“That night went as I'd guessed it would. Loki had indeed taken up permanent residence in the fire here and after a while I was able to talk with him and get some answers to questions, though nothing of profit to Rime Isle as yet. I made arrangements with the Ilthmart for the Flame Den to be reserved one night each week, and like bargains with Hilsa and Rill to come on those nights and entertain the god and keep him happy. Hilsa, has the god been with you tonight?” she called to the woman feeding the fire, the one with red stockings.
“Twice,” that one replied matter-of-factly in a husky voice. “Slipped from the fire invisibly and back again. He's content.”
“Your pardon, Lady Cif,” the Mouser interposed, “but how do these professional women find such close commerce with an invisible god to be? What's it like? I'm curious.”
Cif looked toward them where they sat by the fire.
“Like having a mouse up your skirt,” Hilsa replied with a short chuckle, swinging a red leg.
“Or a toad,” her companion amended. “Although he dwells in the flames, his person is cold.” Rill had laid aside her cat's cradle and joined her hands, fingers interweaving, to make shadow-faces on the wall, of prick-eared gigantic werewolves, great sea serpents, dragons, and long-nosed, long-chinned witches. “He likes these hobgoblins,” she commented.
The Mouser nodded thoughtfully, watching them for a while, and then back to the fire.
Cif continued, “Soon the god, I could tell, was beginning to get the feel of Nehwon, fitting his mind to her, stretching it out to her farthest bounds, and his oracles became more to the point. Meantime Afreyt, with whom I conferred daily, was caring for old Odin out on the moor in much the same way (though using girls to comfort and appease him instead of full-grown women, he being an older god), eliciting prophecies of import.
“Loki it was who first warned us that the Mingols were on the move, mustering horse-ships against Rime Isle, mounting under Khahkht's urgings toward a grand climacteric of madness and rapine. Afreyt put independent question to Odin and he confirmed it — they were together in the tale at every point.
“When asked what we must do, they both advised — again independently — that we seek out two certain heroes in Lankhmar and have them bring their bands to the Isle's defence. They were most circumstantial, giving your names and haunts, saying you were their men, whether or not you knew it in this life, and they did not change their stories under repeated questioning. Tell me, Gray Mouser, have you not known the god Loki before? Speak true.”
“Upon my word, I haven't, Lady Cif,” he averred, “and am no more able than you to explain the mystery of our resemblance. Though there is a certain weird familiarity about the name, and Odin's too, as if I'd heard them in dreams or nightmares. But however I rack my brains, it comes no clearer.”
“Well,” she resumed after a pause, “the two gods kept up their urgings that we seek you out and so half a year ago Afreyt and I took ship for Lankhmar on Hlal — with what results you know.”
“Tell me, Lady Cif,” the Mouser intejected, rousing himself from his fire-peerings, “how did you and tall Afreyt get back to Rime Isle after Khahkht's wizardrous blizzard snatched you out of the Silver Eel?”
“It transpired as swiftly as our journey there was long,” she said. “One moment we were in his cold clutch, battered and blinded by wind-driven ice, our ears assaulted by a booming laughter. The next we had been taken in charge by two feminine flying creatures who whirled us at dizzying speed through darkness to a warm cave where they left us breathless. They said they were a mountain king's two daughters.”
“Hirriwi and Keyaira, I'll be bound!” the Mouser exclaimed. “They must be on our side.”
“Who are those?” Cif inquired.
“Mountain princesses Fafhrd and I have known in our day. Invisibles like our revered fire-dweller here.” He nodded toward the flames. “Their father rules in lofty Stardock.”
“I've heard of that peak and dread Oomforafor, its king, whom some say is with his son Faroomfar an ally of Khahkht. Daughters against father and brother — that would be natural. Well, Afreyt and I after we'd recovered our breath made our way to the cavern's mouth — and found ourselves looking down on Rime Isle and Salthaven from a point midway up Darkfire. With some little difficulty we made our way home across rock and glacier.”
“The volcano,” the Mouser mused. “Again Loki's link with fire.” His attention had been drawn back to the hypnotic flames.
Cif nodded. “Thereafter Loki and Odin kept us informed of the Mingols’ progress toward Rime Isle — and your own. Then four days ago Loki began a running account of your encounters with Khahkht's frost monstreme. He made it most vivid — sometimes you'd have sworn he was piloting one of the ships himself. I managed to reserve the Flame Den the succeeding nights (and have it now for the next three days and nights also), so we were able to follow the details of the long flight or long pursuit — which, truth to tell, became a bit monotonous.”
“You should have been there,” the Mouser murmured.
“Loki made me feel I was.”
“Incidentally,” the Mouser said casually, “I'd think you'd have rented the Flame Den every night once you'd got your god here.”
“I'm not made of gold,” she informed him without rancor. “Besides, Loki likes variety. The brawls that others hold here amuse him — were what attracted him in the first place. Furthermore, it would have made the council even more suspicious of my activities.”
The Mouser nodded. “I thought I recognized a crony of Groniger's playing chess out there.”
“Hush,” she counseled him. “I must now consult the god.” Her voice had grown a little singsong in the later stages of her narrative and it became more so as, without transition, she invoked, “And now, O Loki god, tell us about our enemies across the seas and in the realms of ice. Tell us of cruel, cold Khahkht, of Edumir of the Widdershin Mingols and Gonov of the Sunwise. Hilsa and Rill, sing with me to the god.” And her voice became a somnolent two-toned, wordless chant in which the other women joined: Hilsa's husky voice, Rill's slightly shrill one, and a soft growling that after a bit the Mouser realized came from Mother Grum — all tuned to the fire and its flame-voice.
The Mouser lost himself in this strange medley of notes and all at once the crackling flame-voice, as if by some dream magic, became fully articulate, murmuring rapidly in Low Lankhmarese with occasional words slipped in that were as hauntingly strange as the god's own name:
“Storm clouds thicken round Rime Isle. Nature brews her blackest bile. Monsters quicken, nightmares foal, niss and nicor, drow and troll.” (Those last four nouns were all strange ones to the Mouser, specially the bell-toll sound of “troll.') “Sound alarms and strike the drum — in three days the Mingols come, Sunwise Mingols from the east, horsehead ship and human beast. Trick them all most cunningly — lead them to the spinning sea, to down- swirling dizzy bowl. Trust the whirlpool, ‘ware the troll! Mingols to their deaths must go, down to weedy hell below, never draw an easy breath, suffer an unending death, everlasting pain and strife, everlasting death in life. Mingol madness ever burn! Never peace again return!”
And the flame-voice broke off in a flurry of explosive crackles that shattered the dream-magic and brought the Mouser to his feet with a great start, his sleepy mood all gone. He stared at the fire, walked rapidly around it, peered at it closely from the other side, then swiftly scanned the entire room. Nothing! He glared at Hilsa and Rill. They eyed him blandly and said in unison, “The god has spoken,” but the sense of a presence was gone from the fire and the room as well, leaving behind not even a black hole into which it might have retired — unless perchance (it occurred to the Mouser) it had retired into him, accounting for the feeling of restless energy and flaming thought which now possessed him, while the litany of Mingol doom kept repeating itself over and over in his memory. “Can such things be?” he asked himself and answered himself with an instant and resounding “Yes!”
He paced back to Cif, who had risen likewise. “We have three days,” she said.
“So it appears,” he said. Then, “Know you aught of trolls? What are they?”
“I was about to ask you that,” she replied. “The word's as strange to me as it appears to be to you.”
“Whirlpools, then,” he queried, his thoughts racing. “Any of them about the isle? Any sailors’ tales?”
“Oh, yes — the Great Maelstrom off the isle's rock-fanged east coast with its treacherous swift currents and tricky tides, the Great Maelstrom from whence the island gets what wood it owns, after it's cast up on the Beach of Bleached Bones. It forms regularly each day. Our sailors know it well and avoid it like no other peril.”
“Good! I must put to sea and seek it out and learn its every trick and how it comes and goes. I'll need a small sailing craft for that while
“Wherefore to sea?” her breath catching, she asked. “Wherefore must you dash yourself at such a maw of danger?' — but in her widening eyes he thought he could see the dawning of the answer to that.