He found plenty of good holds for hand and foot in the ancient wall. Climbing it was truly child’s play to one who had scaled in his youth Obelisk Polaris in the frosty Mountains of the Giants. He was far more concerned with what he might meet at the top of the wall, where he would be briefly helpless against a foe footed above him.
But more than all else—and increasingly so—he was puzzled by the darkness and silence with which the city was wrapped. Where was the battle-din; where were the flames? Or if Lankhmar had already been subdued, which despite Ningauble’s optimism seemed most likely from the fifty-to-one odds against her, where were the screams of the tortured, the shrieks of the raped, and all the gleeful clatter and shout of the victors?
He reached the wall’s top and suddenly drew himself up and vaulted through a wide embrasure down onto the wide parapet, ready to draw Graywand and his ax. But the parapet was empty as far as be could see in either direction.
Wall Street below was dark, and empty too as far as he could tell. Cash Street, stretching west and flooded with pale moonlight from behind him, was visibly bare of figures. While the silence was even more marked than when he’d been climbing. It seemed to fill the great, walled city, like water brimming a cup.
Fafhrd felt spooked. Had the conquerors of Lankhmar already departed?—carrying off all its treasure and inhabitants in some unimaginably huge fleet or caravan? Had they shut up themselves and their gagged victims in the silent houses for some rite of mass torture in darkness? Was it a demon, not human army which had beset the city and vanished its inhabitants? Had the very earth gaped for victor and vanquished alike and then shut again? Or was Ningauble’s whole tale wizardly flimflam?—yet even that least unlikely explanation still left unexplained the city’s ghostly desolation.
Or was there a fierce battle going on under his eyes at this very moment, and he by some spell of Ningauble or Sheelba unable to see, hear, or even scent it?—until, perchance, he had fulfilled the geas of the bells which Ningauble had laid on him.
He still did not like the idea of his bells-mission. His imagination pictured the Gods of Lankhmar resting in their brown mummy-wrappings and their rotted black togas, their bright black eyes peeping from between resin-impregnated bandages and their deadly black staves of office beside them, waiting another call from the city that forgot yet feared them and which they in turn hated yet guarded. Waking with naked hand a clutch of spiders in a hole in desert rocks seemed wiser than waking such. Yet a geas was a geas and must be fulfilled.
He hurried down the nearest dark stone stairs three steps at a time and headed west on Cash Street, which paralleled Crafts Street a block to the south. He half imagined he brushed unseen figures. Crossing curvy Cheap Street, dark and untenanted as the others, he thought he heard a murmuring and chanting from the north, so faint that it must come from at least as far away as the Street of Gods. But he held to his predetermined course, which was to follow Cash Street to Nun Street, then three blocks north to the accursed bell-tower.
Whore Street, which was even more twisty than Cheap Street, looked tenantless too, but he was hardly half a block beyond it when he heard the tramp of boots and the clink of armor behind him. Ducking into the narrow shadows, he watched a double squad of guardsmen cross hurriedly through the moonlight, going south on Whore Street in the direction of the South Barracks. They were crowded close together, watched every way, and carried their weapons at the ready, despite the apparent absence of foe. This seemed to confirm Fafhrd’s notion of an army of invisibles. Feeling more spooked than ever, he continued rapidly on his way.
And now he began to note, here and there, light leaking out from around the edges of a shuttered upper window. These dim-drawn oblongs only increased his feeling of supernatural dread. Anything, he told himself, would be better than this locked-in silence, now broken only by the faint echoing tread of his own boots on the moonlit cobbles. And at the end of his trip: mummies!
Somewhere, faintly, muffled, eleven o’clock knelled. Then of a sudden, crossing narrow, black-brimming Silver Street, he heard a multitudinous pattering, like rain—save that the stars were bright overhead except for the moon’s dimming of them, and he felt no drops. He began to run.
Aboard Squid, the kitten, as if he had received a call which he might not disregard despite all dreads, made the long leap from the scuppers to the dock, clawed his way up onto the latter and hurried off into the dark, his black hair on end and his eyes emerald bright with fear and danger-readiness.
Glipkerio and Samanda sat in his Whip Room, reminiscing and getting a tipsy glow on, to put them in the right mood for Reetha’s thrashing. The fat palace mistress had swilled tankards of dark wine of Tovilyis until her black wool dress was soaked with sweat and salty beads stood on each hair of her ghostly black mustache. While her overlord sipped violet wine of Kiraay, which she had fetched from the upper pantry when no butler or page answered the ring of the silver and even the brazen summoning-bell. She’d said, “They’re scared to stir since your guardsmen went off. I’ll welt them properly—but only when you’ve had your special fun, little master.”
Now, for the nonce neglecting all the rare and begemmed instruments of pain around them and blessedly forgetting the rodent menace to Lankhmar, their thoughts had returned to simpler and happier days. Glipkerio, his pansy wreath awry and somewhat wilted, was saying with a tittering eagerness, “Do you recall when I brought you my first kitten to throw in the kitchen fire?”
“Do I?” Samanda retorted with affectionate scorn. “Why, little master, I remember when you brought me your first fly, to show me how neatly you could pluck off his wings and legs. You were only a toddler, but already skinny-tall.”
“Yes, but about that kitten,” Glipkerio persisted, violet wine dribbling down his chin as he took a hasty and tremble-handed swallow. “It was black with blue eyes newly unfilmed. Radomix was trying to stop me—he lived at the palace then—but you sent him away bawling.”
“I did indeed,” Samanda concurred. “The cotton-hearted brat! And I remember how the kitten screamed and frizzled, and how you cried afterwards because you hadn’t him to throw in again. To divert your mind and cheer you, I stripped and whipped an apprentice maid as skinny-tall as yourself and with long blonde braids. That was before you got your thing about hair,”—she wiped her mustache—”and had all the girls and boys shaved. I thought it was time you graduated to manlier pleasures, and sure enough you showed your excitement in no uncertain fashion!” And with a whoop of laughter she reached across and thumbed him indelicately.
Excited by this tickling and his thoughts, Lankhmar’s overlord stood up cypress-tall-and-black in his toga, though no cypress ever twitched as he did, except perhaps in an earthquake or under most potent witchcraft. “Come,” he cried. “Eleven’s struck. We’ve barely time before I must haste me to the Blue Audience Chamber to meet with Hisvin and save the city.”
“Right,” Samanda affirmed, levering herself up with her brawny forearms pulling at her knees and then pushing the pinching armchair off her large rear. “Which whips was it you’d picked now for the naughty and traitorous minx?”
“None, none,” Glipkerio cried with impatient glee. “In the end that well-oiled old black dog-whip hanging; from your belt always seems best. Hurry we, dear Samanda, hurry!”
Reetha shot up in crispy-linened bed as she heard hinges creak. Shaking nightmares from her smooth-shaven head, she fumbled frantically about for the bottle whose draining would bring her protective oblivion.
She put it to her lips, but paused a moment before upending it. The door still hadn’t opened and the creaking had been strangely tiny and shrill. Glancing over the edge of the bed, she saw that another door not quite a foot high had opened outward at floor level In the seamless-seeming wood paneling. Through it there stepped swiftly and silently, ducking his head a trifle, a well-formed and leanly muscular little man, carrying in one hand a gray bundle and in the other what seemed to be a long toy sword as naked as himself.
He closed the door behind him, so that it once more seemed not to be there, and gazed about piercingly.
“Gray Mouser!” Reetha yelled, springing from bed and throwing herself down on her knees beside him “You’ve come back to me!”
He winced, lifting his burdened tiny hands to his ears.