Mystic Warrior

by Tracy Hickman

  Mimic himself had few illusions as to his current status on the great bureaucratic totem that sat above him. He was short for a goblin—barely over four feet tall*—and not very good-looking. His ears were not long enough and their points were somewhat rounded—a physical fault he had lamented on more than one occasion. Worse, his left ear tended to droop more than his right, giving him a rather disconcerting off-balance appearance of little appeal to symmetrically minded goblins. The last stroke of bad grooming fortune involved his hair. His single tuft was bright white and completely uncooperative. No amount of coaxing would get it to stand straight up. Occasionally, when he happened upon some black grease from one of the derelict Titan machines, its application to his hair seemed to sharpen his image. Yet the grease was getting scarce, and a particularly unfortunate mishap involving the Megong Bonfire Dance had nearly left him bald.

  Since then he had worn his old cap with the hole in the top and used it as best he could to hold his pathetic hairlock in something close to a respectable vertical position. Even though Lirry smacked him around every morning yelling about “that stupid hat ain’t regulationatory,” Mimic knew different. So long as he wore his shirt of office—the orange shirt of the engineer fourth class—he was within the established and well-defined dress code of his class.

  Besides, Mimic thought, Lirry would just find something else to beat him up for anyway. It was better to know what to expect. So every morning Mimic wore his hat and every morning Lirry smacked him around, and Mimic took it quietly because, for one thing, the beatings never lasted very long.

  And for another thing, Mimic silently knew that one day—he didn’t know when—one day, things would be different.

  Mimic said little to his fellow engineers but thought plenty to himself. He would envision wild stories about making a Titan fully functional one day—just by accident—and having it step on Lirry. Or he would be working on one of his little clockwork experiments and he would imagine it suddenly would start actually working—and it would blow a hole through Lirry’s head. Or he would find a gigantic tree-cutting machine of the Titans and find a way to start it again just as Lirry—

  “Hey, Mimic!” It was Lugnut Lipik, the second class engineer. He had joined G’dag and Zoof leaping around the fire. “Look at us! We’re summoning the fire spirits!”

  The rest of the Expeditionary Force had built a huge fire nearby. They would need the warmth as the night progressed, since Mimic was sure that Lirry—the expedition boss—would never allow them to leave their prize for even nearby shelter.

  This particular Titan they had found nearly whole. It was filled with lots of gears and wheels and even a couple of belts still intact. It was quite a prize, and Lirry should have been pleased, but he seemed just as sour as ever. “Nothing works!” he had said after they had climbed all over the hulk, half buried as it was in the hillside. “How am I gonna get outta this job unless you rock-knotted tar-poopers get one of these things to move?”

  The first engineer shrugged, the second engineer shrugged, the third engineer shrugged, and then Lirry smacked Mimic. All of this seemed perfectly equitable to the first through third engineers.

  Mimic stood up with a deep sigh, turning his back on the fire. The ripple of its light flickered against the huge form of the fallen Titan, its metal still shining in places. The right arm was missing and the rest was buried in the hillside. What must they have been like when they walked the land! he thought. Their strides were over a hundred feet in length. Did the ground shake under their footfalls?

  This Titan had nearly crested the Norvald Ridge before it fell for the last time. Beyond its shattered form, the range dropped down to the west into the Cynderlond. A great battle had taken place there, long before his memory or the memory of anyone that he knew. Through the mists of distance, he could make out the Forge, the broken mountain which still hurled the molten blood of G’tok from its wound.

  The view inspired Mimic with both awe and sadness at once. Did they live there? he wondered. Had his own people lived with them? Did his ancestors worship the Titans as gods? Why had the gods died?

  “Hey, Mimic! If you’re not going to dance, then at least make yourself useful! The fire’s dying already!”

  It took a moment before Mimic realized someone was yelling at him. He turned back to face his companions by the fire.

  “Eh? What do you want?”

  “I said the fire’s dying already here!” Lugnut said, stamping his foot.

  “Oh, right!” Mimic could see that the flames were quite low. “Be right with you.”

  He reached down with both arms and filled them with as many books as he could carry. Staggering over to the blaze, he dumped them quickly into the flames.

  The fire roared and crackled back to life.

  Mimic shuffled back to his rock and flopped down once more. These book-things were everywhere. A lot of Titans seemed to have a number of them inside. Sometimes they found entire buildings containing these books—stacks and stacks of them. Sometimes they had artlike pictures inside that showed machines—especially the ones they found inside the Titans themselves—but otherwise they were not very pretty. Lots of angular designs in lines on the page, but after a while one lost interest because the angled lines didn’t mean anything and weren’t all that pretty.

  They did, however, burn extremely well.

  Mimic had begun to grow a bit uneasy about these books. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he wondered if there wasn’t something more to them than ornate fuel for bonfires. He honestly didn’t think the Titans had created them with that purpose in mind. So, if not bonfires, what did the Titans think the books were for? Why bother keeping so many of them around everywhere they went?

  Maybe, he thought by the light of the burning books, maybe they were holy icons of the Titans’ gods! Maybe the Titans thought the symbols would protect them or bless them in battle.

  Maybe.

  If so, then they didn’t do a very good job, he thought, gazing up at the broken iron face rising behind him from the hillside.

  Mimic took in a long breath. It had been a hard day and the next would prove no easier. There was more of the Titan to salvage. Dong Mahaj-Megong would want as many trophies from this expedition as possible, and Lirry was no doubt determined to more than please his own superiors in the Ministry of Acquisition and Theft.

  The flames of the fire danced before him. In their waves of heat and light, there appeared to him a face—a thin, tall face with ugly, tiny ears. Its skin appeared pale and terrifyingly smooth. It looked vaguely like some sort of horrid flesh-Titan—a ghostly spirit perhaps haunting this hilltop since the War Days.

  Mimic knew that face. He had seen it in his dreams many times before.

  Did this spirit come in the night through the flames of the fire? Mimic had handled books often. Perhaps the books were tombs for the spirits of the Titans and they had freed them in their burnings! Perhaps the spirit came to kill them even as they watched!

  But the spirit made no move. Its image disappeared as quickly as it had come.

  Perhaps it comes to kill Lirry?

  Mimic smiled. With a sigh that made his left ear droop uncontrollably, he curled up on the rock and went to sleep . . . thinking of the spirit chasing Lirry through all time.

  I say this as an engineer first. As I have explained before, to be an engineer one must begin with the position of the argument and then find the facts that fit it. When the discovered facts do not fit the argument, one knows there is something wrong with the facts. One then needs to go out and get new facts that work. If this proves impossible, one may be forced to modify the original position of the argument with the sure knowledge that the new argument was actually the old argument all along, only remembered incorrectly by everyone else.*

  This is science: the truth is only what we believe it to be. Life is merely a question of ignoring those facts that do not support your viewpoint.

  It is important to understand this, as
it has direct bearing on my arguments and the extraordinary circumstances of my life afterward.

  Before this time, each of my encounters with the Creature was in my dreams. Dreams are constructs of our imagination or the manifestation of spirits intruding into our perspective viewpoint or the result of underdone meat. In any event, I found that in this particular dream, I was standing near the bonfire of my companions. They had all apparently fled, for I saw none of them nearby.

  The hideous Creature stood in the midst of the bonfire. His form was made entirely of the flames. His face was smooth and pinched, while his ears were rounded as though by some terrible accident, as I have heretofore detailed to you. His robes glowed as though they were the embers of the fire itself.

  I thought about how I might help him. He was constructed entirely of flame, and so I sought to encourage the fire by throwing another set of books into the conflagration. This I was making ready to do—but through his gestures he plainly forbade me. I felt thereby encouraged in my suspicion that there was something more important in the book than its burning.

  I opened the book in my hand. The strange, angular designs that lined the page began to glow. As I watched in amazement, they drifted upward from off the surface of the pages and circled around the fire. As each spiraled up around the fire—and I must be perfectly clear on this—the angled designs pulled flame from the creature until they, too, burned.

  Then, when the designs were burning white-hot in the air, they flew over my head. Different designs branded themselves to different parts of the Titan. Each glowed for a time then faded, absorbed by the metal of the fallen giant, only to be replaced by more designs. The pages of the book began to turn over, leaf after leaf, in my hand. The burning sigils flew faster and faster until the last of the pages was empty and the book slammed shut with a sound like the clap of thunder.

  The last of the symbols faded against the iron shell of the Titan. I stood in unreserved amazement. I adjusted my cap and tried to straighten my recalcitrant hair to a more respectful vertical rise.

  The sound was low at first but unmistakable. Ancient metal was moving.

  As I watched, the great Titan began to rise.

  Its hollow, metallic eye winked at me.

  AN ORAL HISTORY OF MIMIC, BRONZE CANTICLES, FOLIO 1, LEAF 32

  20

  For a Clock That Works

  The first engineer shrugged. The second engineer shrugged. The third engineer shrugged. Mimic closed his eyes.

  Then Lirry smacked Mimic across the head, sending the goblin down to the ground. A puff of dust billowed where Mimic hit—as close to a comment as the goblin engineer ever got.

  Lirry glared down at Mimic, seemingly offended at his very presence. Lirry was Mimic’s superior, a fact that Lirry never tired of reminding Mimic or any of the other four engineers under his command. The difference between them may have been only a single, fading black band around the middle of Lirry’s orange tunic, but it was a difference that Lirry beat into Mimic every day.

  Lirry was shorter than any of his crew but he had a wide, barrel-shaped chest and fists that could fracture granite. His shiny yellow eyes were set far back in his head and looked too close together. His wide mouth could show plenty of teeth, but Lirry never smiled unless it was at the discomfort, misfortune, or pain of someone else. His ears were his best feature, rising quite high on either side of his head—a vanity that he never tired of talking about.

  Lirry was known without any trace of affection as “Chief” to anyone with the misfortune of working under him. It was an endearing nickname he had chosen for himself, and woe betide any of his crew who forgot it. His official title was “Chief Engineer,” which meant he was one rung up from the bottom and an uncountable number of rungs from the top. Not that any of that daunted Lirry in the least. He was absolutely convinced that the next discovery or the next lucky throw of the bones could be parlayed, traded, or leveraged into the next step up that same ladder. Results were measured entirely by his progress in the eyes of his superiors. Lirry’s status before the Dong Mahaj-Megong was the only reason any of the engineers beneath him had for breathing. Every unenthusiastic response from his crew was a personal insult, every missed discovery a deliberate act of career sabotage.

  “You call yourselves engineers?” Lirry spat as he spoke. He always spat when he was really mad or excited. “I find the most complete Titan since the Great Leg of last year and you cannot get it to work?”

  Actually, that was not entirely true: it was Mimic who had led them to this remote side of the Norvald Ridge, guided by the inexplicable promptings of his friend from the fire. Still, as Lirry often reminded them, they were supposed to be a team. As such, anything the team discovered should rightly belong to him.

  “Disloyal maggots! Stupid idiots! What rock-brain called you engineers anyway?”

  “Oh, I know! You say we engineer!” It was Engineer Third Class Zoof. Zoof was a tall, scrawny goblin with an ample tuft of white hair at the ridge of his head that made Mimic mildly jealous. Zoof was a good engineer, too, but had no understanding of when to keep his mouth shut.

  The tips of Lirry’s ears quivered with rage. Zoof was too big for Lirry to smack, so he kicked Mimic instead. “You get back into that Titan! No more slack work! You won’t embarrass this chief! You find me something that works!”

  With that, Mimic knew that the morning morale meeting was fortunately at an end. He could safely get up from the ground now and resume his exploration of the Titan where he had left off. Lirry assumed his accustomed position, sitting outside the Titan and eating while the four of them entered to work. The three other engineers were clambering up through the lowest ear of the great head, somehow convinced that if they were near one of their fellow engineers when the “big discovery” was made, they would share in it, too. None of them actually expected that they would be the ones to find it, but they were willing to gamble that someone else just might.

  Mimic groaned to himself, unconsciously tried to straighten his scraggly strands of hair, and headed up toward the nose where he had left off the night before. The metallic face of the Titan had weathered considerably over the years since the War Days. There were plenty of hand- and footholds etched by nature in the face now. He quickly climbed the upper lip and came to the opening.

  Mimic glanced to the east. The sun was rising with a lustrous pink into a clearing sky. He could almost see the ruins of Farval to the east and the purple mountains of the Sanctuary Range beyond. The sun would provide good warmth this morning, and that cheered him. Goblins could see the differences between hot and cold in the dark. The chill of the previous night and the warmth of the sun on the Titan would make his job much easier this morning than it was yesterday afternoon when the Titan had warmed through the day to an even temperature.

  With that, Mimic put both hands on opposite sides of the nostril and pulled himself up.

  Making his way up the short passage, he then turned at once to his left. The smooth, round shaft of metal snaked downward into the lower parts of the great machine. He knew this way well, for he had traversed it yesterday with great delight. The long, snaking brass fittings were elegant and mystical to him. The chambers below held great collections of sprockets, worm gears, flywheels, and other wonders that he had only heard about in the recitations of the tale-masters.

  The tale-masters spoke of such things, of course, because that was their job, instructing the youth in the ways of life and what was expected of them. In the most ancient of days, before the War Days, the goblins and their kind served the great Titans as slaves, tending their machines and treading the very same narrow corridors of metal that Mimic walked at that moment. Then came the War Days and the Titans fell in some terrible conflict. The tale-masters said that the Titans fell because Dong Mahaj-Megong the First banished them from his great kingdom and brought destruction upon them with fire and death. Then the goblins were free to be ruled by the Dong and had been ever since. Still, the Dong was sorry fo
r the loss of the Titans’ great machines. In truth, the goblins were not entirely certain as to whether there was any distinction between the Titans and their machines. Most believed that the Titans were the machines. Regardless of which was true, since that time, it has been the dream of every goblin to reclaim the glorious machines of the lost Titans.

  This Titan was like walking into a dream.

  Mimic frowned. Perhaps it was better not to think about his dreams right now. He had work to do.

  He worked his way through a maze of passageways both large and small. Several times he had to squeeze his slight body through an opening that appeared too narrow even for him. He could both see and feel the walls get cooler as he moved farther and farther down. The differences in temperature between the metal plates were getting less and less down here, for the sun had not penetrated this far yet. It was getting hard for him to see. Yet there was one passage that he had noticed the night before that he was most curious about. He could not have explored it then—the temperature was too even by then to see well—but this morning he might have more luck.

  He was right. The corridor was much brighter.

  He entered it and traversed some of the distance before stopping for a moment. The corridor before him had buckled, and jagged edges of metal stuck out. Then the passage became narrow and difficult, still he continued downward through the twisted, wrenched metal. Much to his surprise, things seemed to be getting easier to see now, as though there were some source of heat from below. The shaft was now nearly vertical, so Mimic spread his hands and feet in all directions, pressing against the sides of the metallic wall as he continued downward.