Swords in the Mist (Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, #3)

by Fritz Leiber

Then there were things that Nikri, body slave to the infamous False Laodice, told the cook while she anointed the bruises of her latest beating. Things concerning two strangers who visited her mistress, and the carousal her mistress proposed to them, and how they escaped the black eunuch scimitarmen she had set to slay them when the carousal was done. “They were magicians, both of them,” Nikri averred, “for at the peak of the doings they transformed my lady into a hideous, wiggly-horned sow, a horrid chimera of snail and swine. But that wasn’t the worst, for they stole her chest of aphrodisiac wines. When she discovered that the demon mummia was gone with which she’d hoped to stir the lusts of Ptolemy, she screamed in rage and took her back-scratcher to me. Ow, but that hurts!”