Jonathan Strahan - Swords & Dark Magic - The New Sword and Sorcery

This was the city Bront the Inexorable beheld one autumn morning, wending his way up its spiral streets, threading among the drays and freight-wagons, the wains and rickshaws. From the Jarkeladd Tundras, a man raised to raiding and war, Bront viewed dazzling Helix with an uneasy sense of excess. Look where he would, he saw no cornice not surmounted by frieze work, no window not lavishly mullioned, nor doorway undadoed and unpilastered…and every one of these embellishments painstakingly traced in its own tint.

Color was a constant rumor in his ears as well—the tale on every tongue. Bront heard from the jostling throng such shards of talk as: “…the lintels puce, you understand, the dadoes apricot, and all the panels mauve !”

“ Mauve? Do you trifle with me?”

“The grim truth, nothing less!”

“ Mauve …! You tax belief!”

Bront’s shoulders were as muscled as a titanoplod’s thigh. He wore his broadsword’s hilt thrust up behind his head, and in the matter of decoration of any kind, he was an ascetic. His bronze cuirass, a scarred and dented veteran of many a subarctic skirmish, bore only the severest touch of embellishment: an embossed severed head between his pectorals. It was a crudely executed piece at that, done by a Tundra tinker on a little anvil mounted on the tail of his cart. Not surprisingly, the warrior overheard such aesthetic cavils with a mounting exasperation.

Bront, it must be said, was no dunce, nor was he utterly dead to the aesthetic joys. One’s senses were windows to the divine, and excellence must be sought through all the senses’ apertures. What man with a soul in him did not thrill to a plangent paean at the close of slaughter? To the architecture of an houri’s haunch, or the succulence of snow-chilled wine? To the heft of specie nested in a pouch? Or, indeed, to that specie’s glint of buttery gold?

But how many colors did a sane man need? What color, by the Black Crack, was mauve? What color was puce ?

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.