The Mouser felt a shiver creeping on him, yet not altogether one of fear.
A dab of palest green leaped from one of the jars to the point Hrissa was watching and vanished there. But then he saw a streak of reflected green appear in the mirror. The riddlesome maneuver was repeated, and soon in the mirror’s silver there hung a green mask, somewhat clouded by the silver’s dullness.
Then the mask vanished from the mirror and simultaneously reappeared unblurred hanging in the air above the ivory stool. It was the mask the Mouser knew achingly well—narrow chin, high-arched cheeks, straight nose and forehead.
The pouty wine-dark lips opened a little and a soft throaty voice asked, “Does my visage displease you, man of Lankhmar?”
“You jest cruelly, O Princess,” the Mouser replied, drawing on all his aplomb and sketching a courtier’s bow, “for you are Beauty’s self.”
Slim fingers, half outlined now in pale green, dipped into the unguent jar and took up a more generous dab.
The soft throaty voice, that so well matched half the laughter he had once heard in a snowfall, now said, “You shall judge all of me.”
* * * *
Fafhrd woke in the dark and touched the girl beside him. As soon as he knew she was awake too, he grasped her by the hips. When he felt her body stiffen, he lifted her into the air and held her above him as he lay flat on his back.
She was wondrous light, as if made of pastry or eiderdown, yet when he laid her beside him again, her flesh felt as firm as any, though smoother than most.
“Let us have a light, Hirriwi, I beg you,” he said.
“That were unwise, Faffy,” she answered in a voice like a curtain of tiny silver bells lightly brushed. “Have you forgotten that now I am wholly invisible?—which might tickle some men, yet you, I think…”
“You’re right, you’re right, I like you real,” he answered, gripping her fiercely by the shoulders to emphasize his feelings, then guiltily jerking away his hands as he thought of how delicate she must be.
The silver bells clashed in full laughter, as if the curtain of them had been struck a great swipe. “Have no fears,” she told him. “My airy bones are grown of matter stronger than steel. It is a riddle beyond your philosophers and relates to the invisibility of my race and of the animals from which it sprang. Think how strong tempered glass can be, yet light goes through it. My cursed brother Faroomfar has the strength of a bear for all his slimness while my father Oomforafor is a very lion despite his centuries. Your friend’s encounter with Faroomfar was no final test—but oh how it made him howl—Father raged at him—and then there are the cousins. Soon as this night be ended—which is not soon, my dear; the moon still climbs—you must return down Stardock. Promise me that. My heart grows cold at the thought of the dangers you’ve already faced—and was like ice I know not how many times this last three-day.”
“Yet you never warned us,” he mused. “You lured me on.”
“Can you doubt why?” she asked. He was feeling her snub nose then and her apple cheeks, and so he felt her smile too. “Or perhaps you resent it that I let you risk your life a little to win here to this bed?”
He implanted a fervent kiss on her wide lips to show her how little true that was, but she thrust him back after a moment.
“Wait, Faffy dear,” she said. “No, wait, I say! I know you’re greedy and impetuous, but you can at least wait while the moon creeps the width of a star. I asked you to promise me you would descend Stardock at dawn.”
There was a rather long silence in the dark.
“Well?” she prompted. “What shuts your mouth?” she queried impatiently. “You’ve shown no such indecision in certain other matters. Time wastes, the moon sails.”
“Hirriwi,” Fafhrd said softly, “I must climb Stardock.”
“Why?” she demanded ringingly. “The poem has been fulfilled. You have your reward. Go on, and only frigid fruitless perils await you. Return, and I’ll guard you from the air—yes, and your companion too—to the very Waste.” Her sweet voice faltered a little. “O Faffy, am I not enough to make you forego the conquest of a cruel mountain? In addition to all else, I love you—if I understand rightly how mortals use that word.”
“No,” he answered her solemnly in the dark. “You are wondrous, more wondrous than any wench I’ve known—and I love you, which is not a word I bandy—yet you only make me hotter to conquer Stardock. Can you understand that?”
Now there was silence for a while in the other direction.
“Well,” she said at length, “you are masterful and will do what you will do. And I have warned you. I could tell you more, show you reasons counter, argue further, but in the end I know I would not break your stubbornness—and time gallops. We must mount our own steeds and catch up with the moon. Kiss me again. Slowly. So.”
* * * *
The Mouser lay across the foot of the bed under the amber globes and contemplated Keyaira, who lay lengthwise with her slender apple-green shoulders and tranquil sleeping face propped by many pillows.
He took up the corner of a sheet and moistened it with wine from a cup set against his knee and with it rubbed Keyaira’s slim right ankle so gently that there was no change in her narrow bosom’s slow-paced rise and fall. Presently he had cleared away all the greenish unguent from a patch as big as half his palm. He peered down at his handiwork. This time he expected surely to see flesh, or at least the green cosmetic on the underside of her ankle, but no, he saw through the irregular little rectangle he’d wiped only the bed’s tufted coverlet reflecting the amber light from above. It was a most fascinating and somewhat unnerving mystery.
He glanced questioningly over at Hrissa who now lay on an end of the low table, the thin-glassed, fantastic perfume bottles standing around her, while she contemplated the occupants of the bed, her white tufted chin set on her folded paws. It seemed to the Mouser that she was looking at him with disapproval, so he hastily smoothed back unguent from other parts of Keyaira’s leg until the peephole was once more greenly covered.
There was a low laugh. Keyaira, propped on her elbows now, was gazing at him through slitted heavy-lashed eyelids.
“We invisibles,” she said in a humorous voice truly or feignedly heavy with sleep, “show only the outward side of any cosmetic or raiment on us. It is a mystery beyond our seers.”
“You are Mystery’s queenly self a-walk through the stars,” the Mouser pronounced, lightly caressing her green toes. “And I the most fortunate of men. I fear it’s a dream and I’ll wake on Stardock’s frigid ledges. How is it I am here?”
“Our race is dying out,” she said. “Our men have become sterile. Hirriwi and I are the only princesses left. Our brother Faroomfar hotly wished to be our consort—he still boasts his virility—’twas he you dueled with—but our father Oomforafor said, ‘It must be new blood—the blood of heroes.’ So the cousins and Faroomfar, he much against his will, must fly hither and yon and leave those little rhymed lures written on ramskin in perilous, lonely spots apt to tempt heroes.”
“But how can visibles and invisibles mate?” he asked.
She laughed with delight. “Is your memory that short, Mouse?”
“I mean, have progeny,” he corrected himself, a little irked, but not much, that she had hit on his boyhood nickname. “Besides, wouldn’t such offspring be cloudy, a mix of seen and unseen?”
Keyaira’s green mask swung a little from side to side.
“My father thinks such mating will be fertile and that the children will breed true to invisibility—that being dominant over visibility—yet profit greatly in other ways from the admixture of hot, heroic blood.”
“Then your father commanded you to mate with me?” the Mouser asked, a little disappointed.
“By no means, Mouse,” she assured him. “He would be furious if he dreamt you were here, and Faroomfar would go mad. No, I took a fancy to you, as Hirriwi did to your comrade, when first I spied on you on the Waste—very fortunate that was for you, since my father would have got your seed, if you had won to Stardock’s top, in quite a different fashion. Which reminds me, Mouse, you must promise me to descend Stardock at dawn.”
“That is not so easy a promise to give,” the Mouser said. “Fafhrd will be stubborn, I know. And then there’s that other matter of a bag of diamonds, if that’s what a pouch of stars means—oh, it’s but a trifle, I know, compared to the embraces of a glorious girl … still…”