The Mouser dearly loved puzzles, if only to elaborate on them rather than solve them, but he had no time for this one. The wherry had drawn up at the royal wharf, and he was haughtily exhibiting to the clamoring eunuchs and guards his starfish-emblemed courier’s ring from Glipkerio and his parchment sealed with the cross-sworded seal of Movarl.
The latter seemed to impress the palace-fry most. He was swiftly bowed across the dock, mounted a dizzily tall, gaily-painted wooden stair, and found himself in Glipkerio’s audience chamber—a glorious sea-fronting blue-tiled room, each large triangular tile bearing a fishy emblem in bas-relief.
The room was huge despite the blue curtains dividing it now into two halves. A pair of naked and shaven pages bowed to the Mouser and parted the curtains for him. Their sinuous silent movements against that blue background made him think of mermen. He stepped through the narrow triangular opening—to be greeted by a rather distant but imperious “Hush!”
Since the hissing command came from the puckered lips of Glipkerio himself and since one of the beanpole monarch’s hand-long skinny fingers now rose and crossed those lips, the Mouser stopped dead. With a fainter hiss the blue curtains fell together behind him.
It was a strange and most startling scene that presented itself. The Mouser’s heart missed a beat—mostly in self-outrage that his imagination had completely missed the weird possibility that was now staged before him.
Three broad archways led out onto a porch on which rested the pointy-ended gray vehicle he had noted balanced at the top of the chute. Now he could see a hinged manhole toward its out-jutting bow.
At the near end of the room was a large, thick-bottomed, close-barred cage containing at least a score of black rats, which chittered and wove around each other ceaselessly and sometimes clattered the bars menacingly.
At the far end of the sea-blue room, near the circular stair leading up into the palace’s tallest minaret, Glipkerio had risen in excitement from his golden audience couch shaped like a seashell. The fantastic overlord stood a head higher than Fafhrd, but was thin as a starved Mingol. His black toga made him look like a funeral cypress. Perhaps to offset this dismal effect, he wore a wreath of small violet flowers around his blond head, the hair of which clustered in golden ringlets.
Close beside him, scarce half his height, hanging weightlessly on his arm like an elf and dressed in a loose robe of pale blonde silk, was Hisvet. The Mouser’s dagger-cut, stretching from her left nostril to her jaw, was still a pink line and would have given her a sardonic expression, except that now as her gaze swung to the Mouser she smiled most prettily.
Standing almost midway between the audience couch and the caged rats was Hisvet’s father Hisvin. His skinny frame was wrapped in a black toga, but he still wore his tight black leather cap with its long cheek-flaps. His gaze was fixed fiercely on the caged rats and he was weaving his bony fingers at them hypnotically.
“Gnawers dark from deep below…” he began to incant in a voice that whistled with age yet was authoritatively strident.
At that instant a naked young serving maid appeared through a narrow archway near the audience couch, bearing on her shaven head a great silver tray laden with goblets and temptingly mounded silver plates. Her wrists were chained to her waist, while a fine silver chain between her narrow black anklets prevented her from taking steps more than twice as long as her narrow pink-toed feet.
Without a “Hush!” this time, Glipkerio raised a narrow long palm to her and once again put a long, skinny finger to his lips. The slim maid’s movements ceased imperceptibly and she stood silent as a birch tree on a windless day.
The Mouser was about to say, “Puissant Overlord, this is evilest enchantment. You are consorting with your dearest enemies!”—but at that instant Hisvet smiled at him again and he felt a frighteningly delicious tingling run down his cheek and gums from the silver dart in his left temple to his tongue, inhibiting speech.
Hisvin recommenced in his commanding Lankhmarese that bore the faintest trace of an Ilthmar lisp and reminded the Mouser of the lisping rat Grig:
“Gnawers dark from deep below,
To ratty grave you now must go!
Blear each eye and drag each tail!
Fur fall off and heartbeat fail!”
All the black rats crowded to the farthest side of their cage from Hisvin, chittering and squeaking as if in maddest terror. Most of them were on their hind feet, clawing toward the bars like a panicky human crowd.
The old man, now swiftly weaving his fingers in a most complex, mysterious pattern, continued relentlessly:
“Blur your eyesight, stop your breath!—
By corrupting spell of Death!
Your brains are cheese, your life is fled!
Spin once around and drop down dead!”
And the black rats did just that—spinning like amateur actors both to ease and dramatize their falls, yet falling most convincingly all the same with varying plops onto the cage floor or each other and lying stiff and still with furry eyelids a-droop and hairless tails slack and sharp-nailed feet thrust stiffly up.
There was a curious slow-paced slappy clapping as Glipkerio applauded with his narrow hands which were long as human feet. Then the beanpole monarch hurried to the cage with strides so lengthy that the lower two-thirds of his toga looked like the silhouette of a tent. Hisvet skipped merrily at his side, while Hisvin came circling swiftly.
“Didst see that wonder, Gray Mouser?” Glipkerio demanded in piping voice, waving his courier closer. “There is a plague of rats in Lankhmar. You, who might from your name be expected to protect us, have returned somewhat tardily. But—bless the Black-Boned Gods!—my redoubtable servant Hisvin and his incomparable sorcerer-apprentice daughter Hisvet, having conquered the rats which menaced the grain fleet, hastened back in good time to take measures against our local rat-plague—magical measures which will surely be successful, as has now been fully demonstrated.”
At this point the fantastical overlord reached a long thin naked arm from under his toga and chucked the Mouser under the chin, much to the latter’s distaste, though he concealed it. “Hisvin and Hisvet even tell me,” Glipkerio remarked with a fluty chuckle, “that they suspected you for a while of being in league with the rats—as who would not from your gray garb and small crouchy figure?—and kept you tied. But all’s well that ends well and I forgive you.”
The Mouser began a most polemical refutation and accusation—but only in his mind, for he heard himself saying, “Here, Milord, is an urgent missive from the King of the Eight Cities. By the by, there was a dragon—”
“Oh, that two-headed dragon!” Glipkerio interrupted with another piping chuckle and a roguish finger-wave. He thrust the parchment into the breast of his toga without even glancing at the seal. “Movarl has informed me by albatross post of the strange mass delusion in my fleet. Hisvin and Hisvet, master psychologists both, confirm this. Sailors are a woefully superstitious lot, Gray Mouser, and ‘tis evident their fancies are more furiously contagious than I suspected—for even you were infected! I would have expected it of your barbarian mate—Favner? Fafrah?—or even of Slinoor and Lukeen—for what are captains but jumped-up sailors?—but you, who are at least sleazily civilized … However, I forgive you that too! Oh, what a mercy that wise Hisvin here thought to keep watch on the fleet in his cutter!”
The Mouser realized he was nodding—and that Hisvet and, in his wrinkle-lipped fashion, Hisvin were smiling archly. He looked down at the piled stiff rats in their theatrical death-throes. Issek take ‘em, but their droopy-lidded eyes even looked whitely glazed!
“Their fur hasn’t fallen off,” he criticized mildly.
“You are too literal,” Glipkerio told him with a laugh. “You don’t comprehend poetic license.”
“Or the devices of humano-animal suggestion,” Hisvin added solemnly.
The Mouser trod hard—and, he thought, surreptitiously—on a long tail that drooped from the cage bottom to the tiled floor. There was no atom of response.
But Hisvin noted and lightly clicked a fingernail. The Mouser fancied there was a slight stirring deep in the rat-pile. Suddenly a nauseous stink sprang from the cage. Glipkerio gulped. Hisvet delicately pinched her pale nostrils between thumb and ring-finger.
“You had some question about the efficacy of my spell?” Hisvin asked the Mouser most civilly.
“Aren’t the rats corrupting rather fast?” the Mouser asked. It occurred to him that there might have been a tight-sealed sliding door in the floor of the cage and a dozen long-dead rats or merely a well-rotted steak in the thick bottom beneath.
“Hisvin kills ‘em doubly dead,” Glipkerio asserted somewhat feebly, pressing his long hand to his narrow stomach. “All processes of decay are accelerated!”
Hisvin waved hurriedly and pointed toward an open window beyond the archways to the porch. A brawny yellow Mingol in black loincloth sprang from where he squatted in a corner, heaved up the cage, and ran with it to dump it in the sea. The Mouser followed him. Elbowing the Mingol aside with a shrewd dig at the short ribs and leaning far out, supporting himself with his other hand reaching up and gripping the tiled window-side, the Mouser saw the cage tumbling down the sheer wall and sea-eaten rock, the stiff rats tumbling about in it, and fall with a white splash into the blue waters.