Fafhrd lowered his sword. The silence in the black cave grew heavy and ominous. Then, in a voice that was distant yet resonant, like the sound that came from the statue of Memnon at Thebes when the first rays of the morning sun fell upon it, Ningauble began to speak.
“It comes to me, confusedly, like a scene in a rusted mirror; nevertheless, it comes, and thus: You must first possess yourselves of certain trifles. The shroud of Ahriman, from the secret shrine near Persepolis—”
“But what about the accursed swordsmen of Ahriman, Father?” put in the Mouser. “There are twelve of them. Twelve, Father, and all very accursed and hard to persuade.”
“Do you think I am setting toss-and-fetch problems for puppy dogs?” wheezed Ningauble angrily. “To proceed: You must secondly obtain powdered mummy from the Demon Pharaoh, who reigned for three horrid and unhistoried midnights after the death of Ikhnaton—”
“But, Father,” Fafhrd protested, blushing a little, “you know who owns that powdered mummy, and what she demands of any two men who visit her.”
“Shhh! I’m your elder, Fafhrd, by eons. Thirdly, you must get the cup from which Socrates drank the hemlock; fourthly, a sprig from the original Tree of Life, and lastly…” He hesitated as if his memory had failed him, dipped up a potsherd from the pile, and read from it: “And lastly, you must procure the woman who will come when she is ready.”
“What woman?”
“The woman who will come when she is ready.” Ningauble tossed back the fragment, starting a small landslide of shards.
“Corrode Loki’s bones!” cursed Fafhrd, and the Mouser said, “But, Father, no woman comes when she’s ready. She always waits.”
Ningauble sighed merrily and said, “Do not be downcast, children. Is it ever the custom of your good friend the Gossiper to give simple advice?”
“It is not,” said Fafhrd.
“Well, having all these things, you must go to the Lost City of Ahriman that lies east of Armenia—whisper not its name—”
“Is it Khatti?” whispered the Mouser.
“No, Blowfly. And furthermore, why are you interrupting me when you are supposed to be hard at work recalling all the details of the scandal of the Friday concubine, the three eunuch priests, and the slave girl from Samos?”
“Oh truly, Spy of the Unmentionable, I labor at that until my mind becomes a weariness and a wandering, and all for love of you.” The Mouser was glad of Ningauble’s question, for he had forgotten the three eunuch priests, which would have been most unwise, as no one in his senses sought to cheat the Gossiper of even a pinch of misinformation promised.
Ningauble continued, “Arriving at the Lost City, you must seek out the ruined black shrine, and place the woman before the great tomb, and wrap the shroud of Ahriman around her, and let her drink the powdered mummy from the hemlock cup, diluting it with a wine you will find where you find the mummy, and place in her hand the sprig from the Tree of Life, and wait for the dawn.”
“And then?” rumbled Fafhrd.
“And then the mirror becomes all red with rust. I can see no further, except that someone will return from a place which it is unlawful to leave, and that you must be wary of the woman.”
“But, Father, all this scavenging of magical trumpery is a great bother,” Fafhrd objected. “Why shouldn’t we go at once to the Lost City?”
“Without the map on the shroud of Ahriman?” murmured Ningauble.
“And you still can’t tell us the name of the adept we seek?” the Mouser ventured. “Or even the name of the woman? Puppy dog problems indeed! We give you a bitch, Father, and by the time you return her, she’s dropped a litter.”
Ningauble shook his head ever so slightly, the six eyes retreated under the hood to become an ominous multiple gleam, and the Mouser felt a shiver crawl on his spine.
“Why is it, Riddle-Vendor, that you always give us half knowledge?” Fafhrd pressed angrily. “Is it that at the last moment our blades may strike with half force?”
Ningauble chuckled.
“It is because I know you too well, children. If I said one word more, Hulk, you could be cleaving with your great sword—at the wrong person. And your cat-comrade would be brewing his child’s magic—the wrong child’s magic. It is no simple creature you foolhardily seek, but a mystery, no single identity but a mirage, a stony thing that has stolen the blood and substance of life, a nightmare crept out of dream.”
For a moment it was as if, in the far reaches of that nighted cavern, something that waited stirred. Then it was gone.
Ningauble purred complacently, “And now I have an idle moment, which, to please you, I will pass in giving ear to the story that the Mouser has been impatiently waiting to tell me.”
So, there being no escape, the Mouser began, first explaining that only the surface of the story had to do with the concubine, the three priests, and the slave girl; the deeper portion touching mostly, though not entirely, on four infamous handmaidens of Ishtar and a dwarf who was richly compensated for his deformity. The fire grew low and a little, lemurlike creature came edging in to replenish it, and the hours stretched on, for the Mouser always warmed to his own tales. There came a place where Fafhrd’s eyes bugged with astonishment, and another where Ningauble’s paunch shook like a small mountain in earthquake, but eventually the tale came to an end, suddenly and seemingly in the middle, like a piece of foreign music.
Then farewells were said and final questions refused answer, and the two seekers started back the way they had come. And Ningauble began to sort in his mind the details of the Mouser’s story, treasuring it the more because he knew it was an improvisation, his favorite proverb being, “He who lies artistically, treads closer to the truth than ever he knows.”
Fafhrd and the Mouser had almost reached the bottom of the boulder stair when they heard a faint tapping and turned to see Ningauble peering down from the verge, supporting himself with what looked like a cane and rapping with another.
“Children,” he called, and his voice was tiny as the note of the lone flute in the Temple of Baal, “it comes to me that something in the distant spaces lusts for something in you. You must guard closely what commonly needs no guarding.”
“Yes, Godfather of Mystification.”
“You will take care?” came the elfin note. “Your beings depend on it.”
“Yes, Father.”
And Ningauble waved once and hobbled out of sight. The little creatures of his great darkness followed him, but whether to report and receive orders or only to pleasure him with their gentle antics, no man could be sure. Some said that Ningauble had been created by the Elder Gods for men to guess about and so sharpen their imaginations for even tougher riddles. None knew whether he had the gift of foresight, or whether he merely set the stage for future events with such a bewildering cunning that only an efreet or an adept could evade acting the part given him.
3: The Woman Who Came
After Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser emerged from the Bottomless Caves into the blinding upper sunlight, their trail for a space becomes dim. Material relating to them has, on the whole, been scanted by annalists, since they were heroes too disreputable for classic myth, too cryptically independent ever to let themselves be tied to a folk, too shifty and improbable in their adventurings to please the historian, too often involved with a riffraff of dubious demons, unfrocked sorcerers, and discredited deities—a veritable underworld of the supernatural. And it becomes doubly difficult to piece together their actions during a period when they were engaged in thefts requiring stealth, secrecy, and bold misdirection. Occasionally, however, one comes across the marks they left upon the year.
For instance, a century later the priests of Ahriman were chanting, although they were too intelligent to believe it themselves, the miracle of Ahriman’s snatching of his own hallowed shroud. One night the twelve accursed swordsmen saw the blackly scribbled shroud rise like a pillar of cobwebs from the altar, rise higher than mortal man, although the form within seemed anthropoid. Then Ahriman spoke from the shroud, and they worshipped him, and he replied with obscure parables and finally strode giantlike from the secret shrine.
The shrewdest of the century-later priests remarked, “I’d say a man on stilts, or else—” (happy surmise!) “—one man on the shoulders of another.”
Then there were things that Nikri, body slave to the infamous False Laodice, told the cook while she anointed the bruises of her latest beating. Things concerning two strangers who visited her mistress, and the carousal her mistress proposed to them, and how they escaped the black eunuch scimitarmen she had set to slay them when the carousal was done. “They were magicians, both of them,” Nikri averred, “for at the peak of the doings they transformed my lady into a hideous, wiggly-horned sow, a horrid chimera of snail and swine. But that wasn’t the worst, for they stole her chest of aphrodisiac wines. When she discovered that the demon mummia was gone with which she’d hoped to stir the lusts of Ptolemy, she screamed in rage and took her back-scratcher to me. Ow, but that hurts!”