“You should have been there,” the Mouser murmured.
“Loki made me feel I was.”
“Incidentally,” the Mouser said casually, “I’d think you’d have rented the Flame Den every night once you’d got your god here.”
“I’m not made of gold,” she informed him without rancor. “Besides, Loki likes variety. The brawls that others hold here amuse him—were what attracted him in the first place. Furthermore, it would have made the council even more suspicious of my activities.”
The Mouser nodded. “I thought I recognized a crony of Groniger’s playing chess out there.”
“Hush,” she counseled him. “I must now consult the god.” Her voice had grown a little singsong in the later stages of her narrative and it became more so as, without transition, she invoked, “And now, O Loki god, tell us about our enemies across the seas and in the realms of ice. Tell us of cruel, cold Khahkht, of Edumir of the Widdershin Mingols and Gonov of the Sunwise. Hilsa and Rill, sing with me to the god.” And her voice became a somnolent two-toned, wordless chant in which the other women joined: Hilsa’s husky voice, Rill’s slightly shrill one, and a soft growling that after a bit the Mouser realized came from Mother Grum—all tuned to the fire and its flame-voice.
The Mouser lost himself in this strange medley of notes and all at once the crackling flame-voice, as if by some dream magic, became fully articulate, murmuring rapidly in Low Lankhmarese with occasional words slipped in that were as hauntingly strange as the god’s own name:
“Storm clouds thicken round Rime Isle. Nature brews her blackest bile. Monsters quicken, nightmares foal, niss and nicor, drow and troll.” (Those last four nouns were all strange ones to the Mouser, specially the bell-toll sound of “troll.”) “Sound alarms and strike the drum—in three days the Mingols come, Sunwise Mingols from the east, horsehead ship and human beast. Trick them all most cunningly—lead them to the spinning sea, to down-swirling dizzy bowl. Trust the whirlpool, ‘ware the troll! Mingols to their deaths must go, down to weedy hell below, never draw an easy breath, suffer an unending death, everlasting pain and strife, everlasting death in life. Mingol madness ever burn! Never peace again return!”
And the flame-voice broke off in a flurry of explosive crackles that shattered the dream-magic and brought the Mouser to his feet with a great start, his sleepy mood all gone. He stared at the fire, walked rapidly around it, peered at it closely from the other side, then swiftly scanned the entire room. Nothing! He glared at Hilsa and Rill. They eyed him blandly and said in unison, “The god has spoken,” but the sense of a presence was gone from the fire and the room as well, leaving behind not even a black hole into which it might have retired—unless perchance (it occurred to the Mouser) it had retired into him, accounting for the feeling of restless energy and flaming thought which now possessed him, while the litany of Mingol doom kept repeating itself over and over in his memory. “Can such things be?” he asked himself and answered himself with an instant and resounding “Yes!”
He paced back to Cif, who had risen likewise. “We have three days,” she said.
“So it appears,” he said. Then, “Know you aught of trolls? What are they?”
“I was about to ask you that,” she replied. “The word’s as strange to me as it appears to be to you.”
“Whirlpools, then,” he queried, his thoughts racing. “Any of them about the isle? Any sailors’ tales?”
“Oh, yes—the Great Maelstrom off the isle’s rock-fanged east coast with its treacherous swift currents and tricky tides, the Great Maelstrom from whence the island gets what wood it owns, after it’s cast up on the Beach of Bleached Bones. It forms regularly each day. Our sailors know it well and avoid it like no other peril.”
“Good! I must put to sea and seek it out and learn its every trick and how it comes and goes. I’ll need a small sailing craft for that while Flotsam’s laid up for repairs—there’s little time. Aye, and I’ll need more money too—shore silver for my men.”
“Wherefore to sea?” her breath catching, she asked. “Wherefore must you dash yourself at such a maw of danger?”—but in her widening eyes he thought he could see the dawning of the answer to that.
“Why, to put down your foes,” he said ringingly. “Heard you not Loki’s prophecy? We’ll expedite it. We’ll drown at least one branch of the Mingols e’er ever they set foot on Rimeland! And if, with Odin’s aid, Fafhrd and Afreyt can scupper the Widder-Mingols half as handily, our task is done!”
The triumphant look flared up in her eyes to match that in his own.
* * * *
The waning moon rode high in the southwest and the brightest stars still shone, but in the east the sky had begun to pale with the dawn, as Fafhrd led his twelve berserks north out of Salthaven. Each was warmly clad against the ice ahead and bore longbow, quiver, extra arrow-pack, belted ax, and bag of provender. Skor brought up the rear, keen to enforce Fafhrd’s rule of utter silence while they traversed the town, so that this breach of port regulations might go unnoticed. And for a wonder they had not been challenged. Perhaps the Rimelanders slept extra sound because so many of them had been up to all hours salting down the monster fish-catch, the last boatloads of which had come in after nightfall.
With the berserks tripped along the girls May and Mara in their soft boots and hooded cloaks, the former with a jar of fresh-drawn milk for the god Odin, the latter to be the expedition’s guide across central Rime Isle to Cold Harbor, at Afreyt’s insistence—”for she was born on a Cold Harbor farm and knows the way—and can keep up with any man.”
Fafhrd had nodded dubiously on hearing that. He had not liked accepting responsibility for a girl with his childhood sweetheart’s name. Nor had he liked leaving the management of everything in Salthaven to the Mouser and the two women, now that there was so much to do, and besides all else the new task of investigating the Grand Maelstrom and spying out its ways, which would occupy the Mouser for a day at least, and which more befitted Fafhrd as the more experienced ship-conner. But the four of them had conferred together at midnight in Flotsam’s cabin behind shrouded portholes, pooling their knowledge and counsels and the two gods’ prophecies, and it had been so decided.
The Mouser would take Ourph with him, for his ancient sea-wisdom, and Mikkidu, to discipline him, using a small fishing craft belonging to the women.
Meanwhile, Pshawri would be left in sole charge of the repairs on Flotsam and Sea Hawk (subject to the advisements of the three remaining Mingols), trying to keep up the illusion that Fafhrd’s berserks were still aboard the latter. Cif and Afreyt would take turns in standing by at the docks to head off inquiries by Groniger and deal with any other matters that might arise unexpectedly.
Well, it should work, Fafhrd told himself, the Rime Islers being such blunt, unsubtle types, hardy and simple. Certainly the Mouser had seemed confident enough—restless and driving, eyes flashing, humming a tune under his breath.
On-winging dawn pinkened the low sky to the east as Fafhrd tramped ahead through the heather, lengthening his stride, an ear attuned to the low voices of the men behind and the lighter ones of the girls. A glance overshoulder told him they were keeping close order, with Mara and May immediately behind him.
As Gallows Hill showed up to the left, he heard the men mark it with grim exclamations. A couple spat to ward off ill omen.
“Bear the god my greeting, May,” he heard Mara say.
“If he wakes enough to attend to aught but drink his milk and sleep again.” May replied as she branched off from the expedition and headed for the hill with her jar through the dissipating shadows of night.
Some of the men exclaimed gloomily at that, too, and Skor called for silence.
Mara said softly to Fafhrd, “We bear left here a little, so as to miss Darkfire’s icefall, which we skirt through the Isle’s center until it joins the glacier of Mount Hellglow.”
Fafhrd thought, what cheerful names they favor, and scanned ahead. Heather and gorse were becoming scantier and stretches of lichened, shaly rock beginning to show.
“What do they call this part of Rime Isle?” he asked her.
“The Deathlands,” she answered.
More of the same, he thought. Well, at any rate the name fits the mad, death-bent Mingols and this gallows-favoring Odin god too.
* * * *
The Mouser was tallest of the four short, wiry men waiting at the edge of the public dock. Pshawri close beside him looked resolute and attentive, though still somewhat pale. A neat bandage went across his forehead. Ourph and Mikkidu rather resembled two monkeys, the one wizened and wise, the other young and somewhat woebegone.