Save for one touch: almost straight overhead, seeming now to come from Obelisk Polaris, the ghostly Grand Pennon streamed southwest.
From behind Fafhrd and the Mouser as they worked came the tantalizing odor of two snow hares roasting by the fire, while before it Hrissa tore flesh slowly and savoringly from the carcass of a third she’d coursed down. The ice-cat was about the size and shape of a cheetah, though with long tufty white hair. The Mouser had bought her from a far-ranging Mingol trapper just north of the Trollsteps.
Beyond the fire the ponies eagerly chomped the last of the grain, strengthening stuff they’d not tasted for a week.
Fafhrd wrapped his sheathed longsword Graywand in oiled silk and laid it in the cairn, then held out a big hand to the Mouser.
“Scalpel?”
“I’m taking my sword with me,” the Mouser stated, then added justifyingly, “it’s but a feather to yours.”
“Tomorrow you’ll find what a feather weighs,” Fafhrd foretold. The big man shrugged and placed by Graywand his helmet, a bear’s hide, a folded tent, shovel and pickax, gold bracelets from his wrists and arms, quills, ink, papyrus, a large copper pot, and some books and scrolls. The Mouser added various empty and near-empty bags, two hunting spears, skis, an unstrung bow with a quiver of arrows, tiny jars of oily paint and squares of parchment, and all the harness of the ponies, many of the items wrapped against damp like Graywand.
Then, their appetites quickening from the roast-fumes, the two comrades swiftly built two top courses, roofing the cairn.
Just as they turned toward supper, facing the raggedly gilt-edged flat western horizon, they heard in the silence the rushy sail-like noise again, fainter this time but twice: once in the air to the north and, almost simultaneously, to the south.
Again they stared around swiftly but searchingly, yet there was nothing anywhere to be seen except—again Fafhrd saw it first—a thread of black smoke very near White Fang, rising from a point on the glacier between that mountain and Stardock.
“Gnarfi and Kranarch, if it be they, have chosen the rocky north wall for their ascent,” the Mouser observed.
“And it will be their bane,” Fafhrd predicted, up-jerking his thumb at the Pennon.
The Mouser nodded with less certainty, then demanded, “Fafhrd, what was that sound? You’ve lived here.”
Fafhrd’s brow crinkled and his eyes almost shut. “Some legend of great birds…” he muttered questioningly, “…or of great fish—no, that couldn’t be right.”
“Memory pot still seething all black?” the Mouser asked. Fafhrd nodded.
Before he left the cairn, the Northerner laid beside it a slab of salt. “That,” he said, “along with the ice-filmed pool and herbage we just passed, should hold the ponies here for a week. If we don’t return, well, at least we showed ‘em the way between here and Illik-Ving.”
Hrissa smiled up from her bloody tidbit, as if to say, “No need to worry about me or my rations.”
* * * *
Again the Mouser woke as soon as sleep had gripped him tight, this time with a surge of pleasure, as one who remembers a rendezvous. And again, this time without any preliminary star-staring or flame-gazing, the living mask faced him across the sinking fire: every same expression-quirk and feature—short lips, nose and forehead one straight line—except that tonight it was ivory pale with greenish lips and lids and lashes.
The Mouser was considerably startled, for last night he had stayed awake, waiting for the phantom girl-face—and even trying to make it come again—until the swelling moon had risen three handbreadths above Stardock … without any success whatever. His mind had known that the face had been an hallucination on the first occasion, but his feelings had insisted otherwise—to his considerable disgust and the loss of a quarter night’s sleep.
And by day he had secretly consulted the last of the four short stanzas on the parchment scrap in his pouch’s deepest pocket:
Who scales the Snow King’s citadel
Shall father his two daughters’ sons;
Though he must face foes fierce and fell,
His seed shall live while time still runs.
Yesterday that had seemed rather promising—at least the fathering and daughters part—though today, after his lost sleep, the merest mockery.
But now the living mask was there again and going through all the same teasing antics, including the shuddersome yet somehow thrilling trick of opening wide its lids to show not eyes but a dark backing like the rest of the night. The Mouser was enchanted in a shivery way, but unlike the first night he was full-mindedly alert, and he tested for illusions by blinking and squinting his own eyes and silently shifting his head about in his hood—with no effect whatever on the living mask. Then he quietly unlaced the thong from the top hooks of his cloak—Hrissa was sleeping against Fafhrd tonight—and slowly reached out his hand and picked up a pebble and flicked it across the pale flames at a point somewhat below the mask.
Although he knew there wasn’t anything beyond the fire but scattered scree and ringingly hard earth, there wasn’t the faintest sound of the pebble striking anywhere. He might have thrown it off Nehwon.
At almost the same instant, the mask smiled tauntingly.
The Mouser was very swiftly out of his cloak and on his feet.
But even more swiftly the mask dissolved away—this time in one swift stroke from forehead to chin.
He quickly stepped, almost lunged, around the fire to the spot where the mask had seemed to hang, and there he stared around searchingly. Nothing—except a fleeting breath of wine or spirits of wine. He stirred the fire and stared around again. Still nothing. Except that Hrissa woke beside Fafhrd and bristled her moustache and gazed solemnly, perhaps scornfully, at the Mouser, who was beginning to feel rather like a fool. He wondered if his mind and his desires were playing a silly game against each other.
Then he trod on something. His pebble, he thought, but when he picked it up, he saw it was a tiny jar. It could have been one of his own pigment jars, but it was too small, hardly bigger than a joint of his thumb, and made not of hollowed stone but some kind of ivory or other tooth.
He knelt by the fire and peered into it, then dipped in his little finger and gingerly rubbed the tip against the rather hard grease inside. It came out ivory-hued. The grease had an oily, not winy odor.
The Mouser pondered by the fire for some time. Then with a glance at Hrissa, who had closed her eyes and laid back her moustache again, and at Fafhrd, who was snoring softly, he returned to his cloak and to sleep.
He had not told Fafhrd a word about his earlier vision of the living mask. His surface reason was that Fafhrd would laugh at such calf-brained nonsense of smoke-faces; his deeper reason the one which keeps any man from mentioning a pretty new girl even to his dearest friend.
So perhaps it was the same reason which next morning kept Fafhrd from telling his dearest friend what happened to him late that same night. Fafhrd dreamed he was feeling out the exact shape of a girl’s face in absolute darkness while her slender hands caressed his body. She had a rounded forehead, very long-lashed eyes, in-dipping nose bridge, apple cheeks, an impudent snub nose—it felt impudent!—and long lips whose grin his big gentle fingers could trace clearly.
He woke to the moon glaring down at him aslant from the south. It silvered the Obelisk’s interminable wall, turning rock-knobs to black shadow bars. He also woke to acute disappointment that a dream had been only a dream. Then he would have sworn that he felt fingertips briefly brush his face and that he heard a faint silvery chuckle which receded swiftly. He sat up like a mummy in his laced cloak and stared around. The fire had sunk to a few red ember-eyes, but the moonlight was bright, and by it he could see nothing at all.
Hrissa growled at him reproachfully for a silly sleep-breaker. He damned himself for mistaking the afterimage of a dream for reality. He damned the whole girl-less, girl-vision-breeding Cold Waste. A bit of the night’s growing chill spilled down his neck. He told himself he should be fast asleep like the wise Mouser over there, gathering strength for tomorrow’s great effort. He lay back, and after some time he slumbered.
* * * *
Next morning the Mouser and Fafhrd woke at the first gray of dawn, the moon still bright as a snowball in the west, and quickly breakfasted and readied themselves and stood facing Obelisk Polaris in the stinging cold, all girls forgotten, their manhood directed solely at the mountain.
Fafhrd stood in high-laced boots with newly-sharpened thick hobnails. He wore a wolfskin tunic, fur turned in but open now from neck to belly. His lower arms and legs were bare. Short-wristed rawhide gloves covered his hands. A rather small pack, wrapped in his cloak, rode high on his back. Clipped to it was a large coil of black hempen rope. On his stout unstudded belt, his sheathed ax on his right side balanced on the other a knife, a small waterskin, and a bag of iron spikes headed by rings.