Swords Against Wizardry by Fritz Leiber ...
Swords Against Wizardry by Fritz Leiber ...
Swords Against Wizardry by Fritz Leiber ...
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
ABBYY PDF Transformer 2.0<br />
Click here to buy<br />
w w w.A BBYY.co m<br />
"I'll swear I scored on him, Mouser," he snarled, recovering. "My ax touched<br />
something besides air."<br />
"You harebrained fool!" the Mouser cried. "Your scratches will anger him and<br />
bring him back." He let go of the chopped ice-hold with his hand and, steadying<br />
himself <strong>by</strong> his pike, he searched the sun-bright air ahead and around for ripples.<br />
"More like I've scared him off," Fafhrd asserted, doing the same. The rushy<br />
sound faded and did not return; the air became quiet, and the steep slope grew<br />
very still; even the water-drip faded.<br />
Turning back to the wall with a grunt of relief, the Mouser touched emptiness.<br />
He grew still as death himself. Turning his eyes only he saw that upward from a<br />
point level with his knees the whole snow ridge had vanished -- the whole saddle<br />
and a section of the swell to either side of it -- as if some great god had reached<br />
down while the Mouser's back was turned and removed that block of reality.<br />
Giddily he clung to his pike. He was standing atop a newly created snowsaddle<br />
now. Beyond and below its raw, fresh-fractured white eastern slope, the<br />
silently departed great snow-cornice was falling faster and faster, still in one hillsize<br />
chunk.<br />
Behind them the steps Fafhrd had cut mounted to the new snow rim, then<br />
vanished.<br />
"See, I chopped us down far enough only in the nick," Fafhrd grumbled. "My<br />
judgment was faulty."<br />
The falling cornice was snatched downward out of sight so that the Mouser<br />
and Fafhrd at last could see what lay east of the Mountains of the Giants: a rolling<br />
expanse of dark green that might be treetops except that from here even giant<br />
trees would be tinier than grass blades -- an expanse even farther below them<br />
than the Cold Waste at their backs. Beyond the green-carpeted depression,<br />
another mountain range loomed like the ghost of one.<br />
"I have heard legends of the Great Rift Valley," Fafhrd murmured. "A<br />
mountainsided cup for sunlight, its warm floor a league below the Waste."<br />
Their eyes searched.<br />
"Look," the Mouser said, "how trees climb the eastern face of Obelisk almost<br />
to his top. Now the goats don't seem so strange."<br />
They could see nothing, however, of the east face of Stardock.<br />
"Come on!" Fafhrd commanded. "If we linger, the invisible growl-laughtered<br />
flier may gather courage to return despite my ax-nick."<br />
And without further word he began resolutely to cut steps onward ... and still<br />
a little down.<br />
Hrissa continued to peer over the rim, her bearded chin almost resting on it,<br />
her nostrils a-twitch as if she faintly scented gossamer threads of meat-odor<br />
mounting from the leagues' distant dark green, but when the rope tightened on<br />
her harness, she followed.<br />
Perils came thick now. They reached the dark rock of the Ladder only <strong>by</strong><br />
chopping their way along a nearly vertical ice wall in the twinkly gloom under a<br />
close-arching waterfall of snow that shot out from an icy boss above them -perhaps<br />
a miniature version of the White Waterfall that was Stardock's skirt.<br />
When they stepped at last, numb with cold and hardly daring to believe they'd<br />
made it, onto a wide dark ledge, they saw a jumble of bloody goat tracks in the<br />
ABBYY PDF Transformer 2.0<br />
Click here to buy<br />
w w w.A BBYY.co m