Slinoor said curtly, “I would advise against it, Demoiselle. The sailors have a mad fear and hatred of all rats. ‘Twere best not to arouse it.”
“But these are aristos,” the Mouser objected, while Hisvet only repeated, “They’ll take a chill.”
Fafhrd, hearing this, took his hand out of his mouth and came hurrying to Hisvet, saying, “Little Mistress, may I carry them below? I’ll be gentle as a Kleshite nurse.” He lifted between thumb and third finger a cage with two rats in it. Hisvet rewarded him with a smile, saying, “I wish you would, gallant Swordsman. The common sailors handle them too roughly. But two cages are all you may safely carry. You’ll need proper help.” She gazed at the Mouser and Slinoor.
So Slinoor and the Mouser, the latter much to his distaste and apprehension, must each gingerly take up a silver cage, and Fafhrd two, and follow Hisvet to her cabin below the afterdeck. The Mouser could not forbear whispering privily to Fafhrd, “Oaf! To make rat-grooms of us! May you get rat-bites to match your cat-bite!” At the cabin door Hisvet’s dark maid Frix received the cages, Hisvet thanked her three gallants most briefly and distantly and Frix closed the door against them. There was the muffled thud of a bar dropping across it and the jangle of a chain locking down the bar.
* * * *
Darkness grew on the waters. A yellow lantern was lit and hoisted to the crow’s nest. The black war galley Shark, its brown sail temporarily furled, came rowing back to fuss at Clam, next ahead of Squid in line, for being slow in getting up its masthead light, then dropped back by Squid while Lukeen and Slinoor exchanged shouts about a black sail and mist and ship-shaped small black clouds and the Dragon Rocks. Finally the galley went bustling ahead again with its Lankhmarines in browned-iron chain mail to take up its sailing station at the head of the column. The first stars twinkled, proof that the sun had not deserted through the waters of eternity to some other world bubble, but was swimming as he should back to the east under the ocean of the sky, errant rays from him lighting the floating star-jewels in his passage.
After moonrise that night Fafhrd and the Mouser each found private occasion to go rapping at Hisvet’s door, but neither profited greatly thereby. At Fafhrd’s knock Hisvet herself opened the small grille set in the larger door, said swiftly, “Fie, for shame, Swordsman! Can’t you see I’m undressing?” and closed it instantly. While when the Mouser asked softly for a moment with “Ecstasy’s White Shadow,” the merry face of the dark maid Frix appeared at the grille, saying, “My mistress bid me kiss my hand good night to you.” Which she did and closed the grille.
Fafhrd, who had been spying, greeted the crestfallen Mouser with a sardonic, “Ecstasy’s White Shadow!”
“Little Mistress!” the Mouser retorted scathingly.
“Black Plum of Sarheenmar!”
“Kleshite Nurse!”
Neither hero slept restfully that night and two-thirds through it the Squid’s gong began to sound at intervals, with the other ships’ gongs replying or calling faintly. When at dawn’s first blink the two came on deck, Squid was creeping through fog that hid the sail top. The two helmsmen were peering about jumpily, as if they expected to see ghosts. The sails were barely filled. Slinoor, his eyes dark-circled by fatigue and big with anxiety, explained tersely that the fog had not only slowed but disordered the grain fleet.
“That’s Tunny next ahead of us. I can tell by her gong note. And beyond Tunny, Carp. Where’s Clam? What’s Shark about? And still not certainly past the Dragon Rocks! Not that I want to see ‘em!”
“Do not some captains call them the Rat Rocks?” Fafhrd interposed. “From a rat-colony started there from a wreck?”
“Aye,” Slinoor allowed and then grinning sourly at the Mouser, observed, “Not the best day for a rat-show on the afterdeck, is it? Which is some good from this fog. I can’t abide the lolling white brutes. Though but a dozen in number they remind me too much of the Thirteen. Have you ever heard tell of the legend of the Thirteen?”
“I have,” Fafhrd said somberly. “A wise woman of the Cold Waste once told me that for each animal kind—wolves, bats, whales, it holds for all and each—there are always thirteen individuals having almost manlike (or demonlike!) wisdom and skill. Can you but find and master this inner circle, the Wise Woman said, then through them you can control all animals of that kind.”
Slinoor looked narrowly at Fafhrd and said, “She was not an altogether stupid woman.”
The Mouser wondered if for men also there was an inner circle of Thirteen.
The black kitten came ghosting along the deck out of the fog forward. It made toward Fafhrd with an eager mew, then hesitated, studying him dubiously.
“Take for example, cats,” Fafhrd said with a grin. “Somewhere in Nehwon today, mayhap scattered but more likely banded together, are thirteen cats of superfeline sagacity, somehow sensing and controlling the destiny of all catkind.”
“What’s this one sensing now?” Slinoor demanded softly.
The black kitten was staring to larboard, sniffing. Suddenly its scrawny body stiffened, the hair rising along its back and its skimpy tail a-bush.
“Hoongk!”
Slinoor turned to Fafhrd with a curse, only to see the Northerner staring about shut-mouthed and startled. Clearly he had not bellowed.
Chapter Three
Out of the fog to larboard came a green serpent’s head big as a horse’s, with white dagger teeth fencing red mouth horrendously agape. With dreadful swiftness it lunged low past Fafhrd on its endless yellow neck, its lower jaw loudly scraping the deck, and the white daggers clashed on the black kitten.
Or rather, on where the kitten had just been. For the latter seemed not so much to leap as to lift itself, by its tail perhaps, onto the starboard rail and thence vanished into the fog at the top of the aftermast in at most three more bounds.
The helmsmen raced each other forward. Slinoor and the Mouser threw themselves against the starboard taffrail, the unmanned tiller swinging slowly above them affording some sense of protection against the monster, which now lifted its nightmare head and swayed it this way and that, each time avoiding Fafhrd by inches. Apparently it was searching for the black kitten or more like it.
Fafhrd stood frozen, at first by sheer shock, then by the thought that whatever part of him moved first would get snapped off.
Nevertheless he was about to jump for it—besides all else the monster’s mere stench was horrible—when a second green dragon’s head, four times as big as the first with teeth like scimitars, came looming out of the fog. Sitting commandingly atop this second head was a man dressed in orange and purple, like a herald of the Eastern Lands, with red boots, cape and helmet, the last with a blue window in it, seemingly of opaque glass.
There is a point of grotesquerie beyond which horror cannot go, but slips into delirium. Fafhrd had reached that point. He began to feel as if he were in an opium dream. Everything was unquestionably real, yet it had lost its power to horrify him acutely.
He noticed as the merest of quaint details that the two greenish yellow necks forked from a common trunk.
Besides, the gaudily garbed man or demon riding the larger head seemed very sure of himself, which might or might not be a good thing. Just now he was belaboring the smaller head, seemingly in rebuke, with a blunt-pointed, blunt-hooked pike he carried, and roaring out, either under or through his blue-red helmet, a gibberish that might be rendered as:
“Gotterdammer Ungeheuer!” (“Goddam monster!” German is a language completely unknown in Nehwon.)
The smaller head cringed away, whimpering like seventeen puppies. The man-demon whipped out a small book of pages and after consulting it twice (apparently he could see out through his blue window) called down in broken outlandishly accented Lankhmarese, “What world is this, friend?”
Fafhrd had never before in his life heard that question asked, even by an awakening brandy guzzler. Nevertheless in his opium-dream mood he answered easily enough, “The world of Nehwon, oh sorcerer!”
“Gott sei dank!”( “Thank God!”) the man-demon gibbered.
Fafhrd asked, “What world do you hail from?”
The question seemed to confound the man-demon. Hurriedly consulting his book, he replied, “Do you know about other worlds? Don’t you believe the stars are only huge jewels?”
Fafhrd responded, “Any fool can see that the lights in the sky are jewels, but we are not simpletons, we know of other worlds. The Lankhmarts think they’re bubbles in infinite waters. I believe we live in the jewel-ceilinged skull of a dead god. But doubtless there are other such skulls, the universe of universes being a great frosty battlefield.”