Fritz Leiber FGM 6 Swords and Ice Magic

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stinging and impelling as the flames seen through its facial orifices, "And
you remove too, wraith most pitiful. By Khahkht of the Black
Ice and Gara of the Blue -- and e'en Kos of the Green -- I enjoin it! Blow
winds! and out lights all!" Fafhrd and the Mouser were hurt even more sorely
by these new rebuffs. Their very souls were shriveled by the feeling that they
were indeed the phantoms, and the speaking masks the solid reality.
Nevertheless, they might have summoned the courage to attempt to answer
the challenge (though 'tis doubtful), except that at Keyaira's last commands
they were plunged into darkness absolute and manhandled by great winds and
then dumped in a lighted area. A wind-slammed door crashed shut behind them.
They saw with considerable relief that they were not confronting yet another
pair of girls (_that_ would have been unendurable) but were in another stretch
of corridor lit by clear-flaming torches held in brazen wall brackets in the
form of gripping bird-talons, coiling squid-tentacles, and pinching
crab-claws. Grateful for the respite, they took deep breaths.
Then Fafhrd frowned deeply and said, "Mark me, Mouser, there's magic somewhere
in all this. Or else the hand of a god."
The Mouser commented bitterly, "If it's a god, he's a thumb-fingered one, the
way he sets us up to be turned down."
Fafhrd's thoughts took a new tack, as shown by the changing furrows in his
forehead. "Mouser, I never squeaked," he protested. "Hirriwi said I
squeaked."
"Manner of speaking only, I suppose," his comrade consoled. "But gods!
what misery I felt myself, as if I were no longer man at all, and _this_ no
more than broomstick." He indicated his sword Scalpel at his side and gazed
with a shake of his head at Fafhrd's scabbarded Graywand.
"Perchance we dream -- " Fafhrd began doubtfully.
"Well, if we're dreaming, let's get on with it," the Mouser said and, clapping
his friend around the shoulders, started them down the corridor. Yet despite
these cheerful words and actions, both men felt they were getting more and
more into the toils of nightmare, drawing them on will-lessly.
They rounded a turn. For some yards the right-hand wall became a row of
slender dark pillars, irregularly spaced, and between them they could see more
random dusky slim shafts and at middle distance a long altar on which light
showered softly down, revealing a tall, naked woman stretched on it, and by
her a priestess in purple robes with dagger bared in one hand and large silver
chalice in the other, who was intoning a litany.
Fafhrd whispered, "Mouser! the sacrifice is the courtesan Lessnya, with whom I
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had some dealings when I was acolyte of Issek, years ago."
"While the other is Ilala, priestess of the like-named goddess, with whom I
had some commerce when I was lieutenant to Pulg the extortioner," the
Mouser whispered back.
Fafhrd protested, "But we can't have already come all the way to the temple of
Ilala, though this looks like it. It's halfway across Lankhmar from the Eel,"
while the Mouser recalled tales he'd heard of secret passages in
Lankhmar that connected points by distances shorter than the shortest distance
between.
Ilala turned toward them in her purple robes and said with eyebrows raised,
"Quiet back there! You are committing sacrilege, trespassing on most holy
ritual of the great goddess of all shes. Impious intruders, depart!"
While Lessnya lifted on an elbow and looked at them haughtily. Then she lay
back again and regarded the ceiling while Ilala plunged her dagger deep into
her chalice and then with it flicked sprinkles of wine (or whatever other
fluid the chalice held) on Lessnya's naked shape, wielding the blade as if it
were an aspergillum. She aspersed her thrice -- on bosom, loins, and knees --
and then resumed her muttered litany, while Lessnya echoed her (or else
snored) and the Mouser and Fafhrd stole on along the torchlit corridor.
But they had little time to ponder on the strange geometries and stranger
religiosities of their nightmare progress, for now the left-hand wall gave way
for a space to a fabulously decorated, large, dim chamber, which they
recognized as the official residence room of the Grandmaster of the Thieves'
Guild in Thieves' House, half Lankhmar City back again from Ilala's fane. The
foreground was filled with figures kneeling away from them in devout [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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