Fenzig's Fortune_A Gnome's Tale

by Jean Rabe

  “Carmen’s Cure-All? Headache-be-gone? Gray-away?”

  “Yeah, what you call cure-alls and what-not, all the stuff in the wagon. I didn’t mean for you to sell that stuff to some poor, unsuspecting souls who’ll be itching for days, who won’t grow the hair you promised, and who will still have sore throats long after the syrup you sold them is gone.”

  “They’ll get over their sore throats sooner or later anyway,” Carmella giggled. “And if you’re so upset about it, then why’d you help me?”

  “Weak moment.”

  She jingled her coin purse. “Once a thief, always a thief, dear Fenzighan. But we’ll try these gnomish formulas, provided the good folk of Graespeck will reveal their secret recipes.”

  “They’ll reveal their secrets. Most gnomes don’t keep anything secret for long. Just don’t sell them anything. No hand cream. No cologne. No nothing.”

  “All right.” She reached over and ruffled his hair. “But I’ve got all these wonderful, garish costumes in the back of the wagon. So don’t hate me if after a while I go back to my old ways.”

  I don’t think I could ever hate you, Fenzig thought. You saved my life, and I’ll never forget that. I owe you.

  “Thanks,” she answered. “But you don’t owe me anything.”

  The gnome glowered at her, realized she was wearing her necklace that let her read others’ thoughts, hadn’t taken it off after her last sales pitch, but had been on her guard enough not to. . . .

  “Answer your thoughts until now,” she finished for him. “I slipped up. Sorry. Force of habit. I’m used to listening in. Happy now?” She put the necklace in her pocket and set her hand on his shoulder.

  Carmella listened to Fenzig’s tales of growing up in Graespeck as the miles disappeared. It was far different than her life, though she and Fenzig both were raised by their fathers. She was pampered, taught all the important social graces—how to walk, sit, which eating utensils to use for which course, how to read, how to dance, how to hold a tea cup in a ladylike manner. But she was always in her older sisters’ shadows—because she was young, because she wasn’t quite as attentive or practiced as they, and because she was a bit of a scoundrel. And she always felt smothered, yearning for the more colorful life she knew could be had beyond the boundaries of her father’s estate. Life was indeed more colorful outside his high, stone walls, she’d learned. And she was looking forward to seeing the colorful gnomish people in Graespeck again.

  “No.” Fenzig tugged on the reins, signaling the horses to stop.

  “Now what are you worried about?” she huffed. “What could . . . .” Her words trailed off as she spotted what the gnome was staring at—a broken sign.

  It was the small wooden sign proclaiming that Graespeck was just around the turn in the road. It was split in two and spattered with red paint. Fenzig slipped down from the wagon and hurried to pick up the pieces.

  “It’s just a sign, don’t be so upset. A red wagon probably hit it.”

  “It’s not paint. It’s blood,” Fenzig said, glancing down the road. Then he took off running, his stumpy legs pounding toward the village.

  Carmella urged the horses along, careful not to let them trample the gnome.

  “Gods!” Fenzig cried when he stopped in his tracks.

  It was all Carmella could do to stop the horses in time so they wouldn’t run over him. She jumped from the wagon and in a heartbeat was at his side, was looking out over what was left of the gnome village.

  What had been dozens upon dozens of mounds of earth—all with polished walnut doors set into them and woven grass welcome mats out front, was now flattened ground. The dirt was practically level, as if men with plows and oxen had worked the homes into farmland. Colorful, lacy curtains were caught in low-hanging tree branches. Vegetable and flower gardens had been shredded. Animal pens were open, the livestock long gone. The only intact burrow-homes were a pair of businesses at the far end of what was once Graespeck. One had been a smelter with a lean-to behind it, though there wasn’t a lot of the lean-to remaining. The other had an anvil and forge, along with the trappings for making horseshoes.

  “Gods,” Fenzig whispered. “What happened?” The gnome stood unmoving for several minutes. “What could have leveled a town?”

  “Magic, maybe,” Carmella said numbly as she padded by him, went to the nearest home. At her feet was a polished walnut door with deep scratches in it. She knelt and sifted through the ruins, heard him call for his father behind her, silently prayed he would get a response. But his voice was the only one she heard.

  She continued to dig, looking for sigils and glyphs, magical markings that might indicate what spells were used to destroy the gnome town. The type of spells might point a finger at the wizard.

  Nothing. No clue. No response to Fenzig’s shouts.

  “Nothing!” she hissed, furiously digging now, searching the furniture fragments she came across. Everything was broken, nothing carried a sigil or any other kind of magical mark.

  Fenzig continued to call for his father, was running from flattened mound to flattened mound, searching for a trace of him. The gnome’s calls were more frantic now, coming raggedly as he was losing his breath.

  Carmella stopped to watch him as he moved to the next flattened mound. There was practically nothing left to distinguish one family’s home from its neighbor’s. The little things that had made each burrow different, and which had thoroughly delighted Carmella, were scattered everywhere—flower boxes, lantern posts, wooden trim, life-size animal carvings—and were all broken. She surmised Fenzig only knew which home had been his father’s because of the flattened mound’s position in the village and because there were a few more pieces of broken wood around it.

  “Father!”

  “Fenzig, stop,” she said, pushing herself up and joining him. He was tearing savagely at the earth, sobbing and cursing. And for once she was glad she didn’t have her necklace on to eavesdrop on his thoughts. “He’s not here, Fenzighan. No one’s here.”

  “You can’t know that!” he spat, as he continued to dig. “He might be trapped under the dirt. Everyone might be trapped!”

  “No one could be alive under that,” she said sadly.

  “You can’t know that, either!”

  “Yes, I can.” She stepped back, toward what she guessed was the center of the village, and planted her feet wide apart. Then she closed her eyes and started swaying, started mumbling words that didn’t come from the human tongue and that sounded vaguely musical.

  Fenzig paused and turned to watch her, fell on his rump and wiped at his tears with a dirty hand. “What are you doing?”

  “Searching for life,” she whispered. “Remember? It’s one of the few spells I told you I had mastered. Shhh. Let me finish.”

  The gnome thought he saw the air sparkle around her face, thought he spotted those sparkles, like pale fireflies, dart away and flit across the flattened mounds of earth. He tried to follow the miniature lights, but the sun was still up, making it difficult for him to see them. There! He finally caught one in his gaze, followed it, watched it return to her, then melt into her face.

  She gasped and opened her eyes. “No one alive in these homes,” she said, gesturing at the flattened mounds. “But there’s someone–or something–in there.” She pointed toward the far end of what had been Graespeck, indicating the blacksmith’s place.

  Fenzig leapt to his feet and ran toward the building.

  “Fenzig, wait! You don’t know what’s in there. Maybe a wizard. Maybe . . .”

  The gnome disappeared inside, and a scream cut through the air.

  Carmella ran headlong toward the small building, gulping in air as she went. Working the life-searching spell, which she sometimes used on the road to determine in which direction the larger village might be, had exhausted her. “Fenzig!”

  She dropped to her knees and scampered inside, blinked to make her eyes adjust to the darkness. Fenzig was standing in front of an old gnome
, one covered with dried blood and dirt. The old one was gibbering, rocking back and forth and looking furtively between Fenzig and Carmella, babbling gnomish words.

  “He’s terrified,” Fenzig said. “He doesn’t recognize me, screamed when he first saw me. I asked him what happened, but he just spouts gibberish.”

  “Translate the gibberish for me,” she urged. “Maybe I can make some sense of it.”

  Fenzig shook his head. “There’s no sense to it. He just says the darkness swallowed this place.”

  “My necklace!” Carmella reached inside her pocket, and was about to put it over her head when Fenzig’s small fingers stopped her. “But I could read his mind. Learn more.”

  Fenzig tugged at the necklace. “He’s one of my people. If anyone’s going to look inside his head, it should be me.”

  Carmella didn’t argue, relinquished her mother’s necklace, sat back against an earthen wall, and waited. She watched Fenzig cautiously approach the old gnome, sit across from him and try futilely to calm him.

  Fenzig was speaking in the gnome language, fingering the necklace and asking the old one what happened to the village and to the people. He translated most of his questions to Carmella, and then translated what he found in the other gnome’s mind.

  “All he thinks about are people running. My people running into the woods. He couldn’t run, wasn’t fast enough to escape what he calls the ‘smothering blackness.’ So he hid in here, waiting for the blackness to swallow this burrow and him with it. But it didn’t come.“ Fenzig backed away and groaned. “He’s mad, Carmella. His thoughts are like a whirlwind. There’s no way to find out what happened here—at least not from him.”

  Fenzig brushed by her and went outside. After a few moments she followed.

  “I’ve got to look for my father, Carmella, and the rest of the people.” He pointed a stubby arm toward the woods in the distance. “That’s where they went—if anything of what he was thinking is correct. I need to see if they’re all right. If my father’s okay. But I just wish . . .”

  “That you knew what did this,” she finished--without benefit of the necklace.

  He nodded.

  “Listen, I’m not much of a wizard, Fenzighan. I’m better at breaking down other people’s spells than I am at making my own. But I do know a few.”

  “Like your firefly spell that finds people?”

  “Yeah. That’s a rather simple one. This one, the one that would let me know what people had for breakfast yesterday, is a lot more complicated, but works on the same principle. Maybe I can remember how it goes. Wait here with me, please.” She sat with her back against the blacksmith burrow, splayed her fingers on the ground to either side of her, then dug her fingertips into the earth.

  Fenzig watched her, torn between chasing after his people and seeing if she might be able to learn what happened here.

  The foreign words starting tumbling from her mouth again, and in the shadow cast from the mound, the gnome saw the pale firefly lights form about her head again. The glow intensified, and the lights began to dance down her neck, across her chest, then down her arms and into her fingertips.

  With the magical necklace, Fenzig was picking up her thoughts, though he didn’t understand them. They were filled with words that meant nothing, concepts that seemed far beyond his comprehension. “The earth,” was all he could pick up, but he concentrated harder, hoping something that was going through her mind might make sense to him. He concentrated harder, and in that instant he was overwhelmed with images.

  Graespeck was alive. The burrows were intact, the residents were milling about tending gardens, cooking, gossiping over clotheslines, going about their daily business. The sun was sinking in the sky, signaling dinnertime.

  Fenzig smelled the aroma of fresh-baked raisin bread, picked up the scent of a roast pig that must be turning on a spit just out of sight. And there was a trace of honey-glazed peaches in the air. He was at the blacksmith shop, his back to it, and he was facing out onto the village, just as Carmella was. He couldn’t move or talk, was like a fly on the wall observing what was transpiring.

  Must be what Carmella is seeing and thinking with her spell, he thought. But I don’t understand. Everything looks normal. Wait, there’s my father!

  Fenzig’s father dragged a newly-made bench down the center of town, toward Apple-Pie Annie’s, who must have commissioned it from him—and whom no doubt intended to pay for it with apple pies. The woodworker was whistling a tune, paused outside a window to sniff the bread. Then he resumed his course for a few yards before he suddenly released the bench and spun to look at the western edge of the village. There, highlighted by the orange sky, were dark shapes, six-legged creatures that were slowly, but methodically, approaching.

  The other gnomes outside spotted the beasts, too. Some stood, curious, while the older and more practical ones ran for weapons and things that would function as weapons. Fenzig’s father tugged a wicked-looking woodworking tool free from his belt and started toward the west.

  “What are they?” Fenzig heard Apple-Pie Annie holler. The grizzled woman was peaking around the edge of a burrow and squinting into the setting sun. “Panthers?” She had keen eyes—at least she did while Fenzig lived here. “They look like panthers!”

  Not panthers. Craven cats. Fenzig felt his mouth drop open in horror, heard himself holler for his father and the others, instantly realized his words weren’t part of this scene. For the briefest moment, he considered taking off Carmella’s necklace, blotting out what was happening. No, he told himself. I have to see.

  The cats slunk forward, unafraid of the gathering throng of villagers. Eight, Fenzig counted. Eight craven cats. What would they be doing here? The beasts were only known to be in the Haunted Woods, weren’t they? “And in a laboratory deep in King Erlgrane’s castle,” he whispered.

  The lead beast snarled, and its six legs started churning over the ground as it neared Graespeck. The others followed, all snarling, acidic saliva spattering the ground. One of the gnomes rushed forward to meet the cats’ charge. Fenzig didn’t recognize the young man, who must have joined the village in the past seven years since he’d been gone.

  The young gnome swung a club, bashed it into the lead cat’s side. The cat snarled, and its twin tails snapped at him as it went by. The cats following were more vicious. Two threw themselves upon the gnome and tore into his flesh. Fenzig tried to blot out the sounds of the cats snarling and the young man screaming. Then the air was filled with a myriad of screams.

  Only a handful of gnomes, including Fenzig’s father, stood their ground. The rest were running to the southeast, toward the forest.

  Fight them! Fenzig screamed in his mind. There are only eight. There are dozens of you! Fight them!

  The gnomes rushed past him, not seeing him, as he truly wasn’t there. Running headlong out of the village, they continued to cry in terror. And through the press of their bodies, which Ferret could only imagine feeling, he spied more cats. Nine, ten, he counted. Gods! There are well more than a dozen.

  The beasts’ snarls rose to a horrible cacophony of sound, and even the few gnomes who tried to fight the initial charge fled. Ferret saw his father, stout legs churning across the road that ran down the center of the village, spotted the old man who was in the building behind him. The old gnome was laboring, clutching his side and falling farther and farther behind the rest of the villagers, and no one was stopping to help him. He fell to his knees and started crawling frantically, seeking shelter in the blacksmith home while the craven cats chased all the gnomes away.

  The largest of the beasts pulled some of the lagging gnomes down, quickly silencing their screams by ripping into their small bodies. Fenzig shut his eyes, but still the scene persisted in his mind because of the necklace and because he was still locked into Carmella’s thoughts. Eight, nine people dead that he could see, maybe more beyond the edge of the village. His father?

  Then the craven cats turned their attention to th
e burrow-homes. There were eighteen of the beasts now, Fenzig counted, and they were methodically tearing at the dirt with their three pairs of claws. Acid wore away the doors and shutters, acid-dripping tails ruined carefully-tended gardens, destroyed lifetimes of work and memories.

  In the span of several moments, the entire gruesome scene played itself out. The sky darkened and still the cats tore at the homes. The stars illuminated their fiendish work, then the stars faded and the sky started to lighten. Hours upon hours it had taken the creatures to level the village. Hours, and . . . one of the cats’ ears pricked up. The beast snarled and started toward the far end of Graespeck—where only two buildings remained. The rest of the pack started following, and Fenzig knew they were intent on these buildings, were going to flatten these, also, were going to find the mad, old man inside.

  But why were the buildings still here now? he wondered. Why is the old man alive? What happened?

  He watched the cats approach him, though he knew they weren’t really slinking toward him, but the building that existed behind him two days ago. In morbid fascination he noted their rippling muscles, admired their graceful forms. Why are they here? And why didn’t they ruin these buildings? Why?

  Within a heartbeat it was clear to him. The first rays of the morning sun stretched out from the east. The cats stopped, almost as one, glanced at the horizon, then bolted to the north, toward the Haunted Woods.

  “Just like they left me when I was in the woods. They don’t like the light of day,” Fenzig mused.

  “Monsters.” It was Carmella’s voice.

  The scene melted away, leaving an orange glow from this day’s sunset painting the carnage.

  “Our two-day side trip,” Fenzig said. He dropped to her side and shook his head. “If we hadn’t sold those concoctions in the villages . . .”

  “We’d have been here,” Carmella finished. “We would have died, like some of your people, or have been driven off.”

  “But you’re a wizard. You could have . . . “

  ”Done nothing. My spells are not powerful. I can’t create balls of flame or strokes of lightning. I can’t bring down magical hailstones or turn the an acre of earth to air. I couldn’t have done anything to stop even one of those monsters, my friend. I can undo other spells, find out where people are, where they’ve been. That’s it. I’m sorry.”