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this there must be attached to it a body such as that of the beast under view
and itself be man also, however cabined and confined in grainy earth.
Instantly his mind began to get a host of little messages from this attached
body, which turned out to be in fetal position with both hands tenderly
cupping its genitals, rag-limp after their torture by stangury-style orgasm in
the skeletal embrace of blue-pied Sister Pain.
Memory of that terrible triggering made him wonder for a moment if he were not
simply gazing into another room in the apartments of Hisvet in
Lankhmar Below, perhaps that of her sorcerer-father Hisvin, with Foursie due
to burst in naked the next moment chattering out her demon alarm -- and the
dread blue lady once again centipede-walk her bone hand round his waist from
behind as he lay trapped and confined by dirt.
But, no! The very earth that clasped him so intimately had changed profoundly
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in texture and in reek. The rocks from which nature had ground it had been
igneous and metamorphic rather than sedimentary, he could tell. The moisture
in it was not Salt Marsh and Hlal-mouth brackish, but had the icy
bite of the mineralized streams rivuleting from the mountains of Hunger, a
thousand Lankhmar leagues to the south of that metropolis. The commingled
effluvia were not those of polyglot Lankhmar but of some more intense and
secret community with a pervading mushroom odor. Toadstool wine!
A second contemplation of the new buried room and its occupants made much
clear. However had he for a moment confused schoolmasterish, peevish
Hisvin with this imperious figure discoursing to the crafty-looking lad who
stood before him -- the beaky nose, the wattled cheeks, the proud hawklike
visage, but above all the ruby-red eyeballs with white irises and glittering
jet pupils -- those last alone should have told him (but for lingerings of his
torture-wrought amnesia) that this could be none other than Quarmal, Lord of
Quarmall, on numerous counts his and friend Fafhrd's dearest enemy.
As soon as this realization struck him he noted other clues to the scene's
identity and locale, such as a curtain of dangling cords bellowing inward at
the room's far end, and behind that, dimly glimpsed, a thick-
thighed, short-armed human monster walking without moving forward -- one of
the almost mindless slaves specially bred to work the treadmills that spun the
great wooden fans that sucked down air into the many ramp-joined levels of the
buried city and its low-ceilinged mushroom fields.
Unquestionably he was half again as far from Rime Isle as he'd been when
overtaken by Sister Pain while spying on Hisvet's remedy for boredom on
tedious afternoons in Lankhmar Below, the distance demi-doubled -- a
prodigious feat of subterranean transversing, one must admit. Unless, of
course, both experiences were incidents in a lengthy nightmare dreamed while
shallowly buried on Gallows Hill -- which more and more seemed the explanation
of choice for all this underground hugger-mugger, provided he were eventually
rescued from it, to be sure.
Coming out of this reverie, the Mouser checked that his shallow breathing of
earth-trapped air was still unlabored and then scanned anew the long room
lined with books and charts and philosophic instruments. How characteristic of
most of his life, he told himself, was his present situation! To be on the
outside in drenching rain or blasting snow or (like now) worse and looking in
at a cozy abode of culture, comfort, companionship, and couth -- what man
wouldn't turn to thieving and burglary when faced at every turn with such a
fate?
But back to the business at hand, he told himself, resuming his scanning of
the spacious room with its two-and-one-half occupants (the half being for the
monstrous treadslave, laboring behind the wavy curtain of cords at the far
end).
The soundlessly lecturing Lord Quarmal perched on a high stool beside a narrow
table, and the attentive lad (whose dutiful answers or replies were likewise
inaudible) were like a study in old and young skinniness ... and wariness, to
judge by their expressions. He also noted a family resemblance in their
features although the lad's eyes had no sign of the old man's ruby-red balls
and white irises, while the latter's long-hair tufts between his shriveled
ears and bald pate had no greenish cast such as that shown by the other's
short-cropped locks.
What were they being cagey about? he asked himself. Damn it, why was this talk
blocked off? Recalling he'd had the same trouble hearing Hisvet and
Company at first, he focused his attention, (or, rather, the occult auditory)
in one effort to make it come through to him as clearly as the visual did.
Failing to achieve any results, he decided shortly he must be pressing.
He relaxed his concentration and let his mind drift. A gesture of Quarmal with
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the long thin stiff wand or rod he carried turned his attention to the big
Nehwon map, the handsome craft of which tempted the Mouser to scan it almost
idly for a while. The colors were mostly naturalistic, with blues representing
seas and lakes, yellow for deserts, white for snow and ice, and so forth.
Close to the west edge, near the dark blue of the Outer Sea, Quarmall stood
out in royal purple as clearly as if there'd been a sign reading "You are
here."
Just north of it were several small white ovals -- the peaks of the
Mountains of Hunger. Then a great space of pale brown with the blue thread of
the Hlal winding through it -- the grainfields. Then Hlal-mouth with the city
of Lankhmar on its east bank, and above those the paler blue expanse of the
Inner Sea.
Next above that, the dark green Land of the Eight Cities ending in the
white-topped wall of the Trollstep Mountains and, everywhere north of that,
the white of the Cold Waste. And, off in the Outer Sea deep blue of the top-
west corner, something he'd never seen on a map before, Rime Isle. It looked
very small. The Mouser shivered to see depicted the distance between his home
port and Quarmall. This had all better be a nightmare dream, he told himself.
His gaze next traveling east beyond the Cold Waste, it came to the Sea of
Monsters and, beyond that, another shiversome first in his experience of
charts: an elliptical black blotch with a glowing sapphire blue spot at its
center that had to be the Shadowland, Abode of Death. Why, in the Empire of
the East it meant execution by torture for a cartographer to limn that land.
Scattered across the map, but mostly near cities, were enigmatic glowing small
purple dots, along with a lesser number of gleaming red ones, as though it had
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