The Knight and Knave of Swords
Read The Knight and Knave of Swords Online
Authors: Fritz Leiber
Tags: #Science Fiction, #General, #Fantasy, #Fiction, #Fantastic Fiction
Fritz Leiber
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III: The Curse of the Smalls and the Stars
1
On the world of Nehwon and the land of Simorgya, six days fast sailing south from Rime Isle, two handsome silvery personages conversed intimately yet tensely in a dimly and irregularly lit hall of pillars open overhead to the darkness. Very strange was that illumination—greenish and yellowish by turns, it seemed to come chiefly from grotesquely shaped rugs patching the Stygian floor and lapping the pillars' bases and also from slowly moving globes and sinuosities that floated about at head height and wove amongst the pillars, softly dimming and brightening like lethargic and plague-stricken giant fireflies.
Mordroog said sharply, "Caught you that thrill, sister?—faint and far north away, yet unmistakably
ours.
"
Ississi replied eagerly, "The same, brother, as we felt two days agone—our mystic gold dipped deep in the sea for a space, then out again."
"The same indeed, sister, though this time with a certain ambiguity as to the out—whether that or otherwise gone," Mordroog assented.
"Yet the now-confirmed clue is certain and bears only one interpretation: our chiefest treasures, that were our most main guards, raped away long ages agone—and now at long last we know the culprits, those villainous pirates of Rime Isle!" breathed Ississi.
"Long, long ages agone, before ever Simorgya sank (and the fortunate island kingdom became the dark infernal realm)—and their vanishment the hastener or very agent of that sinking. But now we have the remedy—and who knows when our treasure's back what long-sunken things may rise in spouting wrath to consternate the world? Your attention, sister!" snapped Mordroog.
The abysmal scene darkened, then brightened as he dipped his hand into the pouch at his waist and brought it out again holding something big as a girl's fist. The floating globes and sinuosities moved inward inquisitively, jogging and jostling each other. Their flaring glows rebounded through the murk from a lacy yet massy small gold globe showing between his thin clawed silver fingers—its twelve thick edges like those of a hexahedron embedded in the surface of a sphere and curving conformably to that structure. He proffered it to her. The golden light gave the semblance of life to their hawklike features.
"Sister," he breathed, "it is now your task, and geas laid upon you, to proceed to Rime Isle and regain our treasure, taking vengeance or not as opportunity affords and prudence counsels—whilst I maintain here, unifying the forces and regathering the scattered allies against your return. You will need this last cryptic treasure for your protection and as a hound to scent out its brothers in the world above."
Now for the first time Ississi seemed to hesitate and her eagerness to abate.
"The way is long, brother, and we are weak with waiting," she protested, wailing. "What was once a week's fast sailing will be for me three black moons of torturesome dark treading, press I on ever so hard. We have become the sea's slaves, brother, and carry always the sea's weight. And I have grown to abhor the daylight."
"We have also the sea's strength," he reminded her commandingly, "and though we are weak as ghosts on land, preferring darkness and the deep, we also know the old ways of gaining power and facing even the sun. It is your task, sister. The geas is upon you. Salt is heavy but blood is sweet. Go, go, go!"
Wherewith she snatched the goldy ghost-globe from his grip, plunged it into her pouch, and turning with a sudden flirt made off, the living lamps scattering to make a dark northward route for her.
With the last "Go," a small bubble formed at the corner of Mordroog's thin, snarling, silvery lips, detached itself from them, and slowly grew in size as it mounted from these dark deeps up toward the water's distant surface.
Three months after the events aforenarrated, Fafhrd was at archery practice on the heath north of Salthaven City on Rime Isle's southeastern coast—one more self-imposed, self-devised, and self-taught lesson of many in learning the mechanics of life for one lacking a left hand, lost to Odin during the repulse of the Widder Sea-Mingols from the Isle's western shores. He had firmly affixed a tapering, thin, finger-long iron rod (much like a sword blade's tang) to the midst of his bow and wedged it into the corresponding deep hole in the wooden wrist heading the closefitting leather stall, half the length of his forearm and dotted with holes for ventilation, that covered his newly healed stump—with the result that his left arm terminated in a serviceably if somewhat unadjustably clutched bow.
Here near town the heath was grass mingled with ankle-high heather, here and there dotted with small clumps of gorse, in and out of which the occasional pair of plump lemmings played fearlessly, and man-high gray standing stones. These last had perhaps once been of religious significance to the now atheistical Rime Islers—who were atheists not in the sense that they did not believe in gods (that would have been very difficult for any dweller in the world of Nehwon) but that they did not socialize with any such gods or hearken in any way to their commands, threats, and cajolings. They (the standing stones) stood about like so many mute gray grizzle bears.
Except for a few compact white clouds a-hang over the isle, the late afternoon sky was clear, windless, and surprisingly balmy for this late in autumn, in fact on the very edge of winter and its icy, snow-laden winds.
The girl accompanied Fafhrd in his practicing. The silver-blond thirteen-year-old now trudged about with him collecting arrows—half of them transfixing his target, which was a huge ball. To keep his bow out of the way Fafhrd carried it as if over his shoulder, maimed left arm closely bent upward.
"They ought to have an arrow that would shoot around corners," Gale said apropos of hunting behind a standing stone. "That way you'd get your enemy if he hid behind a house or a tree trunk."
"It's an idea," Fafhrd admitted.
"Maybe if the arrow had a little curve in it—" she speculated.
"No, then it would just tumble," he told her. "The virtue of an arrow lies in its perfect straightness, its—"
"You don't have to tell me that," she interrupted impatiently. "I keep hearing all about that, over and over, from Aunt Afreyt and cousin Cif when they lecture me about the Golden Arrow of Truth and the Golden Circles of Unity and all those." The girl was referring to the closely guarded gold ikons that had been from time immemorial the atheist-holy relics of the Rime Isle fisherfolk.
That made Fafhrd think of the Golden Cube of Square Dealing, forever lost when the Mouser had hurled it to quell the vast whirlpool which had vanquished the Mingol fleet and threatened to sink his own in the great sea battle. Did it lie now in mucky black sea bottom near the Beach of Bleached Bones, or had it indeed vanished entire from Nehwon-world with the errant gods, Odin and Loki?
And that in turn made him wonder and worry a little about the Gray Mouser, who had sailed away a month ago in
Seahawk
on a trading expedition to No-Ombrulsk with half his thieves and
Flotsam
's Mingol crew and Fafhrd's own chief lieutenant Skor. The little man (Captain Mouser, now) had planned on getting back to Rime Isle before the winter blizzards.
Gale interrupted his musings. "Did Aunt Afreyt tell you, Captain Fafhrd, about cousin Cif seeing a ghost or something last night in the council hall treasury, which only she has a key to?" The girl was holding up the big target bag clutched against her so that he could pull out the arrows and return them over shoulder to their quiver.
"I don't think so," he temporized. Actually, he hadn't seen Afreyt today, or Cif either for that matter. For the past few nights he hadn't been sleeping at Afreyt's but with his men and the Mouser's at the dormitory they rented from Groniger, Salthaven's harbor master and chief councilman, the better to supervise the mischievous thieves in the Mouser's absence—or at least that was an explanation on which he and Afreyt could safely agree. "What did the ghost look like?"
"It looked very mysterious," Gale told him, her pale blue eyes widening above the bag which hid the lower part of her face. "Sort of silvery and dark, and it vanished when Cif went closer. She called Groniger, who was around, but they couldn't find anything. She told Afreyt it looked like a princess-lady or a big thin fish."
"How could something look like a woman and a fish?" Fafhrd asked with a short laugh, tugging out the last arrow.
"Well, there are mermaids, aren't there?" she retorted triumphantly, letting the bag fall.
"Yes," Fafhrd admitted, "though I don't expect Groniger would agree with us. Say," he went on, his face losing for a bit its faintly drawn, worried look, "put the target bag behind that rock. I've thought of a way to shoot around corners."
"Oh, good!" She rolled the target bag close against the back of one of the ursine, large gray stones and they walked off a couple of hundred yards. Fafhrd turned. The air was very still. A distant small cloud hid the low sun, though the sky was otherwise very blue and bright. He swiftly drew an arrow and laid it against the short wooden thumb he'd affixed to the bow near its center just above its tang. He took a couple of shuffling steps while his frowning eyes measured the distance between him and the rock. Then he leaned suddenly back and discharged the arrow high into the air. It went up, up, then came swiftly down—close behind the rock, it looked.
"That's not around a corner," Gale protested. "Anybody can do that. I meant sideways."
"You didn't say so," he told her. "Corners can be up or down or sideways right or left. What's the difference?"
"Up-corners you can drop things around."
"Yes, indeed you can!" he agreed and in a sudden frenzy of exercise that left him breathing hard sent the rest of the arrows winging successively after the first. All of them seemed to land close behind the standing stone—all except the last, which they heard clash faintly against rock—but when they'd walked up to where they could see, they found that all but the last arrow had missed. The feathered shafts stood upright, their points plunged into the soft earth, in an oddly regular little row that didn't quite reach the target-bag—all but the last, which had gone through an edge of the bag at an angle and hung there, tangled by its three goosefeather vanes.