“That’s right, Miss,” said the very man who’d told them that, spinning around. “Gelfigburg. Named after our founder here, Harkul Gelfig.” The kender put his meaty arm around the shoulder of a gray-haired kender wearing pants similar to his friend’s. Both men beamed.
“But where is ‘here’?” Trapspringer asked.
The kender named Harkul stepped forward, his face serious. He rocked back and forth, heel to toes, his hands unable to clasp behind his back. “We’re not sure about that, exactly. There are those of us who think that we’re dead and that this is Reorx’s pantry.”
“But I don’t worship Reorx,” said Phineas.
The village’s founder frowned. “That’s interesting. Somebody write that down.”
“But the human was with these kender when he entered the foggy tunnel,” said a voice from the crowd. “Maybe he was just sucked along in their vortex.”
“Another good point! Somebody write that down, too.” Harkul rubbed his hammy hands eagerly. “I think we’re on to something here! We haven’t had a good paradox in … oh, a long time, I’d say.”
“How long have you all been here?” Damaris asked, noticing the range of ages in the faces of the crowd.
“Three days!”
“A fortnight!”
“One week!”
“Four months!” That came from Gelfig.
“You’re the founding father, and you’ve only been here four months?” asked Phineas.
Gelfig looked insulted. “It’s been a very productive stay, thank you! Why, I’ve accomplished more in that time than that silly leprechaun mayor, Raleigh, has done in nearly a year.”
“You mean ‘did’ in a year,” Damaris Metwinger, the mayor’s daughter, dutifully pointed out.
Gelfig looked annoyed. “Has Raleigh been replaced already? I knew he wouldn’t last the year!”
Damaris looked confused. “But my father, Meldon Metwinger, has been mayor these last several months. I’ve seen the likeness of this Raleigh you mention on the wall in the council chamber. He was mayor just after the Cataclysm, wasn’t he?”
“That’s right,” Gelfig agreed. “Personally, I had no problem with Raleigh; he seemed effective enough, for a leprechaun. And he once treated me fairly on Audience Day. You say there’s a Mayor Metwinger now?”
Phineas was focusing on Gelfig’s words. “Are you trying to tell us you knew Raleigh?” His voice was barely above a whisper.
“Of course I knew him!” Gelfig snorted. “I was nearly elected to his council, being one of Kendermore’s premier chocolatiers. Of course, the city is so young, competition isn’t too bad yet,” he felt compelled to admit.
“What year do you think this is?” Phineas asked, his eyebrows knitted together.
Gelfig looked at him as if he were an idiot. “Why, it’s 6 A.C., of course. What year do you think it is?”
Flabbergasted, Phineas opened his mouth to speak when five of the stout kender leaped forward to give answers of their own.
“27!”
“45!”
“68!”
“129!”
“234!” the throng of kender chorused.
“Try 346,” Phineas said dryly when the hubbub quieted down. “But none of you have been here for more than four months?”
The kender all shook their heads silently.
“Sounds like a time warp to me,” Trapspringer announced.
“Huh?” Phineas grunted.
“Sure, it’s an old trick,” Trapspringer explained. “You take a pocket dimension or a demi-plane, or break a chunk off a regular plane, surround it in its own singularity, and then either slow down or speed up the local time. Or even make it run backward.”
“So are you saying we’re all a lot older than we think?”
Biting his lip, Trapspringer nodded. Several of the female kender swooned.
But Phineas looked skeptical. “How do you know all this?”
Trapspringer pumped himself up proudly, hooked his thumbs in his collar, and rocked back on his heels. “When I was a prisoner of the frost giants, they locked me up with a wizard from another dimension. He told me all about this stuff.”
“When were you held prisoner by frost giants?” asked Damaris, wide-eyed.
“It doesn’t matter,” Phineas snapped.
“I disagree,” joined Gelfig. “I’d very much like to hear about the frost giants” A murmur of approval swept through the crowd, along with cries of “Story! Story!” Trapspringer readjusted his pouches and belts to get comfortable and seemed about to begin when Phineas interrupted.
“I would much rather figure out what this place is and how we get out of it,” he shouted. The human glared at the assembled kender, who grumbled and shuffled their feet by way of complaint. “Who’s been here the longest?”
Gelfig raised his hand. “I was the first one here.”
“When you first got here, did you find any clues suggesting where all this …” Phineas groped for a word, waved his arms around him, and gave up. “… all this, came from?”
“Oh, it wasn’t like this then.” The kender chorus supplied a round of “No’s” and a good deal of head shaking.
“Now we’re getting somewhere. What was it like, ‘four months’ ago?” asked Phineas.
Gelfig plucked a chocolate tulip and sipped the thick syrup collected in the flower, then launched into his story enthusiastically. “You should have seen this place then. What a dump! There was almost nothing here, nothing at all. Just a flat, featureless, gray nothing.”
The kender chorus shook their heads and sighed.
“I wandered around for a few hours and was just thinking about leaving when I tripped over something. I might have fallen and broken my nose if not for my catlike reflexes.” Gelfig assumed a stealthy stance, up on his toes with his pudgy arms out, to emphasize his grace. It seemed to be a crowd pleaser, though at his current bulk, the pose looked mighty ridiculous to Phineas. The human took advantage of the timely pause to pluck a tulip, curious himself as to how it might taste.
“I spun around to see what I had tripped on, but there was nothing there! This is strange,’ I said, so on my hands and knees I groped around a bit. And sure enough, what do you suppose I found?”
“AN INVISIBLE CHEST!” shouted the assembled kender, startling Phineas so badly that he crushed the tulip in his fingers. Thick, sticky, chocolate goo oozed down his forearm.
“That’s right, an invisible chest,” continued Gelfig. “Bound with invisible chains and sealed with three invisible locks. Now, there was something to do!”
The kender chorus oooed and aaahhed.
“Removing the chains didn’t take long; a child could have done it. The first lock was simple enough, too. I tripped it open with my needle file.”
As he was licking his hand clean, Phineas began getting caught up in the story. He knew the tower was supposed to contain a powerful, magical treasure. And here was Gelfig, describing an invisible, three-lock box concealed inside a pocket dimension! What better hiding place could there be?
“The second lock proved a bit more difficult,” the kender continued. “It being invisible only made things worse. I worked at it for over an hour, and finally I heard those tumblers click.
“By now, I was getting hungry and thirsty, but there was nothing here to eat or drink. I cut a flap of leather from my map pouch and chewed on that so I could concentrate. And that last lock took every ounce of concentration I could muster. It seemed impervious to needle files, invulnerable to penknives, invincible against wires. Finally, the only tool I had left was ‘old number three,’ my charmed pick. I gave it a kiss for luck, slipped it into that lock, and gave it a twist.”
The group of kender gasped in anticipation.
“Nothing happened. I twisted it left, and I twisted it right, and I pushed it in and pulled it out, I tried it backward and upside down. That lock was locked and that’s all there was to it.
“At least that’s the way a
n ordinary kender might have looked at it. But I’m no ordinary kender. I kept at that lock. I had that piece of pouch leather chewed down to nothing, so I cut off another. I worked until I’d chewed that down to nothing, and another, and another, until I’d eaten my whole map pouch. And still that lock wouldn’t open.
“Then, suddenly, all in a flash, the answer hit me. Since that lock was invisible, I could see my pick inside it. That didn’t do me much good because I couldn’t see the lock. But in my tool pouch I had a tiny tube of powdered lead. Putting the tube into the keyhole, I blew into the exposed end and shot just the tiniest bit of lead into that lock. Lo and behold, for just a second, before that lead powder turned invisible like the rest of the lock, it outlined the tumblers! I could see how that lock worked, and oh, it was a beauty. It took ‘old number three’ two flicks and a nudge, and that lock popped right open.”
The crowd of kender stared, their mouths hanging open, breathing in every word. Undoubtedly they had all heard this story dozens of times before—many of them mouthed the words along with Gelfig—and they would hear it dozens of times again, and each telling would be as exciting as the first.
“What was in the box?” asked Damaris, unable to stand the anticipation any longer.
“When that lid sprang open, the enchantment was broken and the whole thing turned visible again. My hands had already told me what the box looked like; a smooth pine box with an arched lid reinforced by thick iron bands. Inside it was a single item: A fine, steel chain necklace, with a steel triangle suspended from it. I picked it up and slid it over my head. That’s when it happened.”
“What happened?” prodded Phineas, the hardened sticky mess on his hand long forgotten. “What did it do?”
Gelfig straightened up, put his arms at his sides. “Suddenly I was surrounded by a field of caramel apple trees. I was terribly hungry, and coincidentally that is what I’d been thinking about before I put the necklace on—caramel apples.”
At the mention of food, the tubby kender all reached without looking, snapped off a piece of landscape, and popped them into their mouths.
“Without really understanding what was happening,” Gelfigburg’s founder continued, “I thought about how nice it would be to have some peppermint schnapps to go with those caramel apples and, poof! A stream of peppermint schnapps appeared, bubbling right past my feet. I don’t think I need to say that this was pretty exciting!”
Phineas sprang forward and grabbed the short, wide kender by his tightly stretched lapels. “Where is the necklace?” he demanded, pawing through the folds of clothing around Gelfig’s neck. “What have you done with it?”
Trapspringer leaped between the two, prying Phineas’s hands loose and pushing the human away. “Settle down, Phineas,” he soothed. “Don’t interrupt the story.”
Gelfig smoothed down his ruffled shirt and settled his shoulders while the rest of the kender scowled at Phineas. “It’s right here, if you must know. I used to wear it, but it won’t fit around my neck anymore.”
Phineas’s eyes were as big as Gelfig’s caramel apples when the kender pulled a slender chain from an inside pocket of his vest. A small steel triangle, no bigger than Phineas’s thumbnail, dangled from it. Phineas turned white.
With his voice trembling, Phineas asked, “Could I see it? I know a little about such things. I may be able to tell you where it came from,” he lied.
Gelfig looked at the chain, then shrugged and extended it to the human. “Sure, why not?” Phineas reached out a shaking hand, snatched the chain, and immediately wished himself into an enormous, gem-encrusted castle filled with rich tapestries and beautiful women and servants to cater to his every whim. When he opened his eyes, he saw Gelfig still peering at him, saying, “It doesn’t work any more anyway.”
Phineas collapsed to the ground near some cotton candy bushes, squishing an intricate mosaic made of cream-filled pastries.
“It doesn’t work,” he mumbled. Then he glared at Gelfig. “You used it up! How could you use up the whole thing? What could you have wanted that was so important you used up all the magic?”
“Hey, look at this place,” Gelfig boasted, sweeping his arm to take in the whole panorama. “You think this was easy? It took a lot of tries to get this just right.”
Phineas doubled over and hugged his knees, sobbing gently. He was surrounded by bloated kender in an unbelievable candyscape. He’d risked everything to get here, and it was all for nothing. Now he was penniless, homeless, and hopeless.
It wasn’t the first time.
The kender drifted away, absorbed in retelling Gelfig’s famous story and devouring the scenery, getting the latest news of Kendermore from Damaris, who, from her enthusiastic munching, seemed to be fitting right into Gelfigburg society. Phineas felt a hand on his shoulder and looked up to see Trapspringer munching on a piece of cinnamon fence. The kender plunked down next to him. They sat that way for several minutes. Finally, Trapspringer broke the silence.
“That’s what you were looking for all along, wasn’t it?” he asked. “I finally put all the pieces together. My nephew, the marriage, the map—it was all because that map I gave you said something about ‘a treasure of powerful magic’.”
Phineas heaved a heavy sigh.
“Don’t take it too hard,” advised the kender. “Treasures come and go—I should know—but this …,” he said, holding up a solid butterscotch mushroom, “… is the sort of thing you don’t find every day.”
Phineas raised his head and stared at the mushroom through unblinking, red-rimmed eyes.
“I’m leaving,” the human said flatly, and struggled to his feet. “Where’s the exit?” He started walking down the licorice street toward Gelfig and the laughing, joking cluster of kender, who were trailing bits of pastry behind.
“Hey, Gelfig,” Phineas shouted, “here’s your trinket back. Now, how do I get out of here?”
Suddenly the kender, who had been jovial and boisterous moments before, grew sullen and quiet. They paused before Gelfig’s gingerbread house. Gelfig coughed self-consciously and pretended he had not heard the question.
“What’s the matter?” asked Phineas, suddenly nervous. He glanced at Trapspringer, who shrugged and looked back to Gelfig.
Finally, Gelfig turned toward them. “Umm, I guess I forgot to mention this, but we haven’t found any way to leave.”
“What!?” screamed Phineas.
“I said, there …”
“There’s no way out!?”
“I didn’t say that, exactly,” explained Gelfig. “I said we haven’t found any way out.”
“That’s a damned fine distinction to be making at this point!” thundered Phineas. He turned and stomped back up the licorice street, then spun back to face Gelfig. “And I hate licorice!”
Chapter 20
The morning after burying Gisella, Woodrow, and Tasslehoff rode Winnie in gloomy silence. The Khalkist Mountains gave way to foothills. At dusk the human and the kender reached the exotic port city of Khuri Khan, across the Khurman Sea and far away from their final destination of Kendermore.
The brilliant rose-orange sunset at their backs reflected off the gold-leafed onion domes that rose majestically into the darkening eastern sky. Date and coconut palms swayed gently in the breeze. Women in colorful, gauzy outfits hurried through the streets on their way home, baskets perched on their heads. Merchants in batik head scarves, wraplike garments, and blousy pants gathered at the ankles, made their final deals of the day, perched from the backs of their elephant mounts.
“See, Winnie, you won’t look too out of place in this city,” Tasslehoff pointed out. The mammoth had been expressing concern since they spotted the city in the distance. “These elephants don’t have nearly as much hair as you do, but then, I don’t know anything that does. Maybe you can meet more of your own kind here.”
“I don’t think so,” Winnie whined. “Lig and Bozdil always told me that I was the last one like me.” A giant tear rolled d
own the mammoth’s big, rubbery cheek. The city frightened him, and being reminded that he was all alone in the world made him even more despondent.
“That’s terrible,” Woodrow said, genuinely sympathetic. He gave the mammoth’s neck an affectionate pat. The big fellow had saved their lives twice already, and the young human hated to see him cry.
“Maybe some food will cheer us up,” Tas suggested.
They pooled their resources, which amounted to two copper pieces from Woodrow and an emerald ring, a small cut of amber, and some pointy teeth from Tasslehoff.
“That looks just like the baroness’s ring, from back in Rosloviggen!” Woodrow exclaimed.
Tas looked surprised, then colored slightly. “Why, I think you’re right. I wonder how it got in my pocket? It must have fallen in somehow, perhaps when she passed me a roll at dinner. Anyway, we may as well pawn it,” he said, without breaking stride.
“We can’t do that!” Woodrow’s shaggy blond mane shook furiously. “It’s not ours! That would be stealing.”
“No it wouldn’t,” disagreed Tas. “Stealing is when you take something, not when you pawn it.” Winnie agreed with the cockeyed logic.
Woodrow’s face was dark. “You’re both right, the pawning comes after the stealing.”
“Exactly! Since I didn’t steal it—”
“—it just fell into your pocket—”
“That’s right. We’d just be borrowing it. We can buy it back when we have more money, and then return it to the baroness.”
“I don’t know,” the human hedged.
Tasslehoff grew tired of Woodrow’s reluctance. Jutting his nose in the air defiantly, he said, “Well, do what you want, but I’m going to sleep in a nice, warm bed tonight, and Winnie will be staying in some comfortable stable filled to the brim with … well, with whatever he wants it filled to the brim with.”
“Oh, all right!” Woodrow gave in. Another night in the woods didn’t appeal much to him, either.
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