Swords Against Death

Join the renowned barbarian and thief in this sword-and-sorcery collection from a Hugo and Nebula Award–winning Grand Master of Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Swords Against Death 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 then 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 “The 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?

“Fritz Leiber's tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are virtually a genre unto themselves. Urbane, idiosyncratic, comic, erotic, and human, spiked with believable action and the eerie creations of a master fantasist.” —Harlan Ellison