Chapter 8

Innova's stay in the lower levels could have gone on for months. He could have lingered in the lower levels, stacking stones and bathing in fetid water, learning odds and ends from Lucretius Climenole up until the day that his sentence ended.

Even longer, if he liked.

There was something serene about the darkness and quiet there in the deepest recesses of Mount Nevermind. It soothed him, restored his balances. Even the lectures from the old gnome ceased to irritate him, though the proverbs still bothered him now and then, and the fear of spiders never left him. Innova began to think he was past major annoyance—bound for some strange and spiritual state in which all wrong and hardship paled before the peace of stacking stones, of shoring the levels against the undermining magma.

He continued to repair the gnomeflingers, of course, not so much out of a duty to his sentence as with a sense of quiet enjoyment. These repairs, too, were something to do as well, and he could never recall later which of the machines, spread throughout the lowest levels of the mountain, he had set his hands to in the idle times.

He would come to regret this lapse in memory… but not then, not in that peaceful time.

Two weeks into this harmony, somewhere around the Seventh or Eighth Level amid rubble and layers of shale, Innova and Lucretius came across something—or someone—who changed all this.

It started with voices behind a stone wall.

As Innova passed by a section of tunnel rubbled and bowed out like a bay window of shale, he heard a smothered cry from somewhere amid the depths of piled stone.

"Lucretius!" he hissed, but the old gnome was rattling on about the gardening he had done in a little glade at the foot of the mountain, about how a trough of mirrors might be made to funnel light into furrows seeded with sunflowers, thereby assuring…

"Lucretius!"

The old fellow blinked and staggered. Dropping the stone he was carrying—a piece of onyx so heavy that its fall made the tunnel shudder and rubble slide slowly onto the corridor floors—Lucretius approached the wall. He leaned into the debris, still whispering to himself and deaf as a post to boot.

Insisted he heard nothing.

Innova began to dig. Five minutes' scrabbling amid stones and collapsed beams produced a small crawlspace into a dimly lit alcove. And five minutes more had opened that space enough for Innova to crawl through.

He entered a little room, quite tastefully appointed with tapestries and dressers, with a canopied featherbed spread over with quilts.

Upon that bed sat a gnome girl, clutching a hand mirror and straightening her hair to receive visitors. She was golden-haired, appealing in a tall sort of way. Immediately, Innova was at a loss for words.

Unlike his companions Talos and Deddalo, he was no ladies' man. The prettier the female, the more fool he made himself, and though this one was only moderately attractive, he had been in the lower levels for some time, his only companion a smelly old metaphysician.

He saw it coming from long off. Tried to speak and only bleated.

The gnome girl glanced at the tattered intruder who had tunneled through her walls, threw down the mirror, and emitted a curious piping sound, like a teapot starting to boil.

Innova could have backed out of the room even then, could have jostled by Lucretius and hastened on up the corridor, writing it all off as hallucination, as some kind of rapture of the mineral depths. He could have remembered his pulverized father's advice: Never trust a tall girl, for she'll always look down on you.

Instead, he smiled, mustered his courage and charm, and courted her with words.

"H-hullo" he stammered. "Sorry to bother you."

"Who are you?" shrieked the moderately attractive creature, falling back onto the bed and covering herself with quilts.

"Innovafertanimusmutatisdicere…" Innova began, but his own name trickled off into oblivion, and he gaped and snorted.

A nose—a powdered and not unseemly one—poked out from the mantle of blankets.

"I know that name!" the girl exclaimed. "Where have I heard that name? Are you a friend of my father?"

"I… I don't know," Innova replied. "Who is your father?"

Sitting upright, emerging from the quilts like a tall sprite rising from water, the girl regarded him scornfully.

"And who are you," she cried, "not to have heard of Incline Barium? And of his daughter Meryl?"

She had survived the silo explosion by nothing short of a miracle. Wakening in unfamiliar corridors, for a while she had even forgotten who she was.

She took up with a band of beggars, she said, bound for the lower levels. It was something she did not want to talk about. Eventually, after long and aimless wandering with the outcasts of gnomish society, Meryl Barium's memory had returned to her when a beam in a crawlspace broke above her head and rained down rock and a three-day coma.

"I tried to return upside," she maintained. "Father would be half-crazy missing his elder daughter."

"Elder?" Lucretius asked. "I thought young Innova said you were a twin."

"A twin, yes, but two minutes older than my dear, departed sister." A tear brimmed on her eyelid, glistened like a half-hidden gemstone. "Not that it makes any difference now. Vaporized, she was, atop a distillery silo. I'm all alone, a solitary. But my father misses me, I am sure, more even than my unraveled sister. After all, an accident of birth made me the elder, the green apple of his eye.

"Silly girl that I am, when I tried to return to Papa, matters only got worse. I left the beggars bound toward the Second Level—I do not want to talk about them—and found my way to a gnomeflinger. I had seen it done before—how the lads climbed into the machine, pulled a thing at the side—"

"A lever," Innova added helpfully.

Her smile was mildly fetching.

"A lever, then. And when they pulled that lever, it would send them to the upper levels, would it not?"

"For all intents and purposes," Innova replied. Then kicked himself for sounding like Lucretius.

"Well, this one didn't work like that at all," she explained, casting a sly glance at Innova. "I suppose it was in… a state of disrepair."

Innova shrank into the shadows so the girl would not see him blush. Cheerily, her story by no means derailed, she turned to Lucretius, who was just now climbing into the chamber.

"That gnomeflinger catapulted me here, or around here. I was injured in the fall. Only in the last few days have I been able to put weight on this ankle. Fortunately, I found this furniture and these quilts at a garbage dump—what a blessed find!—and have waited here until my injuries might heal. Through the rubble I heard you passing and called out, hoping I might find escort back to the upside."

She batted her eyelids alluringly. "I am still rather weak, you see."

To all of this, Innova nodded enthusiastically. Of course, there were things he did not understand. How had she fed herself? Why would someone throw away a perfectly good dresser?

And why was Lucretius staring that way at him?

For the old gnome regarded him skeptically, black eyes darting from Innova to this Meryl Barium and back.

Lucretius knew something, or had hallucinated something.

For the life of him, Innova could not figure what.

For the next day or so, the old gnome seemed subdued, lost in thought.

In fact, Lucretius had been moody since the girl had first told her story down in the caved-in chambers. He went about his business as usual, stacking stones and tinkering with the handcart, which had an irritating habit of always needing repairs.

But the lectures were less frequent. And when they came, they were much shorter and, for the first time, relevant to the subject at hand.

Still, Lucretius's moods were never hostile or dark as much as quiet. He ranged from his old cheerfulness and high volume—where you would think nothing had changed—to this new abstraction. Lucretius had stepped away from things when the two younger gnomes had met, much like a discreet friend will do when he discovers that he makes an unnecessary third to a courtship.

Not that Innova was courting the girl. Nor even all that interested, he had told himself, a little disappointed despite his desire to be proper and honorable. After all, this was Talos's one true love. Or that was what Innova's friends had told him.

Yet he wished that the girl found him more interesting.

Despite the attraction, Innova swore silent loyalty to his old companion. Though something about this girl continued to trouble and haunt and compel him, he would answer no call except that of his friendship with Talos. He would take the girl back to the upper city, and keep both his hands and his indecent thoughts away from her.

It was almost as though Lucretius had read those thoughts. In the week that followed, he stood at the margins while Innova and their new companion acquainted themselves with each other and realized how their stories intersected somewhere in the recent past and the upper levels.

Innova was a little disappointed that she had never heard that much about him. After all, he had fancied himself a major character in the whole Barium business.

"Oh, yes," the girl maintained when he asked. "I miss Talos immensely. But d'you think it's safe to go upside? After all, it's all so confusing up there, with the High Justice sentencing all of you right and left, and the gods know what other business afoot. Maybe I'm silly—'ungnomish' my dear and darling father would say—but politics and law are as much a mystery to me as all these contraptions you boys seem to understand so readily."

She batted her eyelids at Innova.

"A poor little thing like me," she concluded, "would find it rough going up in the city."

Innova took her hand. This kind of talk made him feel larger, braver, and more protective. He wanted to explain to her that he would watch over her. He would stand between her and the roughness of the world. But something within him drew back. Maybe it was only that she was Talos's sweetheart.

Lucretius drew back as well. He sniffed and grumbled, and shook his head. Not ten minutes after the girl had finished her story, the old gnome was back in the handcart, reading the valves, adjusting the pipes and throttles.

Something has happened, Innova told himself. And it's something mysterious, because he's not talking this time. This time, he's thinking himself away from words.

"Get in behind me!" Lucretius shouted at last, as the makeshift vehicle shivered with steam and strained against its brakes. "We're bound for the upper levels!"

"Upper levels?" the girl asked. "So soon?"

Innova thought she seemed disappointed at the prospect.

"I'm taking you home, children!" Lucretius crowed. "Home for a little… context! Now come afore here, or we'll never top the first incline! And bring both those jugs with ye!"

The ceramic jugs that lay in the back of the handcart had been a mystery to Innova. He had asked about them before, received cryptic answers, and decided early on that some things about Lucretius Climenole's work remained and would remain none of his business.

He handled the vessels carefully, expecting some kind of explosive, and with Lucretius's careful turn of a switch, the handcart shrieked forward on the tracks.

The girl shrieked in harmony with the grinding wheels.

As the cart hurtled up the first of two dozen inclines, Innova wondered if he had done something wrong, had displeased Lucretius in some obscure way. After all, he had become settled in these daily labors, he even enjoyed the slow, comfortable dozes brought on by the old fellow's lectures and the strange peace of doing simple tasks far away from the bustle of gnomish business.

Then here comes this Meryl Barium, and the whole world changes.

Suddenly it dawned on Innova.

The old gnome was jealous.

The two of them had explored these caverns in a sort of lonely male teamwork. When a female stepped in, they had become rivals, like it or not.

And he was younger than Lucretius, more lively, more handsome.

Why, it all made sense now. It all fit. And part of it felt good.

He started to explain to his old mentor how the girl was betrothed to his closest friend and that he, Innova, had no designs on her. How he would not be interested, even if she were free and clear of attachment… .

He knew that was a lie, but now was not the time for lies or truths. The cart careened up a steep gradient, flew over a narrow but dangerous break in the tracks, caught traction and sputtered around a tight corner, racing for the upside and for a way of life Innova had nearly forgotten in his lonely and deep pursuits.

On the way they passed the pools of Graygem oil. Noticing the long glance of her companions at the glittering pool, the girl asked what was so fascinating.

Innova told her. Recounted his long slide through the deep corridors, he speculated on the prospect and power of this uncanny liquid, ending with Lucretius's warnings.

He was boasting in a way, displaying his knowledge.

Up through the Twelfth and the Thirteenth Levels the vehicle raced. A legion of bats scattered in panic as it raced by, and once Innova thought he saw a cluster of lights—a settlement down a wide straight corridor, which vanished almost as he glimpsed it.

Now yet a steeper incline approached, and Lucretius looked back at his passengers, his white hair matted by steam and sweat.

"Pour the first jug into the secondary expansion tank!" he commanded.

"The what?"

"Right next to the vertical articulator, Innova. No! Not that one! That's the claxon valve, you utter idiot! Right there beside—No! That's the pneumatic defibrillator!"

Absently, gaping at terms he did not understand and the prospect of sliding back into darkness and accident, Innova fumbled with the stopper of the jug.

The girl pointed to a funnel, shrouded by steam, in the side of a canteen-shaped tank.

"I'm a ninny around machinery," she said, "but perhaps…"

"That's it! That's it!" Lucretius shouted.

And Innova opened the jug. The smell of its contents washed over him at once—the familiar mixture of rust and grain and cayenne he had caught many times in the tavern alleys of the disreputable Nineteenth Level…

"It's… it's dwarf spirits!"

"Thorbardin Oeconomy Malt, to be exact," Lucretius yelled over the hissing steam. "What the gully dwarves call 'Old Tom' and the civilized world calls 'Widowmaker.' I discovered—and do not ask me how—its virtues as a supplementary fuel. Pour the contents of that jug into the funnel designated by… Miss Meryl, is it?"

Innova poured dutifully, and the handcart screeched like squirrels on fire. The jury-rigged vehicle shuddered and lurched forward, casting blue sparks across the buckling tracks behind it. The smell of boiled cabbage and pepper surged down to meet the cart and its passengers, mixed with the other familiar and forgotten smells of Innova's childhood.

They were nearing the upper levels.

They were approaching home.

"Now for the second one!" Lucretius proclaimed. Innova opened the jug, leaned toward the funnel, but the old gnome snatched the Old Tom from his hands and took a long, courageous draw of the noxious stuff. "Drink up, young fellow!" he shouted, proffering the jug to Innova.

"The last leg of the journey is on us!"

It tasted like magma. Innova could have sworn there was cabbage afloat in the stuff—cabbage and ginger. Cayenne raced down his gullet as though some hostile god was funneling spite into his stomach. Joining Lucretius at the helm of the handcart, all thoughts of safety and the girl cast aside, Innova pumped the primer with renewed energy, oblivious to fear, to his own pain and to the rush of light as yet another tunnel opened at their approach.

By Reorx, the spirits worked quickly! It seemed that the cart coasted up the incline, and Innova wanted to sing to the swift clatter of the wheels. He was almost home, back among friends and corridors he knew. He heard the far-off whistle of a guild hall signaling the end of its working day, and the shrill, staccato buzzer of a nearby emergency kiosk.

Talos would be here, be eternally grateful for his rescued sweetheart. Deddalo would be here as well, as would the old pulleys and alleys that mapped their ways through the upper levels.

Innova was home, unscathed except for the dull pain in his backside. With a long life ahead of him…

With a girl who was somehow inveigling his feelings…

And with three months yet to serve on a court-ordered sentence.