The Second Book of Lankhmar

presenting her back to all three of them.
           One of the two whorish-looking women stared into the fire and from time to time fed it with driftwood that sang and sometimes tinged the flames with green and blue and with thorny black twigs that spat and crackled and burned hot orange. The other wove cat's cradles between the spread fingers of her outheld hands on a long loop of black twine. Now and then the Mouser looked aside from the fire at her severe angular creations.
           Neither of the women took notice of the Mouser, but after a while the one feeding the fire stood up, brought a wine jar and two small tankards to his table, poured into one, and stood regarding him.
           He took up the tankard, tasted a small mouthful, swallowed it, set down the tankard, and nodded curtly without looking at her.
           She went back to her former occupation. Thereafter the Mouser took an occasional swallow of wine while studying and listening to the flames. What with their combination of crackling and singing, they were really quite vocal in that rather small, silent room — resembling an eager, rapid, youthful voice, by turns merry and malicious. Sometimes the Mouser could have sworn he heard words and phrases.
           While in the flames, continually renewed, he began to see faces, or rather one face which changed expression a good deal — a youthfully handsome face with very mobile lips, sometimes open and amiable, sometimes convulsed by hatreds and envies (the flames shone green awhile), sometimes almost impossibly distorted, like a face seen through hot air above a very hot fire. Indeed once or twice he had the fancy that it was the face of an actual person sitting on the opposite side of the fire from him, sometimes half rising to regard him through the flames, sometimes crouching back. He was almost tempted to get up and walk around the fire to check on that, but not quite.
           The strangest thing about the face was that it seemed familiar to the Mouser, though he could not place it. He gave up racking his brains over that and settled back, listening more closely to the flame-voice and trying to attune its fancied words to the movements of the flame-face's lips.
           Mother Grum got up again and moved back, bowing. There entered without stooping a lady whose russet cloak was drawn across the lower half of her face, but the Mouser recognized the gold-shot green eyes and he stood up. Cif nodded to Mother Grum and the two harlots, walked to the Mouser's table, cast her cloak atop his, and sat down in the third chair. He poured for her, refilled his own tankard, and sat down also. They drank. She studied him for some time.
           Then, "You've seen the face in the fire and heard its voice?" she asked.
           His eyes widened and he nodded, watching her intently now.
           "But have you guessed why it seems familiar?" He shook his head rapidly, sitting forward, his expression a most curious and expectant frown.
           "It resembles you," she said flatly.
           His eyebrows went up and his jaw dropped, just a little. That was true! It did remind him of himself — only when he was younger, quite a bit younger. Or as he saw himself in mirror these days only when in a most self-infatuated and vain mood, so that he saw himself as unmarked by age.
           "But do you know why?" she asked him, herself intent now.
           He shook his head.
           She relaxed. "Neither do I," she said. "I thought you might know. I marked it when I first saw you in the Eel, but as to why — it is a mystery within mysteries, beyond our present ken."
           "I find Rime Isle a nest of mysteries," he said meaningfully, "not the least your disavowal of myself and Fafhrd."
           She nodded, sat up straighter, and said, "So now I think it's high time I told you why Afreyt and I are so sure of a Mingol invasion of Rime Isle while the rest of the council disbelieves it altogether. Don't you?"
           He nodded emphatically, smiling.
           "Almost a year ago to the day," she said, "Afreyt and I were walking alone upon the moor north of town, as has been our habit since childhood. We were lamenting Rime Isle's lost glories and lost (or man-renounced) gods and wishing for their return, so that the Isle might have surer guidance and foreknowledge of perils. It was a day of changeable winds and weather, the end of