Join the renowned barbarian and thief in this sword-and-sorcery
adventure from a Grand Master of Science Fiction and Fantasy.
While The Lord of the Rings took the world by storm, Fritz Leiber's
fantastic but thoroughly flawed antiheroes, Fafhrd and Gray Mouser,
adventured and stumbled deep within the caves of Inner Earth as well.
They wondered and wandered to the edges of the Outer Sea, across the
Land of Nehwon, and throughout every nook and cranny of gothic Lankhmar,
Nehwon's grandest and most mystically corrupt city. Lankhmar, is
Leiber's fully realized, vivid incarnation of urban decay and
civilization's corroding effect on the human psyche. Fafhrd and Mouse
are not innocents; their world is no land of honor and righteousness. It
is a world of human complexities and violent action, of discovery and
mystery, of swords and sorcery.
Swords Against Death, the second volume in the Lankhmar series, finds
Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser beginning their real journey. Their hearts
altered by the loss of first true love, they embark on a long and
winding path of drunken debauchery and womanizing until crossing paths
with two cross wizards, Sheelba of the Eyeless Face and Ningauble of the
Seven Eyes. A most violent of clashes ensues. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser
descend into Thieves House to discover the exacting skill of the united
backstabbing Thieves of Lankhmar and their rival guild, the Slayer's
Brotherhood, the city's unionized killers. They would wander along the
Bleak Shore to a howling tower to show how fear is not the product of
murder but the cause. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser must resume their
plundering and drunken debauchery until once again darkness had taken
the balance for its favor and then a change would come.
These are just a few of the encounters our swindling swordsmen will
willingly endure in ridding their hearts of their first true loves. But
did they know it would make them indentured swordsman servants to their
former foes, the formidable Sheelba and Ningauble?
