As he reached toward the curtain, heavy with embroidery, it wavered and shook. He froze, his heart leaping wildly. Then the curtains parted a little and there was thrust in the saucy face of Ivivis, wide-eyed with excited curiosity.
“Did your Great Spell work, Mouser?” she asked him breathlessly.
He let out his own breath in a sigh of relief. “You survived it, at all events,” he said and reaching out pulled her against him. Her slim body pressing his felt very good. True, the presence of almost any living being would have been welcome to the Mouser at this moment, but that it should be Ivivis was a bonus he could not help but appreciate.
“Dearest,” he said sincerely, “I was feeling that I was perchance the last man on Earth. But now—”
“And acting as if I were the last girl, lost a year,” she retorted tartly. “This is neither the place nor the time for amorous consolations and intimate pleasantries,” she continued, half mistaking his motives and pushing back from him.
“Did you slay Hasjarl’s wizards?” she demanded, gazing up with some awe into his eyes.
“I slew some sorcerers,” the Mouser admitted judiciously. “Just how many is a moot question.”
“Where are Gwaay’s?” she asked, looking past the Mouser at the empty chairs. “Did he take them all with him?”
“Isn’t Gwaay back from his father’s funeral yet?” the Mouser countered, evading her question, but as she continued to look into his eyes, he added lightly, “His sorcerers are in some congenial spot—I hope.”
Ivivis looked at him queerly, pushed past, hurried to the long table, and gazed up and down the chair seats.
“Oh, Mouser!” she said reprovingly, but there was real awe in the gaze she shot him.
He shrugged. “They swore to me they were of First Rank,” he defended himself.
“Not even a fingerbone or skullshard left,” Ivivis said solemnly, peering closely at the nearest tiny gray dust pile and shaking her head.
“Not even a gallstone,” the Mouser echoed harshly. “My rune was dire.”
“Not even a tooth,” Ivivis reechoed, rubbing curiously if somewhat callously through the pile. “Nothing to send their mothers.”
“Their mothers can have their diapers to fold away with their baby ones,” the Mouser said irascibly though somewhat uncomfortably. “Oh, Ivivis, sorcerers don’t have mothers!”
“But what happens to our Lord Gwaay now that his protectors are gone?” Ivivis demanded more practically. “You saw how Hasjarl’s sendings struck him last night when they but dozed. And if anything happens to Gwaay, then what happens to us?”
Again the Mouser shrugged. “If my rune reached Hasjarl’s twenty-four wizards and blasted them too, then no harm’s been done—except to sorcerers, and they all take their chances, sign their death warrants when they speak their first spells—’tis a dangerous trade.
“In fact,” he went on with argumentative enthusiasm, “we’ve gained. Twenty-four enemies slain at cost of but a dozen—no, eleven total casualties on our side—why, that’s a bargain any warlord would jump at! Then with the sorcerers all out of the way—except for the Brothers themselves, and Flindach—that warty blotchy one is someone to be reckoned with!—I’ll meet and slay this champion of Hasjarl’s and we’ll carry all before us. And if…”
His voice trailed off. It had occurred to him to wonder why he himself hadn’t been blasted by his own spell. He had never suspected, until now, that he might be a sorcerer of the First Rank—having despite a youthful training in country-sorceries only dabbled in magic since. Perhaps some metaphysical trick or logical fallacy was involved…. If a sorcerer casts a rune that midway of the casting blasts all sorcerers, provided the casting be finished, then does he blast himself or…? Or perhaps indeed, the Mouser began to think boastfully, he was unknown to himself a magus of the First Rank, or even higher, or—
In the silence of his thinking, he and Ivivis became aware of approaching footsteps, first a multitudinous patter but swiftly a tumult. The gray-clad man and the slavegirl had hardly time to exchange a questioning apprehensive look when there burst through the draperies, tearing them down, eight or nine of Gwaay’s chiefest henchmen, their faces death-pale, their eyes staring like madmen’s. They raced across the chamber and out the opposite archway almost before the Mouser could recover from where he’d dodged out of their way.
But that was not the end of the footsteps. There was a last pair coming down the black corridor and at a strange unequal gallop, like a cripple sprinting, and with a squushy slap at each tread. The Mouser crossed quickly to Ivivis and put an arm around her. He did not want to be standing alone at this moment, either.
Ivivis said, “If your Great Spell missed Hasjarl’s sorcerers, and their disease-spells struck through to Gwaay, now undefended…”
Her whisper trailed off fearfully as a monstrous figure clad in dark scarlet robes lurched by swift convulsive stages into view. At first the Mouser thought it must be Hasjarl of the Mismated Arms, from what he’d heard of that one. Then he saw that its neck was collared by gray fungus, its right cheek crimson, its left black, its eyes dripping green ichor and its nose spattering clear drops. As the loathy creature took a last great stride into the chamber, its left leg went boneless like a pillar of jelly and its right leg, striking down stiffly though with a heel splash, broke in midshin and the jagged bones thrust through the flesh. Its yellow-crusted, red-cracked scurfy hands snatched futilely at the air for support, and its right arm brushing its head carried away half the hair on that side.
Ivivis began to mewl and yelp faintly with horror and she clung to the Mouser, who himself felt as if a nightmare were lifting its hooves to trample him.
In such manner did Prince Gwaay, Lord of the Lower Levels of Quarmall, come home from his father’s funeral, falling in a stenchful, scabrous, ichorous heap upon the torn-down richly embroidered curtains immediately beneath the pristine-handsome silver bust of himself in the niche above the arch.
The funeral pyre smoldered for a long time, but of all the inhabitants in that huge and ramified castle-kingdom Brilla the High Eunuch was the only one who watched it out. Then he collected a few representative pinches of ashes to preserve; he kept them with some dim idea that they might perhaps act as some protection, now that the living protector was forever gone.
Yet the fluffy-gritty gray tokens did not much cheer Brilla as he wandered desolately into the inner rooms. He was troubled and eunuchlike be-twittered by thoughts of the war between brothers that must now ensue before Quarmall had again a single master. Oh, what a tragedy that Lord Quarmal should have been snatched so suddenly by the Fates with no chance to make arrangement for the succession!—though what that arrangement might have been, considering custom’s strictures in Quarmall, Brilla could not say. Still, Quarmal had always seemed able to achieve the impossible.
Brilla was troubled too, and rather more acutely, by his guilty knowledge that Quarmal’s concubine Kewissa had evaded the flames. He might be blamed for that, though he could not see where he had omitted any customary precaution. And burning would have been small pain indeed to what the poor girl must suffer now for her transgression. He rather hoped she had slain herself by knife or poison, though that would doom her spirit to eternal wandering in the winds between the stars that make them twinkle.
Brilla realized his steps were taking him to the harem, and he halted a-quake. He might well find Kewissa there and he did not want to be the one to turn her in.
Yet if he stayed in this central section of the Keep, he would momentarily run into Flindach and he knew he would hold back nothing when gimleted by that arch-sorcerer’s stern witchy gaze. He would have to remind him of Kewissa’s defection.
So Brilla bethought him of an errand that would take him to the nethermost sections of the Keep, just above Hasjarl’s realm. There was a storeroom there, his responsibility, which he had not inventoried for a month. Brilla did not like the Dark Levels of Quarmall—it was his pride that he was one of the elite who worked in or at least near sunlight—but now, by reason of his anxieties, the Dark Levels began to seem attractive.
This decision made, Brilla felt slightly cheered. He set off at once, moving quite swiftly, with a eunuch’s peculiar energy, despite his elephantine bulk.
He reached the storeroom without incident. When he had kindled a torch there, the first thing he saw was a small girl-like woman cowering among the bales of drapery. She wore a lustrous loose yellow robe and had the winsome triangular face, moss-green hair, and bright blue eyes of an Ilthmarix.
“Kewissa,” he whispered shudderingly yet with motherly warmth. “Sweet chick…”