“Yes, yes, dear Hisvin,” Glipkerio cut in, his babbling growing desperate. “I’m very grateful … Frix and Hisvet, they’re good ones … I’ll remember all … quarter to midnight … Blue Chamber … pages … wands … wands for Mingols. And now I must rush me—”
“Also,” Hisvin continued implacably, his fingernails like a spiked trap. “Beware of the Gray Mouser! Set your guards on the watch for him! And now … be off to your flagellatory pastimes,” he added brightly, loosing his horny nails from Glipkerio’s arm.
Massaging the dents they’d made, hardly yet realizing he was free, Glipkerio babbled on, “Ah yes, the Mouser—bad, bad! But the rest … good, good! Enormous thanks, Hisvin! And now I must rush me—” And he turned away with a lunging, improbably long step.
“—to see a maid—” Hisvin couldn’t resist repeating.
As if the words stung him between the shoulders, Glipkerio turned back at that and interrupted with some spirit. “To attend to business of highest importance! I have other secret weapons than yours, old man—and other sorcerors too!” And then he was swift-striding off again, black toga at extremest stretch.
Cupping bony hand to wrinkled lips, Hisvin cried after him sweetly, “I hope your business writhes prettily and screams most soothingly, brave overlord!”
The Gray Mouser showed his courier’s ring to the guards at the opal-tiled land entry of the palace. He half expected it not to work. Hisvin had had two days to poison silly Glip’s mind against him, and indeed there were sidewise glances and a wait long enough for the Mouser to feel the full strength of his hangover and to swear he’d never drink so much, so mixed again. And to marvel too at his stupidity and good luck in venturing last night into the dark, rat-infested streets and getting back silly-drunk to Nattick’s through some of the darkest of them without staggering into a second rat-ambush. Ah well, at least he’d found Sheelba’s black vial safe at Nattick’s, resisted the impulse to drink it while tipsy, and he’d got that heartening, titillating note from Hisvet. As soon as his business was finished here, he must hie himself straight to Hisvin’s house and—
A guard returned from somewhere and nodded sourly. He was passed inside.
From the sneer-lipped third butler, who was an old gossip friend of the Mouser, he learned that Lankhmar’s overlord was with his Emergency Council, which now included Hisvin. He resisted the grandiose impulse to show off his Sheelban rat-magic before the notables of Lankhmar and in the presence of his chief sorcerous rival, though he did confidently pat the black vial in his pouch. After all, he needed a spot where rats were foregathered for the thing to work and he needed Glipkerio alone best to work on him. So he strolled into the dim mazy lower corridors of the palace to waste an hour and eavesdrop or chat as opportunity afforded.
As generally happened when he killed time, the Mouser soon found himself headed for the kitchen. Though he dearly detested Samanda, he made a point of slyly courting her, because he knew her power in the palace and liked her stuffed mushrooms and mulled wine.
The plain-tiled yet spotless corridors he now traversed were empty. It was the slack half hour when dinner has been washed up and supper mostly not begun, and every weary servitor who can flops on a cot or the floor. Also, the menace of the rats doubtless discouraged wanderings of servant and master alike. Once he thought he heard a faint boot-tramp behind him, but it faded when he looked back, and no one appeared. By the time he had begun to smell foods and fire and pots and soap and dishwater and floorwater, the silence had became almost eerie. Then somewhere a bell harshly knelled three times and from ahead, “Get out!” was suddenly roared in Samanda’s harsh voice. The Mouser shrank back despite himself. A leather curtain bellied a score of paces ahead of him and three kitchen boys and a maid came hurrying silently into the corridor, their bare feet making no sound on the tiles. In the light filtering down from the tiny, high windows they looked like waxen mannikins as they fled swiftly past him. Though they avoided him, they seemed not to see him. Or perhaps that was only some whip-ingrained “eyes front!” discipline.
As silently as they—who couldn’t even make the noise of a hair dropping, since this morning’s barbering had left them none—the Mouser hurried forward and put his eye to the slit in the leather curtains.
The four other doorways to the kitchen, even the one in the gallery, also had their curtains drawn. The great hot room had only two occupants. Fat Samanda, perspiring in her black wool dress and under the prickly plum pudding of her piled black hair, was heating in the whitely blazing fireplace the seven wire lashes of a long-handled whip. She drew it forth a little. The strands glowed dull red. She thrust it back. Her sparse, sweat-beaded black mustache lengthened and shed its salt rain in a smile as her tiny, fat-pillowed eyes fed on Reetha, who stood with arms straight down her sides and chin high, almost in the room’s center, half faced away from the blaze. The serving maid wore only her black leather collar. The diamond-stripe patterns of her last whippings still showed faintly down her back.
“Stand straighter, my pet,” Samanda cooed like a cow. “Or would it be easier if your wrists were roped to a beam and your ankles to the ring-bolt in the cellar door?”
Now the dry stink of dirty floorwater was strongest in the Mouser’s nostrils. Glancing down and to one side through his slit, he noted a large wooden pail filled almost to the brim with a mop’s huge soggy head, lapped around by gray, soap-foamy water.
Samanda inspected the seven wires again. They glowed bright red. “Now,” she said. “Brace yourself, my poppet.”
Slipping through the curtain and snatching up the mop by its thick, splintery handle, the Mouser raced at Samanda, holding the mop’s huge, dripping Medusa-head between their faces in hopes that she would not be able to identify her assailant. As the fiery wires hissed faintly through the air, he took her square in the face with a big smack and a gray splash, so that she was driven back a yard before she tripped on a long grilling-fork and fell backwards on her hinder fat-cushions.
Leaving the mop lying on her face with its handle neatly down her front, the Mouser whirled around, noting as he did a watery yellow eye in the nearest curtain slit and also the last red winking out of the wires lying midway between the fireplace and Reetha, still stiffly erect and with eyes squeezed shut and muscles taut against the red-hot blow.
He grabbed her arm at its pit, she screamed with amazement and pent tension, but he ignored this and hurried her toward the doorway by which he had entered, then stopped short at the tramp of many boots just beyond it. He rushed the girl in turn toward the two other leather-curtained doorways that hadn’t an eye in their slits. More boots tramping. He sped back to the room’s center, still firmly gripping Reetha.
Samanda, still on her back, had pushed the mop away with her pudgy fingers and was frantically wiping her eyes and squealing from soap-smart and rage.
The watery yellow eye was joined by its partner as Glipkerio strode in, daffodil wreath awry, black toga a-flap, and to either side of him a guardsman presenting toward the Mouser the gleaming brown-steel blade of a pike, while close behind came more guardsmen. Still others, pikes ready, filled the other three doorways and even appeared in the gallery.
Waving long white fingers at the Mouser, Glipkerio hissed, “Oh most false Gray Mouser! Hisvin has hinted you work against me and now I catch you at it!”
The Mouser squatted suddenly on his hams and heaved muscle-crackingly with both hands on a big recessed iron ring-bolt. A thick square trapdoor made of heavy wood topped with tile came up on its hinges. “Down!” he commanded Reetha, who obeyed with commendably cool-headed alacrity. The Mouser followed hunched at her heels, and let drop the trapdoor. It slammed down just in time to catch the blades of two pikes thrust at him, and presumably lever them with a jerk from their wielders’ hands. Admirable wedges those tapering browned-iron blades would make to keep the trapdoor shut, the Mouser told himself.
Now he was in absolute darkness, but an earlier glance had shown him the shape and length of the stone stairs and an empty flagstoned area below abutting a niter-stained wall. Once again grasping Reetha’s upper arm, he guided her down the stairs and across the gritty floor to within a couple of yards of the unseen wall. Then he let go the girl and felt in his pouch for flint, steel, his tinderbox, and a short thick-wicked candle.