“I saw his pride — a silver-armored wound. I watched his ambition stalk among the stars as if they were jewels set on black velvet in his treasure house to be. I felt, almost as if it were my own, his choking hatred of the bland, miserly gods — almighty fathers who lock up the secrets of the universe, smile at our pleas, frown, shake their heads, forbid, chastise; and his groaning rage at the bonds of space and time, as if each cubit he could not see and tread upon were a silver manacle on his wrist, as if each moment before or after his own life were a silver crucifying nail. I walked through the gale-blown halls of his loneliness and glimpsed the beauty that he cherished — shadowy, glittering forms that cut the soul like knives — and once I came upon the dungeon of his love, where no light came to show it was corpses that were fondled and bones kissed. I grew familiar with his desires, which demanded a universe of miracles peopled by unveiled gods. And his lust, which quivered at the world as at a woman, frantic to know each hidden part.
“Happily, for I was learning at long last to hate him, I noted how, though he possessed my body, he could not use it easily and bravely as I had. He could not laugh, or love, or dare. He must instead hang back, peer, purse his lips, withdraw."
More than halfway down the ramp, it seemed to the Mouser that the groan was repeated, louder, more whistlingly.
“He and the Old Man started on a new cycle of study and experience that took them, I think, to all corners of the world and that they were confident, I'm sure, would open to them those black realms wherein their powers would become infinite. Anxiously from my cramped vantage-point I watched their quest ripen and then, to my delight, rot. Their outstretched fingers just missed the next handhold in the dark. There was something that both of them lacked. Anra became bitter, blamed the Old Man for their lack of success. They quarreled.
“When I saw Anra's failure become final, I mocked him with my laughter, not of lips but of mind. From here to the stars he could not have escaped it — it was then he would have killed me. But he dared not while I was in his own body, and I now had the power to bar him from that.
“Perhaps it was my faint thought-laughter that turned his desperate mind to you and to the secret of the laughter of the Elder Gods — that, and his need of magical aid in regaining his body. For a while then I almost feared he had found a new avenue of escape — or advance — until this morning before the tomb, with sheer cruel joy, I saw you spit on his offers, challenge, and, helped by my laughter, kill him. Now there is only the Old Man to fear."
Passing again under the massive multiple archway with its oddly recessed keystone, they heard the whistling groan once more repeated, and this time there was no mistaking its reality, its nearness, its direction. Hastening to a shadowy and particularly misty corner of the chamber, they made out an inner window set level with the floor, and in that window they saw a face that seemed to float bodiless on the thick fog. Its features defied recognition — it might have been a distillation of all the ancient, disillusioned faces in the world. There was no beard below the sunken cheeks.
Coming close as they dared, they saw that it was perhaps not entirely bodiless or without support. There was the ghostly suggestion of tatters of clothing or flesh trailing off, a pulsating sack that might have been a lung, and silver chains with hooks or claws.
Then the one eye remaining to that shameful fragment opened and fixed upon Ahura, and the shrunken lips twisted themselves into the caricature of a smile.
“Like you, Ahura,” the fragment murmured in the highest of falsettos, “he sent me on an errand I did not want to run."
As one, moved by a fear they dared not formulate, Fafhrd and the Mouser and Ahura half turned round and peered over their shoulders at the mist-clogged doorway leading outside. For three, four heartbeats they peered. Then, faintly, they heard one of the horses whinny. Whereupon they turned fully round, but not before a dagger, sped by the yet unshaking hand of Fafhrd, had buried itself in the open eye of the tortured thing in the inner window.
Side by side they stood, Fafhrd wild-eyed, the Mouser taut, Ahura with the look of someone who, having successfully climbed a precipice, slips at the very summit.
A slim shadowy bulk mounted into the glow outside the doorway.
“Laugh!” Fafhrd hoarsely commanded Ahura. “Laugh!” He shook her, repeating the command.
Her head flopped from side to side, the cords in her neck jerked, her lips twitched, but from them came only a dry croaking. She grimaced despairingly.
“Yes,” remarked a voice they all recognized, “there are times and places where laughter is an easily-blunted weapon — as harmless as the sword which this morning pierced me through."
Death-pale as always, the tiny blood-clot over his heart, his forehead crumbled in, his black garb travel-dusted, Anra Devadoris faced them.
“And so we come back to the beginning,” he said slowly, “but now a wider circle looms ahead."
Fafhrd tried to speak, to laugh, but the words and laughter choked in his throat.
“Now you have learned something of my history and my power, as I intended you should,” the adept continued. “You have had time to weigh and reconsider. I still await your answer."
This time it was the Mouser who sought to speak or laugh and failed.
For a moment the adept continued to regard them, smiling confidently. Then his gaze wandered beyond them. He frowned suddenly and strode forward, pushed past them, knelt by the inner window.
As soon as his back was turned Ahura tugged at the Mouser's sleeve, tried to whisper something — with no more success than one deaf and dumb.
They heard the adept sob, “He was my nicest."
The Mouser drew a dagger, prepared to steal on him from behind, but Ahura dragged him back, pointing in a very different direction.
The adept whirled on them. “Fools!” he cried, “have you no inner eye for the wonders of darkness, no sense of the grandeur of horror, no feeling for a quest beside which all other adventurings fade in nothingness, that you should destroy my greatest miracle — slay my dearest oracle? I let you come here to Mist, confident its mighty music and glorious vistas would win you to my view — and thus I am repaid. The jealous, ignorant powers ring me round — you are my great hope fallen. There were unfavorable portents as I walked from the Lost City. The white, idiot glow of Ormadz faintly dirtied the black sky. I heard in the wind the senile clucking of the Elder Gods. There was a fumbling abroad, as if even incompetent Ningauble, last and stupidest of the hunting pack, were catching up. I had a charm in reserve to thwart them, but it needed the Old Man to carry it. Now they close in for the kill. But there are still some moments of power left me, and I am not wholly yet without allies. Though I am doomed, there are still those bound to me by such ties that they must answer me if I call upon them. You shall not see the end, if end there be.” With that he lifted his voice in a great eerie shout: “Father! Father!"
The echoes had not died before Fafhrd rushed at him, his great sword swinging.
The Mouser would have followed suit except that, just as he shook Ahura off, he realized at what she was so insistently pointing.
The recess in the keystone above the mighty archway.
Without hesitation he unslipped his climbing rope, and running lightly across the chamber, made a whistling cast.
The hook caught in the recess.
Hand over hand he climbed up.
Behind him he heard the desperate skirl of swords, heard also another sound, far more distant and profound.