Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Intrigue

“Time now is some things should you hear, “ said Haddo, taking a swig from his container. A small bolt of lightning rolled out of the jar mouth and crackled down into his hood. “But nothing trust,” he continued, raising an admonishing finger. “Explain will I later.”

“Hopefully more than you’ve been explaining until now,” Karlini grumbled.

The floor shuddered. An earthquake? No, earthquakes didn’t make that kind of low, gritty, scraping sound, like something was rasping long stone fingernails along the underside of the foundation of a building. Except for the clatter of chairs being knocked about and the crashing of the upended table, which was now being rapidly demolished, and the huffing, grunting, and cursing of the dart players where they were rolling around beneath it on the floor, all other activity had hastily ground to a halt. The same long grating noise came again, this time even causing the dart players to pause; they’d stopped beating at each other with their table legs and were no longer gnawing on each other’s elbows, and their mouths were hanging thoughtfully open as they listened with the rest of the crowd, but - they were still moving. The table top slid off them and flat with a bang. They were moving, because -

The floor underneath them had started to revolve.

Suddenly the bartender was there, shooing the bystanders away with a sweeping gesture and a firm kick, reaching into the pile of hesitating fighters and coming up with the short nasty one held upside down by one furry foot. The bartender slung him backward along the floor toward the stair, sliding him after the rapidly thinning crowd. The short guy’s elvish friend scurried after him on hands and knees, trying to rapidly make headway and gain his feet at the same time. Another kick here and a shove there, and the hulking bartender had cleared the moving section of floor of the pieces of table and the upset chairs, and the few adjacent but still right-side-up chairs as well. Then the bartender knelt down and rapped on the floorboard in the center of the revolving circle.

The circle stopped turning and the screeching died. Rap, rap, whack came back at him from the underside. The bartender knocked a few more times and stepped back. The floorboards rotated another quarter turn, the rasp changed into more of a screech, and that section of floor swung open into the room.

Something moved in the passage beneath the trapdoor. Darkly gleaming and round, like the top of an upside-down cauldron, it couldn’t be alive … but it was lurching up into the air. The smaller top part was round like a cauldron, Karlini realized, and somewhere in its innards there might be a fully spherical shape about half his height, but as it rose into the room the mechanism - for it was certainly a mechanism - seemed so festooned with clanking, whirring, spinning, and huffing pieces of strange apparatus, arranged in so many intriguing lumps and modules, that there was in truth no telling what might have been inside.

Karlini was accustomed to seeing the latest small assemblies of illicit or contraband machinery that Max had dragged home, or whatever his latest target for tinkering happened to be, but he had never seen anything like this - such a conglomeration of cogwheels and jeweled gears, pulleys and linkages and belts, sprockets, cams, cables, and cranks, pneumatic bellows, and panels of lights. Gusts of vaporous air were emerging in spurts from the thing’s flared base; each new gust sent the contraption rising up farther from the floor, only to see it settle slowly back down again before the next gust puffed forth. The cauldron-lid on the top of the thing – no, it was really more of a dome - was faced around with what looked like a strip of hardy windows; it spun slowly around, eyeing the retreating crowd and then the bartender, who eyed it silently back. The dome continued to traverse the room. Finally, it caught sight of Karlini. “Eyeing” was exactly the right word to describe what it was doing, Karlini suddenly thought, as blinking back at him from the blackness behind the windows in the dome were two apparently organic eyes, equipped with the usual pupils and lids and shaded a delicate light green. Standing next to Karlini, Haddo waved at it.

The mechanism tilted slightly over on its left, a trio of vanes like metal grouper fins flapping in the midst of the gears, and another gust of vapor emerged from its rear. Of course, Karlini realized, what else? - the thing was making its way over to their table. It hopped over the last intervening set of chairs and drifted to a halt. Clanking again, three sucker-tipped struts slid out from its underside and it settled gingerly toward the floor. One at a time, the suckers slurped hold of the floorboards. The mechanism wobbled back and forth, getting its footing so to speak, and the whirring, clicking, clanking, and wheezing activity on its surface quieted down substantially. The dome tracked around again and faced Haddo, who was leaning back in his chair with his arms folded over his chest under his dark robe. A small hatch flopped open on one side of the dome and a tube topped with a flaring, tulip-petal horn rose out. It, too, pointed itself at Haddo. In tinny tones, the speaking tube said something totally unintelligible.

“Lower Pocklish not use,” said Haddo.

The tube blew air with a flatulent honk. Then, in a slightly less fractured pitch, it said. “Haddo, with you how is?”

Karlini tried to stifle a groan. It was bad enough trying to communicate with Haddo by himself - now he was supposed to deal simultaneously with another savant employing the same variant syntax? “With me all is fine, Favored One,” Haddo said to the tube.

The dome ground to the left again, to get a better view of Karlini. “This one Maximillian is not,” the machine said,

“You right are. Introduction to make is time. Great Karlini,” Haddo said, “Favored-of-the-Gods meet.”

“A pleasure,” said Karlini; making an abortive handshaking gesture toward the mechanism that left him waggling his fingers in midair.

“Hmph,” said the machine. The dome glanced around them. Karlini, glancing around, too, noticed that the crowd had thinned to virtually nothing. Two of the thickset short miner types were still hanging around at the top of the stairs, out of earshot from their table, obviously keeping watch. Across the room, the bartender nodded once at the machine and gave a thumbs-up, then ducked out of sight into the storeroom. “To me looks situation stable,” Haddo said.

The speaking tube snorted again and withdrew back under its hatch. A metallic clang came from deep in the machine, following by the snickt ing sounds of clamps unclamping and the squelch of screws unscrewing. The dome shook itself, then lifted up off the rest of the machine with a soft slurp and rotated back. A pair of pointed ears rose into sight, followed by a rag-mop of hair and a small elongated face. The ears swiveled to point at them, one at Haddo and one at Karlini, and the rest of the creature hoisted itself out of the interior onto a new perch on the rubberized seal of the dome’s mounting ledge. He was all of three feet tall, even shorter than Haddo. “Are you some kind of elf?” Karlini said.

“That’s one way to put it, I suppose,” Favored-of-the-Gods snapped. “and not the way I’d prefer it if you’d like to know the truth.”

“I see,” said Karlini, not seeing at all. “I beg your pardon. A gnome?”

“Now, wait just a minute here.” said Favored-of-the-Gods. “Wait just a damned minute!” He waved one hand in the air. “I am not a gnome! You got that?”

Karlini threw his own hands up, “Excuse me , I didn’t realize it was a slur.” The guy did look like a gnome, though, at least if he wasn’t some breed of miniature elf. Was there some newer, more politically correct way of referring to them?