"Show yourself, coward!" Fafhrd said as he rose uncertainly to his feet. "Let me put another dagger in you."
"I have already won our duel, barbarian," Malygris answered. "I see the streaming mark of my curse upon you."
Fafhrd gave a stricken look and wiped the back of one hand across his mouth. It came away with a red smear.
Farther down the walkway, the darkness flickered in a peculiar manner, as if the wind had rippled a black curtain and parted it. Malygris's thin, bald form appeared, his arms folded into ragged bloodstained sleeves, his eyes burning with madness.
"Perhaps you'd like a preview of things to come," he said, his wild gaze fixed on Fafhrd.
A violent coughing wracked Fafhrd's mighty frame, bending him double as he clutched his chest and throat. His hair turned thin, lost its luster, and began to fall out. He spit blood into his hands; crimson spotted his lips and chin, the front of his tunic. Dark circles formed around his eyes, and the flesh began to hang upon his cheekbones.
Weakened legs gave way beneath him, and he fell gasping for air with spasming lungs. His musculature dissolved away until his bones began to show through bloodless flesh and his ribs showed right through his garments until he appeared little more than a pitifully thrashing skeleton with a veil of parchment draped over it.
A desperate mewling issued from Fafhrd's dehydrated lips, and he raised a supplicating hand toward the Mouser.
"Stop it!" the Mouser cried. In horror, he watched as Fafhrd's bloody teeth dropped out of his head. Drawing his dagger, Catsclaw, he prepared to throw, but suddenly there were three images of Malygris, then six, then nine, then more than the Mouser could count, all arrayed before him like an impossible, ragged army.
He screamed in frustration. Scooping up a handful of pebbles from the walkway, he flung them. Every image of Malygris reacted exactly the same, raising one arm to shield a laughing face.
"This is how it will be for you, defiler!" Malygris said to Fafhrd, his eyes blazing, his voice an angry hiss. "But you'll die slowly, over weeks, perhaps months. Your flesh will rot and drip from your bones, just as it was with Sadaster. You'll curse the day you came between me and Laurian!"
Through a gumless slash of a mouth, Fafhrd managed to answer, "You're insane."
Balancing his dagger carefully by the point, the Mouser folded his legs and sat down on the ground. His eyes narrowed to small slits; he calmed his breathing and let his racing heart slow. It's all illusion, he reminded himself. Fafhrd was not really dying at his feet. Nor did his enemy stand before him in scores.
He had been the pupil and ward of Glavas Rho. The herb-wizard had raised him through boyhood and taught him a thing or two about magic. A simpler form of magic, to be sure, but the Mouser had paid attention to his studies. A discerning eye, he knew, could tell the real from the false.
"Yes, insane!" Malygris agreed. "You destroyed the most precious jewel in Nehwon, my Laurian. Now I will have my revenge!" The wizard barked a short, ugly laugh. "Just imagine when your heart stops, Northerner!"
Fafhrd's bulging eyes snapped wider. A choked gasp of pain forced its way sharply from his lips as he clutched his shrunken chest.
The Mouser remained calm. Subtly, he snatched another pebble and flicked it toward one of the images of Malygris. When it failed to react, he hid a smile. False, he judged. So the unreal images only reacted when the real wizard moved.
"You killed Laurian," Fafhrd croaked. Somehow, as if he too were managing to fight the illusions, he struggled to his hands and knees. "You wrapped your own hands around her silken neck, because she hated you with all her heart! You are the murderer—and the fool."
The Mouser flicked pebbles at three more images, eliminating them in his mind. When he found one that reacted, then his dagger would fly.
"I could have won her," Malygris raged. The images shook their fists at Fafhrd. "But Sadaster stole her from me and dragged her to this cursed city. Sadaster and Lankhmar poisoned her heart against me. Now see how they are punished!"
Malygris thrust his good arm upward, and his fingers strained toward the sky.
High above the treetops, a thin red glow appeared. A ribbon of bloody hue wafted as if on a wind, furling and unfurling on itself, floating gracefully like a thin kite. Yet through the pretty light, it radiated an evil, a soul-shriveling vileness of dark and vast power.
The Mouser stared. The ribbon descended through the trees to swirl a few times about Malygris's upraised hand. It moved then to Fafhrd, but as if with some arcanely primitive power of recognition, it turned away.
Despite himself, the Mouser's heart quailed. That tenuous scarlet veil swept across the lawn. Too late, he leaped to his feet. The red horror poured into his nostrils, into his mouth as he gave an involuntary cry.
In the moment that it touched him, entered him, infected him, he felt a hunger deeper and blacker than anything his mind had ever conceived, a starving void, a ravening gulf, greedy in its need. It swallowed him like a morsel, devoured him.
Then, it spit him out again like chewed gristle and moved on.
The Mouser shivered with fear even as he fought to remain calm. A barely perceptible weakness burrowed in his muscles; he felt it like the tiniest tear in his soul through which his life-force leaked away.
Forgotten in the conflict, Nuulpha rose suddenly from the ground as the red ribbon coiled serpent-like about his throat. If Nuulpha noticed at all, though, he gave no sign of it. And uncoiling, the ribbon rose away from him and faded. Was Nuulpha, then, already infected as well?
The corporal thrust a hand under his crimson cloak and into a vest pocket on his jerkin. "They are mere swordsmen, fool," he said coldly. Only the voice was not that of Nuulpha! The air seemed to ripple around him like water. Illusions and illusions! The image of Nuulpha melted. In his place stood Demptha Negatarth. "And your fight is here."
Out of that vest pocket came a deck of cards. Demptha Negatarth bent them sharply in his fingers and scattered them through the air.
"You swore not to interfere!" the images of Malygris screamed.
"I swore not to warn Sadaster," Demptha Negatarth answered. "And I've paid the price. Your damned curse is beyond your control. It destroyed my daughter, and now it's poisoned me. I'll see you dead for it, and pour your heart’s blood myself into a vessel for these adventurers."
Demptha's tarot cards flew with unnatural accuracy. Touched by the cards, the images of Malygris vanished, leaving only a single image—Malygris, himself.
Seething with rage, the wizard extended his good arm toward Demptha, but before he could cast any spell, one of the fluttering cards landed on his outstretched hand.
Immediately, the painting on the card came to frightening life. A glittering bird, seemingly formed all of crystal and jewels, sank talons into Malygris's flesh. Shimmering wings with razor-sharp facets beat furiously at his face, and an emerald beak flashed at his eyes.
Malygris screamed in pain and terror, and the bird grew larger. Now its wings beat the air. Malygris swung his arms wildly, trying to fight free as the creature struggled to lift him bodily into the air.
Above him, the red ribbon appeared again, glowing a deeper, uglier shade, pulsing and throbbing with unholy life. Lengthening and lengthening, it wrapped around Malygris and the bird both, muffling the wizard's screams and the bird's angry caws, extinguishing them.
Around and around the ribbon flashed until it was no longer a ribbon at all, but a huge ball, a bubble of blackly crimson hue through which only the vaguest shadows of Malygris and the bird could be seen still locked in combat.
"What enchantment is this?" Fafhrd asked, rising and backing away from the bubble until he stood at the Mouser's side. Free from Malygris's power, he looked himself again.