OK ... it's disembodied heads for Oyceter! (Because it turned out that for one of them, the hardware involved isn't a spike, per se ... pooh!)
The first one is in the classic Fafhrd and Grey Mouser novella "Adept's Gambit." In this, the intrepid adventuring duo have been shifted from their usual fantasy stomping grounds to Earth - specifically, the post-Alexandrian Middle East. They've also been afflicted with a curse that causes any woman embraced by the Mouser to turn into a giant snail and any woman embraced by Fahrd to turn into a pig - a major problem for this pair of womanizers. Their quest to dispel the curse gets them involved with the lissome Ahura Devadoris and her sickly (but magically gifted) twin brother Anra Devadoris - plus Anra's mentor, a sinister fellow known only as the Old Man Without a Beard.
Just short of the story's climax, the heroes and Ahura are exploring Anra's sinister stronghold, the Castle Called Mist, when they discover -
... an inner window, set level with the floor, and in that window they saw a face that seemed to float bodyless in the thick fog. Its feature defied recognition - it might have been a distillation of all the ancient, disillusioned faces in the world. There was no beard below the sunken cheeks.
Coming close as they dared, they saw that it was perhaps not entirely bodyless or without support. There was the ghostly suggestion of tatters of clothing or flesh trailing off, a pulsating sack that might have been a lung, and silver chains with hooks or claws.
Then the one eye remaining to that shameful fragment opened and fixed upon Ahura, and the shrunken lips twisted themslves into the caricature of a smile.
"Like you, Ahura," the fragment murmured in the highest of falsettos, "He sent me on an errand I did not want to run."
More recently, I reread (and blogged) Mary Gentle's early novel Rats and Gargoyles, in which Theodret, the Bishop of Trees (a rather pleasant old codger, although his sect is considered disreputable) and Master Candia of the University of Crime (a much more respectable person) pay a visit to one of the living gods, the Decans, that walk their alternate Earth. The message they deliver is not well-received. Candia is later found wandering the streets, filthy and half-mad. The Bishop is eventually found in the Decan's Fane by Candia, another of his University colleagues, and the mage known as the White Crow:
[The White Crow] stepped into the white stone cell. Its low step caught her foot. She stumbled, staring straight ahead.
Stark against her sight, an iron spike curved up out of the masonry wall. Blood and pale fluids had dried in streaks below it. The White Crow stared at the head of a man impaled on an iron spike. Undecayed, spots of blood still dripped from the neck-stump to the stained floor. White hair flowed to where, red-dappled, it stuck to drying knotes of vertebrae, slashed cords and tendons.
Only the head: the cell held no truncated body.
Dappled light shifted, gold and green. For a second the White Crow sense the rush of branches, birds, steps through leaf-mold. A shriek of ripped wood echoed, the light shifting. She knelt, staring levelly at the creased labile face.
At his open conscious eyes ... .
"Leave ... here ... ."
She shivered. Breath echoed back from the stone behind her, forced into painful speech: an old man's weary voice.
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OK ... it's disembodied heads for Oyceter! (Because it turned out that for one of them, the hardware involved isn't a spike, per se ... pooh!)
The first one is in the classic Fafhrd and Grey Mouser novella "Adept's Gambit." In this, the intrepid adventuring duo have been shifted from their usual fantasy stomping grounds to Earth - specifically, the post-Alexandrian Middle East. They've also been afflicted with a curse that causes any woman embraced by the Mouser to turn into a giant snail and any woman embraced by Fahrd to turn into a pig - a major problem for this pair of womanizers. Their quest to dispel the curse gets them involved with the lissome Ahura Devadoris and her sickly (but magically gifted) twin brother Anra Devadoris - plus Anra's mentor, a sinister fellow known only as the Old Man Without a Beard.
Just short of the story's climax, the heroes and Ahura are exploring Anra's sinister stronghold, the Castle Called Mist, when they discover -
... an inner window, set level with the floor, and in that window they saw a face that seemed to float bodyless in the thick fog. Its feature defied recognition - it might have been a distillation of all the ancient, disillusioned faces in the world. There was no beard below the sunken cheeks.
Coming close as they dared, they saw that it was perhaps not entirely bodyless or without support. There was the ghostly suggestion of tatters of clothing or flesh trailing off, a pulsating sack that might have been a lung, and silver chains with hooks or claws.
Then the one eye remaining to that shameful fragment opened and fixed upon Ahura, and the shrunken lips twisted themslves into the caricature of a smile.
"Like you, Ahura," the fragment murmured in the highest of falsettos, "He sent me on an errand I did not want to run."
More recently, I reread (and blogged) Mary Gentle's early novel Rats and Gargoyles, in which Theodret, the Bishop of Trees (a rather pleasant old codger, although his sect is considered disreputable) and Master Candia of the University of Crime (a much more respectable person) pay a visit to one of the living gods, the Decans, that walk their alternate Earth. The message they deliver is not well-received. Candia is later found wandering the streets, filthy and half-mad. The Bishop is eventually found in the Decan's Fane by Candia, another of his University colleagues, and the mage known as the White Crow:
[The White Crow] stepped into the white stone cell. Its low step caught her foot. She stumbled, staring straight ahead.
Stark against her sight, an iron spike curved up out of the masonry wall. Blood and pale fluids had dried in streaks below it. The White Crow stared at the head of a man impaled on an iron spike. Undecayed, spots of blood still dripped from the neck-stump to the stained floor. White hair flowed to where, red-dappled, it stuck to drying knotes of vertebrae, slashed cords and tendons.
Only the head: the cell held no truncated body.
Dappled light shifted, gold and green. For a second the White Crow sense the rush of branches, birds, steps through leaf-mold. A shriek of ripped wood echoed, the light shifting. She knelt, staring levelly at the creased labile face.
At his open conscious eyes ... .
"Leave ... here ... ."
She shivered. Breath echoed back from the stone behind her, forced into painful speech: an old man's weary voice.