Blood Ties (14 page)

“I don't believe you. I think you're lying. That's typical of your kind.”

“You know nothing of my kind,” said the gnome, sounding angrier than ever. “For starters, you obviously think my kind is as foolish as your kind. You seriously think you can trick me into doing what you want simply by challenging me? Have some respect for my intelligence. Just come out and ask me.”

“Fine,” I said in exasperation to the darkness. “Please help me track those creatures.”

“No!”
This was followed by a sustained peal of laughter.

The laughter continued and didn't seem to be ending anytime soon. So I called out over it, “If you don't lead me to them, then they have no chance of killing me. But if you take me to them, they might well tear me to shreds.”

That stopped him.

There followed what I can only describe as a thoughtful silence. Then he said, wheedlingly, “Do you promise you'll be killed?”

“I can't promise it, no,” I said. “But I should point out that the odds are sorely against me.”

“Not necessarily. That one could have killed you, and instead, he made the others leave you be.”

So he'd noticed that. The little cretin didn't miss a trick. I thought of spinning some elaborate tale to try to explain it, but it was quite obvious that the gnome was highly intelligent. I hated to do it, but the best approach to the situation was apparently going to be honesty. “I have reason to believe that one of those creatures is my brother.”

“Your brother? You mean your parents were insane enough to have more than one of you?”

“Apparently so. And I thought him dead for the longest time, yet he now seems to be as unrecognizable as any monstrosity that ever trod Albion. And I want to find out how he got like that and, if possible, retrieve him from it. The odds are long that I will accomplish it. Much likelier that I will die, either at his claws or those of one of his fellows.”

“And I'd be there to see it.”

“If you led me there, yes.”

Another thoughtful pause, but that one much shorter. “Very well.” And like a stone, he dropped from overhead. He stood there for a moment with his hands defiantly on his hips, as if daring me to suddenly pull out my pistol and shoot him down even though it would be counterproductive. When I did nothing save stand there, he made a dismissive snort and turned away from me. He crouched low to the ground, which certainly wasn't all that far for him, and I saw the edges of his overlarge nostrils flexing.

“This way,” he said decisively, pointing to the right.

I didn't even bother to ask him if he was sure. It would just have given him something else to make a contemptuous remark about.

I mounted up. Clash looked with what I can only term as suspicion toward the gnome. I couldn't exactly blame him. I snapped the reins, and the horse started after the gnome.

The gnome was meticulous, I'll give him that much. Every so often he would stop, sniff around, reaffirm that we were going in the right direction. Then he would nod approvingly, apparently satisfied, and we'd continue on our way.

He continued to provide a steady stream of insults that I continued not to respond to. Finally, though, I tired of his voice being the only thing taking up the air. “Are all gnomes as ‘attuned' to the world around you as you are?” I said.

That seemed to disrupt his flow of acrimony for a moment. Then he said, “What sort of stupid question is that?”

“I was just asking.”

“Pretending you care, are you?”

“I don't know if I'd go so far as to say ‘care.' I'm interested, that's all. I know nothing about gnomes and nothing about you other than that you're ill-tempered for no reason and that, if I'm to believe the rumors, you're statues come to life or some such.”

“
Hah!
That's how much you know, which is to say nothing. At least you're being consistent.”

“So tell me.”

“All right, fine. But only to make clear to you just how pig-ignorant you and your kind are.”

The gnome never looked back at me as he started to talk.

“We were first,” he said. “Before the balverines. Before the hobbes. Before you damned humans set your oversized feet on the land of Albion, there were my people. There were gnomes. We were ancient beyond your imagining.

“We were of the land, and we lived off it, and we knew every square inch of it. No forest, no desert, no stream, no island, nowhere in the whole of Albion did not have its share of gnome population.

“And then, slowly but surely, humanity rose. First a few, then more, spreading like ants at a feast. Your kind had no appreciation for nature, no appreciation for the wonders that Albion had to offer. You mined metals and turned them into weapons. You tapped into the core forces of magic and turned
that
into weapons. You had no interest in living in peace with the whole of Albion. Instead, you and yours were interested in only one thing: conflict.

“You rail against the horrors that plague you? You brought those all on yourself. Hobbes, balverines, every unholy creature in the land, all of them arose from your kind setting the delicate balance of Albion off-kilter.

“And we tried to warn you, we gnomes did. We kept telling humanity to get out. We tried to drive you away so that we could save the land. We shouted at you, we insulted you, we harassed you, and you wouldn't take the hint.
None of you would take the hint.
Instead . . .” And there was actual emotion in his voice besides anger. He sounded grief-stricken. “Instead, you hunted us like we were animals. You pursued us, you shot us, you treated us like pests and vermin, like creatures that had no right to live.

“Finally, only the best, the most clever of us had managed to survive, and we were not as easy pickings as our brethren. We were exceptional at hiding, nearly impossible to find if we so chose. We could likely have survived indefinitely.

“And then came a magic user, probably one of the most formidable who ever lived. His name is unknown, a closely guarded secret since names have power and he wasn't about to give that away. He took it upon himself to end the ‘menace' of the annoying gnomes in one stroke.”

“He cast a spell on you,” I said. It was the first time I had spoken since he had started his narrative. I wasn't able to help myself; I had just blurted it out when I realized.

My having done so might well have prompted the gnome to stop talking or instead go back to lobbing insults. Instead, he simply stopped walking, turned, and looked at me with a combination of bitterness and sorrow. I pulled lightly on the reins, bringing Clash to a halt.

“Yes,” said the gnome. “There were fifty of us remaining, and he transformed us into stone statues. He might well have had a simple death spell at his disposal and instead decided to be ‘merciful.' ” The gnome spat on the ground. “That for his ‘mercy.' We were paralyzed in stone forms, able to see the world but do nothing to interact with it. How was that merciful? You tell me.”

He genuinely seemed to want to know. I had no answer, so I simply shrugged and shook my head.

“You're silent. By choice,” said the gnome. “We had no choice. Generations of humans came and went. Industrialization arose, choking our beloved Albion to death by inches, a practice that continues to this day. And we watched, helplessly, hopelessly.

“And then, not long ago, some idiot broke the spell. He didn't even know he was doing it. But he did, and he released us, and we scattered to all corners of Albion. But our hold on our existence is tenuous; a single bullet is enough to return us to our paralyzed state. But not me,” said the gnome heatedly. “I'm not going to go back to being a stone statue, nursing my hatred for humanity even as I watch you walking about with all the freedom that my brethren and I have been denied for so long. That won't be me. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said, and I truly did.

He glared at me. “You're feeling sorry for me, aren't you? Don't you dare. I don't need your pity. I don't want your pity. If you keep looking at me with your pity, I'm going to wait until you're asleep, and I'll tear your throat out with my teeth, and I don't care if that means I can't keep tormenting you. Your type comes ten to the shilling.”

I couldn't entirely say that he was wrong. As absurd as it might sound, I suddenly felt ashamed on behalf of the entirety of my race.

But I wasn't going to say that. I reasoned that all the gnome would do was throw back into my face any show of guilt or contrition.

How bizarre it was that in telling me the story of his history, it would cause me to think of the annoying creature as something other than . . . well, an annoying creature.

The first step in committing all the greatest crimes of humanity typically involved dehumanizing your opponents. Easier to kill them or dispose of them if you felt they didn't have the same inherent right to live that you had. How much easier, of course, to dehumanize things when they're actually not human.

I had no reason to feel guilty. It wasn't as if I had ever shot one of the stupid things. I'd only met the one, and he was safe in my presence despite his best efforts to get me to plant a bullet between his eyes.

“Well,” the gnome said impatiently. “Do you have anything to say?”

I hesitated, unsure if anything would be accomplished by my saying what was going through my mind. Then, mentally, I shrugged. “I lost every member of my family, some to people possessing the same sort of evil mind-set that endorsed the wholesale slaughter of gnomes. I'd like to say that we've changed as a race, but we haven't. I'd like to say that we treat each other better than we treated the gnomes, but we don't. I'd like to say I'm sorry for what happened to you, but I doubt it will mean much of anything, especially considering I wasn't responsible for any of it. So I suppose the only thing I can say is that I know how you feel.”

The gnome appeared to be considering that; and then, in a surprisingly calm voice, he said, “You know how I kept saying you were a girl?”

“Yes.”

“I was wrong.”

“Well,” I said, feeling that at last we were getting somewhere, “thank you for—”

“You're a full-grown woman. If you were any more of a woman, your teats would be oozing milk right now. In fact, maybe they are. Give 'em a squeeze, see what happens. I think I even see spots. Might want to change your shirt.”

“—nothing,” I completed the thought. “Thank you for nothing.”

“Always glad to give it to you.”

At that point the notion of all the gnomes being transformed into inanimate, unspeaking statues didn't seem such a bad one.

I WASN'T AT ALL SURE WHAT I WAS EXPECTING
as we rode through the night and the following day in pursuit of my brother and his hordes. Perhaps a trail that would take us into the mountains, sorting through caves where they might have their den. Perhaps deeper and deeper into the forest, where they might have some manner of encampment. Sooner or later, I anticipated that we would have to leave the road we were following and track the creatures down to their hidden lair.

Yet the gnome continued to take us down the one path, never deviating. Once or twice I worked up the resolve to say, “Are you quite certain about this?” My reward for such uncertainty was invariably a torrent of abuse, so I stopped asking in short order.

Eventually, we did indeed depart the main road, heading off onto a side road that seemed specifically built to take us to a particular destination. By that I mean that the more popular and heavily traversed roads, such as the one we'd been on, was wider and you could see the evidence of the many people who used it. The road was more cracked, and there were potholes and such that had developed through the course of time.

The side road, by contrast, was narrower and not intended to be a through road to some major destination, such as another town. Instead, as near as I could determine, it had been specifically constructed to provide easy accessibility to travelers and visitors bound for a specific private destination on the other end.

The construction of such a road was typically reserved for the more well-to-do; only they could afford the expense of such an endeavor. But that led to an entirely new set of questions. Were these creatures on some sort of new invasion course? Or was someone of wealth providing a haven for them and, perhaps, even funding them?

I stopped several times along the way to attend to the needs of both the horse and myself insofar as water, food, and other necessities that living bodies required. I noticed that the gnome did not bother to partake of water from the flowing stream I had located. When I offered to share some of the meager bread and dried meat that I'd grabbed for supplies, he merely gave me another of his standard contemptuous looks.

“Do you not require sustenance of any sort? Do you sleep? Do you even breathe?” I asked at one point.

“My needs are my own and no concern of yours,” he said.

“Fine. Whatever you say.”

“If it were truly whatever I said, you'd have been long dead by now.”

I couldn't argue with that logic.

I was fully prepared for the notion that, at any point, the creatures—either led by my brother or operating independently of him—might assail me en route. I was not sanguine about the likelihood that I would survive such an encounter. On the other hand, I had little doubt the gnome would come through it just fine. As for Clash, his fate was entwined with mine. I had to hope that his future was not misplaced in my hand.