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    Lean Times in Lankhmar
    Lean Times in Lankhmar
    Lean Times in Lankhmar
    Ebook56 pages53 minutes

    Lean Times in Lankhmar

    By Fritz Leiber

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    Once upon a time in Lankhmar, City of the Black Toga, in the world of Nehwon, two years after the Year of the Feathered Death, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser parted their ways.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherStart Publishing LLC
    Release dateApr 28, 2020
    ISBN9781952438035
    Lean Times in Lankhmar
    Author

    Fritz Leiber

    Fritz Leiber (1910–1992) was the highly acclaimed author of numerous science fiction stories and novels, many of which were made into films. He is best known as creator of the classic Lankhmar fantasy series. Leiber has won many awards, including the coveted Hugo and Nebula, and was honored as a lifetime Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America.

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      Book preview

      Lean Times in Lankhmar - Fritz Leiber

      Lean Times in Lankhmar

      Fritz Leiber

      Start Publishing LLC

      Copyright © 2020 by Start Publishing LLC

      All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

      First Start Publishing eBook edition March 2020

      Start Publishing is a registered trademark of Start Publishing LLC

      Manufactured in the United States of America

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      ISBN 978-1-952438-03-5

      Lean Times in Lankhmar

      Once upon a time in Lankhmar, City of the Black Toga, in the world of Nehwon, two years after the Year of the Feathered Death, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser parted their ways.

      Exactly what caused the tall brawling barbarian and the slim elusive Prince of Thieves to fall out, and the mighty adventuring partnership to be broken, is uncertainly known and was at the time the subject of much speculation. Some said they had quarreled over a girl. Others maintained, with even greater unlikelihood, that they had disagreed over the proper division of a loot of jewels raped from Muulsh the Moneylender. Srith of the Scrolls suggests that their mutual cooling off was largely the reflection of a supernatural enormity existing at the time between Sheelba of the Eyeless Face, the Mouser’s demonic mentor, and Ningauble of the Seven Eyes, Fafhrd’s alien and multiserpentine patron.

      The likeliest explanation, which runs directly counter to the Muulsh Hypothesis, is simply that times were hard in Lankhmar, adventures few and uninviting, and that the two heroes had reached that point in life when hard-pressed men desire to admix even the rarest quests and pleasurings with certain prudent activities leading either to financial or to spiritual security, though seldom if ever to both.

      This theory—that boredom and insecurity, and a difference of opinion as to how these dismal feelings might best be dealt with, chiefly underlay the estrangement of the twain . . . this theory may account for and perhaps even subsume the otherwise ridiculous suggestion that the two comrades fell out over the proper spelling of Fafhrd’s name, the Mouser perversely favoring a simple Lankhmarian equivalent of Faferd while the name’s owner insisted that only the original mouth-filling agglomeration of consonants could continue to satisfy his ear and eye and his semiliterate, barbarous sense of the fitness of things. Bored and insecure men will loose arrows at dust motes.

      Certain it is that their friendship, though not utterly fractured, grew very cold and that their life-ways, though both continuing in Lankhmar, diverged remarkably.

      Gray Mouser entered the service of one Pulg, a rising racketeer of small religions, a lord of Lankhmar’s dark underworld who levied tribute from the priests of all godlets seeking to become gods—on pain of various unpleasant, disturbing and revolting things happening at future services of the defaulting godlet. If a priest didn’t pay Pulg, his miracles were sure to misfire, his congregation and collection fall off sharply, and it was quite possible that a bruised skin and broken bones would be his lot.

      Accompanied by three or four of Pulg’s buddies and frequently a slim dancing girl or two, the Mouser became a familiar and newly-ominous sight in Lankhmar’s Street of the Gods which leads from the Marsh Gate to the distant docks and the Citadel. He still wore gray, went close-hooded, and carried Cat’s Claw and Scalpel at his side, but the dagger and curving sword kept in their sheaths. Knowing from of old that a threat is generally more effective than its execution, he limited his activities to the handling of conversations and cash. I speak for Pulg–Pulg with a guh! was his usual opening. Later, if holy men grew recalcitrant or overly keen in their bargaining and it became necessary to maul saintlets and break up services, he would sign the bullies to take disciplinary measures while he himself stood idly by, generally in slow sardonic converse with the attendant girl or girls and often munching sweetmeats. As the months passed, the Mouser grew fat and the dancing girls successively more slim and submissive-eyed.

      Fafhrd, on the other hand, broke his longsword across his knee (cutting himself badly in the act), tore from his garments the few remaining ornaments (dull and worthless scraps of metal) and bits of ratty fur, forswore strong drink and all allied pleasures (he had been on small beer and womanless for some time), and became the sole acolyte of Bwadres, the sole priest of Issek of the Jug. Fafhrd let

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