The First Book of Lankhmar

The rushy sound faded and did not return; the air became quiet, and the steep slope grew very still; even the water-drip faded.
           Turning back to the wall with a grunt of relief, the Mouser touched emptiness. He grew still as death himself. Turning his eyes only he saw that upward from a point level with his knees the whole snow ridge had vanished — the whole saddle and a section of the swell to either side of it — as if some great god had reached down while the Mouser's back was turned and removed that block of reality.
           Giddily he clung to his pike. He was standing atop a newly created snow-saddle now. Beyond and below its raw, fresh-fractured white eastern slope, the silently departed great snow-cornice was falling faster and faster, still in one hill-size chunk.
           Behind them the steps Fafhrd had cut mounted to the new snow rim, then vanished.
           "See, I chopped us down far enough only in the nick," Fafhrd grumbled. "My judgment was faulty."
           The falling cornice was snatched downward out of sight so that the Mouser and Fafhrd at last could see what lay east of the Mountains of the Giants: a rolling expanse of dark green that might be treetops except that from here even giant trees would be tinier than grass blades — an expanse even farther below them than the Cold Waste at their backs. Beyond the green-carpeted depression, another mountain range loomed like the ghost of one.
           "I have heard legends of the Great Rift Valley," Fafhrd murmured. "A mountainsided cup for sunlight, its warm floor a league below the Waste."
           Their eyes searched.
           "Look," the Mouser said, "how trees climb the eastern face of Obelisk almost to his top. Now the goats don't seem so strange."
           They could see nothing, however, of the east face of Stardock.
           "Come on!" Fafhrd commanded. "If we linger, the invisible growl-laughtered flier may gather courage to return despite my ax-nick."
           And without further word he began resolutely to cut steps onward ... and still a little down.
           Hrissa continued to peer over the rim, her bearded chin almost resting on it, her nostrils a-twitch as if she faintly scented gossamer threads of meat-odor mounting from the leagues' distant dark green, but when the rope tightened on her harness, she followed.
           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