But at all events. he told himself, he didn’t have to like this sense of being the tool and sport of mysterious forces vastly more powerful than himself, forces that didn’t even deign to tell him the words they spoke through him (that business of the speech he’d given but not heard one word of bothered him more and more). Ahove all he didn’t have to celebrate this bondage to the inscrutable. as the women were doing, by mindlessly repeating words of death and doom.
Also he didn’t like the feeling of being in bondage to women and absorbed more and more into their affairs, such as he’d felt ever since accepting Cif’s commission three months ago in Lankhmar, and which had put him in bondage, in turn, to Pshawri and Mikkidu and all his men, and to his ambitions and self-esteem.
Above all, he didn’t like being in bondage to the idea of himself being a monstrous clever fellow who could walk widdershins round all the gods and godlets, from whom everyone expected godlike performance. Why couldn’t he admit to Cif at least that he’d not heard a word of his supposedly great speech? And if he could do that walk-widdershins bit, why didn’t he?
The cavernous tunnel they’d been following so long debouched into what seemed a far vaster space steaming with vapors, and then they were suddenly brought up short against a great wall that seemed to extend indefinitely upward and to either side.
The women broke oft their doom-song and Rill cried, “Whither now, Loki?” and Hilsa echoed her tremulously. MotherGrum rumbled, “Tell us, wall,” and Cif intoned strongly, “Speak, O god.”
And while the women were saying these things, the Mouser stole forward rapidly and laid his hand on the wall. It was so hot he almost snatched back his hand but did not, and through his palm and outspread fingers he felt a steady strong pulsation, a rhythm in the rock, exactly as if it were itself sounding the women’s song.
And then as if in answer to the women’s entreaty, the Loki torch, which had burnt down to little more than a stub, flared up into a great seven-branched flame, almost intolerably bright—it was a wonder Rill could hold it showing the frighteningly vast extent of the rock face. Even as it flared, the rock seemed to heave under the Mouser’s hand monstrously with each pulsation of its song and the loor began to rock with it. Then the great rock face bulged, and the heat became monstrous too, and the brimstone stench intensified so they were all set a-gagging and a-coughing even as their imaginations envisioned instant earthquake and cave-brimming floods of red-hot lava exploding from the mountain’s heart.
It says much for the Mouser’s prudence that in that short period of panic and terrified wonder it occurred to him to thrust one of his frayed branches into the blinding flame. And it was well he did so, for the great god-flame now died down as swifty as it had flared up, leaving only the feeble illumination of the hurning branch of ordinary dead wood afire in his hands. Rill dropped the dead stub of her burnt-out torch with a cry of pain, as if only now feeling how it had burned her, while Hilsa whimpered and all the women groped about dazedly.
And as if command had questionless passed to the Mouser with the torch, he now began to shepherd them back the way they had come, away from the strangling fumes, through the now-bewilderingly shadowy passageways that only he had conned and that still resounded with the dreadful rock music aping their own, a symphony of doom-song monstrously reverberated by solid stone-away toward the blessed outer light and air and sky, and fields and blessed sea.
Nor was that the full measure of the Mouser’s far-sighted prudence (so far-sighted that he sometimes couldn’t tell what was its aim), for in the moment of greatest panic, when the stub of Loki-torch had fallen from Rillk hand, he had thought to snatch it up from the rocky floor and thrust it, hardly more than a hot black cinder, deep into his pouch. It burnt his fingers a little, he discovered afterwards, but luckily it was not so hot that his pouch caught fire.
* * * *
Afreyt sat on a lichened rock outside the litter on the broad summit-pass of the Deathlands (near where Fafhrd had first encountered the Mingols, though she didn’t know that) with her gray cloak huddled about her, resting. Now and again a wind from the east, whose chilliness seemed that of the violet sky, ruffled the litter’s closed curtains. Its bearers had joined the other men at one of the small fires to the fore and rear, built with carried wood to heat chowder during this evening pause in their march. The gallows had been set down by Afreyt’s direction and its base and beam-end wedged in rock, so that it rested like a fallen-over “L,” its angle lifting above the litter like a crooked roof, or like a rooftree with one kingpost.
There was still enough sunset light in the west for her to wonder if that was smoke she saw moving east above the narrow crater of Mount Hellglow, while in the cold east there was sufficient night for her to see, she was almost sure, a faint glow rising from that of Mount Darkfire. The eastwind blew again and she hunched her shoulders and drew the hood of her cloak more closely against her cheeks.
The curtains of the litter parted for a moment and May slipped out and came and stood in front of Afreyt.
“What’s that you’ve got around your neck?” she asked the girl.
“It’s a noose,” the latter explained eagerly, but with a certain solemnity, “I braided it, Odin showed me how to make the knot. We’re all going to belong to the Order of the Noose, which is something Odin and I invented this afternoon while Gale was taking a nap.”
Afreyt hesitatingly reached her hand to the girl’s slender throat and inspected the loop of heavy braid with uneasy fascination. There, surely enough, was the cruel hangman’s knot drawn rather close, and tucked into it a nosegay of small mountain flowers, somewhat wilted, gathered this morning on the lower slopes.
“I made one for Gale.” the girl said. “She didn’t want to wear it at first hecause I’d helped invent it. She was jealous.”
Afreyt shook her head reprovingly. though her mind wasn’t on that.
“Here,” May continued, lifting her hand which had been hanging close to her side under her cloak. “I’ve made one for you, a little bigger. See, it’s got flowers too. Put back your hood. You wear it under your hair, of course.”
For a long moment Afreyt looked into the girl’s unblinking eyes. Then she drew back her hood, bent down her head, and helped lift her hair through. Using both hands, May drew the knot together at the base of Afreyt’s throat. “There,” she said, “that’s the way you wear it, snug but not tight.”
While this was happening, Groniger had come up, carrying thrce bowls and a small covered pail of chowder. When the nooses had been explained to him, “A capital conceit!” he said with a great grin, his eyebrows lifting. “That’ll show the Mingols something, let them know what they’re in for. It’s a grand chant the Little Captain gave us, isn’t it?” Afr’eyt nodded, looking sideways a moment at Groniger. “Yes,” she said, “his wonderful words.”
Groniger glanced back at her in similar fashion. “Yes, his wonderful words.”
May said, “I wish I’d heard him
Groniger handed them the bowls and swiftly poured the thick, steaming soup.
May said, “I’ll take Gale hers.”
Groniger said gruffly to Afreyt, “Sup it while it’s hot. Then get some rest. We go on at moonrise, agreed?” and when Afreyt nodded. strode off rather bumptiously, cheerily rumble-humming the chant to which they’d marched all day, the Mouser’s—or Loki’s, rather.
Afreyt narrowed her brows. Normally Groniger was such a sober man, dull-spirited she’d once thought, but now he was almost like a buffoon. Was “monstrously comical” too strong an expression? She shook her head slowly. All the Rime-men were getting like that, loutish and grotesque and somehow bigger. Perhaps it was her weariness made her see things askew and magnified, she told herself.
May came bsck and they got out their spoons and fell to. “Gale wanted to eat hers inside,” the girl volunteered after a bit. “I think she and Odin are cooking up something.” She shrugged and went back to her spooning. After another while: “I’m going to make nooses for Mara and Captain Fafhrd.” Finally she scraped her bowl, set it aside, and said, “Cousin Afreyt, do you think Groniger’s a troll?”
“What’s that?” Afreyt asked.
“A word Odin uses. He says Groniger’s a troll.” Gale came excitedly out of the litter with her empty bowl, but remembering to draw the curtains behind her.