“Oh, good!” She rolled the target bag close against the back of one of the ursine, large gray stones and they walked off a couple of hundred yards. Fafhrd turned. The air was very still. A distant small cloud hid the low sun, though the sky was otherwise very blue and bright. He swiftly drew an arrow and laid it against the short wooden thumb he’d affixed to the bow near its center just above its tang. He took a couple of shuffling steps while his frowning eyes measured the distance between him and the rock. Then he leaned suddenly back and discharged the arrow high into the air. It went up, up, then came swiftly down—close behind the rock, it looked.
“That’s not around a corner,” Gale protested. “Anybody can do that. I meant sideways.”
“You didn’t say so,” he told her. “Corners can be up or down or sideways right or left. What’s the difference?”
“Up-corners you can drop things around.”
“Yes, indeed you can!” he agreed and in a sudden frenzy of exercise that left him breathing hard sent the rest of the arrows winging successively after the first. All of them seemed to land close behind the standing stone—all except the last, which they heard clash faintly against rock—but when they’d walked up to where they could see, they found that all but the last arrow had missed. The feathered shafts stood upright, their points plunged into the soft earth, in an oddly regular little row that didn’t quite reach the target-bag—all but the last, which had gone through an edge of the bag at an angle and hung there, tangled by its three goosefeather vanes.
“See, you missed,” Gale said, “all but the one that glanced off the rock.”
“Yes. Well, that’s enough shooting for me,” he decided, and while she pulled up the arrows and carefully teased loose the last, he loosened the bow’s tang from its wood socket, using the back of his knife blade as a pry, then unstrung the bow and hung it across his back by its loose string around his chest, then fitted a wrought-iron hook into the wrist-socket, wedging it tight by driving the head of the hook against the stone. He winced as he did that last, for his stump was still tender and the dozen last shots he’d made had tried it.
.3.
As they walked toward the low, mostly red-roofed homes of Salthaven, the setting sun on their backs, Fafhrd studied the gray standing stones and asked Gale, “What do you know about the old gods Rime Isle had?—before the Rime men got atheism.”
“They were a pretty wild, lawless lot, Aunt Afreyt says—sort of like Captain Mouser’s men before they became soldiers, or your berserks before you tamed them down.” She went on with growing enthusiasm, “They certainly didn’t believe in any Golden Arrow of Truth, or Golden Ruler of Prudence, or Little Gold Cup of Measured Hospitality—mighty liars, whores, murderers, and pirates, I guess, all of them.”
Fafhrd nodded. “Maybe Cif’s ghost was one of them,” he said. A tall, slender woman came toward them from a violet-toned house. When Afreyt neared them she called to Gale, “So that’s where you were. Your mother was wondering.” She looked at Fafhrd. “How did the archery go?”
“Captain Fafhrd hit the target almost every time,” Gale answered for him. “He even hit it shooting around corners! And I didn’t help him a bit fitting his bow or anything.”
Afreyt nodded.
Fafhrd shrugged.
“I told Fafhrd about Cif’s ghost,” Gale went on. “He thought it might be one of the old Rime goddesses—Rin the Moon-runner, one of those. Or the witch queen Skeldir.”
Afreyt’s narrow blond eyebrows arched. “You go along now, your mother wants you.”
“Can I keep the target for you?” the girl asked Fafhrd.
He nodded, lifted his left elbow, and the big ball dropped down. Gale rolled it off ahead of her. The target-bag was smoky red with dye from the snowberry root, and the last rays of the sun setting behind them gave it an angry glare. Afreyt and Fafhrd each had the thought that Gale was rolling away the sun.
When she was gone he turned to Afreyt, asking, “What’s this nonsense about Cif meeting a ghost?”
“You’re getting skeptical as an Isler,” she told him unsmiling. “Is something that robs a councilman of his wits and half his strength nonsense?”
“The ghost did that?” he asked as they began to walk slowly toward town.
She nodded. “When Gwaan pushed into the dark treasury past Cif, he was clutched and struck senseless for an hour’s space—and has since not left his bed.” Her long lips quirked. “Or else he stumbled in the churning shadows and struck his head ‘gainst the wall—there’s that possibility too, since he has lost his memory for the event.”
“Tell me about it more circumstantially,” Fafhrd requested.
“The council session had lasted well after dark, for the waning gibbous moon had just risen,” she began. “Cif and I being in attendance as treasurer and scribe, Zwaaken and Gwaan called on Cif for an inventory of the ikons of the virtues—ever since the loss of the Gold Cube of Square Dealing (though in a good cause) they’ve fretted about them. Cif accordingly unlocked the door to the treasury and then hesitated on the threshold. Moon-light striking in through the small barred window (she told me later) left most of the treasure chamber still in the dark, and there was something unfamiliar about the arrangement of the things she saw that sounded a warning to us. Also, there was a faint noxious marshy scent—”
“What does that window look on?” Fafhrd asked.
“The sea. Gwaan pushed past her impatiently (and most discourteously), and then she swears there was a faint blue smoke like muted lightning and in that trice she seemed to see a silent skinny figure of silver fog embrace Gwaan hungrily. She got the impression, she said, of a weak ghost seeking to draw strength from the living. Gwaan gave a choking cry and pitched to the floor When torches were brought in (at Cif’s behest) the chamber was otherwise empty, but the Gold Arrow of Truth had fallen from its shelf and lay beneath the window, the other ikons had been moved slightly from their places, as if they’d been feebly groped, while on the floor were narrow patches, like footprints, of stenchful black bottom muck.”
“And that was all?” Fafhrd asked as the pause lengthened. When she’d mentioned the thin silvery fog figure, he’d been reminded of someone or something he’d seen lately, but then in his mind a black curtain fell on that particular recollection-flash.
Afreyt nodded. “All that matters, I guess. Gwaan came to after an hour, but remembered nothing, and they’ve put him to bed, where he stays. Cif and Groniger have set special watch on all the Rimic gold tonight.”
Suddenly Fafhrd felt bored with the whole business of Cif’s ghost. His mind didn’t want to move in that direction. “Those councilmen of yours, all they ever worry about is gold—they’re misers all!” he burst out at Afreyt.
“That’s true enough,” she agreed with him—which annoyed Fafhrd for some reason. “They still criticize Cif for giving the Cube to the Mouser along with the other moneys in her charge, and talk still of impeaching her and confiscating her farm—and maybe mine.”
“Ah, the ingrates! And Groniger’s one of the worst—he’s already dunning me for last week’s rent on the men’s dormitory, barely two days overdue.”
Afreyt nodded. “He also complains your berserks caused a disturbance last week at the Sea Wrack tavern.”
“Oh he does, does he?” Fafhrd commented, quieting down.
“How are the Mouser’s men behaving?” she asked.
“Pshawri keeps ‘em in line well enough,” he told her. “Not that they don’t need my supervision while the Gray One’s away.”
“Seahawk will have returned before the gales, I’m sure of that,” she said quietly.
“Yes,” Fafhrd said.
They had come opposite her house and now she went inside with a smiled farewell. She did not invite him to dinner, which was somehow annoying, although he would have refused; and although she had glanced once or twice toward his stump, she had not asked how it fared—which was tactful, but also somehow annoying.
Yet the irritation was momentary, for her mention of the Sea Wrack had started his mind off in a new direction which fully occupied it as he walked a little more rapidly. The past few days he had been feeling out of sorts with almost everyone around him, weary of his left-hand problems, and perversely lonely for Lankhmar with its wizards and criminous folks, its smokes (so different from this bracing northern sea air) and sleazy grandeurs. The night before last he’d wandered into the Sea Wrack, Salthaven’s chief tavern since the Salt Herring had burned, and discovered a certain comfort in observing the passing scene there while sipping a pint or two of black ale.