Swords Of Lankhmar

"A man, of course," she divined with the same tonelessness. "Even Ghoulish men save their greatest love for their male swordmates."

"It's a different sort of love," Fafhrd started to argue as he untied the mare from the thorn tree, feeling at the flat pouch hanging from the saddlebow, to make sure it still held the thin tin cylinder. Then, more practically, "There's still half the antelope to give you strength for your trudge home — and it's uncooked too."

"So you assume my people are eaters of carrion, and that half a dead antelope is a proper measure of what I mean to you?"

"Well, I'd always heard that Ghouls… and no, of course, I'm not trying to _pay_ you….Look here, Bonny Bones — I won't argue with you, you're much too good at it. Suffice it that I must course like the lonely thunderbolt to Lankhmar, pausing only to consult my master sorcerer. I couldn't take you — or anyone! — on that journey."

Kreeshkra looked around curiously. "Who asked to go? The bat?"

Fafhrd bit his lip, then said, "Here, take my hunting knife," and when she made no reply, laid it by her hand. "Can you shoot an arrow?"

The skeleton girl observed to some invisible listener, "Next the Mud Man will be asking if I can slice a liver. Oh well, I should doubtless have tired of him in another night and on pretext of kissing his neck, bit through the great artery under his ear, and drunk his blood and devoured his carrion mud-flesh, leaving only his stupid brain, for fear of contaminating and making imbecilic my own."

Abstaining from speech, Fafhrd laid the Mingol bow and its quiver of arrows beside the hunting knife. Then he knelt for a farewell kiss, but at the last instant the Ghoul turned her head so that his lips found only her cold cheek.

As he stood up, he said, "Believe it or not, I'll come back and find you."

"You won't do either," she assured him, "and I shan't be anywhere."

"Nevertheless I will hunt you down," he said. He had untethered the mare and stood beside it. "For you have given me the weirdest and most wondrous ecstasy of any woman in the world."

Looking out into the night, the Ghoulish girl said, "Congratulations, Kreeshkra. Your gift to humanity: freakish thrills. Make like a thunderbolt, Mud Man. I dote on thrills too."

Fafhrd shut his lips, gazed at her a moment longer. Then as he whirled about him his cloak, the bat fluttered to it and hung there.

Kreeshkra nodded her head, "I said the bat." Fafhrd mounted the mare and cantered down the hillside.

Kreeshkra sprang up, snatched the bow and arrow, ran to the rim of the grassy saucer and drew a bead on Fafhrd's back, held it for three heartbeats, then turned abruptly and winged the arrow at the thorn tree. It lodged quivering in the center of the gray trunk.

Fafhrd glanced quickly around at the _snap, whir, tchunk!_ A skeleton arm was waving him good-bye and continued to do so until he reached the road at the foot of the slope, where he urged the mare into a long-striding lope.

On the hilltop Kreeshkra stood in thought for two breaths. Then from her belt she detached something invisible, which she dropped in the center of the dying campfire.

There was a sputtering and a shower of sparks, when a bright blue flame shot straight up a dozen yards and burnt for as many heartbeats before it died. Kreeshkra's bones looked like blued iron, her glinting glassy flesh like scraps of tropic night-sky, but there was none to see this beauty.

Fafhrd watched the needlelike flare over shoulder as he sped rockingly along and he frowned into the wind.

The rats were murdering in Lankhmar that night. Cats died by swiftly sped crossbow darts that punctured slit-pupiled eye to lodge in brain. Poison set out for rats was cunningly secreted in gobbets of dogs' dinners. Elakeria's marmoset died crucified to the head of the sandalwood bed of that plump wanton, just opposite her ceiling-tall mirror of daily-polished silver. Babies were bitten to death in their cradles. A few big folk were stung by deep-burrowing darts smeared with a black stuff and died in convulsions after hours of agony. Many drank to still their fears, but the unwatched dead-drunk bled to death from neat cuts that tapped arteries. Glipkerio's aunt, who was also Elakeria's mother, strangled in a noose hung over a dark steep stairs made slippery by spilled oil. A venturesome harlot was overrun in the Plaza of Dark Delights and eaten alive while no one heeded her screams.

So tricky were some of the traps the rats set and by circumstantial evidence so deft their wielding of their weapons, that many folk began to insist that some of them, especially the rare and elusive albinos, had on their forelegs tiny clawed hands rather than paws, while there were many reports of rats running on their hind legs.