Swords Against Wizardry by Fritz Leiber ...

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"Your answer: he attacks!"
The Mouser blinked. Ivivis dropped her needle. The statua continued, its eyes
seeming to twinkle, "Greetings, hostless captain mine! Greetings, dear girl. I'm
sorry my stink offends you -- yes, yes, Ivivis, I've observed you pinching your nose
at my poor carcass this last hour through -- but then the world teems with
loathiness. Is that not a black death-adder gliding now through the black robe
you stitch?"
With a gasp of horror Ivivis sprang cat-swift up and aside from the material
and brushed frantically at her legs. The statua gave a naturally silver laugh, than
quickly said, "Your pardon, gentle girl -- I did but jest. My spirits are too high, too
high -- perchance because my body is so low. Plotting will curb my feyness. Hist
now, hist!"
In Hasjarl's Hall of Sorcery his four-and-twenty wizards stared desperately at
a huge magic screen set up parallel to their long table, trying with all their might
to make the picture on it come clear. Hasjarl himself, dire in his dark red funeral
robes, gazing alternately with open eyes and through the grommeted holes in his
upper lids, as if that perchance might make the picture sharper, stutteringly
berated them for their clumsiness and at intervals conferred staccato with his
military.
The screen was dark gray, the picture appearing on it in pale green witchlight.
It stood twelve feet high and eighteen feet long. Each wizard was
responsible for a particular square yard of it, projecting on it his share of the
clairvoyant picture.
This picture was of Gwaay's Hall of Sorcery, but the best effect achieved so far
was a generally blurred image showing the table, the empty chairs, a low mound
on the floor, a high point of silver light, and two figures moving about -- these last
mere salamanderlike blobs with arms and legs attached, so that not even the sex
could be determined, if indeed they were human at all or even male or female.
Sometimes a yard of the picture would come clear as a flowerbed on a bright
day, but it would always be a yard with neither of the figures in it or anything of
more interest than an empty chair. Then Hasjarl would bark sudden for the other
wizards to do likewise, or for the successful wizard to trade squares with someone
whose square had a figure in it, and the picture would invariably get worse and
Hasjarl would screech and spray spittle, and then the picture would go
completely bad, swimming everywhere or with squares all jumbled and
overlapping like an unsolved puzzle, and the twenty-four sorcerers would have to
count off squares and start over again while Hasjarl disciplined them with fearful
threats.
Interpretations of the picture by Hasjarl and his aides differed considerably.
The absence of Gwaay's sorcerers seemed to be a good thing, until someone
suggested they might have been sent to infiltrate Hasjarl's Upper Levels for a
close-range thaumaturgic attack. One lieutenant got fearfully tongue-lashed for
suggesting the two blob-figures might be demons seen unblurred in their true
guise -- though even after Hasjarl had discharged his anger, he seemed a little
frightened by the idea. The hopeful notion that all Gwaay's sorcerers had been
wiped out was rejected when it was ascertained that no sorcerous spells had been
directed at them recently by Hasjarl or any of his wizards.
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