“Fry me for a sardine!” Fafhrd said with great feeling. Then he sought to collect his comprehension. “And those folk on Nehwon's other side — up there — they're seeing a star at the bottom of each waterspout now around us here?”
“Of course not,” the Mouser said patiently. “Sunlight drowns out their twinkles for those folk. It's day up there, you see.” He pointed at the dark near the moon. “Up there, you see, they're bathed in highest noon, drenched in the light of sun, which now is somewhere near us, but hid from us by the thick walls of his sunspout, to coin a word wholly analogous to moonspout.”
“Oh, monstrous!” Fafhrd cried. “For if it's day up there, you little fool, why can't we see it here? Why can't we see up there Nehwon lands bathed in light with bright blue sea around ‘em? Answer me that!”
“Because there are two different kinds of light,” the Mouser said with an almost celestial tranquillity. “Seeming the same by every local test, yet utterly diverse. First, there's direct light, such as we're getting now from moon and stars up there. Second, there is reflected light, which cannot make the really longer journeys, and certainly can't recross — not one faint ray of it — Nehwon's central space to reach us here.”
“Mouser,” Fafhrd said in a very small voice, but with great certainty, “you're not just inventing words, you're inventing the whole business — on the spur of the moment as you go along.”
“Invent the Laws of Nature?” the Mouser asked with a certain horror. “That were far worse than darkest blasphemy.”
“Then in the name of all the gods at once!” Fafhrd demanded in a very large voice, “how can the sun be in a waterspout and not boil it all away in an instant in an explosion vast? Tell me at once.”
“There are some things man was not meant to know,” the Mouser said in a most portentous voice. Then, swiftly switching to the familiar, “or rather, since I am in no way superstitious, there are some things which have not yielded yet to our philosophy. An omission which in this instance I will remedy at once. There are, you see, two different kinds of energy, the one pure heat, the other purest light, which cannot boil the tiniest water-drop — the direct light I've already told you of, which changes almost entirely to heat where e'er it hits, which in turn tells us why reflected light can't make the long trip back through Nehwon's midst. There, have I answered you?”
“Oh damn, damn, damn,” Fafhrd said weakly. Then managing to rally himself, if only desperately for a last time, he asked somewhat sardonically, “All right, all right! But just where then is this floating sun you keep invoking, tucked in his vast adamantine-walled waterspout?”
“Look there,” the Mouser said, pointing due south, steerside abeam.
Across the moon-silvered gray field of the sea pricked out with speeding towers of waterspouts, almost at the dim distant horizon, Fafhrd saw a solitary gigantic waterspout huge as an island, taller than tallest mesa, moving east at least as swiftly as the rest and as ponderous-relentlessly as a juggernaut of the emperor of the Eastern Lands. The hair rose on the back of Fafhrd's neck, he was harrowed with fear and wonder, and he said not a word, but only stared and stared as the horrendous thing forged ahead in its immensity.
After a while he began also to feel a great weariness. He looked ahead and a little up at the stiffly flapping silver lace of the twin shimmer-sprights before the prow, taking comfort from their nearness and steadiness as if they were Black Racer's flags. He slowly lowered himself until he lay prone on the narrow, snugly abutting planks of the deck, his head toward the prow, his chin propped on his hands, still observing the night-sprights.
“You know how groups of stars sometimes wink out mysteriously on clearest Nehwon nights?” the Mouser said lightly and bemusedly.
“That's true enough, they do,” Fafhrd agreed, somewhat sleepily.
“That must be because the tubes of their waterspout-walls are bent enough, by a strong gale perchance, to hide their light, keep it from getting out.”
Fafhrd mumbled, “If you say so.”
After a considerable pause the Mouser asked in the same tones, “Is it not passing strange to think that in the heart of each dark, gray spout out there dotting the main, there burns (without any heat) a jewel of blinding, purest diamond light?”
Fafhrd managed what might have been a weighty sigh of agreement.
After another long pause the Mouser said reflectively, as one who tidied up loose ends, “It's easy now to see, isn't it, that the spouts small and great must all be tubes? For if they were solid water by some strange chance, they'd suck the oceans dry and fill the heavens with heaviest clouds — nay, with the sea! You get my point?”
But Fafhrd had gone to sleep. In his sleep he dreamed and in that dream he rolled over on his back and one of the shimmer-sprights parted from her sister and winged down to flutter close above him: a long and slender, black-haired form, moon pale, appareled in finest silver-shot black lace that witchingly enhanced her nakedness. She was gazing down at him tenderly yet appraisingly, with eyes that would have been violet had there been more light. He smiled at her. She slightly shook her head, her face grew grave, and she flowed down against him head to heel, her wraithlike fingers busy at the great bronze buckle of his heavy belt, while with long, night-cool cheek pressed ‘gainst his fevered one, she whispered softly and yet most clearly in his ear, each word a symbol finely drawn in blackest ink on moon-white paper, “Turn back, turn back, my dearest man, to Shadowland and Death, for that's the only way to stay alive. Trust only in the moon. Suspect all other prophecies but mine. So now, steer north, steer strongly north.”
In his dream Fafhrd replied, “I can't steer north, I've tried. Love me, my dearest girl,” and she answered huskily, “That's as may hap, my love. Seek Death to ‘scape from him. Suspect all flaming youth and scarlet shes. Beware the sun. Trust in the moon. Wait for her certain sign.”
At that instant Fafhrd's dream was snatched from him and he roused numbly to the Mouser's sharp cries and to the chilling fugitive glimpse of a face narrow, beauteous, and of most melancholy mien, pale violet-blue of hue and with eyes like black holes. This above wraithlike, like-complected figure, and all receding swift as thought amidst a beating of black wings.
Then the Mouser was shaking him by the shoulders and crying out, “Wake up, wake up! Speak to me, man!”
Fafhrd brushed his face with the back of his hand and mumbled, “Wha’ happ'n?”
Crouched beside him, the Mouser narrated rapidly and somewhat breathlessly, “The shimmer-sprights grew restless and ‘gan play about the mast like corposants. One buzzed around me shrilly like a wasp, and when I'd driven it off, I saw the other nosing you from toe to waist to head, then nuzzling your neck. Your flesh grew silver-white, as white as death, the whiles the corposant became your glowing shroud. I greatly feared for you and drove it off.”
Fafhrd's muddied eyes cleared somewhat whilst the Mouser spoke and when the latter was done, he nodded and said knowingly, “That would be right. She spoke me much of death and at the end she looked like it, poor sibyl.”
“Who spoke?” the Mouser asked. “What sibyl?”
“The shimmer-girl, of course,” Fafhrd told him. “You know what I mean.”
He stood up. His belt began to slip. He stared down wide-eyes at the undone buckle, then drew it up and hooked it together swiftly.
“Fafhrd, I don't know what you're talking of,” the Mouser denied, his expression suddenly hooded. “Girl? What girl? Art seeing mirages? Has lack of erotic exercise addled your wits? Have you turned moon-mad lunatic?”