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Death himself in the sunless Shadowland; yet on this last occasion, when
Nehwon had swallowed the Mouser, whatever the rationale, he had held back.
With a silvery jangle of harness bells the laden dogcart drew up beyond the
fire. As he got down from the driver's seat, Skullick gave out the news, the
words tumbling from his mouth, that the Great Maelstrom had been observed to
be turning more swiftly, heaving and churning as it swirled round and round in
the cold moonshine. Cif and Pshawri came to their feet.
The noise broke into Fafhrd's reverie just enough as to make him aware of what
his entranced gaze had been unseeingly resting on. The girl Fingers had turned
over in her sleep so that her face was visible and one bare arm had emerged to
lie atop the coarse blanket like a pale serpent. Of whom did her face remind
him? he asked himself. He had loved those features once, he was suddenly
certain. What sweet and yielding female...?
And then as he studied her face more closely, he saw that her eyes were open
and watching him and that her lips were curved in a sleepy smile. The tip of
her tongue came out at a corner and licked them around. Fafhrd felt his sharp
anger return, if it were just that. The saucy baggage! What call had she
to look at him as though they shared a secret? Why was she spying on him? What
was her game? He flashed that when she'd first appeared simpering and posing
to him and Gray Mouser in the cellar, they had just been speaking of men
snatched under the ground or pursued on high by vengeful earth. Why had that
been? What had that synchronicity presaged? Had she aught to do with the
Mouser's vanishment downward, this tainted witchchild from the rat city of
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Ilthmar? He rose up fast and silently, moved as swiftly to her cot and stood
bent over her and glaring down, as though to strip her of her secrets by his
gaze's force, and with his hand upraised, he knew not to do what, while she
smiled up at him with perfect confidence.
"Captain!" Skor's urgent bellow came hollowly out of the hole and boomed
around.
Forgetting all else, Fafhrd dodged from under the shelter tent and was the
first to reach the mouth of the shaft, over which there was now set a stout
man-high ironwood tripod, from which depended a pair of pulleys to halve the
effort needed to raise the dirt.
Steadying himself by two of its legs, the Northerner leaned out and looked
straight down. The planks of the second tier of shorings were in place,
securely braced with crosspieces and tied to the first tier -- and the
excavating had gone a couple of feet below them. From the pulley by his cheek
two lines went down to the second pulley atop the handle of the bucket, which
was set half filled 'gainst a side of the shaft. Against two other sides Skor
and Gale were pressed back, upturned faces large and small, in shadow, the one
framed by scanty red locks, the other by profuse blond tresses. By the fourth
side were two leviathan-oil lamps. Their white light fell strongly on the
slender object lying flat in the center of the shaft's bottom. Fafhrd would
have recognized it anywhere.
"It's Captain Mouser's dirk, Captain," Skor called up, "lying just as we
uncovered it."
"I didn't move it the least bit as I brushed and worked the earth away," Gale
confirmed in her piping tones.
"That's a wise girl," Fafhrd called down. "Leave it so. And don't move from
where you are, either of you. I'm coming down."
Which he accomplished swiftly by way of the ladder of thick pegs jutting from
the shoring, going down hand over hook. When he reached the crowded bottom, he
knelt at once over Cat's Claw, bending down his head to inspect it closely.
"We didn't find the scabbard anywhere," Gale explained somewhat unnecessarily.
He nodded. "The ground gets chalky here," he observed. "Did either of you find
a chunk of the stuff?"
"No," Gale responded quickly, "but I've a lump of yellow umber."
"That'll do fine," he said, holding out his hand. When she'd dug it from her
pouch and handed it to him, he sighted carefully along the dagger's blade and
rubbed a big gold mark on the foot of the shoring to show which way the weapon
pointed.
"That's something we may want to remember," he explained shortly. He lifted
the wicked knife from its site, turning it over and reinspecting it from blade
tip to pommel, but he could discern no special markings, no message of any
sort, on that side either.
"What have you found, Fafhrd?" Cif called down.
"It's Cat's Claw, all right. I'll send it up to you," he called back.
He handed the knife to Skor. "I'll take over for a space down here. You get
some rest." He accepted from his lieutenant the short-handled square spade
that had replaced his ax as chief digging and scraping tool. "You're a good
man, Skor." That one nodded and mounted by the pegs.
"I'm coming down, Fafhrd. My turn to help," Afreyt announced from above.
Fafhrd looked at Gale. At close range the golden strands were sweaty and the
fair complexion streaked with dirt. Pallor and tired smudges around the blue
eyes belied the air of smiling readiness the girl put on. "You need a rest
too. And sleep, you hear? But only after you've had a mug of hot soup."
He took from her her scoop and handbroom. "You've done well, child."
While she wearily yet reluctantly mounted the pegs, with Afreyt urging her to
greater speed from above, Fafhrd drove the spade into the earth near the
hole's edge, continuing the excavation straight down.
After Afreyt had climbed into the hole to join Fafhrd in his task, the harlot
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Rill led the exhausted Gale back to the cookfire beyond the shelter tent. Cif
followed them, somewhat like a sleepwalker, staring at the knife she held,
which Skor had handed her, and after a bit the others gravitated back too.
Standing in the cold to watch folk dig is of no lasting profit.
Rill was pressing Gale to finish the mug of soup she'd poured her.
"Drink it all down while there's some heat in it. That's a good girl.
Why, you still feel like ice! You need to be under blankets. And get a sleep,
you're groggy. Come on now, no arguments."
And she led her off willingly enough to the shelter tent.
Cif was still staring bemusedly at the Mouser's knife, slowly turning it over
and over, so that its bright blade periodically reflected the low firelight.
Old Ourph said ruminatively, "When Khahkht the Conqueror was buried bound and
beweaponed alive for treason, but later cleared and dug up, it was found his
daggers had worked their way yards from his corpse in opposite directions, so
strong and wide were his hatreds."
Pshawri said, "I thought Khahkht was a Rimish ice devil, not a Mingol warchief
paramount."
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