But the Mouser and Fafhrd had found nothing but a horde of fierce male Ghouls, mounted on equally skeletal horses, who had chased them east and south, either to slay them, or to cause them to die of thirst in the desert or of torture in the dungeons of the King of Kings.
It was high noon and the sun was hottest. Fafhrd's left hand touched in the dry heat a cool fence about two feet high, invisible at first though not for long.
“Escape to damp coolth,” he said in a cracked voice.
They eagerly clambered over the fence and threw themselves down on a blessed thick turf of dark grass two inches high, over which a fine mist was falling. They slept about ten hours.
In his castle Death permitted himself a thin grin, as on his map the south-trending tongue of the Shadowland touched the diamond spark and dimmed it.
Nehwon's greatest star, Astorian, was mounting the eastern sky, precursor of the moon, as the two adventurers awoke, greatly refreshed by their long nap. The mist had almost ceased, but the only star visible was vast Astorian.
The Mouser sprang up agitatedly in his gray hood, tunic, and ratskin shoes. “We must escape backward to hot dryth,” he said, “for this is the Shadowland, Death's homeland.”
“A very comfortable place,” Fafhrd replied, stretching his huge muscles luxuriously on the thick greensward. “Return to the briny, granular, rasping, fiery land-sea? Not I."
“But if we stay here,” the Mouser countered, “we will be will-lessly drawn by devilish and delusive will-o'-the-wisps to the low-walled Castle of Death, whom we defied by stealing his mask and giving its two halves to our wizards Sheelba and Ningauble, an action for which Death is not likely to love us. Besides, here we might well meet our two first girls, Ivrian and Vlana, now concubines of Death, and that would not be a pleasant experience.”