Pierced by a dozen thrusts and oozing dark blood on the violet carpet, the scorpion still writhed on its back, its walking legs and great claws a-tremble, its sting sliding a little back and forth.
Hreest, the two green sword-rats, and the three pike-rats had gone in pursuit of the Mouser and the clatter of their boots up the steep stairs had died away.
Frowning darkly, Hisvin said to Hisvet, "I still should slay you."
"Oh Daddy dear, you don't understand at all what happened," Hisvet said tremulously. "The Gray Mouser forced me at sword's point. It was a rape. And at sword's point under the coverlet he compelled me to say those dreadful things to you. You saw I did my best to kill him at the end."
"Pah!" Hisvin spat, turning half aside.
"_She's_ the one should be slain," Skwee asserted, indicating Frix, "She worked the spy's escape."
"Most true, oh mighty councillor," Frix agreed. "Else he would have killed at least half of you, and your brains are greatly needed — in fact, indispensable, are they not? — to direct tonight's grand assault on Lankhmar Above?" She held out her red-dripping palm to Hisvet and said softly, "That's twice, dear mistress."
"For that you shall be rewarded," Hisvet said, setting her lips primly. "And for helping the spy escape — and not preventing my rape! — you shall be whipped until you can no longer scream — tomorrow."
"Right joyfully, milady — tomorrow," Frix responded with a return of something of her merry tones. "But tonight there is work must be done. At Glipkerio's palace in the Blue Audience Chamber. work for all three of us. And at once, I believe, milord," she added deferentially, turning to Hisvin.
"That's true," Hisvin said with a start. He scowled back and forth between his daughter and her maid three times, then with a shrug, said, "Come."
"How can you trust them?" Skwee demanded.
"I must," Hisvin said. "They're needful if I am properly to control Glipkerio. Meanwhile your place is that of supreme command, at the council table. Siss will be needing you. Come!" he repeated to the two girls. Frix worked the medallions. The second painting rose. They went all three up the stairs.
Skwee paced the bed-chamber alone, head bowed in angry thought, automatically overstepping the corpse of the giant sword-rat and circling the still-writhing scorpion. When he at last stopped and lifted his gaze, it was to rest it on the vanity table bearing the black and white bottles of the size-change magic. He approached that table with the gait of a sleepwalker or one who walks through water. For a space he played aimlessly with the vials, rolling them this way and that. Then he said aloud to himself, "Oh why is it that one can be wise and command a vast host and strive unceasingly and reason with diamond brilliance, and still be low as a silverfish, blind as a cutworm? The obvious is in front of our toothy muzzles and we never see it — because we rats have accepted our littleness, hypnotized ourselves with our dwarfishness, our incapacity, and our inability to burst from our cramping drain-tunnels, to leap from the shallow but deadly jail-rut, whose low walls lead us only to the stinking rubbish heap or narrow burial crypt."
He lifted his ice-blue eyes and glared coldly at his silver-furred image in the silver mirror. "For all your greatness, Skwee," he told himself, "you have thought small all your rat's life. Now for once, Skwee, think big!" And with that fierce self-command, he picked up one of the white vials and pouched it, hesitated, swept all the white vials into his pouch, hesitated again, then with a shrug and a sardonic grimace swept the black vials after them and hurried from the room.
On its back on the violet carpet, the scorpion still vibrated its legs feebly.
Chapter Fourteen
Fafhrd swiftly climbed, by the low moonlight, the high Marsh Wall of Lankhmar at the point to which Sheelba had delivered him, a good bowshot south of the Marsh Gate. "At the gate you might run into your black pursuers," Sheelba had told him. Fafhrd had doubted it. True, the black riders had been moving like a storm wind, but Sheelba's hut had raced across the sea-grass like a low-scudding pocket hurricane; surely he had arrived ahead of them. Yet he had put up no argument. Wizards were above all else persuasive salesmen, whether they flooded you off your feet with words, like Ningauble, or manipulated you with meaningful silences, like Sheelba. For the swamp wizard had otherwise maintained his cranky quiet throughout the entire rocking, pitching, swift-skidding trip, from which Fafhrd's stomach was still queasy.
He found plenty of good holds for hand and foot in the ancient wall. Climbing it was truly child's play to one who had scaled in his youth Obelisk Polaris in the frosty Mountains of the Giants. He was far more concerned with what he might meet at the top of the wall, where he would be briefly helpless against a foe footed above him.
But more than all else — and increasingly so — he was puzzled by the darkness and silence with which the city was wrapped. Where was the battle-din; where were the flames? Or if Lankhmar had already been subdued, which despite Ningauble's optimism seemed most likely from the fifty-to-one odds against her, where were the screams of the tortured, the shrieks of the raped, and all the gleeful clatter and shout of the victors?
He reached the wall's top and suddenly drew himself up and vaulted through a wide embrasure down onto the wide parapet, ready to draw Graywand and his ax. But the parapet was empty as far as be could see in either direction.
Wall Street below was dark, and empty too as far as he could tell. Cash Street, stretching west and flooded with pale moonlight from behind him, was visibly bare of figures. While the silence was even more marked than when he'd been climbing. It seemed to fill the great, walled city, like water brimming a cup.
Fafhrd felt spooked. Had the conquerors of Lankhmar already departed? — carrying off all its treasure and inhabitants in some unimaginably huge fleet or caravan? Had they shut up themselves and their gagged victims in the silent houses for some rite of mass torture in darkness? Was it a demon, not human army which had beset the city and vanished its inhabitants? Had the very earth gaped for victor and vanquished alike and then shut again? Or was Ningauble's whole tale wizardly flimflam? — yet even that least unlikely explanation still left unexplained the city's ghostly desolation.
Or was there a fierce battle going on under his eyes at this very moment, and he by some spell of Ningauble or Sheelba unable to see, hear, or even scent it? — until, perchance, he had fulfilled the geas of the bells which Ningauble had laid on him.
He still did not like the idea of his bells-mission. His imagination pictured the Gods _of_ Lankhmar resting in their brown mummy-wrappings and their rotted black togas, their bright black eyes peeping from between resin-impregnated bandages and their deadly black staves of office beside them, waiting another call from the city that forgot yet feared them and which they in turn hated yet guarded. Waking with naked hand a clutch of spiders in a hole in desert rocks seemed wiser than waking such. Yet a geas was a geas and must be fulfilled.
He hurried down the nearest dark stone stairs three steps at a time and headed west on Cash Street, which paralleled Crafts Street a block to the south. He half imagined he brushed unseen figures. Crossing curvy Cheap Street, dark and untenanted as the others, he thought he heard a murmuring and chanting from the north, so faint that it must come from at least as far away as the Street of Gods. But he held to his predetermined course, which was to follow Cash Street to Nun Street, then three blocks north to the accursed bell-tower.
Whore Street, which was even more twisty than Cheap Street, looked tenantless too, but he was hardly half a block beyond it when he heard the tramp of boots and the clink of armor behind him. Ducking into the narrow shadows, he watched a double squad of guardsmen cross hurriedly through the moonlight, going south on Whore Street in the direction of the South Barracks. They were crowded close together, watched every way, and carried their weapons at the ready, despite the apparent absence of foe. This seemed to confirm Fafhrd's notion of an army of invisibles. Feeling more spooked than ever, he continued rapidly on his way.