[Meetings 06] - The Companions

by Tina Daniell - (ebook by Undead)

  Three of the sailors, all female and more loyal to Yuril than to Captain Nugetre, said they would come along as well.

  That made eight, and the furious Nugetre had to promise us two small boats in order to land us ashore.

  Chapter 10

  The Evil Kender

  The potion worked wonderfully. Most assuredly, Tasslehoff Burrfoot had been changed into an evil kender. There could be no question about that. From his former topknot to his toes, Tas was thoroughly evil.

  The minotaur guards weren't so sure they didn't like Tas better the way he was before, before Fesz, the shaman minotaur and the high emissary of the Nightmaster, had fed him the potion that perverted his true kender nature.

  Of course, they couldn't be called Tasslehoff's guards anymore, not strictly speaking. Glorying in his new evilness, Tas had been upgraded from prisoner to honored guest of the minotaur king. He occupied privileged quarters on an upper floor of the palace, a spacious room of plush and velvet with a balcony overlooking the sprawling, seedy city of Lacynos.

  Across the hall was another privileged guest room, even more privileged and roomier, that had been set aside for Fesz, who needed to be close to Tas on account of their growing friendship and frequent consultations.

  A small number of minotaur guards still stood outside Tas's room in the hallway. They were ordered to keep Tas from leaving the premises without escort or authorization, but they were also ordered not to act like guards. Instead, they were to act friendly and do the kender's bidding, and they dared not disobey.

  The evil kender was ten times the nuisance that the good kender had been—that is, if anyone would have called Tas "good" in the first place. Worse than a nuisance, in the unanimous opinion of the minotaur guards, Tas was downright . . . well, evil.

  Since the guards were his to order around, Tas made sure they were kept busy attending to his every whim. And Tas had plenty of whims, one for every minute of the day, it seemed.

  In his evilness, Tas had decided that he would like to take three hot baths each day at strictly appointed intervals. It was hard work, even for the minotaur guards, to organize the baths and heft the hot water buckets up the several flights of stairs leading to the privileged guest quarters three times a day.

  And woe betide them if the water wasn't hot enough. If it wasn't, Tas would throw a terrible tantrum, hitting them over the head with the empty bucket or poking them in the eyes with a curtain rod, the best poking weapon he had at his disposal. Or he would curse them with an amazing litany of taunts. Some of the guards could barely restrain themselves, having to take insults and orders from a kender. But take it they did, and after the hitting and poking and taunting, they usually had to slink out and start all over again, praying to get the bathwater hot enough next time.

  Because he was a bit bored being cooped up all day, every day in his privileged quarters, Tasslehoff also decided that he wanted the room redone and painted in more pleasing colors. He didn't like its present off-white, but it was very difficult for Tas to decide precisely which color, or colors, the room ought to be.

  First he ordered two of the guards to repaint his room a deep indigo blue—by sundown. Afterward, staring at the deep indigo blue that covered the floor, walls, and ceiling, Tas almost fell asleep. So he decided that deep indigo blue was a tad too lulling.

  He ordered the same two guards to repaint the room a bright crimson—by sundown of the next day. The guards grumbled and swore, especially because Tas poked at them, swatted their heads, and berated them as they slaved to meet the deadline.

  Bright crimson kept the kender wide awake at night. So Tas decided that the floor could stay crimson, if it was covered with some rugs—he wouldn't be noticing the floor much at night anyway—but the walls ought to be some substantial color, like orange, while the ceiling ought to be some profoundly evil color, like midnight black.

  The same two minotaur guards, because they had done such a good job the first two times and also because they had done such a bad job the first two times, were selected to repaint Tasslehoff's room again.

  All the minotaur guards complained bitterly among themselves about Tasslehoff. No matter why or when they entered the kender's quarters, they were likely to be struck by some flying object or tackled from behind or tripped by wire strung across their path. Insults—the worst insults Tas could think of, comparisons to dumb cows and dull-horned bulls—poured out nonstop. Food was rejected and tossed in their faces.

  Dogz, the only minotaur who managed to avoid being poked or insulted, sadly remembered the good old Tasslehoff, before he had turned evil.

  Tasslehoff Burrfoot is a valued minion of the Nightmaster," Fesz had declared. And the minotaur guards dared not disagree.

  To Fesz, Tas's hostile and aggressive behavior was proof positive that the kender had turned evil. And if his obnoxious behavior wasn't evidence enough, Tasslehoff also had proved extremely cooperative in telling Fesz a great deal about the thin, intelligent mage from Solace who had sent him to Southern Ergoth to obtain the rare jalopwort from a minotaur herbalist.

  Tas also told Fesz all about his good friends, Flint and Tanis Half-Elven, and his Uncle Trapspringer, and the time he, Tas, had almost captured a woolly mammoth single-handedly. He told him about poor Sturm and Caramon, probably carcasses picked over by spiny fish at the bottom of the Blood Sea by now. It was good riddance to bad rubbish, because they were honorable and pure and wouldn't fit in with the kender's new way of looking at the world as something to be stomped on and mashed and conquered.

  Indeed, the kender loved to talk about his friends—"ex-friends," he sometimes corrected himself. He especially loved to talk about the dwarf, Flint Fireforge. So much did he love to talk about Flint that occasionally Fesz had to put his arm around the kender and gently steer him back to the subject of Raistlin Majere, the enemy of the minotaur race and therefore, Fesz reminded him, an enemy of Tas's.

  Raistlin Majere was the one who interested Fesz the most. This human who was studying to be a mage, and who had wanted the jalopwort because of a spell he had stumbled across in some ancient text.

  "Oh, Raistlin is very smart, you bet," Tas told Fesz. "A pretty good mage, considering that he hasn't taken the Test yet, but don't ask me what the Test is, because it's something very secret, and although I know more about it than practically anybody else, it ties my tongue just to try to explain it. If Raistlin's figured out where the jalopwort went—meaning, where I am, here in Minotaurville—then he's probably on his way here right now. He'll want the jalopwort back, and probably he'll want to rescue me, too—hah! Probably Tanis and Flint will be coming with him. Boy, Flint will get a big kick out of how evil I am before I kill him!

  "But you're right, Fesz. Raistlin is the real threat. I think you and I better start to figure out how to trap him and choke him and stab him and then maybe do something really evil to his dead body, like—I don't know. You've got more experience than I do in this sort of thing. What do you suggest?"

  Whenever the kender got really excited, as he was now, he paced the room, bouncing up and down with an unmistakably wide, wicked leer. It made Fesz feel pleased. Furthermore, it was usually an appropriate time to give the kender another dose of the potion that would keep him evil as long as Tas kept drinking it.

  Tas had been extremely cooperative and very evil for about a week now. Fesz had written down everything the kender said that related to Raistlin and the jalopwort, and dispatched the essence of what he learned across the channel to the Nightmaster on the island of Karthay. Even though the kender was evil, he was still insatiably curious about everything. He begged Fesz to reveal how he managed to communicate with the Nightmaster.

  One afternoon, feeling rather fatherly toward Tas, the shaman minotaur escorted the kender into his quarters to show him where he lived.

  "Hey, how come you have a bigger room than I do?" asked Tasslehoff, looking around indignantly. "You've got nicer paintings and bigger windows, too—and two windows! I
love the color combination you've chosen—a simple brown and dark green combination, like trees and leaves. It reminds me of a forest, in fact. Those stupid minotaur guards have had me all confused with crimson and blue and orange. When I get back, I'm going to give them a piece of my mind."

  Fesz put his arm around the irrepressibly wicked kender with whom he was feeling more and more of a kinship and led him to the windowsill. On the sill sat a large round jar of unusually corpulent bees with unusually long stingers. They swarmed inside the jar, buzzing noisily.

  "These super-intelligent bees bear my messages to the Nightmaster," said Fesz intently, watching Tas's reaction. "They can fly great distances, and they relay messages through telepathic means. Of course"—he gave Tas a sly wink—"they have other nasty uses, but they are most useful for quick and reliable communication."

  For once in his life, Tas was caught speechless. His jaw sagged. He had never heard of such creatures in all his travels.

  With a flourish, the shaman minotaur unscrewed the top of the jar and let the bees rise into the air. They hovered momentarily a few inches above the jar before collecting into a swarm and buzzing up and off in an easterly direction.

  "Wow!" exclaimed Tas, "When I was coming back from Southern Ergoth, I sent a magic message to Raistlin—that's probably how he knows where we are—but all I had was this dumb old bottle that I had to throw into the ocean, and who knows whether it sank to the bottom of sea? If I had bees like that, I could . . . except where would I put them? I don't think it would be a good idea to carry them in my rucksack in case the jar broke, and—"

  Pleased with the kender's ceaseless flow of information, Fesz wrote this new tidbit down as Tasslehoff rattled on. It would be part of his next report to the Nightmaster.

  By now the minotaur shaman had a quite thorough description of Raistlin Majere and the half-elf and the dwarf who would likely be accompanying him. He had a sense of the young mage's flaws and weaknesses. Disguised assassins—minotaurs would be too conspicuous—would be dispatched to Solace in the event that Raistlin was still there. But if Raistlin was on his way to the minotaur isles, the Nightmaster would be forewarned and ready.

  This Raistlin was not a genuine threat, Fesz felt certain, but it couldn't hurt to be vigilant.

  On the eighth day of the kender's evil transformation, Fesz entered Tas's quarters, looking puzzled. He was carrying a parchment bearing a message he himself had transcribed. It was a message from the Nightmaster, delivered to Fesz by the super-intelligent bees.

  Always happy to see his friend, Tas bounced up and down, greeting him with an elaborate salute he had devised. Then he snatched the message from the shaman's hands:

  Have captured a lone female on the shore. She is well armed, obviously a warrior. She refuses to tell me her name or how or why she has come here. We are holding her for sacrifice. I suspect she is the one we have been awaiting. Ask the kender if he knows who she is.

  The Nightmaster

  "The bees brought this message today," said Fesz, his bullish brow knit in thought. "Do you have any idea who this woman could be?"

  Tas didn't have to think about it for very long. "Why, it must be Kitiara!" he exclaimed. "Although how she got to Karthay so fast is beyond me."

  "Who is Kitiara?"

  "Kitiara Uth Matar," said Tasslehoff. "Didn't I tell you about her? Well, I tend to forget her about half the time because she's only Raistlin's half-sister. No pun intended, but if she's here now, that must mean that Raistlin contacted her, so he can't be very far behind . . . ."

  Fesz scribbled it all down as fast as he could.

  * * * * *

  Fesz and Tas became such good friends that sometimes, in the late afternoons, they would get into a cart pulled by human slaves and travel to various sites around Lacynos. These amiable trips always put Tas in a talkative mood, Fesz discovered—not that it took much to do that—and the shaman minotaur learned more and more about the aspiring mage, Raistlin.

  Naturally these two were always followed by one or two minotaur guards, who kept some distance behind them not only out of a sense of protocol, but also because they didn't want Tasslehoff throwing stones at them or otherwise harassing them.

  On these trips, Tas got to know the entire city. He especially liked the evil, smelly places, like the slave pits and the arena of games.

  A number of slave pits were scattered around the city. They were deep holes carved out of the ground for use as primitive living quarters for the thousands of slaves who carried out the day-to-day labor of Lacynos. During the daytime, only about one hundred slaves might occupy these pens—those too ill or too young to work. Their numbers swelled to seven hundred or so in each pen at night, when those slaves who were still alive after a hard day's toil returned.

  The ranks of slaves consisted mostly of persons captured by minotaur pirates, sold by professional slavers, or condemned to a period of indenture for criminal offenses. There was an occasional luckless elf or dishonored minotaur, but nary a kender. In Lacynos, Tas observed, humans predominated as the oppressed race.

  Dozens of minotaur guards lined the perimeter of each pit. The only access was a wide ramp, up whose slope the slaves marched, six or seven abreast, every morning, then down again at nightfall. To guard against an uprising, several retaining walls rimmed the pit. These could be collapsed, dropping tons of earth onto any rebellious mob.

  Tas was very impressed by one slave pit that he visited.

  He praised the ingenuity of the setup and asked a lot of questions.

  "If I ever go back to Solace," he told Fesz, adding quickly, "not that I really want to, because I'm having such a good time here in Lacynos. But if I do ever go back to Solace, I think it would be a fine idea to have a slave pit just like this one in the middle of the town. Teach 'em all a lesson. Of course, Solace is up in the treetops, and speaking technically, I'm not sure that you can build a pit up in the trees, so that is a minor problem I'll have to work out. But I sure do love these slave pits!"

  The kender stood on a walkway, peering down into the pit at a throng of slaves, some of them obviously ill or wounded, lying curled up on the ground, others pushing and fighting. He saw a broad-shouldered human wearing some tattered Solamnic regalia shove his way proudly through the milling population. At the other end of the slave pit, he saw a female cleric on bended knee tending to one of the fallen slaves.

  One of the minotaur guards got too close and Tasslehoff raised his elbow, accidentally knocking him over the railing of the walkway and down some fifty feet to the bottom of the pit. The slaves scurried out of his way as he hurtled downward, landing with a sickening crunch.

  "Oops! Pardon me," said Tas, looking up at Fesz sheepishly. "I was just wondering what a minotaur would sound like, landing on his head after falling a long way down."

  The indulgent Fesz returned the kender's evil smile.

  The arena of games was spectacular as architecture, even if the games were a mite boring, to Tasslehoff's taste, as a spectator sport. Thousands of slaves had toiled under the whip to build the huge stone structure with its high walls, imposing entryways, and comfortable viewing galleries. Many thousands more had died in the barbaric competition in the packed dirt arena, a twice-monthly event that drew the entire city's population, so rabid were the minotaurs about their national sport of watching one gladiator pitted against another in a fight to the death.

  Tas and Fesz spent one sunny afternoon in a private box reserved for the king and his guests near the floor of the arena, directly opposite the ramp entrance, which ascended from the catacombs that served as a waiting room for the gladiators.

  One human scum was fighting another human scum, both were dressed in skimpy clothing and carried fierce-looking weapons. Both were quick and muscular.

  For the life of him, Tas couldn't tell them apart. He could barely keep his bleary eyes open as their ruthless combat went on for what seemed like hours.

  Cheering, jeering, shouting minotaurs and h
uman pirates packed the coliseum. The atmosphere was festive. Wives and children accompanied some of the bull-men, everyone applauded his champion wildly. Many had placed bets.

  One of the human gladiators dodged the other's thrust, smashed him in the face with his shield, and stuck him trough the neck with his long sword. The audience roared, demanding that the loser be beheaded. The victorious human obliged, then pranced around the arena, pleasing the crowd by holding aloft the head dripping with blood.

  "By the way," said Tas, yawning, "that reminds me. I sure would like to have my hoopak back. It's the only real weapon I carry, and besides, it's got sentimental value."

  "Where is your hoopak?" rumbled Fesz solicitously.

  "It was with my rucksack," explained Tas, "until everything I owned got confiscated. I sure would like it back."

  "Would you like the whole rucksack back?" asked Fesz.

  "You bet."

  Fesz said he didn't see any harm in that. Tas grinned.

  They spent the whole next day at the shipyard. Tas found it very interesting. He could plainly see that the minotaurs were busy preparing for a big war or something. Piles of lumber littered the wharf. Hundreds of human slaves, overseen by grim-faced, weapon-flourishing minotaurs, streamed over the scene like ants, wielding tools such as adzes, saws, and drills.

  "At night," explained Fesz, "the work continues. Torches illuminate the construction. We need to be ready for Sargonnas when he is brought into this world."

  Tas nodded. He already knew all about what Fesz and the Nightmaster and the kingdom of minotaurs were planning. Fesz had been telling him bit by bit, just as Tas had been telling Fesz about Raistlin Majere.

  The jalopwort was part of an obscure spell that the leading shaman of the minotaurs intended to cast to open a portal and invite the evil god into the material world. Sargonnas would lead the minotaur kingdom in its obsessive goal to conquer and oppress the inferior races of Ansalon—that is, everyone who wasn't a minotaur.