Once the nim passed, she opened her eyes, checking to see how close they were getting to poor Slobad. She couldn’t see the goblin. The elf was sure he couldn’t have gotten to the next chimney already, but there was no sign of battle in the ranks of the nim. Then, in the distance, she saw ripples in the muck. Slobad emerged from beneath the Dross just ahead of the nim army. The goblin screamed and waded as fast as he could away from the nim.
Glissa couldn’t wait any longer. If she didn’t attack them now, the nim would reach Slobad and tear him apart. No one seemed to be controlling them. She would just have to fight.
“Idiots!” came a voice from behind Glissa. “She’s back here! Turn around, now!”
Glissa turned.
“I’m guessing you weren’t talking to me,” she snarled.
He was a gangly man nearly as tall as the shambling nim, and had the same dull purple skin half-covered in Dross. Like the nim, the man’s mouth was like a gash across his face, but he lacked the exoskeleton and gas spouts of the nim. His features were almost humanoid-not human but not nim … at least not yet. Glissa could see the spark of intelligence in his eyes. It looked as if she had found the controller.
“Return!” he shouted.
Glissa glanced behind her. The nim turned around and began now slogging their way back toward her.
“I know just how long it will take them to get back here,” she said. “Call them off and tell me why you’re after us if you don’t want to die.”
The man looked over her shoulder and smirked. Glissa could hear the slosh of nim behind her.
“Who sent you?” she screamed. “Tell me or die.”
“It matters not what you do to me,” he said. His speech was slurred, as if his misshapen mouth couldn’t form the words correctly. “You’re as good as dead.”
“So are you!” cried Glissa. She swung her sword with both hands. The blade caught the controller just below his shoulder, slicing through his upper arm on its way into the man’s neck. The silver blade cut through vertebrae just as easily as it had cut into the iron chimney. The controller stood for a moment, the smirk frozen on his face, before his head rolled off to the side and he crumpled into the Dross.
Glissa jumped up onto the chimney again, grabbing the notches she had made and scrambling back up to her perch. She didn’t know what the nim would do, but if they were truly mindless, they should continue past her, following their last orders. If not, the controller was right and she was as good as dead.
Glissa tensed and waited for the front line to get to her. They didn’t seem to be paying any attention to her. Their eyes were locked forward. She worried that the nim might stop when they reached their dead master’s body, but the corpse had all but disappeared under the Dross, and the horde continued on past the chimney, trampling him deeper into the muck.
She clung to the chimney until the nim had disappeared into the swirling haze, then dropped down again and ran off to find Slobad. He was standing where he had fallen, wiping muck off his pack.
“What happened, huh?” he asked. “Where did nim go? They coming back? You kill them? Huh?”
“They’re returning,” said Glissa, “just as they were told.”
She told Slobad about the controller and about the nim’s mindless march into the haze. The goblin looked horrible. The Dross hung off him like scabby skin. As she spoke, pieces fell off and plopped into the swamp.
“What happened to you?” she asked. “Did you fall?”
Slobad gave up on cleaning his pack. “Yes,” he said. His eyes gleamed, and a smile spread across his face. “Something big under here. Big and metal. Tripped over leg or something, huh? Fell on top. Something very big. Rolled off into Dross, huh? Think it some big machine, huh?”
“Machine? With legs? Like a leveler?” Her first instinct was to destroy it, but an idea occurred to her. “If it’s a leveler, and you can fix it, could we ride it through this?”
“Slobad can fix anything, huh?” said the goblin. “Anything. Fix Raksha’s doors. Fix cult’s boiler. Take apart leveler once-”
“Okay, okay,” said Glissa. “Let’s see what you found.” She reached beneath the Dross and felt around, then grabbed and lifted. With a huge effort, she pulled her find from the Dross. It looked like a metal boot at least two feet long from toe to heel, and it seemed to be attached to an enormous leg.
Slobad gasped, and Glissa dropped the boot. “What?” she cried. “What’s wrong?” She spun around to see if the nim were coming back, but the haze was still. When Glissa looked at Slobad, she thought the goblin was going to explode.
“What?” she asked again.
“I’ve heard stories,” said Slobad, “but never believed them. Myths. Not real. Always thought they just stories like Krark’s journey into Mother’s Womb. But we found one. We found one.” He was practically jumping out of the Dross, he was so happy.
“What?” screamed Glissa.
“Come quickly,” said Slobad. “We pull from Dross.”
Slobad slogged to the nearby chimney and opened his pack. He pulled out some leather rope and a metal tool with a series of wheels and a handle. He tried to screw one end into the chimney but couldn’t get it to go in. Glissa scanned the haze, looking for any sign of attack, but Slobad motioned for her to join him. She trudged through the muck to his side. The goblin screwed the contraption into a hole and looped the rope through the wheels. He gave one end of the rope to Glissa.
“Tie around foot,” he said. “Go, go. Hurry up, crazy elf, before nim come back.”
“Foot?” asked Glissa. She shook her head and trudged back into the Dross. She glanced around again, still wondering if the nim would ever return to look for their master, then worked on pulling the boot back up. She tied the rope around the boot, glanced around one more time, and headed back to the chimney. Slobad was trying to turn a crank, but it wouldn’t budge.
Glissa took over for him. The rope went taut as she strained at the handle. She feared the rope would break, but then the handle began turning more easily and the rope started to move. She looked back and saw a large metal object coming from the Dross. It’s a giant, thought Glissa. She could see a huge barrel chest, arms, legs, and a squat head coming toward them. As the Dross began to slip off the body, Glissa saw it was all made of metal.
“What the flare is that?” she asked.
“A golem,” said Slobad.
CHAPTER 9
Glissa hardly got any sleep that night. After hauling the massive golem into the chimney, she had trudged back through the Dross to make sure once and for all that the nim weren’t going to return. When she got back, Slobad had the golem’s chest open and had practically crawled inside. With his fire tube burning in one hand, the goblin peered into the chest cavity, making a racket with his tools.
The interior of the chimney was brighter than Glissa would have imagined. The purple energy that streamed through the walls of the chimney provided an eerie glow that illuminated the entire chamber. With light coming from all around her, Glissa cast no shadow at all inside. The structure was completely hollow except for a central tube that ran all the way to the top of the chimney. She could see no smoke, so she assumed it must travel through the tube.
Strands of the same cable she had seen connecting the various chimneys together also ran from the exterior walls to the central tube. Beads of energy ran along these cables, always going in the same direction-in toward the central shaft. As Glissa watched the strands, she saw some of the energy coursing along the walls transfer onto a cable and run across to the tube.
“I don’t think we should stay inside these chimneys too long,” she said to Slobad, but the goblin merely grunted in response. Glissa didn’t know what these chimneys did, but they were obviously spewing something toxic into the air outside. Was Slobad right? Did the Dross itself create the nim from humans? That controller certainly wasn’t human any longer. Perhaps he never had been.