Fafhrd turned out to be right about the up-meadow trudger, but it was few words they got from Ourph as to why he’d made the hike he’d earlier begged off from.
The old Mingol said only to them, and to Groniger, who happed to be by, “The Good News is in.” Then, eyeing the Twain more particularly, “Tonight stay away from the Sea Wrack.”
But he would answer nothing more to their puzzled queries save “I know what I know and I’ve told it,” and two cups of brandy did not loosen his Mingol tongue one whit.
The encounter put them behind the main party, but they did not try to catch up. The sun had set some time back, and now their feet and legs were lapped by the ground mist that already covered Salthaven and into which the picnic party was vanishing, its singing and strumming already sounding tiny and far off.
“You see,” Groniger said to Fafhrd, eyeing the twilit but yet starless sky while the mist lapped higher around them, “you won’t be able to show me your bearded star tonight in any case.”
Fafhrd nodded vaguely but made no other answer save to pass the brandy jug as they footed it along: four men walking deeper and deeper, as it were, into a white silence.
.18.
Cif and Afreyt, very much caught up in the gayety of the evening party, and bright-eyed drunk besides, were among the first to enter the Sea Wrack and encounter arresting silence of another sort, and almost instantly come under the strange, hushing spell of the scene there.
Fafhrd and the Mouser sat at their pet table in the low-walled booth playing backgammon, and the whole tavern frightenedly watched them while pretending not to. Fear was in the air.
That was the first impression. Then, almost at once, Cif and Afreyt saw that Fafhrd couldn’t be Fafhrd, he was much too thin; nor the Mouser the Mouser, much too plump (though every bit as agile and supple-looking, paradoxically).
Nor were the faces and clothing and accouterments of the two strangers anything really like the Twain’s. It was more their expressions and mannerisms, postures and general manner, self-confident manner, those and the fact of being at that table. The sublime impression the two of them made that they were who they were and that they were in their rightful place.
And the fear that radiated from them with the small sounds of their gaming: the muted rattle of shaken bone dice in one or the other’s palm-closed leather cup, the muted clatter as the dice were spilled into one or other of the two low-walled felt-lined compartments of the backgammon box, the sharp little clicks of the bone counters as they were shifted by ones and twos from point to point. The fear that riveted the attention of everyone else in the place no matter how much they pretended to be understanding the conversations they made, or tasting the drinks they swallowed, or busying themselves with little tavern chores. The fear that seized upon and recruited each picnic newcomer. Oh yes, this night something deadly was coiling here at the Sea Wrack, make no mistake about it.
So paralyzing was the fear that it cost Cif and Afreyt a great effort to sidle slowly from the doorway to the bar, their eyes never leaving that one little table that was for now the world’s hub, until they were as close as they could get to the Sea Wrack’s owner, who with downcast and averted eye was polishing the same mug over and over.
“Keeper, what gives?” Cif whispered to him softly but most distinctly. “Nay, sull not up. Speak, I charge you!”
Eagerly that one, as though grateful Cif’s whiplash command had given him opportunity to discharge some of the weight of dread crushing him, whispered them back his tale in short, almost breathless bursts, though without raising an eye or ceasing to circle his rag.
“I was alone here when they came in, minutes after the Good News docked. They spoke no word, but as though the fat one were the lean one’s hunting ferret, they scented out our two captains’ table, sat themselves down at it as though they owned it, then spoke at last to call for drink.
“I took it them, and as they got out their box and dice cups and set up their game, they plied me with harmless-seeming and friendly questions mostly about the Twain, as if they knew them well. Such as: How fared they in Rime Isle? Enjoyed they good health? Seemed they happy? How often came they in? Their tastes in drink and food and the fair sex? What other interests had they? What did they like to talk of? As though the two of them were courtiers of some great foreign empire come hither our captains to please and to solicit about some affair of state.
“And yet, you know, so dire somehow were the tones in which those innocent questions were asked that I doubt I could have refused them if they’d asked me for the Twain’s heart’s blood or my own.
“This too: The more questions they asked about the Twain and the more I answered them as best I might, the more they came to look like … to resemble our … you know what I’m trying to say?”
“Yes, yes!” Afreyt hissed. “Go on.”
“In short, I felt I was their slave. So too, I think, have felt all those who came into the Sea Wrack after them, save for old Mingol Ourph, who shortly stayed, somehow then parted.
“At last they sucked me dry, bent to their game, asked for more drink. I sent the girl with that. Since then it’s been as you see now.”
There was a stir at the doorway through which mist was curling. Four men stood there, for a moment bemused. Then Fafhrd and the Mouser strode toward their table, while old Ourph settled down on his hams, his gaze unwavering, and Groniger almost totteringly sidled toward the bar, like a man surprised at midday by a sleepwalking fit and thoroughly astounded at it.
Fafhrd and the Mouser leaned over and looked down at the table and open backgammon box over which the two strangers were bent, surveying their positions. After a bit Fafhrd said rather loudly, “A good rilk against two silver smerduke on the lean one! His stones are poised to fleet swiftly home.”
“You’re on!” the Mouser cried back. “You’ve underestimated the fat one’s back game.”
Turning his chill blue eyes and flat-nosed skull-like face straight up at Fafhrd with an almost impossible twist of his neck, the skinny one said, “Did the stars tell you to wager at such odds on my success?”
Fafhrd’s whole manner changed. “You’re interested in the stars?” he asked with an incredulous hopefulness.
“Mightily so,” the other answered him, nodding emphatically.
“Then you must come with me,” Fafhrd informed him, almost lifting him from his stool with one fell swoop of his good hand and arm that at once assisted and guided, while his hook indicated the mist-filled doorway. “Leave off this footling game. Abandon it. We’ve much to talk of, you and I.” By now he had a brotherly arm—the hooked one, this time—around the thin one’s shoulders and was leading him back along the path he’d entered by. “Oh, there are wonders and treasures undreamed amongst the stars, are there not?”
“Treasures?” the other asked coolly, pricking an ear but holding back a little.
“Aye, indeed! There’s one in particular under the silvery asterism of the Black Panther that I lust to show you,” Fafhrd replied with great enthusiasm, at which the other went more willingly.
All watched astonishedly, but the only one who managed to speak out was Groniger, who asked, “Where are you going, Fafhrd?” in rather outraged tones.
The big man paused for a moment, winked at Groniger, and smiling said, “Flying.”
Then with a “Come, comrade astronomer” and another great arm-sweep, he wafted the skinny one with him into the bulging white mist, where both men shortly vanished.
Back at the table the plump stranger said in loud but winning tones, “Gentle sir! Would you care to take over my friend’s game, continue it with me?” Then in tones less formal, “And have you noticed that these mug dints on your table together with the platter burn make up the figure of a giant sloth?”
“Oh, so you’ve already seen that, have you?” the Mouser answered the second question, returning his gaze from the door. Then, to the second, “Why, yes, I will, sir, and double the bet!—it being my die cast. Although your friend did not stay long enough even to arrange a chouette.”
“Your friend was most insistent,” the other replied. “Sir, I take your bet.”
Whereupon the Mouser sat down and proceeded to shake a masterly sequence of double fours and double threes so that the skinny man’s stones, now his own, fleeted more swiftly to victory than ever Fafhrd had predicted. The Mouser grinned fiendishly, and as they set up the stones for another game, he pointed out to his more thinly smiling adversary in the tabletop’s dints and stains the figure of a leopard stalking the giant sloth.