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small, moonlit sailing galley (for he had meanwhile identified it as such a
craft) was signaling attack! Yet the range was still so great that he knew of
only one bowman in Nehwon who could have made that miraculous shot. Not
letting go the tiller, he stooped and severed the threads of the pale
parchment wrapped tightly just behind the arrow's half-buried head, and read
(or rather mostly reread) the two notes, his with the devilish postscript he'd
never seen before. Even as he finished, the characters became unreadable from
the black beams of anti-sun fighting down the moon rays and beginning to
darken that orb. Yet he made the same deduction as had Fafhrd, and hot tears
of joy were squeezed from his chilled eye sockets as he realized that whatever
impossible-seeming sleights of ink and voice had been worked this night, his
friend was sane and true.
There was a protracted, sharp crackling as the last ties of the sails were
loosed and wind filled them, breaking their frozen folds and festoons.
The Mouser bore on the tiller, heading _Flotsam_ into what was now a
strengthening gale. But at the same time he sharply commanded, "Mikkidu! burn
three flares, two red, one white!"
Aboard _Sea Hawk_, Fafhrd saw the blessed treble sign flare up in gathering
unnatural murk, even as his reefed sails filled and he turned his own craft
into the wind. He ordered, "Mannimark! answer those flares with like.
Skullick, you dolt! slack your squad's bows. Those to the west are friends!"
Then he said to Skor beside him, "Take the helm. My friend's ship is on
close-hauled southron course like ours. Work over to her. Lay us alongside."
Aboard _Flotsam_, the Mouser was giving like directions to Ourph. He was
cheered by sight of Fafhrd's flares matching his own. though he did not need
their testimony. Now he longed for talk with Fafhrd. Which would be soon.
The gap of black water between ships was narrowing rapidly. He wasted a moment
musing whether mere chance or else some goddess had steered his comrade's
arrow aside from his heart. He thought of Cif.
Aboard both ships, almost in unison, Pshawri and Mannimark cried out
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ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
fearfully, "Ship close astern!"
Out of the torn and darkening fog bank, driving with preternatural rapidity
into the teeth of the gale on a course to smash them both, there had silently
come a craft monstrous in size and aspect. It might well have remained unseen
until collision, save that the weird rays of the rising black
sun striking its loadside engendered there a horrid, pale reflection, not
natural white light at all, but a loathly, colorless luminescence -- a white
to make the flesh crawl, a cave-toad, fish-belly white. And if the substance
making the reflection had any texture at all, it was that of ridged and
crinkled gray horn -- dead men's fingernails.
The leprous Hel-glow showed the demonic craft to have thrice the freeboard of
any natural ship. Its towering prow and sides were craggy and jagged, as if it
were cast entire of ice in a titanic rough mold left over from the Age of
Chaos, or else hacked by jinn into crude ship-likeness from a giant berg
broken off from glacier vast. And it was driven by banks of oars long and
twitchy as insect legs or limbs of myriapod, yet big as jointed yards or
masts, as they sent it scuttling monstrously across black ocean vast. And from
its lofty deck, as if hurled by demon ballistas, catapults, and mangonels,
there now came hurtling down around _Flotsam_ and _Sea Hawk_ great blocks of
ice which sent up black, watery volcanoes. While from the jagged top of its
foremast -- pale, big, and twisted as a thunder-blasted pine long dead
-- there shot out two thin beams of blackest black, like rays of anti-sun but
more intense, which smote the Gray Mouser and Fafhrd each in the chest with
deepstriking chill and sick, spreading dizziness and weakening of will.
Nevertheless they each managed to give rapid, stinging commands, and the two
ships turned away in time's nick from each other and the oared deathberg
striking between them. _Flotsam_ had had only to turn further into the wind
and so come round smoothly and swiftly. But _Sea Hawk_ perforce must jibe. Its
sail shivered a space, then filled abruptly on the other side with noise like
thunder crack, but the stout Ool Krut canvas did not split. Both ships scudded
north before the gale. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]