by Fritz Leiber
The King of Kings was a thrifty soul and unlike many monarchs expected all his wives and concubines to perform useful work rather than be forever lolling, bathing, gossiping and brawling. So, it being the work she was uncontestably best trained for and the one most apt to bring profit, Eesafem had been permitted her forge and her metals.
But despite her regular working of these and her consequent production of numerous beauteous and ingenious objects, Eesafem’s young mind had become viciously unhinged from her twelve harem moons, seven of those in lonely cell, and from the galling fact that the King of Kings had yet to visit her once for amorous or any other reason, even despite the charming metal gifts she had fashioned for him. Nor had any other man visited her, excepting eunuchs who lectured her on the erotic arts—while she was securely trussed up, else she would have flown at their pudgy faces like a wildcat, and even at that she spat at them whenever able—and gave her detailed and patronizing advice on her metalworking, which she ignored as haughtily as she did their other fluting words.
Instead, her creativity, now fired by insane jealousies as well as racklike aches for freedom, had taken a new and secret turn.
Scanning the silver mirror, she carefully inspected the four ornaments adorning her slender yet wiry-strong figure. They were two breast cups and two shin-greaves, all chiefly of a delicate silver filigree, which set off nicely her green and blue tattooing.
Once her gaze in the mirror wandered overshoulder, past her naked pate with its finely patterned, fantastical skullcap, to a silver cage in which perched a green and blue parrot with eye as icily malevolent as her own—perpetual reminder of her own imprisonment.
The only oddity about the filigree ornaments was that the breast cups, jutting outward over the nipples, ended in short spikes trained straight forward, while the greaves were topped, just at the knee, with vertical ebony lozenges about as big as a man’s thumb.
These bits of decor were not very obtrusive, the spikes being stained a greenish blue, as though to match her tattooing.
So Eesafem gazed at herself with a crafty, approving smile. And so Death gazed at her with a more crafty one, and one far more coldly approving than any eunuch’s. And so she vanished in a flash from her cell. And before the blue-green parrot could gin squawk his startlement, Death’s eyes and ears were elsewhere also.
Only seven heartbeats left.
Now it may be that in the world of Nehwon there are gods of whom even Death does not know and who from time to time take pleasure in putting obstacles in his path. Or it may be that Chance is quite as great a power as Necessity. At any rate, on this particular morning Fafhrd the Northerner, who customarily snoozed till noon, waked with the first dull silvery shaft of dawn and took up his dear weapon Graywand, naked as he, and blearily made his way from his penthouse pallet out onto the roof, where he began to practice all manner of swordstrokes, stamping his feet in his advances and from time to time uttering battleshouts, unmindful of the weary merchants he waked below him into groaning, cursing, or fright-quivering life. He shivered at first from the chill, fishy dawnmist from the Great Salt Marsh, but soon was sweating from his exercise, while his thrusts and parries, perfunctory to begin with, grew lightning-swift and most authoritative.
Except for Fafhrd, it was a quiet morning in Lankhmar. The bells had not yet begun to toll, nor the deep-throated gongs resound for the passage of the city’s gentle overlord, nor the news been bruited about of his seventeen cats netted and hustled to the Great Gaol, there in separate cages to await trial.
It also happened that on this same day the Gray Mouser had waked till dawn, which usually found him an hour or so asleep. He curled in penthouse corner on a pile of pillows behind a low table, chin in hand, a woolly gray robe huddled around him. From time to time he wryly sipped sour wine and thought even sourer thoughts, chiefly about the evil and untrustworthy folk he had known during his mazily crooked lifetime. He ignored Fafhrd’s exit and shut his ears to his noisy prancings, but the more he wooed sleep, the further she drew away.
The foamy-mouthed, red-eyed berserk materialized in front of Fafhrd just as the latter assumed the guard of low tierce, swordhand thrust forward, down, and a little to the right, sword slanting upward. He was astounded by the apparition, who, untroubled by sanity’s strictures, instantly aimed at the naked Northerner’s neck a great swipe with his saw-edged scimitar, which looked rather like a row of short, broad-bladed daggers forged side to side and freshly dipped in blood—so that it was pure automatism made Fafhrd shift his guard to a well-braced high carte which deflected the berserk’s sword so that it whished over Fafhrd’s head with something of the sound of a steel rod very swiftly dragged along a fence of steel pickets, as each razor-edged tooth in turn met the Northerner’s blade.
Then reason took a hand in the game and before the berserk could begin a back-handed return swipe, Graywand’s tip made a neat, swift counter-clockwise circle and flicked upward at the berserk’s sword-wrist, so that his weapon and hand went flying harmlessly off. Far safer, Fafhrd knew, to disarm—or dishand?—such a frenziedly fell opponent before thrusting him through the heart, something Fafhrd now proceeded to do.
Meantime the Mouser was likewise astounded by the abrupt, entirely non sequitur appearance of Eesafem in the center of the penthouse. It was as if one of his more lurid erotic dreams had suddenly come to solid life. He could only goggle as she took a smiling step toward him, knelt a little, carefully faced her front at him, and then drew her upper arms close to her sides so that the filigree band which supported her breast cups was compressed. Her almond eyes flashed sinister green.
What saved the Mouser then was simply his lifelong antipathy to having anything sharp pointed at him, be it only the tiniest needle—or the playfully menacing spikes on exquisite silver breast cups doubtless enclosing exquisite breasts. He hurled himself to one side just as with simultaneous zings small but powerful springs loosed the envenomed spikes as though they were crossbow quarrels and buried them with twin zaps in the wall against which he had but now been resting.
He was scrambling to his feet in an instant and hurled himself at the girl. Now reason, or perhaps intuition, told him the significance of her grasping toward the two black lozenges topping her silver greaves. Tackling her, he managed to get to them before her, withdraw the twin, black-handled stilettos, and toss them beyond Fafhrd’s tousled pallet.
Thereafter, twining his legs about hers in such fashion that she could not knee him in the groin, and holding her snapping, spitting head in the crook of his left arm and by an ear—after futilely grasping for hair—and finally mastering with his right hand the wrists of her two sharp-nailed, flailing ones, he proceeded by gradual and not unnecessarily brutal steps to ravage her. As she ran out of spit, she quieted. Her breasts proved to be very small, but doubly delicious.
Fafhrd, returning mightily puzzled from the roof, goggled in turn at what he saw. How the devil had the Mouser managed to smuggle in that winsome bit? Oh, well, no business of his. With a courteous, ‘Pardon me. Pray continue,’ he shut the door behind him and tackled the problem of disposing of the berserk’s corpse. This was readily achieved by heaving him up and dropping him four storeys onto the vast garbage heap that almost blocked Specter Alley. Next Fafhrd picked up the saw-edged scimitar, pried from it the still-clenched hand, and tossed that after. Then frowning down at the encrimsoned weapon, which he intended to keep as a souvenir, he futilely wondered, ‘Whose blood?’
(Disposing of Eesafem was hardly a problem capable of any such instant, hand-brushing solution. Suffice it that she gradually lost much of her madness and a little of her hatred of humanity, learned to speak Lankhmarese fluently, and ended up quite happily running a tiny smithy of her own on Copper Court behind Silver Street, where she made beautiful jewelry and sold under the counter such oddments as the finest poison-fanged rings in all Nehwon.)
Meanwhile Death, for whom time moves in a somewhat different fashion than for men, recognized that there
remained to him only two heartbeats in which to fill his quota. The extremely faint thrill of excitement he had felt at seeing his two chosen heroes foil his brilliant improvisations—and at the thought that there might be powers in the universe unknown to him and subtler even than his—was replaced by a wry disgust at the realization that there was no longer time enough left for artistry and for indirection and that he must personally take a hand in the business—something he thoroughly detested, since the deus ex machina had always struck him as fiction’s—or life’s—feeblest device.
Should he slay Fafhrd and the Mouser direct? No, they had somehow outwitted him, which ought in all justice (if there be any such thing) give them immunity for a space. Besides, it would smack now almost of anger, or even resentment. And after his fashion and despite his occasional and almost unavoidable cheating, Death was a sportsman.
With the faintest yet weariest of sighs, Death magicked himself into the royal guardroom in the Great Golden Palace in Horborixen, where with two almost sightlessly swift, mercifully near-instantaneous thrusts, he let the life out of two most noble and blameless heroes whom he had barely glimpsed there earlier, yet ticketed in his boundless and infallible memory, two brothers sworn to perpetual celibacy and also to the rescue of at least one damsel in distress per moon. And so now they were released from this difficult destiny and Death returned to brood sadly on his low throne in his modest castle in the Shadowland and to await his next mission.
The twentieth heartbeat knelled.
II
Beauty and the Beasts
She was undoubtedly the most beautiful girl in Lankhmar, or all Nehwon, or any other world. So Fafhrd, the red-haired Northerner, and the Gray Mouser, that swarthy, cat-faced Southerner, were naturally following her.
Her name, most strangely, was Slenya Akkiba Magus, the most witching brunette in all the worlds, and also, most oddly, the most sorcerous blonde. They knew Slenya Akkiba Magus was her name because someone had called it out as she glided ahead of them up Pinchbeck Alley, which parallels Gold Street, and she hesitated for an instant in that drawing-together fashion one only does when one’s name is unexpectedly called out, before gliding on without looking around.
They never saw who called. Perhaps someone on a roof. They looked into Sequin Court as they passed, but it was empty. So was Fools Gold Court.
Slenya was two inches taller than the Gray Mouser and ten shorter than Fafhrd—a nice height for a girl.
‘She’s mine,’ the Gray Mouser whispered with great authority.
‘No, she’s mine,’ Fafhrd murmured back with crushing casualness.
‘We could split her,’ the Mouser hissed judiciously.
There was a zany logic to this suggestion for, quite amazingly, she was completely black on the right side and completely fair on the left side. You could see the dividing line down her back very distinctly. This was because of the extreme thinness of the dress of beige silk she was wearing. Her two colors split exactly at her buttocks.
On the fair side her hair was completely blonde. On the black side it was all brunette.
At this moment an ebony-black warrior appeared from nowhere and attacked Fafhrd with a brass scimitar.
Drawing his sword Graywand in a rush, Fafhrd parried at a square angle. The scimitar shattered, and the brazen fragments flew about. Fafhrd’s wrist whipped Graywand in a circle and struck off his foe’s head.
Meanwhile the Mouser was suddenly faced by an ivory-white warrior sprung from another nowhere and armed with a steel rapier, silver-plated. The Mouser whisked out Scalpel, laid a bind on the other’s blade, and thrust him through the heart.
The two friends congratulated each other.
Then they looked around. Save for the corpses, Pinchbeck Alley was empty.
Slenya Akkiba Magus had disappeared.
The twain pondered this for five heartbeats and two inhalations. Then Fafhrd’s frown vanished and his eyes widened.
‘Mouser,’ he said. ‘The girl divided into the two villains! That explains all. They came from the same nowhere.’
‘The same somewhere, you mean,’ the Mouser quibbled. ‘A most exotic mode of reproduction, or fission rather.’
‘And one with a sex alternation,’ Fafhrd added. ‘Perhaps if we examined the corpses—’
They looked down to find Pinchbeck Alley emptier still. The two liches had vanished from the cobbles. Even the chopped-off head was gone from the foot of the wall against which it had rolled.
‘An excellent way of disposing of bodies,’ Fafhrd said with approval. His ears had caught the tramp and brazen clank of the approaching watch.
‘They might have lingered long enough for us to search their pouches and seams for jewels and precious metal,’ the Mouser demurred.
‘But what was behind it all?’ Fafhrd puzzled. ‘A black-and-white magician—?’
‘It’s bootless to make bricks without straw,’ said the Mouser, cutting him short. ‘Let us hie to the Golden Lamphrey and there drink a health to the girl, who was surely a stunner.’
‘Agreed. And we will drink to her appropriately in blackest stout laced with the palest bubbly wine of Ilthmar.’
III
Trapped in the Shadowland
Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser were almost dead from thirst. Their horses had died from the same Hell-throated ailment at the last waterhole, which had proved dry. Even the last contents of their waterbags, augmented by water of their own bodies, had not been enough to keep alive the dear dumb equine beasts. As all men know, camels are the only creatures who can carry men for more than a day or two across the almost supernaturally hot arid deserts of the World of Nehwon.
They tramped on southwestward under the blinding sun and over the burning sand. Despite their desperate plight and heat-fevered minds and bodies, they were steering a canny course. Too far south and they would fall into the cruel hands of the emperor of the Eastern Lands, who would find rare delight in torturing them before killing them. Too far east and they would encounter the merciless Mingols of the Steppes and other horrors. West and northwest were those who were pursuing them now. While north and northeast lay the Shadowland, the home of Death himself. So much they well knew of the geography of Nehwon.
Meanwhile, Death grinned faintly in his low castle in the heart of the Shadowland, certain that he had at last got the two elusive heroes in his bony grip. They had years ago had the nerve to enter his domain, visiting their first loves, Ivrian and Vlana, and even stealing from his very castle Death’s favorite mask. Now they would pay for their temerity.
Death had the appearance of a tall, handsome young man, though somewhat cadaverous and of opalescent complexion. He was staring now at a large map of the Shadowland and its environs set in a dark wall of his dwelling. On this map Fafhrd and the Mouser were a gleaming speck, like an errant star or fire beetle, south of the Shadowland.
Death writhed his thin, smiling lips and moved his bony fingertips in tiny, cabalistic curves, as he worked a small but difficult magic.
His incantation done, he noted with approval that on the map a southern tongue of the Shadowland was visibly extending itself in pursuit of the dazzling speck that was his victims.
Fafhrd and the Mouser tramped on south, staggering and reeling now, their feet and minds aflame, their faces a-drip with precious sweat. They had been seeking, near the Sea of Monsters and the City of Ghouls, their strayed newest girls, Mouser’s Reetha and Fafhrd’s Kreeshkra, the latter a Ghoul herself, all her blood and flesh invisible, which made her bonny pink bones stand out the more, while Reetha believed in going naked and shaven from head to toe, a taste which gave the girls a mutual similarity and sympathy.
But the Mouser and Fafhrd had found nothing but a horde of fierce male Ghouls, mounted on equally skeletal horses, who had chased them east and south, either to slay them, or to cause them to die of thirst in the desert or of torture in the dungeons of the King of Kings.
It was high noon and the sun was hottest. Fafhr
d’s left hand touched in the dry heat a cool fence about two feet high, invisible at first though not for long.
‘Escape to damp coolth,’ he said in a cracked voice.
They eagerly clambered over the fence and threw themselves down on a blessed thick turf of dark grass two inches high, over which a fine mist was falling. They slept about ten hours.
In his castle Death permitted himself a thin grin, as on his map the south-trending tongue of the Shadowland touched the diamond spark and dimmed it.
Nehwon’s greatest star, Astorian, was mounting the eastern sky, precursor of the moon, as the two adventurers awoke, greatly refreshed by their long nap. The mist had almost ceased, but the only star visible was vast Astorian.
The Mouser sprang up agitatedly in his gray hood, tunic, and ratskin shoes. ‘We must escape backward to hot dryth,’ he said, ‘for this is the Shadowland, Death’s homeland.’
‘A very comfortable place,’ Fafhrd replied, stretching his huge muscles luxuriously on the thick greensward. ‘Return to the briny, granular, rasping, fiery land-sea? Not I.’
‘But if we stay here,’ the Mouser countered, ‘we will be will-lessly drawn by devilish and delusive will-o’-the-wisps to the low-walled Castle of Death, whom we defied by stealing his mask and giving its two halves to our wizards Sheelba and Ningauble, an action for which Death is not likely to love us. Besides, here we might well meet our two first girls, Ivrian and Vlana, now concubines of Death, and that would not be a pleasant experience.’
Fafhrd winced, yet stubbornly repeated, ‘But it is comfortable here.’ Rather self-consciously he writhed his great shoulders and restretched his seven feet on the deliciously damp turf. (The ‘seven feet’ refers to his height. He was by no means an octopus missing one limb, but a handsome, red-bearded, very tall barbarian.)
