The Second Book of Lankhmar

lay like a delicate mist cloud the slender translucent bladder of a fish.
           Cif said, "I am minded to experience your love fully tonight. Yet not as fully, mind you, as to wish that we fashion a daughter together."
           The Mouser said, "I've seen the like of this made of thinnest leather well oiled."
           She said, "Not as effectual, I believe."
           He said, "To be sure, here, it would be something from a fish, this being Rime Isle. Tell me, did harbor master Groniger fashion this, as thrifty with the Isle's sperm as with its coins?" Then he nodded.
           He reached over and drew her other foot up on his lap also. After saluting it similarly, he rested the side of his face on both her ankles and sighted up the narrow trough between her legs. "I am minded," he said dreamily but with a little growl in his voice, "to embark on another slow and intensely watchful journey, mindful of every step, such as that by which I arrived at this house this eve."
           She nodded, wondering idly if the growl were Gusorio's, but it seemed too faint for that.
         8
           In the bow of a laden grainship sailing north from Lankhmar across the Inner Sea to the land of the Eight Cities, the Death of Fafhrd, who was tall and lank, dire as a steel scarecrow, said to his fellow passenger, "This incarnation likes me and likes me not. 'Tis a balmy journey now but it'll be long and by all accounts cold as witchcunt at the end, albeit summer. Arth-Pulgh's a mean employer, and unlucky. Hand me a medlar from the sack."
           The Death of the Gray Mouser, lithe as a weasel and forever smiling, replied, "No meaner nor no curster than Hamomel. Working for whom, however, is the pits. I've not yet shaken down to this persona, know not its likings. Reach your own apples."
         9
           A week later, the evening being unseasonably balmy and Witches Moon at first quarter near the top of the sky, a hemispherical silver goblet brimful of stars and scattering them dimmed by moonwine all over the sky as it descended toward the lips of the west, drawn down by the same goddess who had lifted it, Afreyt and Fafhrd after supping alone at her violet-tinted pale house on Salthaven's northern edge were minded to wander across the great meadow in the direction of Elvenhold, a northward slanting slim rock spire two bowshots high, chimneyed and narrowly terraced, that thrust from the rolling fields almost a league away to the west.
           "See how her tilt," Fafhrd observed of that slender mountainlet, "directs her at the dark boss of the Targe — " (naming the northernmost constellation in the Lankhmar heavens) " — as if she were granite arrow aimed at skytop by the gods of the underworld."
           "Tonight the earth is full of the heat of these gods' forges, pressing summer scents from spring flowers and grasses. Let's rest awhile," Afreyt answered, and truly although it was not yet May Eve, the heavy air was more like Midsummer's. She touched his shoulder and sank to the herby sward.
           After a stare around the horizon for any sky wanderer on verge of rise or set, Fafhrd seated himself by her right side. A low lurhorn sounded faintly from the town behind them or the sea beyond that.
           "Night fishers summoning the finny ones," he hazarded.
           "I dreamed last night," she said, "that a beast thing came out of the sea and followed me dripping salt drops as I wandered through a dark wood. I could see its silver scales between the dark boles in the gloom. But I was not afeared, and it in turn seemed to respond to this cue, for the longer it followed me the less it became like a beast and the more like a sea-person, and come not to work a hurt on me but to warn me."
           "Of what?" and when she was silent, "Its sex?"
           "Why, female — " she answered at once, but then becoming doubtful, " — I think. Had it sex? I wonder why I did not wait for it to catch up, or perhaps turn sudden and walk toward it? I think I felt, did I so, and although I feared it not, it would turn to a beast again, a deep-voiced beast."
           "I too dreamed strangely last night, and my dream strangely chimed with yours, or was it by day I dreamed? For I have begun to do that," Fafhrd announced, dropping himself back at full length on the springy sward, the better to observe the seven spiraled stars of the Targe. "I dreamt I