Selected Stories by Fritz Leiber (18 page)

They loped on side by side. 
Free of night-smog and drizzled with starlight, their cramped surroundings seemed much less stinking and oppressive than when they had set out.
Even Bones Alley had a freshness to it.
They hastened up the long, creaking, broken-treaded stairs with an easy carefulness, and when they were both on the porch, the Mouser shoved at the door to open it with surprise-swiftness.
It did not budge.
“Bolted,” he said to Fafhrd shortly. He noted now there was hardly any light at all coming through the cracks around the door, nor had any been noticeable through the lattices—at most, a faint orange-red glow. Then with sentimental grin and in fond voice in which only the ghost of uneasiness lurked, he said, “They’ve gone to sleep, the unworrying wenches!” He knocked loudly thrice and then cupping his lips called softly at the door crack,“Hola, Ivrian! I’m home safe. Hail,Vlana! Your man’s done you proud, felling Guild-thieves innumerable with one foot tied behind his back!” There was no sound whatever from inside—that is, if one discounted a rustling so faint it was impossible to be sure of it.
Fafhrd was wrinkling his nostrils. “I smell vermin.” 
The Mouser banged on the door again. Still no response.
Fafhrd motioned him out of the way, hunching his big shoulder to crash the portal.
The Mouser shook his head and with a deft tap, slide, and a tug removed a brick that a moment before had looked to be a firm-set part of the wall beside the door. He reached in all his arm. There was the scrape of a bolt
being withdrawn, then another, then a third. He swiftly recovered his arm and the door swung fully inward at touch.
But neither he nor Fafhrd rushed in at once, as both had intended to, for the indefinable scent of danger and the unknown came puffing out along with an increased reek of filthy beast and a slight, sickening sweet scent that though female was no decent female perfume.
They could see the room faintly by the orange glow coming from the small oblong of the open door of the little, well-blacked stove. Yet the oblong did not sit properly upright but was unnaturally a-tilt—clearly the stove had been half overset and now leaned against a side wall of the fireplace, its small door fallen open in that direction. 
By itself alone, that unnatural angle conveyed the entire impact of a universe overturned.
The orange glow showed the carpets oddly rucked up with here and there ragged black circles a palm’s breadth across, the neatly stacked candles scattered about below their shelves along with some of the jars and enameled
boxes, and—above all—two black, low, irregular, longish heaps, the one by the fireplace, the other half on the golden couch, half at its foot. From each heap there stared at the Mouser and Fafhrd innumerable pairs of tiny, rather widely set, furnace-red eyes.
On the thickly carpeted floor on the other side of the fireplace was a silver cobweb—a fallen silver cage, but no love birds sang from it. There was the faint scrape of metal as Fafhrd made sure Graywand was loose in his scabbard.
As if that tiny sound had beforehand been chosen as the signal for attack, each instantly whipped out sword and they advanced side by side into the room, warily at first, testing the floor with each step.
At the screech of the swords being drawn, the tiny furnace-red eyes had winked and shifted restlessly, and now with the two men’s approach they swiftly scattered pattering, pair by red pair, each pair at the forward end of a small, low, slender, hairless-tailed black body, and each making for one of the black circles in the rugs, where they vanished.
Indubitably the black circles were ratholes newly gnawed up through the floor and rugs, while the red-eyed creatures were black rats. Fafhrd and the Mouser sprang forward, slashing and chopping at them in a frenzy, cursing and human-snarling besides.
They sundered few. The rats fled with preternatural swiftness, most of them disappearing down holes near the walls and the fireplace. Also Fafhrd’s first frantic chop went through the floor and on his third step, with an ominous crack and splintering, his leg plunged through the floor to his hip. The Mouser darted past him, unmindful of further crackings.
Fafhrd heaved out his trapped leg, not even noting the splinter-scratches it got and as unmindful as the Mouser of the continuing creakings. The rats were gone. He lunged after his comrade, who had thrust a bunch of kindlers into the stove, to make more light.
The horror was that, although the rats were all gone, the two longish heaps remained, although considerably diminished and, as now shown clearly by the yellow flames leaping from the tilted black door, changed in hue—no longer were the heaps red-beaded black, but a mixture of gleaming black and dark brown, a sickening purple-blue, violet and velvet black and snow-serpent white, and the reds of stockings and blood and bloody flesh and bone.
Although hands and feet had been gnawed bone-naked, and bodies tunneled heart-deep, the two faces had been spared. But that was not good, for they were the parts purple-blue from death by strangulation, lips drawn back, eyes bulging, all features contorted in agony. Only the black and very dark brown hair gleamed unchanged—that and the white, white teeth. As each man stared down at his love, unable to look away despite the waves of horror and grief and rage washing higher and higher in him, each saw a tiny black strand uncurl from the black depression ringing each throat and drift off, dissipating, toward the open door behind them—two strands of night-smog.
With a crescendo of crackings the floor sagged three spans more in the center before arriving at a new temporary stability. 
Edges of centrally tortured minds noted details: That Vlana’s silver-hilted dagger skewered to the floor a rat, which, likely enough, overeager had approached too closely before the night-smog had done its magic work.
That her belt and pouch were gone. That the blue-enameled box inlaid with silver, in which Ivrian had put the Mouser’s share of the highjacked jewels, was gone too.
The Mouser and Fafhrd lifted to each other white, drawn faces which were quite mad, yet completely joined in understanding and purpose. No need for Fafhrd to explain why he stripped off his robe and hood, or why he jerked up Vlana’s dagger, snapped the rat off it with a wrist-flick, and thrust it in his belt. No need for the Mouser to tell why he searched out a half-dozen jars of oil and after smashing three of them in front of the flaming stove, paused, thought, and stuck the other three in the sack at his waist, adding to them the remaining kindlers and the fire-pot, brimmed
with red coals, its top lashed down tight.
Then, still without word exchanged, the Mouser reached into the fireplace and without a wince at the burning metal’s touch, deliberately tipped the flaming stove forward, so that it fell door-down on oil-soaked rugs. Yellow flames sprang up around him.
They turned and raced for the door. With louder crackings than any before, the floor collapsed. They desperately scrambled their way up a steep hill of sliding carpets and reached door and porch just before all behind them gave way and the flaming rugs and stove and all the firewood and candles and the golden couch and all the little tables and boxes and jars—and the unthinkably mutilated bodies of their first loves—cascaded into the dry, dusty, cobweb-choked room below, and the great flames of a cleansing or at least obliterating cremation began to flare upward.
They plunged down the stairs, which tore away from the wall and collapsed in the dark as they reached the ground. They had to fight their way over the wreckage to get to Bones Alley.
By then flames were darting their bright lizard-tongues out of the shuttered attic windows and the boarded-up ones in the story just below. By the time they reached Plague Court, running side by side at top speed, the Silver Eel’s fire alarm was clanging cacophonously behind them. They were still sprinting when they took the Death Alley fork. Then the Mouser grappled Fafhrd and forced him to a halt. The big man struck out, cursing insanely, and only desisted—his white face still a lunatic’s—when the Mouser cried panting, “Only ten heartbeats to arm us!”
He pulled the sack from his belt and keeping tight hold of its neck, crashed it on the cobbles—hard enough to smash not only the bottles of oil, but also the fire-pot, for the sack was soon flaming at its base.
Then he drew gleaming Scalpel and Fafhrd Graywand, and they raced on, the Mouser swinging his sack in a great circle beside him to fan its flames.
It was a veritable ball of fire burning his left hand as they dashed across Cheap Street and into Thieves’ House, and the Mouser, leaping high, swung it up into the great niche above the doorway and let go of it. The niche-guards screeched in surprise and pain at the fiery invader of their hidey-hole.
Student thieves poured out of the doors ahead at the screeching and footpounding, and then poured back as they saw the fierce point of flames and the two demon-faced on-comers brandishing their long, shining swords. One skinny little apprentice—he could hardly have been ten years old—lingered too long. Graywand thrust him pitilessly through, as his big eyes bulged and his small mouth gaped in horror and plea to Fafhrd for mercy.
Now from ahead of them there came a weird, wailing call, hollow and hair-raising, and doors began to thud shut instead of spewing forth the armed guards Fafhrd and the Mouser prayed would appear to be skewered by their swords. Also, despite the long, bracketed torches looking newly renewed, the corridor was darkening.
The reason for this last became clear as they plunged up the stairs. Strands of night-smog appeared in the stairwell, materializing from nothing, or the air.
The strands grew longer and more tangible. They touched and clung nastily. In the corridor above they were forming from wall to wall and from ceiling to floor, like a gigantic cobweb, and were becoming so substantial that the Mouser and Fafhrd had to slash them to get through, or so their two maniac minds believed. The black web muffled a little a repetition of the eerie, wailing call, which came from the seventh door ahead and this time ended in a gleeful chittering and cackling as insane as the emotions of the two attackers.
Here, too, doors were thudding shut. In an ephemeral flash of rationality, it occurred to the Mouser that it was not he and Fafhrd the thieves feared, for they had not been seen yet, but rather Hristomilo and his magic, even though working in defense of Thieves’ House.
Even the map room, whence counterattack would most likely erupt, was closed off by a huge oaken, iron-studded door.
They were now twice slashing the black, clinging, rope-thick spiderweb for every single step they drove themselves forward. While midway between the map and magic rooms, there was forming on the inky web, ghostly at first but swiftly growing more substantial, a black spider as big as a wolf. The Mouser slashed heavy cobweb before it, dropped back two steps, then hurled himself at it in a high leap. Scalpel thrust through it, striking amidst its eight new-formed jet eyes, and it collapsed like a daggered bladder, loosing a vile stink.
Then he and Fafhrd were looking into the magic room, the alchemist’s chamber. It was much as they had seen it before, except some things were doubled, or multiplied even further.
On the long table two blue-boiled cucurbits bubbled and roiled, their heads shooting out a solid, writhing rope more swiftly than moves the black swamp-cobra, which can run down a man—and not into twin receivers, but into the open air of the room (if any of the air in Thieves’ House could have been called open then) to weave a barrier between their swords and Hristomilo, who once more stood tall though hunchbacked over his sorcerous, brown parchment, though this time his exultant gaze was chiefly fixed on Fafhrd and the Mouser, with only an occasional downward glance
at the text of the spell he drummingly intoned.
While at the other end of the table, in web-free space, there bounced not only Slivikin, but also a huge rat matching him in size in all members except the head.
From the ratholes at the foot of the walls, red eyes glittered and gleamed in pairs.
With a bellow of rage Fafhrd began slashing at the black barrier, but the ropes were replaced from the cucurbit heads as swiftly as he sliced them, while the cut ends, instead of drooping slackly, now began to strain hungrily toward him like constrictive snakes or strangle-vines. 
He suddenly shifted Graywand to his left hand, drew his long knife and hurled it at the sorcerer. Flashing toward its mark, it cut through three strands, was deflected and slowed by a fourth and fifth, almost halted by a sixth, and ended hanging futilely in the curled grip of a seventh. Hristomilo laughed cacklingly and grinned, showing his huge upper
incisors, while Slivikin chittered in ecstasy and bounded the higher. The Mouser hurled Cat’s Claw with no better result—worse, indeed, since his action gave two darting smog-strands time to curl hamperingly around his sword-hand and stranglingly around his neck. Black rats came racing out of the big holes at the cluttered base of the walls.
Meanwhile other strands snaked around Fafhrd’s ankles, knees and left arm, almost toppling him. But even as he fought for balance, he jerked Vlana’s dagger from his belt and raised it over his shoulder, its silver hilt glowing, its blade brown with dried rat’s-blood.
The grin left Hristomilo’s face as he saw it. The sorcerer screamed strangely and importuningly then, and drew back from his parchment and the table, and raised clawed clubhands to ward off doom.
Vlana’s dagger sped unimpeded through the black web—its strands even seemed to part for it—and betwixt the sorcerer’s warding hands, to bury itself to the hilt in his right eye.
He screamed thinly in dire agony and clawed at his face. 
The black web writhed as if in death spasm.
The cucurbits shattered as one, spilling their lava on the scarred table, putting out the blue flames even as the thick wood of the table began to smoke a little at the lava’s edge. Lava dropped with
plops
on the dark marble floor.
With a faint, final scream Hristomilo pitched forward, hands clutched to his eyes above his jutting nose, silver dagger-hilt protruding between his fingers.
The web grew faint, like wet ink washed with a gush of clear water. The Mouser raced forward and transfixed Slivikin and the huge rat with one thrust of Scalpel before the beasts knew what was happening. They too died swiftly with thin screams, while all the other rats turned tail and fled back down their holes swift almost as black lightning.