The First Book of Lankhmar

the set sun bright on the mountain faces.
           From this closest vantage point the Obelisk was foreshortened into a pyramid that seemed to taper up forever, vertically. Encouragingly, his rock felt diamond-hard while the lowest reaches of the wall at any rate were thick with bumpy handholds and footholds, like pebbled leather.
           To the south, Gran Hanack and the Hint were hidden.
           To the north White Fang towered monstrously, yellowish white in the sunlight, as if ready to rip a hole in the graying sky. Bane of Fafhrd's father, the Mouser recalled.
           Of Stardock, there could be seen the dark beginning of the wind-blasted north wall and the north end of the deadly White Waterfall. All else of Stardock the Obelisk hid.
           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