Selected Stories

by Fritz Leiber

  "I'll say not," Kos agreed, suddenly sober. "I know that it scares me. What if the gods should die? A hellish thought."

  "That infant bugaboo!" Issek told him peevishly. Then turning to Mog with quickening interest, "So, if I read you right, old Arach, let's narrow your silky Mouser's interests in and in from the adventure-beckoning horizon to the things closest around him: the bed table, the dinner board, the privy, and the kitchen sink. Not the far-leaping highway, but the gutter. Not the ocean, but the puddle. Not the grand view outside, but the bleared windowpane. Not the thunder-blast, but the knuckle-crack—or ear-pop."

  Mog narrowed his eight eyes happily. "And for your Fafhrd, I would suggest a different old-age curse, to drive a wedge between them, so they can't understand or help each other: that we put a geas upon him to count the stars. His interests in all else will fade and fail; he'll have mind only for those tiny lights in the sky."

  "So that, with his head in the clouds," Issek pictured, catching on quick, "he'll stumble and bruise himself again and again, and miss all opportunities of earthly delights."

  "Yes, and make him memorize their names and all their patterns!" Kos put in. "There's busy-work for an eternity. I never could abide the things myself. There's such a senseless mess of stars, like flies or fleas. An insult to the gods to say that we created them!"

  "And then, when those two have sufficiently humbled themselves to us and done suitable penance," Issek purred, "we will consider taking off or ameliorating their curses."

  "I say, leave 'em on always," Kos argued. "No leniency. Eternal damnation!—that's the stuff !"

  "That question can be decided when it arises," Mog opined. "Come, gentlemen, to work! We've some damnations to devise in detail and deliver."

  Back at the Sea Wrack Tavern, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser had, despite the latter's apprehensions, been invited to join with and buy a round of bitter ale for their lady-friends Afreyt and Cif, leading and sometimes office-holding citizens of Rime Isle, spinster-matriarchs of otherwise scionless dwindling old families in that strange republic, and Fafhrd's and the Mouser's partners and co-adventurers of a good year's standing in questing, business, and (this last more recently) bed. The questing part had consisted of the almost bloodless routing from the Isle of an invading naval force of maniacal Sea-Mingols, with the help of twelve tall berserks and twelve small warrior-thieves the two heroes had brought with them, and the dubious assistance of the two universes-wandering hobo gods Odin and Loki, and (minor quest) a small expedition to recover certain civic treasures of the Isle, a set of gold artifacts called the Ikons of Reason. And they had been hired to do these things by Cif and Afreyt, so business had been mixed with questing in their relationship from the very start. Other business had been a merchant venture of the Mouser (Captain Mouser for this purpose) in Fafhrd's galley Seahawk with a mixed crew of berserks and thieves, and goods supplied by the ladies, to the oft-frozen port of No-Ombrulsk on Nehwonmainland—that and various odd jobs done by their men and by the women and girls employed by and owing fealty to Cif and Afreyt.

  As for the bed part, both couples, though not yet middle-aged, at least in looks, were veterans of amorous goings-on, wary and courteous in all such doings, entering upon any new relationships, including these, with a minimum of commitment and a maximum of reservations. Ever since the tragic deaths of their first loves, Fafhrd's and the Mouser's erotic solacing had mostly come from a very odd lot of hard-bitten if beauteous slave-girls, vagabond hoydens, and demonic princesses, folk easily come by if at all and even more easily lost, accidents rather than goals of their weird adventurings; both sensed that anything with the Rime Isle ladies would have to be a little more serious at least. While Afreyt's and Cif's love-adventures had been equally transient, either with unromantic and hardheaded Rime Islanders, who are atheistical realists even in youth, or with sea-wanderers of one sort or another, come like the rain—or thunder-squall, and as swiftly gone.

  All this being considered, things did seem to be working out quite well for the two couples in the bed area.

  And, truth to tell, this was a greater satisfaction and relief to the Mouser and Fafhrd than either would admit even to himself. For each was indeed beginning to find extended questing a mite tiring, especially ones like this last which, rather than being one of their usual lone-wolf forays, involved the recruitment and command of other men and the taking on of larger and divided responsibilities. It was natural for them, after such exertions, to feel that a little rest and quiet enjoyment was now owed them, a little surcease from the batterings of fate and chance and new desire. And, truth to tell, the ladies Cif and Afreyt were on the verge of admitting in their secretest hearts something of the same feelings.

  So all four of them found it pleasant during this particular Rime Isle twilight to take a little bitter ale together and chat of this day's doings and tomorrow's plans and reminisce about their turning of the Mingols and ask each other gentle questions about the times before they'd all four met—and each flirt privily and cautiously with the notion that each now had two or three persons on whom they might always rely fully, rather than one like-sexed comrade only.

  During the course of this gossiping Fafhrd mentioned again his and the Mouser's fantasy that they were halves—or perhaps lesser fractions, fragments only—of some noted or notorious past being, explaining why their thoughts so often chimed together.

  "That's odd," Cif interjected, "for Afreyt and I have had like notion and for like reason: that she and I were spirit-halves of the great Rimish witch-queen Skeldir, who held off the Simorgyans again and again in ancient times when that island boasted an empire and was above the waves instead of under them. What was your hero's name—or mighty rogue's?—if that likes you better."

  "I know not, lady, perhaps he lived in times too primitive for names, when man and beast were closer. He was identified by his battle-growling—a leonine cough deep in the throat when'er he entered an encounter."

  "Another like point!" Cif noted. "Queen Skeldir announced her presence by a short dry laugh—her invariable utterance when facing dangers, especially those of a sort to astound and confound the bravest."

  "Gusorio's my name for our beastish forebear," the Mouser threw in. "I know not what Fafhrd thinks. Great Gusorio. Gusorio the Growler."

  "Now he begins to sound like an animal," Afreyt broke in. "Tell me, have you ever been granted vision or dream of this Gusorio, or heard perhaps in darkest night his battle growl?"

  But the Mouser was studying the dinted table top. He bent his head as his gaze traveled across it.

  "No, milady," Fafhrd answered for his abstracted comrade. "At least not I. It's something we heard of a witch or fortuneteller, figment, not fact. Have you ever heard Queen Skeldir's short dry laugh, or had sight of that fabled warrior sorceress?"

  "Neither I nor Cif," Afreyt admitted, "though she is in the Isle's history parchments."

  But even as she answered him, Fafhrd's questioning gaze strayed past her. She looked behind and saw the Sea Wrack's open doorway and the gathering night.

  Cif stood up. "So it's agreed we dine at Afreyt's in a half hour's time?"

  The two men nodded somewhat abstractedly. Fafhrd leaned his head to the right as he continued to stare past Afreyt, who with a smile obligingly shifted hers in the opposite direction.

  The Mouser leaned back and bent his head a little more as his gaze trailed down from the table top to its leg.

  Fafhrd observed, "Astarion sets soon after the sun these nights. There's little time to observe her."

  "God forbid I should stand in the evening star's way," Afreyt murmured humorously as she too arose. "Come, cousin."

  The Mouser left off watching the cockroach as it reached the floor. It had limped interestingly, lacking a mid leg. He and Fafhrd drank off their bitters, then slowly followed their ladies out and down the narrow street, the one's eyes thoughtfully delving in the gutter, as if there might be treasure there, the other's roving the sky as the stars
winked on, naming those he knew and numbering, by altitude and direction, those he didn't.

  Their work well launched, Sheelba retired to Marsh center and Ningauble toward his cavern, the understorm abating, a good omen. While the three gods smiled, invigorated by their cursing. The slum corner of Heaven they occupied now seemed less chilly to Issek and less sweatily enervating to Kos, while Mog's devious mind spider stepped down more pleasant channels.

  Yes, the seed was well planted and left to germinate in silence might have developed as intended, but some gods, and some sorcerers too, cannot resist boasting and gossiping, and so by way of talkative priests and midwives and vagabonds, word of what was intended came to the ears of the mighty, including two who considered themselves well rid of Fafhrd and the Mouser and did not want them back in Lankhmar at all. And the mighty are great worriers and spend much time preventing anything that troubles their peace of mind.

  And so it was that Pulgh Arthonax, penurious and perverse overlord of Lankhmar, who hated heroes of all description, but especially fair-complected big ones like Fafhrd, and Hamomel, thrifty and ruthless grand master of the Thieves' Guild there, who detested the Mouser generally as a freelance competitor and particularly as one who had lured twelve promising apprentices away from the guild to be his henchmen—these two took counsel together and commissioned the Assassins Order, an elite within the Slayers' Brotherhood, to dispatch the Twain in Rime Isle before they should point toe toward Lankhmar. And because Arth-Pulgh and Hamomel were both most miserly magnates and insatiably greedy withal, they beat down the Order's price as far as they could and made it a condition of the commission that three-fourths of any portable booty found on or near the doomed Twain be returned to them as their lawful share.

  So the Order drew up death warrants, chose by lot two of its currently unoccupied fellows, and in solemn secret ceremony attended only by the Master and the Recorder divested these of their identities and rechristened them the Death of Fafhrd and the Death of the Gray Mouser, by which names only they should henceforth be known to each other and within the profession until the death warrants were served and their commissions fulfilled.

  Next day repairs to Seahawk continued, the low tide repeating, Witches Moon being only one day old. During a late morning break Fafhrd moved apart from his men a little and scanned the high bright sky toward north and east, his gaze ranging. Skor ventured to follow him across the wet sand and copy his peerings. He saw nothing in the gray-blue heavens, but experience had taught him his captain had exceptionally keen eyesight.

  "Sea eagles?" he asked softly.

  Fafhrd looked at him thoughtfully, then smiled, shaking his head, and confided, "I was imagining which stars would be there, were it now night."

  Skor's forehead wrinkled puzzledly. "Stars by day?"

  Fafhrd nodded. "Yes. Where think you the stars are by day?"

  "Gone," Skor answered, his forehead clearing. "They go away at dawn and return at evening. Their lights are extinguished—like winter campfires! for surely it must be cold where the stars are, higher than mountaintops. Until the sun comes out to warm up things, of course."

  Fafhrd shook his head. "The stars march west across the sky each night in the same formations which we recognize year after year, dozen years after dozen, and I would guess gross after gross. They do not skitter for the horizon when day breaks or seek out lairs and earth holes, but go on marching with the sun's glare hiding their lights—under cover of day, one might express it."

  "Stars shining by day?" Skor questioned, doing a fair job of hiding his surprise and bafflement. Then he caught Fafhrd's drift, or thought he did, and a certain wonder appeared in his eyes. He knew his captain was a good general who made a fetish of keeping track of the enemy's position especially in terrain affording concealment, as forest on land or fog at sea. So by his very nature his captain had applied the same rule to the stars and studied 'em as closely as he'd traced the movements of the Mingol scouts fleeing across Rime Isle.

  Though it was strange thinking of the stars as enemies. His captain was a deep one! Perhaps he did have foes among the stars. Skor had heard rumor that he'd bedded a queen of the air.

  That night as the Gray Mouser and Cif leisurely prepared for bed in her low-eaved house tinted a sooty red on the northwestern edge of Salthaven City, and whilst that lady busied herself at her mirrored dressing table, the Mouser himself sitting on bed's edge set his pouch upon a low bedside table and withdrew from it a curious lot of commonplace objects—curious in part because they were so commonplace—and arranged them in a line on the table's dark surface.

  Cif, made curious by the slow regularity of his movements she saw reflected cloudily in the sheets of silver she faced, took up a small flat black box and came over and sat herself beside him.

  The objects included a toothed small wooden wheel as big almost as a Sarheenmar dollar with two of the teeth missing, a finch's feather, three look-alike gray round pebbles, a scrap of blue wool cloth stiff with dirt, a bent wrought iron nail, a hazelnut, and a dinted small black round that might have been a Lankhmar tik or Eastern halfpenny.

  Cif ran her eye along them, then looked at him questioningly.

  He said, "Coming here from the barracks at first eve, a strange mood seized me. Low in the sunset glow the new moon's faintest and daintiest silver crescent had just materialized like the ghost of a young girl—and just in the direction of this house, at that, as though to signal your presence here—but somehow I had eyes only for the gutter and the pathside. Which is where I found those. And a remarkable lot they are for a small northern seaport. You'd think Ilthmar at least . . . ." He shook his head.

  "But why collect 'em?" she queried. Like an old ragpicker, she thought.

  He shrugged. "I don't know. I think I thought I might find a use for them," he added doubtfully.

  She said, "They do look like oddments that might be involved in casting a spell."

  He shrugged again, but added, "They're not all what they seem. That, for instance—" He pointed at one of three gray spherelets, "—is not a pebble like the other two, but a lead slingshot, perhaps one of my own."

  Struck by his thrusting finger, that rolled off the table and hit the terrazzo floor with a little dull yet dinky thud, as if to prove his observation.

  As he recovered it, he paused with his eyes close to the floor to study first the crushed black marble of the terrazzo flecked with dark red and gold, and second Cif's near foot, which he then drew up onto his lap and studied still more minutely.

  "A strangely symmetric pentapod coral outcrop from sea's bottom," he observed and planted a slow kiss upon the base of her big toe, insinuated the tip of his tongue between it and the next.

  "There's an eel nosed around in my reef," she murmured.

  Laying his cheek upon her ankle, he sighted up her leg. She was wearing a singlet of fine brown linen that tied between her legs. He said, "Your hair has exactly the same tints as are in the flooring."

  She said, "You think I didn't select the marble for crushing with that in mind? Or add in the gold flakes? Here's a present of sorts for you." And she pushed the small flat black box down her leg toward him from her groin to her knee.

  He sat up to inspect it though keeping her foot in his lap.

  On the black fabric lining it, there lay like a delicate mist cloud the slender translucent bladder of a fish.

  Cif said, "I am minded to experience your love fully tonight. Yet not as fully, mind you, as to wish that we fashion a daughter together."

  The Mouser said, "I've seen the like of this made of thinnest leather well oiled."

  She said, "Not as effectual, I believe."

  He said, "To be sure, here, it would be something from a fish, this being Rime Isle. Tell me, did harbor master Groniger fashion this, as thrifty with the Isle's sperm as with its coins?" Then he nodded.

  He reached over and drew her other foot up on his lap also.

  After saluting it similarly he rested the side of
his face on both her ankles, and sighted up the narrow trough between her legs. "I am minded," he said dreamily but with a little growl in his voice, "to embark on another slow and intensely watchful journey, mindful of every step, such as that by which I arrived at this house this eve."

  She nodded, wondering idly if the growl were Gusorio's, but it seemed too faint for that.

  In the bow of a laden grainship sailing north from Lankhmar across the Inner Sea to the land of the Eight Cities, the Death of Fafhrd, who was tall and lank, dire as a steel scarecrow, said to his fellow passenger, "This incarnation likes me and likes me not. 'Tis a balmy journey now but it'll be long and by all accounts cold as witchcunt at the end, albeit summer. Arth-Pulgh's a mean employer, and unlucky. Hand me a medlar from the sack."

  The Death of the Gray Mouser, lithe as a weasel and forever smiling, replied, "No meaner nor no curster than Hamomel. Working for whom, however, is the pits. I've not yet shaken down to this persona, know not its likings. Reach your own apples."

  A week later, the evening being unseasonably balmy and Witches Moon at first quarter near the top of the sky, a hemispherical silver goblet brimful of stars and scattering them dimmed by moonwine all over the sky as it descended toward the lips of the west, drawn down by the same goddess who had lifted it, Afreyt and Fafhrd after supping alone at her violet-tinted pale house on Salthaven's northern edge were minded to wander across the great meadow in the direction of Elvenhold, a northward slanting slim rock spire two bowshots high, chimneyed and narrowly terraced, that thrust from the rolling fields almost a league away to the west.

  "See how her tilt," Fafhrd observed of that slender mountainlet, "directs her at the dark boss of the Targe—" (naming the northernmost constellation in the Lankhmar heavens) "—as if she were granite arrow aimed at skytop by the gods of the underworld."