Swords & Dark Magic (39 page)

His errand irked him, and that was half his trouble. He had to fetch his employer a tintwright—for which, in terms less pretentious, read housepainter. People didn’t paint things at all in Bront’s native tundras, but he had mercenaried for years in the Great Shallows, along whose timbered coasts the cities were all plank and beam, all of which were protected by whitewashes, serviceable varnishes, and paint of sober hues. And he knew that there, a wall-smearer ranked about with a mill-hand—was a cut above an ostler, for the minor heights he climbed, and well below a tree-jack, who
truly
climbed. But
here
housepainters would be made much of, and doubtless whatever scaffold-monkey he engaged would put on airs.

Only the ample advance his employer disbursed to him secured Bront’s compliance with this menial errand—that, and the necromantic aura that haloed his employer’s name. Eldest Kadaster had met him at the dock in Karkmahn-Ra, and proved to be gaunt and white-haired, his eyebrows brambly and luxuriant, his beard thin and sere, converging to a wispy point below his chin. He wore a black leathern gown that was scuffed and scorched here and there—it struck you as some tradesman’s garment, till you looked into the remote serenity of his eyes and remembered who he was. Eldest Kadaster’s name moved in murmurs throughout the Ephesion Isles, and Bront knuckled his forehead at their meeting, a northern gesture of respect.

The mage conducted him to a tavern and a corner-table conference—asked preferences and graciously ordered for him. Though gratified by the sorcerer’s affability, Bront was troubled when Kadaster explained his first errand.

“But you see, sir,” said Bront, “I don’t know the first thing about housepainters…How am I to choose one?”

“It doesn’t matter. Indeed, the randomness of your choice is itself the point. A natural conjunction is required between you. Just go looking, and when the conjunction occurs, you need not seek me. I’ll be with you.”

The last promise gave Bront just the faintest tingle down his spine.

Thus it was he now wended his way toward the peak of Helix—and amid an embarrassment of riches, housepainter-wise. Had passed a score and more of them already, glimpsed at work in open-doored interiors, or up on scaffolds anchored to facades. But knowing his choice must be random didn’t help Bront. Quite the reverse. How could he know he was making the
right
random choice in so important a matter?

Doing what clearly must be done was the essence of Bront’s trade. Here a parry, there a thrust—in a fight to the death, taken moment by moment, there was little ambiguity. How, on what
basis,
was he supposed to pick a particular wall-smearer? All were equally ignoble, all comically daubed with the tints of their trade…

On his left now rose a wide web of iron and wood fully eight stories high, with seven stories of gaudily painted windows peeping out of the scaffold’s frame, and work still in progress up on the eighth. He studied the man toiling up there—too much undignified climbing to reach
that
smearer…

As he idly scanned those heights, he saw a blip of motion in the sky. No…
out
of the sky, something plummeting right for him. He moved aside, but a beat too late, and felt a weighty impact on his shoulder, and a drenching splash covering the whole left side of his head.

Though Bront couldn’t have named it, the object that struck him was a half-round paint mop: a large wad of sheep’s wool affixed to a short pole, its fleece charged with a good half-gallon of bright-blue paint.

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 emolument 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.