“I think it brings nightmares,” Fafhrd asserted softly, rising in a half crouch. Then, “Mouser, the taint! And my sword tingles to the touch!” The questingmost of the swiftly advancing fog-tendrils fingered them both then and seized on them joyously, as if here were the two captains it had been seeking, the slave leadership which would render it invincible.
The two blood-brothers tall and small felt to the full then the intoxication of the fog, its surging bittersweet touch-song of hate, its hot promises of all bloodlusts forever fulfilled, an uninhibited eternity of murder-madness.
Fafhrd, wineless tonight, intoxicated only by his own idealisms and the thought of watchmanship, was hardly touched by the sensations, did not feel them as temptations at all.
The Mouser, much of whose nature was built on hates and envies, had a harder time, but he too in the end rejected the fog’s masterful lures—if only, to put the worst interpretation on it, because he wanted always to be the source of his own evil and would never accept it from another, not even as a gift from the archfiend himself.
The fog shrank back a dozen paces then, cat-quick, like a vixenishly proud woman rebuffed, revealing the four marchers in it and simultaneously pointing tendrils straight at the Mouser and Fafhrd.
It was well for the Mouser then that he knew the membership of Lankhmar’s underworld to the last semiprofessional murderer and that his intuitions and reflexes were both arrow-swift. He recognized the smallest of the four—Gis with his belt of knives—as also the most immediately dangerous. Without hesitation he whipped Cat’s Claw from its sheath, poised, aimed, and threw it. At the same instant Gis, equally knowledgeable and swift of thought and speedy of reaction, hurled one of his knives.
But the Mouser, forever cautious and wisely fearful, snatched his head to one side the moment he’d made his throw, so that Gis’s knife only sliced his ear flap as it hummed past.
Gis, trusting too supremely in his own speed, made no similar evasive movement—with the result that the hilt of Cat’s Claw stood out from his right eye socket an instant later. For a long moment he peered with shock and surprise from his other eye, then slumped to the cobbles, his features contorted in the ultimate agony. Kreshmar and Skel swiftly drew their swords and Gnarlag his two, not one whit intimidated by the winged death that had bitten into their comrade’s brain.
Fafhrd, with a fine feeling for tactics on a broad front, did not draw sword at first but snatched up the brazier by one of its three burningly hot short legs and whirled its meager red-glowing contents in the attackers’ faces.
This stopped them long enough for the Mouser to draw Scalpel and Fafhrd his heavier cave-forged sword. He wished he could do without the brazier—it was much too hot—but seeing himself opposed to Gnarlag of the Two Swords, he contented himself with shifting it jugglingly to his left hand.
Thereafter the fight was one swift sudden crisis. The three attackers, daunted only a moment by the spray of hot coals and quite uninjured by them, raced forward surefootedly. Four truly-aimed blades thrust at the Mouser and Fafhrd.
The Northerner parried Gnarlag’s right-hand sword with the brazier and his left-hand sword with the guard of his own weapon, which he managed simultaneously to thrust through the bravo’s neck.
The shock of that death-stroke was so great that Gnarlag’s two swords, bypassing Fafhrd one to each side, made no second stroke in their wielder’s death-spasm. Fafhrd, conscious now chiefly of an agonizing pain in his left hand, chucked the brazier away in the nearest useful direction—which happened to be at Skel’s head, spoiling that one’s thrust at the Mouser, who was skipping nimbly back at the moment, though not more swiftly than Kreshmar and Skel were attacking.
The Mouser ducked under Kreshmar’s blade and thrust Scalpel up through the assassin’s ribs—the easy way to the heart—then quickly whipped it out and gave the same measured dose of thin steel to the dazedly staggering Skel. Then he danced away, looking around him dartingly and holding his sword high and menacing.
“All down and dead,” Fafhrd, who’d had longer to look, assured him. “Ow, Mouser, I’ve burnt my fingers!”
“And I’ve a dissected ear,” that one reported, exploring cautiously with little pats. He grinned. “Just at the edge, though.” Then, having digested Fafhrd’s remark, “Serves you right for fighting with a kitchen boy’s weapon!”
Fafhrd retorted, “Bah! If you weren’t such a miser with the charcoal, I’d have blinded them all with my ember cast!”
“And burnt your fingers even worse,” the Mouser countered pleasantly. Then, still more happy-voiced, “Methought I heard gold chink at the belt of the one you brazier-bashed. Skel … yes, alleybasher Skel. When I’ve recovered Cat’s Claw—”
He broke off because of an ugly little sucking sound that ended in a tiny plop. In the hazy glow from the nobles’ quarter they saw a horridly supernatural sight: the Mouser’s bloody dagger poised above Gis’s punctured eye socket, supported only by a coiling white tentacle of the fog which had masked their attackers and which had now grown still more dense, as if it had sucked supreme nutriment—as indeed it had—from its dead servitors in their dying.
Eldritch dreads woke in the Mouser and Fafhrd: dreads of the lightning that slays from the storm-cloud, of the giant sea-serpent that strikes from the sea, of the shadows that coalesce in the forest to suffocate the mighty man lost, of the black smoke-snake that comes questing from the wizard’s fire to strangle.
All around them was a faint clattering of steel against cobble: other fog-tentacles were lifting the four dropped swords and Gis’s knife, while yet others were groping at that dead cutthroat’s belt for his undrawn weapons.
It was as if some great ghost squid from the depths of the Inner Sea were arming itself for combat.
And four yards above the ground, at the rooting point of the tentacles in the thickened fog, a red disk was forming in the center of the fog’s body, as it were—a reddish disk that looked moment by moment more like a single eye large as a face.
There was the inescapable thought that as soon as that eye could see, some ten beweaponed tentacles would thrust or slash at once, unerringly.
Fafhrd stood terror-bemused between the swiftly-forming eye and the Mouser. The latter, suddenly inspired, gripped Scalpel firmly, readied himself for a dash, and cried to the tall northerner, “Make a stirrup!”
Guessing the Mouser’s stratagem, Fafhrd shook his horrors and laced his fingers together and went into a half crouch. The Mouser raced forward and planted his right foot in the stirrup Fafhrd had made of his hands and kicked off from it just as the latter helped his jump with a great heave—and a simultaneous “Ow!” of extreme pain.
The Mouser, preceded by his exactly aimed sword, went straight through the reddish ectoplasmic eye disk, dispersing it entirely. Then he vanished from Fafhrd’s view as suddenly and completely as if he had been swallowed up by a snowbank.
An instant later the armed tentacles began to thrust and slash about, at random and erratically, as blind swordsmen might. But since there were a full ten of them, some of the strokes came perilously close to Fafhrd and he had to dodge and duck to keep out of the way. At the rutch of his shoes on the cobbles the tentacle-wielded swords and knives began to aim themselves a little better, again as blind swordsmen might, and he had to dodge more nimbly—not the easiest or safest work for a man so big. A dispassionate observer, if such had been conceivable and available, might have decided the ghost squid was trying to make Fafhrd dance.
Meanwhile on the other side of the white monster, the Mouser had caught sight of the pinkishly silver thread and, leaping high as it lifted to evade him, slashed it with the tip of Scalpel. It offered more resistance to his sword than the whole fog-body had and parted with a most unnatural and unexpected twang as he cut it through.
Immediately the fog-body collapsed and far more swiftly than any punctured bladder—rather it fell apart like a giant white puffball kicked by a giant boot—and the tentacles fell to pieces, too, and the swords and knives came clattering down harmlessly on the cobbles, and there was a swift fleeting rush of stench that made both Fafhrd and the Mouser clap hand to nose and mouth.
After sniffing cautiously and finding the air breathable again, the Mouser called brightly, “Hola there, dear comrade! I think I cut the thing’s thin throat, or heart string, or vital nerve, or silver tether, or birth cord, or whatever the strand was.”
“Where did the strand lead back to?” Fafhrd demanded.
“I have no intention of trying to find that out,” the Mouser assured him, gazing warily over his shoulder in the direction from which the fog had come. “You try threading the Lankhmar labyrinth if you want to. But the strand seems as gone as the thing.”