Skwee tuned to Lord Null as the litter disappeared by stages beyond the pillars and said through his be-diamonded white mask, “So Grig has a mistress, the old misogynist! Perhaps it’s she who has quickened his mind to such new brilliancies as Operation Black Toga.”
“I still don’t like that one, though you outvoted me and I must go along,” chittered the other irritably from behind his black vizard. “There’s too much uncertainty tonight. The final battle about to be joined. A magically transformed human spy reported in Lankhmar Below. The change in Grig’s character. That rabid mouse running widdershins a-foam at the jaws, outside the Council Chamber, and which squeaked thrice when you slew him. The uncustomary buzzing of the night-bees in Siss’s chambers. And now this new operation adopted on the spur of the moment—”
Skwee clapped Lord Null on the shoulder in friendly fashion. “You’re distraught tonight, comrade, and see omens in every night-bug,” he said. “Grig at all events had one most sound notion. We all could do with a little rest and refreshment. Especially you before your all-important mission. Come.”
And turning the table over to Siss, he and Lord Null went to a curtained alcove just off the Council Chamber, Skwee ordering on the way that food and drink be brought them.
When the curtains were closed behind them, Skwee seated himself in one of the two chairs beside the small table there and took off his mask. In the pulsing violet light of the three silver-caged glow-wasps illuminating the alcove, his long, white-furred, blue-eyed snout looked remarkably sinister.
“To think,” he said, “that tomorrow my people will be masters of Lankhmar Above. For millennia we rats have planned and built, tunneled and studied and striven, and now in less than six hours—it’s worth a drink! Which reminds me, comrade, isn’t it time for your medicinal draught” Lord Null hissed with consternation, prepared to lift his black mask distractedly, dipped his black-gloved right fore-member into his pouch, and came up with a tiny white vial.
“Stop!” Skwee commanded with some honor, capturing the black-gloved wrist with a sudden grab. “If you should drink that one now—”
“I am nervous tonight, nervous to frustration,” the other admitted, returning the white vial to his pouch and coming up with a black one. Before draining its contents, he lifted his black mask entirely. The face behind was not a rat’s, but the seamed and beady-eyed visage, rat-small, of Hisvin the grain-merchant.
The black draught swallowed, he appeared to experience relief and easement of tension. The worry lines in his face were replaced by those of thought.
“Who is Grig’s mistress, Skwee?”’ he speculated suddenly. “No common slut, I’ll swear, or vanity-puffed courtesan.”
Skwee shrugged his hunchy shoulders and said cynically, “The more brilliant the enchanted male, the stupider the enchanting female.”
“No!” Hisvin said impatiently. “I sense a brilliant and rapacious mind here that is not Grig’s. He was ambitious once, you know, sought your position, then his fires sank to coals glowing through wintery ash.”
“That’s true,” Skwee agreed thoughtfully. “Who has blown him alight again?” Hisvin demanded, now with anxious suspicion. “Who is his mistress, Skwee?”
Fafhrd pulled up the Mingol mare before that iron-hearted beast should topple from exhaustion—and had trouble doing it, so resolute unto death was that grim creature. Yet once stopped, he felt her legs giving under her and he dropped quickly from the saddle lest she collapse from his weight. She was lathered with sweat, her head hung between her trembling forelegs, and her slatted ribs worked like a bellows as she gasped whistlingly.
He rested his hand lightly on her shaking shoulders. She never could have made Lankhmar, he knew. They were less than halfway across the Great Salt Marsh.
Low moonlight, striking from behind, washed with a faint gold the gravel of the causeway road and yellowly touched the tops of thorn tree and cactus, but could not yet slant down to the Marsh’s sea-grassed floor and black bottoms.
Save for the hum and crackle of insects and the calls of night birds, the moonlight-brushed area was silent—yet would not be so for long, Fafhrd knew with a shudder.
Ever since the preternatural emergence of the three black riders from the crash of waves over the Sinking Land and their drumming unshakable pursuit of him through the deepening night, he had been less and less able to think of them as mere vengeful Ilthmar brigands, and more and more conceived them as a supernatural black trinity of death. For miles now, besides, something huge and long-legged and lurching, though never distinctly seen, had been pur-suing him through the Marsh, keeping pace with him at the distance of a spear cast. Some giant familiar or obedient djinn of the black horsemen seemed most likely.
His fears had so worked on him that Fafhrd had finally put the mare to her extremest gallop, outdistancing the hoof-noise of the pursuit, though with no effect on the lurching shape and with the inevitable present result. He drew Graywand and faced back toward the new-risen gibbous moon.
Then very faintly he began to hear it: the muted rhythmic drumming of hooves on gravel. They were coming.
At the same moment, from the deep shadows where the giant familiar should be, he heard the Gray Mouser call hoarsely, “This way, Fafhrd! Toward the blue light. Lead your mount. Make it swift!”
Grinning even as the hairs lifted on his neck, Fafhrd looked south and saw a shaped blue glow, like a round-topped, smallish, blue-lit window in the blackness of the Marsh. He plunged down the causeway’s slanting south side toward it, pulling the mare after him, and found underfoot a low ridge of firm ground rather than mud. He moved ahead eagerly through the dark, digging in his heels and leaning forward as he dragged his spent mount. The blue window looked a little above his head now. The drumming coming up from the east was louder.
“Shake a leg, Lazybones!” he heard the Mouser call in the same rasping tones. The Gray One must have caught a cold from the Marsh’s damp or—the Fates forfend!—a fever from its miasmas.
“Tether your mount to the thorn stump,” the Mouser continued gruffly. “There’s food for her there and a water pool. Then come up. Speed, speed!”
Fafhrd obeyed without word or waste motion, for the drumming had become very loud.
As he leaped and caught hold of the blue window’s bottom and drew himself up to it, the blue glow went out. He scrambled inside onto the reed-carpeted floor of whatever it was and swiftly squirmed around so he was looking back the way he’d come.
The Mingol mare was invisible in the dark below. The causeway’s top glowed faintly in the moonlight.
Then round a cluster of thorn trees came speeding the three black riders, the drumming of the twelve hooves thunderous now. Fafhrd thought he could make out a fiendish phosphorescent glow around the nostrils and eyes of the tall black horses and he could faintly discern the black cloaks and hoods of the riders streaming in the wind of their speed. With never a pause they passed the point where he’d left the causeway and vanished behind another thorn grove to the west. He let out a long-held breath.
“Now get away from the door and brace yourself,” a voice that wasn’t the Mouser’s at all grated over his shoulder. “I’ve got to be there to pilot this rig.”
The hairs that had just lain down on Fafhrd’s neck erected themselves again. He had more than once heard the rock-harsh voice of Sheelba of the Eyeless Face, though never seen, let alone entered, his fabulous hut. He swiftly hitched himself to one side, back against wall. Something smooth and round and cool touched the back of his neck. A wall-hung skull, it almost had to be.
A black figure crawled into the space he’d just vacated. Dimly silhouetted in the doorway, its edge touched by moonlight, he saw a black cowl.
“Where’s the Mouser?” Fafhrd asked with a wheeze in his voice.
The hut gave a violent lurch. Fafhrd grabbed gropingly for and luckily found two wall posts.
“In trouble. Deep-down trouble,” Sheelba answered curtly. “I did his voice to make you jump lively. As soon as you’ve fulfilled whatever geas Ningauble has laid upon you—bells, isn’t it?—you must go instantly to his aid.”
The hut gave a second lurch and a third, then began to rock and pitch somewhat like a ship, but in a swift rhythm and more joltingly, as if one were in a howdah on the slant back of a drunken giant giraffe.
“Go instantly where?” Fafhrd demanded, somewhat humbly.
“How should I know and why should I tell you if I did? I am not your wizard. I’m just taking you to Lankhmar by secret ways as a favor to that paunchy, seven-eyed, billion-worded dilettante in sorcery who thinks himself my colleague and has gulled you into taking him as mentor,” the harsh voice responded from the hood. Then, relenting some-what, though growing gruffer, “Overlord’s palace, most likely. Now shut up.”