“Better get ready,” Raegel said. Thehoss of the Committee-their old savior Wheeler-waved and shouted orders to his helpers.
Augers bit into the ice where the colored stakes had been driven. The drills were withdrawn and bronze pipes six inches wide were shoved into the holes. Bags of salt were cut open and the contents dumped into the tubes. When that was done, hoses were clamped to the tube and attached to the windlass powered machines. More hoses protruded from the other side of the devices, and teams of gnomes grabbed onto them, pointing them at the oncoming foe.
“Begin!” cried Wheeler.
Gangs of small, sturdy arms turned the cranks. The machines wheezed and burped. Wheeler called for more speed, and the gnomes raced around the crankshafts. Gradually, the hoses bellied. Mixun looked to Raegel for an explanation. Raegel just pointed.
The center team fired first. A jet of water burst from the open end of their hose, arcing off the plateau and striking the ice ahead of the pirates. The men withdrew a few steps, unsure what they were facing. Then one pirate doffed his hat and caught some of the stream in it.
He tasted it and laughed. “It’s just seawater!”
It wasn’t seawater, but salted fresh water. Raegel explained the gnomes’ plan as Wheeler had explained it to him. The many hollows in the ice had, over the past few days, filled with melted water. By adding salt, the gnomes made sure the water stayed liquid while pumping it out.
“What good will spraying water at them do?” Mixun said, despairing. He didn’t have long to find out.
Laughing, the pirates advanced. More gnome pumps spewed forth, and they focused on the front rank of pirates. The flow was hard, but not hard enough to knock the men down. It didn’t have to. The pirates came on a few paces and began to fall. They couldn’t walk on ice doused with salt water. They fell, got up, fell again, and kept falling. The archers tried to pick off the gnomes with arrows, but once they were drenched, their weapons were useless. Mixun let out a whoop.
“You’ve not seen anything yet!” declared Wheeler. “Special Super Pumps, on!”
Levers were thrown and the machines almost leaped off the ground. Hoses bulged, and the gnomes holding them down danced madly to keep their feet. Water roared out at many times the previous pressure. Now the pirates were washed away. A pair of streams hit one man and carried him several yards. He hit the ice sitting down and continued to slide until he shot off the end of the berg, into the sea. He soon had plenty of company. A dozen more pirates were sluiced into the ocean. Wheeler and the gnomes cheered.
Then things went wrong. The pump on the far right burst apart under the pressure, soaking everyone in the vicinity and sending fragments of jagged metal whizzing dangerously through the air. The gnomes on the third hose lost their grip, and the tube began thrashing about wildly, like a living thing. A portion of its powerful stream hit Mixun in the chest and knocked him down bereft of breath. Raegel helped him stand.
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!”