by Paula Guran
Instinct only made him cling to the sword. Waves of blinding anguish racked him. The coiling lash of darkness encircled him, and its touch was the abysmal cold of outer space, striking deep into his heart.
Hold the sword close, hold it closer, like a shield. The pain is great, but I will not die unless I drop the sword.
Ban Cruach the mighty had fought this fight before.
Stark raised the sword again, close against his body. The fierce pulse of its brightness drove back the cold. Not far, for the freezing touch was very strong. But far enough so that he could rise again and stagger on.
The dark force of the tower writhed and licked about him. He could not escape it. He slashed it in a blind fury with the blazing sword, and where the forces met a flicker of lightning leaped in the air, but it would not be beaten back.
He screamed at it, a raging cat-cry that was all Stark, all primitive fury at the necessity of pain. And he forced himself to run, to drag his tortured body faster across the ice. Because Ciara is dying, because the dark cold wants me to stop . . .
The ice-folk jammed and surged against the archway, in a panic hurry to take refuge far below in their many-leveled city. He raged at them, too. They were part of the cold, part of the pain. Because of them Ciara and Balin were dying. He sent the blade of force lancing among them, his hatred rising full tide to join the hatred of Ban Cruach that lodged in his mind.
Stab and cut and slash with the long terrible beam of brightness. They fell and fell, the hideous shining folk, and Stark sent the light of Ban Cruach’s weapon sweeping through the tower itself, through the openings that were like windows in the stone.
Again and again, stabbing through those open slits as he ran. And suddenly the dark beam of force ceased to move. He tore out of it, and it did not follow him, remaining stationary as though fastened to the ice.
The battle of forces left his flesh. The pain was gone. He sped on to the tower.
He was close now. The withered bodies lay in heaps before the arch. The last of the ice-folk had forced their way inside. Holding the sword level like a lance, Stark leaped in through the arch, into the tower.
The shining ones were dead where the destroying warmth had touched them. The flying spiral ribbons of ice were swept clean of them, the arching bridges and the galleries of that upper part of the tower.
They were dead along the ledge, under the control bank. They were dead across the mechanism that spun the frosty doom around Ciara and Balin. The whirling disc still hummed.
Below, in that stupendous well, the crowding ice-folk made a seething pattern of color on the narrow ways. But Stark turned his back on them and ran along the ledge, and in him was the heavy knowledge that he had come too late.
The frost had thickened around Ciara and Balin. It encrusted them like stiffened lace, and now their flesh was overlaid with a diamond shell of ice.
Surely they could not live!
He raised the sword to smite down at the whirring disc, to smash it, but there was no need. When the full force of that concentrated beam struck it, meeting the focus of shadow that it held, there was a violent flare of light and a shattering of crystal. The mechanism was silent.
The glooming veil was gone from around the ice-shelled man and woman. Stark forgot the creatures in the shaft below him. He turned the blazing sword full upon Ciara and Balin.
It would not affect the thin covering of ice. If the woman and the man were dead, it would not affect their flesh, any more than it had Ban Cruach’s. But if they lived, if there was still a spark, a flicker beneath that frozen mail, the radiation would touch their blood with warmth, start again the pulse of life in their bodies.
He waited, watching Ciara’s face. It was still as marble, and as white.
Something—instinct, or the warning mind of Ban Cruach that had learned a million years ago to beware the creatures of the ice—made him glance behind him.
Stealthy, swift and silent, up the winding ways they came. They had guessed that he had forgotten them in his anxiety. The sword was turned away from them now, and if they could take him from behind, stun him with the chill force of the scepter-like rods they carried . . .
He slashed them with the sword. He saw the flickering beam go down and down the shaft, saw the bodies fall like drops of rain, rebounding here and there from the flying spans and carrying the living with them.
He thought of the many levels of the city. He thought of all the countless thousands that must inhabit them. He could hold them off in the shaft as long as he wished if he had no other need for the sword. But he knew that as soon as he turned his back they would be upon him again, and if he should once fall . . .
He could not spare a moment, or a chance.
He looked at Ciara, not knowing what to do, and it seemed to him that the sheathing frost had melted, just a little, around her face.
Desperately, he struck down again at the creatures in the shaft, and then the answer came to him.
He dropped the sword. The squat, round mechanism was beside him, with its broken crystal wheel. He picked it up.
It was heavy. It would have been heavy for two men to lift, but Stark was a driven man. Grunting, swaying with the effort, he lifted it and let it fall, out and down.
Like a thunderbolt it struck among those slender bridges, the spiderweb of icy strands that spanned the shaft. Stark watched it go, and listened to the brittle snapping of the ice, the final crashing of a million shards at the bottom far below.
He smiled, and turned again to Ciara, picking up the sword.
It was hours later. Stark walked across the glowing ice of the valley, toward the cairn. The sword of Ban Cruach hung at his side. He had taken the talisman and replaced it in the boss, and he was himself again.
Ciara and Balin walked beside him. The color had come back into their faces, but faintly, and they were still weak enough to be glad of Stark’s hands to steady them.
At the foot of the cairn they stopped, and Stark mounted it alone.
He looked for a long moment into the face of Ban Cruach. Then he took the sword, and carefully turned the rings upon it so that the radiation spread out as it had before, to close the Gates of Death.
Almost reverently, he replaced the sword in Ban Cruach’s hands. Then he turned and went down over the tumbled stones.
The shimmering darkness brooded still over the distant tower. Underneath the ice, the elfin city still spread downward. The shining ones would rebuild their bridges in the shaft, and go on as they had before, dreaming their cold dreams of ancient power.
But they would not go out through the Gates of Death. Ban Cruach in his rusty mail was still lord of the pass, the warder of the Norlands.
Stark said to the others, “Tell the story in Kushat. Tell it through the Norlands, the story of Ban Cruach and why he guards the Gates of Death. Men have forgotten. And they should not forget.”
They went out of the valley then, the two men and the woman. They did not speak again, and the way out through the pass seemed endless.
Some of Ciara’s chieftains met them at the mouth of the pass above Kushat. They had waited there, ashamed to return to the city without her, but not daring to go back into the pass again. They had seen the creatures of the valley, and they were still afraid.
They gave mounts to the three. They themselves walked behind Ciara, and their heads were low with shame.
They came into Kushat through the riven gate, and Stark went with Ciara to the King City, where she made Balin follow too.
“Your sister is there,” she said. “I have had her cared for.”
The city was quiet, with the sullen apathy that follows after battle. The men of Mekh cheered Ciara in the streets. She rode proudly, but Stark saw that her face was gaunt and strained.
He, too, was marked deep by what he had seen and done, beyond the Gates of Death.
They went up into the castle.
Thanis took Balin into her arms, and wept. She had lost her first wild
fury, and she could look at Ciara now with a restrained hatred that had a tinge almost of admiration.
“You fought for Kushat,” she said, unwillingly, when she had heard the story. “For that, at least, I can thank you.”
She went to Stark then, and looked up at him. “Kushat, and my brother’s life. . . ” She kissed him, and there were tears on her lips. But she turned to Ciara with a bitter smile. “No one can hold him, any more than the wind can be held. You will learn that.”
She went out then with Balin, and left Stark and Ciara alone, in the chambers of the king.
Ciara said, “The little one is very shrewd.” She unbuckled the hauberk and let it fall, standing slim in her tunic of black leather, and walked to the tall windows that looked out upon the mountains. She leaned her head wearily against the stone.
“An evil day, an evil deed. And now I have Kushat to govern, with no reward of power from beyond the Gates of Death. How man can be misled!”
Stark poured wine from the flagon and brought it to her. She looked at him over the rim of the cup, with a certain wry amusement.
“The little one is shrewd, and she is right. I don’t know that I can be as wise as she . . . Will you stay with me, Stark, or will you go?”
He did not answer at once, and she asked him, “What hunger drives you, Stark? It is not conquest, as it was with me. What are you looking for that you cannot find?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.” He took her between his two hands, feeling the strength and the splendor of her, and it was oddly difficult to find words.
“I want to stay, Ciara. Now, this minute, I could promise that I would stay forever. But I know myself. You belong here, you will make Kushat your own. I don’t. Someday I will go.”
Ciara nodded. “My neck, also, was not made for chains, and one country was too little to hold me. Very well, Stark. Let it be so.”
She smiled, and let the wine-cup fall.
Ted Giola wrote in an essay, “Fritz Leiber at One Hundred”:
[Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser] are depicted as vulnerable, fickle, and down-to-earth in a way that was rare in the 1930s. This was, after all, an era of larger-than-life heroes . . . [and] a simplistic good-versus-evil worldview, not much different than the matchup destined to unfold on European battlefields a few weeks after the publication of the first Fafhrd and Gray Mouser tale. Leiber would have none of this vanilla virtuousness, and in his adventure series he embraced the anti-hero ethos, breaking many of the most cherished rules of genre writing. . . . Leiber’s best work comes across as fresh and modern to an almost uncanny degree.
The nearly seven-foot-tall barbarian Fafhrd and the diminutive, former wizard’s apprentice Mouser first appeared in “Two Sought Adventure” (1939). They continued their roguish adventures in more than thirty stories, the last of which was published in 1988. Our novella, “Ill Met in Lankhmar,” the story of their first meeting, was published in the April 1970 issue of The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy.
Fritz Leiber (1910-1992), who created the term “sword and sorcery” in 1961, thought his characters were “at the opposite extreme from the heroes of Tolkien. My stuff is at least as equally fantastic as his, but it is an earthier sort of fantasy.” The humor, weird wizards, somewhat bawdy encounters with women, and other aspects of the stories were nothing like Howard’s Conan stories and marked a new direction for S&S.
Ill Met in Lankhmar
Fritz Leiber
Silent as specters, the tall and the fat thief edged past the dead, noose-strangled watch-leopard, out the thick, lock-picked door of Jengao the Gem Merchant, and strolled east on Cash Street through the thin black nightsmog of Lankhmar, City of Sevenscore Thousand Smokes.
East on Cash it had to be, for west at the intersection of Cash and Silver was a police post with unbribed guardsmen in browned-iron cuirasses and helms, restlessly grounding and rattling their pikes, while Jengao’s place had no alley entrance or even window in its stone walls three spans thick and the roof and floor almost as strong and without trap doors.
But tall, tight-lipped Slevyas, master thief candidate, and fat, darting-eyed Fissif, thief second class, brevetted first class for this operation, with a rating of talented in double-dealing, were not in the least worried. Everything was proceeding according to plan. Each carried thonged in his pouch a much smaller pouch of jewels of the first water only, for Jengao, now breathing stentoriously inside and senseless from the slugging he’d suffered, must be allowed, nay, nursed and encouraged, to build up his business again and so ripen it for another plucking. Almost the first law of the Thieves’ Guild was never kill the hen that laid brown eggs with a ruby in the yolk, or white eggs with a diamond in the white.
The two thieves also had the relief of knowing that, with the satisfaction of a job well done, they were going straight home now, not to a wife, Aarth forbid!—or to parents and children, all gods forfend!—but to Thieves’ House, headquarters and barracks of the all-mighty Guild which was father to them both and mother too, though no woman was allowed inside its ever-open portal on Cheap Street.
In addition there was the comforting knowledge that although each was armed only with his regulation silver-hilted thief’s knife, a weapon seldom used except in rare intramural duels and brawls, in fact more a membership token than a weapon, they were nevertheless most strongly convoyed by three reliable and lethal bravos hired for the evening from the Slayers’ Brotherhood, one moving well ahead of them as point, the other two well behind as rear guard and chief striking force, in fact almost out of sight—for it is never wise that such convoying be obvious, or so believed Krovas, Grandmaster of the Thieves’ Guild.
And if all that were not enough to make Slevyas and Fissif feel safe and serene, there danced along soundlessly beside them in the shadow of the north curb a small, malformed or at any rate somewhat large-headed shape that might have been a small dog, a somewhat undersized cat, or a very big rat. Occasionally it scuttled familiarly and even encouragingly a little way toward their snugly felt-slippered feet, though it always scurried swiftly back into the darker dark.
True, this last guard was not an absolutely unalloyed reassurance. At that very moment, scarcely twoscore paces yet from Jengao’s, Fissif tautly walked for a bit on tiptoe and strained his pudgy lips upward to whisper softly in Slevyas’ long-lobed ear, “Damned if I like being dogged by that familiar of Hristomilo, no matter what security he’s supposed to afford us. Bad enough that Krovas employs or lets himself be cowed into employing a sorcerer of most dubious, if dire, reputation and aspect, but that—”
“Shut your trap!” Slevyas hissed still more softly.
Fissif obeyed with a shrug and occupied himself even more restlessly and keenly than was his wont in darting his gaze this way and that, but chiefly ahead.
Some distance in that direction, in fact just short of the Gold Street intersection, Cash was bridged by an enclosed second-story passageway connecting the two buildings which made up the premises of the famous stonemasons and sculptors Rokkermas and Slaarg. The firm’s buildings themselves were fronted by very shallow porticos supported by unnecessarily large pillars of varied shape and decoration, advertisements more than structural members.
From just beyond the bridge there came two low, brief whistles, signal from the point bravo that he had inspected that area for ambushes and discovered nothing suspicious and that Gold Street was clear.
Fissif was by no means entirely satisfied by the safety signal. To tell the truth, the fat thief rather enjoyed being apprehensive and even fearful, at least up to a point. A sense of strident panic overlaid with writhing calm made him feel more excitingly alive than the occasional woman he enjoyed. So he scanned most closely through the thin, sooty smog the frontages and overhangs of Rokkermas and Slaarg as his and Slevyas’ leisurely seeming yet un-slow pace brought them steadily closer.
On this side the bridge was pierced by four small windows, between which were three large
niches in which stood—another advertisement—three life-size plaster statues, somewhat eroded by years of weather and dyed varyingly tones of dark gray by as many years of smog. Approaching Jengao’s before the burglary, Fissif had noted them with a swift but comprehensive overshoulder glance. Now it seemed to him that the statue to the right had indefinably changed. It was that of a man of medium height wearing cloak and hood, who gazed down with crossed arms and brooding aspect. No, not indefinably quite—the statue was a more uniform dark gray now, he fancied, cloak, hood, and face; it seemed somewhat sharper featured, less eroded; and he would almost swear it had grown shorter!
Just below the niche, moreover, there was a scattering of gray and raw white rubble which he didn’t recall having been there earlier. He strained to remember if during the excitement of the burglary, with its lively leopard-slaying and slugging and all, the unsleeping watch-corner of his mind had recorded a distant crash, and now he believed it had. His quick imagination pictured the possibility of a hole or even door behind each statue, through which it might be given a strong push and so tumbled onto passersby, himself and Slevyas specifically, the right-hand statue having been crashed to test the device and then replaced with a near twin.
He would keep close watch on all three statues as he and Slevyas walked under. It would be easy to dodge if he saw one start to overbalance. Should he yank Slevyas out of harm’s way when that happened? It was something to think about.
Without pause his restless attention fixed next on the porticos and pillars. The latter, thick and almost three yards tall, were placed at irregular intervals as well as being irregularly shaped and fluted, for Rokkermas and Slaarg were most modern and emphasized the unfinished look, randomness, and the unexpected.
Nevertheless it seemed to Fissif, his wariness wide awake now, that there was an intensification of unexpectedness, specifically that there was one more pillar under the porticos than when he had last passed by. He couldn’t be sure which pillar was the newcomer, but he was almost certain there was one.
