The Mouser dropped his gaze to the ghostly flames of the dying fire, seeking sleep himself. The flames made girl-bodies, then girl-faces. Next a ghostly pale green girl-face — perhaps an afterimage, he thought at first — appeared beyond the fire, staring at him through close-slitted eyes across the flame tops. It grew more distinct as he gazed at it, but there was no trace of hair or body about it — it hung against the dark like a mask.
Yet it was weirdly beautifuclass="underline" narrow chin, high-arched cheeks, wine-dark short lips slightly pouted, straight nose that went up without a dip into the broad, somewhat low forehead — and then the mystery of those fully lidded eyes seeming to peer at him through wine-dark lashes. And all, save lashes and lips, of palest green, like jade.
The Mouser did not speak or stir a muscle, simply because the face was very beautiful to him — just as any man might hope for the moment never to end when his naked mistress unconsciously or by secret design assumes a particularly charming attitude.
Also, in the dismal Cold Waste, any man treasures illusions, though knowing them almost certainly to be such.
Suddenly the eyes parted wide, showing only the darkness behind, as if the face were a mask indeed. The Mouser did start then, but still not enough to wake Hrissa.
Then the eyes closed, the lips puckered with taunting invitation; then the face began swiftly to dissolve as if it were being literally wiped away. First the right side went, then the left, then the center, last of all the dark lips and the eyes. For a moment the Mouser fancied he caught a winy odor; then all was gone.
He contemplated waking Fafhrd and almost laughed at the thought of his comrade's surly reactions. He wondered if the face had been a sign from the gods, or a sending from some black magician castled on Stardock, or Stardock's very soul perhaps — though then where had she left her glittering tresses and hat and her Ashsha eye? — or only a random creation of his own most clever brain, stimulated by sexual privation and tonight by beauteous if devilishly dangerous mountains. Rather quickly he decided on the last explanation and he slumbered.
Two evenings later, at the same hour, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stood scarcely a knife cast from the west wall of Obelisk Polaris, building a cairn from pale greenish rock-shards fallen over the millennia. Among this scanty scree were some bones, many broken, of sheep or goats.
As before, the air was still though very cold, the Waste empty, the set sun bright on the mountain faces.
From this closest vantage point the Obelisk was foreshortened into a pyramid that seemed to taper up forever, vertically. Encouragingly, his rock felt diamond-hard while the lowest reaches of the wall at any rate were thick with bumpy handholds and footholds, like pebbled leather.
To the south, Gran Hanack and the Hint were hidden.
To the north White Fang towered monstrously, yellowish white in the sunlight, as if ready to rip a hole in the graying sky. Bane of Fafhrd's father, the Mouser recalled.
Of Stardock, there could be seen the dark beginning of the wind-blasted north wall and the north end of the deadly White Waterfall. All else of Stardock the Obelisk hid.
Save for one touch: almost straight overhead, seeming now to come from Obelisk Polaris, the ghostly Grand Pennon streamed southwest.
From behind Fafhrd and the Mouser as they worked came the tantalizing odor of two snow hares roasting by the fire, while before it Hrissa tore flesh slowly and savoringly from the carcass of a third she'd coursed down. The ice-cat was about the size and shape of a cheetah, though with long tufty white hair. The Mouser had bought her from a far-ranging Mingol trapper just north of the Trollsteps.
Beyond the fire the ponies eagerly chomped the last of the grain, strengthening stuff they'd not tasted for a week.
Fafhrd wrapped his sheathed longsword Graywand in oiled silk and laid it in the cairn, then held out a big hand to the Mouser.
"Scalpel?"
"I'm taking my sword with me," the Mouser stated, then added justifyingly, "it's but a feather to yours."
"Tomorrow you'll find what a feather weighs," Fafhrd foretold. The big man shrugged and placed by Graywand his helmet, a bear's hide, a folded tent, shovel and pickax, gold bracelets from his wrists and arms, quills, ink, papyrus, a large copper pot, and some books and scrolls. The Mouser added various empty and near-empty bags, two hunting spears, skis, an unstrung bow with a quiver of arrows, tiny jars of oily paint and squares of parchment, and all the harness of the ponies, many of the items wrapped against damp like Graywand.
Then, their appetites quickening from the roast-fumes, the two comrades swiftly built two top courses, roofing the cairn.
Just as they turned toward supper, facing the raggedly gilt-edged flat western horizon, they heard in the silence the rushy sail-like noise again, fainter this time but twice: once in the air to the north and, almost simultaneously, to the south.
Again they stared around swiftly but searchingly, yet there was nothing anywhere to be seen except — again Fafhrd saw it first — a thread of black smoke very near White Fang, rising from a point on the glacier between that mountain and Stardock.
"Gnarfi and Kranarch, if it be they, have chosen the rocky north wall for their ascent," the Mouser observed.
"And it will be their bane," Fafhrd predicted, up-jerking his thumb at the Pennon.
The Mouser nodded with less certainty, then demanded, "Fafhrd, what was that sound? You've lived here."
Fafhrd's brow crinkled and his eyes almost shut. "Some legend of great birds…" he muttered questioningly, "…or of great fish — no, that couldn't be right."
"Memory pot still seething all black?" the Mouser asked. Fafhrd nodded.
Before he left the cairn, the Northerner laid beside it a slab of salt. "That," he said, "along with the ice-filmed pool and herbage we just passed, should hold the ponies here for a week. If we don't return, well, at least we showed 'em the way between here and Illik-Ving."
Hrissa smiled up from her bloody tidbit, as if to say, "No need to worry about me or my rations."
Again the Mouser woke as soon as sleep had gripped him tight, this time with a surge of pleasure, as one who remembers a rendezvous. And again, this time without any preliminary star-staring or flame-gazing, the living mask faced him across the sinking fire: every same expression-quirk and feature — short lips, nose and forehead one straight line — except that tonight it was ivory pale with greenish lips and lids and lashes.
The Mouser was considerably startled, for last night he had stayed awake, waiting for the phantom girl-face — and even trying to make it come again — until the swelling moon had risen three handbreadths above Stardock… without any success whatever. His mind had known that the face had been an hallucination on the first occasion, but his feelings had insisted otherwise — to his considerable disgust and the loss of a quarter night's sleep.
And by day he had secretly consulted the last of the four short stanzas on the parchment scrap in his pouch's deepest pocket:
Who scales the Snow King's citadel
Shall father his two daughters' sons;
Though he must face foes fierce and fell,
His seed shall live while time still runs.
Yesterday that had seemed rather promising — at least the fathering and daughters part — though today, after his lost sleep, the merest mockery.
But now the living mask was there again and going through all the same teasing antics, including the shuddersome yet somehow thrilling trick of opening wide its lids to show not eyes but a dark backing like the rest of the night. The Mouser was enchanted in a shivery way, but unlike the first night he was full-mindedly alert, and he tested for illusions by blinking and squinting his own eyes and silently shifting his head about in his hood — with no effect whatever on the living mask. Then he quietly unlaced the thong from the top hooks of his cloak — Hrissa was sleeping against Fafhrd tonight — and slowly reached out his hand and picked up a pebble and flicked it across the pale flames at a point somewhat below the mask.