When his young sergeant swiftly obeyed, though not without an uneasy glance toward Pshawri, Fafhrd instructed him tersely, while keeping on with his scrapings, “Skullick, run like the wind back to the barracks. Find Skor and Mikkidu. Bid them haste here with one or two men apiece bringing heavy work gloves, scoops, shovels, pails, lanterns, and ropes. Don’t try to explain anything—here, take my ring. Then do you choose a man each of the Mouser’s men and mine—and a Mingol—and come on after with planks and the instruments needful for shoring a shaft, more rope, pulleys, food, fuel, water, a keg of brandy, blankets, the medicine case. Come as soon as these can be gathered. Use the dogcarts. Mannimark to remain in command at the barracks. Any questions? No? Then go!”
Skullick went. Instantly Rill took his place.
“Fafhrd,” she said urgently, “Afreyt and Groniger bid me tell you that whatever you believe we saw or think we saw, deceived perhaps by a phantom, the Mouser, at the end, raced with preternatural speed toward Elvenhold and then took cover. They go to hunt him. They urge you join them, after sending for lanterns, the dogs Racer and Gripper, and an unwashed piece of the Mouser’s intimate clothing.”
Fafhrd left off scraping out the square hole, which was five or six inches deep, to look around questioningly at those who had been listening.
“Captain, he sank into the ground where you are digging,” said Ourph the Mingol. “I saw.”
“It’s true,” growled Mother Grum, “though he grew somewhat insubstantial at the end.”
Cif broke away from the importunate Pshawri to aver with great certitude, “He went down there. I touched his pate and top hair before he sank away.”
Pshawri followed behind her, crying, “Here, Lady, I’ve found it. Here is the proof I lied to the Captain when I told him yesternight I brought up nothing from my Maelstrom dive.”
It was a skeleton cube of smooth metal big as an infant’s fist with something dark wedged inside. The metal looked like silver in the moonlight, but Cif knew that without question it was gold—the Rimish ikon that the Mouser had slung into the Great Maelstrom’s center to quieten it after the wrecking of the Sea-Mingol armada.
“My taking of this from the whirlpool’s maw,” mad-eyed Pshawri proclaimed, “though meant to please him, has been the means of my captain’s doom. As he himself feared might hap. Gods, was ever man so cruelly self-deceived?”
“Why did you lie to him, then?” Fafhrd asked. “And why did you so desire to possess it?”
“I may not tell you,” Pshawri said miserably. “That is a private matter between myself and the Captain. Gods, what’s to do? What is to do?”
“We keep on digging here,” Fafhrd decided, suiting action to word. “Rill, tell Afreyt and Groniger of my decision.”
“First let me make your work here easier,” that one said, bringing the leviathan lantern from behind her and planting it on the ground next the square hole Fafhrd was digging, then snapping the fingers of her right hand thrice.
“Burn without heat,” she said simultaneously.
The simple magic worked.
Leviathan light white as new-fallen snow, pure history, sprang into being and illumined the surroundings like a piece of the full moon brought down to earth, so that every dirt grain inside the new-digged square seemed individually visible.
Fafhrd thanked her duly and Rill made off briskly toward Elvenhold.
Fafhrd turned back and said, “Pshawri, sit across the hole from me and feel through the new dirt uncovered by each of my ax scrapes. Two hands work faster than a hook. Gale! You—and Fingers here—come and kneel beside me and clear off to either side the earth my ax scrapes up. Now I’m through the frozen turf, I can take deeper swaths. Pshawri, while you are feeling for the Mouser’s head, tell us, coolly and clearly, all that your conscience will allow about your Maelstrom dive.”
“You think he may yet survive?” Cif asked falteringly, as though doubting her own wild hopes.
“Madam,” said Fafhrd, “I’ve known the Gray One for some time. It never does to underestimate his resourcefulness under adversity or coolth in peril.”
.11.
Tight-packed upright in dirt, as if he had been honored with a Rimish pit burial, the Mouser became aware of a lump in his throat which, as he observed it, slowly grew larger and harder and began to involve or elicit twitching sensations in his cheeks and his mouth’s roof, and like painful feelings or impulses toward movement, deep in his chest. A tension grew in that whole area and there began the faintest buzzing in his ears. All these sensations continued to increase without respite.
He recalled that his last breath had been drawn while he still saw the moon.
With a tremendous effort of will he fought down the urge to gulp in a great breath (which could fill his mouth with dust, set him coughing and gasping—not to be thought of!). He began very slowly (almost experimentally, you might say, except it had to be done—and soon!) to inhale, at first through his nostrils but swiftly switching to his barely parted lips, where his tongue could wet them and, moving from side to side, push back intrusive particles of earth, keep them at bay—somewhat like the approved technique for smoking hashish whereby one draws in thin whifflets of air on either side of the pipe to dilute the rich fumes. (Ah, mused the Mouser, the wondrous freedom of the tongue inside the mouth! No matter how the body were confined. Folk appreciated it insufficiently.)
And all the while he was drawing cold sips of precious lifegiving air that had been stored between the particles of solid ground, and while letting no more dirt grains pass his lips than he could easily swallow. Why, in this fashion, he speculated, he might eventually move through the ground, taking in earth at his anterior end, perhaps—who knows?—extracting nutriment from it and then excreting it in a fecal trail.
But then the lump in his throat caught his attention again. He blew out that breath (it took an appreciable time, there was resistance) and slowly (remember, always slowly! he told himself) took in a second breath.
He decided after several repetitions of this process that if he worked at it industriously, losing no time but never letting himself be tempted to rush things, he could keep the lump in his throat (and the impulse to gasp) down to a tolerable size.
So for the present, understandably, everything not connected with breathing became of secondary importance to the Mouser—nay, tertiary!
He told himself that if he kept up the process long enough, it would become habitual, and then there would be room in his mind to think of other things, or at least of other aspects of his current predicament.
A question then would be: Would he care to do so when the time came? Would there be profit or comfort in such speculation?
As the Mouser did indeed slowly become able to attend to other matters, he noted a faint reddish glow within his eyelids. A few breaths later he told himself that could not be, it took sunlight to do that and here he had not even moon. (He would have permitted himself a small sob, except under his present circumstances the slightest breathing irregularity was not to be thought of.)
But curiosity, once roused, persisted (“…even to the grave,” he told himself with sententious melodrama), and after a few more breaths he parted his eyelids the narrowest slit, hedged by his lashes.
Nothing attacked him, not the tiniest grain of sand, and there was indeed yellow light.
After a bit he parted his lids still farther, while dutifully keeping up his breathing, of course, and surveyed the little scene.
Judging by the way the view was brightly yellow-rimmed, the illumination appeared to be coming from his own face. He remembered the strange dream or night-incident Cif had told him of, in which she’d seen him wearing a phosphorescent half-mask with ovals of blackness where his eyes would be. Perhaps she had indeed foreseen the future, for he now appeared to be wearing just such a mask.
What the light revealed was this: He was facing into a brown wall, so close it was blurred, but not close enough to touch in any way his bared optics.
Yet as he studied it, he seemed increasingly able to see into it, so that about a finger’s length beyond the frontal blur, individual grains of earth were sharply defined, as if some occult power of vision were mixed in with the natural sort, the former merging into and extending the latter.
By this means, whatever it might be, he saw a black pebble buried in the earth about six inches away, and beside that a dark green one big as his thumb, and next to that the ringed blank reddish face of an earthworm with small central circular mouth working, pointing almost directly at him so that its segments, seen in sharp perspective, nearly merged.