Small Wars

by Matt Wallace

Ryland turns to the anterior wall, squinting into the darkness.

  There isn’t a single break in the rock, yet somehow a golf ball–sized sphere of rusted metal emerges from the wall of the chamber, flies across the space, and cracks him in the left temple.

  He falls.

  Hard.

  Dozens upon dozens of spheres begin firing through the wall, brutally pelting them. Ritter, Moon, and Cindy break for the side walls, trying to clear the strike path.

  In the next moment Hara is there over Ryland, his back to the sphere-spewing rock, scooping up the drunken alchemist as easily as a father picking up his toddler.

  “Go!” Ritter orders him. “Get him out!”

  Hara hesitates for less time than can be practically measured, then charges back down the entrance shaft.

  “What the fuck—” Moon yells before catching a sphere in the face and dropping to a fetal ball at Ritter’s feet.

  Ritter looks down, shining his light on a half dozen of the assaulting objects as they roll to a halt and unfurl themselves.

  They’re not spheres.

  They’re tiny bipedal beings.

  Each one is the height of an index finger, bearded and with flesh that looks as hard as the rock from which they emerged. Their entire bodies and all their appendages are adorned with curved pieces of armor obviously designed to become near-solid spheres when tucked together.

  As he looks on, the armored creatures begin dog-piling one another, more spheres rolling to join what at first looks like a chaotic mass of metal but soon begins to take a definite shape. The sound of tumblers falling in a lock echoes throughout the chamber as the small armored figures interlock with one another, their mass building in height and defining in shape until it begins to resemble a full-sized human form.

  Ritter’s seen enough. He turns to grab Cindy, but sudden streaks of color crackling with repellent energy knock him back, separating them.

  It looks like a wall of rainbow-colored caution tape has been unfurled in front of him.

  Ritter turns from it to find himself face-to-face with a gargantuan automaton fashioned from hundreds of armored bodies; they’ve even arranged themselves to give it a vague double-wide face with hollow eyes and curving lips.

  “All right, that’s a new one on me,” Ritter says, and it sounds like a disturbingly casual admission under the circumstances.

  The construct doesn’t banter with him.

  In the next moment Ritter’s casual demeanor has turned dire as he ducks and rolls from the path of a sweeping metallic limb intent on decapitating him. Ritter bounces to his feet, now behind the automaton, curling his right arm and driving the thick ulna bone of his forearm into the thing’s many-eyed “back.”

  It’s a blow that would painfully readjust the spine of a human opponent.

  This opponent, however, has no spine and a backside made of modular refined ore from the bowels of the Earth.

  As such, the impact bruises Ritter’s forearm down to the bone, which also splinters and sends chemical signals of agony to his brain.

  Ritter steps back, half a dozen curse words blending into one unintelligible oath that only ends when he has to duck to avoid the automaton’s next swing as it turns around.

  The construct advances on him, Ritter backpedaling and scantly avoiding several more blows. He feints and ducks the metal limbs, the facilities of his mind generally tasked with such things collectively shrugging at him as he requests a plan of action.

  “Oh, fuck it!” he yells out loud.

  Ritter ducks under the next swing and dips briefly against the construct’s body, reaching out with both hands and gripping one of the interconnected armored creatures balled up there. With a berserker’s cry and every ounce of strength he can muster, he rips the sphere free of the rest of its fellow and leaps back.

  The act causes the briefest moment of confusion among the rest of the things composing the creature’s body.

  More important, it causes the briefest moment of hesitation.

  Ritter jumps back in, still holding the armored ball, and smashes its surface against the “face” of the construct, detaching several other spheres from their host and sending them flying.

  He immediately reverses the position of the armored ball in his hand and backhands the other side of the construct’s “face,” depleting it further. Ritter continues bashing it with a piece of itself until finally he drops down and smashes the best approximation of a knee joint he can locate on one of the thing’s “legs.”

  The construct is forced to one knee.

  A grating chatter, like a thousand squeaking voices, rises from its every nonexistent pore.

  It’s a confused sound.

  It’s vulnerable sound.

  It’s stopped lashing out.

  Ritter rears back for a coup de grâce, but halts as his entire body abruptly seizes, pain shooting up through his arm. He turns to look at his hand and can’t help freezing further to marvel at the sight of a much tinier hand protruding out from the armored sphere.

  That tiny hand is holding an even tinier dagger.

  That tinier dagger is buried in the meat of Ritter’s palm.

  As he squints in puzzlement at the sight, the tiny hand twists the tinier dagger.

  Ritter curses and drops the sphere altogether. He hears it skitter over the dank, rocky terra and in his anger and pain scans the ground in the dark, hoping to crush the thing underfoot.

  An eternity might as well have passed by the time he remembers his main opposition isn’t the thing that stabbed him.

  It’s behind him.

  And the confused chatter has ceased.

  Ritter already knows he won’t have time to turn around, but he tries anyway.

  The gargantuan construct raises a four-fingered hand and swings it into the side of Ritter’s head, breaking itself apart and sending a dozen bearded warriors flying upon contact.

  Their elated hollers are the last thing Ritter hears before the darkness takes him.

  2009—Algeria

  The average Westerner finds little reason to travel to the Saharan interior of North Africa, much less the middle of the desert, life-threatening miles from anything resembling civilization.

  Ritter has never been average in any respect.

  As such he currently finds himself staring at a horizon made of fire in the hottest season of the year, when there’s not a cloud to be seen in the sky and the air is so dry it sucks at every pore like a thousand microscopic vampires.

  His guide is an ancient, withered Igbo man draped in a woefully oversized Isiagu who sits in the back of their jeep obsessively playing Angry Birds on his smartphone.

  “How much longer, you figure?” Ritter asks him.

  “Not long now,” the old man’s raspy voice replies while its owner never takes his eyes from the tiny screen. “They will come for the water.”

  “What water?”

  “The water beneath our feet.”

  “Oh.” Ritter looks down at the seemingly unending sand. “And how long is ‘not long,’ again?”

  “Soon.”

  This followed by an inaudible curse and some kind of digital rebuke from the man’s game.

  Ritter nods. “Right.”

  He looks back at the horizon.

  Three hours later a trio of figures on horseback appears out of the illusory blaze. They descend and gallop toward the spot where Ritter and his guide have parked their vehicle.

  As they close the gap Ritter can see the blue veils covering their faces, stark even in the waning sun. Two of them are Berber while the third is the largest human being Ritter has ever observed. He sits astride a horse twice the size of the others’ mounts, and it still looks burdened by the man’s weight.

  “I tell you,” Ritter’s guide says, followed by a cluck of victory as he reaches a new level in his ceaseless game. “Soon.”

  “You’re the man, Diji,” Ritter assures him.

  The riders halt several yards from their p
osition, and the giant urges his mount forward, away from the other two. When he’s within a few feet of Ritter he climbs from his saddle, momentarily blotting out the sun.

  “The whole desert-rider mystique works for you, man,” Ritter tells him. “How’re the Touaregs treating you?”

  Hara doesn’t answer, but Ritter doesn’t expect him to.

  Instead he removes his veil. His wide features aren’t painted with the brush of Africa, any part of it. He’s clearly a hybrid, but there’s more of Mongolia in his face than anything.

  Hara waits.

  “I need you,” Ritter says. “I don’t know for how long.”

  Hara nods.

  Without a word he leads his horse by the reins back to his Berber companions and turns them over to one of them.

  For the first time, Diji looks up from Angry Birds.

  “Does the big one owe you a life or something?”

  “Something,” is all Ritter says.

  Now

  He comes to with a hundred tiny pains in his wrists, a dry mouth, a throbbing cranium, and a pore-seeping feeling in every inch of his skin.

  “You know,” Moon says miserably beside him, “this job is the big sweaty tits right up until it absolutely fucking sucks.”

  Ritter blinks away dampness and waits calmly for his eyes to adjust to the relative dark.

  They’re in a small chamber with no apparent entrances or exits. They’re both pressed against an unnaturally smooth wall of rock, and their hands are bound above their heads by what seem like natural formations, as if their wrists have been there for millennia and four thick bands of stone have shaped around them.

  Or they’re restraints fashioned by tiny magical creatures that can manipulate the Earth.

  “Where are Cindy and the others?” Ritter asks him.

  “Fucked if I know. I woke up with a headache just like you. And I’m not even gonna try to explain what I saw back in the mine shaft.”

  Ritter nods.

  They wait.

  It’s not like in the movies, when prisoners awaken and their captors march right in to explain everything.

  They wait a long fucking time.

  It sucks.

  Eventually there’s a gentle rumbling and a barrage of the metallic spheres emerges seamlessly from the far wall, landing on the ground and rolling to a halt in perfect unison. Each sphere unfurls and they begin to interlock themselves into the cyborg-automaton form that attacked Ritter and the team back in the mine shaft.

  It’s somehow even more unsettling, standing there inert, a thousand tiny eyes staring at them while the hollow shapes of two large eyes appear to blink in the thing’s “face.”

  “We are the Gnomi,” a voice made up of each individual creature speaking in unison announces.

  “Yeah, I kind of figured that,” Ritter says. “I’ve never seen a gnome, but I wouldn’t exactly have pegged you for pond sprites.”

  “Are you in league with the Tuath Dé?” the choral voice of the gnomes asks Ritter.

  “No.”

  “Then what are a human warrior and his squire doing in such a place forsaken by your kind?”

  Moon is irate. “Squire? What, like I’m his medieval secretary or some shit? Whoa, hold the fucking phone—”

  “Shut up, Moon.” And to the creature: “I’m not a warrior. I’m a gatherer.”

  “You wear the scars of many battles. You hold the death of many enemies in your eyes.”

  “Gathering has become a rough business up there.”

  “Then you aren’t mercenaries retained by the Tuath Dé?”

  “No.”

  The gnome construct pauses. The hundreds of them composing its body seem to whisper among themselves before answering in their unified voice.

  “Good. You are a great warrior, whatever your protestations to the contrary. You nearly bested the Gnomi in our horde form. No human has ever come so close. You’re worthy. Consider yourself conscripted.”

  Ritter sighs.

  Moon looks at him expectantly.

  “They want us to fight for them,” Ritter explains.

  “Just you,” the Gnomi correct him. “The little one is of no use. He will be a gift to the rocks.”

  “What the fuck does that mean?” Moon demands in horror.

  “He’s my squire,” Ritter says quickly, resolutely. “He serves me in battle. He’s experienced. Broken in. I don’t fight without him.”

  Silence.

  Then: “Very well. Consider yourselves both conscripts.”

  “I don’t know what your conflict is down here, but we want no part of it. We just came to forage. We didn’t know this was your … domain.”

  “It’s too late for such concerns. We’ve met with our enemies and agreed upon the hour and place of our final battle. The Tuath Dé have no doubt already conscribed a giant of their own to fight in that upcoming battle. With such an advantage they’ll crush us. Unless we have giants to fight for our cause.”

  “Cindy,” Ritter whispers to himself, wanting to smash his own head against the wall behind it.

  “What the hell do you need us for?” Moon demands. “You’re all magic and shit. You move through solid rock, which appears to be your total bitch.”

  “The Tuath Dé have their own magic. And try as we might, small magic never seems to win out over giant meat.”

  That last spoken so bitterly, suggesting eons of learning that lesson over and over.

  “There is nothing to discuss,” they pronounce with finality. “You will die in battle fighting with the Gnomi or you will die in this room as interlopers. Choose.”

  “Hey, I’m all for championing a good cause,” Moon says immediately. “You should see my Gears of War rankings.”

  Ritter glances over at him with open disdain.

  “Wise choice, humans,” the gnome construct says, and in the wake of those words begins disassembling into hundreds of the furry, rock-faced armored creatures.

  “Squire?” Moon whispers to Ritter.

  “Would you rather be a ‘gift’ to the rocks?”

  “Right. Fine. What the hell is a ‘ta-wath’ whatever?”

  Ritter sighs. “Tuath Dé,” Ritter pronounces flawlessly. “It means ‘Tribe of the Gods.’ They’re more popularly known as—”

  * * *

  “Leprechauns,” Cindy practically spits in anger. “Fucking leprechauns. I’ve been trussed up with rainbow beams by a bunch of goddamn Lucky Charms four-leaf clover motherfucking leprechauns. I cannot even …”

  She’s berating herself more than speaking to the assemblage of tiny creatures gathered a few yards from her feet. Cindy futilely tugs at the multicolored beams of pure energy binding her wrists behind her back. It doesn’t feel as if solid matter is restraining her, yet she can’t move it.

  Leprechauns are as physically far removed from gnomes as possible, excluding their relative size. Each one is lithe with an angular, almost ant-like face. They’re naked save for leaves tied as loincloths and shredded into wreath-like hats that strongly resemble bowlers.

  Which answers the question of where that bit of imagery came from.

  In truth, Cindy is less interested in the assemblage of magical creatures at her feet and more drawn by the far corners of the cavernous space.

  They’re filled with gold.

  Mounds of it.

  Mounds as tall as ancient oak trees.

  She can’t even begin to calculate the worth of the fortune in direct view.

  More than that, it looks almost forgotten, cast aside as if it were all shoved there to get it out of the way. The golden mounds are covered in the dirt and dust of immense age and utter neglect.

  But then, what good is gold in the bowels of the Earth?

  That’s the brief, obvious conclusion at which she arrives.

  A fractal ribbon bursts forth from the tiny ranks spread out before her and its lip unfurls to within an inch of her chin.

  One of the creatures, feminine to Cindy’s
perception, practically glides up the beam until she is staring up her nose. She raises a wicked-looking spear.

  “We are the Tuath Dé. We were gods when your people were covered in fur and copulating in the muck.”

  The leprechaun isn’t actually speaking, Cindy realizes.

  In point of fact she’s hearing her words inside her head, which may in fact be translating their meaning for her for all she knows.

  “Well, I seem to recall killing God seven, eight times before you took me down,” Cindy answers aloud.

  “And you’ll pay for each death!”

  In reply Cindy works up a wad of spittle and hocks a loogie equivalent to a Buick at the tiny god who has gotten in her face.

  It blasts the leprechaun like a fire hose, knocking her halfway down the rainbow-colored beam. It takes several attempts for her to right herself, slathered from head to toe in sticky, viscous spittle.

  With a shrill battle cry the leprechaun charges back up the illusory ribbon and slashes Cindy above her right eye, splitting her brow open deep enough to expose bone. Blood quickly begins filling her eye.

  Cindy grits her teeth, shutting her eyelid against the sudden, warm flood.

  “You great ape,” the leprechaun rages. “You’re no better than those rock worms, with your stone and steel dwellings. Once my kin built great cities of pure gold that spanned oceans—”

  “That’s not possible,” Cindy interrupts, sounding more annoyed than anything. “Even as small as you are there isn’t enough gold in the world—”

  “That spanned oceans!” the creature insists. “Your kind melted them down. We were forced beneath the canopy at their feet, and now they drive us from that to these pitiful mud veins, and even here we must fight the Gnomi for what cramped space is available to us.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Cindy replies blandly. “What would a black woman know about having her history and culture stolen and raped for hundreds of years?”

  The leprechaun either doesn’t understand or ignores the statement. “We use what remains to live and to fight. That now includes you. We go to meet the Gnomi in battle.”

  “So what?”

  “They have taken their own giants as prisoners. We saw the big one in battle. He’s a fierce fighter. The Gnomi love conscripting dangerous creatures to fight for them. And as you said, you killed a score of our own. You’re also a great warrior. We must battle giants with giants. You will fight for us.”