Swords Against Wizardry

A swashbuckling story collection in the genre-defining sword-and-sorcery series from the Hugo and Nebula Award–winning Grand Master of Science Fiction.

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.

With Swords Against Wizardry, the story unfolds behind the curtain “In the Witch's Tent”. Fafhrd and Gray Mouser are there to consult a sorceress who holds the secret to their escape, but when would they ever need to escape? Would they need this knowledge when they journey to “Stardock”? Where is there to escape up there? No doubt the icy seduction of the cruel one, with her greed for both gore and graciousness, could offer them several ways out. Their luck has been good so far; one way out should work. Their luck continues as thieves. They are “The Two Best Thieves in Lankhmar” until better positions arise: “The Lords of Quarmall.” Gray Mouser and Fafhrd steal a kingdom within a hill and declare themselves lords.

Drawing on themes from Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, and H. P. Lovecraft, master manipulator Fritz Leiber is a worldwide legend within the fantasy genre and actually coined the term Sword and Sorcery that describes the subgenre he helped create.

“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