by Fritz Leiber
‘Some of the finest heroic fantasy ever written’
SF Chronicle
‘A writer who is…still the greatest of us all’
Michael Moorcock
‘The most literate and important sword and sorcery series’
Mike Ashley
‘Most fantasy writers, if asked, admit that Fritz Leiber is our spiritual father, and for the most part we’re sweating to keep up, let alone overtake him’
Raymond E. Feist
‘[A] writer of major importance’
The Encyclopedia of Fantasy
ALSO BY FRITZ LEIBER
Novels
Conjure Wife (1943)
Gather, Darkness! (1950)
The Green Millennium (1953)
Destiny Times Three (1957)
The Big Time (1961)
The Silver Eggheads (1962)
The Wanderer (1964)
Tarzan and the Valley of Gold (1966)
A Specter is Haunting Texas (1969)
Our Lady of Darkness (1977)
Short Story Collections
Night’s Black Agents (1947)
Shadows with Eyes (1962)
Ships to the Stars (1964)
A Pail of Air (1964)
The Night of the Wolf (1966)
The Secret Songs (1968)
Night Monsters (1969)
You’re All Alone (1972)
The Book of Fritz Leiber (1974)
The Best of Fritz Leiber (1974)
The Worlds of Fritz Leiber (1976)
Bazaar of the Bizarre (1978)
The Change War (1978)
Heroes and Horrors (1978)
Ship of Shadows (1979)
The Leiber Chronicles: Fifty Years of Fritz Leiber (1990)
The First Book of Lankhmar (2001)
Poetry
The Demons or the Upper Air (1969)
Sonnets to Jonquil and All (1978)
This edition Copyright © Fritz Leiber 2001
All rights reserved
The right of Fritz Leiber to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
‘The Sadness of the Executioner’ copyright © Lin Carter 1973, ‘Beauty and the Beasts’ copyright © Fritz Leiber 1974, ‘Trapped in the Shadowland’ copyright © Ultimate Publishing Co., Inc. 1973, ‘The Bait’ copyright © Stuart David Schiff 1973, ‘Under the Thumbs of the Gods’ copyright © Ultimate Publishing Co., Inc. 1974, ‘Trapped in the Sea of Stars’ copyright © Fritz Leiber 1975, ‘The Frost Monstreme’ copyright © Lin Carter 1976, ‘Rime Isle’ copyright © Fritz Leiber 1977, ‘The Curse of the Smalls and the Stars’ originally appeared in Heroic Visions copyright © Jessica Amanda Salmonson 1983, ‘The Mer She’ originally appeared in Heroes and Horrors copyright © Stuart Schiff 1978, ‘Sea Magic’ copyright © Fritz Leiber 1977, portions of ‘The Mouser Goes Below’ appeared in Terry’s Universe copyright © Carol Carr 1988, and in Whispers copyright © Fritz Leiber 1987
This edition published in Great Britain in 2001 by
Gollancz
An imprint of the Orion Publishing Group
Orion House, 5 Upper St Martin’s Lane,
London WC2H 9EA
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
ISBN 0 57507 358 6
Typeset at The Spartan Press Ltd,
Lymington, Hants
Printed in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
CONTENTS
The Swords of Lankhmar
Swords and Ice Magic
The Knight and Knave of Swords
The Swords
of Lankhmar
Author’s Note
Fafhrd and the Mouser are rogues through and through, though each has in him a lot of humanity and at least a diamond chip of the spirit of true adventure. They drink, they feast, they wench, they brawl, they steal, they gamble, and surely they hire out their swords to powers that are only a shade better, if that, than the villains. It strikes me (and something might be made of this) that Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are almost at the opposite extreme from the heroes of Tolkien. My stuff is at least equally as fantastic as his, but it’s an earthier sort of fantasy with a strong seasoning of ‘black fantasy’—or of black humor, to use the current phrase for something that was once called gallows’ humor and goes back a long, long way. Though with their vitality, appetites, warm sympathies, and imagination, Fafhrd and the Mouser are anything but ‘sick’ heroes.
One of the original motives for conceiving Fafhrd and the Mouser was to have a couple of fantasy heroes closer to true human stature than supermen like Conan and Tarzan and many another. In a way they’re a mixture of Cabell and Eddison, if we must look for literary ancestors. Fafhrd and the Mouser have a touch of Jurgen’s cynicism and anti-romanticism, but they go on boldly having adventures—one more roll of the dice with destiny and death. While the characters they most parallel in The Worm Ouroboros are Corund and Gro, yet I don’t think they’re touched with evil as those two, rather they’re rogues in a decadent world where you have to be a rogue to survive; perhaps, in legendry, Robin Hood comes closest to them, though they’re certainly a pair of lone-wolf Robin Hoods…
Fritz Leiber
1
‘I see we’re expected,’ the small man said, continuing to stroll toward the large open gate in the long, high, ancient wall. As if by chance, his hand brushed the hilt of his long, slim rapier.
‘At over a bowshot distance how can you—’ the big man began. ‘I get it. Bashabeck’s orange headcloth. Stands out like a whore in church. And where Bashabeck is, his bullies are. You should have kept your dues to the Thieves Guild paid up.’
‘It’s not so much the dues,’ the small man said. ‘It slipped my mind to split with them after the last job, when I lifted those eight diamonds from the Spider God’s temple.’
The big man sucked his tongue in disapproval. ‘I sometimes wonder why I associate with a faithless rogue like you.’
The small man shrugged. ‘I was in a hurry. The Spider God was after me.’
‘Yes, I seem to recall he sucked the blood of your lookout man. You’ve got the diamonds to make the payoff now, of course?’
‘My purse is as bulging as yours,’ the small man asserted. ‘Which is exactly as much as a drunk’s wineskin the morning after. Unless you’re holding out on me, which I’ve long suspected. Incidentally, isn’t that grossly fat man—the one between the two big-shouldered bravos—the keeper of the Silver Eel tavern?’
The big man squinted, nodded, then rocked his head disgustedly. ‘To make such a to-do over a brandy tab.’
‘Especially when it couldn’t have been much more than a yard long,’ the small man agreed. ‘Of course there were those two full casks of brandy you smashed and set afire the last night you were brawling at the Eel.’
‘When the odds are ten to one against you in a tavern fight, you have to win by whatever methods come easiest to hand,’ the big man protested. ‘Which I’ll grant you are apt at times to be a bit bizarre.’
He squinted ahead again at the small crowd ranged around the square inside the open gate. After a while he said, ‘I also make out Rivis Rightby the swordsmith…and just about all the other creditors any two men could have in Lankhmar. And each with his hired thug or three.’ He casually loosened in its scabbard his somewhat huge weapon, shaped like a rapier, but heavy almost as a broadsword. ‘Didn’t you settle any of our bills before we left Lankhmar the last time? I was dead broke, of course, but you must have had money from all those earlier jobs for the Thieves Guild.’
‘I paid Nattick Nimblefingers
in full for mending my cloak and for a new gray silk jerkin,’ the small man answered at once. He frowned. ‘There must have been others I paid—oh, I’m sure there were, but I can’t recall them at the moment. By the by, isn’t that tall rangy wench—half behind the dainty man in black—one you were in trouble with? Her red hair stands out like a…like a bit of Hell. And those three other girls—each peering over her besworded pimp’s shoulder like the first—weren’t you in trouble with them also when we last left Lankhmar?’
‘I don’t know what you mean by trouble,’ the big man complained. ‘I rescued them from their protectors, who were abusing them dreadfully. Believe me, I trounced those protectors and the girls laughed. Thereafter I treated them like princesses.’
‘You did indeed—and spent all your cash and jewels on them, which is why you were broke. But one thing you didn’t do for them: you didn’t become their protector in turn. So they had to go back to their former protectors, which has made them justifiably angry at you.’
‘I should have become a pimp?’ the big man objected. ‘Women!’ Then, ‘I see a few of your girls in the crowd. Neglect to pay them off?’
‘No, borrowed from them and forgot to return the money,’ the small man explained. ‘Hi-ho, it certainly appears that the welcoming committee is out in force.’
‘I told you we should have entered the city by the Grand Gate, where we’d have been lost in the numbers,’ the big man grumbled. ‘But no, I listened to you and came to this godforsaken End Gate.’
‘Wrong,’ the other said. ‘At the Grand Gate we wouldn’t have been able to tell our foes from the bystanders. Here at least we know that everyone is against us, except for the Overlord’s gate watch, and I’m not too sure of them—at the least they’ll have been bribed to take no notice of our slaying.’
‘Why should they all be so hot to slay us?’ the big man argued. ‘For all they know we may be coming home laden with rich treasures garnered from many a high adventure at the ends of the earth. Oh, I’ll admit that three or four of them may also have a private grudge, but—’
‘They can see we haven’t a train of porters or heavily-laden mules,’ the small man interrupted reasonably. ‘In any case they know that after slaying us, they can pay themselves off from any treasure we may have and split the remainder. It’s the rational procedure, which all civilized men follow.’
‘Civilization!’ the big man snorted. ‘I sometimes wonder—’
‘—why you ever climbed south over the Trollstep Mountains and got your beard trimmed and discovered that there were girls without hair on their chests,’ the small man finished for him. ‘Hey, I think our creditors and other haters have hired a third S besides swords and staves against us.’
‘Sorcery?’
The small man drew a coil of thin yellow wire from his pouch. He said, ‘Well, if those two graybeards in the second-story windows aren’t wizards, they shouldn’t scowl so ferociously. Besides, I can make out astrological symbols on the one’s robe and see the glint of the other’s wand.’
They were close enough now to the End Gate that a sharp eye could guess at such details. The guardsmen in browned-iron mail leaned on their pikes impassively. The faces of those lining the small square beyond the gateway were impassive too, but grimly so, except for the girls, who smiled with venom and glee.
The big man said grumpily, ‘So they’ll slay us by spells and incantations. Failing which, they’ll resort to cudgels and gizzard-cutters.’ He shook his head. ‘So much hate over a little cash. Lankhmarts are ingrates. They don’t realize the tone we give their city, the excitement we provide.’
The small man shrugged. ‘This time they’re providing the excitement for us. Playing host, after a fashion.’ His fingers were deftly making a slipknot in one end of the pliant wire. His steps slowed a trifle. ‘Of course,’ he mused, ‘we don’t have to return to Lankhmar.’
The big man bristled. ‘Nonsense, we must! To turn back now would be cowardly. Besides, we’ve done everything else.’
‘There must be a few adventures left outside Lankhmar,’ the small man objected mildly, ‘if only little ones, suitable for cowards.’
‘Perhaps,’ the big man agreed, ‘but big or little, they all have a way of beginning in Lankhmar. Whatever are you up to with that wire?’
The small man had tightened the slipknot around the pommel of his rapier and let the wire trail behind him, flexible as a whip. ‘I’ve grounded my sword,’ he said. ‘Now any death-spell launched against me, striking my drawn sword first, will be discharged into the ground.’
‘Giving Mother Earth a tickle, eh? Watch out you don’t trip over it.’ The warning seemed well-advised—the wire was fully a half-score yards long.
‘And don’t you step on it. ’Tis a device Sheelba taught me.’
‘You and your swamp-rat wizard!’ the big man mocked. ‘Why isn’t he at your side now, making some spells for us?’
‘Why isn’t Ningauble at your side, doing the same?’ the small man counter-asked.
‘He’s too fat to travel.’ They were passing the blank-faced guardsmen. The atmosphere of menace in the square beyond thickened like a storm. Suddenly the big man grinned broadly at his comrade. ‘Let’s not hurt any of them too seriously,’ he said in a somewhat loud voice. ‘We don’t want our return to Lankhmar beclouded.’
As they stepped into the open space walled by hostile faces, the storm broke without delay. The wizard in the star-symboled robe howled like a wolf and lifting his arms high above his head, threw them toward the small man with such force that one expected his hands to come off and fly through the air. They didn’t, but a bolt of bluish fire, wraith-like in the sunlight, streamed from his out-flung fingers. The small man had drawn his rapier and pointed it at the wizard. The blue bolt crackled along the slim blade and then evidently did discharge itself into the ground, for he only felt a stinging thrill in his hand.
Rather unimaginatively the wizard repeated his tactics, with the same result, and then lifted his hands for a third bolt-hurling. By this time the small man had got the rhythm of the wizard’s actions and just as the hands came down, he flipped the long wire so that it curled against the chests and faces of the bullies around the orange-turbaned Bashabeck. The blue stuff, whatever it was, went crackling into them from the wire and with a single screech each they fell down writhing.
Meanwhile the other sorcerer threw his wand at the big man, quickly following it with two more which he plucked from the air. The big man, his own out-size rapier drawn with surprising speed, awaited the first wand’s arrival. Somewhat to his surprise, it had in flight the appearance of a silver-feathered hawk stooping with silver talons forward-pointing to strike. As he continued to watch it closely, its appearance changed to that of a silver long knife with this addition: that it had a silvery wing to either side.
Undaunted by this prodigy and playing the point of his great rapier as lightly as a fencing foil, the big man deftly deflected the first flying dagger so that it transfixed the shoulder of one of the bullies flanking the keeper of the Silver Eel. He treated the second and third flying dagger in the same fashion, so that two other of his foes were skewered painfully though unfatally.
They screeched too and collapsed, more from terror of such supernatural weapons than the actual severity of their wounds. Before they hit the cobbles, the big man had snatched a knife from his belt and hurled it left-handed at his sorcerous foe. Whether the graybeard was struck or barely managed to dodge, he at any rate dropped out of sight.
Meanwhile the other wizard, with continuing lack of imagination or perhaps mere stubbornness, directed a fourth bolt at the small man, who this time whipped upward the wire grounding his sword so that it snapped at the very window from which the blue bolt came. Whether it actually struck the wizard or only the window frame, there was a great crackling there and a bleating cry and that wizard dropped out of sight also.
It is to the credit of the assembled bullies and bravos that th
ey hesitated hardly a heartbeat at this display of reflected death-spells, but urged on by their employers—and the pimps by their whores—they rushed in, lustily trampling the wounded and thrusting and slashing and clubbing with their various weapons. Of course, they had something of a fifty-to-two advantage; still, it took a certain courage.
The small man and the big man instantly placed themselves back to back and with lightning-like strokes stood off the first onset, seeking to jab as many faces and arms as they could rather than make the blows deep and mortal. The big man now had in his left hand a short-handled axe, with whose flat he rapped some skulls for variety, while the small man was supplementing his fiendishly pricking rapier with a long knife whose dartings were as swift as those of a cat’s paw.
At first the greater number of the assaulters was a positive hindrance to them—they got into each other’s way—while the greatest danger to the two fighting back-to-back was that they might be overwhelmed by the mere mass of their wounded foes, pushed forward enthusiastically by comrades behind. Then the battling got straightened out somewhat, and for a while it looked as if the small and big man would have to use more deadly strokes—and perhaps nevertheless be cut down. The clash of tempered iron, the stamp of boots, the fighting-snarls from twisted lips, and the excited screeches of the girls added up to a great din, which made the gate guard look about nervously.
But then the lordly Bashabeck, who had at last deigned to take a hand, had an ear taken off and his collarbone on that side severed by a gentle swipe of the big man’s axe, while the girls—their sense of romance touched—began to cheer on the outnumbered two, at which their pimps and bullies lost heart.
The attackers wavered on the verge of panic. There was a sudden blast of six trumpets from the widest street leading into the square. The great skirling sound was enough to shatter nerves already frayed. The attackers and their employers scattered in all other directions, the pimps dragging their fickle whores, while those who had been stricken by the blue lightning and the winged daggers went crawling after them.