Swords and Ice Magic - By Fritz Leiber Page 0,21

wings.

Then the Mouser was shaking him by the shoulders and crying out, “Wake up, wake up! Speak to me, man!”

Fafhrd brushed his face with the back of his hand and mumbled, “Wha' happ'n?”

Crouched beside him, the Mouser narrated rapidly and somewhat breathlessly, “The shimmer-sprights grew restless and 'gan play about the mast like corposants. One buzzed around me shrilly like a wasp, and when I'd driven it off, I saw the other nosing you from toe to waist to head, then nuzzling your neck. Your flesh grew silver-white, as white as death, the whiles the corposant became your glowing shroud. I greatly feared for you and drove it off.”

Fafhrd's muddied eyes cleared somewhat whilst the Mouser spoke and when the latter was done, he nodded and said knowingly, “That would be right. She spoke me much of death and at the end she looked like it, poor sibyl.”

“Who spoke?” the Mouser asked. “What sibyl?”

“The shimmer-girl, of course,” Fafhrd told him. “You know what I mean.”

He stood up. His belt began to slip. He stared down wide-eyes at the undone buckle, then drew it up and hooked it together swiftly.

“Fafhrd, I don't know what you're talking of,” the Mouser denied, his expression suddenly hooded. “Girl? What girl? Art seeing mirages? Has lack of erotic exercise addled your wits? Have you turned moon-mad lunatic?”

At this point Fafhrd had to speak most sharply and shrewdly to the Mouser to get him to admit that he ― the Mouser ―had suspected for days that the shimmer-sprights were girls, albeit girls with a strong admixture of the supernatural, insofar as any admixture of anything is able to affect the essential girlness of any such being, which isn't much.

But the Mouser did eventually make the admission although his mind had not the edge-of-sleep honesty of Fafhrd's and tended to drift off to musings on his bubble-cosmos. Yet under strong prompting by Fafhrd he even confessed to his encounter with the sun-red vermilion-eyed shimmer-girl last noon, when he'd looked afire, and upon Fafhrd's insistence recalled the exact words she'd said to him in dream.

“Your red girl spoke of Life and pressing on south to immortality and paradise,” Fafhrd summed up thoughtfully, “whilst my dark dear talked of Death and turning back north toward Shadowland and Lankhmar and Cold Waste.” Then, with swift-growing excitement and utter amazement at his own insight, “Mouser, I see it all! There are two different pairs of shimmer-girls! The daytime ones (you spoke with one of those) are children of the sun and messengers from the fabled Land of Gods at Nehwon's Life Pole. While the night-timers, replacing them from dusk to dawn, are minions of the moon, White Huntress' daughters, owing allegiance to the Shadowland, which lies across the world from the Life Pole.”

“Fafhrd, hast thou thought,” the Mouser spoke from a brown study, “how nicely calculated must be the height and diameter of each waterspout-tube, so that the star at its bottom is seen from every spot in other half of Nehwon (up there, when it's night there) but from no spot in our half down here? ― which incidentally explains why stars are brightest at zenith, you see all of each, not just a lens or biconvex meniscus. It seems to argue that some divinity must ― ” At that point the impact of Fafhrd's words at last sank in and he said in tones less dreamy, “Two different sets of girls? Four girls in all? Fafhrd, I think you're overcomplicating things. By Ildritch's Scimitar ― ”

“There are two sets of girl twins,” Fafhrd overrode him. “That much is certain though all else be lies. And mark you this, Small Man, your sun-girls mean us ill though seeming to promise good, for how reach immortality and paradise except by dying? How reach Godsland except by perishing? The whiles the sun, pure light or no, is baleful, hot, and deadly. But my moon-girls, seeming to mean us ill, intend good only ― being at once as cool and lovely as the moon. She said to me in dream, 'Turn back to Death,' which sounds dire. But you and I have lived with Death for dozen years and ta'en no lasting hurt ― just as she said herself, 'for that's the only way to stay alive. Seek Death to 'scape from him!' So steer we north at once! ― as she directed. For if we keep on south, deeper and deeper into torrid realm of sun ('Beware the sun,' she said!) we'll