Skullick uncorked with, “If the bob slanting means he’s moving in that direction, then straight down says that Captain Mouser is below us but not moving just now.”
Cif lifted her eyes toward the speaker. “If it is the Captain.”
“But the how of all this?” Groniger asked wonderingly, shaking his head.
“Look,” Rill said in a strange voice. “The bob is moving again.” They all eyed another wonder. The bob was swinging back and forth between the direction of the shaft head and the sea, but at least five times as slowly as the period of a pendulum of that length. It crawled its swing.
There was some awe in Skullick’s usually irreverent voice. “As if he were pacing back and forth down there. Right now.”
“Maybe he’s found a sea tunnel,” Mother Grum suggested.
“Those fables,” Groniger growled.
Without warning the gold-glinting dark-colored bob jumped seaward to taut cord’s length from Cif’s hand. She gave a quick hiss of pain and it sped on, trailing its cord like a comet’s tail and narrowly missing Rill’s head.
In a diving catch Pshawri interposed the cupped palm of his right hand, which it smote audibly. He clapped his other hand across it as he himself rolled over and came to his feet with both hands tightly cupped together, as if they caged a small animal or large insect, the cord dangling from between them, and walked back to Cif while the rest watched fascinatedly.
Skullick said, almost religiously, “As if, after pacing, the Captain shot off through solid earth under the sea like a bolt of lightning. If such can be imagined.”
Groniger just shook his head, a study in sorely tried skepticism. Pshawri said to Cif, lifting his elbows, “Lady, would you please unbutton my pouch for me?”
She was studying the red-scored pads of her left ring finger and thumb, where the cord had taken skin as it had jerked away from between them, but she quickly complied with his instructions, being careful not to use these two digits in the process.
He plunged his cupped hands into his pouch and went on saying, “Now tie the cord around the button—no, through the central button hole of the pouch flap. Use a square knot. Although it is not moving now, this thing is best securely confined. I don’t trust it anymore, no matter what it’s told us.”
Cif followed the further instructions without argument, saying, “I thoroughly agree with you, Lieutenant Pshawri. In fact, I don’t think the cinder cube has been tracing the Mouser’s movements underground at all, except perhaps at first to start us off.”
The knot was firmly tied. As Pshawri withdrew his hands she closed the flap on the pouch and he buttoned its three buttons.
“Then to what power do you think it’s responding?” Rill asked, getting to her feet.
“To Loki’s,” Cif averred. “I think he wants to lead us on a wild goose chase across the sea. It has all the earmarks of his handiwork: a fascinating lure, strange developments mixed with painful surprises.” She popped her injured finger and thumb into her mouth and sucked them.
“It does seem like his tricksy behavior,” Rill agreed.
“He’s an outlaw god, all right,” Mother Grum nodded. “And vengeful. Likely the one who sent Captain Mouser down.”
“What’s more,” mumbled Cif, talking around her fingers, “I think I know the way to scotch his plots and perhaps return the Mouser to us.”
“Dowsers ahoy!” a bright new voice called out. They turned and saw Afreyt coming briskly across the Meadow carrying a hamper woven of reeds.
She went on, “There’s news from the digging I thought you all should know, but Cif especially. By the way, where’s Fafhrd?”
“We haven’t seen him, Lady,” Pshawri told her.
“Why should he be here?” Groniger asked blankly.
“Why, he left off digging to rest and think alone,” Afreyt explained as she reached them and set the hamper on the grass. “But then Udall and another saw him take a jug and lamp and head out after you. They had nothing to do and watched him until he was halfway to you, Udall said.”
“We’ve none of us seen him,” Cif assured her.
“But then where are Gale and Fingers?” Afreyt next asked. “Their cot in the shelter tent was empty and their clothes gone that had been warming beside the fire. I thought they must have followed after Fafhrd, like they’d been doing all night.”
“We haven’t seen pelt or paws of them either,” Cif insisted. “But what’s this news you promised?”
“But then where in Nehwon…” Afreyt began, looking around at the others. They all shook their heads. She told herself, “Leave it,” and Cif, “This should please you, I think. We’d driven the sideways corridor about fifteen paces in … the digging went faster than straight down—it was a soft sand stretch—and the shoring was easier, despite the added task of roofing … when we found this embedded halfway up the face.”
And she handed Cif a grit-flecked dirk scabbard.
“Cat’s Claw’s?”
“The same.”
“Right!” Cif said as she examined it eagerly.
“And it was lying horizontal, point end toward us,” Afreyt went on, “as if the earth had torn it from his belt as he was being dragged or somehow gotten along, or as though he had left it that way as a clue for us.”
“It proves that Captain Mouser’s down below, all right,” Skullick voiced.
“It does give weight to the two earlier findings of the dirk and cowl,” Groniger admitted.
“And so you can understand,” Afreyt went on, “why I wanted to tell Fafhrd about it at once. And you, of course, Cif. But what’s been happening with the dowsing? What’s brought you here to the coast? You surely haven’t traced him this far—or have you?”
So Cif told Afreyt how the dowsing had gone and how the bob had tried to escape on the last trial of its powers and was no longer trusted, and also her guess that Loki was behind it all.
Afreyt commented at that, “Fafhrd himself warned me the evidence from dowsing would be uncertain and ambiguous compared with the clues got from actual digging, which he thought should be kept up in any case, to hold open an exit from the underworld for the Gray One at the same point he’d entered it. And you may very well be right about Loki trying to lead us astray. He was a tricksy god, as you know better than I, loving destruction above all else. For that matter, old Odin wasn’t reliable either, taking Fafhrd’s hand after the loving worship we’d provided him.”
Pshawri interposed, “Lady Cif, just before the Lady Afreyt joined us, you said you’d thought of a way to foil Loki’s plots and clear the way for Captain Mouser’s return.”
Cif nodded. “Since the cube cinder is of no use to us as a talisman, I think that one of us should take it and hurl it into the flame pit, the molten lava lake of volcano Darkfire, hopefully returning god Loki to his proper element and perchance assuaging his ire against the Captain.”
“And lose forever one of Rime Isle’s ikons, the Gold Cube of Square Dealing?” Groniger protested.
“That gold’s forever tainted with the stranger god’s essence,” Mother Grum informed him, “something I cannot exorcise. Cif’s rede is good.”
“A golden ikon can be refashioned and resanctified,” old Ourph pointed out. “Not so a man.”
“I cannot muster argument against such action, though it seems to me sheerest superstition,” said Groniger wearily. “This morn’s events have taken me out of my own element of reason.”
“And if it must be done,” Cif went on, “you, Pshawri, are the one to attempt it. You raped the cube cinder from the Maelstrom’s maw. You should be the one returns it to the fire.”
“If the damned thing will let itself be hurled into the flame pit,” Skullick burst out, his irreverence at last regenerated. “You’ll hurl it and it’ll take flight the gods know where.”
“I’ll find a way to constrain it, never fear,” the young lieutenant assured him, an uncustomary iron in his voice. He turned to Cif.
“From my heart’s depths I thank you, Lady, for that task. When I wrested that accursed object from the whirlpool, I do now believe I doomed Captain Mouser to his present plight. It is my dearest desire to wipe out that fault.”
“Now wait a moment, all of you,” Afreyt cut in. “I am myself inclined to agree with you about the Queller and Darkfire. It strikes me as the wise thing to do. But this is a step may mean the life or death of Captain Mouser. I do not think that we should take it without the agreement of Captain Fafhrd, his lifelong comrade and forever. I wear his ring, it’s true, yet in this matter would not speak for him. So I come back to it: where’s Fafhrd?”