The Second Book of Lankhmar

and even from the rooftops. But who counts or even notices rats?—especially in a city as old and vermin-infested as Lankhmar.
    The big man and the small man gazed about fiercely a bit longer. Then, regaining their breaths, they laughed uproariously, sheathed their weapons, and faced the trumpeters with a guarded yet relaxed curiosity.
    The trumpeters wheeled to either side. A line of pikemen behind them executed the same movement, and there strode forward a venerable, clean-shaven, stern-visaged man in a black toga narrowly bordered with silver.
    He raised his hand in a dignified salute. He said gravely, “I am chamberlain of Glipkerio Kistomerces, Overlord of Lankhmar, and here is my wand of authority.” He produced a small silver wand tipped with a five-pointed bronze emblem in the form of a starfish.
    The two men nodded slightly, as though to say, “We accept your statement for what it's worth.”
    The chamberlain faced the big man. He drew a scroll from his toga, unrolled it, scanned it briefly, then looked up. “Are you Fafhrd the northern barbarian and brawler?"
    The big man considered that for a bit, then said, “And if I am?"
    The chamberlain turned toward the small man. He once more consulted his parchment. “And are you—your pardon, but it's written here—that mongrel and long-suspected burglar, cut-purse, swindler and assassin, the Gray Mouser?”
    The small man fluffed his gray cape and said, “If it's any business of yours—well, he and I might be connected in some way.”
    As if those vaguest answers settled everything, the chamberlain rolled up his parchment with a snap and tucked it inside his toga. “Then my master wishes to see you. There is a service which you can render him, to your own considerable profit.”
    The Gray Mouser inquired, “If the all-powerful Glipkerio Kistomerces has need of us, why did he allow us to be assaulted and for all he might know slain by that company of hooligans who but now fled this place."
    The chamberlain answered, “If you were the sort of men who would allow yourselves to be murdered by such a mob, then you would not be the right men to handle the assignment, or fulfill the commission, which my master has in mind. But time presses. Follow me.”
    Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser looked at each other and after a moment they simultaneously shrugged, then nodded. Swaggering just a little, they fell in beside the chamberlain, the pikemen and trumpeters fell in behind them, and the cortege moved off the way it had come, leaving the square quite empty.
    Except, of course, for the rats.

Chapter Two
    With the motherly-generous west wind filling their brown triangular sails, the slim war galley and the five broad-beamed grain ships, two nights out of Lankhmar, coursed north in line ahead across the Inner Sea of the ancient world of Nehwon.
    It was late afternoon of one of those mild blue days when sea and sky are the same hue, providing irrefutable evidence for the hypothesis currently favored by Lankhmar philosophers: that Nehwon is a giant bubble rising through the waters of eternity with continents, islands, and the great jewels that at night are the stars all orderly afloat on the bubble's inner surface.
    On the afterdeck of the last grain ship, which was also the largest, the Gray Mouser spat a plum skin to leeward and boasted luxuriously, “Fat times in Lankhmar! Not one day returned to the City of the Black Toga after months away adventuring and we get this cushy job from the Overlord himself—and with an advance on pay too.”
    “I have an old distrust of cushy jobs,” Fafhrd replied, yawning and pulling his fur-trimmed jerkin open wider so that the mild wind might trickle more fully through the tangled hair-field of his chest. “And we were rushed out of Lankhmar so quickly that we had not even time to pay our respects to the ladies. Nevertheless I must confess that we might have done worse. A full purse is the best ballast for any man-ship, especially one bearing letters of marque against ladies.”
    Ship's Master Slinoor looked back with hooded appraising eyes at the small lithe gray-clad man and his tall, more gaudily accoutered barbarian comrade. The master of Squid was a sleek black-robed man of middle years. He stood beside the two stocky black-tunicked bare-legged sailors who held steady the great high-arching tiller that guided Squid .
    “How much do you two rogues really know of your cushy job?” Slinoor asked softly. “Or rather, how