The Second Book of Lankhmar

service."
           "I don't know about all that," Afreyt replied, eyeing Fingers somewhat dubiously, "especially my coolness toward love rivals of whatever age or condition. Though it's true Fafhrd's had an awful many sweethearts, to hear him talk (the Mouser the same), and not only from those classes you mention, but really weird ones like the Ghouless Kreeshkra and that wholly invisible snowmount Princess Hirriwi and (for Mouse) that eight-tit slinky Hisvet — everything from demonesses to mermaids and shimmersprites." Warming to it, she continued, "But I think Cif and I are a match for them, at least in quality if not numbers. We've bedded gods ourselves — or at least arranged for their bedding," she added correctively and a bit guiltily, remembering.
           Listening to this recital, Gale seemed to get a bit uneasy, certainly wide-eyed. Fingers put an arm around her shoulders, saying, "So you see, little one, it is better to have one's hero a friend and uncle only, is it not?"
           Afreyt couldn't resist saying, "Aren't you overdoing the wise old aunt a bit?" Then, recalling Fingers's circumstances, she dropped her smile, adding, "But I was forgetting ... you know what."
           Fingers nodded gravely and fetched a sigh that she thought suitable for A Cabin-girl Against Her Will. Then she gave a squeal. Gale had yanked her hair.
           "I don't know about Uncle Fafhrd," the Rimish girl told her, making a face, "but I certainly want you as a friend and not an aunty!"
           "And now it's time we stopped talking heroes and she-devils and got back to worrying about two real men," Afreyt picked that moment to announce. "Come on, I'll rinse you."
           And taking up the water container, she poured a gush each on the blond and reddish heads, then emptied it over her own head.
         23
           Returning back to that same eventful day's darksome beginning, we find Fafhrd trudging frantically east by leviathan light from the lamp he carried and with a feather-footedness and hectic lightheadedness that puzzled and alarmed him, across the frosty Great Meadow toward fog-blanketed Salthaven and the horizon beyond, paling with the imminent dawn. His anxiety for the Mouser in desperate plight, his selfish urge to shuck off that bondage, and his wishful hope for a miracle solution to this problem ... these three feelings balled up unendurably within him, so that he lifted the brown brandy jug in his right hand to his teeth and fixed them around the protruding cork, biting into it, and drew the jug from off it, spat the cork aside, and downed two swallows that were like lightning brands straight down his throat.
           Then yielding to an unanticipated yet imperative impulse, born perhaps of the two blazing swigs, he scanned the sky ahead above the fog.
           And, lo, the miracle! For a wide stream of brightness, traveling up the pale sky from the impending sun, called his attention to a small fleet of on-cruising clouds. And as he inspected those five pearl-gray white-edged shapes with a sharp clear vision that was like youth returned, he discerned that the midmost was shaped like a large slender pinnace with towering stern-castle driven by a single translucent sail that bellied smoothly toward him, by all signs a demigalleon of the cloud queendom of Arilia, fable no longer.
           And as if there had resounded in his ear a single chime, infinitely stirring and sweet, of the silver bell with which they'd sound the watches upon such a vessel, the knowledge came to him —a message and more — that his old comrade-mistress Frix was aboard her, captaining her crew. And the confident determination was born on him to join her there. And his concern for the Mouser and what Afreyt and his men expected of him dropped away, and he no longer worried about the girls Fingers and Gale following him, and his footsteps grew carefree and light as those of his youth on a Cold Corner hunting morn. He took a measured sup of brandy and skipped ahead.
           The women whom Fafhrd loved seriously (and he rarely loved otherwise) seemed to him when he thought about it to split into the two classes of comrade-mistresses and beloved girls. The former were fearless, wise, mysterious, and sometimes cruel; the latter were timorous, adoring, cute, and mostly faithful — sometimes to the point of making too much of it. Both were — apparently had to be, alas —