“No, Mouser,” she objected lazily. “It awakens an unpleasant memory.”
He did not persist, but lying back again, said unguardedly, “Ah, but I’m a lucky man, Ivivis. I have you and I have an employer who, though somewhat boresome with his sorceries and his endless mild speaking, seems a harmless enough chap and certainly more endurable than his brother Hasjarl, if but half of what I hear of that one is true.”
The voice of Ivivis briskened. “You think Gwaay harmless?—and kinder than Hasjarl? La, that’s a quaint conceit. Why, but a week ago he summoned my late dearest friend, Divis, then his favorite concubine, and telling her it was a necklace of the same stones, hung around her neck an emerald adder, the sting of which is infallibly deadly.”
The Mouser turned his head and stared at Ivivis. “Why did Gwaay do that?” he asked.
She stared back at him blankly. “Why, for nothing at all, to be sure,” she said wonderingly. “As everyone knows, that is Gwaay’s way.”
The Mouser said, “You mean that, rather than say, ‘I am wearied of you,’ he killed her?”
Ivivis nodded. “I believe Gwaay can no more bear to hurt people’s feelings by rejecting them than he can bear to shout.”
“It is better to be slain than rejected?” the Mouser questioned ingenuously.
“No, but for Gwaay it is easier on his feelings to slay than to reject. Death is everywhere here in Quarmall.”
The Mouser had a fleeting vision of Klevis’ corpse stiffening behind the arras.
Ivivis continued, “Here in the Lower Levels we are buried before we are born. We live, love, and die buried. Even when we strip, we yet wear a garment of invisible mold.”
The Mouser said, “I begin to understand why it is necessary to cultivate a certain callousness in Quarmall, to be able to enjoy at all any moments of pleasure snatched from life, or perhaps I mean from death.”
“That is most true, Gray Mouser,” Ivivis said very soberly, pressing herself against him.
Fafhrd started to brush aside the cobwebs joining the two dust-filled sides of the half open, high, nail-studded door, then checked himself and bending very low ducked under them.
“Do you stoop too,” he told Friska. “It were best we leave no signs of our entry. Later I’ll attend to our footprints in the dust, if that be needful.”
They advanced a few paces, then stood hand in hand, waiting for their eyes to grow accustomed to the darkness. Fafhrd still clutched in his other hand Friska’s dress and slippers.
“This is the Ghost Hall?” Fafhrd asked. “Aye,” Friska whispered close to his ear, sounding fearful. “Some say that Gwaay and Hasjarl send their dead to battle here. Some say that demons owing allegiance to neither—”
“No more of that, girl,” Fafhrd ordered gruffly. “If I must battle devils or liches, leave me my hearing and my courage.”
They were silent a space then while the flame of the last torch twenty paces beyond the half shut door slowly revealed to them a vast chamber low-domed with huge, rough black blocks pale-mortared for a ceiling. It was set out with a few tatter-shrouded furnishings and showed many small closed doorways. To either side were wide rostra set a few feet above floor level, and toward the center there was, surprisingly, what looked like a dried-up fountain pool.
Friska whispered, “Some say the Ghost Hall was once the harem of the father lords of Quarmall during some centuries when they dwelt underground between Levels, ere this Quarmal’s father coaxed by his sea-wife returned to the Keep. See, they left so suddenly that the new ceiling was neither finish-polished, nor final-cemented, nor embellished with drawings, if such were purposed.”
Fafhrd nodded. He distrusted that unpillared ceiling and thought the whole place looked rather more primitive than Hasjarl’s polished and leather-hung chambers. That gave him a thought.
“Tell me, Friska,” he said. “How is it that Hasjarl can see with his eyes closed? Is it that—”
“Why, do you not know that?” she interrupted in surprise. “Do you not know even the secret of his horrible peeping? He simply—”
A dim velvet shape that chittered almost inaudibly shrill swooped past their faces, and with a little shriek Friska hid her face in Fafhrd’s chest and clung to him tightly.
In combing his fingers through her heather-scented hair to show her no flying mouse had found lodgment there and in smoothing his palms over her bare shoulders and back to demonstrate that no bat had landed there either, Fafhrd began to forget all about Hasjarl and the puzzle of his second sight—and his worries about the ceiling falling in on them too.
Following custom, Friska shrieked twice, very softly.
Gwaay languidly clapped his white, perfectly groomed hands and with a slight nod motioned for the waiting slaves to remove the platters from the low table. He leaned lazily into the deep-cushioned chair and through half-closed lids looked momentarily at his companion before he spoke. His brother across the table was not in a good humor. But then it was rare for Hasjarl to be other than in a pet, a temper, or more often merely sullen and vicious. This may have been due to the fact that Hasjarl was a very ugly man, and his nature had grown to conform to his body; or perhaps it was the other way around. Gwaay was indifferent to both theories; he merely knew that in one glance all his memory had told him of Hasjarl was verified; and he again realized the bitter magnitude of his hatred for his brother. However, Gwaay spoke gently in a low, pleasant voice:
“Well, how now, Brother, shall we play at chess, that demon game they say exists in every world? ‘Twill give you a chance to lord it over me again. You always win at chess, you know, except when you resign. Shall I have the board set before us?” and then cajolingly, “I’ll give you a pawn!” and he raised one hand slightly as if to clap again in order that his suggestion might be carried out.
With the lash he carried slung to his wrist Hasjarl slashed the face of the slave nearest him, and silently pointed at the massive and ornate chessboard across the room. This was quite characteristic of Hasjarl. He was a man of action and given to few words, at least away from his home territory.
Besides, Hasjarl was in a nasty humor. Flindach had torn him from his most interesting and exciting amusement: torture! And for what? thought Hasjarl: to play at chess with his priggish brother; to sit and look at his pretty brother’s face; to eat food that would surely disagree with him; to wait the answer to the casting, which he already knew—had known for years; and finally to be forced to smile into the horrible blood-whited eyes of his father, unique in Quarmall save for those of Flindach, and toast the House of Quarmall for the ensuing year. All this was most distasteful to Hasjarl and he showed it plainly.
The slave, a bloody welt swift-swelling across his face, carefully slid the chessboard between the two. Gwaay smiled as another slave arranged the chessmen precisely on their squares; he had thought of a scheme to annoy his brother. He had chosen the black as usual, and he planned a gambit which he knew his avaricious opponent couldn’t refuse; one Hasjarl would accept to his own undoing.
Hasjarl sat grimly back in his chair, arms folded. “I should have made you take white,” he complained. “I know the paltry tricks you can do with black pebbles—I’ve seen you as a girl-pale child darting them through the air to startle the slaves’ brats. How am I to know you will not cheat by fingerless shifting your pieces while I deep ponder?”
Gwaay answered gently, “My paltry powers, as you most justly appraise them, Brother, extend only to bits of basalt, trifles of obsidian and other volcanic rocks conformable to my nether level. While these chess pieces are jet, Brother, which in your great scholarship you surely know is only a kind of coal, vegetable stuff pressed black, not even in the same realm as the very few materials subject to my small magickings. Moreover, for you to miss the slightest trick with those quaint slave-surgeried eyes of yours, Brother, were matter for mighty wonder.”
Hasjarl growled. Not until all was ready did he stir; then, like an adder’s strike, he plucked a black rook’s pawn from the board and with a sputtering giggle, snarled: “Remember, Brother? It was a pawn you promised! Move!”
Gwaay motioned the waiting slave to advance his king’s pawn. In like manner Hasjarl replied. A moment’s pause and Gwaay offered his gambit: pawn to king-bishop’s fourth! Eagerly Hasjarl snatched the apparent advantage and the game began in earnest. Gwaay, his face easy-smiling in repose, seemed to be less interested in the game than in the shadow play of the flickering lamps on the figured leather upholsterings of calfskin, lambskin, snakeskin, and even slave-skin and nobler human hide; seemed to move offhand, without plan, yet confidently. Hasjarl, his lips compressed in concentration, was intent on the board, each move a planned action both mental and physical. His concentration made him for the moment oblivious of his brother, oblivious of all but the problem before him; for Hasjarl loved to win beyond all computation.