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

“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.