Fritz Leiber: Swords and Ice Magic

“Wow!” said Fafhrd. “Where did the needle point? I've got turned around.”

They located the same or another puddle-mirror, floated the needle, again found South, and then took up their trek.

They twice tried to escape from the Shadowland by changing course, once east, once west. It was no use. Whatever way they went, they found only soft-turfed earth and the misted sky. So they kept on south, trusting Nattick's needle.

For food they cut out black lambs from the black flocks they encountered, slew, bled, skinned, dressed, and roasted the tender meat over fires from wood of the squat black trees and bushes here and there. The young flesh was succulent. They drank dew.

Death in his low-walled keep continued to grin from time to time at his map, as the dark tongue of his territory kept magically extending southwest, the dimmed spark of his doomed victims in its margin.

He noted that the Ghoulish cavalry originally pursuing the Twain had halted at the boundary of his marchland.

But now there was the faintest trace of anxiety in Death's smile. And now and again a tiny vertical frown creased his opalescent, unwrinkled forehead, as he exerted his faculties to keep his geographical sorcery going.

The black tongue kept on down the map, past Sarheenmar and thievish Ilthmar to the Sinking Land. Both cities on the shore of the Inner Sea were scared unto death by the dark invasion of damp turf and misty sky, and they thanked their degenerate gods that it narrowly bypassed them.

And now the black tongue crossed the Sinking Land, moving due west. The little frown in Death's forehead had become quite deep. At the Swamp Gate of Lankhmar the Mouser and Fafhrd found their magical mentors waiting, Sheelba of the Eyeless Face and Ningauble of the Seven Eyes.

“What have you been up to?” Sheelba sternly asked the Mouser.

“And what have you been doing?” Ningauble demanded of Fafhrd.

The Mouser and Fafhrd were still in the Shadowland, and the two wizards outside it, with the boundary midway between. So their conversation was like that of two pairs of people on opposite sides of a narrow street, on the one side of which it is raining cats and dogs, the other side dry and sunny, though in this instance stinking with the smog of Lankhmar.

“Seeking Reetha,” the Mouser replied, honestly for once.

“Seeking Kreeshkra,” Fafhrd said boldly, “but a mounted Ghoul troop harried us back.”

From his hood Ningauble writhed out six of his seven eyes and regarded Fafhrd searchingly. He said severely, “Kreeshkra, tired of your untameable waywardness, has gone back to the Ghouls for good, taking Reetha with her. I would advise you instead to seek Frix,” naming a remarkable female who had played no small part in the adventure of the rat-hordes, the same affair in which Kreeshkra the Ghoul girl had been involved.

“Frix is a brave, handsome, remarkably cool woman,” Fafhrd temporized, “but how to reach her? She's in another world, a world of air.”

“While I counsel that you seek Hisvet,” Sheelba of the Eyeless Face told the Mouser grimly. The unfeatured blackness in his hood grew yet blacker (with concentration) if that were possible. He was referring to yet another female involved in the rat adventure, in which Reetha also had been a leading character.

“A great idea, Father,” responded the Mouser, who made no bones about preferring Hisvet to all other girls, particularly since he had never once enjoyed her favors, though on the verge of doing so several times. “But she is likely deep in the earth and in her rat-size persona. How would I do it? How, how?"

If Sheel and Ning could have smiled, they would have.

However, Sheelba said only, “It is bothersome to see you both bemisted, like heroes in smoke."

He and Ning, without conference, collaborated in working a small but very difficult magic. After resisting most tenaciously, the Shadowland and its drizzle retreated east, leaving the Twain in the same sunshine as their mentors. Though two invisible patches of dark mist remained, entering into the flesh of the Mouser and Fafhrd and closing forever around their hearts.

Far eastaways, Death permitted himself a small curse which would have scandalized the high gods, had they heard it. He looked daggers at his map and its shortening black tongue. For Death, he was in a most bitter temper. Foiled again!

Ning and Sheel worked another diminutive wizardry.

Without warning, Fafhrd shot upwards in the air, growing tinier and tinier, until at last he was lost to sight.

Without moving from where he stood, the Mouser also grew tiny, until he was somewhat less than a foot high, of a size to cope with Hisvet, in or out of bed. He dove into the nearest rathole.

Neither feat was as remarkable as it sounds, since Nehwon is only a bubble rising through the waters of infinity.

The two heroes each spent a delightful weekend with his lady of the week.

“I don't know why I do things like this,” Hisvet said, lisping faintly and touching the Mouser intimately as they lay side by side supine on silken sheets. “It must be because I loathe you.”

“A pleasant and even worthy encounter,” Frix confessed to Fafhrd in similar situation. “It is my hang-up to enjoy playing, now and then, with the lower animals. Which some would say is a weakness in a queen of the air.”

Their weekend done, Fafhrd and the Mouser were automatically magicked back to Lankhmar, encountering one another in Cheap Street near Nattick Nimblefinger's narrow and dirty-looking dwelling. The Mouser was his right size again.

“You look sunburned,” he observed to his comrade.

“Space-burned, it is,” Fafhrd corrected. “Frix lives in a remarkably distant land. But you, old friend, look paler than your wont.”

“Shows what three days underground will do to a man's complexion,” the Mouser responded. “Come, let's have a drink at the Silver Eel.”

Ningauble in his cave near Ilthmar and Sheelba in his mobile hut in the Great Salt Marsh each smiled, though lacking the equipment for that facial expression. They knew they had laid one more obligation on their protégés.

Fafhrd the Northerner was dreaming of a great mound of gold.

The Gray Mouser the Southerner, ever cleverer in his forever competitive fashion, was dreaming of a heap of diamonds. He hadn't tossed out all of the yellowish ones yet, but he guessed that already his glistening pile must be worth more than Fafhrd's glowing one.

How he knew in his dream what Fafhrd was dreaming was a mystery to all beings in Nehwon, except perhaps Sheelba of the Eyeless Face and Ningauble of the Seven Eyes, respectively the Mouser's and Fafhrd's sorcerer-mentors. Maybe, a vast, black basement mind shared by the two was involved.

Simultaneously they awoke, Fafhrd a shade more slowly, and sat up in bed.

Standing midway between the feet of their cots was an object that fixed their attention. It weighed about eighty pounds, was about four feet eight inches tall, had long straight black hair pendant from head, had ivory-white skin, and was as exquisitely formed as a slim chesspiece of the King of Kings carved from a single moonstone. It looked thirteen, but the lips smiled a cool self-infatuated seventeen, while the gleaming deep eye-pools were first blue melt of the Ice Age. Naturally, she was naked.

“She is mine!” the Gray Mouser said, always quick from the scabbard.

“No, she's mine!” Fafhrd said almost simultaneously, but conceding by that initial “No” that the Mouser had been first, or at least he had expected the Mouser to be first.

“I belong to myself and to no one else, save two or three virile demidevils,” the small naked girl said, though giving them each in turn a most nymphish lascivious look.