“Perchance we dream—” Fafhrd began doubtfully.
“Well, if we’re dreaming, let’s get on with it,” the Mouser said and, clapping his friend around the shoulders, started them down the corridor. Yet despite these cheerful words and actions, both men felt they were getting more and more into the toils of nightmare, drawing them on will-lessly.
They rounded a turn. For some yards the right-hand wall became a row of slender dark pillars, irregularly spaced, and between them they could see more random dusky slim shafts and at middle distance a long altar on which light showered softly down, revealing a tall, naked woman stretched on it, and by her a priestess in purple robes with dagger bared in one hand and large silver chalice in the other, who was intoning a litany.
Fafhrd whispered, “Mouser! the sacrifice is the courtesan Lessnya, with whom I had some dealings when I was acolyte of Issek, years ago.”
“While the other is Ilala, priestess of the like-named goddess, with whom I had some commerce when I was lieutenant to Pulg the extortioner,” the Mouser whispered back.
Fafhrd protested, “But we can’t have already come all the way to the temple of Ilala, though this looks like it. It’s halfway across Lankhmar from the Eel,” while the Mouser recalled tales he’d heard of secret passages in Lankhmar that connected points by distances shorter than the shortest distance between.
Ilala turned toward them in her purple robes and said with eyebrows raised, “Quiet back there! You are committing sacrilege, trespassing on most holy ritual of the great goddess of all shes. Impious intruders, depart!” While Lessnya lifted on an elbow and looked at them haughtily. Then she lay back again and regarded the ceiling while Ilala plunged her dagger deep into her chalice and then with it flicked sprinkles of wine (or whatever other fluid the chalice held) on Lessnya’s naked shape, wielding the blade as if it were an aspergillum. She aspersed her thrice—on bosom, loins, and knees—and then resumed her muttered litany, while Lessnya echoed her (or else snored) and the Mouser and Fafhrd stole on along the torchlit corridor.
But they had little time to ponder on the strange geometries and stranger religiosities of their nightmare progress, for now the left-hand wall gave way for a space to a fabulously decorated, large, dim chamber, which they recognized as the official residence room of the Grandmaster of the Thieves’ Guild in Thieves’ House, half Lankhmar City back again from Ilala’s fane. The foreground was filled with figures kneeling away from them in devout supplication toward a thick-topped ebony table, behind which there stood queenly tall a handsome red-haired woman dressed in jewels and behind her a trim second female in maid’s black tunic collared and cuffed with white.
“’Tis Ivlis in her beauty from the past, for whom I stole Ohmphals’ erubescent fingertips,” the Mouser whispered in stupefaction. “And now she’s got herself a peck more gems.”
“And that is Freg, her maid, looking no older,” Fafhrd whispered back hoarsely in dream-drugged wonderment.
“But what’s she doing here in Thieves’ House?” the Mouser pressed, his whisper feverish, “where women are forbidden and contemned. As if she were grandmaster of the Guild … grand-mistress … goddess … worshipped…. Is Thieves’ Guild upside down?…all Nehwon turvy-topsy…?”
Ivlis looked up at them across the heads of her kneeling followers. Her green eyes narrowed. She casually lifted her fingers to her lips, then flicked them sideways twice, indicating to the Mouser that he should silently keep going in that direction and not return.
With a slow unloving smile, Freg made exactly the same gesture to Fafhrd, but even more idly seeming, as if humming a chorus. The two men obeyed, but with their gazes trailing behind them, so that it was with complete surprise, almost with starts of fear, that they found they had walked blindly into a room of rare woods embellished with intricate carvings, with a door before them and doors to either side, and in the one of the latter nearest the Mouser a freshly nubile girl with wicked eyes, in a green robe of shaggy toweling cloth, her black hair moist, and in the one nearest Fafhrd two slim blondes a-smile with dubious merriment and wearing loosely the black hoods and robes of nuns of Lankhmar. In nightmare’s fullest grip they realized that this was the very same garden house of Duke Danius, haunted by their earliest deepest loves, impiously reconstituted from the ashes to which the sorcerer Sheelba had burned it and profanely refurbished with all the trinkets wizard Ningauble had magicked from it and scattered to the four winds; and that these three night-fillies were Ivmiss Ovartamortes, niece of Karstak like-named, Lankhmar’s then overlord, and Fralek and Fro, mirror-twin daughters of the death-crazed duke, the three she-colts of the dark to whom they’d madly turned after losing even the ghosts of their true loves in Shadowland. Fafhrd was wildly thinking in unvoiced sound, “Fralek and Fro, and Freg, Friska and Frix—what is this Fr’-charm on me?” while through the Mouser’s mind was skipping likewise, “Ivlis, Ivmiss, Ivivis (three Iv’s—and there’s e’en an Iv in Hisvet)—who are these girl-lets of the Iv?” (Near the Life Pole, the gods Mog, Issek, and Kos were working at the top of their bent, crying out to each other new girl-discoveries with which to torment their lapsed worshippers. The crowd of spectator gods around them was now large.)
And then the Mouser bethought him with a shiver that he had not listed amongst his girl-lings of the Iv the archgirl of them all, fair Ivrian, forever lost in Death’s demesne. And Fafhrd likewise shook. And the night-fillies flanking them pouted and made moues at them, and they were fairly catapulted into the midst of a pavilion of wine-dark silk, beyond whose unstirring folds showed the flat black horizons of the Shadowland.
Beauteous, slate-visaged Vlana spat full in Fafhrd’s face, saying, “I told you I’d do that if you came back,” but fair Ivrian only eyed the Mouser with never a sign or word.
And then they were back in the betorched corridor, more hurried along it than hurrying, and the Mouser envied Fafhrd death’s spittle inching down his cheek. And girls were flashing by like ghosts, unheedingly—Mara of Fafhrd’s youth, Atya who worshipped Tyaa, bovine-eyed Hrenlet, Ahura of Seleucia, and many many more—until they were feeling the utter despair that comes with being rejected not by one or a few loves, but by all. The unfairness of it alone was enough to make a man die.
Then in the rush one scene lingered awhile: Alyx the Picklock garbed in the scarlet robes and golden tiara a-swarm with rubies of the archpriest of an eastern faith, and kneeling before her costumed as clerk Lilyblack, the Mouser’s girlish leman from his criminous days, intoning, “Papa, the heathen rage, the civilized decay,” and the transvestite archpriestess pronouncing, “All men are enemies…”
Almost Fafhrd and the Mouser dropped to their knees and prayed to whatever gods may be for surcease from their torment. But somehow they didn’t, and of a sudden they found themselves on Cheap Street near where it crosses Crafts and turning in at a drab doorway after two females, whose backs were teasingly familiar, and following them up a narrow flight of stairs that stretched up so far in one flight that its crazy warpage was magnified.
In Godsland Mog threw himself back, blowing out his breath and saying, “There! that gets them all,” while Issek likewise stretched himself out (so far as his permanently bent ankles and wrists would permit), observing, “Lord, people don’t appreciate how we gods work, what toil in sparrow-watching!” and the spectator gods began to disperse.
But Kos, still frowningly immersed in his task to such a degree that he wasn’t aware of the pain in his short burly thighs from sitting cross-legged so long, cried out, “Hold on! Here’s another pair: to wit, one Nemia of the Dusk, one Eyes of Ogo, women of lax morals and, to boot, receivers of stolen property, oh, that’s vile!”
Issek laughed wearily and said, “Wait now, dear Kos. I crossed those two off at the very start. They’re our men’s dearest enemies, swindled them out of a precious loot of jewels, as almost any god around could tell you. Sooner than seek them out (to be rebuffed in any case, of course) our boys would rot in hell,” while Mog yawned and added, “Don’t you ever know, dear Kos, when the game’s done?”
So the befurred short god shrugged and gave over, cursing as he tried to straighten his legs.
Meanwhile, the Eyes of Ogo and Nemia of the Dusk reached the summit of the endless stairs and tiredly entered their pad, eyeing it with disfavor. (It was an impoverished, dingy, even noisome place—the two best thieves in Lankhmar had fallen on hard times, as even the best of thieves and receivers will in the course of long careers.)