Bracing himself, he scanned around the cloud-streaked night, again sensing menace to the southwest—something on tall invisible legs or shouldering down out of the sullied moonshine.
He advanced three paces and peered down into the volcano’s narrow-throated fire pit.
The tiny rose-red lake of molten lava flooring it looked very far down and startlingly still, yet on his windchilled cheeks and chin he felt the prick of its radiant heat.
His hands shot toward the pouch between his legs so he might take from it the strange talisman of the foreign god who was his captain-father’s foe and hurl it down before hostile night could gather its powers.
But the next instant, as if it had read his mind, the small massy Whirlpool Queller came alive and dashed back and forth, this way and that, seeking escape, outdinting the pouch confining it, drubbing him about the thighs and genitals, inflicting jolts of sickening pain.
His actions shaped themselves without pause to this supernatural flurry. His horny hands closed on the dodging Queller in its bag. He turned around, lunged to the leadstone skull-rock, and pressed tightly against it the encindered and empouched (and certainly ensorcelled!) gold talisman. It shook strongly. He was glad it had no teeth. He felt night’s awfulest powers looming over him.
He did not look up. Keeping the vibrating Queller confined against the leadstone with left hand and knee, he used his right to draw his dirk and cut the straps by which his pouch hung from his belt. Then, holding his dirk in his teeth by its cork-covered grip, he used the coil of thin climbing line hanging at his side to bind together firmly the skull-rock and the tight-woven wool pouch along with its frantic contents—with many a thoughtful look and hardest knots.
While concentrating on this job with blind automatism, steadily resisting the urge to look over his shoulder, his mind roved. He recalled what his co-mate Mikkidu had told him about how Captain Mouser had had them double the lashing of the deck cargo of Seahawk so that the galley retained its integrity and buoyancy when foundered by leviathan dive beside it, and how he’d lectured them on a man’s need to bind securely all his possessions to be sure of them, and how he was guessed to have treated the same a beauteous slim she-demon who had sought to enthrall him and secure the ship.
Next came the memory of a tranquil twilight hour when the day’s work ashore was done and Captain Mouser, wine cup in hand and in a rare mood of philosophizing familiarity, confided, “I distrust all serious thought, reasoned analysis, and such. When faced with difficulties, it is my practice to dive but once, deeply, into the pool of the problem, with supreme confidence in my ability to pluck up the answer.”
That had been before Freg’s letter had transformed his captain and mentor into his hero and sire—and set him seeking special ways to prove himself. And in so seeking he’d loosed, poor fool, his father’s fellest foe.
Where was his father now?
And could he now recoup?
His task was done, the last loop drawn tight, the last knot tied, bag firmly lashed to stone. Again, without one instant’s hesitation, he tightly gripped the weighty package in both hands, turned, took two steps into the icy gale and toward the pit, lifted it to its apex, and then very suddenly (and with the feeling that if he took one moment more, something very big above him would snatch it from him) hurled it straight down at the rosy-red target.
He ended in a low crouch on the rim, which he immediately gripped, shooting his legs back so that he lay flat—prone with his face thrust over, peering down. And it was well that he effected this additional descent for he was smitten by a chill gust from above which else had knocked him after his projectile—and crosswise brushed by a huge wing which would have done the same had he been inches higher.
He kept his eye upon the black grain of the plummeting skull-rock package. From it two tiny, whitely incandescent eyes glared up at him. One of them winked. He saw the grain enter the molten pool, from which a single like-sized red drop rebounded, whereupon the whole small lake ‘gan to seethe and shake and churn and coruscate, its level crawling upward, as if a dam had burst. The speed of this ascent of the lava pool ‘gan to increase as he watched. The crawl became a scramble, then a rush. And what did this portend? Had he saved the Gray Mouser? Or doomed him?—if there were connection between man and talisman.
A blast of hot air traveling ahead of the upgushing lava near seared his slitted eyes. Without pause, groping thought gave way to arrow-swift action. Escape was the one word or he’d not live to think. Pushing himself to his feet and twisting around, he began a skipping moonlit descent of the black cone he’d but now laboriously climbed. Perilous to the point of madness and beyond, yet utterly necessary were he to live to tell.
His eyes were fully occupied spotting the landing points of the successive leaps toward which he steered his feet. The moonlight turned bright pink. There was a giant hissing. He smelled sulfur and brimstone. There was a mighty roar, as if a cosmic lion had coughed, and a hot gust clapped his back heartily, turning three of his leaps into one, speeding his flight. Red missiles flashed past him and burst on impact to either side his course ahead of him like angry stars. The steep slope gentled. His leaps became a lope. The leonine coughing re-echoed like thunder rolling away. The pink moonshine paled and darkened.
At last he risked a backward look, expecting scenes of destruction, but there was only a great wall of sooty darkness that reeked of acid smoke and billowed overhead to besprinkle Skama with black.
He shrugged. For good or ill, his work was done and he was headed south on the front of a second monstrous weather change.
.27.
Fingers knew she was dreaming because there was a rainbow in the cave. But that was all right because the six colors were more like those of pastel chalk than light and there was a blackboard at which she was being taught to pleasure Ilthmar sailor-men by her mother and an old, old man, both wearing long black robes and hoods which hid their upper faces.
For teaching, her mother bore her witch’s wand and the old man a long silver spoon with which he managed the cleverest demonstrations.
But then, perhaps to illustrate some virtue—persistence?—he began to tap the bowl of his spoon on the hollow top of the desk at which they all three sat. He beat softly with a slow funeral rhythm that fascinated her until that doleful sound was all that was left in the world.
She woke to hear water a-drip, in the same slow beat as the dream-spoon, upon the thin horn pane of a slanting roof window close overhead.
She realized she had grown warm and thrown back her blanket, and as she listened to the drip she thought, The frosty spell has broken. It’s the thaw.
From the pillow beside her, Gale, who’d also thrown back her bedclothes, murmured urgently in exactly the same rhythm as the water drops: “Faf-hrd, Faf-hrd, Un-cle Fafhrd.”
Which told Fingers that the drops were a message from the engaging red-haired captain, boding his return. And she told herself that she had a closer relationship to him than Gale’s or even Afreyt’s and must bestir herself and venture out and assure his safe return.
This decision once made, she wormed her way off the bed—it seemed important to make no stir—and drew on her short robe and soft fur boots.
After a moment’s study and thought, she dropped the thin sheet back across Gale’s frowsy supine sprawl and stole from the room.
Passing the bedroom where Cif and Afreyt lodged, she heard sounds of someone rising and turned down the stairs, tiptoeing next the wall to avoid the treads creaking.
Arriving in the banked warmth of the dark kitchen, she smelled gahvey heating and heard footsteps above and behind her. Without haste she made her way to the door of the bath and concealed herself behind Fafhrd’s robe of coarse toweling hanging beside it, in such a way as to be able to observe without herself being seen, she trusted.
It was Cif descended the stairs, dressed for the day’s work. The short woman threw wide the outer door and the sounds of the thaw came in and the low white beams of the setting moon. Standing in them, she set to her lips a thin whistle and blew—without audible results, but Fingers judged a signal had been sent.
Then Cif went to the banked fire, poured herself a mug of gahvey and took it back to the doorway where she sipped and waited. For a while she gazed straight at Fingers. But if Cif saw the girl, the woman made no sign.