The Second Book of Lankhmar

than being immured in it!
           Beyond Fafhrd he saw Cif running straight at him. If she kept on, she'd boot his face, the mad maenad! He instinctively tried to duck aside and only succeeded in wrenching his neck. And then he felt the grip on his ankles tighten and cold earth mount his chin, as his whole being was drawn downward. He clapped his lips tightly together to keep dirt out, drew one swift breath, then tried to narrow his nostrils, finally closed tight his eyes as his engulfment continued. Last thing he saw was the moon. As the gray glow of it transmitted through his eyelids vanished upward, he felt his pate scratched and his topknot sharply tweaked. Then even that was gone and there remained only a grainy coldness sliding up his cheeks. Strangely, then, it seemed to grow a little warmer and — a very little —looser, so he could puff some of the air trapped in his mouth out into his cheeks. The texture of the stuff scraping his cheeks changed from earth to wool to earth again. He realized his cowl had been dragged upward from around his neck and left buried above him. And then the rough sliding seemed to stop. One other thing he had to admit: the feeling of heaviness that had so long dogged him was completely gone. However closely confined, he seemed now rather to be floating.
           The swift something in his mind produced for his consideration a list of the beings who might hate him enough to wish him such a horrid doom and also conceivably have the magical power to effect it on him. The wizards Quarmal of Quarmall, Khahkht the Ice Wizard, Great Oomforafor, Hisvin the Rat King, his own mentor Sheelba turned against him, dear diabolic Hisvet, the gods Loki and Mog. It went on and on.
           One thing stood out: any world in which a man could be twitched into his grave by the legerdemain of some mad principality or power was monstrously unfair!
         10
           Aboveground, Cif rose to her knees from where she'd been crouched, breaking her fingernails scrabbling at the frosty ground, and stretched her arms around the girls, who had been crowding in close and all trying to touch her, more for their own comfort and reassurance than for hers. She tried to touch them all in turn and draw them to her, hushing their clamors, though as much for her own comfort as for theirs. They felt cold.
           Dumbstruck, Fafhrd turned back to ask Afreyt exactly what she'd seen when Mouser had seemed to sink into the ground impossibly. To his confusion he saw that she and Groniger were already a dozen yards away, hurrying toward Elvenhold, while Rill was sprinting after them at an angle from where she'd been at the end of the ritual line, the unlit lamp still streaming out behind her.
           With a slow, puzzled headshake he turned forward again and saw, beyond the huddled backs of Cif and the girls, Pshawri convulsed in an agony, his features grimaced, his eyes squeezed half shut, his taut body rocking forward and back, and literally tearing his hair. By Kos, did the knave think it was mourning time already?
           Then the tortured eyes of the Mouser's young lieutenant fixed upon Cif. They widened, his body ceased to rock, he left off tearing his hair and he threw out both arms to her in mute appeal.
           She responded immediately, pushing fully to her feet to go to him. But at that moment Fafhrd found his voice.
           "Don't move a step!" he called commandingly in carefully enunciated battle tones. "Stay where you are exactly — or we will lose the spot where Mouser disappeared into the ground."
           And he moved toward her deliberately, his sound right hand working to free his doubled-headed hand ax from the case where it hung at his side, its short helve pendant.
           "The spot where we must dig," he amplified, going to his knees close behind her.
           She turned around, and seeing him bringing out his ax and thinking he meant to chop into the ground with it, cried in alarm, "Oh, don't do that, you might hurt him. "
           He shook his head reassuringly, and grasping the ax at the juncture of its head and helve, scraped with it strongly inward toward his knees, feeling with his hook through the earth he uncovered. He scraped three like swaths behind the first, baring a space about as big as a trapdoor, and then repeated the process, going an inch deeper.
           Meanwhile Pshawri was approaching Cif,