“I don’t know if you could rightly call it out-of-way,” the other said with a wry laugh, “but once when we were playing somewhat listlessly abed, he suggested inviting Rill to join us. I told him I’d strangle him first and indeed tried to. In the excitement of the delirium this led to, the original proposal was forgotten at the time and just how playful or serious it had been at the time of it being made.”
Cif laughed, then grew thoughtful in turn. “I once recall the Mouser pestering me as to whether I’d ever felt an attraction to the same sex as my own. At the time I put him in his place, of course, telling I had no truck with any such filthy practices, but since I have wondered once or twice about his curiosity.”
Afreyt looked at her quizzically. “Oh,” she said, “so you didn’t tell him about our…” She left her words hanging.
“But we were barely more than girls when that happened,” Cif protested.
“True indeed,” Afreyt said. “Barely fourteen, as I recall. But you are drowsing off, I plainly see. And so, to tell the truth, am I.”
.25.
Next time the Gray Mouser came first to consciousness, he had forgotten not only who but what he was.
He wondered why a darkness-dwelling creature that was no more than a limp fleshy pocket not moist enough for its own comfort and occupied by two hard, smooth, pointy semicircular ridges that fit together neatly and by a sort of blind sessile snail busy exploring itself and its container endlessly and scavenging life-giving air from the dry grainy outside, should be equipped with a mighty mind capable of mastering whole worlds of life and experience.
The sentient pocket with in-dwelling restless mollusk knew of its mind’s might from the variety and rapid sequence of its inscrutable mysterious thoughts and memories which threatened momently to burst into clarity and stain the omnipresent dark with flaring colors. It knew its dry, grainy, closely packed immediate surroundings by a dull yellow glow so dim as hardly to deserve the name of light at all. It was a sort of dim seeing locked in solidity.
Without preamble or warning there blazed up for this buried mind the moving picture of a brilliantly lamp-lit room, lined with a great map of Nehwon-world and shelves of ancient books, wherein a venerable, kingly, seated biped beast silently discoursed to a considerably smaller version of itself standing attentively before it.
Memory told the sentient pocket that the beast was man, and then in a flash of insight it realized that behind the handsome full red mobile lips known as mouth lay such a moist pocket as itself with pale pointy smooth ridges called teeth and an indwelling anchor named tongue, and that as a consequence of all this there must be attached to it a body such as that of the beast under view and itself be man also, however cabined and confined in grainy earth.
Instantly his mind began to get a host of little messages from this attached body, which turned out to be in fetal position with both hands tenderly cupping its genitals, rag-limp after their torture by stangury-style orgasm in the skeletal embrace of blue-pied Sister Pain.
Memory of that terrible triggering made him wonder for a moment if he were not simply gazing into another room in the apartments of Hisvet in Lankhmar Below, perhaps that of her sorcerer-father Hisvin, with Foursie due to burst in naked the next moment chattering out her demon alarm—and the dread blue lady once again centipede-walk her bone hand round his waist from behind as he lay trapped and confined by dirt.
But, no! The very earth that clasped him so intimately had changed profoundly in texture and in reek. The rocks from which nature had ground it had been igneous and metamorphic rather than sedimentary, he could tell. The moisture in it was not Salt Marsh and Hlal-mouth brackish, but had the icy bite of the mineralized streams rivuleting from the mountains of Hunger, a thousand Lankhmar leagues to the south of that metropolis. The commingled effluvia were not those of polyglot Lankhmar but of some more intense and secret community with a pervading mushroom odor. Toadstool wine!
A second contemplation of the new buried room and its occupants made much clear. However had he for a moment confused schoolmasterish, peevish Hisvin with this imperious figure discoursing to the crafty-looking lad who stood before him—the beaky nose, the wattled cheeks, the proud hawklike visage, but above all the ruby-red eyeballs with white irises and glittering jet pupils—those last alone should have told him (but for lingerings of his torture-wrought amnesia) that this could be none other than Quarmal, Lord of Quarmall, on numerous counts his and friend Fafhrd’s dearest enemy.
As soon as this realization struck him he noted other clues to the scene’s identity and locale, such as a curtain of dangling cords bellowing inward at the room’s far end, and behind that, dimly glimpsed, a thick-thighed, short-armed human monster walking without moving forward—one of the almost mindless slaves specially bred to work the treadmills that spun the great wooden fans that sucked down air into the many ramp-joined levels of the buried city and its low-ceilinged mushroom fields.
Unquestionably he was half again as far from Rime Isle as he’d been when overtaken by Sister Pain while spying on Hisvet’s remedy for boredom on tedious afternoons in Lankhmar Below, the distance demi-doubled—a prodigious feat of subterranean transversing, one must admit. Unless, of course, both experiences were incidents in a lengthy nightmare dreamed while shallowly buried on Gallows Hill—which more and more seemed the explanation of choice for all this underground hugger-mugger, provided he were eventually rescued from it, to be sure.
Coming out of this reverie, the Mouser checked that his shallow breathing of earth-trapped air was still unlabored and then scanned anew the long room lined with books and charts and philosophic instruments. How characteristic of most of his life, he told himself, was his present situation! To be on the outside in drenching rain or blasting snow or (like now) worse and looking in at a cozy abode of culture, comfort, companionship, and couth—what man wouldn’t turn to thieving and burglary when faced at every turn with such a fate?
But back to the business at hand, he told himself, resuming his scanning of the spacious room with its two-and-one-half occupants (the half being for the monstrous treadslave, laboring behind the wavy curtain of cords at the far end).
The soundlessly lecturing Lord Quarmal perched on a high stool beside a narrow table, and the attentive lad (whose dutiful answers or replies were likewise inaudible) were like a study in old and young skinniness … and wariness, to judge by their expressions. He also noted a family resemblance in their features although the lad’s eyes had no sign of the old man’s ruby-red balls and white irises, while the latter’s long-hair tufts between his shriveled ears and bald pate had no greenish cast such as that shown by the other’s short-cropped locks.
What were they being cagey about? he asked himself. Damn it, why was this talk blocked off? Recalling he’d had the same trouble hearing Hisvet and Company at first, he focused his attention, (or, rather, the occult auditory) in one effort to make it come through to him as clearly as the visual did.
Failing to achieve any results, he decided shortly he must be pressing. He relaxed his concentration and let his mind drift. A gesture of Quarmal with the long thin stiff wand or rod he carried turned his attention to the big Nehwon map, the handsome craft of which tempted the Mouser to scan it almost idly for a while. The colors were mostly naturalistic, with blues representing seas and lakes, yellow for deserts, white for snow and ice, and so forth. Close to the west edge, near the dark blue of the Outer Sea, Quarmall stood out in royal purple as clearly as if there’d been a sign reading “You are here.”
Just north of it were several small white ovals—the peaks of the Mountains of Hunger. Then a great space of pale brown with the blue thread of the Hlal winding through it—the grainfields. Then Hlal-mouth with the city of Lankhmar on its east bank, and above those the paler blue expanse of the Inner Sea.
Next above that, the dark green Land of the Eight Cities ending in the white-topped wall of the Trollstep Mountains and, everywhere north of that, the white of the Cold Waste. And, off in the Outer Sea deep blue of the top-west corner, something he’d never seen on a map before, Rime Isle. It looked very small. The Mouser shivered to see depicted the distance between his home port and Quarmall. This had all better be a nightmare dream, he told himself.
His gaze next traveling east beyond the Cold Waste, it came to the Sea of Monsters and, beyond that, another shiversome first in his experience of charts: an elliptical black blotch with a glowing sapphire blue spot at its center that had to be the Shadowland, Abode of Death. Why, in the Empire of the East it meant execution by torture for a cartographer to limn that land.