Kendermore

by Mary Kirchoff

  “But they’re so long,” Tas complained.

  “Bozdil and Ligg?” the one named Ligg said, puzzled.

  Woodrow’s mind was locked onto one terrible word. “Specimens?” he squeaked, repeating Ligg.

  The others turned to him, and three sets of eyebrows arched in surprise.

  “What do you mean, ‘specimens’?”

  Ligg gave Bozdil a perturbed look. “I’ve been waiting for you to get back to explain things to them. I think I’ll go build another display room or something.” He turned to the kender and the human. “Nice knowing you.”

  Bozdil reached out a hand without looking and caught Ligg’s collar as he tried to leave. “You’ll forgive my brother, but this part is always so difficult,” he began with an apologetic smile to Tas and Woodrow. “I know, we’ll show you! I find visual aids so helpful, don’t you?” he asked pleasantly.

  “Actually,” Woodrow said, looking around the room frantically, “we would find the front door most helpful right now. I don’t know why you’ve brought us here, and I’m not sure I want to know. Live and let live, I always say.” He tried to shield Tasslehoff.

  “It’s my job to keep Mr. Burrfoot safe. No offense, Mr. Bozdil, Mr. Ligg, but this is all very strange—and unacceptable. It would be a good idea if you allowed us to leave right now, before we have to hurt you.” Flexing his muscles, Woodrow wished his voice had not cracked as he spoke.

  “Yeah, you’ve got a lot of explaining to do!” Tasslehoff cried, leaping around the human in his excitement. “Like … like how you made that dragon fly—did I tell you how much fun that was—better than—” Woodrow jabbed Tasslehoff in the ribs. “Clunk ’em, Woodrow!”

  Ligg gave Woodrow a severe look. “There’s no need for any clunking around here. Let’s at least be civilized about this.”

  “Ohdearohdearohdear,” muttered Bozdil nervously. “We’re handling this all wrong! Just come with us, and you’ll understand everything.”

  “I’d like to understand something!” the kender said, shaking his head. “Come on, Woodrow, they’re not going to let us leave until we look at whatever it is they want us to see. As long as we’re here, what’s the harm of taking a little peek?

  Woodrow pursed his lips. “OK,” he said at last. “But we’re leaving right afterward.” What choice did he have, really?

  The gnome brothers looked at each other, giggled conspiratorially, then grew serious.

  “Now, is it under ‘K’ for kender, or ‘D’ for demihumans?” Ligg asked Bozdil.

  “No, I think it’s under ‘T’ for ‘things with thirty-two ribs,’ or perhaps ‘B’ for ‘upright bipeds’.”

  “Wouldn’t that be ‘U’?”

  “Oh, you’re right, you’re right,” muttered Bozdil. He scratched his balding head. “Let’s look it up.” Moving a lit candle closer, he pulled a big, cobweb-covered tome from a shelf, sending dust flying. He coughed, and Ligg patted him on the back. Chewing his lip, Bozdil flipped the book open and ticked his index finger down the table of contents until he found what he was looking for. “Ah ha!” He licked his thumb and flipped to the appropriate page. “ ‘K’ for kender!” He let the book thump shut.

  “No, that’s where it used to be,” Ligg said wearily. “Don’t you remember? We reorganized everything ten years ago, so we could keep track of inventory better? After I built the third tower …?” he continued, trying to jog his brother’s memory.

  “Yes!” Bozdil said. “Now I remember! We put it in Display Room Twelve.”

  “So is it ‘D’ or ‘U’ or ‘B’ or what?” Tas nearly exploded.

  Ligg looked at the kender as if he were a bug. “Why would it be any of those?”

  “But you said—oh, never mind!”

  Bozdil led the way and Ligg brought up the rear through at least twelve rooms filled with display cases of all sizes. Tasslehoff stopped in a room that contained aquatic specimens displayed floating in liquid-filled jars. He paused before the jar containing an Eye of the Deep. The evil creature’s large central eye in its round, blobbish body and its two small eye stalks looked so deadly, floating like that in its natural environment, that it brought a shudder even to the fearless kender.

  Woodrow lingered by a display of stuffed and mounted hunting birds. The hawks reminded him of his training as a squire, and he stood in front of the rows of unblinking owls and falcons, remembering his time at his Uncle Gordon’s home.

  Tas and the gnomes didn’t miss him as they stopped in a room whose glass cases varied in size, shape, and color. They walked slowly past stuffed creatures with plaques proclaiming their species: dryad, gully dwarf, wood sprite, mountain dwarf, and elf.

  Bozdil stopped before an empty display case with a plaque at its base that read “kender.” He smiled ruefully and said, “Now do you see why it’s so difficult?”

  “I see an empty kender case,” Tas said stupidly.

  “Not for long,” Ligg sang.

  Tasslehoff still looked puzzled.

  “Don’t make me say it!” Bozdil cried in anguish. “It’s nothing personal, mind you,” he continued quickly, noting Tasslehoff’s growing awareness. “But it’s our Life Quest. One of everything on Krynn, so generations from now our descendants will know what a kender looked like, just for instance.

  “Oh, don’t look so revolted!” he continued, noting the expression on Tas’s face. “You think we like doing this? This isn’t what I would have chosen as a Life Quest! How about you, Ligg?”

  Insulted, his brother snorted, “Certainly not! I’d almost rather count the number of raisins in muffins, like Cousin Gleekfub, for the rest of my life! Hmmphh!” He lifted his nose imperiously.

  Bozdil peered at the captives accusingly. “You have no idea how difficult this job is. Take trolls, for instance. What do you do with a troll? It can only be killed by burning or immersing in acid—,” he snickered without humor “—and you can well imagine what that does to their appearance.” Bozdil’s hands raised in a gesture of helplessness. “And if we kill one, we certainly can’t display it. So how can we get a proper-looking troll for display without killing it?” He frowned. “I still haven’t figured out a solution to that one. Have you been thinking about it, Ligg, like you said you would?” Bozdil cocked one eyebrow at his brother.

  “Troglodytes!” Ligg barked suddenly.

  “I beg your pardon?” said Tasslehoff, startled.

  “Troglodytes!” Ligg repeated. “They can change color at will, you know. If the one we select decides to make itself green at the last moment and we’ve selected a nice green jar, we’d have to change it.” He grew very serious. “Selection of water and jar color is very tricky, and can change at the last minute.”

  “Details, alwaysdetails!” Bozdil had worked himself into a real frenzy on the subject. His face was beet red, and he was hopping about in his ill-fitting shoes. “New breeds, half-breeds—it’s impossible to keep up! But we have to try.”

  “You mean you’re going to pickle me?” Tasslehoff exclaimed, sucking in his breath.

  “Oh, heavens no,” Bozdil kindly reassured him. Tasslehoff exhaled.

  “We always stuff the mammals. Now, I’ll need your full name and date of birth for our records.” He watched disbelief grow in the kender’s face. “I told you,” Bozdil said slowly to Tas, as if speaking to a child, “it’s nothing personal—you seem pleasant enough. But it’s what we do.”

  “Well, I’m taking it personally!” Woodrow squeaked hysterically from the doorway, his face pale, his eyes wide.

  Bozdil peered darkly at the straw-haired man. “I didn’t even want you—we already have a human male specimen. You just sort of latched yourself onto my dragon and barged your way in uninvited.”

  Woodrow didn’t know how to react to that statement. That there wasn’t an empty display case bearing a plaque with his race on it was only marginally good news. He knew he had to do something. He could think of only one thing to do.

  “Run for it, Mr. Burr
foot!” the human screamed, grabbing the kender and yanking him out of the room, into a hallway. Stunned, Tasslehoff stumbled over his hoopak, recovered, and then landed on his feet. Woodrow ran down hall after hall, the kender in tow. Then, he came to a door, twisted the knob, and flung the heavy wooden door open. For a moment, he saw sunlight, then he heard the most awful roaring. Into the doorway shot the open, drooling maw of an enormous mountain lion.

  Woodrow slammed the door shut and leaped away from it, panting, waiting for either the gnomes to reappear or the mountain lion to shred the door while he thought.

  “What are we running for?” Tasslehoff asked, never one to flee a fight. “I’ve got my hoopak—we’ll send that lion packing!” Tasslehoff reached for the doorknob.

  Woodrow’s hand stayed him. “I have nothing to help you but a tiny dagger! A lion would tear us apart and eat us for dinner, hoopak or no hoopak! No offense,” he panted.

  “I’m not afraid,” Tasslehoff said, jutting out his chest proudly.

  “That’s good, because I’m frightened enough for both of us,” Woodrow said seriously. “What I can’t figure out is where Bozdil and Ligg are.”

  “They’re probably tired from running and haven’t found us yet,” Tasslehoff suggested.

  “Good guess.” Woodrow pulled the kender after him.

  Woodrow and Tas tried five other doors and were met by a crocodile pit, a huge ape with fangs like daggers, something that looked like a walking lump of garbage, a five-foot-long scorpion—Tas wanted to stop for a good look at that oddity but Woodrow forbade it—and a room so filled with spiderwebs that Woodrow did not even want to know what was living there. They saw no sign of Ligg and Bozdil.

  At last, they entered a large, one-story chamber that was empty except for huge, regularly spaced support pillars. It appeared to be an unused display chamber.

  “There’s no way out through here,” Tas warned. But the door had already slammed shut, practically in their faces. Kender and human rocked back on their heels and both felt a sense of dread.

  “We’re sorry you made us do this.” Bozdil’s whiny voice filtered through a small grate in the large, wooden door. “We would rather you had been a little more civilized about all this. You could have remained free to wander about the place and dine with us this evening. We certainly would have given you a nicer room, too. I would have liked that—we don’t get too many visitors who can talk, you realize.”

  “But you’ve ruined it by being selfish,” finished Ligg in an accusing, nasal tone. “We can’t be blamed.” Tas could see Ligg’s shoulders through the grate, shrugging. “Now we have things to prepare.” With that, they disappeared.

  “I’ve got to say, Woodrow, that this sure makes getting married look attractive,” Tas sighed, sliding down the wall into a heap.

  Woodrow parted his limp, sweat-soaked hair from his eyes and collapsed next to Tasslehoff on the floor. “You could say that again, Mr. Burrfoot.” He was quickly asleep.

  For once, the kender seemed to know a joke when he heard one. Tired beyond caring, he extinguished the spark in his brain, like a flame snuffed out by wet fingers.

  Suddenly, Tas heard something. What was that noise?

  Something was whimpering behind the pillars. Tasslehoff crept past Woodrow’s sleeping form and tiptoed from pillar to pillar, peering carefully around each. Near the back of the dark room, he leaned around a pillar and gasped.

  Lying in the shadows in a disconsolate heap was a large—enormous, actually—hairy elephantlike creature! It lay on its side, thumping its trunk in an unhappy rhythm, while tears coursed down its thick, gray coat, settling in a puddle by its fierce-looking tusks. Suddenly it raised its head and peered at Tasslehoff around the pillar.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t know anyone was in here,” it said in a high-pitched, sing-song voice.

  “You can talk!” gasped Tas, stepping from behind the pillar.

  “Of course I can. Don’t all woolly mammoths talk?”

  Tasslehoff blinked, taken aback. “I—I’m not sure. I’ve never met one before. Still, I’m fairly certain they don’t talk, as a general rule.”

  A sigh like a trumpet blast erupted from the mammoth’s trunk. “I’ve never met one either.” The creature’s head dropped back to the stone floor, and a big tear squeezed out of one large, pink-rimmed, gray eye.

  The tender-hearted kender knelt by the animal’s massive shoulder and patted it comfortingly. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Don’t cry, you’ll flood the place and we’ll all drown!” he giggled.

  Another large tear plopped onto the ground. “What does it matter if we drown? The gnomes’ll kill us eventually anyway,” the mammoth moaned.

  Tas was beginning to understand. He patted the creature again. “Don’t worry, we’ll find some way out of here,” he said hopefully. “Then Woodrow and I will take you with us.”

  The mammoth’s eyes opened wider. “You would do that?” he said shrilly, then slumped back down unhappily. “It wouldn’t matter if you did think of a way out. I’m too big to get through the doors. This is the only room left in the whole place that’s big enough to hold me.”

  “Then how did they get you in here?” Tas inquired, looking from the enormous mammoth back toward the tiny doorway.

  The mammoth raised itself half-heartedly up onto one knee-joint, and the floor shook. “I was brought here when I was very little,” he said simply, his voice weary.

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Bozdil and Ligg tell me it was more than fifteen years ago.”

  “They’ve kept you locked up in here for fifteen years?” Tasslehoff was incredulous.

  The mammoth’s eyes clouded with concern. “Oh, it’s not their fault,” he said unexpectedly. Seeing Tas’s confusion, he said, “Let me start from the beginning.…”

  Tas made no effort to interrupt.

  “Bozdil found me on one of his specimen expeditions fifteen years ago. I was just a pup at the time, wandering around in the hills south of Zeriak, or so he says, with no sign of my mother. He brought me back here, and he and Ligg thought I was too small to be their woolly mammoth specimen. So they just decided to let me grow up.” The mammoth let out another buglelike sigh. Tas took a handkerchief from his pocket and held it to the end of the creature’s trunk.

  “Thank you,” it sniffed. “Anyway, they fed me and played with me—so I wouldn’t become too flabby to be a good specimen, they said. And I learned to speak. They treated me like the family pet!” Another shattering snort of anguish ripped through the room.

  The noise jolted Woodrow awake. Moments later, his white head poked tentatively around the pillar. “Mr. Burrfoot?”

  “Woodrow, meet—?” Tas looked at the mammoth blankly.

  “The gnomes call me Winnie,” it said. “Even I can’t pronounce the full name they gave me.”

  Tasslehoff patted one of Winnie’s flat-bottomed feet in a modified handshake. “Tasslehoff Burrfoot.”

  “Woodrow,” the human said dubiously, eyeing the mammoth.

  “Glad to meet you,” replied the long-haired mammoth courteously.

  “Woodrow, we’ve got to think of a way to help Winnie escape! Bozdil and Ligg mean to kill him!” the kender said earnestly.

  “That seems to be their overall plan, all right,” said the human. “Us included.” He began pacing, his hands clasped behind his back.

  “I know! Let’s jump them when they come back with our dinner, and clunk their heads together!” Tas suggested.

  Winnie perked up at that, and his eyes opened wide in fear. “Oh, I couldn’t let you do that to Bozdil and Ligg. They’re all the family I have!”

  Tas’s lips pursed in irritation. “Well, they’re ready to pack you full of cotton!”

  Winnie’s large head shook slowly from side to side. “That’s just the problem. They haven’t been able to bring themselves to do it! I can’t get out; they can’t kill me. But they still need a woolly mammoth specimen! They haven’
t spent much time with me lately, so I think the end is near. Oh, it’s all so hopeless!” Winnie pressed his trunk to the ground and wailed and wailed, until every cloth Tasslehoff had was soaked with mammoth tears.

  This has to be much worse than getting married, Tas thought unhappily. “We’ll do something, Winnie, don’t worry.”

  The kender only wished he knew what that something might be.

  Chapter 16

  “You don’t actually expect me to believe this is real silk,” Gisella scoffed, casually tossing a robin’s-egg-blue bolt of cloth to the side, boredom on her rouged face.

  “But of course it’s silk,” the hairy old dwarf said. He hefted the bolt and lovingly held a corner of cloth in his hand. “Look at how few imperfections are present,” he said, flicking a small, thick, raised nub in the fabric. “You don’t usually find such perfection in cotton weaving.”

  Gisella knew he was right. Cotton was coarser and often contained many more thread imperfections, which professionals called slubs. She wanted that fabric—badly. The airy, genuine silk would feel like butter against her fair skin, and its rich hue would complement her fiery hair. In her mind’s eye she saw herself in a clingy gown of blue-green, not to mention that she could sell the remaining fabric at a substantial profit. The vision made her smile like a cat in the sun. But she didn’t want to pay what the merchant was asking.

  She had gulled this old, buck-toothed dwarf, but she feared he was reaching the limit of his patience and his greed.

  She wanted that fabric.

  “OK, three steel, but not a copper more,” she exhaled.

  “Three and a half,” he intoned, wagging his head.

  “Sold!” Gisella hugged the fabric to her chest. It was not the best deal she had ever made, but the fabric was worth the cost. Now all she had to do was get him to extend her some credit until she could bargain her way into some cash. She was wetting her lips for the performance, when she heard shrieks.

  Woodrow and Burrfoot! She suddenly remembered them and spun around. They weren’t in the booth. She heard the shriek again and she looked over at the thing the baron had called a carousel. Dwarves were fleeing like trolls on fire, jumping from the carousel and running for their lives. There was an empty slot in the carousel, as if one of the creatures had been ripped from its place. Hearing more shrieks of terror, she noticed that more and more people were looking up, so Gisella raised her eyes.