The First Book of Lankhmar

by Fritz Leiber

  The iron statue came thrusting and slashing in. Fafhrd took the great sword on his, chopped back, and was parried in return. And now the combat assumed the noisy deadly aspects of a conventional longsword duel, except that Graywand was notched whenever it caught the chief force of a stroke, while the statue’s somewhat longer weapon remained unmarked. Also, whenever Fafhrd got through the other’s guard with a thrust—it was almost impossible to reach him with a slash—it turned out that the other had slipped his lean body or head aside with unbelievably swift and infallible anticipations.

  It seemed to Fafhrd—at least at the time—the most fell, frustrating, and certainly the most wearisome combat in which he had ever engaged, so he suffered some feelings of hurt and irritation when the Mouser reeled up in his coffin again and leaned an elbow on the black-satin-quilted side and rested chin on fist and grinned hugely at the battlers and from time to time laughed wildly and shouted such enraging nonsense as, ‘Use Secret Thrust Two-and-a Half, Fafhrd—it’s all in the book!’ or ‘Jump in the oven!—there’d be a master stroke of strategy’ or—this to the statue—‘Remember to sweep under his feet, you rogue!’

  Backing away from one of Fafhrd’s sudden attacks, the statue bumped the table holding the remains of the Mouser’s repast—evidently its anticipatory abilities did not extend to its rear—and scraps of black food and white potsherds and jags of crystal scattered across the floor.

  The Mouser leaned out of his coffin and waved a finger waggishly. ‘You’ll have to sweep that up!’ he cried and went off into a gale of laughter.

  Backing away again, the statue bumped the black coffin. The Mouser only clapped the demonic figure comradely on the shoulder and called, ‘Set to it again, clown! Brush him down! Dust him off!’

  But the worst was perhaps when, during a brief pause while the combatants gasped and eyed each other dizzily, the Mouser waved coyly to the nearest giant spider and called his inane ‘Yoo-hoo!’ again, following it with, ‘I’ll see you, dear, after the circus.’

  Fafhrd, parrying with weary desperation a fifteenth or a fiftieth cut at his head, thought bitterly, This comes of trying to rescue small heartless madmen who would howl at their grandmothers hugged by bears. Sheelba’s cobweb has shown me the Gray One in his true idiot nature.

  The Mouser had first been furious when the sword-skirling clashed him awake from his black satin dreams, but as soon as he saw what was going on he became enchanted at the wildly comic scene.

  For, lacking Sheelba’s cobweb, what the Mouser saw was only the zany red-capped porter prancing about in his tip-curled red shoes and aiming with his broom great strokes at Fafhrd, who looked exactly as if he had climbed a moment ago out of a barrel of meal. The only part of the Northerner not whitely dusted was a mask-like stretch across his eyes.

  What made the whole thing fantastically droll was that miller-white Fafhrd was going through all the motions—and emotions!—of a genuine combat with excruciating precision, parrying the broom as if it were some great jolting scimitar or two-handed broadsword even. The broom would go sweeping up and Fafhrd would gawk at it, giving a marvelous interpretation of apprehensive goggling despite his strangely shadowed eyes. Then the broom would come sweeping down and Fafhrd would brace himself and seem to catch it on his sword only with the most prodigious effort—and then pretend to be jolted back by it!

  The Mouser had never suspected Fafhrd had such a perfected theatric talent, even if it were acting of a rather mechanical sort, lacking the broad sweeps of true dramatic genius, and he whooped with laughter.

  Then the broom brushed Fafhrd’s shoulder and blood sprang out.

  Fafhrd, wounded at last and thereby knowing himself unlikely to outendure the black statue—although the latter’s iron chest was working now like a bellows—decided on swifter measures. He loosened his hand-axe again in its loop and at the next pause in the fight, both battlers having outguessed each other by retreating simultaneously, whipped it up and hurled it at his adversary’s face.

  Instead of seeking to dodge or ward off the missile, the black statue lowered its sword and merely wove its head in a tiny circle.

  The axe closely circled the lean black head, like a silver wood-tailed comet whipping around a black sun, and came back straight at Fafhrd like a boomerang—and rather more swiftly than Fafhrd had sent it.

  But time slowed for Fafhrd then and he half ducked and caught it left-handed as it went whizzing past his cheek.

  His thoughts too went for a moment fast as his actions. He thought of how his adversary, able to dodge every frontal attack, had not avoided the table or the coffin behind him. He thought of how the Mouser had not laughed now for a dozen clashes and he looked at him and saw him, though still dazed-seeming, strangely pale and sober-faced, appearing to stare with horror at the blood running down Fafhrd’s arm.

  So crying as heartily and merrily as he could, ‘Amuse yourself! Join in the fun, clown!—here’s your slap-stick,’ Fafhrd tossed the axe toward the Mouser.

  Without waiting to see the result of that toss—perhaps not daring to—he summoned up his last reserves of speed and rushed at the black statue in a circling advance that drove it back toward the coffin.

  Without shifting his stupid horrified gaze, the Mouser stuck out a hand at the last possible moment and caught the axe by the handle as it spun lazily down.

  As the black statue retreated near the coffin and poised for what promised to be a stupendous counter-attack, the Mouser leaned out and, now grinning foolishly again, sharply rapped its black pate with the axe.

  The iron head split like a coconut, but did not come apart. Fafhrd’s hand-axe, wedged in it deeply, seemed to turn all at once to iron like the statue and its black haft was wrenched out of the Mouser’s hand as the statue stiffened up straight and tall.

  The Mouser stared at the split head woefully, like a child who hadn’t known knives cut.

  The statue brought its great sword flat against its chest, like a staff on which it might lean but did not, and it fell rigidly forward and hit the floor with a ponderous clank.

  At that stony-metallic thundering, white wildfire ran across the Black Wall, lightening the whole shop like a distant levinbolt, and iron-basalt thundering echoed from deep within it.

  Fafhrd sheathed Graywand, dragged the Mouser out of the black coffin—the fight hadn’t left him the strength to lift even his small friend—and shouted in his ear, ‘Come on! Run!’

  The Mouser ran for the Black Wall.

  Fafhrd snagged his wrist as he went by and plunged toward the arched door, dragging the Mouser after him.

  The thunder faded out and there came a low whistle, cajolingly sweet.

  Wildfire raced again across the Black Wall behind them—much more brightly this time, as if a lightning storm were racing toward them.

  The white glare striking ahead imprinted one vision indelibly on Fafhrd’s brain: the giant spider in the inmost cage pressed against the bloodred bars to gaze down at them. It had pale legs and a velvet red body and a mask of sleek thick golden hair from which eight jet eyes peered, while its fanged jaws hanging down in the manner of the wide blades of a pair of golden scissors rattled together in a wild staccato rhythm like castanets.

  That moment the cajoling whistle was repeated. It too seemed to be coming from the red and golden spider.

  But strangest of all to Fafhrd was to hear the Mouser, dragged unwillingly along behind him, cry out in answer to the whistling, ‘Yes, darling, I’m coming. Let me go, Fafhrd! Let me climb to her! Just one kiss! Sweetheart!’

  ‘Stop it, Mouser,’ Fafhrd growled, his flesh crawling in mid-plunge. ‘It’s a giant spider!’

  ‘Wipe the cobwebs out of your eyes, Fafhrd,’ the Mouser retorted pleadingly and most unwittingly to the point. ‘It’s a gorgeous girl! I’ll never see her ticklesome like—and I’ve paid for her! Sweetheart!’

  Then the booming thunder drowned his voice and any more whistling there might have been, and the wildfire came a
gain, brighter than day, and another great thunderclap right on its heels, and the floor shuddered and the whole shop shook, and Fafhrd dragged the Mouser through the trefoil-arched doorway, and there was another great flash and clap.

  The flash showed a semicircle of Lankhmarians peering ashen-faced overshoulder as they retreated across the Plaza of Dark Delights from the remarkable indoor thunderstorm that threatened to come out after them.

  Fafhrd spun around. The archway had turned to blank wall.

  The Bazaar of the Bizarre was gone from the World of Nehwon.

  The Mouser, sitting on the dank flags where Fafhrd had dragged him, babbled wailfully, ‘The secrets of time and space! The lore of the gods! The mysteries of Hell! Black nirvana! Red and gold Heaven! Five pennies gone forever!’

  Fafhrd set his teeth. A mighty resolve, rising from his many recent angers and bewilderments, crystallized in him.

  Thus far he had used Sheelba’s cobweb—and Ningauble’s tatter too—only to serve others. Now he would use them for himself! He would peer at the Mouser more closely and at every person he knew. He would study even his own reflection! But most of all, he would stare Sheelba and Ning to their wizardly cores!

  There came from overhead a low ‘Hssst!’

  As he glanced up he felt something snatched from around his neck and, with the faintest tingling sensation, from off his eyes.

  For a moment there was a shimmer traveling upward and through it he seemed to glimpse distortedly, as through thick glass, a black face with a cobwebby skin that entirely covered mouth and nostrils and eyes.

  Then that dubious flash was gone and there were only two cowled heads peering down at him from over the wall top. There was chuckling laughter.

  Then both cowled heads drew back out of sight and there was only the edge of the roof and the sky and the stars and the blank wall.

  Swords in the

  Mist

  I

  The Cloud of Hate

  Muffled drums beat out a nerve-scratching rhythm, and red lights flickered hypnotically in the underground Temple of Hates, where five thousand ragged worshipers knelt and abased themselves and ecstatically pressed foreheads against the cold and gritty cobbles as the trance took hold and the human venom rose in them.

  The drumbeat was low. And save for snarls and mewlings, the inner pulsing was inaudible. Yet together they made a hellish vibration which threatened to shake the city and land of Lankhmar and the whole world of Nehwon.

  Lankhmar had been at peace for many moons, and so the hates were greater. Tonight, furthermore, at a spot halfway across the city, Lankhmar’s black-togaed nobility celebrated with merriment and feasting and twinkling dance the betrothal of their Overlord’s daughter to the Prince of Ilthmar, and so the hates were redoubled.

  The single-halled subterranean temple was so long and wide and at the same time so irregularly planted with thick pillars that at no point could a person see more than a third of the way across it. Yet it had a ceiling so low that at any point a man standing tall could have brushed it with his fingertips—except that here all groveled. The air was swooningly fetid. The dark bent backs of the hate-ensorceled worshipers made a kind of hummocky dark ground, from which the nitre-crusted stone pillars rose like gray tree trunks.

  The masked Archpriest of the Hates lifted a skinny finger. Parchment-thin iron cymbals began to clash in unison with the drums and the furnace-red flickerings, wringing to an unendurable pitch the malices and envies of the blackly enraptured communicants.

  Then in the gloom of that great slitlike hall, dim pale tendrils began to rise from the dark hummocky ground of the bent backs, as though a white, swift-growing ghost-grass had been seeded there. The tendrils, which in another world might have been described as ectoplasmic, quickly multiplied, thickened, lengthened, and then coalesced into questing white serpentine shapes, so that it seemed as if tongues of thick river-fog had come licking down into this sub-cellar from the broad-flowing river Hlal.

  The white serpents coiled past the pillars, brushed the low ceiling, moistly caressed the backs of their devotees and source, and then in turn coalesced to pour up the curving black hole of a narrow spiral stairway, the stone steps of which were worn almost to chute-like smoothness—a sinuously billowing white cylinder in which a redness lurked.

  And all the while the drums and cymbals did not falter for a single beat, nor did the Hell-light tenders cease to crank the wooden wheels on which shielded, red-burning candles were affixed, nor did the eyes of the Archpriest flicker once sideways in their wooden mask, nor did one mesmerized bent soul look up.

  Along a misted alley overhead there was hurrying home to the thieves’ quarter a beggar girl, skinny-frail of limb and with eyes big as a lemur’s peering fearfully from a tiny face of elfin beauty. She saw the white pillar, slug-flat now, pouring out between the bars of a window-slit level with the pavement, and although there were thick chilly tendrils of river-fog already following her, she knew that this was different.

  She tried to run around the thing, but swift almost as a serpent striking, it whipped across to the opposite wall, barring her way. She ran back, but it outraced her and made a U, penning her against the unyielding wall. Then she only stood still and shook as the fog-serpent narrowed and grew denser and came wreathing around her. Its tip swayed like the head of a poisonous snake preparing to strike and then suddenly dipped toward her breast. She stopped shaking then and her head fell back and the pupils rolled up in her lemur-like eyes so that they showed only great whites, and she dropped to the pavement limp as a rag.

  The fog-serpent nosed at her for a few moments, then as though irked at finding no life remaining, flipped her over on her face, and went swiftly questing in the same direction the river-fog itself was taking: across city toward the homes of the nobles and the lantern-jeweled palace of the Overlord.

  Save for an occasional fleeting red glint in the one, the two sorts of fog were identical.

  Beside a dry stone horse-trough at the juncture of five alleys, two men curled close to either side of a squat brazier in which a little charcoal glowed. The spot was so near the quarter of the nobles that the sounds of music and laughter came at intervals, faintly, along with a dim rainbow-glow of light. The two men might have been a hulking beggar and a small one, except that their tunics and leggings and cloaks, though threadbare, were of good stuff, and scabbarded weapons lay close to the hand of each.

  The larger said, ‘There’ll be fog tonight. I smell it coming from the Hlal.’ This was Fafhrd, brawny-armed, pale and serene of face, reddish gold of hair.

  For reply the smaller shivered and fed the brazier two small gobbets of charcoal and said sardonically, ‘Next predict glaciers!—advancing down the Street of the Gods, by preference.’ That was the Mouser, eyes wary, lips quirking, cheeks muffled by gray hood drawn close.

  Fafhrd grinned. As a tinkling gust of distant song came by, he asked the dark air that carried it, ‘Now why aren’t we warmly cushioned somewhere inside tonight, well drunk and sweetly embraced?’

  For answer the Gray Mouser drew from his belt a ratskin pouch and slapped it by its drawstrings against his palm. It flattened as it hit and nothing chinked. For good measure he writhed at Fafhrd the backs of his ten fingers, all ringless.

  Fafhrd grinned again and said to the dusky space around them, which was now filled with the finest mist, the fog’s forerunner, ‘Now that’s a strange thing. We’ve won I know not how many jewels and oddments of gold and electrum in our adventurings—and even letters of credit on the Guild of the Grain Merchants. Where have they all flown to?—the credit-letters on parchment wings, the jewels jetting fire like tiny red and green and pearly cuttlefish. Why aren’t we rich?’

  The Mouser snorted, ‘Because you dribble away our get on worthless drabs, or oftener still pour it out for some noble whim—some plot of bogus angels to storm the walls of Hell. Meantime I stay poor nursemaiding you.’

  Fafhrd laughed and retorted, ‘You overlook
your own whimsical imprudences, such as slitting the Overlord’s purse and picking his pocket too the selfsame night you rescued and returned him his lost crown. No, Mouser, I think we’re poor because—’ Suddenly he lifted an elbow and flared his nostrils as he snuffed the chill moist air. ‘There’s a taint in the fog tonight,’ he announced.

  The Mouser said dryly, ‘I already smell dead fish, burnt fat, horse dung, tickly lint, Lankhmar sausage gone stale, cheap temple incense burnt by the ten-pound cake, rancid oil, moldy grain, slaves’ barracks, embalmers’ tanks crowded to the black brim, and the stink of a cathedral full of unwashed carters and trulls celebrating orgiastic rites—and now you tell me of a taint!’

  ‘It is something different from all those,’ Fafhrd said, peering successively down the five alleys. ‘Perhaps the last…’ His voice trailed off doubtfully, and he shrugged.

  Strands of fog came questing through small high-set street-level windows into the tavern called the Rats’ Nest, interlacing curiously with the soot-trail from a failing torch, but unnoticed except by an old harlot who pulled her patchy fur cloak closer at her throat.

  All eyes were on the wrist game being played across an ancient oaken table by the famed bravo Gnarlag and a dark-skinned mercenary almost as big-thewed as he. Right elbows firmly planted and right hands bone-squeezingly gripped, each strained to force the back of the other’s wrist down against the ringed and scarred and carved and knife-stuck wood. Gnarlag, who scowled sneeringly, had the advantage by a thumb’s length.

  One of the fog-strands, as though itself a devotee of the wrist game and curious about the bout, drifted over Gnarlag’s shoulder. To the old harlot the inquisitive fog-strand looked redly-veined—a reflection from the torches, no doubt, but she prayed it brought fresh blood to Gnarlag.

  The fog-finger touched the taut arm. Gnarlag’s sneering look turned to one of pure hate, and the muscles of his forearm seemed to double in thickness as he rotated it more than a half turn. There was a muffled snap and a gasp of anguish. The mercenary’s wrist had been broken.