As Afreyt, all a-shiver at this prodigy, listened to the recitation of the innocuous-seeming second and third lines and realized that the situation must be different, with Fafhrd playing a more passive role than she’d suspected, a second and larger emergence started, that of a head behind and to the right of the hand and with its hairy earth-mired crown beginning at the level of the palm.
The forward-facing brow, as it emerged at the same even rate as had the hand, showed more bright yellow in its illumination than white leviathan light would account for, which reminded Afreyt of Cif’s dream of the Mouser wearing a glowing yellow mask and was Afreyt’s first clue to the identity of the underground traveler. By now it was apparent that the escaping hand was attached to and directed by the rising head, and Afreyt, shaking with terror at the unnatural sight, at least need not fear the dartings, scuttlings, and gropings of a hostile, detached, and independently roving hand.
As she heard the child’s clear little voice recite the somewhat sinister fourth line of the Quarmallian death spell, which Afreyt already suspected to be something of the sort (which Fingers did not as yet), the eyes beneath the rising brow came into view and opened wide.
Afreyt at once recognized the gray eyes of the Mouser, saw that they were fixed upon Fafhrd and full of fear for him and that it was the very fear of death. At that moment she would have given a great deal to know whether Fafhrd’s own eyes were open or closed, if the Mouser had made his deduction from the expression in them or from his comrade’s extreme pallor or other physical symptom. She did not think (at least as yet) of getting up and looking for herself—her awe of what was happening, rather than her fear (though that was great) kept her frozen.
As a matter of fact his eyes were closed with the spell’s workings, which operated by degrees, line by line, from sleep to death.
Fingers, reciting the death spell Quarmal had taught her hypnotically after her kidnapping and which she now thought of as a sleep spell of her mother’s (as he’d told her ‘twas) saw the same figure emerging from the earth that Afreyt did, but it did not catch her interest. She hoped it would not interfere with her recital of the spell and its working on Fafhrd and herself. Perhaps it was the beginning of a dream they’d share.
The Mouser had last lost consciousness underground spying on old Quarmal’s buried map room and chamber of necromancy while asking himself questions about Rime Isle.
He came to awareness now with head, shoulders, and one arm emerged into a familiar cellar on the latter island and with the answers to his questions in plain view: Fafhrd dying in the arms and against the breasts of his daughter by (the Quarmallian) slave girl Friska, and the child’s unwitting recitation of the death spell.
Who else could be the assassin indicated by the lone red dot on Quarmal’s world map? And so what Mouser must do at once to save his dearest friend from life’s worst ill—even before Mou inhaled the unrationed breaths he longed to, stretched the cramped muscles, or tasted the wine for which his dry throat cried—was to countermand that death spell by snapping his fingers thrice as he’d just now seen Quarmal do to stay the instructional assassination of his son Igwarl by the latter’s sister Issa.
And, if Mou knew anything about the rules of magic and the ways of Quarmal, those snaps must be perfectly executed, delivered without delay, and loud as thundercracks—or else he could go whistle for Faf’s life forevermore.
And so it happened that as Afreyt listened to Fingers recite the idyllic fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth lines of the spell (but getting closer to the nasty ones she’d “spelled” to them in her fatigue the second morning of the cold), the Rime Isle woman was puzzled and nonplused to see the earth-traveler—just as there rose into view Mouser’s mouth set in a narrow slit for air scavenging—wave his limply held free hand vigorously, as if it were a dusting rag from which he shook the dirt, and then carefully settle the pad at end of his middle finger against the ball of his thumb above ring and little finger bent back against the palm, and against which the poised and powerfully tensed middle finger now flashed down.
It was, quite simply, the loudest fingersnap she’d ever heard. So might a most impatient god summon a reprehensibly straying angel.
And as if that prodigious snap were not enough to prove whatever point was being contested, it was followed with preternatural swiftness by not one, but two repetitions of the same sound, each one a little louder than the previous one, which as any knowledgeable gambler knows, is not a bet to be backed, an achievement to set a wager on.
The Mouser’s fingerbolts had their desired effect on the others in the cellar, including their sender.
They brought Afreyt to her feet. Fingers was silenced, Quarmal’s death spell canceled. The bell tones ceased to sound, the cabin-girl fell backward. Fafhrd collapsed, sank sidewise against her.
This should have made it easier for Afreyt to see the Mouser, but it didn’t. The effort he’d put into his fingerbolts had taken it out of him. As if time had been turned back to that night of full Satyrs Moon on Gallows Hill, his outline grew fainter, the steady leviathan light flickered, his emergence slowed and stopped, without reaching his waist, and he began to slip backward into the earth.
His eyes fixed on Afreyt’s most dolefully. His lips opened and a low moaning came out, such as a ghost utters at cockcrow, infinitely sad.
Afreyt plunged to her knees before the unpaved square. Her grasping digging hands encountered only loose dirt. She clambered to her feet and turned back to the fallen figures.
The man with the child’s skin and the child lay as if dead. But a closer inspection showed them to be but sleeping.
.28.
Cif scraped the wooden scoop four times across the earthen tunnel face before her, detaching small chunks and granules of loosened sand, which pattered down on and around her boots.
The leviathan-oil lamp behind her cast her head’s shadow on the fresh area of tunnel face thus uncovered and the newly attached snow-serpent hide (which was the twenty-third in from the shaft) puffed warm air upon it from outside, where Satyrs Moon was two hours set and the bright sun almost as long arisen.
She had been working at the tunnel face all of that time, advancing it at least two feet (and making room for another length of the flexible snowy piping, which had just now been attached).
With her free hand she felt, deep in her pouch, the reassuring touch of the brazen loop, wide enough to be a ring for two fingers, with which Mikkidu had greeted her this morn, telling her that it had been recovered during the digging last night and was (as she well knew) an item the Captain was seldom parted from.
She judged she had another hour of face work in her before she lost her freshness and must give place to Rill, who now assisted her and only had been below for half an hour.
But now ‘twas time for one of the quarter-hourly checks she made.
“Cover the lamp,” she called back to Rill.
The lady with the crippled left hand pulled up around the coolly burning lamp a thick black sack and drew it together at the top.
The tunnel grew black as pitch.
Cif stared ahead and this time seemed to see, floating at eye level, a phosphorescent yellow mask such as she’d seen the Mouser wearing in the dream she’d had the first night of the cold. It was dim but truly seemed there.
Letting fall the scoop and withdrawing her left hand from her pouch, she dug her gloved fingers into the sandy face where the mask was drifting. It stayed there, did not fade out or waver, but grew brighter. The featureless black ovals that were its eyes seemed to stare back at her commandingly.
“Uncover the lamp,” she managed to enunciate.
Rill obeyed, not trusting herself to ask questions. Almost with a rush the white light flooded back, revealing Cif staring fiercely at the tunnel face. Rill could no longer contain herself.
“You think…?” she managed to ask in a voice fraught with awe.
“We’ll soon know,” the other replied, drawing back her clawed right hand and driving it into the loosened sand of the tunnel face at the level of her chin, twisting it this way and that, back and forth, feeling around before withdrawing it. (Small chunks and grains showered around.) She repeated this action twice, but on the second occasion paused with her hand still dug in.