Kendermore Read online

  “Where’s Mr. H?” Tas asked.

  Gisella smiled broadly and slapped her thigh. “Right here, Bramblefoot. It’s good for business if people think I’m a Mrs. They just assume I’m Mrs. H. It makes the poor saps think they got a better deal by bamboozling the owner’s silly wife.” Gisella widened her eyes and raised her voice an octave or two. “Oh,” she mimicked, “I couldn’t sell it for that! We paid more than that! Well, if you really like it … it looks so nice on you. But please don’t tell my husband!”

  Tas giggled helplessly. He raced down the remainder of the bridgewalk and skidded to a halt before the wagon. “I can’t wait to see the inside! You collect stuff from all over the place, right? Gems and steel pieces and candy—”

  She laughed. “No, that’s what I get when I sell my goods. Right now I have some spices, a few bolts of fabric, and some melons growing riper by the minute.”

  The dwarf hurried up to the buckboard and rummaged through a large leather pouch at the side. “Now, where is that thing …,” she muttered, pushing a loose sheaf of papers around impatiently. “Woodrow!” she yelled without looking up.

  “Yes, ma’am?” he said quietly at her side.

  “Oh!” she cried, startled. “Don’t creep around like that, dear,” she scolded. “Get the kender settled in the wagon while I find that blasted map. I’ve got to see if I can’t shave some time off the return trip, or we may as well throw some of this stuff out right now.”

  Tas’s ears perked up. “Map? You’re looking for a map? I’ve got lots of maps. My family makes maps.” He thumped his chest proudly. “I’m a mapmaker. It’s what I do!”

  “Really?” Gisella asked, looking up, her face half hopeful, half dubious.

  “Yes. Here.” He reached into his fur-trimmed vest and pulled out a surprising number of rolled pieces of parchment.

  Peering closely at the numbers and shapes scribbled on the upper left corner of each, he finally selected one and unfurled it on the ground. It was slightly faded and the corners were torn, but otherwise the map was in good shape and readable. “That’s odd,” Tas said, blinking at the page. “Solace isn’t on here. Well, it’s a small village, and everyone knows where it is,” he concluded. “It’s just west of Xak Tsaroth, which is marked. He traced his finger from that city to where he knew Solace was.

  “Now, I’ll bet you came up the Southway Road from Pax Tharkas, right? Everyone does.” Gisella nodded, studying the map over his shoulder.

  “Look at this.” Tasslehoff drew an invisible line to the right edge of the map. “The region of Balifor is almost seven hundred miles straight east of here, and that’s right next to the city of Kendermore. We’ll have to climb a few mountains and travel through some thick forests, but we should save a lot of time over going the long way to the south.” He did some quick figuring in his head. “If we really hurry, we should be able to make it to the city in near to a month.”

  Something about the plan bothered Gisella. “Let me see that,” she said, indicating the map, her expression puzzled. “I know what’s different! I don’t see any of the landmarks here that were on my other map.”

  “Was it made by a kender?” Tas asked. She shook her head. “Well, that’s it, then,” Tas said definitively. “Kender often use their own sorts of landmarks, symbols, and elaborate measurements.”

  “Like ‘Uncle Bertie’s foot’?” she asked, pointing to words toward the top of the page. “And what’s this one?” Her eyes were left of center. “ ‘Where I found the pretty stones’; ‘shop with great candy’; ‘monsters with big teeth here’.” She looked up at Tas. “These are important landmarks?”

  Tas shrugged. “They were to Uncle Bertie.”

  “I don’t know, Tasslefoot,” Gisella said slowly, still looking closely at the sheet. “I don’t recognize the names of very many cities on this map.”

  “All the major cities are here—Xak Tsaroth, Thorbardin, Neraka. You name it!” Tas said, stomping his foot in frustration at her reluctance. “Your map must not have been as detailed as mine,” he sniffed, then had a thought. “Do you want to get to Kendermore before your melons rot or not?”

  Gisella frowned. “Of course I do.”

  “Then leave everything to me,” the kender said grandly, rolling up the parchment and slipping it back into his vest. “If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s getting to where I’m going.” With that, he climbed expectantly onto the buckboard. Gisella excused herself and slipped for a moment into the back of the wagon, giving Woodrow last-minute instructions to quickly finish feeding the horses.

  Woodrow’s straw-blond head bobbed absently ahead of the wagon, where he stood feeding the two horses, one dirty-white, the other dove-colored. He stroked their thick necks softly as they nibbled their dinners. The young man didn’t know much about kender, but the one thing he had learned from the few he’d met was that it was a rare kender who knew where he was going in the first place. Woodrow didn’t contradict Tasslehoff’s claims, though; he was in no hurry to get anywhere.

  Chapter 2

  “Now remember, keep those beeswax plugs in your ears for two weeks, and when you take them out you’ll be able to hear much better.”

  The kender, a sawyer named Semus, cocked his head to the side and looked at Phineas Curick with a puzzled expression, then tapped his ear with his hoopak. Phineas placed his mouth next to the kender’s ear and shouted, “Keep them in for two weeks!” Semus smiled.

  “Thanks, Dr. Ears,” he shouted. “Can you hear me OK?”

  “Fine, fine,” said Phineas, ushering the beaming kender out of the chair and steering him back through the waiting room. “That’ll be ten copper,” the doctor said, holding his hand out for payment.

  The kender patted his pockets, then reached in and pulled out a fistful of sticky candy. “I seem to be a little short today. Could you maybe use some scrap wood? You could fix up this dump real nice, add a few more shelves, you know—”

  “No, thank you,” Phineas said, snatching the plugs from the startled kender’s ears and booting him out of the door into the cobbled street. The balding, middle-aged human dusted off his hands, scratched his red-veined nose, and turned to the waiting throng. Ten kender were seated on the long wooden bench that ran along the north wall of the office.

  For a year and a half Phineas Curick had been practicing his peculiar brand of medicine in Kendermore. And if he lived to be one hundred years of age, he thought, he would never understand kender. Day after day they crowded into his front office with their aches and pains and imaginary ills, and day after day he dispensed sugar pills, beeswax, curdled milk, and mustard to his faithful patients. The only real medical procedure he knew was pulling teeth, and there was some call for that, too.

  To kender with toothaches he was Dr. Teeth. To those with ear problems, Dr. Ears. If someone’s joints hurt, Dr. Bones. No ailment was too acute or too minor.

  “Who’s next?” All ten of the seated kender jumped to their feet—or tried to. Only one stood up and strolled confidently into the examination room. The other nine flew to the floor, arms and legs akimbo, shoelaces mysteriously tied to their chairs. Phineas had seen many things in his kender-filled waiting room. Most of his patients with genuine ailments received them in his office. Fights broke out regularly—he made a lot of money off those, removing broken teeth and plugging bloody noses—but he admired this particular kender’s ingenuity.

  Stepping gingerly through the thrashing, flopping bodies and dodging their famous kender taunts, Phineas followed his next patient into the examination room.

  Washing his hands in a stoneware pitcher of cool, murky water, he smiled at his patient. “Just hop up in that chair,” he invited. “What can I do for you today? Teeth, ears—a haircut, maybe?”

  “I have those, yes, and I could use a haircut,” replied the kender—a young one, judging from the deep brown color of his hair and wrinkle-free skin. “But it’s my eyes. When I step into bright sunlight, I can’t see anything,
and when I step out of the sunlight and back into the shade, I can’t see either.”

  “This is a problem?” the doctor asked, readying some large calipers, pliers, and an ice tong on a wooden tray next to the chair.

  The kender glanced uneasily at the tools arrayed on the tray. “That’s a bit of a problem, as I’m the doorman at the Kendermore Inn. What are you going to use that for?” he asked, fidgeting into the farthest corner of the chair.

  “Don’t worry,” Phineas said, opening the ice tongs and placing a point against each of the kender’s temples. “I just have to take a measurement.” He closed the tongs slowly against the patient’s head, then sighted carefully along both temples, with a “hrrmmm” and a “hummm.

  “There!” he announced. Careful not to jiggle the open tongs, he held them up to a row of wire eyeglasses on the wall behind him. “Here we are,” he said, satisfied at last that he’d found the right fit. He placed the spectacles on the tray, then turned away again and rummaged through one of many drawers in a large wall cabinet. He removed two rectangles of dark, oiled parchment and slipped them into the spectacles where the lenses should be. Finally, he set them on the bridge of the kender’s nose and hooked the horns around his ears.

  “You must wear these spectacles for two weeks, and when you take them off you’ll be able to see much better.”

  “But I can’t see at all, Dr. Eyes,” the kender protested, struggling to find the arms of the chair so that he could climb down.

  “If you could see, you wouldn’t have come to me,” Phineas noted patiently.

  The kender’s face brightened under the dark glasses. “That’s true! Oh, thank you, Dr. Eyes!” Arms held before him, the kender bumped into the doorjamb, then banged into a hanging skeleton on the way out of the examining room, sending bones rattling. Phineas guided him to the front door.

  “Just doing my job,” the doctor said modestly. “That’ll be twenty copper.” It was a bit steep for parchment spectacles, but he had to make up for lost revenue from the sawmill worker.

  “I’m afraid I can’t see very well,” the kender apologized. “Could you?” He held open the pouch dangling from his belt by a string.

  Phineas helped himself to twenty-three copper pieces and two of his own pliers. “Thank you, do come again.”

  Only two of the previous nine patients were still in the waiting room, the rest having apparently wandered off after untangling their shoelaces. Or perhaps they all trooped out in one big knot, mused Phineas. One of the two patients was a young woman whose fingers had somehow got caught in opposite ends of a hollow stick and a construction worker who had nailed his own pant leg to a board. Eyeing the reflection of the setting sun in the shop windows across the street, Phineas decided to call it a day.

  Ushering out the unhappy kender, he advised the two of them to try again tomorrow. Locking the door behind them, he extinguished the one source of light in the room, a small, dim oil lantern with a greasy, black mantle.

  Phineas Curick commended his good fortune as he cleaned his tools in the examination room at the back of his “Doctor’s Office.” Kender were such wonderful patients, even for someone who wasn’t a doctor! And while he seldom cured anyone outright, he assuaged his guilt with the knowledge that he provided a great psychological balm to people in distress. And that should be worth something, shouldn’t it?

  “Ten copper pieces per examination!” he chortled happily under his breath.

  Hearing a noise in the outer waiting room, he wiped his hands on his spattered apron and called out in irritation, “I’m closed, didn’t you see the sign?” There was no telling what might be going on, since even locking the front door was no guarantee against a kender just strolling into the office. “You’ll have to come back tomorrow.”

  Many moments passed, and he heard no response. Puzzled, Phineas stepped into the shadows of the waiting room.

  “Hello!” said a deep voice in the darkness.

  Startled, Phineas fell back against the wall, setting up a chorus of rattling glass bottles. “Who are you,” he demanded, “and what do you want? You scared the wits out of me!”

  “Trapspringer Furrfoot. Pleased to meet you.” Phineas felt a small hand shake his. “My friends call me Trapspringer. I’m truly sorry I frightened you; humans are such a jumpy bunch, but I guess you can’t help what you are. Did you know your door is stuck?”

  Phineas strained his eyes in the darkness to discern his visitor. “It’s not stuck; it was locked,” he said sternly, having composed himself. “And you’re supposed to be on the other side of it. You’ll have to come back tomorrow.”

  “Could you light a candle or something?” asked the kender. “I can’t see a thing!”

  “Didn’t you hear me? I said the office is closed.”

  “I heard you, but I was certain you didn’t mean me, since this is a matter of life and death!”

  Phineas sighed; emergencies like these came up daily in Kendermore. “What is it this time?” he asked wearily.

  “I’ve just lost my finger and—”

  Phineas’s eyes went wide with alarm. “Good gods, man, why didn’t you say so?” Phineas didn’t know much about medicine, but he knew that a kender bleeding to death in his office would be bad for business. Groping for the kender’s shoulders in the darkness, he ushered him into the candlelit examining room. “Get up in that chair and hold your hand above your head!” he ordered, collecting a large roll of white cloth strips he used for bandages.

  “This is awfully nice of you,” Trapspringer said.

  With the roll of bandages under his arm and clean water sloshing from a bowl in his hand, Phineas turned to the kender, expecting to be greeted by a fountain of blood.

  Trapspringer Furrfoot sat in the chair, his hand—with all five digits—held high above his head, as instructed. There was not a drop of blood on him.

  “All right, get out of here,” Phineas growled, grabbing Trapspringer by the scruff of the neck. “I’m not in the mood for practical jokes.”

  Genuinely surprised, the kender twisted out of the human’s grasp. “I wasn’t joking. I lost my finger. It was from a minotaur, or maybe a werewolf; they’re hard to tell apart. I collect interesting bones, and this was my lucky one, a beautiful, polished white joint—it looked just like alabaster. Actually, I didn’t lose it. The Kendermore Council borrowed it, but that’s another story entirely and part of the reason I can’t come back tomorrow. So can you help me? It’s really very important, and I’m certain my life is probably in danger.”

  Totally bewildered, Phineas stared at the kender for a long time. This Trapspringer Furrfoot looked very cosmopolitan for a kender. Phineas judged him to be late middle-aged, from the advanced network of lines on his face, the gray streaks in his copper-red, feather-studded topknot of hair, and his deepish voice. He wore a very expensive, flowing cape of purple velvet, so dark it looked black, with leggings of the same, unusual color. His tunic was pea green, and a wide, black leather belt hid the beginnings of a paunch. Around his neck hung a necklace of small, gray-white bones—from what, Phineas did not wish to contemplate. Trapspringer’s red-and-gray-streaked eyebrows twitched in curiosity above his almond-shaped, olive-colored eyes.

  “Well?” Trapspringer said expectantly, tapping a toe. “Will you help me or not?”

  Phineas was still confused. “You want me to get this bone back from the council?” he asked stupidly.

  “Oh, no, that wouldn’t be possible,” the kender said firmly. “What I really need is another minotaur finger bone.”

  Phineas rubbed his face wearily and plopped down on his padded stool. He’d lived around kender long enough to know there was going to be no easy way out of this conversation. “You want me to give you a minotaur bone,” he repeated dully.

  “From a finger. I would be most grateful,” Trapspringer said, holding out his hand expectantly. “You see, my old one was my good luck charm, and I’m certain something dreadful will happen to me unless I r
eplace it soon.”

  “You’re afraid you’ll die without it?” Phineas asked.

  “Perhaps, though that’s not the most dreadful thing that could happen. Actually, it might be interesting, depending on how you, you know, died. Getting run over by a farmer’s cart wouldn’t be nearly as fascinating as, say, falling off a cliff into the mouth of a lion who’s on fire. Now that would be interesting!” His eyes glowed at the concept. “Just the same, I don’t want to take any chances.”

  Phineas gave the eccentric kender an odd look. “But I’m not an animal doctor, or even an apothecary. What makes you think I’d have such a thing?”

  “Well, to be honest, you weren’t my first choice. I couldn’t find anything that looked like my bone in those places—” he pulled a wad of string, four pointy teeth, and a small vial with blue liquid from inside his cape—“though I found some other things I’ve been needing. But there was no one around to ask about bones.”

  “Won’t any of the bones around your neck do?” Phineas asked, suppressing a shudder.

  “If they were finger bones, sure,” Trapspringer said irritably, “but they obviously aren’t.”

  Now that he knew what the kender wanted, Phineas regained his composure and opened a cupboard. He removed a flat-edged wooden tray carefully, so as not to dump its contents of numerous thin, white bones. He picked up the largest of the bones and cupped it tenderly in his hand.

  “Well, this must be your lucky day, Mr. Trapspringer. I just happen to use minotaur finger bones in the preparation of one of my most potent and expensive health elixirs. In fact, I have here the finger bone of a minotaur that was also a werewolf, one of the rarest and most exotic creatures in the world. Lycanthropy is a strange thing. There are those who say it can’t affect creatures like minotaurs, but right here we have the proof. Quite an indispensible item. Being a collector yourself, you must know that such a bone as this is very valuable. But, if it means so much to you—saving your life and all—I’d be willing to part with it. I ask only that you reimburse me for my cost.” He held the bone up for Trapspringer’s inspection and sucked in his breath.