Several leaped guiltily to obey that order and Hasjarl did not wave them away and Fafhrd laughed and remarked, “Masking a champion makes him more dreadsome, oh Hasjarl, but tying his hands behind him is not so apt to impress the enemy—and has other drawbacks. If there should now come suddenly a-rush that one wilier than Zobold, weightier than a mad elephant to tumble and hurl aside your panicky guards—”
“Cut his bonds!” Hasjarl barked, and someone began to saw with a dagger behind Fafhrd’s back. “But don’t give him his sword or ax! Yet hold them ready for him!”
Fafhrd writhed his shoulders and flexed his great forearms and began to massage them and laughed again through his mask.
Hasjarl fumed and then ordered all the shut doors tried once more. Fafhrd readied himself for action as they came to the one behind which Friska and the two others were hidden, for he knew it had no bolt or bar. But it held firm against all shoving. Fafhrd could imagine Brilla’s great back braced against it, with the girls perhaps pushing at his stomach, and he smiled under the red silk.
Hasjarl fumed a while longer and cursed his brother for his delay and swore he had intended mercy to his brother’s minions and girls, but now no longer. Then one of Hasjarl’s henchmen suggested Gwaay’s dart-message might have been a ruse to get them out of the way while an attack was launched from below through other tunnels or even by way of the air-shafts, and Hasjarl seized that henchman by the throat and shook him and demanded why, if he had expected that, he hadn’t spoken earlier.
At that moment a gong sounded, high and silver-sweet, and Hasjarl loosed his henchmen and looked around wonderingly. Again the silvery gong-note, then through the wider black archway there slowly stepped two monstrous figures each bearing a forward pole of an ornately carved black and red litter.
All of those in the Ghost Hall were familiar with the tread-slaves, but to see them anywhere except on their belts was almost as great and grotesque a wonder as to see them for the first time. It seemed to portend unsettlements of custom and dire upheavals, and so there was much murmuring and some shrinking.
The tread-slaves continued to step ponderously forward, and their mates came into view behind them. The four advanced almost to the edge of the raised section of floor and set the litter down and folded their dwarfed arms as well as they could, hooking fingers to fingers across their gigantic chests, and stood motionless.
Then through the same archway there swiftly paced the figure of a rather small sorcerer in black robe and hood that hid his features, and close behind him like his shadow a slightly smaller figure identically clad.
The Black Sorcerer took his stand to one side of the litter and a little ahead of it, his acolyte behind him to his right, and he lifted alongside his cowl a wand tipped with glittering silver and said loudly and impressively, “I speak for Gwaay, Master of Demons and Lord of All Quarmall!—as we will prove!”
The Mouser was using his deepest thaumaturgic voice, which none but himself had ever heard, except for the occasion on which he had blasted Gwaay’s sorcerers—and come to think of it, that had ended with no one else having heard either. He was enjoying himself hugely, marveling greatly at his own audacity.
He paused just long enough, then slowly pointed his wand at the low mound on the litter, threw up his other arm in an imperious gesture, palm forward, and commanded, “On your knees, vermin, all of you, and do obeisance to your sole rightful ruler, Lord Gwaay, at whose name demons blench!”
A few of the foremost fools actually obeyed him—evidently Hasjarl had cowed them all too well—while most of the others in the front rank goggled apprehensively at the muffled figure in the litter—truly, it was an advantage having Gwaay motionless and supine, looking like Death’s horridest self: it made him a more mysterious threat.
Searching over their heads from the cavern of his cowl, the Mouser spotted one he guessed to be Hasjarl’s champion—gods, he was a whopper, big as Fafhrd!—and knowledgeable in psychology if that red silk bag-mask were his own idea. The Mouser didn’t relish the idea of battling such a one, but with luck it wouldn’t come to that.
Then there burst through the ranks of the awed guards, whipping them aside with a short lash, a hunch-shouldered figure in dark scarlet robes—Hasjarl at last! and coming to the fore just as the plot demanded.
Hasjarl’s ugliness and frenzy surpassed the Mouser’s expectations. The Lord of the Upper Levels drew himself up facing the litter and for a suspenseful moment did naught but twitch, stutter, and spray spittle like the veriest idiot. Then suddenly he got his voice and barked most impressively and surely louder than any of his great hounds:
“By right of death—suffered lately or soon—lately by my father, star-smitten and burned to ash—soon by my impious brother, stricken by my sorceries—and who dare not speak for himself, but must fee charlatans—I, Hasjarl, do proclaim myself sole Lord of Quarmall—and of all within it—demon or man!”
Then Hasjarl started to turn, most likely to order forward some of his guards to seize Gwaay’s party, or perhaps to wave an order to his sorcerers to strike them down magically, but in that instant the Mouser clapped his hands together loudly. At that signal, Ivivis, who’d stepped between him and the litter, threw back her cowl and opened her robe and let them fall behind her almost in one continuous gesture—and the sight revealed held everyone spellbound, even Hasjarl, as the Mouser had known it would.
Ivivis was dressed in a transparent black silk tunic—the merest blackly opal gleaming over her pale flesh and slimly youthful figure—but on her face she wore the white mask of a hag, female yet with mouth a-grin showing fangs and with fiercely staring eyes red-balled and white-irised, as the Mouser had swiftly repainted them at the direction of Gwaay, speaking from his silver statua. Long green hair mixed with white fell from the mask behind Ivivis and some thin strands of it before her shoulders. Upright before her in her right hand she held ritualistically a large pruning knife.
The Mouser pointed straight at Hasjarl, on whom the eyes of the mask were already fixed, and he commanded in his deepest voice, “Bring that one here to me, oh Witch-Mother!” and Ivivis stepped swiftly forward.
Hasjarl took a backward step and stared horror-enchanted at his approaching nemesis, all motherly-cannibalistic above, all elfin-maidenly below, with his father’s eyes to daunt him and with the cruel knife to suggest judgment upon himself for the girls he had lustingly done to death or lifelong crippledness.
The Mouser knew he had success within his grasp and there remained only the closing of the fingers.
At that instant there sounded from the other end of the chamber a great muffled gong-note deep as Gwaay’s had been silvery-high, shuddering the bones by its vibrancy. Then from either side of the narrow black archway at the opposite end of the hall from Gwaay’s litter, there rose to the ceiling with a hollow roar twin pillars of white fire, commanding all eyes and shattering the Mouser’s spell.
The Mouser’s most instant reaction was inwardly to curse such superior stage-management.
Smoke billowed out against the great black squares of the ceiling, the pillars sank to white jets, man-high, and there strode forward between them the figure of Flindach in his heavily embroidered robes and with the Golden Symbol of Power at his waist, but with the Cowl of Death thrown back to show his blotched warty face and his eyes like those in Ivivis’ mask. The High Steward threw wide his arms in a proud imploring gesture and in his deep and resonant voice that filled the Ghost Hall recited thus:
“Oh Gwaay! Oh Hasjarl! In the name of your father burned and beyond the stars, and in the name of your grandmother whose eyes I too bear, think of Quarmall! Think of the security of this your kingdom and of how your wars ravage her. Forego your enmities, abjure your brotherly hates, and cast your lots now to settle the succession—the winner to be Lord Paramount here, the loser instantly to depart with great escort and coffers of treasure, and journey across the Mountains of Hunger and the desert and the Sea of the East and live out his life in the Eastern Lands in all comfort and high dignity. Or if not by customary lot, then let your champions battle to the death to decide it—all else to follow the same. Oh Hasjarl, oh Gwaay, I have spoken.” And he folded his arms and stood there between the two pale flame pillars still burning high as he.