Selected Stories by Fritz Leiber (17 page)

The Mouser felt the sweat of relief bead his forehead. The disguises he had brilliantly conceived were still working, taking in even the head man, though he had spotted Fafhrd’s tipsiness. Resuming his blind-man manner, he quavered, “We were directed by the guard above the Cheap Street door to report to you in person, great Krovas, the Night Beggarmaster being on furlough for reasons of sexual hygiene. Tonight we’ve made good haul!” And fumbling in his purse, ignoring as far as possible the tightened grip on his shoulders, he brought out a golden coin and displayed it tremblehanded.
“Spare me your inexpert acting,” Krovas said sharply. “I’m not one of your marks. And take that rag off your eyes.”
The Mouser obeyed and stood to attention again insofar as his pinioning would permit, and smiling the more seeming carefree because of his reawakening uncertainties. Conceivably he wasn’t doing quite as brilliantly as he’d thought.
Krovas leaned forward and said placidly yet piercingly, “Granted you were so ordered, why were you spying into a room beyond this one when I spotted you?”
“We saw brave thieves flee from that room,” the Mouser answered pat. “Fearing that some danger threatened the Guild, my comrade and I investigated, ready to scotch it.”
“But what we saw and heard only perplexed us, great sir,” Fafhrd appended quite smoothly.
“I didn’t ask you, sot. Speak when you’re spoken to,” Krovas snapped at him. Then, to the Mouser,“You’re an overweening rogue, most presumptuous for your rank. Beggars claim to protect thieves indeed! I’m of a mind to have you both flogged for your spying, and again for your drunkenness, aye, and once more for your lies.”
In a flash the Mouser decided that further insolence—and lying, too—rather than fawning, was what the situation required. “I am a most presumptuous rogue indeed, sir,” he said smugly. Then he set his face solemn. “But now I see the time has come when I must speak darkest truth entire. The Day Beggarmaster suspects a plot against your own life, sir, by one of your highest and closest lieutenants—one you trust so well you’d not believe it, sir. He told us that! So he set me and my comrade secretly to guard you and sniff out the verminous villain.”
“More and clumsier lies!” Krovas snarled, but the Mouser saw his face grow pale. The Grandmaster half rose from his seat. “Which lieutenant?”
The Mouser grinned and relaxed. His two captors gazed sidewise at him curiously, loosing their grip a little. Fafhrd’s pair seemed likewise intrigued.
The Mouser then asked coolly,“Are you questioning me as a trusty spy or a pinioned liar? If the latter, I’ll not insult you with one more word.”
Krovas’ face darkened.“Boy!” he called. Through the curtains of an inner doorway, a youth with the dark complexion of a Kleshite and clad only in a black loincloth sprang to kneel before Krovas, who ordered, “Summon first my sorcerer, next the thieves Slevyas and Fissif,” whereupon the dark youth dashed into the corridor.
Krovas hesitated a moment in thought, then shot a hand toward Fafhrd. “What do you know of this, drunkard? Do you support your mate’s crazy tale?”
Fafhrd merely sneered his face and folded his arms, the still-slack grip of his captors permitting it, his sword-crutch hanging against his body from his lightly gripping hand. Then he scowled as there came a sudden shooting pain in his numbed, bound-up left leg, which he had forgotten.
Krovas raised a clenched fist and himself wholly from his chair, in prelude to some fearsome command—likely that Fafhrd and the Mouser be tortured, but at that moment Hristomilo came gliding into the room, his feet presumably taking swift, but very short steps—at any rate his black robe hung undisturbed to the marble floor despite his slithering speed.
There was a shock at his entrance. All eyes in the map room followed him, breaths were held, and the Mouser and Fafhrd felt the horny hands that gripped them shake just a little. Even Krovas’ tense expression became also guardedly uneasy.
Outwardly oblivious to this reaction to his appearance, Hristomilo, smiling thin-lipped, halted close to one side of Krovas’ chair and inclined his hood-shadowed rodent face in the ghost of a bow.
Krovas asked sharply yet nervously, gesturing toward the Mouser and Fafhrd, “Do you know these two?”
Hristomilo nodded decisively. “They just now peered a befuddled eye each at me,” he said, “whilst I was about that business we spoke of. I’d have shooed them off, reported them, save such action would have broken my spell, put my words out of time with the alembic’s workings. The one’s a Northerner, the other’s features have a southern cast—from Tovilyis or near, most like. Both younger than their now-looks. Freelance bravoes, I’d judge ’em, the sort the Brotherhood hires as extras when they get at once several big guard and escort jobs. Clumsily disguised now, of course, as beggars.”
Fafhrd by yawning, the Mouser by pitying headshake tried to convey that all this was so much poor guesswork. The Mouser even added a warning glare, brief as lightning, to suggest to Krovas that the conspiring lieutenant might be the Grandmaster’s own sorcerer.
“That’s all I can tell you without reading their minds,” Hristomilo concluded. “Shall I fetch my lights and mirrors?”
“Not yet.” Krovas faced the Mouser and said,“Now speak truth, or have it magicked from you and then be whipped to death. Which of my lieutenants were you set to spy on by the Day Beggarmaster? But you’re lying about that commission, I believe?”
“Oh, no,” the Mouser denied it guilelessly. “We reported our every act to the Day Beggarmaster and he approved them, told us to spy our best and gather every scrap of fact and rumor we could about the conspiracy.” “And he told me not a word about it!” Krovas rapped out. “If true, I’ll have Bannat’s head for this! But you’re lying, aren’t you?”
As the Mouser gazed with wounded eyes at Krovas, a portly man limped past the doorway with help of a gilded staff. He moved with silence and aplomb.
But Krovas saw him. “Night Beggarmaster!” he called sharply. The limping man stopped, turned, came crippling majestically through the door.
Krovas stabbed a finger at the Mouser, then Fafhrd. “Do you know these two, Flim?”
The Night Beggarmaster unhurriedly studied each for a space, then shook his head with its turban of cloth of gold. “Never seen either before. What are they? Fink beggars?”
“But Flim wouldn’t know us,” the Mouser explained desperately, feeling everything collapsing in on him and Fafhrd. “All our contacts were with Bannat alone.”
Flim said quietly, “Bannat’s been abed with the swamp ague this past ten-day. Meanwhile I have been Day Beggarmaster as well as Night.” At that moment Slevyas and Fissif came hurrying in behind Flim. The tall thief bore on his jaw a bluish lump. The fat thief ’s head was bandaged above his darting eyes. He pointed quickly at Fafhrd and the Mouser and cried, “There are the two that slugged us, took our Jengao loot, and slew our escort.”
The Mouser lifted his elbow and the green bottle crashed to shards at his feet on the hard marble. Gardenia-reek sprang swiftly through the air. But more swiftly still the Mouser, shaking off the careless hold of his startled guards, sprang toward Krovas, clubbing his wrapped-up sword. With startling speed Flim thrust out his gilded staff, tripping the Mouser, who went heels over head, midway seeking to change his involuntary somersault into a voluntary one.
Meanwhile Fafhrd lurched heavily against his left-hand captor, at the same time swinging bandaged Graywand strongly upward to strike his right-hand captor under the jaw. Regaining his one-legged balance with a mighty contortion, he hopped for the loot-wall behind him. Slevyas made for the wall of thieves’ tools, and with a muscle-cracking effort wrenched the great pry-bar from its padlocked ring. Scrambling to his feet after a poor landing in front of Krovas chair, the Mouser found it empty and the Thief King in a half-crouch behind it, gold-hilted dagger drawn, deep-sunk eyes coldly battle-wild. Spinning around, he saw Fafhrd’s guards on the floor, the one sprawled senseless, the other starting to scramble up, while the great Northerner, his back against the wall of weird jewelry, menaced the whole room with wrapped-up Graywand and with his long knife, jerked from its scabbard behind him.
Likewise drawing Cat’s Claw, the Mouser cried in trumpet-voice of battle, “Stand aside, all! He’s gone mad! I’ll hamstring his good leg for you!” And racing through the press and between his own two guards, who still appeared to hold him in some awe, he launched himself with flashing dirk at Fafhrd, praying that the Northerner, drunk now with battle as well as wine and poisonous perfume, would recognize him and guess his stratagem. Graywand slashed well above his ducking head. His new friend not only guessed, but was playing up—and not just missing by accident, the Mouser hoped. Stooping low by the wall, he cut the lashings on Fafhrd’s left leg.
Graywand and Fafhrd’s long knife continued to spare him. Springing up,
he headed for the corridor, crying overshoulder to Fafhrd, “Come on!” Hristomilo stood well out of his way, quietly observing. Fissif scuttled toward safety. Krovas stayed behind his chair, shouting, “Stop them! Head them off!”
The three remaining ruffian guards, at last beginning to recover their fighting-wits, gathered to oppose the Mouser. But menacing them with swift feints of his dirk, he slowed them and darted between—and then
just in the nick of time knocked aside with a downsweep of wrapped-up Scalpel Flim’s gilded staff, thrust once again to trip him. 
All this gave Slevyas time to return from the tools-wall and aim at the Mouser a great swinging blow with the massive pry-bar. But even as that blow started, a very long, bandaged and scabbarded sword on a very long arm thrust over the Mouser’s shoulder and solidly and heavily poked Slevyas high on the chest, jolting him backwards, so that the pry-bar’s swing was short and sang past harmlessly.
Then the Mouser found himself in the corridor and Fafhrd beside him, though for some weird reason still only hopping. The Mouser pointed toward the stairs. Fafhrd nodded, but delayed to reach high, still on one leg only, and rip off the nearest wall a dozen yards of heavy drapes, which he threw across the corridor to baffle pursuit.
They reached the stairs and started up the next flight, the Mouser in advance. There were cries behind, some muffled.
“Stop hopping, Fafhrd!” the Mouser ordered querulously. “You’ve got two legs again.”
“Yes, and the other’s still dead,” Fafhrd complained. “Ahh! Now feeling begins to return to it.”
A thrown knife whished between them and dully clinked as it hit the wall point-first and stone powder flew. Then they were around the bend. Two more empty corridors, two more curving flights, and then they saw above them on the last landing a stout ladder mounting to a dark, square hole in the roof. A thief with hair bound back by a colorful handkerchief—it appeared to be the door guards’ identification—menaced the Mouser with drawn sword, but when he saw that there were two of them, both charging him determinedly with shining knives and strange staves or clubs, he turned and ran down the last empty corridor.
The Mouser, followed closely by Fafhrd, rapidly mounted the ladder and vaulted up through the hatch into the star-crusted night.
He found himself near the unrailed edge of a slate roof which slanted enough to have made it look most fearsome to a novice roof-walker, but safe as houses to a veteran.
Turning back at a bumping sound, he saw Fafhrd prudently hoisting the ladder. Just as he got it free, a knife flashed up close past him out of the hatch.
It clattered down near them and slid off the roof. The Mouser loped south across the slates and was halfway from the hatch to that end of the roof when the faint chink came of the knife striking the cobbles of Murder Alley. Fafhrd followed more slowly, in part perhaps from a lesser experience of roofs, in part because he still limped a bit to favor his left leg, and in part because he was carrying the heavy ladder balanced on his right shoulder. “We won’t need that,” the Mouser called back. 
Without hesitation Fafhrd heaved it joyously over the edge. By the time it crashed in Murder Alley, the Mouser was leaping down two yards and across a gap of one to the next roof, of opposite and lesser pitch. Fafhrd landed beside him.
The Mouser led them at almost a run through a sooty forest of chimneys, chimney pots, ventilators with tails that made them always face the wind, black-legged cisterns, hatch covers, bird houses, and pigeon traps across five roofs, until they reached the Street of the Thinkers at a point where it was crossed by a roofed passageway much like the one at Rokkermas and Slaarg’s.
While they crossed it at a crouching lope, something hissed close past them and clattered ahead. As they leaped down from the roof of the bridge, three more somethings hissed over their heads to clatter beyond. One rebounded from a square chimney almost to the Mouser’s feet. He picked it up, expecting a stone, and was surprised by the greater weight of a leaden ball big as two doubled-up fingers.
“They,” he said, jerking thumb overshoulder, “lost no time in getting slingers on the roof. When roused, they’re good.”
Southeast then through another black chimney-forest toward a point on Cheap Street where upper stories overhung the street so much on either side that it would be easy to leap the gap. During this roof-traverse, an advancing front of night-smog, dense enough to make them cough and wheeze, engulfed them and for perhaps sixty heartbeats the Mouser had to slow to a shuffle and feel his way, Fafhrd’s hand on his shoulder. Just short of Cheap Street they came abruptly and completely out of the smog and saw the stars again, while the black front rolled off northward behind them. “Now what the devil was that?” Fafhrd asked and the Mouser shrugged.
A nighthawk would have seen a vast thick hoop of black night-smog blowing out in all directions from a center near the Silver Eel. East of Cheap Street the two comrades soon made their way to the ground, landing back in Plague Court.
Then at last they looked at each other and their trammeled swords and their filthy faces and clothing made dirtier still by roof-soot, and they laughed and laughed and laughed, Fafhrd roaring still as he bent over to massage his left leg above and below knee. This hooting self-mockery continued while they unwrapped their swords—the Mouser as if his were a surprise package—and clipped their scabbards once more to their belts.
Their exertions had burnt out of them the last mote and atomy of strong wine and even stronger stenchful perfume, but they felt no desire whatever for more drink, only the urge to get home and eat hugely and guzzle hot, bitter gahveh, and tell their lovely girls at length the tale of their mad adventure.