“I’m coming down, Fafhrd. My turn to help,” Afreyt announced from above.
Fafhrd looked at Gale. At close range the golden strands were sweaty and the fair complexion streaked with dirt. Pallor and tired smudges around the blue eyes belied the air of smiling readiness the girl put on. “You need a rest too. And sleep, you hear? But only after you’ve had a mug of hot soup.” He took from her her scoop and handbroom. “You’ve done well, child.”
While she wearily yet reluctantly mounted the pegs, with Afreyt urging her to greater speed from above, Fafhrd drove the spade into the earth near the hole’s edge, continuing the excavation straight down.
After Afreyt had climbed into the hole to join Fafhrd in his task, the harlot Rill led the exhausted Gale back to the cookfire beyond the shelter tent. Cif followed them, somewhat like a sleepwalker, staring at the knife she held, which Skor had handed her, and after a bit the others gravitated back too. Standing in the cold to watch folk dig is of no lasting profit.
Rill was pressing Gale to finish the mug of soup she’d poured her.
“Drink it all down while there’s some heat in it. That’s a good girl. Why, you still feel like ice! You need to be under blankets. And get a sleep, you’re groggy. Come on now, no arguments.”
And she led her off willingly enough to the shelter tent.
Cif was still staring bemusedly at the Mouser’s knife, slowly turning it over and over, so that its bright blade periodically reflected the low firelight.
Old Ourph said ruminatively, “When Khahkht the Conqueror was buried bound and beweaponed alive for treason, but later cleared and dug up, it was found his daggers had worked their way yards from his corpse in opposite directions, so strong and wide were his hatreds.”
Pshawri said, “I thought Khahkht was a Rimish ice devil, not a Mingol warchief paramount.”
After a while Ourph replied, “Great conquerors live on as their enemies’ devils.”
“Or their own folk’s, sometimes,” Groniger put in.
Skullick said, “If dead old Khahkht could make his daggers travel through solid earth, why didn’t he have them cut his bonds?”
Rill returned with an armful of girls’ clothes which she hung by the fire and then sat down beside Cif, saying, “I stripped her down to the buff and bundled her into a warmed nook beside the drowsy Ilthmar kid, who’d half waked but was bound again for slumberland.”
After a courteous pause, Ourph explained, “Khahkht’s bonds were chains of adamant.”
Groniger said speculatively, “I can see how the Mouser’s hood would be stripped away upward as he was dragged down, since it had no ties to his other clothing. And I suppose the up-sliding earth, pressing against the dagger’s grip and crosspiece, might effect the same result, though taking longer, as he was dragged still farther down by … whatever it was.”
“But wouldn’t the knife have been left point down, vertical in the earth, then?” Skullick argued.
Mother Grum interrupted, “Black magic of some breed took him. That’s why the knife got left. Iron doesn’t obey devil power.”
Skullick went on to Groniger, “But the dagger was uncovered lying flat, horizontal. Which would mean by your theory he was being dragged sideways at that point, in the direction Cat’s Claw pointed. In which case we’re digging the shaft the wrong way, keeping on straight down.”
“Gods! I wish we knew exactly what happened to him down there,” Pshawri averred, some of his earlier agony coming back into his voice and aspect. “Did he draw Cat’s Claw to do battle with the monster dragging him under, free himself of it? Or was he more actively attacked down there and drew the knife in self-defense?”
“How could he do either of those things when closely cased in hard earth?” Groniger objected.
“He’d manage somehow!” Pshawri shot back. “But then how came the dagger to be left behind? He’d never have been parted from Cat’s Claw willingly, of that I’m sure.”
“Perhaps he lost consciousness then,” Rill interposed.
“Or perhaps they were both attacked, the dragger and the dragged, by some third party,” Skullick hazarded. “How much do any of us know what may go on down there?”
A look of sheer horror had been growing in Cif’s visage as she eyed the knife. She burst out, “Stop breaking our minds and hearts, all of you, with all these guesses!” She took the Mouser’s cowl out of her pouch and rapidly wrapped up the dagger in it, folding in the ends. “I cannot think while looking at that thing.” She handed the small gray package to Mother Grum. “There, keep it safe and hid,” she said, “while we get on to efforts more constructive.”
A change came over the small white-clad woman, who’d seemed consumed moments before with nervous grief. She rose lithely from her seat by the fire, saying to Pshawri, “Follow me, Lieutenant. We’ll dowse for your captain with his Whirlpool Queller you rescued from the Maelstrom, beginning at the shaft head, and so determine whether and how he’s deviated from the straight down in his strange journey through solid earth.” She wet two fingers in her mouth and held them high a space. “While we were talking, feeding our woes with horror, the north breeze died—which’ll make the dowsing easier for us, its results surer. And you must do the dowsing, Pshawri, because although it galls me somewhat to admit it, you seem the one most sensitive to the Gray Mouser’s presence.”
Although looking puzzled and taken aback at first by her words, it was with a seeming sense of relief and a growing eagerness that the skinny ex-thief came to his feet. “I’m with you, Lady, of course, in any effort to regain the Captain. What do I do?”
As she explained, they started toward the shaft head. The eyes of the others followed them. After a bit Skullick and Rill got up and strolled after and, several moments later, Groniger. But old Ourph and Mother Grum—and Snowtreader and the other cart-dog, both of whom had been unharnessed—stayed warm by the fire.
A bucket was coming up from the hole, heaping full. When its earth had been scattered, Pshawri positioned himself by the hole, knees bent and spread a little, head bent forward, looking down earnestly at the black-gold cinder cube suspended on a cubit’s length of sailor’s twine he’d found in his pouch and held at the top between the thumb and ring finger of his left hand.
Cif stood north of him, spreading her cloak to ward off any remnants of the north breeze, though there seemed no need. The cold air had become quite still.
But although the contraption looked like a pendulum, it did not act like one, neither beginning to swing back and forth in any direction nor yet around in a circle or ellipse.
“And there’s no vibration either,” Pshawri reported in a low voice.
Cif extended a slender forefinger and laid it very lightly and carefully atop the pinching juncture of his finger and thumb. After a space of three heartbeats she nodded in confirmation and said, “Let’s try on the opposite side of the hole.”
“Why do you use the ring finger and left hand?” Rill asked curiously
“I don’t know,” Pshawri said puzzledly. “Maybe because that finger feels the touchiest of the lot. And left hand seems right for magic.”
At that last word Groniger growled a skeptical “Hmmph!”
Fafhrd and Afreyt seemed to be digging and sifting strenuously yet still carefully at the bottom of the hole, which had gotten as much as a foot deeper. Cif called down to them an explanation of what she and Pshawri were doing, ending with, “…and then we’ll spiral out from here in wider and wider circles, dowsing every few feet. When we get a strong reading—if we do—I’ll signal you.”
Fafhrd waved that he understood and returned to his digging.
The second reading showed the same results. Pshawri and Cif moved out four yards and began their first methodical circling of the hole, dowsing every few steps. One by one their small company of observers returned to the fire, wearied by sameness. A full bucket came up from the hole.
And after a while, another.
Slowly the white-glowing lantern with which Cif had provided herself grew more distant from the hole. Slowly the pile of dug earth beside it grew. Fingers and Gale slept in each other’s arms. While the full moon inched down the western sky.
Time passed.
.15.
The yellowing moon was no more than two fists above the western horizon of Rime Isle’s central hills when Fafhrd’s probing spade encountered stone. They’d deepened the hole by about a woman’s height below the second tier of shoring. At first Fafhrd thought the obstruction a small boulder and tried to dig around it. Afreyt warned him against overspeed but he persisted. The boulder grew larger and larger. Soon the whole bottom of the shaft was a flat floor of solid rock.