The Second Book of Lankhmar

by Fritz Leiber

  ‘I will send my daughter Hisvet to attend you. She has now disciplined into instructive erotic capers a new dozen of silver-caged white rats.’

  ‘Rats, rats, rats! Do you seek to drive me mad?’ Glipkerio squeaked angrily.

  ‘I will at once order her to destroy her harmless pets, good scholars though they be,’ Hisvin answered smoothly, bowing very low so that he could make a nasty face unseen. ‘Then, your overlordship wishing, she shall come to soothe your battle-stung brazen nerves with mystic rhythms learned in the Eastern Lands. While her maid Frix is skilled in subtle massages known only to her and to certain practitioners in Quarmall, Kokgnab, and Klesh.’

  Glipkerio lifted his shoulders, pouted his lips, and uttered a little grunt midway between indifference and unwilling satisfaction.

  At that instant, a half-dozen of the officers and pages crouched together and directed their gazes and weapons at a doorway in which had appeared a little low shadow.

  At the same moment, her mind overly absorbed and excited by the imagined squeals and groans of Samanda forced to crawl about the kitchen floor by jerks of her globe-dressed black hair and by jabs of the long pins taken from it, Reetha inadvertently tweaked a tuft of body hair which her gently scratching fingers had encountered.

  Her monarch writhed as if stabbed and uttered a thin, piercing shriek.

  A dwarf white cat had trotted nervously into the doorway, looking back over shoulder with nervous pink eyes, and now when Glipkerio screamed, disappeared as if batted by an unseen broom.

  Glipkerio gasped, then shook a pointing finger under Reetha’s nose. It was all she could do not to snap with her teeth at the soft, perfumed object, which looked as long and loathsome to her as the white caterpillar of a giant moon moth.

  ‘Report yourself to Samanda!’ he commanded. ‘Describe to her in full detail your offense. Tell her to inform me beforehand of your hour of punishment.’

  Against his own rule, Hisvin permitted himself a small, veiled expression of his contempt for his overlord’s wits. In his solemn professional voice he said, ‘For best effect, recite my palindrome backwards, letter by letter.’

  The Mouser snored peacefully on a thick mattress in a small bedroom above the shop of Nattick Nimblefingers the tailor, who was furiously at work below cleaning and mending the Mouser’s clothing and accouterments. One full and one half-empty wine-jug rested on the floor by the mattress, while under the Mouser’s pillow, clenched in his left fist for greater security, was the small black bottle he’d got from Sheelba.

  It had been high noon when he had finally climbed out of the Great Salt Marsh and trudged through the Marsh Gate, utterly spent. Nattick had provided him with a bath, wine and a bed—and what sense of security the Mouser could get from harboring with an old slum friend.

  Now he slept the sleep of exhaustion, his mind just beginning to be tickled by dreams of the glory that would be his when, under the eyes of Glipkerio, he would prove himself Hisvin’s superior at blasting rats. His dreams did not take account of the fact that Hisvin could hardly be counted a blaster of rats, but rather their ally—unless the wily grain-merchant had decided it was time to change sides.

  Fafhrd, stretched out in a grassy hilltop hollow lit by moonlight and campfire, was conversing with a long-limbed recumbent skeleton named Kreeshkra, but whom he now mostly addressed by the pet name Bonny Bones. It was a moderately strange sight, yet one to touch the hearts of imaginative lovers and enemies of racial discrimination in all the many universes.

  The somewhat oddly matched pair regarded each other tenderly. Fafhrd’s curly, rather abundant body hair against his pale skin, where his loosened jerkin revealed it, was charmingly counterpointed by the curving glints of camp-fire reflected here and there from Kreeshkra’s skin against the background of her ivory bones. Like two scarlet minnows joined head and tail, her mobile lips played or lay quivering side by side, alternately revealing and hiding her pearly front teeth. Her breasts mounted on her rib cage were like the stem halves of pears, shading from palest pink to scarlet.

  Fafhrd thoughtfully gazed back and forth between these colorful adornments.

  ‘Why?’ he asked finally.

  Her laughter rippled like glass chimes. ‘Dear stupid Mud Man!’ she said in her outlandishly accented Lankhmarese. ‘Girls who are not Ghouls—all your previous women, I suppose, may they be chopped to still-sentient raw bits in Hell!—draw attention to their points of attraction by concealing them with rich fabric or precious metals. We, who are transparent-fleshed and scorn all raiment, must go about it another way, employing cosmetics.’

  Fafhrd chuckled lazily in answer. He was now looking back and forth between his dear white-ribbed companion and the moon seen through the smooth, pale gray branches of the dead thorn tree on the rim of the hollow, and finding a wondrous content in that counterpoint. He thought how strange it was, though really not so much, that his feelings toward Kreeshkra had changed so swiftly. Last night, when she had revived from her knockout a mile or so beyond burning Sarheenmar, he had been ready to ravage and slay her, but she had comported herself with such courage and later proven herself such a spirited and sympathetic companion, and possessed of a ready wit, though somewhat dry, as befitted a skeleton, that when the pink rim of dawn had added itself to and then drunk the city’s flames, it had seemed the natural thing that she should ride pillion behind him as he resumed his journey south. Indeed, he’d thought, such a comrade might daunt without fight the brigands who swarmed around Ilthmar and thought Ghouls a myth. He had offered her bread, which she refused, and wine, which she drank sparingly. Toward evening his arrow had brought down a desert antelope and they had feasted well, she devouring her portion raw. It was true what they said about Ghoulish digestion. Fafhrd had at first been bothered because she seemed to hold no grudge on behalf of her slain fellows and he suspected that she might be employing her extreme amiability to put him off guard and then slay him, but he had later decided that life or its loss was likely accounted no great matter by Ghouls, who looked so much like skeletons to begin with.

  The gray Mingol mare, tethered to the thorn tree on the hollow’s rim, threw up her head and nickered.

  A mile or more overhead in the windy dark, a bat slipped from the back of a strongly winging black albatross and fluttered earthward like an animate large black leaf.

  Fafhrd reached out an arm and ran his fingers through Kreeshkra’s invisible shoulder-length hair. ‘Bonny Bones,’ he asked, ‘why do you call me Mud Man?’

  She answered tranquilly, ‘All your kind seem mud to us, whose flesh is as sparkling clear as running water in a brook untroubled by man or rains. Bones are beautiful. They are made to be seen.’ She reached out skeleton-seeming soft-touching hand and played with the hair on his chest, then went on seriously, staring toward the stars. ‘We Ghouls have such an aesthetic distaste for mud-flesh that we consider it a sacred duty to transform it to crystal-flesh by devouring it. Not yours, at least not tonight, Mud Man,’ she added, sharply tweaking a copper ringlet.

  He lightly captured her wrist. ‘So your love for me is most unnatural, at least by Ghoulish standards,’ he said with a touch of argumentativeness.

  ‘If you say so, master,’ she answered with a sardonic, mock-submissive note.

  ‘I stand, or rather lie, corrected,’ Fafhrd murmured. ‘I’m the lucky one, whatever your motives and whatever name we give them.’ His voice became clearer again. ‘Tell me, Bonny Bones, how in the world did you ever come to learn Lankhmarese?’

  ‘Stupid, stupid Mud Man,’ she replied indulgently. ‘Why, ’tis our native tongue’—and here her voice grew dreamy—‘deriving from those ages a millennium and more ago when Lankhmar’s empire stretched from Quarmall to the Trollstep Mountains and from Earth’s End to the Sea of Monsters, when Kvarch Nar was Hwarshmar and we lonely Ghouls alley-and-graveyard thieves only. We had another language, but Lankhmarese was easier.’

  He returned her hand to her side, to plant his own beyon
d her and stare down into her black eye sockets. She whimpered faintly and ran her fingers lightly down his sides. Fighting impulse for the moment, he said, ‘Tell me, Bonny Bones, how do you manage to see anything when light goes right through you? Do you see with the inside of the back of your skull?’

  ‘Questions, questions, questions,’ she complained moaningly.

  ‘I only want to become less stupid,’ he explained humbly.

  ‘But I like you to be stupid,’ she answered with a sigh. Then raising up on her elbow so that she faced the still-blazing campfire—the thorn tree’s dense wood burnt slowly and fiercely—she said, ‘Look closely into my eyes. No, without getting between them and the fire. Can you see a small rainbow in each? That’s where light is refracted to the seeing part of my brain, and a very thin real image formed there.’

  Fafhrd agreed he could see twin rainbows, then went on eagerly, ‘Don’t stop looking at the fire yet; I want to show you something.’ He made a cylinder of one hand and held an end of the cylinder to her nearest eye, then clapped his fingers, held tightly together, against the other end. ‘There!’ he said. ‘You can see the fire glow through the edges of my fingers, can’t you? So I’m part transparent. I’m part crystal, at least,’

  ‘I can, I can,’ she assured him with singsong weariness. She looked away from his hands and the fire at his face and hairy chest. ‘But I like you to be mud,’ she said. She put her hands on his shoulders. ‘Come, darling, be dirtiest mud.’

  He gazed down at the moonlit pearl-toothed skull and blackest eye sockets in each of which a faint opalescent moon-bow showed, and he remembered how a wisewoman of the North had once told him and the Mouser that they were both in love with Death. Well, she’d been right, at least about himself, Fafhrd had to confess now, as Kreeshkra’s arms began to tug at him.

  At that instant there sounded a thin whistle, so high as to be almost inaudible, yet piercing the ear like a needle finer than a hair. Fafhrd jerked around, Kreeshkra swiftly lifted her head, and they noted that they were being watched not only by the Mingol mare, but also with upside-down eyes by a black bat which hung from a high gray twig of the thorn tree.

  Filled with premonition, Fafhrd pointed a forefinger at the dangling black flier, which instantly fluttered down to the fleshly perch presented. Fafhrd drew off its leg a tiny black roll of parchment springy as thinnest tempered iron, waved the flutterer back to its first perch, and unrolling the black parchment and holding it close to the firelight and his eyes close to it, read the following missive writ in a white script:

  Mouser in direst danger. Also Lankhmar. Consult Ningauble of the Seven Eyes. Speed of the essence. Don’t lose the tin whistle.

  The signature was a tiny unfeatured oval, which Fafhrd knew to be one of the sigils of Sheelba of the Eyeless Face.

  White jaw resting on folded white knuckles, Kreeshkra watched the Northerner from her inscrutable black eye pits as he buckled on his sword.

  ‘You’re leaving me,’ she asserted in a flat voice.

  ‘Yes, Bonny Bones, I must ride south like the wind,’ Fafhrd admitted hurriedly. ‘A lifelong comrade’s in immense peril.’

  ‘A man, of course,’ she divined with the same tonelessness. ‘Even Ghoulish men save their greatest love for their male sword-mates.’

  ‘It’s a different sort of love,’ Fafhrd started to argue as he untied the mare from the thorn tree, feeling at the flat pouch hanging from the saddlebow, to make sure it still held the thin tin cylinder. Then, more practically, ‘There’s still half the antelope to give you strength for your trudge home—and it’s uncooked too.’

  ‘So you assume my people are eaters of carrion, and that half a dead antelope is a proper measure of what I mean to you?’

  ‘Well, I’d always heard that Ghouls…and no, of course, I’m not trying to pay you…Look here, Bonny Bones—I won’t argue with you, you’re much too good at it. Suffice it that I must course like the lonely thunderbolt to Lankhmar, pausing only to consult my master sorcerer. I couldn’t take you—or anyone!—on that journey.’

  Kreeshkra looked around curiously. ‘Who asked to go? The bat?’

  Fafhrd bit his lip, then said, ‘Here, take my hunting knife,’ and when she made no reply, laid it by her hand. ‘Can you shoot an arrow?’

  The skeleton girl observed to some invisible listener, ‘Next the Mud Man will be asking if I can slice a liver. Oh well, I should doubtless have tired of him in another night and on pretext of kissing his neck, bit through the great artery under his ear, and drunk his blood and devoured his carrion mud-flesh, leaving only his stupid brain, for fear of contaminating and making imbecilic my own.’

  Abstaining from speech, Fafhrd laid the Mingol bow and its quiver of arrows beside the hunting knife. Then he knelt for a farewell kiss, but at the last instant the Ghoul turned her head so that his lips found only her cold cheek.

  As he stood up, he said, ‘Believe it or not, I’ll come back and find you.’

  ‘You won’t do either,’ she assured him, ‘and I shan’t be anywhere.’

  ‘Nevertheless I will hunt you down,’ he said. He had untethered the mare and stood beside it. ‘For you have given me the weirdest and most wondrous ecstasy of any woman in the world.’

  Looking out into the night, the Ghoulish girl said, ‘Congratulations, Kreeshkra. Your gift to humanity: freakish thrills. Make like a thunderbolt, Mud Man. I dote on thrills too.’

  Fafhrd shut his lips, gazed at her a moment longer. Then as he whirled about him his cloak, the bat fluttered to it and hung there.

  Kreeshkra nodded her head, ‘I said the bat.’ Fafhrd mounted the mare and cantered down the hillside.

  Kreeshkra sprang up, snatched the bow and arrow, ran to the rim of the grassy saucer and drew a bead on Fafhrd’s back, held it for three heartbeats, then turned abruptly and winged the arrow at the thorn tree. It lodged quivering in the center of the gray trunk.

  Fafhrd glanced quickly around at the snap, whir, tchunk! A skeleton arm was waving him good-bye and continued to do so until he reached the road at the foot of the slope, where he urged the mare into a long-striding lope.

  On the hilltop Kreeshkra stood in thought for two breaths. Then from her belt she detached something invisible, which she dropped in the center of the dying campfire.

  There was a sputtering and a shower of sparks, when a bright blue flame shot straight up a dozen yards and burnt for as many heartbeats before it died. Kreeshkra’s bones looked like blued iron, her glinting glassy flesh like scraps of tropic night-sky, but there was none to see this beauty.

  Fafhrd watched the needlelike flare over shoulder as he sped rockingly along and he frowned into the wind.

  The rats were murdering in Lankhmar that night. Cats died by swiftly sped crossbow darts that punctured slit-pupiled eye to lodge in brain. Poison set out for rats was cunningly secreted in gobbets of dogs’ dinners. Elakeria’s marmoset died crucified to the head of the sandalwood bed of that plump wanton, just opposite her ceiling-tall mirror of daily-polished silver. Babies were bitten to death in their cradles. A few big folk were stung by deep-burrowing darts smeared with a black stuff and died in convulsions after hours of agony. Many drank to still their fears, but the unwatched dead-drunk bled to death from neat cuts that tapped arteries. Glipkerio’s aunt, who was also Elakeria’s mother, strangled in a noose hung over a dark steep stairs made slippery by spilled oil. A venturesome harlot was overrun in the Plaza of Dark Delights and eaten alive while no one heeded her screams.

  So tricky were some of the traps the rats set and by circumstantial evidence so deft their wielding of their weapons, that many folk began to insist that some of them, especially the rare and elusive albinos, had on their forelegs tiny clawed hands rather than paws, while there were many reports of rats running on their hind legs.

  Ferrets were driven in droves down rat-holes. None returned. Eerily bag-headed, brown-uniformed soldiers rushed about in squads, searching in vain for targets for their new
and much-touted weapons. The deepest wells in the city were deliberately poisoned, on the assumption that the city of rats went as deep and tapped those wells for its water supply. Burning brimstone was recklessly poured into rat-holes and soldiers had to be detached from their primary duty to fight the resultant fires.

  An exodus begun by day continued by night from the city, by yacht, barge, rowboat, and raft, also south by cart, carriage, or afoot through the Grain Gate and even east through the Marsh Gate, until bloodily checked by command of Glipkerio, advised by Hisvin and by the city’s stiff-necked and ancient Captain General, Olegnya Mingolsbane. Lukeen’s war galley was one of the several which rounded up the fleeing civilian vessels and returned them to their docks—that is, all but the most gold-heavy, bribe-capable yachts. Shortly afterwards, rumor spread fast as news of a new sin, that there was a conspiracy to assassinate Glipkerio and set on his throne his widely-admired and studious pauper cousin, Radomix Kistomerces-Null, who was known to keep seventeen pet cats. A striking force of plain-clothes constables and Lankhmarines was sent from the Rainbow Palace through the torchlit dark to seize Radomix, but he was warned in time and lost himself and his cats in the slums, where he and they had many friends, both human and feline.

  As the night of terror grew older at snail’s pace, the streets emptied of civilian human traffic and grew peculiarly silent and dark, since all cellars and many ground floors had been abandoned and locked, barred, and barricaded from above. Only the Street of the Gods was still crowded, where the rats still had made no assault and where comfort of a sort was to be had against fears. Elsewhere the only sounds were the quick, nervous tramp of squads of constables and soldiers on night guard and patterings and chitterings that grew ever more bold and numerous.

  Reetha lay stretched before the great kitchen fire, trying to ignore Samanda sitting in her huge palace mistress’ chair and inspecting her whips, rods, paddles, and other instruments of correction, sometimes suddenly whisking one through the air. A very long thin chain confined Reetha by her neck collar to a large, recessed, iron ring-bolt in the kitchen’s tiled floor near the center of the room. Occasionally Samanda would eye her thoughtfully, and whenever the bell tolled the half hour, she’d order the girl to stand to attention and perhaps perform some trifling chore, such as filling Samanda’s wine-tankard. Yet still she never struck the girl, nor so far as Reetha knew, had sent message to Glipkerio apprising him of the time of his maid’s correction.