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or had a rich father or was dowered with power, being blood-related to the rats, which is a
certain sign of power in more worlds than Nehwon. Do you truly love me for myself, Gray Mouser?"
"I love you most truly indeed, Shadow Princess," the Mouser said with hardly an instant's
hesitation. "Truly I love you for yourself alone, Hisvet. I love you more dearly than aught else
in Nehwon -- aye, and in all other worlds too and heaven and hell besides."
Just then Fafhrd, cruelly clawed or bit by the kitten, let off a most piteous groan indeed
with a dreadful high note in it, and the Mouser said impulsively, "Dear Princess, first chase me
that were-cat from my large friend, for I fear it will be his blinding and death's bane, and then
we shall discourse of our great loves to the end of eternity."
"_That_ is what I mean," Hisvet said softly and reproachfully. "If you loved me truly for
myself, Gray Mouser, you would not care a feather if your closest friend or your wife or mother or
child were tortured and done to death before your eyes, so long as my eyes were upon you and I
touched you with my fingertips. With my kisses on your lips and my slim hands playing about you,
my whole person accepting and welcoming you, you could watch your large friend there scratched to
blindness and death by a cat -- or mayhap eaten alive by rats -- and be utterly content. I have
touched few things in this world, Gray Mouser. I have touched no man, or male demon or larger male
beast, save by the proxy of Frix. Remember that, Gray Mouser."
"To be sure, Dear Light of my Life!" the Mouser replied most spiritedly, certain now of the
sort of self-adoring madness with which he had to deal, since he had a touch of the same mania and
so was well-acquainted with it. "Let the barbarian bleed to death by pinpricks! Let the cat have
his eyes! Let the rats banquet on him to his bones! What skills it while we trade sweet words and
caresses, discoursing to each other with our entire bodies and our whole souls!"
Meanwhile, however, he had started to saw again most fiercely with his now-dulled coin,
unmindful of Hisvet's eyes upon him. It joyed him to feel Cat's Claw lying against his ribs.
"That's spoken like my own true Mouser," Hisvet said with most melting tenderness, brushing
her fingers so close to his cheek that he could feel the tiny chill zephyr of their passage. Then,
turning, she called, "Holla, Frix! Send to me Skwee and the White Company. Each may bring with him
two black comrades of his own choice. I have somewhat of a reward for them, somewhat of a special
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treat. Skwee! Skwee-skwee-skwee!"
What would have happened then, both instantly and ultimately, is impossible to say, for at
that moment Frix hailed, "Ahoy!" into the fog and called happily down, "A black sail, oh Blessed
Demoiselle, it is your father!"
Out of the pearly fog to starboard came the shark's-fin triangle of the upper portion of a
black sail, running alongside _Squid_ aft of the dragging brown mainsail. Two boathooks, a small
ship's length apart, came up and clamped down on the starboard middeck rail while the black sail
flapped. Frix came running lightly forward and secured to the rail midway between the boathooks
the top of a rope ladder next heaved up from the black cutter (for surely this must be that dire
craft, the Mouser thought).
Then up the ladder and over the rail came nimbly an old man of Lankhmar dressed all in
black leather and on his left shoulder a white rat clinging with right forepaw to a cheek-flap of
his black leather cap. He was followed swiftly by two lean bald Mingols with faces yellow-brown as
old lemons, each shoulder-bearing a large black rat that steadied itself by a yellow ear.
At that moment, most coincidentally, Fafhrd groaned again, more loudly, and opened his eyes
and cried out in the faraway moan of an opium-dreamer. "Millions of black monkeys! Take him off, I
say! 'Tis a black fiend of hell torments me! Take him off!"
At that the black kitten raised up, stretched out its small evil face, and bit Fafhrd on
the nose. Disregarding this interruption, Hisvet threw up her hand at the newcomers and cried
clearly, "Greetings, oh Co-commander my Father! Greetings, peerless rat-captain Grig! _Clam_ is
conquered by you, now _Squid_ by me, and this very night, after small business of my own attended
to, shall see the perdition of all this final fleet. Then it's Movarl estranged, the Mingols
across the Sinking Land, Glipkerio hurled down, and the rats ruling Lankhmar under my overlordship
and yours!"
The Mouser, sawing ceaselessly at the third loop, glanced to note Skwee's muzzle at that
moment. The small white captain had come down from the afterdeck at Hisvet's summoning along with
eight white comrades, two bandaged, and now he shot Hisvet a silent look that seemed to say there
might be doubts about the last item of her boast, once the rats ruled Lankhmar.
Hisvet's father Hisvin had a long-nosed, much-wrinkled face patched by a week of white, old-
man's beard, and he seemed permanently stooped far over, yet he moved most briskly for all that,
taking very rapid little shuffling steps.
Now he answered his daughter's bragging speech with a petulant sideways flirt of his black
glove close to his chest and a little impatient "Tsk-tsk!" of disapproval, then went circling the
deck at his odd scuttling gait while the Mingols waited by the ladder-top. Hisvin circled by
Fafhrd and his black tormentor ("Tsk-tsk!") and by the Mouser (another "Tsk!") and stopping in
front of Hisvet said rapid and fumingly, still crouched over, jogging a bit from foot to foot,
"Here's confusion indeed tonight! You catsing and romancing with bound men! I know, I know! The
moon coming through too much! (I'll have my astrologer's liver!) _Shark_ oaring like a mad
cuttlefish through the foggy white! A black balloon with little lights scudding above the waves!
And but now ere we found you, a vast sea monster swimming about in circles with a gibbering demon
on his head -- it came sniffing at us as if we were dinner, but we evaded it!
"Daughter, you and your maid and your little people must into the cutter at once with us,
pausing only to slay these two and leave a suicide squad of gnawers to sink _Squid_!"
"Yeth, think _Thquid_!" the Mouser could have sworn he heard the rat on Hisvin's shoulder
lisp shrilly in Lankhmarese.
"Sink _Squid_?" Hisvet questioned. "The plan was to slip her to Ilthmar with a Mingol
skeleton crew and there sell her cargo."
"Plans change!" Hisvin snapped. "Daughter, if we're not off this ship in forty breaths,
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