For the first time today he really looked out and down.
The Cold Waste was a pale blue expanse almost like the sky—and seeming even more distant—all its copses and mounds and tiny tarns having long since become pinpoints and vanished. Many leagues to the west, almost at the horizon, a jagged pale gold band showed where the shadows of the mountains ended. Midway in the band was a blue gap—Stardock’s shadow continuing over the edge of the world.
Giddily the Mouser snatched his gaze back to Obelisk Polaris … and although he could still see the granite, it didn’t seem to count anymore—only four insecure holds on a kind of pale green nothingness, with Fafhrd and Hrissa somehow suspended beside him. His mind could no longer accept the Obelisk’s steepness.
As the urge to hurl himself down swelled in him, he somehow transformed it into a sardonic snort, and he heard himself say with daggerish contempt, “Leave off your foolish fishing, Fafhrd! I’ll show you now how Lankhmarian mountain science deals with a trifling problem such as this which has baffled all your barbarian whirling and casting!”
And with that he unclipped from his pack with reckless speed the thick black bamboo pike or crook and began cursingly with numb fingers to draw out and let snap into place its telescoping sections until it was four times its original length.
This tool of technical climbing, which indeed the Mouser had brought all the way from Lankhmar, had been a matter of dispute between them the whole trip, Fafhrd asserting it was a tricksy toy not worth the packing.
Now, however, Fafhrd made no comment, but merely coiled up his grapnel and thrust his hands into his wolfskin jerkin against his sides to warm them and, mild-eyed, watched the Mouser’s furious activity. Hrissa shifted to a perch closer to Fafhrd and crouched stoically.
But when the Mouser shakily thrust the narrower end of his black tool toward the bulge above, Fafhrd reached out a hand to help him steady it, yet could not refrain from saying, “If you think to get a good enough hold with the crook on the rim to shinny up that stick—”
“Quiet, you loutish kibitzer!” the Mouser snarled and with Fafhrd’s help thrust pike-end into a pock in the rock hardly a finger’s length from the rim. Then he seated the spiked foot of the pole in a small, deep hollow just above his head. Next he snapped out two short recessed lever-arms from the base of the pole and began to rotate them. It soon became clear that they controlled a great screw hidden in the pole, for the latter lengthened until it stood firmly between the two pocks in the rock, while the stiff black shaft itself bent a little.
At that instant a sliver of rock, being pressed by the pole, broke off from the rim. The pole thrummed as it straightened and the Mouser, screaming a curse, slipped off his holds and fell.
* * * *
It was good then that the rope between the two comrades was short and that the spikes of Fafhrd’s boots were seated firmly, like so many demon-forged dagger-points, in the rock of his footholds—for as the strain came suddenly on Fafhrd’s belt and on his rope-gripping left hand, he took it without plummeting after the Mouser, only bending his knees a little and grunting softly, while his right hand snatched hold of the vibrating pole and saved it.
The Mouser had not even fallen far enough to drag Hrissa from her perch, though the rope almost straightened between them. The ice-cat, her tufted neck bent sharply between foreleg and chest, peered down with great curiosity at the dangling man.
His face was ashen. Fafhrd made no mark of that, but simply handed him the black pole, saying, “It’s a good tool. I’ve screwed it back short. Seat it in another pock and try again.”
Soon the pole stood firm between the hollow by the Mouser’s head and a pock a hand’s width from the rim. The bowlike bend in the pole faced downward. Then they put the Mouser first on the rope, and he went climbing up and out along the pole, hanging from it back downward, his boot-edges finding tiny holds on the pole’s section-shoulders—out into and over the vast, pale blue-gray space which had so lately dizzied him.
The pole began to bend a little more with the Mouser’s weight, the pike-end slipping a finger’s span in the upper pock with a horrible tiny grating sound, but Fafhrd gave the screw another turn, and the pole held firm.
Fafhrd and Hrissa watched the Mouser reach its end, where he paused briefly. Then they saw him reach up his left arm until it was out of sight to the elbow above the rim, meanwhile gripping with his right hand the crook and twining his legs around the shaft. He appeared to feel about with his left hand and find something. Then he moved out and up still further and very slowly his head and after it, in a sudden swift sweep, his right arm went out of sight above the rim.
For several long moments they saw only the bottom half of the bent Mouser, his dark crinkly-soled boots twined securely to the end of the pole. Then, rather slowly, like a gray snail, and with a final push of one boot against the top of the crook, he went entirely out of sight.
Fafhrd slowly paid out rope after him.
After some time the Mouser’s voice, quite ghostly yet clear, came down to them: “Hola! I’ve got the rope anchored around a boss big as a tree stump. Send up Hrissa.”
So Fafhrd put Hrissa on the rope ahead of him, knotting it to her harness with a sheepshank.
Hrissa fought desperately for a moment against being swung into space, but as soon as it was done hung deathly still. Then as she was drawn slowly up, Fafhrd’s knot began to slip. The ice-cat swiftly snatched at the rope with her teeth and gripped it far back between her jaws. The moment she came near the rim, her clawed mittens were ready, and she scrabbled and was dragged out of sight.
Soon word came down from the Mouser that Hrissa was safe and Fafhrd might follow. He frowningly tightened the screw another half turn, though the pole creaked ominously, and then very gently climbed out along it. The Mouser now kept the rope taut from above, but for the first stretch it could hardly take more than a few pounds of Fafhrd’s weight off the pole.
The upper spike once again grated horribly a bit in its pock, but it still held firm. Helped more by the rope now, Fafhrd got his hands and head over the rim.
What he saw was a smooth, gentle rock slope, which could be climbed by friction, and at the top of it the Mouser and Hrissa standing backgrounded by blue sky and gilded by sunlight.
Soon he stood beside them.
The Mouser said, “Fafhrd, when we get back to Lankhmar remind me to give Glinthi the Artificer thirteen diamonds from the pouch of them we’ll find on Stardock’s hat: one for each section and joint of my climbing pole, one each for the spikes at the ends and two for each screw.”
“Are there two screws?” Fafhrd asked respectfully.
“Yes, one at each end,” the Mouser told him and then made Fafhrd brace the rope for him so that he could climb down the slope and, bending all his upper body down over the rim, shorten the pole by rotating its upper screw until he was able to drag it triumphantly back over the top with him.
As the Mouser telescoped its sections together again, Fafhrd said to him seriously, “You must thong it to your belt as I do my ax. We must not chance losing Glinthi’s help on the rest of this journey.”
* * * *
Throwing back their hoods and opening their tunics wide to the hot sun, Fafhrd and the Mouser looked around, while Hrissa luxuriously stretched and worked her slim limbs and neck and body, the white fur of which hid her bruises. Both men were somewhat exalted by the thin air and filled brain-high with the ease of mind and spirit that comes with a great danger skillfully conquered.
Rather to their amazement, the southward swinging sun had climbed barely halfway to noon. Perils which had seemed demihours long had lasted minutes only.
The summit of Obelisk Polaris was a great rolling field of pale rock too big to measure by Lankhmar acres. They had arrived near the southwest corner, and the gray-tinted stone meadow seemed to stretch east and north almost indefinitely. Here and there were hummocks and hollows, but they swelled and dipped most gently. There were a few scattered large boulders, not many, while off to the east were darker indistinct shapes which might be bushes and small trees footed in cracks filled with blown dirt.