The Mouser expected now at last to get a view of the eastern depths, by peering east along the north wall of Obelisk Polaris, but here again he was foiled by the first great swell of the snow-saddle.
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-laughtered 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.