the attacker back by an ankle. At this the small black one hissed low and horribly, turned again, and lunged at Fafhrd. But now the Mouser was roused at last from the shocked daze that he assured himself could never grip him in a less hatefully cold country. He dove forward at the small black one, diverting his thrust — there were sparks as the weapon struck stone within a finger's width of Fafhrd's arm — and skidding his greased form off the ledge beyond Fafhrd. The small black one swooped out of sight as silently as a bat.
Fafhrd, dangling his great frame over the abyss, finished his verse:
“Hush, Fafhrd,” the Mouser hissed, stooped as he listened intently. “I think I heard him hit.'
Fafhrd absentmindedly eased himself up to a seat. “Not if that chasm is half as deep as the last time we saw its bottom, you didn't,” he assured his comrade.
“But what was he?” the Mouser asked frowningly. “He looked like a man of Klesh.'
“Yes, with the jungle of Klesh as far from here as the moon,” Fafhrd reminded him with a chuckle. “Some maddened hermit frostbitten black, no doubt. There are strange skulkers in these little hills, they say.'
The Mouser peered up the dizzy mile-high cliff and spotted the nearby niche. “I wonder if there are more of him?” he questioned uneasily.
“Madmen commonly go alone,” Fafhrd asserted, getting up. “Come, small nagger, we'd best be on our way if you want a hot breakfast. If the old tales are true, we should be reaching the Cold Waste by sunup — and there we'll find a little wood at least.'
At that instant a great glow sprang from the niche from which the small attacker had dropped. It pulsed, turning from violet to green to yellow to red.
“What makes that?” Fafhrd mused, his interest roused at last. “The old tales say nothing of firevents in the Bones of the Old Ones. Now if I were to give you a boost, Mouser, I think you could reach that knob and then make your own way—”
“Oh no,” the Mouser interrupted, tugging at the big man and silently cursing himself for starting the question-asking. “I want my breakfast cooked over more wholesome flames. And I would be well away from here before other eyes see the glow.'
“None will see it, small dodger of mysteries,” Fafhrd said chucklingly, letting himself be urged away along the path. “Look, even now it dies.'
But at least one other eye had seen the pulsing glow — an eye as large as a squid's and bright as the Dog Star.
“Ha, Fafhrd!” the Gray Mouser cried gaily some hours later in the full-broken dawn. “There's an omen to warm our frozen hearts! A green hill winks at us frosty men — gives us the glad eye like a malachite-smeared dusky courtesan of Klesh!'
“She's as hot as a courtesan of Klesh, too,” the huge Northerner supplemented, rounding the brown crag's bulging shoulder in his turn, “for she's melted all the snow.'
It was true. Although the far horizon shone white and green with the snows and glacial ice of the Cold Waste, the saucerlike depression in the foreground held a small unfrozen lake. And while the air was still chilly around them, so that their breath drifted away in small white clouds, the brown ledge they trod was bare.
Up from the nearer shore of the lake rose the hill to which the Mouser had referred, the hill from which one star-small point still reflected the new-risen sun's rays at them blindingly.
“That is, if it is a hill,” Fafhrd added softly. “And in any case, whether a courtesan of Klesh or hill, she has several faces.'
The point was well taken. The hill's green flanks were formed of crags and hummocks which the imagination could shape into monstrous faces — all the eyes closed save the one that twinkled at them. The faces melted downward like wax into huge stony rivulets — or might they be elephantine trunks? — that plunged into the unruffled acid-seeming water. Here and there among the green were patches of dark red rock that might be blood, or mouths. Clashing nastily in color, the hill's rounded summit seemed to be composed of a fleshily pink marble. It too persisted in resembling a face — that of a sleeping ogre. It was crossed by a stretch of vividly red rock that might be the ogre's lips. From a slit in the red rock, a faint vapor rose.
The hill had more than a volcanic look. It seemed like an upwelling from a more savage, primal, fiercer consciousness than any that even Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser knew, an upwelling frozen in the act of invading a younger, weaker world — frozen yet eternally watchful and waiting and yearning.
And then the illusion was gone — or four-faces-out-of-five gone and the fifth wavering. The hill was just a hill again — an odd volcanic freak of the Cold Waste — a green hill with a glitter.
Fafhrd let out a gusty sigh. He surveyed the farther shore of the lake. It was hillocky and matted with a dark vegetation that unpleasantly resembled fur. At one point there rose from it a stubby pillar of rock almost like an altar. Beyond the hairy bushes, which were here and there flecked with red-leafed ones, stretched the ice and snow, broken only occasionally by great rocks and rare clumps of dwarfed trees.
But something else was foremost in the Mouser's thoughts.
“The eye, Fafhrd. The glad, glittering eye!” he whispered, dropping his voice as though they were in a crowded street and some informer or rival thief might overhear. “Only once before have I seen such a gleam, and that was by moonlight, across a king's treasure chamber. That time I did not come away with a huge diamond. A guardian serpent prevented it. I killed the wriggler, but its hiss brought other guards.
“But this time there's only a little hill to climb. And if at this distance the gem gleams so bright, Fafhrd' — his hand dropped and gripped his companion's leg, at the sensitive point just above the knee, for emphasis—'think how big!'
The Northerner, frowning faintly at the violent squeeze as well as at his doubts and misgivings, nevertheless sucked an icy breath in appreciative greed.
“And we poor shipwrecked marauders,” continued the Mouser raptly, “will be able to tell the gaping and envious thieves of Lankhmar that we not only crossed the Bones of the Old Ones, but picked them on the way.'
And he went skipping gaily down the skimpy ledge that merged into the narrow, lake-edged, rocky saddle that joined this greater mountain with the green one. Fafhrd followed more slowly, gazing steadily at the green hill, waiting for it to turn back into faces again, or to turn to no faces at all. It did neither. It occurred to him that it might have been partly shaped by human hands and, after that, the notion of a diamond-eyed idol seemed less implausible. At the far end of the saddle, just at the base of the green hill, he caught up with the Mouser, who was studying a flat, dark rock covered with gashes which a moment's glance told Fafhrd must be artificial.
“The runes of tropic Klesh!” the Northerner muttered.
“What should such hieroglyphs be doing so far from their jungle?'
“Chiseled, no doubt, by some hermit frostbitten black, whose madness taught him the Kleshic language,” the Mouser observed sardonically. “Or have you already forgotten last night's knifer?'
Fafhrd shook his head curtly. Together they pored over the deep-chopped letters, bringing to bear knowledge gained from the perusing of ancient treasure-maps and the deciphering of code-messages carried by intercepted spies.
“The seven black…” Fafhrd read laboriously.
“…priests,” the Mouser finished for him. “They're in it, whoever they may be. And a god or beast or devil — that writhing hieroglyph means any one of the three, depending on the surrounding words, which I don't understand. It's very ancient writing. And the seven black priests are to serve the writhing hieroglyph, or to bind it — again either might be meant, or both.'
“And so long as the priesthood endures,” Fafhrd took up, “that long will the god-beast-devil lie quietly… or sleep… or stay dead… or not come up…'
Abruptly the Mouser bounded straight into the air, fanning his feet. “This rock is hot,” he complained.
Fafhrd understood. Even through the thick walrus soles of his boots he was beginning to feel the unnatural warmth.
“Hotter than the floor of hell,” the Mouser observed, hopping first on one foot and then the other. “Well, what
