Swords Against Wizardry by Fritz Leiber ...

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dried-up fountain pool yet near the open door of the chamber that was their
appointed hiding place. The girls were whispering together, head leaned to head,
yet that was no noisier than the squeaking of mice, nor was the occasional high
sigh Brilla let slip.
Beyond the fountain was the great half open door through which the sole
faint light came questing and through which Fafhrd had brought them before
doubling back to draw off the pursuit. Some of the cobwebs stretching across it
had been torn away by Brilla's ponderous passage.
Taking that door and the one to their hiding place as two opposite corners of
the room, the two remaining opposite corners were occupied by a wide black
archway and a narrow one, each opening on a large section of stony floor raised
three steps above the still larger floor section around the dried-up pool.
Elsewhere in the wall were many small doors, all shut, doubtless leading to
onetime bed chambers. Over all hung the pale mortared great black slabs of the
shallowly domed ceiling. So much their eyes, long accustomed to the darkness,
could readily distinguish.
Brilla, who recognized that this place had once housed a harem, was musing
melancholically that now it had become a kind of tiniest harem again, with
eunuch -- himself -- and pregnant girl -- Kewissa -- gossiping with restless highspirited
girl -- Friska -- who was fretting for the safety of her tall barbarian lover.
Old times! He had wanted to sweep up a bit and find some draperies, even if
rotten ones, to hang and spread, but Friska had pointed out that they mustn't
leave clues to their presence.
There came a faint sound through the great door. The girls quit their
whispering and Brilla his sighs and musings, and they listened with all their
beings. Then more noises came -- footsteps and the knock of a sheathed sword
against the wall of a tunnel -- and they sprang silently up and scurried back into
their hiding chamber and silently shut the door behind them, and the Ghost Hall
was briefly alone with its ghosts once more.
A helmeted guard in the hauberk of Hasjarl's guards appeared in the great
door and stood peering about with arrow nocked to the taut string of a short bow
he held crosswise. Then he motioned with his shoulder and came sneaking in
followed by three of his fellows and by four slaves holding aloft yellowly flaming
torches, which cast the monstrous shadows of the guardsmen across the dusty
floor and the shadows of their heads against the curving far wall, as they spied
about for signs of trap or ambush.
Some bats swooped about and fled the torchlight through the archways.
The first guardsman whistled then down the corridor behind him and waved
an arm and there came two parties of slaves, who applied themselves each to a
side of the great door, so that it groaned and creaked loudly at its hinges, and
they pushed it open wide, though one of them leaped convulsively as a spider fell
on him from the disturbed cobwebs, or he thought it did.
Then more guards came, each with a torch-slave, and moved about calling
softly back and forth, and tried all the shut doors and peered long and
suspiciously into the black spaces beyond the narrow archway and the wide one,
but all returned quite swiftly to form a protective semicircle around the great
door and enclosed most of the floor space of the central section of the Ghost Hall.
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