A woman had been born nude and whole,, though when she moved she still gave of a gust of cold like wind off a glacier. She spoke:"Hail to you, Northron Nifft, call also Nifft the Lean, You and Haldar both are known to me— your qualities of craft and soul. It is ypur luck that you chose this camp, and mine that I reached you in it. Know, gentle thieves, that your fortune has changed. I am your gate to fame, to wealth and power past the tongue’s telling. If you go through me you will go, at first, tbrough terrible darkness, but at the last you will go in brightest daylight, amid pomp and acclamation."I am Dalissem I was a tempie-child of Lurkna Downs. I have been dead these seven years.“I come to offer what you seek. I'll give you the Wizard's Key. For this, you nust bring down to me one living man, one ma stilldon to me to where I dwell in the place of the Raging Dead.

PROSPEROUS HAGIA'S VAULTS BRIMMED WITH GOLD. HER WAREHOUSES BULGED WITH THE GOODS OF THE SOUTHERN SEAS. SHE HAD THE SPIDER-GOD TO THANK FOR HER PROSPERITY.But beneath Hagia's ancient bargain with the A'Rak lay the direst danger. That mercenary kingdom had mortgaged its soul in its pact with the giant arachnoid. When the note fell due, death of the most hideous kind awaited the multitudes of that affluent and bustling nation.As Hagia's debt falls due, two foreigners arrive in Big Quay, her capital: Lagademe and her team, foremost among the world's Nuncios -- deliverers of anything to anywhere -- and Nifft the Lean, thief and rogue extraordinaire.Nifft and Lagademe, strangers to one another at the outset, will soon be struggling side by side for their lives -- and a nation's survival -- against the most hideous foe in the annals of Sword and Sorcery fiction.

THIS TIME, THEY WOULD MAKE A KILLINGJoin master thief Nifft the Lean with his companion-at-arms, mighty barbarian Barnar Hammer-Hand, as they trust to their wits and their luck. Once Nifft and Barnar were hired by the ghost of a dead woman to kidnap the man who betrayed her and drag him down to hell to join her. A simple task -- or so they thought at first....Another time, the pair lucked into an even more lucrative proposition, when they were shipwrecked on the way to work in Costard's sap mine -- very dangerous and sometimes nauseating work far below ground -- and were hired by Bunt to bring back twenty gills of the ichor exuded only by the monstrous insectile queen. It seemed like easy money -- they wouldn't have to go to hell Of course, the best laid plans sometimes do go astray, but this time they were sure they would...make a killing.Publisher's Note: Parts of this work were previously published as "Nifft the Lean" and "The Mines of Behemoth."

Bramt Hex was weary of student life. Although an inframagus of no small standing—or girth—he couldn’t face a future dining on the slender means of a scholar. A hastily contracted alliance with the widow of ruthless homunculus magnate Orgle Poon soon fell through when he bungled the sale of her brothel to an irritable demon. His body sold to the skin-farms, Bramt had little to hope for. The hills were full of vampires and he had no money to bribe the giant Karbies who guarded him. But when a passing wizard freed him, Hex resolved-by hook or by crook—to make his way to Yana. There he would receive the touch of Undying—and could begin to map the world…

With eight psychotropic visions of terror and transformation set in the urban tides pools of San Francisco, COPPING SQUID weaves a tapestry of otherworldly menace shot through with threads of awe-inspiring majesty: of invisible outsiders and self-medicting seekers whose desperate prayers and hidden rituals lead them to behold their warped reflections in the all-seeing eyes of the secret masters of creation. With the deceptive ease and streetwise enlightenment of a weird storytelling master, Michael Shea fearlessly sounds the unplumbed depths of the Cthulhu Mythos to witness revelations from which traditional cosmic horror has always averted its dark-adapted gaze.