The First Book of Lankhmar

outside of his arm. Then he looked toward the small, big-eyed, triangular white mask of Vlana's face and followed her gaze.
           Growing up out of the slope that led to the Old Road were a half dozen tenuous forms high as trees. They looked like hooded women. They got solider and solider as Fafhrd watched.
           He crouched down in terror. This movement caught his pouch between his belly and his thigh. He felt a faint warmth.
           He sprang up and dashed back the way he had come. He ripped the tarpaulin off the back of the sleigh. He grabbed the eight remaining rockets one by one and thrust the tail of each into the snow so that their heads pointed at the vast, thickening ice-figures.
           Then he reached in his pouch, took out his fire-pot, unthonged its top, shook off its gray ashes, shook its red ashes to one side of the bowl, and rapidly touched them to the fuses of the rockets.
           Their multiple spluttering in his ears, he sprang into the sleigh.
           Vlana did not move as he brushed her. But she chinked. She seemed to have put on a translucent cloak of ice crystals that held her where she stood. Reflected moonlight shone stolidly from the crystals. He felt it would move only as the moon moved.
           He grabbed the reins. They stung his fingers like frozen iron. He could not stir them. The ice web ahead had grown around the horses. They were part of it — great equine statues enclosed in a greater crystal. One stood on four legs, one reared on two. The walls of the ice womb were closing in. There is a witchy cold that can follow you....
           The first rocket roared, then the second. He felt their warmth. He heard the mighty tinkling as they struck their up-slope targets.
           The reins moved, slapped the backs of the horses. There was a glassy smashing as they plunged forward. He ducked his head and, holding the reins in his left hand, swung up his right and dragged Vlana down into the seat. Her ice-cloak jingled madly and vanished. Four, five...
           There was a continuous jangling as horses and sleigh shot forward through the ice web. Crystals showered onto and glanced off his ducked head. The jangling grew fainter. Seven, eight...
           All icy constraints fell away. Hooves pounded. A great north wind sprang up, ending the calm of days. Ahead the sky was faintly pink with dawn. Behind, it was faintly red with fire of pine-needles ignited by the rockets. It seemed to Fafhrd that the north wind brought the roaring of flames.
           He shouted, "Gnamph Nar, Mlurg Nar, great Kvarch Nar — we'll see them all! All the cities of the Forest Land! All the Land of the Eight Cities."
           Beside him Vlana stirred warm under his embracing arm and took up his cry with, "Sarheenmar, Ilthmar, Lankhmar! All the cities of the south! Quarmall! Horborixen! Slim-spired Tislinilit! The Rising Land."
           It seemed to Fafhrd that mirages of all those unknown cities and places filled the brightening horizon. "Travel, love, adventure, the world!" he shouted, hugging Vlana to him with his right arm while his left slapped the horses with the reins.
           He wondered why, although his imagination was roaringly aflame like the canyon behind him, his heart was still so cold.

         III: The Unholy Grail
           Three things warned the wizard's apprentice that something was wrong: first the deep-trodden prints of iron-shod hooves along the forest path — he sensed them through his boots before stooping to feel them out in the dark; next, the eerie drone of a bee unnaturally abroad by night; and finally, a faint aromatic odor of burning. Mouse raced ahead, dodging treetrunks and skipping over twisted roots by memory and by a bat's feeling for rebounding whispers of sound. Gray leggings, tunic, peaked hood and streaming cloak made the slight youth, skinny with asceticism, seem like a rushing shadow.
           The exaltation Mouse had felt at the successful completion of his long quest and his triumphal return to this sorcerous master, Glavas Rho, now vanished from his mind and gave way to a fear he hardly dared put into thoughts. Harm to the great wizard, whose mere apprentice he was? — "My Gray Mouse, still midway in his allegiance between white magic and black," Glavas Rho had once put it — no, it was unthinkable that that great figure of wisdom and spiritual might should come to harm.