Swords and Ice Magic - By Fritz Leiber Page 0,71
foot: “March, march, over the Deathlands. Go, go, over the Doomlands. Doom! ― kill the Mingols. Doom! ― die the heroes. Doom! Doom! Glorious doom!” Her voice had grown quite loud by the time she was done.
“Glorious doom?” Afreyt replied.
“Yes. Come on, May, chant it with me.”
“I don't know that I want to.”
“Oh, come on. I'm wearing your noose, aren't I? Odin says we should all chant it.”
As the two girls repeated the chant in their shrill voices with mounting enthusiasm, Groniger and another Rime-man came up.
“That's good,” he said, collecting the bowls. “Glorious doom is good.”
“I like that one.” the other man agreed. “Doom! ― kill the Mingols!” he repeated appreciatively.
They went off chanting it in low voices.
The night darkened. The wind blew. The girls grew quiet.
May said. “lt's cold. The god'll be getting chilly. Gale, we'd better go inside. Will you be all right, cousin Afreyt?”
“I'll be all right.”
A while after the curtains closed behind them, May stuck her head out.
“The god invites you to come inside with us,” she called to Afreyt.
Afreyt caught her breath. Then she said as evenly as she could, “Thank the god, but tell him I will remain here ... on guard.”
“Very well,” May said and the curtains closed again.
Afreyt clenched her hands under her cloak. She hadn't admitted to anyone, even Cif, that for some time now Odin had been fading. She could hardly see even a wispy outline any more. She could still hear his voice. but it had begun to grow faint, lost in wind-moaning. The god had been very real at first on that spring day when she and Cif had found him, and found that there were two gods. He'd seemed so near death then, and she'd labored so hard to save him. She'd been filled with such an adoration, as if he were some ancient hero-saint, or her own dear, dead father. And when he had caressed her fumblingly and muttered in disappointment (it sounded), “You're older than I thought,” and drifted off to sleep, her adoration had been contaminated by horror and rejection. She'd got the idea of bringing in the girls (Did that make her a monster? Well. perhaps) and after that she'd managed very well, keeping it all at a distance.
And then there'd been the excitement of the journey to Lankhmar and the perils of Khahkht's ice-magic and the Mingols and the renewed excitement of the arrival of the Mouser and Fafhrd and the realization that Fafhrd did indeed resemblea younger Odin ― was that what had made god Odin fade and grow whisper-voiced? She didn't know, but she knew it helped make everything torturesome and confusing ― and she couldn't have borne to enter the litter tonight. (Yes, she was a monster.)
She felt a sharp pain in her neck and realized that in her agitation she'd been tugging at the pendant end of the noose beneath her cloak. She loosened it and forced herself to sit quietly. It was full dark now.
There,t~cr~ fr~nt flames flickering from ~arkf~e and Hellglow too. She heard sn~~tches of talk from the campfires and bits of the new ch~nt ~nd laughter as the story ofthat went round. It was very cold, but she did not move. The east Frew silvery-pale. the milky effulgence domed up. and at last the white moon edged into view.
?'he cump stirred then and after a while the bearers came up and unwedgedOdin's gallows and lifted it up and the litter too, and Afreyt arose, unkinking her stiffjoints and stamping her numbed feet, and they all marched off west across the moon-silvered rock, shouldering their grotesque weapons and the two larger burdens. Some of them limped a bit (after all, they were sailors. their feet unused to marching) but they all went on briskly to the new Odin-ch~nt, hunching their backs against the east wind. which now blew strong and steadily.
* * * *
Fafhrd had just kindled his second torch from the emberend of the first and his surroundings had grown warmer, when the lofty passageway he was following debouched into a cavern so vast that the light he bore seemed lost in it. The sound of the cast-away torch-stub hitting rock awakened distant faint echoes and he came to a stop, peering up and around. Then he began to see multitudinous points of light as stars, where flakes of mica in the fire-born stone reflected his torch, and in the middle distance an irregular pillar of mica-flecked rock and on its top a