No Country for Old Gnomes

by Kevin Hearne

  The din seemed to be coming from a knot of gnomes in red coveralls who were shouting and waving their tiny arms, but Faucon couldn’t quite pick out their words among the overall hum and mechanical drone of the city. Soon, gnomes were screeching and grabbing their hats as they dove out of the way of a golden automaatti that was moving fast along the streets toward them. Its shape resembled…well, not an otter or a snake and not precisely a spider either, though it was very low to the ground and reminded Faucon a bit of Eino’s half centipod, but much smaller and obviously not intended to be a transport for anything bigger than a halfling-sized jug of ale. It looked like it had somewhere to go and it was impossible to know what to do about it, so Faucon politely stepped to the side in case its mission was important. By the time he realized what was happening, it was too late to do anything about it.

  The automaatti did indeed have somewhere to go: Its destination was Faucon’s bare feet, and it swerved directly for him and used its many appendages to lock on to his ankles and wrap its body lengthwise along his ten toes, encasing them completely. It was somehow both cold and hot, smooth and sharp, and in the process tackled Faucon to the ground as he tried to escape and was essentially tripped. Everything happened so fast that all he could really feel was fear and an uncomfortable squeezing.

  It was at that point that everyone moved to help, understanding that something was very wrong. But it was already too late: The automaatti’s body convulsed, and Faucon screamed in agony.

  “Augggh! My tooooes!” he cried.

  The automaatti disengaged, and as if through someone else’s eyes, Faucon saw that his toes—his beautiful, perfect toes!—were little more than wee limp bags of meat, the bones in them pulverized into bits and no longer resembling digits.

  One of the gnomes in red who’d been waving from a distance caught up, puffing for breath, and said, “Oh, no!” as he stared down. Faucon blinked and saw two of him.

  “Help?” asked the gnome, who looked up and said, “He’s in shock.”

  “What the Pell just happened?” Hellä Traktiv said, towering over Faucon now that he was splayed on the ground in excruciating pain. He could feel his heartbeat in his ears—thumpity-bump—and beyond that, only the screaming nerves below his ankles.

  “I’m so sorry, we didn’t know there were any halflings in the city, or we never would have run the test sequence,” the gnome in red said. “When we turned it on, it just took off, following its programming. That was one of the new HTS drones you recently ordered for the coming offensive.”

  Hellä gasped.

  What does HTS stand for? Gerd said.

  The gnome trembled and quaked as he looked into Faucon’s eyes. “It stands for Halfling Toe Smasher, and its work cannot be undone.”

  “The number of gnomes who were accidentally stabbed in the throat by pencils stored in their beards used to be quite high, until someone invented a throat-safe pencil. Better to invent that, apparently, than to cease using beards for pencil storage.”

  —HERKO SOKKA, in A Brief Illustrated History of Gnomeric Cleverness

  Faucon paused his screaming to yowl, “My toes! My beautiful toes!” and Kirsi hurried to hold his hand. She didn’t know anything about healing, and she couldn’t curse an injury away, but she was quite good at patting and squeezing hands and saying reassuring things that meant nothing. They had praised her, back in school, for her natural talent at letting her eyebrows draw together in sympathy and nodding at exactly the right time—SYMPATHETIC FURROWING, the medal read. She realized, as her smöl fingers wrapped around his slightly larger, far hairier ones, that she had never touched a halfling before. Her parents had taught her from a young age that it would cause boils to break out across her nose, make her beard fall out, and irreparably wrinkle her cardigan.

  None of these things happened. People taught their children awful things sometimes.

  “Surely someone can help him. Don’t you have surgeons here?” she asked, feeling his tension and terror as his fingers jumped and clutched at hers.

  Hellä shook her head sadly. “We do have surgeons, but the problem with designing a machine to destroy halfling toes permanently is that when you do a good job, it can’t be reversed. I assure you that those toes are in their death throes. The phalanges have been thoroughly pulverized to a fine and most moist meat powder.”

  “Oh, my saddest boyhood britches,” Båggi murmured, pausing as he mixed potions to peer over his picnic basket to examine Faucon’s toes. “My friends, this sort of ruination is beyond the aid of my boning tea. That only mends clean breaks and can’t fix pulverized bone. But perhaps…”

  “Perhaps?” Kirsi pressed.

  “Perhaps I can help him go to sleep while we worry over how to help. All the screaming isn’t very good for one’s nerves, is it? Ha ha!”

  Kirsi had noticed that the poor dwarf only said ha ha when he was panicking or terrified, and she didn’t want to make him feel worse, so she just nodded and said, “Yes. If you can gift him with unconsciousness, I’m sure he’ll thank you. Sometime in the future.”

  Faucon gave his tacit agreement by continuing to scream.

  With great gravitas, Båggi went to his mead cask, turned it upside down, and popped the bottom off, revealing a thick golden-brown sort of jelly. A boozy, honey-sweet scent filled the air, and even Faucon momentarily stopped screeching to take in a deep breath.

  “This is the mead seed,” Båggi explained. “The most concentrated heart of dwarvelish mead. A thimbleful might make you wee ones sleep for a week, so I must carefully administer this dose.” From his basket, Båggi withdrew a special spoon, hand-hammered with a honeycomb motif in the handle. He scraped up about half a spoonful of the mead seed and slipped it delicately into Faucon’s yowling maw.

  “Ahh! Ahh! Oh! Oh. Ohhhhh.” Faucon went from frantic, red-faced, and terror-filled to sleepy and smiling. “That’ll do,” he murmured, and Kirsi’s eyes flew wide to hear him use a contraction. The mead seed was potent indeed. His eyes fluttered closed, and his breathing grew deep. Everyone sighed in relief at the complete lack of screaming.

  “I can dull pain,” Båggi said quietly. “But I can’t fix this.”

  Some things can never be fixed, Gerd said, her voice calm in Kirsi’s mind.

  The gryphon had first responded to Faucon’s situation by attacking the machine that had hurt her friend, and once she’d torn it apart, she’d spread her wings and raised her ruff, warning off any gnomes who might come near. Now it would appear she’d come to terms with the grim finality of the situation.

  But broken things are still worthwhile, she continued. Her noble head rose, her piercing eyes pinning Hellä and the gearhands. And I do not just mean egges. Perhaps you cannot fix him, but you can help him. You are smöl people of vision, are you not? Bring me an invention that will aide this fyne halfling. If you cannot help, if you can only hurt, then you have forgotten the ways of the Elders. Which, by ancient law, means I can eat you in one bite. Because those are the rules. She licked her beak and stared.

  “Help him?” the gearhand muttered. “She told you: We can’t!”

  “But you can!” Onni said, looking up, his eyes alight. Kirsi hadn’t noticed him kneeling by her side; he’d been oddly quiet during their deliberations of strategy. “You’re inventors, so invent something. Something to aid his mobility.”

  “Huh,” the gearhand said, scratching his beard bun. “A rolling chair wouldn’t work so well for your journey, but if we amputated his toes—”

  No! Gerd hooted. He prizes his toes above all else, except the memory of Remy!

  “They’ll only cause him pain from here on out.” Kirsi reached out to gently stroke Gerd’s talon, and the gryphon allowed it. “But if they’re removed, that pain will fade. It will be a kindness.” She looked up at the gearhand. “So can you do it? Can you build…I don’t know. A boot? Some sor
t of contraption?”

  Onni pulled a small book out of his cardigan pocket and started sketching with a pencil Kirsi hadn’t noticed stashed in his beard. “Something like this, maybe?” He passed the notebook to Hellä, and she and her gearhand studied it. Kirsi got a glimpse and felt her smoosh ratchet up into nearly explosively squishy territory. She hadn’t known Onni had any skill with gnomeric devices. Perhaps grouchy old Offi had taught him something, after all. But now Kirsi realized the truth of the well-known gnomeric saying Once you go mechanical, prepare to be fanatical. A gnomeboy with a crisp cardigan and a pencil in his beard was most attractive.

  “I can do that,” the gearhand said. “The design is quite clever, actually. You’ve a gift, boy.” Onni gave a heart-melting grin that seared itself on the backs of Kirsi’s eyeballs.

  “Then go to your workshop and begin,” Hellä said before turning to Kirsi. “I will engage our finest surgeon to operate immediately. You can all stay here for a few weeks as he recuperates—”

  “We don’t have that kind of time, by dinkus,” Kirsi reminded her. “Gnomes are dying willy-nilly aboveground. Perhaps you’re insulated from it down here, but we’ve seen it firsthand. Give us Onni’s invention and a rolling contraption to get us going, and Faucon can recuperate on the way.”

  Hellä shook her head in amazement. “You’re very driven.”

  Kirsi, for once, didn’t smile. “Someone has to be. We must go to the Toot Towers to see the gnomeric jaarl, and we must have the proper documentation in hand to convince him that what’s occurring is unlawful. So fix our halfling, give us the requisite travelers’ gifts, provide us with the proper paperwork, and get us going as quickly as you can. I assume we’ll have to stop in Muffincrumb and Caskcooper on the way.”

  The look Hellä gave her was almost…no, it was admiration. Onni was grinning too.

  “If that’s what you need to save our people,” the mayor said, “then we’ll do it.”

  * * *

  A few hours later, Kirsi and her friends stood at a giant iron door fitted with a multitude of interlocking bars. Faucon lay flat on a brass gurney, his bandaged feet sticking out on one end because the gurney had clearly been crafted for gnomes. He slept, thanks to Båggi’s mead seed, but it was troubling to note that the halfling’s feet looked vastly truncated. Kirsi had never before appreciated how long halfling toes were, since their absence left such a void. Gerd meeped over her friend, a heartbreaking sound.

  Hellä and Inka faced them, the mayor looking dapper and important and the gearhand utterly smeared with grease, her beard a mess but her smile triumphant.

  “Here is everything you should need,” Hellä said. “The letter I promised, two official notarized copies of the Tome of Togethering and the Elder Annals with the important bits highlighted, and an official writ so the gnomefloat gnavigator will give you priority access to travel the Rumplescharte River.”

  “Why two copies?” Kirsi asked, holding out a hand to take one of the two proferred gnomesacks as Onni took the other.

  “Because what kind of fool on a dangerous quest would take only one? One of you might get eaten by a murderguppy or fall into a crevasse or lose your pack to a ravenous giant wasp hungry for paper. This is a library and seat of some power; if we can’t make notarized copies, we’re not very good at what we do. And on a personal note, I wish you well. I haven’t stood in the unfiltered sun for a decade, and I hope the overlands will be free and happy again someday.”

  Hellä leaned over, and Kirsi met her, rubbing noses in the ceremonial fashion. Kirsi realized with pride that she was being treated not as a gnomelet but as an adult and equal.

  A loud, hiccupping sob interrupted the gesture, and Kirsi looked to Agape. The ovitaur was bawling, big fat tears on her cheeks—but she was trying hard to hide it.

  “Agape?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”

  Agape sniffed and turned away. “Nothing.”

  Nothing doesn’t generally involve so much honking, Gerd said. There is no shame in crying. I often wish I could cry. You can tell us what ails you, sheep person. Is it indigestion?

  “No. I’m fine. Really.” The ovitaur turned completely around, her shoulders shaking.

  Kirsi wanted to reach out, but the size difference made it awkward and she didn’t want to pat the ovitaur’s fluffy butt. “I am not familiar with the ovitaurian ways, but I do not believe that’s what fine looks like. Although I would normally go with the gnomeism Keep those feelings tamped down firm to keep from making others squirm, I really think you might need to talk about it.”

  Agape looked like she wanted to continue feigning okayness, albeit poorly, but she also looked like she might explode, and then she did. “I just didn’t know losing people could hurt so much!” she wailed. “I’ve never lost aaanyone! My whole life, it’s been mom and daaad and Piini. But now Piini is gone, and my paaarents left me behind, aaand aaand aaand I FEEL SO BAAAAAAAD.”

  Onni and Båggi looked helplessly to Kirsi, who put on her brightest smile and went in for a Grand Comforting.

  “I know you thought your parents and Piini would always be with you, but sometimes we outgrow things from our youth,” she said. “I had a stuffed mushroom that I loved to rags, and one day I put it on the shelf. I don’t love it any less, and I don’t forget it. It’s always a part of me. But I carry it in my heart instead of my arms.”

  “I caaan’t carry Piini, because he weighs a million pounds!” Agape wailed, and Kirsi realized that there was a vast difference between feelings being real and feelings being based on reality.

  “It’s more of a metaphor,” she said, patting Agape’s knee. “Piini belongs here, and it was you who brought him here. With both destinies fulfilled, you’re free to seek your own happiness. Like your parents are seeking theirs. They just waited until their fifties to grow up, I guess. But you can grow up now. And you have friends. Us.”

  Agape ignored that kindness and shook her head, and tears flew willy-nilly. “But why caaan’t Piini come with me?”

  “He is happy in the library, I assure you,” Inka said, stepping forward. “A machine is happiest fulfilling its purpose. Out in the world, he’ll just get gunked up and bogged down. And your friend Eino will help to keep him well calibrated. They will give each other purpose.”

  “That’s by dinkum true!” Eino enthused. “I can’t wait to get him all oiled up!”

  But that only made Agape cry harder.

  “Wait,” Kirsi said. “I have an idea. Inka, did you replace any parts on Piini? Any cogs or springs?”

  Inka looked confused but dug around in her cardigan pockets. “Plenty of them.” She held her hand out flat, showing many smöl cogs and bits, all grimy but with revealing glints of brass underneath. Kirsi selected the prettiest of the cogs and held it up to Inka.

  “Can you shine this up a bit, perhaps?”

  Understanding Kirsi’s plan, Inka used her pants to wipe the gunk off the gear and hold it out to Agape.

  “Carry this with you, Agape,” Kirsi said. “Keep this piece of Piini with you always, and remember the good times.”

  Agape reached out, tentative, and held up the cog to the lanterns. “I caaan find a chain for it in Caskcooper,” Agape finally said, pocketing the cog. “It’s a very aaartistic city.” Her sobs had fallen off, and although she still looked sad, she seemed capable of going on a journey without waking every predator in the forest with damp bleating.

  “Then you’re still coming with us?”

  Agape’s shoulders rose to brush her drooping ears. “I guess. For a little while. If we’re going in the same direction and all. Aaat least until I find…”

  “Your purpose?” Båggi asked, perking up.

  “Something to do,” Agape shot back. It seemed to Kirsi that Agape was hiding her fear under a Definite Grouch, but that sort of knot took a while to unsnarl. The best thin
g for them all would be to get on the road.

  “Then let’s go,” Kirsi said, waving an arm at the door. “Better to be on your feet and atrot than to stick around standing and stirring the pot.”

  “My brother loves that one,” Onni said with a snort.

  She gave him a sharp look. “That’s because it’s good advice. Come on.”

  Hellä gave Kirsi a key and explained how the door worked, and Kirsi was about to suggest this task be given to Onni when she suddenly realized that she had become the group’s de facto leader. It was a very peculiar feeling, as her parents had raised her to be a proper follower, but she merely took the key and nodded solemnly.

  “Thank you for everything, Hellä,” she said, trying out her own authority by addressing the mayor by her first name. “Well, everything except for destroying and removing Faucon’s toes.”

  A very awkward moment ensued in which no one could look at anyone else and Faucon gently snored, then Hellä recovered herself.

  “Good journey,” she said.

  Everyone hugged Eino and wished him well, and many by dinkums were exchanged, and then Kirsi opened the grand door and stepped into the long, dark tunnel.

  * * *

  The long, dark tunnel wasn’t so bad, as it contained a pleasant train that smoothly transported their entire group miles with the press of a button. And it actually wasn’t that dark, as the gnomes had cleverly coaxed some sort of glowing green algae to grow along the ceilings and in decorative patterns along the walls.