Leiber, Fritz - Saga of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser 03 - Swords in the Mist

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Swords in the Mist [Book 3 of the "Fafhrd and Gray Mouser" series]

by Fritz Leiber

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THE GREEN MILLENIUM

GATHER, DARKNESS!

SWORDS AND DEVILTY

SWORDS AGAINST DEATH

SWORDS IN THE MIST

SWORDS AGAINST WIZARDY

THE SWORDS OF LANKHMAR

SWORDS AND ICE MAGIC

THE KNIGHT AND KNAVE OF SWORDS

THE WANDERER

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*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 subcellar 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 chutelike 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 lemurlike 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.

Gnarlag stood up. He knocked to the wall a wine cup offered him and

cuffed aside a girl who would have embraced him. Then grabbing up his two

swords on their thick belt from the bench beside him, he strode to the brick

stairs and up out of the Rats' Nest. By some trick of air currents, perhaps,

it seemed that a fog-strand rested across his shoulders like a comradely arm.

When he was gone, someone said, "Gnarlag was ever a cold and ungrateful

winner." The dark mercenary stared at his dangling hand and bit back groans.

* * * *

"So tell me, giant philosopher, why we're not dukes," the Gray Mouser

demanded, unrolling a forefinger from the fist on his knee so that it pointed

across the brazier at Fafhrd. "Or emperors, for that matter, or demigods."

"We are not dukes because we're no man's man," Fafhrd replied smugly,

settling his shoulders against the stone horse-trough. "Even a duke must

butter up a king, and demigods the gods. We butter no one. We go our own way,

choosing our own adventures -- and our own follies! Better freedom and a

chilly road than a warm hearth and servitude."

"There speaks the hound turned out by his last master and not yet found

new boots to slaver on," the Mouser retorted with comradely sardonic

impudence. "Look you, you noble liar, we've labored for a dozen lords and

kings and merchants fat. You've served Movarl across the Inner Sea. I've

served the bandit Harsel. We've both served this Glipkerio, whose girl is tied

to Ilthmar this same night."

"Those are exceptions," Fafhrd protested grandly. "And even when we

serve, we make the rules. We bow to no man's ultimate command, dance to no

wizard's drumming, join no mob, hark to no wildering hate-call. When we draw

sword, it's for ourselves alone. _What's that?"_

He had lifted his sword for emphasis, gripping it by the scabbard just

below the guard, but now he held it still with the hilt near his ear.

"It hums a warning!" he said tersely after a moment. "The steel twangs

softly in its sheath!"

Chuckling tolerantly at this show of superstition, the Mouser drew his

slimmer sword from its light scabbard, sighted along the blade's oiled length

at the red embers, spotted a couple of dark flecks and began to rub at them

with a rag.

When nothing more happened, Fafhrd said grudgingly as he laid down his

undrawn sword, "Perchance only a dragon walked across the cave where the blade

was forged. Still, I don't like this tainted mist."

* * * *

Gis the cutthroat and the courtesan Tres had watched the fog coming

across the fantastically peaked roofs of Lankhmar until it obscured the low-

swinging yellow crescent of the moon and the rainbow glow from the palace.

Then they had lit the cressets and drawn the blue drapes and were playing at

throw-knife to sharpen their appetites for a more intimate but hardly kinder

game.

Tres was not unskillful, but Gis could somersault the weapon a dozen or

thirteen times before it stuck in wood and throw as truly between his legs as

back over his shoulder without mirror. Whenever he threw the knife so it

struck very near Tres, he smiled. She had to remind herself that he was not

much more evil than most evil men.

A frond of fog came wreathing between the blue drapes and touched Gis

on the temple as he prepared to throw. "The blood in the fog's in your eye-

whites!" Tres cried, staring at him weirdly. He seized the girl by the ear

and, smiling hugely, slashed her neck just below her dainty jaw. Then, dancing

out of the way of the gushing blood, he delicately snatched up his belt of

daggers and darted down the curving stairs to the street, where he plunged

into a warmhearted fog that was somehow as full of rage as the strong wine of

Tovilyis is of sugar, a veritable cistern of wrath. His whole being was bathed

in sensations as ecstatic as those strong but fleeting ones the tendril's

touch on his temple had loosed from his brain. Visions of daggered princesses

and skewered serving maids danced in his head. He stepped along happily, agog

with delicious anticipations, beside Gnarlag of the Two Swords, knowing him at

once for a hate-brother, sacrosanct, another slave of the blessed fog.

* * * *

Fafhrd cupped his big hands over the brazier and whistled the gay tune

sifting from the remotely twinkling palace. The Mouser, now re-oiling the

blade of Scalpel against the mist, observed, "For one beset by taints and

danger-hums, you're very jolly."

"I like it here," the Northerner asserted. "A fig for courts and beds

and inside fires! The edge of life is keener in the street -- as on the

mountaintop. Is not imagined wine sweeter than wine?" ("Ho!" the Mouser

laughed, most sardonically.) "And is not a crust of bread tastier to one an-

hungered than larks' tongues to an epicure? Adversity makes the keenest

appetite, the clearest vision."

"There spoke the ape who could not reach the apple," the Mouser told

him. "If a door to paradise opened in that wall there, you'd dive through."

"Only because I've never been to paradise," Fafhrd swept on. "Is it not

sweeter now to hear the music of Innesgay's betrothal from afar than mingle

with the feasters, jig with them, be cramped and blinkered by their social

rituals?"

"There's many a one in Lankhmar gnawn fleshless with envy by those

sounds tonight," the Mouser said darkly. "I am not gnawn so much as those

stupid ones. I am more intelligently jealous. Still, the answer to your

question: no!"

"Sweeter by far tonight to be Glipkerio's watchman than his pampered

guest," Fafhrd insisted, caught up by his own poetry and hardly hearing the

Mouser.

"You mean we serve Glipkerio _free?_" the latter demanded loudly. "Aye,

there's the bitter core of all freedom: no pay!"

Fafhrd laughed, came to himself, and said almost abashedly, "Still,

there is something in the keenness and the watchman part. We're watchmen not

for pay, but solely for the watching's sake! Indoors and warm and comforted, a

man is blind. Out here we see the city and the stars, we hear the rustle and

the tramp of life, we crouch like hunters in a stony blind, straining our

senses for -- "

"Please, Fafhrd, no more danger signs," the Mouser protested. "Next

you'll be telling me there's a monster a-drool and a-stalk in the streets, all

slavering for Innesgay and her betrothal-maids, no doubt. And perchance a

sword-garnished princeling or two, for appetizer."

Fafhrd gazed at him soberly and said, peering around through the

thickening mist, "When I am _quite_ sure of that, I'll let you know."

* * * *

The twin brothers Kreshmar and Skel, assassins and alley-bashers by

trade, were menacing a miser in his hovel when the red-veined fog came in

after them. As swiftly as ambitious men take last bite and wine-swig at skull

while Skel thrust into his belt the one small purse of gold they had thus far

extorted from the ancient man now turning to corpse. They stepped briskly

outside, their swords a-swing at their hips, and into the fog, where they

marched side-by-side with Gnarlag and Gis in the midst of the compact pale

mass that moved almost indistinguishably with the river-fog and yet

intoxicated them as surely as if it were a clouded white wine of murder and

destruction, zestfully sluicing away all natural cautions and fears, promising

an infinitude of thrilling and most profitable victims.

Behind the four marchers, the false fog thinned to a single glimmering

thread, red as an artery, silver as a nerve, that led back unbroken around

many a stony corner to the Temple of the Hates. A pulsing went ceaselessly

along the thread, as nourishment and purpose were carried from the temple to

the marauding fog mass and to the four killers, now doubly hate-enslaved,

marching along with it. The fog mass moved purposefully as a snow-tiger toward

the quarter of the nobles and Glipkerio's rainbow-lanterned palace above the

breakwater of the Inner Sea.

Three black-clad police of Lankhmar, armed with metal-capped cudgels

and weighted wickedly-barbed darts, saw the thicker fog mass coming and the

marchers in it. The impression to them was of four men frozen in a sort of

pliant ice. Their flesh crawled. They felt paralyzed. The fog fingered them,

but almost instantly passed them by as inferior material for its purpose.

Knives and swords licked out of the fog mass. With never a cry the

three police fell, their black tunics glistening with a fluid that showed red

only on their sallow slack limbs. The fog mass thickened, as if it had fed

instantly and richly on its victims. The four marchers became almost invisible

from the outside, though from the inside they saw clearly enough.

Far down the longest and most landward of the five alleyways, the

Mouser saw by the palace-glimmer behind him the white mass coming, shooting

questing tendrils before it, and cried gaily, "Look, Fafhrd, we've company!

The fog comes all the twisty way from the Hlal to warm its paddy paws at our

little fire."

Fafhrd, frowning his eyes, said mistrustfully, "I think it masks other

guests."

"Don't be a scareling," the Mouser reproved him in a fey voice. "I've a

droll thought, Fafhrd: what if it be not fog, but the smoke of all the poppy-

gum and hemp-resin in Lankhmar burning at once? What joys we'll have once we

are sniffing it! What dreams we'll have tonight!"

"I think it brings nightmares," Fafhrd asserted softly, rising in a

half crouch. Then, "Mouser, the taint! And my sword tingles to the touch!" The

questingmost of the swiftly advancing fog-tendrils fingered them both then and

seized on them joyously, as if here were the two captains it had been seeking,

the slave leadership which would render it invincible.

The two blood-brothers tall and small felt to the full then the

intoxication of the fog, its surging bittersweet touch-song of hate, its hot

promises of all bloodlusts forever fulfilled, an uninhibited eternity of

murder-madness.

Fafhrd, wineless tonight, intoxicated only by his own idealisms and the

thought of watchmanship, was hardly touched by the sensations, did not feel

them as temptations at all.

The Mouser, much of whose nature was built on hates and envies, had a

harder time, but he too in the end rejected the fog's masterful lures -- if

only, to put the worst interpretation on it, because he wanted always to be

the source of his own evil and would never accept it from another, not even as

a gift from the archfiend himself.

The fog shrank back a dozen paces then, cat-quick, like a vixenishly

proud woman rebuffed, revealing the four marchers in it and simultaneously

pointing tendrils straight at the Mouser and Fafhrd.

It was well for the Mouser then that he knew the membership of

Lankhmar's underworld to the last semiprofessional murderer and that his

intuitions and reflexes were both arrow-swift. He recognized the smallest of

the four -- Gis with his belt of knives -- as also the most immediately

dangerous. Without hesitation he whipped Cat's Claw from its sheath, poised,

aimed, and threw it. At the same instant Gis, equally knowledgeable and swift

of thought and speedy of reaction, hurled one of his knives.

But the Mouser, forever cautious and wisely fearful, snatched his head

to one side the moment he'd made his throw, so that Gis's knife only sliced

his ear flap as it hummed past.

Gis, trusting too supremely in his own speed, made no similar evasive

movement -- with the result that the hilt of Cat's Claw stood out from his

right eye socket an instant later. For a long moment he peered with shock and

surprise from his other eye, then slumped to the cobbles, his features

contorted in the ultimate agony. Kreshmar and Skel swiftly drew their swords

and Gnarlag his two, not one whit intimidated by the winged death that had

bitten into their comrade's brain.

Fafhrd, with a fine feeling for tactics on a broad front, did not draw

sword at first but snatched up the brazier by one of its three burningly hot

short legs and whirled its meager red-glowing contents in the attackers'

faces.

This stopped them long enough for the Mouser to draw Scalpel and Fafhrd

his heavier cave-forged sword. He wished he could do without the brazier -- it

was much too hot -- but seeing himself opposed to Gnarlag of the Two Swords,

he contented himself with shifting it jugglingly to his left hand.

Thereafter the fight was one swift sudden crisis. The three attackers,

daunted only a moment by the spray of hot coals and quite uninjured by them,

raced forward surefootedly. Four truly-aimed blades thrust at the Mouser and

Fafhrd.

The Northerner parried Gnarlag's right-hand sword with the brazier and

his left-hand sword with the guard of his own weapon, which he managed

simultaneously to thrust through the bravo's neck.

The shock of that death-stroke was so great that Gnarlag's two swords,

bypassing Fafhrd one to each side, made no second stroke in their wielder's

death-spasm. Fafhrd, conscious now chiefly of an agonizing pain in his left

hand, chucked the brazier away in the nearest useful direction -- which

happened to be at Skel's head, spoiling that one's thrust at the Mouser, who

was skipping nimbly back at the moment, though not more swiftly than Kreshmar

and Skel were attacking.

The Mouser ducked under Kreshmar's blade and thrust Scalpel up through

the assassin's ribs -- the easy way to the heart -- then quickly whipped it

out and gave the same measured dose of thin steel to the dazedly staggering

Skel. Then he danced away, looking around him dartingly and holding his sword

high and menacing.

"All down and dead," Fafhrd, who'd had longer to look, assured him.

"Ow, Mouser, I've burnt my fingers!"

"And I've a dissected ear," that one reported, exploring cautiously

with little pats. He grinned. "Just at the edge, though." Then, having

digested Fafhrd's remark, "Serves you right for fighting with a kitchen boy's

weapon!"

Fafhrd retorted, "Bah! If you weren't such a miser with the charcoal,

I'd have blinded them all with my ember cast!"

"And burnt your fingers even worse," the Mouser countered pleasantly.

Then, still more happy-voiced, "Methought I heard gold chink at the belt of

the one you brazier-bashed. Skel ... yes, alleybasher Skel. When I've

recovered Cat's Claw -- "

He broke off because of an ugly little sucking sound that ended in a

tiny _plop_. In the hazy glow from the nobles' quarter they saw a horridly

supernatural sight: the Mouser's bloody dagger poised above Gis's punctured

eye socket, supported only by a coiling white tentacle of the fog which had

masked their attackers and which had now grown still more dense, as if it had

sucked supreme nutriment -- as indeed it had -- from its dead servitors in

their dying.

Eldritch dreads woke in the Mouser and Fafhrd: dreads of the lightning

that slays from the storm-cloud, of the giant sea-serpent that strikes from

the sea, of the shadows that coalesce in the forest to suffocate the mighty

man lost, of the black smoke-snake that comes questing from the wizard's fire

to strangle.

All around them was a faint clattering of steel against cobble: other

fog-tentacles were lifting the four dropped swords and Gis's knife, while yet

others were groping at that dead cutthroat's belt for his undrawn weapons.

It was as if some great ghost squid from the depths of the Inner Sea

were arming itself for combat.

And four yards above the ground, at the rooting point of the tentacles

in the thickened fog, a red disk was forming in the center of the fog's body,

as it were -- a reddish disk that looked moment by moment more like a single

eye large as a face.

There was the inescapable thought that as soon as that eye could see,

some ten beweaponed tentacles would thrust or slash at once, unerringly.

Fafhrd stood terror-bemused between the swiftly-forming eye and the

Mouser. The latter, suddenly inspired, gripped Scalpel firmly, readied himself

for a dash, and cried to the tall northerner, "Make a stirrup!"

Guessing the Mouser's stratagem, Fafhrd shook his horrors and laced his

fingers together and went into a half crouch. The Mouser raced forward and

planted his right foot in the stirrup Fafhrd had made of his hands and kicked

off from it just as the latter helped his jump with a great heave -- and a

simultaneous "Ow!" of extreme pain.

The Mouser, preceded by his exactly aimed sword, went straight through

the reddish ectoplasmic eye disk, dispersing it entirely. Then he vanished

from Fafhrd's view as suddenly and completely as if he had been swallowed up

by a snowbank.

An instant later the armed tentacles began to thrust and slash about,

at random and erratically, as blind swordsmen might. But since there were a

full ten of them, some of the strokes came perilously close to Fafhrd and he

had to dodge and duck to keep out of the way. At the rutch of his shoes on the

cobbles the tentacle-wielded swords and knives began to aim themselves a

little better, again as blind swordsmen might, and he had to dodge more nimbly

-- not the easiest or safest work for a man so big. A dispassionate observer,

if such had been conceivable and available, might have decided the ghost squid

was trying to make Fafhrd dance.

Meanwhile on the other side of the white monster, the Mouser had caught

sight of the pinkishly silver thread and, leaping high as it lifted to evade

him, slashed it with the tip of Scalpel. It offered more resistance to his

sword than the whole fog-body had and parted with a most unnatural and

unexpected twang as he cut it through.

Immediately the fog-body collapsed and far more swiftly than any

punctured bladder -- rather it fell apart like a giant white puffball kicked

by a giant boot -- and the tentacles fell to pieces, too, and the swords and

knives came clattering down harmlessly on the cobbles, and there was a swift

fleeting rush of stench that made both Fafhrd and the Mouser clap hand to nose

and mouth.

After sniffing cautiously and finding the air breathable again, the

Mouser called brightly, "Hola there, dear comrade! I think I cut the thing's

thin throat, or heart string, or vital nerve, or silver tether, or birth cord,

or whatever the strand was."

"Where did the strand lead back to?" Fafhrd demanded.

"I have no intention of trying to find that out," the Mouser assured

him, gazing warily over his shoulder in the direction from which the fog had

come. "You try threading the Lankhmar labyrinth if you want to. But the strand

seems as gone as the thing."

"Ow!" Fafhrd cried out suddenly and began to flap his hands. "Oh you

small villain, to trick me into making a stirrup of my burnt hands!"

The Mouser grinned as he poked about with his gaze at the nastily

slimed cobbles and the dead bodies and the scattered hardware. "Cat's Claw

must be here somewhere," he muttered, "and I did hear the chink of gold...."

"You'd feel a penny under the tongue of a man you were strangling!"

Fafhrd told him angrily.

* * * *

At the Temple of the Hates, five thousand worshipers began to rise up

weakly and groaningly, each lighter of weight by some few ounces than when he

had first bowed down. The drummers slumped over their drums, the lantern-

crankers over their extinguished red candles, and the lank Archpriest wearily

and grimly lowered his head and rested the wooden mask in his clawlike hands.

* * * *

At the alley-juncture, the Mouser dangled before Fafhrd's face the

small purse he had just slipped from Skel's belt.

"My noble comrade, shall we make a betrothal gift of it to sweet

Innesgay?" he asked liltingly. "And rekindle the dear little brazier and end

this night as we began it, savoring all the matchless joys of watchmanship and

all the manifold wonders of -- "

"Give it here, idiot boy!" Fafhrd snarled, snatching the chinking thing

for all his burnt fingers. "I know a place where they've soothing salves --

and needles too, to stitch up the notched ears of thieves -- and where both

the wine and the girls are sharp and clean!"

--------

II: Lean Times in Lankhmar

Once upon a time in Lankhmar, City of the Black Toga, in the world of

Nehwon, two years after the Year of the Feathered Death, Fafhrd and the Gray

Mouser parted their ways.

Exactly what caused the tall brawling barbarian and the slim elusive

Prince of Thieves to fall out, and the mighty adventuring partnership to be

broken, is uncertainly known and was at the time the subject of much

speculation. Some said they had quarreled over a girl. Others maintained, with

even greater unlikelihood, that they had disagreed over the proper division of

a loot of jewels raped from Muulsh the Moneylender. Srith of the Scrolls

suggests that their mutual cooling off was largely the reflection of a

supernatural enormity existing at the time between Sheelba of the Eyeless

Face, the Mouser's demonic mentor, and Ningauble of the Seven Eyes, Fafhrd's

alien and multiserpentine patron.

The likeliest explanation, which runs directly counter to the Muulsh

Hypothesis, is simply that times were hard in Lankhmar, adventures few and

uninviting, and that the two heroes had reached that point in life when hard-

pressed men desire to admix even the rarest quests and pleasurings with

certain prudent activities leading either to financial or to spiritual

security, though seldom if ever to both.

This theory -- that boredom and insecurity, and a difference of opinion

as to how these dismal feelings might best be dealt with, chiefly underlay the

estrangement of the twain ... this theory may account for and perhaps even

subsume the otherwise ridiculous suggestion that the two comrades fell out

over the proper spelling of Fafhrd's name, the Mouser perversely favoring a

simple Lankhmarian equivalent of "Faferd" while the name's owner insisted that

only the original mouth-filling agglomeration of consonants could continue to

satisfy his ear and eye and his semiliterate, barbarous sense of the fitness

of things. Bored and insecure men will loose arrows at dust motes.

Certain it is that their friendship, though not utterly fractured, grew

very cold and that their life-ways, though both continuing in Lankhmar,

diverged remarkably.

Gray Mouser entered the service of one Pulg, a rising racketeer of

small religions, a lord of Lankhmar's dark underworld who levied tribute from

the priests of all godlets seeking to become gods -- on pain of various

unpleasant, disturbing and revolting things happening at future services of

the defaulting godlet. If a priest didn't pay Pulg, his miracles were sure to

misfire, his congregation and collection fall off sharply, and it was quite

possible that a bruised skin and broken bones would be his lot.

Accompanied by three or four of Pulg's buddies and frequently a slim

dancing girl or two, the Mouser became a familiar and newly-ominous sight in

Lankhmar's Street of the Gods which leads from the Marsh Gate to the distant

docks and the Citadel. He still wore gray, went close-hooded, and carried

Cat's Claw and Scalpel at his side, but the dagger and curving sword kept in

their sheaths. Knowing from of old that a threat is generally more effective

than its execution, he limited his activities to the handling of conversations

and cash. "I speak for Pulg-Pulg with a _guh!_" was his usual opening. Later,

if holy men grew recalcitrant or overly keen in their bargaining and it became

necessary to maul saintlets and break up services, he would sign the bullies

to take disciplinary measures while he himself stood idly by, generally in

slow sardonic converse with the attendant girl or girls and often munching

sweetmeats. As the months passed, the Mouser grew fat and the dancing girls

successively more slim and submissive-eyed.

Fafhrd, on the other hand, broke his longsword across his knee (cutting

himself badly in the act), tore from his garments the few remaining ornaments

(dull and worthless scraps of metal) and bits of ratty fur, forswore strong

drink and all allied pleasures (he had been on small beer and womanless for

some time), and became the sole acolyte of Bwadres, the sole priest of Issek

of the Jug. Fafhrd let his beard grow until it was as long as his shoulder-

brushing hair, he became lean and hollow-cheeked and cavern-eyed, and his

voice changed from bass to tenor, though _not_ as a result of the distressing

mutilation which some whispered he had inflicted upon himself -- these last

knew he had cut himself but lied wildly as to where.

The gods _in_ Lankhmar (that is, the gods and candidates for divinity

who dwell or camp, it may be said, in the Imperishable City, not the gods of

Lankhmar -- a very different and most secret and dire matter)...the gods in

Lankhmar sometimes seem as if they must be as numberless as the grains of sand

in the Great Eastern Desert. The vast majority of them began as men, or more

strictly the memories of men who led ascetic, vision-haunted lives and died

painful, messy deaths. One gets the impression that since the beginning of

time an unending horde of their priests and apostles (or even the gods

themselves, it makes little difference) have been crippling across that same

desert, the Sinking Land, and the Great Salt Marsh to converge on Lankhmar's

low, heavy-arched Marsh Gate -- meanwhile suffering by the way various

inevitable tortures, castrations, blindings and stonings, impalements,

crucifixions, quarterings and so forth at the hands of eastern brigands and

Mingol unbelievers who, one is tempted to think, were created solely for the

purpose of seeing to the running of that cruel gauntlet. Among the tormented

holy throng are a few warlocks and witches seeking infernal immortality for

their dark satanic would-be deities and a very few proto-goddesses --

generally maidens reputed to have been enslaved for decades by sadistic

magicians and ravished by whole tribes of Mingols.

Lankhmar itself and especially the earlier-mentioned street serves as

the theater or more precisely the intellectual and artistic testing-ground of

the proto-gods after their more material but no more cruel sifting at the

hands of the brigands and Mingols. A new god (his priest or priests, that is)

will begin at the Marsh Gate and more or less slowly work his way up the

Street of the Gods, renting a temple or preempting a few yards of cobbled

pavement here and there, until he has found his proper level. A very few win

their way to the region adjoining the Citadel and join the aristocracy of the

gods in Lankhmar -- transients still, though resident there for centuries and

even millennia (the gods _of_ Lankhmar are as jealous as they are secret). Far

more godlets, it can justly be said, play a one-night-stand near the Marsh

Gate and abruptly disappear, perhaps to seek cities where the audiences are

less critical. The majority work their way about halfway up the Street of the

Gods and then slowly work their way down again, resisting bitterly every inch

and yard, until they once more reach the Marsh Gate and vanish forever from

Lankhmar and the memories of men.

Now Issek of the Jug, whom Fafhrd chose to serve, was one of the most

lowly and unsuccessful of the gods, godlets rather, in Lankhmar. He had dwelt

there for about thirteen years, during which time he had traveled only two

squares up the Street of the Gods and was now back again, ready for oblivion.

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======================SwordsintheMist[Book3ofthe"FafhrdandGrayMouser"series]byFritzLeiber======================Copyright(c)1968byFritzLeibere-readswww.ereads.comFantasy---------------------------------NOTICE:Thisworkiscopyrighted.Itislicensedonlyforusebytheoriginalpurchaser.Duplicationordistribution...

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