“I’ve heard differently,” he told the creature.
The gnome shrugged. “Other gnomes might. Not me.”
He gave an exasperated sigh, tempered only by the fact that they were talking, not torturing. “Look,” he told them, “as soon as my other companion comes back, we are going to leave. We will not be back. If you leave us alone so we can do that, we will harm no more of you. Deal?”
They actually had to discuss it! During the mumbled and whispered debating, however, he caught strands of arguments concerning just how much gnomes had been suffering at the hands of bad mortals lately, and what bad times these were. It appeared that gnomes had been being killed off in large numbers by certain mortals with magic powers.
“We come from a good sorcerer with a charge to deal with those evil men,” he told them.
They suddenly got even more excited. “You think you gon’ kill bad men?” one asked.
He shrugged. “We are going to try to do what harm we can.”
“You sorcerer?”
“No, but we have other secrets.”
“Then you worse than dead already. Better off staying with gnomes.”
Marge suddenly came in and landed in the middle of them, startling the gnomes. She looked tired, but resigned to the state. At her descent, the gnomes started screaming, “Hawk! Hawk!” and in a moment there seemed none of the little creatures around.
“Jeez! I’ve been a party pooper before, but I never had that kind of effect!” she said.
“Maybe we better get what supplies we can and get out of here,” Joe suggested. “They’re not much easier to deal with when you talk to them than when they’re playing with you.” He looked at Mia. “You okay?!”
She nodded uncertainly. “I—I was sure I was a rabbit, then a horse,” she commented uneasily. “I do not like these creatures, Master.”
Mia repacked and rearranged and tore, cut, and tied, and with help from Joe managed to get a fair amount of it on her own back. Joe felt uncomfortable giving her that much of the supplies, but she insisted. At least, the gnomes laid off. Now and again they’d see one or two pop up gopherlike out of underground burrows, but they’d just as quickly vanish again.
“There’s a settlement of sorts right near the ice pack,” Marge told them. “It’s not much, but it’s something. It’ll take you the better part of the day to reach it, though.” She gave him the bearings. “There’s not much else for a very long way. That ice pack is kinda weird, though. There’s so much magic over it and even embedded in it that it looks as if a million two-year-olds got loose with the crayons. Beyond it, though, if I got high enough, I could almost make out your destination.”
“Almost?”
“On the other side of that mess of spells there’s a large area that seems almost covered in fog. On top of that, there’s an almost evil cloud around it that seems nearly black as pitch, and, to top it all off, there’s real smoke coming from there and reaching as high in the air as I could see. The thing would give me the creeps, except that the ice pack in front of it is even creepier.”
He nodded. “I don’t have any explanation for it, but at least it sounds as if we’re in the right place and a lot quicker than we could have been otherwise, thanks to Mia.”
“I assume from everything that you’re gonna chance the settlement,” she said rather than asked. “Looks military. I’d watch myself.”
He shrugged. “Can’t be helped. If I don’t get some cold-weather clothes better than these and maybe some gear for the ice, I don’t see how we can make it across anyway. You run ahead and find someplace to get some sleep. Check on us tonight. If we’re in trouble, you might well have to try to spring us.”
She nodded. “Will do. Uh—it just occurred to me why that high smoke rising in the air looked familiar, and if I’m right, it might explain something about this place.”
“Yeah?”
“I think there’s a volcano out there, either in the middle of or just the other side of the ice,” she told him. “Remember, the center of the Kauri home is a lava pool. If that’s another quiet-type volcanic region, it explains why folks might want to go there, and why it’s shrouded in mist. Hot water, thermal pools—it’s probably warm as toast and very pleasant inside there except for the company, like some kind of spa or hot springs type resort. And I’ll say this—if you were gonna hide anything at all, that would be where I’d hide it.”
“Makes sense. Now, go get some rest and don’t sleep near any gnome burrows. No were business tonight, and we might well need you.”
“Will do,” she replied. “Gnomes don’t bother me, though. They’re not intrinsically evil, just, well, gnomes. You watch it yourself, though. No telling what else might be out there.” She rose up into the air and was quickly gone.
“Well,” Joe sighed, fixing his pack as best he could, “let’s go the hard way.” He was going to have some problems with Mia in this environment; although she was apparently quite comfortable, he got the chills just looking at her.
The walk was cold, dreary, and deathly dull. The scenery was all in back of them, but, then, with the scenery had come the gnomes, and he felt well rid of those. As the sun rose, the temperature got above freezing, although not tremendously so, and that proved a worse condition than the freeze itself, as the top part of the ground turned to mud and cold marsh, making the footing not only messy but treacherous. Worse, it seemed to have loosened every mosquito, blackfly, and nipping gnat in all creation and they all seemed headed right for meal Number One, which was him. The spell that insulated Mia, while not insulating her from the mud, also seemed to ward them off; she walked right through small swarms of them without once getting bitten, although there was maximum exposure, while he, with only a few exposed areas, nonetheless seemed like lunch to them all. He’d swear that some of them were large enough to have rotor blades and all seemed born with full-blown pneumatic drills on their mouths.
After only a few hours walk, they could see their eventual destination, although it was still going to be most of the rest of the day to reach it. It was that flat and that featureless. It stood out as a small grouping of dark blips against what looked like clouds below them, but which, in reality, was ice. They were still much too far away to see over the ice itself, but even from here there was a decided plume of black smoke across the horizon. Joe never so much wanted to get to a place that was probably going to be deadly or worse in his life. If he had to succumb to evil, it was damned well going to be at least warm there.
The slogging toward that far-off settlement was perhaps the most frustrating thing of all, since he walked and walked and walked for hours on end, the goal in sight, and for the longest time it simply didn’t seem to be getting any closer.
These people, he decided, had to be supplied by air, just as the important ones who went out to that redoubt beyond the horizon had to come and go the same way. He couldn’t help but imagine a fleet of the huge nazga with teeth that spelled out Mack and Peterbilt and Kenworth on them, and broad wings bearing Rodeway and Yellow Freight and Preston logos, flown by a team of tough-looking aerial truckers, and wonder what in hell their truck stops looked like.
Just because there was little else to do and not much even to think about, he allowed himself to slip into fairy sight, and what he saw gave him plenty to think about.
Not too much on “shore,” as it were; the usual warm life-form readings here and there of who knew what, and not a lot on the ice, either—until you looked toward that distant horizon. There, not immediately offshore but well out, in the direction they’d have to go, he saw just what Marge was talking about.
Just there, and going to the horizon, it was not white in fairy sight, but instead appeared to him as if some giant was collecting all the yarn in the world and dropped his savings in the Grand Canyon. Brilliant, glowing magical strings, so many of them, in every conceivable color, and so dense and overlapping, that no sense at all could be made of any of it. A shift back to normal sight
showed only the continuing whiteness, deceptive in the extreme, but he understood why such legends about that place existed.
Supernatural phenomenon? Perhaps the dumping ground for the leftovers by those who designed Husaquahr? Or really the site of a frozen battleground between ancient forces back when those with power approached the status of angels and demons? It didn’t matter. They had to cross that! Overland? Could anyone? He would bet almost anything that even Sugasto going out to the redoubt flew around that place. Ruddygore had almost shrugged it off, and yet Joe thought it might be the most dangerous part of the journey, perhaps more dangerous even than the summer palace.
What would happen if died here? he couldn’t help thinking. Died in a place so barren and so cold, a place without trees?
Mia broke his morbid train of thought with a more immediate worry. “Master, what will you tell people in those buildings when we reach them?” she asked him.
“Huh? Hadn’t really thought of that. I guess I just thought I could rely on the safe conduct.”
“But, Master, that won’t explain anything about why we are here in this awful and desolate place, or where we are going, and why. After all, if we were allowed to this hideaway, we would have been entitled to fly there, would we not?”
She had an abnormal ability to shout at him when his brain was in park.
What would be a good explanation? Science? Not likely; even if that really meant something here, he could hardly fake that kind of education. Magic? No, not magic, since clearly neither of them had any. Besides, they were both rather clearly what they really were, even to the most ignorant.
“I think we’re gonna have to fall back on the last refuge of the scoundrel in this sort of situation, particularly if they’re re: ally all or mostly military types up there,” he told her.
“What do you mean, Master?”
“An insidious invention of bureaucrats and military personnel called the Top Secret gambit,” he replied. “It means that only I, not even you, know why we are here, and I’m not supposed to tell.”
“Do you think they will swallow that?”
He smiled grimly. “They might. After all, who but a lunatic, a sacrifice, or somebody really important would be up here in a place like this and going the place we’re going?”
“But they will alert the palace!”
“Perhaps. Depends on just how scared of Sugasto the bastard has made his own people, even up here.”
At least they didn’t have a hostile reception to deal with. In fact, they didn’t have any reception when they finally reached the place, perhaps an hour before sundown. The six buildings, all constructed of logs obviously brought overland or by air from somewhere else, looked incredibly weathered. Although none of the buildings were huge, all had two fireplaces and one had three. Nobody was on the lone street, and there wasn’t much in the way of horses or other steeds, either, although there was the loud barking of dogs down at the end.
“Where are the people, Master?” Mia asked, looking around.
He pointed to the chimney tops. “There’s smoke in all of them, so I assume they’ve got good sense and spend most of the time indoors.”
“But which one do we pick?”
He looked at them. None of them even had signs on them. He guessed that the feeling was that you were only up here if you were assigned here, and if you lived here you knew.
“Three chimneys,” he replied. “It’s got to be some kind of office or mess or some kind of social center, being the largest.”
He went up to the door, took a deep breath, grabbed the knob, opened the door, and went inside.
The first impression was of warmth. The place felt downright comfortable, but it only made certain parts of his body feel as if they were on fire from the contrast.
The place was something like a basic, small social club; it had a bar, a couple of tables, and one fireplace was being used to cook things on spits. Two slaves were in there, both males, one tending the cooking fire and the other wiping down the bar, both with rings in their noses, both as naked and hairless as Mia. They both turned and looked up at them. At a table, one of three, two of the toughest-looking women he’d seen since that truck stop in Wyoming ten years back looked at him in sheer amazement. Both were wearing fur-trimmed black uniforms and matching leather boots.
“Where the hell did you come from, Bub?” one asked in the kind of voice that matched her butch appearance exactly.
He hadn’t expected women officers.
“I was dropped off by courier nazga quite a ways from here, back toward the mountains, this morning,” he replied, trying to match their tough tone. “I’ve been freezing and getting bit since.”
“Nobody told us that anybody was coming,” she noted suspiciously.
“Nobody said to me that there was anybody here other than that there was some army personnel,” he responded. “And I see that there are.”
“We don’t exactly get many people up here, you know.” She got up, looking very irritated. “I think you ought to see security.”
“Fine with me,” he replied. “Can I leave my stuff here? The slave can help out yours. Just let me get some papers out.”
“Sure, go ahead.” She turned to the two slaves behind the counter. “You two better hadn’t burn my dinner! I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“It will be done, Mistress,” one responded in a rather gentle tenor.
“It better be, or you’ll sleep outside with the dogs tonight!”
Joe had just thawed enough to start feeling his bites when she led him outside again and down to the last small building in the settlement.
“Was this always a settlement or was it built for the army?” he asked, mostly trying to make conversation.
“I neither know nor care,” she responded frostily. “In there.”
He walked in after her and found himself in a smaller log house arranged into rooms like an office. Inside were two more women in the same uniforms as the first, looking as tough and weathered as the others. Were there no men here? he wondered.
“What have we here?” asked one of the security officers, a comparatively small woman with a loud, nasal soprano. She looked him over. “Where did he come from?” she asked the woman who’d brought him.
“Came waltzing into the club with a slave as if he owned the place,” his guide replied. “Female slave, too.”
“Go on back to dinner,” the officer told the guide. “We’ll handle this from this point.” The guide clicked her heels together, turned, and left.
“So,” said the security officer, “want to tell me what you’re doing out here at the end of nowhere?”
“No,” he responded.
She was almost as surprised as by his initial appearance. “No?”
“I have the same ultimate boss you do,” he told her, removing the safe conduct and handing it over. “Don’t worry—I am authorized to tell you that what I’m supposed to do has nothing at all to do with this place.”
She handed the safe conduct back. “This means little when you’re out of any beaten path and in a restricted military zone.”
He shrugged. “What am I gonna do?” he asked her sarcastically. “Launch an all-out attack? Me and my slave? Spy on you? Tell them about the Ultimate Weapon you’ve got here? Steal your dogs?”
“Could be. The only reason for this outpost is to prevent people from going any farther, particularly out on the ice beyond this point,” she told him. “If the reason you’re here has nothing to do with us, I assume that’s your objective. That makes you our primary mission right now.”
He sighed. “Mind if I sit?”
“At the moment, stand.”
“All right, all right. Yesterday I was invited to lunch by and with the Master of the Dead himself at an army camp just north of the Marquewood border. And you know exactly what I mean by ‘invited.’ ”
“All right. Get to the point.”
“It seems I impressed him on some other business,
or maybe I pissed him off. Hard to say, but, since I’m still here, it was probably the former. For some reason he’s convinced that enemies, perhaps spies, might get to the summer palace by land. I don’t know what’s going on out there and I don’t want to know. He asked me if I would soothe his nerves by attempting ah undetected overland trek to the palace and, if I made it, attempt to gain entry without their security and spells knowing. I have something of a reputation for doing what people believe is impossible along those lines. A nazga was told to divert north of the mountains miles from here and drop me off. If you want to check you can go up there and see where it came in and we landed. Nazgas make their marks on the land. I gather for some reason they didn’t want to fly me closer in.”
“I’ll bet,” she commented, and his spirit felt better. She was actually buying this crap!
“There wasn’t much cold-weather gear that far south, so I was told I could get some here, since any spy would come equipped.”
“So why didn’t he put this in an order to us?”
He smiled dryly. “You obviously haven’t met the Master of the Dead if you have to ask that.”
“Perhaps. But, by definition, even his lapses aren’t his fault. Why should I believe you?”
“Logic. Do I sound insane? No? That leaves me as either a spy or who I say I am, and I have to ask you, now, would a spy walk in here with a story like this and no cold-weather gear, leaving his slave with your people?”
“Maybe. If he were clever enough.”
“Uh-huh. And even if I made it, how am I going to get back? How am I going to get messages out? The only way I have is via the palace and the Master of the Dead himself. Considering that, even if I were a spy, I wouldn’t exactly be much of a threat, now would I?”
“Could be,” she admitted. “But maybe not. We have one spy in custody right now from up around that area where you said you came from. He fell into the hands of the gnomes and is quite mad. The few who get away from the gnomes are always mad. Usually we have to bribe them to get people back at all; this one went so crazy the gnomes actually begged us to take him.”
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