The Hammer Unfalls

4.73 Goose, Goose, Duck!

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“Cut it out,” Glim mumbled to no one, batting at the air. He jerked awake when the floor rumbled again.

He noticed many things at once. His neck ached. His hunger had returned. He’d warmed up. The room looked exactly as it had when he’d laid down. Yet it felt different. Filled with a vibration that made the tangled mass of vines blur in his sight.

Glim scrambled to his feet, grabbed his pack and his newfound staff, and took the tower stairs as quickly as he could. With an urgent need for visibility, he stopped at the guard room, where he flipped a lever next to one of the arrow slits. Glim pressed his face against the angled wall and looked out.

Morning sun bathed the cavern in a diffuse, cool light. In the center, Certe sat, legs crossed beneath him. Eyes closed, his face serene, his lungs expanded with a massive intake of breath that made his nostrils flare.

A few minutes later, Certe pursed his lips. A low vibration filled the cavern, causing the tower to tremble.

“Ommmmmmmm….” the giant hummed, exhaling slowly. How long the hum would last, Glim would never find out, because Certe cracked one eye open and looked right at Glim. The giant stopped meditating. “I see you have awakened.”

“Yes! Good morning to you, Mister Certe!” he yelled into the cavern.

“I can hear you without the yelling. Though, if it makes you feel better to do so, I won’t stop you.”

“I’ll come down there.”

Glim ran up to the roof, squeezed through the doorway, and over to the wall, cinching his blanket around him. Once he reached the floor, and walked across the buckled ice, Glim truly realized the scale of the giant. The broken ice rose and fell in frozen waves as tall as Glim himself. Which meant the giant was even larger than he’d seemed from the tower. Reaching the other side of the cavern, and looking up at Certe’s clear crystalline eyes, Glim wondered why he’d been in such a hurry. He had nothing new to say.

Fortunately, Certe did.

“Let us begin again. I am Certe, or Father Certe as some once called me. You are Glim. I do not understand you, and you do not understand me. Telling you my story would consume every grain of sand in the hourglass of your life’s span. And you do not know what I want to know. You have no way to harm me. And, although I am weak, I could crush you with a breath. It would be rude of me to do so, like a whale shunning the plankton that gives it life. So, assuming neither of us wants that, there is but one thing left to do.”

“What is that?”

“Play a game.”

Glim started at Certe, who chuckled. “The question game is a tradition as old as society itself. When one is at an impasse as we are.”

The two stared at each other, until Glim shifted on his feet. “Um, okay, Father Certe. I will start. What is a whale?”

“The largest creature in the sea.”

“Oh. I have never seen the sea until yesterday. I have seen a few fish, though, in the tanks. Is a whale bigger?”

“That depends on how big the fish were.” Certe laughed at his joke far more than Glim felt was appropriate, but he joined in the laughter out of politeness. “But that’s not how the question game works. We don’t just ask each other questions. That would be a conversation.”

“How does it work?”

Certe blinked in surprise. “I think of something, and you guess what it is in as few questions as you can.”

“I… see,” Glim said, in the tone that meant he did not see at all. “Is it a whale?’

“I haven’t thought of anything yet! Of course, now all I can picture is a whale.”

“So, did I win?”

The giant narrowed his eyes. “You are quite clever. No. I have thought of something. Go ahead and ask your questions.”

“Is it a tree?’

“No.”

“What color is it?”

“That’s the wrong sort of question. I can only answer yes or no.”

“Oh, sorry. Is it blue?”

“No.”

“Is it red?”

“No.”

“Is it a stewpot?”

“No.”

“Does it make noise?”

Certe frowned. “Have you never played this game before? You seem smarter than this. Let’s switch. You think of something, and I will guess it. Then you’ll see how the game works.”

Glim thought back to the discovery of the peas and smiled. “I have something in mind.”

Certe studied Glim’s face intently.

“Does it live?”

“Yes.”

“Is it an animal?”

“No.”

“Is it a monocot?”

Glim scrunched up his face. “A what?”

“Do its veins run parallel? As opposed to branching out.”

“Um, the veins branch out, I guess.”

“Is it a perennial?”

“I… Certe, I don’t know what that is.”

“That is understandable. Does it die and re-emerge every year, like a weed, or does it survive and grow, like a tree?”

“It dies every year.”

“Does it have alternate branching?”

“It doesn’t have branches.”

Certe smiled at some private joke. “We’ll skip that one. Does it have irregular flowers?”

Glim slumped onto the wall and sighed. “I don’t know.”

Certe stopped asking questions and inclined his head in a gesture Glim assumed was meant to express sympathy.

“You’ll get used to it soon,” the giant said.

“Used to what?’

“Me. Now then. It seems as though you weren’t taught the natural sciences.”

“What are sciences?”

Certe blinked, which Glim was starting to realize meant shock. Furthermore, Glim had the distinct feeling that Certe’s own shock came as a shock to Certe. Whatever concepts the giant had in mind clearly did not match Glim’s life.

“You have the air of an educated man,” Certe said. “Yet you’re unfamiliar with the sciences?”

“What does one look like? Maybe I just have a different name for it than you do.”

Certe’s brow furrowed. “Glim, I am starting to become concerned.”

“About what?”

“About you. You’re clearly not part of the Faction of Symmetry. I don’t even think you are part of this war.”

“This… war?”

“Of course. Surely you’re aware. You are here, after all. You can’t miss it.”

“There is no war.”

Certe’s brow furrowed even more deeply, then his face cleared. “I must hand it to you. Whatever you’ve done to me is puzzling beyond reason. It completely defies all logic. Which is an impressive feat, even if I am on the wrong end of it. I suppose you intend to keep me distracted by truthful nonsense. How long have you been planning this? It must have been decades.”

Glim started to speak, but Certe beat him to it. “I know. I can tell by your eyes. You don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“I do not wish you any harm. And,” Glim’s voice cracked, “I hope you intend me none.”

“My argument is not with you, Glim. Rest your fears.”

“Who is your argument with, then?”

“Just because I trust your words does not mean I have abandoned all caution. I’ll just have to keep my thoughts to myself. I hope you understand.”

Glim’s voice cracked even more as it rose. “I don’t! I have no idea what is happening!”

“Then let us discover it together. Tell me what you do know.”

There was a time when Glim would have blurted out whatever came to mind without a care. But Ryn had cured him of that. Glim still had no idea where the strange vine had come from, who wanted him here, or why. Not to mention his sudden ability to ply phyr.

And, oh yeah, let’s not forget about the giant freaking giant talking about a war.

What would Ryn have advised him to do? This giant apparently had a gift for detecting lies.

“Certe, I am very nervous right now. I don’t know you. I had no reason to lie to you before you told me about this war. I still do not wish to lie to you. But I also fear telling you anything that will anger you.”

“Fortunately for you, I am slow to anger. Very slow indeed. Though I admit, recent events do have me irate.” He took a slow breath, which took much longer than Glim expected it to. “The temperature is helping somewhat.”

“That’s unlikely to change any time soon,” Glim said wryly.

“And yet, I am still weak. Unfathomably so. There is no poison in all of Æronthrall that could do this. It must be something about this place. If only I could figure out what. A very clever trap, to be sure.”

“The essentiæ are strange here.”

Certe’s pupils widened a hair’s width at this news. Given the giant’s clear sense of self-control and acumen, the slight reaction spoke volumes to Glim. Warning bells rang in his mind as loudly as the silver spires had done the day before.

“How do you mean?”

Glim stuck as close to the truth as he could. “These columns here gave off a strange light, and hummed loudly, before the ice cracked and you woke up.”

“And why do you think that happened?”

“I think I set it off. I walked right over your face. I didn’t know you were here. I thought you were a painting. When I saw you start to move, I tried to run away. But you broke the ice and now I’m here talking to you.”

Certe nodded. “I see you have left out part of the tale. We may not trust each other, but perhaps we can be friends just the same. How long have I been sleeping?”

“That depends. When did you go to sleep?”

Certe laughed. “Once more, we cannot help each other, it seems. Yet I have recovered enough to stand, at least. I’d like to take a look around and see if I can glimpse some of the other folk.” The giant flexed his arms and tilted his head, as if to work out a kink in his neck. “You might want to step aside.”

Glim’s heart beat faster as he walked into the tunnel he’d first emerged from into the cavern. He looked at Certe and nodded.

The floor trembled with a deep resonance, straining and cracking under the weight as the giant rose to his feet. Just as Glim himself had been taught. Certe tucked his foot next to his body, braced one hand on the ground, and hauled himself upward. Once again, it reminded Glim of an upside down avalanche, the only spectacle of such magnitude he’d ever seen, with the same sickening vibration and thunderous noise.

The giant’s head cleared the cavern’s roof and kept rising. Higher and higher until his face became partially obscured by white wisps of cloud. Certe looked to his left, showing Glim the back of his head, which undulated with strands of white hair catching the wind between the sleek black curves of curled horn. His head turned back, and Glim saw a look of abject horror on Certe’s face.

“No,” the giant said. “This cannot be!”

His voice rose to the volume of roiling thunder. His wide eyes and open mouth formed three black voids that threatened to swallow the sky. The expression of sheer confusion and consternation on Certe’s face pierced Glim’s heart.

Glim caught movement from the corner of his eye, followed by the distant call of geese. A vee of birds flew towards Certe. As they approached, their formation faltered, the straight lines curled off in a disarray of individual geese going their separate ways. One by one they dropped from the sky, struggling to maintain elevation.

A few of them fell to the edge of the cavern roof, setting off clumps of snow that dropped to the cavern floor. The geese followed, flapping their wings furiously on the way down.

The first crashed to the ground near Glim. It shuddered and tried to rise, but could not, for it had no feet below it. But it did have two webbed antenna sprouting from its shoulders. Glim watched in horror as its feet emerged, opposite from where they should be. The dark gray goose flopped over and tried to walk upside down, exposing the lighter gray feathers of its underbelly.

Another goose twitched in a puddle of ice chips and lay still.

The third goose crested the rim of the cavern and landed. It writhed its neck around and thrust its head at Glim. Its black eyes bulged and its bill split wide. A menacing hiss came from deep in its throat.

Glim stepped back, startled by its ferocity. The goose tried to run at him, hampered by feet with claws like a lizard's, which scrambled for purchase on the slick ice. A lizard's tail dragged behind it, slowing its approach.

The goose hissed again, extending a thick reptilian tongue. A second tongue sprouted from the first, reaching for Glim.

So focused was Glim on the bizarre spectacle unfolding that he failed to notice another bird behind him. With a piercing cry it streaked past his head from the tunnel, sending a gust of air that lifted Glim’s hair away from his face with the speed of its flight. Not a goose, but a massive hawk with pure white feathers. He’d never seen such coloration in a hawk before. It caught the sunlight, almost glowing.

The hawk curled in midair and snatched the writhing tongue. The lizard-goose snapped at the hawk, who stabbed downward with its sharp beak. The goose thrashed with pain. The hawk stabbed again and again, ripping at the goose with its talons until the bird lay still.

Circling Glim, the hawk glanced at him. It’s eyes reflected the same crazed light that he’d seen from the vine. Some color he had no name for that hurt Glim’s eyes and sparked in his mind. It blinked at him, as if in reassurance, then rose into the sky. Further and further it climbed until it came eye to eye with Certe.

The giant took one look at the white hawk then bellowed. The fury of his voice split the air. Glim clamped his hands over his ears. Certe turned his face towards the sky and screamed a heart-wrenching cry, one so resonate with remorse and sorrow that Glim felt overwhelmed by it. It called to mind every sad thought and despondent feeling he’d ever had, which expanded inside him, cold and numb, like freezing water splitting a bucket in two.

When Certe dropped his face back towards the ground, his crystalline silver eyes met Glim’s own mismatched ones. The pupils widened into pools that swallowed Glim’s vision. The black depths likewise swallowed Glim’s mind, draining it of all willpower, purpose, or passion. Glim knew nothing but absolute sorrow; a sorrow so overwhelming it consumed all thought.

With his last vestige of conscious thought, Glim grabbed his pack and staff and stumbled into the tunnel.