Swords Against the Shadowland (Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar) (36 page)

The great sword sang down toward his head again. With delicate artistry, the Mouser's Scalpel flashed out and kissed it away. At the same time, the Mouser danced in close. Catching the front of Malygris's tunic in his empty hand, he attempted to head-butt his foe.

A massive hand came up and caught his face. Steel fingers squeezed. The Mouser felt himself lifted and flung bodily through the air. Managing to roll on the soft ground, he came up in a ready crouch with a greater respect for his enemy.

Malygris advanced, then stopped with a sour expression on his face. Reaching up, he pinched his nostrils shut. "Piss and spit, man!" he cursed in a loud nasal voice. "Your stench is worse than your swordplay! Did you shit your pants in fear of me?"

Stunned by this pronouncement, the Mouser sniffed himself. He coughed at the assault on his sensibilities. The smell of the ditch still clung. "It's a fair effluvia," he answered defensively. "Five silver smerduks an ounce, and all the rage with the dandies in the palace." He blinked, welcoming a chance to get his breath before the fight resumed. "How came you by my partner's sword?"

Malygris's right eyebrow shot up. "I was about to ask how you come by that toothpick the Gray Mouser calls a weapon. Or how you suddenly happen to speak with his same smirking, half-witted sarcasm?"

"Half-witted . . . ?" With narrowing eyes, the Mouser took a tighter grip on the hilt of his sword. "Well, this is certainly my very sword, Scalpel. But I shall be happy to give you a little of it."

His foe took a defensive posture. "Then mine is the more generous nature, for this is my sword, Graywand, and you shall have half its length!"

Yet no sooner had the wizard completed his boast than he fell back in a sudden fit of coughing. Gripped in both hands, the great sword wavered uncertainly. And though he struggled to keep his gaze upon the Mouser, the wizard's eyes widened with a quiet inner fear. He coughed harder, a deep wracking sound that issued from the depths of his lungs, and a thin scarlet spittle stained the corner of his lip.

Slowly, the Gray Mouser lowered his sword. A chill of understanding and subtle horror passed through him. "And how is it," he said in a low voice, "that you cough with the same resonant note as Fafhrd Red-Hair did early this morning and again in his sleep this early evening?"

Malygris's eyes flashed even through the sickness that filled them. "Play me no more games, madman! I am Fafhrd Red-Hair!"

"I know," the Mouser said softly, sheathing his sword. "And do you not recognize your own blood-and-oath bound comrade?"

The point of the great sword dipped to the ground. Fafhrd, wrapped in the illusory appearance of Malygris, stared strangely. "Mouser?" he said.

The air around Fafhrd trembled as with heat-shimmer. Malygris, his angry demeanor, his rags and all melted away like vapor, leaving the tall copper-haired Northerner in his place. For a long moment, he gaped at the Mouser. Then his open mouth closed, and he leaned wearily on the sword he called Graywand.

"I thought you were Malygris," he said, shaking his huge head in confusion. Then his voice turned bitter as he wiped his lip and shot a look toward the city. "He fooled us with another of his damned illusions to make good his escape."

"He worked his magic on us both," the Mouser admitted. "To my eyes you were the image of him. Only the sound of your coughing stayed my hand, else I would have run you through."

The rightward corner of Fafhrd's mouth curled upward in a grin or a sneer. "Spoken boldly, for a man dumped on his rump in the combat. I would surely have taken your head had I not noted the familiar tenor of your boasting. Only that stayed my hand, that and your gut-churning stench, which would keep any man at a distance." He waved a hand under his nose and rolled his eyes in a mock-faint. "Your smell surpasses ..."

The Mouser interrupted him. "It's Malygris's curse, isn't it?" he said. "It's touched you, too." He bit his lip. A band tightened around his chest, and breath failed him for a moment as he regarded the only man he had ever deigned to call
friend.

Then something exploded inside him. He stamped his foot in the grass and smashed his fists on his thighs. "Did you think you could keep it secret?" he raged. "Why didn't you tell me?"

His shouts rolled over the water, and the night carried his accusing words far up and down the riverbanks. He didn't care who heard; Malygris was gone, escaped, and out of the Mouser's thoughts completely. Fafhrd alone mattered.

Not Malygris, not all of Lankhmar, not Sheelba. Only Fafhrd.

"How would I have profited by telling you?" Fafhrd answered with a restrained tension that betrayed his own turmoil. "The only thing you can do is what we've tried and failed so far to do—kill the creator of this dismal curse and take a drop of his heart's blood to the one who can effect a cure."

"And you thought you could do that best by sneaking off without me?" The Mouser shook his fists at the sky. Half-blinded by anger and a sense of betrayal he knew in his heart to be misplaced, he seized up the burning torch and hurled it toward the river, then scattered the campfire with a sweeping kick. Hot ash and sparks spiraled around him and upward into the dark night. "We are partners, Fafhrd—or we are nothing!"

Fafhrd coughed again and hung his head. From deep-shadowed eyes made strange by the remaining pieces of fireglow he fixed the Mouser with a hard look. He put one hand on his chest as if to measure his own heartbeat.

"This is no way for a man to die," he said, his voice little more than a whisper. "I feel it eating at me inside, like a tiny worm whose appetite is endless." He extended one hand toward his partner. "My grip is weaker. My breath is shorter. I don't have Sadaster’s magic to stave off the outward symptoms, nor his blindness to what is really happening." He swallowed. "I left you behind to spare you this."

"You can't spare me!" The Mouser fairly screamed. "The risk is already before me. Did Sheelba not transport me as he did you? Did Laurian's ill-considered spell not drive me to . . ."

Abruptly he shut up, and just as abruptly he mastered all his rage and fear. Such an emotional outburst shamed him. Fafhrd needed his friendship and his sword arm—not anger that should rightly be directed at their enemy.

Reaching over a shoulder, he felt his upper back where the red welts of Liara's velvet whip still stung his flesh. "Well, never mind what it drove me to," he said at last, forcing a little chuckle as he went to Fafhrd's side, "though you'd love to hear the tale."

Frowning, Fafhrd backed off a step and held up a hand. "I face a horrible enough end," he warned. "I beg you, come no closer lest I choke on your reek!"

A grin broke over the Mouser's face and he flung his arms wide. "Then let it be a mercy killing!" he cried.

With that, he leaped upon Fafhrd, wrapping arms and legs about his partner's torso, clinging and laughing and waggling his head under Fafhrd's nose while the Northerner made all manner of gagging and retching noises and tried to wrestle free.

Finally they fell upon the ground, and Fafhrd lay still, eyes wide and staring, tongue lolling out the side of his mouth—a morbidly funny impersonation of death.

The Mouser straddled Fafhrd's chest. "Now my stink is all over you," he announced victoriously.

Fafhrd's eyes snapped closed; his head rolled limply to the side. "The curse in my body is bowing and scraping in the presence of a more potent and horrible force," he whispered.

"Maybe I can drive it out completely," the Mouser suggested. Making a wad of the muddiest part of his cloak, he pressed it to Fafhrd's nose.

Fafhrd's gag this time was genuine. With bunching muscles, he flung his partner off and got to his feet. "Physician, the cure is worse than the disease." He snatched up his sword from where it had fallen and pushed the blade into the sheath on his belt.

The Mouser picked himself up from the grass, straightened his cloak on his shoulders, and turned serious once more. With a grim note he answered, "Then together let's seek out the recommended medicine."

By unspoken agreement, they turned away from the river and strode up the shallow slope toward the city. After only a few paces, they stopped again. Something gleamed in the grass. Bending down, Fafhrd retrieved his dagger. He held it up. The remaining light from the scattered campfire shone on the wetly incarnadined blade.

Fafhrd growled low in his throat, then opened his mouth and drew the blade over his tongue and licked the blood away. "It's only from his arm," he said sternly, "yet it may have an effect."

The Mouser nodded. "If only to make you hungry for the more potent stuff."

Once again, they took to the alleyways and backstreets of nighted Lankhmar. Hooded, with hands on their weapon hilts, they kept to the shadows and sought the empty ways with Crypt Court their destination, there to consider the next course of action. Moving soundlessly past darkened shops and old, rat-infested tenements, they came finally to the warehouses and towering silos that bordered Grain Street.

"We're not returning to Crypt Court," the Mouser announced suddenly. With a pinched look and a furrowed brow, he led the way into the broad open lane, forsaking the gloomy alleys, and headed northward at a rapid pace. "We're going to the Festival District, and to the House of Night Cries."

Fafhrd grimaced. "Surely, Mouser, we face more important tasks than the slaking of your perverted lusts."

The Mouser barely listened. His mind worked furiously as he turned a corner and started down Barter Street, which would take them to the Garden of Dark Delights and thence to Face-of-the-Moon Street. It all had begun in the Festival District, beneath its streets in the Temple of Hates. There Malygris had concocted the evil spell that Sheelba and Demptha Negatarth both said should have been beyond his meager conjurer's skill.

Who, then, had aided him?

Ivrian.
The name rang in his head like the bitter pealing of a broken bell. He no longer thought of her as Liara, for he had no doubt that she was, indeed, Ivrian, whom he had once called his true love.

Affection and desire had blinded him to any part she played in this mysterious adventure. But Fafhrd's illness and the desperateness of the situation now opened his eyes. More than a year ago, he had seen Ivrian dead, her corpse chewed to bloody ruin by rats, then consumed by fire.

Yet she lived!

Malygris and Ivrian—he did not yet know the connection, but he felt intuitively there must be one.

Just so, he knew that Sadaster and Demptha Negatarth shared a connection—the spells they used to keep wife and daughter young beyond their years.

Convinced they were pieces of the same puzzle, he quickened his step. The answers lay with Ivrian!

"Here's another piece of the puzzle for you," Fafhrd said when the Mouser had explained his reasoning. He grabbed his gray comrade's arm and jerked him to a halt in the middle of the street. Raising one arm, he pointed down a narrow sidestreet.

Vlana, or her ghost, beckoned to them from the shadows. A milky nimbus of unnatural light surrounded her form. She swayed her hips to some unheard music, and her arms undulated with fluid, serpentine motions. Black hair swept about her kohl-eyed face, stirred and lifted by a wind neither Fafhrd nor the Mouser felt.

Some pain seemed to stab at Fafhrd's heart. Clutching his chest, he lurched toward her like a man entranced. "Vlana!" he cried. "True love!"

The Mouser caught a piece of Fafhrd's cloak and jerked. A loud gasping, gagging noise issued from Fafhrd's throat as the clasp unexpectedly choked him. Like a man snapped rudely awake, he stopped and spun about.

"Don't look at her!" the Mouser shouted. Catching hold of Fafhrd's arms, he gave him a shake. "Don't you see? She only means to delay us!" He looked up into Fafhrd's eyes. Then, jaw slack with new revelation, he stepped back and slapped his forehead.

"That's what they are supposed to do," he cried, shaking Fafhrd again. "Vlana and Ivrian have done nothing but delay us and prevent us from looking for Malygris."

Fafhrd mumbled as he looked back over his shoulder to the dancing Vlana. "I thought she was one of Malygris's illusions," he admitted. "But I'm not sure!" His voice rose, thick with emotion. "I let her die, Mouser. I let the rats and the fire eat her ivory flesh side by side with your own Ivrian!"

"And someone cruelly uses the guilt we feel," the Mouser answered in a voice turned cold, "to turn us from our real task— finding Malygris." He, too, stared with Fafhrd down the sidestreet. Vlana stood still now, dancing no more, an accusing look upon her pale face.

The Mouser's voice softened somewhat. "I tell you, Fafhrd, she is no more than a decoy. Run off and chase her through the night if you must. But I will not be turned aside."

The Northerner hung his head, and with his eyes squeezed tightly shut, pushed past the Mouser. His feet shuffled in the road for a few steps, then moved with determination. Breathing a sigh of relief, the Mouser took his place at Fafhrd's side, and they continued on to the Festival District.

But he couldn't resist a final glance over his shoulder. Vlana, or whatever she was, had disappeared.

A few blocks further, and they reached the edge of the Festival District. The streets, which should have yet been crowded with celebrants, merchants and entertainers, instead were quiet, nearly empty. A now familiar pallid fear marked the faces of the few pedestrians they encountered. Shops were closed. The kiosks had been taken down. The taverns remained open, but the busiest hosted only a squad of off-duty soldiers, and the noise that issued even from that seemed muted and nervous.