The First Book of Lankhmar

bumped the table holding the remains of the Mouser's repast — evidently its anticipatory abilities did not extend to its rear — and scraps of black food and white potsherds and jags of crystal scattered across the floor.
           The Mouser leaned out of his coffin and waved a finger waggishly. "You'll have to sweep that up!" he cried and went off into a gale of laughter.
           Backing away again, the statue bumped the black coffin. The Mouser only clapped the demonic figure comradely on the shoulder and called, "Set to it again, clown! Brush him down! Dust him off!"
           But the worst was perhaps when, during a brief pause while the combatants gasped and eyed each other dizzily, the Mouser waved coyly to the nearest giant spider and called his inane "Yoohoo!" again, following it with, "I'll see you, dear, after the circus."
           Fafhrd, parrying with weary desperation a fifteenth or a fiftieth cut at his head, thought bitterly, This comes of trying to rescue small heartless madmen who would howl at their grandmothers hugged by bears. Sheelba's cobweb has shown me the Gray One in his true idiot nature.
           The Mouser had first been furious when the sword-skirling clashed him awake from his black satin dreams, but as soon as he saw what was going on he became enchanted at the wildly comic scene.
           For, lacking Sheelba's cobweb, what the Mouser saw was only the zany red-capped porter prancing about in his tip-curled red shoes and aiming with his broom great strokes at Fafhrd, who looked exactly as if he had climbed a moment ago out of a barrel of meal. The only part of the Northerner not whitely dusted was a masklike stretch across his eyes.
           What made the whole thing fantastically droll was that miller-white Fafhrd was going through all the motions — and emotions! — of a genuine combat with excruciating precision, parrying the broom as if it were some great jolting scimitar or two-handed broadsword even. The broom would go sweeping up and Fafhrd would gawk at it, giving a marvelous interpretation of apprehensive goggling despite his strangely shadowed eyes. Then the broom would come sweeping down and Fafhrd would brace himself and seem to catch it on his sword only with the most prodigious effort — and then pretend to be jolted back by it!
           The Mouser had never suspected Fafhrd had such a perfected theatric talent, even if it were acting of a rather mechanical sort, lacking the broad sweeps of true dramatic genius, and he whooped with laughter.
           Then the broom brushed Fafhrd's shoulder and blood sprang out.
           Fafhrd, wounded at last and thereby knowing himself unlikely to outendure the black statue — although the latter's iron chest was working now like a bellows — decided on swifter measures. He loosened his hand-axe again in its loop and at the next pause in the fight, both battlers having outguessed each other by retreating simultaneously, whipped it up and hurled it at his adversary's face.
           Instead of seeking to dodge or ward off the missile, the black statue lowered its sword and merely wove its head in a tiny circle.
           The axe closely circled the lean black head, like a silver wood-tailed comet whipping around a black sun, and came back straight at Fafhrd like a boomerang — and rather more swiftly than Fafhrd had sent it.
           But time slowed for Fafhrd then and he half ducked and caught it left-handed as it went whizzing past his cheek.
           His thoughts too went for a moment fast as his actions. He thought of how his adversary, able to dodge every frontal attack, had not avoided the table or the coffin behind him. He thought of how the Mouser had not laughed now for a dozen clashes and he looked at him and saw him, though still dazed-seeming, strangely pale and sober-faced, appearing to stare with horror at the blood running down Fafhrd's arm.
           So crying as heartily and merrily as he could, "Amuse yourself! Join in the fun, clown! — here's your slap-stick," Fafhrd tossed the axe toward the Mouser.
           Without waiting to see the result of that toss — perhaps not daring to — he summoned up his last reserves of speed and rushed at the black statue in a circling advance that drove it back toward the coffin.
           Without shifting his stupid horrified gaze, the Mouser stuck out a hand at the last possible moment and