“No,” said Tasslehoff, not knowing quite what to make of the strange weather, “this is most certainly not usual.” Tas turned into the wind and scrunched up his face.
Trapspringer peered around in the dim light and swirling dust. “We left a couple of ponies near here before we entered the grove. I think they’re just a ways to the left.” Head bowed, he set off, with Damaris, Tasslehoff, and Vinsint following behind.
Phineas gaped after them, then shouted, “Surely you don’t intend to travel in this! Let’s just wait it out in Vinsint’s tunnel.”
Tasslehoff looked back over his shoulder and hollered, without stopping, “Why? It’s just wind. I think it’s kind of fun trying to stay on your feet in it.”
“You’re crazy! You’ll be blown to Kendermore!”
Tas shrugged. “That would sure speed things up. If you’re afraid, though, stay here. There’s Vinsint’s larder and plenty of company. We’ll see you later in Kendermore.”
“Fine! That’s what I’ll do,” yelled Phineas to no one in particular, as Tas was beyond earshot in the howling wind. The human turned back toward the tunnel exit. He was confronted by a dozen or more very wide, very disoriented kender, deep in a discussion about the merits of mushroom husbandry on a hypothetical city made of small boats lashed together.
Several minutes later, Phineas caught up with Tasslehoff and the other three just as they were preparing the ponies to leave. Grumbling to himself, Phineas got on his dreaded pony behind Tasslehoff.
The group struggled through the wind without speaking, since words were lost in the storm anyway. Travel was slightly easier in the occasional forests, since the trees provided some protection. But the expanses of open fields, crops tearing from the ground around them, taxed their endurance beyond their expectations.
They had traveled about halfway back to Kendermore when they decided to break for the day on a small, clear, grassy rise with a view of Kendermore, still almost ten miles to the west. Sliding off the ponies to the ground to rest and enjoy the first glimpse of the view, Tasslehoff, Trapspringer, Damaris, and Phineas each jerked up again when Vinsint, pointing to the city, cried, “Fire!”
Kendermore was burning.
Chapter 24
Tasslehoff’s party reached the edge of Kendermore before dawn, Damaris and Trapspringer on one pony, Tas and Phineas on another. Vinsint, with his long, powerful legs, easily loped along beside them through the dark fields and wind-blown forests surrounding the burning city.
No smoke hung over the city; the howling wind scattered it before it could rise above the peaked roofs. Only the light from the flames, reflected off the mist and fog, gave away the fact that Kendermore was ablaze. The dull orange halo flickered, rose, and fell.
“It’s like an aurora,” mumbled Trapspringer.
“A what?” Damaris asked.
“An aurora—strange lights in the sky. You have to travel south a good distance to see the effect.”
The five companions stared at the glowing sky, entranced, until Tasslehoff jolted them back to the present.
“I’m sure there are a lot of people who need help. Let’s find out what’s happening.”
As they moved up the main road toward the city, they passed kender fleeing into the countryside. Flames danced above the cityscape on the distant west side, where the worst fire appeared to be raging. Here on the east side, they saw evidence of small spot fires: blackened storefronts and homes, charred trees, flame-swept grass. A few blazes still burned in isolated spots, but small groups of kender fought them with water, dirt, brooms, and blankets.
A short distance inside the city, Tasslehoff spotted a kender dressed in a mackintosh, galoshes, and a broad-brimmed rain hat. He was caught up in securing his ornate windows and door of polished wood against the raging wind by nailing sheets of canvas across them. But each time he got a sheet almost attached, a gust of wind tore it off again.
“Look’s like you could use a few more hands,” shouted Tas. With their heads bowed against the wind and biting rain, he, Vinsint, and Trapspringer pushed their way through the storm to help the beleaguered kender.
While stretching one corner of a canvas sheet across a window opening, Tas asked, “Where are all the people?”
The homeowner plucked another nail from between his lips. “Fled, mostly. Out that way, where you came in. Or fortifying and getting ready to ride it out, like me. This thing looks unstoppable, though. There aren’t many of us left.”
Phineas shook his head. “There’ll be even fewer if you think you can survive a city-wide conflagration just by tacking some wet leather over your windows. Abandoning the town is your only option, and I suggest doing so right now!”
“No!” shouted Tas, setting his chin stubbornly. “Kendermore is my home! I didn’t travel all the way across Ansalon just to see it burn down. There has to be some way to stop this thing. Haven’t any of you ever seen a real fire-fighting team at work?”
Glancing uneasily at the others, Vinsint raised his hand, then looked at Tas expectantly. Tasslehoff, who had never seen this sort of behavior before—he was accustomed to kender, who simply shouted their suggestions at the tops of their lungs—finally realized that Vinsint was awaiting some sort of signal before speaking. He shrugged and said, “Go ahead, Vinsint.”
The ogre cleared his throat and, with one more nervous glance at his fellows, explained fire-fighting as he understood it. “When I was still living in the Ogrelands, my tribe used to raid the neighboring human settlements. Sometimes, places we attacked caught fire. By accident. You know how those things happen.” Vinsint shifted his weight uncomfortably.
“Anyway, sometimes as we were leaving, we would stop on a hill and watch the humans try to put the fires out. They’d form lines to a stream or a well and then pass buckets of water from hand to hand and throw them on the fire. That usually didn’t work very well on a really big fire, so some of the places that caught fire a lot built big barrels in the middle of the town and kept them full of water. Then when a fire broke out, they could get water from the barrel and not have to pass it so far, or they could even just chop a hole in the barrel and let the water flood through the streets to put out all the really hot embers on the ground.
“Of course, if the fire did go out, then my cousins would shoot some burning arrows into the town to start it all up again. They thought that kind of stuff was pretty funny.”
“Nice bunch,” muttered Damaris.
“Yes, well, you don’t see me with them now, do you?” Vinsint grunted. “I knew somebody was going to make a nasty remark.” The bristles on the back of his neck stood up like a bootbrush.
Tas jumped in, trying to calm the ruffled ogre. “That’s OK, Vinsint. We trust you. And that story gives me an idea. Uncle Trapspringer, do the water towers still have water in them?” Tasslehoff squinted against the smoke and spotted several of the tall, bucket-shaped devices above the city.
“They sure do,” he replied. “I went swimming in one just the other day.”
“Good! Lead the way to City Hall.”
The group wound its way through the twisting streets, with Trapspringer in the lead, to City Hall. The streets were clogged with kender trying to get out of the city, into the city, to their homes, to their shops, to the city’s wells with empty buckets, and to the fire with full buckets. Kender were racing in every direction with pails, washtubs, pitchers, battering rams, urns, ladders, bowls, stuffed animals, chamberpots, and cupped hands. Others were pushing carts or pulling wagons loaded with their own or other people’s belongings. There was no panic—no one seemed frightened at all, thought Phineas. But there was pandemonium on an unimaginable scale.
Tasslehoff chose as his goal City Hall because he knew that it was, approximately, in the center of the city. The building was a very valuable symbol to Kendermore’s democratic citizens. It was a good place to stop the fire from spreading to the east side of the city. Tas didn’t recognize any of the civic landmarks on the way to
City Hall. He’d been gone only a few years, yet the town seemed completely changed. Everything’s different—it feels like home, he thought.
The howling of the wind suddenly dropped away to nothing as they rounded a corner into a very small square. Tas looked up at a four-story building. Dark support timbers crisscrossed its face and strengthened the whitewashed wood and stucco walls. The familiar, gaping hole on the second floor showed Tas that not everything had changed in his absence.
Looking at it, everyone knew that the one-hundred-year-old building would burn like dry tinder.
How could they stop the fires from raging?
As Tas pondered that question, two things happened.
First, a straw-haired human with his head bowed down strode out of City Hall.
Second, Tas realized that it was not just the sound of the wind that had died away, but the wind itself. The air in the square was calm. But the noise of the wind was replaced by a different sound; a distant rumbling that reminded Tas of the approach of an avalanche. He had no idea what an avalanche sounded like, really, but he had a good imagination.
Tasslehoff watched the figure hurry out the big door in the front of City Hall and head down the street, directly toward the kender and his companions. Apparently sensing their presence in the street ahead of him, the man looked up.
“Woodrow!” Tasslehoff cried, flinging himself at the startled human.
The straw-haired young man’s face exploded into a smile. “Tasslehoff Burrfoot! I thought I’d never see you again!” Woodrow picked up the kender and spun him around, both laughing joyously.
“How did you know to find me here?” Tasslehoff asked, shouting to be heard above the avalanche.
“After Denzil knocked me out and kidnapped you, I didn’t know what to do. I had no idea where he took you or even which direction he would go in. No one in Port Balifor would even listen to me.
“But I knew that Kendermore’s council was waiting for you and holding your uncle. I figured maybe the council had sent Denzil to take over for Gisella, so I came here. But after four hours with that council,” he continued, slapping the side of his head with his palm, “all I learned was that they didn’t know where you were, either, and that you didn’t need to come back anymore because your fiancee had run away.
“And then this storm hit the city,” Woodrow said. “Wind, rain, lightning everywhere—worse than the storm that sank our boat. The lightning started fires all over the city. I hear it’s a real inferno west of here. We’d better get out of the city while we can!”
“What’s the hurry?” Tas exclaimed. Pushing his uncle forward, he announced, “Uncle Trapspringer Furrfoot, meet my friend Woodrow Ath-Banard.”
Trapspringer thrust out his hand. “So you’re the fellow my nephew’s been talking about since we left: the Ruins. Glad to meet you.” Abruptly Damaris coughed. “Oh, yes,” Trapspringer said, “this is Tasslehoff’s birthmate, Damaris Metwinger—” he extended his gesture to Phineas and Vinsint “—and these are my friends, Phineas Curick and, uh, Vinsint—the ogre.” Woodrow looked questioningly toward Tasslehoff.
“I’ll explain it all to you later,” Tas assured him.
Woodrow turned to Damaris. “Metwinger—isn’t that the mayor’s name?”
“Yes, it is,” Damaris beamed. “He’s my father.” Her eyes narrowed suddenly and glared at Tasslehoff. “And I am no longer his birthmate,” she scoffed. “I’ve divorced him, or disowned him, or disavowed him, or whatever it is you do to someone you were going to marry before you marry him. I’ve un-fianced him.”
“I hate to break up all these happy hellos,” Phineas said loudly, “but the town is still burning down.”
Tasslehoff inclined his ear to the west. “What I want to know is, what’s that weird noise I’m hearing? And what’s happened to the wind all of a sudden?”
Everyone paused for a moment and listened. The sky to the west was a bright orange and yellow palette. Red shadows flickered and danced on the sides of nearby buildings. In the calm air, a massive column of twisting, black smoke climbed upward to blot out the gray dawn.
After a moment’s thought, Phineas said, “The fire must be a real cooker to roar like that. What’s happened to the wind is anybody’s guess.”
“Too late,” Vinsint boomed. “Look!”
They followed his pointing finger to the north of City Hall. Sweeping toward them was a dark, spinning cloud, its pointed tail snapping back and forth like a whip. Everywhere the tail touched ground, buildings exploded or were shredded like straw, trees were ripped from the earth, boulders flew into the air and hung suspended, then crashed down like the hammer of Reorx.
“Get down, in the gutter!” Tasslehoff shouted, pushing Woodrow and Phineas to the ground before diving between them himself. He had seen a cyclone once before, in Neraka, where the people knew that the safest place to be in such a situation was huddled in low, sheltered ground. Trapspringer, Damaris, Vinsint, and even the multitude of kender scurrying about in the street followed suit, diving into the mud and muck.
The tornado twisted and jigged toward them. Tas felt himself being lifted off the ground. Gobs of muddy water swirled around him, then suddenly he was thrown back to the gutter. Quickly he scraped the mud from his eyes and saw the tornado veering to the west of City Hall. It tore a swath around the building and pelted the walls with lumber, rocks, and pieces of furniture. The smashing of stained glass and wood and copper echoed in the streets, mingling with the incongruous squeals of kender. In spite of mortal danger, a tornado was something that happened once in a lifetime and these kender were as thrilled as if Paladine himself had dropped in for a visit.
In the space of a minute, the tornado had passed through the area and was on its way toward the edge of the city. Laughing with glee, Tasslehoff rolled onto his back. “What a ride!” he yelled. Trapspringer and Damaris were equally giddy, flushed from toes to topknot.
“Are you all crazy?” Phineas shrieked. “Every one of us could have been killed, turned inside out by that thing, and you’re laughing as if it was nothing more than a pillow fight!” Phineas climbed to his feet and opened his mouth to say more, but was suddenly dumbstruck by the kenders’ attitudes. He spun back and forth in a half-circle, working his jaw and waving his hands, but no words came out. Finally he strode to a nearby building and slumped to the ground, his back against the wall.
Tasslehoff, meanwhile, had stopped laughing. Frantically he walked the street where Woodrow had fallen. There was no sign of the human! “Woodrow!” he cried. “Woodrow is gone!”
Vinsint, Damaris, and Trapspringer sat up, blinking, and looked around. Even Phineas lifted his head and scanned the road. But there was no sign the young man had ever been there.
Tasslehoff shouted Woodrow’s name, then shouted it again. The only answer was the creaking and groaning of weakened timbers, the roar of the fires, and the rising howl of the returning wind. But then, Tasslehoff heard his name. He looked around, yet saw nothing. When he heard it again, he looked over and saw Woodrow around the corner, looking to the west.
Tasslehoff sprinted to his side. “Woodrow, I thought you’d been swept up by the tornado!” Tas exclaimed, punching his arm in mock anger. “I was really worried!”
Woodrow knew that was quite a statement for a kender. “I’m sorry, Mr. Burrfoot, but I wanted to find out how far the fire had gotten, so I jumped up before everyone else, after the twister. I really hate to upset anyone further, but our troubles aren’t over yet,” he announced. By now, everyone could see flames licking at the buildings immediately to the west of City Hall and across the tornado’s path. “We’ve got to move now.”
“We can’t just abandon the city to the fire!” Damaris cried.
“We can’t stop those flames,” said Phineas, looking uneasily at the approaching inferno.
Everyone, including the other kender in the square, turned to the east. But they stopped when a voice commanded, “No, we’re staying here.”
All eyes turned toward Tasslehoff.
The young kender felt a strange sense of self-consciousness. He shifted his weight from foot to foot. Swallowing hard, he tasted only soot. But everyone was waiting to hear what he had to say next.
“I think we can stop the fire and save at least part of the city. Vinsint’s story about fire-fighting gave me an idea, and the tornado showed me how to make it happen. But we’re all going to have to work together”—a murmur of resistance passed through the crowd of kender—“and we’re going to have to get a lot more help.”
A kender wearing a long, blue, fur-trimmed robe with lots of pockets stepped forward from the crowd. As he drew a deep breath in preparation for a speech, Damaris squealed “Daddy!” and rushed forward, throwing her arms around the man’s neck. There was a brief burst of applause from the crowd while he readjusted his robe, planted a peck on Damaris’s cheek, and cleared his throat nervously.
“People of Kendermore,” he intoned, “as your mayor, I think it behooves us to listen to what this young wanderer has to say, no matter how shabbily he treated my daughter. If he thinks he has a plan, let’s hear it. And if it turns out he doesn’t have a plan, we can always skedaddle afterward. After all, ‘there’s no danger so pressing that it couldn’t be worse’, as they say.” With that, he turned to Tas and folded his arms.
No sooner had Tasslehoff outlined his plan than the tiny assembly fell to putting it into effect. Several crates were piled up for Tas to stand on so he could oversee progress and be heard by everyone.
“Uncle Trapspringer and Damaris and Mayor Metwinger,” he ordered, “go round up more help. We can’t do this with two dozen people.
Kendermore Page 30
