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something to the Old Man, who nodded matter-of-factly. The intruding fear
engulfed me. With a tremendous effort I managed to roll my eyes downward and
look at my real body, the one lying on the floor.
"It was Anra's."
They entered the doorway and found themselves in a huge, many-nooked and
niched stone room -- though seemingly no nearer the ultimate source of the
green glow, except that here the misty air was bright with it. There were
stone tables and benches and chairs scattered about, but the chief feature of
the place was the mighty archway ahead, from which stone groinings curved
upward in baffling profusion. Fafhrd's and the Mouser's eyes momentarily
sought the keystone of the arch, both because of its great size and because
there was an odd dark recess toward its top.
The silence was portentous, making them feel uneasily for their swords.
It was not merely that the luring music had ceased -- here in the Castle
Called Mist there was literally no sound, save what rippled out futilely from
their own beating hearts. There was instead a fog-bound concentration that
froze into the senses, as though they were inside the mind of a titanic
thinker, or as if the stones themselves were entranced.
Then, since it seemed as unthinkable to wait in that silence as for lost
hunters to stand motionless in deep winter cold, they passed under the archway
and took at random an upward-leading ramp.
Ahura continued, "Helplessly I watched them make certain preparations.
While Anra gathered some small bundles of manuscripts and clothing, the Old
Man lashed together the three mortar-crusted stones.
"It may have been that in the moment of victory he relaxed habitual
precautions. At all events, while he was still bending over the stones, my
mother entered the room. Crying out, 'What have you done to him?' she threw
herself down beside me and felt at me anxiously. But that was not to the Old
Man's liking. He grabbed her shoulders and roughly jerked her back. She lay
huddled against the wall, her eyes wide, her teeth chattering -- especially
when she saw Anra, in my body, grotesquely lift the lashed stones. Meanwhile
the Old Man hoisted me, in my new, wasted form, to his shoulder, picked up the
bundles, and ascended the short stair.
"We walked through the inner court, rose-strewn and filled with
Mother's perfumed, wine-splashed friends, who stared at us in befuddled
astonishment, and so out of the house. It was night. Five slaves waited with a
curtained litter in which the Old Man placed me. My last glimpse was of
Mother's face, its paint tracked by tears, peering horrifiedly through the
half open door."
The ramp issued onto an upper level, and they found themselves wandering
aimlessly through a mazy series of rooms. Of little use to record here the
things they thought they saw through shadowy doorways, or thought
they heard through metal doors with massy complex bolts whose drawing they
dared not fathom. There was a disordered, high-shelved library, certain of the
rolls seeming to smoke and fume as though they held in their papyrus and ink
the seeds of a holocaust; the corners were piled with sealed canisters of
greenish stone and age-verdigrised brass tablets. There were instruments that
Fafhrd did not even bother to warn the Mouser against touching. Another room
exuded a fearful animal stench; upon its slippery floor they noted a
sprinkling of short, incredibly thick black bristles. But the only living
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creature they saw at any time was a little hairless thing that looked as if it
had once sought to become a bear cub; when Fafhrd stooped to pet it, it
flopped away whimpering. There was a door that was thrice as broad as it was
high, and its height hardly that of a man's knee. There was a window that let
upon a blackness that was neither of mist nor of night, and yet seemed
infinite; peering in, Fafhrd could faintly see rusted iron handholds leading
upward. The Mouser uncoiled his climbing rope to its full length and swung it
around inside the window, without the hook striking anything.
Yet the strangest impression this ominously empty stronghold begot in them was
also the subtlest, and one which each new room or twisting corridor heightened
-- a feeling of architectural inadequacy. It seemed impossible that the
supports were equal to the vast weights of the great stone floors and
ceilings, so impossible that they almost became convinced that there were
buttresses and retaining walls they could not see, either invisible or
existing in some other world altogether, as if the Castle Called Mist had only
partially emerged from some unthinkable outside. That certain bolted doors
seemed to lead where no space could be, added to this hinting.
They wandered through passages so distorted that, though they retained a
precise memory of landmarks, they lost all sense of direction.
Finally Fafhrd said, "This gets us nowhere. Whatever we seek, whomever we wait
for -- Old Man or demon -- it might as well be in that first room of the great
archway."
The Mouser nodded as they turned back, and Ahura said, "At least we'll be at
no greater disadvantage there. Ishtar, but the Old Man's rhyme is true!
'Each chamber is a slavering maw, each arch a toothy jaw.' I always greatly
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