The Second Book of Lankhmar

rape slender twin sisters. He had managed to thwart this cruel and unaesthetic enterprise because he had given the Mingols no time to use their bows, only the lance, while their short narrow scimitars had been no match for Graywand. When the last of the three had gone down, sputtering curses and blood, Fafhrd had turned to the identically-clad girls, only to discover that he had rescued but one—a Mingol had mean-heartedly cut the other's throat before turning his scimitar on Fafhrd. Thereafter Fafhrd had mastered one of the tethered Mingol horses despite its fiendish biting and kicking. The surviving girl had revealed among her other shriekings that her family might still be alive among the defenders of Klelg Nar, so Fafhrd had swung her up on his saddlebow despite her frantic struggles and efforts to bite. When she quieted somewhat, he had been stirred by her slim sprawly limbs so close and her lemur-large eyes and her repeated assertion, reinforced by horrendous maidenly curses and quaint childhood slang, that all men without exception were hairy beasts, this with a sneer at Fafhrd's luxuriously furred chest. But although tempted to amorousness he had restrained himself out of consideration for her coltish youth—she seemed scarce twelve, though tall for her age—and recent bereavement. Yet when he had returned her to her not very grateful and strangely suspicious family, she had replied to his courteous promise to return in a year or two with a wrinkling of her snub nose and a sardonic flirt of her blue eyes and slim shoulders, leaving Fafhrd somewhat doubtful of his wisdom in sparing her his wooing and also saving her in the first place. Yet he had gained a fresh mount and a tough Mingol bow with its quiver of darts.
    Klelg Nar was the scene of bitter house-to-house and tree-to-tree street fighting, while Mingol campfires glowed in a semicircle to the east every night. To his dismay Fafhrd had learned that for weeks there had not been a ship in Klelg Nar's harbor, of which the Mingols held half the perimeter. They had not fired the city because wood was wealth to the lean dwellers of the treeless steppes—in fact, their slaves dismantled and plucked apart houses as soon as won and the precious planks and lovely carvings were instantly carted off east, or more often dragged on travoises.
    So despite the rumor that a branch of the Mingol horde had bent south, Fafhrd had set off in that direction on his vicious-tempered mount, somewhat tamed by the whip and morsels of honeycomb. And now it seemed from the smoke adrift above the sea-road that the Mingols might not have spared Sarheenmar from the torch as they had Klelg Nar. It also began to seem certain that the Mingols had taken Sarheenmar, from the evidence of the wild-eyed, desperate, ragged, dust-caked refugees who began to crowd the road in their flight north, forcing Fafhrd to toil now and again up the hillside, to save them from his new mount's savage hooves. He questioned a few of the refugees, but they were incoherent with terror, babbling as wildly as if he sought to waken them from nightmare. Fafhrd nodded to himself—he knew the Mingol penchant for torture.
    But then a disordered troop of Mingol cavalry had come galloping along in the same direction as the escaping Sarheenmarts. Their horses were lathered with sweat and their shiny faces contorted by terror. They appeared not to see Fafhrd, let alone consider attacking him, while it seemed not from malice but panic that they rode down such refugees as got in their way.
    Fafhrd's face grew grim and frowning as he cantered on, still against the gibbering stream, wondering what horror would daunt Mingol and Sarheenmart alike.
    * * * *
    Black rats kept showing themselves in Lankhmar by day—not stealing or biting, squealing or scurrying, but only showing themselves. They peered from drains and new-gnawed holes, they sat in window slits, they crouched indoors as calmly and confident-eyed as cats—and as often, proportionately, in milady's boudoir as in the tenement-cells of the poor.
    Whenever they were noted, there was a gasping and then shrieking, a rush of footsteps, and a hurling of black pots, begemmed bracelets, knives, rocks, chessmen, or whatever else might be handy. But often it was a time before the rats were noted, so serene and at home they seemed.
    Some trotted sedately amidst the ankles and swaying black togas of the crowds on the tiled or cobbled streets, like pet dwarf dogs, causing