“Running in that direction, in a woman’s hand, idiot,” said Judah.
Tosvig and Judah chased after her, but it was no use. She was already long-gone.
Someone touched my shoulder, but I was too dazed to see who it was. Cleavon peered at my wound. Voices spoke around me, but the pain in my leg intensified, and the noises and the light and everything all blurred into one.
And then a great numbness settled over me. It was as if I had been plunged into arctic waters and the temperature had frozen my nerves, except I didn’t feel cold. I felt nothing at all.
“That will help the pain,” said Cleavon, his hands covered in a strange brown paste. “Now lie back while I check whether you’re going to bleed to death or not.”
“Bitch stole my knife,” said the guard.
“So take mine, and go and kill her.”
“You kill her.”
“Did you see what she did? How fast she was? You do it!”
“Too late. She’s gone.”
Harrien’s face loomed over mine. “Okai, Isaac?”
“Get out of the way, boy!” said Cleavon. “The wound doesn’t look deep, but it needs sealing before he loses more blood. Check my bag, I might have something.”
“The goo,” I said, my voice strangely calm. It was one of the weirdest sensations of my life; lying on my back, seeing all the blood leaking from me, yet without any pain. “The alchemooze. Check my pocket.”
Cleavon rifled through my trouser pockets, but I didn’t feel him doing it. He eventually found the metal tin I had gotten earlier that morning, the healing goo that was one of my rewards for the turtle battle.
He popped the cap, revealing a splodge of green ooze.
Tosvig, leaning close to me, screwed up his face. Harrien took a few steps away.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“That stuff stinks.”
“Interesting concoction,” said Cleavon.
“Forget how interesting it is and seal me up!”
The healer applied the gnome goo to my wound. I didn’t feel any different, but the blood had stopped spurting, so that was something. The stain on my trousers looked like a giant, bloody island, and the grass around my waist was dyed crimson.
Tosvig kneeled beside me, and the winter air made his breath look like steam.
“Feeling okai, Isaac?”
“I don’t feel much of anything. I guess that’s a good sign.”
“Their strange ointment has closed your wound,” said Cleavon. “And you didn’t lose much blood.”
“Looks like a lot to me.”
“Don’t worry; there is much more of it in your body.”
“Don’t cry over spilled blood, huh?”
“You are going to cry?” asked Tosvig.
“Never mind.”
I pushed my hands on the ground, but I couldn’t even feel the contact through my numbness. I got to my feet, and I immediately lost my balance and stumbled, falling onto the ground again.
“My numbing paste will take a while to wear off,” said Cleavon.
So, I sat on the ground and waited for feeling to return to me, while the others all grabbed their things. Rabert and the gnome guards stood closely together, and I wondered if they might try and get Rabert away, but Adi-Boto and Judah kept a close watch on them.
I thought about chasing after the girl. She was gone now, having sprinted away from us inhumanely fast. I didn’t like the idea of someone stabbing me and get away with it.
But that would have been stupid, to go running out there into the wintry wilds just to set right a stabby wrong. It would be a waste of time and energy for any of us to go after her.
I’d just have to wait and see if Thea and I ever crossed paths again. If we did, I wouldn’t ask her why she stabbed me; I already knew that. She didn’t know us, didn’t trust us, and wanted to get away.
Then again, if that was true, why not just run? The stabbing element of all of this just seemed mean. Plain, old, mean.
Forget it. I was living in a world where gnomish goo could heal wounds, so at least I wasn’t going to die. And now, sensations were returning to my body, and I guessed I could stand without face-planting again.
“You need to rest,” said Harrien.
“I’ll be fine, thanks.”
I wandered over to where the inventory bags had been. There were only three left now, so I took mine.
Items Received:
Your full inventory
Man, it felt good to get my stuff back. My robes, my tinctures, and most importantly, my elementals. I felt less vulnerable, less naked.
Next, I rummaged through the remaining sacks on the ground.
Items Received:
Red Alchemooze x6
Yellow Alchemooze x6
Blue Alchemooze x6
Black Alchemooze x6
Green Alchemooze x6
It looked like I had to figure out what each alchemooze did for myself. Well, I already knew that red alchemooze burned when you spread it, and the blue stuff snuffed fire out. I also knew from recent, painful experience that green alchemooze sealed wounds.
I approached Rabert now.
“Haven’t your rabble finished here yet?” he said. “Or are we going to stand around shivering all day?”
“Tough words for a man with his wrists tied.”
“You won’t kill me.”
“No?” I said.
Truth be told, I wasn’t sure whether I would or not. Rabert was my insurance policy for stopping the Duke Asshole from sending people after me. He knew that if he did, I’d murder the gnome who appeared to be his highest-ranking henchman, besides Vicq.
Even so, part of me wanted to know what gnomish elementals did. A deeper, darker part of me also wondered what buffs a man might get from eating gnome meat.
Ugh. That was a part of myself that I didn’t like so much. It was also one that I needed to co-exist with since it was an aspect of my personality that I guessed had kept me alive so far.
Weighing the odds, I supposed that if we murdered Rabert and the guards, the duke had nothing left to lose. He’d send gnomes after us to get retribution.
No, Rabert’s flesh and elementals and vital organs would have to stay intact.
I laid the goo tins on the ground and opened them to show what was inside.
“What do these do?” I said.
Rabert sighed. “Black alchemooze is a toxin that causes sickness. Yellow alchemooze bestows happiness on he who eats it. Red alchemooze…”
He explained what each one did. From the second he gave me an explanation about the red alchemooze, I knew that he was taking me for a jackass, because I already knew what that ooze did.
I pointed at Rabert. “You’re lying.”
“And you aren’t all you appear, Isaac. I suppose neither of us is standing on the right side of the truth. How about you tell me what prompted such generosity from our duke, and I will explain what these are?”
Rabert was desperate to know what the duke and I had spoken about. Did he want to get an angle on the duke? The truth was, even I didn’t know the full extent of what we said, because I had bluffed my way through it.
But…there might be an opportunity here. An opportunity for chaos. Maybe if I sowed a little discord in the gnome ranks, it would make certain they never thought about coming after us later.
This could only be good for me. Put the duke in a difficult position, concoct trouble for him, and he’d be too preoccupied putting out political fires in Agnartis to give us a second’s thought.
“When you get back to Agnartis, ask the duke about the portal he came through,” I said.
“What about it?”
“Just keep asking him, and watch him sweat. The truth will come out. Now, the goo. Explain please, my gnomish friend.”
Rabert glared at me. “Fine.”
“What a second,” I said. I pointed at one of the guards. “Get up and follow me.”
I led the guard away from Rabert and acr
oss the forest clearing, where I told him to sit. I left him there, out of earshot of us, and headed back to Rabert.
“Okay,” I said. “Explain.”
Rabert explained that the black alchemooze spread darkness over things. It could snuff out light sources, as well as casting a shadow over things that you wanted to hide.
Conversely, the yellow goo was a source of light, and could also reveal hidden things. Traps, doorways, anything one might wish to hide.
When he was done, I had fetched the guard back and had him explain what the goos did, making sure their answers matched.
It was the best I could do to make sure they were telling the truth. Either the guard had the hearing of a wolf, or they had inexplicably already agreed to lie to me about the alchemoozes way before now. That didn’t seem likely.
With that done, I checked the final sack. The duke had ordered his gnomes to put weapons in this sack, at my polite request. They were mostly swords and axes. Durable, sharp, but nothing to brag about.
There was only one that looked different from the rest. This was a short sword with a black hilt and a silver blade. On one side of the blade, the maker had etched something into the metal. A weighing scale with a tray on each side. In one tray was a smiling face, and on the other was a frowning face.
I could have been wrong, but I guessed that meant something. I couldn’t have been particularly easy to etch something into metal, so there must have been a reason.
I showed it to Rabert. “What does this mean?”
He shrugged, so I nodded at the guards.
“I do not know,” said one.
The other shook his head.
I addressed the rest of the group. “Help yourselves to this fine weaponry. Even if you can’t use swords or axes, take one to be safe.”
And that was that.
I had regained all my stuff from before. I had gotten a metal chest-piece, a new sword, a few more elementals, and loads of goo. After spending time as a prisoner and being forced to fight a giant turtle, things could have gone a lot worse.
“Okai, guys,” I said. “We better think about moving. Does anyone have a spare shirt or trousers?”
“I may have,” said Cleavon.
“Great. Tie up the guards. We’ll leave them here when we set out, and it will be a while before anyone finds them. Save material for blindfolds; I don’t want them to know which direction we head in.”
“Where are we going?” asked Harrien.
“First, cut a little material and plug their ears. Actually, wait. I have something.”
From my pocket, I took out a piece of cloth that I had found in the pitman pen back when I was looking for anything that might help me. Guess it had come in useful after all.
Cleavon took an old linen shirt from his bag. Once Rabert and the guards were tied up, blindfolded, and had their ears plugged, I spoke to everyone.
“The duke gave me his copy of the gnomes’ maps of the wilds. I say gave, but he wasn’t exactly happy about it. Did one of you take it from the bags?”
“I took it,” said Tosvig. “A moment, I will get it.”
“What now?” asked Harrien.
I shrugged. “It’s not just up to me. But I guess we better figure out where to find the Mines of Light. After all of this, I’m not going back with nothing to show.”
Tosvig held a scroll of paper in his hand. He unraveled it. “Might be easy, no-color. Think gnomes found the mine.”
“Tosvig, Tosvig, Tosvig,” said Cleavon. “You think the gnomes found the Mines of Light? Really? Think. It is only weeks since the Tallsteeps and Lonehills joined their halves of the map to reveal the location, and that was after decades of it being unknown. And now you believe that the gnomes, a bunch of pig-headed goo makers, have found it? What could possibly lead you to think that?”
Tosvig held the map out for us all to see.
“Because on the map there is a mountain, and next to the mountain they have written mine, and there are three marks of question next to it. And Kostig and Nino told us that mines lie in direction of Agnartis before this, yap?”
“Tosvig has a point,” said Harrien.
“It is the only thing we can try. We either head back home with nothing or we try this,” I said.
There were murmurs of agreement.
You can talk about the differences between the Lonehills and Tallsteeps all day, but they had one thing in common; they decided things fast. Maybe life in the wilds demanded quick decision making.
We headed out of the forest. There was a gnome-made pathway east of us that would lead directly to the mountains. It must have been to make it easier for the gnomes to take stones and metals to and from their dig sites and back to Agnartis. We avoided it.
It added a little onto our journey and meant we had to navigate swampy ground, but we reached the dig site later that evening, with nothing worse happening to us than getting mud on our boots. That made a change.
The map I had taken from the duke’s room marked the mine just ahead of us, and there were three red question marks drawn over it.
It was getting too dark to see much ahead of us, other than half a dozen luminous splodges that seemed to be floating around in the dark. They looked like they were floating through the air, going this way and that like magic, hovering spheres.
“Fairies?” I said.
“Gnomes,” said Cleavon, frowning. “With hats and alchemooze smeared on them.”
“Right. That makes more sense.”
“This is it?” asked Harrien.
I had to believe this was the place. As Tosvig said, Kostig had been leading us in this direction, and how many more mines could there be around here?
Then again, something didn’t add up.
“I thought the Mines of Light was a secret place guarded by generations of half map bullcrap? How did the gnomes find a way in so easily?”
“First,” said Judah, “If you describe anything about our history as half map bullcrap, and I will stick my fist in mouth, down your throat, and pull out your heart.”
“And I will eat it,” said Tosvig. “That was disrespectful, no-color.”
Here I was, bringing two historical enemies together once more. But hey, they were right.
“Sorry. I’m just on edge. Go on.”
“We do not know if this is the Mines of Light yet, Isaac. And if it is, well, the mines are not so hidden that they are impossible to find,” said Judah. “After all, we each had half of map. So maybe other maps exist, and other people have found the mines over the course of time. But, it is said only circle and emerald children can go in. So the location is not so important a secret, if strangers cannot enter.”
“So why didn’t you look for them before now? I understand that your history meant you wouldn’t work together and join your map halves, but you must have had a vague idea of where to search.”
“And we did search,” said Judah. “I speak for the Tallsteeps, anyway. We searched where many different mines are likely to be; places of hard stone. But, gnomes rule this territory. Ogres patrol the east, near mountains and other mines. Hard to conduct a thorough search when being discovered means you must fight, and hard to dig through rock without making noise and attracting battle.”
“Fine, but why haven’t the gnomes found this place before now? Mining and blowing up rocks is their whole thing. It’s what gets their blood flowing. I bet many gnome kids get conceived the night of a particularly good explosion.”
“Check map, Isaac. See shaded parts.”
I had a quick look at the map of the gnome territory. The mountain was ahead of us. Below it, reaching from the mountain base to near Agnartis, some parts of the land were shaded with pencil lines. Old dig sites?
“Ah. There used to be other hill ranges here. Canyons and stuff, and they exploded them. They’ve been working their way north, blowing up rocks and hills and taking what they need.”
“It appears so,” said Cleavon.
“They
detonated their way through a whole hill range? Wow. Say what you will about their hospitality, but they work hard. What are they even doing with all the stone?”
“Some used in temple,” said Tosvig, holding up his hand to show callouses on his palm from a few days of heavy lifting.
“And what about the rest of it? That’s a lot of terrain to get through.”
“They use metal for weapons and tools.”
“That still leaves tons and tons of stone,” I said. I don’t know why I was so fixated on this, but it was really bugging me.
“The gnomes have an alchemooze that turns stone into its base elements,” said Cleavon. “There was a gnome working at the temple who told me this. A political dissident sentenced to labor by the duke. He used to work in a compound where they would use their ooze on stone.”
So, ahead of us was a potential entrance to the Mines of Light, but there was a gnome work crew laboring around it, the glowing ooze on their hats bobbing up and down as they worked.
“There are too many of us to sneak past them,” I said. “I suppose we could march up and just walk in; they won’t be able to overpower us. Then again, all they’ll do is run back to Agnartis and tell the duke where we went. The last thing we want when we leave the mines is to have half of Agnartis waiting outside with swords and spears.”
“We kill them,” said Tosvig.
“Murder a bunch of gnomes just doing their job?” I said.
“They imprisoned us.”
“On the duke’s orders. If I was just a working man, I’d hate someone to hold me accountable for things rulers above me decided.”
“Fine, no-fun Isaac. Sneak up and knock them out.”
“Creep up to six gnomes and render them all unconscious all at the exact same time? I don’t think we’re capable of that.”
“I am,” said Kayla.
“I know you Tallsteeps can sneak, but the rest of us aren’t so hot. Besides, hitting a guy in the skull so hard he blacks out might cause permanent injury. Damage his brain. Right, Cleavon?”
The healer nodded. “It is known to happen.”
“Why do you care about them?” asked Tosvig.
“Because these guys are just working. They’re probably on the night shift, and they spend every second wishing they could go home to their families. They aren’t a direct threat to my immediate survival, so I don’t need to do anything drastic.”
Everything Is Worth Killing- Isaac's Tale Page 37