Leiber, Fitz - F&GM 04 - Swords Against Wizardry (Collection).pdf - Fritz Leiber - przemosta

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Swords Against Wizardry

by Fritz Leiber

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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

--------

*I. In the Witch's Tent*

The hag bent over the brazier. Its upward-seeking gray fumes interwove

with strands of her downward-dangling, tangled black hair. Its glow showed her

face to be as dark, jagged-featured, and dirty as the new-dug root-clump of a

blackapple tree. A half century of brazier heat and smoke had cured it as

black, crinkly, and hard as Mingol bacon.

Through her splayed nostrils and slack mouth, which showed a few brown

teeth like old tree stumps irregularly fencing the gray field of her tongue,

she garglingly inhaled and bubblingly expelled the fumes.

Such of them as escaped her greedy lungs tortuously found their way to

the tent's saggy roof, resting on seven ribs down-curving from the central

pole, and deposited on the ancient rawhide their tiny dole of resin and soot.

It is said that such a tent, boiled out after decades or preferably centuries

of use, yields a nauseous liquid which gives a man strange and dangerous

visions.

Outside the tent's drooping walls radiated the dark, twisty alleys of

Illik-Ving, an overgrown and rudely boisterous town, which is the eighth and

smallest metropolis of the Land of the Eight Cities.

While overhead there shivered in the chill wind the strange stars of

the World of Nehwon, which is so like and unlike our own world.

Inside the tent, two barbarian-clad men watched the crouching witch

across the brazier. The big man, who had red-blond hair, stared somber-eyed

and intently. The little man, who was dressed all in gray, drooped his

eyelids, stifled a yawn, and wrinkled his nose.

"I don't know which stinks worse, she or the brazier," he murmured. "Or

maybe it's the whole tent, or this alley muck we must sit in. Or perchance her

familiar is a skunk. Look, Fafhrd, if we must consult a sorcerous personage,

we should have sought out Sheelba or Ningauble before ever we sailed north

from Lankhmar across the Inner Sea."

"They weren't available," the big man answered in a clipped whisper.

"Shh, Gray Mouser, I think she's gone into trance."

"Asleep, you mean," the little man retorted irreverently.

The hag's gargling breath began to sound more like a death rattle. Her

eyelids fluttered, showing two white lines. Wind stirred the tent's dark wall

-- or it might be unseen presences fumbling and fingering.

The little man was unimpressed. He said, "I don't see why we have to

consult anyone. It isn't as if we were going outside Nehwon altogether, as we

did in our last adventure. We've got the papers -- the scrap of ramskin

parchment, I mean -- and we know where we're going. Or at least you say you

do."

"Shh!" the big man commanded, then added hoarsely, "Before embarking on

any great enterprise, it's customary to consult a warlock or witch."

The little man, now whispering likewise, countered with, "Then why

couldn't we have consulted a civilized one? -- any member in good standing

of the Lankhmar Sorcerers Guild. He'd at least have had a comely naked girl or

two around, to rest your eyes on when they began to water from scanning his

crabbed hieroglyphs and horoscopes."

"A good earthy witch is more honest than some city rogue tricked out in

black cone-hat and robe of stars," the big man argued. "Besides, this one is

nearer our icy goal and its influences. You and your townsman's lust for

luxuries! You'd turn a wizard's workroom into a brothel."

"Why not?" the little man wanted to know. "Both species of glamour at

once!" Then, jerking his thumb at the hag, "Earthy, you said? Dungy describes

her better."

"Shh, Mouser, you'll break her trance."

"Trance?" The little man reinspected the hag. Her mouth had shut and

she was breathing wheezingly through her beaky nose alone, the fume-sooty tip

of which sought to meet her jutting chin. There was a faint high wailing, as

of distant wolves, or nearby ghosts, or perhaps just an odd overtone of the

hag's wheezes.

The little man sneered his upper lip and shook his head.

His hands shook a little too, but he hid that. "No, she's only stoned

out of her skull, I'd say," he commented judiciously. "You shouldn't have

given her so much poppy gum."

"But that's the entire intent of trance," the big man protested. "To

lash, stone, and otherwise drive the spirit out of the skull and whip it up

mystic mountains, so that from their peaks it can spy out the lands of past

and future, and mayhaps other-world."

"I wish the mountains ahead of us were merely mystic," the little man

muttered. "Look, Fafhrd, I'm willing to squat here all night -- at any rate

for fifty more stinking breaths or two hundred bored heartbeats -- to

pleasure your whim. But has it occurred to you that we're in danger in this

tent? And I don't mean solely from spirits. There are other rogues than

ourselves in Illik-Ving, some perhaps on the same quest as ours, who'd dearly

love to scupper us. And here in this blind leather hut we're deer on a skyline

-- or sitting ducks."

Just then the wind came back with its fumblings and fingerings, and in

addition a scrabbling that might be that of wind-swayed branch tips or of dead

men's long fingernails a-scratch. There were faint growlings and wailings too,

and with them stealthy footfalls. Both men thought of the Mouser's last

warning. Fafhrd and he looked toward the tent's night-slitted skin door and

loosened their swords in their scabbards.

At that instant the hag's noisy breathing stopped and with it all other

sound. Her eyes opened, showing only whites -- milky ovals infinitely eerie

in the dark root-tangle of her sharp features and stringy hair. The gray tip

of her tongue traveled like a large maggot around her lips.

The Mouser made to comment, but the out-thrust palm-side of Fafhrd's

spread-fingered hand was more compelling than any shh.

In a voice low but remarkably clear, almost a girl's voice, the hag

intoned:

"For reasons sorcerous and dim

You travel toward the world's frost rim...."

_"Dim" is the key word there,_ the Mouser thought. _Typical witchy say-

nothing. She clearly knows naught about us except that we're headed north,

which she could get from any gossipy mouth_.

"You north, north, north, and north must go

Through dagger-ice and powder-snow...."

_More of the same,_ was the Mouser's inward comment. _But must she rub

it in, even the snow? Brr!_

"And many a rival, envy-eyed,

Will dog your steps until you've died...."

Aha, the inevitable fright-thrust, without which no fortune-tale is

complete!

"But after peril's cleansing fire

You'll meet at last your hearts' desire...."

_And now pat the happy ending! Gods, but the stupidest palm-reading

prostitute of Ilthmar could -- _

Something silvery gray flashed across the Mouser's eyes, so close its

form was blurred. Without a thought he ducked back and drew Scalpel.

The razor-sharp spear-blade, driven through the tent's side as if it

were paper, stopped inches from Fafhrd's head and was dragged back.

A javelin hurtled out of the hide wall. This the Mouser struck aside

with his sword.

Now a storm of cries rose outside. The burden of some was, "Death to

the strangers!" Of others, "Come out, dogs, and be killed!"

The Mouser faced the skin door, his gaze darting.

Fafhrd, almost as quick to react as the Mouser, hit on a somewhat

irregular solution to their knotty tactical problem: that of men besieged in a

fortress whose walls neither protect them nor permit outward viewing. At first

step, he leaped to the tent's central pole and with a great heave drew it from

the earth.

The witch, likewise reacting with good solid sense, threw herself flat

on the dirt.

"We decamp!" Fafhrd cried. "Mouser, guard our front and guide me!"

And with that he charged toward the door, carrying the whole tent with

him. There was a rapid series of little explosions as the somewhat brittle old

thongs that tied its rawhide sides to its pegs snapped. The brazier tumbled

over, scattering coals. The hag was overpassed. The Mouser, running ahead of

Fafhrd, threw wide the door-slit. He had to use Scalpel at once, to parry a

sword thrust out of the dark, but with his other hand he kept the door spread.

The opposing swordsman was bowled over, perhaps a bit startled at being

attacked by the tent. The Mouser trod on him. He thought he heard ribs snap as

Fafhrd did the same, which seemed a nice if brutal touch. Then he was crying

out, "Veer left now, Fafhrd! Now to the right a little! There's an alley

coming up on our left. Be ready to turn sharp into it when I give the word.

Now!" And grasping the door's hide edges, the Mouser helped swing the tent as

Fafhrd pivoted.

From behind came cries of rage and wonder, also a screeching that

sounded like the hag, enraged at the theft of her home.

The alley was so narrow that the tent's sides dragged against buildings

and fences. At the first sign of a soft spot in the dirt underfoot, Fafhrd

drove the tent-pole into it, and they both dashed out of the tent, leaving it

blocking the alley.

The cries behind them grew suddenly louder as their pursuers turned

into the alley, but Fafhrd and the Mouser did not run off over-swiftly. It

seemed certain their attackers would spend considerable time scouting and

assaulting the empty tent.

They loped together through the outskirts of the sleeping city toward

their own well-hidden camp outside it. Their nostrils sucked in the chill,

bracing air funneling down from the best pass through the Trollstep Mountains,

a craggy chain which walled off the Land of the Eight Cities from the vast

plateau of the Cold Waste to the north.

Fafhrd remarked, "It's unfortunate the old lady was interrupted just

when she was about to tell us something important."

The Mouser snorted. "She'd already sung her song, the sum of which was

zero."

"I wonder who those rude fellows were and what were their motives!"

Fafhrd asked. "I thought I recognized the voice of that ale-swiller Gnarfi,

who has an aversion to bear-meat."

"Scoundrels behaving as stupidly as we were," the Mouser answered.

"Motives? -- as soon impute 'em to sheep! Ten dolts following an idiot

leader."

"Still, it appears that someone doesn't like us," Fafhrd opined.

"Was that ever news!" the Gray Mouser retorted.

--------

*II: Stardock*

Early one evening, weeks later, the sky's gray cloud-armor blew away

south, smashed and dissolving as if by blows of an acid-dipped mace. The same

mighty northeast wind contemptuously puffed down the hitherto impregnable

cloud wall to the east, revealing a grimly majestic mountain range running

north to south and springing abruptly from the plateau, two leagues high, of

the Cold Waste -- like a dragon fifty leagues long heaving up its spike-

crested spine from icy entombment.

Fafhrd, no stranger to the Cold Waste, born at the foot of these same

mountains and childhood climber of their lower slopes, named them off to the

Gray Mouser as the two men stood together on the crunchy hoarfrosted eastern

rim of the hollow that held their camp. The sun, set for the camp, still shone

from behind their backs onto the western faces of the major peaks as he named

them -- but it shone not with any romanticizing rosy glow, but rather with a

clear, cold, detail-pinning light fitting the peaks' dire aloofness.

"Travel your eye to the first great northerly upthrust," he told the

Mouser, "that phalanx of heaven-menacing ice-spears shafted with dark rock and

gleaming green -- that's the Ripsaw. Then, dwarfing them, a single ivory-icy

tooth, unscalable by any sane appraisal -- the Tusk, he's called. Another

unscalable then, still higher and with south wall a sheer precipice shooting

up a league and curving outward toward the needletop: he is White Fang, where

my father died -- the canine of the Mountains of the Giants.

"Now begin again with the first snow dome at the south of the chain,"

continued the tall fur-cloaked man, copper-bearded and copper-maned, his head

otherwise bare to the frigid air, which was as quiet at ground level as sea-

deep beneath storm. "The Hint, she's named, or the Come On. Little enough she

looks, yet men have frozen nighting on her slopes and been whirled to death by

her whimsical queenly avalanches. Then a far vaster snow dome, true queen to

the Hint's princess, a hemisphere of purest white, grand enough to roof the

council hall of all the gods that ever were or will be -- she is Gran Hanack,

whom my father was first of men to mount and master. Our town of tents was

pitched _there_ near her base. No mark of it now, I'll guess, not even a

midden.

"After Gran Hanack and nearest to us of them all, a huge flat-topped

pillar, a pedestal for the sky almost, looking to be of green-shot snow but in

truth all snow-pale granite scoured by the storms: Obelisk Polaris.

"Lastly," Fafhrd continued, sinking his voice and gripping his smaller

comrade's shoulder, "let your gaze travel up the snow-tressed, dark-rocked,

snowcapped peak between the Obelisk and White Fang, her glittering skirt

somewhat masked by the former, but taller than they as they are taller than

the Waste. Even now she hides behind her the mounting moon. She is Stardock,

our quest's goal."

"A pretty enough, tall, slender wart on this frostbit patch of Nehwon's

face," the Gray Mouser conceded, writhing his shoulder from Fafhrd's grip.

"And now at last tell me, friend, why you never climbed this Stardock in your

youth and seized the treasure there, but must wait until we get a clue to it

in a dusty, hot, scorpion-patrolled desert tower a quarter world away -- and

waste half a year getting here."

Fafhrd's voice grew a shade unsure as he answered, "My father never

climbed her; how should I? Also, there were no legends of a treasure on

Stardock's top in my father's clan ... though there was a storm of other

legends about Stardock, each forbidding her ascent. They called my father the

Legend Breaker and shrugged wisely when he died on White Fang.... Truly, my

memory's not so good for those days, Mouser -- I got many a mind-shattering

knock on my head before I learned to deal all knocks first ... and then I was

hardly a boy when the clan left the Cold Waste -- though the rough hard walls

of Obelisk Polaris had been my upended playground...."

The Mouser nodded doubtfully. In the stillness they heard their

tethered ponies munching the ice-crisped grass of the hollow, then a faint

unangry growl from Hrissa the ice-cat, curled between the tiny fire and the

piled baggage -- likely one of the ponies had come cropping too close. On the

great icy plain around them, nothing moved -- or almost nothing.

The Mouser dipped gray lambskin-gloved fingers into the bottom of his

pouch and from the pocket there withdrew a tiny oblong of parchment and read

from it, more by memory than sight:

"Who mounts white Stardock, the Moon Tree,

"Past worm and gnome and unseen bars,

"Will win the key to luxury:

"The Heart of Light, a pouch of stars."

Fafhrd said dreamily, "They say the gods once dwelt and had their

smithies on Stardock and from thence, amid jetting fire and showering sparks,

launched all the stars; hence her name. They say diamonds, rubies, smaragds --

all great gems -- are the tiny pilot models the gods made of the stars ... and

then threw carelessly away across the world when their great work was done."

"You never told me that before," the Mouser said, looking at him

sharply.

Fafhrd blinked his eyes and frowned puzzledly. "I am beginning to

remember childhood things."

The Mouser smiled thinly before returning the parchment to its deep

pocket. "The guess that a pouch of stars might be a bag of gems," he listed,

"the story that Nehwon's biggest diamond is called the Heart of Light, a few

words on a ramskin scrap in the topmost room of a desert tower locked and

sealed for centuries -- small hints, those, to draw two men across this

murdering, monotonous Cold Waste. Tell me, Old Horse, were you just homesick

for the miserable white meadows of your birth to pretend to believe 'em?"

"Those small hints," Fafhrd said, gazing now toward White Fang, "drew

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