Indubitably the black circles were ratholes newly gnawed up through ‘the floor and rugs, while the red-eyed creatures were black rats.
Fafhrd and the Mouser sprang forward, slashing and chopping at them in a frenzy, cursing and human-snarling besides.
They sundered few. The rats fled with preternatural swiftness, most of ‘them disappearing down holes near the walls and the fireplace.
Also Fafhrd’s first frantic chop went through the floor and on his third step, with an ominous crack and splinter-ing, his leg plunged through the floor to his hip-. The Mauser darted past him, unmindful of further crackings,.
Fafhrd heaved out his .trapped leg, not even noting the splinter-scratches it got and as unmindful as the Mouser of the continuing creakings. “The rats were gone.
He lunged after his comrade, who had thrust a bunch of kindlers into the stove, to make more light.
The horror was that, although the rats were all gone, the two longish heaps remained, although considerably ‘diminished and, as now shown clearly by the yellow flames leaping from the tilled black door, changed in hue no longer were the heaps red-beaded black, but a mixture of gloaming black and dark brown, a sickening purple-blue, violet and velvet black and snow-serpent white, and the reds of stockings and blood and bloody flesh and bone.
Although hands and feet had been gnawed bone-naked, and bodies tunneled heart-deep, the .two faces had been spared. But that was not good, for they were purple-blue from death by strangulation, lips drawn back, eyes bulg-ing, all features contorted in agony. Only the black and very dark brown hair gleamed unchanged—that and the white, white teeth.
As each man stared down at his love, unable to look away despite the waves of horror and grief and rage washing ‘higher and higher in him, each saw a tiny black strand uncurl from the black depression ringing each throat and drift off, dissipating, toward the open door behind them—two strands of night-smog.
With a crescendo of cracklings the floor sagged three spans more in the center before arriving at a new tem-porary stability.
Edges of centrally tortured minds noted details: That Vlana’s silver-hilted dagger skewered to the floor a rat, which, likely enough, overeager had approached too closely before the night-smog had done its magic work. That her belt and pouch were gone. That the blue-enameled box inlaid with silver, in which lvrian had put the Mouser’s share of the highjacked jewels, was gone too.
The Mouser and Fafhrd lifted to each other white, drawn faces, which were quite mad, yet completely joined in understanding and purpose. No need for Fafhrd to explain why he stripped off his robe and hood, or why he jerked up Vlana’s dagger, snapped the rat off it with a wrist-flick, and ‘thrust it in his belt. No need for the Mouser to tell why he searched out a half dozen jars of oil and after smashing three ‘of them in front of the flaming stove, paused, thought, and stuck the other three in the sack at his waist, adding to them the remaining kin-diers and the firepot, brimmed with red coal?, its top lashed down tight.
Then, still without word exchanged, the Mauser reached into the fireplace and without a wince at the burning metal’s touch, deliberately tipped .the flaming stove forward, so that lit fell door-down on oil-soaked rugs. Yellow flames sprang up around him.
They turned and raced for the door. With louder crackings than any before, the floor collapsed. They desperately scrambled their way up a steep hill of .sliding carpets and reached door and porch just before all behind them gave way and the flaming rugs and stove and all the firewood and candles and the golden couch and all the little tables and boxes and jars—and the unthinkably mutilated bodies of their first loves—cascaded into the dry, dusty, cobweb-choked room below, and the ‘great flames of a cleansing or at least obliterating cremation began to flare upward.
They plunged ‘down the .stairs, which tore away from the wall and collapsed in the dark as they. reached the ground. They had to fight their way over the wreckage to get to Bones Alley.
By then the flames were darting their bright lizard-tongues out of .the shuttered attic windows and the boarded-up ones m the story just ‘below. By the time they reached Plague Court, running side by side ‘at top speed, the Silver Eel’s fire alarm was clanging cacophonously behind .them.
They were still sprinting when .they took the Death Alley fork. Then the Mouser grappled Fafhrd and forced him to a halt. The big man struck out, cursing insanely, and only desisted—his white face still a lunatic’s—when the Mauser cried panting, “Only tea heartbeats to aim us!”
He pulled the sack from ‘his belt and keeping, tight hold of its neck, crashed it on the cobbles-hard -enough to smash mot only the bottles of oil, but .also the firepot, for the sack was soon flaming at its base.
Then he drew gleaming Scalpel and Fafhrd Graywand, and they raced on, the Mouser swinging his sack in a great circle beside him to fan its flames. It was a veritable ball of fire burning his left hand as they dashed across Cheap Street and into Thieves’ House, and the Mouser, leaping high, swung it up into the great niche above the doorway and let go of it. “
The niche-guards screeched in surprise and pain at the fiery invader of their hidey-hole.
Student thieves poured out of the door ahead at the screeching and foot-pounding, and then poured back as they saw the fierce point of flames and the two demon-faced on-comers brandishing their long, shining swords.
One skinny little apprentice—he could hardly have been ten years old—lingered too long. Graywand .thrust him pitilessly through, as his big eyes bulged and his small mouth gaped in horror and plea to Fafhrd for mercy.
Now from ahead ,of them there came a weird, wailing call, hollow and hair-raising, and doors began to thud shut instead of spewing forth the armed guards Fafhrd and the Mouser prayed would appear to be skewered by their swords. Also, despite the long, bracketed torches looking newly renewed, the corridor was darkening.
The reason for .this last became clear as they plunged op the stairs. Strands of night-smog appeared in the stair-well, materializing from nothing, or the air.
The strands grew longer and more tangible. They touched and clung nastily. In the corridor above they were farming from wall to wall and from ceiling to floor, like a gigantic cobweb, and were .becoming so substantial that the Mouser and Fafhrd had to .slash .them to get through, or so their two maniac minds believed. The black web muffled a little a repetition of the eerie, wailing call, which came from the seventh door ahead and this .time ended in a gleeful chittering and cackling as insane as the emotions of the two attackers.
Here, too, doors were thudding shut. In an ephemeral flash of rationality, it occurred to the Mouser that it was not he and Fafhrd the thieves feared, for they had not been seen yet, but rather Hristomilo and his magic, even though working in defense of Thieves’ House.
Even the map room, whence counterattack would most likely erupt, was closed off by a huge ‘oaken, iron-studded door.
They were now twice slashing the black, clinging, rope-thick spider web for every single step they drove themselves forward. While midway between the map and magic rooms, there was forming on the inky web, ghostly at first but swiftly growing more substantial, a black spider as big as a wolf.
The Mauser slashed heavy cobweb before it, dropped back two steps, then buried himself at it in ‘a high leap.
Scalpel thrust through it, striking amidst its eight new-formed jet eyes, and it collapsed like a daggered bladder, loosing a vile stink.
Then he and Fafhrd were looking into the magic room, the ‘alchemist’s chamber. It was much as they had seen it before, except some things were doubled, or multiplied even further.
On the long table two blue-boiled cucurbits bubbled and roiled, their heads shooting out a solid, writhing rope more swiftly than moves the black swamp-cobra, which can run down a man and not into twin receivers, but into the open air of the room (if any of the air in Thieves’
House could have been called open then) to weave a barrier between their swords and Hristomilo, who once more stood tall though hunch-backed over his sorcerous, brown parchment, though this time his exultant gaze was chiefly fixed on Fafhrd and the Mouser, with only an occasional downward glance at the text of the spell he drummingly intoned.
While at the other end of the table, in web-free space, there bounced not only Slivikin, but also a huge rat match-ing him in size in all members except the head.
From the ratholes at the foot of the walls, red eyes glittered ‘and gleamed in pairs.