The First Book of Lankhmar

night he had stayed awake, waiting for the phantom girl-face — and even trying to make it come again — until the swelling moon had risen three handbreadths above Stardock ... without any success whatever. His mind had known that the face had been an hallucination on the first occasion, but his feelings had insisted otherwise — to his considerable disgust and the loss of a quarter night's sleep.
           And by day he had secretly consulted the last of the four short stanzas on the parchment scrap in his pouch's deepest pocket:
    Who scales the Snow King's citadel
    Shall father his two daughters' sons;
    Though he must face foes fierce and fell,
    His seed shall live while time still runs.
           Yesterday that had seemed rather promising — at least the fathering and daughters part — though today, after his lost sleep, the merest mockery.
           But now the living mask was there again and going through all the same teasing antics, including the shuddersome yet somehow thrilling trick of opening wide its lids to show not eyes but a dark backing like the rest of the night. The Mouser was enchanted in a shivery way, but unlike the first night he was full-mindedly alert, and he tested for illusions by blinking and squinting his own eyes and silently shifting his head about in his hood — with no effect whatever on the living mask. Then he quietly unlaced the thong from the top hooks of his cloak — Hrissa was sleeping against Fafhrd tonight — and slowly reached out his hand and picked up a pebble and flicked it across the pale flames at a point somewhat below the mask.
           Although he knew there wasn't anything beyond the fire but scattered scree and ringingly hard earth, there wasn't the faintest sound of the pebble striking anywhere. He might have thrown it off Nehwon.
           At almost the same instant, the mask smiled tauntingly.
           The Mouser was very swiftly out of his cloak and on his feet.
           But even more swiftly the mask dissolved away — this time in one swift stroke from forehead to chin.
           He quickly stepped, almost lunged, around the fire to the spot where the mask had seemed to hang, and there he stared around searchingly. Nothing — except a fleeting breath of wine or spirits of wine. He stirred the fire and stared around again. Still nothing. Except that Hrissa woke beside Fafhrd and bristled her moustache and gazed solemnly, perhaps scornfully, at the Mouser, who was beginning to feel rather like a fool. He wondered if his mind and his desires were playing a silly game against each other.
           Then he trod on something. His pebble, he thought, but when he picked it up, he saw it was a tiny jar. It could have been one of his own pigment jars, but it was too small, hardly bigger than a joint of his thumb, and made not of hollowed stone but some kind of ivory or other tooth.
           He knelt by the fire and peered into it, then dipped in his little finger and gingerly rubbed the tip against the rather hard grease inside. It came out ivory-hued. The grease had an oily, not winy odor.
           The Mouser pondered by the fire for some time. Then with a glance at Hrissa, who had closed her eyes and laid back her moustache again, and at Fafhrd, who was snoring softly, he returned to his cloak and to sleep.
           He had not told Fafhrd a word about his earlier vision of the living mask. His surface reason was that Fafhrd would laugh at such calf-brained nonsense of smoke-faces; his deeper reason the one which keeps any man from mentioning a pretty new girl even to his dearest friend.
           So perhaps it was the same reason which next morning kept Fafhrd from telling his dearest friend what happened to him late that same night. Fafhrd dreamed he was feeling out the exact shape of a girl's face in absolute darkness while her slender hands caressed his body. She had a rounded forehead, very long-lashed eyes, in-dipping nose bridge, apple cheeks, an impudent snub nose — it felt impudent! — and long lips whose grin his big gentle fingers could trace clearly.
           He woke to the moon glaring down at him aslant from the south. It silvered the Obelisk's interminable wall, turning rock-knobs to black shadow bars. He also woke to acute disappointment that a dream had been only a dream. Then he would have sworn that he felt fingertips briefly brush his face and that he heard a faint silvery