The First Book of Lankhmar

the path. "Look, even now it dies."
           But at least one other eye had seen the pulsing glow — an eye as large as a squid's and bright as the Dog Star.
           "Ha, Fafhrd!" the Gray Mouser cried gaily some hours later in the full-broken dawn. "There's an omen to warm our frozen hearts! A green hill winks at us frosty men — gives us the glad eye like a malachite-smeared dusky courtesan of Klesh!"
           "She's as hot as a courtesan of Klesh, too," the huge Northerner supplemented, rounding the brown crag's bulging shoulder in his turn, "for she's melted all the snow."
           It was true. Although the far horizon shone white and green with the snows and glacial ice of the Cold Waste, the saucerlike depression in the foreground held a small unfrozen lake. And while the air was still chilly around them, so that their breath drifted away in small white clouds, the brown ledge they trod was bare.
           Up from the nearer shore of the lake rose the hill to which the Mouser had referred, the hill from which one star-small point still reflected the new-risen sun's rays at them blindingly.
           "That is, if it is a hill," Fafhrd added softly. "And in any case, whether a courtesan of Klesh or hill, she has several faces."
           The point was well taken. The hill's green flanks were formed of crags and hummocks which the imagination could shape into monstrous faces — all the eyes closed save the one that twinkled at them. The faces melted downward like wax into huge stony rivulets — or might they be elephantine trunks? — that plunged into the unruffled acid-seeming water. Here and there among the green were patches of dark red rock that might be blood, or mouths. Clashing nastily in color, the hill's rounded summit seemed to be composed of a fleshily pink marble. It too persisted in resembling a face — that of a sleeping ogre. It was crossed by a stretch of vividly red rock that might be the ogre's lips. From a slit in the red rock, a faint vapor rose.
           The hill had more than a volcanic look. It seemed like an upwelling from a more savage, primal, fiercer consciousness than any that even Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser knew, an upwelling frozen in the act of invading a younger, weaker world — frozen yet eternally watchful and waiting and yearning.
           And then the illusion was gone — or four-faces-out-of-five gone and the fifth wavering. The hill was just a hill again — an odd volcanic freak of the Cold Waste — a green hill with a glitter.
           Fafhrd let out a gusty sigh. He surveyed the farther shore of the lake. It was hillocky and matted with a dark vegetation that unpleasantly resembled fur. At one point there rose from it a stubby pillar of rock almost like an altar. Beyond the hairy bushes, which were here and there flecked with red-leafed ones, stretched the ice and snow, broken only occasionally by great rocks and rare clumps of dwarfed trees.
           But something else was foremost in the Mouser's thoughts.
           "The eye, Fafhrd. The glad, glittering eye!" he whispered, dropping his voice as though they were in a crowded street and some informer or rival thief might overhear. "Only once before have I seen such a gleam, and that was by moonlight, across a king's treasure chamber. That time I did not come away with a huge diamond. A guardian serpent prevented it. I killed the wriggler, but its hiss brought other guards.
           "But this time there's only a little hill to climb. And if at this distance the gem gleams so bright, Fafhrd" — his hand dropped and gripped his companion's leg, at the sensitive point just above the knee, for emphasis — "think how big!"
           The Northerner, frowning faintly at the violent squeeze as well as at his doubts and misgivings, nevertheless sucked an icy breath in appreciative greed.
           "And we poor shipwrecked marauders," continued the Mouser raptly, "will be able to tell the gaping and envious thieves of Lankhmar that we not only crossed the Bones of the Old Ones, but picked them on the way."
           And he went skipping gaily down the skimpy ledge that merged into the narrow, lake-edged, rocky saddle that joined this greater mountain with the green one. Fafhrd followed more slowly, gazing steadily at the green hill, waiting for it to turn back into faces again, or to turn to no faces at all. It did neither. It occurred to him that it