“Look, all I know is that it’s magical,” Teldin snapped as he rapped his spear on the pavement. The farmer held back his rapidly growing temper. He was beginning to understand why so few people had ever visited the gnomes. From behind him came Gomja’s warlike hum as he patiently waited for Teldin to finish before asking his own questions of the gnome.
“Magical, unknown,” the gnome muttered under his breath as he carefully made notes. “And your large friend, who does not look like anything that lives on Krynn or that is cataloged in the records of the Zoologist’s Guild, is he part of the magic or – Gomja bristled. “I came to seek passage on a spelljammer,” the giff grumbled.
“
Oh
!” the gnome blurted, suddenly too stupefied to speak. “Spelljammers? Thirty-fifth floor.”
“Let’s go. I want to get this thing off:’ Teldin urged before the gnome could begin again. “By the way, what’s your name?” The farmer marched through the gate, Gomja in tow, before the doorkeeper could stop them. The little fellow scrambled to gather up his papers, then decided their entrance was as good as an invited one and motioned for them to follow him down the shadowy corridor. He scuttled forward, weaved through a tangle of rope and pulleys, ducked under a large sign labeled
Very important experiment, so do not touch and plug your ears
, and casually wedged his thumbs into his ears, which were buried under a thick layer of hair. Shouting, not because it was loud – since the hall was fairly quiet – but because he could not hear himself, the gnome explained, “I am not going to tell you my full name, because my friend who was the gatekeeper before me but got too old to work the levers —”
“Slow down,” Teldin admonished, trying both to listen and figure out why the warning sign was posted. He hesitantly made to follow the instructions, then stopped, unwilling to appear undignified. The gnome looked and shook his head, wiggling his fingers to show the thumbs in his ears. “
Do not talk so fast
!” Teldin shouted.
“Right!” The gnome nodded. Without missing a beat, the little man picked up where he had left off. “— to work the levers that open the doors told me that the last outsiders yelled at him when he tried to tell them his name, and they yelled at him again when he tried to tell them his nickname —”
Teldin shouted back, loud enough for the gnome to hear, “Get to the point!”
“I am, but you keep yelling at me!” was the gnome’s complaint. His mouth opened to continue, but a sudden screech wailed down the corridor, rapidly growing to earsplitting intensity. Teldin winced in pain and clapped his hands over his ears. Behind him, Gomja staggered backward, giant paws pressed over his head. As he reeled, the giff crashed into the tangle of pulleys, triggering the rickety movement of hawsers through the blocks. Sandbags lashed to the cables dropped and rose all around, forcing the bulky Gomja to dodge and whirl, which only plunged the giff farther into the tangle of ropes and scaffolding. The burlap weights hit the stone floor with skull-splintering thuds and spewed sand, lead shot – even feathers – thoughout the passage. Just as Teldin tried to guess how a bag of feathers could split on impact, the high-pitched squeal abruptly became a reverberating bass that rolled back toward the center of the mountain.
As the last echoes of thunder rebounded in the distance, the weights stopped falling and Teldin’s eardrums ceased throbbing. He could hear faint cheers in the distance. As he stood listening, trying to guess what madness was going on, the human realized the gnome was still talking. The doorkeeper still had his thumbs jammed firmly in his ears.
so because of that business with the avalanche, outsiders call me Fildusmangelhors —” The gnome misinterpreted Teldin’s amazed look. “It means Gnome at the Center of Extremely Cold Solidified Water Shaped into a Large, Hard, Compact Sphere Rolling —”
“Snowball?” Teldin interrupted, rubbing his temples to make the ringing noise go away. Behind him, Gomja irritatedly batted his way through the still-swinging pulleys to rejoin them. The gnome made no indication that Gomja’s calamity had caused anything amiss.
“Right, that is what outsiders call me,” beamed the doorkeeper. “Anyway, I would plug my ears if I were you, because the Communicator’s Guild is going to test its new long-range voice improver message system —” An alarm whistle blew, but by now Teldin hardly twitched. “See, that’s the alarm whistle —”
“If the test was a loud noise, I think they already did it, Snowball,” Teldin wryly commented at a shout, incredulous that the gnome had missed the racket. “Now, please, can we get going?”
“Oh, drats! I missed it!” Snowball said, popping his thumbs out of his ears.
Chapter Eighteen
The gnome rattled on as he ducked under ropes creaking across pulleys and led Teldin and Gomja down the central corridor. Water dripped from patched and repatched pipes that ran at all angles across the ceiling. From down the hallway, toward the center of the mountain, came a faint but steady clamor of bells, whistles, and banging drums. Gnomes, bundles of parchment under their arms, hurried past, sometimes hailing Snowball with a greeting that was never completed until long past. Teldin, just for caution’s sake, remained alert, ready to plug his ears. The giff warily brought up the rear, leery of every rope, pipe, and unknown thing that hung from the ceiling.
At last their passage broke into an immense central shaft, both terrifying and grand. Although Teldin had seen a few impressive fortifications during the war, particularly the dark Tower of High Sorcery at Palanthas, nothing in all his brief travels could compare to the gnome works here. The inside of the mountain was an immense, hollowed out, and inverted cone, terraced just as the outside of the mountain had been, forming rings around a widening central shaft. Lights gleamed and moved along the sides. A constant rumble of noise filled the cavern; the deep drone of a thousand distant sounds were punctuated by occasional shrill bursts close at hand. The chamber soared upward into the darkness as far as Teldin could see and beyond, as he picked out quivering points of light somewhere high above him. They were like night stars, except he knew that neither was it night nor was he outside.
Almost as impressive as the shaft itself was the seemingly endless tangle; ropes and cables stretched across the center of the cavern to tie together far-flung gantries that projected over the rims of different terraces. It looked to Teldin like an incomplete spiderweb. The main floor was littered with catapults of all types and sizes. Gnomes swarmed over these, hammers and saws in hand. “Gnomeflingers,” Snowball explained. “They’re not working right now, because they’ve got just a few little problems that need to be worked out —”
“Such as?” Teldin asked, his curiosity piqued. He was starting to get the hang of gnome speech, the breakneck way they approached the Common tongue and their constant desire to keep talking.
“Oh, well, first, the sponges all died, so we have to get new ones,” Snowball explained as he led them around the perimeter of the main floor, “but we do have a few working gnomeflingers for cargo, and the sponges are only the emergency emergency backup safety system,” the gnome offered hopefully, ‘so it is perfectly safe, unless the new gears in the timing system are not right, which we have not tested yet, but you could be the first and — “No, thank you, Snowball,” Teldin politely refused.
“Besides, I think Gomja might be too heavy for your machines.” He laid a hand on the giffs bulky arm, eager to make his point.
Snowball rolled his eyes up as he made some quick mental calculations. “It might take a few shots, level one to level four, then level four to the big catapult on level seven, then —”
“Nobody is shooting me anywhere, little gnome,” Gomja boomed emphatically as he stepped forward, his ears perked with alarm. Legs set and arms crossed, the giff towered over Snowball.
“Well, then, I guess we will have to use the slow method,” Snowball answered in another peevish huff. “Not that we would ever hurt anyone – gnomes have such a bad reputation with you outsiders, but, really, everything is perfectly safe and I have only been hurt once – seriously.” Watching closely for the expected look of alarm, which did cross his guests’ face, the doorkeeper snickered at his own joke. He led them to a metal disk suspended by chains, like the pan of giant scale. “If you will step on there, we can get you ready …” The gnome tugged on Teldin’s sleeve, impatiently hustling the human onto the disk, talking all the while. The farmer did not hear any more, for his attention was caught suddenly by a creaking overhead. Above he saw a small gondola swinging precariously over open space and being furiously pulled along by a small gnome in a basket. As Teldin gawked upward, Snowball leaned over and scrutinized a needle and a team of gnomes loaded bags onto a similar disk. The gondola passed out of sight, and the farmer looked down and realized he was standing on a giant scale.
After both Teldin and Gomja were weighed and given disks denoting their tonnage, Snowball struck out for another section of the shaft. Here baskets and barrels shot into and out of the darkness above at alarming speeds. Those descending came rushing down with a blare of horns and bells. Teldin jumped involuntarily when one crashed onto a giant pile of pads beside him. The barrel tumbled over, rope raining down on it, and a pair of gnomes spilled onto the cushions and across the floor. They quickly got to their feet and wobbled away with all the dignity they could muster.
“Quickly, now. That is your car, and I will be in the next one,” urged Snowball, pointing to the empty barrel. Teldin went pale at the thought and Gomja planted his feet, one hand reaching for a pistol. “It is the only way up,” the gnome assured as the pair resisted, “because the vertical engineers are redesigning the stairs to make them faster, so come on and get in the car or you will not get to the examiners, besides other people are waiting and you do not want to be rude.” All the while, Snowball, far stronger than he looked, was tugging Teldin toward the hastily righted barrel. Perhaps desperate to be relieved of the cloak, the human finally gave in, steeled his courage, and climbed aboard. Gomja, not one to seem cowardly, followed suit.
Snowball stepped back with a smile and waved to the operators. “Level fifteen – eighty-nine dramnars! That is how much you weigh, see,” the gnome explained, “and up above – oh, up there somewhere – the vertical engineers will load twice your weight to lift you and the barrel, then pull the lever to ring the bell down here, and when that happens, you just hang on and —”
Before Snowball could finish, Teldin’s knees gave out as the barrel was forcefully jerked into the air. The farmer had a sickening feeling of hurtling through dizzying space as the gnome’s upturned face dwindled. One, two, three levels soared past, the number of each terrace disappearing in a brilliant flash. Teldin’s fingers dug into the barrel’s wooden sides. From somewhere below the human heard a clanging bell.
“— still a problem with stopping!” were Snowball’s last shouted words.
The levels whizzed past faster and faster, but Teldin took no notice – of that or of anything, including the pale blue giff frozen beside him. The terrified human was still trying to puzzle out the method of stopping when he looked up. Hurtling toward them was a giant wheel over which ran the rope affixed to their barrel. The yeoman suddenly had an awful guess just what the “problem with stopping” was. “Hang on, Gomja!” he howled over the din. Teldin closed his eyes and braced for the crash.
“I am, sir,” the giff answered in a barely audible voice.
All at once the rope stopped its upward flight, but the barrel, moving of its own momentum, continued upward until the giffs ears barely brushed the flywheel. Barrel, giff, and human hung weightless for an instant, then the wooden gondola plummeted. The shift from meteoric rise to uncontrolled fall was worst of all. The barrel dropped only a short distance before it snapped to a halt, almost throwing Teldin and Gomja over the low sides. As the barrel swung back and forth on the end of its rope, gnomes scrambled to pull the passengers onto a projecting landing. A big, black “15,” painted on the wall, announced the level. Teldin looked up and guessed that the flywheel was mounted on level sixteen.
Once their feet were back on solid ground, Gomja sagged against the wall in a weak-boned heap; Teldin managed to stagger a few steps before he collapsed. “Sir,” the giff announced, his voice trembling with finality, “I’d sooner go down on the blazing
Penumbra
again than ride one of those gnome things another time!” The farmer, his heart thumping wildly, could do little more than nod.
By the time the pair had regained their wits and their breath, Snowball had rejoined them, unruffled by his own harrowing ride. “It is good to see that everything went well and nothing went wrong this time, though it would be interesting to test the safety systems on people as large as you, because we have only had gnomes …” the wild-haired gnome said by way of greeting. Again, the doorkeeper could not suppress a smile at their panicked faces.
“Now what?” Teldin demanded, eager to get moving, get the cloak off, and get out of this madhouse. He weakly struggled to his feet, bracing himself against a wall. Gomja very slowly followed suit.
Snowball plunged down a gloomy corridor. “Well, we go to the Magical Artificer’s Guild examination rooms, and they will do tests on you, which will be fascinating, because I have never seen the kinds of tests – are you coming? – they do …” Sharing a look of dread, Teldin and Gomja followed the prattling Snowball.
The magical artificers received Teldin with great interest and listened to his explanation of the cloak’s discovery. As usual, Teldin adjusted his story a bit, though this time he included the spelljammer and the captain in his tale. It seemed best to mention the cloak’s otherworldly source. What the farmer did not say related to the neogi, especially their deadly interest in the artifact. As he both hoped and now somewhat feared, the gnomes were fascinated by the tale. The human wound up repeating it at least six times as gnomes of greater and greater importance were brought in for consultation. Finally he showed them how the cloak grew and shrank on command.