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second and even larger explosion of white blooms.
Five heartbeats more and as he scurried north across the Plaza of Dark Delights in the
light of the new-risen moon, he had buckled on his belt and withdrawn from a small pouch pendant
on it a bandage which he began deftly to wrap tightly about his wound.
Five more heartbeats and he was hastening through a narrow cobbled alleyway that led in the
direction of the Marsh Gate.
For he had decided that, much as he hated to admit it to himself, the time had come when he
must venture across the treacherous, malodorous Great Salt Marsh and seek the advice of his
sorcerous mentor, Sheelba of the Eyeless Face.
* * * *
Fafhrd spurred his tall gray mare south through the burning streets of Sarheenmar, since no
road led around that city fronted by the Inner Sea and backed by desert mountains. Through those
latter dry, craggy hills the only trail led east to the land-locked desert-girt Sea of Monsters,
by which stood the lonely City of Ghouls, avoided by all other men.
It was smoke-clouded night and the sole light was that of the flames gushing in streamers
and roaring sheets from the roofs, doors, and windows of buildings once noted for their coolness,
firing their thick walls of dried-clay bricks to red heat and a beauteous, rippling porcelain-like
gloss where they did not melt and topple entirely.
Though the wide street was empty, Fafhrd's bloodshot eyes were watchful in his haggard,
smoke-stained, sweat-rivuleted face. He had loosened his sword in its scabbard and his short-ax in
its wide sheath, strung his Mingol bow and held it ready in his left hand, and slung the quiver of
its arrows high behind his right shoulder. His lightened saddlebag and half-full canteen thumped
against his mount's ribs, while his flat pouch, still empty except for the ridiculous tin whistle,
flapped about.
For a wonder the mare was not panicked by the fire all around. Fafhrd had heard that the
Mingols, by stark-real tests, inured their horses to all manner of horrors almost as sternly as
they did themselves, slaying without mercy those who still quailed on the seventh attempt of a
beast or the second of a man.
Yet now Fafhrd's mount suddenly stopped dead, just short of a narrow side street, snorting
her lathered nostrils and glaring her great eyes more wild and bloodshot than Fafhrd's. Heel-thuds
on her ribs would not put her in again, so Fafhrd dismounted and began to drag her forward by
brute force down the center of the smoke-swirled, flame-walled street.
Then there came rushing from around the burning corner ahead what looked at first glance to
be a gang of exceptionally tall and skinny red-litten skeletons, each wearing a skimpy harness and
brandishing in either bony hand a short tapering double-edged needle-pointed sword.
After an instant's shock, Fafhrd realized these must be Ghouls, whose flesh and inner
organs, he had heard -- with much skepticism, but now no longer -- were transparent except where
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the skin became sallowly or rosily translucent on the genital organs and on the lips and small
breasts of their women.
It was said also that they ate only flesh, human by preference, and that it was strange
indeed to watch the raw gobbets they gulped course down and churn within the bars of their ribs,
gradually turning to mush and fading from sight as their sightless blood assimilated and
transformed the food -- granting that a mere normal man might ever have opportunity to watch
Ghouls feast without becoming a supply of gobbets himself.
Fafhrd was filled with dread, but also indignation, that he, clearly a neutral in a Ghoul-
Sarheenmart-Mingol war, should be thus ambushed -- for now the leading skeleton hurled his right-
hand sword and Fafhrd had to weave swiftly aside as it came cartwheeling through the smoky air.
Whipping his hand over shoulder, he set arrow to bow and dropped the foremost Ghoul with a
shot that transfixed his ribs just to the left of his breastbone. Somewhat to his surprise, he
discovered that having a skeleton for foe and target made it easier to aim for a vital part. Now
as the Ghouls approached closer, uttering horrendous war-shrieks, he noted the flame-light
glinting here and there from their gassy hides and realized that even counting their flesh as
solid, they were an exceptionally skinny, though rangy, folk.
He brought down two more of his charging foes, the last with a dart into a black eye
socket, then dropped his bow, whirled out short-ax and sword, and made a long lunge with the
latter as the four remaining Ghouls, their speed unchecked, were upon him.
Graywand took a Ghoul under the chin, jolting him to a dying stop. It was weird to see the
skeleton collapse without rattle of bone. The short-ax next licked out, decapitating another
enemy, whose glassy-fleshed skull went spinning off, but whose torso, louting forward, drenched
the Northerner's ax-hand with invisible, warm, silky fluid.
These grisly events gave the third Ghoul time to run around his stricken comrades and get
in on Fafhrd a thrust which, fortunately coming from above, glanced off his left ribs without
wounding him deeply.
The long smarting sword-slice, however, turned Fafhrd's indignation wholly to fury and he
smote that Ghoul so deeply in the skull that the short-ax stuck and was jerked from Fafhrd's hand.
His fury became an almost blinding red rage, not lacking sexual undertones, so that when he noted
that the fourth and last Ghoul carried pale breasts on her white ribs like two roses pinned there,
he knocked the weapons from her hands with short disarming sword-swipes as she came darting toward
him; then as she faltered stretched her full-length on the road with a left-handed punch to her
jaw.
He stood panting, closely eyeing the scattered skeletons for sign of movement -- there was
none -- and glaring all about for evidence of other parties of Ghouls. None also.
The horror-inured gray mare had hardly shifted an iron-shod hoof during the melee. Now she
tossed her gaunt head, writhed back her black lips from her huge teeth and whinnied snickeringly.
Sheathing Graywand, Fafhrd knelt warily by the female skeleton and pressed two fingers into
the invisible flesh under the hinges of her jaw. He felt a slow pulse. Without ceremony he hoisted
her by the waist. She weighed a little more than he anticipated, so that her slenderness surprised
him as did also the resilience and smooth texture of her invisible skin. Cold-headedly leashing
his hot vengeful impulses, he dumped her over his saddlebow so that her legs dangled on one side
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