He looked at the things around him: the fire, the soup, the piled lumber, the girls’ clothes warming, the shelter tent, its cots.
He didn’t need to talk to children, he told himself. Let them sleep. He wished he could.
But his strange nervousness grew. Finally, to discharge it in action, he seized a fresh brandy jug with his right hand, hooked up a lamp with his other upper extremity, set out across the meadow after the dowsers.
He walked unevenly, veering and correcting himself. He wasn’t sure he wanted to catch up with the dowsers. But he had to be moving, or else explode.
.16.
In the cozy nest from which she’d been watching Fafhrd’s every action, Fingers roused Gale by yanking the pale tuft of her fine maiden hair. “That hurt, you fiend,” the Rimish girl protested, rubbing her eyes. “No one else ever summoned me from slumber so.”
“It hurts most where you love most,” the cabin-girl recited as by rote, continuing in livelier tones, “I knew you’d want to be wide awake, dear demon, to hear the latest news of your hero uncle with the growly name.”
“Fafhrd?” Gale was all attention.
“The same. He’s just come out of the hole, cavorted around the fire, and now taken a lamp and a jar and gone off after your dark-haired aunt who’s dowsing for your other uncle. I think he’s fey and wants watching over.”
“Where are our clothes?” Gale asked at once, squirming half out of the nest.
“The lady with the scarred hand set them to warm close by the fire before they all went off ahead of Fafhrd. Come on, I’ll race you.”
“Someone will see us.” Gale clapped her slender forearm across her barely budded breasts.
“Not if we rush, Miss Prim and Proper.”
The two girls streaked to the fire through the frigid air and, looking around and giggling the while, hurried into their toasty clothes as swiftly as if they’d both been sailors. Then they moved out hand in hand, following Fafhrd’s lamp, while the last sliver of full moon hid itself behind Rime Isle’s central hills and the sky paled with the first hint of dawn.
.17.
The Mouser struggled awake from darkest depths. The process seemed to involve toilsome stages of marginal consciousness, but when he finally—and quite suddenly—felt himself fully master of his mind, he found his body sprawled at full length with his bent head pillowed on the crook of his left elbow and the bracing reek of salt sea filling his nostrils.
For a blessed moment he supposed himself to be abed in his trim room in the Salthaven barracks built last year by his men and Fafhrd’s, and with the window open to the cool, damp morning breeze.
His first attempted movement shattered that illusion. He was in the same dreadful plight he’d been when his awareness had last ebbed away to chthonic darkness while he was most effortfully fleeing Death’s skinny sister Pain.
Except his plight had worsened—he’d lost the strange power of movement he’d had then, of laborious crabwise retreat. That seemed to depend, for its generation, upon extremes of terror.
And the sea stink was new. That must he coming from the grainy earth that gripped him viselike. And that earth was now perceptibly damp. Which must in turn mean that his flight had led him to the Rime Isle coast, to the sea’s fringes. Perhaps he was already under the cold, tumultuous, merciless waters of the boundless Outer Sea.
And he was no longer buried upright but lying flat. Truly it was astonishing what a difference that made. Upright, though as closely confined as a statue by its mold, one felt somehow free and on guard. Whereas lying flat, whether supine or prone, was the posture of submission. It made one feel utterly helpless. It was the very worst—
No, he interrupted himself, don’t exaggerate. Worse than flat would be buried upside down, heels above head. Best leave off imagining confinements lest he think of one that was still worse.
He set himself to do the same routine things he’d done after his earlier underground lapse of consciousness—regularize and maximize his furtive breathing, assure himself of the continuing glow about his eyes and of his seeming occult power to see, albeit somewhat dimly, for some yards all around him.
The way his head was bent, he found he was looking down his body, along his legs and past his feet. He wished he had a wider range of vision, yet at least there was no blue and chalky female form pursuing him sharklike from that direction.
It was really unnerving, though, how defenseless his flat attitude made him feel, all ready to be trampled, or spat upon, or skewered with pitchfork.
He’d had previous strayings into the realm of Death without his nerve failing, he reminded himself, straining for reassurance and to keep panic at bay. There’d been that time in Lankhmar when he’d entered the magic shop of the Devourers and laid down fearlessly in a black-pillowed coffin and also walked quite eagerly into a mirror that was a vertical pool of liquid mercury held upright by mighty sorceress.
But he’d been drunk and girlstruck then, he reminded himself, though at the time the mercury had felt cool and refreshing (not grainy and suffocating like this stuff!), and he’d afterward nursed the private conviction that he’d been about to discover a secret heroes’ heaven high above the one reserved for the gods when Fafhrd had jerked him out of the silver fluid.
No matter. His present friends and lovers, he told himself, must be working like beavers right now to effect his recovery, either by digging (there were enough of them surely) or by working some magic or supernal deal. Perhaps right at this moment dear Cif was manipulating the Golden Ikons of the Isle as she had last year when his mind had been trapped in the brain of a sounding whale.
Or Fafhrd might have figured out some trick to get him back. Though the great oaf had hardly looked capable of such when Mouser had last seen him, goggling down bewilderedly at his disappearing comrade.
Yet how would any of them know where to dig for him, the way he’d moved around? Or be able to dig for him at all, if he were already beneath the Outer Sea?
Which reminded him in turn that according to the most ancient legends, Simorgya had invaded Rime Isle in prehistoric times by way of long, long tunnels leading under the wild waves. That was before the more southern isle sank beneath the billows and its cruel inhabitants grew gills and fins.
A fantasy, no doubt, old witches’ tales. Yet if such tunnels ever had existed, he was surely in the right place to find them now, Rime Isle’s south coast. Or find at least one—surely that was not hoping too much. And so as he industriously sipped air through barely parted lips from the dank earth enfolding him, exhaling in little puffs more forcibly than he inhaled, to drive back intrusive moist granules, he became aware of a pale green undulation parallel to his body some three yards out from him, as though something were moving back and forth out there, up and down a narrow corridor, while it closely regarded him. After a time it resolved itself into the dainty form of the Simorgyan demoness Ississi, not more than a quarter—nay, hardly an eighth!—of the way through her girl-fish shape-change: there was the barest hint of a crest along her spine, and the merest suggestion of webs joining the roots of her slender fingers, and only the slightest green tinge to her glorious complexion, she of the large yellow-green eyes and lisping seductive speech, who’d been so amenable to harshest discipline, at least for quite a while. And she seemed to be wearing a filmy rainbow robe composed of the tatters and rags of the costly, colorful, fine fabric destroyed during his final submarine bout with her when Seahawk had sunk for a space.
For a moment his dissolving skepticism reasserted itself as he asked himself how he could be so certain it was indeed Ississi in this hazy realm where any fish (or girl, for that matter) looked very much like the next (and both like phantoms woven of greenish smoke). But even as he posed that question, the vision became more real, each winsome feature more clearly defined. What’s more, he realized he was in no way frightened of her despite the circumstances of their encounter. In fact, as his eyes moved slowly back and forth as they followed her to and fro, he found himself growing drowsy, the regular movement was so restful. He even found himself developing the illusion (surely it must be one?) that his entire body, not just his eyes, was moving slowly forward and back in unison with hers, as if it had unbeknownst to himself escaped into a corridor or tunnel parallel with hers and was afloat in the unresistant air!