by Fritz Leiber
And with that he unclipped from his pack with reckless speed the thick black bamboo pike or crook and began cursingly with numb fingers to draw out and let snap into place its telescoping sections until it was four times its original length.
This tool of technical climbing, which indeed the Mouser had brought all the way from Lankhmar, had been a matter of dispute between them the whole trip, Fafhrd asserting it was a tricksy toy not worth the packing.
Now, however, Fafhrd made no comment, but merely coiled up his grapnel and thrust his hands into his wolfskin jerkin against his sides to warm them and, mild-eyed, watched the Mouser’s furious activity. Hrissa shifted to a perch closer to Fafhrd and crouched stoically.
But when the Mouser shakily thrust the narrower end of his black tool toward the bulge above, Fafhrd reached out a hand to help him steady it, yet could not refrain from saying, “If you think to get a good enough hold with the crook on the rim to shinny up that stick—”
“Quiet, you loutish kibitzer!” the Mouser snarled and with Fafhrd’s help thrust pike-end into a pock in the rock hardly a finger’s length from the rim. Then he seated the spiked foot of the pole in a small, deep hollow just above his head. Next he snapped out two short recessed lever-arms from the base of the pole and began to rotate them. It soon became clear that they controlled a great screw hidden in the pole, for the latter lengthened until it stood firmly between the two pocks in the rock, while the stiff black shaft itself bent a little.
At that instant a sliver of rock, being pressed by the pole, broke off from the rim. The pole thrummed as it straightened and the Mouser, screaming a curse, slipped off his holds and fell.
It was good then that the rope between the two comrades was short and that the spikes of Fafhrd’s boots were seated firmly, like so many demon-forged dagger-points, in the rock of his footholds—for as the strain came suddenly on Fafhrd’s belt and on his rope-gripping left hand, he took it without plummeting after the Mouser, only bending his knees a little and grunting softly, while his right hand snatched hold of the vibrating pole and saved it.
The Mouser had not even fallen far enough to drag Hrissa from her perch, though the rope almost straightened between them. The ice-cat, her tufted neck bent sharply between foreleg and chest, peered down with great curiosity at the dangling man.
His face was ashen. Fafhrd made no mark of that, but simply handed him the black pole, saying, “It’s a good tool. I’ve screwed it back short. Seat it in another pock and try again.”
Soon the pole stood firm between the hollow by the Mouser’s head and a pock a hand’s width from the rim. The bowlike bend in the pole faced downward. Then they put the Mouser first on the rope, and he went climbing up and out along the pole, hanging from it back downward, his boot-edges finding tiny holds on the pole’s section-shoulders—out into and over the vast, pale blue-gray space which had so lately dizzied him.
The pole began to bend a little more with the Mouser’s weight, the pike-end slipping a finger’s span in the upper pock with a horrible tiny grating sound, but Fafhrd gave the screw another turn, and the pole held firm.
Fafhrd and Hrissa watched the Mouser reach its end, where he paused briefly. Then they saw him reach up his left arm until it was out of sight to the elbow above the rim, meanwhile gripping with his right hand the crook and twining his legs around the shaft. He appeared to feel about with his left hand and find something. Then he moved out and up still further and very slowly his head and after it, in a sudden swift sweep, his right arm went out of sight above the rim.
For several long moments they saw only the bottom half of the bent Mouser, his dark crinkly-soled boots twined securely to the end of the pole. Then, rather slowly, like a gray snail, and with a final push of one boot against the top of the crook, he went entirely out of sight.
Fafhrd slowly paid out rope after him.
After some time the Mouser’s voice, quite ghostly yet clear, came down to them: “Hola! I’ve got the rope anchored around a boss big as a tree stump. Send up Hrissa.”
So Fafhrd put Hrissa on the rope ahead of him, knotting it to her harness with a sheepshank.
Hrissa fought desperately for a moment against being swung into space, but as soon as it was done hung deathly still. Then as she was drawn slowly up, Fafhrd’s knot began to slip. The ice-cat swiftly snatched at the rope with her teeth and gripped it far back between her jaws. The moment she came near the rim, her clawed mittens were ready, and she scrabbled and was dragged out of sight.
Soon word came down from the Mouser that Hrissa was safe and Fafhrd might follow. He frowningly tightened the screw another half turn, though the pole creaked ominously, and then very gently climbed out along it. The Mouser now kept the rope taut from above, but for the first stretch it could hardly take more than a few pounds of Fafhrd’s weight off the pole.
The upper spike once again grated horribly a bit in its pock, but it still held firm. Helped more by the rope now, Fafhrd got his hands and head over the rim.
What he saw was a smooth, gentle rock slope, which could be climbed by friction, and at the top of it the Mouser and Hrissa standing backgrounded by blue sky and gilded by sunlight.
Soon he stood beside them.
The Mouser said, “Fafhrd, when we get back to Lankhmar remind me to give Glinthi the Artificer thirteen diamonds from the pouch of them we’ll find on Stardock’s hat: one for each section and joint of my climbing pole, one each for the spikes at the ends and two for each screw.”
“Are there two screws?” Fafhrd asked respectfully.
“Yes, one at each end,” the Mouser told him and then made Fafhrd brace the rope for him so that he could climb down the slope and, bending all his upper body down over the rim, shorten the pole by rotating its upper screw until he was able to drag it triumphantly back over the top with him.
As the Mouser telescoped its sections together again, Fafhrd said to him seriously, “You must thong it to your belt as I do my ax. We must not chance losing Glinthi’s help on the rest of this journey.”
Throwing back their hoods and opening their tunics wide to the hot sun, Fafhrd and the Mouser looked around, while Hrissa luxuriously stretched and worked her slim limbs and neck and body, the white fur of which hid her bruises. Both men were somewhat exalted by the thin air and filled brain-high with the ease of mind and spirit that comes with a great danger skillfully conquered.
Rather to their amazement, the southward swinging sun had climbed barely halfway to noon. Perils which had seemed demihours long had lasted minutes only.
The summit of Obelisk Polaris was a great rolling field of pale rock too big to measure by Lankhmar acres. They had arrived near the southwest corner, and the gray-tinted stone meadow seemed to stretch east and north almost indefinitely. Here and there were hummocks and hollows, but they swelled and dipped most gently. There were a few scattered large boulders, not many, while off to the east were darker indistinct shapes which might be bushes and small trees footed in cracks filled with blown dirt.
“What lies east of the mountain chain?” the Mouser asked. “More Cold Waste?”
“Our clan never journeyed there,” Fafhrd answered. He frowned. “Some taboo on the whole area, I think. Mist always masked the east on my father’s great climbs, or so he told us.”
“We could have a look now,” the Mouser suggested.
Fafhrd shook his head. “Our course lies there,” he said, pointing northeast, where Stardock rose like a giantess standing tall but asleep, or feigning sleep, looking seven times as big and high at least as she had before the Obelisk hid her top two days ago.
The Mouser said, a shade dolefully, “All our brave work scaling the Obelisk has only made Stardock higher. Are you sure there’s not another peak, perhaps invisible, on top of her?”
Fafhrd nodded without taking his eyes off her, who was empress without consort of the Mountains of the Giants. Her Tresses had grown to great swelling rivers of snow, and now the two adventurers could see
faint stirrings in them—avalanches slipping and tumbling.
The Southern Tress came down in a great dipping double curve toward the northwest corner of the mighty rock summit on which they stood.
At the top, Stardock’s corniced snow hat, its upper rim glittering with sunlight as if it were edged around with diamonds, seemed to nod toward them a trifle more than it ever had before, and the demurely-eyed Face with it, like a great lady hinting at possible favors.
But the gauzy, long pale veils of the Grand and Petty Pennons no longer streamed from her Hat. The air atop Stardock must be as still at the moment as it was where they stood upon the Obelisk.
“What devil’s luck that Kranarch and Gnarfi should tackle the north wall the one day in eight the gale fails!” Fafhrd cursed. “But ’twill be their destruction yet—yes, and of their two shaggy-clad henchmen too. This calm can’t hold.”
“I recall now,” the Mouser remarked, “that when we caroused with ’em in Illik-Ving, Gnarfi, drunken, claimed he could whistle up winds—had learned the trick from his grandmother—and could whistle ’em down too, which is more to the point.”
“The more reason for us to hasten!” Fafhrd cried, upping his pack and slipping his big arms through the wide shoulder straps. “On, Mouser! Up, Hrissa! We’ll have a bite and sup before the snow ridge.”
“You mean we must tackle that freezing, treacherous problem today?” demurred the Mouser, who would dearly have loved to strip and bake in the sun.
“Before noon!” Fafhrd decreed. And with that he set them a stiff walking pace straight north, keeping close to the summit’s west edge, as if to countermand from the start any curiosity the Mouser might have about a peek to the east. The latter followed with only minor further protests; Hrissa came on limpingly, lagging at first far behind, but catching up as her limp went and her cat-zest for newness grew.
And so they marched across the great, strange rolling granite plain of Obelisk’s top, patched here and there with limestone stretches white as marble. Its sun-drenched silence and uniformity became eerie after a bit. The shallowness of its hollows was deceptive: Fafhrd noted several in which battalions of armed men might have hidden a-crouch, unseen until one came within a spear’s cast.
The longer they strode along, the more closely Fafhrd studied the rock his hobnails clashed. Finally he paused to point out a strangely rippled stretch.
“I’d swear that once was seabottom,” he said softly.
The Mouser’s eyes narrowed. Thinking of the great invisible fishlike flier they had seen last evening, its raylike form undulating through the snowfall, he felt gooseflesh crawling on him.
Hrissa slunk past them, head a-weave.
Soon they passed the last boulder, a huge one, and saw, scarcely a bowshot ahead, the glitter of snow.
The Mouser said, “The worst thing about mountain climbing is that the easy parts go so quickly.”
“Hist!” warned Fafhrd, sprawling down suddenly like a great four-legged water beetle and putting his cheek to the rock. “Do you hear it, Mouser!”
Hrissa snarled, staring about, and her white fur bristled.
The Mouser started to stoop, but realized he wouldn’t have to, so fast the sound was coming on: a general high-pitched drumming, as of five hundred fiends rippling their giant thick fingernails on a great stone drumhead.
Then, without pause, there came surging straight toward them over the nearest rock swelling to the southeast, a great wide-fronted stampede of goats, so packed together and their fur so glossy white that they seemed for a flash like an onrushing of living snow. Even the great curving horns of their leaders were ivory-hued. The Mouser noted that a stretch of the sunny air just above their center shimmered and wavered as it will above a fire. Then he and Fafhrd were racing back toward the last boulder with Hrissa bounding ahead.
Behind them the devil’s tattoo of the stampede grew louder and louder.
They reached the boulder and vaulted atop it, where Hrissa already crouched, hardly a pounding heartbeat before the white horde. And well it was that Fafhrd had his ax out the instant they won there, for the midmost of the great billies sprang high, forelegs tucked up and head bowed to present his creamy horns—so close Fafhrd could see their splintered tips. But in that same instant Fafhrd got him in his snowy shoulder with a great swashing deep-cleaving blow so heavy that the beast was carried past them to the side and crashed on the short slope leading down to the rim of the west wall.
Then the white stampede was splitting around the great boulder, the animals so near and packed that there was no longer room for leaping, and the din of their hooves and the gasping and now the frightened bleating was horrendous, and the caprid stench was stifling, while the boulder rocked with their passage.
In the worst of the bruit there was a momentary downrushing of air, briefly dispelling the stench, as something passed close above their heads, rippling the sky like a long flapping blanket of fluid glass, while through the clangor could be heard for a moment a harsh, hateful laughter.
The lesser tongue of the stampede passed between the boulder and the rim, and of these goats many went tumbling over the edge with bleats like screams of the damned, carrying with them the body of the great billy Fafhrd had maimed.
Then as sudden in its departure as a snow squall that dismasts a ship in the Frozen Sea, the stampede was past them and pounding south, swinging east somewhat from the deadly rim, with the last few of the goats, chiefly nannies and kids, bounding madly after.
Pointing his arm toward the sun as if for a sword-thrust, the Mouser cried furiously, “See there, where the beams twist all askew above the herd! It’s the same flier as just now overpassed us and last night we saw in the snowfall—the flier who raised the stampede and whose riders guided it against us! Oh, damn the two deceitful ghostly bitches, luring us on to a goaty destruction stinking worse than a temple orgy in the City of Ghouls!”
“I thought this laughter was far deeper,” Fafhrd objected. “It was not the girls.”
“So they have a deep-throated pimp—does that improve them in your eyes? Or your great flapping love-struck ears?” the Mouser demanded angrily.
The drumming of the stampede had died away even swifter than it had come, and in the new-fallen silence they heard now a happy half-obstructed growling. Hrissa, springing off the boulder at stampede-end, had struck down a fat kid and was tearing at its bloodied white neck.
“Ah, I can smell it broiling now!” the Mouser cried with a great smile, his preoccupations altering in less than an instant. “Good Hrissa! Fafhrd, if those be treelets and bushes and grass to the east—and they must be that, for what else feeds these goats?—there’s sure to be dead wood—why, there may even be mint!—and we can…”
“You’ll eat the flesh raw for lunch or not at all!” Fafhrd decreed fiercely. “Are we to risk the stampede again? Or give the sniggering flier a chance to marshal against us some snow lions?—which are sure to be here too, to prey on the goats. And are we to present Kranarch and Gnarfi the summit of Stardock on a diamond-studded silver platter?—if this devil’s lull holds tomorrow too and they be industrious strong climbers, not nice-bellied sluggards like one I could name!”
So, with only a gripe or two more from the Mouser, the kid was swiftly bled, gutted and skinned, and some of its spine-meat and haunches wrapped and packed for supper. Hrissa drank some more blood and ate half the liver and then followed the Mouser and Fafhrd as they set off north toward the snow ridge. The two men were chewing thin-sliced peppered collops of raw kid, but striding swiftly and keeping a wary eye behind for another stampede.
The Mouser expected now at last to get a view of the eastern depths, by peering east along the north wall of Obelisk Polaris, but here again he was foiled by the first great swell of the snow-saddle.
However, the northern view was fearsomely majestic. A full half league below them now and seen almost vertically on, the White Waterfall went showering down mysteriously, twinkling even in the
shadow.
The ridge by which they must travel first curved up a score of yards, then dipped smoothly down to a long snow-saddle another score of yards below them, then slowly curved up into the South Tress, down which they could now plainly see avalanches trickling and tumbling.
It was easy to see how the northeast gale, blowing almost continually but missing the Ladder, would greatly pile up snow between the taller mountain and the Obelisk—but whether the rocky connection between the two mountains underlay the snow by only a few yards or by as much as a quarter league was impossible to know.
“We must rope again,” Fafhrd decreed. “I’ll go first and cut steps for us across the west slope.”
“What need we steps in this calm!” the Mouser demanded. “Or to go by the west slope? You just don’t want me to see the east, do you? The top of the ridge is broad enough to drive two carts across abreast.”
“The ridge-top in the wind’s path almost certainly over-hangs emptiness to the east and would break away,” Fafhrd explained. “Look you, Mouser; do I know more about snow and ice or do you?”
“I once crossed the Bones of the Old Ones with you,” the Mouser retorted, shrugging. “There was snow there, I recall.”
“Pooh, the mere spillings of a lady’s powderbox compared to this. No, Mouser, on this stretch my word is law.”
“Very well,” the Mouser agreed.
So they roped up rather close—in order, Fafhrd, Mouser, and Hrissa—and without more ado Fafhrd donned his gloves and thonged his ax to his wrist and began cutting steps for them around the shoulder of the snow swell.
It was rather slow work, for under a dusting of powder snow the stuff was hard, and for each step Fafhrd must make at least two cuts—first an in-chopping backhand one to make the step, then a down-chop to clear it. And as the slope grew steeper, he must make the steps somewhat closer together. The steps he made were rather small, at least for his great boots, but they were sure.