Swords Against Wizardry by Fritz Leiber ...

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white ink: the brim of Stardock's pennonless snowy hat.
All the Mouser's aches and weariness came back as he squinted up the Ladder
while feeling in his pouch for the honey jar. Never, he was sure, had he seen so
much distance compressed into so little space by vertical foreshortening. It was
as if the gods had built a ladder to reach the sky, and after using it had kicked
most of the steps away. But he clenched his teeth and prepared to follow Fafhrd.
* * * *
All their previous climbing began to seem book-simple compared to what
they now straggled through, step by straining step, all the long summer
afternoon. Where Obelisk Polaris had been a stern schoolmaster, Stardock was a
mad queen, tireless in preparing her shocks and surprises, unpredictable in her
wild caprices.
The ledges of the Lairs were built of rock that sometimes broke away at a
touch, and they were piled with loose gravel. Also, the climbers made
acquaintance with Stardock's rocky avalanches, which brought stones whizzing
and spattering down around them without warning, so that they had to press
close to the walls and Fafhrd regretted leaving his helmet in the cairn. Hrissa first
snarled at each pelting pebble which hit near her, but when at last struck in the
side by a small one, showed fear and slunk close to the Mouser, trying until
rebuked to push between the wall and his legs.
And once they saw a cousin of the white worm they had slain rear up manhigh
and glare at them from a distant ledge, but it did not attack.
They had to work their way to the northernmost point of the topmost ledge
before they found, at the very edge of the Northern Tress, almost underlying its
streaming snow, a scree-choked gully which narrowed upward to a wide vertical
groove -- or chimney, as Fafhrd called it.
And when the treacherous scree was at last surmounted, the Mouser
discovered that the next stretch of the ascent was indeed very like climbing up the
inside of a rectangular chimney of varying width and with one of the four walls
missing -- that facing outward to the air. Its rock was sounder than that of the
Lairs, but that was all that could be said for it.
Here all tricks of climbing were required and the utmost of main strength into
the bargain. Sometimes they hoisted themselves by cracks wide enough for
finger- and toeholds; if a crack they needed was too narrow, Fafhrd would tap
into it one of his spikes to make a hold, and this spike must, if possible, be
unwedged after use and recovered. Sometimes the chimney narrowed so that they
could walk up it laboriously with shoulders to one wall and boot soles to the
other. Twice it widened and became so smooth-walled that the Mouser's
extensible climbing-pike had to be braced between wall and wall to give them a
necessary step.
And five times the chimney was blocked by a huge rock or chockstone which
in falling had wedged itself fast, and these fearsome obstructions had to be
climbed around on the outside, generally with the aid of one or more of Fafhrd's
spikes driven between chockstone and wall, or his grapnel tossed over it.
"Stardock has wept millstones in her day," the Mouser said of these gigantic
barriers, jerking his body aside from a whizzing rock for a period to his sentence.
This climbing was generally beyond Hrissa, and she often had to be carried
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