The First Book of Lankhmar

by Fritz Leiber

  Pulg shook his head. ‘We also leave him fit to tangle with our collectors the next time they come for the cash. Can’t get him drunk every time we pick up the split. Too complicated. And looks very weak.’

  ‘No need to,’ the Mouser said confidently. ‘Once Bwadres starts paying, the Northerner will go along.’

  Pulg continued to shake his head. ‘You’re guessing, son,’ he said. ‘Oh, to the best of your ability, but still guessing. I want this deal bagged up strongly. An example that will stick, I said. Remember, son, the man we’re really putting on this show for tomorrow night is Basharat. He’ll be there, you can bet on it, though standing in the last row, I imagine—did you hear how your Northerner dumped two of his boys? I liked that.’ He grinned widely, then instantly grew serious again.

  ‘So we’ll do it my way, eh? Grilli’s very sure.’

  The Mouser shrugged once, deadpan. ‘If you say so. Of course, some Northerners suicide when crippled. I don’t think he would, but he might. Still, even allowing for that, I’d say our plan has four chances in five of working out perfectly. Four in five.’

  Pulg frowned furiously, his rather piggy red-rimmed eyes fixed on the Mouser. Finally he said, ‘Sure you can get him drunk, son? Five in five?’

  ‘I can do it,’ the Mouser said. He had thought of a half dozen additional arguments in favor of his plan, but he did not utter them. He did not even add, ‘Six in six,’ as he was tempted to. He was learning.

  Pulg suddenly leaned back in his chair and laughed, signing that the business part of their conference was over. He tweaked the naked girl standing beside him. ‘Wine!’ he ordered. ‘No, not that sugary slop I keep for customers—didn’t Zizzi instruct you?—but the real stuff from behind the green idol. Come, son, pledge me a cup, and then tell me a little about this Issek. I’m interested in him. I’m interested in ’em all.’ He waved loosely at the darkly gleaming shelves of religious curios in the handsomely carved traveling case rising beyond the end of the table. He frowned a very different frown from his business one. ‘There are more things in this world than we understand,’ he said sententiously. ‘Did you know that, son?’ The Great Man shook his head, again very differently. He was swiftly sinking into his most deeply metaphysical mood. ‘Makes me wonder, sometimes. You and I, son, know that these’—He waved again at the case—‘are toys. But the feelings that men have toward them…they’re real, eh?—and they can be strange. Easy to understand part of those feelings—brats shivering at bogies, fools gawking at a show and hoping for blood or a bit of undressing—but there’s another part that’s strange. The priests bray nonsense, the people groan and pray, and then something comes into existence. I don’t know what that something is—I wish I did, I think—but it’s strange.’ He shook his head. ‘Makes any man wonder. So drink your wine, son—watch his cup, girl, and don’t let it empty—and talk to me about Issek. I’m interested in ’em all, but right now I’d like to hear about him.’

  He did not in any way hint that for the past two months he had been watching the services of Issek for at least five nights a week from behind a veiled window in various lightless rooms along the Street of the Gods. And that was something that not even the Mouser knew about Pulg.

  So as a pinkly opalescent, rose-ribboned dawn surged up the sky from the black and stinking Marsh, the Mouser sought out Fafhrd. Bwadres was still snoring in the gutter, embracing Issek’s cask, but the big barbarian was awake and sitting on the curb, hand grasping his chin under his beard. Already a few children had gathered at a respectful distance, though no one else was abroad.

  ‘That the one they can’t stab or cut?’ the Mouser heard one of the children whisper.

  ‘That’s him,’ another answered.

  ‘I’d like to sneak up behind him and stick him with this pin.’

  ‘I’ll bet you would!’

  ‘I guess he’s got iron skin,’ said a tiny girl with large eyes.

  The Mouser smothered a guffaw, patted that last child on the head, and then advanced straight to Fafhrd and, with a grimace at the stained refuse between the cobbles, squatted fastidiously on his hams. He still could do it easily, though his new belly made a considerable pillow in his lap.

  He said without preamble, speaking too low for the children to hear, ‘Some say the strength of Issek lies in love, some say in honesty, some say in courage, some say in stinking hypocrisy. I believe I have guessed the one true answer. If I am right, you will drink wine with me. If I am wrong, I will strip to my loincloth, declare Issek my god and master, and serve as acolyte’s acolyte. Is it a wager?’

  Fafhrd studied him. ‘It is done,’ he said.

  The Mouser advanced his right hand and lightly rapped Fafhrd’s body twice through the soiled camel’s hair—once in the chest, once between the legs.

  Each time there was a faint thud with just the hint of a clank.

  ‘The cuirass of Mingsward and the groin-piece of Gortch,’ the Mouser pronounced. ‘Each heavily padded to keep them from ringing. Therein lie Issek’s strength and invulnerability. They wouldn’t have fit you six months ago.’

  Fafhrd sat as one bemused. Then his face broke into a large grin. ‘You win,’ he said. ‘When do I pay?’

  ‘This very afternoon,’ the Mouser whispered, ‘when Bwadres eats and takes his forty winks.’ He rose with a light grunt and made off, stepping daintily from cobble to cobble.

  Soon the Street of the Gods grew moderately busy and for awhile Fafhrd was surrounded by a scattering of the curious, but it was a very hot day for Lankhmar. By midafternoon the Street was deserted; even the children had sought shade. Bwadres droned through the Acolyte’s Litany twice with Fafhrd, then called for food by touching his hand to his mouth—it was his ascetic custom always to eat at this uncomfortable time rather than in the cool of the evening.

  Fafhrd went off and shortly returned with a large bowl of fish stew. Bwadres blinked at the size of it, but tucked it away, belched, and curled around the cask after an admonition to Fafhrd. He was snoring almost immediately.

  A hiss sounded from the low wide archway behind them. Fafhrd stood up and quietly moved into the shadows of the portico. The Mouser gripped his arm and guided him toward one of several curtained doorways.

  ‘Your sweat’s a flood, my friend,’ he said softly. ‘Tell me, do you really wear the armor from prudence, or is it a kind of metal hair-shirt?’

  Fafhrd did not answer. He blinked at the curtain the Mouser drew aside. ‘I don’t like this,’ he said. ‘It’s a house of assignation. I may be seen and then what will dirty-minded people think?’

  ‘Hung for the kid, hung for the goat,’ the Mouser said lightly. ‘Besides, you haven’t been seen—yet. In with you!’

  Fafhrd complied. The heavy curtains swung to behind them, leaving the room in which they stood lit only by high louvers. As Fafhrd squinted into the semidarkness, the Mouser said, ‘I’ve paid the evening’s rent on this place. It’s private, it’s near. None will know. What more could you ask?’

  ‘I guess you’re right,’ Fafhrd said uneasily. ‘But you’ve spent too much rent money. Understand, my little man, I can have only one drink with you. You tricked me into that—after a fashion you did—but I pay. But only one cup of wine, little man. We’re friends, but we have our separate paths to tread. So only one cup. Or at most two.’

  ‘Naturally,’ purred the Mouser.

  The objects in the room grew in the swimming gray blank of Fafhrd’s vision. There was an inner door (also curtained), a narrow bed, a basin, a low table and stool, and on the floor beside the stool several portly short-necked large-eared shapes. Fafhrd counted them and once again his face broke into a large grin.

  ‘Hung for a kid, you said,’ he rumbled softly in his old bass voice, continuing to eye the stone bottles of vintage. ‘I see four kids, Mouser.’

  The Mouser echoed himself. ‘Naturally.’

  By the time the candle the Mouser had fetched was guttering in a little pool, Fafhrd was drai
ning the third ‘kid.’ He held it upended above his head and caught the last drop, then batted it lightly away like a large feather-stuffed ball. As its shards exploded from the floor, he bent over from where he was sitting on the bed, bent so low that his beard brushed the floor, and clasped the last ‘kid’ with both hands and lifted it with exaggerated care onto the table. Then taking up a very short-bladed knife and keeping his eyes so close to his work that they were inevitably crossed, he picked every last bit of resin out of the neck, flake by tiny flake.

  Fafhrd no longer looked at all like an acolyte, even a misbehaving one. After finishing the first ‘kid’ he had stripped for action. His camel’s hair robe was flung into one corner of the room, the pieces of padded armor into another. Wearing only a once-white loincloth, he looked like some lean doomful berserk, or a barbaric king in a bath-house.

  For some time no light had been coming through the louvers. Now there was a little—the red glow of torches. The noises of night had started and were on the increase—thin laughter, hawkers’ cries, various summonses to prayer…and Bwadres calling ‘Fafhrd!’ again and again in his raspy long-carrying voice. But that last had stopped some time ago.

  Fafhrd took so long with the resin, handling it like gold leaf, that the Mouser had to fight down several groans of impatience. But he was smiling his soft smile of victory. He did move once—to light a fresh taper from the expiring one. Fafhrd did not seem to notice the change in illumination. By now, it occurred to the Mouser, his friend was doubtless seeing everything by that brilliant light of spirits of wine which illumines the way of all brave drunkards.

  Without any warning the Northerner lifted the short knife high and stabbed it into the center of the cork.

  ‘Die, false Mingol!’ he cried, withdrawing the knife with a twist, the cork on its point. ‘I drink your blood!’ And he lifted the stone bottle to his lips.

  After he had gulped about a third of its contents, by the Mouser’s calculation, he set it down rather suddenly on the table. His eyeballs rolled upward, all the muscles of his body quivered with the passing of a beatific spasm, and he sank back majestically, like a tree that falls with care. The frail bed creaked ominously but did not collapse under its burden.

  Yet this was not quite the end. An anxious crease appeared between Fafhrd’s shaggy eyebrows, his head tilted up and his bloodshot eyes peered out menacingly from their eagle’s nest of hair, searching the room.

  Their gaze finally settled on the last stone bottle. A long rigidly-muscled arm shot out, a great hand shut on the top of the bottle and placed it under the edge of the bed and did not leave it. Then Fafhrd’s eyes closed, his head dropped back with finality and, smiling, he began to snore.

  The Mouser stood up and came over. He rolled back one of Fafhrd’s eyelids, gave a satisfied nod, then gave another after feeling Fafhrd’s pulse, which was surging with as slow and strong a rhythm as the breakers of the Outer Sea. Meanwhile the Mouser’s other hand, operating with an habitual deftness and artistry unnecessary under the circumstances, abstracted from a fold in Fafhrd’s loincloth a gleaming gold object he had earlier glimpsed there. He tucked it away in a secret pocket in the skirt of his gray tunic.

  Someone coughed behind him.

  It was such a deliberate-sounding cough that the Mouser did not leap or start, but only turned around without changing the planting of his feet in a movement slow and sinuous as that of a ceremonial dancer in the Temple of the Snake.

  Pulg was standing in the inner doorway, wearing the black-and-silver striped robe and cowl of a masker and holding a black, jewel-spangled vizard a little aside from his face. He was looking at the Mouser enigmatically.

  ‘I didn’t think you could do it, son, but you did,’ he said softly. ‘You patch your credit with me at a wise time. Ho, Wiggin, Quatch! Ho, Grilli!’

  The three henchmen glided into the room behind Pulg, garbed in garments as somberly gay as their master’s. The first two were stocky men, but the third was slim as a weasel and shorter than the Mouser, at whom he glared with guarded and rivalrous venom. The first two were armed with small crossbows and shortswords, but the third had no weapon in view.

  ‘You have the cords, Quatch?’ Pulg continued. He pointed at Fafhrd. ‘Then bind me this man to the bed. See that you secure well his brawny arms.’

  ‘He’s safer unbound,’ the Mouser started to say, but Pulg cut in on him with, ‘Easy, son. You’re still running this job, but I’m going to be looking over your shoulder; yes, and I’m going to be revising your plan as you go along, changing any detail I choose. Good training for you. Any competent lieutenant should be able to operate under the eyes of his general, yes, even when other subordinates are listening in on the reprimands. We’ll call it a test.’

  The Mouser was alarmed and puzzled. There was something about Pulg’s behavior that he did not at all understand. Something discordant, as if a secret struggle were going on inside the master extortioner. He was not obviously drunk, yet his piggy eyes had a strange gleam. He seemed most fey.

  ‘How have I forfeited your trust?’ the Mouser asked sharply.

  Pulg grinned skewily. ‘Son, I’m ashamed of you,’ he said. ‘High Priestess Ilala told me the full story of the black sloop—how you sublet it from the Treasurer in return for allowing him to keep the pearl tiara and stomacher. How you had Ourph the Mingol sail it to another dock. Ilala got mad at the Treasurer because he went cold on her or scared and wouldn’t give her the black gewgaws. That’s why she came to me. To cap it, your Lilyblack spilled the same story to Grilli here, whom she favors. Well, son?’

  The Mouser folded his arms and threw back his head. ‘You said yourself the split was sufficient,’ he told Pulg. ‘We can always use another sloop.’

  Pulg laughed low and rather long. ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ he said at last. ‘I like my lieutenants to be the sort of men who’d want a bolt-hole handy—I’d suspect their brains if they didn’t. I want them to be the sort of men who worry a lot about their precious skins, but only after worrying about my hide first! Don’t fret, son. We’ll get along—I think. Quatch! Is he bound yet?’

  The two burlier henchmen, who had hooked their crossbows to their belts, were well along with their job. Tight loops of rope at chest, waist and knees bound Fafhrd to the bed, while his wrists had been drawn up level with the top of his head and tightly laced to the sides of the bed. Fafhrd still snored peacefully on his back. He had stirred a little and groaned when his hand had been drawn away from the bottle under the bed, but that was all. Wiggin was preparing to bind the Northerner’s ankles, but Pulg signed it was enough.

  ‘Grilli!’ Pulg called. ‘Your razor!’

  The weasel-like henchman seemed merely to wave his hand past his chest and—lo!—there was a gleaming square-headed blade in it. He smiled as he moved toward Fafhrd’s naked ankles. He caressed the thick tendons under them and looked pleadingly at Pulg.

  Pulg was watching the Mouser narrowly.

  The Mouser felt an unbearable tension stiffening him. He must do something! He raised the back of his hand to his mouth and yawned.

  Pulg pointed at Fafhrd’s other end. ‘Grilli,’ he repeated, ‘shave me this man! Debeard and demane him! Shave him like an egg!’ Then he leaned toward the Mouser and said in a sort of slack-mouthed confidential way, ‘I’ve heard of these barbs that it draws their strength. Think you so? No matter, we’ll see.’

  Slashing of a lusty man’s head-and-face hair and then shaving him close takes considerable time, even when the barber is as shudderingly swift as Grilli and as heedless of the dim and flickering light. Time enough for the Mouser to assess the situation seventeen different ways and still not find its ultimate key. One thing shone through from every angle: the irrationality of Pulg’s behavior. Spilling secrets…accusing a lieutenant in front of henchmen…proposing an idiot ‘test’…wearing grotesque holiday clothes…binding a man dead drunk…and now this superstitious nonsense of shaving Fafhrd—why, it was as if Pulg were
fey indeed and performing some eerie ritual under the demented guise of shrewd tactics.

  And there was one thing the Mouser was certain of: that when Pulg got through being fey or drugged or whatever it was, he would never again trust any of the men who had been through the experience with him, including—most particularly!—the Mouser. It was a sad conclusion—to admit that his hard-bought security was now worthless—yet it was a realistic one and the Mouser perforce came to it. So even while he continued to puzzle, the small man in gray congratulated himself on having bargained himself so disastrously into possession of the black sloop. A bolt-hole might soon be handy indeed, and he doubted whether Pulg had discovered where Ourph had concealed the craft. Meanwhile he must expect treachery from Pulg at any step and death from Pulg’s henchmen at their master’s unpredictable whim. So the Mouser decided that the less they (Grilli in particular) were in a position to do the Mouser or anyone else damage, the better.

  Pulg was laughing again. ‘Why, he looks like a new-hatched babe!’ the master extortioner exclaimed. ‘Good work, Grilli!’

  Fafhrd did indeed look startlingly youthful without any hair above that on his chest, and in a way far more like what most people think an acolyte should look. He might even have appeared romantically handsome except that Grilli, in perhaps an excess of zeal, had also shorn naked his eyebrows—which had the effect of making Fafhrd’s head, very pale under the vanished hair, seem like a marble bust set atop a living body.

  Pulg continued to chuckle. ‘And no spot of blood—no, not one! That is the best of omens! Grilli, I love you!’

  That was true enough too—in spite of his demonic speed, Grilli had not once nicked Fafhrd’s face or head. Doubtless a man thwarted of the opportunity to hamstring another would scorn any lesser cutting—indeed, consider it a blot on his own character. Or so the Mouser guessed.

  Gazing at his shorn friend, the Mouser felt almost inclined to laugh himself. Yet this impulse—and along with it his lively fear for his own and Fafhrd’s safety—was momentarily swallowed up in the feeling that something about this whole business was very wrong—wrong not only by any ordinary standards, but also in a deeply occult sense. This stripping of Fafhrd, this shaving of him, this binding of him to the rickety narrow bed…wrong, wrong, wrong! Once again it occurred to him, more strongly this time, that Pulg was unknowingly performing an eldritch ritual.