The Sword & Sorcery Anthology (11 page)

They knew he was dead. That was unmistakable in the way he
lay. Jirel stood very still, looking down upon him, and strangely
it seemed to her that all the lights in the world had gone out. A
moment before he had been so big and vital, so magnificent in the
torchlight—she could still feel his kiss upon her mouth, and the
hard warmth of his arms....

Suddenly and blindingly it came upon her what she had done.
She knew now why such heady violence had flooded her whenever
she thought of him—knew why the light-devil in her own form had
laughed so derisively—knew the price she must pay for taking a gift
from a demon. She knew that there was no light anywhere in the
world, now that Guillaume was gone.

Father Gervase took her arm gently. She shook him off with an
impatient shrug and dropped to one knee beside Guillaume’s body,
bending her head so that the red hair fell forward to hide her tears.

FRITZ LEIBER

T
hree
things
warned
the wizard’s apprentice that something was wrong: first the deep-trodden prints of iron-shod hooves along the forest path—he sensed them through his boots before stooping to feel them out in the dark; next, the eerie drone of a bee unnaturally abroad by night; and finally, a faint aromatic odor of burning. Mouse raced ahead, dodging treetrunks and skipping over twisted roots by memory and by a bat’s feeling for rebounding whispers of sound. Gray leggings, tunic, peaked hood and streaming cloak made the slight youth, skinny with asceticism, seem like a rushing shadow.

The exaltation Mouse had felt at the successful completion of his
long quest and his triumphal return to this sorcerous master, Glavas
Rho, now vanished from his mind and gave way to a fear he hardly
dared put into thoughts. Harm to the great wizard, whose mere
apprentice he was?—“My Gray Mouse, still midway in his allegiance
between white magic and black,” Glavas Rho had once put it—no, it
was unthinkable that that great figure of wisdom and spiritual might
should come to harm. The great magician... (There was something
hysterical about the way Mouse insisted on that “great,” for to the
world Glavas Rho was but a hedge-wizard, no better than a Mingol
necromancer with his second-sighted spotted dog or a conjurer
beggar of Quarmall)...the great magician and his dwelling were
alike protected by strong enchantments no impious outsider could
breach—not even (the heart of Mouse skipped a beat) the lord
paramount of these forests, Duke Janarrl, who hated all magic, but
white worse than black.

And yet the smell of burning was stronger now and Glavas Rho’s
low cottage was built of resinous wood.

There also vanished from Mouse’s mind the vision of a girl’s face,
perpetually frightened yet sweet—that of Duke Janarrl’s daughter
Ivrian, who came secretly to study under Glavas Rho, figuratively
sipping the milk of his white wisdom side by side with Mouse. Indeed,
they had privately come to call each other Mouse and Misling, while
under his tunic Mouse carried a plain green glove he had teased from
Ivrian when he set forth on his quest, as if he were her armored and
beweaponed knight and not a swordless wizardling.

By the time Mouse reached the hilltop clearing he was breathing
hard, not from exertion.

There the gathering light showed him at a glance the hoof-hacked
garden of magic herbs, the overturned straw beehive, the great flare
of soot sweeping up the smooth surface of the vast granite boulder
that sheltered the wizard’s tiny house.

But even without the dawn light he would have seen the fire-
shrunken beams and fire-gnawed posts a-creep with red ember-
worms and the wraithlike green flame where some stubborn sorcerous
ointment still burned. He would have smelled the confusion of
precious odors of burned drugs and balms and the horribly appetizing
kitchen-odor of burned flesh.

His whole lean body winced. Then, like a hound getting the scent,
he darted forward.

The wizard lay just inside the buckled door. And he had fared as
his house: the beams of his body bared and blackened; the priceless
juices and subtle substances boiled, burned, destroyed forever or
streamed upward to some cold hell beyond the moon.

From all around came very faintly a low sad hum, as the unhoused
bees mourned.

Memories fled horror-stricken through Mouse’s mind: these
shriveled lips softly chanting incantations, those charred fingers
pointing at the stars or stroking a small woodland animal.

Trembling, Mouse drew from the leather pouch at his belt a flat
green stone, engraved on the one side with deep-cut alien hieroglyphs,
on the other with an armored, many-jointed monster, like a giant ant,
that trod among tiny fleeing human figures. That stone had been the
object of the quest on which Glavas Rho had sent him. For sake of
it, he had rafted across the Lakes of Pleea, tramped the foothills of
the Mountains of Hunger, hidden from a raiding party of red-bearded
pirates, tricked lumpish peasant-fishermen, flattered and flirted with
an elderly odorous witch, robbed a tribal shrine, and eluded hounds
set on his trail. His winning the green stone without shedding blood
meant that he had advanced another grade in his apprenticeship.
Now he gazed dully at its ancient surface and then, his trembling
controlled, laid it carefully on his master’s blackened palm. As he
stooped he realized that the soles of his feet were painfully hot, his
boots smoldering a little at the edges, yet he did not hurry his steps
as he moved away.

It was lighter now and he noticed little things, such as the anthill
by the threshold. The master had studied the black-armored creatures
as intently as he had their cousin bees. Now it was deeply dented by
a great heelmark showing a semicircle of pits made by spikes—yet
something was moving. Peering closely he saw a tiny heat-maimed
warrior struggling over the sand-grains. He remembered the monster
on the green stone and shrugged at a thought that led nowhere.

He crossed the clearing through the mourning bees to where
pale light showed between the treetrunks and soon was standing,
hand resting on a gnarly bole, at a point where the hillside sloped
sharply away. In the wooded valley below was a serpent of milky mist,
indicating the course of the stream that wound through it. The air
was heavy with the dissipating smoke of darkness. The horizon was
edged to the right with red from the coming sun. Beyond it, Mouse
knew, lay more forest and then the interminable grain fields and
marshes of Lankhmar and beyond even those the ancient world-
center of Lankhmar city, which Mouse had never seen, yet whose
Overlord ruled in theory even this far.

But near at hand, outlined by the sunrise red, was a bundle of
jagged-topped towers—the stronghold of Duke Janarrl. A wary
animation came into Mouse’s masklike face. He thought of the
spiked heelmark, the hacked turf, the trail of hoofmarks leading
down this slope. Everything pointed to the wizard-hating Janarrl
as the author of the atrocity behind him, except that, still revering
his master’s skills as matchless, Mouse did not understand how the
Duke had broken through the enchantments, strong enough to dizzy
the keenest woodsman, which had protected Glavas Rho’s abode for
many a year.

He bowed his head...and saw, lying lightly on the springing
grassblades, a plain green glove. He snatched it up and digging in his
tunic drew forth another glove, darkly mottled and streakily bleached
by sweat, and held them side by side. They were mates.

His lips writhed back from his teeth and his gaze went again to the
distant stronghold. Then he unseated a thick round of scraggy bark
from the treetrunk he’d been touching and delved shoulder-deep in
the black cavity revealed. As he did these things with a slow tense
automatism, the words came back to him of a reading Glavas Rho
had smilingly given him over a meal of milkless gruel.

“Mouse,” the mage had said, firelight dancing on his short white
beard, “when you stare your eyes like that and flare your nostrils, you
are too much like a cat for me to credit you will ever be a sheepdog
of the truth. You are a middling dutiful scholar, but secretly you favor
swords over wands. You are more tempted by the hot lips of black
magic than the chaste slim fingers of white, no matter to how pretty a
misling the latter belong—no, do not deny it! You are more drawn to
the beguiling sinuosities of the left-hand path than the straight steep
road of the right. I fear me you will never be mouse in the end but
mouser. And never white but gray—oh well, that’s better than black.
Now, wash up these bowls and go breathe an hour on the newborn
ague-plant, for ’tis a chill night, and remember to talk kindly to the
thorn bush.”

The remembered words grew faint, but did not fade, as Mouse
drew from the hole a leather belt furred green with mold and dangling
from it a moldy scabbard. From the latter he drew, seizing it by the
thong-wrapped grip, a tapering bronze sword showing more verdigris
than metal. His eyes grew wide, but pinpoint-pupiled, and his face yet
more masklike, as he held the pale-green, brown-edged blade against
the red hump of the rising sun.

From across the valley came faintly the high, clear, ringing note of
a hunting horn, calling men to the chase.

Abruptly Mouse strode off down the slope, cutting over to the
trail of the hooves, moving with long hasty strides and a little stiff-
leggedly, as if drunk, and buckling around his waist as he went the
mold-furred sword-belt.

A dark four-footed shape rushed across the sun-specked forest
glade, bearing down the underbrush with its broad low chest and
trampling it with its narrow cloven hooves. From behind sounded
the notes of a horn and the harsh shouts of men. At the far edge of
the glade, the boar turned. Breath whistled through its nostrils and
it swayed. Then its half-glazed little eyes fixed on the figure of a man
on horseback. It turned toward him and some trick of the sunlight
made its pelt grow blacker. Then it charged. But before the terrible
up-turning tusks could find flesh to slash, a heavy-bladed spear bent
like a bow against the knob of its shoulder and it went crashing over
half backward, its blood spattering the greenery.

Huntsmen clad in brown and green appeared in the glade, some
surrounding the fallen boar with a wall of spear points, others hurrying
up to the man on the horse. He was clad in rich garments of yellow
and brown. He laughed, tossed one of his huntsmen the bloodied
spear and accepted a silver-worked leather wine flask from another.

A second rider appeared in the glade and the Duke’s small yellow
eyes clouded under the tangled brows. He drank deep and wiped his
lips with the back of his sleeve. The huntsmen were warily closing
their spear-wall on the boar, which lay rigid but with head lifted a
finger’s breadth off the turf, its only movements the darting of its
gaze from side to side and the pulse of bright blood from its shoulder.
The spear-wall was about to close when Janarrl waved the huntsmen
to a halt.

“Ivrian!” he called harshly to the newcomer. “You had two chances
at the beast, but you flinched. Your cursed dead mother would already
have sliced thin and tasted the beast’s raw heart.”

His daughter stared at him miserably. She was dressed as the
huntsmen and rode astride with a sword at her side and a spear in
her hand, but it only made her seem more the thin-faced, spindle-
armed girl.

“You are a milksop, a wizard-loving coward,” Janarrl continued.
“Your abominable mother would have faced the boar a-foot and
laughed when its blood gushed in her face. Look here, this boar
is scotched. It cannot harm you. Drive your spear into it now! I
command you!”

The huntsmen broke their spear-wall and drew back to either side,
making a path between the boar and the girl. They sniggered openly
at her and the Duke smiled at them approvingly. The girl hesitated,
sucking at her underlip, staring with fear and fascination too at the
beast which eyed her, head still just a-lift.

“Drive in your spear!” Janarrl repeated, sucking quickly at the
flask. “Do so, or I will whip you here and now.”

Then she touched her heels to the horse’s flanks and cantered
down the glade, her body bent low, the spear trained at its target. But
at the last instant its point swerved aside and gouged the dirt. The
boar had not moved. The huntsmen laughed raucously.

Janarrl’s wide face reddened with anger as he whipped out suddenly
and trapped her wrist, tightened on it. “Your damned mother could
cut men’s throats and not change color. I’ll see you flesh your spear in
that carcass, or I’ll make you dance, here and now, as I did last night,
when you told me the wizard’s spells and the place of his den.”