The Second Book of Lankhmar

less illustrious and powerful than the Overlord of Lankhmar and the Grandmaster of its Thieves Guild had sent assassins to Rime Isle to wipe them out. Even when word came drifting southward that the two tarnished heroes had somehow thwarted their assassins at the last moment and wriggled out from under the old-age curse, detractors were quick to point out that this was not to their credit since it could hardly have been managed without a lot of help from Cif, Afreyt, and those two ladies' Moon Goddess.
           No, these detractors maintained, Fafhrd and Mouser were on the skids (as good as dead) for disdaining their proper hero-villain roles and seeking a snug harbor for their declining years, and as soon as some proper god (Kos, Mog, and Issek were nobodies!) got the ear of Death in his low castle in the Shadowland and spoke a word into it, they were forever done for.
           Now, if these criticisms and dire forecasts had been referred to the two heroes at whom they were directed, Fafhrd might well have replied that he'd come north on a dare and great challenge, and that since then problems and menaces had been coming at him hot and heavy, and as for his hand, he'd lost that saving the necks of his mistress Afreyt and her three girl acolytes of the Moon Goddess and he was trying to make the best of his deficiency, so why the criticism? While the Gray Mouser might well have answered, "What did the fools expect?" He'd never worked as hard in his life at being a hero as he had up here in the shivery inclement arctic clime, taking responsibility not only for his twelve witless apprentice hero-thieves under their barely less imbecilic lieutenants Mikkidu and Pshawri and for his lady Cif and her dependents as well, but also from time to time for Fafhrd's berserks too, and half the dwellers of Rime Isle besides.
           Yet despite these protests each of the Twain felt a gloomy shiver stiffen his short hairs now and again, for both knew well how cruelly and unreasonably demanding audiences can be and how unendingly bitter the enmity of gods as the two of them fumbled with their twisted, slowly unraveling destinies in a world that from time to time imitates that of fancy and romance most cunningly, so as to keep its creatures concerned and moving to prevent their sinking into black despair or bored inaction.
         2
           Pshawri, the Gray Mouser's slender young lieutenant, sat with head bowed and taking slow deep breaths on the aft thwart of the sailing dory Kringle, anchored in a dead calm two Lankhmar leagues east of Rime Isle above the dark center of the Great Maelstrom, quiescent now for an unprecedented seventeen moons, though when a-spin, a ridgy, ship-devouring, roaring water monster.
           The noonday sun of late summer's Satyrs Moon beat down on his wiry nakedness as he studied the five smooth leadstone boulders, each big as his head, lying firm on the dory's bottom. From a snug thong low around his middle hung a scabbarded and well-greased dirk and a bag of stout fishnet, its mouth marked and held open by a circlet of reed. With each belly-bulging inhalation the thong indented his slim side just above where three grayish moles made an inconspicuous equilateral triangle on his left hip.
           Against the gunwale opposite him sprawled his sworn-to-secrecy sailing comrade, Fafhrd's seven-foot second sergeant Skullick. This lean yet comically hulking one left off staring lazily yet doubtfully at Pshawri to turn half on his side and scan down through the near-pellucid saltwater at the sea floor seventeen fathoms below. It was mostly pale sand, green-tinged by depth. He could see Kringle 's tiny shadow and her anchor line going down almost vertically toward the dark cluster of savage rocks marking the whirlpool's maw, and around that the dim shapes of gnawed wrecks waiting a long, long time now for storms and the whirlpool's own action to break them up and drive their waterlogged timbers ashore on the Beach of Bleached Bones, there to be salvaged by the wood-starved Rimers.
           "All clear, as yet," he called softly overshoulder. "Nary a tiger ray nor black hog-nose showing. No fish of size at all.
           "Nonetheless," he added, "if you take my rede, you'll try to spot and snag the gift you intend Captain Mouser on your first dive, before you've roiled the fine sand or roused a man-eater. Foot-steer for the likeliest wreck, scanning carefully ahead for