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  “You tell me,” Gisella said, clicking her tongue at the horses to spur them up the incline. “After all, you’re the sport who made the map.”

  “I said I made maps, all right. But I never said I made this one,” Tasslehoff said, fidgeting.

  “Mr. Burrfoot’s Uncle Bertie made this map,” Woodrow said innocently.

  “Well, I’m not exactly positive Uncle Bertie made it,” Tas said. “That’s just what my Uncle Trapspringer told me when he gave me a bunch of maps for my coming-of-age present. Come to think of it, I’ve never met an Uncle Bertie. I wonder if he’s even my Uncle Bertie.”

  “How did you get to Solace in the first place?” Gisella demanded, ignoring his chatter. “You must remember the route, being a map aficionado and all.”

  “Of course I remember. I came up from the south, through Thorbardin and Pax Tharkas, just like you did,” the kender said simply.

  “Pardon me for asking, but why didn’t we just go back that same way?” said Woodrow.

  Tas looked a little exasperated and held up his hands. “Don’t look at me. Gisella’s the one who was in a hurry and wanted to take a short cut. I simply suggested the direction!”

  Gisella scowled. “I’m not sure what we’re bickering about,” she said. “So Tasslehoff’s map is missing a few cities, some mountains—no ill has come of it. The road is clear, we’re making good time. Let’s keep on!”

  At that, the miffed expression on Tas’s face was replaced by satisfaction, and Woodrow drifted off into silence again.

  Their morning had, in fact, been peaceful, uneventful. They had woken to find the gray, rainy sky replaced by a cloudless, azure one. Tas had risen early, drawn to the sounds of rushing water. Removing his grease-stained leggings, he scrubbed them on a rock in a cold, clear stream, and they dried quickly on a branch in the early morning sun.

  A light sleeper, Woodrow had meanwhile quietly slipped the bag of grain from under the buckboard and fed the horses in anticipation of the long day ahead. After filling their bucket with fresh water, he ventured into the woods and found a late crop of wild blackberries.

  Before long, Gisella had slipped from her bed of overstuffed pillows in the wagon, wearing her raspberry-colored boots and a vivid orange, long-sleeved tunic with matching pants so tight they looked like they had been painted on. The sun gave her hair red hotspots of light as the three sat by the ashes of the fire and breakfasted on cold, leftover bean stuffing, fresh blackberries, and mountain spring water.

  Spirits had been high as they rolled away from camp. Within an hour, they had left the mountains, and the barbarian village of Que-shu shimmered against the blue-gray horizon. Though the road they traveled passed very near—easily within one thousand yards of Que-shu—a clear view of the village was blocked by the perfectly circular stone wall surrounding it. Still, the upper levels of several huge stone temples and a spacious arena could be seen against the blue sky in the late-morning sun. Barbarian eyes, apparently accustomed to traffic on the road, watched from atop the wall, but there was no effort to hail or molest the travelers.

  After passing Que-shu, they had stopped for lunch. Gisella reluctantly dipped into her secret stash of trade goods and produced a small haunch of expensive Tarsitian smoked ham. While munching his portion, Tas had looked to the east and was the first to spot the jagged spines of the mountain range about which they were now bickering.

  “We’re traveling downhill now,” Woodrow said, detecting a slight decline. “Maybe this mountain range wasn’t included on your map because it was relatively small,” he suggested to Tas.

  The kender brightened considerably. “That’s probably it!” He liked finding the answers to mysteries.

  Soon their descent became more obvious. Gisella had to strain mightily on the reins to keep the horses from galloping pell-mell down the mountain. But before long, mountain evergreens gave way to the leafy maples and oaks of the foothills.

  “It’s a straight shot from here to Xak Tsaroth,” Gisella announced, giving the horses their heads. The wagon swayed and bounced and kicked up clouds of dust as the horses bolted down the road. Tasslehoff’s slight frame was tossed about like a ball, but the kender giggled with joy at the madcap dash, though he clutched the buckboard to keep from being tossed to the ground. Brisk wind stung his eyes into tears of laughter.

  But suddenly, looking beyond the horses, Tasslehoff blinked hard. Were his eyes just blurry, he wondered, or did—?

  “Look!” he cried, pointing ahead down the road.

  Gisella squinted in the direction of his finger. But her day vision was not as keen as her night vision when, like all dwarves, she could see partially into the infrared. Her vision got fuzzy some twenty feet ahead of the horses. She saw nothing untoward, so she continued on.

  What Tasslehoff was trying to point out but she could not see was that the road simply stopped, as if the builders had walked away before finishing it, some fifty yards ahead.

  Abruptly the galloping horses skidded unceremoniously into a swamp, dragging the wagon bearing three unwitting passengers. Tasslehoff sailed through the air, leggings over topknot, to land between two squishy lumps of grass-covered ground known as bogs. Lifting his hands out of four inches of cold, muddy water, he shook the slimy green swamp gook from them and stood up. The kender looked sourly at his once-clean leggings. Taking a step toward the wagon, he tripped over an underground bog and landed face-first in the water. Gods, it was cold! he thought. Jerking himself out and up again, he held on to the wagon and shook his head like a wet dog.

  Woodrow had managed to stay with the wagon when the road stopped. Now he was scrambling down to calm the hysterical horses, who were up to their fetlocks in water, their eyes wide with fright.

  “My outfit! It’s ruined!”

  Gisella’s shrieks came from the other side of the horses, to the left of the wagon. Woodrow carefully picked his way through the bogs, sometimes sinking as high as his knees in the mud, until he found the female dwarf.

  Gisella was sitting in the swamp, legs sprawled, arms propping her up from behind. She was covered to her ample chest with murky water. Only two inches of her outfit was still orange. The dwarf gave a start as a frog leaped from her shoulder into the dark, sludgy water.

  Spitting a thick strand of wet, red hair from her mouth and eyes, she spotted the kender, who had stepped around the wagon next to Woodrow. Gisella glared at him. “I don’t suppose this swamp was on your map, either? Or is this your idea of a fun little surprise?”

  * * * * *

  Gisella sat on the top step at the back of the wagon, resignedly pouring muddy water from her raspberry boots. “They’ll never be the same,” she said morosely. “And I traded one of the best nights of my life—” she caught the kender staring at her “—uh, never mind what I traded.”

  She had changed her clothes, putting on a conservative (for Gisella, anyway) purple tunic with pants and plain black work boots. Tasslehoff’s leggings were clinging to his skin and they itched horribly, but he did not have a spare pair.

  “I guess we’ll have to turn around and take the southern route after all,” Gisella grumbled. “We can’t possibly reach Kendermore in time for the fair now.” She sighed. “My melons, my melons … I could have replaced my wardrobe with the money they would have brought me.…”

  “I’m not so sure, ma’am,” Woodrow said suddenly, coming around from the front of the wagon. “About turning back and going south, I mean. I unhitched the horses and led them forward into the swamp for quite some distance, and the water didn’t get any deeper. In some places it was even drier.” The young man shook his shaggy hair from his eyes and regarded Gisella.

  “And?” Gisella’s patience was strained. “What does that mean, Woodrow?”

  “It means the water doesn’t appear to get much deeper than four or five inches in most places. It means that it would be tough with these heavy wheels, but if we take it slow and steady, I think we can make it through.”

&
nbsp; “Through to where? To Xak Tsaroth? How do we know if we’re anywhere near Xak Tsaroth? How do we know this swamp doesn’t go on forever?”

  “Nothing goes on forever, ma’am,” said Woodrow.

  Gisella gave a rueful smile at the young man’s unintentional philosophy. “My head is splitting.”

  “I know how to fix that,” Tasslehoff said helpfully from inside the wagon, reaching toward her temples. “You just tie two dead—”

  “Thanks, but no thanks,” Gisella said quickly, ducking from his grasp and out the back of the wagon.

  “—eucalyptus leaves,” Tas finished vacantly. “But suit yourself.”

  Woodrow pointed the horses toward a distant grove of trees. Holding the horses by their bridles, he kept his eyes on his feet as he picked a path through the bogs and the bush-topped cattails. Muck and mud latched onto him with each step. He curled his toes inside his boots to keep them on his feet. Humidity was high in the wake of the previous day’s rain and heat. Woodrow’s dirty-gray tunic clung to his wiry frame, the hem hanging ragged where he’d ripped a strip of cloth to use as a sweatband. Between swatting at flies, kicking at water snakes, and staying on his feet among the slippery bogs, he was keeping busy.

  Tasslehoff sat next to Gisella, who held the reins and made a show of steering the horses, despite the fact that Woodrow led them.

  The terrain alternated between marshy areas that looked deceptively dry and large expanses of shallow water. Ahead about five hundred yards was a low expanse of shrubs and trees, which everyone hoped meant the end of the swamp.

  “I’d like to know where all this water is coming from,” said Gisella. “We haven’t seen any lakes, or even any streams since we passed Que-shu.”

  Tas rolled out his map. “It’s got to be coming from a stream in this small mountain range just north of Xak Tsaroth,” he said, pointing.

  Gisella snorted indelicately. “I wouldn’t trust that piece of junk,” she said, thumping the back of the map, “for anything more than wrapping mackerel.”

  Tas was about to retort when Woodrow stopped suddenly and cocked his head. “Do you hear that?” he asked.

  Both Tasslehoff and Gisella fell silent and listened. From ahead came the distinct sounds of crashing waves.

  “Ah, ha!” Tas exclaimed. “There’s the stream I predicted.”

  But Woodrow looked skeptical. “It sounds bigger than a stream.”

  “There’s only one way to find out,” said Gisella, clicking her tongue at the horses. Woodrow held steady to their bridles again, until they reached the grove of trees, when he disappeared into the dense shrubs.

  He was back in a flash, his face as white as his quilted tunic must once have been.

  “What is it, Woodrow?” Gisella asked.

  “It’s no stream, ma’am,” he gulped. “There’s water as far as the eye can see.”

  Gisella’s gasp was her initial reply.

  Human and dwarf turned questioning eyes to the kender. Gisella poked him in the chest. “Your Uncle Bertie forgot an ocean, too?”

  Chapter 6

  “Order! Order!” Mayor Menldon Metwinger’s gavel bounced off the hard wooden table that served as the Kendermore Council’s Bench of Authority. The council met every fifth Thursday, and every Monday with a two in its date. Every Friday with an odd-numbered date, the mayor held Audience, the day when criminal cases were tried and domestic and community disputes were settled. Today was such a Friday.

  Rounding up council members to serve as the jury for criminal cases on Audience Day was a mayoral duty. Though the city books listed sixty-three elected council members, representatives of the most important trades in Kendermore, Mayor Metwinger was seated beside just five council members today. He’d managed to find six of them during his morning roundup, but one had apparently wandered off on the way to City Hall.

  The venerable kender rubbed his forehead distractedly and let his hand wander up to scratch the scalp under his graying topknot. Beneath his cheek braids, which marked him among kender as having noble blood, his skin was flushed from his council member search and the exertion of calling the meeting to order. Still, he felt chilled and damp from a draft and pulled his purple, fur-lined mayor’s robe up closer to his pointed chin. Glancing to his immediate right, two feet beyond the end of the Bench of Authority, he eyed the source of the draft.

  The council chamber was missing its exterior wall. At that moment, light autumn rain and damp leaves swirled around the mayor’s feet. Before too long, snow would blow in and form a thick bank on the edge where the wall should be, making it difficult to determine where the building started and stopped. Metwinger made a mental note to have something done about it eventually, although he would surely miss the view.

  The chamber was only one of many rooms on the second floor of the four-story building, housing all of Kendermore’s public works and government offices. Located near the city’s center, the structure had been built more than a century before. Following a kender tradition—or building tendency—each floor was less finished than the one below it, so that the top floor looked as if it were still under construction. The first floor—two grand ballrooms—were intact though had long ago been stripped of anything valuable. The second floor was basically complete, except for the missing exterior wall in the council chamber. The third floor had all the necessary outside walls, but was without a number of crucial doors: kender builders preferred to complete a room before allowing for doorways, so that openings might be located for the convenience of the occupant rather than arbitrarily placed. (More than one kender builder has found himself trapped inside a room with no doors!) The fourth floor was mostly exposed beams, window frames, and the occasional interior wall.

  Not surprisingly, a problem arose with the design of the building shortly after its completion. The original builders had forgotten to include a stairway linking the four floors. Occupants of the upper floors were forced to scale the stone walls and climb in through tiny windows, which made the missing wall in the council room something of an asset. Complaints of deaths, though, particularly among mayors, brought about the construction, some ten years later, of a very elegant, polished wood central staircase that spiraled upward in an ever-decreasing circle (things got pretty tight up on the third floor).

  Kender were a very political people, but they were dedicated to no cause as stridently as their need for constant change. Mayor Metwinger was Kendermore’s 1,397th mayor. Not all of them had been kender. Nailed to the wall in the council chamber was a portrait of the 47th mayor, a leprechaun named Raleigh who reportedly had been an excellent mayor, having successfully held the post for nearly a year. Rumor had it that Raleigh resigned after a dispute when a pot of his gold mysteriously disappeared. Thirteen hundred fifty mayors had worn the coveted purple mayoral robes in the intervening three hundred or so years. Merldon Metwinger had been in the position for a little more than a month, which was longer than average, if no great achievement.

  Accidentally elected when the populace confused his moneylending advertisements for campaign posters, he found that he enjoyed the vaunted position. He particularly liked the purple velvet mayor’s robe with its many secret pockets.

  Looking out at the occupants of the council chamber, Mayor Metwinger rubbed his hands in gleeful anticipation; it promised to be an exciting Audience Day. Two old, white-haired kender were struggling over a bony, wide-eyed-with-fright milk cow, each tugging on one of the animal’s ears, which poked out of holes in a ratty straw hat. Metwinger would liked to have watched them get the cow up the narrow flights of stairs to the council chamber, which no doubt had contributed to the cow’s anxiety.

  Also waiting for a turn with the mayor were a male and female kender, obviously married from the way they were glaring at each other. A matronly looking kender angrily shook a floury rolling pin at a red-faced child, whom she held by his pointed ear. While Metwinger watched, another kender, probably in his mid-fifties and looking strangely content, straggle
d in and sat quietly. Behind him came two attractively dressed, angry-eyed misses, clomping and bobbing awkwardly, since each wore one of an obvious pair of red shoes. Metwinger couldn’t wait to hear their story.

  “This Audience is now in session,” the mayor proclaimed, giving the table another rap with his gavel. “Who’s first, then, hmmm?” he asked eagerly.

  “Me!”

  “Me!”

  “Us!”

  “Them!”

  “I’ll take the two with the cow first,” Mayor Metwinger instructed. The others sat down with grumbles and thinly veiled comments about the mayor’s mother.

  The two farmers stepped forward respectfully, both insisting on keeping a hand on the cow’s collar. They introduced themselves as Digger Dunstan and Wembly Cloverleaf.

  “You see, Your Honor, Dorabell is mine—” Digger began.

  “Bossynova is mine, Digger Dunstan, and you know it!” the other protested, giving the cow’s collar a possessive tug. “Dorabell—what a silly name for a cow! And take that stupid hat off her! She prefers feathers tucked behind her ears!”

  “Well, you should know about stupid, Wembly Cloverleaf,” the first taunted, “you lame-brained, drain-brained excuse for a farmer. You borrowed her from my field—”

  “Only after you took her from mine!”

  “Did not, you oaf!”

  “Did too, you ogre-lover!”

  “DID NOT!”

  “DID TOO!”

  Rather predictably, a scuffle broke out. The farmers reached for each other’s throats over the bony back of the frightened cow. Soon, the audience chose sides and got in on the fight; the members of the council and the mayor cheered them on.

  It was the cow herself who settled the matter. Mooing frantically, she bolted through the throng of kender, right past the Bench of Authority, heading toward the open wall. Splaying himself on his stomach across the right corner of the table, the mayor managed to get a hand on her collar and jerk her to a stop just inches before the precipice.