The First Book of Lankhmar

your throat?"
           The Mouser grinned as he strode along with seeming recklessness, the sword Scalpel swinging at his side. His high-collared gray cloak and hood, pulled close around him, shadowed his swart features but could not conceal their impudence.
           Fafhrd's garments, salvaged from their sloop wrecked on the chilly coast, were all wools and furs. A great golden clasp gleamed dully on his chest and a golden band, tilted awry, confined his snarled reddish hair. His white-skinned face, with gray eyes wide set, had a calm bold look to it, though the brow was furrowed in thought. From over his right shoulder protruded a bow, while from over his left shoulder gleamed the sapphire eyes of a brazen dragonhead that was the pommel of a longsword slung on his back.
           His brow cleared and, as if some more genial mountain than the frozen one they traveled along had given tongue, he sang:
Oh, Lavas Laerk
    Had a face like a dirk
    And of swordsmen twenty-and-three,
    And his greased black ship
    Through the waves did slip —
    'Twas the sleekest craft at sea;
    Yet it helped him naught
    When he was caught
    By magic, the Mouser, and me.
    And now he feeds fishes
    The daintiest dishes,
    But —
           The words broke off and the Gray Mouser heard the hissing scuff of leather on snow. Whirling around, he saw Fafhrd hurtled over the side of the cliff and he had a moment to wonder whether the huge Northerner, maddened by his own doggerel, had decided to illustrate dramatically Lavas Laerk's plunge to the bottomless deeps.
           The next moment Fafhrd caught himself with elbows and hands on the margin of the ledge. Simultaneously, a black and gleaming form hit the spot he had just desperately vacated, broke its fall with bent arms and hunched shoulders, spun over in a somersault, and lunged at the Mouser with a knife that flashed like a splinter of the moon. The knife was about to take the Mouser in the belly when Fafhrd, supporting his weight on one forearm, twitched the attacker back by an ankle. At this the small black one hissed low and horribly, turned again, and lunged at Fafhrd. But now the Mouser was roused at last from the shocked daze that he assured himself could never grip him in a less hatefully cold country. He dove forward at the small black one, diverting his thrust — there were sparks as the weapon struck stone within a finger's width of Fafhrd's arm — and skidding his greased form off the ledge beyond Fafhrd. The small black one swooped out of sight as silently as a bat.
           Fafhrd, dangling his great frame over the abyss, finished his verse:
But the daintiest dish is he.
           "Hush, Fafhrd," the Mouser hissed, stooped as he listened intently. "I think I heard him hit."
           Fafhrd absentmindedly eased himself up to a seat. "Not if that chasm is half as deep as the last time we saw its bottom, you didn't," he assured his comrade.
           "But what was he?" the Mouser asked frowningly. "He looked like a man of Klesh."
           "Yes, with the jungle of Klesh as far from here as the moon," Fafhrd reminded him with a chuckle. "Some maddened hermit frostbitten black, no doubt. There are strange skulkers in these little hills, they say."
           The Mouser peered up the dizzy mile-high cliff and spotted the nearby niche. "I wonder if there are more of him?" he questioned uneasily.
           "Madmen commonly go alone," Fafhrd asserted, getting up. "Come, small nagger, we'd best be on our way if you want a hot breakfast. If the old tales are true, we should be reaching the Cold Waste by sunup — and there we'll find a little wood at least."
           At that instant a great glow sprang from the niche from which the small attacker had dropped. It pulsed, turning from violet to green to yellow to red.
           "What makes that?" Fafhrd mused, his interest roused at last. "The old tales say nothing of firevents in the Bones of the Old Ones. Now if I were to give you a boost, Mouser, I think you could reach that knob and then make your own way — "
           "Oh no," the Mouser interrupted, tugging at the big man and silently cursing himself for starting the question-asking. "I want my breakfast cooked over more wholesome flames. And I would be well away from here before other eyes see the glow."
           "None will see it, small dodger of mysteries," Fafhrd said chucklingly, letting himself be urged away along