The Mouser wore his ramskin hood, pulled close around his face now by its drawstring, and on his body a tunic of gray silk, triple layered. His gloves were longer than Fafhrd’s and fur-lined. So were his slender boots, which were footed with crinkly behemoth hide. On his belt, his dagger Cat’s Claw and his waterskin balanced his sword Scalpel, its scabbard thonged loosely to his thigh. While to this cloak-wrapped pack was secured a curiously thick, short, black bamboo rod headed with a spike at one end and at the other a spike and large hook, somewhat like that of a shepherd’s crook.
Both men were deeply tanned and leanly muscular, in best trim for climbing, hardened by the Trollsteps and the Cold Waste, their chests a shade larger than ordinary from weeks of subsisting on the latter’s thin air.
No need to search about for the best-looking ascent—Fafhrd had done that yesterday as they’d approached the Obelisk.
The ponies were cropping again, and one had found the salt and was licking it with his thick tongue. The Mouser looked around for Hrissa to cuff her cheek in farewell, but the ice-cat was sniffing out a spoor beyond the campsite, her ears a-prick.
“She makes a cat-parting,” Fafhrd said. “Good.”
A faint shade of rose touched the heavens and the glacier by White Fang. Scanning toward the latter, the Mouser drew in his breath and squinted hard, while Fafhrd gazed narrowly from under the roof of his palm.
“Brownish figures,” the Mouser said at last. “Kranarch and Gnarfi always dressed in brown leather, I recall. But I make them more than two.”
“I make them four,” Fafhrd said. “Two strangely shaggy—clad in brown fur suits, I guess. And all four mounting from the glacier up the rock wall.”
“Where the gale will—” the Mouser began, then looked up. So did Fafhrd.
The Grand Pennon was gone.
“You said that sometimes—” the Mouser started.
“Forget the gale and those two and their rough-edged reinforcements,” Fafhrd said curtly. He faced around again at Obelisk Polaris. So did the Mouser.
Squinting up the greenish-white slope, head bent sharply back, the Mouser said, “This morning he seems somewhat steeper than even that north wall and rather extensive upward.”
“Pah!” Fafhrd retorted. “As a child I would climb him before breakfast. Often.” He raised his clenched right rawhide glove as if it held a baton, and cried, “We go!”
With that he strode forward and without a break began to walk up the knobby face—or so it seemed, for although he used handholds he kept his body far out from the rock, as a good climber should.
The Mouser followed in Fafhrd’s steps and holds, stretching his legs farther and keeping somewhat closer to the cliff.
Midmorning and they were still climbing without a break. The Mouser ached or stung in every part. His pack was like a fat man on his back, Scalpel a sizable boy clinging to his belt. And his ears had popped five times.
Just above, Fafhrd’s boots clashed rock-knobs and into rock-holes with an unhesitating mechanistic rhythm the Mouser had begun to hate. Yet he kept his eyes resolutely fixed on them. Once he had looked down between his own legs and decided not to do that again.
It is not good to see the blue of distance, or even the gray-blue of middle distance, below one.
So he was taken by surprise when a small white bearded face, bloodily encumbered, came bobbing up alongside and past him.
Hrissa halted on a ledgelet by Fafhrd and took great whistling breaths, her tufted belly-skin pressing up against her spine with each exhalation. She breathed only through her pinkish nostrils because her jaws were full of two snow hares, packed side by side, with dead heads and hindquarters a-dangle.
Fafhrd took them from her and dropped them in his pouch and laced it shut.
Then he said, just a shade grandiloquently, “She has proved her endurance and skill, and she has paid her way. She is one of us.”
It had not occurred to the Mouser to doubt any of that. It seemed to him simply that there were three comrades now climbing Obelisk Polaris. Besides, he was most grateful to Hrissa for the halt she had brought. Partly to prolong it, he carefully pressed a handful of water from his bag and stretched it to her to lap: Then he and Fafhrd drank a little too.
* * * *
All the long summer day they climbed the west wall of the cruel but reliable Obelisk. Fafhrd seemed tireless. The Mouser got his second wind, lost it, and never quite got his third. His whole body was one great leaden ache, beginning deep in his bones and filtering outward, like refined poison, through his flesh. His vision became a bobbing welter of real and remembered rock-knobs, while the necessity of never missing one single grip or foot-placement seemed the ruling of an insane schoolmaster god. He silently cursed the whole maniacal Stardock project, cackling in his brain at the idea that the luring stanzas on the parchment could mean anything but pipe dreams. Yet he would not cry quits or seek again to prolong the brief breathers they took.
He marveled dully at Hrissa’s leaping and hunching up beside them. But by midafternoon he noted she was limping, and once he saw a light blood-print of two pads where she’d set a paw.
They made camp at last almost two hours before sunset, because they’d found a rather wide ledge—and because a very light snowfall had begun, the tiny flakes sifting silently down like meal.
They made a fire of resin-pellets in the tiny claw-footed brazier Fafhrd packed, and they heated over it water for herb tea in their single narrow high pot. The water was a long time getting even lukewarm. With Cat’s Claw the Mouser stirred two dollops of honey into it.
The ledge was as long as three men stretched out and as deep as one. On the sheer face of Obelisk Polaris that much space seemed an acre, at least.
Hrissa stretched slackly behind the tiny fire. Fafhrd and the Mouser huddled to either side of it, their cloaks drawn around them, too tired to look around, talk, or even think.
The snowfall grew a little thicker, enough to hide the Cold Waste far below.
After his second swallow of sweetened tea, Fafhrd asserted they’d come at least two-thirds of the way up the Obelisk.
The Mouser couldn’t understand how Fafhrd could pretend to know that, any more than a man could tell by looking at the shoreless waters of the Outer Sea how far he’d sailed across it. To the Mouser they were simply in the exact center of a dizzily tip-tilted plain of pale granite, green-tinged and now snow-sprinkled. He was still too weary to outline this concept to Fafhrd, but he managed to make himself say, “As a child you would climb up and down the Obelisk before breakfast?”
“We had rather late breakfasts then,” Fafhrd explained gruffly.
“Doubtless on the afternoon of the fifth day,” the Mouser concluded.
After the tea was drunk, they heated more water and left the hacked and disjointed bits of one of the snow hares in the fluid until they turned gray, then slowly chewed them and drank the dull soup. At about the same time Hrissa became a little interested in the flayed carcass of the other hare set before her nose—by the brazier to keep it from freezing.
Enough interested to begin to haggle it with her fangs and slowly chew and swallow.
The Mouser very gently examined the pads of the ice-cat’s paws. They were worn silk-thin, there were two or three cuts in them, and the white fur between them was stained deep pink. Using a feather touch, the Mouser rubbed salve into them, shaking his head the while. Then he nodded once and took from his pouch a large needle, a spool of thin thong, and a small rolled hide of thin, tough leather.
From the last he cut with Cat’s Claw a shape rather like a very fat pear and stitched from it a boot for Hrissa.
When he tried it on the ice-cat’s hind paw, she let it be for a little, then began to bite at it rather gently, looking up queerly at the Mouser. He thought, then very carefully bored holes in it for the ice-cat’s non-retracting claws, then drew the boot up the leg snugly until the claws protruded fully and tied it there with the drawstring he’d run through slits at the top.
Hrissa no longer bothered the boot. The Mouser made others, and Fafhrd joined in and cut and stitched one too.
When Hrissa was fully shod in her four clawed paw-mittens, she smelled each, then stood up and paced back and forth the length of the ledge a few times, and finally settled herself by the still-warm brazier and the Mouser, chin on his ankle.