by Fritz Leiber
The Mouser snatched up one-handed his unthonged climbing pike and thrust at the snow-sketched figure behind the sword.
The gray sword snaked around the pike and with a sudden sharp twist swept it from the Mouser’s fatigue-slack fingers.
The black tool, on which Glinthi the Artificer had expended all the evenings of the Month of the Weasel three years past, vanished into the silvery snowfall and space.
Hrissa backed against the wall frothing and snarling, a-tremble in every limb.
Fafhrd fumbled frantically for his ax, but his swollen fingers could not even unsnap the sheath binding its head to his belt.
The Mouser, enraged at the loss of his precious pike to the point where he cared not a whit whether his foe was invisible or not, drew Scalpel from its sheath and fiercely parried the gray sword as it came streaking in again.
A dozen parries he had to make and was pinked twice in the arm and pressed back against the wall almost like Hrissa, before he could take the measure of his foe, now out of the snowfall and wholly invisible, and go himself on the attack.
Then, glaring at a point a foot above the gray sword—a point where he judged his foe’s eyes to be (if his foe carried his eyes in his head)—he went stamping forward, beating at the gray blade, slipping Scalpel around it with the tiniest disengages, seeking to bind it with his own sword, and ever thrusting impetuously at invisible arm and trunk.
Three times he felt his blade strike flesh, and once it bent briefly against invisible bone.
His foe leaped back onto the invisible flier, making narrow footprints in the slush gathered there. The flier rocked.
In his fighting rage the Mouser almost followed his foe onto that invisible, living, pulsating platform, yet prudently stopped at the brink.
And well it was he did so, for the flier dropped away like a skate in flight from a shark, shaking its slush into the snowfall. There came a last burst of laughter more like a wail, fading off and down in the silvery murk.
The Mouser began to laugh himself, a shade hysterically, and retreated to the wall. There he wiped off his blade and felt the stickiness of invisible blood, and laughed a wild high laugh again.
Hrissa’s fur was still on end—and was a long time flattening.
Fafhrd quit trying to fumble out his ax and said seriously, “The girls couldn’t have been with him—we’d have seen their forms or footprints on the slush-backed flier. I think he’s jealous of us and works against ’em.”
The Mouser laughed—only foolishly now—for a third time.
The murk turned dark gray. They set about firing the brazier and making ready for night. Despite their hurts and supreme weariness, the shock and fright of the last encounter had excited new energy from them and raised their spirits and given them appetites. They feasted well on thin collops of kid frizzled in the resin-flames or cooked pale gray in water that, strangely, could be sipped without hurt almost while it boiled.
“Must be nearing the realm of the Gods,” Fafhrd muttered. “It’s said they joyously drink boiling wine—and walk hurtlessly through flames.”
“Fire is just as hot here, though,” the Mouser said dully.
“Yet the air seems to have less nourishment. On what do you suppose the Gods subsist?”
“They are ethereal and require neither air nor food,” Fafhrd suggested after a long frown of thinking.
“Yet you just now said they drink wine.”
“Everybody drinks wine,” Fafhrd asserted with a yawn, killing the discussion and also the Mouser’s dim, unspoken speculation as to whether the feebler air, pressing less strongly on heating liquid, let its bubbles escape more easily.
Power of movement began to return to Fafhrd’s right arm and his left was swelling no more. The Mouser salved and bandaged his own small wounds, then remembered to salve Hrissa’s pads and tuck into her boots a little pine-scented eiderdown tweaked from the arrow-holes in Fafhrd’s cloak.
When they were half laced up in their cloaks, Hrissa snuggled between them—and a few more precious resin-pellets dropped in the brazier as a bedtime luxury—Fafhrd got out a tiny jar of strong wine of Ilthmar, and they each took a sip of it, imagining those sunny vineyards and that hot, rich soil so far south.
A momentary flare from the brazier showed them the snow falling yet. A few rocks crashed nearby and a snowy avalanche hissed, then Stardock grew still in the frigid grip of night. The climbers’ aerie seemed most strange to them, set above every other peak in the Mountains of the Giants—and likely all Nehwon—yet walled with darkness like a tiny room.
The Mouser said softly, “Now we know what roosts in the Roosts. Do you suppose there are dozens of those invisible mantas carpeting around us on ledges like this, or a-hang from them? Why don’t they freeze? Or does someone stable them? And the invisible folk, what of them? No more can you call ’em mirage—you saw the sword, and I fought the man-thing at the other end of it. Yet invisible! How’s that possible?”
Fafhrd shrugged and then winced because it hurt both shoulders cruelly. “Made of some stuff like water or glass,” he hazarded. “Yet pliant and twisting the light less—and with no surface shimmer. You’ve seen sand and ashes made transparent by firing. Perhaps there’s some heatless way of firing monsters and men until they are invisible.”
“But how light enough to fly?” the Mouser asked.
“Thin beasts to match thin air,” Fafhrd guessed sleepily.
The Mouser said, “And then those deadly worms—and the Fiend knows what perils above.” He paused. “And yet we must still climb Stardock to the top, mustn’t we? Why?”
Fafhrd nodded. “To beat out Kranarch and Gnarfi…” he muttered. “To beat out my father…the mystery of it…the girls…O Mouser, could you stop here any more than you could stop after touching half of a woman?”
“You don’t mention diamonds anymore,” the Mouser noted. “Don’t you think we’ll find them?”
Fafhrd started another shrug and mumbled a curse that turned into a yawn.
The Mouser dug in his pouch to the bottom pocket and brought out the parchment and blowing on the brazier read it all by the resin’s last flaming:
Who mounts white Stardock, the Moon Tree,
Past worm and gnome and unseen bars,
Will win the key to luxury:
The Heart of Light, a pouch of stars.
The gods who once ruled all the world
Have made that peak their citadel,
From whence the stars were one time hurled
And paths lead on to Heav’n and Hell.
Come, heroes, past the Trollstep rocks.
Come, best of men, across the Waste.
For you, glory each door unlocks.
Delay not, up, and come in haste.
Who scales the Snow King’s citadel
Shall father his two daughters’ sons;
Though he must face foes fierce and fell,
His seed shall live while time still runs.
The resin burnt out. The Mouser said, “Well, we’ve met a worm and one unseen fellow who sought to bar our way—and two sightless witches who might be Snow King’s daughters for all I know. Gnomes now—they would be a change, wouldn’t they? You said something about ice gnomes, Fafhrd. What was it?”
He waited with an unnatural anxiety for Fafhrd’s answer. After a bit he began to hear it: soft regular snores.
The Mouser snarled soundlessly, his demon of restlessness now become a fury despite all his aches. He shouldn’t have thought of girls—or rather of one girl who was nothing but a taunting mask with pouting lips and eyes of black mystery seen across a fire.
Suddenly he felt stifled. He quickly unhooked his cloak and despite Hrissa’s questioning mew felt his way south along the ledge. Soon snow, sifting like ice needles on his flushed face, told him he was beyond the overhang. Then the snow stopped. Another overhang, he thought—but he had not moved. He strained his eyes upward, and there was the black expanse of Stardock’s topmost quarter si
lhouetted against a band of sky pale with the hidden moon and specked by a few faint stars. Behind him to the west, the snowstorm still obscured the sky.
He blinked his eyes and then he swore softly, for now the black cliff they must climb tomorrow was a-glow with soft scattered lights of violet and rose and palest green and amber. The nearest, which were still far above, looked tinily rectangular, like gleam-spilling windows seen from below.
It was as if Stardock were a great hostelry.
Then freezing flakes pinked his face again, and the band of sky narrowed to nothing. The snowfall had moved back against Stardock once more, hiding all stars and other lights.
The Mouser’s fury drained from him. Suddenly he felt very small and foolhardy and very, very cold. The mysterious vision of the lights remained in his mind, but muted, as if part of a dream. Most cautiously he crept back the way he had come, feeling the radiant warmth of Fafhrd and Hrissa and the burnt-out brazier just before he touched his cloak. He laced it around him and lay for a long time doubled up like a baby, his mind empty of everything except frigid blackness. At last he slumbered.
Next day started gloomy. The two men chafed and wrestled each other as they lay, to get the stiffness a little out of them and enough warmth in them to rise. Hrissa withdrew from between them limping and sullen.
At any rate, Fafhrd’s arms were recovered from their swelling and numbing, while the Mouser was hardly aware of his own arm’s little wounds.
They breakfasted on herb tea and honey and began climbing the Roosts in a light snowfall. This last pest stayed with them all morning except when gusty breezes blew it back from Stardock. On these occasions they could see the great smooth cliff separating the Roosts from the ultimate ledges of the Face. By the glimpses they got, the cliff looked to be without any climbing routes whatever, or any marks at all—so that Fafhrd laughed at the Mouser for a dreamer with his tale of windows spilling colored light—but finally as they neared the cliff’s base they began to distinguish what seemed to be a narrow crack—a hairline to vision—mounting its center.
They met none of the invisible flat fliers, either a-wing or a-perch, though whenever gusts blew strange gaps into the snowfall, the two adventurers would firm themselves on their perches and grip for their weapons, and Hrissa would snarl.
The wind slowed them little though chilling them much, for the rock of the Roosts was true.
And they still had to watch out for stony peltings, though these were fewer than yesterday, perhaps because so much of Stardock now lay below them.
They reached the base of the great cliff at the point where the crack began, which was a good thing since the snowfall had grown so heavy that a hunt for it would have been difficult.
To their joy, the crack proved to be another chimney, scarcely a yard across and not much more deep, and as knobbly inside with footholds as the cliff outside was smooth. Unlike yesterday’s chimney, it appeared to extend upward indefinitely without change of width, and as far as they could see there were no chockstones. In many ways it was like a rock ladder half sheltered from the snow. Even Hrissa could climb here, as on Obelisk Polaris.
They lunched on food warmed against their skins. They were afire with eagerness, yet forced themselves to take time to chew and sip. As they entered the chimney, Fafhrd going first, there came three faint growling booms—thunder perhaps and certainly ominous, yet the Mouser laughed.
With never-failing footholds and opposite wall for back-brace, the climbing was easy, except for the drain on main strength, which required rather frequent halts to gulp down fresh stores of the thin air. Only twice did the chimney narrow so that Fafhrd had to climb for a short stretch with his body outside it; the Mouser, slighter framed, could stay inside.
It was an intoxicating experience, almost. Even as the day grew darker from the thickening snowfall and as the crackling booms returned sharper and stronger—thunder now for sure, since they were heralded by brief palings up and down the chimney—snow-muted lightning flashes—the Mouser and Fafhrd felt as merry as children mounting a mysterious twisty stairway in a haunted castle. They even wasted a little breath in joking calls which went echoing faintly up and down the rugged shaft as it paled and gloomed with the lightning.
But then the shaft grew by degrees almost as smooth as the outer cliff and at the same time it began gradually to widen, first a handbreadth, then another, then a finger more, so that they had to mount more perilously, bracing shoulders against one wall and boots against the other and so “walking” up with pushes and heaves. The Mouser drew up Hrissa, and the ice-cat crouched on his pitching, rocking chest—no inconsiderable burden. Yet both men still felt quite jolly—so that the Mouser began to wonder if there might not be some actual intoxicant in air near Heaven.
Being a head or two taller than the Mouser, Fafhrd was better equipped for this sort of climbing and was still able to go on at the moment when the Mouser realized that his body was stretched almost straight between shoulders and boot soles—with Hrissa a-crouch on him like a traveler on a little bridge. He could mount no farther—and was hazy about how he had managed to come this far.
Fafhrd came down like a great spider at the Mouser’s call and seemed not much impressed by the latter’s plight—in fact, a lightning flash showed his great bearded face all a-grin.
“Abide you here a bit,” he said. “’Tis not so far to the top. I think I glimpsed it the last flash but one. I’ll mount and draw you up, putting all the rope between you and me. There’s a crack by your head—I’ll knock in a spike for safety’s sake. Meanwhile, rest.”
Whereupon Fafhrd did all of these things so swiftly and was on his upward way again so soon that the Mouser forebore to utter any of the sardonic remarks churning inside his rigid belly.
Successive lightning flashes showed the Northerner’s long-limbed form growing smaller at a gratifyingly rapid rate until he looked hardly bigger than a trap spider at the end of his tube. Another flash and he was gone, but whether because he had reached the top or passed a bend in the chimney the Mouser couldn’t be sure.
The rope kept paying upward, however, until there was only a small loop below the Mouser. He was aching abominably now and was also very cold, but gritted his teeth against the pain. Hrissa chose this moment to prowl up and down her small human bridge, restlessly. There was a blinding lightning flash and a crash of thunder that shook Stardock. Hrissa cringed.
The rope grew taut, tugging at the belt of the Mouser, who started to put his weight on it, holding Hrissa to his chest, but then decided to wait for Fafhrd’s call. This was a good decision on his part, for just then the rope went slack and began to fall on the Mouser’s belly like a stream of black water. Hrissa crouched away from it on his face. It came pelting endlessly, but finally its upper end hit the Mouser under the breastbone with a snap. The only good thing was that Fafhrd didn’t come hurtling down with it. Another blinding mountain-shaking crash showed the upper chimney utterly empty.
“Fafhrd!” the Mouser called. “Fafhrd!” There came back only the echo.
The Mouser thought for a bit, then reached up and felt by his ear for the spike Fafhrd had struck in with a single offhand slap of his ax-hammer. Whatever had happened to Fafhrd, nothing seemed to remain to do but tie rope to spike and descend by it to where the chimney was easier.
The spike came out at the first touch and went clattering shrilly down the chimney until a new thunderblast drowned the small sound.
The Mouser decided to “walk” down the chimney. After all, he’d come up that way the last few score of yards.
The first attempt to move a leg told him his muscles were knotted by cramp. He’d never be able to bend his leg and straighten it again without losing his purchase and falling.
The Mouser thought of Glinthi’s pike, lost in white space, and he slew that thought.
Hrissa crouched on his chest and gazed down into his face with an expression the next levin-glare showed to be sad yet critical, as if to ask, “Whe
re is this vaunted human ingenuity?”
Fafhrd had barely eased himself out of the chimney onto the wide, deep rock-roofed ledge at its top, when a door two yards high, a yard wide, and two spans thick had silently opened in the rock at the back of the ledge.
The contrast was most remarkable between the roughness of that rock and the ruler-flat smoothness of the dark stone forming the thick sides of the door and the lintel, jambs, and threshold of the doorway.
Soft pink light spilled out and with it a perfume whose heavy fumes were cargoed with dreams of pleasure barges afloat in a rippling sunset sea.
Those musky narcotic fumes, along with the alcoholic headiness of the thin air, almost made Fafhrd forget his purpose, but touching the black rope was like touching Hrissa and the Mouser at its other end. He unknotted it from his belt and prepared to secure it around a stout rock pillar beside the open door. To get enough rope to make a good knot he had to draw it up quite tight.
But the dream-freighted fumes grew thicker, and he no longer felt the Mouser and Hrissa in the rope. Indeed, he began to forget his two comrades altogether.
And then a silvery voice—a voice he knew well from having heard it laugh once and once chuckle—called, “Come in, barbarian. Come in to me.”
The end of the black rope slipped from his fingers unnoticed and hissed softly across the rock and down the chimney.
Stooping a little, he went through the doorway which silently closed behind him just in time to shut out the Mouser’s desperate call.
He was in a room lit by pink globes hanging at the level of his head. Their soft warm radiance colored the hangings and rugs of the room, but especially the pale spread of the great bed that was its only furniture.
Beside the bed stood a slim woman whose black silk robe concealed all of her except her face, yet did not disguise her body’s sleek curves. A black lace mask hid the rest of her.
She looked at Fafhrd for seven thudding heartbeats, then sat down on the bed. A slender arm and hand clothed all in black lace came from under her robe and patted the spread beside her and rested there. Her mask never wavered from Fafhrd’s face.