On the black fabric lining it, there lay like a delicate mist cloud the slender translucent bladder of a fish.
Cif said, “I am minded to experience your love fully tonight. Yet not as fully, mind you, as to wish that we fashion a daughter together.'
The Mouser said, “I've seen the like of this made of thinnest leather well oiled.'
She said, “Not as effectual, I believe.'
He said, “To be sure, here, it would be something from a fish, this being Rime Isle. Tell me, did harbor master Groniger fashion this, as thrifty with the Isle's sperm as with its coins?” Then he nodded.
He reached over and drew her other foot up on his lap also. After saluting it similarly, he rested the side of his face on both her ankles and sighted up the narrow trough between her legs. “I am minded,” he said dreamily but with a little growl in his voice, “to embark on another slow and intensely watchful journey, mindful of every step, such as that by which I arrived at this house this eve.'
She nodded, wondering idly if the growl were Gusorio's, but it seemed too faint for that.
8
In the bow of a laden grainship sailing north from Lankhmar across the Inner Sea to the land of the Eight Cities, the Death of Fafhrd, who was tall and lank, dire as a steel scarecrow, said to his fellow passenger, “This incarnation likes me and likes me not. ‘Tis a balmy journey now but it'll be long and by all accounts cold as witchcunt at the end, albeit summer. Arth-Pulgh's a mean employer, and unlucky. Hand me a medlar from the sack.'
The Death of the Gray Mouser, lithe as a weasel and forever smiling, replied, “No meaner nor no curster than Hamomel. Working for whom, however, is the pits. I've not yet shaken down to this persona, know not its likings. Reach your own apples.'
9
A week later, the evening being unseasonably balmy and Witches Moon at first quarter near the top of the sky, a hemispherical silver goblet brimful of stars and scattering them dimmed by moonwine all over the sky as it descended toward the lips of the west, drawn down by the same goddess who had lifted it, Afreyt and Fafhrd after supping alone at her violet-tinted pale house on Salthaven's northern edge were minded to wander across the great meadow in the direction of Elvenhold, a northward slanting slim rock spire two bowshots high, chimneyed and narrowly terraced, that thrust from the rolling fields almost a league away to the west.
“See how her tilt,” Fafhrd observed of that slender mountainlet, “directs her at the dark boss of the Targe—” (naming the northernmost constellation in the Lankhmar heavens) “—as if she were granite arrow aimed at skytop by the gods of the underworld.'
“Tonight the earth is full of the heat of these gods’ forges, pressing summer scents from spring flowers and grasses. Let's rest awhile,” Afreyt answered, and truly although it was not yet May Eve, the heavy air was more like Midsummer's. She touched his shoulder and sank to the herby sward.
After a stare around the horizon for any sky wanderer on verge of rise or set, Fafhrd seated himself by her right side. A low lurhorn sounded faintly from the town behind them or the sea beyond that.
“Night fishers summoning the finny ones,” he hazarded.
“I dreamed last night,” she said, “that a beast thing came out of the sea and followed me dripping salt drops as I wandered through a dark wood. I could see its silver scales between the dark boles in the gloom. But I was not afeared, and it in turn seemed to respond to this cue, for the longer it followed me the less it became like a beast and the more like a sea-person, and come not to work a hurt on me but to warn me.'
“Of what?” and when she was silent, “Its sex?'
“Why, female—” she answered at once, but then becoming doubtful, “—I think. Had it sex? I wonder why I did not wait for it to catch up, or perhaps turn sudden and walk toward it? I think I felt, did I so, and although I feared it not, it would turn to a beast again, a deep-voiced beast.'
“I too dreamed strangely last night, and my dream strangely chimed with yours, or was it by day I dreamed? For I have begun to do that,” Fafhrd announced, dropping himself back at full length on the springy sward, the better to observe the seven spiraled stars of the Targe. “I dreamt I was pent in the greatest of castles with a million dark rooms in it, and that I searched for Gusorio (for that old legend between the Mouser and me is sometimes more than a joke) because I'd been solemnly told, perchance in a dream within the dream, that he had a message for me.'
She turned and leaned over him, her eyes staring deep into his as she listened. Her palely golden hair fell forward in two sweeping smooth cascades over her shoulders. He readjusted his position slightly so that five of the stars of Targe rose in a semicircle from her forehead (his eyes straying now and again toward her shadowed throat and the silver cord lacing together the sides of her violet bodice) and he continued, “In the twelve times twelve times twelfth room there stood at the far door a figure clad all in silver-scale mail (there's our dreams chiming) but its back was toward me and the longer I looked at it, the taller and skinnier it seemed than Gusorio should be. Nevertheless I cried out to it aloud and in the very instant of my calling knew that I'd made an irreparable mistake and that my voice would work a hideous change in it and to my harm. See, our dreams clink again? But then, as it started to turn, I awoke. Dearest princess, did you know that the Targe crowns you?” And his right hand moved toward the silver bow drooping below her throat as she bent down to kiss him.
But as he enjoyed those pleasures and their continuations and proliferations while the moon sank, which pleasures were greatly enhanced by their starry background, the far ecstasies complementing the near, he marveled how these nights he seemed to be walking at once toward brightest life and darkest death, while through it all Elvenhold loomed in the low distance.
10
“No question on it, Captain Mouser's changed,” Pshawri said with certainty, yet also amazedly and apprehensively, to his fellow lieutenant Mikkidu as they tippled together two evenings later in a small booth of the Sea Wrack. “Here's yet another example if't be needed. You know the care he has for our grub, to see that cookie doesn't poison us. Normally he'll taste a spoon of stew, say what it lacks or not, even order it dumped (that happened once, remember?) and go dancing off. Yet this very afternoon I spied him standing before the roiling soup kettle and staring into it for as long as it takes to stow
Mikkidu nodded. “Or else he's trotting about bent over like Mother Grum, seeing things even an ant ignores. He had me stooping about after him over a route that could have been the plan of a maze, pointing out in turn a tangle of hair combings, a penny, a pebble, a parchment scrap scribbled with runic, mouse droppings, and a dead cockroach.'
“Did he make you eat it?” asked Pshawri.
Mikkidu shook his head wonderingly. “No chewings… and no chewings out either. He only said at the end, when my legs had started to cramp, ‘I want you to keep these matters in mind in the future.’”
“And meantime Captain Fafhrd—” the two semi-rehabilitated thieves looked up. Skor from the next booth had thrust over his balding head, worry-wrinkled, which now loomed above them “—is so busy keeping watch on the stars by night — and by day too, somehow — that it's a wonder he can navigate Salthaven without breaking his neck. Think you some evil wight has put a spell on both?'
Normally the Mouser's and Fafhrd's men were mutually rivalrous, suspicious, and disparaging of each other. It was a measure of their present concern for their captains that they pooled their knowledge and took frank
