Swords & Dark Magic - By Jonathan Strahan Page 0,135
deep night. Their dizzied eyes climbed the networked rays like spiders. And then, a stir in the high vaults. It was soft, but vast, like a whisper of breeze across acres of grass. The Slymires? But nothing of them was yet to be seen.
“I must be quick,” said Hew. He drew from his bandolier a little placket of smoothed bone, which the others saw to be inscribed with a black sketch of cursives, diagonals, and polygons, creating a curious little maze of voids. He plucked out a brush from one of his pigments, studied its color in this alien light, and began to fill in the pattern’s voids, plucking brush after brush in turn with quick intuition. Then he gazed at the finished pattern.
“What is it?” asked Bront.
“It is our passport.”
“What does it mean?”
“I don’t know.”
“There!” barked Bront. “What’s that which rises from the shaft?”
An ocular tentacle coronaed in smoke came pythoning up into the Comb. It seemed to writhe in that crystalline gloom. Hew held the passport aloft, but it was not from this the ghost recoiled. Her eyes seemed to scan something higher in the vertical abyss. She beheld it in multiplex horror for a long moment, and then crumbled into smoke entire, shrank to an inky fume that drained back down the crystal sinus…and was gone.
“She did not know of the Slymires,” said Hew. “Until this moment they have never intersected with the world’s affairs. From this moment, our world has a different future…and She is no more. A different future…and here it comes.”
Standing on their diamond knoll, the four intruders saw, high up the nearest wall, that converging shadows were blotting out the jewels. Big, quick shadows they were, trickling together, and branching downward toward them. Cugel hefted his staff, but Hew touched his arm, and stepped before him.
Down they came, twice man-sized, sinewy-limbed, their hind legs high-jutting, batrachian, and all their four paws splay-fingered and knuckly and suction-padded. Terrifying was the utter fluid ease, the dire prehensile strength with which they descended the faceted steeps…
Much nearer now, their long skulls proved frontally dished, and in these broad concavities gleamed five great opalescent eyes, pentagonally arrayed.
“What can they eat,” rumbled Bront, “with such tiny mouths?”
Their muscled limbs and torsos now showed clearer too, seemed densely furred—or feathered, rather, with a short, foliate plumage that rippled as they moved, restlessly, like breeze-stirred leaves.
“See!” murmured Hew in awe. “See how their plumage seems to…lick each beam of light they move through. Perhaps they feed on light, like plants…” He held aloft his little painted plaque, for the mute host was not two rods distant now.
The Slymires froze. Their supple unison was uncanny, as if they shared a single mind. Their little mouths began to whisper, and a vast, low susurration spread through the host. After a long pause, their phalanx parted, and one of their number, larger than the rest, came stealing forward, something like wonder in its hesitance. So near to Hew, at the last, it crouched, that Hew could see a narrow iris, white as frost, around each of its huge black pupils.
The beast slowly reached forth its huge hand, each exquisitely articulated digit like a muscled frond. It touched—so tenderly—the tintmaster’s colored rune, and a whisper came from its little lips. Hew gestured the plaque, and pointed aloft to the Comb’s highest vault. The Slymire gazed, then nodded, and raised its palms in offering, in acquiescence.
Jacques shed his cargo bed, and unlashed the first rolled length of ladder, while such a whispering spread among the alien multitude that it seemed the tides of a ghostly sea echoed within those mighty vaults. Hew pantomimed the ladder’s unscrolling up to the heights, and Cugel and Bront displayed the mallets and pitons, and their use in anchoring it.
The elder nodded, and his companions swarmed to the task. They ran the ladder up the dizzy slope and spiked it down, while others tucked the rest of the rolls under their arms and ran them higher still…
“Ye powers!” growled Jacques. “Do our labors end so easily?”
“All but mine, I think,” said Hew, gazing up into those dizzy jeweled heights.
“How think you it will go with you, on such a height?” Bront softly asked him.
“Good Bront.” Hew faintly smiled. “I’m trying not to think about that particular aspect of my task.” And tightening his harness of tints, Hew began his climb.
Zig and zag, the Slymires strung it higher, and zig and zag he climbed. His nerve for heights was firm enough,