upheavals her mind had undergone.
Finally the Mouser voiced what was in the thoughts of both of them. “Yes, I am much afraid that Anra Devadoris, who sought to make us his apprentices, was only an apprentice himself and apt, apprentice-wise, to take credit for his master's work. Black-beard is gone, but the beardless one remains. What was it Ningauble said?…no simple creature, but a mystery?…no single identity, but a mirage?'
“Well, by all the fleas that bite the Great Antiochus, and all the lice that tickle his wife!” remarked a shrill, insolent voice behind them. “You doomed gentlemen already know what's in this letter I have for you.'
They whirled around. Standing beside the camel — he might conceivably have been hidden, it is true, behind a nearby boulder — was a pertly grinning brown urchin, so typically Alexandrian that he might have stepped this minute out of Rakotis with a skinny mongrel sniffing at his heels. (The Mouser half expected such a dog to appear at the next moment.)
“Who sent you, boy?” Fafhrd demanded. “How did you get here?'
“Now who and how would you expect?” replied the urchin. “Catch.” He tossed the Mouser a wax tablet. “Say, you two, take my advice and get out while the getting's good. I think so far as your expedition's concerned, Ningauble's pulling up his tent pegs and scuttling home. Always a friend in need, my dear employer.'
The Mouser ripped the cords, unfolded the tablet, and read:
“Greetings, my brave adventurers. You have done well, but the best remains to be done. Hark to the calling. Follow the green light. But be very cautious afterwards. I wish I could be of more assistance. Send the shroud, the cup, and the chest back with the boy as first payment.'
“Loki-brat! Regin-spawn!” burst out Fafhrd. The Mouser looked up to see the urchin lurching and bobbing back toward the Lost City on the back of the eagerly fugitive camel. His impudent laughter returned shrill and faint.
“There,” said the Mouser, “rides off the generosity of poor, penurious Ningauble. Now we know what to do with the camel.'
“Zutt!” said Fafhrd. “Let him have the brute and the toys. Good riddance to his gossiping!'
“Not a very high mountain,” said the Mouser an hour later, “but high enough. I wonder who carved this neat little path and who keeps it clear?'
As he spoke, he was winding loosely over his shoulder a long thin rope of the sort used by mountain climbers, ending in a hook.
It was sunset, with twilight creeping at their heels. The little path, which had grown out of nothing, only gradually revealing itself, now led them sinuously around great boulders and along the crests of ever-steeper rock- strewn slopes. Conversation, which was only a film on wariness, had played with the methods of Ningauble and his agents — whether they communicated with one another directly, from mind to mind, or by tiny whistles that emitted a note too high for human ears to hear, but capable of producing a tremor in any brother whistle or in the ear of the bat.
It was a moment when the whole universe seemed to pause. A spectral greenish light gleamed from the cloudy top ahead — but that was surely only the sun's sky-reflected afterglow. There was a hint of all-pervading sound in the air, a mighty susurrus just below the threshold of hearing, as if an army of unseen insects were tuning up their instruments. These sensations were as intangible as the force that drew them onward, a force so feeble that they knew they could break it like a single spider-strand, yet did not choose to try.
As if in response to some unspoken word, both Fafhrd and the Mouser turned toward Ahura. Under their gaze she seemed to be changing momently, opening like a night flower, becoming ever more childlike, as if some master hypnotist were stripping away the outer, later petals of her mind, leaving only a small limpid pool, from whose unknown depths, however, dark bubbles were dimly rising.
They felt their infatuation pulse anew, but with a shy restraint on it. And their hearts fell silent as the hooded heights above, as she said, “Anra Devadoris was my twin brother.'
7: Ahura Devadoris
“I never knew my father. He died before we were born. In one of her rare fits of communicativeness my mother told me, ‘Your father was a Greek, Ahura. A very kind and learned man. He laughed a great deal.’ I remember how stern she looked as she said that, rather than how beautiful, the sunlight glinting from her ringleted, black-dyed hair.
“But it seemed to me that she had slightly emphasized the word ‘Your.’ You see, even then I wondered about Anra. So I asked Old Berenice the housekeeper about it. She told me she had seen Mother bear us, both on the same night.
“Old Berenice went on to tell me how my father had died. Almost nine months before we were born, he was found one morning beaten to death in the street just outside the door. A gang of Egyptian longshoremen who were raping and robbing by night were supposed to have done it, although they were never brought to justice — that was back when the Ptolemies had Tyre. It was a horrible death. He was almost pashed to a pulp against the cobbles.
“At another time Old Berenice told me something about my mother, after making me swear by Athena and by Set and by Moloch, who would eat me if I did, never to tell. She said that Mother came from a Persian family whose five daughters in the old times were all priestesses, dedicated from birth to be the wives of an evil Persian god, forbidden the embraces of mortals, doomed to spend their nights alone with the stone image of the god in a lonely temple ‘halfway across the world,’ she said. Mother was away that day, and Old Berenice dragged me down into a little basement under Mother's bedroom and pointed out three ragged gray stones set among the bricks and told me they came from the temple. Old Berenice liked to frighten me, although she was deathly afraid of Mother.
“Of course I instantly went and told Anra, as I always did.'
The little path was leading sharply upward now, along the spine of a crest. Their horses went at a walk, first Fafhrd's, then Ahura's, last the Mouser's. The lines were smoothed in Fafhrd's face, although he was still very watchful, and the Mouser looked almost like a quaint child.
Ahura continued, “It is hard to make you understand my relationship with Anra, because it was so close that even the word ‘relationship’ spoils it. There was a game we would play in the garden. He would close his eyes and guess what I was looking at. In other games we would change sides, but never in this one.
“He invented all sorts of versions of the game and didn't want to play any others. Sometimes I would climb up by the olive tree onto the tiled roof — Anra couldn't make it — and watch for an hour. Then I'd come down and tell him what I'd seen — some dyers spreading out wet green cloth for the sun to turn it purple, a procession of priests around the Temple of Melkarth, a galley from Pergamum setting sail, a Greek official impatiently explaining something to his Egyptian scribe, two henna-handed ladies giggling at some kilted sailors, a mysterious and lonely Jew — and he would tell me what kind of people they were and what they had been thinking and what they were planning to do. It was a very special kind of imagination, for afterwards when I began to go outside I found out that he was usually right. At the time I remember thinking that it was as if he were looking at the pictures in my mind and seeing more than I could. I liked it. It was such a gentle feeling.
“Of course our closeness was partly because Mother, especially after she changed her way of life, wouldn't let us go out at all or mix with other children. There was more reason for that than just her strictness. Anra was very delicate. He once broke his wrist, and it was a long time healing. Mother had a slave come in who was skilled in such things, and he told Mother he was afraid that Anra's bones were becoming too brittle. He told about children whose muscles and sinews gradually turned to stone, so that they became living statues. Mother struck him in the face and drove him from the house — an action that cost her a dear friend, because he was an important slave.
“And even if Anra had been allowed to go out, he couldn't have. Once after I had begun to go outside I persuaded him to come with me. He didn't want to, but I laughed at him, and he could never stand laughter. As soon as we climbed over the garden wall he fell down in a faint, and I couldn't rouse him from it, though I tried and tried. Finally I climbed back so I could open the door and drag him in, and Old Berenice spotted me, and I had to tell her what had happened. She helped me carry him in, but afterwards she whipped me because she knew I'd never
