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

Fafhrd laughed, came to himself, and said almost abashedly, "Still,
there is something in the keenness and the watchman part. We're watchmen not
for pay, but solely for the watching's sake! Indoors and warm and comforted, a
man is blind. Out here we see the city and the stars, we hear the rustle and
the tramp of life, we crouch like hunters in a stony blind, straining our
senses for -- "
"Please, Fafhrd, no more danger signs," the Mouser protested. "Next
you'll be telling me there's a monster a-drool and a-stalk in the streets, all
slavering for Innesgay and her betrothal-maids, no doubt. And perchance a
sword-garnished princeling or two, for appetizer."
Fafhrd gazed at him soberly and said, peering around through the
thickening mist, "When I am _quite_ sure of that, I'll let you know."
****
The twin brothers Kreshmar and Skel, assassins and alley-bashers by
trade, were menacing a miser in his hovel when the red-veined fog came in
after them. As swiftly as ambitious men take last bite and wine-swig at skull
while Skel thrust into his belt the one small purse of gold they had thus far
extorted from the ancient man now turning to corpse. They stepped briskly
outside, their swords a-swing at their hips, and into the fog, where they
marched side-by-side with Gnarlag and Gis in the midst of the compact pale
mass that moved almost indistinguishably with the river-fog and yet
intoxicated them as surely as if it were a clouded white wine of murder and
destruction, zestfully sluicing away all natural cautions and fears, promising
an infinitude of thrilling and most profitable victims.
Behind the four marchers, the false fog thinned to a single glimmering
thread, red as an artery, silver as a nerve, that led back unbroken around
many a stony corner to the Temple of the Hates. A pulsing went ceaselessly
along the thread, as nourishment and purpose were carried from the temple to
the marauding fog mass and to the four killers, now doubly hate-enslaved,
marching along with it. The fog mass moved purposefully as a snow-tiger toward
the quarter of the nobles and Glipkerio's rainbow-lanterned palace above the
breakwater of the Inner Sea.
Three black-clad police of Lankhmar, armed with metal-capped cudgels
and weighted wickedly-barbed darts, saw the thicker fog mass coming and the
marchers in it. The impression to them was of four men frozen in a sort of
pliant ice. Their flesh crawled. They felt paralyzed. The fog fingered them,
but almost instantly passed them by as inferior material for its purpose.
Knives and swords licked out of the fog mass. With never a cry the
three police fell, their black tunics glistening with a fluid that showed red
only on their sallow slack limbs. The fog mass thickened, as if it had fed
instantly and richly on its victims. The four marchers became almost invisible
from the outside, though from the inside they saw clearly enough.
Far down the longest and most landward of the five alleyways, the
Mouser saw by the palace-glimmer behind him the white mass coming, shooting
questing tendrils before it, and cried gaily, "Look, Fafhrd, we've company!
The fog comes all the twisty way from the Hlal to warm its paddy paws at our
little fire."
Fafhrd, frowning his eyes, said mistrustfully, "I think it masks other
guests."
"Don't be a scareling," the Mouser reproved him in a fey voice. "I've a