Swords & Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery

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.”