Darkness and Light p-1

by Paul B. Thompson

  "Who could have done this?" Bellcrank asked.

  Cutwood crawled about with his lens, studying tracks.

  Sturm kicked through the pitiful remains of the camp and said, "At least there's no sign of bloodshed."

  "Sixty," Cutwood proclaimed. He had dirt on his nose and in his beard. "At least sixty people were here. They must've carried the Cloudmaster away on their shoulders, 'cause there are no marks of the hull being dragged."

  "I don't believe it," said Sighter. "Sixty humans couldn't carry the Cloudmaster away on their shoulders."

  "Even if they were as strong as Lady Kitiara?" asked

  Roperig. That gave them all pause.

  Kitiara squatted by the trail of footprints. "No human feet made these," she said. "The impressions are round, almost like the hooves of unshod horses." She noted how closely spaced they were, too. "The clumsy fools must have been treading on each others' heels! We'll have to go after them. Track them down and get the ship back."

  "No question about it," said Sturm. Kitiara fished the whetstone out of her belt pouch and sat down to hone the edges of her sword. Sturm gathered the gnomes together.

  "We're going after your colleagues," he announced. The gnomes set up a cheer. Sturm waved for quiet. "Because we don't know how much of a head start they had, we have to move as fast as possible. That means," he saw the anticipa tion in their faces, "each of you can take along only what you can carry."

  That threw the gnomes into a tumult of preparation and counter-preparation. Before Sturm's eyes, they tore the

  Four-Gnome-Power Exploratory Cart to pieces and began assembling Single-Gnome Exploration Packs, made of wooden slats and strips of canvas and blanket cloth. The packs strapped on like knapsacks, but they towered twice as high as the gnomes stood. This called for all kinds of sup porting straps and cords and counter-load balancing. Soon each gnome staggered under a complex tent of wood and cloth, but in the end they didn't leave one bit of their beloved equipment behind.

  Sturm looked them over and groaned inwardly. At this rate, they would never find the Cloudmaster, never get back to Krynn, and never find his father. He wanted to rail at the little men, but he knew it would do no good. Gnomes pro ceed at their own rate, awkwardly and haphazardly, but they do proceed.

  Sighter waddled past, scribbling his notes under a creak ing canopy of canvas. "I'm starting a new log," he said, swaying from side to side. The top of his exploration pack just missed Sturm's nose. 'This is no longer the Lunitari

  Exploratory March." He walked on. Wingover puffed along behind him.

  "Now we are the Lunitari Flying Ship Rescue Mission,"

  Wingover said.

  The trail was wide and plain, and as far as anyone could tell, no effort had been made to hide it. Either those who had captured the flying ship were not very smart, or else they thought Stutts, Birdcall, and Flash were the only crew on board.

  Kitiara and Wingover moved out ahead of the rest. She tested his long-distance vision by having the gnome describe arrangements of rocks from as far away as six miles. Poor

  Wingover got a terrific headache, and his short legs were no match for Kitiara's long, powerful stride". She shouldered his exploratory pack (its straps were strained to the bursting point) and lifted him by the coat collar. Tucking Wingover under her arm, Kitiara took to sprinting far ahead, relying on the gnome's far-seeing to keep them from getting lost.

  The trail carried on in an unswerving line due west.

  Sturm plodded along with the overburdened gnomes.

  They marched on both sides of the trail, arguing over the reasons for Wingover's gift of far-seeing. Sturm shaded his eyes from the sun and looked at the footprints. They were strikingly regular circular depressions in five distinct columns. He said to Bellcrank, "Don't these prints seem strange to you?"

  "Undoubtedly, yes, Master Brightblade, as we've seen no animal life since arriving on the red moon," replied the gnome.

  "Exactly! Have you noticed how very precise the foot prints are? All of them are perfectly aligned."

  "I don't follow."

  "Even a gaited horse will have a little jog, a sideways motion now and then that distinguishes its track."

  "A machine!" Bellcrank exclaimed. "Master Brightblade, you've done it! "Bellcrank grasped Roperig by his lapels.

  "Don't you see, what else could pick up the Cloudmaster and carry it off but another machine!"

  "By Reorx, I hadn't thought of that," said Roperig. Fitter rattled to Rainspot and told him Bellcrank's theory. The idea then leaped the trail to where Cutwood and Sighter were walking. Sighter pooh-poohed the notion.

  "That doesn't solve a thing!" he said. "Where there's a machine, there has to be a machine-maker, yes?"

  Bellcrank opened his mouth to vent his opinion, but just then Kitiara and Wingover came running at them. The war rior woman carried the gnome under her arm like a loaf of bread. Wingover's head bounced and jiggled each time her heels struck the ground. In another situation, the image might have been comic.

  Kitiara braced to a halt in front of Sturm. "There's a vil lage up ahead," she said. She wasn't even out of breath.

  "Village? What sort of village?" asked Roperig.

  "A village village," said Wingover from under Kitiara's arm. "There's some kind of keep in the center of the place."

  "Does the trail lead to this village?" asked Sturm.

  Kitiara shook her head. "It veers off to the north, avoid ing it completely."

  "We ought to inspect this village," Cutwood called from thirty yards away. Sturm and the others looked at each oth er, then at Cutwood.

  "Can you hear what we're saying?" said Wingover in a bare whisper.

  "Well certainly! Do you think I'm deaf?" Cutwood yelled back. Sighter tapped him on the shoulder.

  "I can't hear them," he said. He grabbed Cutwood by the ears and turned his head from side to side, peering into the carpenter's ears. "Everything looks normal," he said. "Does my voice sound loud to you?"

  "It does when you yell from an inch away!"

  Sighter took Cutwood by the hand to where the others stood. "It's happened again," he reported. "Cutwood can hear normal conversation from thirty yards away, maybe more."

  "Really? This calls for some tests," said Rainspot. He low ered his pack to the ground and tried to disentangle himself from the cords and straps.

  "Never mind!" Kitiara said. "What do we do about the village'?"

  "How close will we have to pass if we follow the trail?"

  Sturm queried.

  "Spitting distance."

  He squinted into the sky. "Half the day's gone. If we start now, we can be past the village before nightfall and not lose the trail." Sighter grumbled about the human's lack of scien tific curiosity, but no gnome seriously considered going against Sturm's plan.

  Sturm formed the party single file and sternly admon ished the gnomes to keep quiet. "I feel trouble coming," he said. "A keep means a lord of some kind, and probably armed retainers. If," he added, "if this world is anything like

  Krynn."

  Looking straight ahead, Kit said, "Are you afraid?"

  "Afraid, no. Concerned, yes. Our stay here has never been more precarious. A pitched battle could destroy us even if we win."

  "That's the difference between us, Sturm. You fight to pre serve order and honor; I fight for myself. If trouble is brew ing, the only thing to do is come out on top."

  — No matter what happens to the rest of us?"

  He scored a touch. Kitiara's eyes flashed. "I have never changed sides in a battle, nor betrayed a friend! The little men need our protection, and I'll shed my last drops of blood defending them. You've no right to imply otherwise!"

  Sturm walked on silently for a moment, then said, "I'm sorry, Kit. It's becoming harder for me to know your mind. I think this magical strength you've gained has affected your outlook."

  "My mind, you mean."

  "Trust you to say it the most brutal way."

&n
bsp; "Life is brutal, and so are facts."

  At the rear of the column, Cutwood could hear every thing, and he said, "I think they're mad at each other."

  "Shows how much you know," Sighter replied. "Human males and females always act strangely toward each other.

  They never want their true feelings to show."

  "Why is that?"

  "Because they don't want to seem vulnerable. Humans have a lot of this attitude called 'pride,' which is sort of like the satisfaction you get when your machine performs cor rectly. Pride makes them act contrary to the way they really feel."

  "That's silly!"

  Sighter shrugged under his towering pack and almost fell down. "Unh! By Reorx! Of course it's silly, and these two humans have especially bad cases of pride, which means the fiercer they act and the louder they yell, the more they care about each other."

  Cutwood was dazzled by his colleague's understanding of human behavior. "Where did you learn so much about humans?" he said.

  "I listen and learn," said Sighter, very ungnomishly.

  Though he didn't yet realize it, that was the change wrought in Sighter by the magic of Lunitari. From an intuitive, impetuous gnome, he had become a logical, thoughtful, deductive gnome, a creature that had never before existed.

  The field of stones was largely barren of plants, even by day, so the first sign the marchers had that they were near the village was when stands of scarlet-capped mushrooms seven feet tall appeared, growing in neat rows between two low stone walls. Roperig picked a section of wall apart to study; it was simply made of loose rocks stacked conven iently together. "Very primitive," was his disdainful verdict.

  The mushroom orchard served to screen them from the village itself. Sturm, Kitiara, Wingover, and Cutwood crept through the rows of fungus to the very edge of the settle ment.

  By Krynnish standards, it wasn't much of a village. There weren't any houses at all, just a series of concentric stone walls about waist high, plus a few cribs filled with harvested food. The only full-scale structure was the keep, a squat, single-story, windowless block in the center of the village walls. A lone pole stuck up from the keep, and a dirty gray banner hung limply from it.

  "Not exactly the golden halls of Silvanost, is it?" said Kiti ara. To the gnomes, she said, "Can you hear or see anything stirring down there?" Wingover could see nothing moving.

  Cutwood squinted one eye shut and listened hard.

  "I hear footsteps," he said uncertainly, "pretty faint.

  Someone's walking around inside the keep."

  "Fine. Let's bypass this place," said Sturm.

  The other gnomes waited patiently on the other side, chattering in whispers. When Wingover, Cutwood, and the humans returned, they shouldered their lofty packs and formed a single file again.

  "The village looks deserted," Sturm said. "So we're going past it. Be quiet anyway."

  The trail of the Cloudmaster bent away from the village just beyond the walls of the mushroom orchard. As they rounded the tall red stalks, Kitiara, who was leading, saw that the path was lined on either side by tall, leafless trees.

  "Odd," she said. "Those weren't there before."

  "Did they grow up suddenly, like the other plants?" asked

  Roperig. Kitiara shook her head and drew her sword. v' The trees stood about seven feet high. Their trunks were graduated in bands of color, ranging from deep burgundy red at the base to the lightest of pinks at their rounded-off tops. All had branches that grew out and bent down.

  "Ugliest trees I ever saw," said Cutwood. He left the line long enough to chip a piece of the flaky bark off with his

  Twenty Tool Pocket Kit. He was examining the fleshy gray wood when the tree's left branch flexed and swatted the specimen from his hand.

  "Hey!" he said. "The tree hit me!"

  The double row of trees launched into motion. They pulled their roots out of the ground and freed their limbs.

  Black dishlike eyes opened in the trunks, and ragged mouths split apart.

  Sturm grabbed for his hilt. The gnomes bunched together between him and Kitiara.

  "Suffering bloodstained gods! What are these things?"

  Kitiara exclaimed.

  "Unless I'm gravely mistaken, these are our villagers.

  They were expecting us," Sturm replied, keeping the tip of his sword moving back and forth to discourage the tree things.

  The tree-folk emitted a series of deep hooting sounds, like a chorus of rams' horns. From recesses in their own bodies they produced an array of swords and spears — all made of clear red glass. The tree-folk closed the circle around the besieged band.

  "Be ready," Kitiara said, her voice taut with anticipation.

  "When we break through them, everybody run."

  "Run where?" asked Fitter tremulously.

  One tree-man, the tallest of the lot, broke ranks with its fellows and advanced. It did not actually walk. Rather, the tangle of roots that made up its feet flexed and carried the creature forward. The tree-man raised its crude, hiltless glass sword in one bark-covered hand and hooted loudly.

  "Yah!" Kitiara sprang forward and cut at the glass blade.

  She knocked it aside and swung again, this time striking the tree-man below its left arm. Her sword bit deeply into the soft wood-flesh — so deeply that it would not easily come out. Kitiara ducked the return cut by the tree-man's sword and let go of her own. She retreated a few steps, leaving her blade embedded in the foe. The tree-man did not appear too much discomforted by the yard of steel stuck in him.

  "Sturm, lend me your sword," said Kitiara quickly.

  "I will not," he replied. "Calm down, will you? That crea ture wasn't attacking, it was trying to speak."

  The impaled tree-man regarded them with wide, unblink ing eyes. In a raspy bass voice it said, "Men. Iron. Men?

  "Yes," said Sturm. "We are men."

  "And we're gnomes," said Bellcrank. "Pleased to meet — "

  "Iron?" The tree-man plucked Kitiara's sword from its flank, grasping it by the blade. He offered the hilt to Kitiara.

  "Iron, men — " She gingerly took the handle and let the point fall to the ground.

  "Men, come," said the tree-man. His eyes and mouth van ished, only to reappear on the opposite side. "Men, come, iron king."

  The tree-man reversed direction without turning around.

  The other tree-folk did likewise; their eyes closed up on one side of their heads and reopened on the other.

  "Fascinating," said Cutwood. "Completely saves them the trouble of turning around."

  "Do we go with them?" asked Rainspot.

  Sturm looked away to the trail of the stolen flying ship.

  "For now," he said. "We should pay our respects to this iron king. Maybe he knows what could've taken our ship."

  The tree-folk made straight for the village keep. Sturm,

  Kitiara, and the gnomes fell in behind them. Closer to the village, they saw signs of damage to the walls and gardens.

  Something had battered down a long section of wall, and a crib full of yellow fruit shaped like corkscrews had been plundered. Slippery pulp and seeds were splashed all over the place.

  The tree-men's leader, the one Kitiara had cut, halted before the door of the keep. The gate consisted of overlap ping slabs of red glass, hanging from hinges of the same material. The tree-man boomed, "King! Men, iron come."

  Without waiting for any reply, the tree-man leaned on the gate, and it swung in. The tree-man did not enter himself, but stood back, and with a sweep of his arm indicated that the visitors should go in.

  Kitiara slipped in, her back pressed against the rough stone wall. With a practiced eye for danger, she surveyed the scene. The interior was well lit, as it had no roof. The walls rose ten feet and slanted in, but no thatch or shingles kept out the sun. The room she'd entered was actually a cor ridor, branching off to the left and right. The facing wall was blank, though smoothly plastered with gritty mortar painted white.

  "I
t's clear," she reported. Her voice was taut and low.

  Sturm let the gnomes enter.

  "Man." Sturm looked up at the impassive eyes of the tree man. "Iron king. Him." It pointed left.

  "I understand. Thank you." The tree-man tapped his long, jointed finger on the gate and Sturm pushed it shut.

  "Our host will be found down the left corridor," he said.

  "Everyone, be on your guard!" Kitiara moved to the end of the line, steeled for signs of treachery. The hall turned right and widened. The high walls and lack of ceiling made Sturm feel as if he were in a maze.

  They came upon an unexpectedly familiar artifact: a low, thick door made of oak and strapped with iron hinges. This relic leaned against the wall. Fitter peeked behind it.

  "It doesn't lead anywhere," he said.

  "There's something familiar about it," mused Cutwood.

  "You silly loon, of course it's familiar. You've seen doors before!" said Bellcrank.

  "No, it's the style that's familiar. I have it! This is a ship's door!" he announced.

  "It's not from the Cloudmaster, is it?" Sturm said, alarmed.

  "No, this door is oak, the Cloudmaster's are pine."

  "Now how would a ship's door get on the red moon?"

  Wingover asked rhetorically. Cutwood was composing an answer when Kitiara shooed him on.

  They passed more debris from their world: empty kegs, clay pots and cups, tatters of canvas and scraps of leather, a rusty, broken cutlass. Some coils of rope were identified by an eager Roperig as ship's cordage made in southern Ergoth.

  Excitement mounted as more and more tantalizing things cropped up.

  The corridor turned right again, this time into a wide room. There, standing by an overturned wooden chair, was a man. A genuine man, short and scrawny. He was dressed in a dirty tan vest and cut-off pants, rope sandals, and a peaked canvas cap. His face was dirty and his gray-streaked beard came down almost to his stomach.

  "Heh, heh, heh," rasped the man. "Visitors at last. I've been wanting visitors for a long, long time!"

  "Who are you?" asked Sturm.

  "Me? Me? Why, I'm the King of Lunitari," proclaimed the tattered scarecrow.