hands from the girls’ shoulders and they retreated a little toward Afreyt, still looking up at him, and he lifted his face toward the sky, and Fafhrd saw that although he was a gaunt man at the end of middle age with strong and noble features not unlike Nalgron's, he had thinner lips, their ends downturning like a knowing schoolmaster's, and he wore a patch on his left eye.
He scanned around uncertainly, o'erpassing Fafhrd, who stood motionless and afraid, and then the old man turned north and lifted an arm in that direction and said in a hoarse voice that was like the soughing of the wind in thick branches, “The Widder-Mingol fleet comes on from the west. Two raiders harry ahead, make for Cold Harbor.” Then he rapidly turned back his head through what seemed an impossibly great angle, as though his neck were broken yet somehow still serviceable, so that he looked straight at Fafhrd with his single eye, and said, “You must destroy them!”
Then he seemed to lose interest, and weakness seized him again, or perhaps a sort of sensuous languor after task completed, for he stepped a little more swiftly as he returned toward the bower, and when the girls came in around him, his resting hands seemed to fondle their young necks lasciviously as well as take support from their slim shoulders until the shadow door, darker now, swallowed them.
Fafhrd was so struck with this circumstance, despite his fear, that when Afreyt now came stepping toward him saying in a low but businesslike voice, “Didst mark that? Cold Harbor is Rime Isle's other town, but far smaller, easy prey for even a single Mingol ship that takes it by surprise. It's on the north coast, a day's journey away, ice- locked save for these summer months. You must—” his interrupting reply was “Think you the girls'll be safe with him?”
She broke off, then answered shortly, “As with any man. Or male ghost. Or god.”
At that last word, Fafhrd looked at her sharply. She nodded and continued, “They'll feed him and give him drink and bed him down. Doubtless he'll play with their breasts a little and then sleep. He's an old god and far from home, I think, and wearies easily, which is perhaps a blessing. In any case, they serve Rime Isle too and must run risks.”
Fafhrd considered that and then, clearing his throat, said, “Your pardon, Lady Afreyt, but your Rime Isle men, judging not only from Groniger but from others I've met, some of them councilmen, do not believe in any gods at all.”
She frowned. “That's true enough. The old gods deserted Rime Isle long years ago and our folk have had to learn to fend for themselves in the cruel world — in this clime merciless. It's bred hardheadedness.”
“Yet,” Fafhrd said, recalling something, “My gray friend judged Rime Isle to be a sort of rim-spot, where one might meet all manner of strange ships and men and gods from very far places.”
“That's true also,” she said hurriedly. “And perhaps it's favored the same hard-headedness: how, where there are so many ghosts about, to take account only of what the hand can firmly grasp and can be weighed in scales. Money and fish. It's one way to go. But Cif and I have gone another — where phantoms throng, to learn to pick the useful and trustworthy ones from the flibbertigibbets and flimflammers — which is well for Rime Isle. For these two gods we've found—”
“
“It's a long story,” she said impatiently. “Much too long to tell now, when dire events press upon us thick and fast. We must be practical. Cold Harbor's in dismal peril and—”
“Again your pardon, Lady Afreyt,” Fafhrd broke in, raising his voice a little. “But your mention of practicality reminds me of another matter upon which you and Cif appear to differ most sharply with your fellow councilmen. They know of no Mingol invasion, they say, and certainly nothing of you and Cif hiring us to help repel it — and you've asked us in your notes to keep that secret. Now, I've brought you the twelve berserkers you wanted—”
“I know, I know,” she said sharply, “and I'm pleased. But you were paid for that — and shall get further pay in Rime Isle gold as services are rendered. As for the council, the wizardries of Khahkht have lulled their suspicions — I doubt not that today's fish-run is his work, tempting their cupidity.”
“And my comrade and I have suffered from his wizardries too, I trow,” Fafhrd said. “Nevertheless, you told us at the Silver Eel in Lankhmar that you spoke with the voice of Rime Isle, and now it appears that you speak only for Cif and yourself in a council of — what is it, twelve?”
“Did you expect your task to be all easy sailing?” she flared at him. “Art unacquainted with set-backs and adverse gales in quests? Moreover, we do speak with the voice of Rime Isle, for Cif and I are the only councilpersons who have the old glory of Rime Isle at heart — and we are both full council members, I assure you, only daughters inheriting house, farms and council membership from fathers after (in Cif's case) sons died. We played together as children in these hills, she and I, reviving Rime Isle's greatness in our games. Or sometimes we'd be pirate queens and rape the Isle. But chiefly we'd imagine ourselves seizing power in the council, forcibly putting down all the other members.”
“So much violence in little girls?” Fafhrd couldn't help putting in. “I think of little girls as gathering flowers and weaving garlands whilst fancying themselves little wives and mothers—”
“—and put them all to the sword and cut their wives’ throats!” Afreyt finished. “Oh, we gathered flowers too, sometimes.”
Fafhrd chuckled, then his voice grew grave. “And so you've inherited full council membership. Groniger always mentions you with respect, though I think he has suspicions of something between us — and now you've somehow discovered a stray old god or two whom you think you can trust not to betray you, or delude you with senile ravings, and he's told you of a great two-pronged Mingol invasion of Rime Isle preparatory to world conquest, and on the strength of that you went to Lankhmar and hired the Mouser and me to be your mercenary captains, using your own fortunes for the purpose, I fancy—”
“Cif is the council treasurer,” she assured him with a meaningful crook of her lips. “She's very good at figures and accounts — as I am with the pen and words, the council's secretary.”
“And yet you trust this god,” Fafhrd pressed on, “this old god who loves gallows and seems to draw strength from them. Myself, I'm very suspicious of all old men and gods. In my experience they're full of lechery and avarice — and have a long lifetime's experience of evil to draw on in their twisty machinations.”
“Agreed,” Afreyt said. “But when all's said and done, a god's a god. Whatever nasty itches his old heart may have, whatever wicked thoughts of death and doom, he must first be true to his god's nature: which is, to hear what we say and hold us to it, to speak truth to man about what's going on in distant places, and to prophecy honestly — though he may try to trick us with words if we don't listen to him very carefully.”
“That does agree with my experience of the breed,” Fafhrd admitted. “Tell me, why is this called the Hill of the Eight-Legged Horse?”
Without a blink at the change of subject, Afreyt replied, “Because it takes four men to carry a coffin or the laid-out corpse of one who's been hanged — or died any other way. Four men — eight legs. You might have guessed.”
“And what is this god's name?”
Afreyt said: “Odin.”
Fafhrd had the strangest feeling at the gong-beat sound of that simple name — as if he were on the verge of recalling memories of another lifetime. Also, it had something of the tone of the gibberish spoken by Karl Treuherz, that strange otherworlder who had briefly come into the lives of Fafhrd and the Mouser astride the neck of a two- headed sea serpent whilst they were in the midst of their great adventure-war with the sapient rats of Lankhmar Below-Ground. Only a name — yet there was the feeling of walls between world disturbed.
At the same time he was looking into Afreyt's wide eyes and noting that the irises were violet, rather than blue as they had seemed in the yellow torchlight of the Eel — and then wondering how he could see any violet at all in anything when that tone had some time ago faded entirely from the sky, which was now full night except that the moon a day past full had just now lifted above the eastern highland.
From beyond Afreyt a light voice called tranquilly, attuned to the night, “The god sleeps.”
One of the girls was standing before the mouth of the bower, a slim white shape in the moonlight, clad only in simple frock that was hardly more than a shift and left one shoulder bare. Fafhrd marvelled that she was not shivering in the chill night air. Her two companions were dimmer shapes behind her.
“Did he give any trouble, Mara?” Afreyt called. (Fafhrd felt a strange feeling at that name, too.) “Nothing new,” the girl responded.
Afreyt said, “Well, put on your boots and hooded cloak — May and Gale, you also — and follow me and the
