Swords and Ice Magic - By Fritz Leiber Page 0,34

grieve me. A man must be prepared for all events, no matter how they chill and tear his heart.”

He gave the west a final glance. The front of the southwest gale was close now, sweeping up the ice crystals ahead of it. It was a chord that cut off a whole sector of the circular white fog-sea, replacing it with naked black ocean. From that came a fleeting white glow that made Fafhrd mutter, “Ice blink.”

Then closer still, hardly a half-score bowshots away, still in the fog yet near its wind-smitten edge, a redness flared bright, then died.

Fafhrd sank swiftly into the fog, going down the mast in swift hand-over-hand drops, his boots hardly touching the bronze collar pins.

* * * *

Inside the dark-mapped globular vacuity, It ceased Its dartings, held Itself rigidly erect, facing away from the water-walled equatoriaql sun disk, and intoned in voice like grinding ice flowes, “Heed me, smallest atomies, that in rime seas seethe and freeze. Hear me, spirits of the cold, then do straigtway what you're told. Ships are meeting, heroes greeting; gift to each, from each, of death. Monstreme lurk, in icy murk, picket of the Mingol work 'gainst each city, hearth, and kirk. If they 'scape the Viewless's ruse, make yourself of direst use. Vessels shatter! Man-bones scatter! Bloody flesh, bones darkness splatter! ― every splinter, every tatter! Deeds of darkness, darkness merit ― so, till's done, put out the sun!”

And with reptilian swiftness It whipped around and clapped a blacked-iron lid over the softly flaring, walled solar disk, which plunged the spherical cavity into an absolute blackness, wherein It whispered grindingly and chucklesome, “...and the Ghouls conjured the sun out of Heaven, quotha! Ghouls, indeed! ― ever o'er-boastful. Khahkht never boasts, but does!”

* * * *

At the foot of Flotsam's mainmast the Gray Mouser gripped Pshawri by the throat, but forbore to shake him. Beneath bloody head-circling bandage, his corporal major's white-circled pupils stared at him defiantly from bloodless face.

“Was one light battle-tap enough to make a crack for all your brains to leak out?” the Mouser demanded. “Why did you fire that flare, and so reveal us to our enemy?”

Pshawri winced but continued to oppose his gaze to the captain's glare. “You ordered it ― and did not countermand,” he stated stubbornly.

The Mouser sputtered, but had to allow the truth of that. The fool had been obedient, even if utterly lacking in judgment. Soldiers and their blind devotion to duty! especially spoken order! Most odd to think that this faithful idiot was yesterday a burglar-thief, child of treachery and lies and blinkered selfishness. The Mouser had also guiltily to admit he could have countermanded his command, paying lip service to logic and making allowance for stupidity, and particularly have noted what the fool was up to when he mounted the mast a second time. Pshawri was clearly still shaken from his head blow, poor devil, and at least he had been quick enough in casting boathook and flare into the sea when the Mouser'd roared at him from below.

“Very well,” he said gruffly, releasing his grip. “Next time think too ― if there's time ― and there was! as well as act. Ask Ourph for a noggin of white brandy. Then be forward lookout with Gavs ―I'm doubling them bow and stern.”

And with that, the Mouser himself took up the general work of trying to pierce the stilly fog with eyes and ears, wondering the while unhappy and uneasy about the nature of Fafhrd's madness and of the vast, fell vessel he'd built, bought, commandeered, or perchance got from Ningauble or other sorcerer. Or sorcerers! ― it had surely been big and weird enough to be the chattel of several archimages! Conceivably a refitted prison hulk from rimy No-Ombrulsk. Or, illest thought of all (stemming from Ourph's fears 'bout the vanished oar shard), was the sorcerer Khahkht? ― and some link 'twixt that warlock and mad Fafhrd?

Flotsam ghosted on, the sweepsmen pushing only enough to keep her under way. Mouser had early ordered slowest beat to conserve their strength.

“Three bells,” Ourph softly called.

Dawn nighs, the Mouser thought.

Pshawri could not have been long at the bow when his cry came back, “Clear sea ahead! And wind!”

The fog thinned to wisps torn and tossed aft by the eddying, frosty air. The gibbous moon was firmly bedded on the western horizon, yet still sent an eerie white glare, while south of her a few lonely stars hung in the sky. That was uncanny,