The Second Book of Lankhmar

strained convulsively backward, away from the dirt swimmer, in a spasm like to burst his heart. Then, just as his effort reached an excruciating peak and he abandoned it, he felt emptiness behind him and launched himself into it — with an instant spurt of reverse fear: that he might fall forever into a bottomless pit.
           He could have spared himself that last terror. He had barely retreated a half yard, no more than one short step, when he felt himself everywhere backed again from head to heel with cold grainy earth.
           But now there was an emptiness in front of him, the space from which he'd just withdrawn his trunk, head, and one leg. And there was time to draw a deep, big, glorious breath — one worth twenty of his cautious air sips — and to retreat the other leg before the forward dirt caught up with him again, brutally slapping his face in its eagerness to mold itself exactly to his central facade, as if matter or its gods and goddesses indeed possessed that abhorrence of vacua which some philosophers attribute to it, or to them.
           Neither his startlement at all this totally unexpected occurrence nor his wonderment as to the natural laws or miracles by which it had been effected were great enough, despite the monster breath, to cause him to interrupt his regimen of slow small inhalations through barely parted lips, nor his watchful forward-spying between equally constricted eyelids.
           The latter showed his deathly slim pursuer fully a yard closer to him and with her orientation changed almost completely from the vertical to the horizontal by her powerful swimming motions as she chased him head on, so that he found himself staring aghast straight into her voracious red-glinting eyes.
           This sight was so she-wolfishly dire to him that it inspired him to another gut-bursting effort to back away, with just at its peak the new hope that the strange miracle he'd just experienced might repeat itself. And rather to his surprise, it did: the dizzying emptiness behind, the half-yard backward lurch, the emptiness before, the glorious deep breath, the stinging impact against his whole front, but most tellingly upon his naked face, of cold grainy earth angrily reestablishing its total hold on him.
           This time, assessing the effects of his two short retreats, he saw that he'd lost Cat's Claw, which now lay itself midway between him and his pursuer, its point directed straight at him. Evidently the ground embedding its hilt had torn it away from him at his first backward step, but his finger and thumb on its tip had held on as long as they were able, which had changed the dagger's attitude from vertical to horizontal, while his second backward step had completed the divorcement between him and his weapon. Squinting down with difficulty, he saw the finger and thumb in question beaded with blood where the sharp blade had cut them. Poor digits, wounded in parting, they had done their best!
           He wondered if the fell form following hard upon him would knock the abandoned weapon out of her way, for she was headed straight toward it, or perhaps snatch it up to use against him, but he was already into his third soul-wrenching miracle-provoking effort and must concentrate all of his being on that. And when he was congratulating himself on his third half-yard gain (only it seemed more like a yard this time) and giant breath, he saw looking back that his pale pursuer had stroked herself a little higher in the earth-sea so that she overpassed Cat's Claw by a finger's breadth where it lay now midway between the stalactite buds of her downward-jutting small breasts, its keen tip still directed straight at him like a compass needle pointing him out, while her smooth belly traversed the blade.
           He noted that Cat's Claw's scabbard had worked loose from his belt and lay in the ground's grip a little way behind him in the same attitude — pointing toward him — as its parent weapon did, now lying beyond his pursuer.
           But now he was making his fourth — no, fifth! — bobbing retreat, face pommeled by invisible earth. Damn it! It was all so demeaning — curtseying away from Death's skinny, shameless sister!
           The thought occurred to him that her and his means of progression through solid earth were both so strange and yet so grossly different that he might well be in the grip of some powerful hallucination or mighty