The cries behind them grew suddenly louder as their pursuers turned into the alley, but Fafhrd and the Mouser did not run off over-swiftly. It seemed certain their attackers would spend considerable time scouting and assaulting the empty tent.
They loped together through the outskirts of the sleeping city toward their own well-hidden camp outside it. Their nostrils sucked in the chill, bracing air funneling down from the best pass through the Trollstep Mountains, a craggy chain which walled off the Land of the Eight Cities from the vast plateau of the Cold Waste to the north.
Fafhrd remarked, “It’s unfortunate the old lady was interrupted just when she was about to tell us something important.”
The Mouser snorted. “She’d already sung her song, the sum of which was zero.”
“I wonder who those rude fellows were and what were their motives!” Fafhrd asked. “I thought I recognized the voice of that ale-swiller Gnarfi, who has an aversion to bear-meat.”
“Scoundrels behaving as stupidly as we were,” the Mouser answered. “Motives?—as soon impute ‘em to sheep! Ten dolts following an idiot leader.”
“Still, it appears that someone doesn’t like us,” Fafhrd opined.
“Was that ever news!” the Gray Mouser retorted.
II: Stardock
Early one evening, weeks later, the sky’s gray cloud-armor blew away south, smashed and dissolving as if by blows of an acid-dipped mace. The same mighty northeast wind contemptuously puffed down the hitherto impregnable cloud wall to the east, revealing a grimly majestic mountain range running north to south and springing abruptly from the plateau, two leagues high, of the Cold Waste—like a dragon fifty leagues long heaving up its spike-crested spine from icy entombment.
Fafhrd, no stranger to the Cold Waste, born at the foot of these same mountains and childhood climber of their lower slopes, named them off to the Gray Mouser as the two men stood together on the crunchy hoarfrosted eastern rim of the hollow that held their camp. The sun, set for the camp, still shone from behind their backs onto the western faces of the major peaks as he named them—but it shone not with any romanticizing rosy glow, but rather with a clear, cold, detail-pinning light fitting the peaks’ dire aloofness.
“Travel your eye to the first great northerly upthrust,” he told the Mouser, “that phalanx of heaven-menacing ice-spears shafted with dark rock and gleaming green—that’s the Ripsaw. Then, dwarfing them, a single ivory-icy tooth, unscalable by any sane appraisal—the Tusk, he’s called. Another unscalable then, still higher and with south wall a sheer precipice shooting up a league and curving outward toward the needletop: he is White Fang, where my father died—the canine of the Mountains of the Giants.
“Now begin again with the first snow dome at the south of the chain,” continued the tall fur-cloaked man, copper-bearded and copper-maned, his head otherwise bare to the frigid air, which was as quiet at ground level as sea-deep beneath storm. “The Hint, she’s named, or the Come On. Little enough she looks, yet men have frozen nighting on her slopes and been whirled to death by her whimsical queenly avalanches. Then a far vaster snow dome, true queen to the Hint’s princess, a hemisphere of purest white, grand enough to roof the council hall of all the gods that ever were or will be—she is Gran Hanack, whom my father was first of men to mount and master. Our town of tents was pitched there near her base. No mark of it now, I’ll guess, not even a midden.
“After Gran Hanack and nearest to us of them all, a huge flat-topped pillar, a pedestal for the sky almost, looking to be of green-shot snow but in truth all snow-pale granite scoured by the storms: Obelisk Polaris.
“Lastly,” Fafhrd continued, sinking his voice and gripping his smaller comrade’s shoulder, “let your gaze travel up the snow-tressed, dark-rocked, snowcapped peak between the Obelisk and White Fang, her glittering skirt somewhat masked by the former, but taller than they as they are taller than the Waste. Even now she hides behind her the mounting moon. She is Stardock, our quest’s goal.”
“A pretty enough, tall, slender wart on this frostbit patch of Nehwon’s face,” the Gray Mouser conceded, writhing his shoulder from Fafhrd’s grip. “And now at last tell me, friend, why you never climbed this Stardock in your youth and seized the treasure there, but must wait until we get a clue to it in a dusty, hot, scorpion-patrolled desert tower a quarter world away—and waste half a year getting here.”
Fafhrd’s voice grew a shade unsure as he answered, “My father never climbed her; how should I? Also, there were no legends of a treasure on Stardock’s top in my father’s clan … though there was a storm of other legends about Stardock, each forbidding her ascent. They called my father the Legend Breaker and shrugged wisely when he died on White Fang…. Truly, my memory’s not so good for those days, Mouser—I got many a mind-shattering knock on my head before I learned to deal all knocks first … and then I was hardly a boy when the clan left the Cold Waste—though the rough hard walls of Obelisk Polaris had been my upended playground….”
The Mouser nodded doubtfully. In the stillness they heard their tethered ponies munching the ice-crisped grass of the hollow, then a faint unangry growl from Hrissa the ice-cat, curled between the tiny fire and the piled baggage—likely one of the ponies had come cropping too close. On the great icy plain around them, nothing moved—or almost nothing.
The Mouser dipped gray lambskin-gloved fingers into the bottom of his pouch and from the pocket there withdrew a tiny oblong of parchment and read from it, more by memory than sight:
“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.”
Fafhrd said dreamily, “They say the gods once dwelt and had their smithies on Stardock and from thence, amid jetting fire and showering sparks, launched all the stars; hence her name. They say diamonds, rubies, smaragds—all great gems—are the tiny pilot models the gods made of the stars … and then threw carelessly away across the world when their great work was done.”
“You never told me that before,” the Mouser said, looking at him sharply.
Fafhrd blinked his eyes and frowned puzzledly. “I am beginning to remember childhood things.”
The Mouser smiled thinly before returning the parchment to its deep pocket. “The guess that a pouch of stars might be a bag of gems,” he listed, “the story that Nehwon’s biggest diamond is called the Heart of Light, a few words on a ramskin scrap in the topmost room of a desert tower locked and sealed for centuries—small hints, those, to draw two men across this murdering, monotonous Cold Waste. Tell me, Old Horse, were you just homesick for the miserable white meadows of your birth to pretend to believe ‘em?”
“Those small hints,” Fafhrd said, gazing now toward White Fang, “drew other men north across Nehwon. There must have been other ramskin scraps, though why they should be discovered at the same time, I cannot guess.”
“We left all such fellows behind at Illik-Ving, or Lankhmar even, before we ever mounted the Trollsteps,” the Mouser asserted with complete confidence. “Weak sisters, they were, smelling loot but quailing at hardship.”
Fafhrd gave a small headshake and pointed. Between them and White Fang rose the tiniest thread of black smoke.
“Did Gnarfi and Kranarch seem weak sisters?—to name but two of the other seekers,” he asked when the Mouser finally saw and nodded.
“It could be,” the Mouser agreed gloomily. “Though aren’t there any ordinary travelers of this Waste? Not that we’ve seen a man-shaped soul since the Mingol.”
Fafhrd said thoughtfully, “It might be an encampment of the ice gnomes … though they seldom leave their caves except at High Summer, now a month gone….” He broke off, frowning puzzledly. “Now how did I know that?”
“Another childhood memory bobbing to the top of the black pot?” the Mouser hazarded. Fafhrd shrugged doubtfully.
“So, for choice, Kranarch and Gnarfi,” the Mouser concluded. “Two strong brothers, I’ll concede. Perhaps we should have picked a fight with ‘em at Illik-Ving,” he suggested. “Or perhaps even now … a swift march by night … a sudden swoop—”
Fafhrd shook his head. “Now we’re climbers, not killers,” he said. “A man must be all climber to dare Stardock.” He directed the Mouser’s gaze back toward the tallest mountain. “Let’s rather study her west wall while the light holds.
“Begin first at her feet,” he said. “That glimmering skirt falling from her snowy hips, which are almost as high as the Obelisk—that’s the White Waterfall, where no man may live.
“Now to her head again. From her flat tilted snowcap hang two great swelling braids of snow, streaming almost perpetually with avalanches, as if she combed ‘em day and night—the Tresses, those are called. Between them’s a wide ladder of dark rock, marked at three points by ledges. The topmost of the three ledge-banks is the Face—d’you note the darker ledges marking eyes and lips? The midmost of the three is called the Roosts; the lowermost—level with Obelisk’s wide summit—the Lairs.”