The Second Book of Lankhmar

arm and ran his fingers through Kreeshkra's invisible shoulder-length hair. “Bonny Bones,” he asked, “why do you call me Mud Man?”
    She answered tranquilly, “All your kind seem mud to us, whose flesh is as sparkling clear as running water in a brook untroubled by man or rains. Bones are beautiful. They are made to be seen.” She reached out skeleton-seeming soft-touching hand and played with the hair on his chest, then went on seriously, staring toward the stars. “We Ghouls have such an aesthetic distaste for mud-flesh that we consider it a sacred duty to transform it to crystal-flesh by devouring it. Not yours, at least not tonight, Mud Man,” she added, sharply tweaking a copper ringlet.
    He lightly captured her wrist. “So your love for me is most unnatural, at least by Ghoulish standards,” he said with a touch of argumentativeness.
    “If you say so, master,” she answered with a sardonic, mock-submissive note.
    “I stand, or rather lie, corrected,” Fafhrd murmured. “I'm the lucky one, whatever your motives and whatever name we give them.” His voice became clearer again. “Tell me, Bonny Bones, how in the world did you ever come to learn Lankhmarese?"
    “Stupid, stupid Mud Man,” she replied indulgently. “Why, ‘tis our native tongue"—and here her voice grew dreamy—"deriving from those ages a millennium and more ago when Lankhmar's empire stretched from Quarmall to the Trollstep Mountains and from Earth's End to the Sea of Monsters, when Kvarch Nar was Hwarshmar and we lonely Ghouls alley-and-graveyard thieves only. We had another language, but Lankhmarese was easier.”
    He returned her hand to her side, to plant his own beyond her and stare down into her black eye sockets. She whimpered faintly and ran her fingers lightly down his sides. Fighting impulse for the moment, he said, “Tell me, Bonny Bones, how do you manage to see anything when light goes right through you? Do you see with the inside of the back of your skull?”
    “Questions, questions, questions,” she complained moaningly.
    “I only want to become less stupid,” he explained humbly.
    “But I like you to be stupid,” she answered with a sigh. Then raising up on her elbow so that she faced the still-blazing campfire—the thorn tree's dense wood burnt slowly and fiercely—she said, “Look closely into my eyes. No, without getting between them and the fire. Can you see a small rainbow in each? That's where light is refracted to the seeing part of my brain, and a very thin real image formed there.”
    Fafhrd agreed he could see twin rainbows, then went on eagerly, “Don't stop looking at the fire yet; I want to show you something.” He made a cylinder of one hand and held an end of the cylinder to her nearest eye, then clapped his fingers, held tightly together, against the other end. “There!” he said. “You can see the fire glow through the edges of my fingers, can't you? So I'm part transparent. I'm part crystal, at least,”
    “I can, I can,” she assured him with singsong weariness. She looked away from his hands and the fire at his face and hairy chest. “But I like you to be mud,” she said. She put her hands on his shoulders. “Come, darling, be dirtiest mud.”
    He gazed down at the moonlit pearl-toothed skull and blackest eye sockets in each of which a faint opalescent moonbow showed, and he remembered how a wisewoman of the North had once told him and the Mouser that they were both in love with Death. Well, she'd been right, at least about himself, Fafhrd had to confess now, as Kreeshkra's arms began to tug at him.
    At that instant there sounded a thin whistle, so high as to be almost inaudible, yet piercing the ear like a needle finer than a hair. Fafhrd jerked around, Kreeshkra swiftly lifted her head, and they noted that they were being watched not only by the Mingol mare, but also with upside-down eyes by a black bat which hung from a high gray twig of the thorn tree.
    Filled with premonition, Fafhrd pointed a forefinger at the dangling black flier, which instantly fluttered down to the fleshly perch presented. Fafhrd drew off its leg a tiny black roll of parchment springy as thinnest tempered iron, waved the flutterer back to its first perch, and unrolling the black parchment and holding it close to the firelight and his eyes close to it, read the following missive writ in a white script:
    Mouser in direst danger. Also Lankhmar. Consult Ningauble of the Seven Eyes. Speed of the