Kalkon heard a faint sound, not one that a human or a gnome would have heard. Kalkon raised her head. Wind blew against a swiftly moving object, a flying object, and she heard it clearly now. It was three miles away.
She looked down at the gnome. “Lemborg,” she said. The gnome blinked and stirred, awakening, and raised an unsteady hand to his face. “Lemborg, we must leave now.”
*****
It was, of course, too late to leave the abandoned city. The little gnome had been dead right that they would arrive shortly in search of him. It was not yet too late to prepare, though the useful preparations were few.
Still, Kalkon was not particularly worried. The brain eaters had their own flying ship, but she was Kalkon, and this was her city. She hustled Lemborg out of the way, hiding him in a basement room that was undoubtedly once a mortuary (but she didn’t tell him that). Then she meditated briefly, spoke the name of a spell, and became invisible. That done, she went quietly outside into the noon sun to greet the invaders.
The first thing she noticed upon getting outside was that the invaders were already over her city. That was rather quick, she thought, looking steadily up at the curious device drifting over the stadium. It was just as the gnome had remembered it: a golden coiled shell, set upright, from the mouth of which several interwoven wooden tentacles projected forward, forming a pointed bow. A tall pole with skulls tied to it arose from the middle of the device, and a peculiar sail projected from the back side of the coiled shell. A rudder hung from the bottom of the tentacled hull.
The invaders’ ship was quite large. Kalkon eyed the flying ship and thought it was only slightly shorter than her own length of two hundred fifteen feet. She guessed the ship was entirely made of wood. Excellent: If it was wood, it would burn.
She carefully took up a position at the bottom of the steps, facing directly into the central plaza where smoke still rose from the charred remains of the Spirit of Mount Nevermind, and waited. She remained there for twenty minutes, watching as the flying ship circled the city. Then it drifted closer, cruising along until it was just over the Spirit.
Her mouth opened, preparing for her attack, when without warning the ship shot straight upward into the sky. Kalkon had the shocked impression that the ship had been fired from a bow. She stood there dumbly, looking up in astonishment as the ship became a dot against the blue zenith, then vanished altogether.
She waited in the silent plaza for an hour more, saw and heard nothing, then snorted in uncertainty. She took wing, flew around her city, and saw that it was intact. Dispelling her invisibility, she returned to the administration building to get the little gnome.
“Problem resolved?” the gnome asked fretfully, glad to be out of the basement room. (He had figured out for himself that it had once been a mortuary.)
“It would seem so,” said Kalkon easily. She described the ship, its actions, and its hasty departure.
Lemborg listened but wasn’t comforted. “A repeat visit might still be forthcoming,” he muttered, unconsciously wringing his hands.
“Or it might not,” said the dragon. She regarded the gnome in thought. “I am curious to know the nature of this passage device generator that you took from them.”
Lemborg sighed and explained. Apparently, each group of worlds and their sun was encased in an unbreakable sphere of unthinkable size. A “door” through this sphere into other spheres could be opened only by using a passage device, and the generator provided the magic to power the device. The creatures who had tried to kill Lemborg could not leave this group of worlds without their generator; they were stuck in this sphere for good, and they were not likely to appreciate that if they had business elsewhere.
Kalkon nodded understanding, though it was just so much garbage to her. A doorway in the heavens-the idea beggared reason. Trust a gnome to believe in such a thing. Still, his story held up so far. She elected to wait before rendering a final verdict on the issue.