Fritz Leiber - Swords Against Death

Only the great diamond seemed aware of Fafhrd. Exhibiting a fretful intelligence, it kept bounding at him viciously, sometimes leaping as high as his head. He involuntarily made for the door as his only hope. It was champing up and down with convulsive regularity.

Watching his chance, he dived at it just as it was opening, and writhed through. The diamond followed him, striking at his legs. The carcass of Rannarsh was flung sprawling in his path. He jumped over it, then slid, lurched, stumbled, fell down stairs in earthquake, where dry bones danced. Surely the beast must die, the house must crash and crush him flat. The diamond leaped for his skull, missed, hurtled through the air, and struck a wall. Thereupon it burst into a great puff of iridescent dust.

Immediately the rhythm of the shaking of the house began to increase. Fafhrd raced across the heaving floor, escaped by inches the killing embrace of the great doorway, plunged across the clearing — passing a dozen feet from the spot where the tower was beating boulders into crushed rock — and then leaped over two pits in the ground. His face was rigid and white. His eyes were vacant. He blundered bull-like into two or three trees, and only came to a halt because he knocked himself flat against one of them.

The house had ceased most of its random movements, and the whole of it was shaking like a huge dark jelly. Suddenly its forward part heaved up like a behemoth in death agony. The two smaller domes were jerked ponderously a dozen feet off the ground, as if they were the paws. The tower whipped into convulsive rigidity. The main dome contracted sharply, like a stupendous lung. For a moment it hung there, poised. Then it crashed to the ground in a heap of gigantic stone shards. The earth shook. The forest resounded. Battered atmosphere whipped branches and leaves. Then all was still. Only from the fractures in the stone a tarry, black liquid was slowly oozing, and here and there iridescent puffs of air suggested jewel-dust.

Along a narrow, dusty road two horsemen were cantering slowly toward the village of Soreev in the southernmost limits of the land of Lankhmar. They presented a somewhat battered appearance. The limbs of the larger, who was mounted on a chestnut gelding, showed several bruises, and there was a bandage around his thigh and another around the palm of his right hand. The smaller man, the one mounted on a gray mare, seemed to have suffered an equal number of injuries.

“Do you know where we're headed?” said the latter, breaking a long silence. “We're headed for a city. And in that city are endless houses of stone, stone towers without numbers, streets paved with stone, domes, archways, stairs. Tcha, if I feel then as I feel now, I'll never go within a bowshot of Lankhmar's walls."

His large companion smiled.

“What now, little man? Don't tell me you're afraid of earthquakes?"

“What's the use of knowing the name of a skull? One would never have occasion to talk to it,” said the fat thief loudly. “What interests me is that it has rubies for eyes."

“Yet it is written here that its name is Ohmphal,” replied the black-bearded thief in the quieter tones of authority.

“Let me see,” said the bold, red-haired wench, leaning over his shoulder. She needed to be bold; all women were immemorially forbidden to enter Thieves’ House. Together the three of them read the tiny hieroglyphs.

ITEM:

the skull Ohmphal, of the Master Thief Ohmphal, with great ruby eyes, and one pair of jeweled hands.

HISTORY OF ITEM:

the skull Ohmphal was stolen from the Thieves’ Guild by the priests of Votishal and placed by them in the crypt of their accursed temple.

INSTRUCTIONS:

the skull Ohmphal is to be recovered at the earliest opportunity, that it may be given proper veneration in the Thieves’ Sepulcher.

DIFFICULTIES:

the lock of the door leading to the crypt is reputed to be beyond the cunning of any thief to pick.

WARNINGS:

within the crypt is rumored to be a guardian beast of terrible ferocity.

“Those crabbed letters are devilish hard to read,” said the red-haired wench, frowning.

“And no wonder, for they were written centuries ago,” said the black-bearded thief.

The fat thief said, “I never heard tell of a Thieves’ Sepulcher, save the junkyard, the incinerator, and the Inner Sea."

“Times and customs change,” the black-bearded thief philosophized. “Periods of reverence alternate with periods of realism."

“Why is it called the skull Ohmphal?” the fat thief wondered. “Why not the skull of Ohmphal?"

The black-bearded thief shrugged.

“Where did you find this parchment?” the red-haired wench asked him.

“Beneath the false bottom of a moldering chest in our storerooms,” he replied.

“By the gods who are not,” chuckled the fat thief, still poring over the parchment, “the Thieves’ Guild must have been superstitious in those ancient days. To think of wasting jewels on a mere skull. If we ever get hold of Master Ohmphal, we'll venerate him — by changing his ruby eyes into good hard money."

“Aye!” said the black-bearded thief, “And it was just that matter I wanted to talk to you about, Fissif — the getting hold of Ohmphal."

“Oh, but there are — difficulties, as you, Krovas our master, must surely know,” said the fat thief, quickly singing another tune. “Even today, after the passage of centuries, men still shudder when they speak of the crypt of Votishal, with its lock and its beast. There is no one in the Thieves’ Guild who can—"

“No one in the Thieves’ Guild, that's true!” interrupted the black-bearded thief sharply. “But" — and here his voice began to go low—"there are those outside the Thieves’ Guild who can. Have you heard that there is recently returned here to Lankhmar a certain rogue and picklock known as the Gray Mouser? And with him a huge barbarian who goes by the name of Fafhrd, but is sometimes called the Beast-Slayer? We have a score as you well know, to settle with both of them. They slew our sorcerer, Hristomilo. That pair commonly hunts alone — yet if you were to approach them with this tempting suggestion…"

“But, Master,” interposed the fat thief, “in that case, they would demand at least two-thirds of the profits."

“Exactly!” said the black-bearded thief, with a sudden flash of cold humor. The red-haired wench caught his meaning, and laughed aloud. “Exactly! And that is just the reason why I have chosen you, Fissif, the smoothest of double-crossers, to undertake this business."

The ten remaining days of the Month of the Serpent had passed, and the first fifteen days of the Month of the Owl, since those three had conferred. And the fifteenth day had darkened into night. Chill fog, like a dark shroud, hugged ancient stony Lankhmar, chief city of the land of Lankhmar. This night the fog had come earlier than usual, flowing down the twisting streets and mazy alleyways. And it was getting thicker.

In one street rather narrower and more silent than the rest — Cheap Street, its name — a square yellow torchlight shone from a wide doorway in a vast and rambling house of stone. There was something ominous in a single open door in a street where all other doors were barred against the darkness and the damp. People avoided this street at night. And there was reason for their fear. The house had a bad reputation. People said it was the den in which the thieves of Lankhmar gathered to plot and palaver and settle their private bickerings, the headquarters from which Krovas, the reputed Master Thief, issued his orders — in short, the home of the formidable Thieves’ Guild of Lankhmar.