by Fritz Leiber
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.
Soon the ridge and the Obelisk cut off the sun. It grew very chill. The Mouser closed his tunic and drew his hood around his face, while Hrissa, between her short leaps from step to step, performed a kind of tiny cat-jig on them, to keep her gloved paws from freezing. The Mouser reminded himself to stuff them a bit with lamb’s wool when he renewed the salve. He had his pike out now, telescoped short and thonged to his wrist.
They passed the shoulder of the swell and came opposite the beginning of the snow-saddle, but Fafhrd did not cut steps up toward it. Rather, the steps he now was cutting descended at a sharper angle than the saddle dipped, though the slope they were crossing was becoming quite steep.
‘Fafhrd,’ the Mouser protested quietly, ‘we’re heading for Stardock’s top, not the White Waterfall.’
‘You said, “Very well,”’ Fafhrd retorted between chops. ‘Besides, who does the work?’ His ax rang as it bit into ice.
‘Look, Fafhrd,’ the Mouser said, ‘there are two goats crossing to Stardock along the saddletop. No, three.’
‘We should trust goats? Ask yourself why they’ve been sent.’ Again Fafhrd’s ax rang.
The sun swung into view as it coursed southward, sending their three shadows ranging far ahead of them. The pale gray of the snow turned glittery white. The Mouser unhooded to the yellow rays. For a while the enjoyment of their warmth on the back of his head helped him keep his mouth shut, but then the slope grew steeper yet, as Fafhrd continued remorselessly to cut steps downward.
‘I seem to recall that our purpose was to climb Stardock, but my memory must be disordered,’ the Mouser observed. ‘Fafhrd, I’ll take your word we must keep away from the top of the ridge, but do we have to keep away so far? And the three goats have all skipped across.’
Still, ‘“Very well,” you said,’ was all Fafhrd would answer, and this time there was a snarl in his voice.
The Mouser shrugged. Now he was bracing himself with his pike continuously, while Hrissa would pause studyingly before each leap.
Their shadows went less than a spear’s cast ahead of them now, while the hot sun had begun to melt the surface snow, sending down trickles of ice water to wet their gloves and make their footing unsure.
Yet still Fafhrd kept cutting steps downward. And now of a sudden he began to cut them downward more steeply still, adding with taps of his ax a tiny handhold above each step—and these handholds were needed!
‘Fafhrd,’ the Mouser said dreamily, ‘perhaps an ice-sprite has whispered to you the secret of levitation, so that from this fine takeoff you can dive, level out, and then go spring to Stardock’s top. In that case I wish you’d teach myself and Hrissa how to grow wings in an instant.’
‘Hist!’ Fafhrd spoke softly yet sharply at that instant. ‘I have a feeling. Something comes. Brace yourself and watch behind us.’
The Mouser drove his pike in deep and rotated his head. As he did, Hrissa leaped from the last step behind to the one on which the Mouser stood, landing half on his boot and clinging to his knee—yet this done so dexterously the Mouser was not dislodged.
‘I see nothing,’ the Mouser reported, staring almost sunward. Then, words suddenly clipped: ‘Again the beams twist like a spinning lantern! The glints on the ice ripple and wave. ’Tis the flier come again! Cling!’
There came the rushing sound, louder than ever before and swiftly mounting, then a great sea-wave of air, as of a great body passing swiftly only spans away; it whipped their clothes and Hrissa’s fur and forced them to cling fiercely to their holds, though Fafhrd made a full-armed swipe with his ax. Hrissa snarled. Fafhrd almost louted forward off his holds with the momentum of his blow.
‘I’ll swear I scored on him, Mouser,’ he snarled, recovering. ‘My ax touched something besides air.’
‘You harebrained fool!’ the Mouser cried. ‘Your scratches will anger him and bring him back.’ He let go of the chopped ice-hold with his hand and, steadying himself by his pike, he searched the sun-bright air ahead and around for ripples.
‘More like I’ve scared him off,’ Fafhrd asserted, doing the same. The rushy sound faded and did not return; the air became quiet, and the steep slope grew very still; even the water-drip faded.
Turning back to the wall with a grunt of relief, the Mouser touched emptiness. He grew still as death himself. Turning his eyes only he saw that upward from a point level with his knees the whole snow ridge had vanished—the whole saddle and a section of the swell to either side of it—as if some great god had reached down while the Mouser’s back was turned and removed that block of reality.
Giddily he clung to his pike. He was standing atop a newly created snow-saddle now. Beyond and below its raw, fresh-fractured white eastern slope, the silently departed great snow-cornice was falling faster and faster, still in one hill-size chunk.
Behind them the steps Fafhrd had cut mounted to the new snow rim, then vanished.
‘See, I chopped us down far enough only in the nick,’ Fafhrd grumbled. ‘My judgment was faulty.’
The falling cornice was snatched downward out of sight so that the Mouser and Fafhrd at last could see what lay east of the Mountains of the Giants: a rolling expanse of dark green that might be treetops except that from here even giant trees would be tinier than grass blades—an expanse even farther below them than the Cold Waste at their backs. Beyond the green-carpeted depression, another mountain range loomed like the ghost of one.
‘I have heard legends of the Great Rift Valley,’ Fafhrd murmured. ‘A mountainsided cup for sunlight, its warm floor a league below the Waste.’
Their eyes searched.
‘Look,’ the Mouser said, ‘how trees climb the eastern face of Obelisk almost to his top. Now the goats don’t seem so strange.’
They could see nothing, however, of the east face of Stardock.
‘Come on!�
� Fafhrd commanded. ‘If we linger, the invisible growl-laughter flier may gather courage to return despite my ax-nick.’
And without further word he began resolutely to cut steps onward…and still a little down.
Hrissa continued to peer over the rim, her bearded chin almost resting on it, her nostrils a-twitch as if she faintly scented gossamer threads of meat-odor mounting from the leagues’ distant dark green, but when the rope tightened on her harness, she followed.
Perils came thick now. They reached the dark rock of the Ladder only by chopping their way along a nearly vertical ice wall in the twinkly gloom under a close-arching waterfall of snow that shot out from an icy boss above them—perhaps a miniature version of the White Waterfall that was Stardock’s skirt.
When they stepped at last, numb with cold and hardly daring to believe they’d made it, onto a wide dark ledge, they saw a jumble of bloody goat tracks in the snow around.
Without more warning than that, a long snowbank between that step and the next above reared up its nearest white end a dozen feet and hissed fearsomely, showing it to be a huge serpent with head a big as an elk’s, all covered with shaggy snow-white fur. Its great violet eyes glared like those of a mad horse and its jaw gaped to show slashing-teeth like a shark’s and two great fangs jetting a mist of pale ichor.
The furred serpent hesitated for two sways between the nearer, taller man with flashing ax and the farther, smaller one with thick black stick. In that pause Hrissa, with snarling hisses of her own, sprang forward past the Mouser on the downslope side and the furred serpent struck at this newest and most active foe.
Fafhrd got a blast of its hot acrid breath, and the vapor trail from its nearer fang bathed his left elbow.
The Mouser’s attention was fixed on a fur-wisped violet eye as big as a girl’s fist.
Hrissa looked down the monster’s gaping dark red gullet rimmed by slaver-swimming ivory knives and the two ichor-jetting fangs.
Then the jaws clashed shut, but in the intervening instant Hrissa had leaped back more swiftly even than she’d advanced.
The Mouser plunged the pike-end of his climbing pole into the glaring violet eye.
Swinging his ax two-handed, Fafhrd slashed at the furry neck just back of the horse-like skull, and there gushed out red blood which steamed as it struck the snow.
Then the three climbers were scrambling upward, while the monster writhed in convulsions which shook the rock and spattered with red alike the snow and its snow-white fur.
At what they hoped was a safe distance above it, the climbers watched it dying, though not without frequent glances about for creatures like it or other perilous beasts.
Fafhrd said, ‘A hot-blooded serpent, a snake with fur—it goes against experience. My father never spoke of such; I doubt he ever met ’em.’
The Mouser answered, ‘I’ll wager they find their prey on the east slope of Stardock and come here only to lair or breed. Perhaps the invisible flier drove the three goats over the snow-saddle to lure this one.’ His voice grew dreamy. ‘Or perhaps there’s a secret world inside Stardock.’
Fafhrd shook his head, as if to clear it of such imagination-snaring visions. ‘Our way lies upward,’ he said. ‘We’d best be well above the Lairs before nightfall. Give me a dollop of honey when I drink,’ he added, loosening his water bag as he turned and scanned up the Ladder.
From its base the Ladder was a dark narrow triangle climbing to the blue sky between the snowy, ever-tumbling Tresses. First there were the ledges on which they stood, easy at first, but swiftly growing steeper and narrower. Next an almost blank stretch, etched here and there with shadows and ripplings hinting at part-way climbing routes, but none of them connected. Then another band of ledges, the Roosts. Then a stretch still blanker than the first. Finally another ledge-band, narrower and shorter—the Face—and atop all what seemed a tiny pen-stroke of white ink: the brim of Stardock’s pennonless snowy hat.
All the Mouser’s aches and weariness came back as he squinted up the Ladder while feeling in his pouch for the honey jar. Never, he was sure, had he seen so much distance compressed into so little space by vertical foreshortening. It was as if the gods had built a ladder to reach the sky, and after using it had kicked most of the steps away. But he clenched his teeth and prepared to follow Fafhrd.
All their previous climbing began to seem book-simple compared to what they now straggled through, step by straining step, all the long summer afternoon. Where Obelisk Polaris had been a stern schoolmaster, Stardock was a mad queen, tireless in preparing her shocks and surprises, unpredictable in her wild caprices.
The ledges of the Lairs were built of rock that sometimes broke away at a touch, and they were piled with loose gravel. Also, the climbers made acquaintance with Stardock’s rocky avalanches, which brought stones whizzing and spattering down around them without warning, so that they had to press close to the walls and Fafhrd regretted leaving his helmet in the cairn. Hrissa first snarled at each pelting pebble which hit near her, but when at last struck in the side by a small one, showed fear and slunk close to the Mouser, trying until rebuked to push between the wall and his legs.
And once they saw a cousin of the white worm they had slain rear up man-high and glare at them from a distant ledge, but it did not attack.
They had to work their way to the northernmost point of the topmost ledge before they found, at the very edge of the Northern Tress, almost underlying its streaming snow, a scree-choked gully which narrowed upward to a wide vertical groove—or chimney, as Fafhrd called it.
And when the treacherous scree was at last surmounted, the Mouser discovered that the next stretch of the ascent was indeed very like climbing up the inside of a rectangular chimney of varying width and with one of the four walls missing—that facing outward to the air. Its rock was sounder than that of the Lairs, but that was all that could be said for it.
Here all tricks of climbing were required and the utmost of main strength into the bargain. Sometimes they hoisted themselves by cracks wide enough for finger- and toeholds; if a crack they needed was too narrow, Fafhrd would tap into it one of his spikes to make a hold, and this spike must, if possible, be unwedged after use and recovered. Sometimes the chimney narrowed so that they could walk up it laboriously with shoulders to one wall and boot soles to the other. Twice it widened and became so smooth-walled that the Mouser’s extensible climbing-pike had to be braced between wall and wall to give them a necessary step.
And five times the chimney was blocked by a huge rock or chockstone which in falling had wedged itself fast, and these fearsome obstructions had to be climbed around on the outside, generally with the aid of one or more of Fafhrd’s spikes driven between chockstone and wall, or his grapnel tossed over it.
‘Stardock has wept millstones in her day,’ the Mouser said of these gigantic barriers, jerking his body aside from a whizzing rock for a period to his sentence.
This climbing was generally beyond Hrissa, and she often had to be carried on the Mouser’s back, or left on a chockstone or one of the rare paw-wide ledges and hoisted up when opportunity offered. They were strongly tempted, especially after they grew death-weary, to abandon her but could not forget how her brave feint had saved them from the white worm’s first stroke.
All this, particularly the passing of the chockstones, must be done under the pelting of Stardock’s rocky avalanches—so that each new chockstone above them was welcomed as a roof, until it had to be surmounted. Also, snow sometimes gushed into the chimney, over-spilling from one of the snowy avalanches forever whispering down the North Tress—one more danger to guard against. Ice water runneled too from time to time down the chimney, drenching boots and gloves and making all holds unsure.
In addition, there was less nourishment in the air, so that they had more often to halt and gasp deeply until their lungs were satisfied. And Fafhrd’s left arm began to swell where the venomous mist from the worm’s fang had blown around it, until he could hardly bend i
ts swollen fingers to grip crack or rope. Besides, it itched and stung. He plunged it again and again into snow to no avail.
Their only allies on this most punishing ascent were the hot sun, heartening them by its glow and offsetting the growing frigidity of the thin still air, and the very difficulty and variety of the climb itself, which at least kept their minds off the emptiness around and beneath them—the latter a farther drop than they’d ever stood over on the Obelisk. The Cold Waste seemed like another world, poised separate from Stardock in space.
Once they forced themselves to eat a bite and several times sipped water. And once the Mouser was seized with mountain sickness, ending only when he had retched himself weary.
The only incident of the climb unrelated to Stardock’s mad self occurred when they were climbing out around the fifth chockstone, slowly, like two large slugs, the Mouser first this time and bearing Hrissa, with Fafhrd close behind. At this point the North Tress narrowed so that a hump of the North Wall was visible across the snow stream.
There was a whirring unlike that of any rock. Another whirring then, closer and ending in a thunk. When Fafhrd scrambled atop the chockstone and into the shelter of the walls, he had a cruelly barbed arrow through his pack.
At cost of a third arrow whirring close by his head, the Mouser peeped out north with Fafhrd clinging to his heels and swiftly dragging him back.
‘’Twas Kranarch all right; I saw him twang his bow,’ the Mouser reported. ‘No sight of Gnarfi, but one of their new comrades clad in brown fur crouched behind Kranarch, braced on the same boss. I couldn’t see his face, but ’tis a most burly fellow, short of leg.’
‘They keep apace of us,’ Fafhrd grunted.
‘Also, they scruple not to mix climbing with killing,’ the Mouser observed as he broke off the tail of the arrow piercing Fafhrd’s pack and yanked out the shaft. ‘Oh, comrade, I fear your sleeping cloak is sixteen times holed. And that little bladder of pine liniment—it got holed too. Ah, what fragrance!’
