Kendermore

by Mary Kirchoff

  “Poor Uncle Trapspringer,” Tas said sadly, shaking his head as he pulled the last of the feathers from the bird.

  “I’ll gut it for you,” Woodrow offered, holding out his hand for the chicken. “If I learned anything from my time as a squire, it was how to dress game.”

  Tas handed him the chicken. “I’ll need a spit, too,” he said to Woodrow. After wiping his palms on the grass to remove the feathers, Tas rinsed his hands with the clear water he’d set aside earlier. Next, he drained the water from the bowl of beans. Tossing in a handful each of fennel and sage, he stirred the mixture with his hands.

  Woodrow returned with the bird. “All clean and shiny and pink,” he said, handing it over by the neck.

  Tas split the lemon in half and rubbed what little juice there was over the chicken, inside and out. Next he stuffed the bean mixture into the cavity of the bird while Woodrow drove two sturdy, fork-shaped branches into the ground on either side of the fire. Tas held the stuffed chicken up and Woodrow ran a straight, thin stick through it from one end to the other. Wordlessly, he set it on the two forked sticks with the chicken centered over the glowing coals.

  “Perfect,” Tas sighed. He leaned back against a sturdy wagon wheel and closed his eyes.

  “I’ll keep an eye on dinner,” Woodrow offered, but he knew the kender was already asleep. The human sat cross-legged before the fire, absently staring into the red-hot coals.

  Meanwhile, Gisella scampered barefoot up the slope toward the light of the fire, stopping occasionally to pluck pine needles from the tender pads of her feet. She knew Woodrow was scandalized by her nightly forays to the nearest body of water—and to bodies of another sort when the option was available—she thought with a girlish giggle. He’d said it was rather bold of her to traipse around in the woods unclothed. But Gisella Hornslager was accustomed to taking care of herself. She found the damage from a day’s dirt and sweat grinding into her skin more upsetting than any possible encounter with a wild animal. The frigid bath by moonlight had felt divine, though now her damp skin felt cool against the night mountain air. She drew her thin wrap closer and hurried toward the promised warmth of the fire.

  Gisella stopped in her tracks at the edge of the clearing; the most delicious aroma assailed her nostrils.

  “Tasslehoff’s recipe,” said Woodrow, noting the pleased expression on her face. He had removed the chicken from the fire and was in the process of sliding the bird from the stick.

  Gisella rushed foward and turned over the bucket of water for a seat. Gingerly testing the temperature of the rocks around the fire with her icy toes, she found a comfortable spot. Sighing contentedly, she looked at the kender, who had woken and was holding a large tin plate under their dinner.

  “Perhaps your friend, that cute half-elf, was right about one thing: maybe you are worth more than a bolt of fabric.” She snatched up a smaller plate and held it out eagerly to receive her share. “I’m starved!”

  “Thank you,” Tasslehoff said, though he wasn’t sure if that had been a compliment or not. He tipped the platter so that tender, crumbly bits of chicken rolled onto Gisella’s plate, and then added a helping of bean stuffing. Tas sat back to enjoy his own meal.

  Woodrow ate his share in silence, watching his employer. Gisella’s hands were a flurry of activity, and her mouth never stopped chewing. Before Woodrow had eaten more than two bites, Gisella was finished with hers. She sat with her arms clutched tightly about her waist, holding her wrap closed, her eyes the half-closed slits of a sleeping cat.

  Woodrow had not met many women, and had come to know only a few of them, but he felt that Gisella Hornslager was not typical of her sex. She had her own rules about everything, and she seemed to care not one whit what anyone thought of her. She had a voracious appetite for food, among other things. He blushed, remembering the sound of her “trading” with men these last weeks. He’d tried not to listen to the grunts and groans coming through the wagon’s windows, but it was impossible since on those occasions she posted him right outside as watchman. Afterward, she seemed not the least ashamed to face him and, in fact, seemed to delight in bringing a flood of red to his cheeks with some earthy remark.

  She was afraid of nothing—except the possibility that something she wanted could not be bought. Woodrow concluded that, although he strongly disagreed with her freewheeling lifestyle, he respected her for having the courage of her convictions.

  “What are you staring at?” she demanded suddenly, her eyes wide open. She looked over his lean, muscled body with a suggestive smile on her face. “You haven’t changed your mind about my preferred payment plan?”

  His gaze flew back to his plate, and he concentrated madly on his meal. “N-no,” he stuttered, blushing as usual. “I still need the steel pieces, ma’am.”

  She shrugged, unoffended. “Suit yourself. You know I prefer to barter for services, whenever possible.” Gisella picked up a twig and poked it into the fire. “Let me see that map, Burrfoot,” she said.

  Looking up from his plate, Tas sucked his greasy fingers loudly and reached into his vest. He handed the dwarf a folded piece of parchment. “We’ve traveled for little more than a half-day. Given that, I think we should be able to reach Xak Tsaroth by late tomorrow,” the kender predicted.

  Ignoring him, Gisella tipped the map toward the firelight and peered closely.

  “We’re right about here,” Tas said helpfully, jabbing at the back of the map toward the top center, at a point near the city marked Xak Tsaroth.

  Gisella could see the shadow of his finger through the parchment. “Hmmm, yes,” she said. “It looks like a nice, straight shot from here to—” she looked closely all the way to the right edge “—well, all the way to Balifor.”

  Tasslehoff puffed himself up. “I told you I’d get you back before your melons went bad. If there’s one thing a Burrfoot knows, it’s maps.”

  But Gisella was still looking closely at the map, shaking her head slowly. “I guess …” she mumbled. But the dwarf continued staring at the piece of paper, wondering what it was that she was missing, until the coals burned black, long after Tasslehoff and Woodrow had both curled up to sleep.

  Chapter 4

  Phineas wiped the night’s grit from his eyes with a corner of his white smock as he clomped down the wooden stairs, headed for his office below. Grimacing, he smacked his lips. His mouth had an awful, metallic taste, as if he’d been sucking on a rusty sword. Undoubtedly residue from the pitcher of kender ale he’d drunk before falling asleep last night, he decided.

  After opening the door to his examination room at the foot of the stairs, he quickly lit the stub of a candle in the darkened room and headed straight for the counter that contained the green glass bottle of his own special elixir. It was Phineas’s cure for anything that couldn’t be covered up with a bandage, ear plugs, or oiled parchment glasses, or pulled out like teeth or in-grown toenails. He prescribed it for headaches, stomachaches, foot aches, joint aches, sore throats, bulging eyes, rashes, bad breath, swollen tongues, irregularity, and a host of other ills that seemed to plague the citizens of Kendermore. Oddly enough, he’d found that the sharp-tasting liquid was actually effective against stomachaches and bad breath. He charged a dear price for his elixir, claiming that its mystical ingredients came “from dangerous lands far away, where strangers are met with the sword and the flame and seldom escape with their lives.” Kenders’ eyes would open wide as they contemplated the green bottle, and a low whistle would often escape their lips as they reached greedily for the exotic medicine.

  Taking a swig now and swishing it around in his mouth, Phineas’s full cheeks jiggled with mirth. The special ingredients of his elixir were a few crushed cherry and eucalyptus leaves that he scavenged from the trash behind the neighborhood apothecary’s shop. Nothing mystical about that. Certainly he had never put a bone from a lycanthropic minotaur in any batch, as he’d told the kender the night before.

  Thus remembering his visitor, Phine
as’s eyes fell across the folded paper on the nearby wooden tray. “That Trapspringer was a con artist—maybe even better than me!” the human admitted aloud, unfolding the sheet absently. It was a map. He was about to crumble it between his fists when a word on one corner fleetingly caught his attention.

  The word was “treasure.”

  Frowning in thought, Phineas thumbed the map open and spread it out on the counter, allowing the glow of the candle to fall over it. He squinted in the flickering light and deduced from a smudgy title at the top that this was a map of Kendermore. But he couldn’t make out any fine details on the aged, delicate map. He needed more light.

  The window in the examination room faced west, so Phineas didn’t even bother opening it; he knew he wouldn’t get any appreciable light from that direction so early in the morning. Instead, he stepped into his small waiting room and opened wide the shutters, which faced the east and the rising sun. Morning sunlight filtered in beneath a heavy canvas awning. Phineas dragged a rickety stool to the open window, spread the map out on the waiting bench, and parked his bulk on the stool. The wood creaked in protest, which usually happened when Phineas sat in anything made for a kender.

  Not that he was heavy, at least by the standards of his own race. He was of average human height, with a barrel-shaped chest and rather sticklike arms and legs. His hands were lily white, and there was not an ounce of muscle on his bones. He had always been considered slight and nonthreatening among his own people. But compared to kender, he was large, which was one of the reasons he liked living in Kendermore.

  Nibbling at a fingernail now, Phineas scanned the old parchment map for the word “treasure.” He scanned it again, and then a third time. Had his eyes somehow played a trick on his mind? He was sure he’d been looking at the right side of the map, near the edge. Phineas concentrated his gaze there.

  “Hey, it’th Dr. Teeth!” called a high, lisping girl kender’s voice. Phineas started so violently he almost fell backward off the groaning stool. The voice’s owner poked her head under the awning to peer in the window. “Are you open?” she asked. “I have thith terrible toothache, and thinth there’th no waiting right now, you could …”

  “No, I’m not ‘open’ yet,” snapped Phineas, his eyes drawn back to the map. “Do you see an ‘open’ sign in my door?”

  “Well, no, but your window ith open and I thought maybe you hadn’t turned the thign yet, and my tooth hurtth real bad. Thay, what’th that? A map?”

  Phineas instinctively jerked the paper from the kender’s prying eyes, then looked up. A white strip of cloth was stretched around the kender’s jaw and tied to the top of her head.

  “This? Why, yes, it is a map. I’m thinking of moving my shop, and I’m simply considering new locations,” he improvised hastily. “And yes, my window is open, but I am not.”

  “Well, when will you be open?” she asked, laying a hand gingerly to the left side of her jaw.

  “I don’t know!” he growled impatiently. “Come back this afternoon!”

  “Should I come here, or should I go to your new shop?”

  Phineas looked at her strangely. Ordinarily, kender didn’t bother him, like they did most humans. But for some reason, this kender was annoying him to distraction. Perhaps it was simply a reaction to the previous evening’s excessive nightcap.

  “Here!”

  “OK!” she said merrily. “Bye! Thee you thith afternoon!” Waving, she grinned, but her smile disappeared immediately. Holding her sore jaw, she drifted away down the uneven, cobbled street.

  Quickly, before more snooping kender could appear and pester him, Phineas pulled the map back onto his lap and studied it closely. A street map of Kendermore looked like a box filled with writhing snakes. No two roads were parallel—or even straight—and all but the thicker, main avenues were dead ends. Phineas noted that the names on those main thoroughfares seemed to change at random. He focused his attention on one whose name he recognized as being near his shop; there it was called “Bottleneck Avenue,” two irregular blocks to the east, the same road bore the name “Straight Street” (and appeared to be anything but), and just beyond that word, the street was renamed “Bildor’s Boulevard.”

  If all that weren’t confusing enough, the mapmaker had used his own symbols, which depicted such important landmarks as “Bertie’s house,” “here’s where the robin’s nest is,” and “violet patch.”

  Looking at the map only made the city more confusing, Phineas decided. But asking directions from a kender was hopeless, too. “Turn right—or is it left?—at the big, green tree, then spin in place twice, go past the red geraniums—beautiful, have you seen them?—and before you know it you’re where you are!”

  Again the word seemed to leap from the right edge of the map, this time hitting him squarely in the eyes. Actually, “treasure” was part of a phrase, which may have made it difficult for him to see. In full, it read, “Here be a treasure of gems and magical rings beyond compare.” Phineas’s pulse throbbed in his temples. Snatching up a bit of coal from the small pile near his heating brazier, he circled the phrase with shaking hands. Then he noticed the symbol below it.

  Beneath the glorious words was an arrow pointing to the right edge of the map, its chevron point catching exactly the lip of the sheet. With his nose less than an inch from the page, he noticed that the right edge of the map was slightly frayed, as if it had been torn along a fold.

  The map had been ripped in two, and the location of the treasure was on the other half!

  “No!” Phineas cried. His head moved quickly from side to side, his eyes scouring the map for a different answer. Maybe the arrow didn’t apply to the treasure. But after a few frantic moments, Phineas had to admit that it did. There was nothing else on that edge of the map. Strangely, he was fairly certain that all of Kendermore, as he knew it, was represented on the map in his hand.

  Then what was on the other half of the map?

  And where was it?

  Phineas forced his mind to slow down. He might possibly have in his possession the find of a lifetime. He could live a long time on the sale of gems and magical rings. But he had to have the whole map to find this treasure.

  Trapspringer! The kender had told him the map was one of his most prized possessions, so he obviously knew its value. Surely the odd, elder kender had the other half. But how would he find Trapspringer in the vast city of Kendermore? Phineas’s heart pounded like the sound of a hundred horses’ hooves.

  Frowning, he craned his neck through the open window, then snorted at his own foolishness. The ringing in his ears wasn’t his heart at all, but an early morning parade coming down his street.

  Parades—if the term were used loosely—were a daily event in Kendermore. The occasions they celebrated ranged from the ridiculous to the sublime. This one was shaping up to be the former, Phineas thought sourly, taking note of the band. Five squealing fifers and three thundering cymbalists provided background noise for a middle-aged kender with a black topknot, who yelled through cupped hands from a bench atop a seriously listing wagon. A banner, stretched between the hands of two scantily clad young female kender in knee-high boots, short skirts, and low-cut blouses, proclaimed that they were promoting the election of someone or other into the mayor’s office.

  “And why do we want a gynosphinx for mayor?” he yelled. “Because we’ve never had one, that’s why! Kendermore was founded on freedom and equality—well, maybe no one said those things specifically—but we say that a gynosphinx deserves a chance! Besides, they tell good riddles!” The fifes struck a piercing trill, the cymbals crashed, and the ensemble continued down the street, yelling and cheering for the spokesman’s words.

  Distracted from the map, Phineas shook his head in amusement. A gynosphinx for mayor, indeed. As far as he knew, gynosphinxes were the female of the species of creatures with lion bodies. They were almost as large as ogres, though vastly more intelligent, and they tended to devour anything that offended them. Only in Ke
ndermore would anyone suggest such a thing. Besides, Kendermore already had a mayor, and Phineas had heard of no scheduled elections. Of course, kender seldom scheduled anything.

  Kendermore already had a mayor. Phineas’s eyes darted from side to side as a thought—a recollection, really—congealed in his brain. Trapspringer had said some very strange, contradictory things the night before. He’d said that he was being held in prison. But he’d also said that his nephew was marrying the mayor’s daughter. Had one or both statements been the rambling of a crazy old kender? The two could not possibly be connected. Nevertheless, in the absence of any other clues, it seemed that Phineas’s best chance to find Trapspringer might lay with the mayor, whoever he was. A smile of pure delight and anticipation spread across his middle-aged face.

  In the wake of the parade, kender had begun appearing before his window.

  “Dr. Bones—”

  “I need a haircut and—”

  Forced to acknowledge their raucous presence, Phineas asked abruptly, “Say, do any of you know where I might find the mayor?”

  “City Hall!” they sang out.

  “Thanks,” he said tersely. “I’m closed today, because of the holiday—the parade, and gynosphinxes, and all that.” With that he swung the shutters closed in the kender’s tiny, surprised faces. He could hear their sputtering taunts, but his mind was already on its way to City Hall to locate either a crazy man or—

  Phineas couldn’t think of an ‘or.’

  Chapter 5

  “I don’t get it,” Tasslehoff said for the tenth time that morning. He was seated on the buckboard between Gisella and Woodrow, his map unfolded and spread wide. “The village of Que-shu was where it should be, smack in the middle of the plains. We’re riding on the Sageway East Road—right where it should be, too—but this should be more plains, right?” He flung his arms at the scenery around him. “So where did these mountains come from?” He thumped the map and shook his head. “Has there been an earthquake or something? Everything is turned around.”