Not far above the pearly white surface, which stretched to all horizons save the southwest, the messenger hawk the Mouser had released was winging east. As far as eye could see, no other living thing shared its vast-arched loneliness, yet the bird suddenly veered as if attacked, then frantically beat its wings and came to a twisting stop in mid-air, as if it had been seized and held helpless. Only there was nothing to be seen sharing the clear air with the thrashing bird.
The scrap of parchment around its leg unrolled like magic, lay flat in the air for a space, then rolled itself around the scaly leg again. The white hawk shot off desperately to the east, zigzagging as if to dodge pursuit and flying very close to the white floor, as if ready at any moment to dive into it.
A voice came out of the empty air at the point where the bird had been released, soliloquizing, “There’s profit enow and more in this leaguer of Oomforafor of Stardock and the Khahkht of the Black Ice, if my ruse works—and it will! Dear devilish sisters, weep!—your lovers who defiled you are dead men already, though they still breathe and walk awhile. Delayed revenge long savored and denied is sweeter than swift. And sweetest of all when the ones you hate love, but are forced to kill, each other. For if my notes effect not that mebliss, my name’s not Faroomfar! And now, wing sound-swift! my fleet steed of air, my viewless magic rug.”
* * * *
The strange, low fog stayed thick and bitter cold, but Fafhrd’s garb of reversed snow-fawn fur was snug. Gauntleted hand on the low figurehead—a hissing snow serpent—he gazed back with satisfaction from Sea Hawk’s prow at his oarsmen, still rowing as strongly as when he’d first commanded them on sighting Mouser’s red flare from the masthead. They were staunch lads, when kept busy and battered as needed. Nine of them tall as he, and three taller—his corporals Skullick and Mannimark and sergeant Skor, the last two hid by the fog where Skor clinked time at the stern. Each petty officer immediately commanded a squad of three men.
And Sea Hawk was a staunch sailing galley!—a little longer and narrower of beam and with much taller mast, rigged fore and aft, than the Gray Mouser’s ship (though Fafhrd could not know that, never having seen Flotsam).
Yet he frowned slightly. Pelly should be back by now, provided Mouser had sent a return message, and the little gray man never lost chance to talk, whether by tongue or pen. It was time he visited the top anyhow—the Mouser might burn another flare, and Skullick wake-dream on watch. But as he neared the mast, a seven-foot ghost loomed up—a ghost in turned gray otter’s fur.
“How now, Skullick?” Fafhrd rasped, looking up their half span’s difference in height. “Why have you left your station? Speak swiftly, scum!” And without other warning or preparation, he struck his corporal major a short-traveling jolt in the midriff that jarred him back a step and (rather illogically) robbed him of most of the breath he had to speak with.
“It’s cold … as witch’s womb … up there,” Skullick gasped with pain and difficulty. “And my relief’s … o’erdue.”
“From now on you’ll wait on station for your relief until Hell freezes over, and haply you too. But you’re relieved.” And Fafhrd struck him again in the same crucial spot. “Now water the rowers, four measures of water to one of usquebaugh—and if you take more than two gulps of the last, I’ll surely know!”
He turned away abruptly, reached the mast in two strides, and climbed it rhythmically by the pins of its bronze collars, past the mainyard, to which the big sail was snugly furled, past the peak, until his gloved hands gripped the short horizontal bar of the crow’s-perch. As he drew himself up by them, it was a wonder how the fog gave way without gradation to star-ceilinged air, as though a fine film, impalpable yet tough, confined the ice motes, held them down. When he stood on the bar and straightened himself, he was waist-deep in fog so thick he could barely see his feet. He and the mast top were scudding through a pearly sea, strongly propelled by the invisible rowers below. The stars told him Sea Hawk was still headed due west. His sense of direction had worked truly in the fog below. Good!
Also, the feckless Skullick had spoken true. It was cold indeed as a she-demon’s privies, yet wonderfully bracing. He noted the new wind sweeping up the fog in the southwest, and north of that the spot where he’d picked up the Mouser’s flare on the horizon’s brim. The deformed fat moon was there now, almost touching it, yet still most bright. If the Mouser burned another flare, it ought to be higher, because Fafhrd’s rowing should be bringing the ships together. He searched the west closely to make sure another red spark wasn’t being drowned by Nehwon’s strong moonlight.
He saw a black speck against the lopsided, bright pearl orb. As he watched, it rapidly increased in size, grew wings, and with a white beat of them landed with jolting twin-talon grip on Fafhrd’s gauntleted wrist.
“You’re ruffled, Pelly. Who has troubled you?” he asked as he snapped threads and unrolled from leg the parchment scrap. He recognized the start of his own note, flipped it over, and by the flat moonlight read the Mouser’s.
Madman Most Welcome!—I’ll burn them one each bell. I do not agree. MY crew is trained already.
M.
No feigned attack, you cur once my friend, but earnest deadly. I want no less than your destruction, dog. To the death!
Fafhrd read the salutation and first sentence with great relief and joy. The next two sentences made him frown in puzzlement. But with the dire postscript, his face fell, and his expression became one of deep dread and utter dolefulness. He hurriedly rescanned the script to see how the letters and words were formed. They were the Mouser’s unquestionably, the postscript slightly scrawled ‘cause writ more swift. Something he’d missed nagged briefly at his mind, then was forgot. He crumpled the parchment and thrust it deep in his pouch.
He said to himself in the naked, low tones of a man plunged into nightmare, “I can’t believe and yet cannot deny. I know when Mouser jests and when speaks true. There must be swift-striking madness in these polar seas, perhaps loosed by that warlock Afreyt named … Ice Wizard … It … Khahkht. And yet … and yet I must ready Sea Hawk for total war, howe’er it grieve me. A man must be prepared for all events, no matter how they chill and tear his heart.”
He gave the west a final glance. The front of the southwest gale was close now, sweeping up the ice crystals ahead of it. It was a chord that cut off a whole sector of the circular white fog-sea, replacing it with naked black ocean. From that came a fleeting white glow that made Fafhrd mutter, “Ice blink.”
Then closer still, hardly a half-score bowshots away, still in the fog yet near its wind-smitten edge, a redness flared bright, then died.
Fafhrd sank swiftly into the fog, going down the mast in swift hand-over-hand drops, his boots hardly touching the bronze collar pins.
* * * *
Inside the dark-mapped globular vacuity, It ceased Its dartings, held Itself rigidly erect, facing away from the water-walled equatoriaql sun disk, and intoned in voice like grinding ice flowes, “Heed me, smallest atomies, that in rime seas seethe and freeze. Hear me, spirits of the cold, then do straigtway what you’re told. Ships are meeting, heroes greeting; gift to each, from each, of death. Monstreme lurk, in icy murk, picket of the Mingol work ‘gainst each city, hearth, and kirk. If they ‘scape the Viewless’s ruse, make yourself of direst use. Vessels shatter! Man-bones scatter! Bloody flesh, bones darkness splatter!—every splinter, every tatter! Deeds of darkness, darkness merit—so, till’s done, put out the sun!”
And with reptilian swiftness It whipped around and clapped a blacked-iron lid over the softly flaring, walled solar disk, which plunged the spherical cavity into an absolute blackness, wherein It whispered grindingly and chucklesome, “…and the Ghouls conjured the sun out of Heaven, quotha! Ghouls, indeed!—ever o’er-boastful. Khahkht never boasts, but does!”
* * * *
At the foot of Flotsam’s mainmast the Gray Mouser gripped Pshawri by the throat, but forbore to shake him. Beneath bloody head-circling bandage, his corporal major’s white-circled pupils stared at him defiantly from bloodless face.
“Was one light battle-tap enough to make a crack for all your brains to leak out?” the Mouser demanded. “Why did you fire that flare, and so reveal us to our enemy?”
Pshawri winced but continued to oppose his gaze to the captain’s glare. “You ordered it—and did not countermand,” he stated stubbornly.