Swords Against the Shadowland

FOUR SHADOWS IN THE MIST

Fafhrd yawned, stretching his arms above his head as he sat up on the side of the bed. The muffled sounds of laughter and general carousing rose up through the floorboards from the tavern below. It was not the noise that had awakened him, however, but a nightmare from which he had struggled to awake.

Frowning, he rubbed his nose. Born and raised in the open spaces of the Cold Wastes, the smells of city living constantly offended his senses. At the moment, though, such odors were a welcome distraction, for they forced his mind farther from the specters that even now reached for him and called to him from the receding dream.

Only a feeble light from the lamps in the hallway seeped beneath the door. Otherwise, the room was black as pitch. Throwing back the sheet, Fafhrd rose naked and groped for the chamber pot at the foot of the bed. In the darkness, however, he kicked it, and sent it clattering into some other corner of the room.

Muttering curses, the huge Northerner hopped up and down on his right foot as he clutched his left. His big toe throbbed. Yet he thanked his god, Kos, for small favors, for his nose told him that the Mouser had not used the pot before him. Squinting, he tried to locate the overturned vessel in the blackness. Then, with a shrug, he gave up and limped to the window.

Somebody had closed the shutters, Fafhrd noted sleepily, but he flung them open and leaned against the sill. Damn the chamber pot. He would only have emptied it into the alley below anyway. Yawning again, he released his urine and watched it fall steaming into the cool, foggy night while he listened to the voices coming up through the floor.

Outraged screams and curses rose up from below! Fafhrd grinned as he continued with the task at hand. Cherig's guests were a rowdy lot tonight. No doubt his companion, the Mouser, was downstairs in the thick of it.

Then, another sound jarred against his ears, and suddenly Fafhrd realized the curses were rising, not through the floor, but from the alley below his window. Steel rang on steel, a note played only by one sword blade upon another.

As he continued to pee, Fafhrd leaned his head out the window, curious to see what transpired below. Through the dense fog, he barely spied one small shape fending off two larger attackers. At the same time, he heard his own name shouted.

"Fafhrd, you ill-mannered oaf, you're drenching me in your damnable rain!"

His personal business nearly complete, Fafhrd shouted back in surprise. "Mouser?" he called, the sleep-fog lifting from his brain. "Is that you?"

The small shadow below called back as he dodged and feinted, and steel rang out again. "None other, and covered in your foul stink!"

While one tall shadow engaged the Mouser, another stepped away from the conflict and shook his sword at Fafhrd's window. "As am I, you faceless, bottomless bladder! After we dispatch this puny runt and relieve him of his purse, my comrade and I will be pleased to knock upon your door and deal you similar treatment!"

Fafhrd considered for a moment while all three shadows resumed the fight. "Mouser," he called over the clash of blades. "Do I take it this bout is not just the friendly play of good-natured tavern-mates engaged in peacock displays of skill and manhood?"

A heavy wisp of fog shifted through the alley, momentarily obscuring the combatants from Fafhrd's view, but the Mouser's voice came to him clearly, if a bit breathlessly. "This pair of Ilthmart thieves?" There was a pause, followed by a loud hawk and sound of spitting. "Skill and manhood are both small things to these cowards. I am giving them a fencing lesson!"

Despite the Mouser's bravado, Fafhrd thought he detected a certain slur to his friend's words, and when the fog parted slightly, it seemed to him that the Ilthmart thieves, blades weaving in tandem, were pressing the Mouser to the wall.

His own sword, Graywand, stood sheathed near his pillow. Swiftly crossing the room, Fafhrd stubbed another toe on the bed's leg. With a roar of pain, he drew the blade. A stream of curses flowing from his lips, he returned to the window, leaped over the sill, and plunged through the fog to the street below.

One of the Ilthmarts turned to face Fafhrd. Raising his sword to strike, the thief and would-be murderer hesitated, his eyes widening as he looked up at his seven-foot opponent. No small man, himself, his jaw gaped.

"Now then," Fafhrd said as he took a two-handed grip on his huge weapon and leveled the point near the man's throat, "which of you called my friend a puny runt?"

The thief wet his lips. Without taking his eyes from Fafhrd, he inclined his head toward his partner, who was furiously fending off the Mouser's attacks. "Uh, not me," he answered with an innocent-seeming shrug. "It was my friend. He's always had a big mouth. I'm a quiet one, myself."

"I see," Fafhrd said, drawing a circle before the man's eyes with his sword's point, "No reason to run you through, then." He brought his foot up into the Ilthmart's groin. The man's eyes snapped wider as he dropped his sword, clutched himself between his legs, and sank to his knees; his mouth made a pained oval, and he elicited a pitiful, low moan. "Next time," he gasped as he slumped forward, "just run me through."

Planting the point of Graywand in the dirt, Fafhrd leaned on the pommel and peered through the ever-thickening fog. The clang of blades made a sweet music for a pair of dim shapes dancing a few paces away. "How fares the puny runt?" he called to the pair.

Barely visible in the hazy mist, the remaining Ilthmart scowled contemptuously, though his breathing was ragged. "His sword is a small threat."

Fafhrd smirked. "Play with him a while, and it'll grow."

"I have taught him the parry from the third, fourth, and fifth positions," the Mouser called merrily, his words wine-slurred, "as well as the direct and indirect ripostes." Blades clanged again, mingling with the sounds of boots scraping desperately in the road, ending with a scowled curse and the harsh intake of breath. "Ah, there!" the Mouser cried. "Now he knows the fleche!"

Patting his lips with the palm of one hand, Fafhrd faked a yawn. "Haven't you dispatched him, yet? A spectator might think you were in some trouble."

Again, a ring of steel as blades slid against one another. "A mouser likes to play with its catch before he eats it," the smaller figure laughed. "Ah hah! There! An arm-cut!"

The larger shadow growled. "No more than a scratch, you little braggart! And there's one lesson I learned long before this." Stooping, he grabbed a handful of dirt and flung it at the Mouser's face. "That's when to run away!"

Recoiling, the Mouser shielded his eyes with one hand as the Ilthmart thief disappeared down the fog-enshrouded alley. "I think I should mention he's got our purse," he said, sputtering dirt from his lips as he spoke to Fafhrd. "And I've run up quite a tab with Cherig. There'll be no beer for you tonight if he gets away."

Spurred to action by such a prospect, Fafhrd snatched his sword out of the ground and raced after the Ilthmart, guided only by the sound of fleeing footfalls. Down the length of Bones Alley he ran, emerging into Plague Court. There, he paused to listen and to determine the direction the thief had taken.

The Mouser crashed into him from behind. With a groan, he bounced off Fafhrd's huge form and fell backward on his rump. "Mog's blood!" he cried angrily, invoking his tutelary god. "What do you mean, stopping in the middle of a chase like that, particularly in this pea-soup fog!"

Fafhrd offered a hand to help his friend up. "Maybe I should have called a warning," he whispered derisively. Then, pitching his voice toward an imitation of a woman's soprano, he continued, "Oh, Mouser, I'm stopping now. Don't run into me like some stupid, drunken sot!"

The Mouser grumbled unappreciatively, waving his narrow blade before he wisely sheathed it. "I should have put Scalpel's point up your backside!"

A crash and a now-familiar snarl sounded out of the fog off to Fafhrd's right. Wasting no more time on witticisms, he ran in that direction with the Mouser close behind. At a corner of the next intersection a rain barrel lay overturned and smashed. The muddy ground betrayed how the thief had fallen and scrambled up again, and wet footprints indicated his direction.

Fafhrd stepped carefully around the broken pieces of the barrel, cool mud squishing between his bare toes. It was an abrupt reminder that, in his enthusiasm, he had jumped naked from his window to rescue the Mouser. Standing bare-assed in an unnamed alley with muddy feet and nothing but the night's fog to cover him—and a chilly fog at that—the stolen purse suddenly seemed less important than his dignity.

Unfortunately, at the same moment that he came to this realization, a door opened further down the narrow road, and a dim light spilled briefly out. A brief, muffled laughter echoed up the way before the door closed again.

"The rat's ducked into some dive of a tavern," the Mouser whispered, unsheathing his sword again as he advanced purposefully past Fafhrd. "Lucky for me—I've quite a thirst this evening."

"Mouser!" Fafhrd hissed, hoping to stop his friend. "Mouser!" But the Mouser continued on, determined to retrieve his purse from the Ilthmart thief. With an aggrieved sigh, Fafhrd followed, covering his groin with one hand while his other hand tightened around his sword's grip.

The fog nearly swallowed the weak light of a lone lantern that hung on a jut above the tavern's door. The establishment's name, painted over the same door in long-faded letters, was impossible to read.

"I can't go in there!" Fafhrd insisted. "I'm naked as a babe!"

One hand on the door, the Mouser paused to give Fafhrd an exaggerated wink. "Wait here, then," he said, “until find him and chase him out to you."

Before Fafhrd could protest, the Mouser pushed open the door and disappeared over the threshold. Within, the laughter immediately ceased. A moment later, the Mouser reappeared.

"It's too crowded," he said gravely, "and too poorly lit to see faces."

Keeping to the shadows, Fafhrd leaned one shoulder to the wall and looked patiently down at his smaller partner. "Let us go home then," he suggested. "It's not so bad to tuck your tail between your legs when there's nothing else to keep you warm."

The Mouser rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "I have a plan," he announced. "Stay here, and keep hidden." With that, he turned, pushed open the door once more, and stepped inside. His voice, however, could plainly be heard.

"Your mothers sleep with Mingol stableboys," the Mouser shouted. "So do your fathers. And you've all got faces like the rumps of buggered sheep."

A general cry of outrage followed, and the crash of furniture being thrown about. Fafhrd felt a shock through the wall where he leaned, as if a weighty object had struck the other side. An instant later, the tavern's door flung back, and the Mouser dashed out.

"The one that stays behind will be our man!" he cried as he ran past Fafhrd's place of concealment.

"Good plan," Fafhrd complimented sarcastically, stepping out of the way as a score of insulted customers, brandishing swords and knives, in varying stages of inebriation, charged through the door and after the Mouser. Even the cook gave chase, waving a large wooden spoon, his apron flapping around his knees as he vanished in the fog.

Fafhrd listened to the fading sounds of their cries, then cautiously opened the door and stepped inside.

The Ilthmart thief sat at a table, pouring himself a mug of ale as he clutched the wrist of a serving wench and tried to drag her closer. What the woman lacked in looks, she made up for with ample bosoms. "Now that we're alone, my purty birdie ..." the thief was saying when Fafhrd walked in.

"You're covered with mud and stink like a pisspot!" the woman protested as she tried to pull away.

Hinges creaked as Fafhrd pushed the door closed, and a board groaned under his foot.

The Ilthmart looked up. "Bleedin' hell!" he raged, releasing the woman's arm so suddenly that she pitched backwards and fell. The Ilthmart paid her no more attention. Pushing back his chair, he drew his sword.

Legs straddled and skirts splayed about her, the wench sat up and rubbed her backside, which was as impressively abundant as her breasts. Pushing back a thick strand of hair that fell over her face, she stared wide-eyed at Fafhrd. "I dunno, dearie," she said. "That looks like heaven to me!"

Moving slowly across the floor, Fafhrd raised Graywand. "I'll match you steel for steel and inch for inch, my friend," he said, touching the tip of his longer sword to the Ilthmart's blade.

The wench scrambled out of the way, her gaze still on Fafhrd's nude form. "I'll wager he's got you on either count, luv," she said to the thief.

The Ilthmart backed up nervously. On the sleeve of his sword arm, a rip and a slight red stain showed where the Mouser's blade had earlier nicked him. His gaze darted about the gloom-filled room, seeking a way out. "Perhaps we can come to some accommodation?" he said, lifting the Mouser's purse by its strings from under his belt.

"No doubt we can," Fafhrd replied in calm manner. "Return my partner's purse, and we'll consider it a short-term loan. And that ring you're wearing, we'll consider that interest on the loan. Your sword, too." Then he smiled. "Your cloak, that's a bribe to the middleman who arranged your loan—me. In fact, just leave all your clothes."

The Ilthmart blustered. "Why, my things won't begin to fit you!

Fafhrd smiled. "I know, but I'll feel much better knowing I'm not the only one running buck-naked in the middle of the night through the streets of Lankhmar. And since you're responsible for my current state of undress, it seems fitting that you share my discomfiture." He rested the tip of Graywand on the Ilthmart's chest. "Do I need to emphasize my point?"

The Ilthmart cast his sword down at Fafhrd's feet and scrambled swiftly out of his boots and clothes. In moments, he stood as naked as Fafhrd, but far less at ease.

"Out you go now," Fafhrd said, inclining his head toward the door.

Nervous eyes regarded Fafhrd, then flickered toward the wench, who still sat straddle-legged on the floor, then toward the door, and back to Fafhrd. "That's it?" he said warily. "You're letting me go?"

"What worse can I do to you?" the Northerner answered. "Your humiliation is between your legs."

"Ain't it the truth!" said the wench, making a wry face as she measured a small piece of air with thumb and forefinger.

Face reddening with anger and embarrassment, the Ilthmart clenched his fists. Without another word, he bolted past Fafhrd for the door. Fafhrd, laughing hugely, swung his blade, the flat side of which made a loud, sharp crack on bare buttocks. With a yowl, the Ilthmart flung open the door and raced into the night.

The thick fog crept surreptitiously over the threshold, seeming to pause as it touched the warmer interior air. At a slower, more cautious pace, it flowed along the floor.

Fafhrd picked up the Ilthmart's discarded trousers, frowned, and cast them aside.

"Why not try me on for size, dearie?" the wench suggested with a lewd wink.

Fafhrd considered it for a moment as he extended a hand to help her to her feet. Yet there was still the Mouser's safety to ascertain, and this nameless tavern's customers might return at any moment. Wrapping one arm around her waist, he drew her close for a quick kiss before stepping away. "Except for this cloak," he said, snatching up the garment and lacing it at his throat, "these clothes and sword are yours. Hide them before someone returns and sell them for what you can."

The wench's eyes widened at such generosity. "I'm not used to no gentlemen," she said, swiftly collecting the Ilthmart's belongings. Straightening, she clutched them to her breasts. "But you come back this way any night, and I'll treat you right well, and charge you nothing for it."

Fafhrd smiled at her earnestness. Prying one hand from her new possessions, he planted another kiss on the tips of her fingers, and bowed. Then, gathering the folds of his acquired cloak to conceal his nakedness, he went out into the street.

The fog seemed thicker than ever. It flowed over the ground like a white, feathery river and filled the air with an obscuring, chilly mist. Fafhrd paused long enough to tie the Mouser's purse strings around his left wrist, struck with a curious awe and foreboding by the eerie atmosphere. He drew the cloak closer about his shoulders, unable to see the garment's hem or the lower portions of his legs as he waded through the night.

Hidden in fog, an overturned rain barrel waited for Fafhrd, and the unsuspecting Northerner howled as he smashed the already-abused big toe of his right foot against it. Cursing, he hopped away, slipping in the mud created by the barrel's spillage. With another yelp and a loud curse, his left foot slipped out from under him, and he fell in a sloppy splash.

"Hounds of filthy hell!" Fafhrd grumbled, shaking mud from his hands as he got to his knees and clambered up. Groping in the fog, he seized a piece of the barrel and flung it away. In mid-flight it disappeared in the fog, but the noisy racket it made as it struck some wall gave a small satisfaction.

"Hello?"

The voice drifted out of the fog, distant and muffled. Fafhrd listened as he wiped Graywand's blade on a piece of his sodden cloak, wondering if he should answer.

From another direction, a different voice responded. "Who's there? Hello?"

"Can't see a thing," the first voice called. "Who made that noise?"

Fafhrd repressed a shiver. The overturned barrel was a landmark that told him he stood at the point where the alley joined Plague Court, but he could not see the other side of the street, nor anything up or down it. The callers were virtually invisible, disembodied voices crying in the fog. He thought of answering, then reconsidering, kept silent. These might be the men chasing the Mouser.

Moving slowly into Plague Court, he turned to his left, sure that in that direction lay the Silver Eel, where the Mouser, if he knew what was good for him, would be waiting with a reserved table and a pitcher of beer.

Far down the street, he spied the faintest amber light floating in the misty limbo that Lankhmar had become. The hairs prickled on his neck, and he froze again, until he convinced himself it was only the obscured gleam of someone's torch or lantern. He saw no figure, though, only the light bobbing in the mist. When it disappeared a moment later, he told himself it was because its bearer had turned a corner or entered a building.

The voices continued to call. There seemed to be more of them now. Barely perceived, a shape passed with outstretched arms and faltering steps near to Fafhrd. "Gamron?" the shape murmured nervously. "Is that you?"

Heeding the counsel of his own natural caution, Fafhrd kept silent and moved on, holding his sword low and before him as if it were a blind man's cane.

Never had he seen such a fog. In the Cold Wastes, that distant land of his birth, he had seen the ice witches of his village call great mists, but always they came with a numbing, marrow-freezing chill that set the air to glimmering with ice crystals and coated everything with a white rime.

His mother, Mor, had been such a witch, and with such a spell—damn her jealous eyes—had she killed his father, Nalgron, as he climbed the frigid peak of White Fang Mountain, from which could be seen the very top of the world and all the gods of Nehwon.

He forced the bitter memory away. Fafhrd had not thought of his mother or father, nor of the Snow Clan he had left behind, for a long time. Pausing again to frown and scratch his head, he wondered if he had passed the Silver Eel. Could he have run so far in pursuit of the Ilthmart thief?

Squinting, he tried to penetrate the gray veil with his gaze, spying nothing to left or right, before, or behind. At last, deciding that the middle of the street was the wrong place to be, he took a perpendicular course, expecting eventually, within a few steps, to encounter a wall, along which he could then grope his way.

He encountered no wall. Instead, he found himself in another alley or street. Still the voices, heavily muffled, drifted out of the gray night, and an increasingly worried Fafhrd tried to cheer himself with the wry thought that half the city seemed to be wandering lost and unable to make contact with anyone else.

A superstitious dread suddenly seized him. Reaching out to the right with his sword, he raked the point lightly along a stone construct, reassuring himself that he was not lost in some unnatural wasteland. With a quiet, half-embarrassed sigh, he put his hand on the side of an unknown building and began to feel his way along.

"Fafhrd."

He stopped. Was that his name he'd heard, or did his imagination play tricks on him? Listening, he waited, uncertain if he should continue. He raised the point of his sword. "Mouser?" he whispered.

No response came, nor any sound at all. Feeling foolish, Fafhrd lowered his blade. Only his imagination after all, he told himself. Starting forward again, he stopped just in time when a random eddy in the fog revealed another rain barrel directly in his path. He gave a hearty laugh that was more relief than genuine mirth, thinking that at least this once he had spared his poor toe.

Stepping around the barrel, he advanced through the fog, considering that it might be better simply to wrap himself in his muddy cloak and curl up under some stairway or in some alley until morning and sunlight evaporated the veil enough to let him find his way home, but he licked his lips. The thought of a cool mug impelled him to continue. If not the Silver Eel, surely he could find another tavern to take pity on a naked and filthy man. Thankfully, he had the Mouser's purse.

"Fafhrd."

The voice drifted to him again, and once more he stopped, certain that he had heard his name this time. Should he answer? He bit his lip, chewing a corner of his beard as he did so. How many people knew his name in this city?

A sudden suspicion filled him.

"Mouser," he grumbled, staring ahead into the fog to where the voice seemed to emanate. "If you're playing some trick to get even with me for peeing on you, I'll pound on your head until you're six inches shorter than you presently are!"

Fafhrd grinned with inward satisfaction. If it was, indeed, the Mouser playing games, such a taunt should draw him out. His partner was quite sensitive about his height and refused to abide comments under any circumstances.

Slowly, however, the grin turned to a frown. He might have shouted at the moon, had the moon been visible, for all the response he got.

Suddenly a breeze whispered through the lane, stirring the fog, parting and lifting it. A few paces away, a figure stood swathed in the vapor, quietly regarding him. A beauty she was, clad in a dress of black velvet with strands of raven hair riding the wind about her strong, Lankhmaran features. Around her waist, gleaming with an impossible light, hung a belt of silver links, and from that depended an empty silver sheath where a dagger might once have been.

The breeze swirled the mist once more, briefly revealing her face.

Fafhrd's heart seemed to stop in his chest. "Vlana?" Trembling lips seemed scarcely able to form her name. Extending one hand, he took a lurching step and stopped, unwilling to believe his eyes. Still, he cried, "Truest love!"

The wind ceased, and the mist enshrouded once more the figure before him, the only woman who had ever claimed his heart. With a wild outcry, Fafhrd thrust the point of his sword in the earth and ran forward, flinging his arms around the space where she should have been, encountering nothing. Nearly maddened, he flailed at the fog, spinning around and around like a drunken dancer, calling for his Vlana, until at last, he fell exhausted to his knees.

She was gone, if she had ever been there at all.

Once again, like a teasing serpent, the breeze slithered down the narrow way, and the heavy, gray fog parted before it. Lifting his head, Fafhrd stared across the road at the charred ruin of a once-familiar apartment dwelling and realized with a horrible, heart-wrenching certainty where he was.

In the uppermost floor of that building, his true love and the Mouser's had been set upon and devoured by hordes of rats under the control of a wizard in service to the Thieves' Guild. The women had fought and died while their men were off buying wine from the Silver Eel for a party.

The horror of the sight that greeted his eyes upon returning to those bloody rooms still haunted Fafhrd. It was the substance of all his nightmares, that Vlana called out, cursing his name and begging for aid as the vermin ripped out her throat and drank her eyes from their sweet sockets.

Such was the dream he had dreamed even this night and from which he had struggled to awake.

For the first time in this stranger than strange evening, he felt truly lost.

Alone and unseen, veiled by the darkness and the fog, even a barbarian could weep without shame. On his knees in the street, the big Northerner's head sagged forward onto his chest, and his arms fell limply to his sides as sobs of grief and aching loss filled the night.

The fog hid the building from sight once again, and misty tendrils, offering cool comfort, enwrapped Fafhrd in his pain.