Swords Of Lankhmar[Мечи Ланкмара] fagm-5

by Фриц Ройтер Лейбер

  "Stupid, _stupid_ Mud Man," she replied indulgently. "Why, 'tis our native tongue" — and here her voice grew dreamy — "deriving from those ages a millennium and more ago when Lankhmar's empire stretched from Quarmall to the Trollstep Mountains and from Earth's End to the Sea of Monsters, when Kvarch Nar was Hwarshmar and we lonely Ghouls alley-and-graveyard thieves only. We had another language, but Lankhmarese was easier."

  He returned her hand to her side, to plant his own beyond her and stare down into her black eye sockets. She whimpered faintly and ran her fingers lightly down his sides. Fighting impulse for the moment, he said, "Tell me, Bonny Bones, how do you manage to _see_ anything when light goes right through you? Do you see with the inside of the back of your skull?"

  "Questions, questions, questions," she complained moaningly.

  "I only want to become less stupid," he explained humbly.

  "But I _like_ you to be stupid," she answered with a sigh. Then raising up on her elbow so that she faced the still-blazing campfire — the thorn tree's dense wood burnt slowly and fiercely — she said, "Look closely into my eyes. No, without getting between them and the fire. Can you see a small rainbow in each? That's where light is refracted to the seeing part of my brain, and a very thin real image formed there."

  Fafhrd agreed he could see twin rainbows, then went on eagerly, "Don't stop looking at the fire yet; I want to show you something." He made a cylinder of one hand and held an end of the cylinder to her nearest eye, then clapped his fingers, held tightly together, against the other end. "There!" he said. "You can see the fire glow through the edges of my fingers, can't you? So I'm part transparent. I'm part crystal, at least,"

  "I can, I can," she assured him with singsong weariness. She looked away from his hands and the fire at his face and hairy chest. "But I _like_ you to be mud," she said. She put her hands on his shoulders. "Come, darling, be dirtiest mud."

  He gazed down at the moonlit pearl-toothed skull and blackest eye sockets in each of which a faint opalescent moonbow showed, and he remembered how a wisewoman of the North had once told him and the Mouser that they were both in love with Death. Well, she'd been right, at least about himself, Fafhrd had to confess now, as Kreeshkra's arms began to tug at him.

  At that instant there sounded a thin whistle, so high as to be almost inaudible, yet piercing the ear like a needle finer than a hair. Fafhrd jerked around, Kreeshkra swiftly lifted her head, and they noted that they were being watched not only by the Mingol mare, but also with upside-down eyes by a black bat which hung from a high gray twig of the thorn tree.

  Filled with premonition, Fafhrd pointed a forefinger at the dangling black flier, which instantly fluttered down to the fleshly perch presented. Fafhrd drew off its leg a tiny black roll of parchment springy as thinnest tempered iron, waved the flutterer back to its first perch, and unrolling the black parchment and holding it close to the firelight and his eyes close to it, read the following missive writ in a white script:

  _Mouser in direst danger. Also Lankhmar. Consult Ningauble of the Seven Eyes. Speed of the essence. Don't lose the tin whistle. _

  The signature was a tiny unfeatured oval, which Fafhrd knew to be one of the sigils of Sheelba of the Eyeless Face.

  White jaw resting on folded white knuckles, Kreeshkra watched the Northerner from her inscrutable black eye pits as he buckled on his sword.

  "You're leaving me," she asserted in a flat voice.

  "Yes, Bonny Bones, I must ride south like the wind," Fafhrd admitted hurriedly. "A lifelong comrade's in immense peril."

  "A man, of course," she divined with the same tonelessness. "Even Ghoulish men save their greatest love for their male swordmates."

  "It's a different sort of love," Fafhrd started to argue as he untied the mare from the thorn tree, feeling at the flat pouch hanging from the saddlebow, to make sure it still held the thin tin cylinder. Then, more practically, "There's still half the antelope to give you strength for your trudge home — and it's uncooked too."

  "So you assume my people are eaters of carrion, and that half a dead antelope is a proper measure of what I mean to you?"

  "Well, I'd always heard that Ghouls… and no, of course, I'm not trying to _pay_ you….Look here, Bonny Bones — I won't argue with you, you're much too good at it. Suffice it that I must course like the lonely thunderbolt to Lankhmar, pausing only to consult my master sorcerer. I couldn't take you — or anyone! — on that journey."

  Kreeshkra looked around curiously. "Who asked to go? The bat?"

  Fafhrd bit his lip, then said, "Here, take my hunting knife," and when she made no reply, laid it by her hand. "Can you shoot an arrow?"

  The skeleton girl observed to some invisible listener, "Next the Mud Man will be asking if I can slice a liver. Oh well, I should doubtless have tired of him in another night and on pretext of kissing his neck, bit through the great artery under his ear, and drunk his blood and devoured his carrion mud-flesh, leaving only his stupid brain, for fear of contaminating and making imbecilic my own."

  Abstaining from speech, Fafhrd laid the Mingol bow and its quiver of arrows beside the hunting knife. Then he knelt for a farewell kiss, but at the last instant the Ghoul turned her head so that his lips found only her cold cheek.

  As he stood up, he said, "Believe it or not, I'll come back and find you."

  "You won't do either," she assured him, "and I shan't be anywhere."

  "Nevertheless I will hunt you down," he said. He had untethered the mare and stood beside it. "For you have given me the weirdest and most wondrous ecstasy of any woman in the world."

  Looking out into the night, the Ghoulish girl said, "Congratulations, Kreeshkra. Your gift to humanity: freakish thrills. Make like a thunderbolt, Mud Man. I dote on thrills too."

  Fafhrd shut his lips, gazed at her a moment longer. Then as he whirled about him his cloak, the bat fluttered to it and hung there.

  Kreeshkra nodded her head, "I said the bat." Fafhrd mounted the mare and cantered down the hillside.

  Kreeshkra sprang up, snatched the bow and arrow, ran to the rim of the grassy saucer and drew a bead on Fafhrd's back, held it for three heartbeats, then turned abruptly and winged the arrow at the thorn tree. It lodged quivering in the center of the gray trunk.

  Fafhrd glanced quickly around at the _snap, whir, tchunk!_ A skeleton arm was waving him good-bye and continued to do so until he reached the road at the foot of the slope, where he urged the mare into a long-striding lope.

  On the hilltop Kreeshkra stood in thought for two breaths. Then from her belt she detached something invisible, which she dropped in the center of the dying campfire.

  There was a sputtering and a shower of sparks, when a bright blue flame shot straight up a dozen yards and burnt for as many heartbeats before it died. Kreeshkra's bones looked like blued iron, her glinting glassy flesh like scraps of tropic night-sky, but there was none to see this beauty.

  Fafhrd watched the needlelike flare over shoulder as he sped rockingly along and he frowned into the wind.

  The rats were murdering in Lankhmar that night. Cats died by swiftly sped crossbow darts that punctured slit-pupiled eye to lodge in brain. Poison set out for rats was cunningly secreted in gobbets of dogs' dinners. Elakeria's marmoset died crucified to the head of the sandalwood bed of that plump wanton, just opposite her ceiling-tall mirror of daily-polished silver. Babies were bitten to death in their cradles. A few big folk were stung by deep-burrowing darts smeared with a black stuff and died in convulsions after hours of agony. Many drank to still their fears, but the unwatched dead-drunk bled to death from neat cuts that tapped arteries. Glipkerio's aunt, who was also Elakeria's mother, strangled in a noose hung over a dark steep stairs made slippery by spilled oil. A venturesome harlot was overrun in the Plaza of Dark Delights and eaten alive while no one heeded her screams.

  So tricky were some of the traps the rats set and by circumstantial evidence so deft their wielding of their weapons, that many folk began to insist that
some of them, especially the rare and elusive albinos, had on their forelegs tiny clawed hands rather than paws, while there were many reports of rats running on their hind legs.

  Ferrets were driven in droves down rat-holes. None returned. Eerily bag-headed, brown-uniformed soldiers rushed about in squads, searching in vain for targets for their new and much-touted weapons. The deepest wells in the city were deliberately poisoned, on the assumption that the city of rats went as deep and tapped those wells for its water supply. Burning brimstone was recklessly poured into rat-holes and soldiers had to be detached from their primary duty to fight the resultant fires.

  An exodus begun by day continued by night from the city, by yacht, barge, rowboat, and raft, also south by cart, carriage, or afoot through the Grain Gate and even east through the Marsh Gate, until bloodily checked by command of Glipkerio, advised by Hisvin and by the city's stiff-necked and ancient Captain General, Olegnya Mingolsbane. Lukeen's war galley was one of the several which rounded up the fleeing civilian vessels and returned them to their docks — that is, all but the most gold-heavy, bribe-capable yachts. Shortly afterwards, rumor spread fast as news of a new sin, that there was a conspiracy to assassinate Glipkerio and set on his throne his widely-admired and studious pauper cousin, Radomix Kistomerces-Null, who was known to keep seventeen pet cats. A striking force of plain-clothes constables and Lankhmarines was sent from the Rainbow Palace through the torchlit dark to seize Radomix, but he was warned in time and lost himself and his cats in the slums, where he and they had many friends, both human and feline.

  As the night of terror grew older at snail's pace, the streets emptied of civilian human traffic and grew peculiarly silent and dark, since all cellars and many ground floors had been abandoned and locked, barred, and barricaded from above. Only the Street of the Gods was still crowded, where the rats still had made no assault and where comfort of a sort was to be had against fears. Elsewhere the only sounds were the quick, nervous tramp of squads of constables and soldiers on night guard and patterings and chitterings that grew ever more bold and numerous.

  Reetha lay stretched before the great kitchen fire, trying to ignore Samanda sitting in her huge palace mistress' chair and inspecting her whips, rods, paddles, and other instruments of correction, sometimes suddenly whisking one through the air. A very long thin chain confined Reetha by her neck collar to a large, recessed, iron ring-bolt in the kitchen's tiled floor near the center of the room. Occasionally Samanda would eye her thoughtfully, and whenever the bell tolled the half hour, she'd order the girl to stand to attention and perhaps perform some trifling chore, such as filling Samanda's wine-tankard. Yet still she never struck the girl, nor so far as Reetha knew, had sent message to Glipkerio apprising him of the time of his maid's correction.

  Reetha realized that she was being deliberately subjected to the torment of punishment deferred and tried to lose her mind in sleep and fantasies. But sleep, the few times she achieved it, brought nightmares and made more shockful the half-hourly wakenings, while fantasies of lording it cruelly over Samanda rang too hollow in her present situation. She tried to romance, but the material she had to work with was thin. Among other scraps, there was the smallish, gray-clad swordsman who had asked her her name the day she had been whipped for being scared by rats into dropping her tray. He at least had been courteous and had seemed to regard her as more than an animated serving tray, but surely he had long since forgotten her.

  Without warning, the thought flashed across her mind that if she could lure Samanda close, she might if she were swift enough be able to strangle her with the slack of her chain — but this thought only set her trembling. In the end she was driven to a count of her blessings, such as that at least she had no hair to be pulled or set afire.

  The Gray Mouser woke an hour past midnight feeling fit and ready for action. His bandaged wound didn't bother him, though his left forearm was still somewhat stiff. But since he could not favorably contact Glipkerio before daylight, and having no mind to work Sheelba's anti-rat magic except in the overlord's admiring presence, he decided to put himself to sleep again with the remaining wine.

  Operating silently, so as not to disturb Nattick Nimblefingers, whom he heard snoring tiredly on a pallet near him, he rather rapidly finished off the half-jug and then began more meditatively to suck on the full one. Yet drowsiness, let alone sleep, perversely refused to come. Instead the more that he drank, the more tinglingly alive he became, until at last with a shrug and a smile he took up Scalpel and Cat's Claw with never a clink and stole downstairs.

  There a horn-shielded lamp burning low showed his clothes and accouterments all orderly lying on Nattick's clean worktable. His boots and other leather had been brushed and scrubbed and then re-suppled with neat's-foot oil, and his gray silk tunic and cloak washed, dried, and neatly mended, each new seam and patch interlocked and double-stitched. With a little wave of thanks at the ceiling, he rapidly dressed himself, lifted one of the two large oil-filmed identical keys from their secret hook, unlocked the door, drew it open on its well-greased hinges, slipped into the night and locked the door behind him.

  He stood in deep shadow. Moonlight impartially silvered the age-worn walls opposite and their stains and the tight-shuttered little windows and the low, shut doors above the footstep-hollowed stone thresholds and the worn-down cobbles and the bronze-edged drain-slits and the scattered garbage and trash. The street was silent and empty either way to where it curved out of sight. So, he thought, must look the city of Ghouls by night, except that there, there were supposed to be skeletons slipping about on narrow ridgy ivory feet with somehow never a _clack_ or _click._

  Moving like a great cat, he stepped out of the shadows. The swollen but deformed moon peered down at him almost blindingly over Nattick's scalloped roof-ridge. Then he was himself part of the silvered world, padding at a swift, long-striding walk on his spongy-soled boots along Cheap Street's center toward its curve-hidden intersections with the Street of the Thinkers and the Street of the Gods. Whore Street paralleled Cheap Street to the left and Carter Street and Wall Street to the right, all four following the curving Marsh Wall beyond Wall Street.

  At first the silence was unbroken. When the Mouser moved like a cat, he made no more noise. Then he began to hear it — a tiny pattering, almost like a first flurry of small raindrops, or the first breath of a storm through a small-leafed tree. He paused and looked around. The pattering stopped. His eyes searched the shadows and discerned nothing except two close-set glints in the trash that might have been water-drops or rubies — or something.

  He set out again. At once the pattering was resumed, only now there was more of it, as if the storm were about to break. He quickened his stride a little, and then all of a sudden they were upon him: two ragged lines of small low silvered shapes rushing out of the shadows to his right and from behind the trash-heaps and out of the drain-slits to his left and a few even squeezing under the scoop-thresholded doors.

  He began to run skippingly and much faster than his foes, Scalpel striking out like a silver toad's tongue to pink one after another of them in a vital part, as if he were some fantastic trash collector and the rats animate small rubbish. They continued to close on him from ahead, but most he outran and the rest he skewered. The wine he'd bibbed giving him complete confidence, it became almost a dance — a dance of death with the rats figuring as humanity and he their grisly gray overlord, armed with rapier instead of scythe.

  Shadows and silvered wall switched sides as the street curved. A larger rat got past Scalpel and sprang for his waist, but he deftly flicked it past him on Cat's Claw's point while his sword thrust through two more. Never in his life, he told himself gleefully, had he been so truly and literally the Gray Mouser, decimating a mouser's natural prey.

  Then something whirred past his nose like an angry wasp, and everything changed. He recalled in a vivid flash the supremely strange night of decision aboard _Squid_, which had become almost a fantasy-memory to him, and
the crossbow rats and Skwee with sword at his jugular, and he realized fully for the first time in Lankhmar that he was not dealing with ordinary or even extraordinary rats, but with an alien and hostile culture of intelligent beings, small to be sure, but perhaps more clever and surely more prolific and murder-bent than even men.

  Leaving off skipping, he ran as fast as he could, slashing out repeatedly with Scalpel, but thrusting his dirk in his belt and grabbing in his pouch for Sheelba's black bottle.

  It wasn't there. With sinking heart and a self-curse, he remembered that, wine-bemused, he'd left it under his pillow at Nattick's.

  He shot past the black Street of the Thinkers with its taller buildings shutting out the moon. More rats poured out. His boot squished down on one and he almost slipped. Two more steel wasps buzzed past his face and — he'd never have believed it from another's lips — a small blue-flaming arrow. He raced past the lightless long wall of the building housing the Thieves' Guild, thinking chiefly of making more speed and hardly at all of rat-slashing.

  Then almost at once, Cheap Street curving more sharply, there were bright lights ahead of him and many people, and a few strides later he was among them and the rats all gone.

  He bought from a street vendor a small tankard of charcoal-heated ale to occupy the time while his dread and gasping faded. When his dry throat had been warmly and bitterly wetted, he gazed east two squares down the Street of the Gods to the Marsh Gate and then west more glittering blocks than he could clearly see.

  It seemed to him that all Lankhmar was gathered here tonight by light of flaring torch and lamp and horn-shielded candle — and pole-lofted flare — praying and strolling, moaning and drinking, munching, and whispering fearful gossip. He wondered why the rats had spared this street only. Were they even more afraid of men's gods than men were?

  At the Marsh Gate end of the Street of the Gods were only the hutments of the newest, poorest, and most slum-suited Gods _in_ Lankhmar. Indeed most of the congregations here were mere curbside gatherings about some scrawny hermit or leather-skinned death-skinny priest come from the deserts of the Eastern Lands.