Fritz Leiber: Swords and Ice Magic

“I'll fight you for her,” the Mouser proposed.

“And I you,” Fafhrd confirmed, slowly drawing Graywand from its sheath beside his cot.

The Mouser likewise slipped Scalpel from its ratskin container.

The two heroes rose from their cots.

At this moment, two personages appeared a little behind the girl — from thin air, to all appearances. Both were at least nine feet tall. They had to bend, not to bump the ceiling. Cobwebs tickled their pointed ears. The one on the Mouser's side was black as wrought iron. He swiftly drew a sword that looked forged from the same material.

At the same time, the other newcomer — bone-white, this one — produced a silver-seeming sword, likely steel plated with tin.

The nine-footer opposing the Mouser aimed a skull-splitting blow at the top of his head. The Mouser parried in prime and his opponent's weapon shrieked off to the left. Whereupon, smartly swinging his rapier widdershins, the Mouser slashed off the black fiend's head, which struck the floor with a horrid clank.

The white afreet opposing Fafhrd trusted to a downward thrust. But the Northerner, catching his blade in a counterclockwise bind, thrust him through, the silvery sword missing Fafhrd's right temple by the thinness of a hair.

With a petulant stamp of her naked heel, the nymphet vanished into thin air, or perhaps Limbo.

The Mouser made to wipe off his blade on the cot-clothes, but discovered there was no need. He shrugged. “What a misfortune for you, comrade,” he said in a voice of mocking woe. “Now you will not be able to enjoy the delicious chit as she disports herself on your heap of gold.”

Fafhrd moved to cleanse Graywand on his sheets, only to note that it too was altogether unbloodied. He frowned. “Too bad for you, best of friends,” he sympathized. “Now you won't be able to possess her as she writhes with girlish abandon on your couch of diamonds, their glitter striking opalescent tones from her pale flesh.”

“Mauger that effeminate artistic garbage, how did you know that I was dreaming diamonds?” the Mouser demanded.

“How did I?” Fafhrd asked himself wonderingly. At last he begged the question with, “The same way, I suppose, that you knew I was dreaming of gold.”

The two excessively long corpses chose that moment to vanish, and the severed head with them.

Fafhrd said sagely, “Mouser, I begin to believe that supernatural forces were involved in this morning's haps.”

“Or else hallucinations, oh great philosopher,” the Mouser countered somewhat peevishly.

“Not so,” Fafhrd corrected, “for see, they've left their weapons behind.”

“True enough,” the Mouser conceded, rapaciously eyeing the wrought-iron and tin-plated blades on the floor. “Those will fetch a fancy price on Curio Court.”

The Great Gong of Lankhmar, sounding distantly through the walls, boomed out the twelve funereal strokes of noon, when burial parties plunge spade into earth.

“An after-omen,” Fafhrd pronounced. “Now we know the source of the supernal force. The Shadowland, terminus of all funerals.”

“Yes,” the Mouser agreed. “Prince Death, that eager boy, has had another go at us.”

Fafhrd splashed cool water onto his face from a great bowl set against the wall. “Ah well,” he spoke through the splashes, “'Twas a pretty bait at least. Truly, there's nothing like a nubile girl, enjoyed or merely glimpsed naked, to give one an appetite for breakfast.”

“Indeed yes,” the Mouser replied, as he tightly shut his eyes and briskly rubbed his face with a palm full of white brandy. “She was just the sort of immature dish to kindle your satyrish taste for maids newly budded.”

In the silence that came as the splashing stopped, Fafhrd inquired innocently, “ Whose satyrish taste?”

Drinking strong drink one night at the Silver Eel, the Gray Mouser and Fafhrd became complacently, even luxuriously, nostalgic about their past loves and amorous exploits. They even boasted a little to each other about their most recent erotic solacings (although it is always very unwise to boast of such matters, especially out loud; one never knows who may be listening).

“Despite her vast talent for evil,” the Mouser said, “Hisvet remains always a child. Why should that surprise me? — evil comes naturally to children, it is a game to them, they feel no shame. Her breasts are no bigger than walnuts, or limes, or at most small tangerines topped by hazelnuts — all eight of them.”

Fafhrd said, “Frix is the very soul of the dramatic. You should have seen her poised on the battlement later that night, her eyes raptly agleam, seeking the stars. Naked save for some ornaments of copper fresh as rosy dawn. She looked as if she were about to fly — which she can do, as you know."

In the Land of the Gods, in short in Godsland and near Nehwon's Life Pole there, which lies in the southron hemisphere at the antipodes from the Shadowland (abode of Death), three gods sitting together cross-legged in a circle picked out Fafhrd's and the Mouser's voices from the general mutter of their worshippers, both loyal and lapsed, which resounds eternally in any god's ear, as if he held a seashell to it.

One of the three gods was Issek, whom Fafhrd had once faithfully served as acolyte for three months. Issek had the appearance of a delicate youth with wrists and ankles broken, or rather permanently bent at right angles. During his Passion he had been severely racked. Another was Kos, whom Fafhrd had revered during his childhood in the Cold Waste, rather a squat, brawny god bundled up in furs, with a grim, not to say surly, heavily bearded visage.

The third God was Mog, who resembled a four-limbed spider with a quite handsome, though not entirely human face. Once the girl Ivrian, the Mouser's first love, had taken a fancy to a jet statuette of Mog he had stolen for her and decided, perhaps roguishly, that Mog and the Mouser looked alike.

Now the Gray Mouser is generally believed to be and have always been complete atheist, but this is not true. Partly to humor Ivrian, whom he spoiled fantastically, but partly because it tickled his vanity that a god should choose to look like him, he made a game for several weeks of firmly believing in Mog.

So the Mouser and Fafhrd were clearly worshippers, though lapsed, and the three gods singled out their voices because of that and because they were the most noteworthy worshippers these three gods had ever had and because they were boasting. For the gods have very sharp ears for boasts, or for declarations of happiness and self-satisfaction, or for assertions of a firm intention to do this or that, or for statements that this or that must surely happen, or any other words hinting that a man is in the slightest control of his own destiny. And the gods are jealous, easily angered, perverse, and swift to thwart.

“It's them, all right — the haughty bastards!” Kos grunted, sweating under his furs — for Godsland is paradisial.

“They haven't called on me for years — the ingrates!” Issek said with a toss of his delicate chin. “We'd be dead for all they care, except we've our other worshippers. But they don't know that — they're heartless.”

“They have not even taken our names in vain,” said Mog. “I believe, gentlemen, it is time they suffered the divine displeasure. Agreed?”

In the meanwhile, by speaking privily of Frix and Hisvet, the Mouser and Fafhrd had aroused certain immediate desires in themselves without seriously disturbing their mood of complacent nostalgia.

“What say you, Mouser,” Fafhrd mused lazily, “should we now seek excitement? The night is young.”