She ran to him. “Oh Brilla, I’m so frightened,” she cried softly as she pressed against his paunch and hid herself in his great-sleeved arms.
“I know, I know,” he murmured, making little clucking noises as he smoothed her hair and petted her. “You were always frightened of flames, I remember now. Never mind, Quarmal will forgive when you meet beyond the stars. Look you, little duck, it’s a great risk I run, but because you were the old Lord’s favorite I cherish you dearly. I carry a painless poison … only a few drops on the tongue, then darkness and the windy gulfs….A long leap, true, but better far than what Flindach must order when he discovers—”
She pushed back from him. “It was Flindach who commanded me not to follow My Lord to his last hearth!” she revealed wide-eyed and reproachful. “He told me the stars directed otherwise and also that this was Quarmal’s dying wish. I doubted and feared Flindach—he with face so hideous and eyes so horridly like My Dear Lord’s—yet could not but obey … with some small thankfulness, I must confess, dear Brilla.”
“But what reason earthly or unearthly…?” Brilla stammered, his mind a-whirl.
Kewissa looked to either side. Then, “I bear Quarmal’s quickening seed,” she whispered.
For a bit this only increased Brilla’s confusion. How could Quarmal have hoped to get a concubine’s child accepted as Lord of All when there were two grown legitimate heirs? Or cared so little for the land’s security as to leave alive even an unborn bastard? Then it occurred to him—and his heart shook at the thought—that Flindach might be seeking to seize supreme power, using Kewissa’s babe and an invented death wish of Quarmal as his pretext along with those Quarmal-eyes of his. Palace revolutions were not entirely unknown in Quarmall. Indeed, there was a legend that the present line had generations ago clambered dagger-fisted to power by that route, though it was death to repeat the legend.
Kewissa continued, “I stayed hidden in the harem. Flindach said I’d be safe. But then Hasjarl’s henchmen came searching in Flindach’s absence and in defiance of all customs and decencies. I fled here.”
This continued to make a dreadful sort of sense, Brilla thought. If Hasjarl suspected Flindach’s impious snatch at power, he would instinctively strike at him, turning the fraternal strife into a three-sided one involving even—woe of woes!—the sunlit apex of Quarmall, which until this moment had seemed so safe from war’s alarums….
At that very instant, as if Brilla’s fears had conjured up their fruition, the door of the storeroom opened wide and there loomed in it an uncouth man who seemed the very embodiment of battle’s barbarous horrors. He was so tall his head brushed the lintel; his face was handsome yet stern and searching-eyed; his red-gold hair hung tangledly to his shoulders; his garment was a bronze-studded wolfskin tunic; longsword and massy short-handled ax swung from his belt, and on the longest finger of his right hand Brilla’s gaze—trained to miss no detail of decor and now fear-sharpened—noted a ring with Hasjarl’s clenched-fist sigil.
The eunuch and the girl huddled against each other, quivering.
Having assured himself that these two were all he faced, the newcomer’s countenance broke into a smile that might have been reassuring on a smaller man or one less fiercely accoutered. Then Fafhrd said, “Greetings, Grandfather. I require only that you and your chick help me find the sunlight and the stables of this benighted realm. Come, we’ll plot it out so you may satisfy me with least danger to yourselves.” And he swiftly stepped toward them, silently for all his size, his gaze returning with interest to Kewissa as he noted she was not child but woman.
Kewissa felt that and although her heart was a-flutter, piped up bravely, “You dare not rape me! I’m with child by a dead man!”
Fafhrd’s smile soured somewhat. Perhaps, he told himself, he should feel complimented that girls started thinking about rape the instant they saw him; still he was a little irked. Did they deem him incapable of civilized seduction because he wore furs and was no dwarf? Oh well, they quickly learned. But what a horrid way to try to daunt him!
Meanwhile tubby-fat Grandfather, who Fafhrd now realized was hardly equipped to be that or father either, said fearful-mincing, “She speaks only the truth, oh Captain. But I will be o’erjoyed to aid you in any—”
There were rapid steps in the passage and the harsh slither of steel against stone. Fafhrd turned like a tiger. Two guards in the dark-linked hauberks of Hasjarl’s guards were pressing into the room. The fresh-drawn sword of one had scraped the door-side, while a third behind them cried sharply now. “Take the Northern turncoat! Slay him if he shows fight. I’ll secure old Quarmal’s concubine.”
The two guards started to run at Fafhrd, but he, counterfeiting even more the tiger, sprang at them twice as suddenly. Graywand coming out of his scabbard swept sideways up, fending off the sword of the foremost even as Fafhrd’s foot came crushing down on that one’s instep. Then Graywand’s hilt crashed backhand into his jaw, so that he lurched against his fellow. Meanwhile Fafhrd’s ax had come into his left hand, and at close quarters he stroked it into their brains, then shouldering them off as they fell, he drew back the ax and cast it at the third, so that it lodged in his forehead between the eyes as he turned to see what was amiss, and he dropped down dead.
But the footsteps of a fourth and perhaps a fifth could be heard racing away. Fafhrd sprang toward the door with a growl, stopped with a foot-stamp and returned as swiftly, stabbing a bloody finger at Kewissa cowering into the great hulk of blanching Brilla.
“Old Quarmal’s girl? With child by him?” he rapped out and when she nodded rapidly, swallowing hard, he continued, “Then you come with me. Now! The castrado too.”
He sheathed Graywand, wrenched his ax from the sergeant’s skull, grabbed Kewissa by the upper arm and strode toward the door with a devilish snarling head-wave to Brilla to follow.
Kewissa cried, “Oh mercy, sir! You’ll make me lose the child.”
Brilla obeyed, yet twittered as he did, “Kind Captain, we’ll be no use to you, only encumber you in your—”
Fafhrd, turning suddenly again, spared him one rapid speech, shaking the bloody ax for emphasis: “If you think I don’t understand the bargaining value or hostage-worth of even an unborn claimant to a throne, then your skull is as empty of brains as your loins are of seed—and I doubt that’s the case. As for you, girl,” he added harshly to Kewissa, “if there’s anything but bleat under your green ringlets, you know you’re safer with a stranger then with Hasjarl’s hellions and that better your child miscarry than fall into their hands. Come, I’ll carry you.” He swept her up. “Follow, eunuch; work those great thighs of yours if you love living.”
And he made off down the corridor, Brilla trotting ponderously after and wisely taking great gasping breaths in anticipation of exertions to come. Kewissa laid her arms around Fafhrd’s neck and glanced up at him with qualified admiration. He himself now gave vent to two remarks which he’d evidently been saving for an unoccupied moment.
The first, bitterly sarcastic: “…if he shows fight!”
The second, self-angry: “Those cursed fans must be deafening me, that I didn’t hear ‘em coming!”
Forty loping paces down the corridor he passed a ramp leading upward and turned toward a narrower darker corridor.
From just behind, Brilla called softly yet rapidly, penurious of breath. “That ramp led to the stables. Where are you taking us, My Captain?”
“Down!” Fafhrd retorted without pausing in his lope. “Don’t panic, I’ve a hidey hole for the two of you—and even a girl-mate for little Prince-mother Greenilocks here.” Then to Kewissa, gruffly, “You’re not the only girl in Quarmall who wants rescuing, nor yet the dearest.”
The Mouser, steeling himself for it, knelt and surveyed the noisome heap that was Prince Gwaay. The stench was abominably strong despite the perfumes the Mouser had sprinkled and the incense he had burned but an hour ago.
The Mouser had covered with silken sheets and fur robes all the loathsomeness of Gwaay except for his plagues-stricken pillowed-up face. The sole feature of this face that had escaped obvious extreme contagion was the narrow handsome nose, from the end of which there dripped clear fluid, drop by slow drop, like the ticking of a water clock, while from below the nose proceeded a continual small nasty retching which was the only reasonably sure sign that Gwaay was not wholly moribund. For a while Gwaay had made faint straining moanings like the whispers of a mute, but now even those had ceased.
The Mouser reflected that it was very difficult indeed to serve a master who could neither speak, write, nor gesticulate—particularly when fighting enemies who now began to seem neither dull nor contemptible. By all counts Gwaay should have died hours since. Presumably only his steely sorcerous will and consuming hatred of Hasjarl kept his spirit from fleeing the horrid torment that housed it.