Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser

Two rogues meet over a pair of freshly murdered thieves in a Lankhmar alley, decide they like each other's swordwork, and never quite part again. So begins the friendship at the heart of Nehwon — a world of fog-drowned cities, cold northern wastes, and gods who answer only when it suits them. Fafhrd is the tall barbarian singer who fled the ice; the Gray Mouser is the small, cat-quick cutpurse and lapsed sorcerer who fled nothing so much as respectability. Together they steal, brawl, love badly, and blunder into the schemes of their inscrutable patrons, Ningauble of the Seven Eyes and Sheelba of the Eyeless Face. This is the series in which Fritz Leiber coined the term "sword and sorcery," and it reads like the form before the form hardened. The tales are gathered into seven volumes — Swords and Deviltry, Swords Against Death, Swords in the Mist, Swords Against Wizardry, the lone full novel The Swords of Lankhmar, Swords and Ice Magic, and The Knight and Knave of Swords — with later hands (Robin Wayne Bailey, Nathan Long, gaming spinoffs seeded by James M. Ward) extending the corner of Nehwon Leiber left open. What sets it apart is the wit: wry, worldly, shadowed with real melancholy under the swagger, two mortal men aging across decades of misadventure rather than one invincible hero. Begin with Swords and Deviltry, whose Hugo- and Nebula-winning "Ill Met in Lankhmar" is the night the pair first cross blades and become inseparable — the doorway Leiber himself put first. Sources: [general knowledge — web unavailable this session]