Brian Murphy - The Search For Magic

A second pump exploded, and the gnomes abandoned the rest. They ran for their lives, shouting “Hydrodynamics! Hydrodynamics!” over and over as they fled. Mixun decided Hydrodynamics must be the patron deity of the gnomes.

Sodden and shaking, the remaining pirates managed to stand. Seeing only Raegel and Mixun opposing them, they uttered fearsome oaths and vowed revenge. They slopped their way back to their ropes and climbed down to their ship. Signal flags fluttered from the lugger’s mast. More pennants appeared on the pirate flagship’s yards, and the fleet cracked on sail. At first the men hoped the pirates were departing, but this was not so. The blue-sheeted ships crossed behind the drifting iceberg and forged ahead.

“They’re making for Nevermind South,” Mixun said.

“How do you know?”

“It’s the only place on the floe with a beach. Their scouts must have seen it. They tried to surprise us by landing on the tail here, but since that’s failed, they’re going for the jugular.”

Mixun’s grim metaphor seemed apt. He gripped his makeshift spear, hands tingling for a fight. How he missed the clash and clang of deathly combat!

He stood up to strike a martial pose, slipped on the watery ice, and fell flat on his face.

The sky was heavy and darkening, threatening to storm, but the wind favored the Enstar pirates, and by the time Mixun and Raegel managed to stumble back to the village, it was all over. Scores of longboats were in the water, each deeply laden with fierce buccaneers. The gnomes had no defense to offer.

Raegel was all for hiding in the ice, but Mixun took his comrade by the ear and dragged him forward to help defend the gnomes. Here was his chance to perish gloriously in action.

All that really happened was his spear was taken away from him while he was picking himself up off the ice. Raegel sat down, crossed his legs, and waited what would be. Pirates forced the angry Mixun to kneel in a puddle of cold water, a brace of sharp swords at his back.

A stout, gorgeously dressed fellow wearing a gilded breastplate and a stolen Solamnic helm clumped ashore. As the most grandly dressed buccaneer in sight, they took him to be the pirate chieftain. He looked over the assembled mass of gnomes and scowled.

“Is this all?” he boomed. No one answered. “Who commands here?”

The Chief Designer elbowed his way to the forefront, hands still full of drawings and computations. He began his stupendously long name, but the master pirate snarled and cut him short. Mixun, for one, was grateful.

“I am Artagor, son of Artavash,” the pirate said. “Consider yourselves taken. What loot have you?”

“Loot?” said the Chief Designer.

“Gold, steel, gems, silks, furs, strong drink! Where is it?”

“We have no gold or gems, O Son of Artavash. We have some steel tools, which we need, but we do have some furs about somewhere. If you’re cold, we do have a special warming lotion-”

“Silence!” He drew a long, curved cutlass and laid the blade on the Chief Designer’s shoulder. “Rile me, and I’ll have your head.”

“If you need a head, mine has a larger cranial capacity,” said the gnome on the Chief Designer’s left.

“Rubbish and rot!” said the gnome behind him. “My cranial dimensions are much greater than yours, plus I have the Wingerish Fever!”

Like a match to tinder, the claim to having the biggest head spread through the gnomes until all one thousand of them were shouting and waving calipers, trying to prove that they had the largest skull around. Artagor roared impotently for quiet. He might as well have shouted at a waterfall.

He raised his ugly blade to strike down the Chief Designer. Before he could do so, Mixun evaded his distracted guards and caught the pirate chiefs wrist.

“Don’t do that,” he said mildly.

Artagor glared and tried to free his hand. To his surprise, the smaller man’s grip was hard to break. When a trio of sailors closed in to aid their chief, Mixun released him.

For all his previous bluster, Artagor held his temper in check and said, “Who are you, sirrah? I take you for a man of arms. You’re not with these mad tinkers, are you?”

“No indeed,” said Mixun. “They’re with me.”

Raegel gnawed his lip and said nothing. He’d worked with Mixun long enough to know when his partner had a scheme working.

Artagor laid the dull side of his cutlass on his shoulder. “Explain yourself, and be quick.”

“I am Mixundantalus of Sanction, and this is my colleague, Count Raegel.” The redhead gave the pirate chief a jaunty nod. “We hired these gnomes. They work for us.”

“Doin’ what?”

“Harvesting ice, of course.”

Artagor looked from Mixun to the mob of gnomes arrayed around them. The little folk were quieter than they ever had been, standing and watching the humans with clear, unblinking eyes-a thousand pairs. Artagor tugged at his beard.

“It changes nothing,” the pirate declared, unnerved by the gnomes sudden, quiet attention. “You’re all my prisoners. I want all your valuables gathered here”- he stabbed the ice with the point of his blade- “within the hour. You two will be my guarantees. I want no gnomish nonsense!”

“Of course not,” said Raegel, standing at last. “Take what you will, excellent Artagor.”

The pirates ransacked Nevermind South with brisk, professional thoroughness. The results were disappointing. A small heap of metal trinkets, mostly steel, grew in front of the impatient chief. As time passed and the pile did not progress, he began to roar again.

“What’s this?” he bellowed, gesturing to the modest haul of swag. “All you tinkers, and this is all the metal you’ve got? And you, from Sanction-if you’re the paymaster, where’s your pay chest?”

“The gnomes are working on account,” Raegel said smoothly. “They’re to be paid off when we reach our destination.”

“Which is where?”

Mixun opened his mouth, so Raegel let him answer. “Sancrist Isle, of course.”

A pirate wearing a mate’s cap ran up. “That’s all, captain. There’s no more to find.”

Artagor shoved the young buccaneer away roughly.

“They’ve hidden their loot!” he declared. “I’ll have it out of them, one way or t’other!”

Torture on his mind, he ordered a fire laid. The pirates tried, but there was no dry wood or tinder on the iceberg, and the ice beneath their feet was too cold and wet to allow a flame anyway. As Artagor consulted his mental repertoire of brutality, lightning flashed overhead.

Slipper sidled up to Mixun. “Sir,” he whispered. Mixun discreetly waved the gnome aside. “Sir,” said Slipper, more insistently.

“What is it? Can’t you see we’re all in peril?”

“It’s going to storm, sir.”

“I can see that!”

More lightning crackled overhead. The wind shifted direction, died, then started again from the opposite side of the compass.

“There’s going to be a cyclone,” Slipper muttered.

Mixun shot a look at the smallest of the gnomes. “Are you sure?”

“Barometric readings do not lie.”

As usual, Mixun had no idea what Slipper was talking about, but he believed him. The wind was increasing in strength out of the southwest. It was so balmy the ice around them began to visibly soften and lose its shape. Artagor was shouting for wood to build a pair of frames. Mixun understood he intended to hang him and Raegel by their feet and question them about hidden treasure.

Thunder boomed. The first fat drops of rain landed, followed quickly by an almost sideways sheet of wind-driven rain.

Signal flags whipped from the masts of every pirate ship. The lesser captains pleaded with Artagor to allow them to withdraw, lest the storm drive them into the ice island.