Dragons of Winter Night - Margaret Weis [138]
On that day an ancestor of Lord Gunthar woke up wondering sleepily if his son had fallen through the roof of the hen house again. This had happened only a few weeks before. The boy had been chasing a rooster.
“You take him down to the pond,” Gunthar’s ancestor told his wife sleepily, rolling over in bed and drawing the covers up over his head.
“I can’t!” she said drowsily. “The chimney’s smoking!”
It was then that both fully woke up, realizing that the smoke filling the house was not coming from the chimney and that the ungodly odor was not coming from the hen house.
Along with every other resident of the new colony, the two rushed outside, choking and gagging with the smell that grew worse by the minute. They could see nothing, however. The land was covered with a thick yellow smoke, redolent of eggs that had been sitting in the sun for three days.
Within hours, everyone in the colony was deathly sick from the smell. Packing up blankets and clothes, they headed for the beaches. Breathing the fresh salt breezes thankfully, they wondered if they could ever go back to their homes.
While discussing this and watching anxiously to see if the yellow cloud on the horizon might lift, the colonists were considerably startled to see what appeared to be an army of short, brown creatures stagger out of the smoke to fall almost lifeless at their feet.
The kindly people of Solamnia immediately went to the aid of the poor gnomes, and thus did the two races of people living on Sancrist meet.
The meeting of the gnomes and the knights turned out to be a friendly one. The Solamnic people had a high regard for four things: individual honor, the Code, the Measure, and technology. They were vastly impressed with the labor-saving devices the gnomes had invented at this time, which included the pulley, the shaft, the screw, and the gear.
It was during this first meeting that Mount Nevermind got its name as well.
The knights soon discovered that, while gnomes appeared to be related to the dwarves—being short and stocky—all similarity ended there. The gnomes were a skinny people with brown skin and pale white hair, highly nervous and hot-tempered. They spoke so rapidly that the knights at first thought they were speaking a foreign language. Instead, it turned out to be Common spoken at an accelerated pace. The reason for this became obvious when an elder made the mistake of asking the gnomes the name of their mountain.
Roughly translated, it went something like this: A Great, Huge, Tall Mound Made of Several Different Strata of Rock of Which We Have Identified Granite, Obsidian, Quartz With Traces of Other Rock We Are Still Working On, That Has Its Own Internal Heating System Which We Are Studying In Order to Copy Someday That Heats the Rock Up to Temperatures That Convert It Into Both Liquid and Gaseous States Which Occasionally Come to the Surface and Flow Down the Side of the Great, Huge, Tall Mound—
“Nevermind,” the elder said hastily.
Nevermind! The gnomes were impressed. To think that these humans could reduce something so gigantic and marvelous into something so simple was wonderful beyond belief. And so, the mountain was called Mount Nevermind from that day forth, to the vast relief of the gnomish Map-Makers Guild.
The knights on Sancrist and the gnomes lived in harmony after that, the knights bringing the gnomes any questions of a technological nature that needed solving, the gnomes providing a steady flood of new inventions.
When the dragon orb arrived, the knights needed to know how the thing worked. They gave it into the keeping of the gnomes, sending along two young knights to guard it. The thought that the orb might be magic did not occur to them.
5
Gnomeflingers.
Now, remember. No gnome living or dead ever in his life completed a sentence. The only way you get anywhere is to interrupt them. Don’t worry about being rude. They expect it.”
The old mage himself was interrupted by the appearance of a gnome dressed in long brown robes,