HEW THE TINTMASTER
Michael Shea
Ah, colorful Helix! It’s a rainbow whirligig, a bright coil of bustling streets and painted structures that spirals up the little mountain—or grand hill—of the same name. It lies a few miles inland from Karkmahn-Ra, Earth’s most seething port, and the hub of trade for the whole Sea of Agon.
Every ridgeline of Helix’s slopes is crusted with proud halls and domiciles, and their burnished roof-tiles and gaudy walls flash like the jumbled facets of a grand jewel extruded from the plain. For color’s the thing in Helix. True, the whole Ephesion Island Chain boasts a culture of panache and proud display—the Bazaar of the Southern Hemisphere it’s called—but in Helix, pigmentation borders on obsession, on delirium. Mounted as the city is on the rough cone of its eminence, every structure’s on exhibit, and an ethos of self-proclamation prevails. It is a chromatic carnival.
This was the city Bront the Inexorable beheld one autumn morning, wending his way up its spiral streets, threading among the drays and freight-wagons, the wains and rickshaws. From the Jarkeladd Tundras, a man raised to raiding and war, Bront viewed dazzling Helix with an uneasy sense of excess. Look where he would, he saw no cornice not surmounted by frieze work, no window not lavishly mullioned, nor doorway undadoed and unpilastered…and every one of these embellishments painstakingly traced in its own tint.
Color was a constant rumor in his ears as well—the tale on every tongue. Bront heard from the jostling throng such shards of talk as: “…the lintels puce, you understand, the dadoes apricot, and all the panels mauve!”
“Mauve? Do you trifle with me?”
“The grim truth, nothing less!”
“Mauve…! You tax belief!”
Bront’s shoulders were as muscled as a titanoplod’s thigh. He wore his broadsword’s hilt thrust up behind his head, and in the matter of decoration of any kind, he was an ascetic. His bronze cuirass, a scarred and dented veteran of many a subarctic skirmish, bore only the severest touch of embellishment: an embossed severed head between his pectorals. It was a crudely executed piece at that, done by a Tundra tinker on a little anvil mounted on the tail of his cart. Not surprisingly, the warrior overheard such aesthetic cavils with a mounting exasperation.
Bront, it must be said, was no dunce, nor was he utterly dead to the aesthetic joys. One’s senses were windows to the divine, and excellence must be sought through all the senses’ apertures. What man with a soul in him did not thrill to a plangent paean at the close of slaughter? To the architecture of an houri’s haunch, or the succulence of snow-chilled wine? To the heft of specie nested in a pouch? Or, indeed, to that specie’s glint of buttery gold?
But how many colors did a sane man need? What color, by the Black Crack, was mauve? What color was puce?
His errand irked him, and that was half his trouble. He had to fetch his employer a tintwright—for which, in terms less pretentious, read housepainter. People didn’t paint things at all in Bront’s native tundras, but he had mercenaried for years in the Great Shallows, along whose timbered coasts the cities were all plank and beam, all of which were protected by whitewashes, serviceable varnishes, and paint of sober hues. And he knew that there, a wall-smearer ranked about with a mill-hand—was a cut above an ostler, for the minor heights he climbed, and well below a tree-jack, who truly climbed. But here housepainters would be made much of, and doubtless whatever scaffold-monkey he engaged would put on airs.
Only the ample advance his employer disbursed to him secured Bront’s compliance with this menial errand—that, and the necromantic aura that haloed his employer’s name. Eldest Kadaster had met him at the dock in Karkmahn-Ra, and proved to be gaunt and white-haired, his eyebrows brambly and luxuriant, his beard thin and sere, converging to a wispy point below his chin. He wore a black leathern gown that was scuffed and scorched here and there—it struck you as some tradesman’s garment, till you looked into the remote serenity of his eyes and remembered who he was. Eldest Kadaster’s name moved in murmurs throughout the Ephesion Isles, and Bront knuckled his forehead at their meeting, a northern gesture of respect.
The mage conducted him to a tavern and a corner-table conference—asked preferences and graciously ordered for him. Though gratified by the sorcerer’s affability, Bront was troubled when Kadaster explained his first errand.
“But you see, sir,” said Bront, “I don’t know the first thing about housepainters…How am I to choose one?”
“It doesn’t matter. Indeed, the randomness of your choice is itself the point. A natural conjunction is required between you. Just go looking, and when the conjunction occurs, you need not seek me. I’ll be with you.”
The last promise gave Bront just the faintest tingle down his spine.
Thus it was he now wended his way toward the peak of Helix—and amid an embarrassment of riches, housepainter-wise. Had passed a score and more of them already, glimpsed at work in open-doored interiors, or up on scaffolds anchored to facades. But knowing his choice must be random didn’t help Bront. Quite the reverse. How could he know he was making the right random choice in so important a matter?
Doing what clearly must be done was the essence of Bront’s trade. Here a parry, there a thrust—in a fight to the death, taken moment by moment, there was little ambiguity. How, on what basis, was he supposed to pick a particular wall-smearer? All were equally ignoble, all comically daubed with the tints of their trade…
On his left now rose a wide web of iron and wood fully eight stories high, with seven stories of gaudily painted windows peeping out of the scaffold’s frame, and work still in progress up on the eighth. He studied the man toiling up there—too much undignified climbing to reach that smearer…
As he idly scanned those heights, he saw a blip of motion in the sky. No…out of the sky, something plummeting right for him. He moved aside, but a beat too late, and felt a weighty impact on his shoulder, and a drenching splash covering the whole left side of his head.
Though Bront couldn’t have named it, the object that struck him was a half-round paint mop: a large wad of sheep’s wool affixed to a short pole, its fleece charged with a good half-gallon of bright-blue paint.
It was not so much laughter that filled the street around him, as it was a shocked and commiserating exclamation laced with laughter from those startled witnesses who couldn’t help it.
A voice, reedy with distance and concern, came down to him from the scaffold’s crest. “I’m terribly terribly sorry, sir! It slipped my grip! Unforgivable clumsiness! I beg you to accept a reparation! May I toss you down twenty gold lictors?”
As Bront peered upward for the speaker, blue paint dripped down his brow from his drenched hair, like rain from an eave. He slashed with one hand the gaudy pollution from his face, and beheld, leaning out solicitously far from the scaffold’s highest railing, a smallish figure with spiky red hair. Even at a distance of over eighty feet, smears of color could be detected on this figure’s cheek, his chin…
Twenty lictors was a princely sum. These wall-smearers seemed to be obscenely well-paid—thoughts which came to him as from a great distance, for at his core, Bront was molten with wrath. The smearer’s proposition, declaimed as it seemed to half the city, perfected that wrath. To be painted half-blue, like a harlequin, in full public view! And then to be tossed down a tip, and sent on his way, still half-blue!
Bront roared, throat veins bulging, “You will come down here, and clean me off, and then I will kill you!”
The figure up on the scaffold neither moved nor answered for a moment. The whole street, rapt, harkened as one for his reply.
“Honored sir! So unjustly and undeservedly spattered sir! With the deepest, most abject and heartfelt apologies, I would prefer to throw you down some towels, and perhaps twenty-five lictors!”
“Throw me a tip, will you? I’ll bring a sword-tip up to you!” His rage tore his throat, shouting this. He leapt atop one of the great paint-casks arrayed on the pavement below a dangling block and tackle, and seized the scaffold. Up the outer frame he swarmed—having mounted, under fire, many a battlement as vertiginous as this.
“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.
Now he produced a second bucket, gripping the perfectly clean Bront by the back of his neck, and tucking the bucket under his face. “Bront,” he said. “Come back.”
Upheaval shook the mighty frame. His head came up and he began to puke mightily. Endless this disgorging seemed, yet when he was done, the bucket was precisely filled with pigment, and there was not an iota of spillage. Hew had taken up one of his host’s flasks of wine, and now gently offered it to the warrior, whose eyes seemed to be clearing.
“Perhaps you’d like a cleansing draught?” he said.
Disbelief, then outrage entered Bront’s unfocused eyes as he recognized the two solicitous faces gazing down at him. The proffered flask was something he could grasp—he did so, and drank it off. Rose unsteadily and stood swaying, gaping dazedly upon the mountain peaks that marched away from this fastness on every side.
“Drop that over the railing, would you Bront?” the sorcerer pleasantly suggested, indicating the bucket which the warrior had spewed full. The swordsman stiffly picked it up, and carried it to the balcony’s edge as if it weighed a thousand stone. Then set it down and stood gripping the balustrade, and gazing out wild-eyed into the gulf.
“I was dead!” It was a hoarse shout of protest addressed to the universe. Hew came cautiously to his side.
“I can’t tell you how I rejoice in your…recovery.”
“You killed me!”
“No! I prevented you from killing me, and it resulted in your death! Surely you’ll acknowledge there’s an important difference?”
But the gulf distracted Bront’s wild eye. He had, it was apparent, no thought to spare for quibbles over cause and effect. Again he announced to the vast, limpid mountain air: “I was dead!”—wonder now equaled the note of protest in his voice.
“Come, my dear, respected Bront,” urged Kadaster, “drop the bucket off the balcony, and let us take more wine together.”
As the warrior held the bucket poised to drop, he slanted a question to the tintmaster. “What color would you call this here that I drowned in?”
“Mauve.”
Bront released it as he might a striking snake, and shuddered as he watched it—his death there plummeting into the void, dwindling away…
In easy chairs, gazing over the gulf, the three of them drank wine. Bront between swallows sometimes seemed to marvel at the flask itself, and at his own hand that held it, but soon enough he drained the wine, and poured himself some more.
“Gentlemen,” Kadaster said, “your commission is of the highest importance. To understand where I mean to send you, you must first consider that no light is ever lost, or ever will be lost. Second, you must grasp that time is light. No light is ever lost, and every eon’s glow, each intricate detail, is still fleeing through the universe, radiating outward from its moment of origin. Your destination will lie within this swelling sphere of light.”
“Will lie,” Hew added carefully, “within this sphere of time.”
“Precisely. And precisely what you are to deliver is a bit of light. You, estimable Hew, will shortly be given an insight into the details of this delivery, which it falls to you particularly to execute.”
The wizard paused, and seemed to muse. Bront cleared his throat. “What you need done, this man here, this execrable scaffold-monkey, can do. But you’ve gone to the trouble of painting me mauve before the eyes of the town, drowning me in it, and resurrecting me up here, all because I too have some part in this wall-smearing commission?”
“Your assumption is absolutely correct, good Bront, and I sincerely grieve at the understandable pique your words express. We had, perforce, to rely on chance, and chance was dreadfully unkind to you.
“And I fear the same element of chance will govern your execution of our aim where I will shortly send you. We may rejoice, at least, that this mission of yours lies near at hand.” He rose, and invited them back to the parapet. “It lies, indeed, not thirty leagues due south of here. You’ll be there in scarce three days’ march.”
Hew and Bront viewed the Siderion Mountains on whose spine they were perched. It was an awesome range of sharp, snow-crowned peaks which they knew to stretch a hundred leagues due south.
“Thirty leagues as the crow flies?” Hew was amazed. “Scarce three days? You mean a month’s trek, surely.”
Bront’s thoughts seemed to have wandered. “Resurrection…” he murmured. “How strange it feels, this…reacquaintance with the world…”
The wizard smiled his sympathy. To Hew’s question, he said, “You misconceive the mission. When, in an hour or so, you set out yonder, these mountains will be utterly worn away. A gently rolling high plateau—all that will be left of them—is what you’ll tread. But come now, both of you, to my storerooms to be armed and clad.”
Returning alone to the balcony, Bront did not disdain the wine—nor had he refused from Kadaster’s stores a trail cloak and stout new buskins. While the sorcerer’s golden advance had not erased, it had surely moderated his indignation at his sufferings in that cask of paint.
It irked him that the wall-smearer was still closeted with the mage in private conference…Still, his curiosity was undeniably piqued: the distant future was to be their destination.
When the sorcerer and Hew returned, the tintmaster wore a leathern harness which wrapped a row of cylinders across his chest. A jar of pigment was socketed in each of these lidded cylinders, and each jar sprouted the handle of what looked to be a remarkably small brush.
“My friends…” The mage was pouring a round into their cups. “…Forgive me now if my parting injunctions seem spare to you. This is the mage’s hardest task—to stint direction when chance is the magic’s key additive. I must, perforce, describe your task elliptically.
“At the distance I have named due south of here, lies Minion. It is a bustling place, a gamester’s hive of sleepless carnival. Your task lies in the Crystal Combs, a few leagues eastward, but your preparation must commence in Minion. There you will procure the materials good Hew has determined. Engage a jack-haul—a spry one who can run and fight as well as carry—and make up his load with all you will need inside the Combs.
“At some point prior to your departure from Minion, you will have met your third man, precisely how I cannot say. You will know him for your own because he too will be bound for the Combs. These are reached via tunnels beneath them, and in these, you will certainly encounter conflict with the men who sap and chip from below at the crystals. Your third man will know a way into the tunnels.
“Here, Bront, the combative skills that so distinguish you will come into play. But please note that yours is, in essence, a beneficent mission. Where a solid clubbing will suffice, you are not to spill avoidable blood. When you are up in the Combs themselves, you must take particular care not to harm the denizens there, the Slymires, though I am afraid they are dangerous in the extreme, and may be fiercely aggressive.
“When you have reached the primitive Archive of the Slymires—their grotto of runes—you will have a final and most vital task. Hew will need a great deal of help in constructing the scaffolding he needs to ascend the walls of those colossal vaults, and execute that last, most vital act.”
“…I am to help him construct his…scaffold?”
“Yes.”
Bront shuddered violently. He seemed to be having a full-body memory of his most recent experience on a scaffold. He touched, beneath his cuirass, a pouch of golden lictors—Kadaster’s advance. Registering some comfort from this contact, he shuddered again, more softly.
“Now gentlemen,” smiled the mage. “Please stand with your toes touching the parapet. I wish you godspeed, and ask you to take one step forward.”
“The parapet impedes all forward motion,” protested Bront, but in reflexively pushing his right foot against the wall, he felt it swing effortlessly forward, and come to rest on level rock, and found himself standing on a vast, rolling plateau, beneath the rosy light of a far redder sun, at high noon…
Early on their third day’s march, the weary Bront fell back a bit, and watched Hew’s progress on ahead. The scaffold-monkey, though smallish and squarish, was very tight-knit and nimble. He’d evolved a steady, dancing kind of gait to deal with the terrain, and while Bront had scorned the indignity of it from the first, he’d been forced, at length, to imitate—in a more ponderous way, to be sure—that same half-dancing progress.
The endless plateau received—as they quickly learned—recurrent rains, and this red sun’s more feeble light yet had power to nourish a lush growth of lichens and algaes on the fissured granite. This tough greenish-purplish growth flourished in a springy-clingy carpet, which cushioned one’s boot-soles yet constantly tripped them if they dragged.
Bront disliked this world, the rubescent gloom that was its daylight. What had happened to the sun? Where was its golden fire and fierceness? The landscape seemed not over-populous. They’d seen distant caravans—what looked like men on tall, spindle-legged mounts—seen other solitary journeyers, pairs and trios too. Human-seeming, a good half of these transients. Occasionally, across the furry turf, far flocks of rock-toads moved, batrachian shapes the size of horses grazing the lichens, then drifting on in a lurching, wriggling way to farther pasture. None of these other beings showed any wish to intercept their path. All seemed bent on their own business here on this later Earth, and Bront was vexed that he could not imagine that business. What was everyone doing here?
Irksome too, he found Hew’s endless silence. He had at the outset, of course, told Hew he did not wish to speak to him. But the man might have tried to talk him out of this once or twice! Instead he had marched perfectly mute for more than two days now—save for the exchange of some polite syllables, during the business of making each night’s camp.
“Very well!” Bront at last erupted. Hew turned to face him.
Entering the last quarter of its transit of this endless terrain, the sun’s red grew purplish, while the east took on shades of maroon. It gave one an underwater feeling, to move through air so richly hued. “I wish to know,” he told Hew stiffly, “all that you know of this task we’re at. Mere civility, I’d think, would have prompted you to share that by now!”
“Permit me to ask,” replied Hew. “Is it your wish that we should speak to one another now?”
“Have I not just said so?”
“And that we should speak to one another henceforth?”
“Yes.”
“I’m delighted. I will tell you as clearly as I can what we are enjoined to do. Much is unknown, and much else unclear to me, so…we must have patience.”
“Of course we must! Do you take me for a lout?”
“Certainly not! But you exerted yourself furiously to kill me for a minor clumsiness! It’s only natural I should ask.”
“Well then.”
“Well then. Our mission is for me to make a delivery to the Slymires. A delivery of light. This will take the form of certain colors I will apply to a nook high in their dwelling place within the Crystal Combs. Hence my bandolier of tints.”
A gesture here at his harness, which Bront had noted he never took off till just before sleep, taking it then inside his cloak with him when he lay down.
“And what colors are you to apply?”
“I don’t yet know the colors I shall use. I’ll only know them when I see where they are to go. The site always tells me the color it requires.”
“So, in a subterraneous, and, I take it, vertiginous place, we are to construct scaffolding while under heavy assault, so that you can apply some colors you have not yet identified.”
“Just so.”
“May one ask”—Bront struggled to frame his question in a civil tone—“if this bizarre and difficult exploit has some purpose, beyond driving us to grotesque extremes of effort?”
“Kadaster said—not very comprehensibly to me—that the purpose of this work was to, in his words, save this world.”
“To save this world. To save our world’s future.”
“Well, yes, I suppose so.”
Bront resettled his cuirass, and re-draped his cloak. This seemed a task not entirely unworthy of a man of his stature.
“What else can you tell me of what we are to encounter?”
“I know as little as you of this. Look southeastward there. Do you note a kind of glow?”
A plum-hued gloom had settled on that horizon. Against its backdrop, a frail blossom of golden light—just a smudge as fine as pollen dusting a fingertip—seemed to unfold from a distant hollow in the plateau.
“It must be Minion,” Bront said. “Let’s press on. We might make up our load of…scaffolding before we sleep.”
Full dark drew down as they reached the broad depression where Minion lay like a nest of jewels. For some time they’d been hearing the noise of it across the plateau, a faint exhalation which was now resolved into a tumult of music, laughter, exclamation, and the rattle of myriad wheel-rims on flagstones and cobbles. Before them, an inland sea of lamps and lanterns, tapers, torches, beacons, cressets, and flambeaux—a lake of light and uproar.
Descending into its purlieus, they encountered a vigorous trafficking, even in these more sparsely built-up industrial fringes. Here were dray-beast stables, wagon-wrights, caravan chandlers, brickyards and masonries, and the isolate but boisterous taverns that enliven all such workmen’s districts.
Clearly, commerce flourished by day and by dark, while, amidst the commercial bustle, not a few barouches of more moneyed revelers—blazing with lanterns and rocking with song—rocketed among the crowd: top-pocket gamesters rollicking through their eccentric orbits.
Hew thought a wagon-wright might have spoke-staves that would answer their need. “We want stout rungs not too wide, and then thumb-thick whipcord to ladder them on.”
“Some drovers’ provisioner might be the place for the whipcord,” suggested Bront.
“That’s well bethought! Look there—is that not a wheel-wright?”
The wright, his hair in a high comb dyed silver, was at his cups in the saw-shed with two burly mates.
“Hmmm,” he replied. “I have three-quarter cubit stock that I might sell in bulk. What footage need you?”
“Well,” said Hew, thoughtful at this moment of choice, “…I need no less than five hundred cubits of reach for the ladder work. Eight hundred staves should do.”
“By the Crack,” muttered Bront. “Is it so much weight we’ll be carrying?”
“The bulk,” said Hew regretfully, “will be substantial. Yet the scaffold will be—comparatively—of gossamer thinness for the span it must cross and my weight, which it must bear.”
“Then I’d best engage the jack-haul now. He’ll need time to make up such a load.”
Bront, stoically sidestepping careening carriages of yodeling revelers, found a dray stable nearby. The stable neighbored a very active tavern, and within the yard it took some halooing to find a jack-haul to serve him. This one lay in clean straw on his stomach, his chin resting on his huge crossed arms. “How may we help you?” he rumbled.
“I need to engage one of your brotherhood for strenuous drayage through tunnels and up into the Crystal Combs, the said drayage involving self-defense against violent armed assault.”
“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.”
“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.
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.
“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 ungirt. “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.
At length, the mine’s mouth opened before them, and the sky beyond where broken clouds, red-litten, drifted through a purple sky. Like a liquid, the Slymires’ legions flooded out, coursed through gullies, surged up bluffs, to fill, with their fluid concourse, a broad plateau dispread a little ways below the Combs.
What a host they were, the Slymires crouched on this plain, their gorgeous eyes abrim with the never-known sky, and its never-known sun sinking swollen to the western horizon!
“They’ve never even dreamed of it before…the sun,” murmured Hew. “I think there was a vague rumor of it, recorded in their runes. It seems, by augmenting these, that we have…awakened their minds.”
“And how will this…” Bront’s voice trailed off, so strange the rapture of that monstrous throng, their fellows joining them in a steady stream still issuing out of the earth, all of them settling down into the same mute awe of the dying sun.
“…how will this save this world?” finished Bront in Hew’s ear.
“I have no idea,” said Hew.
The Slymires sat under the darkening wine of the sky, feeling the breeze which they had never known, watching the sun’s carmine eye slowly lidded by the black horizon. Their own eyes were unearthly gems, entranced in wild surmise. Their foliate plumage bristled and stirred insatiably.
The four stole away from that devout concourse with a courteous, embarrassed stealth, like that of folk who leave a church before the service ends. They picked their way back down to the lichened plain, just as dark began to settle down.
“Gentlemen,” said Hew, “we must make north. I cannot express my gratitude for your stalwart spirits, for your help.”
Cugel resettled his knapsack of crystal. “My friends. I can’t recall a more astonishing or more profitable venture than this we have just shared. I must ask you, without prying I hope, what you gain by what you’ve done. You’ve taken no crystal.”
“Our aim was, ah, altruistic,” Hew answered. “It was, in some way we do not understand, to save this world.”
“You quite astonish me!” said Cugel. “And yet perhaps I am not too amazed, for have not I gained a prize that works a great philanthropy? I bring more power to the Biblionites’ sun-cannons, and haste the selfish Guyal’s fall, and the Biblionites, when they have spread the museum’s gnomens far and wide, will have worked a great service to the world.”
“If indeed they prove the pious altruists they claim to be,” rumbled Jacques.
“Ah well!” Cugel smiled. “Who can see the future?” (Bront and Hew here exchanged a glance.) “I would like to stand you to a fine refreshment back in Minion, and perhaps a bracing little game of chance…but laden with wealth as I now am, night and haste must hide my passage from the common eye. Gentlemen, it has been a privilege, an honor, and an amazement to have made one with you!”
Laden with their warm acknowledgments, Cugel turned away into the dark and made light-foot back toward Minion.
Bront turned to Jacques. “Permit me to say, good sir…that you were worth every lictor of your hire.”
The jack-haul laughed. “Dear Bront—I like you too, and I think you a most excellent fellow. Adieu.” The gloom concealed Bront’s blush, but he was not displeased by the jack-haul’s declaration. As Jacques moved off, Bront cleared his throat in some discomfort.
“Esteemed Hew…”
“Please, most excellent Bront. You are my friend, and I am yours. And I am now, and shall henceforward be, most delighted in our friendship.”
Bront smiled gratefully. “Well then.”
“Well then.”
They turned northward, and at their second stride, found themselves standing on Kadaster’s balcony, the grand sharp peaks of the Siderions marching snow-capped past the edge of sight, splendid beneath a golden sun.
Broadly smiling, Kadaster gestured them toward a table, whereon stood three goblets and a pitcher of wine, and beside which sat two obese pouches of gold specie.
“Hew! Bront! You have done well! You have far exceeded my most sanguine hopes. Sit, and be refreshed!”
“Then your aim has been fulfilled?” asked Hew.
“Oh, yes indeed. Or, technically, it will be.”
They drank, and rested for a space, though the expeditioners eyed the mage aslant, now and again. Bront, at last, could not forbear to ask, “May we know, Kadaster, just how we have helped to…”
“How you have helped to save this world? Why, of course you may! How stupid of me not to explain it at once, now that its eventuation is assured! Now that you have assured it!
“The Slymires, you see, will, not too long after you have visited them, build an array of huge reflecting mirrors of amplificatory crystal. With these they will return to the sun its own tremendously augmented light. I must spare you the rather intricate technical paradoxes—all of them mutually contradictory—involved in this transaction, but by so doing, they will rekindle it.”
Hew blinked. “They will rekindle…the sun?”
“Rekindle the sun. Just so! Another flagon, my dear friends?”
SCOTT LYNCH was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He worked a variety of jobs, including as a dishwasher, waiter, Web designer, freelance writer, and office manager, before publishing his first novel, The Lies of Locke Lamora, in 2006. Part of the Gentleman Bastard Sequence, concerned with the life of thief and con man Locke Lamora, and set in the world of the shattered Therin Throne Empire, the series is projected to run to seven books. In addition to being a 2007 John W. Campbell Award, William L. Crawford Award, and Locus Award finalist, Scott is a volunteer firefighter, certified in both Minnesota and Wisconsin. He lives with his wife, Jenny, in the city of New Richmond, Wisconsin.