by Fritz Leiber
The illusion grew stronger that Stardock was a separate world from Nehwon in snow-filled space.
Finally the sky turned blue, and they felt the sun on their backs—they had climbed above the snowfall at last—and Fafhrd pointed at a tiny nick of blue deep in the brim of the Hat—a nick just visible above the next snow-streaked rock bulge—and he cried, “The apex of the Needle’s Eye!”
At that, something dropped into a snowbank beside them, and there was a muffled clash of metal on rock, while from snow a notched and feathered arrow-end stuck straight up.
They dodged under the protective roof of a bigger bulge as a second arrow and a third clashed against the naked rock on which they’d stood.
“Gnarfi and Kranarch have beaten us, curse ’em,” Fafhrd hissed, “and set an ambush for us at the Eye, the obvious spot. We must go roundabout and get above ’em.”
“Won’t they expect that?”
“They were fools to spring their ambush too soon. Besides, we have no other tactic.”
So they began to climb south, though still upward, always keeping rock or snow between them and where they judged the Needle’s Eye to be. At last, when the sun was dropping swiftly toward the western horizon, they came swinging back north again and still upward, stamping out steps now in the steepening bank of snow that reversed its curve above them to make the brim of the Hat that now roofed them ominously, covering two-thirds of the sky. They sweated and shook by turns and fought off almost continuous bouts of giddy faintness, yet still strove to move as silently and warily as they might.
At last they rounded one more snow bulge and found themselves looking down a slope at the great bare stretch of rock normally swept by the gale that came through the Needle’s Eye to make the Petty Pennon.
On the outward lip of the exposed rock were two men, both clad in suits of brown leather, much scuffed and here and there ripped, showing the inward-turned fur. Lank, black-bearded, elk-faced Kranarch stood whipping his arms against his chest for warmth. Beside him lay his strung bow and some arrows. Stocky boar-faced Gnarfi knelt peeping over the rim. Fafhrd wondered where their two brown-clad bulky servitors were.
The Mouser dug into his pouch. At the same moment Kranarch saw them and snatched up his weapon though rather more slowly than he would have in thicker air. With a similar slowness the Mouser drew out the fist-size rock he had picked up several ledges below for just such a moment as this.
Kranarch’s arrow whistled between his and Fafhrd’s heads. A moment later the Mouser’s rock struck Kranarch full on his bow-shoulder. The weapon fell from his hand, and that arm dangled. Then Fafhrd and the Mouser charged recklessly down the snow slope, the former brandishing his unthonged ax, the latter drawing Scalpel.
Kranarch and Gnarfi received them with their own swords, and Gnarfi with a dagger in his left hand as well. The battle that followed had the same dreamlike slowness as the exchange of missiles. First Fafhrd’s and the Mouser’s rush gave them the advantage. Then Kranarch’s and Gnarfi’s great strength—or restedness, rather—told, and they almost drove their enemy off the rim. Fafhrd took a slash in the ribs which bit through his tough wolfskin tunic, slicing flesh and jarring bone.
But then skill told, as it generally will, and the two brown-clad men received wounds and suddenly turned and ran through the great white pointy-topped triangular archway of the Needle’s Eye. As he ran Gnarfi screeched, “Graah! Kruk!”
“Doubtless calling for their shaggy-clad servants or bearers,” the Mouser gasped in surmise, resting sword arm on knee, almost spent. “Farmerish fat country fellows those looked, hardly trained to weapons. We need not fear ’em greatly, I think, even if they come to Gnarfi’s call.” Fafhrd nodded, gasping himself. “Yet they climbed Stardock,” he added dubiously.
Just then there came galloping through the snowy archway on their hind legs with their nails clashing the windswept rock and their fang-edged slavering red mouths open wide and their great-clawed arms widespread—two huge brown bears.
With a speed which their human opponents had been unable to sting from them, the Mouser snatched up Kranarch’s bow and sent two arrows speeding, while Fafhrd swung his ax in a gleaming circle and cast it. Then the two comrades sprang swiftly to either side, the Mouser wielding Scalpel and Fafhrd drawing his knife.
But there was no need for further fighting. The Mouser’s first arrow took the leading bear in the neck, his second straight in its red mouth-roof and brain, while Fafhrd’s ax sank to its helve between two ribs on the trailing bear’s left side. The great animals pitched forward in their blood and death throes and rolled twice over and went tumbling ponderously off the rim.
“Doubtless both shes,” the Mouser remarked as he watched them fall. “Oh those bestial men of Illik-Ving! Still, to charm or train such beasts to carry packs and climb and even give up their poor lives…”
“Kranarch and Gnarfi are no sportsmen, that’s for certain now,” Fafhrd pronounced. “Don’t praise their tricks.” As he stuffed a rag into his tunic over his wound, he grimaced and swore so angrily that the Mouser didn’t speak his quip: Well, bears are only shortened bearers. I’m always right.
Then the two comrades trudged slowly under the high tentlike arch of snow to survey the domain, highest on all Nehwon, of which they had made themselves masters—refusing from light-headed weariness to think, in that moment of triumph, of the invisible beings who were Stardock’s lords. They went warily, yet not too much so, because Gnarfi and Kranarch had run scared and were wounded not trivially—and the latter had lost his bow.
Stardock’s top behind the great toppling snow wave of the Hat was almost as extensive north to south as that of Obelisk Polaris, yet the east rim looked little more than a long bowshot away. Snow with a thick crust beneath a softer layer covered it all except for the north end and stretches of the east rim, where bare dark rock showed.
The surface, both snow and rock, was flatter even than that of the Obelisk and sloped somewhat from north to south. There were no structures or beings visible, nor signs of hollows where either might hide. Truth to tell, neither the Mouser nor Fafhrd could recall ever having seen a lonelier or barer place.
The only oddity they noticed at first were three holes in the snow a little to the south, each about as big as a hogshead but having the form of an equilateral triangle and apparently going down through the snow to the rock. The three were arranged as the apex of another equilateral triangle.
The Mouser squinted around closely, then shrugged. “But a pouch of stars could be a rather small thing, I suppose,” he said. “While a heart of light—no guessing its size.”
The whole summit was in bluish shadow except for the northernmost end and for a great pathway of golden light from the setting sun leading from the Needle’s Eye all the way across the wind-leveled snow to the east rim.
Down the center of this sunroad went Kranarch’s and Gnarfi’s running footsteps, the snow flecked here and there with blood. Otherwise the snow ahead was printless. Fafhrd and the Mouser followed those tracks, walking east up their long shadows.
“No sign of ’em ahead,” the Mouser said. “Looks like there is some route down the east wall, and they’ve taken it—at least far enough to set another ambush.”
As they neared the east rim, Fafhrd said, “I see other prints making north—a spear’s cast that way. Perhaps they turned.”
“But where to?” the Mouser asked.
A few steps more and the mystery was solved horribly. They reached the end of the snow, and there on the dark bloodied rock, hidden until now by the wind-piled margin of the snow, sprawled the carcasses of Gnarfi and Kranarch, their middle clothes ripped away, their bodies obscenely mutilated.
Even as the Mouser’s gorge rose, he remembered Keyaira’s lightly-spoken words: “If you had won to Stardock’s top, my father would have got your seed in quite a different fashion.”
Shaking his head and glaring fiercely, Fafhrd walked around the bodies to the east rim and pe
ered down.
He recoiled a step, then knelt and once more peered.
The Mouser’s hopeful theory was prodigiously disproved. Never in his life had Fafhrd looked straight down half such a distance.
A few yards below, the east wall vanished inward. No telling how far the east rim jutted out from Stardock’s heart-rock.
From this point the fall was straight to the greenish gloom of the Great Rift Valley— five Lankhmar leagues, at least. Perhaps more.
He heard the Mouser say over his shoulder, “A path for birds or suicides. Naught else.”
Suddenly the green below grew bright, though without showing the slightest feature except for a silvery hair, which might be a great river, running down its center. Looking up again, they saw that the sky had gone all golden with a mighty afterglow. They faced around and gasped in wonder.
The last sunrays coming through the Needle’s Eye, swinging southward and a little up, glancingly illuminated a transparent, solid symmetric shape big as the biggest oak tree and resting exactly over the three triangular holes in the snow. It might only be described as a sharp-edged solid star of about eighteen points, resting by three of those on Stardock and built of purest diamond or some like substance.
Both had the same thought: that this must be a star the gods had failed to launch. The sunlight had touched the fire in its heart and made it shine, but for a moment only and feebly, not incandescently and forever, as it would have in the sky.
A piercingly shrill, silvery trumpet call broke the silence of the summit.
They swung their gaze north. Outlined by the same deep golden sunlight, ghostlier than the star, yet still clearly to be seen in some of its parts against the yellow sky, a tall slender castle lifted transparent walls and towers from the stony end of the summit. Its topmost spires seemed to go out of sight upward rather than end.
Another sound then—a wailing snarl. A pale animal bounded toward them across the snow from the northwest. Leaping aside with another snarl from the sprawled bodies, Hrissa rushed past them south with a third snarl tossed at them.
Almost too late they saw the peril against which she had tried to warn them.
Advancing toward them from west and north across the unmarked snow were a score of sets of footprints. There were no feet in those prints, nor bodies above them, yet they came on—right print, left print, appearing in succession—and ever more rapidly. And now they saw what they had missed at first because viewed end-on above each paired set of prints—a narrow-shafted, narrow-bladed spear, pointed straight toward them, coming on as swiftly as the prints.
They ran south with Hrissa, Fafhrd in the lead. After a half dozen sprinting steps the Northerner heard a cry behind him. He stopped and then swiftly spun around.
The Mouser had slipped in the blood of their late foes and fallen. When he got to his feet, the gray spear points were around him on all sides save the rim. He made two wild defensive slashes with Scalpel, but the gray spear points came in relentlessly. Now they were in a close semicircle around him and hardly a span apart, and he was standing on the rim. They advanced another thrust, and the Mouser perforce sprang back from them—and down he fell.
There was a rushing sound, and chill air sluiced Fafhrd from behind, and something sleekly hairy brushed his calves. As he braced himself to rush forward with his knife and slay an invisible or two for his friend, slender unseen arms clasped him from behind and he heard Hirriwi’s silvery voice say in his ear, “Trust us,” and a coppery-golden sister voice say, “We’ll after him,” and then he found himself pulled down onto a great invisible pulsing shaggy bed three spans above the snow, and they told him “Cling!” and he clung to the long thick unseen hair, and then suddenly the living bed shot forward across the snow and off the rim and there tilted vertically so his feet pointed at the sky and his face at the Great Rift Valley— and then the bed plunged straight down.
The thin air roared past, and his beard and mane were whipped back by the speed of that plunge, but he tightened his grip on the handfuls of invisible hair, and a slender arm pressed him down from either side, so that he felt through the fur the throbbing heartbeat of the great invisible carpetlike creature they rode. And he became aware that somehow Hrissa had got under his arm, for there was the small feline face beside his, with slitted eyes and with beard-tuft and ears blown back. And he felt the two invisible girls’ bodies alongside his.
He realized that mortal eyes, could such have watched, would have seen only a large man clasping a large white cat and falling headfirst through empty space—but he would be falling much faster than any man should fall, even from such a vast height.
Beside him Hirriwi laughed, as if she had caught his thought, but then that laughter broke off suddenly and the roaring of the wind died almost to utter silence. He guessed it was because the swiftly thickening air had deafened him.
The great dark cliffs flashing upward a dozen yards away were a blur. Yet below him the Great Rift Valley was still featureless green—no, the larger details were beginning to show now: forests and glades and curling hair-thin streams and little lakes like dewdrops.
Between him and the green below he saw a dark speck. It grew in size. It was the Mouser!—rather characteristically falling headfirst, straight as an arrow, with hands locked ahead of him and legs pressed together behind, probably in the faint hope that he might hit deep water.
The creature they rode matched the Mouser’s speed and then gradually swung its plunge toward him, flattening out more and more from the vertical, so that the Mouser was pressed against them. Arms visible and invisible clasped him then, pulling him closer, so that all five of the plungers were crowded together on that one great sentient bed.
The creature’s dive flattened still more then, halting its fall—there was a long moment while they were all pressed stomach-surgingly tight against the hairy back, while the trees still rushed up at them—and then they were coasting above those same treetops and spiraling down into a large glade.
What happened next to Fafhrd and the Mouser went all in a great tumbling rush, much too swiftly: the feel of springy turf under their feet and balmy air sluicing their bodies, quick kisses exchanged, laughing, shouted congratulations that still sounded all muffled like ghost voices, something hard and irregular yet soft-covered pressed into the Mouser’s hands, a last kiss—and then Hirriwi and Keyaira had broken away and a great burst of air flattened the grass and the great invisible flier was gone and the girls with it.
They could watch its upward spiraling flight for a little, however, because Hrissa had gone away on it too. The ice-cat seemed to be peering down at them in farewell. Then she too vanished as the golden afterglow swiftly died in the darkening sky overhead.
They stood leaning together for support in the twilight. Then they straightened themselves, yawning prodigiously, and their hearing came back. They heard the gurgling of a brook and the twittering of birds and a small, faint rustle of dry leaves going away from them and the tiny buzz of a spiraling gnat.
The Mouser opened the invisible pouch in his hands.
“The gems seem to be invisible too,” he said, “though I can feel ’em well enough. We’ll have a hard time selling them—unless we can find a blind jeweler.”
The darkness deepened. Tiny cold fires began to glow in his palms: ruby, emerald, sapphire, amethyst, and pure white.
“No, by Issek!” the Gray Mouser said. “We’ll only need to sell them by night—which is unquestionably the best time for trade in gems.”
The new-risen moon, herself invisible beyond the lesser mountains walling the Rift Valley to the east, painted palely now the upper half of the great slender column of Stardock’s east wall.
Gazing up at that queenly sight, Fafhrd said, “Gallant ladies, all four.”
III
The Two Best Thieves in Lankhmar
Through the Mazy avenues and alleys of the great city of Lankhmar, Night was a-slink, though not yet grown tall enough to whirl her black
star-studded cloak across the sky, which still showed pale, towering wraiths of sunset.
The hawkers of drugs and strong drinks forbidden by day had not yet taken up their bell-tinklings and thin, enticing cries. The pleasure girls had not lit their red lanterns and sauntered insolently forth. Bravos, desperadoes, procurers, spies, pimps, conmen, and other malfeasors yawned and rubbed drowsy sleep from eyes yet thick-lidded. In fact, most of the Night People were still at breakfast, while most of the Day People were at supper. Which made for an emptiness and hush in the streets, suitable to Night’s slippered tread. And which created a large bare stretch of dark, thick, unpierced wall at the intersection of Silver Street with the Street of the Gods, a crossing-point where there habitually foregathered the junior executives and star operatives of the Thieves Guild; also meeting there were the few freelance thieves bold and resourceful enough to defy the Guild and the few thieves of aristocratic birth, sometimes most brilliant amateurs, whom the Guild tolerated and even toadied to, on account of their noble ancestry, which dignified a very old but most disreputable profession.
Midway along the bare stretch of wall, where none might conceivably overhear, a very tall and a somewhat short thief drifted together. After a while they began to converse in prison-yard whispers.
A distance had grown between Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser during their long and uneventful trek south from the Great Rift Valley. It was due simply to too much of each other and to an ever more bickering disagreement as to how the invisible jewels, gift of Hirriwi and Keyaira, might most advantageously be disposed of—a dispute which had finally grown so acrimonious that they had divided the jewels, each carrying his share. When they finally reached Lankhmar, they had lodged apart and each made his own contact with jeweler, fence or private buyer. This separation had made their relationship quite scratchy, but in no way diminished their absolute trust in each other.