Swords in the Mist by Fritz Leiber

My copy

I am rereading the Ace paperback collections of Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories I first read in the 1980s as an AD&D obsessed kid; today we read Swords in the Mist, subtitled "The Third Book of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser."  Swords in the Mist was first published in 1968--I own a copy of the thirteenth printing of 1984.  There is no Author's Introduction to this one.

"The Cloud of Hate" (1963)

"The Cloud of Hate" was first published in Cele Goldsmith's Fantastic, along with a story of Brak the Barbarian by John Jakes.  (You'll recall that Goldsmith was a fan of sword and sorcery and Michael Moorcock credits her with a major role in the growth of the market for the type of sword slashing fantasy fiction that now dominates the SF field.)  "The Cloud of Hate" was included in the 1975 Sword and Sorcery Annual, a magazine that reprinted a bunch of stories from Fantastic.  I wonder about the business side of these things.  Was Fritz thrilled to see "The Cloud of Hate" appearing in a magazine a second time twelve years later, thinking it was good advertising for Swords in the Mist and the other F&GM books?  Or was he groaning because it might compete with those books for people's limited SF budgets?  And did Fritz get paid a second time for this second printing?

Tonight, the nobles of Lankhmar, city of the Black Toga, are having a big party to celebrate the engagement of the Overlord's daughter to the Prince of Ilthmar, that city where they worship a rat-god.  Halfway across town, underground, in the huge Temple of Hate, five thousand worshipers and their masked priest summon a sort of fog that rises out onto the street level and joins the usual fog of that foggy, smoggy city.  Like a living thing, like a huge serpent or slug, the fog moves across the city, killing an innocent girl, then taking over the minds of four violent men, dangerous criminals armed with swords and daggers.  These four killers, surrounded by the fog, march towards the party in the aristocratic part of town.

Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are sitting on the street, on the fringes of the noble quarter, lamenting their poverty and debating the competing merits of freedom and employment.  The fog, hatred incarnate, latches on to them, but they successfully resist its control--after all, Fafhrd is essentially a decent guy, and the Mouser is very independent-minded.  So the two heroes fight and defeat the four hypnotized killers and then the fog itself, saving the people of Lankhmar from a menace they will never know about--even F&GM don't know what the fog was all about.  Our heroes take the coins from the dead criminals and head to a brothel.

As a kid I remember thinking this story was barely a story at all, just a little episode, and I still kind of feel that way.  Maybe Leiber has some philosophical reason for having the villains of the piece worship an abstract notion like Hate instead of a spider-god or snake-god or whatever; maybe it is so he can draw a distinction between Fafhrd and the Mouser--pirates and burglars who live by theft--and what Leiber considers "real" evil.  The hate-worshipers seem angry that the marriage alliance of Lankhmar and Ilthmar makes the prospect of war less likely--maybe this story is a very oblique anti-war story?

Acceptable.

"Lean Times in Lankhmar" (1959)

I remember laughing out loud at this story when I first read it and thinking it was brilliant, so I have my fingers crossed that I remain enough the same person I was in the 1980s that I can enjoy "Lean Times in Lankhmar" today as much as I did back then.

"Lean Times in Lankhmar" is written in a charming, comfortable, semi-scholarly style, with the narrator talking about the sources for his tale and the disputes among experts about why such and such a thing occurred.  "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...."  This is very effective, somewhat paradoxically making suspension of disbelief easier by admitting the unreliability of the narrative.

During a period of economic slowdown in Lankhmar, Fafhrd and the Mouser suspend their intimate partnership and their dangerous adventuring to settle down a little.  Fafhrd swears off booze and finds religion, becoming a follower of Issek of the Jug, a god of peace.  Issek, when Fafhrd becomes his adherent, has only one priest, the senile Bwadres, and almost no worshipers, but, with Fafhrd filling the position of lead (and sole) acolyte, the popularity of Issek skyrockets.  Fafhrd's sheer charisma and tremendous physical presence, and ability to sing and compose heroic poetry (remember, he was trained as a Singing Skald among the Northern barbarians who are his native people) brings to Bwadres's services plenty of attention and soon adherents.  Fafhrd's revisions of the gospel of Issek are quite amusing--in the traditional stories of Issek, Issek died while being tortured on the rack.  Fafhrd doesn't change the essential nature of this story of holy martyrdom, but punches it up a bit by describing in verse, in his lovely tenor while accompanying himself on the lute, how Issek's saintly form broke seven racks before he finally expired on an eighth.

In "Bazaar of the Bizarre" Leiber described Lankhmar's Plaza of Dark Delights, its unusual customs and traditions.  Here in "Lean Times in Lankhmar" we learn about the even more fascinating Street of the Gods.  New cults start when their clerics begin preaching on the street--brand new cults, with no followings as yet, start all the way at the gate that leads to Ilthmar; as they grow in popularity, their priests move their makeshift places of worship up the street, closer to the center of town.  Cults whose popularity is on the wane recede back towards the city gate.  There are dozens or hundreds of different cults preaching on The Street of the Gods every night; many perish after mere days, others flourish for years or centuries, the most successful building lavish temples at the end of the street furthest from the city wall and gate.

The cults close to the gate, should they pass around the collection plate, receive only crusts of bread and bits of charcoal, but as Issek's priest and his brilliant acolyte shift up the street and attract a higher class of parishioner, they begin to receive actual coins from those who attend services.  Bwadres, now in a position to eat a meal every single day, sloughs off his senility.

This is where the Gray Mouser comes in.  If Fafhrd's idea of settling down was to worship and proselytize for a god of peace, the Mouser's was to become lieutenant to a racketeer, Pulg, who forces all the successful cults on The Street of the Gods to pay him protection money.  While Fafhrd has grown gaunt from abstinence and sprouted a long beard, the Mouser, living the easy life bossing around thugs and eating sweetmeats and sleeping with dancing girls, has grown fat!  Anyway, Issek's cult has started getting real money, and it is the Mouser's job to get Pulg's cut from Bwadres.  Most of the religious institutions on the Street of the Gods are run on cynical, business-like lines, and accept the necessity of paying off Pulg the way you and I pay our rent and tax bills.  But Bwadres is honest and sincere, one of the few legitimately decent people in cruel and corrupt Lankhmar (this is what attracted Fafhrd to him in the first place) and refuses to waste the money provided him by those who have been moved by the story of Issek--Bwadres is saving as much as he can with the prospect in mind of purchasing the beautiful temple of Aarth the Invisible All-Listener, one of the oldest and most famous of the gods on the Street (but one whose treasury has taken a hit recently, leaving his clergy, perhaps, in the mood to sell.)  The Mouser scrambles to figure out a way to keep his job working for Pulg without having to order his old buddy Fafhrd beaten or maimed.

Leiber's plot gets pretty complex, with various unforeseen developments, but it is finely structured, and quite funny--I laughed out loud this time around, even though I knew what was coming.  In the end, F&GM sail away from Lankhmar with their servant Ourph the Mingol, leaving behind Bwadres and Pulg--a convert to Issekianity!--to lead their cult to prominence and (after three years riding high) total destruction at the bony hands of the black gods who truly represent Lankhmar.

A masterpiece--seven out of seven broken torture racks!  By objective criteria "Lean Times in Lankhmar" is a strong candidate for best F&GM story, though I think it is disqualified from that title because it is uncharacteristic of the F&GM stories as a whole--there is a minimum of sword fighting, black magic, and weird monsters.  But it is a brilliant specimen of speculative fiction in that it creates a believable alternative milieu, populates it with interesting characters, and presents a fun and exciting story--and all in less than 50 pages.     

"Lean Times in Lankhmar" made its debut in a special all-Leiber issue of Goldsmith's Fantastic.  It was reprinted in Grand Masters' Choice ("The best stories by the all-time greatest SF writers") in 1989. 

"Their Mistress, the Sea" (1968)

This four-page piece was written originally for this book, and serves as a bridge between "Lean Times in Lankhmar" and the next story in the ordering used in these Ace books (an ordering based on the history of F&GM's lives, not publication order), "When the Sea-King's Away."  It describes how our heroes get back into shape while sailing around, how Fafhrd gets a new sword and axe through piracy, and includes a somewhat tired rape joke and some romantic gush about the sea.  Ourph is left ashore, he not appearing in "When the Sea-King's Away."

"When the Sea-King's Away" (1960)

Here's another story from Cele Goldsmith's Fantastic.  "When the Sea-King's Away" has been anthologized a number of times, including in L. Sprague de Camp's Swords & Sorcery and Hans Stefan Santesson's The Mighty Barbarians. 

Fafhrd knows a crazy legend from Simorgya about how on the seventh day of the seventh moon of the seventh year etc. the King of the Sea leaves his palace on a trip and his queens and concubines then summon heroic sailors to have sex with them.  Fafhrd, observing various signs, believes that now is that time and that their sloop is floating, becalmed, above the palace!

Sure enough, a sort of vertical tunnel opens in the ocean water that our heroes descend via rope to the ocean floor, where they can walk in the deep muck within what Leiber describes as a magical "tent" of air.  They follow a long tunnel of air, stepping over dying fish and scuttling crabs and the corpses of long lost sailors, to the palace of the Sea King, where they meet two beautiful women with scales and webbed hands and gills in their necks, and an old scrawny witch, who is casting the spell that is creating this bubble of air underwater.  These three fishwomen wear elaborate masks that hide their faces.  To have sex with the slender fish girls F&GM have to fight terrible monsters--Fafhrd a giant octopus that wields swords in some of its arms, the Mouser the animated corpses of three dead sailors.  These opponents overcome, our heroes couple with the sexy girls, one green and one silver, and then flee when the spell weakens and water starts running back in to the palace.

The plot of this story is weak, like that of "The Cloud of Hate."  But the style is interesting, though I'm not sure we can quite call it "good."  Leiber spends many many pages describing the weird phenomena of the tunnels and "tents" of air within the ocean, describing how the light passes through the water and the way sound waves make the tunnel sides vibrate and how fish react to the tunnels, etc.  It is all very vivid and clever, but it makes the story very long.  The spell used by the witch to create this temporary bubble of air on the ocean floor is also very creative and memorable--she spins a bunch of tops with whips, making sure none of the tops ceases to spin or falls off the edge of a table or collides with another.  And there is in fact much much more to this whole momentous day that comes once every seven whatevers that I am not going to describe here, except to say that it is all very clever but makes the story long and perhaps unwieldy, and much of it doesn't really add to the story's plot or atmosphere. 

The fighting in the story is noteworthy.  Remember when we noted how in "Jewels in the Forest," the first published F&GM story, Leiber was trying to make the fighting realistic, with even the heroic Fafhrd hard pressed to handle two opponents at once?  For this story at least, Leiber had moved away from that sort of thing, and F&GM just brush aside the fearsome foes they face in the Sea King's palace--where the violence is concerned, Leiber has shifted from realistic thriller mode to mythic legend mode.

The most successful element of the story is its depiction of the relationship between Fafhrd and the Mouser, and the differences in their characters--Fafhrd brash and optimistic and reckless, the Mouser cautious and anxious and calculating.  This stuff was probably easier to write than all the descriptions of weird ocean phenomena, but it is direct and human and it is what brings a smile to reader's face. 

Mildly good--certainly better than "The Cloud of Hate;" "When the Sea-King's Away" has a similarly weak foundation, but the fun character stuff and the vivid aquatic stuff help distract you from the essential weakness of the plot and premise. 

"The Wrong Branch" (1968)

This is another written-for-this-book bridging section, this one preparing us for the fact that the next F&GM story, "Adept's Gambit," is going to be set not on Nehwon, but on our own Earth.  I actually found "The Wrong Branch" entertaining in its own right, it having its own little plot and fun little episodes.

F&GM, following their cuckolding of the Sea-King, suffer a series of terrible misfortunes, storms and shark attacks and so forth, and decide to ask Ninguable of the Seven Eyes to help lift the Sea-King's curse.  Ningauble lives in a labyrinthine desert cave not far from rat-worshiping Ilthmar (their second most powerful god, we learn in this piece, is a shark-god.)  The maze-like cave has outlets in many worlds and dimensions, and Ningauble, as well as lifting the Sea-King's curse, subtly directs them to an exit into the desert near Tyre in the Hellenistic period.  F&GM's minds are altered, so they speak Greek and Aramaic instead of Lankhmarese, and, for example, Fafhrd's memories are of a youth in the Baltic and not of the Cold Waste of Nehwon.

"Adept's Gambit" (1947)

A 1975 UK edition of Night's Black Agents

"Adept's Gambit" was first published in Night's Black Agents, the 1947 Arkham House collection of Leiber stories, but it had a long history before that--Leiber even sent a draft to H. P. Lovecraft in 1936, to which Lovecraft responded with several pages of criticism and suggestion--you can read Lovecraft's letter in Volume 10 of Hippocampus Press's Letters of H. P. Lovecraft, Letters to C. L. Moore and Others.  (I've read the letter in my copy of Letters to C. L. Moore and Others and can report that HPL loved the story and offered lots of advice on finer points of English usage and ancient history that I think might be of interest to language nerds and history buffs.)  That original 1936 version of "Adept's Gambit," along with Lovecraft's comments, can be read in a 2014 volume edited by the leading Lovecraft expert, S. T. Joshi.  Leiber himself abridged a version of the story for publication in a 1964 issue of Fantastic.   I can't find that issue of Fantastic on the internet archive, for some reason, and I don't have that 2014 volume by Joshi, so I am just going to read the version here in my 1984 printing of Swords in the Mist.

As a kid I didn't take "Adept's Gambit" seriously, being irritated that it didn't present to us what I took to be the "real" F&GM--my idea of F&GM was that they were products of Nehwon and I wanted to see them in their characteristic milieu, the smoggy city of the Black Toga.  In this story Leiber stresses an idea quite like Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion idea, presenting F&GM as a sort of immortal force, two men mysteriously connected to ancient gods whose influence crossed multiple dimensions, two men manipulated by fate and powerful beings like Ninguable, sent by them to whatever world or universe required their services--Nehwon was only one of the many places they had inhabited and performed key deeds in.  Anyway, I remember very little about "Adept's Gambit," so my reading of it now is almost like reading a story new to me.

"Adept's Gambit" is long, like 87 pages here, and split into nine chapters.  In the first chapter F&GM are in Tyre, I guess around 197 B.C.  When not committing crimes, they hang out in a wine shop, where it becomes clear they are under some curse or spell--any girl they try to get amorous with turns into a disgusting animal, a pig in Fafhrd's case, a giant snail in the case of the Mouser.  The girl changes back a moment after the startled man throws her aside.  The one exception is a Greek girl, Chloe, who is attached to the Mouser.  For some time the heroes remain celibate in the case of Fafhrd, and faithful in the case of the Gray Mouser, but this does not agree with them--Fafhrd becomes depressed ("his laughter was heard no more") and the Mouser begins to pine for a mysterious close-lipped dark-haired girl, Ahura, AKA Silent Salmacis, who seems somehow mixed up in all this magical mess (she gave Chloe an amulet once, which Chloe still wears....)  So they decide to seek aid from Ningauble.

Ningauble, in this story, is portrayed as a collector and retailer of gossip and rumor from across all the universes, attended by a legion of vermin--bats and rat- and monkey-like things--who serve as his spies and messengers.  He tells the heroes that an adept ("a master practitioner of blackest magic") put the curse on them, and they have to go to a Lost City, bringing with them a bunch of arcane items ("the cup from which Socrates drank the hemlock," "the shroud of Ahriman," "powdered mummy from the Demon Pharaoh," etc.) with which to perform a ritual.  In the third chapter Leiber briefly sketches out how they steal all these items over the course of months.  To perform the ritual they nned the participation of a woman Ningauble wouldn't name, but implied would simply show up when the time was right--the heroes suspect the woman is Chloe, but it turns out to be Ahura who joins the quest at the last moment.

In the fourth chapter the three travel to the Lost City.  Along the way the men's friendship is tested by jealousy as they compete over the cold and mysterious girl's affection.  Ninguable sends them messages via birds, warning them to cease their quarreling and forgo any intimate relationship with Ahura.  At the Lost City (chapter five) they summon the adept from his tomb--he looks much like Ahura, whom the Mouser has begun suspecting is a man in disguise.  The adept tells the heroes that they have the potential to be adepts themselves and enjoy god-like power if only they become his lieutenants.

"I'll give you gods for foes, stars for your treasure-trove, if only you will do as I command....The universe will tremble at your lust, but you will master it and force it down." 

F&GM defeat the adept--or so they think!--with the help of Ahura--the adept's body stiffens, becoming like a statue, and falls over, the head cracking, revealing an empty space.  Then an arrow falls from the sky bearing the message from Ninguable that their quest is not over.  In the sixth chapter they learn that they must ascend a mountain to explore a castle known as The Castle Called Mist.

The seventh, eighth and final chapters are mainly constituted of an almost independent weird tale, the story of Ahura and her sickly twin brother Anra--Anra is the adept who rose from the tomb in the Lost City.  As they travel to the castle, Ahura tells F&GM the story of her childhood with Anra in the house of their mother in Tyre, their father having allegedly died before they were born.  From the earliest of ages Anra could see through Ahura's eyes and even read the minds of people she saw; he studied scrolls and ostraca to learn many languages, he later achieved the ability to control her and sent her on missions to steal books for him and spy for him.  She uncovered clues suggesting their real father was not human, but a man of stone, like a crude blocky statue.  Ahura met a wizard, and her brother enjoined her to bring him back to their home to be his live-in tutor--weak and coddled Anra had never left the house.  The wizard taught Anra many things, including eventually how to switch bodies with Ahura.  Anra's body, containing Ahura's soul, was left in the tomb in the Lost City, while Anra occupied his sister's body and conducted all kinds of wizardly shenanigans with the wizard.  He and the wizard tried to accomplish some great sorcerous goal, but failed, embittering Anra and ruining his relationship with the wizard.  When Anra, in Ahura's body, noticed Fafhrd and the Mouser and realized they are great heroes with connections across various dimensions and with beings like Ninguable, he decided to try to recruit them to be his assistants--maybe with their support he could achieve the goals he failed to accomplish when working in concert with that wizard.  So, the Mouser was right to suspect the woman he and Fafhrd almost came to blows over was in fact a man.  When the tomb was opened, Anra's soul returned to his now hollow and statue-like body, and Ahura again took custody of her own body.

In the castle the three find that wizard, a fragment of his former self, imprisoned and mutilated; Fafhrd euthanizes him.  Then the cracked but still smoothly operating Anra catches up to them.  Anra had wanted them to come to the Castle Called Mist, thinking its magnificence would inspire them to join him after all.  Ninguable also wanted F&GM to come to the castle, because it is where Anra's heart and brain are hidden.  The heroes find the heart and brain and by destroying them destroy Anra and the castle, which collapses.  (Anra's heart and brain in a bowl of goo in the castle's keystone reminded me of the alien brain of a living building in "Jewels in the Forest.")  In the end of the story Fafhrd and the Mouser decide to go to Nehwon, and Ahura asks if she can come along.

Much of what goes on in "Adept's Gambit" is good, but there are problems.  For one thing, there is no real reason I can see that it take place on Earth.  Fafhrd talks a lot about Odin and Frigga and such Norse stuff, and the Mouser talks about Greek mythology like Hermaphroditus and Salmacis, and there are references to Alexander and Philip V of Macedon and Xenophon and so forth, but this is just gingerbread, not essential to the story.  (If I was being harsh, I'd say this was Leiber just showing off his erudition.)  The story could have been set in Nehwon, and then we would have been spared a lot of superfluous rigmarole about moving between universes and all that.

More importantly, while the story of Anra and Ahura is a pretty good weird tale of body switching and ambitious wizards being frustrated and cool stuff like that, the integration of it with the main story causes structural and pacing issues.  Some 40 pages into the story (in chapter 5) we get the apparently climactic fight with the adept--Leiber spends a long time describing this fight, like four pages, and we are told it is the most taxing sword fight of the Mouser's life!  But it is followed by a whole anti-climactic chapter of the characters walking to a mountain and then in chapter 7 we start an entirely new story with several new characters (Ahura's mother, two of the household slaves, and the wizard) then stretches through chapter 8 and into 9.  I found it jarring and frustrating to be starting a new story in the middle of the ending of the main story--even though this Anra-Ahura material is good on its own merits, the whole time I was reading it (and it is like 24 pages) I was anxious to find out what was going on with Fafhrd and the Mouser.  Then comes the dual climax of both the main story and the Anra-Ahura story in the Castle Called Mist; unfortunately, I found the castle to be less interesting than the Lost City, and the final fight involving Anra's organs in the keystone to be less elaborate and exciting than the fight in the Lost City.  The end is thus kind of a let down--it doesn't feel right that the final scene be less complex and weighty than that middle scene.

"Adept's Gambit" has many good elements, but it just doesn't feel satisfying because of its structure and length.  Maybe I would prefer the original version, or the Fantastic version?

*********

Alright, another Fafhrd and Gray Mouser reread under my belt.  Before long we'll be checking out Swords Against Wizardry, but first more excursions into old issues of Thrilling Wonder Stories.