The Mouser grinned as he poked about with his gaze at the nastily slimed cobbles and the dead bodies and the scattered hardware. “Cat's Claw must be here somewhere,” he muttered, “and I did hear the chink of gold…."

“You'd feel a penny under the tongue of a man you were strangling!” Fafhrd told him angrily.

At the Temple of the Hates, five thousand worshipers began to rise up weakly and groaningly, each lighter of weight by some few ounces than when he had first bowed down. The drummers slumped over their drums, the lantern-crankers over their extinguished red candles, and the lank Archpriest wearily and grimly lowered his head and rested the wooden mask in his clawlike hands.

At the alley-juncture, the Mouser dangled before Fafhrd's face the small purse he had just slipped from Skel's belt.

“My noble comrade, shall we make a betrothal gift of it to sweet Innesgay?” he asked liltingly. “And rekindle the dear little brazier and end this night as we began it, savoring all the matchless joys of watchmanship and all the manifold wonders of—"

“Give it here, idiot boy!” Fafhrd snarled, snatching the chinking thing for all his burnt fingers. “I know a place where they've soothing salves — and needles too, to stitch up the notched ears of thieves — and where both the wine and the girls are sharp and clean!"

II: Lean Times in Lankhmar

Once upon a time in Lankhmar, City of the Black Toga, in the world of Nehwon, two years after the Year of the Feathered Death, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser parted their ways.

Exactly what caused the tall brawling barbarian and the slim elusive Prince of Thieves to fall out, and the mighty adventuring partnership to be broken, is uncertainly known and was at the time the subject of much speculation.