The First Book of Lankhmar

white house cat," Fafhrd replied imperturbably. "Aye, and has just such a high, quavering cry."
           "Are you suggesting — ?"
           "Of course not. As I imagine you do, I think there was a door somewhere in the rock, fitted so well we could not discern the junctures. We heard it shut. But before that, he — she, it, they — went through it."
           "Then why babble of echoes and snow snakes?"
           "It is well to consider all possibilities."
           "He — she and so forth — named us sons," the Mouser mused.
           "Some say the serpent is wisest, oldest, and even father of all," Fafhrd observed judiciously.
           "Snakes again! Well, one thing's certain: all hold it rash folly for a man to take advice of a serpent, let alone seven."
           "Yet he — consider the other pronouns spoken — had a point, Mouser. Mauger the indeterminate western continent, we have traveled all Nehwon in spiderweb wise. What's left but Lankhmar?"
           "Damn your pronouns! We swore never to return. Have you forgotten that, Fafhrd?"
           "No, but I'm dying of boredom. Times I have sworn never again to drink wine."
           "I would choke to death on Lankhmar! Her day-smokes, her night-smogs, her rats, her filth!"
           "At the moment, Mouser, I care little whether I live or die, and where or when or how."
           "Now adverbs and conjunctions! Bah, you need a drink!"
           "We seek a deeper forgetfulness. They say to lay a ghost, go where she died."
           "Aye, and be worse haunted!"
           "I could not be worse haunted than now."
           "To let a serpent shame us by asking, were we afraid!"
           "Are we, perhaps?"
           And so the argument went, with the final foreseeable result that Fafhrd and the Mouser cantered past Ilthmar to a stony stretch of shore that was a curiously abraded low precipice, and waited there a day and a night for the Sinking Land to emerge with anomalous aqueous convulsions from the waters joining the Sea of the East to the Inner Sea. They swiftly and warily crossed its flinty, steaming expanse — for it was a hot, sunny day — and so again rode Causey Road, but this time back toward Lankhmar.
           Distant, twin thunderstorms played to either side — north over the Inner Sea and south above the Great Salt Marsh — as they approached that monstrous city and as its towers, spires, fanes, and great crenelated wall emerged from its huge, customary cap of smoke, being somewhat silhouetted by the light of the setting sun, which was turned to a dull silver disk by the high fog and the smoke.
           Once the Mouser and Fafhrd thought they saw a rounded, flat-floored shape on tall, invisible legs moving amongst the seahawk trees and faintly heard a harsh voice crying, "I told you. I told you. I told you," but both Sheelba's wizardly hut and voice, if they were those, remained distant as the storms.
           In such wise Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser returned flat against their oaths to the city they despised, yet hankered after. They did not find forgetfulness there, the ghosts of Ivrian and Vlana were not laid, yet perhaps solely because of passage of time, the two heroes were a little less troubled by them. Nor were their hates, as of the Thieves' Guild, rekindled, but rather faded. And in any case Lankhmar seemed no worse than any other place in Nehwon and more interesting than most. So they stayed there for a space, making it once more the headquarters of their adventurings.

         II: The Jewels in the Forest
           It was the Year of the Behemoth, the Month of the Hedgehog, the Day of the Toad. A hot, late summer sun was sinking down toward evening over the somber, fertile land of Lankhmar. Peasants toiling in the endless grain fields paused for a moment and lifted their earth-stained faces and noted that it would soon be time to commence lesser chores. Cattle cropping the stubble began to move in the general direction of home. Sweaty merchants and shopkeepers decided to wait a little longer before enjoying the pleasures of the bath. Thieves and astrologers moved restlessly in their sleep, sensing that the hours of night and work were drawing near.
           At the southernmost limit of the land of Lankhmar, a day's ride beyond the village of Soreev, where the grain fields give way to rolling forests of maple and oak, two