"Fritz Leiber - FGM 4 - Swords Against Wizardry" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leiber Fritz)

Illik-Ving, an overgrown and rudely boisterous town, which is the eighth and
smallest metropolis of the Land of the Eight Cities.
While overhead there shivered in the chill wind the strange stars of
the World of Nehwon, which is so like and unlike our own world.
Inside the tent, two barbarian-clad men watched the crouching witch
across the brazier. The big man, who had red-blond hair, stared somber-eyed
and intently. The little man, who was dressed all in gray, drooped his
eyelids, stifled a yawn, and wrinkled his nose.
"I don't know which stinks worse, she or the brazier," he murmured. "Or
maybe it's the whole tent, or this alley muck we must sit in. Or perchance her
familiar is a skunk. Look, Fafhrd, if we must consult a sorcerous personage,
we should have sought out Sheelba or Ningauble before ever we sailed north
from Lankhmar across the Inner Sea."
"They weren't available," the big man answered in a clipped whisper.
"Shh, Gray Mouser, I think she's gone into trance."
"Asleep, you mean," the little man retorted irreverently.
The hag's gargling breath began to sound more like a death rattle. Her
eyelids fluttered, showing two white lines. Wind stirred the tent's dark wall
-- or it might be unseen presences fumbling and fingering.
The little man was unimpressed. He said, "I don't see why we have to
consult anyone. It isn't as if we were going outside Nehwon altogether, as we
did in our last adventure. We've got the papers -- the scrap of ramskin
parchment, I mean -- and we know where we're going. Or at least you say you
do."
"Shh!" the big man commanded, then added hoarsely, "Before embarking on
any great enterprise, it's customary to consult a warlock or witch."
The little man, now whispering likewise, countered with, "Then why
couldn't we have consulted a civilized one? -- any member in good standing
of the Lankhmar Sorcerers Guild. He'd at least have had a comely naked girl or
two around, to rest your eyes on when they began to water from scanning his
crabbed hieroglyphs and horoscopes."
"A good earthy witch is more honest than some city rogue tricked out in
black cone-hat and robe of stars," the big man argued. "Besides, this one is
nearer our icy goal and its influences. You and your townsman's lust for
luxuries! You'd turn a wizard's workroom into a brothel."
"Why not?" the little man wanted to know. "Both species of glamour at
once!" Then, jerking his thumb at the hag, "Earthy, you said? Dungy describes
her better."
"Shh, Mouser, you'll break her trance."
"Trance?" The little man reinspected the hag. Her mouth had shut and
she was breathing wheezingly through her beaky nose alone, the fume-sooty tip
of which sought to meet her jutting chin. There was a faint high wailing, as
of distant wolves, or nearby ghosts, or perhaps just an odd overtone of the
hag's wheezes.
The little man sneered his upper lip and shook his head.
His hands shook a little too, but he hid that. "No, she's only stoned
out of her skull, I'd say," he commented judiciously. "You shouldn't have
given her so much poppy gum."
"But that's the entire intent of trance," the big man protested. "To
lash, stone, and otherwise drive the spirit out of the skull and whip it up