Swords & Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery

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.