When he was gone, someone said, “Gnarlag was ever a cold and ungrateful winner.” The dark mercenary stared at his dangling hand and bit back groans.
* * * *
“So tell me, giant philosopher, why we’re not dukes,” the Gray Mouser demanded, unrolling a forefinger from the fist on his knee so that it pointed across the brazier at Fafhrd. “Or emperors, for that matter, or demigods.”
“We are not dukes because we’re no man’s man,” Fafhrd replied smugly, settling his shoulders against the stone horse-trough. “Even a duke must butter up a king, and demigods the gods. We butter no one. We go our own way, choosing our own adventures—and our own follies! Better freedom and a chilly road than a warm hearth and servitude.”
“There speaks the hound turned out by his last master and not yet found new boots to slaver on,” the Mouser retorted with comradely sardonic impudence. “Look you, you noble liar, we’ve labored for a dozen lords and kings and merchants fat. You’ve served Movarl across the Inner Sea. I’ve served the bandit Harsel. We’ve both served this Glipkerio, whose girl is tied to Ilthmar this same night.”
“Those are exceptions,” Fafhrd protested grandly. “And even when we serve, we make the rules. We bow to no man’s ultimate command, dance to no wizard’s drumming, join no mob, hark to no wildering hate-call. When we draw sword, it’s for ourselves alone. What’s that?”
He had lifted his sword for emphasis, gripping it by the scabbard just below the guard, but now he held it still with the hilt near his ear.
“It hums a warning!” he said tersely after a moment. “The steel twangs softly in its sheath!”
Chuckling tolerantly at this show of superstition, the Mouser drew his slimmer sword from its light scabbard, sighted along the blade’s oiled length at the red embers, spotted a couple of dark flecks and began to rub at them with a rag.
When nothing more happened, Fafhrd said grudgingly as he laid down his undrawn sword, “Perchance only a dragon walked across the cave where the blade was forged. Still, I don’t like this tainted mist.”
* * * *
Gis the cutthroat and the courtesan Tres had watched the fog coming across the fantastically peaked roofs of Lankhmar until it obscured the low-swinging yellow crescent of the moon and the rainbow glow from the palace. Then they had lit the cressets and drawn the blue drapes and were playing at throw-knife to sharpen their appetites for a more intimate but hardly kinder game.
Tres was not unskillful, but Gis could somersault the weapon a dozen or thirteen times before it stuck in wood and throw as truly between his legs as back over his shoulder without mirror. Whenever he threw the knife so it struck very near Tres, he smiled. She had to remind herself that he was not much more evil than most evil men.
A frond of fog came wreathing between the blue drapes and touched Gis on the temple as he prepared to throw. “The blood in the fog’s in your eye-whites!” Tres cried, staring at him weirdly. He seized the girl by the ear and, smiling hugely, slashed her neck just below her dainty jaw. Then, dancing out of the way of the gushing blood, he delicately snatched up his belt of daggers and darted down the curving stairs to the street, where he plunged into a warmhearted fog that was somehow as full of rage as the strong wine of Tovilyis is of sugar, a veritable cistern of wrath. His whole being was bathed in sensations as ecstatic as those strong but fleeting ones the tendril’s touch on his temple had loosed from his brain. Visions of daggered princesses and skewered serving maids danced in his head. He stepped along happily, agog with delicious anticipations, beside Gnarlag of the Two Swords, knowing him at once for a hate-brother, sacrosanct, another slave of the blessed fog.
* * * *
Fafhrd cupped his big hands over the brazier and whistled the gay tune sifting from the remotely twinkling palace. The Mouser, now re-oiling the blade of Scalpel against the mist, observed, “For one beset by taints and danger-hums, you’re very jolly.”
“I like it here,” the Northerner asserted. “A fig for courts and beds and inside fires! The edge of life is keener in the street—as on the mountaintop. Is not imagined wine sweeter than wine?” (“Ho!” the Mouser laughed, most sardonically.) “And is not a crust of bread tastier to one an-hungered than larks’ tongues to an epicure? Adversity makes the keenest appetite, the clearest vision.”
“There spoke the ape who could not reach the apple,” the Mouser told him. “If a door to paradise opened in that wall there, you’d dive through.”
“Only because I’ve never been to paradise,” Fafhrd swept on. “Is it not sweeter now to hear the music of Innesgay’s betrothal from afar than mingle with the feasters, jig with them, be cramped and blinkered by their social rituals?”
“There’s many a one in Lankhmar gnawn fleshless with envy by those sounds tonight,” the Mouser said darkly. “I am not gnawn so much as those stupid ones. I am more intelligently jealous. Still, the answer to your question: no!”
“Sweeter by far tonight to be Glipkerio’s watchman than his pampered guest,” Fafhrd insisted, caught up by his own poetry and hardly hearing the Mouser.
“You mean we serve Glipkerio free?” the latter demanded loudly. “Aye, there’s the bitter core of all freedom: no pay!”
Fafhrd laughed, came to himself, and said almost abashedly, “Still, there is something in the keenness and the watchman part. We’re watchmen not for pay, but solely for the watching’s sake! Indoors and warm and comforted, a man is blind. Out here we see the city and the stars, we hear the rustle and the tramp of life, we crouch like hunters in a stony blind, straining our senses for—”
“Please, Fafhrd, no more danger signs,” the Mouser protested. “Next you’ll be telling me there’s a monster a-drool and a-stalk in the streets, all slavering for Innesgay and her betrothal-maids, no doubt. And perchance a sword-garnished princeling or two, for appetizer.”
Fafhrd gazed at him soberly and said, peering around through the thickening mist, “When I am quite sure of that, I’ll let you know.”
* * * *
The twin brothers Kreshmar and Skel, assassins and alley-bashers by trade, were menacing a miser in his hovel when the red-veined fog came in after them. As swiftly as ambitious men take last bite and wine-swig at skull while Skel thrust into his belt the one small purse of gold they had thus far extorted from the ancient man now turning to corpse. They stepped briskly outside, their swords a-swing at their hips, and into the fog, where they marched side-by-side with Gnarlag and Gis in the midst of the compact pale mass that moved almost indistinguishably with the river-fog and yet intoxicated them as surely as if it were a clouded white wine of murder and destruction, zestfully sluicing away all natural cautions and fears, promising an infinitude of thrilling and most profitable victims.
Behind the four marchers, the false fog thinned to a single glimmering thread, red as an artery, silver as a nerve, that led back unbroken around many a stony corner to the Temple of the Hates. A pulsing went ceaselessly along the thread, as nourishment and purpose were carried from the temple to the marauding fog mass and to the four killers, now doubly hate-enslaved, marching along with it. The fog mass moved purposefully as a snow-tiger toward the quarter of the nobles and Glipkerio’s rainbow-lanterned palace above the breakwater of the Inner Sea.
Three black-clad police of Lankhmar, armed with metal-capped cudgels and weighted wickedly-barbed darts, saw the thicker fog mass coming and the marchers in it. The impression to them was of four men frozen in a sort of pliant ice. Their flesh crawled. They felt paralyzed. The fog fingered them, but almost instantly passed them by as inferior material for its purpose.
Knives and swords licked out of the fog mass. With never a cry the three police fell, their black tunics glistening with a fluid that showed red only on their sallow slack limbs. The fog mass thickened, as if it had fed instantly and richly on its victims. The four marchers became almost invisible from the outside, though from the inside they saw clearly enough.
Far down the longest and most landward of the five alleyways, the Mouser saw by the palace-glimmer behind him the white mass coming, shooting questing tendrils before it, and cried gaily, “Look, Fafhrd, we’ve company! The fog comes all the twisty way from the Hlal to warm its paddy paws at our little fire.”
Fafhrd, frowning his eyes, said mistrustfully, “I think it masks other guests.”
“Don’t be a scareling,” the Mouser reproved him in a fey voice. “I’ve a droll thought, Fafhrd: what if it be not fog, but the smoke of all the poppy-gum and hemp-resin in Lankhmar burning at once? What joys we’ll have once we are sniffing it! What dreams we’ll have tonight!”