'Damn you, Garith!' Orun cried, snatching his axe up. 'Damn you and your magic! You a DEAD boy!'
My limbs began to move the way I wanted them to go, and I staggered to my feet. The Theiwar was on top of the cabinet. He pointed a short white finger down at us. 'N'zkool Akrek Grafkun — Miwarsh!' he shrieked, in triumph.
Greenish yellow fog blasted from his finger. A windstorm filled the room. The overhead lights were dimmed by the thick mist.
Orun started to shout, but his voice ended abruptly with a shocked gasp, then a loud, hacking cough. I could barely see him through the green fog. He clutched at his throat with both hands, the axe thumping into the floor. He gave a strangled cry, teeth clenched shut, his lungs filling with poisoned air.
I went for the cabinet. My hands gripped a shelf at the height of my head, and I pulled back hard. The dish- filled cabinet rocked; plates clattered flat. The Theiwar cursed and dropped to his knees, fingers grabbing for purchase on the top. I heaved against the shelf again and saw the cabinet lean toward me, then continue coming. I shoved it aside. It slammed into the floor away from the choking dwarf.
As suddenly as it had appeared, the greenish fog blew away as if caught by a high wind. Orun's hacking cough and hoarse cries echoed in the now silent room.
The Theiwar fell to the floor across the room. Rolling, he came up on his feet. He saw me coming around the fallen cabinet, and he tried to flee for the closed door. He jerked a long crystal vial from his belt. His bulging eyes were as big as moons when I tackled him.
My dead hands locked around his little body. You could hear him for miles, screaming like a spitted rodent with a giant's lung power. He punched and kicked in hysteria. I jabbed one hand through the hail of blows and got my long, cold fingers into the flesh at his throat, sinking in the grip. Gasping, he stabbed at my arm with the vial, shattering it with the first blow and opening up bloodless gashes that went down to the dull white bone.
Abruptly, he stiffened. I grabbed his arm with my free one and held it steady for an instant. I had seen it coming.
A red stream, mixed with strands of oozing black, was running down his arm. His huge, watery eyes focused on his hand with an expression of complete terror such as I had never seen on a living face before. His eyes rolled up then, and his body shuddered and went still.
Garith had just learned what the Nerakans had learned about black wax, with the same results.
I released his body and fell to the floor. I tried to keep myself up on my hands and knees, but my strength poured out of me now like water through a collapsed dam. In the background, I could hear Roggis wailing and Orun coughing. The door to the study burst open, and everyone in the manor surged in to shout and point. But they all kept away from me. They knew.
'The boys warned me that he wasn't the same!' Roggis was saying, in tears. 'I didn't believe them. When they were killed, he acted as if he didn't care a whit. I thought he was mad, but I didn't dare speak to him about it. I was afraid he'd become violent. He hardly seemed himself!'
The racket was fading away, far away. I struggled to get up. It was no use. I'd done what I'd come back to do. I was more tired than I'd ever been before in my life.
'Evredd,' wheezed a hoarse voice near my ear. 'You still there?'
I managed to nod, but that was all.
'Good work for a dead boy,' Orun said. 'Right on target.'
High praise. I wondered if I'd see Garayn and Klart soon, and my uncle, and what they would say about it. Family business.
I fell forward into the darkness. Everything was right again, and there would be no coming back.
War Machines
There was a great blast of steam in the passage through the mountain. Gnomes came sliding down the rock sides, a few dropping from above and caught, heartstoppingly, by nets; two popped out of compressed-air tubes in the ground and tumbled in the air before plummeting toward a landing-pad near the steam source. One landed on the pad, the other in a bush. The assembled gnomes pulled levers, rang bells, turned cranks, and shouted directions at each other without listening to the directions shouted back.
Mara dashed from rock to rock like a child playing hide-and-seek, each sprint taking her closer to her objective. In her whole life in Arnisson she had never heard this much whistling, clanking, and general noise. She resisted putting both hands over her ears and edged quietly and quickly through the assembled gnomes until she arrived at a narrow ledge at the point where the passageway met the inner crater wall of the mountain. She slid onto it, staring down in fascination at the array of gantries and cranes and at the almost continual rain of equipment and gnomes. Far below, she could see a trap door.
A loose cable drifted toward her.
Mara leapt nimbly out of the shadows, catching a hanging cable with her cloth-wrapped hand. She slid down, touching the mountainside lightly with her feet, then sailing back into open air. She vanished into a pit in the ground.
She saw above her, in a brief flash, layer on layer of gnome houses and workshops, cranes, nets, and the occasional flying (or falling) gnome. She congratulated herself on passing unseen and unheard, but part of her grudgingly admitted that any gnome who saw her would have assumed she was just testing a new invention, unless the gnome was also close enough to notice that she was human. And no one could have heard her over the clanking, whirring, grinding, and intermittent steam whistles.
The cable swung against the edge of the pit, which was now a skylight, above her. She climbed up with the rope, pumped with her legs to accelerate its swinging, tucked, sprang, rolled over in midair and landed noiselessly on the stone floor next to a gnomeflinger.
'Perfect, of course,' she said with satisfaction. Mara unwrapped her hand from the rope, took three swaggering steps forward, and accidentally knocked down a gnome who was looking the other way. Mara sprawled backward, legs in the air and arms flailing.
The gnome scrambled up and offered her a hand. 'Awfully sorry; it was my fault, after all I was busy thinking, there must be a defect in the — '
'It was my fault really,' she began. 'I'm sorry — ' Then she realized that he hadn't stopped talking.
' — a little borrowed hydraulic gear would make it more efficient yet, if it didn't make it top-heavy — and a spring with a trigger-catch might store the energy — '
'Stop.'
He did.
'Now,' Mara said, 'what are you talking about?'
'I was just telling you,' the gnome said impatiently, 'about the idea I had when I watched you trying to sneak down here — '
'You saw me coming?' She sagged slightly.
' — and I thought, if people are going to jump through the air, which I hadn't considered — until I saw you; you were obvious — we need precautions because of the gnomeflingers.' His eyes, a light violet, all but glowed. 'We all need bumpers. Yes. Being-bumpers, employing my sensors. Large, high-tension fenders suspended from our shoulders to absorb the shock. They'd have metal frames, cloth padding on the outside — '
'They sound awfully heavy,' Mara objected. She was quite young, and slightly built, compared to the gnome.
'Then we'd add wheels to it,' he continued without pausing, 'And a spring-loaded axle for each wheel, and a governor to keep the axles balanced — '
'Who could move with all that on?'
' — and a motor to move the whole thing,' the gnome finished firmly. 'How do you expect to walk anywhere, if you don't use a motor? Youngsters these days.' He rolled his eyes, but smiled at her. 'Excuse me.' Pulling a bulky pen from a loop on his belt, he tucked his chin and began drawing frantic, jagged lines across his shirt — a shirt that
