The breasts, white as ivory, that he had known would not be there, were there. And yet, instead of his nightmare lifting, it deepened.
It was something too profound for surprise, this wholly unexpected further insight. For as he knelt there, somberly studying, he knew for a certainty that this ivory flesh too was a mask, as cunningly fashioned as the face and for as frighteningly incomprehensible a purpose. The ivory eyelids did not flicker, but the edges of the teeth showed in what he fancied was a deliberate, flickery smile.
He was never more certain than at this moment that Ahura was a man.
The embers crunched behind him.
Turning, the Mouser saw only the streak of gleaming steel poised above Fafhrd’s head, motionless for a moment, as if with superhuman forbearance a god should give his creature a chance before loosing the thunderbolt.
The Mouser ripped out his own slim sword in time to ward the titan blow. From hilt to point, the two blades screamed.
And in answer to that scream, melting into, continuing, and augmenting it, there came from the absolute calm of the west a gargantuan gust of wind that sent the Mouser staggering forward and Fafhrd reeling back, and rolled Ahura across the place where the embers had been.
Almost as suddenly the gale died. As it died, something whipped batlike toward the Mouser’s face and he grabbed at it. But it was not a bat, or even a large leaf. It felt like papyrus.
The embers, blown into a clump of dry grass, had perversely started a blaze. To its flaring light he held the thin scrap that had fluttered out of the infinite west.
He motioned frantically to Fafhrd, who was clawing his way out of a scrub pine.
There was squid-black writing on the scrap, in large characters, above the tangled seal.
“By whatever gods you revere, give up this quarrel. Press onward at once. Follow the woman.”
They became aware that Ahura was peering over their abutting shoulders. The moon came gleamingly from behind the small black tatter of cloud that had briefly obscured it. She looked at them, pulled together chiton and gown, belted them with her cloak. They collected their horses, extricated the fallen camel from the cluster of thorn bushes in which it was satisfiedly tormenting itself, and set out.
After that the Lost City was found almost too quickly; it seemed like a trap or the work of an illusionist. One moment Ahura was pointing out to them a boulder-studded crag; the next, they were looking down a narrow valley choked with crazily-leaning, moonsilvered monoliths and their accomplice shadows.
From the first it was obvious that “city” was a misnomer. Surely men had never dwelt in those massive stone tents and huts, though they may have worshipped there. It was a habitation for Egyptian colossi, for stone automata. But Fafhrd and the Mouser had little time to survey its entirety, for without warning Ahura sent her horse clattering and sliding down the slope.
Thereafter it was a harebrained, drunken gallop, their horses plunging shadows, the camel a lurching ghost, through forests of crude-hewn pillars, past teetering single slabs big enough for palace walls, under lintels made for elephants, always following the elusive hoofbeat, never catching it, until they suddenly emerged into clear moonlight and drew up in an open space between a great sarcophaguslike block or box with steps leading up to it and a huge, crudely man-shaped monolith.
But they had hardly begun to puzzle out the things around them before they became aware that Ahura was gesturing impatiently. They recalled Ningauble’s instructions and realized that it was almost dawn. So they unloaded various bundles and boxes from the shivering, snapping camel, and Fafhrd unfolded the dark, cobwebby shroud of Ahriman and wrapped it around Ahura as she stood wordlessly facing the tomb, her face a marble portrait of eagerness, as if she sprang from the stone around her.
While Fafhrd busied himself with other things, the Mouser opened the ebony chest they had stolen from the False Laodice. A fey mood came upon him and, dancing cumbrously in imitation of a eunuch serving man, he tastefully arrayed a flat stone with all the little jugs and jars and tiny amphorae that the chest contained. And in an appropriate falsetto he sang:
“I laid a board for the Great Seleuce,
I decked it pretty and abstruse;
And he must have been pleased,
For when stuffed, he wheezed,
‘As punishment castrate the man.’
“You thee, Fafhrd,” he lisped, “the man had been cathtwated ath a boy, and tho it wath no punithment at all. Becauthe of pweviouth cathtwathion.”
“I’ll castrate your wit-engorged top end,” Fafhrd cried, raising the next implement of magic, but thought better of it.
Then Fafhrd handed him Socrates’ cup and, still prancing and piping, the Mouser measured into it the mummy powder and added the wine and stirred them together and, dancing fantastically toward Ahura, offered it to her. When she made no movement, he held it to her lips and she greedily gulped it without taking her eyes from the tomb.
Then Fafhrd came with the sprig from the Babylonian Tree of Life, which still felt marvelously fresh and firm-leafed to his touch, as if the Mouser had only snipped it a moment ago. And he gently pried open her clenched fingers and placed the sprig inside them and folded them again.
Thus ready, they waited. The sky reddened at the edge and seemed for a moment to grow darker, the stars fading and the moon turning dull. The outspread aphrodisiacs chilled, refusing the night breeze their savor. And the woman continued to watch the tomb, and behind her, seeming to watch the tomb too, as if it were her fantastic shadow, loomed the man-shaped monolith, which the Mouser now and then scrutinized uneasily over his shoulder, being unable to tell whether it were of primevally crude workmanship or something that men had laboriously defaced because of its evil.
The sky paled until the Mouser could begin to make out some monstrous carvings on the side of the sarcophagus—of men like stone pillars and animals like mountains—and until Fafhrd could see the green of the leaves in Ahura’s hand.
Then he saw something astounding. In an instant the leaves withered and the sprig became a curled and blackened stick. In the same instant Ahura trembled and grew paler still, snow pale, and to the Mouser it seemed that there was a tenuous black cloud forming around her head, that the riddlesome stranger he hated was pouring upward like a smoky jinni from her body, the bottle.
The thick stone cover of the sarcophagus groaned and began to rise.
Ahura began to move toward the sarcophagus. To the Mouser it seemed that the cloud was drawing her along like a black sail.
The cover was moving more swiftly, as if it were the upper jaw of a stone crocodile. The black cloud seemed to the Mouser to strain triumphantly toward the widening slit, dragging the white wisp behind it. The cover opened wide. Ahura reached the top and then either peered down inside or, as the Mouser saw it, was almost sucked in along with the black cloud. She shook violently. Then her body collapsed like an empty dress.
Fafhrd gritted his teeth, a joint cracked in the Mouser’s wrist. The hilts of their swords, unconsciously drawn, bruised their palms.
Then, like an idler from a day of bowered rest, an Indian prince from the tedium of the court, a philosopher from quizzical discourse, a slim figure rose from the tomb. His limbs were clad in black, his body in silvery metal, his hair and beard raven and silky. But what first claimed the sight, like an ensign on a masked man’s shield, was a chatoyant quality of his youthful olive skin, a silvery gleaming that turned one’s thoughts to fishes’ bellies and leprosy—that, and a certain familiarity.
For the face of this black and silver stranger bore an unmistakable resemblance to Ahura.
5: Anra Devadoris
Resting his long hands on the edge of the tomb, the newcomer surveyed them pleasantly and nodded as if they were intimates. Then he vaulted lightly over and came striding down the steps, treading on the shroud of Ahriman without so much as a glance at Ahura.
He eyed their swords. “You anticipate danger?” he asked, politely stroking the beard which, it seemed to the Mouser, could never have grown so bushily silky except in a tomb.
“You are an adept?” Fafhrd retorted, stumbling over the words a little.
The stranger disregarded the question and stopped to study amusedly the zany array of aphrodisiacs.
“Dear Ningauble,” he murmured, “is surely the father of all seven-eyed Lechers. I suppose you know him well enough to guess that he had you fetch these toys because he wants them for himself. Even in his duel with me, he cannot resist the temptation of a profit on the side. But perhaps this time the old pander had curtsied to destiny unwittingly. At least, let us hope so.”