Swords & Dark Magic - By Jonathan Strahan Page 0,131

counterattack of Hew and the wrights and the lanky stranger they’d pursued here.

The turmoil was but briefly intense, the larger, more practiced bruisers soon enough laying the whole gaggle of gamblers on the ground. The object of their pursuit professed his gratitude, as well as his utter puzzlement as to his pursuers’ motives. His bows of acknowledgment showed a sinewy strength, as had his fighting. His profile in the torchlight was sharp-jawed, with a nose most aquiline, and there was something droll, and instantly untrustworthy, in his face.

Bront set to dragging the pummeled gamblers out into the public lane, while the rest of his party continued loading and lashing Jacques’s back-bed.

The stranger lent Bront a hand. They dropped a pair of his stunned persecutors onto the cobbles, and he bowed graciously.

“Sir. I ducked your way merely seeking some obscurity in which to evade my attackers. I am Cugel, a name not unadorned with my sobriquet—the, ahem, Clever. I am an itinerant entrepreneur, and most grateful for your help.”

“Think nothing of it. I am Bront, a stranger to these parts.”

“Tell me, good Brunt—”

“Bront, the Inexorable.”

“Tell me, esteemed Bront. Have you come here seeking personal enrichment?”

“Alas.” They were dragging out a second pair of groggy gamblers in their mud-spotted finery. “We have a mission of our own.”

“May I just breathe you a notion? A single thought? The Chippers’ tunnels, underneath the Crystal Combs. A wealth of gems and lenses.”

“You can find these tunnels? Find your way into them?”

“Nothing easier!—nothing easier for me, I mean,” he added solemnly. Bront knew him then for their third man, chance-met and similarly bound, but he recoiled from the carte blanche he was instructed to offer. Plainly a rogue and a ready felon, this man, if paid his own price in advance, would vanish at once. “I sense, good Cugel, that you seek allies within the Combs.”

“No! Within the tunnels below them.”

“Of course, of course.” Bront cursed his near-betrayal of their own objective, and struck a note of innocent enthusiasm. “It is a wonderful coincidence, our meeting thus, for we share your goal of penetrating the Chippers’ tunnels! The more hands for defense there, the better.”

“My own view precisely! Crystal is my very purpose here. I was in a den of chance, financing my expedition, when these ruffians assaulted me.”

They were now dragging out the last pair of the groggy gamesters. “Indeed!” Bront commiserated, repressing a sardonic smile. “You mean to say they burst into your place of recreation?”

“No! They were seated at my table! Who would have imagined?”

“Shocking!”

When Jacques’s bed was loaded with the rolls of laddering, and balanced and lashed to his satisfaction, he led their party to a sawyer, and then a joiner, where he presided over the manufacture of a large wooden piston with a shaft to fit his huge hands—for “tunnel clearing,” he said. Cugel completed his own preparations by the simple acquisition of a stout, commodious knapsack. They repaired to Jacques’s stables with a demi-amphora of tart Skaldish wine. Seated on hay bales, the three men wielded the jacks’ big goblets two-handed.

The coincidence of Cugel’s destination with their own caused Hew to nod to Bront, as if to say, here was their liaison foretold. “I regret,” he told Cugel, “that we are sworn not to speak of our own errand in the mines, but we must—forgive us—know yours, lest it impede our own.”

Cugel drank off his goblet with evident relish. “My venture involves a lovely commercial arrangement which I do not blush to boast of. I’ve made a colleague among the Chippers who has sequestered for me a load of prime dodecas! Naturally, with such precious contraband at issue, my rendezvous within the mines must be discreetly made.”

“It may be,” Jacques growled thoughtfully, “that our aims will hinder yours, for we foresee our entry as arousing something of a stir.”

“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.