When that was done, he said, “Look, I’m going to buy a jug. You tell her what happened, Mouser.”
When he came out of the Golden Lamprey he was carrying four jugs in the crook of his left arm and wiping his lips on the back of his right hand. Vlana was frowning. He grinned at her. The Mouser smacked his lips at the jugs. They continued east on Cash. Fafhrd realized that the frown was for more than the jugs and the prospect of stupidly drunken male revelry. The Mouser tactfully walked ahead, ostensibly to lead the way. When his figure was little more than a blob in the thickening smog, Vlana whispered harshly, “You had two members of the Thieves’ Guild knocked out cold and you didn’t cut their throats?”
“We slew three bravos,” Fafhrd protested by way of excuse.
“My quarrel is not with the Slayers’ Brotherhood, but that abominable Guild. You swore to me that whenever you had the chance—”
“Vlana! I couldn’t have the Gray Mouser thinking I was an amateur counter-thief consumed by hysteria and blood lust.”
“You already set great store by him, don’t you?”
“He possibly saved my life tonight.”
“Well, he told me that he’d have slit their throats in a wink, if he’d known I wanted it that way.”
“He was only playing up to you from courtesy.”
“Perhaps and perhaps not. But you knew and you didn’t—”
“Vlana, shut up!”
Her frown became a rageful glare, then suddenly she laughed wildly, smiled twitchingly as if she were about to cry, mastered herself and smiled more lovingly. “Pardon me, darling,” she said. “Sometimes you must think I’m going mad and sometimes I believe I am.”
“Well, don’t,” he told her shortly. “Think of the jewels we’ve won instead. And behave yourself with our new friends. Get some wine inside you and relax. I mean to enjoy myself tonight. I’ve earned it.”
She nodded and clutched his arm in agreement and for comfort and sanity. They hurried to catch up with the dim figure ahead.
The Mouser, turning left, led them a half square north on Cheap Street to where a narrower way went east again. The black mist in it looked solid.
“Dim Lane,” the Mouser explained.
Fafhrd nodded that he knew.
Vlana said, “Dim’s too weak—too transparent a word for it tonight,” with an uneven laugh in which there were still traces of hysteria and which ended in a fit of strangled coughing. When she could swallow again, she gasped out, “Damn Lankhmar’s night-smog! What a hell of a city.”
“It’s the nearness here of the Great Salt Marsh,” Fafhrd explained. And he did indeed have part of the answer. Lying low betwixt the Marsh, the Inner Sea, the River Hlal, and the flat southern grain fields watered by canals fed by the Hlal, Lankhmar with its innumerable smokes was the prey of fogs and sooty smogs. No wonder the citizens had adopted the black toga as their formal garb. Some averred the toga had originally been white or pale brown, but so swiftly soot-blackened, necessitating endless laundering, that a thrifty Overlord had ratified and made official what nature or civilization’s arts decreed.
About halfway to Carter Street, a tavern on the north side of the lane emerged from the murk. A gape-jawed serpentine shape of pale metal crested with soot hung high for a sign. Beneath it they passed a door curtained with begrimed leather, the slit in which spilled out noise, pulsing torchlight, and the reek of liquor.
Just beyond the Silver Eel the Mouser led them through an inky passageway outside the tavern’s east wall. They had to go single file, feeling their way along rough, slimily bemisted brick and keeping close together.
“Mind the puddle,” the Mouser warned. “It’s deep as the Outer Sea.”
The passageway widened. Reflected torchlight filtering down through the dark mist allowed them to make out only the most general shape of their surroundings. To the right was more windowless, high wall. To the left, crowding close to the back of the Silver Eel, rose a dismal, rickety building of darkened brick and blackened, ancient wood. It looked utterly deserted to Fafhrd and Vlana until they had craned back their heads to gaze at the fourth-story attic under the ragged-guttered roof. There faint lines and points of yellow light shone around and through three tightly-latticed windows. Beyond, crossing the T of the space they were in, was a narrow alley.
“Bones Alley,” the Mouser told them in somewhat lofty tones. “I call it Ordure Boulevard.”
“I can smell that,” Vlana said.
By now she and Fafhrd could see a long, narrow wooden outside stairway, steep yet sagging and without a rail, leading up to the lighted attic. The Mouser relieved Fafhrd of the jugs and went up it quite swiftly.
“Follow me when I’ve reached the top,” he called back. “I think it’ll take your weight, Fafhrd, but best one of you at a time.”
Fafhrd gently pushed Vlana ahead. With another hysteria-tinged laugh and a pause midway up for another fit of choked coughing, she mounted to the Mouser where he now stood in an open doorway, from which streamed yellow light that died swiftly in the night-smog. He was lightly resting a hand on a big, empty, wrought-iron lamp-hook firmly set in a stone section of the outside wall. He bowed aside, and she went in.
Fafhrd followed, placing his feet as close as he could to the wall, his hands ready to grab for support. The whole stairs creaked ominously and each step gave a little as he shifted his weight onto it. Near the top, one gave way with the muted crack of half-rotted wood. Gently as he could, he sprawled himself hand and knee on as many steps as he could reach, to distribute his weight, and cursed sulfurously.
“Don’t fret, the jugs are safe,” the Mouser called down gayly.
Fafhrd crawled the rest of the way, a somewhat sour look on his face, and did not get to his feet until he was inside the doorway. When he had done so, he almost gasped with surprise. It was like rubbing the verdigris from a cheap brass ring and finding a rainbow-fired diamond of the first water set in it. Rich drapes, some twinkling with embroidery of silver and gold, covered the walls except where the shuttered windows were—and the shutters of those were gilded. Similar but darker fabrics hid the low ceiling, making a gorgeous canopy in which the flecks of gold and silver were like stars. Scattered about were plump cushions and low tables, on which burned a multitude of candles. On shelves against the walls were neatly stacked like small logs a vast reserve of candles, numerous scrolls, jugs, bottles, and enameled boxes. A low vanity table was backed by a mirror of honed silver and thickly scattered over with jewels and cosmetics. In a large fireplace was set a small metal stove, neatly blacked, with an ornate fire-pot. Also set beside the stove were a tidy pyramid of thin, resinous torches with frayed ends—fire-kindlers—and other pyramids of short-handled brooms and mops, small, short logs, and gleamingly black coal.
On a low dais by the fireplace was a wide, short-legged, high-backed couch covered with cloth of gold. On it sat a thin, pale-faced, delicately handsome girl clad in a dress of thick violet silk worked with silver and belted with a silver chain. Her slippers were of white snow-serpent fur. Silver pins headed with amethysts held in place her high-piled black hair. Around her shoulders was drawn a white ermine wrap. She was leaning forward with uneasy-seeming graciousness and extending a narrow, white hand which shook a little to Vlana, who knelt before her and now gently took the proffered hand and bowed her head over it, her own glossy, straight, dark-brown hair making a canopy, and pressed the other girl’s hand’s back to her lips.
Fafhrd was happy to see his woman playing up properly to this definitely odd though delightful situation. Then looking at Vlana’s long, red-stockinged leg stretched far behind her as she knelt on the other, he noted that the floor was everywhere strewn—to the point of double, treble, and quadruple overlaps—with thick-piled, close-woven, many-hued rugs of the finest imported from the Eastern Lands. Before he knew it, his thumb had shot toward the Gray Mouser.
“You’re the Rug Robber!” he proclaimed. “You’re the Carpet Crimp!—and the Candle Corsair too,” he continued, referring to two series of unsolved thefts which had been on the lips of all Lankhmar when he and Vlana had arrived a moon ago.
The Mouser shrugged impassive-faced at Fafhrd, then suddenly grinned, his slitted eyes a-twinkle, and broke into an impromptu dance which carried him whirling and jigging around the room and left him behind Fafhrd, where he deftly reached down the hooded and long-sleeved huge robe from the latter’s stooping shoulders, shook it out, carefully folded it, and set it on a pillow.