From ahead of him a rippling, silvery voice quite unlike the first called, “Your jewels, like no others I have ever seen, gleam in the absence of all light.”
Scanning piercingly across the table and box, the Mouser could see no sign of the second caller. Evening out his own voice, so it was not breathy with apprehension, but bland with confidence, he said, to the emptiness, “My gems are like no others in the world. In fact, they come not from the world, being of the same substance as the stars. Yet you know by your test that one of them is harder than diamond.”
“They are truly unearthly and most beautiful jewels,” the sourless silvery voice answered. “My mind pierces them through and through, and they are what you say they are. I shall advise Ogo to pay your asking price.”
At that instant the Mouser heard behind him a little cough and a dry, rapid scuttling. He whirled around, dirk poised to strike. There was nothing to be seen or sensed, except for the hassock or whatever, which had not moved. The scuttling was no longer to be heard.
He swiftly turned back, and there across the table from him, her front illumined by the twinkling jewels, stood a slim naked girl with pale straight hair, somewhat darker skin, and overlarge eyes staring entrancedly from a child’s tiny-chinned, pouty-lipped face.
Satisfying himself by a rapid glance that the jewels were in their proper pattern under their mesh and none missing, he swiftly advanced Cat’s Claw so that its needle point touched the taut skin between the small yet jutting breasts. “Do not seek to startle me so again!” he hissed. “Men—aye, and girls—have died for less.”
The girl did not stir by so much as the breadth of a fine hair; neither did her expression nor her dreamy yet concentrated gaze change, except that her short lips smiled, then parted to say honey-voiced, “So you are the Gray Mouser. I had expected a crouchy, sear-faced rogue, and I find … a prince.” The very jewels seemed to twinkle more wildly because of her sweet voice and sweeter presence, striking opalescent glimmers from her pale irises.
“Neither seek to flatter me!” the Mouser commanded, catching up his box and holding it open against his side. “I am inured, I’ll have you know, to the ensorcelments of all the world’s minxes and nymphs.”
“I speak truth only, as I did of your jewels,” she answered guilelessly. Her lips had stayed parted a little, and she spoke without moving them.
“Are you the Eyes of Ogo?” the Mouser demanded harshly, yet drawing Cat’s Claw back from her bosom. It bothered him a little, yet only a little, that the tiniest stream of blood, like a black thread, led down for a few inches from the prick his dirk had made.
Utterly unmindful of the tiny wound, the girl nodded. “And I can see through you, as through your jewels, and I discover naught in you but what is noble and fine, save for certain small subtle impulses of violence and cruelty, which a girl like myself might find delightful.”
“There your all-piercing eyes err wholly, for I am a great villain,” the Mouser answered scornfully, though he felt a pulse of fond satisfaction within him.
The girl’s eyes widened as she looked over his shoulder somewhat apprehensively, and from behind the Mouser the dry and thick voice croaked once more, “Keep to business! Yes, I will pay you in gold your offering price, a sum it will take me some hours to assemble. Return at the same time tomorrow night and we will close the deal. Now shut the box.”
The Mouser had turned around, still clutching his box, when Ogo began to speak. Again he could not distinguish the source of the voice, though he scanned minutely. It seemed to come from the whole wall.
Now he turned back. Somewhat to his disappointment, the naked girl had vanished. He peered under the table, but there was nothing there. Doubtless some trapdoor or hypnotic device…
Still suspicious as a snake, he returned the way he had come. On close approach, the black hassock appeared to be only that. Then as the door to the outside slid open noiselessly, he swiftly obeyed Ogo’s last injunction, snapping shut the box, and departed.
* * * *
Fafhrd gazed tenderly at Nemia lying beside him in perfumed twilight, while keeping the edge of his vision on his brawny wrist and the pouch pendant from it, both of which his companion was now idly fondling.
To do Nemia justice, even at the risk of imputing a certain cattiness to the Mouser, her charms were neither overblown, nor even ample, but only … sufficient.
From just behind Fafhrd’s shoulder came a spitting hiss. He quickly turned his head and found himself looking into the crossed blue eyes of a white cat standing on the small bedside table beside a bowl of bronze chrysanthemums.
“Ixy!” Nemia called remonstratingly yet languorously.
Despite her voice, Fafhrd heard behind him, in rapid succession, the click of a bracelet opening and the slightly louder click of one closing.
He turned back instantly, to discover only that Nemia had meanwhile clasped on his wrist, beside the browned-iron bracelet, a golden one around which sapphires and rubies marched alternately in single file.
Gazing at him from betwixt the strands of her long dark hair, she said huskily, “It is only a small token which I give to those who please me … greatly.”
Fafhrd drew his wrist closer to his eyes to admire his prize, but mostly to palpate his pouch with the fingers of his other hand, to assure himself that it bulged as tightly as ever.
It did, and in a burst of generous feeling he said, “Let me give you one of my gems in precisely the same spirit,” and made to undo his pouch.
Nemia’s long-fingered hand glided out to prevent. “No,” she breathed. “Let never the gems of business be mixed with the jewels of pleasure. Now if you should choose to bring me some small gift tomorrow night, when at the same hour we exchange your jewels for my gold and my letters of credit on Glipkerio, underwritten by Hisvin the Grain Merchant…”
“Right,” Fafhrd said briefly, concealing the relief he felt. He’d been an idiot to think of giving Nemia one of the gems—and with it a day’s opportunity to discover its abnormalities.
“Until tomorrow,” Nemia said, opening her arms to him.
“Until tomorrow, then,” Fafhrd agreed, embracing her fervently, yet keeping his pouch clutched in the hand to which it was chained—and already eager to be gone.
* * * *
The Silver Eel was far less than half filled, its candles few, its cupbearers torpid, as Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser entered simultaneously by different doors and made for one of the many empty booths.
The only eye to watch them at all closely was a gray one above a narrow section of pale cheek bordered by dark hair, peering past the curtain of the backmost booth.
When their thick table-candles had been lit and cups set before them and a jug of fortified wine, and fresh charcoal tumbled into the red-seeded brazier at table’s end, the Mouser placed his flat box on the table and, grinning, said, “All’s set. The jewels passed the test of the Eyes—a toothsome wenchlet; more of her later. I get the cash tomorrow night—all my offering price! But you, friend, I hardly thought to see you back alive. Drink we up! I take it you escaped from Nemia’s divan whole and sound in organs and limbs—as far as you yet know. But the jewels?”
“They came through too,” Fafhrd answered, swinging the pouch lightly out of his sleeve and then back in again. “And I get my money tomorrow night … the full amount of my asking price, just like you.”
As he named those coincidences, his eyes went thoughtful.
They stayed that way while he took two large swallows of wine. The Mouser watched him curiously.
“At one point,” Fafhrd finally mused, “I thought she was trying the old trick of substituting for mine an identical but worthlessly filled pouch. Since she’d seen the pouch at our first meeting, she could have had a similar one made up, complete with chain and bracelet.”
“But was she—?” the Mouser asked.
“Oh no, it turned out to be something entirely different,” Fafhrd said lightly, though some thought kept two slight vertical furrows in his forehead. “That’s odd,” the Mouser remarked. “At one point—just one, mind you—the Eyes of Ogo, if she’d been extremely swift, deft, and silent, might have been able to switch boxes on me.”
Fafhrd lifted his eyebrows.
The Mouser went on rapidly, “That is, if my box had been closed. But it was open, in darkness, and there’d have been no way to reproduce the varicolored twinkling of the gems. Phosphorus or glow-wood? Too dim. Hot coals? No, I’d have felt the heat. Besides, how get that way a diamond’s pure white glow? Quite impossible.”