Just then, as if some subterranean being gripping the Mouser’s ankles had given another mighty yank, Fafhrd’s comrade swiftly sank another half yard so he was buried to the chin like a Mingol traitor whom vengeful mates will leisurely dispatch by bowling rocks at his head and leaden-weighted skulls, though only after his concubines have been allowed (or forced) to kiss him one time each full on the lips.
And then the Mouser looked up at Fafhrd with moonlit eyes widening, as if in full realization of his horrid plight, and gasped in piteous appeal, “Help me!” And his tall comrade could only quake and stare.
Fafhrd heard from behind the sound of onrunning footsteps, boots ringing on frozen earth. And for a moment it seemed to him that he could see the moonlit ground through the Mouser’s head, as if the little man were becoming attenuated, insubstantial. Or was that only his strange qualm returning? His own swimming eyes?
And then, as if those subterranean hands were giving another tug, the Mouser began to move downward once again rapidly.
From behind him Cif cast herself full length on the frozen ground, her outstretched hands snatching at the disappearing head.
Fafhrd regained his power of movement and swiftly scanned around in case the Mouser’s ghost were floating off in some other direction. The air seemed full of movement, but nothing substantial when he looked closely.
With three exceptions everyone was staring at Cif or else hurrying toward her, who was now scrabbling through the scant frozen grass, as though frenziedly hunting for a jewel she’d dropped there. Afreyt and Groniger were looking off intently toward Elvenhold. The tall woman pointed at something and the deliberate man nodded in agreement.
While Fingers was staring straight at Fafhrd in cool accusal, as if asking, “Why didn’t you save your friend?”
.9.
From the Gray Mouser’s point of view, what had happened was this:
He’d been staring toward the moon, quite unmindful of the cold and the ceremony, lost in puzzlement as to how he could at once feel so heavy—as though wearied to death and barely able to stay erect, victim of some heatless fever—and yet at the same time so listless—light and insubstantial, as if he were thinning out to become a ghost whom the slightest breeze might blow away. The two feelings didn’t agree at all, yet both were there.
Without warning, he experienced a spasm of strange faintness, like Fafhrd’s but more intense, so that he blacked out completely. It was as if the ground had been taken out from under his feet. When he came to his senses again, he was looking up at his northern comrade, who had never before seemed quite so tall.
He must have simply keeled over, he told himself, and fallen flat. But when he tried to get up, he found he could move neither hand nor foot, bend waist or knee. Was he paralyzed? Everywhere below his neck something gripped him closely, and when he moved his fingers and thumbs against each other (both hands being imprisoned down by his sides so he couldn’t spread fingers or make a fist), that something felt suspiciously grainy, like raw earth.
In the most horrifying reorientation he’d ever experienced in the course of an eventful life, flat-on-my-back became buried-to-my-neck. Oh dismal! And so incredible that he couldn’t really say whether it was the world, or he, that had moved to effect the dreadful exchange.
Something terribly swift in his mind scanned almost instantaneously the pressures all over his body. Were they slightly greater around his ankles? As if he wore gyves, as if something, or someone gripped both his legs—such as the quicksand nixies Sheelba had warned him against in the Great Salt Marsh. Oh Mog, no!
His gaze traveled up Fafhrd, who seemed tall as a pine, and he gasped out his agonized plea—and the great lout would only goggle and grimace at him, mop and mow in the moonlight, not only withholding help, but also seeming utterly unmindful of the priceless privilege he enjoyed of standing free atop the ground rather than being immured in it!
Beyond Fafhrd he saw Cif running straight at him. If she kept on, she’d boot his face, the mad maenad! He instinctively tried to duck aside and only succeeded in wrenching his neck. And then he felt the grip on his ankles tighten and cold earth mount his chin, as his whole being was drawn downward. He clapped his lips tightly together to keep dirt out, drew one swift breath, then tried to narrow his nostrils, finally closed tight his eyes as his engulfment continued. Last thing he saw was the moon. As the gray glow of it transmitted through his eyelids vanished upward, he felt his pate scratched and his topknot sharply tweaked. Then even that was gone and there remained only a grainy coldness sliding up his cheeks. Strangely, then, it seemed to grow a little warmer and—a very little—looser, so he could puff some of the air trapped in his mouth out into his cheeks. The texture of the stuff scraping his cheeks changed from earth to wool to earth again. He realized his cowl had been dragged upward from around his neck and left buried above him. And then the rough sliding seemed to stop. One other thing he had to admit: the feeling of heaviness that had so long dogged him was completely gone. However closely confined, he seemed now rather to be floating.
The swift something in his mind produced for his consideration a list of the beings who might hate him enough to wish him such a horrid doom and also conceivably have the magical power to effect it on him. The wizards Quarmal of Quarmall, Khahkht the Ice Wizard, Great Oomforafor, Hisvin the Rat King, his own mentor Sheelba turned against him, dear diabolic Hisvet, the gods Loki and Mog. It went on and on.
One thing stood out: any world in which a man could be twitched into his grave by the legerdemain of some mad principality or power was monstrously unfair!
.10.
Aboveground, Cif rose to her knees from where she’d been crouched, breaking her fingernails scrabbling at the frosty ground, and stretched her arms around the girls, who had been crowding in close and all trying to touch her, more for their own comfort and reassurance than for hers. She tried to touch them all in turn and draw them to her, hushing their clamors, though as much for her own comfort as for theirs. They felt cold.
Dumbstruck, Fafhrd turned back to ask Afreyt exactly what she’d seen when Mouser had seemed to sink into the ground impossibly. To his confusion he saw that she and Groniger were already a dozen yards away, hurrying toward Elvenhold, while Rill was sprinting after them at an angle from where she’d been at the end of the ritual line, the unlit lamp still streaming out behind her.
With a slow, puzzled headshake he turned forward again and saw, beyond the huddled backs of Cif and the girls, Pshawri convulsed in an agony, his features grimaced, his eyes squeezed half shut, his taut body rocking forward and back, and literally tearing his hair. By Kos, did the knave think it was mourning time already?
Then the tortured eyes of the Mouser’s young lieutenant fixed upon Cif. They widened, his body ceased to rock, he left off tearing his hair and he threw out both arms to her in mute appeal.
She responded immediately, pushing fully to her feet to go to him. But at that moment Fafhrd found his voice.
“Don’t move a step!” he called commandingly in carefully enunciated battle tones. “Stay where you are exactly—or we will lose the spot where Mouser disappeared into the ground.”
And he moved toward her deliberately, his sound right hand working to free his doubled-headed hand ax from the case where it hung at his side, its short helve pendant.
“The spot where we must dig,” he amplified, going to his knees close behind her.
She turned around, and seeing him bringing out his ax and thinking he meant to chop into the ground with it, cried in alarm, “Oh, don’t do that, you might hurt him.”
He shook his head reassuringly, and grasping the ax at the juncture of its head and helve, scraped with it strongly inward toward his knees, feeling with his hook through the earth he uncovered. He scraped three like swaths behind the first, baring a space about as big as a trapdoor, and then repeated the process, going an inch deeper.
Meanwhile Pshawri was approaching Cif, fumbling his pouch and babbling, “Sweet Lady, I am responsible for this dire mishap to my captain. I alone am guilty. Here, let me show you.”
Without ceasing his work, Fafhrd called sharply, “Forget that, Pshawri, and come here. I have an errand for you.”
But when that one did not seem to hear his words, only continuing to stare desperately at Cif and now groping at her arms to draw her attention, Fafhrd signed to her to draw the madman aside and hear his mouthings, meanwhile commanding, “You, Skullick, then! Come here!”