Swords & Dark Magic - By Jonathan Strahan Page 0,136

but four hundred cubits aloft wildly outwent the worst he’d ever faced. Yet his fear, though great, was strangely dwarfed by the radiance he ascended. The crystals he touched woke odd imaginings within his very flesh. He saw—remembered, it almost seemed—terrains he’d never dreamed of, sweeping planet-scapes of barbarous beauty, suns gilding seas on worlds he never knew, in hues un-viewed by any human eye…

And he came, almost before he knew it, into an apex of the Comb where, on a stretch of naked stone, abstract patterns were arrayed. Belting himself to the ladder, he gazed a moment at the first of these runes…and plucked out a brush.

At what behest he chose a hue, and applied it, then chose again—at what prompting he worked, he never knew. It was his nerves that did the work, his spine, which coruscated with strange fear, strange joy. At one point, almost unknown to himself, he murmured, “I am in the very hand of time, painting the future…”

After an unmeasurable interval, Hew socketed his final brush, and, with a strange reluctance, began his descent of the slender ladder’s vertiginous zigzag. He was exhausted to the very bone, but there was exaltation in his heart. And as he inched downward, a tide of Slymires poured past him, surging up to view his work.

Throughout his descent, still they rivered up to the runic grotto, seething there to see, and see again, while the vast whisper raged throughout the Comb, a troubled breeze of rumor and report. Denial and doubt, alarm and disbelief hissed everywhere, while urgent crosswinds swept the swarming shadows, awed rebuttals breathing possibility…amazement…revelation.

Hew found his comrades girt for their return, and Jacques ungirt. “Do you leave your cargo bed here, Jacques?” he asked.

“Indeed I do! I therewith solemnize my retirement from my trade, thanks to your bounty, good Bront. Also, the Chippers stir below—” and indeed there was a rumble and clatter, a noise of returning forces filling the shaft far below, “—and I’ll fight better disencumbered…Where has friend Cugel gone?”

“Why,” marveled Bront, “he was here not a moment past!”

Movement rippled above them, and their eyes went aloft. Here came a sinuous cascade of Slymires converging toward them. Their silver-backed elder led them. They converged around the artist and his crew. But as the elder beamed his clustered eyes upon them, a whisper of alarm was heard, and here came a pair of the beasts, bearing between them the powerfully pinioned Cugel, whose rock hammer and half-filled knapsack of crystals were still incriminatingly clenched in his hands.

Brought near the elder, Cugel prepared to vent words of reproof and expostulation for his unjust seizure, yet his voice died in his throat as he beheld the labyrinthine luster of the elder’s gaze. Such…reverence he saw there. It could be called nothing else.

Cugel stood gaping when they tenderly set him down, and the elder loomed over him, and spread his marvelous long, supple fingers at all the cold fire of the Crystal Combs around them, and with a second ineffable gesture, laid it all at Cugel’s feet.

Then Cugel stood bemused as the elder’s fleet, surgical fingers danced across the crystals of the wall, and snapped off now here, now there, huge, flawless dodecas, swiftly filling his rucksack with a fortune.

When Cugel had bowed his acknowledgment, the elder gathered all four of the intruders in his gaze. Long and long he whispered to them. The four interlopers received this intricate communication almost comprehendingly. When they saw the tremors of this host around them, the coruscations of their countless eyes like living gems, and felt the longing in this inhuman multitude, they thought they understood. This race had never been outside the Combs. Now that they were convinced there was an Outside, and that they must see it, it was their purpose to emerge…

The three men and the jack—with gracious gestures—stood aside. The elder led the supple Slymires down, through the crystal sinus, down the drain-hole human enterprise had dug into their Comb, flooding over the gantry.

“We are done, my friends,” said Bront. “Let’s after them.”

Below in the adit, they found a few more lifeless forms than they had left there, for a resurgence of the miners—commencing with the ghost’s death—could now be heard fleeing before the Slymires’ onrush. Outcry and tumult echoed as the creatures swept onward, outward. Jacques in the van, the men ran after them.

At length, the mine’s mouth opened before them, and the sky beyond where broken clouds, red-litten, drifted through a purple sky. Like