The Knight and Knave of Swords (24 page)

But that time the Mouser had been present all the while, playing the fool, calling out zany comments to the battlers, and even slain the statue in the end by splitting its massive head with Fafhrd's ax, thinking the weapon was a jester's bladder, while he, Fafhrd, had been the one being buried under the double weight of wizards' words and crushing iron blows. But this time the Mouser simply vanished without frills or fanfare, swallowed by earth in fashion most conclusive without warning, without shroud or coffin to shield him from the ground's cruel cold grip, and without words, foolish or otherwise, except that piteous, gasped out "Help me, Fafhrd," before his mouth was stopped by hungry upward-gliding clay. And now that he was gone, there was no fighting to be done to get him back, no mighty battling with sword or words, but only very slow, laborious scraping and digging, careful, methodical, and which seemed to make sense and hold out hope only so long as one was doing it. As soon as you stopped digging, you realized what a last-chance, forlorn-hope, desperate rescue attempt it really was—to believe a man could somehow breathe long enough underground, like a Kleshite ghoul or Eastern Lands fakir, for you to tunnel your way to him. Pitiful! Why, Fafhrd'd only been able to persuade himself and the others to it because no one had a better idea—and because they all (some of 'em, anyway) needed busy-work to keep at bay the sickening sense of loss and of fear for self lest a like fate befall.

Fafhrd balled his good fist and almost in his gust of frustration smote the cot beside his thigh, but recalled in time the sleeping girls. He'd thought the next cot was empty, but now saw that its dark green blanket hid a single sleeper, whose slight form and short shock of flame-red hair showed her to be the self-styled Ilthmar princess and cabin-girl Fingers, who'd been following him around all night gazing at him reproachfully for not somehow saving the Mouser before he sank or else sinking into the ground beside him like a staunch comrade should. He felt a sudden spurt of sharp anger at the minx—what cause had she to criticize him so?

Yet it was true, he upbraided himself as another flood of melancholy memories engulfed him, that he and his gray comrade had often behaved like death-seekers, as when they'd sailed in stony-faced silence side by side forever westward in the Outer Sea, seeking that coast of doom called the Bleak Shore, or lured by shimmer-sprites, steered their craft south into the great Equatorial Current whence no ships return, or when they'd surmounted Stardock, Nehwon's mightiest peak, or dared Quarmall's cavern and twice encountered Death himself in the sunless Shadowland; yet on this last occasion, when Nehwon had swallowed the Mouser, whatever the rationale, he had held back.

With a silvery jangle of harness bells the laden dogcart drew up beyond the fire. As he got down from the driver's seat, Skullick gave out the news, the words tumbling from his mouth, that the Great Maelstrom had been observed to be turning more swiftly, heaving and churning as it swirled round and round in the cold moonshine. Cif and Pshawri came to their feet.

The noise broke into Fafhrd's reverie just enough as to make him aware of what his entranced gaze had been unseeingly resting on. The girl Fingers had turned over in her sleep so that her face was visible and one bare arm had emerged to lie atop the coarse blanket like a pale serpent. Of whom did her face remind him? he asked himself. He had loved those features once, he was suddenly certain. What sweet and yielding female...?

And then as he studied her face more closely, he saw that her eyes were open and watching him and that her lips were curved in a sleepy smile. The tip of her tongue came out at a corner and licked them around. Fafhrd felt his sharp anger return, if it were just that. The saucy baggage! What call had she to look at him as though they shared a secret? Why was she spying on him? What was her game? He flashed that when she'd first appeared simpering and posing to him and Gray Mouser in the cellar, they had just been speaking of men snatched under the ground or pursued on high by vengeful earth. Why had that been? What had that synchronicity presaged? Had she aught to do with the Mouser's vanishment downward, this tainted witchchild from the rat city of Ilthmar? He rose up fast and silently, moved as swiftly to her cot and stood bent over her and glaring down, as though to strip her of her secrets by his gaze's force, and with his hand upraised, he knew not to do what, while she smiled up at him with perfect confidence.

"Captain!" Skor's urgent bellow came hollowly out of the hole and boomed around.

Forgetting all else, Fafhrd dodged from under the shelter tent and was the first to reach the mouth of the shaft, over which there was now set a stout man-high ironwood tripod, from which depended a pair of pulleys to halve the effort needed to raise the dirt.

Steadying himself by two of its legs, the Northerner leaned out and looked straight down. The planks of the second tier of shorings were in place, securely braced with crosspieces and tied to the first tier—and the excavating had gone a couple of feet below them. From the pulley by his cheek two lines went down to the second pulley atop the handle of the bucket, which was set half filled 'gainst a side of the shaft. Against two other sides Skor and Gale were pressed back, upturned faces large and small, in shadow, the one framed by scanty red locks, the other by profuse blond tresses. By the fourth side were two leviathan-oil lamps. Their white light fell strongly on the slender object lying flat in the center of the shaft's bottom. Fafhrd would have recognized it anywhere.

"It's Captain Mouser's dirk, Captain," Skor called up, "lying just as we uncovered it."

"I didn't move it the least bit as I brushed and worked the earth away," Gale confirmed in her piping tones.

"That's a wise girl," Fafhrd called down. "Leave it so. And don't move from where you are, either of you. I'm coming down."

Which he accomplished swiftly by way of the ladder of thick pegs jutting from the shoring, going down hand over hook. When he reached the crowded bottom, he knelt at once over Cat's Claw, bending down his head to inspect it closely.

"We didn't find the scabbard anywhere," Gale explained somewhat unnecessarily.

He nodded. "The ground gets chalky here," he observed. "Did either of you find a chunk of the stuff?"

"No," Gale responded quickly, "but I've a lump of yellow umber."

"That'll do fine," he said, holding out his hand. When she'd dug it from her pouch and handed it to him, he sighted carefully along the dagger's blade and rubbed a big gold mark on the foot of the shoring to show which way the weapon pointed.

"That's something we may want to remember," he explained shortly. He lifted the wicked knife from its site, turning it over and reinspecting it from blade tip to pommel, but he could discern no special markings, no message of any sort, on that side either.

"What have you found, Fafhrd?" Cif called down.

"It's Cat's Claw, all right. I'll send it up to you," he called back. He handed the knife to Skor. "I'll take over for a space down here. You get some rest." He accepted from his lieutenant the short-handled square spade that had replaced his ax as chief digging and scraping tool. "You're a good man, Skor." That one nodded and mounted by the pegs.

"I'm coming down, Fafhrd. My turn to help," Afreyt announced from above.

Fafhrd looked at Gale. At close range the golden strands were sweaty and the fair complexion streaked with dirt. Pallor and tired smudges around the blue eyes belied the air of smiling readiness the girl put on. "You need a rest too. And sleep, you hear? But only after you've had a mug of hot soup." He took from her her scoop and handbroom. "You've done well, child."

While she wearily yet reluctantly mounted the pegs, with Afreyt urging her to greater speed from above, Fafhrd drove the spade into the earth near the hole's edge, continuing the excavation straight down.

After Afreyt had climbed into the hole to join Fafhrd in his task, the harlot Rill led the exhausted Gale back to the cookfire beyond the shelter tent. Cif followed them, somewhat like a sleepwalker, staring at the knife she held, which Skor had handed her, and after a bit the others gravitated back too. Standing in the cold to watch folk dig is of no lasting profit.

Rill was pressing Gale to finish the mug of soup she'd poured her.

"Drink it all down while there's some heat in it. That's a good girl. Why, you still feel like ice! You need to be under blankets. And get a sleep, you're groggy. Come on now, no arguments."

And she led her off willingly enough to the shelter tent.

Cif was still staring bemusedly at the Mouser's knife, slowly turning it over and over, so that its bright blade periodically reflected the low firelight.

Old Ourph said ruminatively, "When Khahkht the Conqueror was buried bound and beweaponed alive for treason, but later cleared and dug up, it was found his daggers had worked their way yards from his corpse in opposite directions, so strong and wide were his hatreds."

Pshawri said, "I thought Khahkht was a Rimish ice devil, not a Mingol warchief paramount."

After a while Ourph replied, "Great conquerors live on as their enemies' devils."

"Or their own folk's, sometimes," Groniger put in.

Skullick said, "If dead old Khahkht could make his daggers travel through solid earth, why didn't he have them cut his bonds?"

Rill returned with an armful of girls' clothes which she hung by the fire and then sat down beside Cif, saying, "I stripped her down to the buff and bundled her into a warmed nook beside the drowsy Ilthmar kid, who'd half waked but was bound again for slumberland."

After a courteous pause, Ourph explained, "Khahkht's bonds were chains of adamant."

Groniger said speculatively, "I can see how the Mouser's hood would be stripped away upward as he was dragged down, since it had no ties to his other clothing. And I suppose the up-sliding earth, pressing against the dagger's grip and crosspiece, might effect the same result, though taking longer, as he was dragged still farther down by ... whatever it was."

"But wouldn't the knife have been left point down, vertical in the earth, then?" Skullick argued.

Mother Grum interrupted, "Black magic of some breed took him. That's why the knife got left. Iron doesn't obey devil power."

Skullick went on to Groniger, "But the dagger was uncovered lying flat, horizontal. Which would mean by your theory he was being dragged sideways at that point, in the direction Cat's Claw pointed. In which case we're digging the shaft the wrong way, keeping on straight down."

"Gods! I wish we knew exactly what happened to him down there," Pshawri averred, some of his earlier agony coming back into his voice and aspect. "Did he draw Cat's Claw to do battle with the monster dragging him under, free himself of it? Or was he more actively attacked down there and drew the knife in self-defense?"

"How could he do either of those things when closely cased in hard earth?" Groniger objected.

"He'd manage somehow!" Pshawri shot back. "But then how came the dagger to be left behind? He'd never have been parted from Cat's Claw willingly, of that I'm sure."

"Perhaps he lost consciousness then," Rill interposed.

"Or perhaps they were both attacked, the dragger and the dragged, by some third party," Skullick hazarded. "How much do any of us know what may go on down there?"

A look of sheer horror had been growing in Cif's visage as she eyed the knife. She burst out, "Stop breaking our minds and hearts, all of you, with all these guesses!" She took the Mouser's cowl out of her pouch and rapidly wrapped up the dagger in it, folding in the ends. "I cannot think while looking at that thing." She handed the small gray package to Mother Grum. "There, keep it safe and hid," she said, "while we get on to efforts more constructive."

A change came over the small white-clad woman, who'd seemed consumed moments before with nervous grief. She rose lithely from her seat by the fire, saying to Pshawri, "Follow me, Lieutenant. We'll dowse for your captain with his Whirlpool Queller you rescued from the Maelstrom, beginning at the shaft head, and so determine whether and how he's deviated from the straight down in his strange journey through solid earth." She wet two fingers in her mouth and held them high a space. "While we were talking, feeding our woes with horror, the north breeze died—which'll make the dowsing easier for us, its results surer. And you must do the dowsing, Pshawri, because although it galls me somewhat to admit it, you seem the one most sensitive to the Gray Mouser's presence."

Although looking puzzled and taken aback at first by her words, it was with a seeming sense of relief and a growing eagerness that the skinny ex-thief came to his feet. "I'm with you, Lady, of course, in any effort to regain the Captain. What do I do?"

As she explained, they started toward the shaft head. The eyes of the others followed them. After a bit Skullick and Rill got up and strolled after and, several moments later, Groniger. But old Ourph and Mother Grum—and Snowtreader and the other cart-dog, both of whom had been unharnessed—stayed warm by the fire.

A bucket was coming up from the hole, heaping full. When its earth had been scattered, Pshawri positioned himself by the hole, knees bent and spread a little, head bent forward, looking down earnestly at the black-gold cinder cube suspended on a cubit's length of sailor's twine he'd found in his pouch and held at the top between the thumb and ring finger of his left hand.

Cif stood north of him, spreading her cloak to ward off any remnants of the north breeze, though there seemed no need. The cold air had become quite still.

But although the contraption looked like a pendulum, it did not act like one, neither beginning to swing back and forth in any direction nor yet around in a circle or ellipse.

"And there's no vibration either," Pshawri reported in a low voice.

Cif extended a slender forefinger and laid it very lightly and carefully atop the pinching juncture of his finger and thumb. After a space of three heartbeats she nodded in confirmation and said, "Let's try on the opposite side of the hole."