Swords & Dark Magic (40 page)

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.

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.”