Snidnaruss Caskpike slammed two more crystals into the barrels of his ground borer. He yelled out. “I’m going to give you one chance to say who you are and why I shouldn’t just melt you where you stand!” The gnorve waited for all of two heartbeats before he leveled his ground borer down the hall and pulled the trigger again, laughing. Two half-circle blasts of green and blue energy flashed down the hall. The temperature spiked where he was standing a good 50 gnorves as what little hair he still had on his eyebrows flashed off. The stone walls of the hallway instantly glowed orange, and a few lesser stones started to run. However, halfway down, the beam of fury and heat stopped. It was a sharp end to the spectacular display of power. Appearing where the beams hit revealed the worst kind of intruder. There where the blast ended, stood the worst human he had ever had the displeasure of meeting more than once: Bartholomew, the god of bards and summer beer. Snidnarus spat at the ground, pulled a giant bomb out of his bag, and threw it. As it started to fly towards Barth, his eyes grew big. The god quickly pulled out a small shield and dropped it on the ground. As it hit the ground, it changed from a half-inch thick piece of metal to a six-inch slab with reinforced beams. More than that, it looked custom-made to deflect explosions as it had a slight curve back toward where the bomb came from. To top it off, it had its own stand, which included handles for the bard to hold onto. When the explosion happened, the huge shield slid back several feet with the god connected to it. Bartholomew yelled out. “Snid! What type of greeting was that?” The little gnorve yelled back. “A better one than you deserve! Sneaking in like that is liable to get you shot!” “It did get me shot!” “Well did it teach you anything?” “Yeah! You’re still crazy and perhaps a bit angry!” A second explosion threw the giant blast shield off the ground and twenty feet down the hall. Snidnaruss called out. “I’m still hearing those songs! You said that you would get them changed!” The 3-foot-tall mad scientist threw his third bomb down the hallway. Unlike the first two, this one didn’t explode as much as it bloomed. A ball of lava around twenty feet in diameter filled the hallway and serged around the edges of the blast shield. The cantankerous little man smiled as he heard the god start to curse. Barth yelled out from behind the shield. “You didn’t have to use lava did you?” “You didn’t have to have a song about me not being able to hold my drink! You know full well I can drink any god under the table unless they cheat!” Barth laughed, leaned around the shield, and saw that the cranky old inventor had set down his ground borer and was pulling out his smoking pipe. “You done?” Snid looked up from lighting his pipe and cracked a smile. “For now. Now why are those songs still out there?” Barth tapped his blast shield a few times, and it shrunk back down to the size of a bulker. “Well I did put out the change to the bards. The problem is the other ones were so good that the people like them. Oddly enough, the most common place for them to be sung is right here in Boulderhall. Might be that the people who know you like singing that version for some reason.” Snid took a long pull on his pipe. “Might be I need to fix some of my countrymen. Perhaps they need to try drinking some of the brews that I have.” Barth smiled as he shook his head. “Nothing you have is a brew and you know it. All the things that you BREW is done with a still!” Snid gave a big toothy grin and laughed. “That it is, but I drink it like you humans drink that weak junk you that call summer beer!” Barth shook his head and pulled around a small box with half a dozen bottles. “So I can’t offer you one?” With lightning-quick reflexes born out of the need to dodge his own explosions and failed machines, the gnorve yanked a bottle out of the box. “Everyone needs to drink water from time to time.” Two beers later, they moved into the main room of Snid’s lab. They found a table and activated things to keep them from being scried. Then after a few more moments, the gnorve smiled. The gnorveish artificer said. “You didn’t bring your sorry butt down here just to give me a beer and let me throw a few bombs at you.” Barth nodded. “You’re right. I came to see how you were doing and if everything was a go on your end.” Snid shook his head slowly. “I don’t have anyway to test what I am doing, so I have it built to be fire at full power. My only hope is that it has enough force once the shield is gone to go through. I just don’t know the real distance that I have to shoot it.” The bard pulled his lute from around his back and started to pluck. “That’s the problem that we have with this whole thing. I gave you the distance that we think it is. So the hope is that you can build something that can shoot that high.” Snidnaruss rolled his eyes. “So calculations based on Max’s own ideas. I still don’t get why he didn’t just get rid of the rocks himself.” Bartholomew nodded. “Some of that is odd to me as well. Surely he would have been able to turn it all to vapor. However, he was quite clear that the pieces needed to go through where sky is now sealed.” Caskpike got quiet for a moment. “What happens if we don’t get them all through?” Barth sat down and pulled his pipe out. “Worst case, everything we did does nothing. Best case is we weaken them per rock.” “The shielding works for the shells that I have. But I am still worried that we are missing one. Do you have a full list of where they are and how many we are removing?” Barth pulled out a thin leather folder and placed it in the gnorve’s hand. “I have been working on gathering this for the last six hundred years or so. I don’t know how long we have left to get the rest of them here. I have most of them but there are still a few out there. There are two here in Boulderhall that we need to get and then I have people moving on another three. All of those are marked. The problem is going to be the last two.” Snidnaruss huffed out a big puff of smoke and then clamped his teeth on the bit of his pipe. Then he opened the case and pulled out the map and list. Soon he climbed up onto the table and was looking at things. He pulled a small handheld device out and tapped on the crystals. As he did, the device hanging from the ceiling shot light at a wall. That light turned into a map of Boulderhall. Then he pressed a few more crystals, and the map pulled off the wall giving a three-dimensional display. Bartholomew gave a bit of a huff but smiled. “That’s a nice map. I don’t pick up any mana from the map itself.” “It’s all in the projector. That’s something that I figured out a while back. Mana doesn’t have to be in the projection after it is projected. That’s how we are getting most of the objects off our planet. That is if the seal drops.” Barth stood up and walked over to the projected map. “I know. It still has to drop in time for us to remove the rocks. Then it has to go back up so that they can’t get back in.” Snid nodded. “How Max is pulling that off without even being here anymore I don’t know. Mind telling me?” Barth shook his head. “It’s in his plan and I’m just getting things moving for it.” “Dumb plan that has to wait a thousand years after he is banished just to do anything. We should have done this all before he was banished. Would have had a better chance of it all working.” The god sighed. “I don’t disagree with you but I think he was working a different angle before the war started. Then he started to work on this one.” “Even in the war?” Barth nodded. “Even in the war, that’s where over half of the pieces came from. He gathered them for us and marked out all of this.” Snidnaruss pulled his pipe from his mouth and relighted his pipe. “So what’s so hard about this last piece?” Bartholomew sighed. “Well it’s marked here as being in the middle of no where. However, the problem is that since the end of the war we found out that that piece was in a hidden city.” “Hidden from Max and you? I thought you gods were better than all of that.” “We are! The problem is that it was Taphine who was hiding the city. We didn’t even know she was a goddess until the end of the war. I think Max learned of her a day perhaps two before he was banished.” “So it is just in someone’s home?” The bard pulled his lute around and strummed a few bars. “Kind of. It seems that she made it her main alter.” * * *