The sword-clashing below reached one of its climaxes, but Hasjarl did not mark it.
He said softly, “Open your eyes, Brother. I want you to speak once before I slay you.”
There was no reply from Gwaay—not a motion, not a whisper, not a bubble of retching.
“Very well,” Hasjarl said harshly, “then die a prim shut-mouth,” and he drove down the dagger.
It stopped violently a hairbreadth above Gwaay’s upper cheek, and the muscles of Hasjarl’s arm driving it were stabbingly numbed by the jolt they got.
Gwaay did open his eyes then, which was not very pleasant to behold since there was nothing in them but green ichor.
Hasjarl instantly closed his own eyes, but continued to peer down through the holes in his upper lids.
Then he heard Gwaay’s voice like a silver mosquito by his ear saying, “You have made a slight oversight, dear brother. You have chosen the wrong weapon. After our father’s burning you swore to me my life was sacrosanct—until you killed me by crushing. ‘Until I crush it out,’ you said. The gods hear only our words, Brother, not our intentions. Had you come lugging a boulder, like the curious gnome you are, you might have accomplished your aim.”
“Then I’ll have you crushed!” Hasjarl retorted angrily, leaning his face closer and almost shouting. “Aye, and I’ll sit by and listen to your bones crunch—what bones you have left! You’re as great a fool as I, Gwaay, for you too after our father’s funeral promised not to slay me. Aye, and you’re a greater fool, for now you’ve spilled to me your little secret of how you may be slain.”
“I swore not to slay you with spells or steel or venom or with my hand,” the bright insect voice of Gwaay replied. “Unlike you, I said nothing at all of crushing.” Hasjarl felt a strange tingling in his flesh while in his nostrils there was an acrid odor like that of lightning mingling with the stink of corruption.
Suddenly Gwaay’s hands thrust up to the palms out of his overly rich bedclothes. The flesh was shredding from the finger bones which pointed straight up, invokingly.
Hasjarl almost started back, but caught himself. He’d die, he told himself, before he’d cringe from his brother. He was aware of strong forces all about him.
There was a muffled grating noise and then an odd faintly pattering snowfall on the coverlet and on Hasjarl’s neck … a thin snowfall of pale gritty stuff … grains of mortar….
“Yes, you will crush me, dear brother,” Gwaay admitted tranquilly. “But if you would know how you will crush me, recall my small special powers … or else look up!”
Hasjarl turned his head, and there was the great black basalt slab big as the litter rushing down, and the one moment of life left Hasjarl was consumed in hearing Gwaay say, “You are wrong again, my comrade.”
Fafhrd stopped a sword-slash in midcourse when he heard the crash and the Mouser almost nicked him with his rehearsed parry. They lowered their blades and looked, as did all others in the central section of the Ghost Hall.
Where the litter had been was now only the thick basalt slab mortar-streaked with the litter-poles sticking out from under, and above in the ceiling the rectangular white hole whence the slab had been dislodged. The Mouser thought, That’s a larger thing to move by thinking than a checker or jar, yet the same black substance.
Fafhrd thought, Why didn’t the whole roof fall?—there’s the strangeness.
Perhaps the greatest wonder of the moment was the four tread-slaves still standing at the four corners, eyes forward, fingers locked across their chests, although the slab had missed them only by inches in its falling.
Then some of Hasjarl’s henchmen and sorcerers who had seen their Lord sneak to the litter now hurried up to it but fell back when they beheld how closely the slab approached the floor and marked the tiny rivulet of blood that ran from under it. Their minds quailed at the thought of those brothers who had hated each other so dearly, and now their bodies locked in an obscene interpenetrating and commingling embrace.
Meanwhile Ivivis came running to the Mouser and Friska to Fafhrd to bind up their wounds, and were astonished and mayhap a shade irked to be told there were none. Kewissa and Brilla came too and Fafhrd with one arm around Friska reached out the wine-bloody hand of the other and softly closed it around Kewissa’s wrist, smiling at her friendlily.
Then the great muffled gong-note sounded again and the twin pillars of white flame briefly roared to the ceiling to either side of Flindach. They showed by their glare that many men had entered by the narrow archway behind Flindach and now stood around him: stout guardsmen from the companies of the Keep with weapons at the ready, and several of his own sorcerers.
As the flame-pillars swiftly shrank, Flindach imperiously raised hand and resonantly spoke:
“The stars which may not be cheated foretold the doom of the Lord of Quarmall. All of you heard those two”—he pointed toward the shattered litter—”proclaim themselves Lord of Quarmall. So the stars are twice satisfied. And the gods, who hear our words to each tiniest whisper, and order our fates by them, are content. It remains that I reveal to you the next Lord of Quarmall.”
He pointed at Kewissa and intoned, “The next Lord of Quarmall but one sleeps and waxes in the womb of her, wife of the Quarmal so lately honored with burnings and immolations and ceremonious rites.”
Kewissa shrank, and her blue eyes went wide. Then she began to beam.
Flindach continued, “It still remains that I reveal to you the next Lord of Quarmall, who shall tutor Queen Kewissa’s babe until he arrives at manhood a perfect king and all-wise sorcerer, under whom our buried realm will enjoy perpetual inward peace and outward-raiding prosperity.”
Then Flindach reached behind his left shoulder. All thought he purposed to draw forward the Cowl of Death over his head and brows and hideous warty winy cheeks for some still more solemn speaking. But instead he grasped his neck by the short hairs of the nape and drew it upward and forward and his scalp and all his hair with it, and then the skin of his face came off with his scalp as he drew his hand down and to the side, and there was revealed, sweat-gleaming a little, the unblemished face and jutting nose and full mobile smiling lips of Quarmal, while his terrible blood-red white-irised eyes gazed at them all mildly.
“I was forced to visit Limbo for a space,” he explained with a solemn yet genial fatherly familiarity, “while others were Lords of Quarmall in my stead and the stars sent down their spears. It was best so, though I lost two sons by it. Only so might our land be saved from ravenous self-war.”
He held up for all to see the limp mask with empty lash-fringed eyeholes and purple-blotched left cheek and wart-triangled right. He said, “And now I bid you all honor great and puissant Flindach, the loyalest Master of Magicians a king ever had, who lent me his face for a necessary deception and his body to be burned for mine with waxen mask of mine to cover his poor head-front, which had sacrificed all. In solemnly supervising my own high flaming obsequies, I honored only Flindach. For him my women burned. This his face, well preserved by my own skills as flayer and swift tanner, will hang forever in place of honor in our halls, while the spirit of Flindach holds my chair for me in the Dark World beyond the stars, a Lord Paramount there until I come, and eternally a Hero of Quarmall.”
Before any cheering or hailing could be started—which would have taken a little while, since all were much bemused—Fafhrd cried out, “Oh cunningest king, I honor you and your babe so highly and the Queen who carries him in her womb that I will guard her moment by moment, not moving a pace from her, until I and my small comrade here are well outside Quarmall—say a mile—together with horses for our conveyance and with the treasures promised us by those two late kings.” And he gestured as Quarmal had toward the crushed litter.
The Mouser had been about to launch at Quarmal some subtly intimidating remark about his own skills as a sorcerer in blasting Gwaay’s eleven. But now he decided that Fafhrd’s words were sufficient and well-spoken, save for the slighting reference to himself, and he held his peace.
Kewissa started to withdraw her hand from Fafhrd’s, but he tightened his grip just a little, and she looked at him with understanding. In fact, she called brightly to Quarmal, “Oh, Lord Husband, this man saved my life and your son’s from Hasjarl’s fiends in a storeroom of the Keep. I trust him,” while Brilla, dabbing tears of joy from his eyes with his undersleeve, seconded her with, “My very dear Lord, she speaks only nakedest truth, bare as a newborn babe or new-wed wife.”