Read The Second Book of Lankhmar for Free Online

dimly to see tiny dark forms—rats surely!—climbing over its side from out of the water. “There's what gnawed holes in Clam ,” Slinoor said.
    Then Slinoor pointed between the ships, near the cutter. Among the last of the ripple-army was a white-headed one. A second later a small white form could be seen swiftly mounting the cutter's side. Slinoor said, “There's what commanded the hole-gnawers.”
    With a dull splintering rumble the arched deck of Clam burst upward, spewing brown.
    “The grain!” Slinoor cried hollowly.
    “Now you know what tears ships,” the Mouser said.
    The black cutter grew ghostlier, moving west now into the retreating fog.
    The galley Shark went boiling past Squid 's stern, its oars moving like the legs of a leaping centipede. Lukeen shouted up, “Here's foul trickery! Clam was lured off in the night!”
    The black cutter, winning its race with the eastward-rolling fog, vanished in whiteness.
    The split-decked Clam nosed under with hardly a ripple and angled down into the black and salty depths, dragged by its leaden keel.
    With war trumpet skirling, Shark drove into the white wall after the cutter.
    Clam 's masthead, cutting a little furrow in the swell, went under. All that was to be seen now on the waters south of Squid was a great spreading stain of tawny grain.
    Slinoor turned grim-faced to his mate. “Enter the Demoiselle Hisvet's cabin, by force if need be,” he commanded. “Count her white rats!”
    Fafhrd and the Mouser looked at each other.
    * * * *
    Three hours later the same four persons were assembled in Hisvet's cabin with the Demoiselle, Frix and Lukeen.
    The cabin, low-ceilinged enough so that Fafhrd, Lukeen and the mate must move bent and tended to sit hunch-shouldered, was spacious for a grain ship, yet crowded by this company together with the caged rats and Hisvet's perfumed, silver-bound baggage piled on Slinoor's dark furniture and locked sea chests.
    Three horn windows to the stern and louver slits to starboard and larboard let in a muted light.
    Slinoor and Lukeen sat against the horn windows, behind a narrow table. Fafhrd occupied a cleared sea chest, the Mouser an upended cask. Between them were racked the four rat-cages, whose white-furred occupants seemed as quietly intent on the proceedings as any of the men. The Mouser amused himself by imagining what it would be like if the white rats were trying the men instead of the other way round. A row of blue-eyed white rats would make most formidable judges, already robed in ermine. He pictured them staring down mercilessly from very high seats at a tiny cringing Lukeen and Slinoor, round whom scuttled mouse pages and mouse clerks and behind whom stood rat pikemen in half armor holding fantastically barbed and curvy-bladed weapons.
    The mate stood stooping by the open grille of the closed door, in part to see that no other sailors eavesdropped.
    The Demoiselle Hisvet sat cross-legged on the swung-down sea-bed, her ermine smock decorously tucked under her knees, managing to look most distant and courtly even in this attitude. Now and again her right hand played with the dark wavy hair of Frix, who crouched on the deck at her knees.
    Timbers creaked as Squid bowled north. Now and then the bare feet of the helmsmen could be heard faintly slithering on the afterdeck overhead. Around the small trapdoor-like hatches leading below and through the very crevices of the planking came the astringent, toastlike, all-pervasive odor of the grain.
    Lukeen spoke. He was a lean, slant-shouldered, cordily muscled man almost as big as Fafhrd. His short coat of browned-iron mail over his simple black tunic was of the finest links. A golden band confined his dark hair and bound to his forehead the browned-iron five-pointed curvy-edged starfish emblem of Lankhmar.
    “How do I know Clam was lured away? Two hours before dawn I twice thought I heard Shark 's own gong-note in the distance, although I stood then beside Shark 's muffled gong.