Fafhrd shrugged, displaying his palm. “Who knows? Who cares?"
“They might,” the other answered.
2
Many Lankhmar leagues east and south, and so in darkest moonless night, the archmagus Ningauble conferred with the sorceress Sheelba at the edge of the Great Salt Marsh. The seven luminous eyes of the former wove many greenish patterns within his gaping hood as he leaned his quaking bulk perilously downward from the howdah on the broad back of the forward-kneeling elephant which had borne him from his desert cave, across the Sinking Land through all adverse influences, to this appointed spot. While the latter's eyeless face strained upward likewise as she stood tall in the doorway of her small hut, which had traveled from the Marsh's noxious center to the same dismal verge on its three long rickety (but now rigid) chicken legs. The two wizards strove mightily to outshout (outbellow or outscreech) the nameless cosmic din (inaudible to human ears) which had hitherto hindered and foiled all their earlier efforts to communicate over greater distances. And now, at last, they strove successfully!
Ningauble wheezed, “I have discovered by certain infallible signs that the present tumult in realms magical, botching my spells, is due to the vanishment from Lankhmar of my servitor and sometimes student, Fafhrd the barbarian. All magics dim without his credulous and kindly audience, while high quests fail lacking his romantical and custard-headed idealisms."
Sheelba shot back through the murk, “While I have ascertained that my ill-spells suffer equally because the Mouser's gone with him, my protégé and surly errand boy. They will not work without the juice of his brooding and overbearing malignity. He must be summoned from that ridiculous rim-place of Rime Isle, and Fafhrd with him!"
“But how to do that when our spells won't carry? What servitor to trust with such a mission to go and fetch ‘em? I know of a young demoness might undertake it, but she's in thrall to Khahkht, wizard of power in that frosty area — and he's inimical to both of us. Or should the two of us search out in noisy spirit realm to be our messenger that putative warlike ascendant of theirs and whom forebear known as the Growler? A dismal task! Where'er I look I see naught but uncertainties and obstacles—"
“I shall send word of their whereabouts to Mog the spider god, the Gray One's tutelary deity! — this din won't hinder prayers,” Sheelba interrupted in a harsh, clipped voice. The presence of the vacillating and loquacious over-sighted wizard, who saw seven sides to every question, always roused her to her best efforts. “Send you like advisors to Fafhrd's gods, stone-age brute Kos and the fastidious cripple Issek. Soon as they know where their lapsed worshippers are, they'll put such curses and damnations on them as shall bring them back squealing to us to have those taken off."
“Now why didn't I think of that?” Ningauble protested, who was indeed sometimes called the Gossiper of the Gods. “To work! To work!"
3
In paradisiacal Godsland, which lies at the antipodes of Nehwon's death pole and Shadowland, in the southernmost reach of that world's southernmost continent, distanced and guarded from the tumultuous northern lands by the Great eastward-rushing Equatorial Current (where some say swim the stars), sub-equatorial deserts, and the Rampart Mountains, the gods Kos, Issek, and Mog sat somewhat apart from the mass of more couth and civilized Nehwonian deities, who objected to Kos's lice, fleas, and crabs, and a little to Issek's effeminacy — though Mog had contacts among these, as he sarcastically called ‘em, “higher beings."
Sunk in divine somnolent broodings, not to say almost deathlike trances, for prayers, petitions, and even blasphemous nametakings had been scanty of late, the three mismatched godlings reacted at once and enthusiastically to the instantaneously transmitted wizard missives.
“Those two ungodly swording rogues!” Mog hissed softly, his long thin lips stretched slantwise in a half spider grin. “The very thing! Here's work for all of us, my heavenly peers. A chance to curse again and to bedevil."
“A glad inspiro that, indeed, indeed!” Issek chimed, waving his limp-wristed hands excitedly. “I should have thought of that! — our chiefest lapsed worshippers, hidden away in frosty and forgotten far Rime Isle, farther away than Shadowland itself, almost beyond our hearing and our might. Such infant cunning! Oh, but we'll make them pay!"
“The ingrate dogs!” Kos grated through his thick and populous black beard. “Not only casting us off, their natural heavenly fathers and rightful da's, but forsaking all decent Nehwonian deities and running with atheist men and gone a-whoring after stranger gods beyond the pale! Yes, by my lights and spleen, we'll make ‘em suffer! Where's my spiked mace?"
(On occasion Mog and Issek had been known to have to hold Kos down to keep him from rushing ill-advised out of Godsland to seek to visit personal dooms upon his more disobedient and farther-strayed worshippers.)
“What say we set their women against them, as we did last time?” Issek urged twitteringly. “Women have power over men almost as great as gods do."
Mog shook his humanoid cephalothorax. “Our boys are too coarse-tasted. Did we estrange from them Afreyt and Cif, they'd doubtless fall back on amorous arrangements with the Salthaven harlots Rill and Hilsa — and so on and so on.” Now that his attention had been called to Rime Isle, he had easy knowledge of all overt things there — a divine prerogative. “No, not the women this time, I ween."
“A pox on all such subtleties!” Kos roared. “I want tortures for ‘em! Let's visit on ‘em the strangling cough, the prick-rot, and the Bloody Melts!"
“Nor can we risk wiping them out entirely,” Mog answered swiftly. “We haven't worshippers to spare for that, you fire-eater, as you well know. Thrift, thrift! Moreover, as you should also know, a threat is always more dreadful than its execution. I propose we subject them to some of the moods and preoccupations of old age and of old age's bosom comrade, inseparable though invisible-seeming — Death himself! Or is that too mild a fear and torment, thinkest thou?"
“I'll say not,” Kos agreed, suddenly sober. “I know that it scares me. What if the gods should die? A hellish thought."
“That infant bugaboo!” Issek told him peevishly. Then turning to Mog with quickening interest, “So, if I read you right, old Arach, let's narrow your silky Mouser's interests in and in from the adventure-beckoning horizon to the things closest around him: the bed table, the dinner board, the privy, and the kitchen sink. Not the far-leaping highway, but the gutter. Not the ocean, but the puddle. Not the grand view outside, but the bleared windowpane. Not the thunder-blast, but the knuckle crack — or ear-pop."
Mog narrowed his eight eyes happily. “And for your Fafhrd, I would suggest a different old-age curse, to drive a wedge between them so they can't understand or help each other, that we put a geas upon him to count the stars. His interests in all else will fade and fail; he'll have mind only for those tiny lights in the sky."
“So that, with his head in the clouds,” Issek pictured, catching on quick, “he'll stumble and bruise himself again and again, and miss all opportunities of earthly delights."
“Yes, and make him memorize their names and all their patterns!” Kos put in. “There's busy-work for an eternity. I never could abide the things myself. There's such a senseless mess of stars, like flies or fleas. An insult to the gods to say that we created them!"