The Second Book of Lankhmar

Fafhrd?
           Flotsam ghosted on, the sweepsmen pushing only enough to keep her under way. Mouser had early ordered slowest beat to conserve their strength.
           "Three bells," Ourph softly called.
           Dawn nighs, the Mouser thought.
           Pshawri could not have been long at the bow when his cry came back, "Clear sea ahead! And wind!"
           The fog thinned to wisps torn and tossed aft by the eddying, frosty air. The gibbous moon was firmly bedded on the western horizon, yet still sent an eerie white glare, while south of her a few lonely stars hung in the sky. That was uncanny, the Mouser thought, for the imminent dawn should already have extinguished them. He faced east — and almost gasped.
           Above the low, moonlit fog bank, the heavens were darker than ever, the night was starless, while due east on the fog bank there rested a sliver of blackness blacker than any night could be, as if a black sun were rising that shot out beams of a darkness powerful and active as light — not light's absence, but its enemy opposite. And from that same thickening sliver, along with the potent darkness, there seemed to come a cold more intense and differing in kind from that of the bitter southwest wind striking behind his right ear.
           "Ship on our loadside beam!" Pshawri cried shrilly.
           At once the Mouser dropped his gaze and sighted the stranger vessel, about three bowshots distant, just emerged from the fog bank and equally illumined by the moon glare, and headed straight at Flotsam . At first he took it for Fafhrd's icy leviathan come again, then saw it was small as his own ship, maybe narrower of beam. His thoughts zigzagged wildly — did mad Fafhrd command a fleet? was it a Sea Mingol warcraft? or still other pirate? or from Rime Isle? He forced himself to think more to the purpose.
           His heart pulsed twice. Then, "Make sail, my Mingols all!" he commanded. "Odd-numbered sweepsmen! rack your long tools, then arm! Pshawri! command 'em!" And he grasped the tiller as the steersman let it go.
           Aboard Sea Hawk , Fafhrd saw Flotsam 's low hull and short masts and long, slantwise main and mizzen yards blackly silhouetted against the spectrally white, misshapen moon awash in the west. In the same instant he at last realized what it was that had nagged his mind at the mast top. He whipped the gauntlet from his right hand, plunged the latter into his pouch, plucked out the parchment scrap, and this time reread his own note — and saw below it the damning postscript he knew he'd never written. Clearly both postscripts, penned in deceptive scrawls, were cunning forgeries, however done o'erhead in birds' realm.
           So even as he felt the wind and commanded, "Skor! Take your squad. Prepare to make sail!" he drew a favorite arrow from the quiver ready beside him on the deck, threaded the note around it in studied haste, swiftly uncased and strung his great bow, and with a curt prayer to Kos bent it to its muscle-cracking extreme and sent the pet arrow winging high into the black sky toward the moon and the black two-master.
           Aboard Flotsam , the Mouser felt a shiver of super-added apprehension which mounted while he watched his Mingols purposefully struggling with frozen lines and ties in the freshening chilly wind, until it culminated in the chunk of an arrow almost vertically into the deck scarce a cubit from his foot. So the small, moonlit sailing galley (for he had meanwhile identified it as such a craft) was signaling attack! Yet the range was still so great that he knew of only one bowman in Nehwon who could have made that miraculous shot. Not letting go the tiller, he stooped and severed the threads of the pale parchment wrapped tightly just behind the arrow's half-buried head, and read (or rather mostly reread) the two notes, his with the devilish postscript he'd never seen before. Even as he finished, the characters became unreadable from the black beams of anti-sun fighting down the moon rays and beginning to darken that orb. Yet he made the same deduction as had Fafhrd, and hot tears of joy were squeezed from his chilled eye sockets as he realized that whatever impossible-seeming sleights of ink and voice had been worked this night, his friend was sane and true.
           There was a protracted, sharp crackling as the last ties of the sails were loosed and wind filled them, breaking their frozen