Swords Against Wizardry by Fritz Leiber ...

ABBYY PDF Transformer 2.0
Click here to buy
w w w.A BBYY.co m
The tiny grains of snow were still falling ruler-straight, frosting the ledge and
Fafhrd's coppery hair. He and the Mouser began to pull up their hoods and lace
their cloaks about them for the night. The sun still shone through the snowfall,
but its light was filtered white and brought not an atom of warmth.
Obelisk Polaris was not a noisy mountain, as many are -- a-drip with glacial
water, rattling with rock slides, and even with rock strata a-creak from uneven
loss or gain of heat. The silence was profound.
The Mouser felt an impulse to tell Fafhrd about the living girl-mask or
illusion he'd seen by night, while simultaneously Fafhrd considered recounting to
the Mouser his own erotic dream.
At that moment there came again, without prelude, the rushing in the silent
air and they saw, clearly outlined by the falling snow, a great flat undulating
shape.
It came swooping past them, rather slowly, about two spear-lengths out from
the ledge.
There was nothing at all to be seen except the flat, flakeless space the thing
made in the airborne snow and the eddies it raised; it in no way obscured the
snow beyond. Yet they felt the gust of its passage.
The shape of this invisible thing was most like that of a giant skate or stingray
four yards long and three wide; there was even the suggestion of a vertical fin and
a long, lashing tail.
"Great invisible fish!" the Mouser hissed, thrusting his hand down in his halflaced
cloak and managing to draw Scalpel in a single sweep. "Your mind was
most right, Fafhrd, when you thought it wrong!"
As the snow-sketched apparition glided out of sight around the buttress
ending the ledge to the south, there came from it a mocking rippling laughter in
two voices, one alto, one soprano.
"A sightless fish that laughs like girls -- most monstrous!" Fafhrd commented
shakenly, hefting his ax, which he'd got out swiftly too, though it was still
attached to his belt by a long thong.
They crouched there then for a while, scrambled out of their cloaks, and with
weapons ready, awaited the invisible monster's return, Hrissa standing between
them with fur bristling. But after a while they began to shake from the cold and so
they perforce got back into their cloaks and laced them, though still gripping their
weapons and prepared to throw off the upper lacings in a flash. Then they briefly
discussed the weirdness just witnessed, insofar as they could, each now
confessing his earlier visions or dreams of girls.
Finally the Mouser said, "The girls might have been riding the invisible thing,
lying along its back -- and invisible too! Yet, what was the thing?"
This touched a small spot in Fafhrd's memory. Rather unwillingly he said, "I
remember waking once as a child in the night and hearing my father say to my
mother, '...like great thick quivering sails, but the ones you can't see are the
worst.' They stopped speaking then, I think because they heard me stir."
The Mouser asked, "Did your father ever speak of seeing girls in the high
mountains -- flesh, apparition, or witch, which is a mixture of the two; visible or
invisible?"
"He wouldn't have mentioned 'em if he had," Fafhrd replied. "My mother was
ABBYY PDF Transformer 2.0
Click here to buy
w w w.A BBYY.co m