The Hammer Unfalls

4.65 Minor Detour

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“No followers,” he said to his father at the gate the next morning. “They won’t be able to keep up, and I don’t want distractions.”

His father sighed and jerked his head. Two guards stepped out of the trees.

Glim shrugged his pack tight. The last time he’d left Wohn-Grab, he’d had no eyes on him, and no idea what was to come. This time he had two guards, his father, Garrick, and Gyda all watching him head down the path. Their eyes at his back made Glim feel even more alone once he’d crested the slope and left their view.

With the sparkling of the ice at sunrise and the relatively warm currents of breeze from time to time, the walk might have been pleasant—if not for the thoughts churning inside of Glim as he walked. Past memories of this very walk, and the violence that had ensued. Glim had imagined beasts in every shadow for months afterward.

He thought of Ryn shouting at the guards at the compost bins to attack that sludge with all their might. He hadn’t known her then. Glim smiled as he remembered her unorthodox methods.

Glim thought of linden trees blooming, and the lurch of the shuttle as it dropped down the mountain, and scrubbing vials of muscheron chicane. It all became a barrage of imagery. So he stopped and took deep breaths. Once he’d regained focus, Glim thought of the beetles. Goats in their pens. Wind in the branches. The connection between all things, as the book in the library had suggested to him. In that mindset, Glim noticed a puff of breath in the shallows of the path ahead.

The hinterjacks had found him.

Glim let his senses wander. He sought warmth and water. The spark of life. He couldn’t feel them explicitly, or see them. But he had an awareness of forms moving around him. Curious, and perhaps… hungry?

But that didn’t fit. Hunger alone would not drive a wild beast to death at the hands of a much larger foe. Two human foes, even, in the case of the last confrontation. And how had Master Willow been so certain of the hinterjack’s positions? Glim had overlooked something.

The beetles came into his mind, and the vision he’d had of little beads of silver essentiæ shuffling around beneath the dead wood and detritus of the forest floor. The connection he imagined between them.

That’s it! It all clicked. The hinterjacks weren’t drawn by the possibility of meat. They were drawn somehow by his essentiæ.

Glim breathed deep and settled himself. He tried to replace his apprehension with curiosity.

“Fine day, isn’t it?” he said, as a hinterjack raised its head to peer at him. It blinked and rose, skittish.

Keeping to his path, Glim kept talking with his new companion, who padded along a parallel path. Others joined the first, silently stalking him as he walked.

“And who are your friends?” Glim nodded at them, and the hinterjacks scurried back, only to immediately return to their measured distance.

He heard a low growl behind him. Glim drew himself up and turned slightly. “Don’t make me freeze your paws. You’ll be scrambling around for an hour and looking like an idiot.” Glim tossed a sphere of ice over his shoulder and heard his hidden stalker scurry back. “And you there. You’re about to get a mouthful of ice if you don’t show some manners.”

At a certain point, the jackals stopped following him, but watched him pull away from them. He heard yips in the distance. “Ahh yes,” Glim called to them. “Return to your pups.” The hinterjacks faded into the shadows.

He came upon the tower just after noon. Smaller than he remembered. He pressed the buttons outside the door just as Ryn had shown him and it swung inward. The now-familiar smell of old wood, oil, and ice hit his nose. Glim set his pack down on the table and looked around the small room. The panel of flickering lights remained as he’d left it, with all of the pipes in alignment.

He sat and ate his lunch, thinking about the recent confrontation. Or lack thereof. It had gone differently this time, which pleased Glim, but it didn’t quite make sense. Last time, the hinterjacks had rushed to attack. This time they’d been wary. He hadn’t grown much, and there was only one of him instead of he and Master Willow.

Glim walked up the stairs and came to a floor with windows looking out over the path he’d just walked. He could see and hear the hinterjacks from here, the little pups yipping and tumbling around their mother in the snow. Their antics amused him. Glim watched a long time, chewing on his dried apples and hardbread.

Something about the trail seemed strange. Had they walked this way last time? Glim checked the map, then looked back down.

They hadn’t. Master Willow had gone out of his way, and taken them right next to the hinterjack’s burrow. Near the pups. No wonder the mothers had attacked!

Glim felt his fists tighten. Once again, he’d fallen prey to his tutor’s agenda.

--------------- ~~~ *** ~~~ ---------------

As he often did at Wohn-Grab, Glim sought solace in the machines of the Elderkin here in the tower. He tried to forget his tutor’s treachery and walked down the stairs into the bottom floors of the tower.

The equipment here seemed much less intimidating than what lay beneath Wohn-Grab. A few banks of panels, some gears, and a few runs of pipe.

What had Master Willow been looking for?

The more he looked around, and saw the undisturbed dust on the floor, Glim decided the man hadn’t been looking for anything. He’d just wanted to put Glim in his place with the hinterjack confrontation.

But perhaps Glim could find something useful.

He walked around the small chamber. As far as Glim could tell, the tower existed merely as a junction between various pipe sources. Heat being the primary one. The chamber felt so warm that he took off his cloak. He followed the line of the heat pipe with his eye, and pictured it extending northward over the forbidding mountains. It still struck him as odd that heat came from there. Volcanoes, Ryn had said.

One of the larger panels had a smooth wall that Glim had come to associate with hidden cabinets. He prodded it and a hinged door swing out. To his pleasant surprise, the tools he’d been hoping to find were there. A full set of “twisters,” as he’d come to call them.

With elation, Glim stuffed the tools into his pack. They clanked together, and weighed the pack down tremendously, but he didn’t mind. He’d gladly bear the weight.

--------------- ~~~ *** ~~~ ---------------

Stowing his bedroll, Glim set out from the tower as soon as he had enough light to see. The return trip would be easier, because it was mostly downhill. And with his newfound powers of falling gracefully, Glim could go even faster.

He made a game of it. Glim leaned out the tower window and leapt into the air. He landed on a soft pile of snow.

Running down the trail, Glim jumped and slid along icy ramps that appeared at his feet, careening down the mountainside like a marble in the Elderkin head sorter, but determining his own path on the way down. The game invigorated him. Warm winds buoyed his spirits, already high from the find in the tower, and his success with the hinterjacks. Glim felt light, and free, for perhaps the first time.

It all went well until, just when the watchfires of Wohn-Grab came into sight against the dim morning sky, Glim misjudged an icy shelf for solid ground. He fell right through the thin crust and into a ravine, where he caught himself in a hastily conjured pile of snow. Close one.

That’s enough for now.

To get his bearings, Glim looked around the dim ravine he’d fallen into. He’d moved so fast down the mountain that daylight had not caught up to him. Glim pulled a torch from his pack, struck a firesteel, and lit it.

The pitch caught immediately, releasing clouds of black smoke that choked him. The torch sputtered and the soot billowed away. Glim turned from side to side, checking out the rift that extended down the mountainside. A sea of dewdrops reflected back at him like stars in a darkening sky.

So beautiful. But, wrong somehow. It took him a moment to realize that dew shouldn't appear here among the ice. Glim moved his light closer, to get a better look at the nearest dew drops.

They swiveled and shrank from the light. The snow shook and sloughed away as a spider-like creature erupted from the ground.

Snowcrabs. Those weren't dew drops in the distance, but the reflected light from a thousand eyes.

Limbs jangled awkwardly, clawing for purchase on the slick ice with scraping sounds. Claws the size of his head snapped open as the creature skittered towards him. Glim unsheathed his sword and swung, cracking the pinchers that could crush his skull with ease. A shower of white goo spurted from its hollow limbs.

Piles of snow shuddered in all directions around him. Massive crabs, easily the size of his torso, scritched the ice with sword-point legs. They moved fast, and unpredictably, like broken marionettes. A second or two from now, he'd be overwhelmed and overcome. He’d watch, alive and screaming, as they plundered his insides for warm meat.

He looked up at the ridge he’d fallen from. Without thinking it through, Glim reacted. He summoned an ice shard at his feet, a massive one, hoping to climb it to safety. Instead, it launched him into the air. Glim dropped his torch and grasped frantically for some sort of hold. He clung to a tree root and scrambled to his feet, watching the skittering throng rushing below him through the ravine.

The warm winds shifted, bringing the smell of goat to his nose. He watched with mounting panic as the flood of crabs headed for Wohn-Grab.