The First Book of Lankhmar Read online

  ‘Two of the most delightful characters in the history of fantastic literature’

  Neil Gaiman

  ‘Most fantasy writers, if asked, admit that Fritz Leiber is our spiritual father, and for the most part we’re sweating to keep up, let alone overtake him’

  Raymond E. Feist

  ‘Masterly prose and urbane wit’

  Michael Moorcock

  The most literate and important sword and sorcery series’

  Mike Ashley

  ‘[A] writer of major importance’

  The Encyclopedia of Fantasy

  ALSO BY FRITZ LEIBER

  Novels

  Conjure Wife (1943)

  Gather, Darkness! (1950)

  The Green Millennium (1953)

  Destiny Times Three (1957)

  The Big Time (1961)

  The Silver Eggheads (1962)

  The Wanderer (1964)

  Tarzan and the Valley of Gold (1966)

  A Specter is Haunting Texas (1969)

  Our Lady of Darkness (1977)

  Short Story Collections

  Night’s Black Agents (1947)

  Shadows with Eyes (1962)

  Ships to the Stars (1964)

  A Pail of Air (1964)

  The Night of the Wolf (1966)

  The Secret Songs (1968)

  Night Monsters (1969)

  You’re All Alone (1972)

  The Book of Fritz Leiber (1974)

  The Best of Fritz Leiber (1974)

  The Worlds of Fritz Leiber (1976)

  Bazaar of the Bizarre (1978)

  The Change War (1978)

  Heroes and Horrors (1978)

  Ship of Shadows (1979)

  The Leiber Chronicles: Fifty Years of Fritz Leiber (1990)

  Poetry

  The Demons or the Upper Air (1969)

  Sonnets to Jonquil and All (1978)

  This edition Copyright © Fritz Leiber 2001

  All rights reserved

  The right of Fritz Leiber to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This edition published in Great Britain in 2001 by

  Gollancz

  An imprint of the Orion Publishing Group

  Orion House, 5 Upper St Martin’s Lane,

  London WC2H 9EA

  Second impression reprinted in 2003

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available

  from the British Library

  ISBN 185798 327 0

  Typeset at The Spartan Press Ltd,

  Lymington, Hants

  Printed in Great Britain by

  Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

  Fritz Leiber (1910-1992) was born in Chicago. Both his parents were Shakespearean actors and his father appeared in a number of films. He majored in psychology and physiology at the University of Chicago and then spent a year at a theological seminary. He joined his father’s acting company in 1934 and even had a few roles in films, including a small part in Camille, which starred Greta Garbo. In 1936 he married and turned to writing, although his career also included periods as an editor, mainly with Science Digest, and as a drama teacher. His long and distinguished writing career covered science fiction and horror as well as his ground-breaking fantasy, and included such acclaimed titles as The Big Time, The Wanderer, both of which won Hugos, and Our Lady of Darkness. In all, Fritz Leiber won six Hugos and four Nebulas, and more than twenty other awards, including the 1975 Grand Master of Fantasy (Gandalf) Award and the 1976 Life Achievement Lovecraft Award. The 1981 Grand Master Nebula Award was presented for his work as a whole.

  CONTENTS

  Swords and Deviltry

  I Induction

  II The Snow Women

  III The Unholy Grail

  IV Ill Met in Lankhmar

  Swords Against Death

  I The Circle Curse

  II The Jewels in the Forest

  III Thieves’ House

  IV The Bleak Shore

  V The Howling Tower

  VI The Sunken Land

  VII The Seven Black Priests

  VIII Claws From the Night

  IX The Prince of Pain-Ease

  X Bazaar of the Bizarre

  Swords in the Mist

  I The Cloud of Hate

  II Lean Times in Lankhmar

  III Their Mistress, The Sea

  IV When The Sea-King’s Away

  V The Wrong Branch

  VI Adept’s Gambit

  Swords Against Wizardry

  I In the Witch’s Tent

  II Stardock

  III The Two Best Thieves in Lankhmar

  IV The Lords of Quarmall

  Swords and

  Deviltry

  I

  Induction

  Sundered from us by gulfs of time and stranger dimensions dreams the ancient world of Nehwon with its towers and skulls and jewels, its swords and sorceries. Nehwon’s known realms crowd about the Inner Sea: northward the green-forested fierce Land of the Eight Cities, eastward the steppe-dwelling Mingol horsemen and the desert where caravans creep from the rich Eastern Lands and the River Tilth. But southward, linked to the desert only by the Sinking Land and further warded by the Great Dike and the Mountains of Hunger, are the rich grain fields and walled cities of Lankhmar, eldest and chiefest of Nehwon’s lands. Dominating the Land of Lankhmar and crouching at the silty mouth of the River Hlal in a secure corner between the grain fields, the Great Salt Marsh, and the Inner Sea is the massive-walled and mazy-alleyed metropolis of Lankhmar, thick with thieves and shaven priests, lean-framed magicians and fat-bellied merchants—Lankhmar the Imperishable, the City of the Black Toga.

  In Lankhmar on one murky night, if we can believe the runic books of Sheelba of the Eyeless Face, there met for the first time those two dubious heroes and whimsical scoundrels, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Fafhrd’s origins were easy to perceive in his near seven-foot height and limber-looking ranginess, his hammered ornaments and huge longsword: he was clearly a barbarian from the Cold Waste north even of the Eight Cities and the Trollstep Mountains. The Mouser’s antecedents were more cryptic and hardly to be deduced from his childlike stature, gray garb, mouse-skin hood shadowing flat swart face, and deceptively dainty rapier; but somewhere about him was the suggestion of cities and the south, the dark streets and also the sun-drenched spaces. As the twain eyed each other challengingly through the murky fog lit indirectly by distant torches, they were already dimly aware that they were two long-sundered, matching fragments of a greater hero and that each had found a comrade who would outlast a thousand quests and a lifetime—or a hundred lifetimes—of adventuring.

  No one at that moment could have guessed that the Gray Mouser was once named Mouse, or that Fafhrd had recently been a youth whose voice was by training high-pitched, who wore white furs only, and who still slept in his mother’s tent although he was eighteen.

  II

  The Snow Women

  At Cold Corner in midwinter, the women of the Snow Clan were waging a cold war against the men. They trudged about like ghosts in their whitest furs, almost invisible against the new-fallen snow, always together in female groups, silent or at most hissing like angry shades. They avoided Godshall with its trees for pillars and walls of laced leather and towering pine-needle roof.

  They gathered in the big, oval Tent of the Women, which stood guard in front of the smaller home tents, for sessions of chanting and ominous moaning and various silent practices designed to create powerful enchantments that would tether their husbands’ ankles to Cold Corner, tie up their loins, and give them sniveling, nose-dripping colds, with the threat of the Great Cough and Winter Fever held in reserve.
Any man so unwise as to walk alone by day was apt to be set upon and snowballed and, if caught, thrashed—be he even skald or mighty hunter.

  And a snowballing by Snow Clan women was nothing to laugh at. They threw overarm, it is true, but their muscles for that had been greatly strengthened by much splitting of firewood, lopping of high branches, and pounding of hides, including the iron-hard one of the snowy behemoth. And they sometimes froze their snowballs.

  The sinewy, winter-hardened men took all of this with immense dignity, striding about like kings in their conspicuous black, russet, and rainbow-dyed ceremonial furs, drinking hugely but with discretion, and trading as shrewdly as Ilthmarts their bits of amber and ambergris, their snow-diamonds visible only by night, their glossy animal pelts, and their ice-herbs, in exchange for woven fabrics, hot spices, blued and browned iron, honey, waxen candles, fire-powders that flared with a colored roar, and other products of the civilized south. Nevertheless, they made a point of keeping generally in groups, and there was many a nose a-drip among them.

  It was not the trading the women objected to. Their men were good at that and they—the women—were the chief beneficiaries. They greatly preferred it to their husbands’ occasional piratings, which took those lusty men far down the eastern coasts of the Outer Sea, out of reach of immediate matriarchal supervision and even, the women sometimes feared, of their potent female magic. Cold Corner was the farthest south ever got by the entire Snow Clan, whose members spent most of their lives on the Cold Waste and among the foothills of the untopped Mountains of the Giants and the even more northerly Bones of the Old Ones, and so this midwinter camp was their one yearly chance to trade peaceably with venturesome Mingols, Sarheenmarts, Lankhmarts, and even an occasional Eastern desert-man, heavily beturbaned, bundled up to the eyes, and elephantinely gloved and booted.

  Nor was it the guzzling which the women opposed. Their husbands were great quaffers of mead and ale at all times and even of the native white snow-potato brandy, a headier drink than most of the wines and boozes the traders hopefully dispensed.

  No, what the Snow Women hated so venomously and which each year caused them to wage cold war with hardly any material or magical holds barred, was the theatrical show which inevitably came shivering north with the traders, its daring troupers with faces chapped and legs chilblained, but hearts a-beat for soft northern gold and easy if rampageous audiences—a show so blasphemous and obscene that the men preempted Godshall for its performance (God being unshockable) and refused to let the women and youths view it; a show whose actors were, according to the women, solely dirty old men and even dirtier scrawny southern girls, as loose in their morals as in the lacing of their skimpy garments, when they went clothed at all. It did not occur to the Snow Women that a scrawny wench, her dirty nakedness all blue goosebumps in the chill of drafty Godshall, would hardly be an object of erotic appeal, besides her risking permanent all-over frostbite.

  So the Snow Women each midwinter hissed and magicked and sneaked and sniped with their crusty snowballs at huge men retreating with pomp, and frequently caught an old or crippled or foolish, young, drunken husband and beat him soundly.

  This outwardly comic combat had sinister undertones. Particularly when working all together, the Snow Women were reputed to wield mighty magics, particularly through the element of cold and its consequences: slipperiness, the sudden freezing of flesh, the gluing of skin to metal, the frangibility of objects, the menacing mass of snow-laden trees and branches, and the vastly greater mass of avalanches. And there was no man wholly unafraid of the hypnotic power in their ice-blue eyes.

  Each Snow Woman, usually with the aid of the rest, worked to maintain absolute control of her man, though leaving him seemingly free, and it was whispered that recalcitrant husbands had been injured and even slain, generally by some frigid instrumentality. While at the same time witchy cliques and individual sorceresses played against each other a power game in which the brawniest and boldest of men, even chiefs and priests, were but counters.

  During the fortnight of trading and the two days of the Show, hags and great strapping girls guarded the Tent of the Women at all quarters, while from within came strong perfumes, stenches, flashes and intermittent glows by night, clashings and tinklings, cracklings and quenchings, and incantational chantings and whisperings that never quite stopped.

  This morning one could imagine that the Snow Women’s sorcery was working everywhere, for the weather was windless and overcast, and there were wisps of fog in the moist freezing air, so that crystals of ice were rapidly forming on every bush and branch, every twig and tip of any sort, including the ends of the men’s moustaches and the eartips of the tamed lynxes. The crystals were as blue and flashing as the Snow Women’s eyes and even mimicked in their forms, to an imaginative mind, the Snow Women’s hooded, tall, and white-robed figures, for many of the crystals grew upright, like diamond flames.

  And this morning the Snow Women had caught, or rather got a near certain chance of trapping, an almost unimaginably choice victim. For one of the Show girls, whether by ignorance or foolhardy daring, and perhaps tempted by the relatively mild, gem-begetting air, had strolled on the crusty snow away from the safety of the actors’ tents, past Godshall on the precipice side, and from thence between two sky-thrusting copses of snow-laden evergreens, out onto the snow-carpeted natural rock bridge that had been the start of the Old Road south to Gnampf Nar until some five man-lengths of its central section had fallen three score years ago.

  A short step from the up-curving, perilous brink she had paused and looked for a long while south through the wisps of mist that, in the distance, grew thin as pluckings of long-haired wool. Below her in the canyon’s overhung slot, the snow-capped pines flooring Trollstep Canyon looked tiny as the white tents of an army of Ice Gnomes. Her gaze slowly traced Trollstep Canyon from its far eastern beginnings to where, narrowing, it passed directly beneath her and then, slowly widening, curved south, until the buttress opposite her with its matching, jutting section of the one-time rock bridge, cut off the view south. Then her gaze went back to trace the New Road from where it began its descent beyond the actors’ tents and clung to the far wall of the canyon until, after many a switchback and many a swing into great gully and out again—unlike the far swifter, straighter descent of the Old Road—it plunged into the midst of the flooring pines and went with them south.

  From her constant yearning look, one might have thought the actress a silly homesick soubrette, already regretting this freezing northern tour and pining for some hot, flea-bitten actors’ alley beyond the Land of the Eight Cities and the Inner Sea—except for the quiet confidence of her movements, the proud set of her shoulders, and the perilous spot she had chosen for her peering. For this spot was not only physically dangerous, but also as near the Tent of the Snow Women as it was to Godshall, and in addition the spot was taboo because a chief and his children had plunged to their deaths when the central rock-span had cracked away three score years ago, and because the wooden replacement had fallen under the weight of a brandy-merchant’s cart some two score years later. Brandy of the fieriest, a loss fearsome enough to justify the sternest of taboos, including one against ever rebuilding the bridge.

  And as if even those tragedies were not sufficient to glut the jealous gods and make taboo absolute, only two years past the most skillful skier the Snow Clan had produced in decades, one Skif, drunk with snow brandy and an icy pride, had sought to jump the gap from the Cold Corner side. Towed to a fast start and thrusting furiously with his sticks, he had taken off like a gliding hawk, yet missed the opposite snowy verge by an arm’s length; the prows of his skis had crashed into rock, and he himself smashed in the rocky depths of the canyon.

  The bemused actress wore a long coat of auburn fox fur belted with a light, gold-washed brass chain. Icy crystals had formed in her high-piled, fine, dark brown hair.

  From the narrowness of her coat, her figure promised to be scrawny or at least thinly muscula
r enough to satisfy the Snow Women’s notion of female players, but she was almost six feet tall—which was not at all as actresses should be and definitely an added affront to the tall Snow Women now approaching her from behind in a silent white rank.

  An over-hasty white fur boot sang against the glazed snow.

  The actress spun around and without hesitation raced back the way she had come. Her first three steps broke the snowcrust, losing her time, but then she learned the trick of running in a glide, feet grazing the crust.

  She hitched her russet coat high. She was wearing black fur boots and bright scarlet stockings.

  The Snow Women glided swiftly after her, pitching their hard-packed snowballs.

  One struck her hard on the shoulder. She made the mistake of looking back.

  By ill chance two snowballs took her in jaw and forehead, just beneath painted lip and on an arched black eyebrow.

  She reeled then, turning fully back, and a snowball thrown almost with the force of a slinger’s stone struck her in the midriff, doubling her up and driving the breath from her lungs in an open-mouthed whoosh.

  She collapsed. The white women rushed forward, blue eyes a-glare.

  A big, thinnish, black-moustached man in a drab quilted jacket and a low black turban stopped watching from beside a becrystalled, rough-barked living pillar of Godshall, and ran toward the fallen woman. His footsteps broke the crust, but his strong legs drove him powerfully on.

  Then he slowed in amaze as he was passed almost as if he were at a standstill by a tall, white, slender figure glide-running so swiftly that it seemed for a moment it went on skis. Then for another instant, the turbaned man thought it was another Snow Woman, but then he noted that it wore a short fur jerkin rather than a long fur robe—and so was presumably a Snow Man or Snow Youth, though the black-turbaned man had never seen a Snow Clan male dressed in white.

  The strange, swift figure glide-ran, with chin tucked down and eyes bent away from the Snow Women, as if fearing to meet their wrathful blue gaze. Then, as he swiftly knelt by the felled actress, long reddish-blond hair spilled from his hood. From that and the figure’s slenderness, the black-turbaned man knew an instant of fear that the intercomer was a very tall Snow Girl, eager to strike the first blow at close quarters.