The First Book of Lankhmar

by Fritz Leiber

  The Mouser retreated in jerky, circling stages, his face sweaty, his throat hot, but his heart exulting, for never before had he fought this well—not even on that stifling morning when, his head in a sack, he had disposed of a whimsically cruel Egyptian kidnapper.

  Inexplicably, he had the feeling that his days spent in spying on Ahura were now paying off.

  Needle came slipping in, and for the moment the Mouser could not tell upon which side of Scalpel it skirred and so sprang backward, but not swiftly enough to escape a prick in the side. He cut viciously at the adept’s withdrawing arm—and barely managed to jerk his own arm out of the way of a stop thrust.

  In a nasty voice so low that Fafhrd hardly heard her, and the Mouser heard her not at all, Ahura called, ‘The spiders tickled your flesh ever so lightly as they ran, Anra.’

  Perhaps the adept hesitated almost imperceptibly, or perhaps it was only that his eyes grew a shade emptier. At all events, the Mouser was not given that opportunity, for which he was desperately searching, to initiate a counterattack and escape the deadly whirligig of his circling retreat. No matter how intently he peered, he could spy no gap in the sword-woven steel net his adversary was tirelessly casting toward him, nor could he discern in the face behind the net any betraying grimace, any flicker of eye hinting at the next point of attack, any flaring of nostrils or distention of lips telling of gasping fatigue similar to his own. It was inhuman, unalive, the mask of a machine built by some Daedalus, or of a leprously silver automaton stepped out of myth. And like a machine, Devadoris seemed to be gaining strength and speed from the very rhythm that was sapping his own.

  The Mouser realized that he must interrupt that rhythm by a counterattack, any counterattack, or fall victim to a swiftness become blinding.

  And then he further realized that the proper opportunity for that counterattack would never come, that he would wait in vain for any faltering in his adversary’s attack, that he must risk everything on a guess.

  His throat burned, his heart pounded on his ribs for air, a stinging, numbing poison seeped through his limbs.

  Devadoris started a feint, or a deadly thrust, at his face.

  Simultaneously, the Mouser heard Ahura jeer, ‘They hung their webs on your beard and the worms knew your secret parts, Anra.’

  He guessed—and cut at the adept’s knee.

  Either he guessed right, or else something halted the adept’s deadly thrust.

  The adept easily parried the Mouser’s cut, but the rhythm was broken and his speed slackened.

  Again he developed speed, again at the last possible moment the Mouser guessed. Again Ahura eerily jeered, ‘The maggots made you a necklace, and each marching beetle paused to peer into your eye, Anra.’

  Over and over it happened, speed, guess, macabre jeer, but each time the Mouser gained only momentary respite, never the opportunity to start an extended counterattack. His circling retreat continued so uninterruptedly that he felt as if he had been caught in a whirlpool. With each revolution, certain fixed landmarks swept into view: Fafhrd’s blanched agonized face; the hulking tomb; Ahura’s hate-contorted, mocking visage; the red stab of the risen sun; the gouged, black, somber monolith, with its attendant stony soldiers and their gigantic stone tents; Fafhrd again…

  And now the Mouser knew his strength was failing for good and all. Each guessed counterattack brought him less respite, was less of a check to the adept’s speed. The landmarks whirled dizzily, darkened. It was as if he had been sucked to the maelstrom’s center, as if the black cloud which he had fancied pouring from Ahura were enveloping him vampirously, choking off his breath.

  He knew that he would be able to make only one more counter-cut, and must therefore stake all on a thrust at the heart.

  He readied himself.

  But he had waited too long. He could not gather the necessary strength, summon the speed.

  He saw the adept preparing the lightning death-stroke.

  His own thrust was like the gesture of a paralyzed man seeking to rise from his bed.

  Then Ahura began to laugh.

  It was a horrible, hysterical laugh; a giggling, snickering laugh; a laugh that made him dully wonder why she should find such joy in his death; and yet, for all the difference, a laugh that sounded like a shrill, distorted echo of Fafhrd’s or his own.

  Puzzledly, he noted that Needle had not yet transfixed him, that Devadoris’ lightning thrust was slowing, slowing, as if the hateful laughter were falling in cumbering swathes around the adept, as if each horrid peal dropped a chain around his limbs.

  The Mouser leaned on his own sword and collapsed, rather than lunged, forward.

  He heard Fafhrd’s shuddering sigh.

  Then he realized that he was trying to pull Scalpel from the adept’s chest and that it was an almost insuperably difficult task, although the blade had gone in as easily as if Anra Devadoris had been a hollow man. Again he tugged, and Scalpel came clear, fell from his nerveless fingers. His knees shook, his head sagged, and darkness flooded everything.

  Fafhrd, sweat-drenched, watched the adept. Anra Devadoris’ rigid body teetered like a stone pillar, slim cousin to the monolith behind him. His lips were fixed in a frozen, foreknowing smile. The teetering increased, yet for a while, as if he were an incarnation of death’s ghastly pendulum, he did not fall. Then he swayed too far forward and fell like a pillar, without collapse. There was a horrid, hollow crash as his head struck the black pavement.

  Ahura’s hysterical laughter burst out afresh.

  Fafhrd ran forward calling to the Mouser, anxiously shook the slumped form. Snores answered him. Like some spent Theban phalanx-man drowsing over his pike in the twilight of the battle, the Mouser was sleeping the sleep of complete exhaustion. Fafhrd found the Mouser’s gray cloak, wrapped it around him, and gently laid him down.

  Ahura was shaking convulsively.

  Fafhrd looked at the fallen adept, lying there so formally outstretched, like a tomb-statue rolled over. Devadoris’ lankness was skeletal. He had bled hardly at all from the wound given him by Scalpel, but his forehead was crushed like an eggshell. Fafhrd touched him. The skin was cold, the muscles hard as stone.

  Fafhrd had seen men go rigid immediately upon death—Macedonians who had fought too desperately and too long. But they had become weak and staggering toward the end. Anra Devadoris had maintained the appearance of ease and perfect control up to the last moment, despite the poisons that must have been coursing through his veins almost to the exclusion of blood. All through the duel, his chest had hardly heaved.

  ‘By Odin crucified!’ Fafhrd muttered. ‘He was something of a man, even though he was an adept.’

  A hand was laid on his arm. He jerked around. It was Ahura come behind him. The whites showed around her eyes. She smiled at him crookedly, then lifted a knowing eyebrow, put her finger to her lips, and dropped suddenly to her knees beside the adept’s corpse. Gingerly she touched the satin-smooth surface of the tiny blood-clot on the adept’s breast. Fafhrd, noting afresh the resemblance between the dead and the crazy face, sucked in his breath. Ahura scurried off like a startled cat.

  Suddenly she froze like a dancer and looked back at him, and a gloating, transcendent vindictiveness came into her face. She beckoned to Fafhrd. Then she ran lightly up the steps to the tomb and pointed into it and beckoned again. Doubtfully the Northerner approached, his eyes on her strained and unearthly face, beautiful as an efreet’s. Slowly he mounted the steps.

  Then he looked down.

  Looked down to feel that the wholesome world was only a film on primary abominations. He realized that what Ahura was showing him had somehow been her ultimate degradation and the ultimate degradation of the thing that had named itself Anra Devadoris. He remembered the bizarre taunts that Ahura had thrown at the adept during the duel. He remembered her laughter, and his mind eddied along the edge of suspicions of pit-spawned improprieties and obscene intimacies. He hardly noticed that Ahura had slumped over the wall of t
he tomb, her white arms hanging down as if pointing all ten slender fingers in limp horror. He did not know that the blackly puzzled eyes of the suddenly awakened Mouser were peering up at him.

  Thinking back, he realized that Devadoris’ fastidiousness and exquisitely groomed appearance had made him think of the tomb as an eccentric entrance to some luxurious underground palace.

  But now he saw that there were no doors in that cramping cell into which he peered, nor cracks indicating where hidden doors might be. Whatever had come from there, had lived there, where the dry corners were thick with webs and the floor swarmed with maggots, dung beetles, and furry black spiders.

  6 The Mountain

  Perhaps some chuckling demon, or Ningauble himself, planned it that way. At all events, as Fafhrd stepped down from the tomb, he got his feet tangled in the shroud of Ahriman and bellowed wildly (the Mouser called it ‘bleating’) before he noticed the cause, which was by that time ripped to tatters.

  Next Ahura, aroused by the tumult, set them into a brief panic by screaming that the black monolith and its soldiery were marching toward them to grind them under stony feet.

  Almost immediately afterwards the cup of Socrates momentarily froze their blood by rolling around in a semicircle, as if its learned owner were invisibly pawing for it, perhaps to wet his throat after a spell of dusty disputation in the underworld. Of the withered sprig from the Tree of Life there was no sign, although the Mouser jumped as far and as skittishly as one of his namesakes when he saw a large black walking-stick insect crawling away from where the sprig might have fallen.

  But it was the camel that caused the biggest commotion, by suddenly beginning to prance about clumsily in a most uncharacteristically ecstatic fashion, finally cavorting up eagerly on two legs to the mare, which fled in squealing dismay. Afterwards it became apparent that the camel must have gotten into the aphrodisiacs, for one of the bottles was pashed as if by a hoof, with only a scummy licked patch showing where its leaked contents had been, and two of the small clay jars were vanished entirely. Fafhrd set out after the two beasts on one of the remaining horses, hallooing crazily.

  The Mouser, left alone with Ahura, found his glibness put to the test in saving her sanity by a barrage of small talk, mostly well-spiced Tyrian gossip, but including a wholly apocryphal tale of how he and Fafhrd and five small Ethiopian boys once played Maypole with the eyestalks of a drunken Ningauble, leaving him peering about in the oddest directions. (The Mouser was wondering why they had not heard from their seven-eyed mentor. After victories Ningauble was always particularly prompt in getting in his demands for payment; and very exacting too—he would insist on a strict accounting for the three missing aphrodisiac containers.)

  The Mouser might have been expected to take advantage of this opportunity to press his suit with Ahura, and if possible assure himself that he was now wholly free of the snail curse. But, her hysterical condition aside, he felt strangely shy with her, as if, although this was the Ahura he loved, he were now meeting her for the first time. Certainly this was a wholly different Ahura from the one with whom they had journeyed to the Lost City, and the memory of how he had treated that other Ahura put a restraint on him. So he cajoled and comforted her as he might have some lonely Tyrian waif, finally bringing two funny little hand-puppets from his pouch and letting them amuse her for him.

  And Ahura sobbed and stared and shivered, and hardly seemed to hear what nonsense the Mouser was saying, yet grew quiet and sane-eyed and appeared to be comforted.

  When Fafhrd eventually returned with the still-giddy camel and the outraged mare, he did not interrupt, but listened gravely, his gaze occasionally straying to the dead adept, the black monolith, the stone city, or the valley’s downward slope to the north. High over their heads a flock of birds was flying in the same direction. Suddenly they scattered wildly, as if an eagle had dropped among them. Fafhrd frowned. A moment later he heard a whirring in the air. The Mouser and Ahura looked up too, momentarily glimpsed something slim hurtling downward. They cringed. There was a thud as a long whitish arrow buried itself in a crack in the pavement hardly a foot from Fafhrd and stuck there vibrating.

  After a moment Fafhrd touched it with shaking hand. The shaft was crusted with ice, the feathers stiff, as if, incredibly, it had sped for a long time through frigid supramundane air. There was something tied snugly around the shaft. He detached and unrolled an ice-brittle sheet of papyrus, which softened under his touch, and read, ‘You must go farther. Your quest is not ended. Trust in omens. Ningauble.’

  Still trembling, Fafhrd began to curse thunderously. He crumpled the papyrus, jerked up the arrow, broke it in two, threw the parts blindly away. ‘Misbegotten spawn of a eunuch, an owl, and an octopus!’ he finished. ‘First he tries to skewer us from the skies, then he tells us our quest is not ended—when we’ve just ended it!’

  The Mouser, well knowing these rages into which Fafhrd was apt to fall after battle, especially a battle in which he had not been able to participate, started to comment coolly. Then he saw the anger abruptly drain from Fafhrd’s eyes, leaving a wild twinkle which he did not like.

  ‘Mouser!’ said Fafhrd eagerly. ‘Which way did I throw the arrow?’

  ‘Why, north,’ said the Mouser without thinking.

  ‘Yes, and the birds were flying north, and the arrow was coated with ice!’ The wild twinkle in Fafhrd’s eyes became a berserk brilliance. ‘Omens, he said? We’ll trust in omens all right! We’ll go north, north, and still north!’

  The Mouser’s heart sank. Now would be a particularly difficult time to combat Fafhrd’s long-standing desire to take him to ‘that wondrously cold land where only brawny, hot-blooded men may live and they but by the killing of fierce, furry animals’—a prospect poignantly disheartening to a lover of hot baths, the sun, and southern nights.

  ‘This is the chance of all chances,’ Fafhrd continued, intoning like a skald. ‘Ah, to rub one’s naked hide with snow, to plunge like walrus into ice-garnished water. Around the Caspian and over greater mountains than these goes a way that men of my race have taken. Thor’s gut, but you will love it! No wine, only hot mead and savory smoking carcasses, skin-toughening furs to wear, cold air at night to keep dreams clear and sharp, and great strong-hipped women. Then to raise sail on a winter ship and laugh at the frozen spray. Why have we so long delayed? Come! By the icy member that begot Odin, we must start at once!’

  The Mouser stifled a groan. ‘Ah, blood-brother,’ he intoned, not a whit less brazen-voiced, ‘my heart leaps even more than yours at the thought of nerve-quickening snow and all the other niceties of the manly life I have long yearned to taste. But’—here his voice broke sadly—‘we forget this good woman, whom in any case, even if we disregard Ningauble’s injunction, we must take safely back to Tyre.’

  He smiled inwardly.

  ‘But I don’t want to go back to Tyre,’ interrupted Ahura, looking up from the puppets with an impishness so like a child’s that the Mouser cursed himself for ever having treated her as one. ‘This lonely spot seems equally far from all builded places. North is as good a way as any.’

  ‘Flesh of Freya!’ bellowed Fafhrd, throwing his arms wide. ‘Do you hear what she says, Mouser? By Idun, that was spoken like a true snow-land woman! Not one moment must be wasted now. We shall smell mead before a year is out. By Frigg, a woman! Mouser, you are good for one so small, did you not notice the pretty way she put it?’

  So it was bustle about and pack and (for the present, at least, the Mouser conceded) no way out of it. The chest of aphrodisiacs, the cup, and the tattered shroud were bundled back onto the camel, which was still busy ogling the mare and smacking its great leathery lips. And Fafhrd leaped and shouted and clapped the Mouser’s back as if there were not an eon-old dead stone city around them and a lifeless adept warming in the sun.

  In a matter of moments they were jogging off down the valley, with Fafhrd singing tales of snowstorms and hunting and monsters big as icebergs and giants as tal
l as frost mountains, and the Mouser dourly amusing himself by picturing his own death at the hands of some overly affectionate ‘great strong-hipped’ woman.

  Soon the way became less barren. Scrub trees and the valley’s downward trend hid the city behind them. A surge of relief which the Mouser hardly noticed went through him as the last stony sentinel dipped out of sight, particularly the black monolith left to brood over the adept. He turned his attention to what lay ahead—a conical mountain barring the valley’s mouth and wearing a high cap of mist, a lonely thunderhead which his imagination shaped into incredible towers and spires.

  Suddenly his sleepy thoughts snapped awake. Fafhrd and Ahura had stopped and were staring at something wholly unexpected—a low wooden windowless house pressed back among the scrubby trees, with a couple of tilled fields behind it. The rudely carved guardian spirits at the four corners of the roof and topping the kingposts seemed Persian, but Persian purged of all southern influence—ancient Persian.

  And ancient Persian too appeared the thin features, straight nose, and black-streaked beard of the aged man watching them circumspectly from the low doorway. It seemed to be Ahura’s face he scanned most intently—or tried to scan, since Fafhrd mostly hid her.

  ‘Greetings, Father,’ called the Mouser. ‘Is this not a merry day for riding, and yours good lands to pass?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied the aged man dubiously, using a rusty dialect. ‘Though there are none, or few, who pass.’

  ‘Just as well to be far from the evil stinking cities,’ Fafhrd interjected heartily. ‘Do you know the mountain ahead, Father? Is there an easy way past it that leads north?’

  At the word ‘mountain’ the aged man cringed. He did not answer.

  ‘Is there something wrong about the path we are taking?’ the Mouser asked quickly. ‘Or something evil about that misty mountain?’

  The aged man started to shrug his shoulders, held them contracted, looked again at the travelers. Friendliness seemed to fight with fear in his face, and to win, for he leaned forward and said hurriedly, ‘I warn you, sons, not to venture farther. What is the steel of your swords, the speed of your steeds, against—but remember’—he raised his voice—‘I accuse no one.’ He looked quickly from side to side. ‘I have nothing at all to complain of. To me the mountain is a great benefit. My fathers returned here because the land is shunned by thief and honest man alike. There are no taxes on this land—no money taxes. I question nothing.’