"Fritz Leiber - FGM 6 - Swords and Ice Magic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leiber Fritz)

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Swords and Ice Magic [Book 6 of the "Fafhrd and Gray Mouser" series]

by Fritz Leiber

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Copyright (c)1977 by Fritz Leiber


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*I: The Sadness of the Executioner*

There was a sky that was always gray.

There was a place that was always far away.

There was a being who was always sad.

Sitting on his dark-cushioned, modest throne in his low, rambling
castle in the heart of the Shadowland, Death shook his pale head and pummeled
a little his opalescent temples and slightly pursed his lips, which were the
color of violet grapes with the silvery bloom still on, above his slender
figure armored in chain mail and his black belt, studded with silver skulls
tarnished almost as black, from which hung his naked, irresistible sword.

He was a relatively minor death, only the Death of the World of Nehwon,
but he had his problems. Tenscore flickering or flaring human lives to have
their wicks pinched in the next twenty heartbeats. And although the heartbeats
of Death resound like a leaden bell far underground and each has a little of
eternity in it, yet they do finally pass. Only nineteen left now. And the
Lords of Necessity, who outrank Death, still to be satisfied.

Let's see, thought Death with a vast coolness that yet had a tiny
seething in it, one hundred sixty peasants and savages, twenty nomads, ten
warriors, two beggars, a whore, a merchant, a priest, an aristocrat, a
craftsman, a king, and two heroes. That would keep his books straight.

Within three heartbeats he had chosen one hundred and ninety-six of the
tenscore and unleashed their banes upon them: chiefly invisible, poisonous
creatures within their flesh which suddenly began to multiply into resistless
hordes, here a dark and bulky bloodclot set loose with feather touch to glide
through a vein and block a vital portal, there a long-eroded artery wall
tunneled through at last; sometimes slippery slime oozing purposefully onto
the next footrest of a climber, sometimes an adder told where to wriggle and
when to strike, or a spider where to lurk.

Death, by his own strict code known only to himself, had cheated just a