Leiber, Fitz - F&GM 03 - Swords in the Mist (Collection).pdf - Fritz Leiber - przemosta

Swords in the Mist [Book 3 of the

"Fafhrd and Gray Mouser" series]

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Swords in the Mist [Book 3 of the "Fafhrd and Gray Mouser" series]

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Swords in the Mist [Book 3 of the "Fafhrd and Gray Mouser" series]

Other works by Fritz Leiber also available in e-reads editions

THE GREEN MILLENIUM

GATHER, DARKNESS!

SWORDS AND DEVILTY

SWORDS AGAINST DEATH

SWORDS IN THE MIST

SWORDS AGAINST WIZARDY

THE SWORDS OF LANKHMAR

SWORDS AND ICE MAGIC

THE KNIGHT AND KNAVE OF SWORDS

THE WANDERER

Swords in the Mist [Book 3 of the "Fafhrd and Gray Mouser" series]

I: THE CLOUD OF HATE

Muffled drums beat out a nerve-scratching rhythm, and red lights flickered hypnotically in

the underground Temple of Hates, where five thousand ragged worshipers knelt and abased

themselves and ecstatically pressed foreheads against the cold and gritty cobbles as the

trance took hold and the human venom rose in them.

The drumbeat was low. And save for snarls and mewlings, the inner pulsing was inaud-

ible. Yet together they made a hellish vibration which threatened to shake the city and land of

Lankhmar and the whole world of Nehwon.

Lankhmar had been at peace for many moons, and so the hates were greater. Tonight,

furthermore, at a spot halfway across the city, Lankhmar's black-togaed nobility celebrated

with merriment and feasting and twinkling dance the betrothal of their Overlord's daughter to

the Prince of Ilthmar, and so the hates were redoubled.

The single-halled subterranean temple was so long and wide and at the same time so ir-

regularly planted with thick pillars that at no point could a person see more than a third of the

way across it. Yet it had a ceiling so low that at any point a man standing tall could have

brushed it with his fingertips—except that here all groveled. The air was swooningly fetid. The

dark bent backs of the hate-ensorceled worshipers made a kind of hummocky dark ground,

from which the nitre-crusted stone pillars rose like gray tree trunks.

The masked Archpriest of the Hates lifted a skinny finger. Parchment-thin iron cymbals

began to clash in unison with the drums and the furnace-red flickerings, wringing to an unen-

durable pitch the malices and envies of the blackly enraptured communicants.

Then in the gloom of that great slitlike hall, dim pale tendrils began to rise from the dark

hummocky ground of the bent backs, as though a white, swift-growing ghost-grass had been

seeded there. The tendrils, which in another world might have been described as ectoplas-

mic, quickly multiplied, thickened, lengthened, and then coalesced into questing white ser-

pentine shapes, so that it seemed as if tongues of thick river-fog had come licking down into

this subcellar from the broad-flowing river Hlal.

The white serpents coiled past the pillars, brushed the low ceiling, moistly caressed the

backs of their devotees and source, and then in turn coalesced to pour up the curving black

hole of a narrow spiral stairway, the stone steps of which were worn almost to chutelike

smoothness—a sinuously billowing white cylinder in which a redness lurked. And all the while

the drums and cymbals did not falter for a single beat, nor did the Hell-light tenders cease to

crank the wooden wheels on which shielded, red-burning candles were affixed, nor did the

eyes of the Archpriest flicker once sideways in their wooden mask, nor did one mesmerized

bent soul look up.

Along a misted alley overhead there was hurrying home to the thieves’ quarter a beggar

girl, skinny-frail of limb and with eyes big as a lemur's peering fearfully from a tiny face of elfin

beauty. She saw the white pillar, slug-flat now, pouring out between the bars of a window-slit

level with the pavement, and although there were thick chilly tendrils of river-fog already fol-

lowing her, she knew that this was different.

She tried to run around the thing, but swift almost as a serpent striking, it whipped across

to the opposite wall, barring her way. She ran back, but it outraced her and made a U, pen-

ning her against the unyielding wall. Then she only stood still and shook as the fog-serpent

narrowed and grew denser and came wreathing around her. Its tip swayed like the head of a

poisonous snake preparing to strike and then suddenly dipped toward her breast. She

stopped shaking then and her head fell back and the pupils rolled up in her lemurlike eyes so

that they showed only great whites, and she dropped to the pavement limp as a rag.

The fog-serpent nosed at her for a few moments, then as though irked at finding no life re-

maining, flipped her over on her face, and went swiftly questing in the same direction the

river-fog itself was taking: across city toward the homes of the nobles and the lantern-jeweled

palace of the Overlord.

Save for an occasional fleeting red glint in the one, the two sorts of fog were identical.

* * * *

Beside a dry stone horse-trough at the juncture of five alleys, two men curled close to

either side of a squat brazier in which a little charcoal glowed. The spot was so near the

quarter of the nobles that the sounds of music and laughter came at intervals, faintly, along

with a dim rainbow-glow of light. The two men might have been a hulking beggar and a small

one, except that their tunics and leggings and cloaks, though threadbare, were of good stuff,

and scabbarded weapons lay close to the hand of each.

The larger said, “There'll be fog tonight. I smell it coming from the Hlal.” This was Fafhrd,

brawny-armed, pale and serene of face, reddish gold of hair.

For reply the smaller shivered and fed the brazier two small gobbets of charcoal and said

sardonically, “Next predict glaciers!—advancing down the Street of the Gods, by preference.”

That was the Mouser, eyes wary, lips quirking, cheeks muffled by gray hood drawn close.

Fafhrd grinned. As a tinkling gust of distant song came by, he asked the dark air that car-

ried it, “Now why aren't we warmly cushioned somewhere inside tonight, well drunk and

sweetly embraced?"

For answer the Gray Mouser drew from his belt a ratskin pouch and slapped it by its

drawstrings against his palm. It flattened as it hit and nothing chinked. For good measure he

writhed at Fafhrd the backs of his ten fingers, all ringless. Fafhrd grinned again and said to

the dusky space around them, which was now filled with the finest mist, the fog's forerunner,

“Now that's a strange thing. We've won I know not how many jewels and oddments of gold

and electrum in our adventurings—and even letters of credit on the Guild of the Grain Mer-

chants. Where have they all flown to?—the credit-letters on parchment wings, the jewels jet-

ting fire like tiny red and green and pearly cuttlefish. Why aren't we rich?"

The Mouser snorted, ‘'Because you dribble away our get on worthless drabs, or oftener

still pour it out for some noble whim—some plot of bogus angels to storm the walls of Hell.

Meantime I stay poor nursemaiding you."

Fafhrd laughed and retorted, “You overlook your own whimsical imprudences, such as slit-

ting the Overlord's purse and picking his pocket too the selfsame night you rescued and re-

turned him his lost crown. No, Mouser, I think we're poor because—” Suddenly he lifted an el-

bow and flared his nostrils as he snuffed the chill moist air. “There's a taint in the fog tonight,”

he announced.

The Mouser said dryly, “I already smell dead fish, burnt fat, horse dung, tickly lint, Lankh-

mar sausage gone stale, cheap temple incense burnt by the ten-pound cake, rancid oil, moldy

grain, slaves’ barracks, embalmers’ tanks crowded to the black brim, and the stink of a

cathedral full of unwashed carters and trulls celebrating orgiastic rites—and now you tell me

of a taint!"

“It is something different from all those,” Fafhrd said, peering successively down the five

alleys. “Perhaps the last...” His voice trailed off doubtfully, and he shrugged.

* * * *

Strands of fog came questing through small high-set street-level windows into the tavern

called the Rats’ Nest, interlacing curiously with the soot-trail from a failing torch, but unnoticed

except by an old harlot who pulled her patchy fur cloak closer at her throat. All eyes were on

the wrist game being played across an ancient oaken table by the famed bravo Gnarlag and a

dark-skinned mercenary almost as big-thewed as he. Right elbows firmly planted and right

hands bone-squeezingly gripped, each strained to force the back of the other's wrist down

against the ringed and scarred and carved and knife-stuck wood. Gnarlag, who scowled

sneeringly, had the advantage by a thumb's length.

One of the fog-strands, as though itself a devotee of the wrist game and curious about the

bout, drifted over Gnarlag's shoulder. To the old harlot the inquisitive fog-strand looked redly-

veined—a reflection from the torches, no doubt, but she prayed it brought fresh blood to

Gnarlag.

The fog-finger touched the taut arm. Gnarlag's sneering look turned to one of pure hate,

and the muscles of his forearm seemed to double in thickness as he rotated it more than a

half turn. There was a muffled snap and a gasp of anguish. The mercenary's wrist had been

broken.

Gnarlag stood up. He knocked to the wall a wine cup offered him and cuffed aside a girl

who would have embraced him. Then grabbing up his two swords on their thick belt from the

bench beside him, he strode to the brick stairs and up out of the Rats’ Nest. By some trick of

air currents, perhaps, it seemed that a fog-strand rested across his shoulders like a com-

Leiber, Fitz - F&GM 03 - Swords in the Mist (Collection).pdf

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