Summer of Sword and Sorcery: Week 3

"The Circle Curse" by Fritz Leiber. Kind of an odd, amusing vignette which introduces Fafhrd and the Mouser's patron wizards, Ningauble of the Seven Eyes and Sheelba of the Eyeless Face.  Not much happening here, plot-wise, but Ningauble and Sheelba are two of the strangest and most memorable characters to appear in Leiber's stories.

"The Jewels in the Forest" by Fritz Leiber. One of the earliest-written Fafherd/Mouser tales; this involving the hunt for a treasure in a strange and enchanted ruin.  There's enough of these scenarios in the Fahrd/Mouser canon that its a wonder the two didn't stop seeking such things.  Nonetheless, a fun and mystifying tale.

"The Howling Tower" by Fritz Leiber.  An eerie and effective tale involving a haunted tower and a battle with wolves on the astral plane.

"The Sunken Land" by Fritz Leiber.  Something of a fave, even though the meat of the story is only a moderately-interesting journey aboard a megalomaniacal captain's raiding ship - it's the denouement in the (usually) sunken city of Simorgya that makes this one memorable.

"The Seven Black Priests" by Fritz Leiber.  F/M play ten little indians with a gang of pissed-off priests after stealing the eye out of their idol.  Mainly fun for the banter as our heroes get the better of their pursuers one-by-one ("I think they're unreasonably angry" says Faf; "Priests always are." shrugs the Mouser).  Fun stuff.

"Tsais" by Jack Vance.  The third tale in Vance's The Dying Earth.  All of these stories could be called fairy tales, for all intents and purposes, albeit of a decidedly ungentle and hallucinogenic sort, set on an Earth so far flung into the future that it might as well be an alien planet.  "Tsais" tells of the title character, a homonculoid young woman (she was not born but grown by a wizard), who exists with a fatal flaw - she cannot perceive beauty. The things normal people find beautiful, she finds hideous. She is sent to Earth from her home world (another planet or dimension) in order to see if she can develop the capacity to appreciate beauty or love.  She becomes involved in a tricky cat-and-mouse game between the lonely wizard who rescues her from bandits, and the evil sorceress who long ago cursed him.  This is my favorite Dying Earth story so far.
   
"Liane the Wayfarer" by Jack Vance.  Another fractured fairy tale, this time of Liane, a rat bastard who gets the tables turned on him by a witch.  Plenty of ambiguity and tantalizing, unanswered questions here.