Fritz Leiber - FGM 5 - The Swords of Lankhmar

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The Swords of Lankhmar [Book 5 of the "Fafhrd and Gray Mouser" series]
by Fritz Leiber
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Copyright (c)1968 by Fritz Leiber
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THE GREEN MILLENIUM
GATHER, DARKNESS!
SWORDS AND DEVILTY
SWORDS AGAINST DEATH
SWORDS IN THE MIST
SWORDS AGAINST WIZARDRY
THE SWORDS OF LANKHMAR
SWORDS AND ICE MAGIC
THE KNIGHT AND KNAVE OF SWORDS
THE WANDERER
--------
*Chapter One*
"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
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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
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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 they 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
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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.
In a short time the square was empty, save for the two victors, the line of trumpeters in
the street mouth, the line of guards outside the gateway now facing away from the square as if
nothing at all had happened -- and a hundred and more pairs of eyes as tiny and red-glinting black
as wild cherries, which peered intently from between the grills of street drains and from various
small holes in the walls and even from the rooftops. But who counts or even notices rats? --
especially in a city as old and vermin-infested as Lankhmar.
The big man and the small man gazed about fiercely a bit longer. Then, regaining their
breaths, they laughed uproariously, sheathed their weapons, and faced the trumpeters with a
guarded yet relaxed curiosity.
The trumpeters wheeled to either side. A line of pikemen behind them executed the same
movement, and there strode forward a venerable, clean-shaven, stern-visaged man in a black toga
narrowly bordered with silver.
He raised his hand in a dignified salute. He said gravely, "I am chamberlain of Glipkerio
Kistomerces, Overlord of Lankhmar, and here is my wand of authority." He produced a small silver
wand tipped with a five-pointed bronze emblem in the form of a starfish.
The two men nodded slightly, as though to say, "We accept your statement for what it's
worth."
The chamberlain faced the big man. He drew a scroll from his toga, unrolled it, scanned it
briefly, then looked up. "Are you Fafhrd the northern barbarian and brawler?"
The big man considered that for a bit, then said, "And if I am?"
The chamberlain turned toward the small man. He once more consulted his parchment. "And are
you -- your pardon, but it's written here -- that mongrel and long-suspected burglar, cut-purse,
swindler and assassin, the Gray Mouser?"
The small man fluffed his gray cape and said, "If it's any business of yours -- well, he
and I might be connected in some way."
As if those vaguest answers settled everything, the chamberlain rolled up his parchment
with a snap and tucked it inside his toga. "Then my master wishes to see you. There is a service
which you can render him, to your own considerable profit."
The Gray Mouser inquired, "If the all-powerful Glipkerio Kistomerces has need of us, why
did he allow us to be assaulted and for all he might know slain by that company of hooligans who
but now fled this place."
The chamberlain answered, "If you were the sort of men who would allow yourselves to be
murdered by such a mob, then you would not be the right men to handle the assignment, or fulfill
the commission, which my master has in mind. But time presses. Follow me."
Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser looked at each other and after a moment they simultaneously
shrugged, then nodded. Swaggering just a little, they fell in beside the chamberlain, the pikemen
and trumpeters fell in behind them, and the cortege moved off the way it had come, leaving the
square quite empty.
Except, of course, for the rats.
--------
*Chapter Two*
With the motherly-generous west wind filling their brown triangular sails, the slim war
galley and the five broad-beamed grain ships, two nights out of Lankhmar, coursed north in line
ahead across the Inner Sea of the ancient world of Nehwon.
It was late afternoon of one of those mild blue days when sea and sky are the same hue,
providing irrefutable evidence for the hypothesis currently favored by Lankhmar philosophers: that
Nehwon is a giant bubble rising through the waters of eternity with continents, islands, and the
great jewels that at night are the stars all orderly afloat on the bubble's inner surface.
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On the afterdeck of the last grain ship, which was also the largest, the Gray Mouser spat a
plum skin to leeward and boasted luxuriously, "Fat times in Lankhmar! Not one day returned to the
City of the Black Toga after months away adventuring and we get this cushy job from the Overlord
himself -- and with an advance on pay too."
"I have an old distrust of cushy jobs," Fafhrd replied, yawning and pulling his fur-trimmed
jerkin open wider so that the mild wind might trickle more fully through the tangled hair-field of
his chest. "And we were rushed out of Lankhmar so quickly that we had not even time to pay our
respects to the ladies. Nevertheless I must confess that we might have done worse. A full purse is
the best ballast for any man-ship, especially one bearing letters of marque against ladies."
Ship's Master Slinoor looked back with hooded appraising eyes at the small lithe gray-clad
man and his tall, more gaudily accoutered barbarian comrade. The master of _Squid_ was a sleek
black-robed man of middle years. He stood beside the two stocky black-tunicked bare-legged sailors
who held steady the great high-arching tiller that guided _Squid_.
"How much do you two rogues really know of your cushy job?" Slinoor asked softly. "Or
rather, how much did the arch-noble Glipkerio choose to tell you of the purpose and dark
antecedents of this voyaging?" Two days of fortunate sailing seemed at last to have put the closed-
mouthed ship's master in a mood to exchange confidences, or at least trade queries and lies.
From a bag of netted cord that hung by the taffrail, the Mouser speared a night-purple plum
with the dirk he called Cat's Claw. Then he answered lightly, "This fleet bears a gift of grain
from Overlord Glipkerio to Movarl of the Eight Cities in gratitude for Movarl's sweeping the
Mingol pirates from the Inner Sea and mayhap diverting the steppe-dwelling Mingols from assaulting
Lankhmar across the Sinking Land. Movarl needs grain for his hunter-farmers turned cityman-
soldiers and especially to supply his army relieving his border city of Klelg Nar, which the
Mingols besiege. Fafhrd and I are, you might say, a small but mighty rear-guard for the grain and
for certain more delicate items of Glipkerio's gift."
"You mean those?" Slinoor bent a thumb toward the larboard rail.
_Those_ were twelve large white rats distributed among four silver-barred cages. With their
silky coats, pale-rimmed blue eyes and especially their short, arched upper lips and two huge
upper incisors, they looked like a clique of haughty, bored, inbred aristocrats, and it was in a
bored aristocratic fashion that they were staring at a scrawny black kitten which was perched with
dug-in claws on the starboard rail, as if to get as far away from the rats as possible, and
staring back at them most worriedly.
Fafhrd reached out and ran a finger down the black kitten's back. The kitten arched its
spine, losing itself for a moment in sensuous delight, but then edged away and resumed its worried
rat-peering -- an activity shared by the two black-tunicked helmsmen, who seemed both resentful
and fearful of the silver-caged afterdeck passengers.
The Mouser sucked plum juice from his fingers and flicked out his tongue-tip to neatly
capture a drop that threatened to run down his chin. Then, "No, I mean not chiefly those high-bred
gift-rats," he replied to Slinoor and kneeling lightly and unexpectedly and touching two fingers
significantly to the scrubbed oak deck, he said, "I mean chiefly _she_ who is below, who ousts you
from your master's cabin, and who now insists that the gift-rats require sunlit and fresh air --
which strikes me as a strange way of cosseting burrow- and shadow-dwelling vermin."
Slinoor's cropped eyebrows rose. He came close and whispered, "You think the Demoiselle
Hisvet may not be merely the conductress of the rat-gift, but also herself part of Glipkerio's
gift to Morvarl? Why, she's the daughter of the greatest grain-merchant in Lankhmar, who's grown
rich selling tawny corn to Glipkerio."
The Mouser smiled cryptically but said nothing.
Slinoor frowned, then whispered ever lower, "True, I've heard the story that Hisvet has
already been her father Hisvin's gift to Glipkerio to buy his patronage."
Fafhrd, who'd been trying to stroke the kitten again with no more success than to chase it
up the aftermast, turned around at that. "Why, Hisvet's but a child," he said almost reprovingly.
"A most prim and proper miss. I know not of Glipkerio, he seems decadent" -- the word was not an
insult in Lankhmar -- "but surely Movarl, a Northerner albeit a forest man, likes only strong-
beamed, ripe, complete women."
"Your own tastes, no doubt?" the Mouser remarked, gazing at Fafhrd with half-closed eyes.
"No traffic with child-like women?"
Fafhrd blinked as if the Mouser had dug fingers in his side. Then he shrugged and said
loudly, "What's so special about these rats? Do they do tricks?"
"Aye," Slinoor said distastefully. "They play at being men. They've been trained by Hisvet
to dance to music, to drink from cups, hold tiny spears and swords, even fence. I've not seen it --
nor would care to."
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The picture struck the Mouser's fancy. He envisioned himself small as a rat, dueling with
rats who wore lace at their throats and wrists, slipping through the mazy tunnels of their
underground cities, becoming a great connoisseur of cheese and smoked meats, perchance wooing a
slim rat-queen and being surprised by her rat-king husband and having to dagger-fight him in the
dark. Then he noted one of the white rats looking at him intently through the silver bars with a
cold inhuman blue eye and suddenly his idea didn't seem amusing at all. He shivered in the
sunlight.
Slinoor was saying, "It is not good for animals to try to be men." _Squid_'s skipper gazed
somberly at the silent white aristos. "Have you ever heard tell of the legend of -- " he began,
hesitated, then broke off, shaking his head as if deciding he had been about to say too much.
"A sail!" The call winged down thinly from the crow's nest. "A black sail to windward!"
"What manner of ship?" Slinoor shouted up.
"I know not, master. I see only sail top."
"Keep her under view, boy," Slinoor commanded.
"Under view it is, master."
Slinoor paced to the starboard rail and back.
"Movarl's sails are green," Fafhrd said thoughtfully.
Slinoor nodded. "Lankhmar's are white. The pirates' were red, mostly. Lankhmar's sails once
were black, but now that color's only for funeral barges and they never venture out of sight of
land. At least I've never known..."
The Mouser broke in with, "You spoke of dark antecedents of this voyaging. Why dark?"
Slinoor drew them back against the taffrail, away from the stocky helmsmen. Fafhrd ducked a
little, passing under the arching tiller. They looked all three into the twisting wake, their
heads bent together.
Slinoor said, "You've been out of Lankhmar. Did you know this is not the first gift-fleet
of grain to Movarl?"
The Mouser nodded. "We'd been told there was another. Somehow lost. In a storm, I think.
Glipkerio glossed over it."
"There were two," Slinoor said tersely. "Both lost. Without a living trace. There was no
storm."
"What then?" Fafhrd asked, looking around as the rats chittered a little. "Pirates?"
"Movarl had already whipped the pirates east. Each of the two fleets was galley-guarded
like ours. And each sailed off into fair weather with a good west wind." Slinoor smiled thinly.
"Doubtless Glipkerio did not tell you of these matters for fear you might beg off. We sailors and
the Lankhmarines obey for duty and the honor of the City, but of late Glipkerio's had trouble
hiring the sort of special agents he likes to use for second bowstrings. He has brains of a sort,
our overlord has, though he employs them mostly to dream of visiting other world bubbles in a
great diving-bell or sealed metallic diving-ship, while he sits with trained girls watching
trained rats and buys off Lankhmar's enemies with gold and repays Lankhmar's ever-more-greedy
friends with grain, not soldiers." Slinoor grunted. "Movarl grows most impatient, you know. He
threatens, if the grain comes not, to recall his pirate-patrol, league with the land-Mingols and
set them at Lankhmar."
"Northerners, even though not snow-dwelling, league with Mingols?" Fafhrd objected.
"Impossible!"
Slinoor looked at him. "I'll say just this, ice-eating Northerner. If I did not believe
such a league both possible and likely -- and Lankhmar thereby in dire danger -- I would never
have sailed with this fleet, honor and duty or no. Same's true of Lukeen, who commands the galley.
Nor do I think Glipkerio would otherwise be sending to Movarl at Kvarch Nar his noblest performing
rats and dainty Hisvet."
Fafhrd growled a little. "You say both fleets were lost without a trace?" he asked
incredulously.
Slinoor shook his head. "The first was. Of the second, some wreckage was sighted by an
Ilthmar trader Lankhmar-bound. The deck of only one grain ship. It had been ripped off its hull,
splinteringly -- how or by what, the Ilthmart dared not guess. Tied to a fractured stretch of
railing was the ship's master, only hours dead. His face had been nibbled, his body gnawed."
"Fish?" the Mouser asked.
"Seabirds?" Fafhrd inquired.
"Dragons?" a third voice suggested, high, breathless, and as merry as a schoolgirl's. The
three men turned around, Slinoor with guilty swiftness.
The Demoiselle Hisvet stood as tall as the Mouser, but judging by her face, wrists, and
ankles was considerably slenderer. Her face was delicate and taper-chinned with small mouth and
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pouty upper lip that lifted just enough to show a double dash of pearly tooth. Her complexion was
creamy pale except for two spots of color high on her cheeks. Her straight fine hair, which grew
low on her forehead, was pure white touched with silver and all drawn back through a silver ring
behind her neck, whence it hung unbraided like a unicorn's tail. Her eyes had china whites but
darkly pink irises around the large black pupils. Her body was enveloped and hidden by a loose
robe of violet silk except when the wind briefly molded a flat curve of her girlish anatomy. There
was a violet hood, half thrown back. The sleeves were puffed but snug at the wrists. She was bare-
foot, her skin showing as creamy there as on her face, except for a tinge of pink about the toes.
She looked them all three one after another quickly in the eye. "You were whispering of the
fleets that failed," she said accusingly. "Fie, Master Slinoor. We must all have courage."
"Aye," Fafhrd agreed, finding that a cue to his liking. "Even dragons need not daunt a
brave man. I've often watched the sea monsters, crested, horned, and some two-headed, playing in
the waves of outer ocean as they broke around the rocks sailors call the Claws. They were not to
be feared, if a man remembered always to fix them with a commanding eye. They sported lustily
together, the man dragons pursuing the woman dragons and going -- " Here Fafhrd took a tremendous
breath and then roared out so loudly and wailingly that the two helmsmen jumped -- "_Hoongk!
Hoongk!_"
"Fie, Swordsman Fafhrd," Hisvet said primly, a blush mantling her cheeks and forehead. "You
are most indelicate. The sex of dragons -- "
But Slinoor had whirled on Fafhrd, gripping his wrist and now crying, "Quiet, you monster-
fool! Know you not we sail tonight by moonlight past the Dragon Rocks? You'll call them down on
us!"
"There are no dragons in the Inner Sea," Fafhrd laughingly assured him.
"There's something that tears ships," Slinoor asserted stubbornly.
The Mouser took advantage of this brief interchange to move in on Hisvet, rapidly bowing
thrice as he approached.
"We have missed the great pleasure of your company on deck, Demoiselle," he said suavely.
"Alas, sir, the sun mislikes me," she answered prettily. "Now his rays are mellowed as he
prepared to submerge. Then too," she added with an equally pretty shudder, "these rough sailors --
" She broke off as she saw that Fafhrd and the master of _Squid_ had stopped their argument and
returned to her. "Oh, I meant not you, dear Master Slinoor," she assured him, reaching out and
almost touching his black robe.
"Would the Demoiselle fancy a sun-warmed, wind-cooled black plum of Sarheenmar?" the Mouser
suggested, delicately sketching in the air with Cat's Claw.
"I know not," Hisvet said, eyeing the dirk's needle-like point. "I must be thinking of
getting the White Shadows below before the evening's chill is upon us."
"True," Fafhrd agreed with a flattering laugh, realizing she must mean the white rats. "But
'twas most wise of you, Little Mistress, to let them spend the day on deck, where they surely
cannot hanker so much to sport with the Black Shadows -- I mean, of course, their black free
commoner brothers, and slim delightful sisters, to be sure, hiding here and there in the hold."
"There are no rats on my ship, sportive or otherwise," Slinoor asserted instantly, his
voice loud and angry. "Think you I run a rat-brothel? Your pardon, Demoiselle," he added quickly
to Hisvet. "I mean, there are no common rats aboard _Squid_."
"Then yours is surely the first grain ship so blessed," Fafhrd told him with indulgent
reasonableness.
The sun's vermilion disk touched the sea to the west and flattened like a tangerine. Hisvet
leaned back against the taffrail under the arching tiller. Fafhrd was to her right, the Mouser to
her left with the plums hanging just beyond him, near the silver cages. Slinoor had moved
haughtily forward to speak to the helmsmen, or pretend to.
"I'll take that plum now, Dirksman Mouser," Hisvet said softly.
As the Mouser turned away in happy obedience and with many a graceful gesture, delicately
palpating the net bag to find the most tender fruit, Hisvet stretched her right arm out sideways
and without looking once at Fafhrd slowly ran her spread-fingered hand through the hair on his
chest, paused when she reached the other side to grasp a fistful and tweak it sharply, then
trailed her fingers rightly back across the hair she had ruffled.
Her hand came back to her just as the Mouser turned around. She kissed the palm
lingeringly, then reached it across her body to take the black fruit from the point of the
Mouser's dirk. She sucked delicately at the prick Cat's Claw had made and shivered.
"Fie, sir," she pouted. "You told me 'twould be sun-warmed and 'tis not. Already all things
grow chilly with evening." She looked around her thoughtfully. "Why, Swordsman Fafhrd is all
gooseflesh," she announced, then blushed and tapped her lips reprovingly. "Close your jerkin, sir.
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'Twill save you from catarrh and perchance from further embarrassment a girl who is unused to any
sight of man-flesh save in slaves."
"Here is a tastier plum," the Mouser called from beside the bag. Hisvet smiled at him and
lightly tossed him back-handed the plum she'd sampled. He dropped that overboard and tossed her
the second plum. She caught it deftly, lightly squeezed it, touched it to her lips, shook her head
sadly though still smiling, and tossed back the plum. The Mouser, smiling gently too, caught it,
dropped it overboard and tossed her a third. They played that way for some time. A shark following
in the wake of the _Squid_ got a stomachache.
The black kitten came single-footing back along the starboard rail with a sharp eye to
larboard. Fafhrd seized it instantly as any good general does opportunity in the heat of battle.
"Have you seen the ship's catling, Little Mistress?" he called, crossing to Hisvet, the
kitten almost hidden in his big hands. "Or perhaps we should call the _Squid_ the catling's ship,
for she adopted it, skipping by herself aboard just as we sailed. Here, Little Mistress. It feels
sun-toasted now, warmer than any plum," and he reached the kitten out sitting on the palm of his
right hand.
But Fafhrd had been forgetting the kitten's point of view. Its fur stood on end as it saw
itself being carried toward the rats and now, as Hisvet stretched out her hand toward it, showing
her upper teeth in a tiny smile and saying, "Poor little waif," the kitten hissed fiercely and
raked out stiff-armed with spread claws.
Hisvet drew back her hand with a gasp. Before Fafhrd could drop the kitten or bat it aside,
it sprang to the top of his head and from there onto the highest point of the tiller.
The Mouser darted to Hisvet, crying meanwhile at Fafhrd, "Dolt! Lout! You knew the beast
was half wild!" Then, to Hisvet, "Demoiselle! Are you hurt?"
Fafhrd struck angrily at the kitten and one of the helmsmen came back to bat at it too,
perhaps because he thought it improper for kittens to walk on the tiller. The kitten made a long
leap to the starboard rail, slipped over it, and dangled by two claws above the curving water.
Hisvet was holding her hand away from the Mouser and he was saying, "Better let me examine
it, Demoiselle. Even the slightest scratch from a filthy ship's cat can be dangerous," and she was
saying, almost playfully, "No, Dirksman, I tell you it's nothing."
Fafhrd strode to the starboard rail, fully intending to flick the kitten overboard, but
somehow when he came to do it he found he had instead cupped the kitten's rear in his hand and
lifted it back on the rail. The kitten instantly sank its teeth deeply in the root of his thumb
and fled up the aftermast. Fafhrd with difficulty suppressed a great yowl. Slinoor laughed.
"Nevertheless, I will examine it," the Mouser said masterfully and took Hisvet's hand by
force. She let him hold it for a moment, then snatched it back and drawing herself up said
frostily, "Dirksman, you forget yourself. Not even her own physician touches a Demoiselle of
Lankhmar, he touches only the body of her maid, on which the Demoiselle points out her pains and
symptoms. Leave me, Dirksman."
The Mouser stood huffily back against the taffrail. Fafhrd sucked the root of his thumb.
Hisvet went and stood beside the Mouser. Without looking at him, she said softly, "You should have
asked me to call my maid. She's quite pretty."
Only a fingernail clipping of red sun was left on the horizon. Slinoor addressed the crow's
nest: "What of the black sail, boy?"
"She holds her distance, master," the cry came back. "She courses on abreast of us."
The sun went under with a faint green flash. Hisvet bent her head sideways and kissed the
Mouser on the neck, just under the ear. Her tongue tickled.
"Now I lose her, master," the crow's nest called. "There's mist to the northwest. And to
the northeast ... a small black cloud ... like a black ship specked with light ... that moves
through the air. And now that fades too. All gone, master."
Hisvet straightened her head. Slinoor came toward them muttering, "The crow's nest sees too
much." Hisvet shivered and said, "The White Shadows will take a chill. They're delicate,
Dirksman." The Mouser breathed, "You are Ecstasy's White Shadow, Demoiselle," then strolled toward
the silver cages, saying loudly for Slinoor's benefit, "Might we not be privileged to have a show
of them, Demoiselle, tomorrow here on the afterdeck? 'Twould be wondrous instructive to watch you
control them." He caressed the air over the cages and said, lying mightily, "My, they're fine
handsome fellows." Actually he was peering apprehensively for any of the little spears and swords
Slinoor had mentioned. The twelve rats looked up at him incuriously. One even seemed to yawn.
Slinoor said curtly, "I would advise against it, Demoiselle. The sailors have a mad fear
and hatred of all rats. 'Twere best not to arouse it."
"But these are aristos," the Mouser objected, while Hisvet only repeated, "They'll take a
chill."
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Fafhrd, hearing this, took his hand out of his mouth and came hurrying to Hisvet, saying,
"Little Mistress, may I carry them below? I'll be gentle as a Kleshite nurse." He lifted between
thumb and third finger a cage with two rats in it. Hisvet rewarded him with a smile, saying, "I
wish you would, gallant Swordsman. The common sailors handle them too roughly. But two cages are
all you may safely carry. You'll need proper help." She gazed at the Mouser and Slinoor.
So Slinoor and the Mouser, the latter much to his distaste and apprehension, must each
gingerly take up a silver cage, and Fafhrd two, and follow Hisvet to her cabin below the
afterdeck. The Mouser could not forbear whispering privily to Fafhrd, "Oaf! To make rat-grooms of
us! May you get rat-bites to match your cat-bite!" At the cabin door Hisvet's dark maid Frix
received the cages, Hisvet thanked her three gallants most briefly and distantly and Frix closed
the door against them. There was the muffled thud of a bar dropping across it and the jangle of a
chain locking down the bar.
* * * *
Darkness grew on the waters. A yellow lantern was lit and hoisted to the crow's nest. The
black war galley _Shark_, its brown sail temporarily furled, came rowing back to fuss at _Clam_,
next ahead of _Squid_ in line, for being slow in getting up its masthead light, then dropped back
by _Squid_ while Lukeen and Slinoor exchanged shouts about a black sail and mist and ship-shaped
small black clouds and the Dragon Rocks. Finally the galley went bustling ahead again with its
Lankhmarines in browned-iron chain mail to take up its sailing station at the head of the column.
The first stars twinkled, proof that the sun had not deserted through the waters of eternity to
some other world bubble, but was swimming as he should back to the east under the ocean of the
sky, errant rays from him lighting the floating star-jewels in his passage.
After moonrise that night Fafhrd and the Mouser each found private occasion to go rapping
at Hisvet's door, but neither profited greatly thereby. At Fafhrd's knock Hisvet herself opened
the small grille set in the larger door, said swiftly, "Fie, for shame, Swordsman! Can't you see
I'm undressing?" and closed it instantly. While when the Mouser asked softly for a moment with
"Ecstasy's White Shadow," the merry face of the dark maid Frix appeared at the grille, saying, "My
mistress bid me kiss my hand good night to you." Which she did and closed the grille.
Fafhrd, who had been spying, greeted the crestfallen Mouser with a sardonic, "Ecstasy's
White Shadow!"
"Little Mistress!" the Mouser retorted scathingly.
"Black Plum of Sarheenmar!"
"Kleshite Nurse!"
Neither hero slept restfully that night and two-thirds through it the _Squid_'s gong began
to sound at intervals, with the other ships' gongs replying or calling faintly. When at dawn's
first blink the two came on deck, _Squid_ was creeping through fog that hid the sail top. The two
helmsmen were peering about jumpily, as if they expected to see ghosts. The sails were barely
filled. Slinoor, his eyes dark-circled by fatigue and big with anxiety, explained tersely that the
fog had not only slowed but disordered the grain fleet.
"That's _Tunny_ next ahead of us. I can tell by her gong note. And beyond _Tunny, Carp_.
Where's _Clam_? What's _Shark_ about? And still not certainly past the Dragon Rocks! Not that I
want to see 'em!"
"Do not some captains call them the Rat Rocks?" Fafhrd interposed. "From a rat-colony
started there from a wreck?"
"Aye," Slinoor allowed and then grinning sourly at the Mouser, observed, "Not the best day
for a rat-show on the afterdeck, is it? Which is some good from this fog. I can't abide the
lolling white brutes. Though but a dozen in number they remind me too much of the Thirteen. Have
you ever heard tell of the legend of the Thirteen?"
"I have," Fafhrd said somberly. "A wise woman of the Cold Waste once told me that for each
animal kind -- wolves, bats, whales, it holds for all and each -- there are always thirteen
individuals having almost manlike (or demonlike!) wisdom and skill. Can you but find and master
this inner circle, the Wise Woman said, then through them you can control all animals of that
kind."
Slinoor looked narrowly at Fafhrd and said, "She was not an altogether stupid woman."
The Mouser wondered if for men also there was an inner circle of Thirteen.
The black kitten came ghosting along the deck out of the fog forward. It made toward Fafhrd
with an eager mew, then hesitated, studying him dubiously.
"Take for example, cats," Fafhrd said with a grin. "Somewhere in Nehwon today, mayhap
scattered but more likely banded together, are thirteen cats of superfeline sagacity, somehow
sensing and controlling the destiny of all catkind."
"What's this one sensing now?" Slinoor demanded softly.
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The black kitten was staring to larboard, sniffing. Suddenly its scrawny body stiffened,
the hair rising along its back and its skimpy tail a-bush.
"_Hoongk!_"
Slinoor turned to Fafhrd with a curse, only to see the Northerner staring about shut-
mouthed and startled. Clearly _he_ had not bellowed.
--------
*Chapter Three*
Out of the fog to larboard came a green serpent's head big as a horse's, with white dagger
teeth fencing red mouth horrendously agape. With dreadful swiftness it lunged low past Fafhrd on
its endless yellow neck, its lower jaw loudly scraping the deck, and the white daggers clashed on
the black kitten.
Or rather, on where the kitten had just been. For the latter seemed not so much to leap as
to lift itself, by its tail perhaps, onto the starboard rail and thence vanished into the fog at
the top of the aftermast in at most three more bounds.
The helmsmen raced each other forward. Slinoor and the Mouser threw themselves against the
starboard taffrail, the unmanned tiller swinging slowly above them affording some sense of
protection against the monster, which now lifted its nightmare head and swayed it this way and
that, each time avoiding Fafhrd by inches. Apparently it was searching for the black kitten or
more like it.
Fafhrd stood frozen, at first by sheer shock, then by the thought that whatever part of him
moved first would get snapped off.
Nevertheless he was about to jump for it -- besides all else the monster's mere stench was
horrible -- when a second green dragon's head, four times as big as the first with teeth like
scimitars, came looming out of the fog. Sitting commandingly atop this second head was a man
dressed in orange and purple, like a herald of the Eastern Lands, with red boots, cape and helmet,
the last with a blue window in it, seemingly of opaque glass.
There is a point of grotesquerie beyond which horror cannot go, but slips into delirium.
Fafhrd had reached that point. He began to feel as if he were in an opium dream. Everything was
unquestionably real, yet it had lost its power to horrify him acutely.
He noticed as the merest of quaint details that the two greenish yellow necks forked from a
common trunk.
Besides, the gaudily garbed man or demon riding the larger head seemed very sure of
himself, which might or might not be a good thing. Just now he was belaboring the smaller head,
seemingly in rebuke, with a blunt-pointed, blunt-hooked pike he carried, and roaring out, either
under or through his blue-red helmet, a gibberish that might be rendered as:
"_Gotterdammer Ungeheuer!"_^ _("Goddam monster!" German is a language completely unknown
in Nehwon_.)
The smaller head cringed away, whimpering like seventeen puppies. The man-demon whipped out
a small book of pages and after consulting it twice (apparently he could see out through his blue
window) called down in broken outlandishly accented Lankhmarese, "What world is this, friend?"
Fafhrd had never before in his life heard that question asked, even by an awakening brandy
guzzler. Nevertheless in his opium-dream mood he answered easily enough, "The world of Nehwon, oh
sorcerer!"
"_Gott sei dank!_"(^ _"Thank God!")_ the man-demon gibbered.
Fafhrd asked, "What world do _you_ hail from?"
The question seemed to confound the man-demon. Hurriedly consulting his book, he replied,
"Do you know about other worlds? Don't you believe the stars are only huge jewels?"
Fafhrd responded, "Any fool can see that the lights in the sky are jewels, but we are not
simpletons, we know of other worlds. The Lankhmarts think they're bubbles in infinite waters. _I_
believe we live in the jewel-ceilinged skull of a dead god. But doubtless there are other such
skulls, the universe of universes being a great frosty battlefield."
The tiller, swinging as _Squid_ wallowed with sail a-flap, bumped the lesser head, which
twisted around and snapped at it, then shook splinters from its teeth.
"Tell the sorcerer to keep it off!" Slinoor shouted, cringing.
After more hurried page-flipping the man-demon called down, "Don't worry, the monster seems
to eat only rats. I captured it by a small rocky island where many rats live. It mistook your
small black ship's cat for a rat."
Still in his mood of opium-lucidity, Fafhrd called up, "Oh sorcerer, do you plan to conjure
the monster to your own skull-world, or world-bubble?"
This question seemed doubly to confound and excite the man-demon. He appeared to think
Fafhrd must be a mind reader. With much frantic book-consulting, he explained that he came from a
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摘要：

file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%20E-books/Fritz%20Leiber%20-%20FGM5%20-%20The%20Swords%20of%20Lankhmar.txt======================TheSwordsofLankhmar[Book5ofthe"FafhrdandGrayMouser"series]byFritzLeiber======================Copyright(c)1968byFritzLeibere-readswww.ereads.comFantasy------------...

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