Swords Against Wizardry by Fritz Leiber ...

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ABBYY PDF Transformer 2.0 Click here to buy w w w.A BBYY.co m The tiny grains of snow were still falling ruler-straight, frosting the ledge and Fafhrd's coppery hair. He and the Mouser began to pull up their hoods and lace their cloaks about them for the night. The sun still shone through the snowfall, but its light was filtered white and brought not an atom of warmth. Obelisk Polaris was not a noisy mountain, as many are -- a-drip with glacial water, rattling with rock slides, and even with rock strata a-creak from uneven loss or gain of heat. The silence was profound. The Mouser felt an impulse to tell Fafhrd about the living girl-mask or illusion he'd seen by night, while simultaneously Fafhrd considered recounting to the Mouser his own erotic dream. At that moment there came again, without prelude, the rushing in the silent air and they saw, clearly outlined by the falling snow, a great flat undulating shape. It came swooping past them, rather slowly, about two spear-lengths out from the ledge. There was nothing at all to be seen except the flat, flakeless space the thing made in the airborne snow and the eddies it raised; it in no way obscured the snow beyond. Yet they felt the gust of its passage. The shape of this invisible thing was most like that of a giant skate or stingray four yards long and three wide; there was even the suggestion of a vertical fin and a long, lashing tail. "Great invisible fish!" the Mouser hissed, thrusting his hand down in his halflaced cloak and managing to draw Scalpel in a single sweep. "Your mind was most right, Fafhrd, when you thought it wrong!" As the snow-sketched apparition glided out of sight around the buttress ending the ledge to the south, there came from it a mocking rippling laughter in two voices, one alto, one soprano. "A sightless fish that laughs like girls -- most monstrous!" Fafhrd commented shakenly, hefting his ax, which he'd got out swiftly too, though it was still attached to his belt by a long thong. They crouched there then for a while, scrambled out of their cloaks, and with weapons ready, awaited the invisible monster's return, Hrissa standing between them with fur bristling. But after a while they began to shake from the cold and so they perforce got back into their cloaks and laced them, though still gripping their weapons and prepared to throw off the upper lacings in a flash. Then they briefly discussed the weirdness just witnessed, insofar as they could, each now confessing his earlier visions or dreams of girls. Finally the Mouser said, "The girls might have been riding the invisible thing, lying along its back -- and invisible too! Yet, what was the thing?" This touched a small spot in Fafhrd's memory. Rather unwillingly he said, "I remember waking once as a child in the night and hearing my father say to my mother, '...like great thick quivering sails, but the ones you can't see are the worst.' They stopped speaking then, I think because they heard me stir." The Mouser asked, "Did your father ever speak of seeing girls in the high mountains -- flesh, apparition, or witch, which is a mixture of the two; visible or invisible?" "He wouldn't have mentioned 'em if he had," Fafhrd replied. "My mother was ABBYY PDF Transformer 2.0 Click here to buy w w w.A BBYY.co m
ABBYY PDF Transformer 2.0 Click here to buy w w w.A BBYY.co m a very jealous woman and a devil with a chopper." The whiteness they'd been scanning turned swiftly to darkest gray. The sun had set. They could no longer see the falling snow. They pulled up their hoods and laced their cloaks tight and huddled together at the back of the ledge with Hrissa close between them. * * * * Trouble came early the next day. They roused with first light, feeling battered and nightmare-ridden, and uncramped themselves with difficulty while the morning ration of strong herb tea and powdered meat and snow were stewed in the same pot to a barely uncold aromatic gruel. Hrissa gnawed her rewarmed hare's bones and accepted a little bear's fat and water from the Mouser. The snow had stopped during the night, but the Obelisk was powdered with it on every step and hold, while under the snow was ice -- the first-fallen snow melted by yesterday afternoon's meager warmth on the rock and quickly refrozen. So Fafhrd and the Mouser roped together, and the Mouser swiftly fashioned a harness for Hrissa by cutting two holes in the long side of an oblong of leather. Hrissa protested somewhat when her forelegs were thrust through the holes and the ends of the oblong double-stitched together snugly over her shoulders. But when an end of Fafhrd's black hempen rope was tied around her harness where the stitching was, she simply lay down flat on the ledge, on the warm spot where the brazier had stood, as if to say, "This debasing tether I will not accept, though humans may." But when Fafhrd slowly started up the wall and the Mouser followed and the rope tightened on Hrissa, and when she had looked up and seen them still roped like herself, she followed sulkily after. A little later she slipped off a bulge -- her boots, snug as they were, must have been clumsy to her after naked pads -- and swung scrabbling back and forth several long moments before she was supporting her own weight again. Fortunately the Mouser had a firm stance at the time. After that, Hrissa came on more cheerily, sometimes even climbing to the side ahead of the Mouser and smiling back at him -- rather sardonically, the Mouser fancied. The climbing was a shade steeper than yesterday with an even greater insistence that each hand- and foothold be perfect. Gloved fingers must grip stone, not ice; spikes must clash through the brittle stuff to rock. Fafhrd roped his ax to his right wrist and used its hammer to tap away treacherous thin platelets and curves of the glassy frozen water. And the climbing was more wearing because it was harder to avoid tenseness. Even looking sideways at the steepness of the wall tightened the Mouser's groin with fear. He wondered _what if the wind should blow?_ -- and fought the impulse to cling flat to the cliff. Yet at the same time sweat began to trickle down his face and chest, so that he had to throw back his hood and loosen his tunic to his belly to keep his clothes from sogging. But there was worse to come. It had looked as though the slope above were gentling, but now, drawing nearer, they perceived a bulge jutting out a full two yards some seven yards above them. The under-slope was pocked here and there -- fine handholds, except that they opened down. The bulge extended as far as ABBYY PDF Transformer 2.0 Click here to buy w w w.A BBYY.co m
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Swords Against Wizardry by Fritz Leiber ...

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