“A small snow snake greatly resembles the animated tail of a white house cat,” Fafhrd replied imperturbably. “Aye, and has just such a high, quavering cry.”
“Are you suggesting—?”
“Of course not. As I imagine you do, I think there was a door somewhere in the rock, fitted so well we could not discern the junctures. We heard it shut. But before that, he — she, it, they — went through it.”
“Then why babble of echoes and snow snakes?”
“It is well to consider all possibilities.”
“He — she and so forth — named us sons,” the Mouser mused.
“Some say the serpent is wisest, oldest, and even father of all,” Fafhrd observed judiciously.
“Snakes again! Well, one thing's certain: all hold it rash folly for a man to take advice of a serpent, let alone seven.”
“Yet he — consider the other pronouns spoken — had a point, Mouser. Mauger the indeterminate western continent, we have traveled all Nehwon in spiderweb wise. What's left but Lankhmar?”
“Damn your pronouns! We swore never to return. Have you forgotten that, Fafhrd?”
“No, but I'm dying of boredom. Times I have sworn never again to drink wine.”
“I would choke to death on Lankhmar! Her day-smokes, her night-smogs, her rats, her filth!”
“At the moment, Mouser, I care little whether I live or die, and where or when or how.”
“Now adverbs and conjunctions! Bah, you need a drink!”
“We seek a deeper forgetfulness. They say to lay a ghost, go where she died.”
“Aye, and be worse haunted!”
“I could not be worse haunted than now.”
“To let a serpent shame us by asking, were we afraid!”
“Are we, perhaps?”
And so the argument went, with the final foreseeable result that Fafhrd and the Mouser cantered past Ilthmar to a stony stretch of shore that was a curiously abraded low precipice, and waited there a day and a night for the Sinking Land to emerge with anomalous aqueous convulsions from the waters joining the Sea of the East to the Inner Sea. They swiftly and warily crossed its flinty, steaming expanse — for it was a hot, sunny day — and so again rode Causey Road, but this time back toward Lankhmar.