Fritz Leiber - FGM 4 - Swords Against Wizardry

VIP免费

2024-12-15 0 0 288.5KB 102 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

======================

Swords Against Wizardry

by Fritz Leiber

======================

e-reads

www.ereads.com

Fantasy

---------------------------------

NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original

purchaser. Duplication or distribution of this work by email, floppy disk,

network, paper print out, or any other method is a violation of international

---------------------------------

Other works by Fritz Leiber also available in e-reads editions

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

--------

*I. In the Witch's Tent*

The hag bent over the brazier. Its upward-seeking gray fumes interwove

with strands of her downward-dangling, tangled black hair. Its glow showed her

face to be as dark, jagged-featured, and dirty as the new-dug root-clump of a

blackapple tree. A half century of brazier heat and smoke had cured it as

black, crinkly, and hard as Mingol bacon.

Through her splayed nostrils and slack mouth, which showed a few brown

teeth like old tree stumps irregularly fencing the gray field of her tongue,

she garglingly inhaled and bubblingly expelled the fumes.

Such of them as escaped her greedy lungs tortuously found their way to

the tent's saggy roof, resting on seven ribs down-curving from the central

pole, and deposited on the ancient rawhide their tiny dole of resin and soot.

It is said that such a tent, boiled out after decades or preferably centuries

of use, yields a nauseous liquid which gives a man strange and dangerous

visions.

Outside the tent's drooping walls radiated the dark, twisty alleys of

Illik-Ving, an overgrown and rudely boisterous town, which is the eighth and

smallest metropolis of the Land of the Eight Cities.

While overhead there shivered in the chill wind the strange stars of

the World of Nehwon, which is so like and unlike our own world.

Inside the tent, two barbarian-clad men watched the crouching witch

across the brazier. The big man, who had red-blond hair, stared somber-eyed

and intently. The little man, who was dressed all in gray, drooped his

eyelids, stifled a yawn, and wrinkled his nose.

"I don't know which stinks worse, she or the brazier," he murmured. "Or

maybe it's the whole tent, or this alley muck we must sit in. Or perchance her

familiar is a skunk. Look, Fafhrd, if we must consult a sorcerous personage,

we should have sought out Sheelba or Ningauble before ever we sailed north

from Lankhmar across the Inner Sea."

"They weren't available," the big man answered in a clipped whisper.

"Shh, Gray Mouser, I think she's gone into trance."

"Asleep, you mean," the little man retorted irreverently.

The hag's gargling breath began to sound more like a death rattle. Her

eyelids fluttered, showing two white lines. Wind stirred the tent's dark wall

-- or it might be unseen presences fumbling and fingering.

The little man was unimpressed. He said, "I don't see why we have to

consult anyone. It isn't as if we were going outside Nehwon altogether, as we

did in our last adventure. We've got the papers -- the scrap of ramskin

parchment, I mean -- and we know where we're going. Or at least you say you

do."

"Shh!" the big man commanded, then added hoarsely, "Before embarking on

any great enterprise, it's customary to consult a warlock or witch."

The little man, now whispering likewise, countered with, "Then why

couldn't we have consulted a civilized one? -- any member in good standing

of the Lankhmar Sorcerers Guild. He'd at least have had a comely naked girl or

two around, to rest your eyes on when they began to water from scanning his

crabbed hieroglyphs and horoscopes."

"A good earthy witch is more honest than some city rogue tricked out in

black cone-hat and robe of stars," the big man argued. "Besides, this one is

nearer our icy goal and its influences. You and your townsman's lust for

luxuries! You'd turn a wizard's workroom into a brothel."

"Why not?" the little man wanted to know. "Both species of glamour at

once!" Then, jerking his thumb at the hag, "Earthy, you said? Dungy describes

her better."

"Shh, Mouser, you'll break her trance."

"Trance?" The little man reinspected the hag. Her mouth had shut and

she was breathing wheezingly through her beaky nose alone, the fume-sooty tip

of which sought to meet her jutting chin. There was a faint high wailing, as

of distant wolves, or nearby ghosts, or perhaps just an odd overtone of the

hag's wheezes.

The little man sneered his upper lip and shook his head.

His hands shook a little too, but he hid that. "No, she's only stoned

out of her skull, I'd say," he commented judiciously. "You shouldn't have

given her so much poppy gum."

"But that's the entire intent of trance," the big man protested. "To

lash, stone, and otherwise drive the spirit out of the skull and whip it up

mystic mountains, so that from their peaks it can spy out the lands of past

and future, and mayhaps other-world."

"I wish the mountains ahead of us were merely mystic," the little man

muttered. "Look, Fafhrd, I'm willing to squat here all night -- at any rate

for fifty more stinking breaths or two hundred bored heartbeats -- to

pleasure your whim. But has it occurred to you that we're in danger in this

tent? And I don't mean solely from spirits. There are other rogues than

ourselves in Illik-Ving, some perhaps on the same quest as ours, who'd dearly

love to scupper us. And here in this blind leather hut we're deer on a skyline

-- or sitting ducks."

Just then the wind came back with its fumblings and fingerings, and in

addition a scrabbling that might be that of wind-swayed branch tips or of dead

men's long fingernails a-scratch. There were faint growlings and wailings too,

and with them stealthy footfalls. Both men thought of the Mouser's last

warning. Fafhrd and he looked toward the tent's night-slitted skin door and

loosened their swords in their scabbards.

At that instant the hag's noisy breathing stopped and with it all other

sound. Her eyes opened, showing only whites -- milky ovals infinitely eerie

in the dark root-tangle of her sharp features and stringy hair. The gray tip

of her tongue traveled like a large maggot around her lips.

The Mouser made to comment, but the out-thrust palm-side of Fafhrd's

spread-fingered hand was more compelling than any shh.

In a voice low but remarkably clear, almost a girl's voice, the hag

intoned:

"For reasons sorcerous and dim

You travel toward the world's frost rim...."

_"Dim" is the key word there,_ the Mouser thought. _Typical witchy say-

nothing. She clearly knows naught about us except that we're headed north,

which she could get from any gossipy mouth_.

"You north, north, north, and north must go

Through dagger-ice and powder-snow...."

_More of the same,_ was the Mouser's inward comment. _But must she rub

it in, even the snow? Brr!_

"And many a rival, envy-eyed,

Will dog your steps until you've died...."

Aha, the inevitable fright-thrust, without which no fortune-tale is

complete!

"But after peril's cleansing fire

You'll meet at last your hearts' desire...."

_And now pat the happy ending! Gods, but the stupidest palm-reading

prostitute of Ilthmar could -- _

Something silvery gray flashed across the Mouser's eyes, so close its

form was blurred. Without a thought he ducked back and drew Scalpel.

The razor-sharp spear-blade, driven through the tent's side as if it

were paper, stopped inches from Fafhrd's head and was dragged back.

A javelin hurtled out of the hide wall. This the Mouser struck aside

with his sword.

Now a storm of cries rose outside. The burden of some was, "Death to

the strangers!" Of others, "Come out, dogs, and be killed!"

The Mouser faced the skin door, his gaze darting.

Fafhrd, almost as quick to react as the Mouser, hit on a somewhat

irregular solution to their knotty tactical problem: that of men besieged in a

fortress whose walls neither protect them nor permit outward viewing. At first

step, he leaped to the tent's central pole and with a great heave drew it from

the earth.

The witch, likewise reacting with good solid sense, threw herself flat

on the dirt.

"We decamp!" Fafhrd cried. "Mouser, guard our front and guide me!"

And with that he charged toward the door, carrying the whole tent with

him. There was a rapid series of little explosions as the somewhat brittle old

thongs that tied its rawhide sides to its pegs snapped. The brazier tumbled

over, scattering coals. The hag was overpassed. The Mouser, running ahead of

Fafhrd, threw wide the door-slit. He had to use Scalpel at once, to parry a

sword thrust out of the dark, but with his other hand he kept the door spread.

The opposing swordsman was bowled over, perhaps a bit startled at being

attacked by the tent. The Mouser trod on him. He thought he heard ribs snap as

Fafhrd did the same, which seemed a nice if brutal touch. Then he was crying

out, "Veer left now, Fafhrd! Now to the right a little! There's an alley

coming up on our left. Be ready to turn sharp into it when I give the word.

Now!" And grasping the door's hide edges, the Mouser helped swing the tent as

Fafhrd pivoted.

From behind came cries of rage and wonder, also a screeching that

sounded like the hag, enraged at the theft of her home.

The alley was so narrow that the tent's sides dragged against buildings

and fences. At the first sign of a soft spot in the dirt underfoot, Fafhrd

drove the tent-pole into it, and they both dashed out of the tent, leaving it

blocking the alley.

The cries behind them grew suddenly louder as their pursuers turned

into the alley, but Fafhrd and the Mouser did not run off over-swiftly. It

seemed certain their attackers would spend considerable time scouting and

assaulting the empty tent.

They loped together through the outskirts of the sleeping city toward

their own well-hidden camp outside it. Their nostrils sucked in the chill,

bracing air funneling down from the best pass through the Trollstep Mountains,

a craggy chain which walled off the Land of the Eight Cities from the vast

plateau of the Cold Waste to the north.

Fafhrd remarked, "It's unfortunate the old lady was interrupted just

when she was about to tell us something important."

The Mouser snorted. "She'd already sung her song, the sum of which was

zero."

"I wonder who those rude fellows were and what were their motives!"

Fafhrd asked. "I thought I recognized the voice of that ale-swiller Gnarfi,

who has an aversion to bear-meat."

"Scoundrels behaving as stupidly as we were," the Mouser answered.

"Motives? -- as soon impute 'em to sheep! Ten dolts following an idiot

leader."

"Still, it appears that someone doesn't like us," Fafhrd opined.

"Was that ever news!" the Gray Mouser retorted.

--------

*II: Stardock*

Early one evening, weeks later, the sky's gray cloud-armor blew away

south, smashed and dissolving as if by blows of an acid-dipped mace. The same

mighty northeast wind contemptuously puffed down the hitherto impregnable

cloud wall to the east, revealing a grimly majestic mountain range running

north to south and springing abruptly from the plateau, two leagues high, of

the Cold Waste -- like a dragon fifty leagues long heaving up its spike-

crested spine from icy entombment.

Fafhrd, no stranger to the Cold Waste, born at the foot of these same

mountains and childhood climber of their lower slopes, named them off to the

Gray Mouser as the two men stood together on the crunchy hoarfrosted eastern

rim of the hollow that held their camp. The sun, set for the camp, still shone

from behind their backs onto the western faces of the major peaks as he named

them -- but it shone not with any romanticizing rosy glow, but rather with a

clear, cold, detail-pinning light fitting the peaks' dire aloofness.

"Travel your eye to the first great northerly upthrust," he told the

Mouser, "that phalanx of heaven-menacing ice-spears shafted with dark rock and

gleaming green -- that's the Ripsaw. Then, dwarfing them, a single ivory-icy

tooth, unscalable by any sane appraisal -- the Tusk, he's called. Another

unscalable then, still higher and with south wall a sheer precipice shooting

up a league and curving outward toward the needletop: he is White Fang, where

my father died -- the canine of the Mountains of the Giants.

"Now begin again with the first snow dome at the south of the chain,"

continued the tall fur-cloaked man, copper-bearded and copper-maned, his head

otherwise bare to the frigid air, which was as quiet at ground level as sea-

deep beneath storm. "The Hint, she's named, or the Come On. Little enough she

looks, yet men have frozen nighting on her slopes and been whirled to death by

her whimsical queenly avalanches. Then a far vaster snow dome, true queen to

the Hint's princess, a hemisphere of purest white, grand enough to roof the

council hall of all the gods that ever were or will be -- she is Gran Hanack,

whom my father was first of men to mount and master. Our town of tents was

pitched _there_ near her base. No mark of it now, I'll guess, not even a

midden.

"After Gran Hanack and nearest to us of them all, a huge flat-topped

pillar, a pedestal for the sky almost, looking to be of green-shot snow but in

truth all snow-pale granite scoured by the storms: Obelisk Polaris.

"Lastly," Fafhrd continued, sinking his voice and gripping his smaller

comrade's shoulder, "let your gaze travel up the snow-tressed, dark-rocked,

snowcapped peak between the Obelisk and White Fang, her glittering skirt

somewhat masked by the former, but taller than they as they are taller than

the Waste. Even now she hides behind her the mounting moon. She is Stardock,

our quest's goal."

"A pretty enough, tall, slender wart on this frostbit patch of Nehwon's

face," the Gray Mouser conceded, writhing his shoulder from Fafhrd's grip.

"And now at last tell me, friend, why you never climbed this Stardock in your

youth and seized the treasure there, but must wait until we get a clue to it

in a dusty, hot, scorpion-patrolled desert tower a quarter world away -- and

waste half a year getting here."

Fafhrd's voice grew a shade unsure as he answered, "My father never

climbed her; how should I? Also, there were no legends of a treasure on

Stardock's top in my father's clan ... though there was a storm of other

legends about Stardock, each forbidding her ascent. They called my father the

Legend Breaker and shrugged wisely when he died on White Fang.... Truly, my

memory's not so good for those days, Mouser -- I got many a mind-shattering

knock on my head before I learned to deal all knocks first ... and then I was

hardly a boy when the clan left the Cold Waste -- though the rough hard walls

of Obelisk Polaris had been my upended playground...."

The Mouser nodded doubtfully. In the stillness they heard their

tethered ponies munching the ice-crisped grass of the hollow, then a faint

unangry growl from Hrissa the ice-cat, curled between the tiny fire and the

piled baggage -- likely one of the ponies had come cropping too close. On the

great icy plain around them, nothing moved -- or almost nothing.

The Mouser dipped gray lambskin-gloved fingers into the bottom of his

pouch and from the pocket there withdrew a tiny oblong of parchment and read

from it, more by memory than sight:

"Who mounts white Stardock, the Moon Tree,

"Past worm and gnome and unseen bars,

"Will win the key to luxury:

"The Heart of Light, a pouch of stars."

Fafhrd said dreamily, "They say the gods once dwelt and had their

smithies on Stardock and from thence, amid jetting fire and showering sparks,

launched all the stars; hence her name. They say diamonds, rubies, smaragds --

all great gems -- are the tiny pilot models the gods made of the stars ... and

then threw carelessly away across the world when their great work was done."

"You never told me that before," the Mouser said, looking at him

sharply.

Fafhrd blinked his eyes and frowned puzzledly. "I am beginning to

remember childhood things."

The Mouser smiled thinly before returning the parchment to its deep

pocket. "The guess that a pouch of stars might be a bag of gems," he listed,

"the story that Nehwon's biggest diamond is called the Heart of Light, a few

words on a ramskin scrap in the topmost room of a desert tower locked and

sealed for centuries -- small hints, those, to draw two men across this

murdering, monotonous Cold Waste. Tell me, Old Horse, were you just homesick

for the miserable white meadows of your birth to pretend to believe 'em?"

"Those small hints," Fafhrd said, gazing now toward White Fang, "drew

other men north across Nehwon. There must have been other ramskin scraps,

though why they should be discovered at the same time, I cannot guess."

"We left all such fellows behind at Illik-Ving, or Lankhmar even,

before we ever mounted the Trollsteps," the Mouser asserted with complete

confidence. "Weak sisters, they were, smelling loot but quailing at hardship."

Fafhrd gave a small headshake and pointed. Between them and White Fang

rose the tiniest thread of black smoke.

"Did Gnarfi and Kranarch seem weak sisters? -- to name but two of the

other seekers," he asked when the Mouser finally saw and nodded.

"It could be," the Mouser agreed gloomily. "Though aren't there any

ordinary travelers of this Waste? Not that we've seen a man-shaped soul since

the Mingol."

Fafhrd said thoughtfully, "It might be an encampment of the ice gnomes

... though they seldom leave their caves except at High Summer, now a month

gone...." He broke off, frowning puzzledly. "Now how did I know that?"

"Another childhood memory bobbing to the top of the black pot?" the

Mouser hazarded. Fafhrd shrugged doubtfully.

"So, for choice, Kranarch and Gnarfi," the Mouser concluded. "Two

strong brothers, I'll concede. Perhaps we should have picked a fight with 'em

at Illik-Ving," he suggested. "Or perhaps even now ... a swift march by night

... a sudden swoop -- "

Fafhrd shook his head. "Now we're climbers, not killers," he said. "A

man must be all climber to dare Stardock." He directed the Mouser's gaze back

toward the tallest mountain. "Let's rather study her west wall while the light

holds.

"Begin first at her feet," he said. "That glimmering skirt falling from

her snowy hips, which are almost as high as the Obelisk -- that's the White

Waterfall, where no man may live.

"Now to her head again. From her flat tilted snowcap hang two great

swelling braids of snow, streaming almost perpetually with avalanches, as if

she combed 'em day and night -- the Tresses, those are called. Between them's

a wide ladder of dark rock, marked at three points by ledges. The topmost of

the three ledge-banks is the Face -- d'you note the darker ledges marking eyes

and lips? The midmost of the three is called the Roosts; the lowermost --

level with Obelisk's wide summit -- the Lairs."

"What lairs and roosts there?" the Mouser wanted to know.

"None may say, for none have climbed the Ladder," Fafhrd replied. "Now

as to our route up her -- it's most simple. We scale Obelisk Polaris -- a

trustworthy mountain if there ever was one -- then cross by a dippling snow-

saddle (there's the danger-stretch of our ascent!) to Stardock and climb the

Ladder to her top."

"How do we climb the Ladder in the long blank stretches between the

ledges?" the Mouser asked with childlike innocence, almost. "That is, if the

Lairers and Roosters will honor our passports and permit us to try."

Fafhrd shrugged. "There'll be a way, rock being rock."

"Why's there no snow on the Ladder?"

"Too steep."

"And supposing we climb it to the top," the Mouser finally asked, "how

do we lift our black-and-blue skeletonized bodies over the brim of Stardock's

snowy hat, which seems to outcurve and downcurve most stylishly?"

"There's a triangular hole in it somewhere called the Needle's Eye,"

Fafhrd answered negligently. "Or so I've heard. But never you fret, Mouser,

we'll find it."

"Of course we will," the Mouser agreed with an airy certainty that

almost sounded sincere, "we who hop-skip across shaking snow bridges and dance

the fantastic up vertical walls without ever touching hand to granite. Remind

me to bring a longish knife to carve our initials on the sky when we celebrate

the end of our little upward sortie."

His gaze wandered slightly northward. In another voice he continued,

"The dark north wall of Stardock now -- that looks steep enough, to be sure,

but free of snow to the very top. Why isn't that our route -- rock, as you say

with such unanswerable profundity, being rock."

Fafhrd laughed unmockingly. "Mouser," he said, "do you mark against the

darkening sky that long white streamer waving south from Stardock's top? Yes,

and below it a lesser streamer -- can you distinguish that? That second one

comes through the Needle's Eye! Well, those streamers from Stardock's hat are

called the Grand and Petty Pennons. They're powdered snow blasted off Stardock

by the northeast gale, which blows at least seven days out of eight, never

predictably. That gale would pluck the stoutest climber off the north wall as

easily as you or I might puff dandelion down from its darkening stem.

Stardock's self shields the Ladder from the gale."

"Does the gale never shift around to strike the Ladder?" the Mouser

inquired lightly.

"Only occasionally," Fafhrd reassured him.

"Oh, that's great," the Mouser responded with quite overpowering

sincerity and would have returned to the fire, except just then the darkness

began swiftly to climb the Mountains of the Giants, as the sun took his final

dive far to the west, and the gray-clad man stayed to watch the grand

spectacle.

It was like a black blanket being pulled up. First the glittering skirt

of the White Waterfall was hidden, then the Lairs on the Ladder and then the

Roosts. Now all the other peaks were gone, even the Tusk's and White Fang's

gleaming cruel tips, even the greenish-white roof of Obelisk Polaris. Now only

Stardock's snow hat was left and below it the Face between the silvery

Tresses. For a moment the ledges called the Eyes gleamed, or seemed to. Then

all was night.

Yet there was a pale afterglow about. It was profoundly silent and the

air utterly unmoving. Around them, the Cold Waste seemed to stretch north,

west, and south to infinity.

And in that space of silence something went whisper-gliding through the

still air, with the faint rushy sound of a great sail in a moderate breeze.

Fafhrd and the Mouser both stared all around wildly. Nothing. Beyond the

little fire, Hrissa the ice-cat sprang up hissing. Still nothing. Then the

sound, whatever had made it, died away.

Very softly, Fafhrd began, "There is a legend...." A long pause. Then

with a sudden headshake, in a more natural voice: "The memory slips away,

Mouser. All my mind-fingers couldn't clutch it. Let's patrol once around the

camp and so to bed."

* * * *

From first sleep the Mouser woke so softly that even Hrissa, back

pressed against him from his knees to his chest on the side toward the fire,

did not rouse.

Emerging from behind Stardock, her light glittering on the southern

Tress, hung the swelling moon, truly a proper fruit of the Moon Tree. Strange,

the Mouser thought, how small the moon was and how big Stardock, silhouetted

against the moon-pale sky.

Then, just below the flat top of Stardock's hat, he saw a bright, pale

blue twinkling. He recalled that Ashsha, pale blue and brightest of Nehwon's

stars, was near the moon tonight, and he wondered if he were seeing her by

rare chance through the Needle's Eye, proving the latter's existence. He

wondered too what great sapphire or blue diamond -- perhaps the Heart of

Light? -- had been the gods' pilot model for Ashsha, smiling drowsily the

while at himself for entertaining such a silly, lovely myth. And then,

embracing the myth entirely, he asked himself whether the gods had left any of

their full-scale stars, unlaunched, on Stardock. Then Ashsha, if it were she,

winked out.

The Mouser felt cozy in his cloak lined with sheep's-wool and now

thong-laced into a bag by the horn hooks around its hem. He stared long and

dreamily at Stardock until the moon broke loose from her and a blue jewel

twinkled on top of her hat and broke loose too -- now Ashsha surely. He

wondered unfearfully about the windy rushing he and Fafhrd had heard in the

still air -- perhaps only a long tongue of a storm licking down briefly. If

the storm lasted, they would climb up into it.

Hrissa stretched in her sleep. Fafhrd grumbled low in a dream, wrapped

in his own great thong-laced cloak stuffed with eiderdown.

The Mouser dropped his gaze to the ghostly flames of the dying fire,

seeking sleep himself. The flames made girl-bodies, then girl-faces. Next a

ghostly pale green girl-face -- perhaps an afterimage, he thought at first --

appeared beyond the fire, staring at him through close-slitted eyes across the

flame tops. It grew more distinct as he gazed at it, but there was no trace of

hair or body about it -- it hung against the dark like a mask.

Yet it was weirdly beautiful: narrow chin, high-arched cheeks, wine-

dark short lips slightly pouted, straight nose that went up without a dip into

the broad, somewhat low forehead -- and then the mystery of those fully lidded

eyes seeming to peer at him through wine-dark lashes. And all, save lashes and

lips, of palest green, like jade.

The Mouser did not speak or stir a muscle, simply because the face was

very beautiful to him -- just as any man might hope for the moment never to

end when his naked mistress unconsciously or by secret design assumes a

particularly charming attitude.

Also, in the dismal Cold Waste, any man treasures illusions, though

knowing them almost certainly to be such.

Suddenly the eyes parted wide, showing only the darkness behind, as if

the face were a mask indeed. The Mouser did start then, but still not enough

to wake Hrissa.

Then the eyes closed, the lips puckered with taunting invitation; then

the face began swiftly to dissolve as if it were being literally wiped away.

First the right side went, then the left, then the center, last of all the

dark lips and the eyes. For a moment the Mouser fancied he caught a winy odor;

then all was gone.

He contemplated waking Fafhrd and almost laughed at the thought of his

comrade's surly reactions. He wondered if the face had been a sign from the

gods, or a sending from some black magician castled on Stardock, or Stardock's

very soul perhaps -- though then where had she left her glittering tresses and

hat and her Ashsha eye? -- or only a random creation of his own most clever

brain, stimulated by sexual privation and tonight by beauteous if devilishly

dangerous mountains. Rather quickly he decided on the last explanation and he

slumbered.

* * * *

Two evenings later, at the same hour, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stood

scarcely a knife cast from the west wall of Obelisk Polaris, building a cairn

from pale greenish rock-shards fallen over the millennia. Among this scanty

scree were some bones, many broken, of sheep or goats.

As before, the air was still though very cold, the Waste empty, the set

sun bright on the mountain faces.

From this closest vantage point the Obelisk was foreshortened into a

pyramid that seemed to taper up forever, vertically. Encouragingly, his rock

felt diamond-hard while the lowest reaches of the wall at any rate were thick

with bumpy handholds and footholds, like pebbled leather.

To the south, Gran Hanack and the Hint were hidden.

To the north White Fang towered monstrously, yellowish white in the

sunlight, as if ready to rip a hole in the graying sky. Bane of Fafhrd's

father, the Mouser recalled.

Of Stardock, there could be seen the dark beginning of the wind-blasted

north wall and the north end of the deadly White Waterfall. All else of

Stardock the Obelisk hid.

Save for one touch: almost straight overhead, seeming now to come from

Obelisk Polaris, the ghostly Grand Pennon streamed southwest.

From behind Fafhrd and the Mouser as they worked came the tantalizing

odor of two snow hares roasting by the fire, while before it Hrissa tore flesh

slowly and savoringly from the carcass of a third she'd coursed down. The ice-

cat was about the size and shape of a cheetah, though with long tufty white

hair. The Mouser had bought her from a far-ranging Mingol trapper just north

of the Trollsteps.

Beyond the fire the ponies eagerly chomped the last of the grain,

strengthening stuff they'd not tasted for a week.

Fafhrd wrapped his sheathed longsword Graywand in oiled silk and laid

it in the cairn, then held out a big hand to the Mouser.

"Scalpel?"

"I'm taking my sword with me," the Mouser stated, then added

justifyingly, "it's but a feather to yours."

"Tomorrow you'll find what a feather weighs," Fafhrd foretold. The big

man shrugged and placed by Graywand his helmet, a bear's hide, a folded tent,

shovel and pickax, gold bracelets from his wrists and arms, quills, ink,

papyrus, a large copper pot, and some books and scrolls. The Mouser added

various empty and near-empty bags, two hunting spears, skis, an unstrung bow

with a quiver of arrows, tiny jars of oily paint and squares of parchment, and

all the harness of the ponies, many of the items wrapped against damp like

Graywand.

Then, their appetites quickening from the roast-fumes, the two comrades

swiftly built two top courses, roofing the cairn.

Just as they turned toward supper, facing the raggedly gilt-edged flat

western horizon, they heard in the silence the rushy sail-like noise again,

fainter this time but twice: once in the air to the north and, almost

simultaneously, to the south.

Again they stared around swiftly but searchingly, yet there was nothing

anywhere to be seen except -- again Fafhrd saw it first -- a thread of black

smoke very near White Fang, rising from a point on the glacier between that

mountain and Stardock.

"Gnarfi and Kranarch, if it be they, have chosen the rocky north wall

for their ascent," the Mouser observed.

"And it will be their bane," Fafhrd predicted, up-jerking his thumb at

the Pennon.

The Mouser nodded with less certainty, then demanded, "Fafhrd, what was

that sound? You've lived here."

Fafhrd's brow crinkled and his eyes almost shut. "Some legend of great

birds..." he muttered questioningly, "...or of great fish -- no, that couldn't

be right."

"Memory pot still seething all black?" the Mouser asked. Fafhrd nodded.

Before he left the cairn, the Northerner laid beside it a slab of salt.

"That," he said, "along with the ice-filmed pool and herbage we just passed,

should hold the ponies here for a week. If we don't return, well, at least we

showed 'em the way between here and Illik-Ving."

Hrissa smiled up from her bloody tidbit, as if to say, "No need to

worry about me or my rations."

* * * *

Again the Mouser woke as soon as sleep had gripped him tight, this time

with a surge of pleasure, as one who remembers a rendezvous. And again, this

time without any preliminary star-staring or flame-gazing, the living mask

faced him across the sinking fire: every same expression-quirk and feature --

short lips, nose and forehead one straight line -- except that tonight it was

ivory pale with greenish lips and lids and lashes.

The Mouser was considerably startled, for last night he had stayed

awake, waiting for the phantom girl-face -- and even trying to make it come

again -- until the swelling moon had risen three handbreadths above Stardock

... without any success whatever. His mind had known that the face had been an

hallucination on the first occasion, but his feelings had insisted otherwise -

- to his considerable disgust and the loss of a quarter night's sleep.

And by day he had secretly consulted the last of the four short stanzas

on the parchment scrap in his pouch's deepest pocket:

Who scales the Snow King's citadel

Shall father his two daughters' sons;

Though he must face foes fierce and fell,

His seed shall live while time still runs.

Yesterday that had seemed rather promising -- at least the fathering

and daughters part -- though today, after his lost sleep, the merest mockery.

But now the living mask was there again and going through all the same

teasing antics, including the shuddersome yet somehow thrilling trick of

opening wide its lids to show not eyes but a dark backing like the rest of the

night. The Mouser was enchanted in a shivery way, but unlike the first night

he was full-mindedly alert, and he tested for illusions by blinking and

squinting his own eyes and silently shifting his head about in his hood --

with no effect whatever on the living mask. Then he quietly unlaced the thong

from the top hooks of his cloak -- Hrissa was sleeping against Fafhrd tonight

-- and slowly reached out his hand and picked up a pebble and flicked it

across the pale flames at a point somewhat below the mask.

Although he knew there wasn't anything beyond the fire but scattered

scree and ringingly hard earth, there wasn't the faintest sound of the pebble

striking anywhere. He might have thrown it off Nehwon.

At almost the same instant, the mask smiled tauntingly.

The Mouser was very swiftly out of his cloak and on his feet.

But even more swiftly the mask dissolved away -- this time in one swift

stroke from forehead to chin.

He quickly stepped, almost lunged, around the fire to the spot where

the mask had seemed to hang, and there he stared around searchingly. Nothing -

- except a fleeting breath of wine or spirits of wine. He stirred the fire and

stared around again. Still nothing. Except that Hrissa woke beside Fafhrd and

bristled her moustache and gazed solemnly, perhaps scornfully, at the Mouser,

who was beginning to feel rather like a fool. He wondered if his mind and his

desires were playing a silly game against each other.

Then he trod on something. His pebble, he thought, but when he picked

it up, he saw it was a tiny jar. It could have been one of his own pigment

jars, but it was too small, hardly bigger than a joint of his thumb, and made

not of hollowed stone but some kind of ivory or other tooth.

He knelt by the fire and peered into it, then dipped in his little

finger and gingerly rubbed the tip against the rather hard grease inside. It

came out ivory-hued. The grease had an oily, not winy odor.

The Mouser pondered by the fire for some time. Then with a glance at

Hrissa, who had closed her eyes and laid back her moustache again, and at

Fafhrd, who was snoring softly, he returned to his cloak and to sleep.

He had not told Fafhrd a word about his earlier vision of the living

mask. His surface reason was that Fafhrd would laugh at such calf-brained

nonsense of smoke-faces; his deeper reason the one which keeps any man from

mentioning a pretty new girl even to his dearest friend.

So perhaps it was the same reason which next morning kept Fafhrd from

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

======================SwordsAgainstWizardrybyFritzLeiber======================Copyright(c)1968byFritzLeibere-readswww.ereads.comFantasy---------------------------------NOTICE:Thisworkiscopyrighted.Itislicensedonlyforusebytheoriginalpurchaser.Duplicationordistributionofthisworkbyemail,floppydisk,netw...

展开>> 收起<<

Fritz Leiber - FGM 4 - Swords Against Wizardry.pdf

共102页,预览21页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Fritz Leiber - FGM 4 - Swords Against Wizardry

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: