Swords & Dark Magic (41 page)

“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 Bront’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, seemed 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.

“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…