely that Fafhrd be tortured. The Mouser cut in hurriedly with, ‘The Secret Seven, they’re called, are its leaders. None in the outer circles of the conspiracy know their names, though rumor has it that they’re secret Guild-thief renegades representing, one for each, the cities of Oool Hrusp, Kvarch Nar, Ilthmar, Horborixen, Tisilinilit, far Kiraay and Lankhmar’s very self…It’s thought they’re moneyed by the merchants of the East, the priests of Wan, the sorcerers of the Steppes and half the Mingol leadership too, legended Quarmall, Aarth’s Assassins in Sarheenmar, and also no lesser man than the King of Kings.’
Despite Krovas’ contemptuous and then angry remarks, the ruffians holding the Mouser continued to harken to their captive with interest and respect, and they did not retighten their grip on him. His colorful revelations and melodramatic delivery held them, while Krovas’ dry, cynical, philosophic observations largely went over their heads.
