Perils came thick now. They reached the dark rock of the Ladder only by chopping their way along a nearly vertical ice wall in the twinkly gloom under a close-arching waterfall of snow that shot out from an icy boss above them—perhaps a miniature version of the White Waterfall that was Stardock’s skirt.
When they stepped at last, numb with cold and hardly daring to believe they’d made it, onto a wide dark ledge, they saw a jumble of bloody goat tracks in the snow around.
Without more warning than that, a long snowbank between that step and the next above reared up its nearest white end a dozen feet and hissed fearsomely, showing it to be a huge serpent with head a big as an elk’s, all covered with shaggy snow-white fur. Its great violet eyes glared like those of a mad horse and its jaw gaped to show slashing-teeth like a shark’s and two great fangs jetting a mist of pale ichor.
The furred serpent hesitated for two sways between the nearer, taller man with flashing ax and the farther, smaller one with thick black stick. In that pause Hrissa, with snarling hisses of her own, sprang forward past the Mouser on the downslope side and the furred serpent struck at this newest and most active foe.
Fafhrd got a blast of its hot acrid breath, and the vapor trail from its nearer fang bathed his left elbow.
The Mouser’s attention was fixed on a fur-wisped violet eye as big as a girl’s fist.
Hrissa looked down the monster’s gaping dark red gullet rimmed by slaver-swimming ivory knives and the two ichor-jetting fangs.
Then the jaws clashed shut, but in the intervening instant Hrissa had leaped back more swiftly even than she’d advanced.
The Mouser plunged the pike-end of his climbing pole into the glaring violet eye.
Swinging his ax two-handed, Fafhrd slashed at the furry neck just back of the horselike skull, and there gushed out red blood which steamed as it struck the snow.
Then the three climbers were scrambling upward, while the monster writhed in convulsions which shook the rock and spattered with red alike the snow and its snow-white fur.
At what they hoped was a safe distance above it, the climbers watched it dying, though not without frequent glances about for creatures like it or other perilous beasts.
Fafhrd said, “A hot-blooded serpent, a snake with fur—it goes against experience. My father never spoke of such; I doubt he ever met ‘em.”
The Mouser answered, “I’ll wager they find their prey on the east slope of Stardock and come here only to lair or breed. Perhaps the invisible flier drove the three goats over the snow-saddle to lure this one.” His voice grew dreamy. “Or perhaps there’s a secret world inside Stardock.”
Fafhrd shook his head, as if to clear it of such imagination-snaring visions. “Our way lies upward,” he said. “We’d best be well above the Lairs before nightfall. Give me a dollop of honey when I drink,” he added, loosening his water bag as he turned and scanned up the Ladder.
From its base the Ladder was a dark narrow triangle climbing to the blue sky between the snowy, ever-tumbling Tresses. First there were the ledges on which they stood, easy at first, but swiftly growing steeper and narrower. Next an almost blank stretch, etched here and there with shadows and ripplings hinting at part-way climbing routes, but none of them connected. Then another band of ledges, the Roosts. Then a stretch still blanker than the first. Finally another ledge-band, narrower and shorter—the Face—and atop all what seemed a tiny pen-stroke of white ink: the brim of Stardock’s pennonless snowy hat.
All the Mouser’s aches and weariness came back as he squinted up the Ladder while feeling in his pouch for the honey jar. Never, he was sure, had he seen so much distance compressed into so little space by vertical foreshortening. It was as if the gods had built a ladder to reach the sky, and after using it had kicked most of the steps away. But he clenched his teeth and prepared to follow Fafhrd.
* * * *
All their previous climbing began to seem book-simple compared to what they now straggled through, step by straining step, all the long summer afternoon. Where Obelisk Polaris had been a stern schoolmaster, Stardock was a mad queen, tireless in preparing her shocks and surprises, unpredictable in her wild caprices.
The ledges of the Lairs were built of rock that sometimes broke away at a touch, and they were piled with loose gravel. Also, the climbers made acquaintance with Stardock’s rocky avalanches, which brought stones whizzing and spattering down around them without warning, so that they had to press close to the walls and Fafhrd regretted leaving his helmet in the cairn. Hrissa first snarled at each pelting pebble which hit near her, but when at last struck in the side by a small one, showed fear and slunk close to the Mouser, trying until rebuked to push between the wall and his legs.
And once they saw a cousin of the white worm they had slain rear up man-high and glare at them from a distant ledge, but it did not attack.
They had to work their way to the northernmost point of the topmost ledge before they found, at the very edge of the Northern Tress, almost underlying its streaming snow, a scree-choked gully which narrowed upward to a wide vertical groove—or chimney, as Fafhrd called it.
And when the treacherous scree was at last surmounted, the Mouser discovered that the next stretch of the ascent was indeed very like climbing up the inside of a rectangular chimney of varying width and with one of the four walls missing—that facing outward to the air. Its rock was sounder than that of the Lairs, but that was all that could be said for it.
Here all tricks of climbing were required and the utmost of main strength into the bargain. Sometimes they hoisted themselves by cracks wide enough for finger- and toeholds; if a crack they needed was too narrow, Fafhrd would tap into it one of his spikes to make a hold, and this spike must, if possible, be unwedged after use and recovered. Sometimes the chimney narrowed so that they could walk up it laboriously with shoulders to one wall and boot soles to the other. Twice it widened and became so smooth-walled that the Mouser’s extensible climbing-pike had to be braced between wall and wall to give them a necessary step.
And five times the chimney was blocked by a huge rock or chockstone which in falling had wedged itself fast, and these fearsome obstructions had to be climbed around on the outside, generally with the aid of one or more of Fafhrd’s spikes driven between chockstone and wall, or his grapnel tossed over it.
“Stardock has wept millstones in her day,” the Mouser said of these gigantic barriers, jerking his body aside from a whizzing rock for a period to his sentence.
This climbing was generally beyond Hrissa, and she often had to be carried on the Mouser’s back, or left on a chockstone or one of the rare paw-wide ledges and hoisted up when opportunity offered. They were strongly tempted, especially after they grew death-weary, to abandon her but could not forget how her brave feint had saved them from the white worm’s first stroke.
All this, particularly the passing of the chockstones, must be done under the pelting of Stardock’s rocky avalanches—so that each new chockstone above them was welcomed as a roof, until it had to be surmounted. Also, snow sometimes gushed into the chimney, overspilling from one of the snowy avalanches forever whispering down the North Tress—one more danger to guard against. Ice water runneled too from time to time down the chimney, drenching boots and gloves and making all holds unsure.
In addition, there was less nourishment in the air, so that they had more often to halt and gasp deeply until their lungs were satisfied. And Fafhrd’s left arm began to swell where the venomous mist from the worm’s fang had blown around it, until he could hardly bend its swollen fingers to grip crack or rope. Besides, it itched and stung. He plunged it again and again into snow to no avail.
Their only allies on this most punishing ascent were the hot sun, heartening them by its glow and offsetting the growing frigidity of the thin still air, and the very difficulty and variety of the climb itself, which at least kept their minds off the emptiness around and beneath them—the latter a farther drop than they’d ever stood over on the Obelisk. The Cold Waste seemed like another world, poised separate from Stardock in space.
Once they forced themselves to eat a bite and several times sipped water. And once the Mouser was seized with mountain sickness, ending only when he had retched himself weary.