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!”
“I’m beginning to think those two men of Illik-Ving aren’t sportsmen,” Fafhrd asserted. “So … up and on!”
They were all dog-weary, even cat-Hrissa, and the sun was barely ten fingerbreadths (at the end of an outstretched arm) above the flat horizon of the Waste; and something in the air had turned Sol white as silver—he no longer sent warmth to combat the cold. But the ledges of the Roosts were close above now, and it was possible to hope they would offer a better campsite than the chimney.
So although every man and cat muscle protested against it, they obeyed Fafhrd’s command.
Halfway to the Roosts it began to snow, powdery grains falling arrow-straight like last night, but thicker.
This silent snowfall gave a sense of serenity and security which was most false, since it masked the rockfalls which still came firing down the chimney like the artillery of the God of Chance.
Five yards from the top a fist-size chunk struck Fafhrd glancingly on the right shoulder, so that his good arm went numb and hung useless, but the little climbing that remained was so easy he could make it with boots and puffed-up, barely-usable left hand.
He peeped cautiously out of the chimney’s top, but the Tress here had thickened up again, so that there was no sight of the North Wall. Also the first ledge was blessedly wide and so overhung with rock that not even snow had fallen on its inner half, let alone stones. He scrambled up eagerly, followed by the Mouser and Hrissa.
But even as they cast themselves down to rest at the back of the ledge, the Mouser wriggling out of his heavy pack and unthonging his climbing-pike from his wrist—for even that had become a torturesome burden—they heard a now-familiar rushing in the air, and there came a great flat shape swooping slowly through the sun-silvered snow which outlined it. Straight at the ledge it came, and this time it did not go past, but halted and hung there, like a giant devil fish nuzzling the sea’s rim, while ten narrow marks, each of suckers in line, appeared in the snow on the ledge’s edge, as of ten short tentacles gripping there.
From the center of this monstrous invisibility rose a smaller snow-outlined invisibility of the height and thickness of a man. Midway up this shape was one visible thing: a slim sword of dark gray blade and silvery hilt, pointed straight at the Mouser’s breast.
Suddenly the sword shot forward, almost as fast as if hurled, but not quite, and after it, as swiftly, the man-size pillar, which now laughed harshly from its top.
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?”