Swords & Dark Magic - By Jonathan Strahan Page 0,125

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.

He might just have made it, but for a huge paint-cask standing on a trestle. The cask intercepted his somersault, so that the back of his neck and shoulders punched through its heading. Bront was swallowed upside down to his knees in a geyser of pigment, spreading a corona of color from which the throng simultaneously—but not all successfully—recoiled.

Despite the crowd’s besmirchment, the spectacular quality of this brief transaction between swordsman and painter left them almost mute with awe. The loudest sound in the whole street was that of the painter hastily descending the scaffold along its outer frame.

“Friends! Neighbors! Your help! Please! He might drown!” He called this from a monkey’s perch just above the ruptured cask.

“He’s drowned already!” someone shouted. “Look!”

And just below the painter, Bront’s sandaled feet and greaved shins pedaled spasmodically against the air, and then were still, like two grotesque blossoms protruding from a mauve pond.

“Friends!” said the painter. “You saw it all! Surely you do not blame me?”

“No one blames you, sir.” The voice startled everyone. The speaker had not been noticed in their midst—a thin, white-bearded man in a shabby leather gown. “Dear citizens! This was a tragic mishap from first to last! Not least tragic is the defacement of your street, your garments! I am moved by civic feeling to repair the damage.”

It seemed, for just a pulse or two, that the day grew dimmer. The sunlight turned from gold to dark honey, and an early-evening feeling filled the street, like the hour of lamps a-lighting. The painter, still clinging to the scaffold above the cask, blinked, and shook his head.

And then it was broad noon again, people were dispersing, the soft roar of their varied discourse rising as if never interrupted. The painter saw not one spot of mauve on any garment in the crowd—nor anywhere on the pavement. The stranger smiled up at him. “Will you come down? May I know your name? I am Elder Kadaster, of Karkmahn-Ra, and I am wholly at your service.”

“I am Dapplehew, tintmaster, at your service. Please call me Hew.” The man jumped to the street. While not large, he seemed of a dense and springy construction. He wore an affable, courteous expression. The orbits of his blue eyes were crinkly and sunburned—far-squinting eyes they seemed, that had long studied great facades, and imagined their new coloring.

“Hew, if you would help me, I would like to put this unfortunate gentleman to rest. I knew him, you see, and no one else hereabouts does. He was a decent fellow in his way, but tragically inclined to passion.”

“You are a remarkable, generous gentleman! I am so sorry to have unwittingly—”

Hew’s new friend turned away and graciously detained the driver of a passing wain, the vehicle empty and loud on steel-shod wheels. He murmured earnestly to the driver, a massive dolt with hayrick hair. Amazement slowly dawned on the fellow’s face. Receiving from the mage a