The Mouser sputtered, but had to allow the truth of that. The fool had been obedient, even if utterly lacking in judgment. Soldiers and their blind devotion to duty! especially spoken order! Most odd to think that this faithful idiot was yesterday a burglar-thief, child of treachery and lies and blinkered selfishness. The Mouser had also guiltily to admit he could have countermanded his command, paying lip service to logic and making allowance for stupidity, and particularly have noted what the fool was up to when he mounted the mast a second time. Pshawri was clearly still shaken from his head blow, poor devil, and at least he had been quick enough in casting boathook and flare into the sea when the Mouser’d roared at him from below.
“Very well,” he said gruffly, releasing his grip. “Next time think too—if there’s time—and there was! as well as act. Ask Ourph for a noggin of white brandy. Then be forward lookout with Gavs—I’m doubling them bow and stern.”
And with that, the Mouser himself took up the general work of trying to pierce the stilly fog with eyes and ears, wondering the while unhappy and uneasy about the nature of Fafhrd’s madness and of the vast, fell vessel he’d built, bought, commandeered, or perchance got from Ningauble or other sorcerer. Or sorcerers!—it had surely been big and weird enough to be the chattel of several archimages! Conceivably a refitted prison hulk from rimy No-Ombrulsk. Or, illest thought of all (stemming from Ourph’s fears ‘bout the vanished oar shard), was the sorcerer Khahkht?—and some link ‘twixt that warlock and mad Fafhrd?
Flotsam ghosted on, the sweepsmen pushing only enough to keep her under way. Mouser had early ordered slowest beat to conserve their strength.
“Three bells,” Ourph softly called.
Dawn nighs, the Mouser thought.
Pshawri could not have been long at the bow when his cry came back, “Clear sea ahead! And wind!”
The fog thinned to wisps torn and tossed aft by the eddying, frosty air. The gibbous moon was firmly bedded on the western horizon, yet still sent an eerie white glare, while south of her a few lonely stars hung in the sky. That was uncanny, the Mouser thought, for the imminent dawn should already have extinguished them. He faced east—and almost gasped.
Above the low, moonlit fog bank, the heavens were darker than ever, the night was starless, while due east on the fog bank there rested a sliver of blackness blacker than any night could be, as if a black sun were rising that shot out beams of a darkness powerful and active as light—not light’s absence, but its enemy opposite. And from that same thickening sliver, along with the potent darkness, there seemed to come a cold more intense and differing in kind from that of the bitter southwest wind striking behind his right ear.
“Ship on our loadside beam!” Pshawri cried shrilly.
At once the Mouser dropped his gaze and sighted the stranger vessel, about three bowshots distant, just emerged from the fog bank and equally illumined by the moon glare, and headed straight at Flotsam. At first he took it for Fafhrd’s icy leviathan come again, then saw it was small as his own ship, maybe narrower of beam. His thoughts zigzagged wildly—did mad Fafhrd command a fleet? was it a Sea Mingol warcraft? or still other pirate? or from Rime Isle? He forced himself to think more to the purpose.
His heart pulsed twice. Then, “Make sail, my Mingols all!” he commanded. “Odd-numbered sweepsmen! rack your long tools, then arm! Pshawri! command ‘em!” And he grasped the tiller as the steersman let it go.
Aboard Sea Hawk, Fafhrd saw Flotsam’s low hull and short masts and long, slantwise main and mizzen yards blackly silhouetted against the spectrally white, misshapen moon awash in the west. In the same instant he at last realized what it was that had nagged his mind at the mast top. He whipped the gauntlet from his right hand, plunged the latter into his pouch, plucked out the parchment scrap, and this time reread his own note—and saw below it the damning postscript he knew he’d never written. Clearly both postscripts, penned in deceptive scrawls, were cunning forgeries, however done o’erhead in birds’ realm.
So even as he felt the wind and commanded, “Skor! Take your squad. Prepare to make sail!” he drew a favorite arrow from the quiver ready beside him on the deck, threaded the note around it in studied haste, swiftly uncased and strung his great bow, and with a curt prayer to Kos bent it to its muscle-cracking extreme and sent the pet arrow winging high into the black sky toward the moon and the black two-master.
Aboard Flotsam, the Mouser felt a shiver of super-added apprehension which mounted while he watched his Mingols purposefully struggling with frozen lines and ties in the freshening chilly wind, until it culminated in the chunk of an arrow almost vertically into the deck scarce a cubit from his foot. So the small, moonlit sailing galley (for he had meanwhile identified it as such a craft) was signaling attack! Yet the range was still so great that he knew of only one bowman in Nehwon who could have made that miraculous shot. Not letting go the tiller, he stooped and severed the threads of the pale parchment wrapped tightly just behind the arrow’s half-buried head, and read (or rather mostly reread) the two notes, his with the devilish postscript he’d never seen before. Even as he finished, the characters became unreadable from the black beams of anti-sun fighting down the moon rays and beginning to darken that orb. Yet he made the same deduction as had Fafhrd, and hot tears of joy were squeezed from his chilled eye sockets as he realized that whatever impossible-seeming sleights of ink and voice had been worked this night, his friend was sane and true.
There was a protracted, sharp crackling as the last ties of the sails were loosed and wind filled them, breaking their frozen folds and festoons. The Mouser bore on the tiller, heading Flotsam into what was now a strengthening gale. But at the same time he sharply commanded, “Mikkidu! burn three flares, two red, one white!”
Aboard Sea Hawk, Fafhrd saw the blessed treble sign flare up in gathering unnatural murk, even as his reefed sails filled and he turned his own craft into the wind. He ordered, “Mannimark! answer those flares with like. Skullick, you dolt! slack your squad’s bows. Those to the west are friends!” Then he said to Skor beside him, “Take the helm. My friend’s ship is on close-hauled southron course like ours. Work over to her. Lay us alongside.”
Aboard Flotsam, the Mouser was giving like directions to Ourph. He was cheered by sight of Fafhrd’s flares matching his own. though he did not need their testimony. Now he longed for talk with Fafhrd. Which would be soon. The gap of black water between ships was narrowing rapidly. He wasted a moment musing whether mere chance or else some goddess had steered his comrade’s arrow aside from his heart. He thought of Cif.
Aboard both ships, almost in unison, Pshawri and Mannimark cried out fearfully, “Ship close astern!”
Out of the torn and darkening fog bank, driving with preternatural rapidity into the teeth of the gale on a course to smash them both, there had silently come a craft monstrous in size and aspect. It might well have remained unseen until collision, save that the weird rays of the rising black sun striking its loadside engendered there a horrid, pale reflection, not natural white light at all, but a loathly, colorless luminescence—a white to make the flesh crawl, a cave-toad, fish-belly white. And if the substance making the reflection had any texture at all, it was that of ridged and crinkled gray horn—dead men’s fingernails.
The leprous Hel-glow showed the demonic craft to have thrice the freeboard of any natural ship. Its towering prow and sides were craggy and jagged, as if it were cast entire of ice in a titanic rough mold left over from the Age of Chaos, or else hacked by jinn into crude ship-likeness from a giant berg broken off from glacier vast. And it was driven by banks of oars long and twitchy as insect legs or limbs of myriapod, yet big as jointed yards or masts, as they sent it scuttling monstrously across black ocean vast. And from its lofty deck, as if hurled by demon ballistas, catapults, and mangonels, there now came hurtling down around Flotsam and Sea Hawk great blocks of ice which sent up black, watery volcanoes. While from the jagged top of its foremast—pale, big, and twisted as a thunder-blasted pine long dead—there shot out two thin beams of blackest black, like rays of anti-sun but more intense, which smote the Gray Mouser and Fafhrd each in the chest with deepstriking chill and sick, spreading dizziness and weakening of will.