Ningauble sighed windily and a shade piously. “All this is very bad, My Gentle Son,” he continued, his eye-glows weaving hypnotically in his cowl, “but natural enough in universes administered by such gods as we have—natural enough and perhaps endurable. However”—he paused—”there is worse to come! The Devourers want not only the patronage of all beings in all universes, but—doubtless because they are afraid someone will someday raise the ever-unpleasant question, of the true worth of things—they want all their customers reduced to a state of slavish and submissive suggestibility, so that they are fit for nothing whatever but to gawk at and buy the trash the Devourers offer for sale. This means of course that eventually the Devourers’ customers will have nothing wherewith to pay the Devourers for their trash, but the Devourers do not seem to be concerned with this eventuality. Perhaps they feel that there is always a new universe to exploit. And perhaps there is!”
“Monstrous!” Fafhrd commented. “But what do the Devourers gain from all these furious commercial sorties, all this mad merchandising? What do they really want?”
Ningauble replied, “The Devourers want only to amass cash and to raise little ones like themselves to amass more cash and they want to compete with each other at cash-amassing. (Is that coincidentally a city, do you think, Fafhrd? Cashamash?) And the Devourers want to brood about their great service to the many universes—it is their claim that servile customers make the most obedient subjects for the gods—and to complain about how the work of amassing cash tortures their minds and upsets their digestions. Beyond this, each of the Devourers also secretly collects and hides away forever, to delight no eyes but his own, all the finest objects and thoughts created by true men and women (and true wizards and true demons) and bought by the Devourers at bankruptcy prices and paid for with trash or—this is their ultimate preference—with nothing at all.”
“Monstrous indeed!” Fafhrd repeated. “Merchants are ever an evil mystery and these sound the worst. But what has all this to do with me?”
“Oh My Gentle Son,” Ningauble responded, the piety in his voice now tinged with a certain clement disappointment, “you force me once again to resort to hypothecating. Let us return to the supposition of this brave man whose whole universe is direly menaced and who counts his life a trifle and to the related supposition of this brave man’s wise uncle, whose advice the brave man invariably follows—”
“The Devourers have set up shop in the Plaza of Dark Delights!” Sheelba interjected so abruptly and in such iron-harsh syllables that this time Fafhrd actually did start. “You must obliterate this outpost tonight!”
Fafhrd considered that for a bit, then said, in a tentative sort of voice, “You will both accompany me, I presume, to aid me with your wizardly sendings and castings in what I can see must be a most perilous operation, to serve me as a sort of sorcerous artillery and archery corps while I play assault battalion—”
“Oh My Gentle Son…” Ningauble interrupted in tones of deepest disappointment, shaking his head so that his eye-glows jogged in his cowl.
“You must do it alone!” Sheelba rasped.
“Without any help at all?” Fafhrd demanded. “No! Get someone else. Get this doltish brave man who always follows his scheming uncle’s advice as slavishly as you tell me the Devourers’ customers respond to their merchandising. Get him! But as for me—No, I say!”
“Then leave us, coward!” Sheelba decreed dourly, but Ningauble only sighed and said quite apologetically, “It was intended that you have a comrade in this quest, a fellow soldier against noisome evil—to wit, the Gray Mouser. But unfortunately he came early to his appointment with my colleague here and was enticed into the shop of the Devourers and is doubtless now deep in their snares, if not already extinct. So you can see that we do take thought for your welfare and have no wish to overburden you with solo quests. However, My Gentle Son, if it still be your firm resolve…”
Fafhrd let out a sigh more profound than Ningauble’s. “Very well,” he said in gruff tones admitting defeat, “I’ll do it for you. Someone will have to pull that poor little gray fool out of the pretty-pretty fire—or the twinkly-twinkly water!—that tempted him. But how do I go about it?” He shook a big finger at Ningauble. “And no more Gentle-Sonning!”
Ningauble paused. Then he said only, “Use your own judgment.”
Sheelba said, “Beware the Black Wall!”
Ningauble said to Fafhrd, “Hold, I have a gift for you,” and held out to him a ragged ribbon a yard long, pinched between the cloth of the wizard’s long sleeve so that it was impossible to see the manner of hand that pinched. Fafhrd took the tatter with a snort, crumpled it into a ball, and thrust it into his pouch.
“Have a greater care with it,” Ningauble warned. “It is the Cloak of Invisibility, somewhat worn by many magic usings. Do not put it on until you near the Bazaar of the Devourers. It has two minor weaknesses: it will not make you altogether invisible to a master sorcerer if he senses your presence and takes certain steps. Also, see to it that you do not bleed during this exploit, for the cloak will not hide blood.”
“I’ve a gift too!” Sheelba said, drawing from out of his black cowl-hole—with sleeve-masked hand, as Ningauble had done—something that shimmered faintly in the dark like…
Like a spiderweb.
Sheelba shook it, as if to dislodge a spider, or perhaps two.
“The Blindfold of True Seeing,” he said as he reached it toward Fafhrd. “It shows all things as they really are! Do not lay it across your eyes until you enter the Bazaar. On no account, as you value your life or your sanity, wear it now!”
Fafhrd took it from him most gingerly, the flesh of his fingers crawling. He was inclined to obey the taciturn wizard’s instructions. At this moment he truly did not much care to see the true visage of Sheelba of the Eyeless Face.
The Gray Mouser was reading the most interesting book of them all, a great compendium of secret knowledge written in a script of astrologic and geomantic signs, the meanings of which fairly leaped off the page into his mind.
To rest his eyes from that—or rather to keep from gobbling the book too fast—he peered through a nine-elbowed brass tube at a scene that could only be the blue heaven-pinnacle of the universe where angels flew shimmeringly like dragonflies and where a few choice heroes rested from their great mountain-climb and spied down critically on the antlike labors of the gods many levels below.
To rest his eye from that, he looked up between the scarlet (bloodmetal?) bars of the inmost cage at the most winsome, slim, fair, jet-eyed girl of them all. She knelt, sitting on her heels, with her upper body leaned back a little. She wore a red velvet tunic and had a mop of golden air so thick and pliant that she could sweep it in a neat curtain over her upper face, down almost to her pouting lips. With the slim fingers of one hand she would slightly part these silky golden drapes to peer at the Mouser playfully, while with those of the other she rattled golden castanets in a most languorously slow rhythm, though with occasional swift staccato bursts.
The Mouser was considering whether it might not be as well to try a turn or two on the ruby-crusted golden crank next to his elbow, when he spied for the first time the glimmering wall at the back of the shop. What could its material be? he asked himself. Tiny diamonds countless as the sand set in smoky glass? Black opal? Black pearl? Black moonshine?
Whatever it was, it was wholly fascinating, for the Mouser quickly set down his book, using the nine-crooked spy-tube to mark his place—a most engrossing pair of pages on dueling where were revealed the Universal Parry and its five false variants and also the three true forms of the Secret Thrust—and with only a finger-wave to the ensorceling blonde in red velvet he walked quickly toward the back of the shop.
As he approached the Black Wall he thought for an instant that he glimpsed a silver wraith, or perhaps a silver skeleton, walking toward him out of it, but then he saw that it was only his own darkly handsome reflection, pleasantly flattered by the lustrous material. What had momentarily suggested silver ribs was the reflection of the silver lacings on his tunic.
He smirked at his image and reached out a finger to touch its lustrous finger when—Lo, a wonder!—his hand went into the wall with never a sensation at all save a faint tingling coolth promising comfort like the sheets of a fresh-made bed.
He looked at his hand inside the wall and—Lo, another wonder—it was all a beautiful silver faintly patterned with tiny scales. And though his own hand indubitably, as he could tell by clenching it, it was scarless now and a mite slimmer and longer fingered—altogether a more handsome hand than it had been a moment ago.