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shown me the Gray One in his true idiot nature._
The Mouser had first been furious when the sword-skirling clashed him
awake from his black satin dreams, but as soon as he saw what was going on he
became enchanted at the wildly comic scene.
For, lacking Sheelba's cobweb, what the Mouser saw was only the zany red-
capped porter prancing about in his tip-curled red shoes and aiming with his
broom great strokes at Fafhrd, who looked exactly as if he had climbed a moment
ago out of a barrel of meal. The only part of the Northerner not whitely dusted
was a masklike stretch across his eyes.
What made the whole thing fantastically droll was that miller-white Fafhrd
was going through all the motions -- and emotions! -- of a genuine combat with
excruciating precision, parrying the broom as if it were some great jolting
scimitar or two-handed broadsword even. The broom would go sweeping up and
Fafhrd would gawk at it, giving a marvelous interpretation of apprehensive
goggling despite his strangely shadowed eyes. Then the broom would come
sweeping down and Fafhrd would brace himself and seem to catch it on his sword
only with the most prodigious effort -- and then pretend to be jolted back by it!
The Mouser had never suspected Fafhrd had such a perfected theatric talent,
even if it were acting of a rather mechanical sort, lacking the broad sweeps of true
dramatic genius, and he whooped with laughter.
Then the broom brushed Fafhrd's shoulder and blood sprang out.
Fafhrd, wounded at last and thereby knowing himself unlikely to outendure
the black statue -- although the latter's iron chest was working now like a bellows
-- decided on swifter measures. He loosened his hand-axe again in its loop and at
the next pause in the fight, both battlers having outguessed each other by
retreating simultaneously, whipped it up and hurled it at his adversary's face.
Instead of seeking to dodge or ward off the missile, the black statue lowered
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r r
its sword and merely wove its head in a tiny circle.
The axe closely circled the lean black head, like a silver wood-tailed comet
whipping around a black sun, and came back straight at Fafhrd like a boomerang
-- and rather more swiftly than Fafhrd had sent it.
But time slowed for Fafhrd then and he half ducked and caught it left-handed
as it went whizzing past his cheek.
His thoughts too went for a moment fast as his actions. He thought of how his
adversary, able to dodge every frontal attack, had not avoided the table or the
coffin behind him. He thought of how the Mouser had not laughed now for a
dozen clashes and he looked at him and saw him, though still dazed-seeming,
strangely pale and sober-faced, appearing to stare with horror at the blood
running down Fafhrd's arm.
So crying as heartily and merrily as he could, "Amuse yourself! Join in the
fun, clown! -- here's your slap-stick," Fafhrd tossed the axe toward the Mouser.
Without waiting to see the result of that toss -- perhaps not daring to -- he
summoned up his last reserves of speed and rushed at the black statue in a
circling advance that drove it back toward the coffin.
Without shifting his stupid horrified gaze, the Mouser stuck out a hand at the
last possible moment and caught the axe by the handle as it spun lazily down.
As the black statue retreated near the coffin and poised for what promised to
be a stupendous counter-attack, the Mouser leaned out and, now grinning
foolishly again, sharply rapped its black pate with the axe.
The iron head split like a coconut, but did not come apart. Fafhrd's hand-axe,
wedged in it deeply, seemed to turn all at once to iron like the statue and its black
haft was wrenched out of the Mouser's hand as the statue stiffened up straight
and tall.
The Mouser stared at the split head woefully, like a child who hadn't known
knives cut.
The statue brought its great sword flat against its chest, like a staff on which it
might lean but did not, and it fell rigidly forward and hit the floor with a
ponderous clank.
At that stony-metallic thundering, white wildfire ran across the Black Wall,
lightening the whole shop like a distant levinbolt, and iron-basalt thundering
echoed from deep within it.
Fafhrd sheathed Graywand, dragged the Mouser out of the black coffin -- the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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