The Second Book of Lankhmar

jumped back to the tall ratess with the brace of straining shrews. But that was ridiculous, he told himself. There was sleeping and sleeping, and that one had very little if anything to do with the other.
    He came out of his thought-trance to realize fully what his senses had for some time been telling him: that the strollers had become fewer, the breeze more damp and cool and fresh, and sea-odorous too, and the pillars ahead natural rock, while through the doorways chiseled between them shone a yellowish light, not bright yet twinkling and quite unlike that of the fire-beetles, glow-wasps, and tiny torches.
    He passed a marble doorway and noted white marble steps going down from it. Then he stepped between two of the rocky pillars and halted on the rim of a wonder-place.
    It was a roughly circular natural rock cave many rats high and many more long and wide, and filled with faintly rippling seawater which transmitted a mild flood of yellowish light that came through a great wide hole, underwater by about the length of a rat's-pike, in the other end of the glitter-ceilinged cavern. All around this sea lake, about two rat-pikes above the water, went the rather narrow rock road, looking in part natural, in part chiseled and pickaxed, on which he now stood. At its distant end, in the shadows above the great underwater hole, he could dimly make out the forms and gleaming weapons of a half-dozen or so motionless rats, evidently on guard duty.
    As the Mouser watched, the yellow light became yellower still, and he realized it must be the light of later afternoon, surely the afternoon of the day in which he had entered the rat-world. Since sunset was at six o'clock and he had entered the rat-world after three, he had spent fewer than three of his nine hours. Most important he had linked the passage of time in the rat-world with that in the big world—and was somewhat startled at the relief he felt.
    He recalled too the “dead” rats which had seemed to swim away from the cage dropped from the palace window into the Inner Sea after Hisvin's demonstration of his death-spell. They might very well have swum underwater into this very cavern, or another like it.
    It also came to him that he had discovered the secret of the damp breeze. He knew the tide was rising now, an hour or so short of full, and in rising it drove the cave-trapped air through the concourse. At low tide the great hole would be in part above water, allowing the cavern air to be refreshed from outside. A rather clever if intermittent ventilation system. Perhaps some of these rats were a bit more ingenious than he had given them credit for.
    At that instant there came a light, inhuman touch on his right shoulder. Turning around, he saw stepping back from him with naked rapier held a little to one side the black-masked black-clad rat who had disturbed him in the privy.
    “What's the meaning of this?” he chitteringly blustered. “By God's hairless tail, why am I catted and ferreted?—you black dog!”
    In far less ratlike Lankhmarese than the Mouser's, the other asked quietly, “What are you doing in a restricted area? I must ask you to unmask, sir.”
    “Unmask? I'll see the color of your liver first, mouseling!” the Mouser ranted wildly. It would never do, he knew, to change character now.
    “Must I call in my underlings to unmask you by force?” the other inquired in the same soft, deadly voice. “But it is not necessary. Your reluctance to unmask is final confirmation of my deduction that you are indeed the magically shrunken human come as a spy into Lankhmar Below.”
    “That opium specter again?” the Mouser raved, dropping his hand to Scalpel's hilt. “Begone, mad mouse dipped in ink, before I cut you to collops!”
    “Your threats and brags are alike useless, sir,” the other answered with a low and humorous laugh. “You wonder how I became certain of your identity? I suppose you think you were very clever. Actually you gave yourself away more than once. First, by relieving yourself in that jakes where I first encountered you. Your dung was of a different shape, color, consistency, and odor than that of my compatriots. You should have sought out a water-privy. Second, although you did try to shadow your eyes, the eye-holes in your mask are too squintingly close together, as are all human eyes. Third, your boots are clearly made to fit human rather than rodent feet, though you have the small sense to walk on your toes to ape our legs and