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
Nick O’Donohoe
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, heart-
stoppingly, 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,