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

droll thought, Fafhrd: what if it be not fog, but the smoke of all the poppy-
gum and hemp-resin in Lankhmar burning at once? What joys we'll have once we
are sniffing it! What dreams we'll have tonight!"
"I think it brings nightmares," Fafhrd asserted softly, rising in a
half crouch. Then, "Mouser, the taint! And my sword tingles to the touch!" The
questingmost of the swiftly advancing fog-tendrils fingered them both then and
seized on them joyously, as if here were the two captains it had been seeking,
the slave leadership which would render it invincible.
The two blood-brothers tall and small felt to the full then the
intoxication of the fog, its surging bittersweet touch-song of hate, its hot
promises of all bloodlusts forever fulfilled, an uninhibited eternity of
murder-madness.
Fafhrd, wineless tonight, intoxicated only by his own idealisms and the
thought of watchmanship, was hardly touched by the sensations, did not feel
them as temptations at all.
The Mouser, much of whose nature was built on hates and envies, had a
harder time, but he too in the end rejected the fog's masterful lures -- if
only, to put the worst interpretation on it, because he wanted always to be
the source of his own evil and would never accept it from another, not even as
a gift from the archfiend himself.
The fog shrank back a dozen paces then, cat-quick, like a vixenishly
proud woman rebuffed, revealing the four marchers in it and simultaneously
pointing tendrils straight at the Mouser and Fafhrd.
It was well for the Mouser then that he knew the membership of
Lankhmar's underworld to the last semiprofessional murderer and that his
intuitions and reflexes were both arrow-swift. He recognized the smallest of
the four -- Gis with his belt of knives -- as also the most immediately
dangerous. Without hesitation he whipped Cat's Claw from its sheath, poised,
aimed, and threw it. At the same instant Gis, equally knowledgeable and swift
of thought and speedy of reaction, hurled one of his knives.
But the Mouser, forever cautious and wisely fearful, snatched his head
to one side the moment he'd made his throw, so that Gis's knife only sliced
his ear flap as it hummed past.
Gis, trusting too supremely in his own speed, made no similar evasive
movement -- with the result that the hilt of Cat's Claw stood out from his
right eye socket an instant later. For a long moment he peered with shock and
surprise from his other eye, then slumped to the cobbles, his features
contorted in the ultimate agony. Kreshmar and Skel swiftly drew their swords
and Gnarlag his two, not one whit intimidated by the winged death that had
bitten into their comrade's brain.
Fafhrd, with a fine feeling for tactics on a broad front, did not draw
sword at first but snatched up the brazier by one of its three burningly hot
short legs and whirled its meager red-glowing contents in the attackers'
faces.
This stopped them long enough for the Mouser to draw Scalpel and Fafhrd
his heavier cave-forged sword. He wished he could do without the brazier -- it
was much too hot -- but seeing himself opposed to Gnarlag of the Two Swords,
he contented himself with shifting it jugglingly to his left hand.
Thereafter the fight was one swift sudden crisis. The three attackers,
daunted only a moment by the spray of hot coals and quite uninjured by them,