A split appeared in the middle of the open door. Nevertheless Frix sprang away from there to the starboard trap-door leading to the hold and heaved it up. Hisvet threw herself on the floor toward it and thrust her head down into the dark square hole.
There was something terribly animal-like about the movements of the two women. It may have been only the cramped quarters and the low ceiling, but it seemed to the Mouser that they moved by preference on all fours.
All the while Fafhrd’s chest-sunk head kept lifting very slowly and then falling with a jerk as he went on snoring.
Hisvet sprang up and waved on the ten white rats. Led by Skwee, they trooped down through the hatch, their blued-iron weapons flashing and once or twice clashing, and were gone in a twinkling. Frix grabbed dark garments out of a curtained niche. Hisvet caught her by the wrist and thrust the maid ahead of her down the trap and then descended herself. Before pulling the hatch down above her, she took a last look around the cabin. As her red eyes gazed briefly at the Mouser, it seemed to him that her forehead and cheeks were grown over with silky white hair, but that may well have been a combination of eyelash-blur and her own disordered hair streaming and streaking down across her face.
The cabin door split and a man’s length of thick mast boomed through, overturning the bolstering table and scattering the furniture set on and against it. After the mast-end came piling in three apprehensive sailors followed by Slinoor, holding a cutlass low, and Slinoor’s starsman (navigation officer) with a crossbow at the cock.
Slinoor pressed ahead a little and surveyed the scene swiftly yet intently, then said, “Our poppy-dust curry has taken Glipkerio’s two lust-besotted rogues, but Hisvet’s hid with her nymphy slave-girl. The rats are out of their cages. Search, sailors! Starsman, cover us!”
Gingerly at first, but soon in a rush, the sailors searched the cabin, tumbling the empty boxes and jerking the quilts and mattress off the sea-bed and swinging it up to see beneath, heaving chests away from walls and flinging open the unlocked ones, sweeping Hisvet’s wardrobe in great silken armfuls out of the curtained niches in which it had been hanging.
The Mouser again made a mighty effort to speak or move, with no more success than to widen his blurred eye-slits a little. A sailor louted into him and he helplessly collapsed sideways against an arm of his chair without quite falling out of it. Fafhrd got a shove behind and slumped face-down on the table in a dish of stewed plums, his great arms outsweeping unconsciously, upsetting cups and scattering plates.
The starsman kept crossbow trained on each new space uncovered. Slinoor watched with eagle eye, flipping aside silken fripperies with his cutlass point and using it to overset the rats’ table, peering the while narrowly.
“There’s where the vermin feasted like men,” he observed disgustedly. “The curry was set before them. Would they had gorged themselves senseless on it.”
“Likely they were the ones to note the drug even through the masking spices of the curry, and warn the women,” the starsman put in. “Rats are prodigiously wise to poisons.”
As it became apparent neither girls nor rats were in the cabin, Slinoor cried with angry anxiety, “They can’t have escaped to the deck—there’s the sky-trap locked below besides our guard above. The mate’s party bars the after hold. Perchance the stern-lights—”
But just then the Mouser heard one of the horn windows behind him being opened and Squid’s arms-master call from there, “Naught came this way. Where are they, captain?”
“Ask someone wittier than I,” Slinoor tossed him sourly. “Certain, they’re not here.”
“Would that these two could speak,” the starsman wished, indicating the Mouser and Fafhrd.
“No,” Slinoor said dourly. “They’d just lie. Cover the larboard trap to the hold. I’ll have it up and speak to the mate.”
Just then footsteps came hurrying across the middeck and Squid’s mate with blood-streaked face entered by the broken door, half dragging and half supporting a sailor who seemed to be holding a thin stick to his own bloody cheek.
“Why have you left the hold?” Slinoor demanded of the first. “You should be with your party below.”
“Rats ambushed us on our way to the after hold,” the mate gasped. “There were dozens of blacks led by a white, some armed like men. The sword of a beam-hanger almost cut my eye across. Two foamy-mouthed springers dashed out our lamp. ‘Twere pure folly to have gone on in the dark. There’s scarce a man of my party not bitten, slashed or jabbed. I left them guarding the foreway to the hold. They say their wounds are poisoned and talk of nailing down the hatch.”
“Oh monstrous cowardice!” Slinoor cried. “You’ve spoiled my trap that would have scotched them at the start. Now all’s to do and difficult. Oh scarelings! Daunted by rats!”
“I tell you they were armed!” the mate protested and then, swinging the sailor forward, “Here’s my proof with a spearlet in his cheek.”
“Don’t drag her out, captain, sir,” the sailor begged as Slinoor moved to examine his face. “’Tis poisoned too, I wot.”
“Hold still, boy,” Slinoor commanded. “And take your hands away—I’ve got it firm. The point’s near the skin. I’ll drive it out forward so the barbs don’t catch. Pinion his arms, mate. Don’t move your face, boy, or you’ll be hurt worse. If it’s poisoned, it must come out the faster. There!”
The sailor squeaked. Fresh blood rilled down his cheek.
“’Tis a nasty needle indeed,” Slinoor commended, inspecting the bloody point. “Doesn’t look poisoned. Mate, gently cut off the shaft aft of the wound, draw out the rest forward.”
“Here’s further proof, most wicked,” said the starsman, who’d been picking about in the litter. He handed Slinoor a tiny crossbow.
Slinoor held it up before him. In the pale candlelight it gleamed bluely, while the skipper’s dark-circled eyes were like agates.
“Here’s evil’s soul,” he cried. “Perchance ‘twas well you were ambushed in the hold. ‘Twill teach each mariner to hate and fear all rats again, like a good grain-sailor should. And now by a swift certain killing of all rats on Squid wipe out today’s traitorous foolery, when you clapped for rats and let rats lead your cheers, seduced by a scarlet girl and bribed by that most misnamed Mouser.”
The Mouser, still paralyzed and perforce watching Slinoor aslant as Slinoor pointed at him, had to admit it was a well-turned reference to himself.
“First off,” Slinoor said, “drag those two rogues on deck. Truss them to mast or rail. I’ll not have them waking to botch my victory.”
“Shall I up with a trap and loose a dart in the after hold?” the starsman asked eagerly.
“You should know better,” was all Slinoor answered.
“Shall I gong for the galley and run up a red lamp?” the mate suggested.
Slinoor was silent two heartbeats, then said, “No. This is Squid’s fight to wipe out today’s shame. Besides, Lukeen’s a hothead botcher. Forget I said that, gentlemen, but it is so.”
“Yet we’d be safer with the galley standing by,” the mate ventured to continue. “Even now the rats may be gnawing holes in us.”
“That’s unlikely with the Rat-Queen below,” Slinoor retorted. “Speed’s what will save us and not standby ships. Now hearken close. Guard well all ways to the hold. Keep traps and hatches shut. Rouse off the watch. Arm every man. Gather on middeck all we can spare from sailing. Move!”
The Mouser wished Slinoor hadn’t said “Move!” quite so vehemently, for the two sailors instantly grabbed his ankles and dragged him most enthusiastically out of the littered cabin and across the middeck, his head bumping a bit. True, he couldn’t feel the bumps, only hear them.
To the west the sky was a quarter globe of stars, to the east a mass of fog below and thinner mist above, with the gibbous moon shining through the latter like a pale misshapen silver ghost-lamp. The wind had slackened. Squid sailed smoothly.
One sailor held the Mouser against the mainmast, facing aft, while the other looped rope around him. As the sailors bound him with his arms flat to his sides, the Mouser felt a tickle in his throat and life returning to his tongue, but he decided not to try to speak just yet. Slinoor in his present mood might order him gagged.
The Mouser’s next divertissement was watching Fafhrd dragged out by four sailors and bound lengthwise, facing inboard with head aft and higher than feet, to the larboard rail. It was quite a comic performance, but the Northerner snored through it.
Sailors began to gather then on middeck, some palely silent but most quipping in low voices. Pikes and cutlasses gave them courage. Some carried nets and long sharp-tined forks. Even the cook came with a great cleaver, which he hefted playfully at the Mouser.