“I AM TIRED, Gray Mouser, of these little brushes with Death,” Fafhrd the Northerner said, lifting his dinted, livid goblet and taking a measured sup of sweet ferment of grape laced with bitter brandy.
“Want a big one?” his comrade scoffed, drinking likewise.
Fafhrd considered that, while his gaze traveled slowly yet without stop all the way round the tavern, whose sign was a tarnished and serpentine silver fish. “Perhaps,” he said.
“It's a dull night,” the other agreed.
True indeed, the interior of the Silver Eel presented a tavern visage as leaden-hued as its wine cups. The hour was halfway between midnight and dawn, the light dim without being murky, the air dank yet not chill, the other drinkers like moody statues, the faces of the barkeep and his bully and servers paralyzed in expressions of petulant discontent, as if Time herself had stopped.
Outside, the city of Lankhmar was silent as a necropolis, while beyond that the world of Nehwon had been at peace — unwar, rather — for a full year. Even the Mingols of the vasty Steppes weren't raiding south on their small, tough horses.
Yet the effect of all this was not calm, but an unfocused uneasiness, a restlessness that had not yet resulted in the least movement, as if it were the prelude to an excruciating flash of cold lightning transfixing every tiniest detail of life.
This atmosphere affected the feelings and thoughts of the tall, brown-tunicked barbarian and his short, gray-cloaked friend.
“Dull indeed,” Fafhrd said. “I long for some grand emprise!”
“Those are the dreams of untutored youth. Is that why you've shaved your beard? — to match your dreams? Both barefaced lies!” the Mouser asked, and answered.
“Why have you let yours grow these three days?” Fafhrd conntered.
“I am but resting the skin of my face for a full tweaking of its hairs. And you've lost weight. A wishfully youthful fever?”
“Not that, or any ill or care. Of late you're lighter, too. We are changing the luxuriant musculature of young manhood for a suppler, hardier, more enduring structure suited to great mid-life trials and venturings.”
“We've had enough of those,” the Mouser asserted. “Thrice around Nehwon, at the least.”
Fafhrd shook his head morosely. “We've never really lived. We've not owned land. We've not led men.”
“Fafhrd, you're gloomy-drunk!” the Mouser chortled. “Would you be a farmer? Have you forgot a captain is the prisoner of his command? Here, drink yourself sober, or at least glad.”
The Northerner let his cup be refilled from two jars, but did not change his mood. Staring unhappily, he continued, “We've neither homes nor wives.”
“Fafhrd, you need a wench!”
“Who spoke of wenches?” the other protested. “I mean women. I had brave Kreeshkra, but she's gone back to her beloved Ghouls. While your pert Reetha prefers the hairless land of Eevamarensee.”
The Mouser interjected sotto voce, “I also had imperious, insolent Hisvet, and you her brave, dramatic queen-slave Frix.”
Fafhrd went on, “Once, long ago, there were Friska and Ivivis, but they were Quarmall's slaves and then became free women at Tovilysis. Before them were Keyaira, Hirriwi, but they were princesses, invisibles, loves of one long, long night, daughters of dread Oomforafor and sib of murderous Faroomfar. Long before all of those, in Land of Youth, there were fair Ivrian and slender Vlana. But they were girls, those lovely in-betweens (or actresses, those mysteries), and now they dwell with Death in Shadowland. So I'm but half a man. I need a mate. And so do you, perchance.”
“Fafhrd, you're mad! You prate of world-spanning wild adventures and then babble of what would make them impossible: wife, home, henchmen, duties. One dull night without girl or fight, and your brains go soft. Repeat, you're mad.”
Fafhrd reinspected the tavern and its stodgy inmates. “It stays dull, doesn't it,” he remarked, “as if not one nostril had twitched or ear wiggled since I last looked. And yet it is a calm I do not trust. I feel an icy chill. Mouser…”
That one was looking past him. With little sound, or none at all, two slender persons had just entered the Silver Eel and paused appraisingly inside the lead-weighted iron-woven curtains that kept out fog and could turn sword thrusts. The one was tall and rangy as a man, blue-eyed, thin-cheeked, wide-mouthed, clad in jerkin and trousers of blue and long cloak of gray. The other was wiry and supple-seeming as a cat, green-eyed, compact of feature, short thick lips compressed, clothed similarly save the hues were rust red and brown. They were neither young nor yet near middle age. Their smooth unridged brows, tranquil eyes, evenly curving jaws, and long cheek-molding hair — here silvery yellow, there black shot with darkest brown (in turn gold-shotten, or were those golden wires braided in?) — proclaimed them feminine.
That last attribute broke the congealed midnight trances of the assembled dullards, a half dozen of whom converged on the newcomers, calling low invitations and trailing throaty laughs. The two moved forward as if to hasten the encounter, with gaze unwaveringly ahead.
And then, without an instant, pause or any collision, except someone recoiled slightly as if his instep had been trod on and someone else gasped faintly as if his short ribs had encountered a firm elbow, the two were past the six. It was as if they had simply walked through them, as a man would walk through smoke with no more fuss than the wrinkling of a nostril. Behind them, the ignored smoke fumed and wove a bit.
Now there were in their way the Gray Mouser and Fafhrd, who had both risen and whose hands still indicated the hilts of their scabbarded swords without touching them.
“Ladies…” the Mouser began.
“Will you take wine?” Fafhrd continued.
“Strengthened against night's chill,” the Mouser concluded, sketching a bow, while Fafhrd courteously indicated the four-chaired table from which they'd just risen.
The slender women halted and surveyed them without haste.
“We might,” the smaller purred.
“Provided you let Rime Isle pay for the drinks,” the taller concluded in tones bright and swift as running snow water.
At the words ”Rime Isle,” the faces of the two men grew thoughtful and wondering, as if in another universe someone had said Atlantis or El Dorado or Ultima Thule. Nevertheless they nodded agreement and drew back chairs for the women.
“Rime Isle,” Fafhrd repeated conjuringly, as the Mouser did the honors with cups and jars. “As a child in the Cold Waste and later in my adolescent piratings, I've heard it and Salthaven City whispered of. Legend says the Claws point at it — those thin, stony peninsulas that tip Nehwonland's last north-west corner.”
“For once legend speaks true,” the electrum-haired woman in blue and gray said softly yet crisply, “Rime Isle exists today. Salthaven, too.”
“Come,” said the Mouser with a smile, ceremoniously handing her her cup, “it's said Rime Isle's no more real than Simorgya.”
“And is Simorgya unreal?” she asked, accepting it.
“No,” he admitted with a somewhat startled, reminiscent look. “I once watched it from a very small ship when it was briefly risen from the deeps of the Outer Sea. My more venturesome friend” — he nodded toward Fafhrd…”trod its wet shale for a short space to see some madmen dance with devilfish which had the aspect of black fur cloaks awrithe.”
“North of Simorgya, westward from the Claws,” briskly said the red- and brown-clad woman with black hair shot with glistening dark bronze and gold. Her right hand holding steady in the air her brimming wine cup where she'd just received it, she dipped her left beneath the table and swiftly slapped it down on the arabesquery of circle-stained oak, then lifted it abruptly to reveal four small rounds gleaming pale as moons. “You agreed Rime Isle would pay.”
With nods abstracted yet polite, the Mouser and Fafhrd each took up one of the coins and closely studied it.
“By the teats of Titchubi,” the former breathed, “this is no sou marque, black dog, no chien noir.”
“Rime Isle silver?” Fafhrd asked softly, lifting his gaze, eyebrows a-rise, from the face of the coin toward that of the taller woman.
Her gaze met his squarely. There was the hint of a smile at the ends of her long lips, back in her cheeks. She said sincerely yet banteringly, “Which never tarnishes.”
He said, “The obverse shows a vast sea monster menacing out of the depths.”
She said, “Only a great whale blowing after a deep sound.”
The Mouser said to the other woman, “Whilst the reverse depicts a ship-shaped, league-long square rock rising from miles-long swells.”
She said, “Only an iceberg hardly half that size.”
Fafhrd said, “Well, drink we what this bright, alien coinage has bought. I am Fafhrd, the Gray Mouser he.”
The tall woman said, “And I Afreyt, my comrade Cif.”
After deep draughts, they put down their cups. Afreyt with a sharp double tap of pewter on oak. “And now to business,” she said cliptly, with the faintest of frowns at Fafhrd (it was arguable if there was any frown at all) as he reached for the wine jars. “We speak with the voice of Rime Isle…”
“And dispurse her golden monies,” Cif added, her green eyes glinting with yellow flecks. Then, flatly, “Rime Isle is straitly menaced.”
Her voice going low, Afreyt asked, “Hast ever heard of the Sea Mingols?” and, when Fafhrd nodded, shifted her gaze to the Mouser, saying, “Most Southrons misdoubt their sheer existence, deeming every Mingol a lubber when off his horse, whether on land or sea.”
“Not I” he answered. “I've sailed with Mingol crew. There's one, now old, named Ourph…”
“And I've met Mingol pirates,” Fafhrd said. “Their ships are few, each dire. Arrow-toothed water rats --Sea Mingols, as you say.”
“That's good,” Cif told them both. “Then you'll more like believe me when I tell you that in response to the eldritch prophecy, 'Who seizes Nehwon's crown, shall win her all…'”
“For crown, read north polar coasts,” Afreyt interjected.
“And supremely abetted by the Wizard of Ice, Khahkht, whose very name's a frozen cough…”
“Perchance the evilest being ever to exist…” Afreyt supplemented, her eyes a sapphire moon shining frosty through two narrowed, crosswise window slits.
“The Mingols have ta'en ship to harry Nehwon's northmost coasts in two great fleets, one following the sun, the other — the Widdershin Mingols — going against it…”
“For a few dire ships, believe armadas,” Afreyt put in, still gazing chiefly at Fafhrd (just as Cif favored the Mouser), and then took up the main tale with, “Till Sunwise and Widdershins meet at Rime Isle, overwhelm her, and fan out south to rape the world!”
“A dismal prospect,” Fafhrd commented, setting down the brandy jar with which he'd laced the wine he'd poured for all.
“At least an overlively one,” the Mouser chimed in. “Mingols are tireless raptors.”
Cif leaned forward, chin up. Her green eyes flamed. “So Rime Isle is the chosen battleground. Chosen by Fate, by cold Khahkht, and the Gods. The place to stop the Steppe horde turned sea raiders.”
Without moving, Afreyt grew taller in her chair, her blue gaze flashing back and forth between Fafhrd and his comrade, “So Rime Isle arms, and musters men, and hires mercenaries. The last's my work and Cif's. We need two heroes, each to find twelve men like himself and bring them to Rime Isle in the space of three short moons. You are the twain!”
“You mean there's any other one man in Nehwon like me — let alone a dozen?” the Mouser asked incredulously.
“It's an expensive task, at very least,” Fafhrd said judiciously.
Her biceps swelling slightly under the close-fitting rust-red cloth, Cif brought up from beneath the table two tight-packed pouches big as oranges and set one down before each man. The small thuds and swiftly damped chinkings were most satisfying sounds.
“Here are your funds!”
The Mouser's eyes widened, though he did not yet touch his globular sack. “Rime Isle must need heroes sorely. And heroines? — if I might make suggestion.”
“That has been taken care of,” Cif said firmly.
Fafhrd's middle finger feather-brushed his bag and came away.
Afreyt said, “Drink we.”
As the goblets lifted, there came from all around a tiny tinkling as of faery bells; a minute draft, icy chill, stole past from the door; and the air itself grew very faintly translucent, very slightly softening and pearling all things seen — all of which portents grew light-swift by incredible tiger leaps into a stunning, sense-raping clangor of bells big as temple domes and thick as battlements, an ear-splittingly roaring and whining polar wind that robbed away all heat in a trice and blew out flat the iron-and-lead-weighted door drapes and sent the inhabitants of the Silver Eel sailing and tumbling, and an ice fog thick as milk, through which Cif could be heard to cry, “'Tis icy breath of Khahkht!” and Afreyt, “It's tracked us down!” before pandemonium drowned out all else.
Fafhrd and the Mouser each desperately gripped moneybag with one hand and with the other, table, glad it was bolted down to stop its use in brawls.
The gale and the tumult died and the fog faded, not quite as swiftly as it all had come. They unclenched their hands, wiped ice crystals from brows and eyes, lit lamps, and looked around.
The place was a bloodless shambles, silent too as death until the frightened moaning began, the cries of pain and wonder. They scanned the long room, first from their tables, then afoot. Their slender tablemates were not among the slowly recovering victims.
The Mouser intoned, somewhat airily, “Were such folk here as we've been searching for? Or have we drunk some drug that…”
He broke off. Fafhrd had taken up his fat little moneybag and headed for the door. “Where away?” Mouser called.
Fafhrd stopped and turned. He called back unsmiling, “North of the Trollsteps, to hire my twelve berserks. Doubtless you'll find your dozen swordsmen-thieves in warmer clime. In three moons less three days, we rendezvous at sea midway between Simorgya and Rime Isle. Till then, fare well.”
The Mouser watched him out, shrugged, rummaged up a cup and the brandy jar overset but unbroken, bedewed by the magic blast. The liquor that hadn't spilled made a gratifyingly large slug. He fingered his moneybag a moment, then teased open the hard knot in its thong. Inside, the leather had a faint amber glow. “A golden orange indeed,” he said happily, unmindful of the forms mewling and crawling and otherwise crippling around him, and plucked out one of the packed yellow coins. Reverse, a smoking volcano, possibly snow-clad; obverse, a great cliff rising from the sea and looking not quite like ice or any ordinary rock. What drollery! He gazed again at the iron-curtained doorway. What a huge fool, he thought, to take seriously a quite impossible task set by vanished females most likely dead or at best sorcelled beyond reach! Or to make rendezvous at distant date in uncharted ocean betwixt a sunken land and a fabulous one — Fafhrd's geography was even more hopeful than his usual highly imaginative wont.
And just think what rare delights — nay, what whole sets of ecstasies and blisses — this much gold would buy. How fortunate that metal was mindless slave of the man who held it!
He returned the coin, thonged shut the gold and its glow, stood up decisively, then looked back at the table top, near an edge of which the four silver coins still lay cozily flat.
While he regarded them, the grubby hand of a fat server who'd been wedged under the table by the indoor blizzard reached up and whisked them down.
With another shrug, the Mouser ambled rather grandly toward the doorway, whistling between his teeth a Mingol march.
Inside a sphere half again as tall as a man, a skinny old being was busy. On the interior of the sphere was depicted a world map of Nehwon, the seas in blackest blues, the lands in blackest greens and browns, yet all darkly agleam like blued, greened, and browned iron, creating the illusion that the sphere was a giant bubble rising forever through infinite murky, oily waters — as some Lankhmar philosophers assert is veriest truth about Nehwon-world itself. South of the Eastern Lands in the Great Equatorial Ocean there was even depicted a ring-shaped water wall a span across and three fingers high, such as those same philosophers say hides the sun from the half of Nehwon it is floating across, though no blinding solar disk now lay in the bottom of the liquid crater, but only a pale glow sufficient to light the sphere's interior.
Where they were not hid by a loose, light robe, the old being's four long, ever-active limbs were covered by short, stiff black hairs either grizzled or filmed with ice, while Its narrow face was nasty as a spider's. Now It lifted Its leathery lips and nervously questing long-nailed fingers toward an area of the map where a tiny, gleaming black blotch south of blue and amidst brown signified Lankhmar City on the southron coast of the Inner Sea. Was it Its breath that showed frosty, or did Its will conjure up the white wisp that streaked across the black blotch? Whichever, the vapor vanished.
It muttered high-pitched in Mingolish, “They're gone, the bitches. Khahkht sees each fly die, and sends Its shriveling breath where'er It will. Mingols harry, world unwary. Harlots fumble, heroes stumble. And now 'tis time, 'tis time, 'tis time to gin to build the frost monstreme.”
It opened a circular trap door in the South Polar Regions and lowered Itself out on a thin line.
Three days short of three moons later, the Mouser was thoroughly disgusted, bone weary, and very cold. His feet and toes were very, very cold inside fine, fur-lined boots, which slowly rose and fell under his soles as the frosty deck lifted and sank with the long, low swell. He stood by the short mainmast, from the long yard of which (longer than the boom) the loosely furled mainsail hung in frozen festoons. Beyond dimly discerned low prow and stern and mainyard top, vision was utterly blotted out by a fog of tiniest ice crystals, like cirrus cloud come down from Stardock heights, through which the light of an unseen gibbous moon, still almost full swollen, seeped out dark pearl gray. The windlessness and general stillness, contrary to all experience, seemed to make the cold bite deeper.
Yet the silence was not absolute. There was the faint wash and drip — perhaps even tiniest crackling of thinnest ice film — as the hull yielded to the swell. There were the resultant small creakings of the timbers and rigging of Flotsam. And beneath or beyond these, still fainter sounds lurked in the fringes of the inaudible. A part of the Mouser's mind that worked without being paid attention strained ceaselessly to hear those last. He was of no mind to be surprised by a Mingol flotilla, or single craft even. Flotsam was transport, not warship, he repeatedly warned himself. Very strange some of those last real or fancied sounds were that came out of the frigid fog-shatterings of massive ice leagues away, the thump and splash of mighty oars even farther off, distant doleful shriekings, still more distant deep minatory growlings, and a laughter as of fiends beyond the rim of Nehwon. He thought of the invisible fliers that had troubled the snowy air halfway up Stardock when Fafhrd and he had climbed her, Nehwon's loftiest peak.
The cold snapped that thought chain. The Mouser longed to stamp his feet, flail his hands cross-front against his sides, or — best! — warm himself with a great burst of anger, but he perversely held off, perhaps so ultimate relief would be greater, and set to analyze his disgusted weariness.
First off, there'd been the work of finding, winning, and mastering twelve fighter-thieves — a rare breed to begin with. And training 'em! — half of 'em had to be taught the art of the sling, and two (Mog help him!) swordsmanship. And the choosing of the likeliest two for corporals — Pshawri and Mikkidu, who were now sleeping snug below with the double squad, damn their hides!
Concurrent with that, there'd been the searching out of Old Ourph and gathering of his Mingol crew of four. A calculated risk, that. Would Mingol mariners fight fiercely 'gainst their own in the pinch? Mingols were ever deemed treacherous. Yet 'twas always good to have some of the enemy on your side, the better to understand 'em. And from them he might even get wider insight into the motives behind the present Mingol excursions naval.
Concurrent with that, the selection, hire, patching, and provisioning of Flotsam for its voyage.
And then the study needed! Beginning with poring over ancient charts filched from the library of the Lankhmar Starsmen and Navigators Guild, the refreshing of his knowledge of wind, waves, and celestial bodies. And the responsibility!! for no fewer than seventeen men, with no Fafhrd to share it and spell him while he slept — to lick 'em into shape, doctor their scurvies, probe underwater for 'em with boathook when they tumbled overboard (he'd almost lost thumb-footed Mikkidu that way the first day out), keep 'em in good spirits but in their places too, discipline 'em as required. (Come to think of it, that last was sometimes delight as well as duty. How quaintly Pshawri squealed when shrewedly thwacked with Cat's Claw's scabbard! — and soon would again, by Mog!)
Lastly, the near moon-long perilous voyage itself!!! Northwest from Lankhmar across the Inner Sea. Through a treacherous gap in the Curtain Wall (where Fafhrd had once sought sequined sea-queens) into the Outer Sea. Then a swift, broad reach north with the wind on their loadside until they sighted the black ramparts of No-Ombrulsk, which shared the latitude of sunken Simorgya. There he had nosed Flotsam due west, away from all land and almost into the teeth of the west wind, which blew a little on their steerside. After four days of that weary, close reach, they had arrived at the undistinguished patch of troubled ocean that marked Simorgya's grave, according to the independent cipherings of the Mouser and Ourph, the one working from his stolen charts, the other counting knots in grimy Mingol calculating cords. Then a swift two-day broad reach north again, while air and sea grew rapidly colder, until by their reckonings they were half-journey to the latitude of the Claws. And now two days of dismal beating about in one place await for Fafhrd, with the cold increasing steadily until, this midnight, clear skies had given way to the ice fog in which Flotsam lay becalmed. Two days in which to wonder if Fafhrd would manage to find this spot, or even come at all. Two days in which to get bored with and maddened by his scared, rebellious crew and dozen soldier-thieves — all snoring warm below, Mog flog 'em! Two days to wonder why in Mog's name he'd spent all but four of his Rime Isle doubloons on this insane voyage, on work for himself instead of on wine and women, rare books and art objects, in short on sweet bread and circuses for himself alone.
And finally, superlastly, the suspicion growing toward conviction that Fafhrd had never started out from Lankhmar at all!!! That he'd strode so nobly, so carkingly high-minded, out of the Silver Eel with his bag of gold — and instantly begun to spend it on those very same delights which the Mouser (inspired by Fafhrd's seeming-good example) had denied himself.
In a pinnacle of exasperation, a mountaintop of rage, the Mouser seized the padded striker from its mainmast hook and smote the ship's gong a blow mighty enough to shatter the gelid bronze. In fact, he was mildly surprised that Flotsam's frosty deck wasn't showered with sharp-edged frozen shards of brown metal. Whereupon he smote it again and again and again, so that the gong swung like a signboard in a hurricane, and meanwhile he jumped up and down, adding to the general alarm the resounding thuds of his feet (and haply warming them).
The forward hatch was flung back from below and Pshawri shot up out of it like a jack-in-the-box, to scurry to the Mouser and stand before him mad-eyed. The corporal major was followed in a pouring rush by Mikkidu and the rest of the two squads, most of them half-naked. After them — and far more leisurely — came Gavs and the other Mingol crewman off watch, thonging their black hoods closely under their yellow chins, while Ourph came ghosting up behind his captain, though the two other Mingols properly kept to their stations at tiller and prow. The Mouser was vastly surprised. So his scabbard thwackings had actually done some good!
Measuredly beating the padded striker head in the cupped palm of his right hand, the Mouser observed, “Well, my small stealers” — (all of the thieves were in fact at least a finger-breadth shorter than the Gray One)…”it appears you've missed a beating, barely,” his face in a hideous grin as he closely surveyed the large areas of bare flesh exposed to the icy air.
He went on, “But now we must keep you warm — a sailorly necessity in this clime, for which each of you is responsible on pain of flogging, I'll have you know.” His grin became more hideous still. “To evade night ramming attack, man the sweeps!”
The ragged dozen poured past him to snatch up the long, slender oars from their rack between mainmast and mizzen, and drop their looms into the ten proper locks, and stand facing prow at the ready, feet braced against sweeping studs, oar handles against chests, blades poised overside in the fog. Pshawri's squad was stationed steerside, Mikkidu's loadside, while major and minor corporals supervised fore and aft.
After a quick glance at Pshawri, to assure himself every man was at his station, the Mouser cried, “Flotsamers! One, two, three — sweep!” and tapped the gong, which he steadied and damped by its edge gripped in his right hand. The ten sweepsmen dipped blades into the unseen salt water and thrust heavily forward against the tholes.
“Recover!” the Mouser growled slowly, then gave the gong another tap. The ship began to move forward and the wash of the swell became tiny slaps against the hull.
“And now keep to it, you clownish, ill-clad cutpurses!” he cried. “Master Mikkidu! Relieve me at the gong! Sir Pshawri, keep 'em sweepin' evener!” And as he handed the striker to the gasping corporal minor, he dipped his lips toward the cryptic wrinkled face of Ourph and whispered, “Send Trenchi and Gib below to fetch 'em their warm duds on deck.”
Then he allowed himself a sigh, generally pleased yet perversely dissatisfied because Pshawri hadn't given him excuse to thwack him. Well, one couldn't have everything. Odd to think of a Lankhmar second-story man and Thieves Guild malcontent turned promising soldier-sailor. Yet natural enough — there wasn't that much difference between climbing walls and rigging.
Feeling warmer now, he thought more kindly of Fafhrd. Truly, the Northerner had not yet missed rendezvous; it was Flotsam, rather, that'd been early. Now was the time appointed. His face grew somber as he permitted himself the coldly realistic thought (of the sort no one likes) that it would indeed be miracle if he and Fafhrd did find each other in this watery waste, not to mention the icy fog. Still, Fafhrd was resourceful.
The ship grew silent again except for the brush and drip of the sweeps, the clink of the gong, and the small commotions as Pshawri briefly relieved oarsmen hurrying into the clothes the Mingols had fetched. The Mouser turned his attention to the part of his mind that kept watch on the fog's hiddenmost sounds. Almost at once he turned questioningly toward Old Ourph. The dwarfish Mingol flapped his arms slowly up and down. Straining his ears, the Mouser nodded. Then the beat of approaching wings became generally audible. Something struck the icy rigging overhead and a white shape hurtled down. The Mouser threw up his right arm to fend it off and felt his wrist and forearm strongly gripped by something that heaved and twisted. After a moment of breathless fear, in which his left hand snatched at his dirk, he reached it out instead and touched the horny talons tight as gyves around his wrist, and found rolled around a scaly leg a small parchment, the threads of which he cut with sharpened thumbnail. Whereupon the large white hawk left his wrist and perched on the short, round rod from which the ship's gong hung.
Then by flame of fat candle a Mingol crewman fetched after lighting it from the firebox, the Mouser read in Fafhrd's huge script writ very small:
Ahoy, Little Man! — for 'tis unlike there's vessel closer in this wavy wilderness. Burn a red flare and I'll be there. — F.
And then in blacker but sloppier letters suggesting hurried afterthought:
Let's feign mutual attack when we meet, to train our crews. Agreed!
The white flame, burning steady and bright in the still air, showed the Mouser's delighted grin and also the added expression of incredulous outrage as he read the postscript. Northerners as a breed were battle-mad, and Fafhrd the feyest.
“Gib, get quill and squid ink,” he commanded. “Sir Pshawri, take slow-fire and a red flare to the mainmast top and burn it there. Yarely! But if you fire Flotsam, I'll nail you to the burning deck!”
Some moments later, as the Mouser-enlisted small cat-burglar steadily mounted the rigging, though additionally encumbered by a boathook, his captain reversed the small parchment, spread it flat against the mast, and neatly inscribed on its back by light of candle, which Gib held along with the inkhorn:
Madman Most Welcome! — I'll burn them one each bell. I do not agree. My crew is trained already. — M.
He shook the note to dry it, then gingerly wrapped it closely around the glaring hawk's leg, just above talons and threaded it tight. As his fingers came away, the bird bated with a shriek and winged off into the fog without command. Fafhrd had at least his avian messengers well trained.
A red glare, surprisingly bright, sprang forth from the fog at the masthead and rose mysteriously a full ten cubits above the top. Then the Mouser saw that, for safety's sake, his own and his ship's, the little corporal major had fixed the flare to the boathook's end and thrust it aloft, thereby also increasing the distance at which it could be seen — by at least a Lankhmar league, the Mouser hurriedly calculated. A sound thought, he had to admit, almost a brilliancy. He had Mikkidu reverse Flotsam's course for practice, the steerside sweepsmen pulling water to swing the ship their way. He went to the prow to assure himself that the heavily muffled Mingol there was steadily scanning the fog ahead, next he returned to the stern, where Ourph stood by his tillerman, both equally thick-cloaked against the cold.
Then, as the red flare glowed on and the relative quiet of steady sweeping returned, the Mouser's ears unwilled resumed their work of searching the fog for strange sounds, and he said softly to Ourph without looking at him, “Tell me now, Old One, what you really think about your restless nomad brotheren and why they've ta'en to ship instead of horse.”
“They rush like lemmings, seeking death… for others,” the ancient croaked reflectively. “Gallop the waves instead of flinty steppes. To strike down cities is their chiefest urge, whether by land or sea. Perhaps they flee the People of the Ax.”
“I've heard of those,” the Mouser responded doubtfully. “Think you they'd league with Stardock's viewless fliers, who ride the icy airs above the world?”
“I do not know. They'll follow their clan wizards anywhere.”
The red flare died. Pshawri came down rather jauntily from the top and reported to his dread captain, who dismissed him with a glare which was unexpectedly terminated by a broad wink and the command to burn another flare at the next bell, or demi-hour. Then turning once more to Ourph, the Mouser spoke low: “Talking of wizards, do you know of Khahkht?”
The ancient let five heartbeats go by, then croaked, “Khahkht is Khahkht. It is no tribal sorcerer, 'tis sure. It dwells in farthest north within a dome — some say a floating globe — of blackest ice, from whence It watches the least deeds of men, devising evil every chance It gets, as when the stars are right — better say wrong — and all the Gods asleep. Mingols dread Khahkht and yet… whene'er they reach a grand climacteric they turn to It, beseech It ride ahead before their greatest, bloodiest centaurings. Ice is Its favored quarter, ice Its tool, and icy breath Its surest sign save blink.”
“Blink?” the Mouser asked uneasily.
“Sunlight or moonlight shining back from ice,” the Mingol replied. “Ice blink.”
A soft white flash paled for an instant the dark, pearly fog, and through it the Mouser heard the sound of oars — mightier strokes than those of Flotsam's sweeps and set in a more ponderous rhythm, yet oars or sweeps indubitably, and swiftly growing louder. The Mouser's face grew gladsome. He peered about uncertainly. Ourph's pointing finger stabbed dead ahead. The Mouser nodded, and pitching his voice trumpet-shrill to carry, he hailed forward, “Fafhrd! Ahoy!”
There was a brief silence, broken only by the beat of Flotsam's sweeps and of the oncoming oars, and then there came out of the fog the heart-quickening though still eerie cry, “Ahoy, small man! Mouser, well met in wildering waters! And now — on guard!” The Mouser's glad grin grew frantic. Did Fafhrd seriously intend to carry out in fog his fey suggestion of a feigned ships'-battle? He looked with a wild questioning at Ourph, who shrugged hugely for one so small.
A brighter white blink momentarily lightened the fog ahead. Without pausing an instant for thought, the Mouser shouted his commands. “Loadside sweeps! Pull water! Yarely! Steerside, push hard!” And unmindful of the Mingol manning it, he threw himself at the tiller and drove it steerside so that Flotsam's rudder would strengthen the turning power of the loadside sweeps.
It was well he acted as swiftly as he did. From out the fog ahead thrust a low, thick, sharp-tipped, glittering shaft that would otherwise have rammed Flotsam's bow and split her in twain. As it was, the ram grazed Flotsam's side with shuddering rasp as the small ship veered abruptly loadside in response to the desperate sweeping of its soldier-thieves.
And now, following its ram, the white, sharp prow of Fafhrd's ship parted the gleam-shot fog. Almost incredibly lofty that prow was, high as a house and betokening ship as huge, so that Flotsam's men had to crane necks up at it and even the Mouser gasped in fear and wonder. Fortunately it was yards to steerward as Flotsam continued to veer loadward, or else the smaller ship had been battered in.
Out of the fog dead ahead there appeared a flatness traveling sideways. A yard above the deck, it struck the mast, which might have snapped except that the flatness broke off first and there dropped with a clash at the Mouser's feet something which further widened his eyes: the great ice-crusted blade and some of the loom of an oar twice the size of Flotsam's sweeps, and looking for all the world like a dead giant's fingernail.
The next huge oar missed the mast, but struck Pshawri a glancing blow and sent him sprawling. The rest missed Flotsam by widening margins. From the vast and towering, white, glittering bulk already vanishing in the fog there came a mighty cry: ”Oh coward! To turn aside from battle challenge! Oh, crafty coward! But go on guard again! I'll get you yet, small one, howe'er you dodge!”
Those huge, mad words were followed by an equally insane laughter. It was the sort of laughter the Mouser had heard before from Fafhrd in perilous battle plights, now madder than ever, fiendish even, but it was loud as if there were a dozen Fafhrds voicing it in unison. Had he trained his berserks to echo him?
A clawlike hand gripped the Mouser's elbow hard. Then Ourph was pointing at the big, broken oar end on the deck. “It's nought but ice.” The old Mingol's voice resonated with superstitious awe. “Ice forged in Khahkht's chill smithy.” He let go Mouser and, swiftly stooping, raised the thing in black-mitted hands widely spaced, as one might a wounded deadly serpent, and of a sudden hurled it overboard.
Beyond him, Mikkidu had lifted Pshawri's shoulders and bloodied head from the deck. But now he was peering up at his captain over his still, senseless comrade. In his wild eyes was a desperate questioning.
The Mouser hardened his face. “Sweep on, you sluggards,” he commanded measuredly. “Push strongly. Mikkidu, let crewmen see to Pshawri, you chink gong for the sweeps. Swiftest beat! Ourph, arm your crew. Send down for arrows and your bows of horn — and for my soldiers their slings and ammunition. Leaden ball, not rock. Gavs, keep close watch astern, Trenchi at prow. Yarely all!”
The Gray One looked grimly dangerous and was thinking thoughts he hated. A thousand years ago in the Silver Eel, Fafhrd had announced he'd hire twelve berserkers, madmen in battle. But had his dear friend, now demon-possessed, guessed then just how mad his dozen dements would be, and that their craziness would be catching? and infect himself?
Above the ice fog, the stars glittered like frost candles, dimmed only by the competing light of the gibbous moon low in the southwest, where in the distance the front of an approaching gale was rolling up the thick carpet of ice crystals floating in air.
Not far above the pearly white surface, which stretched to all horizons save the southwest, the messenger hawk the Mouser had released was winging east. As far as eye could see, no other living thing shared its vast-arched loneliness, yet the bird suddenly veered as if attacked, then frantically beat its wings and came to a twisting stop in mid-air, as if it had been seized and held helpless. Only there was nothing to be seen sharing the clear air with the thrashing bird.
The scrap of parchment around its leg unrolled like magic, lay flat in the air for a space, then rolled itself around the scaly leg again. The white hawk shot off desperately to the east, zigzagging as if to dodge pursuit and flying very close to the white floor, as if ready at any moment to dive into it.
A voice came out of the empty air at the point where the bird had been released, soliloquizing, “There's profit enow and more in this leaguer of Oomforafor of Stardock and the Khahkht of the Black Ice, if my ruse works — and it will! Dear devilish sisters, weep! — your lovers who defiled you are dead men already, though they still breathe and walk awhile. Delayed revenge long savored and denied is sweeter than swift. And sweetest of all when the ones you hate love, but are forced to kill, each other. For if my notes effect not that mebliss, my name's not Faroomfar! And now, wing sound-swift! my fleet steed of air, my viewless magic rug.”
The strange, low fog stayed thick and bitter cold, but Fafhrd's garb of reversed snow-fawn fur was snug. Gauntleted hand on the low figurehead — a hissing snow serpent — he gazed back with satisfaction from Sea Hawk's prow at his oarsmen, still rowing as strongly as when he'd first commanded them on sighting Mouser's red flare from the masthead. They were staunch lads, when kept busy and battered as needed. Nine of them tall as he, and three taller — his corporals Skullick and Mannimark and sergeant Skor, the last two hid by the fog where Skor clinked time at the stern. Each petty officer immediately commanded a squad of three men.
And Sea Hawk was a staunch sailing galley! — a little longer and narrower of beam and with much taller mast, rigged fore and aft, than the Gray Mouser's ship (though Fafhrd could not know that, never having seen Flotsam).
Yet he frowned slightly. Pelly should be back by now, provided Mouser had sent a return message, and the little gray man never lost chance to talk, whether by tongue or pen. It was time he visited the top anyhow — the Mouser might burn another flare, and Skullick wake-dream on watch. But as he neared the mast, a seven-foot ghost loomed up — a ghost in turned gray otter's fur.
“How now, Skullick?” Fafhrd rasped, looking up their half span's difference in height. “Why have you left your station? Speak swiftly, scum!” And without other warning or preparation, he struck his corporal major a short-traveling jolt in the midriff that jarred him back a step and (rather illogically) robbed him of most of the breath he had to speak with.
“It's cold… as witch's womb… up there,” Skullick gasped with pain and difficulty. “And my relief's… o'erdue.”
“From now on you'll wait on station for your relief until Hell freezes over, and haply you too. But you're relieved.” And Fafhrd struck him again in the same crucial spot. “Now water the rowers, four measures of water to one of usquebaugh — and if you take more than two gulps of the last, I'll surely know!”
He turned away abruptly, reached the mast in two strides, and climbed it rhythmically by the pins of its bronze collars, past the mainyard, to which the big sail was snugly furled, past the peak, until his gloved hands gripped the short horizontal bar of the crow's-perch. As he drew himself up by them, it was a wonder how the fog gave way without gradation to star-ceilinged air, as though a fine film, impalpable yet tough, confined the ice motes, held them down. When he stood on the bar and straightened himself, he was waist-deep in fog so thick he could barely see his feet. He and the mast top were scudding through a pearly sea, strongly propelled by the invisible rowers below. The stars told him Sea Hawk was still headed due west. His sense of direction had worked truly in the fog below. Good!
Also, the feckless Skullick had spoken true. It was cold indeed as a she-demon's privies, yet wonderfully bracing. He noted the new wind sweeping up the fog in the southwest, and north of that the spot where he'd picked up the Mouser's flare on the horizon's brim. The deformed fat moon was there now, almost touching it, yet still most bright. If the Mouser burned another flare, it ought to be higher, because Fafhrd's rowing should be bringing the ships together. He searched the west closely to make sure another red spark wasn't being drowned by Nehwon's strong moonlight.
He saw a black speck against the lopsided, bright pearl orb. As he watched, it rapidly increased in size, grew wings, and with a white beat of them landed with jolting twin-talon grip on Fafhrd's gauntleted wrist.
“You're ruffled, Pelly. Who has troubled you?” he asked as he snapped threads and unrolled from leg the parchment scrap. He recognized the start of his own note, flipped it over, and by the flat moonlight read the Mouser's.
Madman Most Welcome! — I'll burn them one each bell. I do not agree. MY crew is trained already. — M.
No feigned attack, you cur once my friend, but earnest deadly. I want no less than your destruction, dog. To the death!
Fafhrd read the salutation and first sentence with great relief and joy. The next two sentences made him frown in puzzlement. But with the dire postscript, his face fell, and his expression became one of deep dread and utter dolefulness. He hurriedly rescanned the script to see how the letters and words were formed. They were the Mouser's unquestionably, the postscript slightly scrawled 'cause writ more swift. Something he'd missed nagged briefly at his mind, then was forgot. He crumpled the parchment and thrust it deep in his pouch.
He said to himself in the naked, low tones of a man plunged into nightmare, “I can't believe and yet cannot deny. I know when Mouser jests and when speaks true. There must be swift-striking madness in these polar seas, perhaps loosed by that warlock Afreyt named… Ice Wizard… It… Khahkht. And yet… and yet I must ready Sea Hawk for total war, howe'er it grieve me. A man must be prepared for all events, no matter how they chill and tear his heart.”
He gave the west a final glance. The front of the southwest gale was close now, sweeping up the ice crystals ahead of it. It was a chord that cut off a whole sector of the circular white fog-sea, replacing it with naked black ocean. From that came a fleeting white glow that made Fafhrd mutter, “Ice blink.”
Then closer still, hardly a half-score bowshots away, still in the fog yet near its wind-smitten edge, a redness flared bright, then died.
Fafhrd sank swiftly into the fog, going down the mast in swift hand-over-hand drops, his boots hardly touching the bronze collar pins.
Inside the dark-mapped globular vacuity, It ceased Its dartings, held Itself rigidly erect, facing away from the water-walled equatoriaql sun disk, and intoned in voice like grinding ice flowes, “Heed me, smallest atomies, that in rime seas seethe and freeze. Hear me, spirits of the cold, then do straigtway what you're told. Ships are meeting, heroes greeting; gift to each, from each, of death. Monstreme lurk, in icy murk, picket of the Mingol work 'gainst each city, hearth, and kirk. If they 'scape the Viewless's ruse, make yourself of direst use. Vessels shatter! Man-bones scatter! Bloody flesh, bones darkness splatter! — every splinter, every tatter! Deeds of darkness, darkness merit — so, till's done, put out the sun!”
And with reptilian swiftness It whipped around and clapped a blacked-iron lid over the softly flaring, walled solar disk, which plunged the spherical cavity into an absolute blackness, wherein It whispered grindingly and chucklesome, “…and the Ghouls conjured the sun out of Heaven, quotha! Ghouls, indeed! — ever o'er-boastful. Khahkht never boasts, but does!”
At the foot of Flotsam's mainmast the Gray Mouser gripped Pshawri by the throat, but forbore to shake him. Beneath bloody head-circling bandage, his corporal major's white-circled pupils stared at him defiantly from bloodless face.
“Was one light battle-tap enough to make a crack for all your brains to leak out?” the Mouser demanded. ”Why did you fire that flare, and so reveal us to our enemy?”
Pshawri winced but continued to oppose his gaze to the captain's glare. “You ordered it — and did not countermand,” he stated stubbornly.
The Mouser sputtered, but had to allow the truth of that. The fool had been obedient, even if utterly lacking in judgment. Soldiers and their blind devotion to duty! especially spoken order! Most odd to think that this faithful idiot was yesterday a burglar-thief, child of treachery and lies and blinkered selfishness. The Mouser had also guiltily to admit he could have countermanded his command, paying lip service to logic and making allowance for stupidity, and particularly have noted what the fool was up to when he mounted the mast a second time. Pshawri was clearly still shaken from his head blow, poor devil, and at least he had been quick enough in casting boathook and flare into the sea when the Mouser'd roared at him from below.
”Very well,” he said gruffly, releasing his grip. “Next time think too — if there's time — and there was! as well as act. Ask Ourph for a noggin of white brandy. Then be forward lookout with Gavs — I'm doubling them bow and stern.”
And with that, the Mouser himself took up the general work of trying to pierce the stilly fog with eyes and ears, wondering the while unhappy and uneasy about the nature of Fafhrd's madness and of the vast, fell vessel he'd built, bought, commandeered, or perchance got from Ningauble or other sorcerer. Or sorcerers! — it had surely been big and weird enough to be the chattel of several archimages! Conceivably a refitted prison hulk from rimy No-Ombrulsk. Or, illest thought of all (stemming from Ourph's fears 'bout the vanished oar shard), was the sorcerer Khahkht? — and some link 'twixt that warlock and mad Fafhrd?
Flotsam ghosted on, the sweepsmen pushing only enough to keep her under way. Mouser had early ordered slowest beat to conserve their strength.
“Three bells,” Ourph softly called.
Dawn nighs, the Mouser thought.
Pshawri could not have been long at the bow when his cry came back, “Clear sea ahead! And wind!”
The fog thinned to wisps torn and tossed aft by the eddying, frosty air. The gibbous moon was firmly bedded on the western horizon, yet still sent an eerie white glare, while south of her a few lonely stars hung in the sky. That was uncanny, the Mouser thought, for the imminent dawn should already have extinguished them. He faced east — and almost gasped.
Above the low, moonlit fog bank, the heavens were darker than ever, the night was starless, while due east on the fog bank there rested a sliver of blackness blacker than any night could be, as if a black sun were rising that shot out beams of a darkness powerful and active as light — not light's absence, but its enemy opposite. And from that same thickening sliver, along with the potent darkness, there seemed to come a cold more intense and differing in kind from that of the bitter southwest wind striking behind his right ear.
“Ship on our loadside beam!” Pshawri cried shrilly.
At once the Mouser dropped his gaze and sighted the stranger vessel, about three bowshots distant, just emerged from the fog bank and equally illumined by the moon glare, and headed straight at Flotsam. At first he took it for Fafhrd's icy leviathan come again, then saw it was small as his own ship, maybe narrower of beam. His thoughts zigzagged wildly — did mad Fafhrd command a fleet? was it a Sea Mingol warcraft? or still other pirate? or from Rime Isle? He forced himself to think more to the purpose.
His heart pulsed twice. Then, “Make sail, my Mingols all!” he commanded. “Odd-numbered sweepsmen! rack your long tools, then arm! Pshawri! command 'em!” And he grasped the tiller as the steersman let it go.
Aboard Sea Hawk, Fafhrd saw Flotsam's low hull and short masts and long, slantwise main and mizzen yards blackly silhouetted against the spectrally white, misshapen moon awash in the west. In the same instant he at last realized what it was that had nagged his mind at the mast top. He whipped the gauntlet from his right hand, plunged the latter into his pouch, plucked out the parchment scrap, and this time reread his own note — and saw below it the damning postscript he knew he'd never written. Clearly both postscripts, penned in deceptive scrawls, were cunning forgeries, however done o'erhead in birds' realm.
So even as he felt the wind and commanded, “Skor! Take your squad. Prepare to make sail!” he drew a favorite arrow from the quiver ready beside him on the deck, threaded the note around it in studied haste, swiftly uncased and strung his great bow, and with a curt prayer to Kos bent it to its muscle-cracking extreme and sent the pet arrow winging high into the black sky toward the moon and the black two-master.
Aboard Flotsam, the Mouser felt a shiver of super-added apprehension which mounted while he watched his Mingols purposefully struggling with frozen lines and ties in the freshening chilly wind, until it culminated in the chunk of an arrow almost vertically into the deck scarce a cubit from his foot. So the small, moonlit sailing galley (for he had meanwhile identified it as such a craft) was signaling attack! Yet the range was still so great that he knew of only one bowman in Nehwon who could have made that miraculous shot. Not letting go the tiller, he stooped and severed the threads of the pale parchment wrapped tightly just behind the arrow's half-buried head, and read (or rather mostly reread) the two notes, his with the devilish postscript he'd never seen before. Even as he finished, the characters became unreadable from the black beams of anti-sun fighting down the moon rays and beginning to darken that orb. Yet he made the same deduction as had Fafhrd, and hot tears of joy were squeezed from his chilled eye sockets as he realized that whatever impossible-seeming sleights of ink and voice had been worked this night, his friend was sane and true.
There was a protracted, sharp crackling as the last ties of the sails were loosed and wind filled them, breaking their frozen folds and festoons. The Mouser bore on the tiller, heading Flotsam into what was now a strengthening gale. But at the same time he sharply commanded, “Mikkidu! burn three flares, two red, one white!”
Aboard Sea Hawk, Fafhrd saw the blessed treble sign flare up in gathering unnatural murk, even as his reefed sails filled and he turned his own craft into the wind. He ordered, “Mannimark! answer those flares with like. Skullick, you dolt! slack your squad's bows. Those to the west are friends!” Then he said to Skor beside him, “Take the helm. My friend's ship is on close-hauled southron course like ours. Work over to her. Lay us alongside.”
Aboard Flotsam, the Mouser was giving like directions to Ourph. He was cheered by sight of Fafhrd's flares matching his own. though he did not need their testimony. Now he longed for talk with Fafhrd. Which would be soon. The gap of black water between ships was narrowing rapidly. He wasted a moment musing whether mere chance or else some goddess had steered his comrade's arrow aside from his heart. He thought of Cif.
Aboard both ships, almost in unison, Pshawri and Mannimark cried out fearfully, “Ship close astern!”
Out of the torn and darkening fog bank, driving with preternatural rapidity into the teeth of the gale on a course to smash them both, there had silently come a craft monstrous in size and aspect. It might well have remained unseen until collision, save that the weird rays of the rising black sun striking its loadside engendered there a horrid, pale reflection, not natural white light at all, but a loathly, colorless luminescence — a white to make the flesh crawl, a cave-toad, fish-belly white. And if the substance making the reflection had any texture at all, it was that of ridged and crinkled gray horn — dead men's fingernails.
The leprous Hel-glow showed the demonic craft to have thrice the freeboard of any natural ship. Its towering prow and sides were craggy and jagged, as if it were cast entire of ice in a titanic rough mold left over from the Age of Chaos, or else hacked by jinn into crude ship-likeness from a giant berg broken off from glacier vast. And it was driven by banks of oars long and twitchy as insect legs or limbs of myriapod, yet big as jointed yards or masts, as they sent it scuttling monstrously across black ocean vast. And from its lofty deck, as if hurled by demon ballistas, catapults, and mangonels, there now came hurtling down around Flotsam and Sea Hawk great blocks of ice which sent up black, watery volcanoes. While from the jagged top of its foremast — pale, big, and twisted as a thunder-blasted pine long dead — there shot out two thin beams of blackest black, like rays of anti-sun but more intense, which smote the Gray Mouser and Fafhrd each in the chest with deepstriking chill and sick, spreading dizziness and weakening of will.
Nevertheless they each managed to give rapid, stinging commands, and the two ships turned away in time's nick from each other and the oared deathberg striking between them. Flotsam had had only to turn further into the wind and so come round smoothly and swiftly. But Sea Hawk perforce must jibe. Its sail shivered a space, then filled abruptly on the other side with noise like thunder crack, but the stout Ool Krut canvas did not split. Both ships scudded north before the gale.
Behind them the eldritch bergship slowed and turned with supernatural celerity, spider-walked by its strange oars, and came in monstrous pursuit, gigantically oared on. And although no word was voiced or sign given by the pursued — almost as if by taking no notice of it, the menacing tangle of ghostly white evil astern could be made not to be — a collective shudder nevertheless went through the crews and captains of the sailing galley and the long-yarded two-master.
With that began a time of trial and tension, a Reign of Terror, an Eternal Night, such as no one amongst them had ever known before. First, there was the darkness, which grew greater the higher the anti-sun climbed in the black heavens. Even candle flames below and the cook fires sheltered from the blast grew blue and dim. While the pustulant white glow hunting them had this quality: that its light illumined nothing it fell on, but rather darkened it, as if it carried the essence of the anti-light along with it, as if it existed solely to make visible the terror of the bergship. Although the bergship was real as death and ever inching nearer, that eerie light sometimes seemed to Fafhrd and the Mouser most akin to the glows seen crawling on the inside of closed eyelids in darkness absolute.
Second, there was the cold that was a part of the anti-sunlight and struck deep with it, that penetrated every cranny of Sea Hawk and Flotsam, that had to be fought with both protective huddlings and violent movement, and also with drink and food warmed very slowly and with difficulty over the enfeebled flames — a cold that could paralyze both mind and body, and then kill.
Third, there was the potent silence that came with the unnatural dark and cold, the silence that made almost inaudible the constant creakings of rigging and wood, that muffled all foot-stampings and side-flailings against the cold, that turned all speech to whispers and changed the pandemonium of the great gale itself driving them north to the soft roaring of a seashell held forever to the ear.
And then there was that great gale itself, no whit weaker that it had no great noise — the gale that blew icy spume over the stern, the murderous gale that had always to be struggled against and kept watch on (gripping with fingers and thumbs like gyves to hopefully firm handholds when a man was anywhere on deck or above), the gale near hurricane force that was driving them ever north at an unprecedented pace. None of them had ever before sailed before such a wind, even in the Mouser's and Fafhrd's and Ourph's first passage of the Outer Sea. Any of them would have long since hove to with bare masts and likely sea anchor, save for the menace of the bergship behind.
Last, there was that monstrous craft itself, deathberg or bergship, ever gaining on them, its leggy oars ever more strongly plied. Rarely, a jagged ice block crashed in black sea beside them. Rarely, a black ray teased at hero's heart. But those were but cackling reminders. The monster craft's main menace: it did nothing (save close the distance to its fleeing foes). The monster-craft's intent: grapple and board! (or so it seemed).
Each on his ship, Fafhrd and Mouser fought weariness and chill; insane desire to sleep; strange, fleeting dreads. Once Fafhrd fancied unseen fliers battling overhead, as if in fabulous aerial extension of the sea war of his and Mouser's craft 'gainst iceship huge. Once Mouser seemed to see black sails of two great fleets. Both masters cheered their men, kept them alive.
Sometimes Sea Hawk and Flotsam were far apart in their parallel flight north, quite out of sight and hail. Sometimes they came together enough to see glints of each other. And once so close their captains could trade words.
Fafhrd hailed in bursts (they were whispers in Mouser's ears), “Ho, Small One! Heard you Stardock's fliers? Our mountain princesses… fighting with Faroomfar?”
The Mouser shouted back, “My ears are frostbit. Have you sighted… other foe ships… besides monstreme?”
Fafhrd: Monstreme? What's that?
Mouser: That ill astern. My word's analogous… to bireme… quadrireme. Monstreme! — rowed by monsters.
Fafhrd: A monstreme in full gale. An awful thought! (He looked astern at it.)
Mouser: Monstreme in monsoon… would be awfuler.
Fafhrd: Let's not waste breath. When will we raise Rime Isle?
Mouser: I had forgot we had a destination. What time think you?
Fafhrd: First bell in second dogwatch. Sunset season.
Mouser: It should get lighter… when this black sun sets.
Fafhrd: It ought to. Damn the double dark!
Mouser: Damn the dimidiate halved white astern! What's its game?
Fafhrd: Freeze fast to us, I wot. Then kill by cold, else board us.
Mouser: That's great, I must say. They should hire you.
So their shouts trailed off — a joy at first, but soon a tiredness. And they had their men to care for. Besides, it was too risky, ships so close.
There passed a weary and nightmarish time. Then to the north, where nought had changed all the black day of plunging into it, Fafhrd marked a dark red glow. Long while he doubted it, deemed it some fever in his frozen skull. He noted Afreyt's slender face bobbing among his thoughts. At his side Skor asked him, “Captain, is that a distant fire dead ahead? Our lost sun about to rise in north?” At last Fafhrd believed in the red glow.
Aboard Flotsam, the Mouser, racked by the poisons of exhaustion and barely aware, heard Fafhrd whisper, “Mouser, ahoy. Look ahead. What do you see?” He realized it was a mighty shout diminished by black silence and the gale, and that Sea Hawk had come close again. He could see glints from the shields affixed along her side, while astern the monstreme was close too, looming like a leprously opalescent cliff arock. Then he looked ahead.
After a bit, “A red light,” he wheezed, then forced himself to bellow the same words alee, adding, “Tell me what is it. And then let me sleep.”
“Rime Isle, I trow,” Fafhrd replied across the gap.
“Are they burning her down?” the Mouser asked.
The answer came back faintly and eerily. “Remember… on the gold pieces… a volcano?” The Mouser didn't believe he'd heard aright his comrade's next cry after that one, until he'd made him repeat it. Then, “Sir Pshawri!” he called sharply, and when that one came limping up, hand to bandaged head, he ordered, “Heave bucket overside on line and haul it up. I want waves' sample. Swiftly, you repulsive cripple!”
Somewhat later, Pshawri's eyebrows rose as his captain took the sloshing bucket he proffered and set it to his lips and uptilted it, next handed it back to Pshawri, swished around his teeth the sample he'd taken into his mouth, made a face, and spat to lee.
The fluid was far less icy than the Mouser had expected, almost tepid — and saltier than the water of the Sea of Monsters, which lies just west of the Parched Mountains that hide the Shadowland. He wondered for a mad moment if they'd been magicked to that vast, dead lake. 'Twould fit with monstreme. He thought of Cif.
There was impact. The deck tilted and did not rock back. Pshawri dropped the bucket and screamed.
The monstreme had thrust between the smaller ships and instantly frozen to them with its figurehead (living or dead?) of sea monster hacked or born of ice, its jaws agape betwixt their masts, while from the lofty deck high overhead there pealed down Fafhrd's laughter, monstrously multiplied.
The monstreme visibly shrank.
At one stride went the dark. From the low west the true sun burst forth, warmly lighting the bay in which they lay and striking an infinitude of golden gleams from the great, white, crystalline cliff to steerside, down which streaming water rushed in a thousand streams and runnels. A league or so beyond it rose a conical mountain down whose sides flowed glaring scarlet and from whose jaggedly truncated summit brilliant vermilion flames streamed toward the zenith, their dark smoke carried off northeastward by the wind.
Pointing at it with outthrown arm, Fafhrd called, “See, Mouser, the red glow.”
Straight ahead, nearer than the cliff and drifting steadily still nearer, was a town or small unwalled city of low buildings hugging gentle hills, its waterfront one long low wharf, where a few ships were docked and a small crowd was assembled quietly. While to the west, rounding out the bay, there were more cliffs, the nearer bare dark rock, the farther robed in snow.
Facing the city, Fafhrd said, “Salthaven.”
Studying the steaming, streaming, glittering white cliff and fiery peak beyond, the Mouser remembered the two scenes on his golden coins, all spent. This reminded him of the four silver coins he'd not been able to spend because they'd been snatched from his table at the Eel by the battered server, and of the two scenes on their faces: an iceberg and a monster. He turned round.
The monstreme was gone. Or rather, its last dissolving shards were sinking into the tranquil waters of the bay without sound or commotion, save that a little steam was rising.
Half-hurled, half-self-magicked from the monstreme's bridge, where It had been gazing out in triumph over the welter of dire, frigid forms on the decks below, Its mind obsessed with evil, back into Its cramped black sphere, Khahkht cursed in voice like Fafhrd's which midway became again a croak, “Damn to the depths of Hell Rime Isle's strange gods! Their day will come, their dooms! Which now devise I whilst I snugly sleep….” It whipped the lid off the water-walled sun and spoke a spell that rotated the sphere until the sun was topmost, the Great Subequatorial Desert nethermost. It briefly fanned the former hot and then curled up in the latter and closed Its eyes, muttering, “…for even Khahkht is cold.” While on tall Stardock, Great Oomforafor listened to the news of the defeat, or setback rather, and of his dear daughters' further treacheries, as told him by his furious, bedraggled son Prince Faroomfar, who'd been hurled back much as Khahkht.
As the Mouser turned back to the great white cliff, he realized that it must be made entire of salt — hence the seaport-name — and that the hot, volcanic waters coursing down it were dissolving it, which did much to account for the warm saltiness of ocean hereabouts and the swift melting of the frost monstreme. The last made all of magic ice, he mused, both stronger and weaker than the ordinary — as magic itself than life.
Fafhrd and he, looking toward the long wharf as they experienced sweetest relief and their ships drew steadily closer to it, saw two slender figures of different heights standing somewhat apart from the other seaside welcomers, who by that token and their proud attitudes and quietly rich garb — blue-gray the one, rust-red the other — must be individuals high in the councils of Rime Isle.