Swords & Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery

“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.”