Swords & Dark Magic - By Jonathan Strahan Page 0,133
“So. The Chippers will do their best to kill us every step of the way. They mine the veins of crystal that run below the Combs, but, high though they follow these veins, they have never dared to enter the Combs themselves, for awe of the Slymires. As to the nature of those dread beings, so wildly different are our notions of them that we seem to concur on only one point: that it is at least uncertain whether or not they eat the bodies of the human intruders they kill.”
“And that is because,” rumbled Jacques, “we have no notion of what they do eat. Penetration of the Combs has never been thought of by even the most rapacious Chipper…Well. It seems we had all best take some sleep, don’t you think so, gentlemen?”
In the magenta dawn, they shouldered their gear, and stepped out into heavy rain. Up from Minion’s hollow, and out onto the sodden plateau they climbed, and thereafter, for two leagues, they marched through an unremitting, drenching downpour so loud that it impeded speech. Approaching the immemorial antiquity of the Crystal Combs, Hew felt himself—felt all four of them to be the merest ephemera, as brief and slight as dead leaves. Surely this deluge would erase them long before they ever reached those ancient eminences…
But the storm-rack thinned as the land rose, the rain broke into brief soakings now and then, and murky amber morning filtered down on the rising terrain. Ahead, rocky knolls and foldings of the earth formed a kind of corolla encircling much taller shapes: the towering warped domes and wrenched hogbacks of a smoother, blacker stone. These dusky megaliths overtopped by some three hundred cubits their jumbled piedmont: the Combs—all their crystal immured within those huge shells of black basalt.
Across the plateau, other people, here and there, converged toward the same place. “These you see,” said Cugel, “the various mines’ agents, assayers, bookkeepers, commissaries—all use the main entries. These are far too heavily guarded for us. But all the big mines have quite a few secondary entries. These can be hard to find in that jumbled terrain—the trick is to look for their sentries. These, though they also lie hid, can be spotted.”
And so it proved. They’d searched the piedmont’s knolls and gullies through but one rain-squall more, when Bront detected, just beyond a hillside boulder, the movement of a hand resettling a rain hood on a briefly exposed head.
Storm-rack, red-shot by a sun now nearer zenith, still paved the sky, and wraiths of mist surrounded them. Yet the expeditioners suddenly lost the feeling that they were enveloped in this weather’s embrace. A sense of overarching space, of a gulf above them, prickled their napes. They all looked up.
The wraith of the future hung over them, itself like storm-rack now, four hundred cubits’ span, swirling in its corona of black smoke, which seemed to rise from its galaxy of eyes as from blazing white coals.
But though it roofed them with terror, it could not unseat their minds. For all four expeditioners, upon first rising from their pallets in the stable yard, had dashed a few drops in both eyes from a tiny flask that Hew had produced from his bandolier. This effusion had, throughout their morning’s trek, produced no alteration of their sight.
Only now did its effect appear, when the mighty ghost unleashed her sleet of madness. Now the riots of memory could not engulf them, were a translucence which enshrouded them like a cyclone but did not touch them within the sorcerous envelope.
And so, from grandeurs and glories, the imagery changed character, became a homicidal tapestry of war and murder—every kind of dying ever done tornadoed about them. Ravaged populations struck with plague died as they dropped their dead in burial pits, and fell in after. Conflagrations chewed cities to cascades of red-hot coals, in which whole shoals of humankind were shrunk to blackened sticks. Cataclysmic floods slid tidal tongues through thickly peopled valleys, and swept their populations streaming over their sunken towns, their struggles like some strange spasmodic flight, until these struggles slowed, and they sank down with dreaming eyes.
But finding the four untouched, again she spoke within them.
“Your world-killing work here will never be done. I nullify your dark transaction before it can begin.”
And she poured, in her tempest of homicide, up toward the ragged terrain whose sentries the party had detected. Her undulous, all-seeing smoke flowed into the gullied knolls, and gathered there like an earth-gripping storm, during which