Swords and Ice Magic - By Fritz Leiber Page 0,49
though he could not place it. He gave up racking his brains over that and settled back, listening more closely to the flame-voice and trying to attune its fancied words to the movements of the flame-face's lips.
Mother Grum got up again and moved back, bowing. There entered without stooping a lady whose russet cloak was drawn across the lower half of her face, but the Mouser recognized the gold-shot green eyes and he stood up. Cif nodded to Mother Grum and the two harlots, walked to the Mouser's table, cast her cloak atop his, and sat down in the third chair. He poured for her, refilled his own tankard, and sat down also. They drank. She studied him for some time.
Then, “You've seen the face in the fire and heard its voice?” she asked.
His eyes widened and he nodded, watching her intently now.
“But have you guessed why it seems familiar?” He shook his head rapidly, sitting forward, his expression a most curious and expectant frown.
“It resembles you,” she said flatly.
His eyebrows went up and his jaw dropped, just a little. That was true! It did remind him of himself ― only when he was younger, quite a bit younger. Or as he saw himself in mirror these days only when in a most self-infatuated and vain mood, so that he saw himself as unmarked by age.
“But do you know why?” she asked him, herself intent now.
He shook his head.
She relaxed. “Neither do I,” she said. “I thought you might know. I marked it when I first saw you in the Eel, but as to why ― it is a mystery within mysteries, beyond our present ken.”
“I find Rime Isle a nest of mysteries,” he said meaningfully, “not the least your disavowal of myself and Fafhrd.”
She nodded, sat up straighter, and said, “So now I think it's high time I told you why Afreyt and I are so sure of a Mingol invasion of Rime Isle while the rest of the council disbelieves it altogether. Don't you?”
He nodded emphatically, smiling.
“Almost a year ago to the day,” she said, "Afreyt and I were walking alone upon the moor north of town, as has been our habit since childhood. We were lamenting Rime Isle's lost glories and lost (or man-renounced) gods and wishing for their return, so that the Isle might have surer guidance and foreknowledge of perils. It was a day of changeable winds and weather, the end of spring, not quite yet summer, all the air alive, now bright, now gloomed over, as clouds raced past the sun. We had just topped a gentle rise when we came upon the form of a youth sprawled on his back in the heather with eyes closed and head thrown back, looking as if he were dying or in the last stages of exhaustion ― as though he had been cast ashore by the last great wave of some unimaginably great storm on high.
"He wore a simple tunic of homespun, very worn, and the plainest sandals, worn thin, with frayed thongs, and a very old belt dimly pricked out with monsters, yet from first sight I was almost certain that he was a god.
"I knew it in three ways. From his insubstantiality ― though he was there to the touch, I could almost see the crushed heather through his pale flesh. From his supernal beauty ― it was ... the flame-face, though tranquil-featured, almost as if in death. And from the adoration I felt swelling in my heart.
"I also knew it from the way Afreyt acted, kneeling at once like myself beside him across from me ― though there was something unnatural in her behavior, betokening an amazing development when we understood it aright, which we did not then. (More of that later.)
"You know how they say a god dies when his believers utterly fail him? Well, it was as if this one's last worshipper were dying in Nehwon. Or as if ― this is closer to it ― all his worshippers had died in his own proper world and he whirled out into the wild spaces between the worlds, to sink or swim, survive or perish according to the reception he got in whatever new world whereon chance cast him ashore. I think it within the power of gods to travel between the worlds, don't you? ― both involuntarily and also by their own design. And who knows what unpredictable tempests they might encounter in dark mid-journey?
"But I was not wasting time in