"Fritz Leiber - FGM 3 - Swords in the Mist" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leiber Fritz)

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At the Temple of the Hates, five thousand worshipers began to rise up
weakly and groaningly, each lighter of weight by some few ounces than when he
had first bowed down. The drummers slumped over their drums, the lantern-
crankers over their extinguished red candles, and the lank Archpriest wearily
and grimly lowered his head and rested the wooden mask in his clawlike hands.
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At the alley-juncture, the Mouser dangled before Fafhrd's face the
small purse he had just slipped from Skel's belt.
"My noble comrade, shall we make a betrothal gift of it to sweet
Innesgay?" he asked liltingly. "And rekindle the dear little brazier and end
this night as we began it, savoring all the matchless joys of watchmanship and
all the manifold wonders of -- "
"Give it here, idiot boy!" Fafhrd snarled, snatching the chinking thing
for all his burnt fingers. "I know a place where they've soothing salves --
and needles too, to stitch up the notched ears of thieves -- and where both
the wine and the girls are sharp and clean!"
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II: 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.