“So’s yours,” Fafhrd observed, and crouching on his right leg got a good handful of muck himself. Heaving himself up with a mighty effort, he wiped the stuff off on the Mouser’s cloak and gray silken jerkin too.
The small man cursed, but, “Dramatic consistency,”
Fafhrd reminded him. “Now come on, while our fires and our stinks are still high.” And grasping hold of the Mouser’s shoulder, he propelled himself rapidly toward Cheap Street, setting his bandaged sword between cobbles well ‘ahead and taking mighty hops.
“Slow down, idiot,” the Mouser cried softly, shuffling along with the speed almost of a skater to keep up, while tapping his (sword) cane like mad. “A cripple’s supposed to be feeble—that’s what draws the sympathy.”
Fafhrd nodded wisely and slowed somewhat. The ominous empty doorway slid again into view. The Mouser tilted his jug to get the last of his wine, swallowed awhile, then choked sputteringly. Fafhrd snatched and drained the jug, then tossed it over shoulder to shatter noisily.
They hop-shuffled across Cheap Street and without pause up the two worn steps and .through the doorway, past the exceptionally thick wall. Ahead was a long, straight, high-ceilinged corridor ending in a stairs and with doors spilling light at intervals and wall-set torches adding their flare, but empty all its length.
They had just got through the doorway when cold steel chilled the neck and pricked a shoulder of each of them. From just above, two voices commanded in unison, “Halt!”
Although fired—and fuddled—by fortified wine, they each had wit enough to freeze and then very cautiously look upward.
Two gaunt, scarred, exceptionally ugly faces, each topped by a gaudy scarf binding back hair, looked down at ‘them from a big, deep niche just above the doorway.
Two bent, gnarly arms thrust down the swords that still.
pricked them.
“Gone out with the noon beggar-batch, eh?” one of them observed. “Well, you’d better have a ‘high take to justify your tardy return. The Night Beggarmaster’s on a Whore Street furlough. Report above to Krovas. Gods, you stink! Better clean up first, or Krovas will have you bathed in live steam. Begone!”
The Mouser and Fafhrd shuffled and hobbled forward at ‘their most authentic. One niche-guard cried after them, “Relax, boys! You don’t have to put it on here.”
“Practice makes perfect,” the Mouser called back in a quavering voice. Fafhrd’s fingerends dug his shoulder warningly. They moved along somewhat more naturally, so far as Fafhrd’s tied-up leg allowed. Truly, thought Fafhrd, Kos of the Dooms seemed to be leading him direct to Krovas and perhaps head-chopping would be the order of ‘the night. And now he and the Mouser began to hear voices, mostly curt and clipped ones, and other noises.
They passed some doorways ‘they’d liked to have paused at, yet the most they dared do was slow down a bit more.
Very interesting were some of those activities. In one room young boys were being trained to pick pouches and slit purses. They’d approach from behind an instructor, and if he heard scuff of bare foot or felt touch of dipping hand—or, worst, heard clunk of dropped leaden mockcoin that ‘boy would be thwacked.
In a second room, older student thieves were doing laboratory work in lock picking. One group was being lectured by a grimy-handed graybeard, who was taking apart a most complex lock piece by weighty piece.
In a third, thieves were eating at long tables. The odors were tempting, even to men full of booze. The Guild did well by its members.
In a fourth, the floor was padded in part and instruc-tion was going on in slipping, dodging, ducking, tumbling, tripping, and otherwise foiling pursuit. A voice like a sergeant-major’s rasped, “Nah, nah, nah! You couldn’t give your crippled grandmother the slip. I said duck, not genuflect to holy Arth. Now this ‘time”
By ‘that time the Mouser and Fafhrd were halfway up the end stairs, Fafhrd vaulting somewhat laboriously as he grasped curving banister and swaddled sword.
The second floor duplicated .the first, but was as luxurious as the other had been bare. Down the long corridor lamps and filagreed incense pots pendent from the ceiling alternated, diffusing a mild light and spicy smell. The walls were richly draped, the floor .thick-carpeted. Yet this corridor was empty too and, moreover, completely silent. After a glance at each other, they started off boldly.
The first door, wide open, showed an untenanted room full ‘of racks of garments, rich and plain, spotless and filthy, also wig stands, shelves of beards and such. A disguising room, clearly.
The Mouser darted in and out to snatch up a large green flask from the nearest table. He unstoppered and sniffed it. A rotten-sweet gardenia-reek contended with the nose-sting of spirits of wine. The Mouser sloshed his and Fafhrd’s fronts with this dubious perfume.
“Antidote to muck,” he explained with ‘the pomp of a physician, stoppering the flask. “Don’t want to be par-boiled by Krovas. No, no, no.”
Two figures appeared at the far end of the corridor and came toward ‘them. The Mouser hid the flask under his cloak, holding it between elbow and side, and he and Fafhrd continued boldly onward.
The next three doorways they passed were shut by heavy doors. As they neared the fifth, the two approach-ing figures, coming on arm-in-arm, became distinct. Their clothing was that of noblemen, but their faces those of thieves. They were frowning with indignation and suspicion, too, at the Mouser and Fafhrd.
Just then, from somewhere between the ‘two man-pairs, a voice began to speak words in a strange tongue, using the rapid monotone priests employ in a routine service, or some sorcerers in their incantations.
The two richly clad thieves slowed at the seventh doorway and looked in. Their progress ceased altogether.
Their necks strained, their eyes widened. They paled.
Then of a sudden they hastened onward, almost running, and by-passed Fafhrd and the Mouser as if they were furniture. The incantatory voice drummed on without missing a beat.
The fifth doorway was shut, but the sixth was open. The Mouser peeked in with one eye, his nose brushing the jamb. Then he stepped forward and gazed inside with entranced expression, pushing the black rag onto his forehead for better vision. Fafhrd joined him.
It was a large room, empty so far as could be told of hub-man and animal life, but filled with most interesting ‘ things. From knee-high up, the entire far wall was a map of the city of Lankhmar. Every building and street seemed depicted, down to the meanest hovel and narrow-est court. There were signs of recent erasure and redrawing at many spots, and here and there little colored hiero-glyphs of mysterious import.
The floor was marble, the ceiling blue as lapis lazuli.
The side walls were thickly hung, the one with all manner of thieves’ tools, from a huge, thick, pry-bar that looked as if it could unseat the universe, to a rod so slim it might be an elf-queen’s wand and seemingly de-signed to telescope out and fish from a distance for precious gauds on milady’s spindle-legged, ivory-topped vanity table. The other wall had padlocked to it all sorts of quaint, gold-gleaming and jewel-flashing objects, evi-dently mementos chosen for their oddity from the spoils of memorable burglaries, from a female mask of thin gold, breathlessly beautiful in its features and contours but thickly set with rubies simulating the spots of the pox in its fever stage, to a knife whose blade was wedged-shaped diamonds set side by side and this diamond catting-edge looking razor-sharp.
In the center of the room was a bare round table of ebony and ivory squares. About it were set seven straight-backed but well-padded chairs, the one facing the map and ‘away from the Mouser and Fafhrd being higher backed and wider armed than the others chiefs chair, likely that of Krovas.
The Mouser tiptoed forward, irresistibly drawn, but Fafhrd’s left hand clamped down on his shoulder.
Scowling his disapproval, the Northerner brushed down the black rag over the Mouser’s eyes again and with his crutch-hand ‘thumbed ahead, then set off in that direction in most carefully calculated, silent hops. With a shrug of disappointment the Mouser followed.
As soon as they had turned away from the doorway, a neatly black-bearded, crop-haired head came like a serpent’s around the side of the highest-backed chair and gazed after them from deep-sunken yet glinting eyes. Next a snake-supple, long hand followed the head out, crossed thin lips with ophidian forefinger for silence, and ‘then finger-beckoned the two pairs of dark-tunicked men who were standing to either side of the doorway, their backs to the corridor wall, each of the four gripping a curvy knife in one hand and a dark leather, lead-weighted bludgeon in the ‘other.
When Fafhrd was halfway to the seventh doorway, from which the monotonous yet sinister recitation continued to well, there shot out through it a slender, whey-faced youth, his narrow hands clapped over his mouth, under terror-wide ‘eyes, as if to shut in ‘screams ‘or vomit, and with a broom clamped in an armpit, so that he seemed a hit like a young warlock about to take to the air. He dashed past Fafhrd and the Mouser ‘and away, his racing footsteps sounding rapid-dull ‘on the carpeting and hollow-sharp ‘on the ‘stairs before dying away.