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Tor Double #19: Fritz Leiber’s Ill Met in Lankhmar and Charles de Lint’s The Fair in Emain Macha

Tor Double #19: Fritz Leiber’s Ill Met in Lankhmar and Charles de Lint’s The Fair in Emain Macha

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Cover for Ill Met in Lankhmar by Sam Rakeland
Cover for The Fair at Emain Macha by Mel Grant

This volume of the Tor Double series offers something it hasn’t offered before.  Although several of the novellas previously published in the series have played with the tropes of fantasy novels, such as Jack Vance’s The Last Castle or Joanna Russ’s Souls, all of the stories published to this point have been science fiction. With Volume 19, the series offers two novellas which are unabashedly fantasy, Fritz Leiber’s Ill Met in Lankhmar and Charles de Lint’s The Fair in Emain Macha. Not only are both fantasy stories, but both of them are parts of series exploring the characters who feature in them.

Fritz Leiber introduced the world to Lankhmar and his characters of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser in August of 1939 in the story “Two Sought Adventure,” which appeared in Unknown. By 1969, he had published an additional eighteen stories about the adventurers, including one story which told of the Grey Mouser’s life before he met Fafhrd.

Ill Met in Lankhmar was originally published in F&SF  in April, 1970. It won the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award. Ill Met in Lankhmar is the second of four Leiber stories to be published in the Tor Doubles series. A prequel to all of the previously published Lankhmar stories with the exception of “The Unholy Grail,” this novella tells how his two characters meet for the first time. …

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Random Reviews: “Wizard’s Bounty” by Charles de Lint

Random Reviews: “Wizard’s Bounty” by Charles de Lint

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Cover by Gene Day
Cover by Gene Day

“Wizard’s Bounty” is an early short story by Charles de Lint, first published in 1979 in Dark Fantasy magazine and only reprinted in de Lint’s collection A Handful of Coppers. As such an early appearance, it does not have the feel of much of de Lint’s work as he was clearly trying to find his voice when the story was written, which certainly does not mean that it isn’t a story worth reading.

de Lint has published a handful of stories surrounding the character Aynber, of which “Wizard’s Bounty” was the second. In this story, which would not have been out of place if it appeared in TSR’s The Dragon magazine of the same era, sets Aynber as a bounty hunter nicknamed “The Huntress” who is after the wizard Nemenor, who has a 5,000 gold piece bounty on his head. A chance encounter at a tavern with Boadar, who claims to know where she can find Nemenor, gives Aynber an unwelcome companion who can lead her to the wizard at the cost of part of the bounty.

Against her better judgement, Aynber accepts Boadar’s company and knowledge on her quest and he does lead her to the wizard’s tower. As a companion, Boadar proves useless when they are attacked. Furthermore, during their journey, Boadar takes liberties with her body when she sleeps, which seems gratuitous, but serves to reinforce Aynber’s own judgment of Boadar for the reader, even if she is unaware of Boadar’s action. …

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