by Kevin Hearne
Kirsi looked over at Agape, who’d been watching the entire conversation. “Honestly, I’m not even surprised aaanymore,” the ovitaur said.
At that, Kirsi grinned. “See? I told you. People can be nice.”
“Speaking in broad terms—exceptions abound, of course—those with sophisticated palates agree that goat cheese is generally superior to sheep cheese, cow cheese, and indeed most cheeses except for the rare moose cheese one can only acquire at great cost from the elves of the Morningwood.”
—QELVIN QURD, in his introduction to The Pellican Cheese Atlas by Qermit Qoxswain
“Huh. Looks like a giant one of those things,” Gustave said, looking up at whatever it was.
The Royal Pellican Centipod and Traveling Hootenanny had emerged from the canopy of the Pruneshute Forest, and up ahead, that thing was dominating the horizon, just demanding to be talked about, provided one knew what it was.
“What things?” Grinda asked.
“The things one of the minstrels was playing with before we sent him into Bruding. You blow on one end of it, apply your fingers here and there, then there’s some twitching and a lot of noise.”
“Are you talking about a flute?”
“Yeah. That building looks like a giant flute.”
Grinda gave him the look he mostly associated with making a boom-boom in the royal carriage in his early days as a human and a king. “That’s because it is a giant flute, basically. Both of them are. Hence the name: the Toot Towers.”
“Really? Can they play music?”
“Yes. The centers are hollow and air is driven up from massive bellows in the basement. They play at the top of every hour, except for the first six after midnight. Clockwork settings move the stops to create different notes. The result is a sound many octaves below a flute, but both towers play simultaneously, creating opportunities for interesting melodies. They are called Toot Poems, and composing them is considered a great honor among composers. We’re sure to hear one before we get there.”
The centipod came to a whining mechanical halt and died with a bone-shaking shudder.
“Out of power,” Grinda said, disgusted.
“Hey, at least we didn’t have to hear another platitude from the gnomeric automaatti pilot guy, right?” Gustave said, trying to keep the atmosphere light. “If he could talk right now, I bet he’d be saying something like We’re all out of gas thanks to all of your mass! Or Time to get off with no time to scoff!” He realized he was frowning. “I think I hate that guy, actually.”
The road from Nokanen to the Toot Towers slashed diagonally across the map of Pell in a straight line, only several leagues of it passing through the southern reaches of the Pruneshute Forest, and two days of travel had brought them close enough to see their goal. The twin towers—the seat of the kanssa-jaarli’s power—beckoned annoyingly on the horizon. All they had to do was get there. Gustave was even looking forward to the leisurely jaunt, hoping to perhaps convince Grinda to take the market road and pass an oat merchant slinging cookies from a street cart who wished to gift the king some top-notch snacks.
He was about to suggest this route when one of Gustave’s guards yelped in surprise, said, “Hey, what?” and fell over dead with an arrow in his back, and other arrows began landing around them or pinging off the roof of the centipod.
Lord Ergot had never given up the chase and had obviously gotten fresh horses along the way, and his archers had impressive range and weren’t nearly as drunk as a king under assault might hope.
Which meant: no oats, more running.
* * *
Gustave had never been fond of running, but he enjoyed it far less on two legs than on four. Thumbs were great, no doubt—doors and thumb-wrestling contests were no obstacle now!—but thumbs were absolutely worthless when he needed to run for his life, and he told them so between gasps for breath.
“You,” he wheezed, “are bony flesh knobs of zero value.”
His thumbs, numb to verbal abuse, failed spectacularly to take offense.
He wished he were a goat again. He felt frightened and hunted, which was really no different from being a goat, except that now he couldn’t run away as fast as he used to. And he needed speed. Because Lord Ergot had horses. The hundred riders had been reduced significantly by their anticavalry defenses, but the spidery automaatti had eventually been destroyed and there were still more cavalry on their trail than they could handle, albeit a goodly distance behind, they hoped.
Grinda drew her wand and flicked it at the approaching cavalry. A wall of dust and sediment rose in the air, obscuring them from view and forcing the horses to sneeze.
“Harry them from the trees and reduce their number as much as possible. Slow them down!” she ordered the guard captain. He snapped more orders at his men, and Grinda tugged at Gustave’s arm as well as Ralphee’s, leading them off to the left-hand side of the road as the soldiers deployed.
“What are we doing?” Gustave asked. “Like, what’s the plan? I feel I should know it in case it goes wrong, so that I’ll know which way to run, screaming?”
“We’re going to run for our lives and hope we make it to the towers before Ergot’s men find us,” Grinda explained. “And we’ll keep to the trees to reduce the risk of an arrow plunging into our backs. Wait, wait.” She stopped and her eyes drifted to the top of Gustave’s head and then his hand. “You’re wearing your crown? You have your ring?”
“Yes. You said to always wear them.” His crown wasn’t gaudy—just a golden circlet with a large ruby in the center of it, some famous stone that the dwarves had dug out of the Korpås Range long before Gustave’s time. And the ring was flat on top with grooves that he was supposed to press into wax when he wrote letters or official thingies, and it was one of a kind.
“Good. We’ll need them to prove who you are. Now, let’s run.”
That was when Gustave wished for his hooves back. Both Grinda and Ralphee were faster than he was. The old witch had a real commitment to cardio. When the sounds of battle and people dying reached his ears, he tried to go faster but couldn’t. He cursed his thumbs again.
“Stupid do-nothing meat nubs! Floppity skin-wrapped mini-hams! I want my trusty trotters back!”
His thumbs remained dumb and made no comment.
Grinda stopped at one point to peek at the road behind them, once the grunts and cries of dying bodyguards had ceased and they could hear the rumble of horses approaching. She waved her wand at what she saw. Curses and coughing and whinnies and horsey sneezes followed soon after.
“What did you do?” Ralphee asked between gulps of air.
“There are only three of them now, including Lord Ergot. For the next hour or so, they will be plagued by a persistent dust cloud as long as they pursue us. Every breath they take while traveling this way equals more dust up their noses. If they stop or turn around, they’ll breathe free.”
“We’ve stopped and I still can’t breathe,” Gustave said. He felt as if someone were scraping a pipe cleaner up and down his throat.
“Just try to keep up. When we get into town we can blend in and lose them.”
“Is it a nice town?”
Grinda shrugged a shoulder. “Of a sort. Housing for the government workers, kuffee shoppes, tooty bars, and lots of buffets on the halfling side of the river.”
Ralphee blanched. “What the heck is a tooty bar?”
“You’re too young,” Grinda said with a scowl, and resumed running, counting on them to follow.
“What? I am not! Hey!” Ralphee scrambled after her, demanding an explanation.
Gustave lurched after them, burning lungs and noodly legs complaining as he staggered on toward some sorta-kinda-maybe promise of safety. He thought about what it must mean that Grinda had to slow their three pursuers down: His bodyguards had to be dead, and so did many of Lord Ergot’
s men. He had never before considered that being the king might be…dangerous.
He tried to think of how Lord Ergot’s actions could be construed as a mistake or a misunderstanding rather than treason. He hadn’t ever entered the city of Bruding or introduced himself. He’d never had his people announce themselves as there on business for the king. These were definitely not the “bro-times” Ergot had repeatedly offered in his letters. Grinda’s sand golems just busted Ralphee out of the dungeon without bona fides or credentials of any kind. It was therefore plausible that Lord Ergot thought he was pursuing a criminal in an expensive gnomeric centipod who just happened to travel with uniformed soldiers wearing the king’s golden-goat sigil and a sand witch who dressed in audacious shades of purple just like the king’s chamberlain. Or…not very plausible at all.
He pushed himself to run just a little faster.
Soon they could spy other buildings huddled below the tower. In fact, once they arrived they saw plenty of construction and more halflings on the gnomeric side of the river than Gustave would have expected. They were dressed in splotched and wrinkled military livery, which looked as if it had just been taken out of storage and promptly stained with mustard, and were marching around in patrols and columns.
“Take off your crown and ring,” Grinda said, “and give them to me for safekeeping. We need to disappear for a while and find our way into the towers.”
Gustave did so and the items disappeared into Grinda’s cloak. Shaking out his hair, he instantly felt better—lighter and less weighed down by troubles. He didn’t hate his thumbs as much. Grinda led them to a street lined with markets and pulled them into Daami Perki’s Herki Jerkins, a gnomeric tailor shop that catered to taller folk as well as gnomes. An automaatti took their measurements and they were able to quickly acquire some jerkins Daami Perki had in stock, with only minor alterations made to the sleeves. They also swapped cloaks with a minimum of haggling and acquired a broad-rimmed hat with a saucy feather in the band, behind which Gustave could hide his identity. It might all be for naught, since there were few other humans wandering around and they would most likely stick out regardless, but Grinda had a plan.
“Ralphee, we’re going to send you to be with your sister now,” she told him, and gave him directions to the Songful Tower of Roses and a small sack of coins much like those Gustave had given to the lutist back in Bruding. “You need to leave.”
“But I want to see a tooty bar!”
“No, it’s too perilous right now. Remember Lord Ergot wants you dead or in a dungeon, and he’s on his way here. But don’t return to Bruding, either, until after we’ve restored order.”
Once the lad stalked away to the south to head for Meadow Verge and then points west, muttering about being denied his first tooties, Grinda sighed in relief.
“Now. We’re disguised, we’re alone, you’re breathing again, sort of, and we can find out what’s going on with the kanssa-jaarli.”
“How are we going to do that?”
A sonorous honk blatted from the tower above them, startling Gustave. It was answered by a long, sustained note from the other side of the river, and the gnomeric tower began to grunt up and down the scale like a hyperexcited tuba.
“We’re going to be tourists. If memory serves, there’s a tour every hour on the toot. Come on, we can just catch this one if we hurry.”
At the base of the gnomeric tower there was a kiosk bedecked with flags advertising tours; a small gaggle of people clustered around it—mostly gnomes, but also a few dwarves and humans. Grinda forked over a couple of coins and they joined the group, led by a gnome whose gname tag read Hippi Potti.
A halfling holding a mysterious chain stood before the door with her arms crossed, but Hippi flashed her badge, and the halfling gave a terse nod and let them pass, just another tour on another day full of tours.
But Gustave could not believe, once they began to ascend the gnomerically constructed mechanical tower elevator and peer through the windows at the vista below, that this was business as usual around the towers.
For one thing, there were an awful lot of halflings marching around on the gnome side and hardly any gnomes. When he mentioned this in low tones to Grinda, she ventured that they might be underground. And once they reached the top of the tower and circled around to get a good view of the bridge across the Rumplescharte River, Gustave was both awed and dismayed by what he saw.
Awed because the enclosed bridge spanning the Rumplescharte between the two towers was truly a marvel of engineering, a hallway on either side leading to a saucer-like room in the middle known as the Toot Suite, where the kanssa-jaarli met each day to attend to the affairs of the Skyr. Crescents of glass in the roof served as skylights, but the outer walls of the saucer were also windows; the view from within must’ve been fantastic. Gustave admired the gleaming ribbon of the Rumplescharte flowing north to the Dämköld Sea, with the tufted tops of the Pruneshute Forest on the western banks and the coiffed pastures and fields of farms stretching away like green quilted squares on the east.
But much to Gustave’s horror, he also saw unnecessarily large halfling forces on the eastern side of the river and vast herds of innocent cattle, sheep, and goats, which were obviously there to feed that army of halflings. There was even a building that clearly functioned as an abattoir, into which animals walked, screamed, and exited as butchered filets, chops, and racks of ribs. Seeing it, hearing the grinding noise it made, Gustave nearly had a boom-boom moment. But he couldn’t dwell on that. The problem of exploding gnomes would have to come first.
There was an astounding amount of construction going on down below. Squat, ugly buildings dreamt up by some failure of an architect, no doubt the result of Lord Ergot working in conjunction with the Dastardly Rogues. Everything they’d heard…was true.
Gustave missed most of Hippi’s tour patter but did hear her say that they’d get to greet the kanssa-jaarli soon. “Currently the gnomeric jaarl is Jarmo Porkkala from Luri, and the halfling jaarl is Gasparde Chundertoe of the Muffincrumb Chundertoes.”
“I beg your pardon?” Grinda said. “I thought the halfling jaarl was Parnalle Peatbog of the Cheapmeat Peatbogs?”
Hippi looked surprised that a human would know or even care about the halfling jaarl. “He was, until recently. He died soon after his return from Songlen to see the new king crowned.”
“How did he die?”
“Natural causes. He was very old.”
“Hmm. Did Jarmo Porkkala attend the coronation?”
“No, I believe he was ill at the time.”
Grinda grunted but said nothing more until they moved to enter an elevator that would take them down from the top of the tower to the bridge spanning the river.
“You might not remember meeting him, but I do, and Parnalle Peatbog wasn’t old,” she muttered to Gustave. “And I bet Jarmo Porkkala wasn’t ill either.”
The lift opened and they exited into a foyer that led to the covered bridge. Gustave noted that there was also a broad door leading to a stairwell on the right. They lingered in the rear of the tour group, following Hippi onto the covered bridge. There were sections of thick glass in the floor, allowing one to look down at the glittering waters of the Rumplescharte and have, if one wished, a minor heart attack.
Grinda withdrew Gustave’s crown and ring from her cloak. “Time to ditch that hat and reveal yourself,” she murmured as Hippi burbled happily about the history of the kanssa-jaarli. “We need to ask Jarmo Porkkala why he’s allowing his cities to be overrun with drubs.”
Gustave noted as he donned his royal accoutrements that there were a couple of gnomeric guards but no automaatti of any kind stationed outside the doors of the Toot Suite. One would think that if they were serious about guarding anything from the taller folk, they’d have some mechanical backup. These guards did not seem particularly alert or eager to examine the touris
ts; instead of giving the group more than a cursory glance, they were discussing their dreams of retiring one day in the Seven Toe Islands.
The interior of the Toot Suite was a profound contrast to the exterior of steel, chrome, and glass. It was a sybaritic chamber covered in lush carpet the color of old port or older blood. A perfectly circular room, the walls to the east and west were furnished in clever cherrywood bookcases arranged to showcase iconic works of gnomeric and halfling culture. The northern and southern windows provided views of the Rumplescharte. Directly to the south lay not only Corraden but Songlen, the capital of Pell, and to the north was the Skyr, over which the kanssa-jaarli held sway. The kanssa-jaarli were seated at the northern end of the room, their thrones set upon rotating bases that were currently facing south. Behind them a couple of writing desks waited, as well as some festive potted plants drinking in the sun.
The gnomeric jaarl, Jarmo Porkkala, looked mildly interested at their arrival. The halfling jaarl, Gasparde Chundertoe, was in the midst of eating an enormous hand-rolled sushi cone and could not be bothered to look up. Behind the halfling’s throne was an expansive buffet with all sorts of meats and casseroles and desserts waiting to delight his tongue. Behind the gnomeric jaarl, a more limited buffet stood ready, with twelve ceramic dishes offering variations on a theme: One could have some sort of pickled fish from the top row, a gourmet selection of muesli from the middle row, or a fine pudding from the bottom row. Gustave idly wondered if one of those was the hot nut pudding for which the Skyr was famous, but he was more interested in the muesli. He’d not eaten in some while and the run had made him hungry.
It was highly odd that both the kanssa-jaarli were guarded by halflings and that Jarmo Porkkala had not a single automaatti in sight for clerical tasks or anything. The gnome had a single gnome attendant, who looked forlorn and lost. Gasparde Chundertoe, by contrast, had five or six halflings attending him. One of them, standing at Gasparde’s elbow with what looked like a golden mechanical bird perched on his shoulder, was dressed in expensive pleated fabrics in a shade of green that Gustave thought vaguely obscene, punctuated with what were either square golden buttons or pats of rancid butter.