by Matt Wallace
“How much longer, you figure?” Ritter asks him.
“Not long now,” the old man’s raspy voice replies while its owner never takes his eyes from the tiny screen. “They will come for the water.”
“What water?”
“The water beneath our feet.”
“Oh.” Ritter looks down at the seemingly unending sand. “And how long is ‘not long,’ again?”
“Soon.”
This followed by an inaudible curse and some kind of digital rebuke from the man’s game.
Ritter nods. “Right.”
He looks back at the horizon.
Three hours later a trio of figures on horseback appears out of the illusory blaze. They descend and gallop toward the spot where Ritter and his guide have parked their vehicle.
As they close the gap Ritter can see the blue veils covering their faces, stark even in the waning sun. Two of them are Berber while the third is the largest human being Ritter has ever observed. He sits astride a horse twice the size of the others’ mounts, and it still looks burdened by the man’s weight.
“I tell you,” Ritter’s guide says, followed by a cluck of victory as he reaches a new level in his ceaseless game. “Soon.”
“You’re the man, Diji,” Ritter assures him.
The riders halt several yards from their position, and the giant urges his mount forward, away from the other two. When he’s within a few feet of Ritter he climbs from his saddle, momentarily blotting out the sun.
“The whole desert-rider mystique works for you, man,” Ritter tells him. “How’re the Touaregs treating you?”
Hara doesn’t answer, but Ritter doesn’t expect him to.
Instead he removes his veil. His wide features aren’t painted with the brush of Africa, any part of it. He’s clearly a hybrid, but there’s more of Mongolia in his face than anything.
Hara waits.
“I need you,” Ritter says. “I don’t know for how long.”
Hara nods.
Without a word he leads his horse by the reins back to his Berber companions and turns them over to one of them.
For the first time, Diji looks up from Angry Birds.
“Does the big one owe you a life or something?”
“Something,” is all Ritter says.
Now
He comes to with a hundred tiny pains in his wrists, a dry mouth, a throbbing cranium, and a pore-seeping feeling in every inch of his skin.
“You know,” Moon says miserably beside him, “this job is the big sweaty tits right up until it absolutely fucking sucks.”
Ritter blinks away dampness and waits calmly for his eyes to adjust to the relative dark.
They’re in a small chamber with no apparent entrances or exits. They’re both pressed against an unnaturally smooth wall of rock, and their hands are bound above their heads by what seem like natural formations, as if their wrists have been there for millennia and four thick bands of stone have shaped around them.
Or they’re restraints fashioned by tiny magical creatures that can manipulate the Earth.
“Where are Cindy and the others?” Ritter asks him.
“Fucked if I know. I woke up with a headache just like you. And I’m not even gonna try to explain what I saw back in the mine shaft.”
Ritter nods.
They wait.
It’s not like in the movies, when prisoners awaken and their captors march right in to explain everything.
They wait a long fucking time.
It sucks.
Eventually there’s a gentle rumbling and a barrage of the metallic spheres emerges seamlessly from the far wall, landing on the ground and rolling to a halt in perfect unison. Each sphere unfurls and they begin to interlock themselves into the cyborg-automaton form that attacked Ritter and the team back in the mine shaft.
It’s somehow even more unsettling, standing there inert, a thousand tiny eyes staring at them while the hollow shapes of two large eyes appear to blink in the thing’s “face.”
“We are the Gnomi,” a voice made up of each individual creature speaking in unison announces.
“Yeah, I kind of figured that,” Ritter says. “I’ve never seen a gnome, but I wouldn’t exactly have pegged you for pond sprites.”
“Are you in league with the Tuath Dé?” the choral voice of the gnomes asks Ritter.
“No.”
“Then what are a human warrior and his squire doing in such a place forsaken by your kind?”
Moon is irate. “Squire? What, like I’m his medieval secretary or some shit? Whoa, hold the fucking phone—”
“Shut up, Moon.” And to the creature: “I’m not a warrior. I’m a gatherer.”
“You wear the scars of many battles. You hold the death of many enemies in your eyes.”
“Gathering has become a rough business up there.”
“Then you aren’t mercenaries retained by the Tuath Dé?”
“No.”
The gnome construct pauses. The hundreds of them composing its body seem to whisper among themselves before answering in their unified voice.
“Good. You are a great warrior, whatever your protestations to the contrary. You nearly bested the Gnomi in our horde form. No human has ever come so close. You’re worthy. Consider yourself conscripted.”
Ritter sighs.
Moon looks at him expectantly.
“They want us to fight for them,” Ritter explains.
“Just you,” the Gnomi correct him. “The little one is of no use. He will be a gift to the rocks.”
“What the fuck does that mean?” Moon demands in horror.
“He’s my squire,” Ritter says quickly, resolutely. “He serves me in battle. He’s experienced. Broken in. I don’t fight without him.”
Silence.
Then: “Very well. Consider yourselves both conscripts.”
“I don’t know what your conflict is down here, but we want no part of it. We just came to forage. We didn’t know this was your . . . domain.”
“It’s too late for such concerns. We’ve met with our enemies and agreed upon the hour and place of our final battle. The Tuath Dé have no doubt already conscribed a giant of their own to fight in that upcoming battle. With such an advantage they’ll crush us. Unless we have giants to fight for our cause.”
“Cindy,” Ritter whispers to himself, wanting to smash his own head against the wall behind it.
“What the hell do you need us for?” Moon demands. “You’re all magic and shit. You move through solid rock, which appears to be your total bitch.”
“The Tuath Dé have their own magic. And try as we might, small magic never seems to win out over giant meat.”
That last spoken so bitterly, suggesting eons of learning that lesson over and over.
“There is nothing to discuss,” they pronounce with finality. “You will die in battle fighting with the Gnomi or you will die in this room as interlopers. Choose.”
“Hey, I’m all for championing a good cause,” Moon says immediately. “You should see my Gears of War rankings.”
Ritter glances over at him with open disdain.
“Wise choice, humans,” the gnome construct says, and in the wake of those words begins disassembling into hundreds of the furry, rock-faced armored creatures.
“Squire?” Moon whispers to Ritter.
“Would you rather be a ‘gift’ to the rocks?”
“Right. Fine. What the hell is a ‘ta-wath’ whatever?”
Ritter sighs. “Tuath Dé,” Ritter pronounces flawlessly. “It means ‘Tribe of the Gods.’ They’re more popularly known as—”
“Leprechauns,” Cindy practically spits in anger. “Fucking leprechauns. I’ve been trussed up with rainbow beams by a bunch of goddamn Lucky Charms four-leaf clover motherfucking leprechauns. I cannot even . . .”
She’s berating herself more than speaking to the assemblage of tiny creatures gathered a few yards from her feet. Cindy futilely tugs at the multicolored beams o
f pure energy binding her wrists behind her back. It doesn’t feel as if solid matter is restraining her, yet she can’t move it.
Leprechauns are as physically far removed from gnomes as possible, excluding their relative size. Each one is lithe with an angular, almost antlike face. They’re naked save for leaves tied as loincloths and shredded into wreathlike hats that strongly resemble bowlers.
Which answers the question of where that bit of imagery came from.
In truth, Cindy is less interested in the assemblage of magical creatures at her feet and more drawn by the far corners of the cavernous space.
They’re filled with gold.
Mounds of it.
Mounds as tall as ancient oak trees.
She can’t even begin to calculate the worth of the fortune in direct view.
More than that, it looks almost forgotten, cast aside as if it were all shoved there to get it out of the way. The golden mounds are covered in the dirt and dust of immense age and utter neglect.
But then, what good is gold in the bowels of the Earth?
That’s the brief, obvious conclusion at which she arrives.
A fractal ribbon bursts forth from the tiny ranks spread out before her and its lip unfurls to within an inch of her chin.
One of the creatures, feminine to Cindy’s perception, practically glides up the beam until she is staring up her nose. She raises a wicked-looking spear.
“We are the Tuath Dé. We were gods when your people were covered in fur and copulating in the muck.”
The leprechaun isn’t actually speaking, Cindy realizes.
In point of fact she’s hearing her words inside her head, which may in fact be translating their meaning for her for all she knows.
“Well, I seem to recall killing God seven, eight times before you took me down,” Cindy answers aloud.
“And you’ll pay for each death!”
In reply Cindy works up a wad of spittle and hocks a loogie equivalent to a Buick at the tiny god who has gotten in her face.
It blasts the leprechaun like a fire hose, knocking her halfway down the rainbow-colored beam. It takes several attempts for her to right herself, slathered from head to toe in sticky, viscous spittle.
With a shrill battle cry the leprechaun charges back up the illusory ribbon and slashes Cindy above her right eye, splitting her brow open deep enough to expose bone. Blood quickly begins filling her eye.
Cindy grits her teeth, shutting her eyelid against the sudden, warm flood.
“You great ape,” the leprechaun rages. “You’re no better than those rock worms, with your stone and steel dwellings. Once my kin built great cities of pure gold that spanned oceans—”
“That’s not possible,” Cindy interrupts, sounding more annoyed than anything. “Even as small as you are there isn’t enough gold in the world—”
“That spanned oceans!” the creature insists. “Your kind melted them down. We were forced beneath the canopy at their feet, and now they drive us from that to these pitiful mud veins, and even here we must fight the Gnomi for what cramped space is available to us.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” Cindy replies blandly. “What would a black woman know about having her history and culture stolen and raped for hundreds of years?”
The leprechaun either doesn’t understand or ignores the statement. “We use what remains to live and to fight. That now includes you. We go to meet the Gnomi in battle.”
“So what?”
“They have taken their own giants as prisoners. We saw the big one in battle. He’s a fierce fighter. The Gnomi love conscripting dangerous creatures to fight for them. And as you said, you killed a score of our own. You’re also a great warrior. We must battle giants with giants. You will fight for us.”
“The fuck I will.”
The leprechaun presses the tip of her spear into the pulsing center of flesh covering Cindy’s carotid artery. It must sound like the beating of a war drum to her.
“You will fight, or you will die. In bondage. If you be a warrior, you’ll want to die on your feet with your axe in your hand. So you will fight.”
“Those boys are my comrades and my friends. I won’t fight them.”
“Then they’ll kill you. On your feet. With your axe in your hand. But in the end your kind always fights. You kill everything, until there’s nothing left.”
The leprechaun raises her spear.
Cindy flinches.
This time, however, a tiny crimson ribbon, like a thin stream of blood underwater, flits from the tip and touches Cindy’s wound, closing it.
“The touch of a god,” the leprechaun says wryly. “If only your kind appreciated it instead of damning it.”
The gnome’s name is Auch and he looks ancient even for a creature made of grizzled beard and stony flesh.
“I was a prisoner of your kind for a time,” he explains as he balances on Ritter’s shoulder.
It’s not the high-pitched helium voice of a microscopic character in a fantasy film. It sounds more like an aged whisper.
“I learned to speak your modern tongue. Brought it back to the Gnomi. Comes in handy when some wiseass plastic-helmet-wearing worker bungles into these shafts.”
The old gnome grinds the granite meat of his own palm into a fine powder and sprinkles it on Ritter’s wounds.
The Gnomi want them both in optimal condition for the battle.
“Why live so close to the surface with the kind of power you have?” Ritter asks. “Everything I’ve heard about elementals has them dwelling much deeper.”
Auch sighs. “Once we kept the whole world spinnin’,” he says, the single gnomish voice barely a whisper to them both. “’Twas our task. We formed and re-formed and moved the great rocks to keep the surface from tearing itself asunder. We moved the great wheel of its core to keep it from being spun off into oblivion.”
“What happened?” Ritter asks.
“The world changed. The need for elementals lessened. The core became molten. The heat gave rise to creatures like the ones who fathered your kind. We were forced farther and farther from the fire.”
Auch works his way around to Ritter’s other shoulder, concentrating on his wounds. “Yessir. The Earth you’ve made is not a place for gnome nor sylph nor salamander anymore. The undine’ll be next. When you’ve spoiled the land you’ll delve to new depths of the sea. You don’t know no better.”
Ritter has nothing to offer that assessment, or its truth.
“Why fight the Tuath Dé? Why not band together to make the most of what’s left?”
“They still think they’re gods. We still think we’re the wardens of the Earth. Nowhere shall the two meet, I reckon. So we’ll keep killing each other over who’s the right to these miserable mined-out hollows till we make slaves of the few of them’re left or they do the same to us. And there’ll come a time when those that’ve survived the battle to come fade into the rock and that’ll be the end of us both.”
“Wow,” Moon says weightily (for him, anyway). “That’s some fucked-up shit, little dude.”
“I’m sorry for everything that’s happened to your people,” Ritter says. “I really am.”
Auch snickers. “Aye. Your folk always are. Shame they never feel that way before they do a thing.”
“Is it always like this when the lot of you go out?” Ryland asks.
He’s sitting on the ground, one hand cradling a half-smoked cigarette while the other holds a clotting, blood-soaked compress against his skull.
Hara doesn’t answer.
He’s busy smashing a heavy pickax against the cave-in that’s preventing them from searching for the others.
“I’ll abstain from now on, if it’s all the same to you,” Ryland adds.
Hara just grunts.
Whether it’s a reply or a sign of exertion from bringing the ax against the rock futilely and for the three hundredth time is unclear.
Neither Ritter nor Moon can guess how deep beneath the surface the
y are now, but they both feel as far removed from the world above, their world, as they ever have in their lives.
The Gnomi and the Tuath Dé have chosen a vast, stalagmite-filled cavern as their epic battlefield. The armies are mustered on opposite sides of it. They’re too small to take a proper counting, but there can’t be more than five hundred in either force.
Ritter wonders fleetingly if those numbers represent their entire respective species.
If the lives of his team weren’t in immediate peril he might be filled with sorrow and sympathy for both collectives.
“Is there a plan here, boss?” Moon asks nervously.
“For you? Stay in the background and try not to get killed.”
“Check. What are you going to do?”
“Get to Cindy. Try to hack our way out of here. Keep an eye on us.”
Ritter stares at Cindy across the subterranean cavern. She looks very much the way she did when he first put eyes on her, stripped to the waist and prepared for combat, only this time, rather than a plastic knife, she’s armed with the razor-edged tomahawk he once gifted her.
He can’t read her expression.
He doubts she can read his, either.
2012—Tijuana, Mexico
“Hígado del chupacabra!” the fat master of ceremonies announces, holding a slick, fetid organ high before plopping it down on the tabletop between Moon and his opponent.
The crowd packing the tiny bar cheers raucously as bet takers move through their ranks exchanging hand-scrawled tickets for cash.
Moon is too busy sucking the pickled scorpion from a bottle of mescal to fully take in his next challenge.
His opponent, however, a fierce looking curandera who must be pushing eighty years of age, is focused solely and intently on the piece of offal between them. She grips a knife and fork in her withered fists and steels herself.
Somewhere in the back of the bar Ritter wedges himself between drunken tourists and sober locals. He spots an American in a floral resort shirt flirting with one of the bartenders and wades to him.
“Migs!” Ritter yells through the cacophony.
The man dressed for a Hawaiian vacation turns at the sound of his name and grins wide when he spots Ritter.