The Second Book of Lankhmar

from her black silken robe and began to pipe a sweet yet drowsy melody. Samanda and Elakeria held Glipkerio face down on his couch, the one at his shoulders, the other at his ankles, while Frix, kneeling with one knee on the small of his back began with her fingertips to stroke his spine from skull to tail in time to Hisvet's music, favoring her left hand with its bandaged palm.
    Glipkerio continued to convulse upward at regular intervals, but gradually the violence of these earthquakes of the body decreased and Frix was able to transfer some of her rhythmic strokings to his flailing arms.
    Hisvin, hard a-pace and snapping his fingers again, his shadows marching like those of giant rats moving confusedly and size-changingly against each other across the blue tiles, demanded suddenly on noting the wands of authority, “Where are your pages you promised to have here?”
    Glipkerio responded dully, “In their quarters. In revolt. You stole my guards who would have controlled them. Where are your Mingols?”
    Hisvin stopped dead in his pacing and frowned. His gaze went questioningly toward the unmoving blue door-drapes through which he had entered.
    Fafhrd, breathing a little heavily, drew himself up into one of the belfry's eight windows and sat on its sill and scanned the bells.
    There were eight in all and all large: five of bronze, three of browned-iron, coated with the sea-pale verdigris and earth-dark rust of eons. Any ropes had rotted away, centuries ago for all he knew. Below them was dark emptiness spanned by four narrow flat-topped stone arches. He tried one of them with his foot. It held.
    He set the smallest bell, a bronze one, swinging. There was no sound except for a dismal creaking.
    He first peered, then felt up inside the bell. The clapper was gone, its supporting link rusted away.
    All the other bells’ clappers were likewise gone, presumably fallen to the bottom of the tower.
    He prepared to use his ax to beat out the alarum, but then he saw one of the fallen clappers lying on a stone arch.
    He lifted it with both hands, like a somewhat ponderous club, and moving about recklessly on the arches, struck each bell in turn. Rust showered him from the iron ones.
    Their massed clangor sounded louder than mountainside thunder when lightning strikes from a cloud close by. The bells were the least musical Fafhrd had ever heard. Some made swelling beats together, which periodically tortured the ear. They must have been shaped and cast by a master of discord. The brazen bells shrieked, clanged, clashed, roared, twanged, jangled, and screamingly wrangled. The iron bells groaned rusty-throated, sobbed like leviathan, throbbed as the heart of universal death, and rolled like a black swell striking a smooth rock coast. They exactly suited the Gods of Lankhmar, from what Fafhrd had heard of the latter.
    The metallic uproar began to fade somewhat and he realized that he was becoming deafened. Nevertheless he kept on until he had struck each bell three times. Then he peered out the window by which he had entered.
    His first impression was that half the human crowd was looking straight at him . Then he realized it must be the noise of the bells which had turned upward those moonlit faces.
    There were many more kneelers before the temple now. Other Lankhmarts were pouring up the Street of the Gods from the east, as if being driven.
    The erect, black-togaed rats still stood in the same tiny line below him, auraed by grim authority despite their size, and now they were flanked by two squads of armored rats, each bearing a small weapon which puzzled Fafhrd, straining his eyes, until he recalled the tiny crossbows which had been used aboard Squid .
    The reverberations of the bells had died away, or sunk too low for his deafened ears to note, but then he began to hear, faintly at first, murmuring and cries of hopeless horror from below.
    Gazing across the crowd again, he saw black rats climbing unresisting up some of the kneeling figures, while many, of the others already had something black squatting on their right shoulders.
    There came from directly below a creaking and groaning and rending. The ancient doors of the temple of the Gods of Lankhmar were thrust wide open.
    The white faces that had been gazing upward now stared at the porch.
    The black-togaed rats and their soldiery faced around.
    There strode four abreast from the wide-open doorway a company of fearfully thin brown figures, black-togaed too. Each bore a