“For crown, read north polar coasts,” Afreyt interjected.
“And supremely abetted by the Wizard of Ice, Khahkht, whose very name’s a frozen cough—”
“Perchance the evilest being ever to exist—” Afreyt supplemented, her eyes a sapphire moon shining frosty through two narrowed, crosswise window slits.
“The Mingols have ta’en ship to harry Nehwon’s northmost coasts in two great fleets, one following the sun, the other—the Widdershin Mingols—going against it—”
“For a few dire ships, believe armadas,” Afreyt put in, still gazing chiefly at Fafhrd (just as Cif favored the Mouser), and then took up the main tale with, “Till Sunwise and Widdershins meet at Rime Isle, overwhelm her, and fan out south to rape the world!”
“A dismal prospect,” Fafhrd commented, setting down the brandy jar with which he’d laced the wine he’d poured for all.
“At least an overlively one,” the Mouser chimed in. “Mingols are tireless raptors.”
Cif leaned forward, chin up. Her green eyes flamed. “So Rime Isle is the chosen battleground. Chosen by Fate, by cold Khahkht, and the Gods. The place to stop the Steppe horde turned sea raiders.”
Without moving, Afreyt grew taller in her chair, her blue gaze flashing back and forth between Fafhrd and his comrade, “So Rime Isle arms, and musters men, and hires mercenaries. The last’s my work and Cif’s. We need two heroes, each to find twelve men like himself and bring them to Rime Isle in the space of three short moons. You are the twain!”
“You mean there’s any other one man in Nehwon like me—let alone a dozen?” the Mouser asked incredulously.
“It’s an expensive task, at very least,” Fafhrd said judiciously.
Her biceps swelling slightly under the close-fitting rust-red cloth, Cif brought up from beneath the table two tight-packed pouches big as oranges and set one down before each man. The small thuds and swiftly damped chinkings were most satisfying sounds.
“Here are your funds!”
The Mouser’s eyes widened, though he did not yet touch his globular sack. “Rime Isle must need heroes sorely. And heroines?—if I might make suggestion.”
“That has been taken care of,” Cif said firmly.
Fafhrd’s middle finger feather-brushed his bag and came away.
Afreyt said, “Drink we.”
As the goblets lifted, there came from all around a tiny tinkling as of faery hells; a minute draft, icy chill, stole past from the door; and the air itself grew very faintly translucent, very slightly softening and pearling all things seen—all of which portents grew light-swift by incredible tiger leaps into a stunning, sense-raping clangor of bells big as temple domes and thick as battlements, an ear-splittingly roaring and whining polar wind that robbed away all heat in a trice and blew out flat the iron-and-lead-weighted door drapes and sent the inhabitants of the Silver Eel sailing and tumbling, and an ice fog thick as milk, through which Cif could be heard to cry, “’Tis icy breath of Khahkht!” and Afreyt, “It’s tracked us down!” before pandemonium drowned out all else.
Fafhrd and the Mouser each desperately gripped moneybag with one hand and with the other, table, glad it was bolted down to stop its use in brawls.
The gale and the tumult died and the fog faded, not quite as swiftly as it all had come. They unclenched their hands, wiped ice crystals from brows and eyes, lit lamps, and looked around.
The place was a bloodless shambles, silent too as death until the frightened moaning began, the cries of pain and wonder. They scanned the long room, first from their tables, then afoot. Their slender tablemates were not among the slowly recovering victims.
The Mouser intoned, somewhat airily, “Were such folk here as we’ve been searching for? Or have we drunk some drug that—”
He broke off. Fafhrd had taken up his fat little moneybag and headed for the door. “Where away?” Mouser called.
Fafhrd stopped and turned. He called back unsmiling, “North of the Trollsteps, to hire my twelve berserks. Doubtless you’ll find your dozen swordsmen-thieves in warmer clime. In three moons less three days, we rendezvous at sea midway between Simorgya and Rime Isle. Till then, fare well.”
The Mouser watched him out, shrugged, rummaged up a cup and the brandy jar overset but unbroken, bedewed by the magic blast. The liquor that hadn’t spilled made a gratifyingly large slug. He fingered his moneybag a moment, then teased open the hard knot in its thong. Inside, the leather had a faint amber glow. “A golden orange indeed,” he said happily, unmindful of the forms mewling and crawling and otherwise crippling around him, and plucked out one of the packed yellow coins. Reverse, a smoking volcano, possibly snow-clad; obverse, a great cliff rising from the sea and looking not quite like ice or any ordinary rock. What drollery! He gazed again at the iron-curtained doorway. What a huge fool, he thought, to take seriously a quite impossible task set by vanished females most likely dead or at best sorcelled beyond reach! Or to make rendezvous at distant date in uncharted ocean betwixt a sunken land and a fabulous one—Fafhrd’s geography was even more hopeful than his usual highly imaginative wont.
And just think what rare delights—nay, what whole sets of ecstasies and blisses—this much gold would buy. How fortunate that metal was mindless slave of the man who held it!
He returned the coin, thonged shut the gold and its glow, stood up decisively, then looked back at the table top, near an edge of which the four silver coins still lay cozily flat.
While he regarded them, the grubby hand of a fat server who’d been wedged under the table by the indoor blizzard reached up and whisked them down.
With another shrug, the Mouser ambled rather grandly toward the doorway, whistling between his teeth a Mingol march.
* * * *
Inside a sphere half again as tall as a man, a skinny old being was busy. On the interior of the sphere was depicted a world map of Nehwon, the seas in blackest blues, the lands in blackest greens and browns, yet all darkly agleam like blued, greened, and browned iron, creating the illusion that the sphere was a giant bubble rising forever through infinite murky, oily waters—as some Lankhmar philosophers assert is veriest truth about Nehwon-world itself. South of the Eastern Lands in the Great Equatorial Ocean there was even depicted a ring-shaped water wall a span across and three fingers high, such as those same philosophers say hides the sun from the half of Nehwon it is floating across, though no blinding solar disk now lay in the bottom of the liquid crater, but only a pale glow sufficient to light the sphere’s interior.
Where they were not hid by a loose, light robe, the old being’s four long, ever-active limbs were covered by short, stiff black hairs either grizzled or filmed with ice, while Its narrow face was nasty as a spider’s. Now It lifted Its leathery lips and nervously questing long-nailed fingers toward an area of the map where a tiny, gleaming black blotch south of blue and amidst brown signified Lankhmar City on the southron coast of the Inner Sea. Was it Its breath that showed frosty, or did Its will conjure up the white wisp that streaked across the black blotch? Whichever, the vapor vanished.
It muttered high-pitched in Mingolish, “They’re gone, the bitches. Khahkht sees each fly die, and sends Its shriveling breath where’er It will. Mingols harry, world unwary. Harlots fumble, heroes stumble. And now ‘tis time, ‘tis time, ‘tis time to gin to build the frost monstreme.”
It opened a circular trap door in the South Polar Regions and lowered Itself out on a thin line.
* * * *
Three days short of three moons later, the Mouser was thoroughly disgusted, bone weary, and very cold. His feet and toes were very, very cold inside fine, fur-lined boots, which slowly rose and fell under his soles as the frosty deck lifted and sank with the long, low swell. He stood by the short mainmast, from the long yard of which (longer than the boom) the loosely furled mainsail hung in frozen festoons. Beyond dimly discerned low prow and stern and mainyard top, vision was utterly blotted out by a fog of tiniest ice crystals, like cirrus cloud come down from Stardock heights, through which the light of an unseen gibbous moon, still almost full swollen, seeped out dark pearl gray. The windlessness and general stillness, contrary to all experience, seemed to make the cold bite deeper.
Yet the silence was not absolute. There was the faint wash and drip—perhaps even tiniest crackling of thinnest ice film—as the hull yielded to the swell. There were the resultant small creakings of the timbers and rigging of Flotsam. And beneath or beyond these, still fainter sounds lurked in the fringes of the inaudible. A part of the Mouser’s mind that worked without being paid attention strained ceaselessly to hear those last. He was of no mind to be surprised by a Mingol flotilla, or single craft even. Flotsam was transport, not warship, he repeatedly warned himself. Very strange some of those last real or fancied sounds were that came out of the frigid fog-shatterings of massive ice leagues away, the thump and splash of mighty oars even farther off, distant doleful shriekings, still more distant deep minatory growlings, and a laughter as of fiends beyond the rim of Nehwon. He thought of the invisible fliers that had troubled the snowy air halfway up Stardock when Fafhrd and he had climbed her, Nehwon’s loftiest peak.