Batting aside a springing salt-spider with the back of his gauntleted hand, the Mouser called upward, "That's a mighty small jug to hold poison for all the rats of Lankhmar. Hola, you in the black bag there, aren't you going to invite me up for a drink, a bite, and a dry-out? I'll curse you otherwise with spells I've unbeknownst stolen from you!"
"I'm not your mother, mistress, or nurse, but your wizard!" Sheelba retorted in his harsh hollow sea-voice. "Cease your childish threats and stiffen your back, small gray one!"
That last seemed the ultimate and crushing infidelity to the Mouser with his stiff neck and straining spine. He thought bitterly of the sinew-punishing, skin-smarting night he'd just spent. He'd left Lankhmar by the Marsh Gate, to the frightened amazement of the guards, who had strongly advised against solo marsh sorties even by day. Then he'd followed the twisty causeway by moonlight to the lightning-blasted but still towering gray Seahawk Tree. There after long peering he'd spotted Sheelba's hut by a pulsing blue glow coming from its low doorway, and plunged boldly toward it through the swordish sea grass. Then had come nightmare. Deep creeks and thorny hummocks had appeared where he didn't expect them and he had speedily lost his usually infallible sense of direction. The small blue glow had winked out and finally reappeared far to his right, then seemed to draw near and recede bafflingly time after time. He had realized he must be walking in circles around it and guessed that Sheelba had cast a dizzying enchantment on the area, perhaps to ensure against interruption while working some particularly toilsome and heinous magic. Only after twice almost perishing in quicksands and being stalked by a long-legged marsh leopard with blue-glinting eyes which the Mouser once mistook for the hut, because the beast seemed to have a habit of winking, had he at last reached his destination as the stars were dimming.
Thereafter he had poured out, or rather up, to Sheelba all his recent vexations, suggesting suitable solutions for each problem: a love potion for Hisvet, friendship potions for Frix and Hisvin, a patron potion for Glipkerio, a Mingol-repellent ointment, a black albatross to seek out Fafhrd and tell him to hurry home, and perhaps something to use against the rats, too. Now he was being offered only the last.
He rotated his head writhingly to unkink his neck, flicked a sea cobra away with Scalpel's scabbard-tip, then gazed up sourly at the little bottle.
"How am I supposed to administer it?" he demanded. "A drop down each rat-hole? Or do I spoon it into selected rats and release them? I warn you that if it contains seeds of the Black Sickness, I will send all Lankhmar to extirpate you from the Marsh."
"None of those," Sheelba grated contemptuously. "You find a spot where rats are foregathered. Then you drink it yourself."
The Mouser's eyebrows lifted. After a bit he asked, "What will that do? Give me an evil eye for rats, so my glance strikes them dead? Make me clairvoyant, so I can spy out their chief nests through solid earth and rock? Or wondrously increase my cunning and mental powers?" he added, though truth to tell, he somewhat doubted if the last were possible to any great degree.
"Something like all those," Sheelba retorted carelessly, nodding his hood. "It will put you on the right footing to cope with the situation. It will give you a power to deal with rats and deal death to them too, which no complete man has ever possessed on earth before. Here." He let go the bottle. The Mouser caught it. Sheelba added instantly, "The effects of the potion last but nine hours, to the exact pulse-beat, which I reckon at a tenth of a million to the day, so see that all your work be finished in three-eighths that time. Do not fail to report to me at once thereafter all the circumstances of your adventure. And now farewell. Do not follow me."
Sheelba withdrew inside his hut, which instantly bent its legs and by ones and twos lifted its shield-like feet with sucking _plops_ and walked away — somewhat ponderously at first, but then more swiftly, footing it like a great black beetle or water bug, its platters fairly skidding on the mashed-down sea grass.
The Mouser gazed after it with fury and amazement. Now he understood why the hut had been so elusive, and what had _not_ gone wrong with his sense of direction, and why the tall Seahawk Tree was no longer anywhere in sight. The wizard had led him a long chase last night, and doubtless a merry one from Sheelba's viewpoint.
And when it occurred to the bone-tired, be-mired Mouser that Sheelba could readily now have transported him to the vicinity of the Marsh Gate in his traveling hut, he was minded to peg at the departing vehicular dwelling the lousy little bottle he'd got.
Instead he knotted a length of bandage tightly around the small black container, top to bottom, to make sure the stopper didn't come out, put the bottle in the midst of his pouch, and carefully retightened and tied the pouch's thong. He promised himself that if the potion did not solve his problems, he would make Sheelba feel that the whole city of Lankhmar had lifted up on myriad stout legs and come trampling across the Great Salt Marsh to pash the wizard in his hut. Then with a great effort he pulled his feet one after the other out of the muck into which he'd sunk almost knee-deep, pried a couple of pulsing sea slugs off his left boot with Cat's Claw, used the same dagger to slay by slashing a giant worm tightening around his right ankle, drank the last stinging sup of wine in his wine-flask, tossed that away, and set out toward the tiny towers of Lankhmar, now dimly visible in the smoky west, directly under the sinking, fading gibbous moon.
* * * *
The rats were harming in Lankhmar, inflicting pain and wounds. Dogs came howling to their masters to have needle-like darts taken out of their faces. Cats crawled into hiding to wait it out while rat-bites festered and healed. Ferrets were found squealing in rat-traps that bruised flesh and broke bones. Elakeria's black marmoset almost drowned in the oiled and perfumed water of his mistress' deep, slippery-sided silver bathtub, into which the spidery-armed pet had somehow been driven, befouling the water in his fear.
Rat-nips on the face brought sleepers screamingly awake, sometimes to see a small black form scuttling across the blanket and leaping from the bed. Beautiful or merely terrified women took to wearing while they slept full masks of silver filigree or tough leather. Most households, highest to humblest, slept by candlelight and in shifts, so that there were always watchers. A shortage of candles developed, while lamps and lanterns were priced almost out of sight. Strollers had their ankles bitten; most streets showed only a few hurrying figures, while alleys were deserted. Only the Street of the Gods, which stretched from the Marsh Gate to the granaries on the Hlal, was free of rats, in consequence of which it and its temples were crammed with worshipers rich and poor, credulous and hitherto atheist, praying for relief from the Rat Plague to the ten hundred and one Gods _in_ Lankhmar and even to the dire and aloof Gods _of_ Lankhmar, whose bell-towered, ever-locked temple stood at the granaries-end of the street, opposite the narrow house of Hisvin the grain-merchant.
In frantic reprisal rat-holes were flooded, sometimes with poisoned water. Fumes of burning phosphorus and sulfur were pumped down them with bellows. By order of the Supreme Council and with the oddly ambivalent approval of Glipkerio, who kept chattering about his secret weapons, professional rat-catchers were summoned en masse from the grainfields to the south and from those to the west, across the river Hlal. By command of Olegnya Mingolsbane, acting without consultation with his overlord, regiments of black-clad soldiers were rushed at the double from Tovilyis, Kartishla, even Land's End, and issued on the way weapons and items of uniform which puzzled them mightily and made them sneer more than ever at their quartermasters and at the effete and fantasy-minded Lankhmar military bureaucracy: long-handled three-tined forks, throwing balls pierced with many double-ended slim spikes, lead-weighted throwing nets, sickles, heavy leather gauntlets and bag-masks of the same material.