No Country for Old Gnomes Read online

  Båggi could see that the leaves of the cabbage that Bo pointed to were moving without the aid of wind. He didn’t know if he would describe the movement as longing, however. It was more like a child that desperately needed to visit the privy.

  The prophet sank to his knees before the cabbage, left hand spread over the vegetable, small machete in the right. His eyes closed in ecstasy. “Reveal to us, Sacred Cabbage, the first death that will be caused by the dwarvelish herbalist Båggi Biins!”

  “Hey, what?”

  Brother Bo’s blade chopped down into the base of the cabbage with a hollow thunk, and at the same moment Båggi felt his heart clutch in his chest, a strange pain blooming there. The seer ripped the cabbage free and something red sprayed from the base, which Båggi thought odd.

  “Behold the blood of one of your victims!” Bo cried. He turned the base to his face and peered at the core, which Båggi realized might resemble a spine traveling up into the base of a skull. The harvested portions of cabbage were described as heads, after all. “A halfling! Father of two! Loves his dogs!” Bo tossed the cabbage aside and shook his head as he got to his feet. “Oh, Båggi. How much rage must live inside you to kill such a person?”

  “That’s not funny,” the dwarf said, feeling shook. “It’s horrifying.”

  “I agree. Revealed Death is no joke.” A rustling noise, a couple of rows closer but farther north, drew their attention. “Another cabbage longs to speak of the future!”

  “What? No. Great galloping gallberries, stop this!” Båggi said, even as Brother Bo rushed to the spot. “Please.”

  The prophet ignored him, once more kneeling and repeating the ritual, and Båggi again felt a punch in the chest when the machete chopped into the vegetal head.

  “A second halfling! Beloved brother and uncle, caretaker of an elderly hamster. Collects porcelain figurines of frogs.” Bo tossed this cabbage aside and fixed the dwarf with a reproving glare. “Honestly, what kind of demons do you keep caged in those ribs?”

  Båggi didn’t know how to answer. His breath came in short gasps, and he was sweating even though it was a pleasant day. Brother Bo was clearly deranged, yet he also had some kind of strange power that caused real pain. A new rustling in the rows beckoned, faint but discernible. Bo turned to find the source and then stared at Båggi, agog.

  “No, please,” Båggi whimpered.

  Bo waggled a finger at the flailing vegetable. “That’s the oldest cabbage in the field. Growing here long before my arrival, waiting all this time for you! What will it reveal?”

  “Your unkindness, no doubt,” Båggi replied, but the pastor was already sprinting to the spot. The dwarf labored after him, wondering why his legs felt so leaden and his lungs couldn’t seem to fill properly. “Brother Bo! Stop! I insist!”

  “I cannot stop the Revealed Deaths once they begin! Every one of these cabbages foretells the violent death of someone at the hands of our visitors!”

  Båggi did not say aloud that this had to be one of the most inhospitable ways to treat visitors apart from actually poisoning them or killing them, but he thought it. He also thought it shouldn’t continue. And as Brother Bo knelt beside the ancient cabbage, his machete raised high, ignoring his guest’s pleas to desist, Båggi felt some new emotion stirring within him, his skin flushing, his teeth clenching. He gripped his Telling Cudgel in both hands, knuckles whitened against the base, and he saw peripherally that it was beginning to transform from a simple gnarled piece of wood into something far more deadly, with spikes protruding at all angles like a wakening porcupine. The Telling Cudgel always told the world when a dwarf was angry and when he was at peace, and it would also tell Båggi when he had purged the violence from his spirit.

  He began to raise the cudgel above his head just as Brother Bo’s machete thwacked into the old cabbage, and he was staggered by the impact, once again, at his core. The pastor inspected the head and intoned, “A middle-aged troll who enjoys croquet. Imagine what a rare creature he must be! But not for long, eh?” He clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth a few times. “You’re a monster, Båggi Biins.”

  The herbalist gasped at the insult and felt a new wave of anger wash through him. He hefted his cudgel, and the pastor gave him a soft smile, throwing his arms wide. “Yes! Strike me down among the cabbages, that my blood may mingle with theirs!”

  Båggi dearly wanted to, but he would not be baited. He remembered that he was not obligated to stay there a second longer; only his good manners had brought him to the cabbage field in the first place. With his unprecedented rudeness, Brother Bo had released him from any need to be polite. So Båggi pointed himself north and ran, his picnic basket thumping against his back, not bothering to issue a farewell. As soon as he cleared the cabbage patch, his lung capacity returned and his Telling Cudgel slowly, meekly, slid and scraped itself back into an innocent bough of gnarled hardwood with a mead cask and pint glass etched into the grain.

  He hoped the cabbage prophecies were all nonsense—he could not imagine ever slaying innocent halflings—but whether or not their visions were true, Båggi understood now why he needed to go out on Meadschpringå. It turned out he had plenty of violence lurking inside his spirit, patient and waiting, and it had only needed the right person—or cabbage—to coax it forth.

  Perhaps, Båggi thought, this Lord Ergot was another such person. He began trudging toward Bruding, hating cabbage more than ever.

  “Thatch tortoises lead intensely interesting lives. For example, they…No, I’m sorry. I can’t pretend anymore. After decades of research and an epic waste of time, I’ve no choice but to conclude that they are intensely boring creatures. What am I even doing with my life?”

  —MANG ROVE, in an introduction to the shortest doctoral thesis ever, which reads in its entirety, “Please see title,” which is called, Thatch Tortoises Are Just Tortoises That Slowly Eat Your Roof and Occasionally Lay Eggs: and No, I Can’t Explain How They Got Up There in the First Place Even Though I Observed Them Closely for Thirty-five Tedious Years

  In the space of a heartbeat, Agape’s life went from contemplating a future of independent freedom to taking care of her wounded parents. Her father fell inside the shack and turned to pull Fedora in behind him. Her beautiful caftan was torn and burned in several places, but they both seemed mostly unharmed.

  Mad cackling erupted outside, along with several loud explosions—the hallmarks of a visit from the dreaded halfling drubs. The thatch overhead caught fire, and then something deeply strange happened.

  The cottage lurched upward with a terrified cluck.

  “Wait,” Agape gasped, stumbling to catch herself against the mantel. “Are you saying those chicken legs weren’t just ornamental?”

  As if in response, the cottage clucked again and began to run on its long orange chicken legs, which had definitely appeared to be a fun quirk to a cheap rental. The lease they’d signed had included a deep discount in case of “abrupt relocations,” something labeled the “Chicken Run Clause,” and suddenly it all made sense. The realtor, who in retrospect had seemed very witchy, had definitely lied to them on multiple counts—and also tsked at their hooves. At the time, Agape thought it was because they’d scratch the floors, but now she understood it was because the witch was well aware that they’d be sliding all over the dang place if the house took to its feet. Agape might’ve been mad, but considering the drubs outside, she rather thought having a mobile home was useful in this instance.

  On her belly now, brooms clattering all around her, Agape crawled to Piini and put a hand on his heavy golden foot.

  “Piini Automaatti,” she said, recognizing her role as Vartija. “If we get separated, take my parents to Bruding. I’ll meet you there. Keep them saaafe!”

  As the running house canted side to side and bumped into trees and bushes, and as the halflings outside whooped and cheered, tossed
more firebombs, and gave chase, the metal man’s head inclined slightly. His hands came down to his sides as the gem in his forehead flared briefly with a warm and understanding glow. Did Agape imagine that Piini nodded? Probably. It didn’t matter. After all this time on the run, they’d finally been found by the halfling hunters.

  Her first hour as the Vartija was already a failure. She could only hope the witch’s house could outrun the drubs. Crawling to the fireplace, she took the frying pan back in hand. She couldn’t help noticing the postcard of Grakkel her father had left behind as the contents of the house skittered madly and fell to ruin all around her.

  “Wish You Were Here,” it said, and their new address was scrawled beneath it.

  Yeah, well, Agape wished they were anywhere else. The house, it seemed, shared that desire. But the drubs must’ve expected that the Fallopia family would run. They were not only half sheep—and running away was a primary instinct of sheep—but that was what the Fallopias had always done to protect Piini, especially in this last year of unusually dogged pursuit. Although Agape couldn’t see out through the filthy and cobwebbed windows, she could feel each lurch when the house’s direction was forced to change, and it was all too easy to imagine halflings herding them one way or another with arrows and firebombs.

  “Is there any way to control the house?” she asked her parents, who merely huddled together near the open door.

  “This is baaaad!” her mother bleated as if she’d lost all sense.

  “I can’t staaaand the haaalfling maaafia!” her father moaned.

  Crawling over to them, frying pan in hand, Agape gently nudged her cowering parents away from the swinging door and slammed it shut, catching a glimpse of a dozen halflings pursuing them with homemade bombs in their tooled leather bags.

  The chicken shack must’ve found a gap in the halfling line, however, as it first surged forward and then slowed to a sustainable pace without too much zigging and zagging. The gentle gallop, accompanied by not-so-gentle clucking, was easy enough to ride, almost like a boat in choppy seas. Still, Agape knew the limitations of hooves on wood, especially with dozens of brooms rolling about. She crawled over to the desk and opened the drawer, looking for the usual helpful information provided when one rented an edifice. Unfortunately, all she found was a curse to keep tortoises out of the thatch, which would’ve been far more useful before the thatch had caught fire.

  Still, perhaps she could save one life.

  “Bubble, bubble, toil and poof, get this tortoise out of my roof!” she cried. The first thatch tortoise nearly concussed her as it fell from the ceiling. But then she thought of holding the frying pan over her head as the rest rained down. Once the plopping had stopped, she grabbed a broom and scooted them all under the bed like giant hockey pucks as the shack sped up again.

  Forced to look at the roof, she had to concede that it was really and truly on fire, and a pan of water and a rag could not handle it. No wonder the shack was in such a hurry. She could hear the drubs shouting and cackling nearby, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to rub clean a patch of the dirty window glass to see where they were headed. If it was in the direction the halflings wanted them to go, it wasn’t going to be pleasant.

  Not that occupying an ambulatory dwelling was pleasant. Especially when it exhibited aeronautical ambitions. In a paroxysm of panic that sent them all sprawling to the floor, the house sprang out into space and hovered for just a moment before dropping like a stone.

  “Daaaaang!” Agape cried in unison with her parents, and worried about the impact that would surely come when the house landed, for although they’d noticed the supposedly ornamental chicken legs, nothing had been said of secret wings. Chickens were not renowned for long-distance flights, and chicken wings laden with the weight of architecture, furniture, and ovitaur occupants were even less likely to deliver a nice long glide. Sure enough, her stomach nearly fell through her throat as they plummeted. Nothing could’ve prepared her for the heavy smack of impact, and she’d barely begun to celebrate being alive when water started to ooze through the cracks in the floorboards.

  The flaming chicken shack had cleverly jumped into a lake. And here Agape had always assumed that chickens were dumb.

  She crawled back to her quaking parents and shook her father’s shoulder. “Daaad? Maamaa? The house is sinking. We’ve got to get out.”

  “Aaaaaaghhh!” her mom wailed.

  But her parents dutifully stood, clutching each other and watching Agape with wide eyes. It seemed to her that they’d aged decades in the span of an hour.

  “Piini Automaatti,” she said, using her commanding voice, “get out of the water safely. Stay with me. Do you understaaand?”

  The metal man strode to the door, feet clomping through the rising water, and punched a hole in the ancient wood.

  That woke Agape’s father up enough to mutter, “There goes our deposit.”

  Agape immediately understood that they weren’t going to drown—it was just a little fen. Perhaps chickens weren’t as smart as she’d given them credit for. The water destroying the floor wasn’t anywhere close to putting out the fire on the roof. But there was still danger, of course. Squeezing through the hole in the door after Piini, she didn’t see any halflings, but she knew they were on their way. With each step, the metal man sank deeper in the bog, but he didn’t get stuck, and Agape was able to shepherd her parents out in his wake. Soon they all stood among the cattails, looking out at the golden plains beyond while the poor chicken house, struggling in the muck, burned down behind them. It clucked irritably and tried to shift out of the quagmire, but it had entirely the wrong sort of feet to effect any sort of escape. Agape would’ve felt bad for the unlucky clucker if she hadn’t been fully aware of the still very real threat of the drubs.

  “What do we do?” she asked her parents.

  Her father looked at her in puzzlement. “You’re the Vartija now,” he said. “It’s up to you.”

  Agape considered the perverse logic at work. When she’d woken up, her parents had been in charge. Then, for a brief and magical moment, she’d been independent, as her parents moved on with their lives without giving her a single thought. Now she was soaked to the hocks in bogwater and cauldron contents, surrounded by broken brooms and confused tortoises, in charge for the first time. And not only responsible for Piini but also her parents. Their survival and her destiny, it appeared, were up to her.

  She sighed. To the east they could only expect more halflings. There were hills to the north and south. The nearest help was in Bruding, and it was also the easiest terrain to cross.

  “We head for Bruding,” she said.

  “Alternate spellings for some words—typically colors and other sensory adjectives, but also some nouns—are asserted by gryphons and other beings who insist that their heightened perceptions reveal an extrasensory reality. Alternate spellings, therefore, will be marked in the dictionary with an asterisk and indicate that the word’s definition is essentially the same as the common spelling but also includes the additional nuanced understanding of such beings. In short, gryphons are weird.”

  —EDITOR’S NOTE IN Lexi Conn’s Dictionary of the Pellican Language, 42nd edition

  Skies have different temperatures and textures, Gerd reflected, and in that sense they were very similar to egges. Skies could be cold and hard, or hot and moist, or any number of other things, and so could egges. As a gryphon, Gerd could fly right through all manner of skies, and in a way, all manner of egges flew right through her. It pleased Gerd that her two favorite things—skies and egges—had so much in common. Sometimes skies thundered and boomed with anger, for example, and sometimes egges made her backside thunder and boom as well.

  Though there was no danger of thunder at the present. Gerd doubted she had ever seen a sky so blü as the one she shot through right then, hunting the goldenne man for Faucon, the unusuall
y kleen halfling. A clear day, a brilliant day, and a rare day, for this region north of the Coxcomb, her old high home in the rocks, was so often glümee with clouds. Her wingtips sliced through the air, her beak a breaker streaming wind past her eyes, the goldenne fur on her flanks rippling in the breeze. Below her, the targets moved slowly and bleated in dismay at her approach, which made Gerd feel a pang of guilt.

  She did not mean to be so frightful and did not wish anyone ill. She certainly did not want to eat any ovitaurs. Humans tasted terrible, and anything that was part human was therefore at least part terrible. Gryphones left centaurs, llamataurs, minotaurs, and ovitaurs alone as a result. Gnomes were too salty, halflings tasted rotten, and dwarves required so much salt that one might as well not bother. Elves were delicious, though; a nice elf butt roast was an exquisite delicacy, and one that Gerd had only tasted once, at the funeral feast of her grandfather. Elf butts were infamously hard to come by, however, attached as they were to elves who lived in the Morningwood, that being a place very difficult to fly through and see well. There was so much blasted glitter in the air, sparkling and winking in harsh tones of blü and yellö and redde, that gryphones could go blind in mere minutes. Indeed, many gryphones had gone blind in pursuit of the world’s most delicious meat. If anything should be taboo for gryphones to eat, Gerd thought, it should be elf butts, because that would save the eyesight and even lives of so many hunters. But no, instead it was taboo to eat egges: glorious, harmless, tasty egges, which could be made into fluffee omlets. The world did not make sense.

  Gerd wanted to reassure the ovitaurs that she meant them no harm, but she could not use her vocal cords to make the kinds of noises most folk would understand. Her assorted whistles, gurgles, and screeches were perfectly comprehensible to gryphones, but other creatures typically interpreted them as terrifying. So she used the peculiar talent of gryphones to think aloud, which, she was told, sounded to thinking beings like someone speaking in their own language, except in their heads.