Swords & Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery

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.