“Go no further in your wicked work. I am this world’s future and its destined end. I am this world’s witness at its dying, carrying within me the centuries whose terminus I am. Fecund with their whole remembered span, I will embrace eternity. I am this world’s future, and you shall not unmake me.”
It came to them, after a long, dazed time, that they were alone. They rose to their feet, and stood on solid ground again. They searched one another’s eyes, and each learned that he had not dreamed. Jacques withdrew from his doublet the swollen pouch of Kadaster’s gold, and tendered it to Bront.
“My profound apologies. I have not strength to move against such power.”
“Do not apologize,” said Hew, and cleared his throat. “Hold fast to your stipend. We have been provided with a means…to shield our wits and wills from Her. Forgive me, I was taken unawares. For our next encounter we will be prepared.”
They drank, and mused. “A ghost of the yet-to-be,” muttered Bront. “Are we slayers of an entire future?”
“Indeed we are,” Hew said gravely, “if we save this earth from its predestined end.”
They all took more wine, sorting silently through their thoughts. Cugel, who had been in the gaming dens for three straight days and nights, made his pallet on the straw and fell asleep. The other three, in lower tones, tried to collect some clearer notion of the work that lay ahead of them, and of the Combs’ denizens, the Slymires.
Bront, at length, summarized their meager certainties. “So. The Chippers will do their best to kill us every step of the way. They mine the veins of crystal that run below the Combs, but, high though they follow these veins, they have never dared to enter the Combs themselves, for awe of the Slymires. As to the nature of those dread beings, so wildly different are our notions of them that we seem to concur on only one point: that it is at least uncertain whether or not they eat the bodies of the human intruders they kill.”
“And that is because,” rumbled Jacques, “we have no notion of what they do eat. Penetration of the Combs has never been thought of by even the most rapacious Chipper…Well. It seems we had all best take some sleep, don’t you think so, gentlemen?”
In the magenta dawn, they shouldered their gear, and stepped out into heavy rain. Up from Minion’s hollow, and out onto the sodden plateau they climbed, and thereafter, for two leagues, they marched through an unremitting, drenching downpour so loud that it impeded speech. Approaching the immemorial antiquity of the Crystal Combs, Hew felt himself—felt all four of them to be the merest ephemera, as brief and slight as dead leaves. Surely this deluge would erase them long before they ever reached those ancient eminences…
But the storm-rack thinned as the land rose, the rain broke into brief soakings now and then, and murky amber morning filtered down on the rising terrain. Ahead, rocky knolls and foldings of the earth formed a kind of corolla encircling much taller shapes: the towering warped domes and wrenched hogbacks of a smoother, blacker stone. These dusky megaliths overtopped by some three hundred cubits their jumbled piedmont: the Combs—all their crystal immured within those huge shells of black basalt.
Across the plateau, other people, here and there, converged toward the same place. “These you see,” said Cugel, “the various mines’ agents, assayers, bookkeepers, commissaries—all use the main entries. These are far too heavily guarded for us. But all the big mines have quite a few secondary entries. These can be hard to find in that jumbled terrain—the trick is to look for their sentries. These, though they also lie hid, can be spotted.”
And so it proved. They’d searched the piedmont’s knolls and gullies through but one rain-squall more, when Bront detected, just beyond a hillside boulder, the movement of a hand resettling a rain hood on a briefly exposed head.
Storm-rack, red-shot by a sun now nearer zenith, still paved the sky, and wraiths of mist surrounded them. Yet the expeditioners suddenly lost the feeling that they were enveloped in this weather’s embrace. A sense of overarching space, of a gulf above them, prickled their napes. They all looked up.
The wraith of the future hung over them, itself like storm-rack now, four hundred cubits’ span, swirling in its corona of black smoke, which seemed to rise from its galaxy of eyes as from blazing white coals.
But though it roofed them with terror, it could not unseat their minds. For all four expeditioners, upon first rising from their pallets in the stable yard, had dashed a few drops in both eyes from a tiny flask that Hew had produced from his bandolier. This effusion had, throughout their morning’s trek, produced no alteration of their sight.
Only now did its effect appear, when the mighty ghost unleashed her sleet of madness. Now the riots of memory could not engulf them, were a translucence which enshrouded them like a cyclone but did not touch them within the sorcerous envelope.
And so, from grandeurs and glories, the imagery changed character, became a homicidal tapestry of war and murder—every kind of dying ever done tornadoed about them. Ravaged populations struck with plague died as they dropped their dead in burial pits, and fell in after. Conflagrations chewed cities to cascades of red-hot coals, in which whole shoals of humankind were shrunk to blackened sticks. Cataclysmic floods slid tidal tongues through thickly peopled valleys, and swept their populations streaming over their sunken towns, their struggles like some strange spasmodic flight, until these struggles slowed, and they sank down with dreaming eyes.
But finding the four untouched, again she spoke within them.
“Your world-killing work here will never be done. I nullify your dark transaction before it can begin.”
And she poured, in her tempest of homicide, up toward the ragged terrain whose sentries the party had detected. Her undulous, all-seeing smoke flowed into the gullied knolls, and gathered there like an earth-gripping storm, during which time a dozen men, in dun capes and strapped with weaponry, erupted from their coverts emitting hoarse cries and unhinged screeches, and fled scrambling away across the gaunt bluffs.
But then all the jeweled smoke of her bannered up, and her whole mass drained into one deep gully, and vanished. In the ensuing silence, Hew cleared his throat. “We can only hope. We can only follow her in.”
They clambered down into the network of gullies, and threaded toward that fold in the bluff they had marked. Long before they reached it, hoarse echoes—as from a tunnel—erupted, and wild-eyed miners fled toward them, colliding, stumbling, fleeing past.
By the time they reached the shaft-mouth, Jacques was using his wooden piston to deflect a veritable river of fleeing, maddened miners the ghost had stampeded.
The party paused outside the stonework portal. Still the miners poured out from an echosome clamor that seemed to branch deep in the earth. “In there,” Hew told them, “we are seeking a vertical shaft high enough to enter the Combs themselves. The bigger the gantry, the higher we’ll know they have tunneled. Some of these adits reach natural fissures up into the crystal lodes, and into one of these, we climb.”
Into the tunnel’s long, lanterned demi-gloom they ran, ran amidst mayhem, the three men clustered in Jacques’s wake, plying their staves to either side. Many were the dead and wounded that they overleapt, miners mutually battered in their frenzy. Jacques’s piston proved an excellent defensive weapon—the madmen it shouldered aside were instantly locked in combat with those they were thrown against.
The shaft broadened: an adit ahead, where a wide-legged derrick of timber thrust straight up into the basal stone of the Comb. Heavily lanterned, this was a populous site, accommodating assayers’ benches, storage bins, ore-cracking mills. Here, locked in epidemic frenzy, the miners toiled, battering and bludgeoning each other as diligently as ever they had mined crystal. The derrick, well strung with lights, showed eighty cubits of vertical shaft, and though its higher faces gleamed with seams of crystal, it dead-ended in the matrix stone.
On they charged, shouldering, heaving, clubbing. They ran and fought, ran and fought past weariness, and in this delirium, t
hree other adits they encountered—all too shallow. Meanwhile, the shafts had grown less populous, those miners not stricken down having fled away.
The fifth adit was the largest yet encountered. Though all the miners here lay stunned or dead, the howl of farther echoes in the mine bespoke more distant reaches still in uproar, where the ghost’s madness was still reaping new victims.
A far more massive gantry was this one, and, though it was all strung with lamps, it had a very different light pouring down it. Through the lanterns’ saffron glow there wove a silvery spiderweb-light of ricocheting filaments, a little labyrinth of transecting beams.
Jacques, Bront, and Hew went to the gantry and gazed up it. “Does the Comb’s black shell,” mused Jacques, “let filter through itself some exiguous remnant of the sun? Or do those crystals in the Comb breed light from the darkness?”
Cugel, unmoved by this kind of speculation, was drawn elsewhere: to an assayer’s bench heaped with field-cut crystals, a wealth of lenses. He slipped off his knapsack, began to fill it, and then looked back at the trio. He viewed their rapture, gazing up the gantry. He hesitated, harking uneasily to the hellish echoes branching through the tunnels…and then he rejoined his fellows. The derrick rose 120 cubits up—not to a cap of stone but to a faceted aperture, a crooked chimney of crystals whence poured the web-work of icy light.
“That is your destination?” Cugel asked. “Is it truly up into the Combs themselves?”
Their only answer was to begin climbing the derrick, and after a moment, Cugel began climbing after, disbelieving his own action at first, until, climbing, he grew wholly absorbed in the great size and perfection of the crystals they climbed toward.
Jacques entered the aperture first, testing the crystals’ strength to bear his great weight. His hugeness dwindled into the high, diamond-white radiance that leaked from the Comb above. He passed a turning, out of view. And some time after…“Ye gods!” they heard him rumble. “Come up! Come up!”
They ascended the faceted throat that narrowed, narrowed…and then it widened, and then they climbed into the Combs…and stood in awe.
In darkness visible, the colossal caverns loomed away: barrel vaults, groined domes, crooked steeplings, raftered transepts—clustered polyhedra clad each surface, their intersecting beams of such coherence that all this light was matrixed in deep night. Their dizzied eyes climbed the networked rays like spiders. And then, a stir in the high vaults. It was soft, but vast, like a whisper of breeze across acres of grass. The Slymires? But nothing of them was yet to be seen.
“I must be quick,” said Hew. He drew from his bandolier a little placket of smoothed bone, which the others saw to be inscribed with a black sketch of cursives, diagonals, and polygons, creating a curious little maze of voids. He plucked out a brush from one of his pigments, studied its color in this alien light, and began to fill in the pattern’s voids, plucking brush after brush in turn with quick intuition. Then he gazed at the finished pattern.
“What is it?” asked Bront.
“It is our passport.”
“What does it mean?”
“I don’t know.”
“There!” barked Bront. “What’s that which rises from the shaft?”
An ocular tentacle coronaed in smoke came pythoning up into the Comb. It seemed to writhe in that crystalline gloom. Hew held the passport aloft, but it was not from this the ghost recoiled. Her eyes seemed to scan something higher in the vertical abyss. She beheld it in multiplex horror for a long moment, and then crumbled into smoke entire, shrank to an inky fume that drained back down the crystal sinus…and was gone.
“She did not know of the Slymires,” said Hew. “Until this moment they have never intersected with the world’s affairs. From this moment, our world has a different future…and She is no more. A different future…and here it comes.”
Standing on their diamond knoll, the four intruders saw, high up the nearest wall, that converging shadows were blotting out the jewels. Big, quick shadows they were, trickling together, and branching downward toward them. Cugel hefted his staff, but Hew touched his arm, and stepped before him.
Down they came, twice man-sized, sinewy-limbed, their hind legs high-jutting, batrachian, and all their four paws splay-fingered and knuckly and suction-padded. Terrifying was the utter fluid ease, the dire prehensile strength with which they descended the faceted steeps…
Much nearer now, their long skulls proved frontally dished, and in these broad concavities gleamed five great opalescent eyes, pentagonally arrayed.
“What can they eat,” rumbled Bront, “with such tiny mouths?”
Their muscled limbs and torsos now showed clearer too, seemed densely furred—or feathered, rather, with a short, foliate plumage that rippled as they moved, restlessly, like breeze-stirred leaves.
“See!” murmured Hew in awe. “See how their plumage seems to…lick each beam of light they move through. Perhaps they feed on light, like plants…” He held aloft his little painted plaque, for the mute host was not two rods distant now.
The Slymires froze. Their supple unison was uncanny, as if they shared a single mind. Their little mouths began to whisper, and a vast, low susurration spread through the host. After a long pause, their phalanx parted, and one of their number, larger than the rest, came stealing forward, something like wonder in its hesitance. So near to Hew, at the last, it crouched, that Hew could see a narrow iris, white as frost, around each of its huge black pupils.
The beast slowly reached forth its huge hand, each exquisitely articulated digit like a muscled frond. It touched—so tenderly—the tintmaster’s colored rune, and a whisper came from its little lips. Hew gestured the plaque, and pointed aloft to the Comb’s highest vault. The Slymire gazed, then nodded, and raised its palms in offering, in acquiescence.
Jacques shed his cargo bed, and unlashed the first rolled length of ladder, while such a whispering spread among the alien multitude that it seemed the tides of a ghostly sea echoed within those mighty vaults. Hew pantomimed the ladder’s unscrolling up to the heights, and Cugel and Bront displayed the mallets and pitons, and their use in anchoring it.
The elder nodded, and his companions swarmed to the task. They ran the ladder up the dizzy slope and spiked it down, while others tucked the rest of the rolls under their arms and ran them higher still…
“Ye powers!” growled Jacques. “Do our labors end so easily?”
“All but mine, I think,” said Hew, gazing up into those dizzy jeweled heights.
“How think you it will go with you, on such a height?” Bront softly asked him.
“Good Bront.” Hew faintly smiled. “I’m trying not to think about that particular aspect of my task.” And tightening his harness of tints, Hew began his climb.
Zig and zag, the Slymires strung it higher, and zig and zag he climbed. His nerve for heights was firm enough, but four hundred cubits aloft wildly outwent the worst he’d ever faced. Yet his fear, though great, was strangely dwarfed by the radiance he ascended. The crystals he touched woke odd imaginings within his very flesh. He saw—remembered, it almost seemed—terrains he’d never dreamed of, sweeping planet-scapes of barbarous beauty, suns gilding seas on worlds he never knew, in hues un-viewed by any human eye…
And he came, almost before he knew it, into an apex of the Comb where, on a stretch of naked stone, abstract patterns were arrayed. Belting himself to the ladder, he gazed a moment at the first of these runes…and plucked out a brush.
At what behest he chose a hue, and applied it, then chose again—at what prompting he worked, he never knew. It was his nerves that did the work, his spine, which coruscated with strange fear, strange joy. At one point, almost unknown to himself, he murmured, “I am in the very hand of time, painting the future…”
After an unmeasurable interval, Hew socketed his final brush, and, with a strange reluctance, began his descent of the slender ladder’s vertiginous zigzag. He was exhausted to the very bone, but there was exaltation
in his heart. And as he inched downward, a tide of Slymires poured past him, surging up to view his work.
Throughout his descent, still they rivered up to the runic grotto, seething there to see, and see again, while the vast whisper raged throughout the Comb, a troubled breeze of rumor and report. Denial and doubt, alarm and disbelief hissed everywhere, while urgent crosswinds swept the swarming shadows, awed rebuttals breathing possibility…amazement…revelation.
Hew found his comrades girt for their return, and Jacques ungirt. “Do you leave your cargo bed here, Jacques?” he asked.
“Indeed I do! I therewith solemnize my retirement from my trade, thanks to your bounty, good Bront. Also, the Chippers stir below—” and indeed there was a rumble and clatter, a noise of returning forces filling the shaft far below, “—and I’ll fight better disencumbered…Where has friend Cugel gone?”
“Why,” marveled Bront, “he was here not a moment past!”
Movement rippled above them, and their eyes went aloft. Here came a sinuous cascade of Slymires converging toward them. Their silver-backed elder led them. They converged around the artist and his crew. But as the elder beamed his clustered eyes upon them, a whisper of alarm was heard, and here came a pair of the beasts, bearing between them the powerfully pinioned Cugel, whose rock hammer and half-filled knapsack of crystals were still incriminatingly clenched in his hands.
Brought near the elder, Cugel prepared to vent words of reproof and expostulation for his unjust seizure, yet his voice died in his throat as he beheld the labyrinthine luster of the elder’s gaze. Such…reverence he saw there. It could be called nothing else.
Cugel stood gaping when they tenderly set him down, and the elder loomed over him, and spread his marvelous long, supple fingers at all the cold fire of the Crystal Combs around them, and with a second ineffable gesture, laid it all at Cugel’s feet.
Then Cugel stood bemused as the elder’s fleet, surgical fingers danced across the crystals of the wall, and snapped off now here, now there, huge, flawless dodecas, swiftly filling his rucksack with a fortune.
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