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The Mouser frowned at her terribly, then sent the same expression roving to
either side, as if spying for a route by which she could have got unseen from
bunk to chest past the double-lashed and closely abutting casks --
and mayhap for her confederates, animal, human, or demonic. Next he got off
the bunk and, approaching her, edged his way around the chest and back, eyeing
her up and down as though searching for concealed weapons, even so little as a
sharpened fingernail, and turning his own body so that his frown was always
fixed on her and he never lost sight of her for an instant, until he faced her
once more.
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His nostrils flared with his deep breathing, while the lamp's yellow beams and
shadows swayed measuredly across his dark angry presence and her moon-pale
skin.
She continued to braid her hair and to smile and to warble and trill, and
after a short while her trillings and warblings became a sort of rough song of
recitation, one shot with seeming improvisations, as though she were
translating it into Low Lankhmarese from another language:
"Oh, the golden gifts of my land are six, And round you now they're straitly
fixed. The Golden Shaft of Death and Desire, The Rod of Command whose smart's
like fire, The Cup of Close Confinement and Minding, The Circles of
Fate whose ways are winding. The Cubical Prison of god and of elf, The Many-
Barred Globe of Simorgya and Self. Deep, oh deep is my far country, Where gold
will carry us, me and thee."
The Mouser shook his finger before her face in dark challenge and dire
warning. Then he slashed lengths of ribbed black silk ribbon from a roll,
twisting and tugging it to test its strength, continuing to eye her all the
while, and he bound her legs together as they were, slender ankle to calf,
just below the knee, and slender calf to ankle. Then he held out his hand for
hers imperiously. She rapidly finished plaiting her hair, whipped the braid
round her head and tucked it in, so that it became a sort of silvery coronet.
Then with a sigh and a turning away of her somewhat narrow face, she held out
her wrists to him close together, the palms of her hands upward.
He seized them contemptuously and drew them behind her and bound them there,
as he had on the previous night, and her elbows too, drawing her shoulders
backward. And then he tipped her over forward so that her face was buried in
the coppery silk intended for Cif (how long ago?) and led a double ribbon from
her bound wrists down her spine to her crosswise-bound lower legs, and drew it
tight as he could, so that her back was perforce arched and her face lifted
free of the silk.
But despite his mounting excitement, the thought nagged him that there had
been something in her warbled ditty which he had not liked. Ah yes, the
mention of Simorgya. What place had that sunken kingdom in a whore's never-
never lands? And all her earlier babble of moist and watery influences in the
imagined land where she queened, or rather princessed it -- There, she was at
it again!
"Come, Brother Mordroog, to royally escort us," she warbled over the orangy
silk, seemingly unmindful of her acute discomforts. "Come with our guardians,
Deep Rusher your horse -- your behemoth, rather, and you in his castle. Come
also with Slasher and vasty All-Gripper, to shatter our prison and ferry us
home. And send all your spirits coursing before you, so our minds are engulfed
-- "
The shadows steadied unnaturally as the lamp's swing shortened quiveringly,
then stopped.
On the deck immediately above their heads there was consternation. The wind
had unaccountably faded and the sea grown oily calm. The tiller in Skor's grip
was lifeless, the sheet that Mikkidu fingered slack. The sky did not appear to
be overcast, yet there was a shadowed, spectral quality to the sunlight, as
though an unpredicted eclipse or other ominous event impended.
Then without warning the dark sea mounded up boiling scarce a spear's cast off
steerside -- and subsided again without any diminishment in the feeling of
foreboding. The spreading wave jogged _Seahawk._ The two lieutenants and Ourph
stared about wonderingly and then at each other. None of them marked the trail
of bubbles leading from the place of the mounding toward the becalmed sailing
galley.
*.10.*
In the treasury Cif had the sudden feeling that the Mouser stood in need of
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more protection. The doll looked lonely there at pentagram's center.
Perhaps he was too far from the ikons. She gathered the ikons together and
after a moment's hesitation thrust the doll, doubled up, into the barred
globe. Then she poked the ruler and the crooked arrow in along with him,
transfixing the globe (more gold close to him!), almost as an afterthought
clapped the tiny cup like a helmet on the protruding doll's head, and set all
down on the linked rings. Then she seated herself again, staring doubtfully at
what she had done.
*.11.*
In the cabin the Gray Mouser rolled the bound Ississi over on her back and
regarded the silvery girl opened up for his enjoyment. The blood pounded in
his head and he felt an increasing pressure there, as if his brain had grown
too large for his skull. The motionless cabin grew spectral, there was a sense
of thronging presences, and then it was as if part of him only remained there
while another part whirled away into a realm where he was a giant coursing
through rushing darkness uncertain of his humanity, while the pressure inside
his skull grew and grew.
But the part of him in the cabin still was capable of sensation, though hardly
of action, and this one watched helpless and aghast, through air that seemed
to thicken and become more like water, the silvery, smiling, trussed-up
Ississi writhe and writhe yet again while her skin grew more silvery still --
scaly silvery -- and her elfin face narrowed and her green eyes swam apart,
while from her head and back and shoulders, and along the backs of her legs
and her hands and arms, razor-sharp spines erected themselves in crests and,
as she writhed once more again mightily, cut through all the black ribbons at
once so they floated in shreds about her. Then through the curtained hatchway
there swam a face like her own new one, and she came up from the coppery silk
in a great forward undulation and reached the palms of her back-crested hands
out toward the Mouser's cheeks lovingly on arms that seemed to grow longer and
longer, saying in a strange deep voice that seemed to bubble from her, "In
moments this prison will be broken, Deep Rusher will smash it, and we will be
free."
At those words the other part of the Mouser realized that the darkness through [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]