Leiber, Fritz FGM 2 Swords Against Death

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spangled Mask of Death. Perhaps fortunately, at that time Death himself was
away, on business or vacation.
At that instant, both Fafhrd and the Mouser realized he was promise-bound
by oath to Ningauble and Sheelba, to slay his comrade. The Mouser whicked out
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Scalpel. Quite as swiftly Fafhrd whipped out Graywand. They stood face to face,
ready to kill each other.
At that instant a long, glittering scimitar came down between them, swift as
light, and the black glittering Mask of Death was cloven precisely in two, black
forehead to black chin.
Then the swift sword of Duke Danius went licking right at Fafhrd. The
Northerner barely parried the blow of the mad-eyed aristocrat. The gleaming
blade swept back toward the Mouser, who also barely shoved aside the slice.
Both heroes likely would have been slain -- for who in the long run has might
to master the insane? -- except that at that instant Death himself returned to his
customary abode in his black castle in the Shadowland and with his black hands
seized Duke Danius by the neck and strangled him dead within seventeen of
Fafhrd's heartbeats and twenty-one of the Mouser's -- and some hundreds of
Danius'.
Neither of the two heroes dared look at Death. Before that most remarkable
and horrid being was a third finished with Danius, his foolish foe, they snatched
up a gleaming half of a black mask each, sprang each on his horse, and galloped
side by side like twin lunatics of the frantickest sort, ridden even harder than they
rode their powerful white and black horses by that cosmically champion jockey
Fear, out of the Shadowland southwest by the straightest path possible.
Lankhmar and her environs, to which they swiftly returned, were no great
good to them. Ningauble and Sheelba were both most angry at getting only half a
mask apiece, even though it was the mask of the most potent being in all
universes known and unknown. The two rather self-centered and somewhat
irrational archimages, intent on and vastly enamored of their private war --
though they were undoubtedly the cunningest and wisest sorcerers ever to exist
in the World of Nehwon -- were entirely adamant against the very sound four
arguments Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser advanced in their self-defense: one, that
they had stuck to the magician-set rules by first making certain to get the Mask of
Death (or as much as they could of it) out of the Shadowland at whatever
personal cost to themselves and diminishment of their self-respect. For, if they
had fought each other, as Rule Two required, they would most likely have
simultaneously slain each other, and so not even a sliver of a mask get to Sheel or
Ning, while who in his sane senses would take on Death as an opponent? --
Danius being a most crushing, present argument here. Two, that half a magical
mask is better than none. Three, that each magician having half the mask, both
would be forced to quit their stupid war, cooperate in future, and so double their
already considerable powers. And, four, that the two sorcerers had neither
returned Vlana and Ivrian in their lovely, living flesh to Fafhrd and the Mouser,
nor vanished them utterly from time, so that there was no memory of them
anywhere, as promised, but only tortured the two heroes -- and likely the two
girls also -- by a final horrid encounter. In pets most undignified for great
wizards, Ningauble magicked all objects whatsoever out of the home Fafhrd and
the Mouser had stolen, while Sheelba burned it to ashes indistinguishable from
those of the earlier tenement in which Vlana and Ivrian had perished.
Which was probably all to the good, since the whole idea of the two heroes
dwelling in a house behind the Silver Eel -- right in the midst of the graveyard of
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their great beloveds -- had undoubtedly been most morbid from the start.
Thereafter Sheelba and Ningauble, showing no gratitude whatever, or
remorse for their childish revenges, insisted on exacting from the Mouser and
Fafhrd the utmost service established by the bargain they had set with the two
heroes.
But Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser were never once again haunted by those two [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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