The Second Book of Lankhmar

tenderly cultivated and grew and grew. The Mouser sought to return these favors, but she stopped his mouth with hers. As his tongue caressed her teeth, he noted that her two center front incisors were somewhat overlarge, but in his infatuated state this difference seemed only one more point of beauty. Why even if Hisvet turned out to have some of the appurtenances of a dragon or a giant white spider—or a rat, for that matter—he would love and cosset them each and all. Even if there lifted over her head from behind the joint-masted white moist sting of a scorpion, he would honor it with a loving kiss—well, he mightn't go quite so far as that, he decided abruptly ... still and on the other hand, he almost might, for at that instant Hisvet's eyelashes tickled the ridge of skin over the silver dart in his temple.
    This was ecstasy indeed, he assured himself. It seemed to him that he was now in the Ninth and topmost Heaven, where a few select heroes luxuriate and dream and submit themselves to almost unendurable pleasures, at whiles glancing down with lazy amusement at all the gods toiling at their sparrow-watching and incense-sniffing and destiny-directing on the many tiers below.
    The Mouser might never have known what happened next—and it might have been a direly different happening too—if it had not been that, never satisfied even with the most supreme ecstasy, he decided once more to disobey Hisvet's explicit injunction and steal a glance at Frix. Up to this moment he had been obediently disregarding her with eye and ear, but now it occurred to him that it would twist the launching cords of the catapult of pleasure a notch tighter if he observed both faces of his—after a fashion—two-headed light-of-love.
    So when Hisvet once again nuzzled his outside ear with her slender pink and blue tongue and while he encouraged her to keep at it with small twistings of his head and moanings of delight, he rolled his eyes in the other direction, gazing surreptitiously at the face of Frix.
    His first thought was that she had her neck bent at an angle that could hardly be anything but uncomfortable, to keep her head quite out of the way of the Mouser's and her mistress'. His second thought was that although her cheeks were passionately inflamed and her perfumy breath was panting through her yawn-slack lips, her gaze was coolly sad, distantly melancholy, and fixed on something worlds away, perhaps a chess game in which she and the Mouser and even Hisvet were less than pawns, perhaps a scene from an unimaginably remote childhood, perhaps—
    Or perhaps she was watching something a little closer than that, something behind him and not quite worlds away—
    Although it discourteously took his ear away from Hisvet's maddening tongue, he rolled his whole head in the direction he had his eyeballs and glancing over shoulder saw, blackly outlined against the pale pulsating wall of closet-blooms, the edge of a crouching silhouette with half-outstretched arm and something gleaming blue-gray at the end of that.
    Instantly the Mouser crouched himself, rudely drawing back from Frix, and then half spun around, flailing out backhanded with his left hand which had an instant earlier embraced Hisvet's maid.
    It was a blow barely in time and of necessity imperfectly aimed. As the back of his left fist crashed against the lean wrist of the ocher hand holding the knife, he felt the sting of its point in his forearm. But then his right fist smashed into the Mingol's face, stirring it at least for a moment from its taut-skinned impassiveness.
    As the snugly black-clad figure staggered backward under the impact, it seemed to divide in two, like some creature of slime reproducing itself, as a second dagger-armed Mingol circled from behind the first and moved toward the Mouser, who was snatching up his belt and its pendant scabbards with a curse, drawing his dirk Cat's Claw, because the pommel of that weapon came first to his hand.
    Frix, who still stood dreamily in her black draperies, was saying in a husky, faraway voice, “Alarums and excursions. Enter two Mingols,” while behind her Hisvet was exclaiming petulantly, “Oh, my accursed, spoilsport father! He always ruins my most aesthetic creations in the realms of delight, whether from some vile and most unfatherly jealousy, or from—”
    By now the first Mingol had recovered and the two rushed warily toward the Mouser, flickering their knives ahead of their slit-eyed yellow faces as