Now the Gray Mouser is generally believed to be and have always been complete atheist, but this is not true. Partly to humor Ivrian, whom he spoiled fantastically, but partly because it tickled his vanity that a god should choose to look like him, he made a game for several weeks of firmly believing in Mog.
So the Mouser and Fafhrd were clearly worshippers, though lapsed, and the three gods singled out their voices because of that and because they were the most noteworthy worshippers these three gods had ever had and because they were boasting. For the gods have very sharp ears for boasts, or for declarations of happiness and self-satisfaction, or for assertions of a firm intention to do this or that, or for statements that this or that must surely happen, or any other words hinting that a man is in the slightest control of his own destiny. And the gods are jealous, easily angered, perverse, and swift to thwart.
“It’s them, all right—the haughty bastards!” Kos grunted, sweating under his furs—for Godsland is paradisial.
“They haven’t called on me for years—the ingrates!” Issek said with a toss of his delicate chin. “We’d be dead for all they care, except we’ve our other worshippers. But they don’t know that—they’re heartless.”
“They have not even taken our names in vain,” said Mog. “I believe, gentlemen, it is time they suffered the divine displeasure. Agreed?”
* * * *
In the meanwhile, by speaking privily of Frix and Hisvet, the Mouser and Fafhrd had aroused certain immediate desires in themselves without seriously disturbing their mood of complacent nostalgia.
“What say you, Mouser,” Fafhrd mused lazily, “should we now seek excitement? The night is young.”
His comrade replied grandly, “We have but to stir a little, to signify our interest, and excitement will seek us. We’ve loved and been forever adored by so many girls that we’re bound to run into a pair of ‘em. Or even two pair. They’ll catch our present thoughts on the wing and come running. We will hunt girls—ourselves the bait!”
“So let’s be on our way,” said Fafhrd, drinking up and rising with a lurch.
“Ach, the lewd dogs!” Kos growled, shaking sweat from his brow, for Godsland is balmy (and quite crowded). “But how to punish ‘em?”
Mog said, smiling lopsidedly because of his partially arachnid jaw structure, “They seem to have chosen their punishment.”
“The torture of hope!” Issek chimed eagerly, catching on. “We grant them their wishes—”
“—and then leave the rest to the girls,” Mog finished.
“You can’t trust women,” Kos asserted darkly.
“On the contrary, my dear fellow,” Mog said, “when a god’s in good form, he can safely trust his worshippers, female and male alike, to do all the work. And now, gentlemen, on with our thinking caps!”
Kos scratched his thickly matted head vigorously, dislodging a louse or two.
* * * *
Whimsically, and perhaps to put a few obstacles between themselves and the girls presumably now rushing toward them, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser chose to leave the Silver Eel by its kitchen door, something they’d never done once before in all their years of patronage.
The door was low and heavily bolted, and when those were shot still wouldn’t budge. And the new cook, who was deaf and dumb, left off his stuffing of a calf’s stomach and came over to make gobbling noises and flap his arms in gestures of protest or warning. But the Mouser pressed two bronze agols into his greasy palm while Fafhrd kicked the door open. They prepared to stride out into the dismal lot covered by the eroded ashes of the tenement where the Mouser had dwelt with Ivrian (and she and Fafhrd’s equally dear Vlana had burned) and also the ashes of the wooden garden house of mad Duke Danius, which they’d once stolen and occupied for a space—the dismal and ill-omened lot which they’d never heard of anyone building on since.
But when they’d ducked their heads and gone through the doorway, they discovered that construction of a sort had been going on (or else that they’d always seriously underestimated the depth of the Silver Eel) for instead of on empty ground open to sky, they found themselves in a corridor lit by torches held in brazen hands along each wall.
Undaunted, they strode forward past two closed doors.
“That’s Lankhmar City for you,” the Mouser observed. “You turn your back and they’ve put up a new secret temple.”
“Good ventilation, though,” Fafhrd commented on the absence of smoke.
They followed the corridor around a sharp turn … and stopped dead. The split-level chamber facing them had surprising features. The sunken half was close-ceilinged and otherwise gave the impression of being far underground, as if its floor were not eight finger-joints deeper than the raised section but eighty yards. Its furniture was a bed with a coverlet of violet silk. A thick yellow silk cord hung through a hole in the low ceiling.
The chamber’s raised half seemed the balcony or battlement of a tower thrust high above Lankhmar’s smog, for stars were visible in the black upper background and ceiling.
On the bed, silver-blonde head to its foot, slim Hisvet lay prone but upthrust on her straightened arms. Her robe of fine silk, yellow as desert sunlight, was out-dented by her pair of small high breasts, but depended freely from the nipples of those, leaving unanswered the question of whether there were three more pairs arranged symmetrically below.
While against starry night (or its counterfeit), her dark hair braided with scrubbed copper wire, Frix stood magnificently tall and light-footed (though motionless) in her silken robe violet as a desert’s twilight before dawn.
Fafhrd was about to say, “You know, we were just talking about you,” and the Mouser was about to tread on his instep for being so guileless, when Hisvet called to the latter, “You again!—intemperate dirksman. I told you never even to think of another rendezvous with me for two years’ space.”
Frix said to Fafhrd, “Beast! I told you I played with a member of the lower orders only on rare occasions.”
Hisvet tugged sharply on the silken cord. A heavy door dropped down in the men’s faces from above and struck its sill with a great and conclusive jar.
Fafhrd lifted a finger to his nose, explaining ruefully, “I thought the door had taken off the tip. Not exactly a loving reception.”
The Mouser said bravely, “I’m glad they turned us off. Truly, it would have been too soon, and so a bore. On with our girl hunt!”
They returned past the mute flames held in bronze hands to the second of the two closed doors. It opened at a touch to reveal another dual chamber and in it their loves Reetha and Kreeshkra, whom only short months ago they’d been seeking near the Sea of Monsters, until they were trapped in the Shadowland and barely escaped back to Lankhmar. To the left, in muted sunlight on a couch of exquisitely smoothed dark wood, Reetha reclined quite naked. Indeed, extremely naked, for as the Mouser noted, she’d kept up her habit, inculcated when she’d been slave of a finicky overlord, of regularly shaving all of herself, even her eyebrows. Her totally bare head, held at a pert angle, was perfectly shaped and the Mouser felt a surge of sweet desire. She was cuddling to her tender bosom a very emaciated-seeming but tranquil animal, which the Mouser suddenly realized was a cat, hairless save for its score of whiskers bristling from its mask.
To the right, in dark night a-dance with the light of campfire and on a smooth shale shore of what Fafhrd recognized to be, by the large white-bearded serpents sporting in it, the Sea of Monsters, sat his beloved Kreeshkra, more naked even than Reetha. She might have been a disquieting sight to some (naught but an aristocratically handsome skeleton), except that the flames near which she sat struck dark blue gleams from the sweetly curved surfaces of her transparent flesh casing her distinguished bones.
“Mouser, why have you come?” Reetha cried out somewhat reproachfully. “I’m happy here in Eevamarensee, where all men are as hairless by nature (our household animals too) as I am by my daily industry. I love you dearly still, but we can’t live together and must not meet again. This is my proper place.”
Likewise, bold Kreeshkra challenged Fafhrd with “Mud Man, avaunt! I loved you once. Now I’m a Ghoul again. Perhaps in future time … But now, begone!”
It was well neither Fafhrd nor Mouser had stepped across the threshold, for at those words this door slammed in their faces too, and this time stuck fast. Fafhrd forbore to kick it.
“You know, Mouser,” he said thoughtfully. “We’ve been enamored of some strange ones in our time. But always most intensely interesting,” he hastened to add.
“Come on, come on,” the Mouser enjoined gruffly. “There are other fish in the sea.”