Swords Against Wizardry by Fritz Leiber ...

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they could see to either side, at most points looking worse.
They found themselves the best and highest holds they could, close together,
and stared up at their problem. Even Hrissa, a-cling by the Mouser, seemed
subdued.
Fafhrd said softly, "I mind me now they used to say there was an out-jutting
around the Obelisk's top. His Crown, I think my father called it. I wonder..."
"Don't you know?" the Mouser demanded, a shade harshly. Standing rigid on
his holds, his arms and legs were aching worse than ever.
"O Mouser," Fafhrd confessed, "in my youth I never climbed Obelisk Polaris
farther than halfway to last night's camp. I only boasted to raise our spirits."
There being nothing to say to that, the Mouser shut his lips, though
somewhat thinly. Fafhrd began to whistle a tuneless tune and carefully fished a
small grapnel with five dagger-sharp flukes from his pouch and tied it securely to
the long end of their black rope still coiled on his back. Then stretching his right
arm as far out as he might from the cliff, he whirled the grapnel in a smallish
circle, faster and faster, and finally hurled it upward. They heard it clash against
rock somewhere above the bulge, but it did not catch on any crack or hump and
instantly came sliding and then dropping down, missing the Mouser by hardly a
handbreadth, it seemed to him.
Fafhrd drew up the grapnel -- with some delays, since it tended to catch on
every crack or hump below them -- and whirled and hurled it again. And again
and again and again, each time without success. Once it stayed up, but Fafhrd's
first careful tug on the rope brought it down.
Fafhrd's sixth cast was his first really bad one. The grapnel never went out of
sight at all. As it reached the top of the throw, it glinted for an instant.
"Sunlight!" Fafhrd hissed happily. "We're almost to the summit!"
"That 'almost' is a whopper, though," the Mouser commented, but even he
couldn't keep a cheerful note out of his voice.
By the time Fafhrd had failed on seven more casts, all cheerfulness was gone
from the Mouser again. His aches were horrible, his hands and feet were
numbing in the cold, and his brain was numbing too, so that the next time Fafhrd
cast and missed, he was so unwise as to follow the grapnel with his gaze as it fell.
For the first time today he really looked out and down.
The Cold Waste was a pale blue expanse almost like the sky -- and seeming
even more distant -- all its copses and mounds and tiny tarns having long since
become pinpoints and vanished. Many leagues to the west, almost at the horizon,
a jagged pale gold band showed where the shadows of the mountains ended.
Midway in the band was a blue gap -- Stardock's shadow continuing over the edge
of the world.
Giddily the Mouser snatched his gaze back to Obelisk Polaris ... and although
he could still see the granite, it didn't seem to count anymore -- only four insecure
holds on a kind of pale green nothingness, with Fafhrd and Hrissa somehow
suspended beside him. His mind could no longer accept the Obelisk's steepness.
As the urge to hurl himself down swelled in him, he somehow transformed it
into a sardonic snort, and he heard himself say with daggerish contempt, "Leave
off your foolish fishing, Fafhrd! I'll show you now how Lankhmarian mountain
science deals with a trifling problem such as this which has baffled all your
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