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but Tyre; and that here the greatest city was not called Lankhmar, but
Alexandria.
And even with those thoughts, the memory of Lankhmar and the whole world of
Nehwon began to fade in their minds, become a remembered dream or series of
dreams.
Only the memory of Ningauble and his caverns stayed sharp and clear.
But the exact nature of the trick he had played on them became cloudy.
No matter, the air here was sharp and clean, the food good, the wine sweet and
addling, the men built nicely enough to promise interesting women.
What if the names and the new words seemed initially weird? Such feelings
diminished even as one thought about them.
Here was a new world, promising unheard-of adventures. Though even as one
thought "new," it became a world more familiar.
They cantered down the white sandy track of their new, yet foreordained,
destiny.
--------
VI: Adept's Gambit
_1: Tyre_
It happened that while Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser were dallying in a wine shop
near the Sidonian Harbor of Tyre, where all wine shops are of doubtful repute,
a long-limbed yellow-haired Galatian girl lolling in Fafhrd's lap turned
suddenly into a wallopingly large sow. It was a singular occurrence, even in
Tyre. The Mouser's eyebrows arched as the Galatian's
breasts, exposed by the Cretan dress that was the style revival of the hour,
became the uppermost pair of slack white dugs, and he watched the whole
proceeding with unfeigned interest.
The next day four camel traders, who drank only water disinfected with sour
wine, and two purple-armed dyers, who were cousins of the host, swore that no
transformation took place and that they saw nothing, or very little out of the
ordinary. But three drunken soldiers of King Antiochus and four women with
them, as well as a completely sober Armenian juggler, attested the event in
all its details. An Egyptian mummy-smuggler won brief attention with the claim
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that the oddly garbed sow was only a semblance, or phantom, and made dark
references to visions vouchsafed men by the animal gods of his native land,
but since it was hardly a year since the Seleucids had beaten the
Ptolemies out of Tyre, he was quickly shouted down. An impecunious traveling
lecturer from Jerusalem took up an even more attenuated position, maintaining
that the sow was not a sow, or even a semblance, but only the semblance of a
semblance of a sow.
Fafhrd, however, had no time for such metaphysical niceties. When, with a roar
of disgust not unmingled with terror, he had shoved the squealing monstrosity
halfway across the room so that it fell with a great splash into the water
tank, it turned back again into a long-limbed Galatian girl and a very angry
one, for the stale water in which the sow had floundered drenched her garments
and plastered down her yellow hair (the Mouser murmured, "Aphrodite!") and the
sow's uncorsetable bulk had split the tight Cretan waist. The stars of
midnight were peeping through the skylight above the tank, and the wine cups
had been many times refilled, before her anger was dissipated. Then, just as
Fafhrd was impressing a reintroductory kiss upon her melting lips, he felt
them once again become slobbering and tusky. This time she picked herself up
from between two wine casks and, ignoring the shrieks, excited comments, and
befuddled stares as merely part of a rude mystification that had been carried
much too far, she walked with Amazonian dignity from the room. She paused only
once, on the dark and deep-worn threshold, and then but to hurl at Fafhrd a
small dagger, which he absentmindedly deflected upward with his copper goblet,
so that it struck full in the mouth a wooden satyr on the wall, giving that
deity the appearance of introspectively picking his teeth.
Fafhrd's sea-green eyes became likewise thoughtful as he wondered what
magician had tampered with his love life. He slowly scanned the wine shop
patrons, face by sly-eyed face, pausing doubtfully when he came to a tall,
dark-haired girl beyond the water tank, finally returning to the Mouser. There
he stopped, and a certain suspiciousness became apparent in his gaze.
The Mouser folded his arms, flared his snub nose, and returned the stare with
all the sneering suavity of a Parthian ambassador. Abruptly he turned,
embraced and kissed the cross-eyed Greek girl sitting beside him, grinned
wordlessly at Fafhrd, dusted from his coarse-woven gray silk robe the antimony
that had fallen from her eyelids, and folded his arms again.
Fafhrd began softly to beat the base of his goblet against the butt of his
palm. His wide, tight-laced leather belt, wet with the sweat that stained his
white linen tunic, creaked faintly.
Meanwhile murmured speculation as to the person responsible for casting a
spell on Fafhrd's Galatian eddied around the tables and settled uncertainly on
the tall, dark-haired girl, probably because she was sitting alone and
therefore could not join in the suspicious whispering.
"She's an odd one," Chloe, the cross-eyed Greek, confided to the
Mouser. "Silent Salmacis they call her, but I happen to know that her real
name is Ahura."
"A Persian?" asked the Mouser.
Chloe shrugged. "She's been around for years, though no one knows
exactly where she lives or what she does. She used to be a gay, gossipy little
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