No, never! He realized he couldn’t in his misery and self-rage bear the thought of even looking at Fafhrd.
Besides, the Northerner would certainly be drunk.
And two, or at most three, rilks would buy him certain tolerable and even interesting pleasures to fill the hours before dawn brought him release from this hateful city.
* * * *
Fafhrd was indeed drunk, being on his third jug. He had burnt up all the black jewels and was now with the greatest delicacy and most careful use of the needle point of his knife, releasing unharmed each of the silver-wired firebeetles, glowwasps, nightbees, and diamondflies. They buzzed about erratically.
Two cupbearers and the chucker-out had come to protest, and now Slevyas himself joined them, rubbing the back of his thick neck. He had been stung and a customer too. Fafhrd had himself been stung twice, but hadn’t seemed to notice. Nor did he now pay the slightest attention to the four haranguing him.
The last nightbee was released. It careened off noisily past Slevyas’ neck, who dodged his head with a curse. Fafhrd sat back, suddenly looking very wretched. With varying shrugs the master of the Silver Eel and his three servitors made off, one cupbearer making swipes at the air.
Fafhrd tossed up his knife. It came down almost point first, but didn’t quite stick in the teak. He laboriously scabbarded it, then forced himself to take a small sip of wine.
As if someone were about to emerge from the backmost booth, there was a stirring of its heavy curtains, which like all the others had stitched to them heavy chain and squares of metal, so that one guest couldn’t stab another through them, except with luck and the slimmest stilettos.
But at that moment a very pale man, who held up his cloak to shield his eyes from the candlelight, entered by the side door and made to Fafhrd’s table.
“I’ve come for my answer, Northerner,” he said in a voice soft yet sinister. He glanced at the toppled jugs and spilled wine. “That is, if you remember my proposition.”
“Sit down,” Fafhrd said. “Have a drink. Watch out for the glowwasps—they’re vicious.” Then, scornfully, “Remember! Prince Hasjarl of Marquall—Quarmall. Passage by ship. A mountain of gold rilks. Remember!”
Keeping on his feet, the other amended, “Twenty-five rilks. Provided you take ship with me at once and promise to render a day’s service to my prince. Thereafter by what further agreement you and he arrive at.”
He placed on the table a small golden tower of precounted coins.
“Munificent!” Fafhrd said, grabbing it up and reeling to his feet. He placed five of the coins on the table and shoved the rest in his pouch, except for three more, which scattered dulcetly across the floor. He corked and pouched the third wine jug. Coming out from behind the table, he said, “Lead the way, comrade,” gave the squinty-eyed man a mighty shove toward the side door, and went weaving after him.
In the backmost booth, Alyx the Picklock pursed her lips and shook her head disapprovingly.
IV: The Lords of Quarmall
The room was dim, almost maddeningly dim to one who loved sharp detail and the burning sun. The few wall-set torches that provided the sole illumination flamed palely and thinly, more like will-o’-the-wisps than true fire, although they released a pleasant incense. One got the feeling that the dwellers of this region resented light and only tolerated a thin mist of it for the benefit of strangers.
Despite its vast size, the room was carved all in somber solid rock—smooth floor, polished curving walls, and domed ceiling—either a natural cave finished by man or else chipped out and burnished entirely by human effort, although the thought of that latter amount of work was nearly intolerable. From numerous deep niches between the torches, metal statuettes and masks and jeweled objects gleamed darkly.
Through the room, bending the feeble bluish flames, came a perpetual cool draft bringing acid odors of damp ground and moist rock which the sweet spicy scent of the torches never quite masked.
The only sounds were the occasional rutch of rock on wood from the other end of the long table, where a game was being played with black and white stone counters—that and, from beyond the room, the ponderous sighing of the great fans that sucked down the fresh air on its last stage of passage from the distant world above and drove it through this region … and the perpetual soft thudding of the naked feet of the slaves on the heavy leather tread-belts that drove those great wooden fans … and the very faint mechanic gasping of those slaves.
After one had been in this region for a few days, or only a few hours, the sighing of the fans and the soft thudding of the feet and the faint gaspings of the tortured lungs seemed to drone out only the name of this region, over and over.
“Quarmall…” they seemed to chant. “Quarmall … Quarmall is all…”
The Gray Mouser, upon whose senses and through whose mind these sensations and fancies had been flooding and flitting, was a small man strongly muscled. Clad in gray silks irregularly woven, with tiny thread-tufts here and there, he looked restless as a lynx and as dangerous.
From a great tray of strangely hued and shaped mushrooms set before him like sweetmeats, the Mouser disdainfully selected and nibbled cautiously at the most normal looking, a gray one. Its perfumy savor masking bitterness offended him, and he spat it surreptitiously into his palm and dropped that hand under the table and flicked the wet chewed fragments to the floor. Then, while he sucked his cheek sourly, the fingers of both his hands began to play as slowly and nervously with the hilts of his sword Scalpel and his dagger Cat’s Claw as his mind played with his boredoms and murky wonderings.
Along each side of the long narrow table, in great high-backed chairs widely spaced, sat six scrawny old men, bald or shaven of dome and chin, and chicken-fluted of jowl, and each clad only in a neat white loincloth. Eleven of these stared intently at nothing and perpetually tensed their meager muscles until even their ears seemed to stiffen, as though concentrating mightily in realms unseen. The twelfth had his chair half turned and was playing across a far corner of the table the board-game that made the occasional tiny rutching noises. He was playing it with the Mouser’s employer Gwaay, ruler of the Lower Levels of Quarmall and younger son to Quarmal, Lord of Quarmall.
Although the Mouser had been three days in Quarmall’s depths he had come no closer to Gwaay than he was now, so that he knew him only as a pallid, handsome, soft-spoken youth, no realer to the Mouser, because of the eternal dimness and the invariable distance between them, than a ghost.
The game was one the Mouser had never seen before and quite tricky in several respects.
The board looked green, though it was impossible to be certain of colors in the unending twilight of the torches, and it had no perceptible squares or tracks on it, except for a phosphorescent line midway between the opponents, dividing the board into two equal fields.
Each contestant started the game with twelve flat circular counters set along his edge of the board. Gwaay’s counters were obsidian-black, his ancient opponent’s marble-white, so the Mouser was able to distinguish them despite the dimness.
The object of the game seemed to be to move the pieces randomly forward over uneven distances and get at least seven of them into your opponent’s field first.
Here the trickiness was that one moved the pieces not with the fingers but only by looking at them intently. Apparently, if one gazed only at a single piece, one could move it quite swiftly. If one gazed at several, one could move them all together in a line or cluster, but more sluggishly.
The Mouser was not yet wholly convinced that he was witnessing a display of thought-power. He still suspected threads, soundless air-puffings, surreptitious joggings of the board from below, powerful beetles under the counters, and hidden magnets—for Gwaay’s pieces at least could by their color be some sort of lodestone.
At the present moment Gwaay’s black counters and the ancient’s white ones were massed at the central line, shifting only a little now and then as the push-of-war went first a nail’s breadth one way, then the other. Suddenly Gwaay’s rearmost counter circled swiftly back and darted toward an open space at the board’s edge. Two of the ancient’s counters formed a wedge and thrust across the midline through the weak point thus created. As the ancient’s two detached counters returned to oppose them, Gwaay’s end-running counter sped across. The game was over—Gwaay gave no sign of this, but the ancient began fumblingly to return the pieces to their starting positions with his fingers.