Swords Against Wizardry

A dozen parries he had to make and was pinked twice in the arm and pressed back against the wall almost like Hrissa, before he could take the measure of his foe, now out of the snowfall and wholly invisible, and go himself on the attack.

Then, glaring at a point a foot above the gray sword — a point where he judged his foe's eyes to be (if his foe carried his eyes in his head) — he went stamping forward, beating at the gray blade, slipping Scalpel around it with the tiniest disengages, seeking to bind it with his own sword, and ever thrusting impetuously at invisible arm and trunk.

Three times he felt his blade strike flesh, and once it bent briefly against invisible bone.

His foe leaped back onto the invisible flier, making narrow footprints in the slush gathered there. The flier rocked.

In his fighting rage the Mouser almost followed his foe onto that invisible, living, pulsating platform, yet prudently stopped at the brink.

And well it was he did so, for the flier dropped away like a skate in flight from a shark, shaking its slush into the snowfall. There came a last burst of laughter more like a wail, fading off and down in the silvery murk.

The Mouser began to laugh himself, a shade hysterically, and retreated to the wall. There he wiped off his blade and felt the stickiness of invisible blood, and laughed a wild high laugh again.

Hrissa's fur was still on end — and was a long time flattening.

Fafhrd quit trying to fumble out his ax and said seriously, "The girls couldn't have been with him — we'd have seen their forms or footprints on the slush-backed flier. I think he's jealous of us and works against 'em."

The Mouser laughed — only foolishly now — for a third time.

The murk turned dark gray. They set about firing the brazier and making ready for night. Despite their hurts and supreme weariness, the shock and fright of the last encounter had excited new energy from them and raised their spirits and given them appetites. They feasted well on thin collops of kid frizzled in the resin-flames or cooked pale gray in water that, strangely, could be sipped without hurt almost while it boiled.

"Must be nearing the realm of the Gods," Fafhrd muttered. "It's said they joyously drink boiling wine — and walk hurtlessly through flames."

"Fire is just as hot here, though," the Mouser said dully.

"Yet the air seems to have less nourishment. On what do you suppose the Gods subsist?"

"They are ethereal and require neither air nor food," Fafhrd suggested after a long frown of thinking.

"Yet you just now said they drink wine."

"Everybody drinks wine," Fafhrd asserted with a yawn, killing the discussion and also the Mouser's dim, unspoken speculation as to whether the feebler air, pressing less strongly on heating liquid, let its bubbles escape more easily.

Power of movement began to return to Fafhrd's right arm and his left was swelling no more. The Mouser salved and bandaged his own small wounds, then remembered to salve Hrissa's pads and tuck into her boots a little pine-scented eiderdown tweaked from the arrow-holes in Fafhrd's cloak.

When they were half laced up in their cloaks, Hrissa snuggled between them — and a few more precious resin-pellets dropped in the brazier as a bedtime luxury — Fafhrd got out a tiny jar of strong wine of Ilthmar, and they each took a sip of it, imagining those sunny vineyards and that hot, rich soil so far south.

A momentary flare from the brazier showed them the snow falling yet. A few rocks crashed nearby and a snowy avalanche hissed, then Stardock grew still in the frigid grip of night. The climbers' aerie seemed most strange to them, set above every other peak in the Mountains of the Giants — and likely all Nehwon — yet walled with darkness like a tiny room.

The Mouser said softly, "Now we know what roosts in the Roosts. Do you suppose there are dozens of those invisible mantas carpeting around us on ledges like this, or a-hang from them? Why don't they freeze? Or does someone stable them? And the invisible folk, what of them? No more can you call 'em mirage — you saw the sword, and I fought the man-thing at the other end of it. Yet invisible! How's that possible?"

Fafhrd shrugged and then winced because it hurt both shoulders cruelly. "Made of some stuff like water or glass," he hazarded. "Yet pliant and twisting the light less — and with no surface shimmer. You've seen sand and ashes made transparent by firing. Perhaps there's some heatless way of firing monsters and men until they are invisible."

"But how light enough to fly?" the Mouser asked.

"Thin beasts to match thin air," Fafhrd guessed sleepily.

The Mouser said, "And then those deadly worms — and the Fiend knows what perils above." He paused. "And yet we must still climb Stardock to the top, mustn't we? Why?"

Fafhrd nodded. "To beat out Kranarch and Gnarfi…" he muttered. "To beat out my father… the mystery of it… the girls… O Mouser, could you stop here any more than you could stop after touching half of a woman?"