Swords & Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery

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.