by Brian Murphy
“Not at all!” he said. “As a luxury item, we plan to sell ice in port cities for one steel per pound.”
The islanders murmured to each other, trying to calculate the wealth in sight if the ice could be sold at that price.
“It’s good ice,” said one man. “I have a plot of land on Kraken Bay. You could build your warehouse there.”
“Not so fast, Jericas!” the woman interjected. “I saw the strangers first!”
“I spoke to them first,” the moneychanger shouted.
“Friends, friends!” Raegel said. “There’s ice and profit enough for all. Since our stock is currently melting on the beach, why don’t those of you interested in our proposition leave us your names and a small deposit? Once our fortunes are restored, we’ll mount another expedition to Icewall for more ice.”
Like gnomes arguing over an obscure point of mathematics, the Enstarians crowded around the two men, thrusting handfuls of coins at them while shouting their names. Mixun made a great show of writing down everyone’s name and the amount of their payment. He then urged them to help themselves to all the ice they could carry. Whooping like children, the hard-bitten islanders swooped down on the rapidly melting ice and hauled it away in buckets, jackets, even women’s skirts.
Away from the mob of islanders, Raegel and Mixun counted their money. “There must be two hundred steel pieces here,” Mixun chortled. “Who’d have thought? We can sell anything to anyone!”
“We must share the money with the gnomes,” Raegel said.
“What! Why?”
Raegel looked at Mixun, but said nothing.
“All right,” Mixun said. “They did save our lives back on Icewall. We’ll give them something.” He mused. “Twenty percent?”
“Fifty percent. They’ll need it.”
“For what?” said Mixun, raising his voice.
“To equip our next trip to Icewall.”
Mixun jerked his comrade farther away from scavenging islanders and the gnomes. “Are you crazy?” he hissed. “We’re not going back to Icewall! That was a song for the marks, that stuff about selling ice in every port-”
“I’m going to do it,” Raegel said simply.
Mixun stared. “You’re not serious, are you?”
“I am. The figures I gave the island people weren’t lies. We can get a steel piece per pound in any port, mark my words. And how many pounds do you think was in that ice floe? A million? Two million? Twenty? That’s serious coinage, Mix, my friend.”
Twenty million steel pieces? All the scams for the rest of his life wouldn’t net Mixun so much money. Was this scheme of Raegel’s the real thing? On far less than twenty million he could redeem his inheritance and fulfill his destiny in his homeland.
He studied Raegel’s face. The former farm boy from Throt was lost in a waking dream-no doubt surveying some distant vista of ice. If they could sell it, they could turn an island of ice into an island of money. In that moment, Mixun caught the dream too.
“Hey, Slipper!” he called. The little gnome, seated on a broken barrelhead, turned to face him. “How much ice was in that berg, anyway?”
The calculations took only minutes, but the resulting argument lasted the rest of the day.
The Great Gully Dwarf Clmacteric Of 40 S.C
Jeff Crook
At the corner of Globe and Market Streets, in the City of Seven Circles, Palanthas the Ancient, two kender skidded around the corner of the Military and Medical Guild of the Gnomes of Mount Nevermind-Local 458, Palanthian Division, the MMGGMN (mmggmn for short). Farther up Globe Street, from whence an angry mob surged, stood the ancient and revered Cartographer’s Guild, and it was no surprise that many in the mob brandished an assortment of compasses (the pointy kind), long metal rules, and T-squares. Even a few surveyor’s sticks bobbed in their midst, like pikemen in a ragtag army.
Neither was it surprising that, from the voluminous pouches of the elder kender, there protruded a shock of newly acquired rolls of parchment bound with green ribbons and bearing the great seal of the Cartographer’s Guild impressed in an official-looking red wax. The two kender were not aware that it was they who were the object of the chase. They were simply trying to get out of the mob’s way, while at the same time clambering for a glimpse of the two thieves who had so earned the mob’s ire.
The two kender ducked behind a stone staircase and watched the mob roll by, cross Market Street, and sweep onward along Poulter’s Lane, chickens rising before them like dust before a cavalry charge. The elder kender stepped into the street to watch the tail of the mob dwindle away, a grin on his face that seemed to continue all the way up to the tips of his pointy ears. His companion, however, remained seated in the shade of the steps, for it was an uncommonly hot day, and he looked miserable. His hair (if one could call it that) was a veritable rat’s nest, with an honest-to-goodness rat living in it. His clothes, leggings, vest, and even his pouches appeared to be held together by force of will alone (or maybe it was the dried mud). Likely, they had not seen a tailor’s shop, even from a distance, since the Second Cataclysm. Were the companion kender to sneeze, in all probability he would have emerged from the resultant cloud of dust naked as the day he was born. Contrary to popular belief, kender are not born fully clothed, their pouches already stuffed with other people’s belongings.
The elder kender was as unsurprising in appearance as his companion was exceptional. He was the living epitome of a kender, from his hoopak to his lime green leggings to his orange-furred vest, all the way up to a topknot that had grown beyond preposterous and was dangling over the edge of absurd. He’d been meticulously growing it every day of his eighty-odd years, and it was now as long as the tail of a beer-wagon horse. In winter, he wore it as both a hat and a scarf at the same time. He could also tie it under his nose and pretend to be a dwarf. If the kender race could be bothered with writing books about themselves, they might have put his picture on the cover.
Now that the fun was over, the elder kender looked around for something new to do. In Palanthas, there was always something new to do. But as his gray eyes fell upon his miserable companion, a spasm of sadness passed over his wrinkled brown face. Blinking back a tear and almost reaching for a handkerchief, his eyes strayed up the side of the imposing marble building looming over them. Suddenly, his face brightened, the wrinkles around his eyes writhed with glee, and he stuffed the hanky away before he’d finished drawing it out.
“Whort, my boy,” he said, “we’re here.”
Hearing the riot outside, Dr. Palaver set aside his delicate alchemical experiment for a moment, exited his office, and crossed the lobby to the front door. It being late in the day, all of the other members of the Military and Medical Guild of the Gnomes of Mount Nevermind, Local 458, Palanthian Division, had already gone home, and the doors were locked.
As he approached the door, he searched his pockets for the keys, found them, then dropped them. He bent to pick them up, heard a loud bang, and the next thing he knew, two kender were sitting beside him, patting his cheeks and waving various bottles of ointments, esters, and tinctures under his long bulbous nose, while going through his pockets as though they were their own. His keys had vanished altogether. He was flat on his back on the floor, with a large knot swelling on his enormous bald head. He slapped away their hands, sat up, swooned, and awoke again just in time to keep them from pouring some concoction of their own mixing down his throat.
“What’s all this?” the gnome managed to bluster.
“What’s wrong with your voice?” the elder kender asked, his jaw falling open.
“My voice? My voice? Does it sound confabulated? Oh, dear. I hope you didn’t pour anything unmaturated down my throat while I was napping. Say, what happened? The last thing l remember is bending over to pick-up the keys and hearing a loud bang…”
“Someone hit you on the head with the door,” the elder kender answered, interrupting him. “We found you here. I thought for a moment that you weren’t a
gnome. You looked like a gnome, but you were talking much too slowly. It is very important that we see a gnome, but now I see that you are one after all, and so it is much better.” He helped the gnome to rise.
“By the way, my name is Morgrify Pinchpocket,” the kender said, extending his small brown hand.
The gnome placed a pair of spectacles on the end of his nose and examined the kender’s hand. “Whatap-pearstobethetrouble?” he asked, while removing a small rubber mallet from one of the two-dozen pockets in his long white coat.
“Nothing’s wrong with my hand!” Morg responded, snatching back his hand and stuffing it safely into one of his own pockets (as opposed to someone else’s). “It’s my nephew here, Whortleberry Pinchpocket. Show your manners to the doctor, Whort.”
The younger kender stepped forward and dragged his foot across the floor, his head bowed. “Erngh,” he said, or something very like that.
“Remarkable! I’ve never seen a case like it. What-doyoucallit?” The gnome dropped his hammer and pulled a rather large book from a rather small pocket in his coat, opened it, and began flipping through the pages. “Manners, do you say? Let me see… mumps, mouth-and-foot disease, melancholy measles, mealy mouth malthasia… Nope, no manners. Is it a partic-ulated kender confliction?”
“A what?”
“Is it peculiar, to your knowledge?” the gnome attempted to elaborate.
“Most peculiar,” the kender answered. “You see, he’s broken, and I’d like to get him fixed.” He leaned closer and whispered, “I think he’s been afflicted.”
“Anafflictedkenderohhowmarvelous!” Dr. Palaver exclaimed as he led them through his alchemical laboratory.
Several large pots galloped atop a small stove, which caused the whole contraption to rock and scoot slowly around the room. Morg stood on his toes to see what was cooking and very nearly set his topknot on fire. Meanwhile, the doctor led Whort through a door that opened into an examination chamber.
“I’ve never had the opportunity to study an afflicted kender before. How did he come by it? I have heard that it is caused by expostulation to some source of vaporous fear, like that induced by dragons or other… do you mind if I measure his skull?”
He took down from the wall a device that looked like a giant nutcracker and approached the younger kender. Whort backed away, shaking his head and moaning “Erngh!” most emphatically.
“What is he afraid of?” the gnome asked.
“Everything!” Morg groaned.
“Everything?”
“Everything.”
“Mostpeculiarindeed!” the gnome squeaked with a little gleeful spring. “Renderareafraidofnothingbuthe-isafr iadofeverythinghowmarvelous!”
He began opening cupboards, of which there were perhaps three score, and drawers numbering in the hundreds. In the middle of the room stood a squat white marble examination table covered with what looked to be the same paper a butcher uses to wrap pork chops or whatnot. The large drain in the floor also did not bode well.
Dr. Palaver rattled about the room, gathering his instruments onto a large wooden tray and spilling various gleaming metal contraptions in his wake. Morg dutifully followed behind him, picking them up, but most of them somehow ended up in his own pockets rather than atop the doctor’s tray. The gnome did not seem to notice, so intent was he on his “unprecedented opportunity maybe even an article in the MMGGMN semi-quarterly annual,” and with running about, snapping his fingers and exclaiming, “Yes, I shall need that too!”
Whort crawled onto the examination table and curled up into a ball of dirt. His rat poked its head out of his hair and watched the doctor with growing alarm.
Finally, Dr. Palaver stood beside his patient and fingered through the instruments on the wooden tray. He picked up a small yellow card and held it at arm’s length from his face, peered down his nose and through his spectacles at it, reading aloud, “Now then, what seems to be the problem?” He dropped the card, lifted a device that looked like a flat piece of wood, and shoved it into Whort’s mouth. “Say ah.”
“Erngh.”
“He can’t speak,” Morg said.
“Cannot speak? Tch-tch. What a shame.” The doctor sympathized while trying to maneuver the beam of a bullseye lantern into the kender’s gaping mouth.
“It’s a tragedy!” Morg exclaimed.
“Erngh,” Whort agreed, choking on the stick.
The doctor removed the stick from Whort’s mouth and snapped the lid on the lantern. “Repeat after me. Big brown bugbear biting blue bottleflies.”
“Erngh.”
“You have been living with gully dwarves,” Dr. Palaver noted.
“Erngh.”
“That’s remarkable!” Morg said in awe. “I found him in the sewers in the company of about forty gully dwarves. You see, his mother sent me to look for him-”
“Elementary. The smell alone testifies to his modus homunculus,” the doctor said.
“Yes, I had noticed that. You see, his mother sent me-”
“The prognosis is obfuscated,” Dr. Palaver announced.
“She sent me- It’s what?”
“I know what is wrong with him.”
“You do?” Morg asked excitedly. “Can you fix him?”
“I am not a surgeon, and even if I were this boy’s cure is not to be found at the point of a knife,” Dr. Palaver said, as he dumped the tray of instruments on the examination table. He lifted a long butcher’s blade from the mass of metal and held it up to the light. “Not this one, anyway.”
“Erngh.”
“Whortleberry is suffering from acute panic psoriasis,” the doctor pronounced.
“It sounds horrible!” Morg cried. “Is it catching? Does it itch? Will he live? What is it?”
“It means that he is afraid.”
The elder kender’s face hardened. “We already know that! Are you sure you are a doctor?” he asked. “Don’t you fellows carry a badge or something?”
“There is the name on the door if you care to look,” the gnome answered, somewhat miffed. “In any case you did not allow me to complete my diagonal, concerning the gully dwarves. You see, the laborious odor of these creatures has permutated into his speaking glands, interrupting their normal effluvia of sound, while his fear-whatever its cause-has conscripted the muscles around his talk bone, preventing its ability to swing freely.”
“So what is to be done?” Morg asked.
“There is only one cure, and of course I have only just invented it today. That is why I was so late leaving, or you might not have found me on the floor,” the gnome said as he helped Whort from the table. The rat retreated back into Whort’s hair.
“The cure,” Dr. Palaver said as he led Morg and Whort down a low, dark, odiferous tunnel, “is to face the fear that produced the affectation, while at the same time indigesting a special formula-of which I am the inventor and which should evacuate the speak glands. Since I speculum that the source of the fear originates down here in the sewers, where you first found your nephew, the cure for the fear must also lie in the sewers.”
“If you only just invented it today, how can you be sure it will work?” Morg asked.
“There is an old gnomish axiom which states that something will work until it doesn’t,” Dr. Palaver explained. “And since we don’t know that it doesn’t work we must assume that it does. It really is elementary if you think about.”
“I see,” Morg sighed, though he really didn’t see.
When they had reached a certain section of the tunnel that seemed significant to the gnome, but which was no different than any other they had passed along the way-except perhaps that there was a particularly vile smell wafting from a nearby passageway-the gnome paused and removed a strange-looking device from one of his coat pockets.
“This inflatable sleeve monitors the thickness of the vines in the arm,” the gnome said, as he wrapped a thing around the kender’s arm that looked like the air bladder of a large fish. A long tube ending in a
n onion-shaped bulb of similar material depended from one end of the device, while from the other hung three tiny brass bells of varying sizes and tones. “It is believed that the thickness of the vines in the arm is directly provisional to the state of health. Any sudden changes could indicate a converse reaction to the potion, but we will be alerted to such changes by the ringing of the smallest bell. This middle bell indicates that there is a problem with the first bell, and this largest bell indicates that there is a problem not associated with either bell.”
Next, the doctor removed a strange set of spectacles from the upper-middle breast pocket of his white coat. They were not ordinary reading spectacles like the ones perched on the tip of his own very large, bulbous nose. Instead, they seemed made of some kind of thick, dark, opaque material through which no light could possibly pass, and which wrapped completely around the face. “How marvelously hideous!” Morg exclaimed, as the doctor slipped them onto his nephew’s nose and wrapped the arms behind his pointy ears. Once on his face, the lenses magnified to grotesque proportions the size of his eyes behind them. He blinked, and it was like someone quickly opening and closing the shutters of a pair of dark windows.
“These spectacles measure the pupae reactions of the eyes for any changes which could indicate possible side effects such as a sudden onset of death-like symptoms. The lenses also prevent any outside influx of proprietary confluences which might construe the results obtained from the measurement of the potion’s benefits. Do you understand?”
“Not really.”
“Erngh.”
“Excellent! Shall we begin?” The gnome snapped open the cover of his bullseye lantern. Pointing a long narrow beam of light ahead of him, he led the two kender into a smaller passage of the sewer. He splashed heedlessly through the muck, while Whort trudged behind and Morg brought up the rear, leaping nimbly or pole-vaulting with his hoopak from dry spot to dry spot in a vain attempt to keep his bright green leggings clean.