Page 88 of The Thrice-Bound Fool

All the cyclopes are, and there aren’t many left.

All this strange, dry landscape was theirs once, you see.

“All this strange, dry landscape once was ours,” the cyclops told me between hammer-blows as he fashioned what looked like a short sword sized for a half-giant. “But long ago, the mountain murdered us with fire. It’s why the Throne of Thumos hides his face in clouds, for the sin of it. Though he sits still as a grandfather and seems gentle, he is a glad-hearted killer.”

The material he worked glowed blue white rather than orange, and the heat was fearsome. The light from the forge and the glow of the piece being worked were the only illumination in the smithy, and the cyclops the only one at work at this hour. Seeing several finished pieces hanging up, I knew why it glowed differently from metal. It wasn’t metal at all.

The creature rolled his single huge eye down to see where I was looking.

“Blackglass,” he said. “The midnight bastard child of steel and glass, but with an artful give to it when struck. You’ll not be shattering no child of mine to splintered shards, not with hammer, rock, nor eastern spell. The walls of hell are made of this, and so the chains that bind the damned. Are you damned, small one? Has your inky tongue licked spells from the book of vices?”

How the kark did he know about my book? Or was this chance?

“I need no book to study vice,” I said, “but write my own.”

This pleased him. He gritted and bared his teeth, which were black. This is what they do that passes for smiling. Oh, but now’s a good time to tell you what these karkers look like close-up; they’re quite singular.

This one stood about ten feet tall, as big as a small true giant. Like the half-giants, he was lean, but here’s where the traits they share with us start falling off. These geezers are the color of fire, for one; red or rust orange. This one was red. No hair on him, but a gravelly hide that drinks heat. When you first see a cyclops, you’ll think he’s wearing a helm, but he’s not. Their heads are heavy, and all bone, the vivid hue of the face giving way to off-white.

But the eye.

A cyclops eye is the strangest you’ll ever see, even if you’ve met a kraken, as I have. The part that’s white on our eye is gold on them, and I don’t mean yellow. I mean gold like the metal, and it gives back light like that, though it has traces and patterns in it like a cat has. Of course I’m talking about one of their eyes; despite what you’ve heard, they actually have two, though they only show one at a time. But I wouldn’t see the other one just yet, so more about this one. In the middle of that eye’s plane of gold, the pupil is black and sharp as the blade of a dagger. I’ve mentioned cats’ eyes before, and that’s the closest to it. For the nighttime eye of a cyclops can see without sun, moon, or candle.

“And what are you that creeps the palace floor while others sleep? A thief?”

“A fool.”

“A thief most bold to steal the title of a fool.”

“I did not steal my ‘fool,’ but fool was I declared, and with such title did I from the blacksand steal my proper self. For I was never made to hold a sword.”

“We hold what to our hand is thrust, for our hand shapes better to the tool than the tool to the hand.”

“A philosopher, then! It seems your mind’s no duller than the weapons hanging near,” I said.

“Books are dear to me. They feed my mind with folly and my mouth with pretty words.”

“Books are dear to me as well. Have you need of more?”

He lay down his hammer now and plunged his sword in water, causing steam to hiss and cloud. He fixed his eye on me.

“It were a mean, unworthy trick if you should say such a thing and have no means to carry through. I am mad for books, which ease my slavery for while I read them.”

“Are you a slave, then?”

“What else, being here, and under the hand of such as these?”

“Friend, I can shift. I’ll deliver what you will.”

“So a thief, in truth?”

“What else, being here alone at mouse’s hours?”

“I knew you were no fool, Hasp the fool being my friend. Unless poor Hasp has died?”

“He stood near the door of it but turned away. For the moment.”

He fixed me now with his great gold eye, which seemed the size of a moon in that smoky, firelit place.