Book description
While THE LORD OF THE RINGS took the world by storm, Fritz Leiber's
fantastic but thoroughly flawed anti-heroes, 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 isn't 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?
Fritz Leiber is considered one of science fiction's legends. Author of a
prodigious number of stories and novels, many of which were made into
films, he is best known as creator of the classic Lankhmar fantasy
series. Fritz Leiber has won awards too numerous to count including the
coveted Hugo and Nebula, and was honored as a lifetime Grand Master by
the Science Fiction Writers of America. He died in 1992.
