Swords Of Lankhmar

The Mouser's heart leaped. So did he.

As the Mouser arrived inside the bower amid an explosion of dislodged white blooms, as if the tree herself were throwing flowers to welcome him, the two slim black figures faced around toward him and dropped back their hoods. The same as he had last seen it aboard _Squid_, Frix's dark hair was confined by a silver net. The smile still curved her lips, though her gaze was distant and grave. But Hisvet's hair was itself a silver-blonde wonder, her lips pouted enticingly, as if blowing him a kiss, while her gaze danced all over his person with naughty merriment.

She moved toward him a step.

With a happy roaring shout only he could hear, blood rushed through the Mouser's arteries toward his center, reviving his limp manhood in a mere moment, as a magically summoned genie offhandedly builds a tower.

The Mouser imitated his blood, rushing blindly to Hisvet and clapping his arms around her.

But with a concerted movement like a half-circling in a swift dance, the two girls had changed places, so that it was Frix he found himself embracing, and with cheek pressed to cheek, for at the last moment she had swayed her head aside.

The Mouser would have disengaged himself then, murmuring courteous and indeed almost sincere excuses, for through her robe Frix's body felt slimly enticing and most interestingly embossed, except that at that instant Hisvet leaned her head over Frix's shoulder and, tipping her elfin face sideways, planted her half-parted lips on the Mouser's mouth, which instantly began to imitate that of the industrious bee sipping nectar.

It seemed to him that he was in the Seventh Heaven, which is reserved for only the most youthful and beauteous of the gods.

When at last Hisvet removed her lips from his, keeping her face so close that the fresh scar Cat's Claw had made was a blue-edged pink ribbon from magnificent nostril to velvet-rounded slender jaw, it was instantly to murmur to him, "Rejoice, delicious Dirksman, for you have kissed with your own the actual lips of a Demoiselle of Lankhmar, which is a familiarity almost beyond imagining, and you have kissed _my_ lips, an intimacy which passeth all understanding. And now, Dirksman, embrace Frix closely whilst I preoccupy your eyes and solace your face, which is truly the noblest area of the skin, the very soul's vizard. It is demeaning work for me, to be sure, as if a goddess should scrub and anoint with oil a common soldier's dirty boot, yet know that I do it right gladly."

Meanwhile Frix's slim fingers were unbuckling his ratskin belt. With the faintest slither and tiniest double _thunk_, it slipped with Scalpel and Cat's Claw to the springy close-cropped turf bleached almost white by the closet tree's perpetual shade.

"Remember, your eyes on _me_ only," Hisvet whispered with the faintest yet firmest note of reproach. "I remain unjealous of Frix only so long as you disregard her utterly."

Though the light was still velvet soft, it seemed brighter inside the closet tree's bower than without. Perhaps the gibbous moon had risen. Perhaps the glimmer of the nectar-supping fire-beetles and glow-wasps and night-bees was concentrated here. A few of them circled lazily inside the bower, winking on and off like flirtatious gem moons.

The Mouser clapped his arms more tightly around Frix's slim waist, meanwhile murmuring to Hisvet, "Oh, White Princess… Oh, icy directress of desire… Oh, frosty goddess of the erotic… Oh, satanic virgin…" as she all the while planted tiny kisses on his eyelids and cheeks and free ear, and raked them with the long silvery lashes of her blinking eyes, so that the plant of love was tenderly cultivated and grew and grew. The Mouser sought to return these favors, but she stopped his mouth with hers. As his tongue caressed her teeth, he noted that her two center front incisors were somewhat overlarge, but in his infatuated state this difference seemed only one more point of beauty. Why even if Hisvet turned out to have some of the appurtenances of a dragon or a giant white spider — or a rat, for that matter — he would love and cosset them each and all. Even if there lifted over her head from behind the joint-masted white moist sting of a scorpion, he would honor it with a loving kiss — well, he mightn't go quite so far as that, he decided abruptly… still and on the other hand, he almost might, for at that instant Hisvet's eyelashes tickled the ridge of skin over the silver dart in his temple.

This was ecstasy indeed, he assured himself. It seemed to him that he was now in the Ninth and topmost Heaven, where a few select heroes luxuriate and dream and submit themselves to almost unendurable pleasures, at whiles glancing down with lazy amusement at all the gods toiling at their sparrow-watching and incense-sniffing and destiny-directing on the many tiers below.