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

“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…

But the storm-rack thinned as the land rose, the rain broke into brief soakings now and then, and murky amber morning filtered down on the rising terrain. Ahead, rocky knolls and foldings of the earth formed a kind of corolla encircling much taller shapes: the towering warped domes and wrenched hogbacks of a smoother, blacker stone. These dusky megaliths overtopped by some three hundred cubits their jumbled piedmont: the Combs—all their crystal immured within those huge shells of black basalt.

Across the plateau, other people, here and there, converged toward the same place. “These you see,” said Cugel, “the various mines’ agents, assayers, bookkeepers, commissaries—all use the main entries. These are far too heavily guarded for us. But all the big mines have quite a few secondary entries. These can be hard to find in that jumbled terrain—the trick is to look for their sentries. These, though they also lie hid, can be spotted.”

And so it proved. They’d searched the piedmont’s knolls and gullies through but one rain-squall more, when Bront detected, just beyond a hillside boulder, the movement of a hand resettling a rain hood on a briefly exposed head.

Storm-rack, red-shot by a sun now nearer zenith, still paved the sky, and wraiths of mist surrounded them. Yet the expeditioners suddenly lost the feeling that they were enveloped in this weather’s embrace. A sense of overarching space, of a gulf above them, prickled their napes. They all looked up.