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there came from the absolute calm of the west a gargantuan gust of wind that
sent the Mouser staggering forward and Fafhrd reeling back, and rolled
Ahura across the place where the embers had been.
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Almost as suddenly the gale died. As it died, something whipped batlike toward
the Mouser's face and he grabbed at it. But it was not a bat, or even a large
leaf. It felt like papyrus.
The embers, blown into a clump of dry grass, had perversely started a blaze.
To its flaring light he held the thin scrap that had fluttered out of the
infinite west.
He motioned frantically to Fafhrd, who was clawing his way out of a scrub
pine.
There was squid-black writing on the scrap, in large characters, above the
tangled seal.
"By whatever gods you revere, give up this quarrel. Press onward at once.
Follow the woman."
They became aware that Ahura was peering over their abutting shoulders.
The moon came gleamingly from behind the small black tatter of cloud that had
briefly obscured it. She looked at them, pulled together chiton and gown,
belted them with her cloak. They collected their horses, extricated the fallen
camel from the cluster of thorn bushes in which it was satisfiedly tormenting
itself, and set out.
After that the Lost City was found almost too quickly; it seemed like a trap
or the work of an illusionist. One moment Ahura was pointing out to them a
boulder-studded crag; the next, they were looking down a narrow valley choked
with crazily-leaning, moonsilvered monoliths and their accomplice shadows.
From the first it was obvious that "city" was a misnomer. Surely men
had never dwelt in those massive stone tents and huts, though they may have
worshipped there. It was a habitation for Egyptian colossi, for stone
automata. But Fafhrd and the Mouser had little time to survey its entirety,
for without warning Ahura sent her horse clattering and sliding down the
slope.
Thereafter it was a harebrained, drunken gallop, their horses plunging
shadows, the camel a lurching ghost, through forests of crude-hewn pillars,
past teetering single slabs big enough for palace walls, under lintels made
for elephants, always following the elusive hoofbeat, never catching it, until
they suddenly emerged into clear moonlight and drew up in an open space
between a great sarcophaguslike block or box with steps leading up to it and a
huge, crudely man-shaped monolith.
But they had hardly begun to puzzle out the things around them before they
became aware that Ahura was gesturing impatiently. They recalled
Ningauble's instructions and realized that it was almost dawn. So they
unloaded various bundles and boxes from the shivering, snapping camel, and
Fafhrd unfolded the dark, cobwebby shroud of Ahriman and wrapped it around
Ahura as she stood wordlessly facing the tomb, her face a marble portrait of
eagerness, as if she sprang from the stone around her.
While Fafhrd busied himself with other things, the Mouser opened the ebony
chest they had stolen from the False Laodice. A fey mood came upon him and,
dancing cumbrously in imitation of a eunuch serving man, he tastefully arrayed
a flat stone with all the little jugs and jars and tiny amphorae that the
chest contained. And in an appropriate falsetto he sang:
_"I laid a board for the Great Seleuce,_
_I decked it pretty and abstruse;_
_And he must have been pleased, _
_For when stuffed, he wheezed, _
_'As punishment castrate the man.'_
"You thee, Fafhrd," he lisped, "the man had been cathtwated ath a boy, and tho
it wath no punithment at all. Becauthe of pweviouth cathtwathion."
"I'll castrate your wit-engorged top end," Fafhrd cried, raising the next
implement of magic, but thought better of it.
Then Fafhrd handed him Socrates' cup and, still prancing and piping, the
Mouser measured into it the mummy powder and added the wine and stirred them
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together and, dancing fantastically toward Ahura, offered it to her. When she
made no movement, he held it to her lips and she greedily gulped it without
taking her eyes from the tomb.
Then Fafhrd came with the sprig from the Babylonian Tree of Life, which still
felt marvelously fresh and firm-leafed to his touch, as if the Mouser had only
snipped it a moment ago. And he gently pried open her clenched fingers and
placed the sprig inside them and folded them again.
Thus ready, they waited. The sky reddened at the edge and seemed for a moment
to grow darker, the stars fading and the moon turning dull. The outspread
aphrodisiacs chilled, refusing the night breeze their savor. And the woman
continued to watch the tomb, and behind her, seeming to watch the tomb too, as
if it were her fantastic shadow, loomed the man-shaped monolith, which the
Mouser now and then scrutinized uneasily over his shoulder, being unable to
tell whether it were of primevally crude workmanship or something that men had
laboriously defaced because of its evil.
The sky paled until the Mouser could begin to make out some monstrous carvings
on the side of the sarcophagus -- of men like stone pillars and animals like
mountains -- and until Fafhrd could see the green of the leaves in Ahura's
hand.
Then he saw something astounding. In an instant the leaves withered and the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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