It had begun just as he’d gingerly seated himself on the foot of Mara’s and Klute’s cot with the sudden vivid memory—startling in its power—of another occasion, almost two decades gone, when he’d had to work furiously for seeming hours to rescue the Mouser from death’s closest grip and in the end had had to drag the Gray One screaming and kicking from his intended coffin. It had all happened in the sorcery-built magic emporium of those cosmic peddlers of filth, the Devourers, and there had been no rest periods on that occasion either. Fafhrd had first endlessly and most resourcefully to argue with their two cantankerous and elephant-brained wizardly mentor-masters Sheelba of the Eyeless Face and Ningauble of the Seven Eyes just to get the all-essential means and information to achieve the rescue and then battle interminably and with brilliantly devised instant stratagems against a tireless iron statue, a devilish two-handed longsword of blued steel—not to mention gaudy giant spiders whom his obscenely ensorcelled comrade saw as beauteous supple girls in scanty velvet dresses.
But that time the Mouser had been present all the while, playing the fool, calling out zany comments to the battlers, and even slain the statue in the end by splitting its massive head with Fafhrd’s ax, thinking the weapon was a jester’s bladder, while he, Fafhrd, had been the one being buried under the double weight of wizards’ words and crushing iron blows. But this time the Mouser simply vanished without frills or fanfare, swallowed by earth in fashion most conclusive without warning, without shroud or coffin to shield him from the ground’s cruel cold grip, and without words, foolish or otherwise, except that piteous, gasped out “Help me, Fafhrd,” before his mouth was stopped by hungry upward-gliding clay. And now that he was gone, there was no fighting to be done to get him back, no mighty battling with sword or words, but only very slow, laborious scraping and digging, careful, methodical, and which seemed to make sense and hold out hope only so long as one was doing it. As soon as you stopped digging, you realized what a last-chance, forlorn-hope, desperate rescue attempt it really was—to believe a man could somehow breathe long enough underground, like a Kleshite ghoul or Eastern Lands fakir, for you to tunnel your way to him. Pitiful! Why, Fafhrd’d only been able to persuade himself and the others to it because no one had a better idea—and because they all (some of ‘em, anyway) needed busy-work to keep at bay the sickening sense of loss and of fear for self lest a like fate befall.
Fafhrd balled his good fist and almost in his gust of frustration smote the cot beside his thigh, but recalled in time the sleeping girls. He’d thought the next cot was empty, but now saw that its dark green blanket hid a single sleeper, whose slight form and short shock of flame-red hair showed her to be the self-styled Ilthmar princess and cabin-girl Fingers, who’d been following him around all night gazing at him reproachfully for not somehow saving the Mouser before he sank or else sinking into the ground beside him like a staunch comrade should. He felt a sudden spurt of sharp anger at the minx—what cause had she to criticize him so?
Yet it was true, he upbraided himself as another flood of melancholy memories engulfed him, that he and his gray comrade had often behaved like death-seekers, as when they’d sailed in stony-faced silence side by side forever westward in the Outer Sea, seeking that coast of doom called the Bleak Shore, or lured by shimmer-sprites, steered their craft south into the great Equatorial Current whence no ships return, or when they’d surmounted Stardock, Nehwon’s mightiest peak, or dared Quarmall’s cavern and twice encountered Death himself in the sunless Shadowland; yet on this last occasion, when Nehwon had swallowed the Mouser, whatever the rationale, he had held back.
With a silvery jangle of harness bells the laden dogcart drew up beyond the fire. As he got down from the driver’s seat, Skullick gave out the news, the words tumbling from his mouth, that the Great Maelstrom had been observed to be turning more swiftly, heaving and churning as it swirled round and round in the cold moonshine. Cif and Pshawri came to their feet.
The noise broke into Fafhrd’s reverie just enough as to make him aware of what his entranced gaze had been unseeingly resting on. The girl Fingers had turned over in her sleep so that her face was visible and one bare arm had emerged to lie atop the coarse blanket like a pale serpent. Of whom did her face remind him? he asked himself. He had loved those features once, he was suddenly certain. What sweet and yielding female…?
And then as he studied her face more closely, he saw that her eyes were open and watching him and that her lips were curved in a sleepy smile. The tip of her tongue came out at a corner and licked them around. Fafhrd felt his sharp anger return, if it were just that. The saucy baggage! What call had she to look at him as though they shared a secret? Why was she spying on him? What was her game? He flashed that when she’d first appeared simpering and posing to him and Gray Mouser in the cellar, they had just been speaking of men snatched under the ground or pursued on high by vengeful earth. Why had that been? What had that synchronicity presaged? Had she aught to do with the Mouser’s vanishment downward, this tainted witchchild from the rat city of Ilthmar? He rose up fast and silently, moved as swiftly to her cot and stood bent over her and glaring down, as though to strip her of her secrets by his gaze’s force, and with his hand upraised, he knew not to do what, while she smiled up at him with perfect confidence.
“Captain!” Skor’s urgent bellow came hollowly out of the hole and boomed around.
Forgetting all else, Fafhrd dodged from under the shelter tent and was the first to reach the mouth of the shaft, over which there was now set a stout man-high ironwood tripod, from which depended a pair of pulleys to halve the effort needed to raise the dirt.
Steadying himself by two of its legs, the Northerner leaned out and looked straight down. The planks of the second tier of shorings were in place, securely braced with crosspieces and tied to the first tier—and the excavating had gone a couple of feet below them. From the pulley by his cheek two lines went down to the second pulley atop the handle of the bucket, which was set half filled ‘gainst a side of the shaft. Against two other sides Skor and Gale were pressed back, upturned faces large and small, in shadow, the one framed by scanty red locks, the other by profuse blond tresses. By the fourth side were two leviathan-oil lamps. Their white light fell strongly on the slender object lying flat in the center of the shaft’s bottom. Fafhrd would have recognized it anywhere.
“It’s Captain Mouser’s dirk, Captain,” Skor called up, “lying just as we uncovered it.”
“I didn’t move it the least bit as I brushed and worked the earth away,” Gale confirmed in her piping tones.
“That’s a wise girl,” Fafhrd called down. “Leave it so. And don’t move from where you are, either of you. I’m coming down.”
Which he accomplished swiftly by way of the ladder of thick pegs jutting from the shoring, going down hand over hook. When he reached the crowded bottom, he knelt at once over Cat’s Claw, bending down his head to inspect it closely.
“We didn’t find the scabbard anywhere,” Gale explained somewhat unnecessarily.
He nodded. “The ground gets chalky here,” he observed. “Did either of you find a chunk of the stuff?”
“No,” Gale responded quickly, “but I’ve a lump of yellow umber.”
“That’ll do fine,” he said, holding out his hand. When she’d dug it from her pouch and handed it to him, he sighted carefully along the dagger’s blade and rubbed a big gold mark on the foot of the shoring to show which way the weapon pointed.
“That’s something we may want to remember,” he explained shortly. He lifted the wicked knife from its site, turning it over and reinspecting it from blade tip to pommel, but he could discern no special markings, no message of any sort, on that side either.
“What have you found, Fafhrd?” Cif called down.
“It’s Cat’s Claw, all right. I’ll send it up to you,” he called back. He handed the knife to Skor. “I’ll take over for a space down here. You get some rest.” He accepted from his lieutenant the short-handled square spade that had replaced his ax as chief digging and scraping tool. “You’re a good man, Skor.” That one nodded and mounted by the pegs.