The dust settled enough for me to open my eyes. When I did, I saw that there was no sign of Kostig and Nino; they had left the canyon. Harrien in the middle of the canyon, ten feet away. But he wasn’t alone.
Harrien was on his knees, and standing beside him were two small, muscular creatures. They looked almost human, but with oversized heads and floppy ears. Both had thick, grey beards dotted with dust and dirt.
One held a spear, and he pressed the point against Harrien’s throat. The other, who looked feminine if you ignored the beard, held an axe above Harrien’s head, ready to strike.
Way behind them, more of the creatures were rappelling down the cliffside using ropes that looked like they were made of metal but were flexible.
“Gnomes,” said Tosvig.
One gnome raised her axe. “Ta fleg na carta ma niorgine!”
Another language? Man, I don’t have time to learn another.
“Huh?” I said. I turned to my group. “Anyone here speak gnome?”
The spear-carrying gnome nudged his friend. “Ah, it speaks human.”
Axe-lady smiled. “Human boy!”
“Man, actually.”
“We haven’t seen humans in a long time. It is lucky we are proud linguists, no? This is feckin’ splendid. It has been a while since humans played our games.”
“Games?”
“Duke Woldstone will be happy with us. A human contestant!”
Tosvig glared at them. He clenched his fist, and I could tell he was thinking of reaching for his sword. The problem was that a dozen gnomes had rappelled to the canyon now, and half a dozen more were coming.
“Gnomes will die at Tosvig’s sword,” he said.
The spear gnome frowned. “And now this one speaks Kartum.”
“This is getting confusing,” said the other, in Kartum speech.
“Very confusing.”
“A universal language would have been less complicated, na?”
“True, Yarip, but with a generalized language would come a loss of cultural identity. It is better this way.”
“Ah, feck it.”
“Oh well,” said spear gnome. He looked behind him. “Surround them. Don’t kill them. Duke Woldstone will be unhappy if he learns we maimed prospective contestants.”
“But what if they struggle? The one-handed brute looks like he would enjoy disemboweling me.”
“If they attack, then of course kill them.”
As a dozen gnomes advanced on us, I tried to think of anything I could do. There were only seven of us now. Kostig had been our best fighter, I think, and Nino the highest-ranked mage. Tostig had hurt his ankle, and the rest of us were cold and tired after spending most of the day and night shivering against the cliffs.
I had time for one spell. I could cycle a hrr-chare and Siddel’s medallion would add more firepower to it, but I’d only catch three, maybe four gnomes even with a perfect shot.
Maybe I could play nice. Tell the gnomes they looked tired, and they should take a rest. I had a nice blanket I could cover them with, in case they were cold. Yeah, the fire blanket would keep them toasty alright…
Damn it. There were no real solutions.
Unless…
I could eat the hare meat to get a speed buff and get the hell out of there. With the added speed, I’d be gone before they could throw a spear or swing an axe.
But what about the others?
It was my survival or theirs. Always that question, and always the same answer.
I reached to my pocket for the meat, but it wasn’t there. I checked my other pocket…gone!
I must have dropped it in the blast. The exploding wingless dragon had taken me by surprise, I was ashamed to admit. There was a lesson here; expect everything. I resolved that from here on out, I’d live my life expecting a dynamite-driven lizard detonation at every turn.
That didn’t help me now. It didn’t help any of us, surrounded as we were by fourteen gnomes wielding a mixture of weapons, from spears to swords to axes. One of them even had a scythe.
One, I would like to say a younger gnome but I was finding it impossible to figure out their ages, was wearing thick leather gloves. In one gloved hand, he held a blob of green goo with a fuze poking out of it.
“I say we make them boom,” he said.
“Boom boom,” corrected another gnome.
The spear gnome shook his head. “No. Do not light that fuze. We take them to Agnartis and see what the duke says. We still need slaves to build the temple, and some of these specimens will make excellent contestants.”
Slaves? Contestants?
Maybe I was a pessimist, but that didn’t sound good.
“Damn it,” said the maybe-younger gnome.
“Don’t pout, Edel. What have I told you about pouting?”
“Not to do it.”
“Yes. There will be plenty of booms in your future.” He turned to the other six gnomes who had just reached the ground and were coiling up their metal ropes. “You! Gather all the pieces of loose scales you can find. Don’t worry if they are mixed with rocks, we will sort them later.”
“Yes, Vicq.”
“Where is Erimdag? I need a word with him.”
“He didn’t come today.”
“I could have sworn that I saw him. Where is he?”
“Back at Agnartis, Vicq. He found something earlier today. The duke has given him an audience.”
“The duke? Erimdag must have found something great. I tell you, if it overshadows our bags full of komonaut scales, I will be mad as all hells. Anyway, keep your eye on these chumps. When we have gathered everything, we will march back to Agnartis.”
Harrien pressed close to me now. “Idea, Isaac?” he whispered.
I wished I could give him any sign of hope. Even a word.
I shook my head. “Not a single damn one, Harrien.”
“Gnome bastards.”
“Exactly my thoughts.”
The gnomes paid attention to detail, I will give them that. While keeping careful watch on us, they stripped us of our weapons and inventory bags.
Items removed:
Everything you own
As much as losing all my carefully gathered robes, tincture, weapons, and elementals made me boil with fury, there was one detail that gave me hope. They failed to remove my, Harrien, and Cleavon’s medallions.
From this, I gathered that they were ignorant of the Lonehills’ magic, which was a piece of hope to hold on to. Course, we couldn’t use any spells without elementals, but I would just have to think of something.
The half-dozen gatherer gnomes sang songs in their own language while they collected all the scattered pieces of komonaut scales.
While they did this, I looked for any kind of opening. To do what, I didn’t know. But the gnomes guarding us never wavered in their attention for even a second, and I knew it was useless. They might not have known much about spells, but they knew how to guard us.
The Tallsteep scouts spoke in hushed words to each other, while Harrien sat close to me. Cleavon was silent, his expression as calm as ever, while Tosvig glared at the spear gnome, the one they called Vicq who seemed to oversee things.
I knew Tosvig’s glare well, because I had seen him give it many times by now. It was a stare that said, the second you give me a chance, I will tear out your intestines and wear them as a scarf, while donning your bladder as a lovely, fleshy hat.
Finally, as the sun began to rise in the eastern sky, the gnomes had five sacks bulging with komonaut scales. Five gnomes slung these over their backs without effort, which told me one thing; they had magic inventory bags, too.
With that done, Vicq turned his attention to us. “Who is your leader?” he said, in Kartum. The gnomes, I had found, had an impressive command of languages.
Harrien went to speak, so I nudged him before he said a single word. I thought I knew what he was going to say.
The Lonehill teenager seemed to think I was great. No idea where he got that from. He thought
I always had a plan for every situation, and he’d even suggested that I should become chief of the Lonehill clan, which was crazy.
As much as an ego boost was nice, this wasn’t the time.
Right now, I was suspicious of why the gnome would want to know who our leader was. Call me pessimistic, but I thought he might want to subdue us by making an example of our leader. It’s what I would do in his position.
The fact was, we didn’t have a leader, anyway. Kostig had been in charge of the Tallsteep scouts, and Nino oversaw the Lonehills.
So, I didn’t want Harrien to think he was being kind by calling me the leader, only for the gnome to chop my head off. Luckily, my nudge got the message across.
“Well?” said Vicq.
Tosvig stepped forward. “I am leader.”
Vicq appraised Tosvig, looking him up and down while twiddling his beard. “You? What’s your name?”
“Tosvig, bastard.”
“What happened to your hand, Tosvig Bastard?”
“I was born this way.”
Vicq nodded. “And you do not wear a false hand?”
“False hand?”
“When a large part of your population work with explosives, lots of appendages get blown off. We have a weekly fire where we incinerate feet, hands, ears. You name it. But we can’t have people sitting around and not working just because they lost a hand or foot. So, we have devised many different types of false ones.”
“Why tell this?”
“Because you will be needed. For the temple or the pits, I do not know. Hmm. I will report your lack of hand when we get back to the city.”
“Why do you want to know who is leader?” asked Tosvig.
Here it comes, I thought. If he looks like he’s going to kill Tosvig, I’ll have to step in. We were surrounded, so there was no chance of overpowering them, but I could say something. Convince them to spare him.
Vicq folded his arms. “I find it is always best to have a single point of contact when we capture people. Someone to funnel messages through. Now tell me, leader Tosvig Bastard, how long ago did you and your group last eat or drink?”
And that was how I learned that the gnomes were surprisingly nice.
I mean, for a bunch of guys who’d blown up a giant wingless dragon and then taken us prisoner at sword point, they were pretty kind and charming.
Before setting out on a march back to their city, the gnomes started a fire and cooked sausages over it. They shared these out, even giving an equal portion to us. I felt conflicted at this. The smell was divine, and my stomach was crying out to have some of the lovely sausages in it.
Then again, I hated the idea of being held prisoner and accepting my captor’s food. It made me feel like a cat at the mercy of his owner or something.
But what was I going to do? Starve because I didn’t like my situation? Nope. If I was going to get out of this, I needed to keep alert mentally and energized physically. So, I accepted the sausage. Man, it was the nicest thing I had eaten in a long, long time. My stomach and I resolved our differences then and became very good friends.
The gnomes sang songs around the fire, and it reminded me a lot of the nights I had spent with the Lonehills. The only differences, my prisoner situation aside, were that the gnomes sang songs that I could tell were a lot raunchier. Even though they sang them in their own language, I could tell by their laughs and smirks that the songs were blue.
The other difference was the fire; rather than using spells or good old-fashioned kindling and flint, the gnomes spread a red goo over the ground. After a few seconds exposed to the air, it set alight, and the flames burned on for hours.
I needed to get me some of that. I really, really needed it.
Just like with elementals and with buffs, I couldn’t stand the idea of a resource being there, something that could help me, and not being able to get it.
I wondered what other kinds of goo they had. I had already seen the green stuff they used to stick dynamite to the komonaut, and now they had red ooze that set alight after a few seconds of air getting to it, and then kept burning for hours.
Was this stuff magic? Was it alchemy? Did weird goo grow in the wild, or something?
So many things I was desperate to know.
After a few hours of food, drink, and rest, Vicq announced that it was time to leave. One gnome took a metal tin from his pocket, opened it, and then threw a single blob of blue goo onto the fire. The substance spread, and within seconds the flames were gone.
Wow.
Vicq addressed us all again now. “I hate to point out the obvious, especially in something so brutal, but this must be said. We’re going to march now. You will be fed and you’ll get breaks. However, at the first sign of resistance or an attempt to escape, we will break the offender’s legs and leave him to die in the wilds. Understood?”
Adi-Boto nodded. Judah gave a quiet “yes.” One by one, we all agreed, since there was little else we could do yet. Only one of us didn’t speak in agreement.
“Tosvig Bastard?” said Vicq.
Tosvig looked like he wanted to tear Vicq’s heart out and eat it in front of his face. He didn’t do this, though. Instead, he said, “Understand.”
And then we set off, walking north through the canyon in the same way we had been traveling yesterday, before the komonauts had disrupted things.
We walked for days, and true to their word, the gnomes were courteous and fair. We stopped every few hours, and they always made sure we had water. Whenever they ate, they divided their rations among us without a single gnome grumbling about it.
If it were me, and I was the kind of person to keep someone as a prisoner, I’d resent giving them rations. I’d keep them alive, but I wouldn’t share my stuff equally.
Then again, what about Roddie? Who was I kidding? Survival was such a weird thing. It made me question who I was. Like, I never knew how cold I would be in a situation until I was in it. I never knew if I would act in my own interests or someone else’s until my survival was on the line.
It was then that I missed my buddy, and wished I’d brought him along, but at least I knew he was safe back in the secret valley.
One thing their sharing told me was that the gnomes were compassionate. I learned that immediately, and they reinforced it again and again on our march.
When Harrien stood on a sharp rock and punctured his foot, one of the gnomes rubbed a strange yellow salve on his heel. When a pack of wild wolves growled from some unseen shadows one night, the gnomes formed a circle around us, and they drew their weapons to protect us.
The wolves never revealed themselves, but the gnomes’ actions told me a couple of things.
They weren’t a barbaric people, for one. They obviously believed their prisoners had rights to fair treatment and protection.
But secondly, they placed a high value on us, to the point their first instinct on hearing wolves was to protect us.
We were valuable to them.
This brought me back to a couple of things I had learned a while ago; that raw flesh gave buffs, and the more powerful a person, the more powerful the buff they left behind.
Ditto with me. As a human, the elemental inside me was valuable. Everything was worth killing, but humans were worth killing most of all.
Were they protecting us because we were commodities?
It was a worrying thought, but I reminded myself that the gnomes let us keep our medallions. They didn’t know about magic, so most likely had no clue about elementals. Besides, they’d already mentioned something about building a temple, and us playing some kind of game for them.
Okay. They weren’t about to butcher us for our flesh.
Even so, I made sure to keep a close eye on my captors as we marched. I listened to them whenever they spoke in English or Kartum. I took note of each of their weapons and how they held them.
I watched their interpersonal relationships. I gauged who among them seemed more attentive in watching us, who was their
cleverest, who was their best warrior.
I formed a picture of their strengths and weaknesses in my head, and I hoped I would get a chance to use it to escape.
Before long, though, maybe three or four days later, our march was almost at an end.
“Feast your eyes on the most beautiful place in the world,” said Vicq, his voice edged with emotion.
There, in the distance, was the gnomes’ city.
CHAPTER 33 – The Temple & the Pit
“The most beautiful place in the world.”
“A city so fair you will never want to leave…not that you can.”
“A place a gnome, ogre, man, anyone, can fall in love with.”
I had heard all of these phrases countless times during our travels from the canyon and to Agnartis, the gnomes’ city. I had expected something grand, something magnificent in scope, and I wasn’t disappointed there.
So far, the only settlement I had seen that didn’t involve tents was the village of cottages, and that was empty. Agnartis had those beat.
But beautiful?
I looked upon Agnartis in person now, and I saw shipping containers. Giant, metal shipping containers lying all around. Some of them stacked on top of each until they were twelve containers high and had wooden ladders and platforms built on them. Others were alone, surrounded by barrels, piles of scrap, and bits of metal.
The containers seemed to perform several duties; homes, workshops, storerooms, shops. Made sense, I guessed, since they were waterproof.
It was impressive…but not beautiful. Sorry, gnomes. I just couldn’t get behind that idea.
The only concession the gnomes had made to aesthetics was to paint their containers. Some painted them in random colors, while others had drawn shapes. One container had painted a giant pan over a fire, with an egg drying in it. Painted nearby was a field of komonauts laying the eggs. Weird.
Going from one container to another, and forming a spider’s web above head height, were lots of steel cables. Hundreds of them. Then there were winches, gears, and levers all around on the ground, and gnomes turned levers to make things move along the cables.
If there was an overall sound in Agnartis, it was the clamor of metal stuff clanging against other metal stuff. What the sounds really were, I had no idea. Blacksmiths, maybe? Whatever it was, this place was loud enough that I was surprised they weren’t all deaf. But then, when I looked at the working gnomes, I noticed that they all had a splodge of black goo on their ear lobes.
Everything Is Worth Killing- Isaac's Tale Page 31