Beyong the Moons tcc-1

by David Cook

  It was only an overnight hike to reach Mount Never- mind. The trail led first through meadow-patched forest and then gradually into the mountains’ lush foothills. All along the route lay reminders of the gnomes: rusted cogs buried under tree roots, vine-cloaked skeletons of ancient machinery, and, ever in the distance, the cone-shaped peak of Mount Nevermind itself. After a quiet night, marred only by Teldin’s silent fears that the gnomes might refuse him, the pair set off on the final leg of their trek. Gomja, who fully expected to return to space, was positively jaunty as they marched.

  It was midafternoon when the road finally crested a rocky ridge and dropped down into the valley that nestled against Nevermind’s slopes. There was no mistaking the gnomes mountain, for the entire region was landscaped on an immense scale that only maniacally industrious hands could have accomplished. The forest ended in a straight, clean line at the rim of the valley. Beyond that unnatural boundary were carefully laid fields that filled the perfectly level valley floor. The road cut straight through these to the massive mountain peak at the far end.

  The mountain was the most extraordinary feature, more so than anything Teldin had been led to expect. Captain Luciar had said only, “You will know when you find it.” The peak would have been a perfect cone, shaped by volcanic action eons ago, except that the sides had been sliced into series of terraces, reducing the overall shape of the mountain to a giant staircase reaching up to the clouds. Teldin was dumbfounded by the sheer size of it-an entire mountain, the tallest on all of Sancrist, had been carved into a single massive ziggurat.

  “This must be Mount Nevermind, sir,” Gomja offered helpfully, his small eyes open wide with amazement.

  “You’re right, Gomja.” The farmer spoke mechanically, for he was too awed to show any other emotion.

  Advancing with greater caution, Teldin and Gomja picked their way down the slope. On the valley floor, the road bridged innumerable canals and ditches, part of an intricate irrigation system that radiated from the peak. On the distant terraces, Teldin could see planned waterfalls where aqueducts descended to lower levels and tracks where things were hauled up. A scraggly forest of cranes creaked in the distant wind, filling the valley with the echoing cries of mechanical birds.

  The road ended at a pair of bronze doors, larger than any gates Teldin had ever seen. It took the pair almost an hour to reach the massive valves. The bronze was smooth and polished but unadorned, and the evening sun’s glare off the gleaming surface was almost blinding.

  “Well, this is it,” Teldin said with grim finality as he pounded against the great gate.

  Nothing happened.

  Teldin banged again, beating at the door with all his might, but he barely made the metal valves echo. Gomja stepped up and helped him, and the pair thumped the doors for all they were worth. Still nothing happened. Finally, in desperation, Teldin beat the bronze with the butt of his spear. A faint ringing sound echoed from inside.

  Before the echoes faded, there was a metallic scrape and the perfectly smooth door was marred by a small peephole that opened high over their heads. A pair of tiny eyes glared down through the opening.

  “Youcan’tgetinbybanging. Youhavetousethedooralarm. It’s-’’

  “What?” Teldin asked, unprepared for the barrage of gibberish from the muffled voice. It seemed like Common speech, but the words went by so fast.

  The little face stopped and scowled. “Whatisthematter? DoyounotunderdstandCommon, whichlam-speaking? ItisCommon, anditisnotmyfaultifyouareoutsiderswhodonot. knowthatyouhavetopressthedoor-alarm”

  “What?” Teldin pleaded, “Slow down!”

  There was a loud sigh from overhead, then the little, bearded face began again, saying every word with exaggerated precision. “I said, you can’t get in by banging, because you have to use the door alarm, which is that little button alongside the door, and if you push it, the door might be opened if the Doormaker’s Guild says it’s all right, which it might-”

  Teldin suspected that the gnome might go on talking forever, so he reached out and pressed the small, black button alongside the door. The gnome’s declaration, which definitely was still going on, was interrupted by a blaring claxon. Teldin, his finger still on the button, leaped back in terror at the thundering noise, and Gomja tensed, his huge body striking a fighting pose. Only the gnome seemed unfazed by the racket. “There, that is much better, because now I, as a member of the Doormaker’s Guild, may open the gate and.

  The little, talking face disappeared from the window. From inside came a series of rattles, groans, clanks, whistles, and wheezes. With a rattling hiss and a fitful cloud of steam that leaked from the hinges, the doors slowly swung inward. A little brown-skinned man, slightly smaller than a dwarf, stood in the center of the doorway. He wore simple tradesman’s clothes, a once-white, loose shirt and coarse pants covered with a stout leather apron. Quills, small tools, and rolled up sheets of paper poked out of every pocket and even stuck out from the wild tangles of his hair and beard.

  “WhyhaveyoucometothewonderfulGreatHugeTall Mound-MadeofSeveralDifferentStrataofRock-”

  What?” Teldin demanded for the third time. His spear, still in hand, swung ominously up as his exasperation increased. Gomja laid a steadying hand on his shoulder.

  “Calm, sir. It’s the way gnomes speak. I’ve heard them like this before.” Teldin took a deep breath and nodded understandingly.

  “-WhichOccasionallyCometotheSurfaceandFlowDownthe-SideoftheGreatHugeTallMoundthatOurAncestorsLearned-fromtheHumansWasReallyCalledMountNevermind,” finished the doorkeeper, apparently all in one huge breath. The gnome stood there panting and waiting for a response.

  “Think carefully before you answer,” Teldin whispered to himself, sensing that the wrong word probably would set the doorkeeper off on an unending string of gibberish. The farmer quickly cast a cautionary look to Gomja. as if to warn the giff to keep silent while Teldin thought. Finally, he composed an answer. “I come because I was given a magical cloak and now I can’t take it off. If the gnomes can remove it, I would be glad to leave it with them and go back home to Kalaman. Please speak slowly when you answer." Teldin braced himself for the reply.

  “I always speak slowly. That is why I am the doorkeeper,” the gnome answered indignantly, his words picking up pace as he went along. Teldin held up a hand, and the gnome restrained himself. Perhaps to keep his furious mind occupied, the gnome pulled out parchment, quill, and ink from his voluminous pockets, sat in the middle of the roadway, and prepared to take notes. “Strange cloak, eh? If you want the cloak examined for weave, you’ll have to go to the Weaver’s Guild, but if the color is important, that is a problem for the Dyer’s Guild. On the other hand, if the thread is important, that would be the Weaver’s Guild again, but since you said you cannot take it off, the Jeweler’s Guild might have to be called in to look at the clasp, unless it is magical, in which case-”

  “Magical, as I said before,” Teldin interrupted, seizing on something he understood in the gnome’s stream of speech.

  The gnome stopped, scowled, made a note on his sheet, and looked up at Teldin again. “Magical examinations are on the fifteenth floor, but before you can go I need to know if the cloak is only apparently magical, magically powered by an outside source, or-

  “Look, all I know is that it’s magical,” Teldin snapped as he rapped his spear on the pavement. The farmer held back his rapidly growing temper. He was beginning to understand why so few people had ever visited the gnomes. From behind him came Gomja’s warlike hum as he patiently waited for Teldin to finish before asking his own questions of the gnome.

  “Magical, unknown,” the gnome muttered under his breath as he carefully made notes. “And your large friend, who does not look like anything that lives on Krynn or that is cataloged in the records of the Zoologist’s Guild, is he part of the magic or- Gomja bristled. “I came to seek passage on a spelljammer,” the giff grumbled.

  “Oh!” the gnome blurted, suddenly too stupefied to
speak. “Spelljammers? Thirty-fifth floor.”

  “Let’s go. I want to get this thing off:’ Teldin urged before the gnome could begin again. “By the way, what’s your name?” The farmer marched through the gate, Gomja in tow, before the doorkeeper could stop them. The little fellow scrambled to gather up his papers, then decided their entrance was as good as an invited one and motioned for them to follow him down the shadowy corridor. He scuttled forward, weaved through a tangle of rope and pulleys, ducked under a large sign labeled Very important experiment, so do not touch and plug your ears, and casually wedged his thumbs into his ears, which were buried under a thick layer of hair. Shouting, not because it was loud- since the hall was fairly quiet-but because he could not hear himself, the gnome explained, “I am not going to tell you my full name, because my friend who was the gatekeeper before me but got too old to work the levers-”

  “Slow down,” Teldin admonished, trying both to listen and figure out why the warning sign was posted. He hesitantly made to follow the instructions, then stopped, unwilling to appear undignified. The gnome looked and shook his head, wiggling his fingers to show the thumbs in his ears. “Do not talk so fast!” Teldin shouted.

  “Right!” The gnome nodded. Without missing a beat, the little man picked up where he had left off. “-to work the levers that open the doors told me that the last outsiders yelled at him when he tried to tell them his name, and they yelled at him again when he tried to tell them his nickname-”

  Teldin shouted back, loud enough for the gnome to hear, “Get to the point!”

  “I am, but you keep yelling at me!” was the gnome’s complaint. His mouth opened to continue, but a sudden screech wailed down the corridor, rapidly growing to earsplitting intensity. Teldin winced in pain and clapped his hands over his ears. Behind him, Gomja staggered backward, giant paws pressed over his head. As he reeled, the giff crashed into the tangle of pulleys, triggering the rickety movement of hawsers through the blocks. Sandbags lashed to the cables dropped and rose all around, forcing the bulky Gomja to dodge and whirl, which only plunged the giff farther into the tangle of ropes and scaffolding. The burlap weights hit the stone floor with skull-splintering thuds and spewed sand, lead shot — even feathers — thoughout the passage. Just as Teldin tried to guess how a bag of feathers could split on impact, the high- pitched squeal abruptly became a reverberating bass that rolled back toward the center of the mountain.

  As the last echoes of thunder rebounded in the distance, the weights stopped falling and Teldin’s eardrums ceased throbbing. He could hear faint cheers in the distance. As he stood listening, trying to guess what madness was going on, the human realized the gnome was still talking. The doorkeeper still had his thumbs jammed firmly in his ears.

  — so because of that business with the avalanche, outsiders call me Fildusmangelhors-” The gnome misinterpreted Teldin’s amazed look. “It means Gnome at the Center of Extremely Cold Solidified Water Shaped into a Large, Hard, Compact Sphere Rolling-”

  “Snowball?” Teldin interrupted, rubbing his temples to make the ringing noise go away. Behind him, Gomja irritatedly batted his way through the still-swinging pulleys to rejoin them. The gnome made no indication that Gomja’s calamity had caused anything amiss.

  “Right, that is what outsiders call me,” beamed the doorkeeper. “Anyway, I would plug my ears if I were you, because the Communicator’s Guild is going to test its new long-range voice improver message system-” An alarm whistle blew, but by now Teldin hardly twitched. “See, that’s the alarm whistle-”

  “If the test was a loud noise, I think they already did it, Snowball,” Teldin wryly commented at a shout, incredulous that the gnome had missed the racket. “Now, please, can we get going?”

  “Oh, drats! I missed it!” Snowball said, popping his thumbs out of his ears.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The gnome rattled on as he ducked under ropes creaking across pulleys and led Teldin and Gomja down the central corridor. Water dripped from patched and repatched pipes that ran at all angles across the ceiling. From down the hallway, toward the center of the mountain, came a faint but steady clamor of bells, whistles, and banging drums. Gnomes, bundles of parchment under their arms, hurried past, sometimes hailing Snowball with a greeting that was never completed until long past. Teldin, just for caution’s sake, remained alert, ready to plug his ears. The giff warily brought up the rear, leery of every rope, pipe, and unknown thing that hung from the ceiling.

  At last their passage broke into an immense central shaft, both terrifying and grand. Although Teldin had seen a few impressive fortifications during the war, particularly the dark Tower of High Sorcery at Palanthas, nothing in all his brief travels could compare to the gnome works here. The inside of the mountain was an immense, hollowed out, and inverted cone, terraced just as the outside of the mountain had been, forming rings around a widening central shaft. Lights gleamed and moved along the sides. A constant rumble of noise filled the cavern; the deep drone of a thousand distant sounds were punctuated by occasional shrill bursts close at hand. The chamber soared upward into the darkness as far as Teldin could see and beyond, as he picked out quivering points of light somewhere high above him. They were like night stars, except he knew that neither was it night nor was he outside.

  Almost as impressive as the shaft itself was the seemingly endless tangle; ropes and cables stretched across the center of the cavern to tie together far-flung gantries that projected over the rims of different terraces. It looked to Teldin like an incomplete spiderweb. The main floor was littered with catapults of all types and sizes. Gnomes swarmed over these, hammers and saws in hand. “Gnomeflingers,” Snowball explained. “They’re not working right now, because they’ve got just a few little problems that need to be worked out-”

  “Such as?” Teldin asked, his curiosity piqued. He was starting to get the hang of gnome speech, the breakneck way they approached the Common tongue and their constant desire to keep talking.

  “Oh, well, first, the sponges all died, so we have to get new ones,” Snowball explained as he led them around the perimeter of the main floor, “but we do have a few working gnomeflingers for cargo, and the sponges are only the emergency emergency backup safety system,” the gnome offered hopefully, ‘so it is perfectly safe, unless the new gears in the timing system are not right, which we have not tested yet, but you could be the first and- “No, thank you, Snowball,” Teldin politely refused.

  “Besides, I think Gomja might be too heavy for your machines.” He laid a hand on the giffs bulky arm, eager to make his point.

  Snowball rolled his eyes up as he made some quick mental calculations. “It might take a few shots, level one to level four, then level four to the big catapult on level seven, then-”

  “Nobody is shooting me anywhere, little gnome,” Gomja boomed emphatically as he stepped forward, his ears perked with alarm. Legs set and arms crossed, the giff towered over Snowball.

  “Well, then, I guess we will have to use the slow method,” Snowball answered in another peevish huff. “Not that we would ever hurt anyone-gnomes have such a bad repuration with you outsiders, but, really, everything is perfectly safe and I have only been hurt once-seriously.” Watching closely for the expected look of alarm, which did cross his guests’ face, the doorkeeper snickered at his own joke. He led them to a metal disk suspended by chains, like the pan of giant scale. “If you will step on there, we can get you ready…" The gnome tugged on Teldin’s sleeve, impatiently hustling the human onto the disk, talking all the while. The farmer did not hear any more, for his attention was caught suddenly by a creaking overhead. Above he saw a small gondola swinging precariously over open space and being furiously pulled along by a small gnome in a basket. As Teldin gawked upward, Snowball leaned over and scrutinized a needle and a team of gnomes loaded bags onto a similar disk. The gondola passed out of sight, and the farmer looked down and realized he was standing on a giant scale.

  After both Teldin and Go
mja were weighed and given disks denoting their tonnage, Snowball struck out for another section of the shaft. Here baskets and barrels shot into and out of the darkness above at alarming speeds. Those descending came rushing down with a blare of horns and bells. Teldin jumped involuntarily when one crashed onto a giant pile of pads beside him. The barrel tumbled over, rope raining down on it, and a pair of gnomes spilled onto the cushions and across the floor. They quickly got to their feet and wobbled away with all the dignity they could muster.

  “Quickly, now. That is your car, and I will be in the next one,” urged Snowball, pointing to the empty barrel. Teldin went pale at the thought and Gomja planted his feet, one hand reaching for a pistol. “It is the only way up,” the gnome assured as the pair resisted, “because the vertical engineers are redesigning the stairs to make them faster, so come on and get in the car or you will not get to the examiners, besides other people are waiting and you do not want to be rude.” All the while, Snowball, far stronger than he looked, was tugging Teldin toward the hastily righted barrel. Perhaps desperate to be relieved of the cloak, the human finally gave in, steeled his courage, and climbed aboard. Gomja, not one to seem cowardly, followed suit.

  Snowball stepped back with a smile and waved to the operators. “Level fifteen-eighty-nine dramnars! That is how much you weigh, see,” the gnome explained, “and up above-oh, up there somewhere-the vertical engineers will load twice your weight to lift you and the barrel, then pull the lever to ring the bell down here, and when that happens, you just hang on and-”

  Before Snowball could finish, Teldin’s knees gave out as the barrel was forcefully jerked into the air. The farmer had a sickening feeling of hurtling through dizzying space as the gnome’s upturned face dwindled. One, two, three levels soared past, the number of each terrace disappearing in a brilliant flash. Teldin’s fingers dug into the barrel’s wooden sides. From somewhere below the human heard a clanging bell.