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

“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.”