The Second Book of Lankhmar

rat-plague—magical measures which will surely be successful, as has now been fully demonstrated.”
    At this point the fantastical overlord reached a long thin naked arm from under his toga and chucked the Mouser under the chin, much to the latter's distaste, though he concealed it. “Hisvin and Hisvet even tell me,” Glipkerio remarked with a fluty chuckle, “that they suspected you for a while of being in league with the rats—as who would not from your gray garb and small crouchy figure?—and kept you tied. But all's well that ends well and I forgive you.”
    The Mouser began a most polemical refutation and accusation—but only in his mind, for he heard himself saying, “Here, Milord, is an urgent missive from the King of the Eight Cities. By the by, there was a dragon—”
    “Oh, that two-headed dragon!” Glipkerio interrupted with another piping chuckle and a roguish finger-wave. He thrust the parchment into the breast of his toga without even glancing at the seal. “Movarl has informed me by albatross post of the strange mass delusion in my fleet. Hisvin and Hisvet, master psychologists both, confirm this. Sailors are a woefully superstitious lot, Gray Mouser, and ‘tis evident their fancies are more furiously contagious than I suspected—for even you were infected! I would have expected it of your barbarian mate—Favner? Fafrah?—or even of Slinoor and Lukeen—for what are captains but jumped-up sailors?—but you, who are at least sleazily civilized ... However, I forgive you that too! Oh, what a mercy that wise Hisvin here thought to keep watch on the fleet in his cutter!”
    The Mouser realized he was nodding—and that Hisvet and, in his wrinkle-lipped fashion, Hisvin were smiling archly. He looked down at the piled stiff rats in their theatrical death-throes. Issek take ‘em, but their droopy-lidded eyes even looked whitely glazed!
    “Their fur hasn't fallen off,” he criticized mildly.
    “You are too literal,” Glipkerio told him with a laugh. “You don't comprehend poetic license.”
    “Or the devices of humano-animal suggestion,” Hisvin added solemnly.
    The Mouser trod hard—and, he thought, surreptitiously—on a long tail that drooped from the cage bottom to the tiled floor. There was no atom of response.
    But Hisvin noted and lightly clicked a fingernail. The Mouser fancied there was a slight stirring deep in the rat-pile. Suddenly a nauseous stink sprang from the cage. Glipkerio gulped. Hisvet delicately pinched her pale nostrils between thumb and ring-finger.
    “You had some question about the efficacy of my spell?” Hisvin asked the Mouser most civilly.
    “Aren't the rats corrupting rather fast?” the Mouser asked. It occurred to him that there might have been a tight-sealed sliding door in the floor of the cage and a dozen long-dead rats or merely a well-rotted steak in the thick bottom beneath.
    “Hisvin kills ‘em doubly dead,” Glipkerio asserted somewhat feebly, pressing his long hand to his narrow stomach. “All processes of decay are accelerated!”
    Hisvin waved hurriedly and pointed toward an open window beyond the archways to the porch. A brawny yellow Mingol in black loincloth sprang from where he squatted in a corner, heaved up the cage, and ran with it to dump it in the sea. The Mouser followed him. Elbowing the Mingol aside with a shrewd dig at the short ribs and leaning far out, supporting himself with his other hand reaching up and gripping the tiled window-side, the Mouser saw the cage tumbling down the sheer wall and sea-eaten rock, the stiff rats tumbling about in it, and fall with a white splash into the blue waters.
    At the same instant he felt Hisvet, who had rapidly followed him, press closely with her silken side against his from armpit to ankle bone.
    The Mouser thought he made out small dark shapes leaving the cage and swimming strongly underwater toward the rock as the iron rat-prison sank down and down.
    Hisvet breathed in his ear, “Tonight when the evening star goes to bed. The Plaza of Dark Delight. The grove of closet trees.”
    Turning swiftly back, Hisvin's delicate daughter commanded the black-collared, silver-chained maid, “Light wine of Ilthmar for his Majesty! Then serve us others.”
    Glipkerio gulped down a goblet of sparkling colorless ferment and turned a shade less green. The Mouser selected a goblet of darker, more potent stuff and also a black-edged tender beef cutlet from the great silver tray as the maid dropped