Фриц Лейбер: Swords Of Lankhmar[Мечи Ланкмара]

To his left Elakeria snatched up a handful of the wands of office and raised them threateningly. To the Mouser, even those flimsy rods were huge as pikes.

To his right Glipkerio, still cringing away, reached down surreptitiously for his light battle-ax. Evidently the Mouser's loyal squeaks had gone unheard, or not been believed.

The Mouser wondered which way to jump.

Behind him Frix murmured softly, though to the Mouser's ears still somewhat boomingly, "Exit kitchen tyrant pursued by pages unclad and maids in a state of nature, leaving our hero beset by an ogre and two — or is it three? — ogresses."

Fafhrd, although he came down the temple's wall fast, found the battle once more considerably changed when he reached the bottom.

The Gods _of_ Lankhmar, though not exactly in panicky rout, were withdrawing toward the open door of their temple, thrusting their staves from time to time at the horde of rats which still beset them. Wisps of smoke still trailed from a few of them — ghostly moonlit pennons. They were coughing, or more likely cursing and it sounded like coughs. Their brown skull-faces were dire — the expression of elders defeated and trying to cloak their impotent, gibbering rage with dignity.

Fafhrd moved rapidly out of their way.

Kreeshkra and her two male Ghouls were slashing and stabbing from their saddles at another flood of rats in front of Hisvin's house, while their black horses crunched rats under their hooves.

Fafhrd made toward them, but at that moment there was a rush of rats at him and he had to unsheathe Graywand. Using the great sword as a scythe, he cleared a space around him with three strokes, then started again toward the Ghouls.

The doors of Hisvin's house burst open and there fled out down the short stairs a crowd of Mingol slaves. Their faces grimaced with terror, but even more striking was the fact that they were thin almost beyond emaciation. Their once-tight black liveries hung loosely on them. Their hands were skeletal. Their faces were skulls covered with yellow skin.

Three groups of skeletons: brown, ivory, and yellow — _It is a prodigy of prodigies_, Fafhrd thought, _the beginning of a dark spectrum of bones_.

Behind the Mingols and driving them, not so much to kill them as to get them out of the way, came a company of crouchy but stalwart masked men, some wearing armor, all brandishing weapons — swords and crossbows. There was something horribly familiar about their scuttling, hobble-legged gait. Then came some with pikes and helmets, but without masks. The faces, or muzzles rather, were those of rats. All the newcomers, masked or nakedly fur-faced, made for the three Ghoulish riders.

Fafhrd sprang forward, Graywand singing about his head, unmindful of the new surge of ordinary rats coming against him — and came to a skidding halt.

The man-sized and man-armed rats were still pouring from Hisvin's house. Hero or no, he couldn't kill _that_ many of them.

At that instant he felt claws sink into his leg. He raised his crook-fingered big left hand to sweep away from him whatever now attacked him… and saw climbing his thigh the black kitten from _Squid_.

_That scatterbrain mustn't be in this dread battle_, he thought… and opened his empty pouch to thrust in the kitten… and saw gleaming dully at its bottom the tin whistle… and realized that here was a metal straw to cling to.

He snatched it out and set it to his lips and blew it.

When one taps with idle finger a toy drum, one does not expect a peal of thunder. Fafhrd gasped and almost swallowed the whistle. Then he made to hurl it away from him. Instead he set it to his lips once more, put his hands to his ears, for some reason closed his eyes tight, and once more blew it.

Once again the horrendous noise went shuddering up toward the moon and down the shadowed streets of Lankhmar.

Imagine the scream of a leopard, the snarl of a tiger, and the roaring of a lion commingled, and one will have some faint suggestion of the sound the tin whistle produced.

Everywhere the little rats held still in their hordes. The skeletal Mingols paused in their shaking, staggering flight. The big armed rats, masked or helmeted, halted in their attack upon the Ghouls. Even the Ghouls and their horses held still. The fur on the black kitten fluffed out as it still clung to Fafhrd's crouching thigh, and its green eyes became enormous.

Then the awesome sound had died away, a distant bell was tolling midnight, and all the battlers fell to action again.

But black shapes were forming in the moonlight around Fafhrd. Shapes that were at first no more than shadows with a sheen to them. Then darker, like translucent polished black horn. Then solid and velvet black, their pads resting on the moonlit flagstones. They had the slender, long-legged forms of cheetahs, but the mass of tigers or lions. They stood almost as high at the shoulder as horses. Their somewhat small and prick-eared heads swayed slowly, as did their long tails. Their fangs were like needles of faintly green ice. Their eyes, which were like frozen emeralds, stared all twenty-six at Fafhrd — for there were thirteen of the beasts.

Then Fafhrd realized that they were staring not at his head but at his waist.

The black kitten there gave a shrill, wailing cry that was at once a young cat's first battle call and also a greeting.

With a screaming, snarling roar, like thirteen of the tin whistles blown at once, the War Cats bounded outward. With preternatural agility, the black kitten leaped after a group of four of them.

The small rats fled toward walls and shutters and doors — wherever holes might be. The Mingols threw themselves down. The half-splintered doors of the temple of the Gods _of_ Lankhmar could be heard to screech shut rather rapidly.

The four War Cats to whom the kitten had attached himself raced toward the man-size rats coming from Hisvin's house. Two of the Ghouls had been struck from their saddles by pikes or swords. The third — it was Kreeshkra — parried a blow from a rapier, then kicked her horse into a gallop past Hisvin's house toward the Rainbow Palace. The two riderless black horses followed her.

Fafhrd prepared to follow her, but at that instant a black parrot swooped down in front of him, beating its wings, and a small skinny boy with a puckered scar under his left eye was tugging at his wrist.

Mouser-Mouser!" the parrot squawked. "Danger-danger! Blue-Blue Blue-Blue Audience Chamber!"

"Same message, big man," the urchin rasped with a grin.

So Fafhrd, running around the battle of armed rats and War Cats — a whirling melee of silvery swords and flashing, claws, of cold green and hot red eyes — set out after Kreeshkra anyhow, since she had been going in the same direction.

Long pikes struck down a War Cat, but the kitten sprang like a shining black comet at the face of the foremost of the giant rodent pike-wielders as the other three War Cats closed in beside him.

The Gray Mouser lightly dropped off the back of the golden couch the instant Hisvin and Hisvet got within stabbing distance. Then, since they were both coming around the couch, he ran under it and from thence under the low table. During his short passage through the open, Glipkerio's ax crashed on the tiles to one side of him, while Elakeria's bundle of wands smashed clatteringly down on the other. He paused under the center of the table, plotting his next action.

Glipkerio darted prudently away, leaving his ax where he had let go of it from the sting of the blow. Plump Elakeria, however, slipped and fell with the force of her clumsy thwack and for the moment both her sprawled form and the ax were quite close to the Mouser.

Then — well, one moment the table was a roof a comfortable rat's-span or so above the Mouser's head. The next moment he had, without moving, bumped his head on it and very shortly afterward somehow overturned it to one side without touching it with his hands and despite the fact that he had sat down rather hard on the floor.