Swords & Dark Magic

by Jonathan Strahan; Lou Anders

  The endless plateau received—as they quickly learned—recurrent rains, and this red sun’s more feeble light yet had power to nourish a lush growth of lichens and algaes on the fissured granite. This tough greenish-purplish growth flourished in a springy-clingy carpet, which cushioned one’s boot-soles yet constantly tripped them if they dragged.

  Bront disliked this world, the rubescent gloom that was its daylight. What had happened to the sun? Where was its golden fire and fierceness? The landscape seemed not over-populous. They’d seen distant caravans—what looked like men on tall, spindle-legged mounts—seen other solitary journeyers, pairs and trios too. Human-seeming, a good half of these transients. Occasionally, across the furry turf, far flocks of rock-toads moved, batrachian shapes the size of horses grazing the lichens, then drifting on in a lurching, wriggling way to farther pasture. None of these other beings showed any wish to intercept their path. All seemed bent on their own business here on this later Earth, and Bront was vexed that he could not imagine that business. What was everyone doing here?

  Irksome too, he found Hew’s endless silence. He had at the outset, of course, told Hew he did not wish to speak to him. But the man might have tried to talk him out of this once or twice! Instead he had marched perfectly mute for more than two days now—save for the exchange of some polite syllables, during the business of making each night’s camp.

  “Very well!” Bront at last erupted. Hew turned to face him.

  Entering the last quarter of its transit of this endless terrain, the sun’s red grew purplish, while the east took on shades of maroon. It gave one an underwater feeling, to move through air so richly hued. “I wish to know,” he told Hew stiffly, “all that you know of this task we’re at. Mere civility, I’d think, would have prompted you to share that by now!”

  “Permit me to ask,” replied Hew. “Is it your wish that we should speak to one another now?”

  “Have I not just said so?”

  “And that we should speak to one another henceforth?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m delighted. I will tell you as clearly as I can what we are enjoined to do. Much is unknown, and much else unclear to me, so…we must have patience.”

  “Of course we must! Do you take me for a lout?”

  “Certainly not! But you exerted yourself furiously to kill me for a minor clumsiness! It’s only natural I should ask.”

  “Well then.”

  “Well then. Our mission is for me to make a delivery to the Slymires. A delivery of light. This will take the form of certain colors I will apply to a nook high in their dwelling place within the Crystal Combs. Hence my bandolier of tints.”

  A gesture here at his harness, which Bront had noted he never took off till just before sleep, taking it then inside his cloak with him when he lay down.

  “And what colors are you to apply?”

  “I don’t yet know the colors I shall use. I’ll only know them when I see where they are to go. The site always tells me the color it requires.”

  “So, in a subterraneous, and, I take it, vertiginous place, we are to construct scaffolding while under heavy assault, so that you can apply some colors you have not yet identified.”

  “Just so.”

  “May one ask”—Bront struggled to frame his question in a civil tone—“if this bizarre and difficult exploit has some purpose, beyond driving us to grotesque extremes of effort?”

  “Kadaster said—not very comprehensibly to me—that the purpose of this work was to, in his words, save this world.”

  “To save this world. To save our world’s future.”

  “Well, yes, I suppose so.”

  Bront resettled his cuirass, and re-draped his cloak. This seemed a task not entirely unworthy of a man of his stature.

  “What else can you tell me of what we are to encounter?”

  “I know as little as you of this. Look southeastward there. Do you note a kind of glow?”

  A plum-hued gloom had settled on that horizon. Against its backdrop, a frail blossom of golden light—just a smudge as fine as pollen dusting a fingertip—seemed to unfold from a distant hollow in the plateau.

  “It must be Minion,” Bront said. “Let’s press on. We might make up our load of…scaffolding before we sleep.”

  Full dark drew down as they reached the broad depression where Minion lay like a nest of jewels. For some time they’d been hearing the noise of it across the plateau, a faint exhalation which was now resolved into a tumult of music, laughter, exclamation, and the rattle of myriad wheel-rims on flagstones and cobbles. Before them, an inland sea of lamps and lanterns, tapers, torches, beacons, cressets, and flambeaux—a lake of light and uproar.

  Descending into its purlieus, they encountered a vigorous trafficking, even in these more sparsely built-up industrial fringes. Here were dray-beast stables, wagon-wrights, caravan chandlers, brickyards and masonries, and the isolate but boisterous taverns that enliven all such workmen’s districts.

  Clearly, commerce flourished by day and by dark, while, amidst the commercial bustle, not a few barouches of more moneyed revelers—blazing with lanterns and rocking with song—rocketed among the crowd: top-pocket gamesters rollicking through their eccentric orbits.

  Hew thought a wagon-wright might have spoke-staves that would answer their need. “We want stout rungs not too wide, and then thumb-thick whipcord to ladder them on.”

  “Some drovers’ provisioner might be the place for the whipcord,” suggested Bront.

  “That’s well bethought! Look there—is that not a wheel-wright?”

  The wright, his hair in a high comb dyed silver, was at his cups in the saw-shed with two burly mates.

  “Hmmm,” he replied. “I have three-quarter cubit stock that I might sell in bulk. What footage need you?”

  “Well,” said Hew, thoughtful at this moment of choice, “…I need no less than five hundred cubits of reach for the ladder work. Eight hundred staves should do.”

  “By the Crack,” muttered Bront. “Is it so much weight we’ll be carrying?”

  “The bulk,” said Hew regretfully, “will be substantial. Yet the scaffold will be—comparatively—of gossamer thinness for the span it must cross and my weight, which it must bear.”

  “Then I’d best engage the jack-haul now. He’ll need time to make up such a load.”

  Bront, stoically sidestepping careening carriages of yodeling revelers, found a dray stable nearby. The stable neighbored a very active tavern, and within the yard it took some halooing to find a jack-haul to serve him. This one lay in clean straw on his stomach, his chin resting on his huge crossed arms. “How may we help you?” he rumbled.

  “I need to engage one of your brotherhood for strenuous drayage through tunnels and up into the Crystal Combs, the said drayage involving self-defense against violent armed assault.”

  “You seek considerable services beyond drayage.”

  “That is correct. I’d very much like a jack who can fight.”

  “Well. We all can, when assaulted.” It struck Bront as an odd and reckless notion, to assault a jack-haul. This one’s legs, shorter than his arms, were just as massive, jointed for maximum thrust. His fists were as broad as bucklers. “But I must say the work you propose outgoes my own appetite for strife. To enter the Chippers’ tunnels alone I would engage, with adequate recompense—”

  “We are instructed that you shall name your price.”

  The jack gave this declaration a long moment of thought, as anyone would. “…Even so. The tunnels, yes. But to climb up into the Combs! Well. But there is one of my colleagues whose present circumstances incline him to be much moved by gold.”

  This second jack Bront found curled on his side in his straw, snoring peacefully. The warrior was surprised. He’d assumed he’d find a younger, more combative jack. This one’s fur was in its autumn—he was almost a silver-back.

  Salutations failing, Bront had to give him a careful nudge. He woke at once, and on B
ront’s self-introduction, equably proposed a stroll through the yards to wake him more fully. They passed the pens of other sleeping jacks, and the hay barn, while Bront stated his needs.

  The jack paused, and placed his hindquarters on a bale of hay. He stroked his beard, and even against that massive jaw, his fingertips looked shockingly large.

  “Well. I can see a way we might make the tunnels. An implement must be improvised which I would wield. But within the Combs…imagination fails me. I can climb, but not as you must climb at the last inside the comb. Nor would your scaffold bear me. I will fight to the last to defend our lives against the Slymires, but I cannot yet see how that might be done.”

  “Nor can I. And…I fear that we are not to kill any of these Slymires.”

  “Oh! Assuming I could do it, I would never kill one!”

  “Why not?”

  The jack smiled thinly. “Call it…an intractable preference of my own, that all of them should live. Now. Forgive my reversion to contractual considerations. Am I, freely and absolutely, to name my own price?”

  “That is correct.”

  The jack promptly named a sum that staggered Bront. He worked his mouth, but naught came out. Yet even as he did, he felt something growing, swelling against his ribs. It was a pouch Kadaster had given him to tuck behind his cuirass. He had to unbuckle the cuirass to extract the suddenly engorged poke, and hand it over to the jack.

  “Well then. I am Bront, and my partner is Hew.”

  “I am Jacques.”

  Against the great wedge of his back, Jacques put on his load-bed, inserting arms and legs into its massive harness, massively buckled. At the wheelwrights’, they found Hew and the others hard at work. The whipcord had been procured, and they were tying fifty-cubit lengths of ladder, and rolling these in bundles. Jacques shucked his load-bed, and they began to lash the ladder-rolls upon it.

  An uproar and a commotion of boot soles came surging into the wheelwrights’ yard. A tall, lean figure, pursued by the rest, dodged narrowly past Bront, but then tripped over Hew and went sprawling, while the rout of his pursuers, so close upon him, collided outright with the expeditioners.

  This rout, some dozen men much in their liquor but rapt in their onrush of outrage, began at once to ply their staves and knouts on the jack-haul, the wheelwrights, and their employers alike. Bonneted and glad-ragged in a way that suggested moneyed revelers from the gaming halls, they fought with a furious tenacity, even against the wakened wrath of Jacques and Bront, and the spirited counterattack of Hew and the wrights and the lanky stranger they’d pursued here.

  The turmoil was but briefly intense, the larger, more practiced bruisers soon enough laying the whole gaggle of gamblers on the ground. The object of their pursuit professed his gratitude, as well as his utter puzzlement as to his pursuers’ motives. His bows of acknowledgment showed a sinewy strength, as had his fighting. His profile in the torchlight was sharp-jawed, with a nose most aquiline, and there was something droll, and instantly untrustworthy, in his face.

  Bront set to dragging the pummeled gamblers out into the public lane, while the rest of his party continued loading and lashing Jacques’s back-bed.

  The stranger lent Bront a hand. They dropped a pair of his stunned persecutors onto the cobbles, and he bowed graciously.

  “Sir. I ducked your way merely seeking some obscurity in which to evade my attackers. I am Cugel, a name not unadorned with my sobriquet—the, ahem, Clever. I am an itinerant entrepreneur, and most grateful for your help.”

  “Think nothing of it. I am Bront, a stranger to these parts.”

  “Tell me, good Brunt—”

  “Bront, the Inexorable.”

  “Tell me, esteemed Bront. Have you come here seeking personal enrichment?”

  “Alas.” They were dragging out a second pair of groggy gamblers in their mud-spotted finery. “We have a mission of our own.”

  “May I just breathe you a notion? A single thought? The Chippers’ tunnels, underneath the Crystal Combs. A wealth of gems and lenses.”

  “You can find these tunnels? Find your way into them?”

  “Nothing easier!—nothing easier for me, I mean,” he added solemnly. Bront knew him then for their third man, chance-met and similarly bound, but he recoiled from the carte blanche he was instructed to offer. Plainly a rogue and a ready felon, this man, if paid his own price in advance, would vanish at once. “I sense, good Cugel, that you seek allies within the Combs.”

  “No! Within the tunnels below them.”

  “Of course, of course.” Bront cursed his near-betrayal of their own objective, and struck a note of innocent enthusiasm. “It is a wonderful coincidence, our meeting thus, for we share your goal of penetrating the Chippers’ tunnels! The more hands for defense there, the better.”

  “My own view precisely! Crystal is my very purpose here. I was in a den of chance, financing my expedition, when these ruffians assaulted me.”

  They were now dragging out the last pair of the groggy gamesters. “Indeed!” Bront commiserated, repressing a sardonic smile. “You mean to say they burst into your place of recreation?”

  “No! They were seated at my table! Who would have imagined?”

  “Shocking!”

  When Jacques’s bed was loaded with the rolls of laddering, and balanced and lashed to his satisfaction, he led their party to a sawyer, and then a joiner, where he presided over the manufacture of a large wooden piston with a shaft to fit his huge hands—for “tunnel clearing,” he said. Cugel completed his own preparations by the simple acquisition of a stout, commodious knapsack. They repaired to Jacques’s stables with a demi-amphora of tart Skaldish wine. Seated on hay bales, the three men wielded the jacks’ big goblets two-handed.

  The coincidence of Cugel’s destination with their own caused Hew to nod to Bront, as if to say, here was their liaison foretold. “I regret,” he told Cugel, “that we are sworn not to speak of our own errand in the mines, but we must—forgive us—know yours, lest it impede our own.”

  Cugel drank off his goblet with evident relish. “My venture involves a lovely commercial arrangement which I do not blush to boast of. I’ve made a colleague among the Chippers who has sequestered for me a load of prime dodecas! Naturally, with such precious contraband at issue, my rendezvous within the mines must be discreetly made.”

  “It may be,” Jacques growled thoughtfully, “that our aims will hinder yours, for we foresee our entry as arousing something of a stir.”

  “Too truly said,” conceded Cugel. “My hope is to assist your struggles to the point where I may…branch off to my quieter work. There is much traffic in the shafts, and the adits, where gantries tunnel upward toward the Combs, are busy zones, where one can slip betimes away.”

  The jack-haul’s great sable eyes sought Hew’s and Bront’s. “Do you object to having his help until he leaves us?”

  Bront said, “We rejoice that our enterprise will, as it seems, offer protection to yours. May we know a bit more? What, for instance, are dodecas?”

  “I can answer you with perfect candor. They are twelve-faceted crystals, fractible into lenses for heat-cannons, intensifiers of the sunlight. I can even openly avow the prospective purchasers of my dodecas: the Biblionites, who presently besiege the Museum of Man, to despoil Guyal the Curator and distribute the museum’s numberless gnomens to the world at large. It is only by these sun-cannons’ use that the besiegers have damaged those mighty walls even the little that they have.”

  The jack nodded his huge head, and took a pensive draft. “I, for one, have always doubted the sincerity of the Biblionites. Do they truly intend a philanthropic flooding of the earth with all their plundered texts? Nonetheless…en route to our divergent goals, I am inclined to welcome your knout and your blade. Gentlemen?” This last to his employers.

  A wind blew through the yard, icy and intimate, rifling their garments with pickpocket fingers. This wind’s scent and haunting whisper were unearthly—or rather, se
emed to breathe from the entire earth at once—the tang of midnight ocean, the sear of arctic tundra, the green humidity of endless jungle were in it, and every note of restless atmosphere, and a hint of cold like the absolute cold between the stars…Along the street—empty some long while now—a figure came gliding, and turned in at the gate.

  Caped and hooded in black, both tall and wide this figure was, advancing on them. No gait was evident in its going, no rhythm of legs, but a smooth drifting which, though it never paused at all, seemed forever in arriving, its approach unending, never done. And the four of them, bound in one rapture, watched it come, and felt that, suddenly, this was a different world they sat in.

  The visitant towered before them. Lifted ragged hands of smoke, and drew back the hood. What she uncowled—within an undulant mane of tendriling black smoke—was a globe of eyes, eyes only and uncountable, for each eye focused on resolved into a globular cluster of eyes more myriad, and each of these distinctly brimming with memories and meaning…

  And all at once, the four dumbfounded entrepreneurs knew those memories. It smote them down into a reeling madness, this storm of beauties recollected in those eyes. Their minds were blown beneath skies paved with starfire, or flotillaed with sun-struck cumuli sailing, were chased along shores and valleys and mountains, rode prairie gales flattening the earth’s deep golden fur, crossed red-and-cerulean deserts where cactus armies stood swollen with green fire, saw carpentered villages bobbing on the swell of forested foothills—all while their hearts were shown nearer things, shown, from a mother’s nearness, radiant infants laid in cradles, or in graves, shown the long-beloved, white-haired, kissed farewell, shown the dying eyes of an enemy stabbed amid tumult and dire extremity, shown the devout eyes that guide the laying of the capstone on a temple of prayer…

  Torn in this storm of multi-mindedness, they toppled from their seats and groveled in the straw, groped for their sanity in a maelstrom of worlds and of hearts’ upheaval, and as they crouched in this gale, their visitant spoke within them.