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The Second Book of Lankhmar

Titel: The Second Book of Lankhmar Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Fritz Leiber
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encountered it before he could not tell.
           His intimate yet somehow mystic view of this quiescent figure seemed not so much obscured by the three intervening yards of solid dirt as softened by them, as though he were viewing it (her?) through several of the finest imaginable veils, such as might grace some ethereal princess's boudoir rather than these cruel cemetery confines.
           At first he thought he was imagining the whole vision and told himself how apt the human eye is to see definite shapes of things in smoke, expanses of vegetation, old tapestries, simmering stews, slow fires, and similars — and especially apt to interpret pale indistinct shapes as human bodies. But the longer he looked at it, the more distinct it got. Looking away and then back didn't banish it, nor did consciously trying to make it seem something else.
           All this while the figure remained in the same attitude with visage serene, never changing as a creation of the imagination might be expected to do, so in the end he decided she must be an actual piece of statuary buried by some strange chance at just this spot, though the style seemed to him not at all Rimish. While her glimmering whiteness still seemed unpleasantly familiar. Where? When? He racked his brains.
           Then there came a flurry of those small glimmering marching forms that were so hard to pin down as to location. They resolved themselves into a number of fine-beaded white lines connected to points on the quiescent naked female form — its eyes, ears, nostrils, mouth, and privacies. As he studied them they grew more distinct and he saw that the individual beads were creeping along in single file, toward the figure in about half the lines and away from it in the others. The word "maggots" came into his mind and stayed despite his efforts to banish it. And the finely beaded busy lines became more real, no matter how vehement his self-assertion that they were but strayed figments of his imagination.
           But then it occurred to him that if he truly were watching maggots devour dead buried flesh, there would inevitably be diminuations and other changes for the worse in the latter, whereas the slim blue-shadowed she-figure now appeared more attractive, if anything, than when he had first glimpsed her, in particular the small, saucy, unsagging breasts, medallions of supreme artistry, whose large azure nipplets implored kisses. Were the situation otherwise he would surely be feeling desire despite their unromantic and highly constrictive surroundings. He coldly imagined hand-capturing her dainty tits and tormentingly teasing them to their utmost erection, tonguing them avidly — gods! Could nothing break his constant awareness of the dreadful Mouser-shaped mold encasing him? (But to not get too far afield, wit-worshipping dolt, he told himself — recall to breathe!) Old legends said Death had a skinny sister denominated Pain, passionately devoted to the loathsome torture that often was Death's prelude.
           But she was only a statue, he reminded himself desperately.
           Her lips parted and a lissome blue tongue ran round them hungrily.
           Her eyes opened and she fixed her red-glinting gaze upon him.
           She smiled.
           Suddenly he knew where he had seen her opalescently white complexion before. In the Shadowland! Upon the slender face and neck and hands and wrists of Death himself, whom he had twice beheld there. And she resembled Death facially and in her slenderness.
           Then she puckered her lips and, through all the dirt that buried them both, he heard the thrilling soft seductive whistle with which a Lankhmar streetgirl invites trade. He felt the hair lift on the back of his neck while an icy chill went through him.
           And then, to his extremest horror, this pale ghoul-waif, Sister of Death, seemingly without effort extended both her glimmering narrow hands toward him, blue palms turned invitingly upward and opalescent fingers rippling tremulously, and then gathering those same fingers together cuppingly and kicking back her left and right legs successively, began slowly to swim toward him through the harsh earth everywhere closely encasing them both, as if it offered no more resistance to her blue-shadowed starkly naked form than it did to his occult vision.
           Despite all his good resolutions to avoid panicky overexertion while buried, he

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