The Incompleat Nifft

THIS TIME,
THEY WOULD MAKE A KILLING

Join 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.

"[Shea combines] the exotic style of lack Vance plus the ingenuity of Fritz Leiber's Gray Mouser stories to produce an extravagant quest novel." --The Encyclopedia of Fantasy

". . . dark, hallucinatory ... impressive work." --The Science Fiction Source Book 

Paperback

Cover art by Gary Ruddell

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

First printing, May 2000

Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN: 0-671-57869-3

Copyright (c) 2000 by Michael Shea

Nifft the Lean copyright (c) 1982; The Mines of Behemoth copyright (c) 1997; both by Michael Shea

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

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