The Second Book of Lankhmar

his black toga flapping like a sail torn loose in a squall from a tall-masted yacht. Oh, he thought, if only Hisvin would work his master spell! But the old grain-merchant and sorcerer had told him that one planet was not quite yet in the proper configuration to reinforce his magic. Events in Lankhmar had begun to look like a race between some star and the rats. Well, if worse came to worst, Glipkerio told himself, at once giggling and panting in his swirly flight, he had an infallible way of escaping from Lankhmar and Nehwon too, and winning his way to some other world, where he would doubtless quickly be proclaimed monarch of all or at any rate an ample principality to begin with—he was a very reasonable overlord, Glipkerio felt—and thereby have some small solace for the loss of Lankhmar.

Chapter Nine
    Sheelba of the Eyeless Face reached into the hut without turning his hooded head and swiftly found a small object and held it forth.
    “Here is your answer to Lankhmar's Rat Plague,” he said in a voice deep, hollow, rapid and grating as round stones thudding together in a moderate surf. “Solve that problem, you solve all.”
    Gazing from more than a yard below, the Gray Mouser saw silhouetted against the paling sky a small squat bottle pinched between the black fabric of the overlong sleeve of Sheelba, who chose never to show his fingers, if they were that. Silvery dawnlight shivered through the bottle's crystal stopper.
    The Mouser was not impressed. He was bone-weary and be-mired from armpit to boots, which were now sunk ankle-deep in sucking muck and sinking deeper all the time. His coarse gray silks were be-slimed and ripped, he feared, beyond the most cunning tailor's repair. His scratched skin, where it was dry, was scaled with the Marsh's itching muddy salt. The bandaged wound in his left arm ached and burned. And now his neck had begun to ache too, from having to peer craningly upward.
    All around him stretched the dismal reaches of the Great Salt Marsh, acres of knife-edged sea grass hiding treacherous creeks and deadly sink-holes and pimpled with low hummocks crowded with twisted, dwarfed thorn trees and bloated prickly cactuses. While its animal population ran a noxious gamut from sea leeches, giant worms, poison eels and water cobras to saw-beaked, low-flapping cadaver birds and far-leaping, claw-footed salt-spiders.
    Sheelba's hut was a black dome about as big as the closet-tree bower in which the Mouser had last evening endured ecstasy and attempted assassination. It stood above the Marsh on five crooked poles or legs, four spaced evenly around its rim, the fifth central. Each leg was footed with a round plate big as a cutlassman's shield, concave upward, and apparently envenomed, for ringing each was a small collection of corpses of the Marsh's deadly fauna.
    The hut had a single doorway, low and top-rounded as a burrow entrance. In it now Sheelba lay, chin on bent left elbow, if either of those were those, stretching out the squat bottle and seeming to peer down at the Mouser, unmindful of the illogicality of one called the Eyeless peering. Yet despite the sky-rim now pinkening to the east, the Mouser could see no hint of face of any sort in the deep hood, only midnight dark. Wearily and for perhaps the thousandth time, the Mouser wondered if Sheelba were called the Eyeless because he was blind in the ordinary way, or had only leathery skin between nostrils and pate, or was skull-headed, or perhaps had quivering antennae where eyes should be. The speculation gave him no shiver of fear, he was too angry and fatigued—and the squat bottle still didn't impress him.
    Batting aside a springing salt-spider with the back of his gauntleted hand, the Mouser called upward, “That's a mighty small jug to hold poison for all the rats of Lankhmar. Hola, you in the black bag there, aren't you going to invite me up for a drink, a bite, and a dry-out? I'll curse you otherwise with spells I've unbeknownst stolen from you!”
    “I'm not your mother, mistress, or nurse, but your wizard!” Sheelba retorted in his harsh hollow sea-voice. “Cease your childish threats and stiffen your back, small gray one!”
    That last seemed the ultimate and crushing infidelity to the Mouser with his stiff neck and straining spine. He thought bitterly of the sinew-punishing, skin-smarting night he'd just spent. He'd left Lankhmar by the Marsh Gate, to the frightened amazement of the guards, who had strongly advised against