The Search For Magic tftwos-1

by Brian Murphy

  “Wait!” said Mixun. “These aren’t clothes. They’re just piles of cloth!”

  “Can’t you make your own clothes? I can show you how to make your own, using the Improved Squirm-Proof Full Body Stitcher. You lie down on a table, see, with cloth beneath you and on top, and the machine sews around you, creating perfectly fitting clothes-”

  “Never mind, friend Slipper,” Raegel said. “We’ll manage.” He found a brown woolen blanket and cut it into strips with Tamaro’s dagger, winding the strips around his legs as puttees. Mixun draped a gray linsey-woolsey blanket around his shoulders like a mantle.

  Slipper sniffed. “If you want to be crude about it!” He tried to leave again.

  “Wait,” Mixun said. “What about food? Where can we get something to eat?”

  “Follow your nose. It will lead you to the Nevermind South Efficient Eatery and Experimental Food Shop.”

  Raegel tied his leggings in place. “Now that sounds like fine dining to me.”

  More warmly dressed and their hunger assuaged by a visit to the Efficient Eatery (“Just our luck-it’s experimental food day,” Raegel said when he saw the strange victuals offered), the men wandered around the gnome camp, trying to figure out what the little men were doing.

  Former farmer Raegel, who developed an eye for counting free-roaming chickens as a child, estimated there were a thousand gnomes in Nevermind South. Other giant wheels, like Snow Biter, came and went via the sea. Since gnomes were always shouting their business for all to hear, Mixun heard every returning wheel master declare things like “The cut is sixty-nine percent complete,” or “the cut is seventy-seven percent complete.” At one point he snagged a busy gnome and asked, “What is this ‘cut’ I keep hearing about?”

  “The cut that will make the Excellent Continental Ice Project,” said the gnome.

  “You’re cutting out blocks of ice?” said Raegel.

  “No, just one block.” The full-bearded gnome, clad in the cut-down pelt of a polar bear, slipped out of the puzzled Mixun’s grasp and hurried on.

  “These little men are mad,” he declared.

  “That’s been said before,” Raegel agreed. “Still, they do have lots of energy.”

  Just then a shrill metallic whistle screamed, causing the two friends to leap, ready to run from whatever danger had just been announced. Instead of an attack, the gnomes poured out of their huts and houses and formed themselves into a disorganized mass, all facing northwest.

  Even then, they couldn’t stop talking. A quartet of senior gnomes (recognizable by their knee-length beards) climbed atop a platform of ice bricks and waited for the mob to calm. It never did, so one of the elders put a large, elaborate-looking horn in his mouth and blew. The same piercing shriek emerged, overpowering all conversation.

  “Comrades! Fellow inventors! Lend me your aural and ocular attention!” cried the longest-bearded gnome on the platform.

  “Lend him what?” asked Raegel.

  “I don’t know, but I’m not giving them any money,” Mixun warned.

  “Shh!” said six gnomes in front of them. “The Chief Designer speaks!”

  “Fellow technocrats! As of three o’ clock and ten minutes past this afternoon, the cut has reached eighty percent of our goal. At this rate it will take just two more days to reach the next phase of the Excellent Continental Ice Project!”

  The gnomes on either side of the Chief Designer did some rapid calculating with nubs of chalk on slates.

  “Uh, Chief, it will take two days and eight and half hours,” said one.

  “Ha! You forgot to carry the one! It’s three days, two hours-”

  “You forgot to allow for wind resistance!”

  “Colleagues, colleagues! What about the Wingerish Fever?”

  “Enough!” bellowed the Chief Designer. “Culmination is nigh, whatever the exact hour! At the Splitting minus one day, the hammer towers will begin operation. At Splitting minus six hours, all colleagues will secure their work and await the Splash.”

  “Do you have any notion what he’s talking about?” Mixun asked.

  “Not a whit,” Raegel said. “Seems to me they’re digging trenches in the ice with those wheel-machines- maybe to roof ‘em over and make tunnels out of them. That way they can get around no matter how much it snows.”

  Mixun was impressed by his friend’s analytical powers. He had only one objection. “What could the gnomes be getting around to? There’s nothing here but snow, ice, and rocks.”

  In answer, Raegel only shrugged.

  The men passed the night and all the following day in idleness, eating, sleeping, or wandering around the camp and observing inexplicable gnome behavior. The snowy scene was littered with their odd machines, often highly complicated devices to do the simplest jobs-like the pendulum powered potato masher in the Efficient Eatery, or the snow whisk operated by the increasing weight of seagull droppings collecting on a teetering platform overlooking the sea.

  Their second night at Nevermind South, Mixun and Raegel bedded down in the storeroom of the main ice-building. They were alive and well, which was a great improvement over their prospects since leaving Port o’ Call, but Mixun was already restless.

  “We’ve got to find a way off this snowpile,” he whispered in the dark. “I’ll go mad if I have to stay here too long! How’re we going to get back to the real world?”

  “If we had a boat, we could sail across Ice Mountain Bay to the Plains of Dust,” Raegel said.

  Mixun said, “That won’t do.”

  “What’s wrong with that? The gnomes must have gotten here by boat. We could borrow one of theirs, I’m certain.”

  “I’m not against taking a boat. I just can’t go to the desert country.”

  “Eh? Why’s that?”

  “Because I can’t, that’s why. Why don’t you want to return to Throt?”

  Raegel cleared his throat. “I get your meaning. Hmm. Ergoth is a possibility.”

  “Are we still wanted in Silvamori?” Mixun said.

  “Um, dead or alive. I told you we shouldn’t have gulled Lady Riva’s factotum out of all that steel.”

  Mixun snorted. “Fool. He deserved what he got.”

  “Tdarnk still rules in Daltigoth,” Raegel said. “Plenty of opportunity there for men of wit and daring.”

  Yes, opportunity to get drawn and quartered, Mixun thought. Raegel went on, listing cities and lands of the west, weighing the possible pickings they might find. Mixun stopped listening in the midst of his companion’s dissection of Zhea Harbor and lapsed into a deep, untroubled sleep.

  Somewhere far away, a great bell tolled. The pealing was dirge-like and vastly deep. Mixun, who could sleep through most disturbances, opened his eyes. He and Raegel had rigged a hide tarp over their pallets to keep water from dripping on them as they slept. With each toll of the bell, a cascade of chill droplets ran off each corner of the tarp.

  “Raegel? You awake?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What’s that sound?”

  “Gnomes.” Raegel turned over, away from his friend. “Just gnomes.”

  That wasn’t good enough for Mixun. He threw back his fur blanket and made his way out of the storehouse. It was an oddly warm morning for Icewall- still below freezing, but just barely. Heavy, low clouds reached down from the sky, gripping the stark landscape.

  Bong.

  The note was held a very long time. It seemed to come from all directions at once. Mixun would have asked the nearest gnome what was going on, but there were none in sight. Nevermind South was empty.

  Bong.

  The wind was still for the first time since their arrival at Icewall, and the sound carried with great clarity. It seemed to be coming from both east and west. Mixun drew his cloak tight and made his way through the snowdrifts toward a ridge of ice that ringed the landward side of Nevermind South. As he topped the rise, he heard the ringing sound again, followed by high, cheering voices. The gnomes were excited about something
.

  Mixun walked toward the cheering, and gradually he saw a tall tower in the clouds. It was a spindly construction of logs, with long ropes attached to it. As Mixun watched, a huge, wedge-shaped object rose inside the tower, drawn up by ropes. The gleam of metal meant it was sheathed in steel, and the iron box above it was filled with loose gravel. When the wedge reached the top of the tower, the tackle released, and it fell heavily to the ground.

  Bong.

  “So that’s it,” Mixun mused aloud. The gray sky echoed the massed cheers of the gnomes.

  On closer inspection, he found the little people had carved out an amphitheater in the ice facing the tower, and they sat raptly watching as the great weighted blade rose and fell. The tower straddled a deep trench that ran as far as the eye could see east and west. From the piles of frozen slush on either side of the pit, Mixun guessed this was the cut plowed into the ice by the gnomes’ digging machines. The trench was so deep he couldn’t see the bottom, just glassy blue ice as far down as the eye could see.

  He spotted Slipper in the crowd and hailed him. The tiny gnome waved back, never taking his eyes off the rising weight.

  “Slipper-”

  “Shh!” hissed two hundred gnomes at once. Mixun snapped his jaw shut, quelled by their unanimity. With a screech, the shackle opened, and the wedge plunged into the ravine. The gnomes cheered wildly.

  “Slipper,” he said again, once the noise died down.

  “What is it?”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Watching.”

  “No. I mean, what are you doing there, with that tower?”

  “This is the Splitting,” said the gnome beside Slipper. He had a fantastic snowsuit on, all covered with small, mirrored glass panels. Mixun asked what the Splitting was.

  “The next phase of the Excellent Continental Ice Project,” said Slipper. Mixun had to wait until the wedge dropped again, then with strained patience he asked what the Excellent Continental Ice Project really was.

  “We are separating a quantity of ice from the glacier, to take back home to Sancrist,” said the mirror-clad gnome.

  “What for?” asked the amused human.

  “Fresh water,” said Slipper.

  “No, for our Low Temperature Laboratory!” said Mirror Suit.

  A tubby gnome seated behind these two thrust his head between theirs and boomed, “Yer both wrong! The ice will be used to fight the red dragon, Pyrothraxus, who occupies our ancestral home, Mt. Nevermind! We’ll freeze ‘im in his lair!’”

  Bong.

  This time the blow sounded different. A prolonged cracking sound rose, like cloth being torn asunder. Every gnome in the theater rose on stubby legs and gazed rapturously at the tower.

  “Slipper?” The little gnome did not answer Mixun until he tugged on the gnome’s down-stuffed sleeve. “How much ice are you taking?”

  “One point six-eight cubic miles.”

  “Miles?”

  “Hurrah!” cried the gnomes. “Now the Splitting! Next the Splash!”

  The ground heaved beneath Mixun’s feet. Before he could question or exclaim, the tower over the ravine snapped apart with a loud crack. Rope and timbers whipped into the deep gap, and the gnomes began spilling off their icy seats with commendable rapidity. Mixun found himself being borne along with the flow of white-haired folk. The glacier canted, first a little, then more and more. Gnomes went down like leaves in a fall wind, skidding into hummocks of snow or into Mixun’s legs. As little men piled up around him, Mixun lost his balance and fell too.

  “Eight degrees! Fifteen degrees! Twenty-one degrees!” shouted a gnome gripping a surveyor’s quadrant. Mixun had the horrifying thought that “the Splash” would come when he and all the gnomes were dumped into the frigid sea.

  The glacier shivered like a living thing, wracked from end to end by powerful forces. What was left of the derrick vanished into the widening ravine. Mixun rolled over, clawing at the snow for support. To his amazement, green seawater gushed skyward from the gap the gnomes had cut in the ice. So it was true. The little men had carved off a massive piece of the Icewall glacier!

  For a fleeting, thrilling moment, Mixun felt himself falling. The ice dropped away from him and, in the next heartbeat, slammed into the yielding sea. Mixun flattened on the ice, spun around, and found himself buried under a squirming mass of frantic, excited gnomes.

  By the time he extricated himself, Mixun felt a very slight rolling motion in the ice. He stood easily and surveyed the scene. Where once had been an expanse of ice all the way to the horizon, there was now a widening channel of swirling green water. Mixun dashed to the edge and looked left and right. There was nothing but ocean between them and shore. Cold wind was driving them out to sea at a notable pace.

  The gnomes had sorted themselves out and were busily scribbling notes on any surface available-thick pads of paper, scraps of parchment, even their sleeves and the backs of their colleagues.

  “What have you done?” Mixun asked, incredulous.

  “Splash successfully survived,” noted Slipper on his foolscap. “The Splitting was more extreme than calculated.”

  “Not so,” said another gnome. “My figures, posted three days ago on the wall of the Efficient Eatery, clearly indicate a maximum angle of twenty-six degrees before the Splash.”

  “How many degrees was it?”

  The quadrant-bearing gnome had marked his instrument at the most extreme angle. “Twenty-six degrees, two minutes, forty-four seconds!”

  Slipper and the other gnomes bowed to the successful predictor. “Excellent calculations, my dear chap! Simply excellent!”

  Mixun scratched his sprouting beard and said, “Excuse me, but what happens now?”

  “Now we return to Sancrist Isle,” said the calculator.

  “But how? Won’t we just drift with the wind?”

  The assembled gnomes laughed in explosive chirps and soprano guffaws. “Not this iceberg!” Slipper declared. “We have propulsion!”

  Mixun picked up a handful of snow. It melted quickly in the warm palm of his hand.

  “Sancrist is a long way from here. Will the ice last, or will it all melt before we get there?”

  This time the gnomes didn’t laugh. They deferred to the successful calculator, who made a rapid computation on his neighbor’s pants leg. When he was done, he smiled broadly.

  “We can lose sixty percent of our total ice and still stay afloat,” he said. “The maximum amount we can expect to melt between here and Sancrist is no more than thirty-two percent.”

  Mixun didn’t understand the percentages, but he was soothed by the gnome’s bland confidence. He had no reason to complain. Raegel had wanted to get office-wall, and now they were-in a way.

  Raegel! He was still in the storehouse! Without a word, Mixun leaped over the gnomes, scrambling over the ridge toward Nevermind South. As he skidded down the slick hill to the camp (now teeming with gnomes again), he saw the great wheel machines being partially dismantled. One wheel was already being pegged into place at the edge of the iceberg so that the heavy plow blades dipped into the sea. Once in motion, the machines would act like giant waterwheels, paddling the floating island of ice to its ultimate destination.

  Mixun burst into the storehouse, expecting to find a frantic Raegel stricken with fear. He did not.

  “Raegel?” he called gently. The only reply was a soft and steady snoring.

  Once he was wakened, Raegel didn’t believe Mixun’s story. The gnomes had sawn off a giant raft of ice, three miles long and a mile wide? It was ridiculous, and damned impossible!

  “Come see for yourself,” Mixun said, rising from the iceblock table in the Efficient Eatery.

  From the snow village, the only view was out to sea anyway, so Mixun and Raegel climbed the ridge above the town to see water all around them. Raegel opened his mouth a few times, but no words came out. He sat down on the mound of ice and gazed at the endless ocean.

  Mixun held a ringer t
o the wind, then squinted at the sun. “North by west,” he said sagely. “Dead on for Sancrist Isle.” He sat down by his bemused companion. “It’s too much to believe. If these little folk can do something this grand, why don’t they command the world?”

  “Don’t let the size of the deed fool you,” Raegel said. “Gnomes are smart, but they’re also more than a little loony. It took a thousand of them to carve out this island of ice, but in another time and place the same thousand might devote themselves to something totally useless, like…” He struggled for an example. “Counting the ants in an anthill or trying to catch clouds in a jar.”

  “There’s gotta be something in this for us!” Mixun said, rising suddenly. “Some way to turn this to our advantage!”

  “I’ll think on it. All this ice must be worth something. After all, it’s a chill wind that blows us no good.”

  Mixun frowned and slapped Raegel on the back of the head.

  The ridge above Nevermind South was the highest point on the floe. From there they could see for miles to all points of the compass. On their second day at sea, Mixun spotted the white sails of a ship bearing down on them from the northeast. It was running before the wind, while the ponderous ice island was paddling steadily against the prevailing zephyr. He interrupted Raegel’s plotting and pointed to the oncoming vessel.

  “What do you think they’re thinking right now?” he said.

  Raegel grinned. “They’re likely wondering what a big berg like this is doing so far from Icewall!”

  The ship, a tubby two-master flying the colors of Solamnia, closed rapidly. It crossed the narrow “bow” of the island and drove down the length of the iceberg, barely a cable’s length away. Mixun and Raegel waved cheerfully to the astonished sailors working the rigging of the merchant ship.

  The two-master sailed on, and so did the floe. The vast, bulky berg could not manage much speed, but the gnomish machines were tireless, and drove them at a tireless pace. Within three days, they were passing through the Sirrion Straits into the southern sea. The farther north they went, the more shipping they encountered. Five days after the Splash, the iceberg entered the major trading route between the western islands and the mainland. An hour did not pass without some vessel in sight-fat argosies with scarlet sails, trim sloops with brightly striped hulls, and dull gray fishing smacks from the coast of Kharolis. Their reaction to the mighty floe was the same: all put their helms over and steered wide of the glistening apparition.