“Keep lookin’.”
“Ow! Get off a my foot!”
Thump. Clatter.
“Sh!”
“Somebody fall down again.”
“SH!
They were travelers. They had been travelers since long
before any of them could remember, which was not very
long unless the thing to remember was truly worth
remembering: traveling generally was not. It was just
something they did, something they had always done,
something their parents and their ancestors had done. Few
of them had any idea why they traveled, or why their
travels – more often than not – tended to be westward.
For the few among them who might occasionally
wonder about such things, the answer was simple and
extremely vague. They traveled because they were in
search of the Promised Place.
Where was the Promised Place? Nobody had the
slightest idea.
Why did they seek the Promised Place? No one really
knew that, either. Someone, a long time ago – some
Highbulp, probably, since it was usually the Highbulp
who initiated unfathomable ventures – had gotten the
notion that there was a Promised Place, to the west, and it
was their destiny to find it. That had been generations
back – an unthinkable time to people who usually
recognized only two days other than today: yesterday and
tomorrow. But once the pilgrimage was begun, it just kept
going.
That was the nature of the Aghar – the people most
others called gully dwarves. One of their strongest driving
forces was simple inertia.
The size and shape of the group changed constantly as
they made their way through the ruins of the city, tending
upward toward its center. Here and there, now and then,
by ones and threes and fives, various among them lost
interest in following along and took off on side
expeditions, searching and gawking, usually rejoining the
main group somewhere farther along.
There was no way to know whether all of them came
back. None among them had any real idea of how many of
them there were, except that there were more than two – a
lot more than two. Maybe fifty times two, though such
concepts were beyond even the wisest of them. Numbers
greater than two were seldom considered worth worrying
about.
Gradually, the stragglers converged upon the higher
levels of the ruined city. Here the fallen building stones
were more massive – huge, smoke-darkened blocks that
lay aslant against one another, creating tunnels and gullies
roofed by shattered rubble. Here they found more dead
things – humans and animals, corpses mutilated, stripped
and burned, the brutal residue of battle. They crept around
these at a distance, their eyes wide with dread. Something
fearful had happened here, and the pall of it hung in the
silent air of the place like a tangible fear.
At a place where a flanking wall had fallen, some of
them paused to stare at a tumble of great, iron-bound
timbers that might once have been some piece of giant
furniture but now was a shattered ruin. The thing lay as
though it had fallen from high above, its members and
parts in disarray. Having not the faintest idea of what it
might be, most of them crept past and went on. One,
though, remained, walking around the huge thing,
frowning in thought.
His name was Tagg, and an odd bit of memory
tugged at him as his eyes traced the dimensions of the
fallen thing. He had seen something like it before . . .
somewhere. Tugging at his lip, Tagg circled entirely
around the thing. A few others were with him now. They
had seen his curiosity and returned, curious themselves.
“Got a arm,” he muttered, squatting to reason out the
placement of a great timber jutting outward from the
device. Within the twisted structure itself, the timber was
bound to a sort of big, wooden drum, with heavy rope
wrapped around it and a set of massive gears at its hub.
“Fling-thing,” he said, beginning to remember. It was
like something he had seen from a distance, atop some
human structure his people had skirted long ago in their
travels. He remembered it because he had seen the Talls
operate it, and had been impressed. It was a wooden tower