Fafhrd thoughtfully gazed back and forth between these colorful adornments.
"Why?" he asked finally.
Her laughter rippled like glass chimes. "Dear stupid Mud Man!" she said in her outlandishly accented Lankhmarese. "Girls who are not Ghouls — all your previous women, I suppose, may they be chopped to still-sentient raw bits in Hell! — draw attention to their points of attraction by concealing them with rich fabric or precious metals. We, who are transparent-fleshed and scorn all raiment, must go about it another way, employing cosmetics."
Fafhrd chuckled lazily in answer. He was now looking back and forth between his dear white-ribbed companion and the moon seen through the smooth, pale gray branches of the dead thorn tree on the rim of the hollow, and finding a wondrous content in _that_ counterpoint. He thought how strange it was, though really not so much, that his feelings toward Kreeshkra had changed so swiftly. Last night, when she had revived from her knockout a mile or so beyond burning Sarheenmar, he had been ready to ravage and slay her, but she had comported herself with such courage and later proven herself such a spirited and sympathetic companion, and possessed of a ready wit, though somewhat dry, as befitted a skeleton, that when the pink rim of dawn had added itself to and then drunk the city's flames, it had seemed the natural thing that she should ride pillion behind him as he resumed his journey south. Indeed, he'd thought, such a comrade might daunt without fight the brigands who swanned around Ilthmar and thought Ghouls a myth. He had offered her bread, which she refused, and wine, which she drank sparingly. Toward evening his arrow had brought down a desert antelope and they had feasted well, she devouring her portion raw. It was true what they said about Ghoulish digestion. Fafhrd had at first been bothered because she seemed to hold no grudge on behalf of her slain fellows and he suspected that she might be employing her extreme amiability to put him off guard and then slay him, but he had later decided that life or its loss was likely accounted no great matter by Ghouls, who looked so much like skeletons to begin with.
The gray Mingol mare, tethered to the thorn tree on the hollow's rim, threw up her head and nickered.
A mile or more overhead in the windy dark, a bat slipped from the back of a strongly winging black albatross and fluttered earthward like an animate large black leaf.
Fafhrd reached out an arm and ran his fingers through Kreeshkra's invisible shoulder-length hair. "Bonny Bones," he asked, "why do you call me Mud Man?"
She answered tranquilly, "All your kind seem mud to us, whose flesh is as sparkling clear as running water in a brook untroubled by man or rains. Bones are beautiful. They are made to be seen." She reached out skeleton-seeming soft-touching hand and played with the hair on his chest, then went on seriously, staring toward the stars. "We Ghouls have such an aesthetic distaste for mud-flesh that we consider it a sacred duty to transform it to crystal-flesh by devouring it. Not yours, at least not tonight, Mud Man," she added, sharply tweaking a copper ringlet.
He lightly captured her wrist. "So your love for me is most unnatural, at least by Ghoulish standards," he said with a touch of argumentativeness.
"If you say so, master," she answered with a sardonic, mock-submissive note.
"I stand, or rather lie, corrected," Fafhrd murmured. "I'm the lucky one, whatever your motives and whatever name we give them." His voice became clearer again. "Tell me, Bonny Bones, how in the world did you ever come to learn Lankhmarese?"
"Stupid, _stupid_ Mud Man," she replied indulgently. "Why, 'tis our native tongue" — and here her voice grew dreamy — "deriving from those ages a millennium and more ago when Lankhmar's empire stretched from Quarmall to the Trollstep Mountains and from Earth's End to the Sea of Monsters, when Kvarch Nar was Hwarshmar and we lonely Ghouls alley-and-graveyard thieves only. We had another language, but Lankhmarese was easier."
He returned her hand to her side, to plant his own beyond her and stare down into her black eye sockets. She whimpered faintly and ran her fingers lightly down his sides. Fighting impulse for the moment, he said, "Tell me, Bonny Bones, how do you manage to _see_ anything when light goes right through you? Do you see with the inside of the back of your skull?"
"Questions, questions, questions," she complained moaningly.
"I only want to become less stupid," he explained humbly.
"But I _like_ you to be stupid," she answered with a sigh. Then raising up on her elbow so that she faced the still-blazing campfire — the thorn tree's dense wood burnt slowly and fiercely — she said, "Look closely into my eyes. No, without getting between them and the fire. Can you see a small rainbow in each? That's where light is refracted to the seeing part of my brain, and a very thin real image formed there."
Fafhrd agreed he could see twin rainbows, then went on eagerly, "Don't stop looking at the fire yet; I want to show you something." He made a cylinder of one hand and held an end of the cylinder to her nearest eye, then clapped his fingers, held tightly together, against the other end. "There!" he said. "You can see the fire glow through the edges of my fingers, can't you? So I'm part transparent. I'm part crystal, at least,"
"I can, I can," she assured him with singsong weariness. She looked away from his hands and the fire at his face and hairy chest. "But I _like_ you to be mud," she said. She put her hands on his shoulders. "Come, darling, be dirtiest mud."
He gazed down at the moonlit pearl-toothed skull and blackest eye sockets in each of which a faint opalescent moonbow showed, and he remembered how a wisewoman of the North had once told him and the Mouser that they were both in love with Death. Well, she'd been right, at least about himself, Fafhrd had to confess now, as Kreeshkra's arms began to tug at him.
At that instant there sounded a thin whistle, so high as to be almost inaudible, yet piercing the ear like a needle finer than a hair. Fafhrd jerked around, Kreeshkra swiftly lifted her head, and they noted that they were being watched not only by the Mingol mare, but also with upside-down eyes by a black bat which hung from a high gray twig of the thorn tree.
Filled with premonition, Fafhrd pointed a forefinger at the dangling black flier, which instantly fluttered down to the fleshly perch presented. Fafhrd drew off its leg a tiny black roll of parchment springy as thinnest tempered iron, waved the flutterer back to its first perch, and unrolling the black parchment and holding it close to the firelight and his eyes close to it, read the following missive writ in a white script:
_Mouser in direst danger. Also Lankhmar. Consult Ningauble of the Seven Eyes. Speed of the essence. Don't lose the tin whistle. _
The signature was a tiny unfeatured oval, which Fafhrd knew to be one of the sigils of Sheelba of the Eyeless Face.
White jaw resting on folded white knuckles, Kreeshkra watched the Northerner from her inscrutable black eye pits as he buckled on his sword.
"You're leaving me," she asserted in a flat voice.
"Yes, Bonny Bones, I must ride south like the wind," Fafhrd admitted hurriedly. "A lifelong comrade's in immense peril."
"A man, of course," she divined with the same tonelessness. "Even Ghoulish men save their greatest love for their male swordmates."
"It's a different sort of love," Fafhrd started to argue as he untied the mare from the thorn tree, feeling at the flat pouch hanging from the saddlebow, to make sure it still held the thin tin cylinder. Then, more practically, "There's still half the antelope to give you strength for your trudge home — and it's uncooked too."
"So you assume my people are eaters of carrion, and that half a dead antelope is a proper measure of what I mean to you?"
"Well, I'd always heard that Ghouls… and no, of course, I'm not trying to _pay_ you….Look here, Bonny Bones — I won't argue with you, you're much too good at it. Suffice it that I must course like the lonely thunderbolt to Lankhmar, pausing only to consult my master sorcerer. I couldn't take you — or anyone! — on that journey."