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

“She did not know of the Slymires,” said Hew. “Until this moment they have never intersected with the world’s affairs. From this moment, our world has a different future…and She is no more. A different future…and here it comes.”

Standing on their diamond knoll, the four intruders saw, high up the nearest wall, that converging shadows were blotting out the jewels. Big, quick shadows they were, trickling together, and branching downward toward them. Cugel hefted his staff, but Hew touched his arm, and stepped before him.

Down they came, twice man-sized, sinewy-limbed, their hind legs high-jutting, batrachian, and all their four paws splay-fingered and knuckly and suction-padded. Terrifying was the utter fluid ease, the dire prehensile strength with which they descended the faceted steeps…

Much nearer now, their long skulls proved frontally dished, and in these broad concavities gleamed five great opalescent eyes, pentagonally arrayed.

“What can they eat,” rumbled Bront, “with such tiny mouths?”

Their muscled limbs and torsos now showed clearer too, seemed densely furred—or feathered, rather, with a short, foliate plumage that rippled as they moved, restlessly, like breeze-stirred leaves.

“See!” murmured Hew in awe. “See how their plumage seems to…lick each beam of light they move through. Perhaps they feed on light, like plants…” He held aloft his little painted plaque, for the mute host was not two rods distant now.

The Slymires froze. Their supple unison was uncanny, as if they shared a single mind. Their little mouths began to whisper, and a vast, low susurration spread through the host. After a long pause, their phalanx parted, and one of their number, larger than the rest, came stealing forward, something like wonder in its hesitance. So near to Hew, at the last, it crouched, that Hew could see a narrow iris, white as frost, around each of its huge black pupils.

The beast slowly reached forth its huge hand, each exquisitely articulated digit like a muscled frond. It touched—so tenderly—the tintmaster’s colored rune, and a whisper came from its little lips. Hew gestured the plaque, and pointed aloft to the Comb’s highest vault. The Slymire gazed, then nodded, and raised its palms in offering, in acquiescence.

Jacques shed his cargo bed, and unlashed the first rolled length of ladder, while such a whispering spread among the alien multitude that it seemed the tides of a ghostly sea echoed within those mighty vaults. Hew pantomimed the ladder’s unscrolling up to the heights, and Cugel and Bront displayed the mallets and pitons, and their use in anchoring it.

The elder nodded, and his companions swarmed to the task. They ran the ladder up the dizzy slope and spiked it down, while others tucked the rest of the rolls under their arms and ran them higher still…

“Ye powers!” growled Jacques. “Do our labors end so easily?”

“All but mine, I think,” said Hew, gazing up into those dizzy jeweled heights.

“How think you it will go with you, on such a height?” Bront softly asked him.

“Good Bront.” Hew faintly smiled. “I’m trying not to think about that particular aspect of my task.” And tightening his harness of tints, Hew began his climb.

Zig and zag, the Slymires strung it higher, and zig and zag he climbed. His nerve for heights was firm enough, but four hundred cubits aloft wildly outwent the worst he’d ever faced. Yet his fear, though great, was strangely dwarfed by the radiance he ascended. The crystals he touched woke odd imaginings within his very flesh. He saw—remembered, it almost seemed—terrains he’d never dreamed of, sweeping planet-scapes of barbarous beauty, suns gilding seas on worlds he never knew, in hues un-viewed by any human eye…

And he came, almost before he knew it, into an apex of the Comb where, on a stretch of naked stone, abstract patterns were arrayed. Belting himself to the ladder, he gazed a moment at the first of these runes…and plucked out a brush.

At what behest he chose a hue, and applied it, then chose again—at what prompting he worked, he never knew. It was his nerves that did the work, his spine, which coruscated with strange fear, strange joy. At one point, almost unknown to himself, he murmured, “I am in the very hand of time, painting the future…”

After an unmeasurable interval, Hew socketed his final brush, and, with a strange reluctance, began his descent of the slender ladder’s vertiginous zigzag. He was exhausted to the very bone, but there was exaltation in his heart. And as he inched downward, a tide of Slymires poured past him, surging up to view his work.

Throughout his descent, still they rivered up to the runic grotto, seething there to see, and see again, while the vast whisper raged throughout the Comb, a troubled breeze of rumor and report. Denial and doubt, alarm and disbelief hissed everywhere, while urgent crosswinds swept the swarming shadows, awed rebuttals breathing possibility…amazement…revelation.

Hew found his comrades girt for their return, and Jacques un girt. “Do you leave your cargo bed here, Jacques?” he asked.

“Indeed I do! I therewith solemnize my retirement from my trade, thanks to your bounty, good Bront. Also, the Chippers stir below—” and indeed there was a rumble and clatter, a noise of returning forces filling the shaft far below, “—and I’ll fight better disencumbered…Where has friend Cugel gone?”

“Why,” marveled Bront, “he was here not a moment past!”

Movement rippled above them, and their eyes went aloft. Here came a sinuous cascade of Slymires converging toward them. Their silver-backed elder led them. They converged around the artist and his crew. But as the elder beamed his clustered eyes upon them, a whisper of alarm was heard, and here came a pair of the beasts, bearing between them the powerfully pinioned Cugel, whose rock hammer and half-filled knapsack of crystals were still incriminatingly clenched in his hands.

Brought near the elder, Cugel prepared to vent words of reproof and expostulation for his unjust seizure, yet his voice died in his throat as he beheld the labyrinthine luster of the elder’s gaze. Such… reverence he saw there. It could be called nothing else.

Cugel stood gaping when they tenderly set him down, and the elder loomed over him, and spread his marvelous long, supple fingers at all the cold fire of the Crystal Combs around them, and with a second ineffable gesture, laid it all at Cugel’s feet.

Then Cugel stood bemused as the elder’s fleet, surgical fingers danced across the crystals of the wall, and snapped off now here, now there, huge, flawless dodecas, swiftly filling his rucksack with a fortune.

When Cugel had bowed his acknowledgment, the elder gathered all four of the intruders in his gaze. Long and long he whispered to them. The four interlopers received this intricate communication almost comprehendingly. When they saw the tremors of this host around them, the coruscations of their countless eyes like living gems, and felt the longing in this inhuman multitude, they thought they understood. This race had never been outside the Combs. Now that they were convinced there was an Outside, and that they must see it, it was their purpose to emerge…

The three men and the jack—with gracious gestures—stood aside. The elder led the supple Slymires down, through the crystal sinus, down the drain-hole human enterprise had dug into their Comb, flooding over the gantry.

“We are done, my friends,” said Bront. “Let’s after them.”

Below in the adit, they found a few more lifeless forms than they had left there, for a resurgence of the miners—commencing with the ghost’s death—could now be heard fleeing before the Slymires’ onrush. Outcry and tumult echoed as the creatures swept onward, outward. Jacques in the van, the men ran after them.