by Fritz Leiber
He shouldered out of his pack and unbuckled his ax belt.
The Mouser finished pounding all the thin blade of his dagger into the crack by his ear, using the firestone from his pouch for hammer, so that sparks showered from every cramped stroke of stone against pommel—small lightning flashes to match the greater flares still chasing up and down the chimney, while their thunder crashed an obbligato to the Mouser’s taps. Hrissa crouched on his ankles, and from time to time the Mouser glared at her, as if to say, “Well, cat?”
A gust of snow-freighted wind roaring up the chimney momentarily lifted the lean shaggy beast a span above him and almost blew the Mouser loose, but he tightened his pushing muscles still more and the bridge, arching upward a trifle, held firm.
He had just finished knotting an end of the black rope around the dagger’s crossguard and grip—and his fingers and forearms were almost useless with fatigue—when a window two feet high and five wide silently opened in the back of the chimney, its thick rock shutter sliding aside, not a span away from the Mouser’s inward shoulder.
A red glow sprang from the window and somewhat illuminated four faces with piggy black eyes and with low hairless domes above.
The Mouser considered them. They were all four of extreme ugliness, he decided dispassionately. Only their wide white teeth, showing between their grinning lips which almost joined ear to swinish ear, had any claim to beauty.
Hrissa sprang at once through the red window and disappeared. The two faces between which she jumped did not flicker a black button-eye.
Then eight short brawny arms came out and easily pried the Mouser out and lifted him inside. He screamed faintly from a sudden increase in the agony of his cramps. He was aware of thick dwarfish bodies clad in hairy black jerkins and breeks—and one in a black hairy skirt—but all with thick-nailed splay-feet bare. Then he fainted.
When he came to, it was because he was being punishingly massaged on a hard table, his body naked and slick with warm oil. He was in a low, ill-lit chamber and still closely surrounded by the four dwarves, as he could tell from the eight horny hands squeezing and thumping his muscles before he ever opened his eyes.
The dwarf kneading his right shoulder and banging the top of his spine crinkled his warty eyelids and bared his beautiful white teeth bigger than a giant’s in what might be intended for a friendly grin. Then he said in an atrocious Mingol patois, “I am Bonecracker. This is my wife Gibberfat. Cosseting your body on the larboard side are my brothers Legcruncher and Breakskull. Now drink this wine and follow me.”
The wine stung, yet dispelled the Mouser’s dizziness, and it was certainly a blessing to be free of the murderous massage—and also apparently of the cramp-lumps in his muscles.
Bonecracker and Gibberfat helped him off the slab while Legcruncher and Breakskull rubbed him quickly down with rough towels. The warm low-ceilinged room rocked dizzily for a moment; then he felt wondrous fine.
Bonecracker waddled off into the dimness beyond the smoky torches. With never a question the Mouser followed the dwarf. Or were these Fafhrd’s ice gnomes? he wondered.
Bonecracker pulled aside heavy drapes in the dark. Amber light fanned out. The Mouser stepped from rock-roughness onto down-softness. The drapes swished to behind him.
He was alone in a chamber mellowly lit by hanging globes like great topazes—yet he guessed they would bounce aside like puffballs if touched. There was a large wide couch and beyond it a low table against the arras-hung wall with an ivory stool set before it. Above the table was a great silver mirror, while on it were fantastic small bottles and many tiny ivory jars.
No, the room was not altogether empty. Hrissa, sleekly groomed, lay curled in a far corner. She was not watching the Mouser, however, but a point above the stool.
The Mouser felt a shiver creeping on him, yet not altogether one of fear.
A dab of palest green leaped from one of the jars to the point Hrissa was watching and vanished there. But then he saw a streak of reflected green appear in the mirror. The riddlesome maneuver was repeated, and soon in the mirror’s silver there hung a green mask, somewhat clouded by the silver’s dullness.
Then the mask vanished from the mirror and simultaneously reappeared unblurred hanging in the air above the ivory stool. It was the mask the Mouser knew achingly well—narrow chin, high-arched cheeks, straight nose and forehead.
The pouty wine-dark lips opened a little and a soft throaty voice asked, “Does my visage displease you, man of Lankhmar?”
“You jest cruelly, O Princess,” the Mouser replied, drawing on all his aplomb and sketching a courtier’s bow, “for you are Beauty’s self.”
Slim fingers, half outlined now in pale green, dipped into the unguent jar and took up a more generous dab.
The soft throaty voice, that so well matched half the laughter he had once heard in a snowfall, now said, “You shall judge all of me.”
Fafhrd woke in the dark and touched the girl beside him. As soon as he knew she was awake too, he grasped her by the hips. When he felt her body stiffen, he lifted her into the air and held her above him as he lay flat on his back.
She was wondrous light, as if made of pastry or eiderdown, yet when he laid her beside him again, her flesh felt as firm as any, though smoother than most.
“Let us have a light, Hirriwi, I beg you,” he said.
“That were unwise, Faffy,” she answered in a voice like a curtain of tiny silver bells lightly brushed. “Have you forgotten that now I am wholly invisible?—which might tickle some men, yet you, I think…”
“You’re right, you’re right, I like you real,” he answered, gripping her fiercely by the shoulders to emphasize his feelings, then guiltily jerking away his hands as he thought of how delicate she must be.
The silver bells clashed in full laughter, as if the curtain of them had been struck a great swipe. “Have no fears,” she told him. “My airy bones are grown of matter stronger than steel. It is a riddle beyond your philosophers and relates to the invisibility of my race and of the animals from which it sprang. Think how strong tempered glass can be, yet light goes through it. My cursed brother Faroomfar has the strength of a bear for all his slimness while my father Oomforafor is a very lion despite his centuries. Your friend’s encounter with Faroomfar was no final test—but oh how it made him howl—Father raged at him—and then there are the cousins. Soon as this night be ended—which is not soon, my dear; the moon still climbs—you must return down Stardock. Promise me that. My heart grows cold at the thought of the dangers you’ve already faced—and was like ice I know not how many times this last three-day.”
“Yet you never warned us,” he mused. “You lured me on.”
“Can you doubt why?” she asked. He was feeling her snub nose then and her apple cheeks, and so he felt her smile too. “Or perhaps you resent it that I let you risk your life a little to win here to this bed?”
He implanted a fervent kiss on her wide lips to show her how little true that was, but she thrust him back after a moment.
“Wait, Faffy dear,” she said. “No, wait, I say! I know you’re greedy and impetuous, but you can at least wait while the moon creeps the width of a star. I asked you to promise me you would descend Stardock at dawn.”
There was a rather long silence in the dark.
“Well?” she prompted. “What shuts your mouth?” she queried impatiently. “You’ve shown no such indecision in certain other matters. Time wastes, the moon sails.”
“Hirriwi,” Fafhrd said softly, “I must climb Stardock.”
“Why?” she demanded ringingly. “The poem has been fulfilled. You have your reward. Go on, and only frigid fruitless perils await you. Return, and I’ll guard you from the air—yes, and your companion too—to the very Waste.” Her sweet voice faltered a little. “O Faffy, am I not enough to make you forego the conquest of a cruel mountain? In addition to all else, I love you—if I understand rightly how mortals use that word.”
“No,” he ans
wered her solemnly in the dark. “You are wondrous, more wondrous than any wench I’ve known—and I love you, which is not a word I bandy—yet you only make me hotter to conquer Stardock. Can you understand that?”
Now there was silence for a while in the other direction.
“Well,” she said at length, “you are masterful and will do what you will do. And I have warned you. I could tell you more, show you reasons counter, argue further, but in the end I know I would not break your stubbornness—and time gallops. We must mount our own steeds and catch up with the moon. Kiss me again. Slowly. So.”
The Mouser lay across the foot of the bed under the amber globes and contemplated Keyaira, who lay lengthwise with her slender apple-green shoulders and tranquil sleeping face propped by many pillows.
He took up the corner of a sheet and moistened it with wine from a cup set against his knee and with it rubbed Keyaira’s slim right ankle so gently that there was no change in her narrow bosom’s slow-paced rise and fall. Presently he had cleared away all the greenish unguent from a patch as big as half his palm. He peered down at his handiwork. This time he expected surely to see flesh, or at least the green cosmetic on the underside of her ankle, but no, he saw through the irregular little rectangle he’d wiped only the bed’s tufted coverlet reflecting the amber light from above. It was a most fascinating and somewhat unnerving mystery.
He glanced questioningly over at Hrissa who now lay on an end of the low table, the thin-glassed, fantastic perfume bottles standing around her, while she contemplated the occupants of the bed, her white tufted chin set on her folded paws. It seemed to the Mouser that she was looking at him with disapproval, so he hastily smoothed back unguent from other parts of Keyaira’s leg until the peephole was once more greenly covered.
There was a low laugh. Keyaira, propped on her elbows now, was gazing at him through slitted heavy-lashed eyelids.
“We invisibles,” she said in a humorous voice truly or feignedly heavy with sleep, “show only the outward side of any cosmetic or raiment on us. It is a mystery beyond our seers.”
“You are Mystery’s queenly self a-walk through the stars,” the Mouser pronounced, lightly caressing her green toes. “And I the most fortunate of men. I fear it’s a dream and I’ll wake on Stardock’s frigid ledges. How is it I am here?”
“Our race is dying out,” she said. “Our men have become sterile. Hirriwi and I are the only princesses left. Our brother Faroomfar hotly wished to be our consort—he still boasts his virility—’twas he you dueled with—but our father Oomforafor said, ‘It must be new blood—the blood of heroes.’ So the cousins and Faroomfar, he much against his will, must fly hither and yon and leave those little rhymed lures written on ramskin in perilous, lonely spots apt to tempt heroes.”
“But how can visibles and invisibles mate?” he asked.
She laughed with delight. “Is your memory that short, Mouse?”
“I mean, have progeny,” he corrected himself, a little irked, but not much, that she had hit on his boyhood nickname. “Besides, wouldn’t such offspring be cloudy, a mix of seen and unseen?”
Keyaira’s green mask swung a little from side to side.
“My father thinks such mating will be fertile and that the children will breed true to invisibility—that being dominant over visibility—yet profit greatly in other ways from the admixture of hot, heroic blood.”
“Then your father commanded you to mate with me?” the Mouser asked, a little disappointed.
“By no means, Mouse,” she assured him. “He would be furious if he dreamt you were here, and Faroomfar would go mad. No, I took a fancy to you, as Hirriwi did to your comrade, when first I spied on you on the Waste—very fortunate that was for you, since my father would have got your seed, if you had won to Stardock’s top, in quite a different fashion. Which reminds me, Mouse, you must promise me to descend Stardock at dawn.”
“That is not so easy a promise to give,” the Mouser said. “Fafhrd will be stubborn, I know. And then there’s that other matter of a bag of diamonds, if that’s what a pouch of stars means—oh, it’s but a trifle, I know, compared to the embraces of a glorious girl…still…”
“But if I say I love you?—which is only truth…”
“Oh Princess,” the Mouser sighed, gliding his hand to her knee. “How can I leave you at dawn? Only one night…”
“Why, Mouse,” Keyaira broke in, smiling roguishly and twisting her green form a little, “do you not know that every night is an eternity? Has not any girl taught you that yet, Mouse? I am astonished. Think, we have half an eternity left us yet—which is also an eternity, as your geometer, whether white-bearded or dainty-breasted, should have taught you.”
“But if I am to sire many children—” the Mouser began.
“Hirriwi and I are somewhat like queen bees,” Keyaira explained, “but think not of that. We have eternity tonight, ’tis true, but only if we make it so. Come closer.”
A little later, plagiarizing himself somewhat, the Mouser said softly, “The sole fault of mountain climbing is that the best parts go so swiftly.”
“They can last an eternity,” Keyaira breathed in his ear. “Make them last, Mouse.”
Fafhrd woke shaking with cold. The pink globes were gray and tossing in icy gusts from the open door. Snow had blown in on his clothes and gear scattered across the floor and was piled inches deep on the threshold, across which came also the only illumination—leaden daylight.
A great joy in him fought all these grim gray sights and conquered them.
Nevertheless he was naked and shivering. He sprang up and beat his clothes against the bed and thrust his limbs into their icy stiffness.
As he was buckling his ax belt, he remembered the Mouser down in the chimney, helpless. Somehow all night, even when he’d spoken to Hirriwi of the Mouser, he’d never thought of that.
He snatched up his pack and sprang out on the ledge.
From the corner of his eye he caught something moving behind him. It was the massive door closing.
A titan gust of snow-fisted wind struck him. He grabbed the rough rock pillar to which he’d last night planned to tie the rope and hugged it tight. The gods help the Mouser below! Someone came sliding and blowing along the ledge in the wind and snow and hugged the pillar lower down.
The gust passed. Fafhrd looked for the door. There was no sign of it. All the piled snow was redrifted. Keeping close hold of pillar and pack with one hand, he felt over the rough wall with the other. Fingernails no more than eyes could discover the slightest crack.
“So you got tossed out too?” a familiar voice said gaily. “I was tossed out by ice gnomes, I’ll have you know.
“Mouser!” Fafhrd cried. “Then you weren’t—? I thought—”
“You never thought of me once all night, if I know you,” the Mouser said. “Keyaira assured me you were safe and somewhat more than that. Hirriwi would have told you the same of me if you’d asked her. But of course you didn’t.”
“Then you too—?” Fafhrd demanded, grinning with delight.
“Yes, Prince Brother-in-Law,” the Mouser answered him, grinning back.
They pommeled each other around the pillar a bit—to battle chill, but in sheer high spirits too.
“Hrissa?” Fafhrd asked.
“Warm inside, the wise one. They don’t put out the cat here, only the man. I wonder, though…. Do you suppose Hrissa was Keyaira’s to begin with and that she foresaw and planned…” His voice trailed off.
No more gusts had come. The snowfall was so light they could see almost a league—up to the Hat above the snow-streaked ledges of the Face and down to where the Ladder faded out.
Once again their minds were filled, almost overpowered by the vastness of Stardock and by their own Predicament: two half-frozen mites precariously poised on a frozen vertical world only distantly linked with Nehwon.
To the south there was a pale silver disk in the sky—the sun. They’d been abed till noon.
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br /> “Easier to fashion an eternity out of an eighteen-hour night,” the Mouser observed.
“We galloped the moon deep under the sea,” Fafhrd mused.
“Your girl promise to make you go down?” the Mouser asked suddenly.
Fafhrd nodded his head. “She tried.”
“Mine too. And not a bad idea. The summit smells, by her account. But the chimney looks stuffed with snow. Hold my ankles while I peer over. Yes, packed solid all the way down. So—?”
“Mouser,” Fafhrd said, almost gloomily, “whether there’s a way down or no, I must climb Stardock.”
“You know,” the Mouser answered, “I am beginning to find something in that madness myself. Besides, the east wall of Stardock may hold an easy route to that lush-looking Rift Valley. So let’s do what we can with the bare seven hours of light left us. Daytime’s no stuff to fashion eternities.”
Mounting the ledges of the Face was both the easiest and hardest climbing they’d had yet to do. The ledges were wide, but some of them sloped outward and were footed with rotten shale that went skidding away into space at a touch, and now and again there were brief traverses which had to be done by narrow cracks and main strength, sometimes swinging by their hands alone.
And weariness and chill and even dizzying faintness came far quicker at this height. They had to halt often to drink air and chafe themselves. While in the back of one deep ledge—Stardock’s right eye, they judged—they were forced to spend time firing the brazier with all the remaining resin-pellets, partly to warm food and drink, but chiefly to warm themselves.
Last night’s exertions had weakened them too, they sometimes thought, but then the memories of those exertions would return to strengthen them.
And then there were the sudden treacherous wind gusts and the constant yet variable snowfall, which sometimes hid the summit and sometimes let them see it clear against the silvery sky, with the great white out-curving brim of the Hat now poised threateningly above them—a cornice like that of the snow-saddle, only now they were on the wrong side.