Kranarch and Gnarfi received them with their own swords, and Gnarfi with a dagger in his left hand as well. The battle that followed had the same dreamlike slowness as the exchange of missiles. First Fafhrd’s and the Mouser’s rush gave them the advantage. Then Kranarch’s and Gnarfi’s great strength—or restedness, rather—told, and they almost drove their enemy off the rim. Fafhrd took a slash in the ribs which bit through his tough wolfskin tunic, slicing flesh and jarring bone.
But then skill told, as it generally will, and the two brown-clad men received wounds and suddenly turned and ran through the great white pointy-topped triangular archway of the Needle’s Eye. As he ran Gnarfi screeched, “Graah! Kruk!”
“Doubtless calling for their shaggy-clad servants or bearers,” the Mouser gasped in surmise, resting sword arm on knee, almost spent. “Farmerish fat country fellows those looked, hardly trained to weapons. We need not fear ‘em greatly, I think, even if they come to Gnarfi’s call.” Fafhrd nodded, gasping himself. “Yet they climbed Stardock,” he added dubiously.
Just then there came galloping through the snowy archway on their hind legs with their nails clashing the windswept rock and their fang-edged slavering red mouths open wide and their great-clawed arms widespread—two huge brown bears.
With a speed which their human opponents had been unable to sting from them, the Mouser snatched up Kranarch’s bow and sent two arrows speeding, while Fafhrd swung his ax in a gleaming circle and cast it. Then the two comrades sprang swiftly to either side, the Mouser wielding Scalpel and Fafhrd drawing his knife.
But there was no need for further fighting. The Mouser’s first arrow took the leading bear in the neck, his second straight in its red mouth-roof and brain, while Fafhrd’s ax sank to its helve between two ribs on the trailing bear’s left side. The great animals pitched forward in their blood and death throes and rolled twice over and went tumbling ponderously off the rim.
“Doubtless both shes,” the Mouser remarked as he watched them fall. “Oh those bestial men of Illik-Ving! Still, to charm or train such beasts to carry packs and climb and even give up their poor lives…”
“Kranarch and Gnarfi are no sportsmen, that’s for certain now,” Fafhrd pronounced. “Don’t praise their tricks.” As he stuffed a rag into his tunic over his wound, he grimaced and swore so angrily that the Mouser didn’t speak his quip: Well, bears are only shortened bearers. I’m always right.
Then the two comrades trudged slowly under the high tentlike arch of snow to survey the domain, highest on all Nehwon, of which they had made themselves masters—refusing from light-headed weariness to think, in that moment of triumph, of the invisible beings who were Stardock’s lords. They went warily, yet not too much so, because Gnarfi and Kranarch had run scared and were wounded not trivially—and the latter had lost his bow.
Stardock’s top behind the great toppling snow wave of the Hat was almost as extensive north to south as that of Obelisk Polaris, yet the east rim looked little more than a long bowshot away. Snow with a thick crust beneath a softer layer covered it all except for the north end and stretches of the east rim, where bare dark rock showed.
The surface, both snow and rock, was flatter even than that of the Obelisk and sloped somewhat from north to south. There were no structures or beings visible, nor signs of hollows where either might hide. Truth to tell, neither the Mouser nor Fafhrd could recall ever having seen a lonelier or barer place.
The only oddity they noticed at first were three holes in the snow a little to the south, each about as big as a hogshead but having the form of an equilateral triangle and apparently going down through the snow to the rock. The three were arranged as the apex of another equilateral triangle.
The Mouser squinted around closely, then shrugged. “But a pouch of stars could be a rather small thing, I suppose,” he said. “While a heart of light—no guessing its size.”
The whole summit was in bluish shadow except for the northernmost end and for a great pathway of golden light from the setting sun leading from the Needle’s Eye all the way across the wind-leveled snow to the east rim.
Down the center of this sunroad went Kranarch’s and Gnarfi’s running footsteps, the snow flecked here and there with blood. Otherwise the snow ahead was printless. Fafhrd and the Mouser followed those tracks, walking east up their long shadows.
“No sign of ‘em ahead,” the Mouser said. “Looks like there is some route down the east wall, and they’ve taken it—at least far enough to set another ambush.”
As they neared the east rim, Fafhrd said, “I see other prints making north—a spear’s cast that way. Perhaps they turned.”
“But where to?” the Mouser asked.
A few steps more and the mystery was solved horribly. They reached the end of the snow, and there on the dark bloodied rock, hidden until now by the wind-piled margin of the snow, sprawled the carcasses of Gnarfi and Kranarch, their middle clothes ripped away, their bodies obscenely mutilated.
Even as the Mouser’s gorge rose, he remembered Keyaira’s lightly-spoken words: “If you had won to Stardock’s top, my father would have got your seed in quite a different fashion.”
Shaking his head and glaring fiercely, Fafhrd walked around the bodies to the east rim and peered down.
He recoiled a step, then knelt and once more peered.
The Mouser’s hopeful theory was prodigiously disproved. Never in his life had Fafhrd looked straight down half such a distance.
A few yards below, the east wall vanished inward. No telling how far the east rim jutted out from Stardock’s heart-rock.
From this point the fall was straight to the greenish gloom of the Great Rift Valley— five Lankhmar leagues, at least. Perhaps more.
He heard the Mouser say over his shoulder, “A path for birds or suicides. Naught else.”
Suddenly the green below grew bright, though without showing the slightest feature except for a silvery hair, which might be a great river, running down its center. Looking up again, they saw that the sky had gone all golden with a mighty afterglow. They faced around and gasped in wonder.
The last sunrays coming through the Needle’s Eye, swinging southward and a little up, glancingly illuminated a transparent, solid symmetric shape big as the biggest oak tree and resting exactly over the three triangular holes in the snow. It might only be described as a sharp-edged solid star of about eighteen points, resting by three of those on Stardock and built of purest diamond or some like substance.
Both had the same thought: that this must be a star the gods had failed to launch. The sunlight had touched the fire in its heart and made it shine, but for a moment only and feebly, not incandescently and forever, as it would have in the sky.
A piercingly shrill, silvery trumpet call broke the silence of the summit.
They swung their gaze north. Outlined by the same deep golden sunlight, ghostlier than the star, yet still clearly to be seen in some of its parts against the yellow sky, a tall slender castle lifted transparent walls and towers from the stony end of the summit. Its topmost spires seemed to go out of sight upward rather than end.
Another sound then—a wailing snarl. A pale animal bounded toward them across the snow from the northwest. Leaping aside with another snarl from the sprawled bodies, Hrissa rushed past them south with a third snarl tossed at them.
Almost too late they saw the peril against which she had tried to warn them.
Advancing toward them from west and north across the unmarked snow were a score of sets of footprints. There were no feet in those prints, nor bodies above them, yet they came on—right print, left print, appearing in succession—and ever more rapidly. And now they saw what they had missed at first because viewed end-on above each paired set of prints—a narrow-shafted, narrow-bladed spear, pointed straight toward them, coming on as swiftly as the prints.
They ran south with Hrissa, Fafhrd in the lead. After a half dozen sprinting steps the Northerner heard a cry behind him. He stopped and then swiftly spun around.
The Mouser had slipped in the blood of their late foes and fallen. When he got to his feet, the gray spear points were around him on all sides save the rim. He made two wild defensive slashes with Scalpel, but the gray spear points came in relentlessly. Now they were in a close semicircle around him and hardly a span apart, and he was standing on the rim. They advanced another thrust, and the Mouser perforce sprang back from them—and down he fell.
There was a rushing sound, and chill air sluiced Fafhrd from behind, and something sleekly hairy brushed his calves. As he braced himself to rush forward with his knife and slay an invisible or two for his friend, slender unseen arms clasped him from behind and he heard Hirriwi’s silvery voice say in his ear, “Trust us,” and a coppery-golden sister voice say, “We’ll after him,” and then he found himself pulled down onto a great invisible pulsing shaggy bed three spans above the snow, and they told him “Cling!” and he clung to the long thick unseen hair, and then suddenly the living bed shot forward across the snow and off the rim and there tilted vertically so his feet pointed at the sky and his face at the Great Rift Valley— and then the bed plunged straight down.