Swords & Dark Magic - By Jonathan Strahan Page 0,126

weighty pouch, the man dismounted, unhitched his little ’plod, and led the beast away. Kadaster beckoned the painter.

“Now, Hew, perhaps we can use your tackle to place the cask, and poor Bront, in the wain?”

This transfer accomplished, Kadaster reached up, affectionately patted one of Bront’s protruding calves, and said in elegy, “He was, within his limits, a decent man. Who of us, after all, lacks some defect? And now, shall we take him to my domicile?” And the mage gestured toward the entry of the very structure whose topmost floor Hew had just been painting.

The tintmaster stood astonished. He knew the structure—all Helix did—to be the Seigneurial, a luxurious residential club, second home to Old Money rentiers and retired notables. And he knew the doors Kadaster indicated opened on an elegantly carpeted lobby, spacious to be sure, but as unable to receive the bulky wagon as the doorframe was too narrow to admit it.

“Pull the wain in there, sir?”

“Well, let’s start by pulling just the traces through, and see how we fare from that point. Shall we?”

They pulled the traces over the threshold—scarcely pulled, the wheels seemed to roll of themselves—and entered, not the well-known lobby of the Seigneurial Club but a high passage of hewn stone, dark above but yellowishly lit below, as if from a subtle lambency of the flagstones they trod. The wain rolled softly after them, tragic Bront’s sandaled feet nodding with its movement like two funeral lilies in their pool of mauve.

“I will confess to you, Hew,” said Kadaster as they walked, “that I sent Bront here in search of a man of your trade. The mode of your meeting I perforce left to chance. I grieve that it proved…stressful for you both. But now that we are all together, I would like to engage your services, yours and Bront’s here, for what I hope you’ll consider a handsome emolument in fine-gold specie: fifty thousand lictors each.”

Hew’s mouth opened, without at first producing speech. At length, he said, “I am deeply honored that you should consider my services worth such a sum, and I am of course keen to learn what you have in view. Still, though I would rather die than offend you,” he added, “I must ask if Master Bront’s being, ah, dead, isn’t an obstacle to this project of yours.”

“Ah!” cried Kadaster. “Here’s the terrace—I’ll pour us all some refreshment!”

And indeed, just ahead of them, the tunnel ended at a blaze of sunlight. They stepped out onto the magnificent terrace of a manse that clung to a great gray mountain’s shoulder. Hew stood gazing out into the yawning gulfs of blue air. He realized, finding himself so distant from where he had been mere minutes before, that he was already hired. “Have we come so far? Is that Helix there, barely visible upon the plain? Are we up in the Siderions?”

“Yes, yes, and yes.”

Hew gazed at Helix, a little cone of brightness on the distant plain that swept down from these mountains’ feet. “Well, great Kadaster, I’m stunned to be so…honored.”

“The honor is mine. But help me with Bront.”

He opened the wain’s tailgate. They hoisted the traces high, and the paint cask toppled, releasing the dead mauve Bront. His corpse was slick as an otter, except for his calves and his feet.

Kadaster made a gesture and the wain sprang off the terrace and tumbled away into the mountain gulfs. He seized up a bucket from somewhere and made an emptying gesture with it at the flood of pigment, and every scrap of color peeled off of the terrace and the corpse and cohered in the bucket, which Kadaster tossed, in its turn, out into the abyss.

Now he produced a second bucket, gripping the perfectly clean Bront by the back of his neck, and tucking the bucket under his face. “Bront,” he said. “Come back.”

Upheaval shook the mighty frame. His head came up and he began to puke mightily. Endless this disgorging seemed, yet when he was done, the bucket was precisely filled with pigment, and there was not an iota of spillage. Hew had taken up one of his host’s flasks of wine, and now gently offered it to the warrior, whose eyes seemed to be clearing.

“Perhaps you’d like a cleansing draught?” he said.

Disbelief, then outrage entered Bront’s unfocused eyes as he recognized the two solicitous faces gazing down at him. The proffered flask was something he could grasp—he did so, and drank it off. Rose unsteadily and stood swaying, gaping dazedly