The Knight and Knave of Swords

stars winked on, naming those he knew and numbering, by altitude and direction, those he didn't.

5

Their work well launched, Sheelba retired to Marsh center and Ningauble toward his cavern, the understorm abating, a good omen. While the three gods smiled, invigorated by their cursing. The slum corner of Heaven they occupied now seemed less chilly to Issek and less sweatily enervating to Kos, while Mog's devious mind spider- stepped down more pleasant channels.

Yes, the seed was well planted, and left to germinate in silence, might have developed as intended, but some gods, and some sorcerers too, cannot resist boasting and gossiping, and so by way of talkative priests and midwives and vagabonds, word of what was intended came to the ears of the mighty, including two who considered themselves well rid of Fafhrd and the Mouser and did not want them back in Lankhmar at all. And the mighty are great worriers and spend much time preventing anything that troubles their peace of mind.

And so it was that Pulgh Arthonax, penurious and perverse overlord of Lankhmar, who hated heroes of all description — but especially fair-complected big ones like Fafhrd — and Hamomel, thrifty and ruthless grand master of the Thieves Guild there, who detested the Mouser generally as a freelance competitor and particularly as one who had lured twelve promising apprentices away from the Guild to be his henchmen — these two took counsel together and commissioned the Assassins’ Order, an elite within the Slayers’ Brotherhood, to dispatch the Twain in Rime Isle before they should point toe toward Lankhmar. And because Arth-Pulgh and Hamomel were both most miserly magnates and insatiably greedy withal, they beat down the Order's price as far as they could and made it a condition of the commission that three-fourths of any portable booty found on or near the doomed Twain be returned to them as their lawful share.

So the Order drew up death warrants, chose by lot two of its currently unoccupied fellows, and in solemn secret ceremony attended only by the Master and the Recorder, divested these of their identities and rechristened them the Death of Fafhrd and the Death of the Gray Mouser, by which names only they should henceforth be known to each other and within the profession until the death warrants were served and their commissions fulfilled.

6

Next day repairs to Seahawk continued, the low tide repeating, Witches Moon being only one day old. During a late morning break Fafhrd moved apart from his men a little and scanned the high bright sky toward north and east, his gaze ranging. Skor ventured to follow him across the wet sand and copy his peerings. He saw nothing in the gray-blue heavens, but experience had taught him his captain had exceptionally keen eyesight.

“Sea eagles?” he asked softly.

Fafhrd looked at him thoughtfully, then smiled, shaking his head, and confided, “I was imagining which stars would be there, were it now night.'

Skor's forehead wrinkled puzzledly. “Stars by day?'

Fafhrd nodded. “Yes. Where think you the stars are by day?'

“Gone,” Skor answered, his forehead clearing. “They go away at dawn and return at evening. Their lights are extinguished — like winter campfires! for surely it must be cold where the stars are, higher than mountaintops. Until the sun comes out to warm up things, of course.'

Fafhrd shook his head. “The stars march west across the sky each night in the same formations which we recognize year after year, dozen years after dozen, and I would guess gross after gross. They do not skitter for the horizon when day breaks or seek out lairs and earth holes, but go on marching with the sun's glare hiding their lights — under cover of day, one might express it.'

“Stars shining by day?” Skor questioned, doing a fair job of hiding his surprise and bafflement. Then he caught Fafhrd's drift, or thought he did, and a certain wonder appeared in his eyes. He knew his captain was a good general who made a fetish of keeping track of the enemy's position, especially in terrain affording concealment, as forest on land or fog at sea. So by his very nature his captain had applied the same rule to the stars and studied ‘em as closely as he'd traced the movements of the Mingol scouts fleeing across Rime Isle.

Though it was strange thinking of the stars as enemies. His captain was a deep one! Perhaps he did have foes among the stars. Skor had heard rumor that he'd bedded a queen of the air.

7

That night as the Gray Mouser and Cif leisurely prepared for bed in her low-eaved house tinted a sooty red on the northwestern edge of Salthaven City, and whilst that lady busied herself at her mirrored dressing table, the Mouser himself sitting on bed's edge set his pouch upon a low bedside table and withdrew from it a curious lot of commonplace objects — curious in part because they were so commonplace — and arranged them in a line on the table's dark surface.

Cif, made curious by the slow regularity of his movements she saw reflected cloudily in the sheets of silver she faced, took up a small flat black box and came over and sat herself beside him.

The objects included a toothed small wooden wheel as big almost as a Sarheenmar dollar with two of the teeth missing, a finch's feather, three lookalike gray round pebbles, a scrap of blue wool cloth stiff with dirt, a bent wrought-iron nail, a hazelnut, and a dinted small black round that might have been a Lankhmar tik or Eastern halfpenny.

Cif ran her eye along them, then looked at him questioningly. He said, “Coming here from the barracks at first eve, a strange mood seized me. Low in the sunset glow the new moon's faintest and daintiest silver crescent had just materialized like the ghost of a young girl — and just in the direction of this house, at that, as though to signal your presence here — but somehow I had eyes only for the gutter and the pathside. Which is where I found those. And a remarkable lot they are for a small northern seaport. You'd think Ilthmar at least…” He shook his head.

“But why collect ‘em?” she queried. Like an old ragpicker, she thought.

He shrugged. “I don't know. I think I thought I might find a use for them,” he added doubtfully.

She said, “They do look like oddments that might be involved in casting a spell.'

He shrugged again, but added, “They're not all what they seem. That, for instance—” he pointed at one of three gray spherelets “—is not a pebble like the other two, but a lead slingshot, perhaps one of my own.'

Struck by his thrusting finger, that rolled off the table and hit the terrazzo floor with a little dull yet dinky thud, as if to prove his observation.

As he recovered it, he paused with his eyes close to the floor to study first the crushed black marble of the terrazzo flecked with dark red and gold, and second Cif's near foot, which he then drew up onto his lap and studied still more minutely.

“A strangely symmetric pentapod coral outcrop from sea's bottom,” he observed, and planted a slow kiss upon the base of her big toe, insinuated the tip of his tongue between it and the next.

“There's an eel nosed around in my reef,” she murmured.

Laying his cheek upon her ankle, he sighted up her leg. She was wearing a singlet of fine brown linen that tied between her legs. He said, “Your hair has exactly the same tints as are in the flooring.'

She said, “You think I didn't select the marble for crushing with that in mind? Or add in the gold flakes? Here's a present of sorts for you.” And she pushed the small flat black box down her leg toward him from her groin to her knee.

He sat up to inspect it, though keeping her foot in his lap.