The remaining soldier, though covered hand and face with leeches, sought to fulfill his orders. Sword upraised, he lumbered toward the Mouser's unprotected back.
Screaming a warning, Fafhrd hurled Graywand. The long blade flashed across the chamber to slam forcefully between the soldier's shoulder blades even as the Mouser, alerted, spun and plunged Scalpel through the man's heart.
With one hand free, Fafhrd grasped the edges of his hood and drew it closer about his face. He felt the creatures striking him, attaching themselves to his clothes. More than a few had wormed their way under his garments.
He smashed the torch down on the head of another serpent, then snatched up a soldier's fallen sword to cleave its body in half. That still left five crawling about the room.
The Mouser was having no luck at the doors. Only the crushed body of the first soldier prevented them from closing and, no doubt, sealing them in.
Koh-Vombi! chanted the voices, Koh-Vombi!
"Koh-Vombi up your nose!" Fafhrd shouted at his invisible tormentors. He shot another look around the room. The last remaining soldier whirled blindly about, smashing chairs, tripping over a fallen comrade, screaming as he ripped leeches from his unprotected face. Coiled on the altar, a golden serpent hissed and showed its fangs.
Gripping the torch tightly, Fafhrd called to his comrade. "Look out, Mouser, I'm coming through!"
Running across the chamber, he leaped, hurling himself at the doors. Wood shattered and hinge-metal shrieked. Fafhrd struck the floor amid shards and splinters, and the Mouser flew over him to bound across the hall and up the staircase.
The voices followed them from the inner chamber. The hallway began to swirl with leeches.
Springing up, Fafhrd hit the staircase at a run, torch in hand, his new cloak thick and weighty with slimy bloodsuckers. Three at a time he took the stairs, climbing as fast as his legs would go.
"Want to go back for your sword?" the Mouser suggested sarcastically as Fafhrd overtook him.
"Want to go back for that damned jewel, you greedy-guts?" Fafhrd called over his shoulder as he passed his partner.
Leeches darted and dived at them. Bloated shapes covered the backs of Fafhrd's hands. Blood trickled down his neck. A wet warmth settled suddenly in his right eyebrow. With a gasp, he tore the bloodsucker away, and pushed himself to even greater speed.
"This way, Mouser!" he called desperately to his comrade, uncertain if the Mouser was still behind him. "This way!"
And ancient voices answered, Koh-Vombi! Koh-Vombi! The tower echoed with that sound. The very stones seemed to shiver with it.
At last, he found the window through which they had come. The Mouser slammed into him, nearly knocking him through it, as he struggled to free the line and grapnel from about his shoulders with one hand, while with the other he used the torch to fight off the leeches.
"Hurry!" the Mouser shouted, clutching his hood tightly about his face so that he saw only through the narrowest space of cloth. Fear and panic shone brightly in his dark eyes.
Setting the grapnel firmly on the sill, Fafhrd cast the line out. "Go!" he ordered, grasping the Mouser's shoulder, half-flinging him out the window.
While the Mouser scrambled over the edge and down the line, Fafhrd braced himself before the portal and swung the torch with both hands, igniting scores of leeches as they flew at him. Tiny burning bodies fell like stars at his feet, smoking and stinking with a hideously foul odor.
As many as he killed, though, far more struck his face, his hands, burrowed beneath his clothes. With fearful desperation, he touched the torch to one of the rafters overhead. The old wood took fire immediately. With a small curtain of flame burning before him, he threw down the torch and squeezed his great bulk through the window's slender space.
A leech slapped his nose and stuck.
Fafhrd's hands closed about the line. Without any control, he slid halfway down, burning his ungloved palms. The leech crawled toward his eye. In utter panic, he let go of the line with one hand and clawed at the creature. With only one tortured hand on the line, his weight and momentum proved too great.
The Mouser cried his name as Fafhrd fell.
ELEVEN
THE RAINBOW'S BLACK HEART
Screaming his partner’s name, the Gray Mouser watched horrified as Fafhrd lost his grip on the line and, tangled in the folds of a fluttering black cloak, plummeted earthward. His horror doubled when a darkly violet hole opened in the star-flecked heavens beneath Fafhrd. The Northerner fell through it, vanishing in midair, and the hole blinked out of existence.
For an instant, the Mouser stared, open-mouthed. Then his own survival instinct asserted itself. Fafhrd was gone, beyond help for the moment, and the Mouser had to think of himself. Ripping away his garments, he scraped desperately at the black leeches that fed on his flesh.
To his amazement, they crumbled at his touch, flaking into pieces, then into a black, ashen powder. Trickles of blood and painful red blotches on his skin proved the creatures' menace. They had settled in his hair, wormed under his clothes, into his armpits, his crotch, even down inside his boots. But outside of the tower, beyond the range of whatever magic spawned them, they were dying a quick and strange death.
Naked, he gave a whoop of triumph and brushed the remains of the last leech from between his toes.
"Halt, criminal, in the name of the Overlord!"
At the sound of that authoritative command, the Mouser dived and rolled, reaching his weapons belt, drawing his rapier, Catsclaw, in one smooth motion as he came to his feet again. Swiftly, he saw his predicament and the futility of resistance.
A ring of soldiers stood knee-deep in the weeds inside the iron fence that surrounded the tower. A dozen grim-faced men-at-arms stood ready with pikes or drawn swords. Another dozen bowmen, bowstrings quivering with tension, sighted carefully down drawn shafts.
The Mouser glanced hopelessly to his left and right. Even if he could reach the fence, those archers would make a pin cushion of him before he could climb it. He looked back at the tower. Thick smoke poured from the window above his head, and tongues of red flame licked the sky.
"Damn you, Fafhrd," he muttered disgustedly. "Once again, you've left me in the lurch."
Scowling, he threw down his sword. Covering his groin with his hands, mindful of the arrows trained on him, he stood meekly until the Overlord's men seized him. A pair of guards roughly twisted his arms behind his back and applied ropes to his wrists. A soldier in a corporal's livery knotted another rope loosely about his neck and gave it a jerk. The Mouser's head snapped up. Forgetting himself, the Mouser cursed the corporal's unfaithful mother.
They beat him for that, slapping and punching him until he fell on the ground. They kicked him and jabbed him with the butts of pikes. Covering his vitals as best he could, he rolled on the harsh, broken paving stones and waited for it to end, biting his already bloody lip to keep from giving further offense.
Finally, the guards wearied of such easy sport. Using the rope around his neck, they hauled him cruelly to his feet, mocking him with great mirth. The guard whose mother he had insulted seized the leash and reeled the Mouser close until they stood nose to nose. He let fly a slimy wad straight into the Mouser's left eye, then turned away, laughing.
The Mouser burned with embarrassment and rage. His mouth quivered, and he bit his lower lip until his own teeth drew new streams of blood. Puss and piss! he thought bitterly, staring at the broad back of his abuser. My sentence is already death for violating a forbidden tower.