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precisely on Rhan-top as if it were that needle-spire's green-lensed
pinnacle-lantern.
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He might have followed the Mouser, he might have done no such thing, he
certainly would have pondered the briefly glimpsed event, but just then there
came from behind him a long low "Hssssst!"
Fafhrd turned like a giant dancer and his longsword Graywand came out of its
sheath swiftly and rather more silently than a snake emerges from its hole.
Ten arm lengths behind him, in the mouth of an alleyway darker than the
Dark Plaza would have been without its new commercial moon, Fafhrd dimly made
out two robed and deeply cowled figures poised side by side.
One cowl held darkness absolute. Even the face of a Negro of Klesh might have
been expected to shoot ghostly bronze gleams. But here there were none.
In the other cowl there nested seven very faint pale greenish glows.
They moved about restlessly, sometimes circling each other, swinging mazily.
Sometimes one of the seven horizontally oval gleams would grow a little
brighter, seemingly as it moved forward toward the mouth of the cowl -- or a
little darker, as it drew back.
Fafhrd sheathed Graywand and advanced toward the figures. Still facing him,
they retreated slowly and silently down the alley.
Fafhrd followed as they receded. He felt a stirring of interest ... and of
other feelings. To meet his own supernatural mentor alone might be only a bore
and a mild nervous strain; but it would be hard for anyone entirely to repress
a shiver of awe at encountering at one and the same time both
Ningauble of the Seven Eyes and Sheelba of the Eyeless Face.
Moreover, that those two bitter wizardly rivals would have joined forces, that
they should apparently be operating together in amity ...
Something of great note must be afoot! There was no doubting that.
The Mouser meantime was experiencing the smuggest, most mind-teasing, most
exotic enjoyments imaginable. The sleekly leather-bound gold-stamped books
turned out to contain scripts stranger far than that in the book whose pages
he had flipped outside -- scripts that looked like skeletal beasts, cloud
swirls, and twisty-branched bushes and trees -- but for a wonder he could read
them all without the least difficulty.
The books dealt in the fullest detail with such matters as the private life of
devils, the secret histories of murderous cults, and -- these were illustrated
-- the proper dueling techniques to employ against sword-armed demons and the
erotic tricks of lamias, succubi, bacchantes, and hamadryads.
The lenses and brass tubes, some of the latter of which were as fantastically
crooked as if they were periscopes for seeing over the walls and through the
barred windows of other universes, showed at first only delightful jeweled
patterns, but after a bit the Mouser was able to see through them into all
sorts of interesting places: the treasure-rooms of dead kings, the bedchambers
of living queens, council-crypts of rebel angels, and the closets in which the
gods hid plans for worlds too frighteningly fantastic to risk creating.
As for the quaintly clad slim girls in their playfully widely-barred cages,
well, they were pleasant pillows on which to rest eyes momentarily fatigued by
book-scanning and tube-peering.
Ever and anon one of the girls would whistle softly at the Mouser and then
point cajolingly or imploringly or with languorous hintings at a jeweled crank
set in the wall whereby her cage, suspended on a gleaming chain running
through gleaming pulleys, could be lowered to the floor.
At these invitations the Mouser would smile with a bland amorousness and nod
and softly wave a hand from the fingerhinge as if to whisper, "Later
... later. Be patient."
After all, girls had a way of blotting out all lesser, but not thereby
despicable, delights. Girls were for dessert.
Ningauble and Sheelba receded down the dark alleyway with Fafhrd following
them until the latter lost patience and, somewhat conquering his unwilling
awe, called out nervously, "Well, are you going to keep on fleeing me backward
until we all pitch into the Great Salt Marsh? What do you want of me? What's
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it all about?"
But the two cowled figures had already stopped, as he could perceive by the
starlight and the glow of a few high windows, and now it seemed to Fafhrd that
they had stopped a moment before he had called out. A typical sorcerers'
trick for making one feel awkward! He gnawed his lip in the darkness. It was
ever thus!
"Oh My Gentle Son..." Ningauble began in his most sugary-priestly tones, the
dim puffs of his seven eyes now hanging in his cowl as steadily and glowing as
mildly as the Pleiades seen late on a summer night through a greenish mist
rising from a lake freighted with blue vitriol and corrosive gas of salt.
"I asked what it's all about!" Fafhrd interrupted harshly. Already convicted
of impatience, he might as well go the whole hog.
"Let me put it as a hypothetical case," Ningauble replied imperturbably. "Let
us suppose, My Gentle Son, that there is a man in a universe and that a most
evil force comes to this universe from another universe, or perhaps from a
congeries of universes, and that this man is a brave man who wants to defend
his universe and who counts his life as a trifle and that moreover he has to
counsel him a very wise and prudent and public-
spirited uncle who knows all about these matters which I have been
hypothecating -- "
"The Devourers menace Lankhmar!" Sheelba rapped out in a voice as harsh as a
tree cracking and so suddenly that Fafhrd almost started -- and for all we
know, Ningauble too.
Fafhrd waited a moment to avoid giving false impressions and then switched his
gaze to Sheelba. His eyes had been growing accustomed to the darkness and he
saw much more now than he had seen at the alley's mouth, yet he still saw not
one jot more than absolute blackness inside Sheelba's cowl.
"Who are the Devourers?" he asked.
It was Ningauble, however, who replied, "The Devourers are the most
accomplished merchants in all the many universes -- so accomplished, indeed,
that they sell only trash. There is a deep necessity in this, for the
Devourers must occupy all their cunning in perfecting their methods of selling
and so have not an instant to spare in considering the worth of what they
sell. Indeed, they dare not concern themselves with such matters for a moment,
for fear of losing their golden touch -- and yet such are their skills that
their wares are utterly irresistible, indeed the finest wares in all the many
universes -- if you follow me?"
Fafhrd looked hopefully toward Sheelba, but since the latter did not this time
interrupt with some pithy summation, he nodded to Ningauble.
Ningauble continued, his seven eyes beginning to weave a bit, judging from the
movements of the seven green glows, "As you might readily deduce, the
Devourers possess all the mightiest magics garnered from the many universes,
whilst their assault groups are led by the most aggressive wizards imaginable,
supremely skilled in all methods of battling, whether it be with the wits, or
the feelings, or with the beweaponed body.
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Dobre pomysły nie mają przeszłości, mają tylko przyszłość. Robert Mallet
De minimis - o najmniejszych rzeczach.
Dobroć jest ważniejsza niż mądrość, a uznanie tej prawdy to pierwszy krok do mądrości. Theodore Isaac Rubin
Dobro to tylko to, co szlachetne, zło to tylko to, co haniebne.
Dla człowieka nie tylko świat otaczający jest zagadką; jest on nią sam dla siebie. I z obu tajemnic bardziej dręczącą wydaje się ta druga. Antoni Kępiński (1918-1972)
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