“Raegel! Ho, Raegel!”
Mixun moved forward carefully, but not carefully enough. The ice gave way under him too, and he slid feet first into the depths.
He slid quite a ways-more than twice his own height-before coming to rest against a pile of loose snow. Mixun sat up and saw Raegel lying on his stomach a few feet away.
“Ho!” he said. “Are you alive?”
“So far,” was the whispered reply. “Don’t talk so loud, if you want to keep living.”
Mixun looked around and saw the reason for Raegel’s concern. They had fallen into a large hollow in the ice, ten feet or more below the surface, and if the rest of the roof gave way, they’d be buried alive under tons of ice and snow.
With great deliberation, Raegel sat up. His face and hands were chalk-white with cold, leaving only the tips of his ears and his nose with any color in them. Mixun was shocked, but knew he was at least as far gone.
“Well, we’re out of the storm,” Mixun said in a very low voice.
His lanky friend remarked, “Snow news is good news.”
Mixun was too cold to groan. He drew his knees up to his chest and rested his square chin on them.
“Never thought I’d go like this,” he muttered. “I always thought I’d die with a sword in my hand, fighting to the end.”
Raegel imitated Mixun’s fetal posture and said, “I always wanted to die in the arms of a beautiful lady. A rich, beautiful lady.”
They said little more. Breath froze on their lips, sealing their mouth with ice. After shivering apart for a while, Raegel crawled to his friend’s side and huddled close to him.
Last post, Mixun thought. He would never see home again, never complete the task he’d dedicated his life to. Everything had ended in this white desert, forever frozen and dead.
He closed his eyes. With his last bit of strength, he found Raegel’s hand and clasped it. His friend returned the gesture with a slight squeeze, just to let Mixun know he was there.
Shut off from the sensations of his body by the encroaching cold, Mixun fell into a twilight of dreams, images, and lost desires. He saw again the wide sandy wastes of home, the burning sun overhead, and the wind stirring the dust into whirlpools around him.
Strangely, he felt no heat from the sun, which should have been beating down on his exposed face like a torch. He felt nothing at all.
The landscape shimmered, though not with heat. It trembled with a rapid, rhythmic pulse that he first thought was his own heart beating, but it was too fast, too even. The pulsation grew stronger. The darkness around Mixun lightened a bit as he struggled to rise to consciousness.
“Stop kicking me.” Raegel sounded slurred, like a drunken man.
“I’m not kicking you, you idiot.” Mixun did kick Raegel then, and was delighted to feel his leg respond to his mental command.
A roaring filled the ice chamber, and snow cascaded down. The cold skin of Mixun’s face was still warm enough to melt it, and he opened his eyes, breaking the lacy crust of ice on his lashes. He sat up. Raegel was lying on his side, curled up in a ball. The noise wasn’t in Mixun’s head, it was real.
“Raegel! Raegel, wake up!”
“Scratch my back, will you?” the drowsy man replied.
“Get up, jackass! The hole’s coming down around us!” Mixun said hoarsely. He drew back his foot and planted a sharp kick on his friend’s backside. Raegel flinched hard and rolled over, rubbing the spot.
Dragging his benumbed friend by the collar, Mixun scrambled up the ramp of snow created when “he and Raegel had tumbled down into the ice cave. The tremors were very rapid now, almost continuous, and the roaring, grinding sound was deafening.
Mixun glimpsed the chill gray sky and burst through the last few inches of loose snow. Once in the open, he thrust both hands into the hole and hauled Raegel out.
Towering above them was the source of the noise and shaking-an enormous wheel, fully thirty paces high, made of heavy timbers and strapped with black iron bands. The wheel stood upright and was turning at a goodly rate, digging plow-like teeth into the ice. Snow and ice sprayed out behind the wheel in two high arcs, creating artificial drifts on either side of the deep trench the device was carving. The axle on which the wheel turned was as broad as a man was tall, and protruded some distance from the center of the wheel. Rising from the ends of the axle were two tall wooden masts, topped with windmill vanes, spinning briskly.
“What is it? What in the name of the four winds is it?” Mixun shouted, backing away on his feet and hands, sliding on the seat of his pants across the ice. “Some kind of machine,” Raegel said. “I can see that! But what kind of machine?” As if in answer, the churning wheel sounded a shrill blast on a brass horn. The windmill vanes canted, presenting their edges to the breeze, slowed, and stopped. At once the vast device slowed. The plow blades no longer tore smoothly through the ice crust, but bit and bounced on the stone-hard surface. Lethally large chunks of ice flew, and for some moments the two men were kept busy dodging them.
Without high rotational speed to steady it, the great wheel wobbled. Finally the long axle touched the snowy ground, and the amazing contrivance ground to a halt, leaning on its side like a monstrous child’s top.
A hatch opened on the axle’s upper surface and a head covered by a puffy black hat emerged. Mixun, though stiff and reeling from the cold, stood up and tried to look dangerous. Raegel didn’t bother. He sat crossed legged in the snow, awaiting whatever fate lay ahead.
The puffy black hat was attached to a puffy black suit. The person in the suit climbed out and dropped to the ground, staggered, and fell down. Another round, padded hat appeared in the hatch.
Mixun started toward the strange visitor. Raegel grasped his leg as he passed.
“You don’t know who they are,” he warned.
“They have warm clothes, and probably have food and drink,” Mixun said. “And I want some!”
By the time he reached the axle, four black-suited figures had come out. They all wobbled in circles, as if drunk. Mixun grabbed the closest one. He was small, shorter by half than Mixun, who was not a tall man. Mixun snatched at the lacing on the front of the puffy hat and shoved it back. Out came a mass of silver-white hair and an ageless pink face.
Gnomes. He should have guessed. The strange giant wheel had all the earmarks of a gnomish mechanism.
“Greetings!” cried the gnome. When Mixun did not promptly reply, he repeated his salutation in Elvish, Old High Dwarvish, Ogrespeak, then whinnied like a centaur.
“Common tongue will do,” Mixun said, setting the little fellow back on his feet. “Who are you?”
Eight minutes later the gnome concluded his name.
Three-quarters frozen, the only part Mixun remembered was the first bit: “Master maker of wheels, wheel- rims, spokes, hubs, axles, cotter-pins, bearings (roller and ball), fabricated in wood, bronze, brass, iron, and steel…” In lieu of all that, Mixun thought of him as “Wheeler” from then on.
The other gnomes gradually recovered their equilibrium and surrounded the freezing pair. They chattered volubly about the weather, thickness of the ice beneath their feet, the formation and texture of snowflakes-on and on without pause, as Raegel slumped to his knees and Mixun’s eyelashes grew heavy with frost.
“We’re dying!” he managed to gasp. “Can you help us?”
“What’s the matter with you?” asked Wheeler. The near-identical gnome on his right said, “Over-active glands. Gets ‘em every time, these big people.”
“Maybe they have the Wingerish Fever?” said another.
“You have the Wingerish Fever,” said Wheeler severely. The gnome in question put a hand to his neighbor’s forehead.
“How can you say that?” he replied. “My blood pressure feels normal!”
“The c-c-cold,” Raegel chattered. His eyes fluttered and closed, and he fell backward in the snow.
“Dear, dear,” said Wheeler. “They aren’t dressed for the climate, are they? Come, let us repair to the Improved Self-Propelled Ice Engraver and warm these poor men.”
“Did I hear you say the ISPIE needs repair?” asked the gnome with the Wingerish Fever. “No!” said the other four gnomes.
Wheeler took Mixun by the hand and led him to the hollow axle of the stupendous wheel. The rest of the
