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_6: The Mountain_
Perhaps some chuckling demon, or Ningauble himself, planned it that way. At
all events, as Fafhrd stepped down from the tomb, he got his feet tangled in
the shroud of Ahriman and bellowed wildly (the Mouser called it
"bleating") before he noticed the cause, which was by that time ripped to
tatters.
Next Ahura, aroused by the tumult, set them into a brief panic by screaming
that the black monolith and its soldiery were marching toward them to grind
them under stony feet.
Almost immediately afterwards the cup of Socrates momentarily froze their
blood by rolling around in a semicircle, as if its learned owner were
invisibly pawing for it, perhaps to wet his throat after a spell of dusty
disputation in the underworld. Of the withered sprig from the Tree of Life
there was no sign, although the Mouser jumped as far and as skittishly as one
of his namesakes when he saw a large black walking-stick insect crawling away
from where the sprig might have fallen.
But it was the camel that caused the biggest commotion, by suddenly beginning
to prance about clumsily in a most uncharacteristically ecstatic fashion,
finally cavorting up eagerly on two legs to the mare, which fled in squealing
dismay. Afterwards it became apparent that the camel must have gotten into the
aphrodisiacs, for one of the bottles was pashed as if by a hoof, with only a
scummy licked patch showing where its leaked contents had been, and two of the
small clay jars were vanished entirely. Fafhrd set out after the two beasts on
one of the remaining horses, hallooing crazily.
The Mouser, left alone with Ahura, found his glibness put to the test in
saving her sanity by a barrage of small talk, mostly well-spiced Tyrian
gossip, but including a wholly apocryphal tale of how he and Fafhrd and five
small Ethiopian boys once played Maypole with the eyestalks of a drunken
Ningauble, leaving him peering about in the oddest directions. (The Mouser was
wondering why they had not heard from their seven-eyed mentor. After victories
Ningauble was always particularly prompt in getting in his demands for
payment; and very exacting too -- he would insist on a strict accounting for
the three missing aphrodisiac containers.)
The Mouser might have been expected to take advantage of this opportunity to
press his suit with Ahura, and if possible assure himself that he was now
wholly free of the snail curse. But, her hysterical condition aside, he felt
strangely shy with her, as if, although this was the Ahura he loved, he were
now meeting her for the first time. Certainly this was a wholly different
Ahura from the one with whom they had journeyed to the Lost City, and the
memory of how he had treated that other Ahura put a restraint on him.
So he cajoled and comforted her as he might have some lonely Tyrian waif,
finally bringing two funny little hand-puppets from his pouch and letting them
amuse her for him.
And Ahura sobbed and stared and shivered, and hardly seemed to hear what
nonsense the Mouser was saying, yet grew quiet and sane-eyed and appeared to
be comforted.
When Fafhrd eventually returned with the still-giddy camel and the outraged
mare, he did not interrupt, but listened gravely, his gaze occasionally
straying to the dead adept, the black monolith, the stone city, or the
valley's downward slope to the north. High over their heads a flock of birds
was flying in the same direction. Suddenly they scattered wildly, as if an
eagle had dropped among them. Fafhrd frowned. A moment later he heard a
whirring in the air. The Mouser and Ahura looked up too, momentarily glimpsed
something slim hurtling downward. They cringed. There was a thud as a long
whitish arrow buried itself in a crack in the pavement hardly a foot from
Fafhrd and stuck there vibrating.
After a moment Fafhrd touched it with shaking hand. The shaft was crusted with
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ice, the feathers stiff, as if, incredibly, it had sped for a long time
through frigid supramundane air. There was something tied snugly around the
shaft. He detached and unrolled an ice-brittle sheet of papyrus, which
softened under his touch, and read, "You must go farther. Your quest is not
ended. Trust in omens. Ningauble."
Still trembling, Fafhrd began to curse thunderously. He crumpled the papyrus,
jerked up the arrow, broke it in two, threw the parts blindly away.
"Misbegotten spawn of a eunuch, an owl, and an octopus!" he finished. "First
he tries to skewer us from the skies, then he tells us our quest is not ended
-- when we've just ended it!"
The Mouser, well knowing these rages into which Fafhrd was apt to fall
after battle, especially a battle in which he had not been able to
participate, started to comment coolly. Then he saw the anger abruptly drain
from Fafhrd's eyes, leaving a wild twinkle which he did not like.
"Mouser!" said Fafhrd eagerly. "Which way did I throw the arrow?"
"Why, north," said the Mouser without thinking.
"Yes, and the birds were flying north, and the arrow was coated with ice!" The
wild twinkle in Fafhrd's eyes became a berserk brilliance. "Omens, he said?
We'll trust in omens all right! We'll go north, north, and still north!"
The Mouser's heart sank. Now would be a particularly difficult time to combat
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