by Fritz Leiber
Yet the strangest impression this ominously empty stronghold begot in them was also the subtlest, and one which each new room or twisting corridor heightened—a feeling of architectural inadequacy. It seemed impossible that the supports were equal to the vast weights of the great stone floors and ceilings, so impossible that they almost became convinced that there were buttresses and retaining walls they could not see, either invisible or existing in some other world altogether, as if the Castle Called Mist had only partially emerged from some unthinkable outside. That certain bolted doors seemed to lead where no space could be, added to this hinting.
They wandered through passages so distorted that, though they retained a precise memory of landmarks, they lost all sense of direction.
Finally Fafhrd said, ‘This gets us nowhere. Whatever we seek, whomever we wait for—Old Man or demon—it might as well be in that first room of the great archway.’
The Mouser nodded as they turned back, and Ahura said, ‘At least we’ll be at no greater disadvantage there. Ishtar, but the Old Man’s rhyme is true! “Each chamber is a slavering maw, each arch a toothy jaw.” I always greatly feared this place, but never thought to find a mazy den that sure as death has stony mind and stony claws.
‘They never chose to bring me here, you see, and from the night I left our home in Anra’s body, I was a living corpse, to be left or taken where they wished. They would have killed me, I think, at least there came a time when Anra would, except it was necessary that Anra’s body have an occupant—or my rightful body when he was out of it, for Anra was able to reenter his own body and walk about in it in this region of Ahriman. At such times I was kept drugged and helpless at the Lost City. I believe that something was done to his body at that time—the Old Man talked of making it invulnerable—for after I returned to it, I found it seeming both emptier and stonier than before.’
Starting back down the ramp, the Mouser thought he heard from somewhere ahead, against the terrible silence, the faintest of windy groans.
‘I grew to know my twin’s body very well, for I was in it most of seven years in the tomb. Somewhere during that black period all fear and horror vanished—I had become habituated to death. For the first time in my life my will, my cold intelligence, had time to grow. Physically fettered, existing almost without sensation, I gained inward power. I began to see what I could never see before—Anra’s weaknesses.
‘For he could never cut me wholly off from him. The chain he had forged between our minds was too strong for that. No matter how far away he went, no matter what screens he raised up, I could always see into some sector of his mind, dimly, like a scene at the end of a long, narrow, shadowy corridor.
‘I saw his pride—a silver-armored wound. I watched his ambition stalk among the stars as if they were jewels set on black velvet in his treasure house to be. I felt, almost as if it were my own, his choking hatred of the bland, miserly gods—almighty fathers who lock up the secrets of the universe, smile at our pleas, frown, shake their heads, forbid, chastise; and his groaning rage at the bonds of space and time, as if each cubit he could not see and tread upon were a silver manacle on his wrist, as if each moment before or after his own life were a silver crucifying nail. I walked through the gale-blown halls of his loneliness and glimpsed the beauty that he cherished—shadowy, glittering forms that cut the soul like knives—and once I came upon the dungeon of his love, where no light came to show it was corpses that were fondled and bones kissed. I grew familiar with his desires, which demanded a universe of miracles peopled by unveiled gods. And his lust, which quivered at the world as at a woman, frantic to know each hidden part.
‘Happily, for I was learning at long last to hate him, I noted how, though he possessed my body, he could not use it easily and bravely as I had. He could not laugh, or love, or dare. He must instead hang back, peer, purse his lips, withdraw.’
More than halfway down the ramp, it seemed to the Mouser that the groan was repeated, louder, more whistlingly.
‘He and the Old Man started on a new cycle of study and experience that took them, I think, to all corners of the world and that they were confident, I’m sure, would open to them those black realms wherein their powers would become infinite. Anxiously from my cramped vantage-point I watched their quest ripen and then, to my delight, rot. Their outstretched fingers just missed the next handhold in the dark. There was something that both of them lacked. Anra became bitter, blamed the Old Man for their lack of success. They quarreled.
‘When I saw Anra’s failure become final, I mocked him with my laughter, not of lips but of mind. From here to the stars he could not have escaped it—it was then he would have killed me. But he dared not while I was in his own body, and I now had the power to bar him from that.
‘Perhaps it was my faint thought-laughter that turned his desperate mind to you and to the secret of the laughter of the Elder Gods—that, and his need of magical aid in regaining his body. For a while then I almost feared he had found a new avenue of escape—or advance—until this morning before the tomb, with sheer cruel joy, I saw you spit on his offers, challenge, and, helped by my laughter, kill him. Now there is only the Old Man to fear.’
Passing again under the massive multiple archway with its oddly recessed keystone, they heard the whistling groan once more repeated, and this time there was no mistaking its reality, its nearness, its direction. Hastening to a shadowy and particularly misty corner of the chamber, they made out an inner window set level with the floor, and in that window they saw a face that seemed to float bodiless on the thick fog. Its features defied recognition—it might have been a distillation of all the ancient, disillusioned faces in the world. There was no beard below the sunken cheeks.
Coming close as they dared, they saw that it was perhaps not entirely bodiless or without support. There was the ghostly suggestion of tatters of clothing or flesh trailing off, a pulsating sack that might have been a lung, and silver chains with hooks or claws.
Then the one eye remaining to that shameful fragment opened and fixed upon Ahura, and the shrunken lips twisted themselves into the caricature of a smile.
‘Like you, Ahura,’ the fragment murmured in the highest of falsettos, ‘he sent me on an errand I did not want to run.’
As one, moved by a fear they dared not formulate, Fafhrd and the Mouser and Ahura half turned round and peered over their shoulders at the mist-clogged doorway leading outside. For three, four heartbeats they peered. Then, faintly, they heard one of the horses whinny. Whereupon they turned fully round, but not before a dagger, sped by the yet unshaking hand of Fafhrd, had buried itself in the open eye of the tortured thing in the inner window.
Side by side they stood, Fafhrd wild-eyed, the Mouser taut, Ahura with the look of someone who, having successfully climbed a precipice, slips at the very summit.
A slim shadowy bulk mounted into the glow outside the doorway.
‘Laugh!’ Fafhrd hoarsely commanded Ahura. ‘Laugh!’ He shook her, repeating the command.
Her head flopped from side to side, the cords in her neck jerked, her lips twitched, but from them came only a dry croaking. She grimaced despairingly.
‘Yes,’ remarked a voice they all recognized, ‘there are times and places where laughter is an easily-blunted weapon—as harmless as the sword which this morning pierced me through.’
Death-pale as always, the tiny blood-clot over his heart, his forehead crumbled in, his black garb travel-dusted, Anra Devadoris faced them.
‘And so we come back to the beginning,’ he said slowly, ‘but now a wider circle looms ahead.’
Fafhrd tried to speak, to laugh, but the words and laughter choked in his throat.
‘Now you have learned something of my history and my power, as I intended you should,’ the adept continued. ‘You have had time to weigh and reconsider. I still await your answer.’
This time it was the Mouser who sought to speak or laugh and failed.
For a moment the adept continued
to regard them, smiling confidently. Then his gaze wandered beyond them. He frowned suddenly and strode forward, pushed past them, knelt by the inner window.
As soon as his back was turned Ahura tugged at the Mouser’s sleeve, tried to whisper something—with no more success than one deaf and dumb.
They heard the adept sob, ‘He was my nicest.’
The Mouser drew a dagger, prepared to steal on him from behind, but Ahura dragged him back, pointing in a very different direction.
The adept whirled on them. ‘Fools!’ he cried, ‘have you no inner eye for the wonders of darkness, no sense of the grandeur of horror, no feeling for a quest beside which all other adventurings fade in nothingness, that you should destroy my greatest miracle—slay my dearest oracle? I let you come here to Mist, confident its mighty music and glorious vistas would win you to my view—and thus I am repaid. The jealous, ignorant powers ring me round—you are my great hope fallen. There were unfavorable portents as I walked from the Lost City. The white, idiot glow of Ormadz faintly dirtied the black sky. I heard in the wind the senile clucking of the Elder Gods. There was a fumbling abroad, as if even incompetent Ningauble, last and stupidest of the hunting pack, were catching up. I had a charm in reserve to thwart them, but it needed the Old Man to carry it. Now they close in for the kill. But there are still some moments of power left me, and I am not wholly yet without allies. Though I am doomed, there are still those bound to me by such ties that they must answer me if I call upon them. You shall not see the end, if end there be.’ With that he lifted his voice in a great eerie shout: ‘Father! Father!’
The echoes had not died before Fafhrd rushed at him, his great sword swinging.
The Mouser would have followed suit except that, just as he shook Ahura off, he realized at what she was so insistently pointing.
The recess in the keystone above the mighty archway. Without hesitation he unslipped his climbing rope, and running lightly across the chamber, made a whistling cast.
The hook caught in the recess.
Hand over hand he climbed up.
Behind him he heard the desperate skirl of swords, heard also another sound, far more distant and profound.
His hand gripped the lip of the recess, he pulled himself up and thrust in head and shoulders, steadying himself on hip and elbow. After a moment, with his free hand, he whipped out his dagger.
Inside, the recess was hollowed like a bowl. It was filled with a foul greenish liquid and encrusted with glowing minerals. At the bottom, covered by the liquid, were several objects—three of them rectangular, the others irregularly round and rhythmically pulsating.
He raised his dagger, but for the moment did not, could not, strike. There was too crushing a weight of things to be realized and remembered—what Ahura had told about the ritual marriage in her mother’s family—her suspicion that, although she and Anra were born together, they were not children of the same father—how her Greek father had died (and now the Mouser guessed at the hands of what)—the strange affinity for stone the slave-physician had noted in Anra’s body—what she had said about an operation performed on him—why a heart-thrust had not killed him—why his skull had cracked so hollowly and egg-shell easy—how he had never seemed to breathe—old legends of other sorcerers who had made themselves invulnerable by hiding their hearts—above all, the deep kinship all of them had sensed between Anra and this half-living castle—the black, man-shaped monolith in the Lost City—
He saw Anra Devadoris, spitted on Fafhrd’s blade, hurling himself closer along it, and Fafhrd desperately warding off Needle with a dagger.
As if pinioned by a nightmare, he helplessly heard the clash of swords rise toward a climax, heard it blotted out by the other sound—a gargantuan stony clomping that seemed to be following their course up the mountain, like a pursuing earthquake—
The Castle Called Mist began to tremble, and still he could not strike—
Then, as if surging across infinity from that utmost rim beyond which the Elder Gods had retreated, relinquishing the world to younger deities, he heard a mighty, star-shaking laughter that laughed at all things, even at this; and there was power in the laughter, and he knew the power was his to use.
With a downward sweep of his arm he sent his dagger plunging into the green liquid and tearing through the stone-crusted heart and brain and lungs and guts of Anra Devadoris.
The liquid foamed and boiled, the castle rocked until he was almost shaken from the niche, the laughter and stony clomping rose to a pandemonium.
Then, in an instant it seemed, all sound and movement ceased. The Mouser’s muscles went weak. He half fell, half slid, to the floor. Looking about dazedly, making no attempt to rise, he saw Fafhrd wrench his sword from the fallen adept and totter back until his groping hand found the support of a table-edge, saw Ahura, still gasping from the laughter that had possessed her, go up and kneel beside her brother and cradle his crushed head on her knees.
No word was spoken. Time passed. The green mist seemed to be slowly thinning.
Then a small black shape swooped into the room through a high window, and the Mouser grinned.
‘Hugin,’ he called luringly.
The shape swooped obediently to his sleeve and clung there, head down. He detached from the bat’s leg a tiny parchment.
‘Fancy, Fafhrd, it’s from the commander of our rear guard,’ he announced gaily. ‘Listen:
‘“To my agents Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, funeral greetings! I have regretfully given up all hope for you, and yet—token of my great affection—I risk my own dear Hugin in order to get this last message through. Incidentally, Hugin, if given opportunity, will return to me from Mist—something I am afraid you will not be able to do. So if, before you die, you see anything interesting—and I am sure you will—kindly scribble me a memorandum. Remember the proverb: Knowledge takes precedence over death. Farewell for two thousand years, dearest friends. Ningauble.”’
‘That demands drink,’ said Fafhrd, and walked out into the darkness. The Mouser yawned and stretched himself, Ahura stirred, printed a kiss on the waxen face of her brother, lifted the trifling weight of his head from her lap, and laid it gently on the stone floor. From somewhere in the upper reaches of the castle they heard a faint crackling.
Presently Fafhrd returned, striding more briskly, with two jars of wine under his arm.
‘Friends,’ he announced, ‘the moon’s come out, and by its light this castle begins to look remarkably small. I think the mist must have been dusted with some green drug that made us see sizes wrong. We must have been drugged, I’ll swear, for we never saw something that’s standing plain as day at the bottom of the stairs with its foot on the first step—a black statue that’s twin brother to the one in the Lost City.’
The Mouser lifted his eyebrows. ‘And if we went back to the Lost City…?’ he asked.
‘Why,’ said Fafhrd, ‘we might find that those fool Persian farmers, who admitted hating the thing, had knocked down the statue there, and broken it up, and hidden the pieces.’ He was silent for a moment. Then, ‘Here’s wine,’ he rumbled, ‘to sluice the green drug from our throats.’
The Mouser smiled. He knew that hereafter Fafhrd would refer to their present adventure as ‘the time we were drugged on a mountaintop.’
They all three sat on a table-edge and passed the two jars endlessly round. The green mist faded to such a degree that Fafhrd, ignoring his claims about the drug, began to argue that even it was an illusion. The crackling from above increased in volume; the Mouser guessed that the impious rolls in the library, no longer shielded by the damp, were bursting into flame. Some proof of this was given when the abortive bear cub, which they had completely forgotten, came waddling frightenedly down the ramp. A trace of decorous down was already sprouting from its naked hide. Fafhrd dribbled some wine on its snout and held it up to the Mouser.
‘It wants to be kissed,’ he rumbled.
‘Kiss it yourself, in memory of pig-trickery,’ re
plied the Mouser.
This talk of kissing turned their thoughts to Ahura. Their rivalry forgotten, at least for the present, they persuaded her to help them determine whether her brother’s spells were altogether broken. A moderate number of hugs demonstrated this clearly.
‘Which reminds me,’ said the Mouser brightly, ‘now that our business here is over, isn’t it time we started, Fafhrd, for your lusty Northland and all that bracing snow?’
Fafhrd drained one jar dry and picked up the other.
‘The Northland?’ he ruminated. ‘What is it but a stamping ground of petty, frost-whiskered kinglets who know not the amenities of life. That’s why I left the place. Go back? By Thor’s smelly jerkin, not now!’
The Mouser smiled knowingly and sipped from the remaining jar. Then, noticing the bat still clinging to his sleeve, he took stylus, ink, and a scrap of parchment from his pouch, and, with Ahura giggling over his shoulder, wrote:
