twisted themselves into the caricature of a smile.
“Like you, Ahura,” the fragment murmured in the highest of falsettos, “he sent me on an errand I did not want to run.'
As one, moved by a fear they dared not formulate, Fafhrd and the Mouser and Ahura half turned round and peered over their shoulders at the mist-clogged doorway leading outside. For three, four heartbeats they peered. Then, faintly, they heard one of the horses whinny. Whereupon they turned fully round, but not before a dagger, sped by the yet unshaking hand of Fafhrd, had buried itself in the open eye of the tortured thing in the inner window.
Side by side they stood, Fafhrd wild-eyed, the Mouser taut, Ahura with the look of someone who, having successfully climbed a precipice, slips at the very summit.
A slim shadowy bulk mounted into the glow outside the doorway.
“Laugh!” Fafhrd hoarsely commanded Ahura. “Laugh!” He shook her, repeating the command.
Her head flopped from side to side, the cords in her neck jerked, her lips twitched, but from them came only a dry croaking. She grimaced despairingly.
“Yes,” remarked a voice they all recognized, “there are times and places where laughter is an easily-blunted weapon — as harmless as the sword which this morning pierced me through.'
Death-pale as always, the tiny blood-clot over his heart, his forehead crumbled in, his black garb travel- dusted, Anra Devadoris faced them.
“And so we come back to the beginning,” he said slowly, “but now a wider circle looms ahead.'
Fafhrd tried to speak, to laugh, but the words and laughter choked in his throat.
“Now you have learned something of my history and my power, as I intended you should,” the adept continued. “You have had time to weigh and reconsider. I still await your answer.'
This time it was the Mouser who sought to speak or laugh and failed.
For a moment the adept continued to regard them, smiling confidently. Then his gaze wandered beyond them. He frowned suddenly and strode forward, pushed past them, knelt by the inner window.
As soon as his back was turned Ahura tugged at the Mouser's sleeve, tried to whisper something — with no more success than one deaf and dumb.
They heard the adept sob, “He was my nicest.'
The Mouser drew a dagger, prepared to steal on him from behind, but Ahura dragged him back, pointing in a very different direction.
The adept whirled on them. “Fools!” he cried, “have you no inner eye for the wonders of darkness, no sense of the grandeur of horror, no feeling for a quest beside which all other adventurings fade in nothingness, that you should destroy my greatest miracle — slay my dearest oracle? I let you come here to Mist, confident its mighty music and glorious vistas would win you to my view — and thus I am repaid. The jealous, ignorant powers ring me round — you are my great hope fallen. There were unfavorable portents as I walked from the Lost City. The white, idiot glow of Ormadz faintly dirtied the black sky. I heard in the wind the senile clucking of the Elder Gods. There was a fumbling abroad, as if even incompetent Ningauble, last and stupidest of the hunting pack, were catching up. I had a charm in reserve to thwart them, but it needed the Old Man to carry it. Now they close in for the kill. But there are still some moments of power left me, and I am not wholly yet without allies. Though I am doomed, there are still those bound to me by such ties that they must answer me if I call upon them. You shall not see the end, if end there be.” With that he lifted his voice in a great eerie shout: “Father! Father!'
The echoes had not died before Fafhrd rushed at him, his great sword swinging.
The Mouser would have followed suit except that, just as he shook Ahura off, he realized at what she was so insistently pointing.
The recess in the keystone above the mighty archway.
Without hesitation he unslipped his climbing rope, and running lightly across the chamber, made a whistling cast.
The hook caught in the recess.
Hand over hand he climbed up.
Behind him he heard the desperate skirl of swords, heard also another sound, far more distant and profound.
His hand gripped the lip of the recess, he pulled himself up and thrust in head and shoulders, steadying himself on hip and elbow. After a moment, with his free hand, he whipped out his dagger.
Inside, the recess was hollowed like a bowl. It was filled with a foul greenish liquid and encrusted with glowing minerals. At the bottom, covered by the liquid, were several objects — three of them rectangular, the others irregularly round and rhythmically pulsating.
He raised his dagger, but for the moment did not, could not, strike. There was too crushing a weight of things to be realized and remembered — what Ahura had told about the ritual marriage in her mother's family — her suspicion that, although she and Anra were born together, they were not children of the same father — how her Greek father had died (and now the Mouser guessed at the hands of what) — the strange affinity for stone the slave-physician had noted in Anra's body — what she had said about an operation performed on him — why a heart-thrust had not killed him — why his skull had cracked so hollowly and egg-shell easy — how he had never seemed to breathe — old legends of other sorcerers who had made themselves invulnerable by hiding their hearts — above all, the deep kinship all of them had sensed between Anra and this half-living castle — the black, man- shaped monolith in the Lost City—
He saw Anra Devadoris, spitted on Fafhrd's blade, hurling himself closer along it, and Fafhrd desperately warding off Needle with a dagger.
As if pinioned by a nightmare, he helplessly heard the clash of swords rise toward a climax, heard it blotted out by the other sound — a gargantuan stony clomping that seemed to be following their course up the mountain, like a pursuing earthquake—
The Castle Called Mist began to tremble, and still he could not strike—
Then, as if surging across infinity from that utmost rim beyond which the Elder Gods had retreated, relinquishing the world to younger deities, he heard a mighty, star-shaking laughter that laughed at all things, even at this; and there was power in the laughter, and he knew the power was his to use.
With a downward sweep of his arm he sent his dagger plunging into the green liquid and tearing through the stone-crusted heart and brain and lungs and guts of Anra Devadoris.
The liquid foamed and boiled, the castle rocked until he was almost shaken from the niche, the laughter and stony clomping rose to a pandemonium.
Then, in an instant it seemed, all sound and movement ceased. The Mouser's muscles went weak. He half fell, half slid, to the floor. Looking about dazedly, making no attempt to rise, he saw Fafhrd wrench his sword from the fallen adept and totter back until his groping hand found the support of a table-edge, saw Ahura, still gasping from the laughter that had possessed her, go up and kneel beside her brother and cradle his crushed head on her knees.
No word was spoken. Time passed. The green mist seemed to be slowly thinning.
Then a small black shape swooped into the room through a high window, and the Mouser grinned.
“Hugin,” he called luringly.
The shape swooped obediently to his sleeve and clung there, head down. He detached from the bat's leg a tiny parchment.
“Fancy, Fafhrd, it's from the commander of our rear guard,” he announced gaily. “Listen:
“'To my agents Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, funeral greetings! I have regretfully given up all hope for you, and yet — token of my great affection — I risk my own dear Hugin in order to get this last message through. Incidentally, Hugin, if given opportunity, will return to me from Mist — something I am afraid you will not be able to do. So if, before you die, you see anything interesting — and I am sure you will — kindly scribble me a memorandum. Remember the proverb: Knowledge takes precedence over death. Farewell for two thousand years, dearest friends. Ningauble.’”
“That demands drink,” said Fafhrd, and walked out into the darkness. The Mouser yawned and stretched himself, Ahura stirred, printed a kiss on the waxen face of her brother, lifted the trifling weight of his head from her lap, and laid it gently on the stone floor. From somewhere in the upper reaches of the castle they heard a faint crackling.
