Swords & Dark Magic

by Jonathan Strahan; Lou Anders

  It was not so much laughter that filled the street around him, as it was a shocked and commiserating exclamation laced with laughter from those startled witnesses who couldn’t help it.

  A voice, reedy with distance and concern, came down to him from the scaffold’s crest. “I’m terribly terribly sorry, sir! It slipped my grip! Unforgivable clumsiness! I beg you to accept a reparation! May I toss you down twenty gold lictors?”

  As Bront peered upward for the speaker, blue paint dripped down his brow from his drenched hair, like rain from an eave. He slashed with one hand the gaudy pollution from his face, and beheld, leaning out solicitously far from the scaffold’s highest railing, a smallish figure with spiky red hair. Even at a distance of over eighty feet, smears of color could be detected on this figure’s cheek, his chin…

  Twenty lictors was a princely sum. These wall-smearers seemed to be obscenely well-paid—thoughts which came to him as from a great distance, for at his core, Bront was molten with wrath. The smearer’s proposition, declaimed as it seemed to half the city, perfected that wrath. To be painted half-blue, like a harlequin, in full public view! And then to be tossed down a tip, and sent on his way, still half-blue!

  Bront roared, throat veins bulging, “You will come down here, and clean me off, and then I will kill you!”

  The figure up on the scaffold neither moved nor answered for a moment. The whole street, rapt, harkened as one for his reply.

  “Honored sir! So unjustly and undeservedly spattered sir! With the deepest, most abject and heartfelt apologies, I would prefer to throw you down some towels, and perhaps twenty-five lictors!”

  “Throw me a tip, will you? I’ll bring a sword-tip up to you!” His rage tore his throat, shouting this. He leapt atop one of the great paint-casks arrayed on the pavement below a dangling block and tackle, and seized the scaffold. Up the outer frame he swarmed—having mounted, under fire, many a battlement as vertiginous as this.

  “I must regretfully, deeply regretfully, insist that you do not climb my scaffold, sir!” Shouting this, the housepainter vanished from view. Bront felt the far, hasty tread of the man through the frame he climbed—running along the crest to intersect Bront’s line of ascent. His smudged face thrust out from the top tier directly overhead now. Bront, already three tiers up and moving fast, could see his face much plainer—ferrety cheekbones, smallish nose and jaw.

  “Don’t climb your scaffold you say?” shrieked Bront, and climbed faster. The smearer ducked out of sight, and then reappeared with a long, heavy foot-plank hugged around its middle—leaning out again with this in arms. The vile ferret was stronger than he looked.

  “Please stop climbing! I entreat you! My apologies are beyond expression!”

  Just two tiers below the wretch, Bront climbed with reckless speed. In three more lunges he would have his hands around the smearer’s throat.

  But suddenly, the plank came down dropping crosswise across his arms. Like a sidewise battering ram, it broke the grip of both his hands, and he pitched backward from the scaffold.

  Throughout this whole encounter, it seemed that Bront’s reflexes had been just one beat late—and late they were again, for he was thirty feet into his fall before he began a backward somersault, to bring his feet down first on impact.

  He might just have made it, but for a huge paint-cask standing on a trestle. The cask intercepted his somersault, so that the back of his neck and shoulders punched through its heading. Bront was swallowed upside down to his knees in a geyser of pigment, spreading a corona of color from which the throng simultaneously—but not all successfully—recoiled.

  Despite the crowd’s besmirchment, the spectacular quality of this brief transaction between swordsman and painter left them almost mute with awe. The loudest sound in the whole street was that of the painter hastily descending the scaffold along its outer frame.

  “Friends! Neighbors! Your help! Please! He might drown!” He called this from a monkey’s perch just above the ruptured cask.

  “He’s drowned already!” someone shouted. “Look!”

  And just below the painter, Bront’s sandaled feet and greaved shins pedaled spasmodically against the air, and then were still, like two grotesque blossoms protruding from a mauve pond.

  “Friends!” said the painter. “You saw it all! Surely you do not blame me?”

  “No one blames you, sir.” The voice startled everyone. The speaker had not been noticed in their midst—a thin, white-bearded man in a shabby leather gown. “Dear citizens! This was a tragic mishap from first to last! Not least tragic is the defacement of your street, your garments! I am moved by civic feeling to repair the damage.”

  It seemed, for just a pulse or two, that the day grew dimmer. The sunlight turned from gold to dark honey, and an early-evening feeling filled the street, like the hour of lamps a-lighting. The painter, still clinging to the scaffold above the cask, blinked, and shook his head.

  And then it was broad noon again, people were dispersing, the soft roar of their varied discourse rising as if never interrupted. The painter saw not one spot of mauve on any garment in the crowd—nor anywhere on the pavement. The stranger smiled up at him. “Will you come down? May I know your name? I am Elder Kadaster, of Karkmahn-Ra, and I am wholly at your service.”

  “I am Dapplehew, tintmaster, at your service. Please call me Hew.” The man jumped to the street. While not large, he seemed of a dense and springy construction. He wore an affable, courteous expression. The orbits of his blue eyes were crinkly and sunburned—far-squinting eyes they seemed, that had long studied great facades, and imagined their new coloring.

  “Hew, if you would help me, I would like to put this unfortunate gentleman to rest. I knew him, you see, and no one else hereabouts does. He was a decent fellow in his way, but tragically inclined to passion.”

  “You are a remarkable, generous gentleman! I am so sorry to have unwittingly—”

  Hew’s new friend turned away and graciously detained the driver of a passing wain, the vehicle empty and loud on steel-shod wheels. He murmured earnestly to the driver, a massive dolt with hayrick hair. Amazement slowly dawned on the fellow’s face. Receiving from the mage a weighty pouch, the man dismounted, unhitched his little ’plod, and led the beast away. Kadaster beckoned the painter.

  “Now, Hew, perhaps we can use your tackle to place the cask, and poor Bront, in the wain?”

  This transfer accomplished, Kadaster reached up, affectionately patted one of Bront’s protruding calves, and said in elegy, “He was, within his limits, a decent man. Who of us, after all, lacks some defect? And now, shall we take him to my domicile?” And the mage gestured toward the entry of the very structure whose topmost floor Hew had just been painting.

  The tintmaster stood astonished. He knew the structure—all Helix did—to be the Seigneurial, a luxurious residential club, second home to Old Money rentiers and retired notables. And he knew the doors Kadaster indicated opened on an elegantly carpeted lobby, spacious to be sure, but as unable to receive the bulky wagon as the doorframe was too narrow to admit it.

  “Pull the wain in there, sir?”

  “Well, let’s start by pulling just the traces through, and see how we fare from that point. Shall we?”

  They pulled the traces over the threshold—scarcely pulled, the wheels seemed to roll of themselves—and entered, not the well-known lobby of the Seigneurial Club but a high passage of hewn stone, dark above but yellowishly lit below, as if from a subtle lambency of the flagstones they trod. The wain rolled softly after them, tragic Bront’s sandaled feet nodding with its movement like two funeral lilies in their pool of mauve.

  “I will confess to you, Hew,” said Kadaster as they walked, “that I sent Bront here in search of a man of your trade. The mode of your meeting I perforce left to chance. I grieve that it proved…stressful for you both. But now that we are all together, I would like to engage your services, yours and Bront’s here, for what I hope you’ll consider a handsome e
molument in fine-gold specie: fifty thousand lictors each.”

  Hew’s mouth opened, without at first producing speech. At length, he said, “I am deeply honored that you should consider my services worth such a sum, and I am of course keen to learn what you have in view. Still, though I would rather die than offend you,” he added, “I must ask if Master Bront’s being, ah, dead, isn’t an obstacle to this project of yours.”

  “Ah!” cried Kadaster. “Here’s the terrace—I’ll pour us all some refreshment!”

  And indeed, just ahead of them, the tunnel ended at a blaze of sunlight. They stepped out onto the magnificent terrace of a manse that clung to a great gray mountain’s shoulder. Hew stood gazing out into the yawning gulfs of blue air. He realized, finding himself so distant from where he had been mere minutes before, that he was already hired. “Have we come so far? Is that Helix there, barely visible upon the plain? Are we up in the Siderions?”

  “Yes, yes, and yes.”

  Hew gazed at Helix, a little cone of brightness on the distant plain that swept down from these mountains’ feet. “Well, great Kadaster, I’m stunned to be so…honored.”

  “The honor is mine. But help me with Bront.”

  He opened the wain’s tailgate. They hoisted the traces high, and the paint cask toppled, releasing the dead mauve Bront. His corpse was slick as an otter, except for his calves and his feet.

  Kadaster made a gesture and the wain sprang off the terrace and tumbled away into the mountain gulfs. He seized up a bucket from somewhere and made an emptying gesture with it at the flood of pigment, and every scrap of color peeled off of the terrace and the corpse and cohered in the bucket, which Kadaster tossed, in its turn, out into the abyss.

  Now he produced a second bucket, gripping the perfectly clean Bront by the back of his neck, and tucking the bucket under his face. “Bront,” he said. “Come back.”

  Upheaval shook the mighty frame. His head came up and he began to puke mightily. Endless this disgorging seemed, yet when he was done, the bucket was precisely filled with pigment, and there was not an iota of spillage. Hew had taken up one of his host’s flasks of wine, and now gently offered it to the warrior, whose eyes seemed to be clearing.

  “Perhaps you’d like a cleansing draught?” he said.

  Disbelief, then outrage entered Bront’s unfocused eyes as he recognized the two solicitous faces gazing down at him. The proffered flask was something he could grasp—he did so, and drank it off. Rose unsteadily and stood swaying, gaping dazedly upon the mountain peaks that marched away from this fastness on every side.

  “Drop that over the railing, would you Bront?” the sorcerer pleasantly suggested, indicating the bucket which the warrior had spewed full. The swordsman stiffly picked it up, and carried it to the balcony’s edge as if it weighed a thousand stone. Then set it down and stood gripping the balustrade, and gazing out wild-eyed into the gulf.

  “I was dead!” It was a hoarse shout of protest addressed to the universe. Hew came cautiously to his side.

  “I can’t tell you how I rejoice in your…recovery.”

  “You killed me!”

  “No! I prevented you from killing me, and it resulted in your death! Surely you’ll acknowledge there’s an important difference?”

  But the gulf distracted Bront’s wild eye. He had, it was apparent, no thought to spare for quibbles over cause and effect. Again he announced to the vast, limpid mountain air: “I was dead!”—wonder now equaled the note of protest in his voice.

  “Come, my dear, respected Bront,” urged Kadaster, “drop the bucket off the balcony, and let us take more wine together.”

  As the warrior held the bucket poised to drop, he slanted a question to the tintmaster. “What color would you call this here that I drowned in?”

  “Mauve.”

  Bront released it as he might a striking snake, and shuddered as he watched it—his death there plummeting into the void, dwindling away…

  In easy chairs, gazing over the gulf, the three of them drank wine. Bront between swallows sometimes seemed to marvel at the flask itself, and at his own hand that held it, but soon enough he drained the wine, and poured himself some more.

  “Gentlemen,” Kadaster said, “your commission is of the highest importance. To understand where I mean to send you, you must first consider that no light is ever lost, or ever will be lost. Second, you must grasp that time is light. No light is ever lost, and every eon’s glow, each intricate detail, is still fleeing through the universe, radiating outward from its moment of origin. Your destination will lie within this swelling sphere of light.”

  “Will lie,” Hew added carefully, “within this sphere of time.”

  “Precisely. And precisely what you are to deliver is a bit of light. You, estimable Hew, will shortly be given an insight into the details of this delivery, which it falls to you particularly to execute.”

  The wizard paused, and seemed to muse. Bront cleared his throat. “What you need done, this man here, this execrable scaffold-monkey, can do. But you’ve gone to the trouble of painting me mauve before the eyes of the town, drowning me in it, and resurrecting me up here, all because I too have some part in this wall-smearing commission?”

  “Your assumption is absolutely correct, good Bront, and I sincerely grieve at the understandable pique your words express. We had, perforce, to rely on chance, and chance was dreadfully unkind to you.

  “And I fear the same element of chance will govern your execution of our aim where I will shortly send you. We may rejoice, at least, that this mission of yours lies near at hand.” He rose, and invited them back to the parapet. “It lies, indeed, not thirty leagues due south of here. You’ll be there in scarce three days’ march.”

  Hew and Bront viewed the Siderion Mountains on whose spine they were perched. It was an awesome range of sharp, snow-crowned peaks which they knew to stretch a hundred leagues due south.

  “Thirty leagues as the crow flies?” Hew was amazed. “Scarce three days? You mean a month’s trek, surely.”

  Bront’s thoughts seemed to have wandered. “Resurrection…” he murmured. “How strange it feels, this…reacquaintance with the world…”

  The wizard smiled his sympathy. To Hew’s question, he said, “You misconceive the mission. When, in an hour or so, you set out yonder, these mountains will be utterly worn away. A gently rolling high plateau—all that will be left of them—is what you’ll tread. But come now, both of you, to my storerooms to be armed and clad.”

  Returning alone to the balcony, Bront did not disdain the wine—nor had he refused from Kadaster’s stores a trail cloak and stout new buskins. While the sorcerer’s golden advance had not erased, it had surely moderated his indignation at his sufferings in that cask of paint.

  It irked him that the wall-smearer was still closeted with the mage in private conference…Still, his curiosity was undeniably piqued: the distant future was to be their destination.

  When the sorcerer and Hew returned, the tintmaster wore a leathern harness which wrapped a row of cylinders across his chest. A jar of pigment was socketed in each of these lidded cylinders, and each jar sprouted the handle of what looked to be a remarkably small brush.

  “My friends…” The mage was pouring a round into their cups. “…Forgive me now if my parting injunctions seem spare to you. This is the mage’s hardest task—to stint direction when chance is the magic’s key additive. I must, perforce, describe your task elliptically.

  “At the distance I have named due south of here, lies Minion. It is a bustling place, a gamester’s hive of sleepless carnival. Your task lies in the Crystal Combs, a few leagues eastward, but your preparation must commence in Minion. There you will procure the materials good Hew has determined. Engage a jack-haul—a spry one who can run and fight as well as carry—and make up his load with all you will need inside the Combs.

  “At some point prior to your departure from Minion, you will have met your third man, precisely how I cannot say.
You will know him for your own because he too will be bound for the Combs. These are reached via tunnels beneath them, and in these, you will certainly encounter conflict with the men who sap and chip from below at the crystals. Your third man will know a way into the tunnels.

  “Here, Bront, the combative skills that so distinguish you will come into play. But please note that yours is, in essence, a beneficent mission. Where a solid clubbing will suffice, you are not to spill avoidable blood. When you are up in the Combs themselves, you must take particular care not to harm the denizens there, the Slymires, though I am afraid they are dangerous in the extreme, and may be fiercely aggressive.

  “When you have reached the primitive Archive of the Slymires—their grotto of runes—you will have a final and most vital task. Hew will need a great deal of help in constructing the scaffolding he needs to ascend the walls of those colossal vaults, and execute that last, most vital act.”

  “…I am to help him construct his…scaffold?”

  “Yes.”

  Bront shuddered violently. He seemed to be having a full-body memory of his most recent experience on a scaffold. He touched, beneath his cuirass, a pouch of golden lictors—Kadaster’s advance. Registering some comfort from this contact, he shuddered again, more softly.

  “Now gentlemen,” smiled the mage. “Please stand with your toes touching the parapet. I wish you godspeed, and ask you to take one step forward.”

  “The parapet impedes all forward motion,” protested Bront, but in reflexively pushing his right foot against the wall, he felt it swing effortlessly forward, and come to rest on level rock, and found himself standing on a vast, rolling plateau, beneath the rosy light of a far redder sun, at high noon…

  Early on their third day’s march, the weary Bront fell back a bit, and watched Hew’s progress on ahead. The scaffold-monkey, though smallish and squarish, was very tight-knit and nimble. He’d evolved a steady, dancing kind of gait to deal with the terrain, and while Bront had scorned the indignity of it from the first, he’d been forced, at length, to imitate—in a more ponderous way, to be sure—that same half-dancing progress.