Chapter 21

It was a wonder that the sergeant stayed his hand.

As a matter of fact, Innova thought, as the gnomes dragged him down the stairwell toward an unknown destination, it was pretty near a miracle. For the club-wielding sergeant, digits short of a full number, was none other than Flurious Akimbo, Hero of the Suppression and a favorite of the imprisoned Generalissimo.

This was the gnome who had quelled the gully dwarf uprising at Peterloo almost single-handed. When the rebels had walled themselves into a corner of the Fifteenth Level, it had been the Generalissimo's intention to starve them out.

After all, the gully dwarves had walled their provisions outside.

But Sergeant Akimbo, to whom patience was unknown, had ordered a battering ram set against the ramshackle gates of the rebel fortress, and as if that weren't enough, had lashed himself to the head of the ram, riding it as it broke through the rusty bolts and rotten wood.

He had wanted to be the first to breach the walls.

Instead, he had been the last to regain consciousness, a week later in the hospitals on the Twenty-Seventh Level.

It had been the gesture that mattered, the bold placing of himself in immediate danger, that had made Flurious Akimbo the hero of the hour in Mount Nevermind.

The old sergeant growled and lowered his club, as rough hands seized Innova and wrestled him to his feet.

Silently, the gnomes dragged Innova by the ankles to the spiraling staircase, then down one level, and another.

Innova tried to cry out, to beg for mercy, but his head smacked against each metal step, and soon the dark of the stairwell was overwhelmed by another dark, and he thought and remembered nothing.

Innova awoke in a shabby encampment—an old, unsettled chamber draped with stalactites, where stale water dripped steadily somewhere in the narrowing shadows.

An officer stood above him, regarding him skeptically, but with no real malice.

"Who…" Innova began, but the officer shook his head.

"If half of what is said is true," he said, "you're in a dungheap of trouble, Master Innova."

"Half of what is said is rarely true," Innova replied, masking the tremor in his voice.

"I know," the officer replied. "That's why you're still alive."

It hurt to breathe. It hurt to even blink. His eyes adjusting to the play of firelight and shadow, Innova caught a glimpse of the sentries stationed at the mouth of the chamber.

A famous insignia. A red gate broken by a dragonheaded ram.

Generalissimo Glorius Peterloo's army. Or what was left of it.

All around him lay wounded soldiers. Bandaged heads, arms in slings, or sleeves pinned where an arm was once. A jungle of limbs and broken bodies, the only sound a long chorus of moans.

Moans and the rumbling cough of the pneumalaise—what the physicians called the disease that had come with the Knights into the city. Where the lungs filled with dark fluid and drowned the desperate breathers.

Some desperate medical technician had set up an enormous bellows, and two of the younger soldiers pumped at it heroically, stirring the stagnant air into warm, moist winds that circled the field hospital.

Moving air breeds less infection, some philosopher had told them.

The soldiers didn't believe it. They had come here to die. From all corners of Mount Nevermind they had assembled, less than a week ago, their glorious duty to repel an invading army. But someone had betrayed them: Deep in the hollows of the mountain, someone had shown entry to the Knights of Takhisis, and these courageous gnomes had been caught in a withering vise of steel and magic.

Someone had betrayed them. It had not taken long for that rumor to reach every gnome within the sound of the metavox.

And the Paradise Machine, up and running in the topmost levels, was sealing the Knights behind a web of defenses. The Paradise Machine that was Innova's own invention.

Cause and effect, he thought. That old madness.

"You are Innovafertanimusmutatas…" the officer began.

It took no genius to realize what would follow.

Innova stared into the eyes of the gnome Commander—two gray pools that he hoped were not without a small eddy of tenderness and compassion.

"I am that notorious Innova, sir," he began. "But before I go further, I believe you are honor bound to tell me your name. I am entitled to know my interrogator. My… my confessor, if you will."

The officer nodded. "Only fair. I am Lieutenant Colonel Grex Pointillo, late of the staff of Generalissimo Glorius Peterloo and provisional Commander of the gnome army of resistance."

"Pointillo? But I had heard you were—"

And suddenly, the conversation he had overheard on the stairwell became clear to Innova.

Slipped clean away. The one last chance against the Knights of Takhisis.

Just plain folk at the end of the day.

Pointillo was the one whom the soldiers were talking about on the stairwell.

Innova laughed bitterly.

"I am turned in by my own vanity," he muttered.

The colonel's eyes widened. "Tell me that story," he urged his captive.

He was blunt. To the point. Immediately, despite the awkward situation, Innova struck a liking for his captor.

They talked alike. Perhaps they listened alike as well.

So he began. As Pointillo helped him to his feet, Innova recounted the events surrounding the philosophers' contest, the competitive inventions, and his own appointment to the guild. He spoke as well of his own sorrow that the Paradise Machine, devised with mostly good intentions, had come to haunt Mount Nevermind, as the machines of defense and control had begun to function at last.

It felt almost like a last confession.

Of course, Innova sincerely hoped it was not.

All the same, there were some things he held back. He carefully avoided too much mention of Deddalo. Something within Innova balked at blaming his friend for the death of old Incline Barium, the false accusations surrounding Talos, and the betrayal of the city.

Perhaps his old companion was guilty of all these things. He would leave that decision to the barristers and judges.

At the end of his account, Lieutenant Colonel Grex Pointillo regarded him skeptically. With a gentle gesture, he guided him through the litter of bodies toward an open space in an adjoining chamber.

"You don't believe me, do you, Colonel?"

Pointillo seated himself on a low stool in the center of the room. Scrawled on the floor were elaborate lines of chalk and charcoal—something runic, perhaps, or perhaps a battle plan. From his prospect at the threshold of the chamber, Innova could not tell.

"I believe you in part," the colonel replied, "which is as much as I believe anyone these days."

"So you said."

"There's more, isn't there?" the colonel asked, lowering his eyes to the scribblings at his feet. "Some things you aren't telling."

"I confess it, sir. But as a prisoner in time of conflict, I reserve the right not to betray my comrades."

Pointillo's eyes met his. In the shadowy room, it was difficult to read the colonel's face.

"It would be odd," he said, "if Mount Nevermind's most abject traitor refused to betray his friends. Especially to save his own neck."

"But I never betrayed the city!" Innova protested.

"I said it would be odd" Pointillo replied. "Not that you were that traitor. Now tell me about the Paradise Machine."

So Innova told him.

About his inspiration in the offices of Scymnidus Carcharias—the continual motion toy at the heart of the device. He explained how locating the devices above the selfrefreshing pools of water in the upper levels of the city had assured that the motion was not only continual, but pretty near perpetual.

All of this was taken in by the colonel. Even though his eyes were cast upon the drawings at his feet, Grex Pointillo was listening—alertly, intuitively. After a while, he interrupted Innova's account.

"It may not work," he declared. "Something tells me it is basically, deeply flawed."

The machine? Innova was surprised at the strange and sudden hope that rose in him when the colonel spoke.

Was there a flaw somewhere in the making of the machine? A flaw that could be exploited—could set the defenses of Halion Khargos into chaos ?

"A flaw?" he asked aloud. "But where—"

"Oh, I was speaking of this battle plan," Pointillo said, leaning forward to trace a stubby finger along a black line at the edge of the drawing. "But I'll be bothered if I can figure it myself. What about the friction, Innova?"

Innova frowned. "I beg your pardon?"

"The friction. The Paradise Machine. I'm no engineer, but I do recall something about a Second Law in school. That all machines run down—"

"Except when they don't," Innova said, and told the colonel about the Graygem oil.

"Fascinating," Pointillo said, when Innova's story was ended. "And you say that this… Lucretius maintains no other earthly use for the substance?"

Innova nodded. "He should know. He's been down there his whole life."

Pointillo's gaze was steady on him now. The gnome officer arose from the short stool and approached him.

"Who is this Lucretius, Innovafertanimus?"

"Lucretius Climenole. Of the vanished clerical family."

Something in the colonel's countenance stirred. His gray eyes widened, and he laid a hand on Innova's shoulder.

"I'd like to meet this Lucretius Climenole," he murmured. "I have things to say to him, things to ask."

"This pneumalaise," Innova asked the colonel. "It's a product of Bone Order magic, is it not?"

"That's what they tell me," Grex Pointillo replied. "Though I also hear there's but one Bone Acolyte among 'em."

The two of them were bound down a long corridor, flanked with gnome guards. At the end of the tunnel a bright light fluttered—a bonfire, perhaps, or a vast assemblage of lamps.

Whatever it was, Innova reckoned, it was there he would see the heart of the army.

"And how," he asked the colonel, "do the Knights square the spreading of deadly disease with their vaunted honor?"

"Either their cleric is a man of great wretchedness," Pointillo replied bitterly, "or the rest of them have partaken of his poison. Whatever the case, there's a lot they need to square."

"I suppose it's to do with that Vision of theirs," Innova offered, and was surprised by the anger of the colonel's response.

"Convenient mysticism!" he snapped. "I heard it up and down in the prison topside, the Lily Knights rattling about 'Vision this' and 'Vision that/ But when it came down to it, they were doing exactly what they wanted, using a faint glimpse of some long-ago ritualized dream to justify whatever desire they had at the moment!"

"I see. But this Khargos, they say, moves in and out of the Vision at will."

"Even more convenient," Pointillo muttered. "The whole thing is like a manuscript in a foreign tongue or a dwarf-spirit delirium: You can't recall half of it once you're through it, so if you're weak enough… or desirous enough… you make what you remember fit what you want."

Pointillo suddenly stopped in mid-tunnel. Innova brushed against him, felt a tension passing through his captor.

"Sounds as though you're speaking from experience, Colonel," he observed.

Then cursed himself for the observing.

"More than you know, Innova," Grex Pointillo replied quietly. "We'd best hasten. I've a sergeant to disappoint."

The army of Generalissimo Glorius Peterloo, or what was left of it, had gathered in a vast rotunda that seemed to lie somewhere between levels, as though at one time excavators and engineers had decided there was room for further digging and then, confronted by impermeable rock, had changed their minds altogether.

It was this makeshift arena that Grex Pointillo and his confused captive and companion entered, walking straight into the midst of a tattered company.

A legion of gnome soldiers, three hundred strong, encircled a basket suspended from a huge crane. In the basket stood Sergeant Flurious Akimbo, his stubby arms waving passionately, afloat in waving wicker. All eyes were on the sergeant: some devoted, others horrified, for there seemed no middle ground in dealing with this prodigy.

Innova looked around. The army was considerably the worse for wear. The helmets issued by the militia were mostly missing, replaced by felt caps and kettles and, in one odd circumstance, a wicker basket. Some of the troops carried shields, but for the most part the seats of chairs, lids of barrels, and window shutters had been drafted to do new duty in an army ill-equipped and ill-tempered, banished to the outskirts of what was once their home.

In those outskirts, their imaginations, it seemed, had been unleashed. Bizarre inventions lay scattered on the floor of the chamber: an aquarium filled with brackish water, from which emanated two pulsing coils. A pair of pedal-operated vehicles, resembling velocipedes except for the fan blades set at a strange horizontal angle above the rider's seat. Mounds of disassembled metal parts, stacked haphazardly on the steam-powered handcarts that stood on the tracks that laced the chamber and the adjoining levels. Other gadgets seemed invented in desperation, bizarre things with tendrils, cogs, and levers the function of which Innova could not even imagine. Some of the devices throbbed with glistening membranes; in others, bone-colored, gelid ball bearings rolled in recessed sockets like blind eyes. They were probably weapons or vehicles, but in each of them was something uncannily evolved, like the deep-sea fish that retreat to the darkest depths of the ocean, transformed over generations into grotesques and monsters.

Sergeant Akimbo, it seemed, was concluding an emotional, fiery rallying speech. "Strike now!" he cried. "Strike as we have struck in the annals and levels of history, from this point at the nadir all the way to the uppermost level! Strike quickly, I urge you, before this traitor's damnable machine…"

The gesture toward the approaching Innova was menacing.

"…seals the city forever from our hands, and Mount Nevermind becomes but another Knight's encampment, but a bead on the necklace of the Dark Queen, a toothless cog in her vast, infernal machinery!"

Two hundred gnomes battered their makeshift shields in approval of the metaphor, spears and clubs and hydraulic wrenches rattling against cured leather, wood, and wicker in an angry drumming that echoed throughout the half-finished chamber.

Grex Pointillo raised his hand. The noise swept over him like an underground rumbling, and it was a long minute before he drew the eyes and ears of the troops he was supposed to command.

Innova swallowed hard. It did not look good. As the room fell into a grumbling quiet, it was apparent that power had slipped from the colonel's grasp and into the grasp of Flurious Akimbo.

"You'd best stand back, Colonel," the sergeant said gruffly. "I got no quarrel with officers, but the time has come when our thoughts must be bloody instead of… dainty and roundabout."

"So soon an ultimatum?" the colonel asked wearily.

Sergeant Akimbo frowned, replied bluntly. "We have waited in defeat and in darkness and in the lower levels far too long."

Silence fell on the vaulted room. Innova watched as Colonel Pointillo closed his eyes, seeming to travel to a space deep within his own being.

"Very well," he said at last. "If such is your intention, take your soldiers—those who choose to follow you, and none other—and mount your assault in any way you see fit. I shall not stand against you. If, on the other hand, you attempt to take my army, the bloody prospect will become blood in fact, and while I am standing, you will not seize command."

It made no sense. An abdication in the city's great time of need. Innova gaped at the colonel, who was lost somewhere in unfathomable thought.

All rules of strategy and command shouted that Colonel Grex Pointillo had shown an unforgivable weakness here, giving over his authority to a headstrong sergeant. Yet there was still strength in his bearing, as though a deeper force—perhaps the will of the mountain itself—sustained his deciding.

Not that I can choose, Innova thought. But if I could, despite all that I have been told…

My choice would lie with the Colonel.

So as Flurious Akimbo gathered his soldiers and a heavy gloom settled upon the gnome encampment, Innova did what he could to stay by the Commander of his choosing. Pointillo was quiet, almost meditative, as nearly ten score of his troopers prepared to embark.

"What… what do you plan to do, Colonel?" Innova asked.

But he received no answer.

Not until the ranks gathered about the spiraling stairwell at the center of the level, and under crisp orders from the rebellious sergeant, what remained of the Generalissimo's army was divided almost in half—some to a dangerous destination in the upper levels, the others to… to where?

Again Innova asked, and this time received a response.

"We are bound, you and I," Grex Pointillo said, "to the lowest levels. I can do nothing else but trust you, since all other trust is shearing away. This Lucretius Climenole is someone I have sought for years. He may know more about undoing this Paradise Machine than even he knows."