Conundrum

Chapter
13

Several dozen small stinging flies buzzed round Doctor Bothy’s head, laughing at him with their tiny, buzzing voices. He blinked awake, squinting into a bright light. After a few moments he realized that the light was only a candle, but it was blinding compared to the darkness of the previous hour.

However, the candle was quite plainly hanging upside down from the ceiling, its flame pointed straight at the ground in blatant defiance of every law of nature. He blinked again, trying to shake the hair out of his face, then he remembered he was bald. The hair was his beard. With that realization, the full horror of his situation rushed at him like a starved gully dwarf, yellow teeth flashing.

It was he who was upside down, bound with hundreds of blackberry vines and dangling by a rope looped over a particularly thick tree root in the ceiling. Dancing round him in the air were several dozen small, naked, fantastically-painted and gossamer-winged beings that seemed right out of a child’s picture album, except that many wore hideous masks carved out of acorn caps and the half-shells of walnuts and pecans. Others brandished tiny, needle-tipped spears from which depended a variety of shrew skulls, hummingbird feathers, dusty gray mouse scalps, and other diminutive-yet-no-less-horrific trophies. Every once in a while, one of the fierce little creatures would fly closer and prod him with the butt of its spear, an action which reminded him all too vividly of a cook testing the doneness of his roast. He glanced up-no, he reminded himself, down-and to his relief saw not a cooking fire smoldering beneath him, but a single yellow candle affixed to the floor in its own pool of hardened wax.

Then again, maybe these tiny creatures were used to cooking their meals over the flame of a candle, he thought with a shudder. He wondered how long it would take him to cook by candle.

“Stop that!” someone shouted.

Doctor Bothy craned his head round and discovered that Sir Grumdish hung nearby, similarly trussed and dangling over a single green candle. He angrily spat his beard from his mouth. This seemed to amuse the creatures to no end. They buzzed merrily around the small, stuffy underground chamber, squeaking, “Monkey talk! Monkey talk! Listen monkey talk!”

“I am not a monkey!” Sir Grumdish spat. Every time he opened his mouth, his beard fell into it.

One of the creatures swooped close and hovered a few inches from the tip of Sir Grumdish’s nose, its wings a blur. It gathered up a fistful of the gnome’s white beard. “Hair… face… monkey!” it cried with glee, then gave Sir Grumdish’s beard a sharp tug. Sir Grumdish bellowed in pain and tried to twist his head away, which only set him to swinging in crazy circles.

“Why are you doing this?” Doctor Bothy asked.

“This is your fault, Bothy!” Sir Grumdish howled. “I hold you to be responsible. I should have let you eat that whole cottage.”

“Please be quiet, Grumdish!” the doctor shouted. “I am trying to establish polite communication.”

“How do you propose to accomplish this miracle?” Sir Grumdish mocked.

The tiny creatures now concentrated on the doctor, buzzing all around his head. They took turns thwacking him on the thighs and belly with their small spear-staves, giggling uproariously at the way the blows rippled across the expanse of his dangling portliness, like waves in a pond. “Cry fat monkey! Fat monkey cry!”

“This is intolerable!” the doctor wailed.

Suddenly, the tiny creatures let off and flew away to the corners of the chamber to hide amongst the roots dangling from the roof or sprouting from the walls. Doctor Bothy tried to turn his head to see what had startled them. Grumdish slowly twirled at the end of his entangling vines, first one way, then the other.

The only thing unusual they saw was a small door in the center of one wall. It was set into an arched frame of rough unmorticed stones. Through the cracks in this door, they noticed a bright white light shining, but a shadow came before it, walking with a slow, purposeful gait toward the door. They also noticed a peculiar scrape-thumping noise, repeated at regular intervals, like a shutter tossed against the side of a house in a storm. As the shadow behind the door grew larger, the odd noise grew louder, until it seemed to be just outside the room. Then, ominously, it stopped. A nervous titter rippled through the room’s occupants, gnomish and otherwise.

The door creaked open, spilling the light brightly across the floor. A cold gust of wind snuffed out the two candles, casting the chamber into startling contrasts of light and shadow. The roots hanging down from the roof took on a horrific aspect, as though they might writhe suddenly to life and reach out to grip and choke the helpless gnomes. The two gnomes cried out in terror, their eyes starting from their heads at the thing that lurked in the open doorway.

Its shadow stretched across the length of the floor and loomed up the further wall. Most like a bear it seemed, standing on its hind legs, but it had a tiny head sunk down between its shoulders, and no neck at all. What was more, it had only one leg. The other was a wooden peg.

As it entered the chamber stump-clumping on its wooden leg, it seemed to diminish in size, if not fearsomeness. They perceived that it was not a bear but a largish badger, but this failed to bring them much comfort, for what difference is it whether a bear or a badger enters your room stumping along on a wooden peg? It seemed to walk with something of a swagger, exaggerated by its false leg, and it carried a small, twisted twig or stick tucked military-fashion under one arm-or foreleg-like a riding crop. It was from the nether tip of this curious wand that the brilliant white light emanated.

The badger strode a few paces into the chamber before stopping and gazing up with hate-filled eyes at the two dangling gnomes. The door, seemingly of its own accord, swung shut and thudded in its frame. The badger then flipped the stick-which was a wand-out from under its arm and stood it on the floor before him, like a staff of office, his small, clawed fists gripping it fiercely. The glow at its tip softened and dimmed until it was no brighter than the flame of a single candle.

“Who are these miserable creatures?” the badger snarled.

“My name is Doctor Bothy,” the doctor gasped after he had got over his astonishment. “And this is Sir Grumdish, a knight of renown.”

The badger thumped his staff/wand on the ground three times, which had the effect of starting a spume of sparks from its glowing end. The sparks fell about him like a shower, and where they settled, they seemed to cling together in a discernible shape or pattern. In moments, they had formed a large chair or throne, which continued to glow and throb with its own light. The badger eased his furry bulk into this amazing piece of furniture.

“Say, you wouldn’t mind lending me your wand, once this is cleared up and we are released?” Bothy said. “I know some folks who’d like to study it for a day or so.”

The badger shouted, “Silence!”

His small but powerful voice tolled like a bell, resounding through the small underground chamber, and Doctor Bothy found that his tongue was suddenly stuck to the roof of his mouth, as though he had been eating hot marshmallows.

“What did we do to deserve this?” Sir Grumdish asked angrily.

“You did criminally bury your nasty haggis in my forest,” the badger said.

“Your forest?”

“My forest!” the one-legged badger growled. “I am Grim Alderwand, king of this place. This very night by light of the ugly new moon, you fouled my forest with your nasty sheepses’ stomachs. What vine did you hope to sprout from such a seed?”

Before either astonished gnome could answer, the creature continued, speaking now to no one, or perhaps to everyone. He lifted his small black eyes to the roof and raised his hands as though invoking heaven. “These nasty monkeys is always stinking up my forest with their rubbishes. We are the burrowers, the diggers under the roots. We finds all these things that they be trying to be hiding here, their garbages and their fish heads and their nasty sheepses’ offals. They are worse than trolls, for trolls eat everthings: bones, scales, prickles and all. But these mens, these humans…”

“But we are not humans. We are gnomes!” Sir Grumdish argued.

“And a kender,” Doctor Bothy mumbled, finally freeing his tongue from its magical confines.

“Did you not this very night dig holes in our forest for to hide your nasty haggises?” the badger king asked.

“It was horrible! We couldn’t eat it, or at least some of us couldn’t,” Sir Grumdish said, glancing sharply at the doctor. “We had no other choice!”

“Yes, we didn’t wish to be impolite to our hosts, and we certainly couldn’t keep the haggis onboard our ship,” Doctor Bothy said. “We have a long sea voyage ahead of us, and we don’t want to attract sharks.”

“Yet you are impolite to us, most impolite indeed, I must say,” the king said, looking round. The shadows in the corners shifted and hummed with the winged creatures hiding there. “You does not want to take the sheepses offals into your houses, so you come here and bury it in ours.”

“But we didn’t know you were here,” Sir Grumdish said.

“That is because monkeys, so high up their trees, never looks down to see whose head it is upon which they are peeing,” the king said, waving his wand over his head like a director’s baton. “When you monkeys come round our homes burying your haggises and fish heads, you do not think of these trolls that your nasty things attract. And when these trolls come rooting round our houses for sheep stomachses that you are burying, which they can smell from miles away I can tell you by golly, they do not care if they accidentally eat themselves a hedgehog or a badger or whatnot!”

“We meant no offense,” Doctor Bothy said.

“Yet offense you have given,” the king countered.

“How can we make amends?” the doctor asked. “Truly, for we gnomes are sympathetic to your plight. You call us monkeys and confuse us with humans, but we are smaller than humans and are ever their subjects.”

“Even now, humans rule our home mountain in the name of an evil dragon,” Sir Grumdish added.

“They do not take us very seriously,” Doctor Bothy continued, “and then only when something goes wrong or explodes.”

“That all sounds very terrible,” the king sympathized. “Very terrible indeed. Yet it does not excuse you to come burying your haggis in our roofs to attract these trolls hereabouts to come and eat us up. If these things that you are telling me are true, then you should have been even more thoughtful than these other monkeys who live in the villages.”

“What are you going to do with us?” Sir Grumdish asked worriedly.

“We will take you up to the forest again,” the king said.

Sir Grumdish sighed in relief. Doctor Bothy said, “Good. Because I didn’t want to complain, but all the blood has gone to my head, hanging upside down this way.”

“Yes, you will be taken to the forest,” the badger king continued, smiling in a snarly sort of way, baring his short but wicked fangs, “and there you will be hung from the tree under which you buried your nasty haggis. Then, when the trolls come sniffing round, they can eat you, rather than our small burrowing selveses.”

“I told you we went the wrong way,” Conundrum said. He and Razmous stood at the mouth of a dark forest cave, looking out at the stars peeping through treetops.

“I went down,” Razmous said as he stood there scratching his head. “Everybody knows that when you are in a dungeon, you go down to find its secret chambers, not up. Up is for haunted castles and ruined towers. Down is for dungeons.”

“Well, down brought us to the entrance, seemingly,” Conundrum said. “Or perhaps it is an exit. I don’t see any guards.”

“There’s only one thing to be done. We must go back,” Razmous said, with not a little enthusiasm. “Sometimes getting lost isn’t such a bad thing, you know. I’ve been lost many times, and I’ve often had a better time than when I knew where I was going.”

He turned and led the way back into the dark depths of the cave. They felt their way along the wall until they found the small entrance through which they’d come. The kender ducked down to enter it, then froze, a hiss whistling through his teeth.

“That’s torn it!” Razmous whispered. “There’s a light! Someone’s coming. We can’t get in this way now.”

“Let’s hide. Maybe they’ll pass.” By the light shining from the passageway, they made their way to a crack in the far wall and squeezed themselves into it to hide. Razmous had to turn his pouches sideways just to make it inside the crack before the light emerged into the cave.

“This crack must lead somewhere,” the kender whispered. “I feel a draft.”

“I should say you do,” Conundrum answered with a barely-suppressed snicker. “You’ve finished tearing out the seat of your breeches.”

But they had no more time to discuss cave exploration or the superiority of various fabrics. From the small passage appeared as strange a procession as even the kender was ever likely to see in his long and adventurous life. A dozen or more badgers and hedgehogs, some with one head, some with two, and some with as many as four, strode into the cavern. They walked upright with a curious waddling gait and carried in their tiny paws a comparatively tall pole. From the end of the pole depended a small glass globe glowing with a wan blue light. Conundrum realized with a start that the globes were glowing because they were filled with the tiny glowworms they had seen earlier in the trap. In quick whispers, he described to Razmous what he, being wedged in front, saw.

“Ah, yes! How ingenious!” the kender replied also in a whisper. “We could use those onboard the boat when we dive!”

Next to emerge from the passageway was a pair of badgers crawling along on all fours. These looked more primitive and stupid-and vicious-than their upright, multi-headed fellows, and each wore a type of muzzle made of woven grapevine. The badgers were bound together by a sort of harness, to which was attached a squat, two-wheeled cart. Atop the cart, secured with numerous ropes and blackberry vines, lay the enormous bulk of their friend and shipmate, the good doctor Bothy. Another pair of muzzled badgers appeared behind the cart, towing Sir Grumdish similarly trussed. Last came a second company of badgers and hedgehogs, some carrying coils of rope, others with tiny silver crossbows held at the ready. With ponderous ceremony they crossed the floor of the cavern and vanished into the nighttime forest.

Conundrum slipped out of their hiding place and scampered silently to the cave’s mouth. Razmous followed, and the two of them peered out of the cave into the night-dark woods. It was as though the motley group had vanished from the face of Krynn. The two crept out, listening, staring into the deep shadows for any sign of their friends. Finally, they spotted a gleam of blue light, like a will-o-wisp floating up the hillside through the trees. They set off after the light, moving as quietly and quickly as possible in the unfamiliar woods.

Before they reached the hilltop, they came upon the returning party of badgers and hedgehogs. Razmous scampered like a squirrel up a tree, while Conundrum hid behind a large black boulder overgrown with gray lichens and straggling vines of blackberry laden with unripe red fruit. The badgers passed first, pulling their now-empty carts, followed closely by the hedgehogs. When they had gone, vanished with hardly a sound down the hill, Conundrum stole out from his hiding place.

The kender swung down from his branch and landed with a crunching thump in the leaves. “What do you suppose they’ve done with them?” the kender asked.

A scream of terror, echoing through the woods, seemed to answer his question. They paused a moment, their faces turning gray as they looked at one another, then Razmous was off like a shot, quickly leaving Conundrum struggling up the hillside as fast as his legs could carry him. Soon, he was utterly alone in the vast dark wood, too frightened to call out, with only the steady blue glow at the hilltop to guide him.

As Conundrum neared the light, he slowed and crept forward cautiously. Another scream rent the night, followed closely by a long rumbling laugh, like a boulder rolling down the hillside. A screen of matted vines hid from him the source of the light, which was now red-he guessed its cause-and the laughter. He tried to find a way through the vines, but finding them thorny and tangled, he chose to search for a path around. He started off to his right, only to stumble into a hole of some sort. He almost cried out in surprise, but something caught him and kept him from falling. At the same moment, a small hand clapped over his mouth. He struggled a moment, then grew still at the sound of Razmous’s voice whispering in his ear.

“Be very, very quiet, unless you want to get eaten,” the kender said as he removed his hand from Conundrum’s mouth and set him back on his feet.

“Why? What’s wrong?” Conundrum asked.

In answer, the kender pointed through a gap in the vines. Conundrum closed one eye and peered through.

In the clearing beyond stood a troll, its massive fists resting on its narrow hips, and its long gangly neck craned back to stare up into the trees at the two gnomes dangling just out of its long-armed reach. The badgers and hedgehogs had left a half dozen of their glowwormglobes lying about on the ground, apparently either to attract the troll or to allow the gnomes to see their doom. The globes glowed with a deep crimson light as the gnomes above struggled and wept. The troll stood below them, contemplating a way to get at the juicy, vine-wrapped morsels.

Doctor Bothy, being the fatter of the two, especially attracted the troll’s attention. The creature gazed at him with its black eyes and smacked its leathery lips in anticipation.

“A troll!” Conundrum gasped. He had heard of such monsters, but it was the first he had ever seen. It was nearly as tall as the chaos beast that had nearly eaten him a few weeks ago, and it was tremendously strong, as it proved when it strode over to the towering oak from which the gnomes dangled, grabbed its massive trunk in its claws, and shook the tree vigorously. Doctor Bothy and Sir Grumdish tossed and jangled at the end of their ropes, but they did not fall. The troll growled in annoyance and stared up at them.

“Isn’t this the same place where-” Conundrum began.

“Where we buried the haggis, yes,” Razmous finished for him.

“Well, that’s awfully convenient. It makes things much easier.”

“Easier? How?” Razmous asked.

“Don’t worry. I’ve got a idea!” Conundrum said, scrunching up his eyes in a huge grin. Razmous leaned close as Conundrum explained his plan. The kender only smiled more broadly as he heard it. He clapped a hand over his mouth to suppress a giggle.

“Can you do it?” Conundrum asked.

“Certainly!” Razmous bragged. “No problem.”

“After you do your part, I’ll skinny up the tree and cut them down,” Conundrum said.

“Then you’ll need this,” Razmous said as he dug through his pouches. He removed something and pressed it into the gnome’s hand. Conundrum opened his fingers and looked at it.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“Commodore Brigg’s remarkable all-purpose-thousand-in-one-uses-folding-knife. He must have dropped it while we weren’t eating our haggis, and I forgot to give it back to him,” Razmous explained. “When I give the signal, you can start.”

With that, he dashed away as silently as a cat.

“Signal? But what’s the signal?” Conundrum asked, but Razmous had already gone, vanished, as quiet as quiet can. He had left his pouches, which meant he meant business. Conundrum chewed his lip and peered back through the gap in the vines, waiting and listening.

“I don’t think I can skinny up anything,” he muttered, having second thoughts. “Oh, well. I’ll solve that puzzle when I come to it.”

The troll apparently had a new idea for getting at the gnomes. In one huge long, knobby hand it held a largish stone, about the size of mush melon, and it was at the moment searching the ground for another. Conundrum had no doubt that, once it had dug up a similarly-sized boulder, it would fling them at his friends, like a child trying to knock a beloved toy from the crook of a tree. Conundrum gripped Commodore Brigg’s wonderful all-purpose knife and waited. He wondered for a moment whether it had a tool that might prove of use against trolls. He knew it had one for clipping nose hairs, but he didn’t know if trolls had nose hairs, nor did he much care to get close enough to find out. But they did have jolly big noses, of that he was sure.

Then he heard the kender’s voice on the other side of the clearing. Razmous was shouting in a mocking singsong voice, “I say, you’ll never get them down that way. What you need is a ladder or longer arms. But I don’t suppose you have thought of that, have you, your being a troll and all?”

The troll stopped and glared around, its piggy black eyes prying into every shadow. Conundrum felt sure he would be seen, despite the screen of the vines. He crouched down and gripped the all-purpose knife more tightly.

Meanwhile, Razmous continued. “I heard once that trolls reproduce by budding, but I don’t believe it. They say that when you want to have a family, you just rip off various body parts and throw them on the ground to grow new versions of yourself. That must be why you are all so butt-ugly. But of course, that can’t be true, because everyone knows that trolls are so ugly when they’re born the doctor slaps the mother.”

The troll dropped his boulders and growled. His long warty nose tested the air.

“And their noses are so long because that’s what the doctor steps on when he pulls out your tails,” Razmous taunted. His voice seemed to come from various places within the forest, first here and now there, so that the troll was making itself dizzy turning round and round.

“Of course, when he pulls out your tail, most of your brain comes with it, the troll butt being the scientifically proven location of the troll brain. Or, I should say, what’s left of the troll brain. When you sit down, aren’t you afraid you will smother yourself?”

With a howl of rage, the troll tore off into the forest. Razmous’s voice floated back, pitched high to carry over the troll’s infuriated thrashing through the forest.

“Now, Conundrum!”

Conundrum scurried from his hiding place into the clearing and ran over to the trunk of the tree where Doctor Bothy and Sir Grumdish hung, their mouths open wide in surprise. Searching all around the tremendous bole of the tree, Conundrum found no way to ascend and rescue his companions. He was as stuck as the troll, even more so. He stood beneath his friends, looking up at them helplessly.

“You need a ladder,” Sir Grumdish said. “I don’t suppose there is time to hurry back to the village. That troll won’t chase him long. There hasn’t been a troll born that could catch a kender in a wood.”

“But I don’t have a ladder,” Conundrum cried. “What can I do?”

“It’s a shame Commodore Brigg isn’t here,” Doctor Bothy sighed. “He’d have a an idea. Born leader, the commodore is.”

“Oh, please, Bothy! Be reasonable. The lad feels bad enough as it is. No use comparing him to the good commodore. He’s a great gnome, but he certainly doesn’t go about with ladders in his pockets.”

“Oh, but he does!” the doctor protested. “He has the most wonderful knife, invented by the master of the weapons guild in Mount Nevermind.”

“I have it here!” Conundrum exclaimed. He showed it to them, holding it up on the palm of his hand.

“That’s it! Glory and salvation, Conundrum, how did you come by it?” the doctor asked.

“Razmous!”

“I might have guessed,” Sir Grumdish said. “Are you trying to tell us, Bothy, that thing has a ladder in it?”

“Yes!” Doctor Bothy said. “A mini-extension ladder. See if you can find it, Conundrum.”

“I’ll try.” He began flipping out the knife’s various tools and apparatuses. There was a curly-cue wire useful for removing corks from bottles of medicine and whatnot, a thin, flat shim such as a burglar might use to slip open the latch on a window, a tiny pair of scissors not useful for much of anything, a larger pair of scissors useful for trimming hedges or the beards of dwarves, a backscratcher, a small plow, a bronze birdbath with a sundial in the middle, a spoon, a fork, even a tiny plate and frying pan. Conundrum wondered if he might not soon come across the stove, and the dinner, too! Before long, he looked as if he had the entire contents of a kender’s bedtable drawer clutched in his hands.

Suddenly, out of the commodore’s pocket apparatus sprang a thirty-foot ladder with rubber safety pads on the feet to keep it from slipping. Conundrum nearly fell over in surprise, which would have been disastrous, as he would likely have been skinned, filed, polished, trimmed, julienned, and uncorked all at the same time.

“Good show!” Sir Grumdish shouted. “Now climb up here and cut us down.”

“Um…” Conundrum hesitated, still flipping through tools.

“What is it?” Doctor Bothy hissed. “Hurry, before the troll comes back!”

“Um, there doesn’t seem to be… um, a knife,” Conundrum said as he looked up in dismay. Then he spun round, for something was coming through the woods toward them.

Razmous Pinchpocket ran for his life, as only a kender can run when a troll is hot on his heels. He could almost feel its hot, reeking breath on his neck as his topknot cracked like a flag in the wind of his speed. The dark forest flashed by, and he dodged, dipped, ducked, and leaped like a whirling dervish, avoiding low-hanging branches that would have brained him, groping roots that would have tripped him, and looming trunks that would have pulverized him had he run into them head on.

And he wouldn’t have had it any other way.

There is nothing that makes a kender feel quite so alive as the hot breath of doom blowing down his shorts. Perhaps it is the nearness of death that makes the creatures so enjoy life, like the condemned prisoner who treasures every moment, every glimmer of the sun off the spider-webs in his cell, the taste of the earth in the stale bread and rank water that is his last meal. The kender race is without fear, a trait that gives them their power and indeed their very nature, their spirit, their reason for living, and at the same time usually leads to their demise. For it is lack of fear that makes them such intrepid travelers, and it is lack of fear that provides the only real check on their population. The kender are too peaceful and good-natured to involve themselves in war, too clever with their hands in other peoples pockets to ever starve, and too mobile to be threatened by plague. The normal limiting factors that keep most civilizations from destroying themselves utterly or so theorize the gnomes of the Philosophers” Guild, are completely absent from the kender race because of their very nature. So the gods made them fearless, to keep them from ruling the world.

But Razmous wasn’t thinking of all this as he fled from the troll. He was thinking of his leap. He must time the leap perfectly, or else end up on top of an angry troll at the bottom of a very deep, sword-lined hole.

Of course, it had come to him as he sat in the briars looking at the troll stalking round his dangling friends, that the badgers and hedgehogs had built their trap to catch trolls, among other things. Nothing else could explain the trap’s gargantuan scale, its huge stones, and wide, deep, sword-lined pit. And he thought, if I can get the troll to chase me to the pit, maybe I can get him to fall into it, too. Of course, there is always the danger that the limb will break, or that I will miss it in the dark, or that I won’t be able to leap the hole…

Really, he reminded himself, he had been around gnomes for far too long. He was almost beginning to think like a gnome, more concerned with a thousand possibilities and designing against what might go wrong than concentrating on making it go right-or at least trying to make it go right. The trying was the important part, he reminded himself, as he slapped aside a sapling and hurtled a fallen log. After this voyage, he planned to find some kender and go on a real adventure for a change.

Then he saw it, or thought he saw it. He saw something that certainly looked like it-a darker spot against the near-blackness of the forest floor, and a tree looming over it. The troll was almost on his heels, and there were twenty yards to go, twenty open yards in which the troll’s longer legs could gain the advantage. Razmous wondered if he would soon feel the troll’s hot breath upon his neck, like in the stories told by bards. Ten yards now, and he felt something tug briefly at his topknot. It might have been the troll clutching at the rippling pennant of hair streaming out behind the kender, or it might have been only a bit of underbrush becoming momentarily entangled in his topknot. In any case, it gave Razmous the brief surge of encouragement-he liked to call it-to cover the last few yards and leap for the tree’s overhanging limb.

He caught it, swung up almost vertical, and reversed his grip like a trapeze artist so that on the down swing he’d be facing the way he had come. He swung down to find the troll teetering on the edge of the trap, its long arms swinging wildly, trying to maintain its balance. Seeing the kender within easy reach, it shot out one clawed hand and grabbed him by the legs, and this, oddly enough, proved its downfall.

Razmous, caught in the troll’s deadly grasp, tried to pull free, which was just enough to overbalance the troll and drag it into the pit. Of course, now Razmous was dangling from a tree limb, and the troll was dangling from him. The kender cried out in agony as he felt his arms being wrenched from their sockets, while the troll’s cruel nails dug into the flesh of his legs. The troll thrashed and kicked, trying to find some purchase with its long black toes against the sides of the trap’s stony walls, and it roared in fury and fear. Only by the most heroic effort did Razmous manage to hang onto the tree limb as long as he did.

He felt his fingers slipping, slipping… the skin of his palms tearing against the cruel bark of the tree…

But it wasn’t his skin or even his joints that gave way first. It was his breeches. Worn to a frazzle from sliding down chutes and crawling through stone cracks and bramble patches, the last few threads now tore with a small ripping noise. The troll seemed to hang in the air a moment, staring in amazement at the sun-bleached yellow rags clutched in its fist, before it vanishing with a cry down the hole-a cry that, seconds later, was suddenly cut short.

Razmous looked down the hole and heaved a pained sigh before pulling himself up into the tree. He sat balanced on the tree limb for a moment, contemplating his next move. The sea breeze felt cool as it stirred the fine downy hair covering his much-paler legs.

“It’s a good thing this is the balmy north,” he groaned as he scrambled to his feet on the branch and teetered there like a high-wire artist that he had seen in Palanthas once, “and there are no ladies about.”

Conundrum faced the creature thrashing through the woods toward them, the ball of convenient tools clutched protectively before him. He hoped it would make him look more dangerous somehow.

“It’s only me!” said a high, thin voice from the deep shadows beneath the trees.

“Razmous?” Conundrum asked.

“I see him!” Doctor Bothy said from his vantage point dangling high up in the tree. “I see his topknot!”

“Razmous, come help me!” Conundrum shouted. “There isn’t a knife in Commodore Brigg’s wonderful all-purpose knife.”

“First I have to put some pants on,” Razmous answered.

“What’s happened to your pants?” Conundrum asked.

“More importantly, what happened to the troll?” Sir Grumdish demanded.

“Both fell in the trap,” Razmous said as he stepped into the clearing, a large sheet of rotting bark held modestly before him. With every step, it rotted and crumbled just a little more.

Conundrum explained the trap to his companions while Razmous crossed the clearing and retrieved his pouches. From them, he pulled a freshly-washed pair of homespun trousers and a new set of bright yellow leggings. Behind the screen of the vines, he slipped them on, then settled his pouches over his shoulders and around his waist. When he returned to the clearing, he felt like a new kender.

“That’s better,” he announced.

“Do you always carry an extra set of clothes in your pouches?” Sir Grumdish said from the treetops. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a knife or a dagger or anything actually useful for our current situation?”

Presently, Razmous produced one of Doctor Bothy’s scalpels-one that had been missing for some weeks.

“It’s a good thing for you that I found it!” the kender chirped as he sawed at the doctor’s ropes.

But even with the ladder and the scalpel, there was little to prevent them from falling on their heads and breaking their necks once cut free. So cleverly had they been trussed that the cutting of a single strand would unravel the whole bunch and send them both plummeting headfirst to the ground. Conundrum managed to scrape together a smallish pile of dead leaves to cushion their fall somewhat, while Razmous advised them to try to fall as softly as possible.

“How, pray tell, shall I do that?” Sir Grumdish snarled as he watched the sharp blade slice into the final bit of rope from which he dangled.

“I don’t know,” Razmous answered crossly. “Pretend you are a feather!”