From above came a muffled crack. Doubtless a pike-pole breaking as someone sought to rock out the trapped blade. Then someone commanded a muffled, “Heave!” The Mouser grinned in the dark, thinking how that would wedge the browned-iron wedges tighter.
Tiny sparks showered, a ghostly flame rose from a corner of the tinderbox, a tiny round flame like a golden pillbug with a sapphire center appeared at the tip of the candle’s wick and began to swell. The Mouser snapped shut the tinderbox and held up the candle beside his head. Its flame suddenly flared big and bright. The next instant Reetha’s arms were clamped around his neck and she was gasping in dry-mouthed terror against his ear.
Surrounding them on three sides and backing them against the ancient stone wall with its pale crystalline splotches, were a dozen ranks of silent rats formed in a semicircle about a spear-length away—hundreds, nay thousands of blackest long-tails, and more pouring out to join them from a score of rat-holes in the base of the walls in the long cellar, which was piled here and there with barrels, casks, and grain-sacks.
The Mouser suddenly grinned, thrust tinderbox, steel, and flint back in his pouch and felt there for something else.
Meanwhile he noted a tall, narrow rat-hole just by them, newly gnawed—or perhaps chiseled and pickaxed, to judge from the fragments of mortar and tiny shards of stone scattered in front of it. No rats came from it, but he kept a wary eye on it.
The Mouser found Sheelba’s squat black bottle, pried the bandage off it, and withdrew its crystal stopper.
The dull-brained louts in the kitchen overhead were pounding on the trapdoor now—another useless assault!
The rats still poured from the holes and in such numbers that they threatened to become a humpy black carpet covering the whole floor of the cellar except for the tiny area where Reetha clung to the Mouser.
His grin widened. He set the bottle to his lips, took an experimental sip, thoughtfully rolled it on his tongue, then upended the vial and let its faintly bitter contents gurgle into his mouth and down his throat.
Reetha, unlinking her arms, said a little reproachfully, “I could use some wine too.”
The Mouser raised his eyebrows happily at her and explained, “Not wine. Magic!” Had not her own eyebrows been shaven, they would have risen in puzzlement. He gave her a wink, tossed the bottle aside, and confidently awaited the emergence of his anti-rat powers, whatever they might be.
From above came the groan of metal and the slow cracking of tough wood. Now they were going about it the right way, with pry-bars. Likely the trap would open just in time for Glipkerio to witness the Mouser vanquishing the rat army. Everything was timing itself perfectly.
The black sea of hitherto silent rats began to toss and wave and from it came an angry chittering and a clashing of tiny teeth. Better and better!—this warlike show would put some rife into their defeat.
He idly noted that he was standing in the center of a large, gray-bordered splotch of pinkish slime he must have overlooked before in his haste and excitement. He had never seen a cellar-mold quite like it.
His eyeballs seemed to him to swell and burn a little and suddenly he felt in himself the powers of a god. He looked up at Reetha to warn her not to be frightened at anything that might happen—say his flesh glowing with a golden light or two bright scarlet beams flashing from his eyes to shrivel rats or heat them to popping.
Then he was asking himself, “Up at Reetha?”
The pinkish splotch had become a large puddle lapping slimily over the soles of his boots.
There was a splintering. Light spilled down from the kitchen on the crowded rats.
The Mouser gawked at them horror-struck. They were as big as cats! No, black wolves! No, furry black men on all fours! He clutched at Reetha … and found himself vainly seeking to encircle with his arms a smooth white calf thick as a temple pillar. He gazed up at Reetha’s amazed and fear-struck giant face two stories above. There echoed evilly in his ears Sheelba’s carelessly spoken, fiendishly ambiguous: “…put you on the right footing to cope with the situation…” Oh yes indeed!
The slime-puddle and its gray border had grown wider still and he was in it up to his ankles.
He clung to Reetha’s leg a moment longer with the faint and ungracious hope that since his weapons and his clothing, which touched him, had shrunk with him, she might shrink too at his touch. He would at least have a companion. Perhaps to his credit, it did not occur to him to yell, “Pick me up!”
The only thing that happened was that an almost inaudibly deep voice thundered down at him from Reetha’s mouth, big as a red-edged shield, “What are you doing? I’m scared. Start the magic!”
The Mouser jumped away from the fleshly pillar, splashing the nasty pink stuff and almost slipping in it, and whipped out his sword Scalpel. It was just a shade bigger than a needle for mending sails. While the candle, which he still held in his left hand, was the proper size to light a small room in a doll’s house.
There was loud, confused, multiple padding and claw-clicking, chittering war cries blasted his ears, and he saw the huge black rats stampeding him from three sides, kicking up the gray border in puffs as if it were a powder and then splashing the pink slime and sending ripples across it.
Reetha, terror-struck, watched her inexplicably diminished rescuer spin around, leap over a shard of rock, land in a pink splash, and brandishing his tiny sword before him, shielding his doll’s candle with his cloak, and ducking his head, rush into the rat-hole behind her and so vanish. Racing rats brushed her ankles and snapped at each other, to be first down the hole after the Mouser. Elsewhere the rat horde was swiftly disappearing down the other holes. But one rat stayed long enough to nip her foot.
Her nerve snapped. Her first footsteps spattering pink slime and gray dust, she shrieked and ran, rats dodging from under her feet, and dashed up the steps, clawed her way past several wide-eyed guardsmen into the kitchen, and sank sobbing and panting on the tiles. Samanda snapped a chain on her collar.
Fafhrd, his arms joined in a circle above and before his head to avoid skull-bump from rocky outcrops and also the unexpected brushings on face of cobwebs and wraithlike fingers and filmy wings, at last saw a jaggedly circular green glow ahead. Soon he emerged from the black tunnel into a large and many entranced cavern somewhat lit at the center of its rocky floor by a green glow which was being replenished with thin blood-red logs by two skinny, raggedy-tunicked, sharp-eyed boys, who looked like typical street urchins of Lankhmar or Ilthmar, or any other decadent city. One had a puckered scar under his left eye. On the other side of the fire from them sat on low wide stone an obscenely fat figure so well cloaked and hooded that not a speck of his face or hand were visible. He was sorting out a large pile of parchment scraps and potsherds, pinching hold of them through the dark fabric of his overlong, dangling sleeves, and scanning them close-sightedly, almost putting them inside his hood.
“Welcome, my Gentle Son,” he called to Fafhrd in a voice like a quavering sweet flute. “What happy chance brings you here?”
“You know!” Fafhrd said harshly, striding forward until he was glaring across the leaping green flames at the black oval defined by the forward edge of the hood. “How am I to save the Mouser? What’s with Lankhmar? And why, in the name of all the gods of death and destruction, is the tin whistle so important?”
“You speak in riddles, Gentle Son,” the fluty voice responded soothingly, as its owner went on sorting his scraps. “What tin whistle? What peril’s the Mouser in now?—reckless youth! And what is with Lankhmar?”
Fafhrd let loose a flood of curses, which rattled impotently among the stalactites overhead. Then he jerked free from his pouch the tiny black oblong of Sheelba’s message and held it forward between finger and thumb that shook with rage. “Look, Know-nothing One: I dumped a lovely girl to answer this and now—”
But the hooded figure had whistled warblingly and at that signal the black bat, which Fafhrd had forgot, launched itself from his shoulder, snatched with sharp teeth the black note from his finger-grip, and fluttered past the green flames to land on the paunchy one’s sleeve-hidden hand, or tentacle, or whatever it was. The whatever-it-was conveyed to hood-mouth the bat, who obligingly fluttered inside and vanished in the coally dark there.