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

The wraith of the future hung over them, itself like storm-rack now, four hundred cubits’ span, swirling in its corona of black smoke, which seemed to rise from its galaxy of eyes as from blazing white coals.

But though it roofed them with terror, it could not unseat their minds. For all four expeditioners, upon first rising from their pallets in the stable yard, had dashed a few drops in both eyes from a tiny flask that Hew had produced from his bandolier. This effusion had, throughout their morning’s trek, produced no alteration of their sight.

Only now did its effect appear, when the mighty ghost unleashed her sleet of madness. Now the riots of memory could not engulf them, were a translucence which enshrouded them like a cyclone but did not touch them within the sorcerous envelope.

And so, from grandeurs and glories, the imagery changed character, became a homicidal tapestry of war and murder—every kind of dying ever done tornadoed about them. Ravaged populations struck with plague died as they dropped their dead in burial pits, and fell in after. Conflagrations chewed cities to cascades of red-hot coals, in which whole shoals of humankind were shrunk to blackened sticks. Cataclysmic floods slid tidal tongues through thickly peopled valleys, and swept their populations streaming over their sunken towns, their struggles like some strange spasmodic flight, until these struggles slowed, and they sank down with dreaming eyes.

But finding the four untouched, again she spoke within them.

“Your world-killing work here will never be done. I nullify your dark transaction before it can begin.”

And she poured, in her tempest of homicide, up toward the ragged terrain whose sentries the party had detected. Her undulous, all-seeing smoke flowed into the gullied knolls, and gathered there like an earth-gripping storm, during which time a dozen men, in dun capes and strapped with weaponry, erupted from their coverts emitting hoarse cries and unhinged screeches, and fled scrambling away across the gaunt bluffs.

But then all the jeweled smoke of her bannered up, and her whole mass drained into one deep gully, and vanished. In the ensuing silence, Hew cleared his throat. “We can only hope. We can only follow her in.”

They clambered down into the network of gullies, and threaded toward that fold in the bluff they had marked. Long before they reached it, hoarse echoes—as from a tunnel—erupted, and wild-eyed miners fled toward them, colliding, stumbling, fleeing past.

By the time they reached the shaft-mouth, Jacques was using his wooden piston to deflect a veritable river of fleeing, maddened miners the ghost had stampeded.

The party paused outside the stonework portal. Still the miners poured out from an echosome clamor that seemed to branch deep in the earth. “In there,” Hew told them, “we are seeking a vertical shaft high enough to enter the Combs themselves. The bigger the gantry, the higher we’ll know they have tunneled. Some of these adits reach natural fissures up into the crystal lodes, and into one of these, we climb.”

Into the tunnel’s long, lanterned demi-gloom they ran, ran amidst mayhem, the three men clustered in Jacques’s wake, plying their staves to either side. Many were the dead and wounded that they overleapt, miners mutually battered in their frenzy. Jacques’s piston proved an excellent defensive weapon—the madmen it shouldered aside were instantly locked in combat with those they were thrown against.

The shaft broadened: an adit ahead, where a wide-legged derrick of timber thrust straight up into the basal stone of the Comb. Heavily lanterned, this was a populous site, accommodating assayers’ benches, storage bins, ore-cracking mills. Here, locked in epidemic frenzy, the miners toiled, battering and bludgeoning each other as diligently as ever they had mined crystal. The derrick, well strung with lights, showed eighty cubits of vertical shaft, and though its higher faces gleamed with seams of crystal, it dead-ended in the matrix stone.

On they charged, shouldering, heaving, clubbing. They ran and fought, ran and fought past weariness, and in this delirium, three other adits they encountered—all too shallow. Meanwhile, the shafts had grown less populous, those miners not stricken down having fled away.

The fifth adit was the largest yet encountered. Though all the miners here lay stunned or dead, the howl of farther echoes in the mine bespoke more distant reaches still in uproar, where the ghost’s madness was still reaping new victims.

A far more massive gantry was this one, and, though it was all strung with lamps, it had a very different light pouring down it. Through the lanterns’ saffron glow there wove a silvery spiderweb-light of ricocheting filaments, a little labyrinth of transecting beams.

Jacques, Bront, and Hew went to the gantry and gazed up it. “Does the Comb’s black shell,” mused Jacques, “let filter through itself some exiguous remnant of the sun? Or do those crystals in the Comb breed light from the darkness?”

Cugel, unmoved by this kind of speculation, was drawn elsewhere: to an assayer’s bench heaped with field-cut crystals, a wealth of lenses. He slipped off his knapsack, began to fill it, and then looked back at the trio. He viewed their rapture, gazing up the gantry. He hesitated, harking uneasily to the hellish echoes branching through the tunnels…and then he rejoined his fellows. The derrick rose 120 cubits up—not to a cap of stone but to a faceted aperture, a crooked chimney of crystals whence poured the web-work of icy light.

“That is your destination?” Cugel asked. “Is it truly up into the Combs themselves?”

Their only answer was to begin climbing the derrick, and after a moment, Cugel began climbing after, disbelieving his own action at first, until, climbing, he grew wholly absorbed in the great size and perfection of the crystals they climbed toward.

Jacques entered the aperture first, testing the crystals’ strength to bear his great weight. His hugeness dwindled into the high, diamond-white radiance that leaked from the Comb above. He passed a turning, out of view. And some time after…“Ye gods!” they heard him rumble. “Come up! Come up!”

They ascended the faceted throat that narrowed, narrowed…and then it widened, and then they climbed into the Combs…and stood in awe.

In darkness visible, the colossal caverns loomed away: barrel vaults, groined domes, crooked steeplings, raftered transepts—clustered polyhedra clad each surface, their intersecting beams of such coherence that all this light was matrixed in deep night. Their dizzied eyes climbed the networked rays like spiders. And then, a stir in the high vaults. It was soft, but vast, like a whisper of breeze across acres of grass. The Slymires? But nothing of them was yet to be seen.

“I must be quick,” said Hew. He drew from his bandolier a little placket of smoothed bone, which the others saw to be inscribed with a black sketch of cursives, diagonals, and polygons, creating a curious little maze of voids. He plucked out a brush from one of his pigments, studied its color in this alien light, and began to fill in the pattern’s voids, plucking brush after brush in turn with quick intuition. Then he gazed at the finished pattern.

“What is it?” asked Bront.

“It is our passport.”

“What does it mean?”

“I don’t know.”

“There!” barked Bront. “What’s that which rises from the shaft?”

An ocular tentacle coronaed in smoke came pythoning up into the Comb. It seemed to writhe in that crystalline gloom. Hew held the passport aloft, but it was not from this the ghost recoiled. Her eyes seemed to scan something higher in the vertical abyss. She beheld it in multiplex horror for a long moment, and then crumbled into smoke entire, shrank to an inky fume that drained back down the crystal sinus…and was gone.