by Fritz Leiber
‘Indeed we did!’ Reetha smirked like a sated leopardess. ‘What a sizzling she made! Look, doll, her belt of office does go three times round my waist. Oh yes! we cornered her in the kitchen and brought her down. Each of us took a pin from her hair. Then—’
‘Spare me the details, darling,’ the Mouser cut her short. ‘This night for nine hours I’ve been a rat, with all of a rat’s nasty feelings, and that’s quite long enough. Come with me, pet; there’s something we must attend to ere the crowd gets too thick.’
When they returned after a short space, the Mouser was carrying a box wrapped in his cloak, while Reetha wore a violet robe, around which was still triply looped, however, Samanda’s belt. And the crowd had thickened indeed. Radomix Kistomerces-no-longer-Null had already been informally vested with Lankhmar’s overlordship and was sitting somewhat bemused on the golden seashell audience couch along with his seventeen cats and also a smiling Elakeria, who had wrapped her coverlet like a sari around her sylphlike figure.
The Mouser drew Fafhrd aside. ‘That’s quite a girl you’ve got,’ he remarked, rather inadequately, of Kreeshkra.
‘Yes, isn’t she,’ Fafhrd agreed blandly.
‘You should have seen mine,’ the Mouser boasted. ‘I don’t mean Reetha there, I mean my weird one. She had—’
‘Don’t let Kreeshkra hear you use that word,’ Fafhrd warned sharply through sub voce.
‘Well, anyhow, whenever I want to see her again,’ the Mouser continued conspiratorially, ‘I have only to swallow the contents of this black vial and—’
‘I’ll take charge of that,’ Reetha announced crisply, snatching it out of his hand from behind him. She glanced at it, then expertly pitched it through a window into the Inner Sea.
The Mouser started a glare at her which turned into an infuriating smile.
Flapping her black robe to cool her, Kreeshkra came up behind Fafhrd. ‘Introduce me to your friends, dear,’ she directed.
Meanwhile around the golden couch was an ever-thickening press of courtiers, nobles, councillors, and officers. New titles were being awarded by the dozen to all first-comers. Sentences of perpetual banishment and confiscation of property were being laid on Hisvin and all others absent, guilty or guiltless. Reports were coming in of the successful fighting of all fires in the city and the complete vanishment of rats from its streets. Plans were being laid for the complete extirpation from under the city of the entire rat-metropolis of Lankhmar Below—subtle and complex plans which did not sound to the Mouser entirely practical. It was becoming clear that under the saintly Radomix Kistomerces, Lankhmar would more than ever be ruled by foolish fantasy and shameless greed. At moments like these it was easy to understand why the Gods of Lankhmar were so furiously exasperated by their city.
Various lukewarm thanks were extended to the Mouser and Fafhrd, although most of the newcomers seemed not at all clear as to what part the two heroes had placed in conquering the rats, despite Elakeria’s repeated accounts of the final fighting and of Glipkerio’s sea-plunge. Soon, clearly, seeds would be planted against the Mouser and Fafhrd in Radomix’s saintly-vague mind, and their bright heroic roles imperceptibly darkened to blackest villainy.
At the same time it became evident that the new court was disturbed by the restless tramping of the four ominous war-horses, three Ghoulish and one Mingol, and that the presence of an animated skeleton was becoming more and more disquieting, for Kreeshkra continued to wear her black robe and hood like a loose garment. Fafhrd and the Mouser looked at one another, and then at Kreeshkra and Reetha, and they realized that there was agreement between them. The Northerner mounted the Mingol mare, and the Mouser and Reetha the two leftover Ghoulish horses, and they all four made their way out of the Rainbow Palace as quietly as is possible when hooves clop on tile.
Thereafter there swiftly grew in Lankhmar a new legend of the Gray Mouser and Fafhrd: how as rat-small midget and bell-tower-tall giant they had saved Lankhmar from the rats, but at the price of being personally summoned and escorted to the After-world by Death himself, for the black-robed ivory skeleton, was remembered as male, which would doubtless have irked Kreeshkra greatly.
However, as next morning the four rode under the fading stars toward the paling east along the twisty causeway across the Great Salt Marsh, they were all merry enough in their own fashions. They had commandeered three donkeys and laden them with the box of jewels the Mouser had abstracted from Glipkerio’s bed-chamber and with food and drink for a long journey, though exactly where that journey would lead they had not yet agreed. Fafhrd argued for a trip to his beloved Cold Waste, with a long stopover on the way at the City of Ghouls. The Mouser was equally enthusiastic for the Eastern Lands, slyly pointing out to Reetha what an ideal place it would be for sunbathing unclad.
Yanking up her violet robe to make herself more comfortable, Reetha nodded her agreement. ‘Clothes are so itchy,’ she said. ‘I can hardly bear them. I like to ride bareback—my back, not the horse’s. While hair is even itchier—I can feel mine growing. You will have to shave me every day, dear,’ she added to the Mouser.
He agreed to take on that chore, but added, ‘However, I can’t concur with you altogether, sweet. Besides protecting from brambles and dust, clothes give one a certain dignity.’
Reetha retorted tartly, ‘I think there’s far more dignity in the naked body.’
‘Pish, girl,’ Kreeshkra told her, ‘what can compare with the dignity of naked bones?’ But glancing toward Fafhrd’s red beard and red, curled chest, she added, ‘However, there is something to be said for hair.’
Swords and
Ice Magic
Contents
THE SADNESS OF THE EXECUTIONER
A danse macabre as viewed from the vantage point of its choreographer. He contemplates his own mortality and finds compensation in the search for knowledge. Of melancholy, madness, and other moods and mysteries. The advantages of early rising and late retiring. An economic slaying and a salutary but not therefore altogether unsadistic rape. Savoir-faire. The rewards of craftsmanship and unceasing professional discipline. How each heartbeat, like toll of funeral bell, has in it something of eternity.
BEAUTY AND THE BEASTS
Shadowland’s master once more essays. Of the dual nature of one woman and of a double duel. Death without corpses.
TRAPPED IN THE SHADOWLAND
Of the intolerably hot, dry texture of life and the alluringly dark, moist landscape of its contrary. How a map may be the territory. Geomancy. Needles and swords. Of loves fled and infatuations pursued.
THE BAIT
Death repeats his o’erancient strategem. Those closest confederates: girls and demons. The Twain grown complacent.
UNDER THE THUMBS OF THE GODS
Egregious conceit and vasty vanity of heroes. Mischievousness of gods. Their problems. Infinite variety and instructional cruelty of women. A pageant of loves lost, or, rather, presently otherwise occupied. A surfeit of gander-sauce. Where least expected, a qualified consolation.
TRAPPED IN THE SEA OF STARS
Wherein the secrets of the will-o-the-wisp are revealed and the geography of Nehwon extended southward. Captives of the Great Equatorial Current. The Mouser turns natural philosopher: distinguishes two species of light and energy, expounds the doctrine of pre-established harmony, discerns the true inwardness of waterspouts, invokes the Scimitar of Ildritch. A quibble of girls. Tempest fugit. The great aurochs.
THE FROST MONSTREME
A prelude in a tavern and at sea. Fabulous isles and gold not faery. Trials of leaders and tribulations of followers. Supernal intrigue. Ice magic.
RIME ISLE
A tragical comedy of wandering gods and restless mortals. Improvisations of puppet masters and also of puppets—which is which? The affinity of gods and children and the likeness of women and men. Monsters of sea, earth, air, and fire. Lemmings and trolls. A fish dinner in Salthaven.
I
The Sadness of the Executioner
There was a sky that was always gray.
There was a place that was always far away.
There was a being who was always sad.
Sitting on his dark-cushioned, modest throne in his low, rambling castle in the heart of the Shadowland, Death shook his pale head and pommeled a little his opalescent temples and slightly pursed his lips, which were the color of violet grapes with the silvery bloom still on, above his slender figure armored in chain mail and his black belt, studded with silver skulls tarnished almost as black, from which hung his naked, irresistible sword.
He was a relatively minor death, only the Death of the World of Nehwon, but he had his problems. Tenscore flickering or flaring human lives to have their wicks pinched in the next twenty heartbeats. And although the heartbeats of Death resound like a leaden bell far underground and each has a little of eternity in it, yet they do finally pass. Only nineteen left now. And the Lords of Necessity, who outrank Death, still to be satisfied.
Let’s see, thought Death with a vast coolness that yet had a tiny seething in it, one hundred sixty peasants and savages, twenty nomads, ten warriors, two beggars, a whore, a merchant, a priest, an aristocrat, a craftsman, a king, and two heroes. That would keep his books straight.
Within three heartbeats he had chosen one hundred and ninety-six of the tenscore and unleashed their banes upon them: chiefly invisible, poisonous creatures within their flesh which suddenly began to multiply into resistless hordes, here a dark and bulky bloodclot set loose with feather touch to glide through a vein and block a vital portal, there a long-eroded artery wall tunneled through at last; sometimes slippery slime oozing purposefully onto the next footrest of a climber, sometimes an adder told where to wriggle and when to strike, or a spider where to lurk.
Death, by his own strict code known only to himself, had cheated just a little on the king. For some time in one of the deepest and darkest corners of his mind he had been fashioning the doom of the current overlord of Lankhmar, chiefest city and land in the World of Nehwon. This overlord was a gentle and tenderhearted scholar, who truly loved only his seventeen cats, yet wished no other being in Nehwon ill, and who was forever making things difficult for Death by pardoning felons, reconciling battling brothers and feuding families, hurrying barges or wains of grain to regions of starvation, rescuing distressed small animals, feeding pigeons, fostering the study of medicine and kindred arts, and most simply of all by always having about him, like finest fountain spray on hottest day, an atmosphere of sweet and wise calm which kept swords in scabbards, brows unknotted, and teeth unclenched. But now, at this very instant, by Death’s crooked, dark-alleyed plotting hidden almost but not quite from himself, the thin wrists of the benign monarch of Lankhmar were being pricked in innocent play by his favoritest cat’s needle-sharp claws, which had by a jealous, thin-nosed nephew of the royal ailurophile been late last night envenomed with the wind-swift poison of the rare emperor snake of tropical Klesh.
Yet on the remaining four and especially the two heroes—Death assured himself a shade guiltily—he would work solely by improvisation. In no time at all he had a vision of Lithquil, the Mad Duke of Ool Hrusp, watching from high balcony by torchlight three northern berserks wielding saw-edged scimitars joined in mortal combat with four transparent-fleshed, pink-skeletoned ghouls armed with poniards and battle-axes. It was the sort of heavy experiment Lithquil never tired of setting up and witnessing to the slaughterhouse end, and incidentally it was getting rid of the majority of the ten warriors Death had ticketed for destruction.
Death felt a less than momentary qualm recalling how well Lithquil had served him for many years. Even the best of servants must some day be pensioned off and put to grass, and in none of the worlds Death had heard of, certainly not Nehwon, was there a dearth of willing executioners, including passionately devoted, incredibly untiring, and exquisitely fantastic-minded ones. So even as the vision came to Death, he sent his thought at it and the rearmost ghoul looked up with his invisible eyes, so that his pink-broidered black skull-sockets rested upon Lithquil, and before the two guards flanking the Mad Duke could quite swing in their ponderous shields to protect their master, the ghoul’s short-handled ax, already poised overshoulder, had flown through the narrowing gap and buried itself in Lithquil’s nose and forehead.
Before Lithquil could gin crumple, before any of the watchers around him could nock an arrow to dispatch or menace the assassin, before the naked slavegirl who was the promised but seldom-delivered prize for the surviving gladiator could start to draw breath for a squealing scream, Death’s magic gaze was fixed on Horborixen, citadel-city of the King of Kings. But not on the interior of the Great Golden Palace, though Death got a fleeting glimpse of that, but on the inwardness of a dingy workshop where a very old man looked straight up from his rude pallet and truly wished that the cool dawn light, which was glimmering through window- and lower-crack, would never more trouble the cobwebs that made ghostly arches and buttresses overhead.
This ancient, who bore the name of Gorex, was Horborixen’s and perhaps all Nehwon’s skillfulest worker in precious and military metals and deviser of cunningest engines, but he had lost all zest in his work or any other aspect of life for the last weary twelve-month, in fact ever since his great-granddaughter Eesafem, who was his last surviving kin and most gifted apprentice in his difficult craft, a slim, beauteous, and barely nubile girl with almond eyes sharp as needles, had been summarily abducted by the harem scouts of the King of Kings. His furnace was ice cold, his tools gathered dust, he had given himself up entirely to sorrow.
He was so sad in fact that Death had thought to add a drop of his own melancholy humor to the black bile coursing slowly and miserably through the tired veins of Gorex, and the latter painlessly and instantly expired, becoming one with his cobwebs.
So!—the aristocrat and the craftsman were disposed of in no more than two snaps of Death’s long, slender, pearly mid-finger and thumb, leaving only the two heroes.
Twelve heartbeats to go.
Death most strongly felt that, if only for artistry’s sake, heroes should be made to make their exits from the stage of life in the highest melodramatic style, with only one in fifty score let to die of old age and in the bed of sleep for the object of irony. This necessity was incidentally so great that it permitted, he believed as part of his self-set rules, the use of outwardly perceptible and testifiable magic and need not be puttied over with realism, as in the case of more humdrum beings. So now for two whole heartbeats he listened only to the faint simmer of his cool mind, while lightly massaging his temples again with nacreous knuckles. Then his thoughts shot toward one Fafhrd, a largely couth and most romantical barbarian, the soles of whose feet and mind were nonetheless firmly set in fact, particularly when he was either very sober, or very drunk, and toward this one’s lifelong comrade, the Gray Mouser, perhaps the cleverest and wittiest thief in all Nehwon and certainly the one with either the bonniest or bitterest self-conceit.
The still less than momentary qualm which Death experienced at this point was far deeper and stronger than that which he had felt in the case of Lithquil. Fafhrd and the Mouser had served him well and in vastly more varied fashion than the Mad Duke, whose eyes had been fixed on death to the point of crossedness, making his particular form of ax-dispatch most appropriate. Yes, the large vagabond Northerner and the small, wry-smiling, eyebrow-arching cutpurse had been most useful pawns in some of Death’s finest games.
Yet without exception every pawn must eventually be snapped up and tossed in box in the course of the greatest game, even if it have advanced to the ultimate rank and become king or queen. So Death reminded himself, who knew that even he himself must ultimately die, and so he set to his intuitively creative task relentlessly and swifter than ever arrow or rocket or falling star flew.
After the fleetingest glance southwest toward the vast, dawn-pink city of Lankhmar, to reassure himself that Fafhrd and the Mouser still occupied a rickety penthouse atop
an inn which catered to the poorer sort of merchants and faced on Wall Street near the Marsh Gate, Death looked back at the late Lithquil’s slaughter pen. In his improvisations he regularly made a practice of using materials closest at hand, as any good artist will.
Lithquil was in mid-crumple. The slavegirl was screaming. The mightiest of the berserks, his big face contorted by a fighting fury that would never fade till sheer exhaustion forced it, had just slashed off the bonily pink, invisibly fleshed head of Lithquil’s assassin. And quite unjustly and even idiotically—but most of Death’s lesser banes outwardly appear to work in such wise—a halfscore arrows were winging from the gallery toward Lithquil’s avenger.
Death magicked and the berserk was no longer there. The ten arrows transfixed empty air, but by that time Death, again following the practice of economy in materials, was peering once more at Horborixen and into a rather large cell lit by high, barred windows in the midst of the harem of the King of Kings. Rather oddly, there was a small furnace in the cell, a quenching bath, two small anvils, several hammers, many other tools for working metals, as well as a small store of precious and workaday metals themselves.
In the center of the cell, examining herself in a burnished silver mirror with almond eyes sharp as needles and now also quite as mad as the berserk’s, there stood a deliciously slender girl of no more than sixteen, unclad save for four ornaments of silver filigree. She was, in fact, unclad in extremest degree, since except for her eyelashes, her every last hair had been removed and wherever such hair had been she was now tattooed in fine patterns of green and blue.
For seven moons now Eesafem had suffered solitary confinement for mutilating in a harem fight the faces of the King of Kings’ favoritest concubines, twin Ilthmarts. Secretly the King of Kings had not been at all displeased by this event. Truth to tell, the facial mutilations of his special darlings slightly increased their attractiveness to his jaded appetite. Still, harem discipline had to be kept, hence Eesafem’s confinement, loss of all hairs—most carefully one at a time—and tattooing.