by Ellis Knox
I had a distinct feeling of tipping over and falling, though I remained perfectly stable on my feet. This was like being on that wave, I thought. Swept along. Tumbling.
Rockfall.
The gnomes led us into the honey-colored wall, which turned into a long, curving hall. We had a score of questions, which we hurled at the gnomes as fast as we could manage. This made for a jumbled conversation, but we managed to get the essence of an understanding.
Gnomes had been listening to all we had to say, from the moment we arrived in the Tower Golden. Word had reached all gnomes across the city, for the gnomes of all towers regarded themselves as comrades, regardless of the rivalries of their masters. News of exotic strangers, and particularly of the kindness of Big, which was their name for the ogre, was news of first importance.
Because we had befriended, and tried to defend, the gnome village, we had become heroes. Cosmas in particular. When they heard us talking about a need to escape, they determined to help us.
The gnomes named Relim and Prill I thought might be husband and wife, or lovers, for they frequently held hands. Prill was the organizer of a kind of underground movement. Prill and others had built a whole system for shuttling gnomes in and out of the city. It had to be in both directions because someone had to take the place of the absent gnome. Since all gnomes were stained and cloaked, and since the drow are arrogantly neglectful, one gnome was much the same as the next, to them. This was a cause for bitter satisfaction with the gnomes.
I revised my estimation of the gnomes. They were more than meek sufferers of oppression, though suffer they did, and most unjustly. They also resisted, where they could. I was sure, without asking, that many a gnome had died in helping her fellows get away. And now these two, and who knew how many others, were risking themselves to help us.
Until now I had regarded the gnomes with a condescending sympathy. They were the charming, exploited victims of a cruel society of masters. With a jolt I realized this was precisely how I regarded gnomes on the Surface. They were the charming, gentle creatures who had been cruelly misused, and I longed that they might one day be quaint again.
These gnomes showed a different face. They were no warriors. They would not build barricades on the boulevards such as Europa had seen so recently. But neither were they hapless victims. They could not be violent, but they could be carefully clever.
Now we would find out if they could also be helpful. I could not help remembering the other gnomes who helped us and the price they had paid for that.
The opening in the glowing wall was narrow, only just tall enough for Cosmas to fit without hunching. His shoulders scraped the walls, and he was bent over like an old man.
We soon came to a stairwell that spiraled both down and up from where we stood. Cosmas managed to stretch out only by lying down flat, but he had to curl himself to the curve of the well. The gnomes fussed over him, talking mainly by gesture. Cosmas explained they preferred not to speak, for fear of mispronouncing a word and causing embarrassment. And I had thought it was to maintain secrecy.
The descent was going to be difficult for us, for the steps were suited to gnomes and were most shallow—I reckoned I might take three at a stride—but it was nearly impossible for Cosmas. He had no choice but to stay down and slide himself the whole way. The slope, though steep, was not enough that he could slide; instead, he had to scoot himself along over an endless series of bumps. He might just as well dragged himself down a mountain.
I asked him if he would be all right.
“It will be uncomfortable,” Cosmas said, looking up at me for once, from his prone position. “Capture will be more uncomfortable.”
“Ogre logic,” Nik said. “Faultless as ever.”
“Quod vitare non sustineo,” the professor intoned. The translation was easy enough: what cannot be avoided must be endured.
I will not recount the descent, save to say that it took too long and we all knew it. Cosmas was the slow horse. Try as one might, one cannot travel quickly on one’s backside. In truth, he looked comical enough, pushing himself with his hands while pulling with his heels. In a marvel of contortion—I walked behind with several gnomes while the men went in front—Cosmas managed at one point to flip around onto hands and knees, but this mode of locomotion brought little improvement, and he was soon on his back once more. Presumably it was because knees are less fleshy than other parts of the body.
What cannot be avoided must be endured. Indeed.
As I said, it might all have been amusing but for the knowledge that our absence was likely already noticed, and our pursuers would be swift and merciless. Despite the ogre’s obvious pain, I did not cease to urge him to hurry, though I never said this aloud.
At length we reached the ground floor, and there we met with an obstacle, for the exit was nowhere near large enough. Even we humans would have trouble squeezing through, though Beso could likely manage. Why had they led us here?
The stairwell opened into a wide, low room. Barrels and boxes identified it as a warehouse of some sort.
“Nothing for it but to try,” Nik said, looking at the outline of the door.
“Getting stuck would be a disaster,” Henrik said. He studied first the door, then the ogre, wringing his hands the while.
“You all go first,” Cosmas said, still prone, though he’d rolled onto his side.
“We don’t leave people behind,” Nik said.
Cosmas raised his one eyebrow at that. Henrik winced and struggled not to say something. Even Nik reacted to his own words. I wondered what I was missing there.
But the gnomes were gesturing again. Cosmas rose with some effort to his knees. He spoke with the gnomes, using hands, head, shoulders, in addition to a spoken word here and there. Then he turned to us.
“Herr Doktor Professor goes with Niklot Thesiger and Gabrielle Lauten.”
Nik started to protest, but Cosmas stopped him with a look.
“I and Bessarion follow. These friends,” he indicated the gnomes, “must remain, but we are given into other hands. There is a street outside. It is wide and it is public; you must run. Directly across are other friends. Prill will be there.”
Henrik was still studying the door. “I don’t understand,” he said. “We go first, but how are you to fit through that?”
“I press against it, and it expands,” Cosmas replied. “They use this door to bring in supplies. Whole wagons come and go.”
The professor laughed with delight. “Remarkable!”
“Then let’s go,” Nik said. “The drow are searching for us, and I’m sure they’ve called up their dürgar.”
He walked up to the door and leaned into it. It opened.
Urstadt has no streets, only spaces between buildings. Some of these were as wide as a modern plaza, while in other places I could touch the walls of separate towers by spreading my arms. We met with neither drow nor dürgar, but gnomes were everywhere, dressed in their dark cloaks, hurrying on their unending errands. I thought one or two might have glanced our way, but their veils hid everything. Despite their subservience, I kept imagining at any moment one of them would point us out with cries of “Spy! Saboteur!” But nothing of the sort happened. The only sound was the soft shuffle of their slippered feet.
The gnomes all pretended we weren’t there, that they did not see us. Centuries of servitude had honed that skill. In another skill, they managed to warn us of danger.
I never did figure out how they did this. I only know that, twice, Prill suddenly waved us into the deepest shadows of buildings. We moved through the dürgar sector, which had shadows in plenty.
No sooner did we squeeze into a corner than a squad of soldiers rode down the very street we’d been on. The feet of their mounts clicked on the hard surface, but never once did the soldiers slow or even look aside. Had they listened at all, they surely would have heard my heart pounding like a war drum, but they passed on.
Both times, Prill apologized profusely for inconven
iencing us.
“They’re looking for us,” Nik said after the second group went by.
“They must not find you,” Prill said.
“Prill,” I said, “you are taking a terrible risk for us.”
She made a quick bow. “Respected is not wrong, but we owe a debt. You risked for us.”
“The village,” I said, “I know. But they burned the village, because of us.” Anguish lined my voice; the memory still hurt.
“We rebuild the village.” She bowed again. “You are owed a debt. Respected Cosmas saved my kindred.”
“Can we go?” Henrik broke in. “Let us count all debts paid. We must keep going.”
I glared at the professor. That he was right didn’t make his statement any less callous.
“Uncle is right,” Nik said. “If Agedat has any sense at all, he’ll be bringing troops to guard this portal.”
Some several minutes further, Prill came to an uncertain stop. She halted, advanced, then halted again. She kept glancing at something sideways, which turned out to be an inscription set into a kind of short obelisk.
“We must go around,” Prill said. “Guardian.” She was shaking.
“That’s the Guardian?”
“A spell,” Nik said. “Or a warning of some kind. Can anyone read it?”
“I can make out a few words, but … .”
“I can read it,” Bessarion said. “The language is very old, but it is dwarvish.” His every word dragged as if weighted.
His hands belong to me
He shall strangle his kin
His eyes belong to me
He shall see demons and deserts
His tongue belongs to me
He shall blaspheme the gods
His heart belongs to me
I count the number of its beats
His home belongs to me
I shall people it with my servants
“Gods and devils,” Henrik said. “What’s it mean?”
“It’s a curse,” Nik said. “Anyone going past here will suffer its effects. Or that’s the intent, anyway.”
A sound distracted us. It came from Prill. She was whimpering.
“For all love, let us be going. This is torture for her.”
Again I revised my opinion of gnomes. Specifically, regarding their courage. For Prill, still shaking violently, forged ahead and went past the terrible sign.
“Are you all right?” I asked Beso as we left that place.
“These are my ancestors,” he said in a small voice. “I cannot look away any more. I cannot deny what I see. It’s all lies.”
“Not lies,” I said quickly, stooping a bit so I could speak softly to him. “Mistakes, perhaps. But much more. When we are home”–oh would that we were!–“When we are home, look again at all your learning, all your traditions. You’ll find much worthwhile there, I’m sure. Don’t throw it all away in this dark alley.”
His hand found mine and squeezed it, but he said nothing.
The Tower Black
“Look you.”
Prill had brought us into another building, into an empty room with windows on two sides. She pointed to one but would not come near it.
We all looked out the window. Before us lay a wide plaza, well over a hundred yards across. Half the plaza lay in the dürgar zone, half in the drow zone. One half was flagged with coal-black stones, while the other half glowed with colors that ran in rivulets. On one side of the plaza, brilliant towers danced skyward. On the other, gray blocks climbed in a kind of crude imitation of the drow towers. The dürgar buildings looked like grotesque reflections of the drow towers.
As striking as was this scene, all eyes went to the center of the plaza. There rose a third type of tower, black as the space between stars.
It looked to be drow built, for it was not built of crude rectangles. Rather, it curved and vaulted upward, not reaching so high as most of the drow towers, but with balconies and niches like the others. Next to its impenetrable darkness, the glowing towers nearby looked merely gaudy.
The utter black left no doubt this was a portal, but the shape differed so greatly from the others we knew, I blinked and then blinked again.
“It’s a tower,” Nik said.
“In shape only,” Henrik said.
“It’s huge,” I said, keeping my voice as soft as theirs. “Why make it so big?”
The black tower stood upon a foundation of stone that itself was ten or twelve feet high, perfectly smooth on its sides. A long, wide ramp ran from the ground to the tower. It ran not far past our window, still several feet off the ground. The base of the ramp sat somewhere farther back in the shadows.
“What’s that fellow there doing?” Nik said.
On the far side of the tower floated a platform with a lone drow standing on it. The platform was the same as the ramp, a shiny black like obsidian, with a railing around the perimeter. It faced the tower. The drow’s hands played over a surface of some kind, whose nature was impossible to guess from this distance and angle. The platform hung in the air like a roofless flying car.
“The ramp gives access,” Henrik said. “Look, it raises even now.”
“This tower’s damned peculiar,” Nik said.
“Wait a moment and I believe we shall see the solution to the mystery.”
The ramp was indeed moving, rising at the speed of a slow walk. It had the same strange malleability as other drow structures. Where a normal ramp would move rigidly, pivoting at its base, this seemed to arch, like a cat stretching, then straighten again. It settled into a particular place, next to one of the black balconies. A moment later, three drow stepped out from the nothingness.
I gasped. I had done the very thing myself. I’d seen my friends emerge from flat black. But those dwarf portals had been blank mysteries. This was a structure, I might even call it a machine, with the ramp and the platform and the operator. Seeing such a portal made it at once more spectacular and more sinister.
“We have to get up there,” Nik said, “which means we have to get to there.” He pointed to the base of the ramp, nearly lost in the shadows of the dürgar buildings. And that’s going to be a problem.” He pointed in a third direction and added, “Soldiers.”
He was pointing in the direction of the drow city, but the patrol was all dürgar—a dozen or more, riding their dreadful mounts. Nik pointed again. I looked just in time to see a second patrol moving into the shadows of the dark, gray blocks of the dürgar town.
“They look for you,” Prill said.
“All right,” Nik said, “let’s get away from the window and gather close.”
“I stay with Herr Doktor Professor,” Cosmas said.
Nik gave him a long look, then nodded. “You’re right, I was going to have you come with me, but … contract is blood, right?”
“Is.”
“We’ll move together as much as possible. I expect we’ll make it close to the ramp readily enough—I’m glad the base of the ramp is in the shadows and not over among the towers.”
“The ramp is used by individuals,” Henrik said, “but I think it was designed to move the armies that will come later.”
The thought was chilling. How much later? Our arrival had almost certainly moved up the drow timetable.
“Once at the ramp, though,” Nik went on, “we’ll have no choice. We’ll have to run for it. I’ve got the only gun, so I will go first. Beso, you’re with me. If I match your pace, I won’t outpace the others.”
Beso scowled but did not object.
“That puts you three behind. Uncle ahead, then Gabi and Cosmas behind. I don’t have a weapon to give you.”
“Alpenstock,” Cosmas said. He had already pulled them out of the trägersack.
“They’ll have to do, I suppose,” Nik said, “though if the dürgar get close enough for you to hit them, we’re in trouble.”
“We’re in trouble anyway, Niki,” Henrik said.
“True enough.”
“Then, at
the top of the ramp, it’s hey ho in we go, and no hesitating.” He paused and fixed us with a look. “That’s vital. No hesitating. There’s no turning back and no coming back, understood?”
We all claimed we understood.
“What about that drow on the platform?” Beso asked.
Nik showed his pistol. “I’ll take care of him.”
“I’ll need the bullets, Cosmas.”
The ogre already had them. He handed over a small box.
“Better have all of them,” Nik said grimly.
“That is all of them.”
Nik started to protest, then took the box. “Five.”
“It’s not your fault,” Henrik said. “You thought we’d have no need of a gun once we left the Surface.”
“Bit of bad planning, that,” Nik said. “Five in the revolver, plus these five. So, everyone make sure we face no more than ten enemies, agreed?” He grinned ruefully. “And I’ll make sure I don’t miss.”
An awkward and uncomfortable silence fell.
“We’d better get going, Niki.”
“Sure. More patrols coming, most likely.”
“Prill, you have done all you could,” I said to the gnome. “It’s time you were away. Be safe.”
“Yes,” the gnome said. “I will try my best to be safe.”
“On behalf of the expedition and of all the Surface Folk,” Henrik said with a quick bow, “I express thanks. Your courage and sacrifice will be known and remembered and one day, I hope, well repaid.”
Prill bowed low, then turned and slipped away.
“That’s that, then,” Nik said. “Here we go.”
We went out through the very ordinary door. No lights illuminated the street, but the bright towers shone down upon us. This had the effect of making parts of the street well lit while creating deep shadows where the dürgar towers blocked it. We were able to dart from one pool of shadow to the next, unseen so far as we could tell. At least no one raised an alarm.
We very nearly stumbled onto the ramp. We hurried out from a well of shadow around a corner and there it was. A wide street ran onto the ramp, which ran upward to the black tower. Nik herded us back into shadow, then peeked out.