Short Sorcery: Fritz Leiber’s “Thieves’ House” by Bill Ward More than any other classic sword-and-sorcery series, Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are associated with thievery. It isn’t just that the twain, the dynamic duo of tall Northerner Fafhrd and shifty little Mouser, are themselves consummate rogues of wild daring and tremendous fame, but that the world they usually inhabit, the crazy mazey streets of Lankhmar, is thickly populated by cutpurses, sneaks, assassins, bravos, backstabbers, pickpockets, skullduggers, and rapacious robbers of all stripes. Indeed, a great amount of the DNA of thievery in fantasy fiction, particularly after the advent of Dungeons & Dragons, can be traced to Leiber’s Lankhmar. The City of Sevenscore Thousand Smokes could just as well be called the Town of Twice Ten Thousand and Two Thieves.  In “Thieves House,” Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser come into direct conflict with Lankhmar’s Thieves Guild, after being hired as freelancers to recover an ancient jeweled skull (and matching skeletal hands, fingernailed with rubies) from a highly guarded temple crypt. It is the Skull of Ohmphal, once a great Master Thief, his remains long ago stolen from the Guild and forgotten until a chance discovery revealed their whereabouts. Not only was this particular Skull forgotten, but the very notion of respecting the bones of a departed rogue has become an alien concept among the guild: “I never heard tale of a Thieves’ Sepulcher, save the junkyard, the incinerator, and the Inner Sea.” says fat Fissif, the slippery backbiter who hires the twain for the Skull heist with the full intention of double-crossing them. Krovas, Master of the Guild, replies simply; “Times and customs change … periods of reverence alternate with periods of realism.” First appearing in the pages of Unknown (Worlds) Magazine in 1943 – the fifth and last Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser tale to do so before the magazine folded – “Thieves House” belongs to the earliest run of Lankhmar stories, those that would come to be collected in Swords Against Death (originally titled Two Sought Adventure).* These tales are Leiber at his pulpiest and most fast-paced, his gifts for wordplay and inventive asides evident but kept in check by the need for forward momentum. One of the oddities of coming to the Lankhmar saga through its collected works is the high variation...