The Hammer Unfalls

Glim stared down the long path ahead. Indistinct, with mists pooling on either side.

He stepped off the path to test the ground, but there was none. An empty void fell away to either side, threatening to swallow him up.

Foolish steps will damn you, the wind whispered. A stiff breeze kicked up, blowing the mist away. Glim found himself walking a blade’s edge. One false step and he’d plummet to his death. The mists swirled back around him.

As he walked, pea shoots writhed along the thin path. He trampled the satiny purple leaves, expecting to smell the sweet scent. Instead, the vines crunched, scentless, beneath his footsteps.

Daryna the gardener emerged from the dim, holding a brass book. Or something of similar shape. A pane of glass, rippled with age, but clear enough to see the array of evenly spaced brass pegs beneath the glass sandwiched against a brass plate at the back. It had runes etched into it, but Glim could not read them.

The top of the device had a shallow funnel that pointed right at the middle. The bottom had a line of dividers separating the span of glass into channels. It reminded Glim of the compost bins. A line of identical cubes, with open faces he could look into, just like this.

“What is it?” Glim asked.

“A game,” she said. “The Elderkin made it. Watch.”

Daryna held a stone sphere between her fingers. She dropped it into the funnel. It hit a peg at the top and skittered to one side, then hit another peg and took a different path. With a series of metallic pinging sounds, it plinked and plunked its way to the bottom, coming to rest inside one of the buckets at the bottom.

“Now watch once more.”

She set another marble into the funnel. It fell into the maze of pegs, careening in an unpredictable path until it landed in a different pocket at the bottom.

“Marvelous!” Daryna exclaimed, with a zeal she’d never displayed until now. Her eyes shone with a sickly light.

“Let’s try again.”

The third stone fell. It’s descent slowed. Glim watched in fascination as it hit each lower peg, slanting to one side or another. It finally came to rest on top of the first.

Daryna’s face fell and she frowned. “That is where most of them go.”

“What is this device called?” Glim asked.

“It’s a head sorter.”

“A head sorter?”

“See for yourself.”

She held the device up so Glim could get a clear look at the bottom. The three stone marbles shuddered. Only they weren’t marbles at all, but heads. Tiny human heads. They opened their eyes and stared into his. Their mouths moved, thick with blood, emitting faint gurgles.

Glim cried out and shoved past Daryna, running down the misty trail.

“Don’t you want to play, Glim?’ she called at his back, before the mist swallowed her.

Orange light blossomed in the clouds before him. Muted flickers. The scent of char.

The mists burned away as Glim approached the fires. The flames hovered nearby, igniting the air. Heat assaulted him. He’d never felt its like.

A line of people stood before him, shuffling their feet as they waited. Glim heard the ringing sound of metal in the dark, a conking sound, and the rustle of something heavy falling off the side of the trail. Glim got closer, and saw a man at the front of the line start to run. Glim heard a sound like a sword leaving its scabbard. The man’s head popped from his shoulders and fell to one side. His body slid off the other side, plummeting into the void.

The next broke into a run. A young girl. Glim cried out in warning, but she too met the unseen blade in the dark. Her head spun through the air, looking at him as it fell into the chasm.

“Creation comes easy to us,” Master Willow said, emerging from the darkness. “Focus is harder. We must draw on Phyr, which does not come naturally to an Icer.”

“You mean Algidist, Master.”

His tutor’s face contorted. He laughed maniacally.

“Indeed I do. But we’re in Phyr’s domain now.”

Glim looked at his feet and saw that he’d been walking the curved edge of a giant sickle.

“There’s no ice here,” his tutor said. “It’s time to learn your final lesson.”

“What is that, Master?”

“Casting blades.”

Master Willow swept his hands. A golden sickle glinted in the firelight. It spun through the air, headed right for Glim, who reached instinctively for his sword. But he had no scabbard at his hip.

The sickle found the skin of Glim’s throat. Heat seared his neck. The world tilted around him. Glim saw himself crumple to the ground, decapitated, as his head arced through the air. He tried to touch his face, but his hands were on the ground with the rest of his body.

A hot wind enveloped him, and carried him towards a shallow brass funnel.

Drain isn’t the only thing a plyer should fear, it whispered, setting him gently down.

Glim tried to scream, but he no longer had lungs. He dropped out of the funnel and crashed into a brass cylinder. Below him, endless channels unfolded, each defined by the next row of pegs. His cheek glanced off of one, which sent him skittering sideways, only to crash into another peg.

He careened down the path, rushing to the bottom.

Two disembodied heads turned to watch his descent through unseeing eyes.

“Join us,” they moaned.

“That is where most of them go!” Daryna called out from far above.

Glim’s eyes flew open. He saw the wooden floor of his study above him, and could just see the stairway from the corner of his eye. He tried to look around for father, but his head would not respond to his mind’s commands. He tried to yank the covers away and sit up, but his arms did not move. For one interminable, frozen moment, panic overwhelmed him. Why couldn’t he move?

At last his limbs responded and he leapt out of his bed.

Glim patted his throat, relieved to find it attached to his head. His neck hurt, as if he’d been sleeping on it wrong.

The cooking fire had grown cold. The sunlight seemed strange. Overly bright, and the shadows wrong.

Æolia’s shriveled teats! He’d overslept.

Dressing quickly, Glim rushed to Master Willow’s tower. He tried to put the dream out of his mind. But fear clenched around his heart. He felt jittery.

Master Willow flung open the door, looking up in irritation. “This is becoming a pattern,” he said, leading Glim into the antechamber filled with shelves of Elderkin devices. “Shall I rearrange my days to suit yours?”

“I’m sorry, Master. I haven’t been sleeping well.”

“As you said yesterday. You need to stay ahead of this. Sleep, health… they all matter.” The Mage-at-Arms paused, staring at Glim in irritation. “What in the world is the matter now?”

Stay ahead of this, his tutor had said. At the word ‘head’ Glim shuddered and felt sick. He pictured his tutor’s maniacal sneer as he sent the sickle swirling towards Glim.

“I had a dream. About heads.”

“Well, that does sound dramatic!” His tutor’s voice dripped sarcasm. “Forgive my irritation. Let me fetch you a cot and some blankets so you can dream a bit more. Would you like me to sing you a lullabye?”

“It really disturbed me.”

Glim looked at his tutor, haunted by the dream. Master Willow’s frown retreated into something like curiosity.

“You typically are punctual, I’ll give you that. I can see you’re in no condition to ply right now. But you are not off the hook. Dreams are sometimes the last resort of logic. A puzzle you can’t pay attention to during the day. So you must find some sort of resolution. Figure out what the dream is trying to tell you.”

Glim nodded and started to reply. His words caught in his throat at the sight of something on a shelf just over Master Willow’s shoulder. Like a book of brass and glass, with an array of offset pegs in rows.

Master Willow followed his gaze to the shelf. He took the device from the shelf.

“Is this bothering you?”

“I saw it. In my dream.”

“You walk past this every day. You’ve seen it a hundred times. It’s nothing sinister. Overlooked details have a way or worming their way into our dreams.”

“What is it?”

“A passtime. It has no essentiæl value.”

“Can I try it?”

“Take it,” Master Willow said with a sigh. “It’s been up there for years taking up space. Don’t forget these.” He handed Glim a leather bag filled with some sort of beads. “Remember long-term mastery. You’ve been neglecting your Elderkin studies. Perhaps that’s what your dream is about.”

Glim took the device and beads with trembling hands. He walked as quickly as he dared to his study above the floor he’d been starting at, transfixed, minutes ago. Glim set the ‘head sorter’ onto his desk.

He opened the leather bag and took out a bead. Hard, polished wood. Not stone, as it had been in his dream. Yellowish white, stained by years.

Glim sat in his chair and placed a bead into the slot at the top. It rolled down the shallow funnel and, with a series of high-pitched twangs, bounced its way to the bottom.

It landed in the middle chamber. He counted and saw nine chambers in all: One at the center, and four to each side.

Glim dropped a second bead. It took a different path than the first, yet also fell into the middle chamber.

Daryna’s voice came into his mind: That is where most of them go! The memory of the dream rushed back, and for a moment Glim feared the beads had turned into tiny skulls.

He picked up a bead and held it, feeling the polished surface, and wondered whether it was carved from wood at all.

The thought disturbed him. Glim set the leather bag aside and pushed the chair away from the desk. Dream imagery flooded his thoughts: the clouds of fire. The sickle’s edge. The writhing of purple pea leaves under his feet.

Pea leaves.

Glim ran to the windowsill and peeked into the pot. Six glossy purple leaves had unfurled above the soil. Just like Master Willow had said: overlooked details work their way into dreams.

Glim looked at the budding pea vines with a thrill of satisfaction. Then at the head sorter with a mixture of fascination and dread. Had the dream been about neglecting his plants? His ignored Elderkin studies? Apprehension about plying?

The image of Master Willow laughing, and killing Glim with a gleaming sickle, disturbed Glim most of all. A voice from another dream chilled him. The warning that he’d fallen for the trap.

Whatever hidden sense had sent him down this path clamored inside him. He felt foolish. Hadn’t he always known it? No one could get him out of this trap but himself. How could Glim have grown so complacent? Master Willow was going to kill him. One way or another.

At last, Glim admitted the meaning of the dream to himself.

The time to leave Wohn-Grab had come.